Al Jazeera (in English and Arabic) on YouTube
Al Jazeera has started publishing programmes from its English-language and Arabic-language channels on YouTube. The English-language channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/AlJazeeraEnglish The Arabic-language channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/user/aljazeerachannel Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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]
Political opposition and communication technology in Egypt
This is an English translation of the transcript of a meeting entitled "Bloggers in Prison, Too", which took place on 18 March 2007 at the Centre for Socialist Studies in Cairo, Egypt: http://www.political-explorations.info/en/wiki/Bloggers_in_Prison%2C_Too The background for the meeting was the case of Abd Al-Karim Nabil Sulaiman, an Egyptian blogger sentenced to four years in prison for 'contempt of religion'[1]. The discussion touched on many subjects, including the worldwide battle against freedom of expression, the state of Egypt's opposition groups, young people's participation in protests, the political role of blogs, the loss of privacy and the spread of wireless Internet technology. Some excerpts from Alaa Seif's talk: "Most of those tools [for protecting privacy on the Internet] have been designed on the basis of the assumption that kidnapping and torture have a very high financial and social cost So if they got a copy of that encrypted email and wanted to decrypt it, the cost of breaking the code would be ten thousand times more than the cost of kidnapping you and torturing you and saying: 'Tell us what you said in that email.' [laughter] But that's based on the cost of kidnapping and torturing you where? In Switzerland. [laughter] Great! OK, what's the cost of kidnapping and torturing you in Egypt? About 5 Egyptian pounds [i.e. next to nothing]. [laughter] See what I mean? I'm totally serious." "Today if you go to my home town... you'll find wireless Internet antennas on the towers in which pigeons are raised. That's a local area network. They can block web sites so that when I'm sitting in Egypt I can't see what's out there, but as soon as something gets into our local area network, it will spread. This wireless technology is very cheap, very easy to use, and it's the sort of thing Egyptians are good at. You know, just like we've got car mechanics who know how do things that nobody else knows how to do, just wait until you see what will happen with wireless technology in Egypt." "One important thing is that we have to get in early as creators and inventors. What's happened now is that we reuse technology that was designed for us elsewhere, and we're very good at putting things to new uses. But for some things... that might not be good enough in some cases, so we need to come up with solutions ourselves." Ben [1] http://www.freekareem.org/ # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: War profiteers in art (Biennale di Venezia, 2007)
On 11/06/07, Ana Peraica <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I am thinking again on the role of the war reporter that has emancipated > indicating a cultural need for the distant trauma in public Sometimes it's not so distant. People in Iraq do watch TV news reports about the war going on around them. > It indeed reminded me of plenty of conferences on war topics in which > speakers were "caught in war" for a day, having all kinds of > bullet-protection jackets and who had only made troubles to local police that > had to cover them up instead of taking care for children, old people and > women in danger that would not be able to escape, as these "reporters" A lot of reporters have been killed in Iraq, and quite a few of them have been Iraqis: http://www.rsf.org/special_iraq_en.php3 To get a sense of why some journalists risk their lives to cover wars, you could have a look at the BBC documentary "Control Room", about Al-Jazeera's coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, perhaps especially the part about Al-Jazeera journalist Tariq Ayyoub, who was killed by an American air strike on the Al Jazeera office in Baghdad, and the statement by his widow, in which she implores a gathering of journalists to persist in telling the truth about the war. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: Free Media vs Free Beer (By Andrew L)]
> Free Media vs Free Beer > by Andrew =97 last modified 2007-04-15 13:23 > [...] > * EngageMedia.org - an Australian based free software project and > video sharing site for social and environmental justice film from > Southeast Asia, Australia and the Pacific. > * Transmission.cc - a new global network of social change online > video projects co-founded by EngageMedia. While I'm happy to see things like this happening, it seems strange to me that those two web sites are entirely in English, and barely touch on the issue of language and translation, and then only in the context of making subtitles for videos. EngageMedia.org has videos about many countries in Southeast Asia, but doesn't even seem to have a way of indicating which language a video is in, apparently because they're all assumed to be in English. EngageMedia's "project brief" says: "We are focussing on Australia, the Pacific and South East Asia, as we want to build cross-border cultural relations within the region and facilitate this sharing of cultures through grassroots communication networks. The project aims to provide a global distribution tool for local community media makers who would otherwise be unable to distribute their film widely." How can you make a regional media distribution tool, never mind a global one, that doesn't at least attempt to treat all languages equally? Also, translation is more than subtitling. Not all videos are self-explanatory to all audiences. If you're Australian and you don't know anything about, say, Indonesia, maybe you can understand a video about Indonesia made by Australians for an Australian audience. But I suspect you won't necessarily understand a video about Indonesia made by Indonesians for an Indonesian audience, even if it's subtitled in English. You might need an introductory text, potentially a long and detailed one, to give you the necessary background knowledge and put the video in context. (I could give specific examples of Egyptian films and videos that would be very hard to understand for someone who hasn't lived in Egypt.) Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: appropriation and type
> i'd love to know your take on this manuscript, regarding the field > of typography Perhaps your argument would be strengthened by a consideration of some of the issues involved in typography of non-Western scripts. In the case of Arabic, for example, calligraphic tradition long ago standardised a certain number of styles, which users naturally expect to find on their computers. The results are judged by comparison with classical models that are seen as aesthetic and functional design ideals. Unfortunately, technology such as Unicode, which attempts to make Arabic script work like the Latin alphabet, has become standardised. Operating systems simply do not provide the infrastructure that would be needed in order to render Arabic well. Therefore word processors produce ugly results in Arabic, and even Arabic books are often poorly typeset. A good introduction the failure of current font technology to produce beautiful, highly readable Arabic script is the article "Authentic Arabic: A Case Study" by Thomas Milo, presented to the International Unicode Conference in 2002: http://www.tradigital.de/specials/casestudies.htm Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Energy Consumption of an Avator in Second Life
On 07/02/07, Alex Foti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In fact, these calculations push me to pose larger questions: how many > kwh per year are consumed to operate the Net There are some scientific papers here about the energy consumption of computer networks and computer manufacturing: http://www.it-environment.org/publications.html Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: history lesson
On 22/01/07, Quirk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Once socialist sharing communities can out-accumulate private Capital, > only then will our economic power will extend into real political > power. Wouldn't that mean out-producing and out-consuming as well? But that would be environmental suicide. Current levels of production and consumption are already leading to environmental suicide.[1] For the past few years I've been seeing occasional texts in French about something called "decroissance", or "de-growth"[2]. The idea is that since limitless economic growth is not possible on a planet with finite resources (of which two-thirds are apparently already used up[3]), human beings will have to produce and consume less. Brian, I read Giovanni Arrighi's article "Hegemony Unravelling"[4], which you recommended, and was surprised that although he discusses at length "the reliance of capital accumulation on the existence of a particular built environment of facilities", he gives no attention at all to its dependence on the natural environment, or its effects on that environment. He discusses the idea that China may soon be in a position to become the world's main centre of capital accumulation and thus replace the US as global hegemon, without considering whether environmental constraints might make this impossible. Just as Arrighi's article was being published, China's deputy environment minister said in an interview that China's economic "miracle will end soon because the environment can no longer keep pace".[5] Meanwhile, the Pentagon expects catastrophic climate change to lead to nuclear war in the next 15 years.[6] Ben [1] "U.K. fears disaster in climate change", Heather Timmons, International Herald Tribune, 30 October 2006, http://www.iht.com/bin/print.php?id=3334967 [2] "Would the West actually be happier with less? The world downscaled", Serge Latouche, Le Monde diplomatique, December 2003, http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27/081.html [3] "Two-thirds of world's resources 'used up'", Tim Radford, The Guardian, 30 March 2005, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1447863,00.html [4] "Hegemony Unravelling", Giovanni Arrighi, New Left Review 32, March-April 2005, http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2552 [5] "China's environmental suicide: a government minister speaks", Andreas Lorenz, Der Spiegel, 7 March 2005, http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,345694,00.html [6] "Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us", Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, The Observer, 22 February 2004, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1153513,00.html # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Iraq: The Way Forward
On 19/01/07, Michael H Goldhaber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The Contras were in Nicaragua. Reagan hardly hid his political support for > them, but was eventually forced by Congress to be secretive about direct aid > to them. Yes, Nicaragua, sorry. That's just one of many examples of covert US military action... isn't it? All those books by former CIA agents like John Stockwell... or do you disagree? Do you maintain that the US has never engaged in any secret wars? How do secret wars fit into your view of the US military? I'm sorry to be a pest, but I feel as if you haven't answered this question. > As for Saudi Arabia, I understand that shortly after the Iraq invasion, the > US closed all its bases there. [...] (I don't dispute that are bases in > places such as > Qatar.) Doesn't that amount to the same thing? It's a small concession to the Saudis but basically maintains the status quo. > Those bases did not go up in 1973, as your timeline would suggest, but in > 1990, after Saddam > invaded Kuwait. I don't have access here to the books Brian recommended, but... it seems that "the 1973 oil embargo "caused a major readjustment of U. S. policy priorities in the Gulf the U. S. began periodic naval deployments in the Indian Ocean and expanded Diego Garcia into a naval station capable of supporting major air and naval deployments."[1] The US "considered using force to seize oilfields in the Middle East" if the 1973 embargo went on for too long[2], and the British government was afraid they might really do it[3]. After the embargo ended, high levels of oil production actually caused economic problems for the Gulf countries, and would have liked to reduce production. "This option was firmly refused by the US, who let it be known that any reduction in production would practically represent a cause for war American officials implied, in public and in private, that they were prepared to intervene militarily in zones of oil production if their vital interests required it."[4] It seems that Carter and Reagan would very much have liked to establish more bases in the Gulf, particularly in order to make sure the Soviet Union would not be able to interrupt the flow of oil to the US, but couldn't persuade their Gulf allies to let them do so until 1991. > Anyway, my main argument is not that particular interests at times seek to > benefit from American military might, but that as a domestically extremely > powerful and culturally important institution, the military and ist > supporters keep finding rationales for strengthening it. On the whole they > probably believe whatever the momentary rationale is, but they and > certainly, their main Congressional supporters, do not really quesiotn that > there must be one. The rationale of protecting access to oil is not momentary; it has been a feature of US policy in the Gulf since Nixon justified his "twin pillar" policy in 1973 by saying that "assurance of the continued flow of Middle East energy resources is increasingly important to the United States"[1]. However, it almost seems as if you agree with me here. If US presidents have really believed in that rationale all this time, and if this is why they've carried out the military policies we're talking about, wouldn't removing the possibility of such a rationale (by eliminating US dependence on oil) make it more difficult to justify certain military interventions? I realise that you're probably going to say, "No, because they'll just find some other excuse". But, well, look at what people who study conflict prevention say. A lot of it seems to be about reducing material causes for conflict, which typically involve competition for scarce resources, such as water, oil, grazing land, and so on. When you have an army, and another country has something you need, it's tempting to take it by force. I agree with you that reducing the size of your army to the minimum necessary for self-defence is sure to help as well. But it's hard not to notice that the US has the highest resource consumption per capita of any country in the world, and also has the largest military capacity. As George Kennan put it in 1948: "we have about 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security."[5] So what I'm suggesting is this: if you have a teachable moment, take advantage of it not only to teach Americans about their bloated, self-serving military, but also about the economic disparity that that military is being used to protect. Point out that US oil consumption is an environmental disaster as well as a cause of war. Try to end the occupation of Iraq, yes, but also try to get people thinking about how to change the US economy (e.g. by elimi
Re: Iraq: The Way Forward
On 12/01/07, A. G-C <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > How do you explain the proliferation of US military bases in the > > Middle East[1] if those bases aren't intended to protect American > > access to oil?[2] > [...] > to keep a military strategic position of US Defence at the south > of Russia and China [...] > Because civil nuclear becoming now a predictable market of America [...] > Imagine what Iran yet now represents in this geo challenge Those seem to me like plausible factors as well, but they can coexist with the importance of protecting access to oil. I think we mustn't forget that the CIA helped overthrow Iranian prime minister Mossadegh in 1953 because the British, hurt by the nationalisation of Iran's oil industry, persuaded the US that Mossadegh was turning towards communism. Thus oil and the Cold War, for example, were closely linked. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: ACT4MASCHINENDIGEST [Foti, Marcelo]
On 16 Jan 2007 13:21:11 "Alex Foti" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We are not occidentalists [...] We are rather for secularism > wherever we can find it. What do you mean by secularism? Do you mean separation of church and state, anticlericalism, militant atheism, or what an old European leftist once told me: "I don't like religious people"? Whichever of those meanings you choose, you can be sure that, in much of the world, secularism is indeed identified with occidentalism, so your assertion above will tend to be seen as a contradiction at best. I have spent a lot of time talking to European atheists and to Middle Eastern Muslims about the different perceptions of religion in Europe and the Middle East. The European atheists tend to see all religion as an instrument of domination, at best as a necessary evil, to be confined to private life and tolerated as little as possible, in the hope that someday it will disappear completely thanks to universal education based on Enlightenment principles. The Middle Eastern Muslims tend to see religion as the source of all ethical inspiration in human life (both public and private), as the source of ideals of altruism, generosity, responsibility, justice and social harmony, as an essential tool for self-criticism and self-improvement, and they imagine that life without it would be horrible, indeed almost inconceivable. (Therefore they are astonished to learn that many Europeans are atheists.) I can hardly imagine a greater depth of misunderstanding between two groups of people. In both groups, most of the people I talk to are highly educated, yet their education has completely failed to teach them anything about the other group in this regard. In the _Networked Politics_ reader, Moema Miranda says, answering a question of yours: "We cannot face the challenges of today if we reduce our understanding of anti-capitalist struggles and of politics to just the rationalistic dimensions of our movements. For example, here in Brazil, Liberation Theology and the Ecclesial Grassroots Communities were essential in the struggle against dictatorship and in creating the basis for the PT. [...] These dimension of spirituality [...] were badly interpreted in the formulations of classical left. So there is a great challenge to open up the scope of who we talk to."[1] That observation applies at least as well to the Middle East. Ben [1] http://www.networked-politics.info/index.php/Reader_Networked_Politics # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Iraq: The Way Forward
On 11/01/07, Michael H Goldhaber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > b) Venice is in fact becoming de-populated, with its natives moving > to the car-unfree mainland; That's because tourism has driven up real estate prices to the point where locals can no longer afford to live there. There are ways to prevent this from occurring in car-free cities, and some of these are discussed in the book _Carfree Cities_. The author emphasises that Venice is not an ideal car-free city, and that it should be possible to build better ones; hence his detailed design proposal. > c) it is a complete mistake to think that Americans' access to oil > depends on having troops in Iraq =97or anywhere in the middle east > for that matter. How do you explain the proliferation of US military bases in the Middle East[1] if those bases aren't intended to protect American access to oil?[2] > On this last point, when Iran threw out the Shah and held the > American embassy staff hostage, it continued to sell oil on the > world market, like any other OPEC country. Iran's oil production plummeted in 1979, and oil prices shot up as a result.[3][4] > As it is, the invasion of Iraq has certainly not increased US oil > supplies or lowered prices, but in fact done the opposite. The war > is conceivably a war for oil-company profits (which have gone way up > since it started) but not a war for oil itself. The invasion of Iraq looks to me like a colossal miscalculation, but I find it difficult to explain except as an attempt to turn Iraq into an extension of the Arabian peninsula, i.e. of an oil-rich region with US-friendly rulers and plenty of American military bases. Ben [1] http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/centcom.htm [2] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050425/klare [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1979_energy_crisis [4] http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Iraq: The Way Forward
On 10/01/07, Felix Stalder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Now, we are in a situation where nobody has any good idea what to do. [...] > There are no community rituals, no community centers, often there are no > sidewalks. People live in empty soulless houses and drive big empty cars on > freeways to Los Angeles and sit in vast offices and then come home again. I've just read a very thoughtful book, _Carfree Cities_, that begins with an analysis of how cars destroy communities. The author goes on to provide a detailed design proposal for car-free cities, borrowing heavily from Christopher Alexander's architectural design patterns. In essence, the proposal attempts to combine the best aspects of old European neighbourhoods with an urban topology that allows for very efficient public transport based on a metro or tram system. A comparison of car-centric Los Angeles with car-free Venice runs throughout the book. The author's web site provides a brief summary of the book: http://www.carfree.com/ I don't know whether the time is ripe for this idea in the US, but maybe September 11 and the Iraq war could be used to concentrate Americans' minds on an idea that would enable them to rebuild their communities while reducing their dependence on oil (and thus reducing their military presence in the Middle East). Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Iraq: The Way Forward
On 05/01/07, Michael H Goldhaber <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On the whole, Americans, and even most of their Congresspeople =97 not > to mention the President =97 remain remarkably uninformed about the > rest of the world. [...] > If we want to avoid future Iraqs, we had better understand the > rareness of this "teachable moment," when the country is forced to > look outward [...] If part of the reason for wars like this one is Americans' lack of knowledge about the rest of the world, perhaps it will be necessary to remedy that problem in order to avoid future Iraqs. In saying that this is a "teachable moment", do you mean that it's an opportunity for Americans to gain a better understanding of the rest of the world? How could a change like that come about? If you want to help make it happen, I have a suggestion: try to get an American cable TV provider to carry Al Jazeera's new English-language channel. I watched it for a few hours soon after it was launched, and liked it much better than, say, BBC World. Not only because it contains much less fluff, gives priority to stories of interest to people living outside the Western world (particularly issues of social justice) and is sharply critical of US foreign policy. In a reversal of the typical situation in which journalists from former British colonies work for the BBC and are obliged to toe its editorial line, Al Jazeera English also offers the pleasantly uncanny spectacle of British presenters beginning the news broadcast, against a background image of London, by saying, in BBC English: "Tonight's top story on Al-Jazeera..." It's as if Qatar had colonised the UK. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Immaterial Civil War
On 12/11/06, Matteo Pasquinelli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> The brand of Barcelona is a "consensual hallucination" produced
> by many but exploited by few. [...]
> "The rise of Barcelona to prominence within the European system of
> cities has in part been based on its steady amassing of symbolic
> capital and its accumulating marks of distinction. [...]"
> "It is a matter of determining which segments of the population are
> to benefit most from the collective symbolic capital to which
> everyone has, in their own distinctive ways, contributed both now and
> in the past. [...]"
> The crucial question is: how to develop a symbolic capital of
> resistance that can not be exploited as another mark of distinction?
Can collective symbolic capital function as an insurance policy
against invasion? The question might seem bizarre, but I mean it
seriously. Does the collective symbolic capital accumulated by Latin
America in the past few decades help explain why US hasn't overthrown
any of the leftist governments that have come to power there in recent
years? Is it more difficult for the US government to get away with,
say, organising a coup in Venezuela or Bolivia now that a generation
of young Americans have grown up with positive associations with Latin
America (Che Guevara, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Isabel Allende, Octavio
Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Paulo Coelho, Frida Kahlo, Chico Mendes, Paulo
Freire, The Official Story, Nine Queens, Man Facing Southeast, Carlos
Santana, Buena Vista Social Club, bossa nova, samba, Diego Maradona,
Ronaldo, and so on, not to mention Subcommandante Marcos and the World
Social Forum)?
Jacqueline Salloum's mock movie trailer, "Planet of the Arabs"[1], a
"montage spectacle of Hollywood's relentless vilification and
dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims", gives an indication of how far
the Middle East is from having any positive associations for most
Americans.
I think solidarity isn't something that just happens; it's at least
partly constructed out of collective symbolic capital. For example,
for the average person in the Middle East, Lebanon has many positive
associations, not least because Lebanon's formidable culture industry
is the source of much of the music listened to in the region. It
seems to me that, for a long time, the strongest and best-loved symbol
of Lebanon has been the singer Fairouz, who long ago attained the
status of Arab cultural treasure while remaining strongly associated
with her home country. During the outpouring of solidarity with
Lebanon that swept across the region during the recent war, there was
a deluge of Fairouz songs on satellite television, in concerts and in
theatre. Fairouz was presented as the soul of Lebanon: poetic,
vulnerable and imbued with dignity.
I'll never forget the surprised, disoriented and amused expression on
the faces of some educated young people in London a few years ago when
I tried to explain Fairouz to them ("a bit like Celine Dion..."). I
suppose their surprise was the result of cognitive dissonance between
their image of Arabs (the Hollywood image exemplified by Jacqueline
Salloum's film) and the concept of the adored and respected female
singer.
A lot of work surely went into giving the West positive associations
with Latin America. Perhaps literature professors helped by getting
their students to read Latin American writers. Surely a lot of
capital went into projects like Buena Vista Social Club. Perhaps
someone here knows more about the history of that process. Is it
worth trying something something similar for the Middle East, a region
crushed under the weight of authoritarian states and American
intervention, a bit like Latin America in the 1970s?
Ben
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Re: Peace-for-War
On 22/08/06, Alex Foti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > But only if we > construct a sufficiently shared narrative on the parable of capitalism > and communism in the 20th century, and especially on the exhaustion of > neoliberalism at end of the century, can we create the bases for that > new radical, secular, cosmopolitan, ecological, transethnic, > multigendered culture that can give new thrust to movements, fight war > and rebuild the world. Napoleon attempted unsuccessfully to export his version of the Enlightenment to the Middle East via his invasion of Egypt in 1798: "The revolutionary modernity expressed by [Napoleon's] Egyptian expedition was completely rejected by the Muslim world, which saw it above all as a militant atheism, hostile to all religions."[1] During the 19th century, Muslim intellectuals nevertheless appropriated Enlightenment thought and integrated it with Islamic thought, both in order to understand how their societies could catch up with Europe in terms of industry, military achievements and standard of living, and to understand how they could resist being dominated by Europe.[2] Correspondences between European and Islamic thought became commonplace. The Islamic concept of "shura" (consultation) was identified with democracy.[3] Ottoman constitutionalist reforms, though based on European ideas, were justified in terms of Islamic law. A belief in the progressive character of ethnic nationalism was a key aspect of European political ideology, and European states went to great lengths to introduce and promote this concept in the Ottoman empire and to help emergent nationalisms gain political independence. This was also of course a means of increasing European influence in the region.[4] In the first half of the 20th century, Europe was widely seen as applying a double standard: proclaiming the universality of Enlightenment ideas such as self-rule, but not allowing its colonies to enjoy the benefits of those ideas. Independence movements were aimed mainly at eliminating this double standard in order to establish independent European-style liberal democracies. After formal independence was attained, however, it became clear that economic independence was much more difficult to achieve. Socialist ideas, another product of European humanism, gained some influence in the Middle East (particularly Lenin's account of imperialism), and some states developed ties with the Soviet Union, or took advantage of rivalries between the US and the USSR in order to increase their political autonomy, while nationalising their industries and adopting a policy of import substitution. However, import substitution turned out to be unsustainable,[5] and dependence on Soviet protection turned out to be another form of foreign domination.[6] Meanwhile, the masses welcomed the benefits of modern technology, but remained attached to their traditional Islamic culture, which seemed to be sidelined, deprived of its central role in regulating society, its place taken by a Western liberalism that brought painful economic upheavals and continued Western domination. Islamist movements gained popularity by arguing that both capitalism and socialism had failed in the Middle East, and that the only way to gain true independence was to revive the original, true values of Islam, in order to create a new form of modernity.[7] That dream is alive and well, as the popularity of Hizballah demonstrates. At the moment, it seems unlikely to me that any secular movement can gain widespread popular support in the Middle East. The ideologies that currently seem most likely to rebuild this part of the world are Islamist ones. If you want to create a new global political culture, I suggest thinking seriously about the role Islam could play in that culture. Ben [1] Henry Laurens, _L'Orient Arabe: Arabisme et islamisme de 1798 a 1945_ (Paris: Armand Colin, 2004), pp. 40-45. [2] Albert Hourani, _Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939_ (Cambridge University Press, 1983). [3] Maxime Rodinson, "Rapports entre Islam et communisme", in _Marxisme et monde musulman_ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972), pp. 130-180. [4] Henry Laurens, op. cit. [5] Henry Laurens, _Paix et guerre au Moyen-Orient: L'orient arabe et le monde de 1945 a nos jours, second =E9dition (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005) pp. 206-207. [6] Maxime Rodinson's article "Les probl=E8mes des partis communistes en Syrie et en Egypte", in _Marxisme et monde musulman_ (pp. 412-449) contains many interesting observations on the relationships that developed between the Kremlin and its clients in the Middle East, and between Marxist and Islamic ideologies. [7] Fran=E7ois Burgat, _L'Islamisme en face_. Paris, La D=E9couverte 2002. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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 b
Re: Re: rejoinder: is a radical project identity achievable?
On 01/08/06, Brian Holmes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> What kind of culture, what kind of shared horizon can
> help us get there? [...]
> A political culture that can resolve serious differences
> between dissenting groups, and can draw plans for using and
> governing the productive forces that make and shake the
> earthscape [...]
> The exact science of our unbound
> dreams is what governments should be afraid of.
Brian, I sympathise immensely with your motivation for asking these
questions, but I think this quest for a universal progressive
political culture is Quixotic and perhaps dangerous, despite the best
of intentions.
In 2002 I fell under the spell of a hypothesis: that some of the
principles of what I saw as the political culture of free software --
open participation, public ownership of knowledge, strong reliance on
consensus -- could be applied to other kinds of production -- to
industry, to agriculture -- and could be used to build political
systems capable of organising human life on a large scale. I was
encouraged to find similar principles at work in some European
activist groups and workers' collectives. I was disappointed to find
that many activist groups, however, were organised along the opaque,
authoritarian lines of traditional political parties, and speculated
that if European social movements could be persuaded instead to put
these principles (described at http://www.open-organizations.org) into
practice, they would not only do their work as activists better, they
would also embody a real alternative to the failed models of
parliamentary democracy and of the political party, an alternative
that might thus appeal to the broader disillusioned European public.
Indeed, I wondered, could these principles become part of a political
culture capable of working on a global level, a new universalist dream
to replace the failed dream of communism, in short the Holy Grail
evoked by your questions above?
I knew enough about ethnocentrism to have strong reservations about
anything resembling yet another Enlightenment project intended to
bring a universal political culture to the world's benighted masses.
I wondered: What are the necessary links between one's political
culture and the rest of the culture that one lives in? How can one
choose between the competing claims of any proposed new political
culture and those of any existing culture? Who can legitimately make
such choices?
The Left has tended to settle such questions impatiently, without much
reflection, by reference to supposedly universal principles of Marxism
(once thought by many, and still by some, to be an "exact science") or
of the French Enlightenment, or more often, by instinct ("I personally
can't accept..."), which amounts to the same thing. Any political
culture that doesn't correspond to those principles therefore appears
backward and, it is thought, should be consigned to the dustbin of
history.
I decided not to look any further for any sort of "shared horizon"
until I had carefully studied a non-Western culture, in its political
and other aspects, in some depth. I studied Arabic, and a year ago I
began an extended period of study in the Middle East. I have learnt a
great deal here and hope to learn a great deal more. I don't have
answers to the questions I asked above, but I'm more convinced than
ever that these are hard and important questions, not to be brushed
aside in any premature rush towards an imagined universalism.
I don't think politics can be separated from culture. The British
House of Commons, European anarchist working groups, and the
deliberations among the heads of clans in Upper Egypt all have their
distinctive cultures. Perhaps you are right, Brian, that tomorrow's
social movements need a new shared horizon as the basis for
international cooperation. But even if that's true, let it not be a
totalitarian horizon, one that attempts to cast all political life in
the same mould. Let it be one that allows individuals and groups to
move freely among political cultures and to mediate between them.
Ben
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Re: The strange love affair of Wikipedia and EGS
On 23/06/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Do you think that one should differentiate, in terms of reliability of > sources, between blogs written by unknown people and blogs written by, > i.e. famous authors or blogs for specific publications? It seems to me that we ought to care about a couple of things when choosing sources: 1. Who wrote the information that we want to cite? Are they knowledgeable enough about the subject to be a reliable source? An author might be famous, but not actually know anything about the subject in question. Unfortunately some famous people, including some academics, do seem to feel that they can write about matters far outside their area of expertise, and thus they sometimes make serious mistakes.[1] I think we need easily measurable criteria of expertise, otherwise we'll find ourselves in endless disputes. I don't know of any such criteria other than credentials. For example, if the person in question is a university professor specialised in that particular subject, I think that's generally good enough. 2. What standards was the author held to in publishing this information? For example, a university professor may well be less rigorous when making informal remarks during an interview in the mass media than when writing an article for a peer-reviewed journal, or a book that will face criticism from other experts in the same field. The first consideration doesn't disqualify blogs; indeed, some experts write blogs about their area of expertise. However, it seems to me that blogs don't yet provide the environment of critical scrutiny, among experts in the same field, that academic publishers currently provide. > Also, if political controversy is the question, EGS is a university, not a > very politically controversial subject at all. I think it's reasonable to use different standards for choosing sources depending on how controversial the subject is and how much expertise it requires. For example, if I want to know the results of a basketball match in the US, it should be good enough to check the New York Times web site. But I wouldn't rely on the NYT for, say, information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Perhaps Wikipedia could have some guidelines specifying a hierarchy of different types of sources, graded according to reliability, along with the minimum standard to use when choosing sources for different kinds of subjects. Then they could have a rule stipulating that when a controversy arises about the sources for an article, any participant can require the use of higher-grade sources for that article. Ben [1] http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2005/06/REYMOND/12563 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
[no subject]
On 23/06/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Second, apparently blogs are not considered good enough sources for > Wikipedia. (Apologies for partial cross-posting.) In my own experience, many of the people who contribute to Wikipedia articles in English, on politically controversial subjects, seem to be motivated by the desire to promote an ideology at all costs, typically an ideology of the American far right. These are the people who repeatedly, insistently, copy and paste material from conspiracy theory web sites or neoconservative propaganda web sites into Wikipedia articles, or just make things up and insert them without citing any sources. If you want to maintain any kind of scholarly standards in a Wikipedia article, it can be very difficult to avoid an edit war with them, and of course every time you revert their edits, you'll be accused of promoting your own bias and censoring other points of view. Wikipedia policy encourages compromise and, last time I checked at least, doesn't take a clear stand on what kinds of sources are acceptable. Anyone can anonymously put up a web site (and why not a blog?) to publish fabricated information, and cite that web site as a source in a Wikipedia article. The result is often something like this cartoon: http://www.idrewthis.org/2004/bothsides.gif Or to put it differently, it's a bit like the reports in the New York Times, based on fables told by Ahmad Chalabi, that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction.[1] Wasn't Wikipedia supposed to do better than this? For this reason, a number of controversial Wikipedia articles (particularly those dealing with Islam and related subjects) are locked by Wikipedia administrators. Others have simply been abandoned to unscrupulous propagandists. Ben [1] http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040607/scheer0525 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: ECONOMIES OF AFFECTIVITY
Juan Martin Prada's essay reminded me of this talk that Shierry Weber Nicholsen gave a few years ago and that, to my knowledge, hasn't been published anywhere. She takes as her starting point Stjepan Mestrovic's notion of "postemotional society": "While emotions would seem to be the inviolable heart of individual subjective experience, in postemotional society they are prefabricated, simulated, manipulated externally by, say, the mass media, triggered by images. They lose their genuineness and become quasi-emotions." She then compares this with Theodor Adorno's grim assessment of emotional life in _Minima Moralia_ to the work of psychoanalytic theorists including Wilfred Bion, Christopher Bollas and Joyce McDougall. Ben Adorno's Minima Moralia: On Passion, Psychoanalysis and the Postemotional Dilemma Shierry Weber Nicholsen September, 2002 The Postemotional Let me start with the third of the terms in my subtitle, the postemotional. The term postemotional was coined by a sociologist, Stjepan Mestrovic. When you hear what he means by it you will probably agree with me that it is somewhat misleading. But it is catchy, and it points to a problematic around emotion in contemporary subjectivity and thus links to the question of passion. Mestrovic elaborates his idea of the postemotional in his 1997 book Postemotional Society. He conceives his work as an extension of sociologist David Riesman's analysis of American culture in The Lonely Crowd (1950), thus in the tradition of studies in culture and personality. Riesman analyzed American culture in terms of inner directed and outer directed personalities. For Mestrovic, contemporary American society is the further evolution of Riesman's outer-directed society. He argues that now it is not only ideas and behavior but also emotions that are socially determined. For reasons that will not concern me today, Mestrovic calls this state of affairs "postemotional." While emotions would seem to be the inviolable heart of individual subjective experience, in postemotional society they are prefabricated, simulated, manipulated externally by, say, the mass media, triggered by images. They lose their genuineness and become quasi-emotions. The emotional spectrum becomes limited and individual "emotions" blurred. In Mestrovic's words, "Postemotionalism holds that contemporary emotions are 'dead' in the analogous sense that one speaks of a dead current versus a 'lie wire,' or a 'dead nerve' in a limb or tooth. The current is still on, the nerve is still present anatomically, but neither is functioning as it was supposed to. The result is that all of the primal passions discussed from Aristotle to Hume to the present become shadows of their former selves. Anger becomes indignation. Envy ... becomes an objectless craving for something better. Heartfelt joy is now the bland happiness represented by the 'happy meal.' Sorrow, as the manifestation of affliction, anguish, grief, pain, remorse, trials, tribulations, and sadness, is magically transformed by the TV journalist's question 'How do you feel?' (after a death of a loved one to a sniper, or a tornado, or other calamity) into the typical but vague answer 'I'm very upset.'" Mestrovic, Postemotional Society, 62-3 Complement to the prefabricated, quasi-nature of emotions is a cult of sincerity, genuineness, and quasi-therapeutic self-examination. The reality of phoniness is masked by the propaganda of the genuine. Because emotions are not only triggered but generated through the mass-media, they can not only be manipulated but serve as means of manipulation. They serve this purpose all the better in that individuals find themselves pressed to consider their preformed emotions their very own, genuine and sincere expressions of self. Mestrovic's idea has a very disturbing implication. For the individual in such a society is in the grips of what I will call "the postemotional dilemma." What do I make of what seems to be my subjective experience? How do I know what is real? How and where can truly genuine emotional experience survive? And on what basis can I make these assertions of external manipulation? Mestrovic does not speak directly to this dilemma, but Adorno does. My focus today will be on how Adorno formulates and addresses this postemotional dilemma. For Mestrovic, "America" exemplifies postemotional society in its most advanced form. His work thus also figures in the tradition of cultural criticism through a description of American society. This tradition includes Riesman's work as well de Toqueville's and Veblen's and Adorno's. Minima Moralia and Postemotional Society Adorno wrote Minima Moralia, the work I will focus on today, while in exile in the United States in the 1940s. (Minima Moralia, note, predates Mestrovic's book by some 50 years, though it is roughly contemporaneous with Riesman's.) He had left Nazi Germany is 1934 and arrived in
Re: report_on_NNA
One of the things I like best about nettime is the high signal-to-noise ratio, and I think it's got better over the last few years. It seems to me that a lot of thought generally goes into the postings that appear here, thanks both to the authors and the moderators. So if a day goes by without anything appearing on the list, that seems fine to me. I think nettime is a sort of middle way between an academic journal and a traditional discussion list. It's much more open than an academic journal, but its standards are higher than those of most lists. The high standards make academics want to post ideas here, but the openness means that non-academics can reply, and can post their own ideas. I think that's good, because it goes against the tendency for academic discourse to become self-referential and disconnected from discourses and practices going on elsewhere. I personally don't care where nettimers work or what their titles are; I like that we can have a dialogue here that cuts across professions. I suspect the makeup of this list reflects at least one important social reality, that of solidarity between different kinds of "knowledge workers" and artists whose lives and work have been profoundly affected by, and who have been participating in, global transformations in communications, media, knowledge production and politics. Tactical media has been just one manifestation of that group's appearance on the world stage. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Mona Cholet/ le Monde Diplolmatique: France's precarious graduate
On 19/05/06, Keith Hart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > At the extreme, those who stay in have opted for self-exploitation. This sounds an awful lot like the classical liberal idea that workers and employers are equal parties to an employment contract that they both choose to sign, so if the workers are exploited, it's their own fault. As if the invisible hand of the job market had anything better to offer. > I spent the last two years of my PhD without any overt source of income. [...] > It wasn't a bad life. We got by. I felt a lot poorer later when I was > a lecturer with a mortgage, car and the rest of it. [...] > > [S=E9verine] thinks she's frying her brains and gets nothing from it all. > And she has a public for this. I don't know what to make of it politically > or of this whole precarity movement. I don't know how you survived "without any overt source of income" (maybe you had some sort of safety cushion, your parents perhaps?), but for some people, not knowing where your next month's rent is coming from, for years on end, produces a gnawing anxiety that you can never shake. (And yes, before you ask, I grew up under those conditions.) Spiralling credit-card debt and drug habits are typical symptoms. Moreover, strange as it may seem, there are people who want something more in life than just "getting by": not wealth, but the feeling that they're doing something useful in the world, as opposed to just oiling the machinery of capital. Some people study history, art, literature or sociology because they really think the world needs these things, rather than in the hope of getting "a mortgage, car and the rest of it". > But then I joined stayed in school for the rest of my life in order to > avoid having to get a real job. Those of us who have had "real jobs" should forgive you for not knowing how lucky you are. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Latino political influence in the US?
On 03/05/06, David Garcia <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So although the recent rise of the left in Latin America is momentous and > influencing oppinion and across the world, I wonder whether this current US > campaign is (as is often the case with US) more inward looking than Ben's post > suggests. I wonder, too... a friend of mine sent me a photo he took at the May Day immigrants' rights march in Los Angeles, showing people carrying a banner saying "Chiapas presente" in big letters. On 1 May, Delegate Zero (Subcommandante Marcos) of the Zapatistas led a march[1] to the US embassy in Mexico City in support of the immigrants' movement in the US. Ben [1] "Thousands in Mexico back 'A Day Without Gringos': Protests support immigrants in U.S.", San Francisco Chronicle, 2 May 2006, http://tinyurl.com/gun32 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Latino political influence in the US?
The American immigrants' rights movement has been getting a fair amount of media attention outside the US. Is there anyone here knowledgeable enough to comment on any broader effects that Latino political movements might be having on American politics, beyond the specific issue of immigration? Have they shown much interest in leftist currents in Latin American politics or been influenced by those currents? Ben -- http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article361313.ece Millions mark America's 'day without immigrants' The Independent By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles Published: 02 May 2006 The surging movement for immigrants' rights across the United States reached new heights as millions of foreign-born workers walked off their jobs, withheld all but the most necessary consumer purchases and joined noisy, peaceful May Day protest marches in more than 50 cities. [...] "There's no question in my mind that we are in the midst of an historic, new social movement," commented Marc Cooper, a border and immigration specialist with the University of Southern California's Institute for Justice and Journalism. "It's taken decades to build and reach critical mass and it is still going to take years to mature and fully pay off. So far, the cool-headed long-term strategists have dominated." # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Network, Swarm, Microstructure
On 19/04/06, Felix Stalder <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Large projects (think of > states, armies, major companies etc) tended to be highly structured in order > to manage scale [...] > ICTs are enabling (just enabling, not determining) people and organizations to > handle much, much more information efficiently, hence they still can scale, > but to not need to accept inflexibility as the trade-off. [...] > This ability of multiple entities to undertake very large projects, loosely > coordinated, is what is fuelling the renaissance of notions such as > "multitude" [...] > networks create their own geography of closeness and > distance. They create their own physical environment (think airports, or > radical community centers, etc.). While I agree that new kinds of organisations have appeared in which protocols play a more important role than in the past, I think it would be a mistake to see them as alternatives to older structures, because in reality they depend completely on these older structures for their existence. Internet protocols can function because "states, armies, major companies, etc." control the land and the energy resources, produce the hardware, lay the cable, launch the satellites, and so on, on which the whole network relies. The same goes for airports. Thus networks don't "create their own physical environment"; they exist in an environment that traditional organisations allow them to use. Similarly, the financial markets, so often cited as an example of spontaneous, self-structuring collective behaviour, depend on states to provide a reliable regulatory environment in which they can operate. More importantly, they are ultimately subject to the authority of those states' central banks. Since banks do business with central banks only at the latter's pleasure, the US government, for example, is fully capable of imposing practically any sort of regulations on the world's financial markets. If anyone has proposed a theory explaining how a network could control territory through military power and take over the functions of the state, I'd like to hear about it. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: re: nuclear diplomatic track
On 13/04/06, brian carroll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > yet, in 'a state of emergency' it would be imperative to have public > .US control over the state, so things do not get out of hand. so, it is > like having a circuit-breaker, and what will be called for is that the > .US military prepare to take temporary control of all critical .US > functionality, outside of political control of the reigning parties, > until the state can be reconstituted. I don't think a military coup can be equated with public control of the state. Military coups often lead to military regimes that last for decades, or to unstable states in which regularly occurring coups become the normal mechanism by which power is transferred from one ruling clique to another. "States of emergency" have an unfortunate tendency to last for a very long time. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Democracy without borders?
On 10/04/06, nettime wrote: > A proxy class implements exactly the interfaces specified at its creation, ... > If a proxy class implements a non-public interface, then it will be defined > ... In 1945, American president Harry Truman decided to support Jewish immigration into Palestine, against the State Department's recommendations. He reasoned that he needed the Jewish vote, whereas the Arab vote was not significant in American elections.[1] Thus one side in the conflict had effective proxies in the American electoral system, while the other side didn't. Ben [1] Henry Laurens, _Paix et guerre au Moyen-Orient_, 2e =E9dition, Armand Colin, Paris, 2005, pp. 72-73. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Democracy without borders?
A short essay on the possibility of democracy on an international level, taking as its starting point an observation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Also available here (in several languages): http://political-explorations.info/democracy_without_borders_en.html Ben -- Democracy Without Borders? Benjamin Geer 6 April 2006 Many observers of the recent Palestinian parliamentary elections have pointed out that the US has been caught in the trap of its own commitment to Palestinian democracy. Having declared its support for free and fair Palestinian elections, it now faces the annoyance of a Hamas victory. The US government's response to the elections has been to try to pressure Hamas into becoming the sort of party that it would find acceptable, by insisting that Hamas disarm and recognise Israel.[1] Meanwhile, in Israel, the party of Ehud Olmert, the current acting prime minister, has won the Israeli parliamentary elections. Olmert has said he will not negotiate with Hamas, and that the priority of the next Israeli government should be to to fix Israel's final borders unilaterally.[2] Something is clearly wrong with democracy as it is being practiced in this conflict. The policies of the Israeli government have an overwhelming effect on Palestinians, yet Israel's democracy doesn't give Palestinians any say in those policies. Those of the Palestinian Authority have a far smaller yet still significant effect on Israelis, and Israelis likewise have no say in Palestinian democracy. This failure is inherent in the very concept of the state: states only allow their own citizens to vote in their elections. To take another example, the vast majority of Iraqis were not consulted on the issue of whether the US should invade and occupy their country. People joke that, since the US president's power extends throughout the world, the whole world should vote in American presidential elections. This joke reflects an intuitive recognition that it would be fairer if people could exercise influence over decisions to the extent that they are affected by those decisions. I have suggested elsewhere that we call this principle "fair influence". Non-Americans suffer from an influence deficit with regard to American foreign policy. Of course, existing democracies are far from implementing fair influence even for their own citizens. For example, in the West, parties and electoral campaigns require large sums of money, and political platforms are thus limited to the range of options that wealthy donors wish to support. The wealthy also control the media that shape public opinion. Moreover, the structure of the economic system is excluded from the sphere of issues that the electoral process is authorised to change.[3] Even if democracy faithfully represented the majority's interests, majority rule would still place minorities at a disadvantage. This is not the place for a detailed analysis of these problems. Let us assume for the moment that democracy can be improved so that it truly implements fair influence in domestic politics, and that a state's constitution could specify how such a democracy would work. Could fair influence then be practiced on an international level as well? Max Weber defined the state as "a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory".[4] A state thus reflects an agreement to resolve local conflicts peacefully within a certain political and legal framework, leaving the state itself as the sole entity authorised to use force in order to ensure that citizens respect that framework. When that agreement breaks down, and the state no longer has a monopoly of force, the result can be civil war or the rule of bandits. Because states need weapons to enforce their constitutions internally, they can also make war against each other, and all states must therefore rely on armies to protect themselves. Therefore the pact that gives the state a monopoly of force on a domestic level cannot be reproduced on an international level. Two or more states could sign a treaty giving each of them some influence in the other's domestic decision-making, but the militarily strongest state would be free to violate the treaty whenever it wished. Therefore, a real solution to the global influence deficit may require a new kind of political entity yet to be imagined, one that departs from Weber's definition of the state. In the meantime, in a world composed of states, the greater a state's relative military strength, the greater the risk that it will dominate other states. Thus, perhaps one way to reduce this risk is to undermine the economic basis of the wealth that the richest countries spend on weapons. That wealth currently depends on the exploitation of labour and raw materials in less wealthy countries, with the cooperation of local elites. The more a state im
Re: The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
On 24/03/06, Keith Hart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > But I truly wonder where Benjamin got the material for his riposte Mostly from listening to Egyptians. > Where do you get your information on Bolivian politics?The Guardian? I admit I'm far from knowledgeable about Bolivia, but what brought it to mind was the articles in the current issue of New Left Review. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
On 23/03/06, Rana Dasgupta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > i should make clear that this article is not interested in people who > live in Third-World cities, or in making generalisations about what they > might think. nowhere does the "reality" of the Third-World city > feature: the article is precisely about the commodified images of which > you speak, which are for the most part not produced by by people in > Third-World cities. this article is an anthropology of the west, not > the east [or the south or whatever one calls it]. I understand, and liked the article in that sense; I was just thinking how it might be read by someone who had only seen the commodified images, and wasn't at all aware of the reality. I thought it wouldn't hurt to clarify things a bit for such a reader. > interesting line of thought. but do you think that the virtue of europe > is so great that any compromise to it could only come from the corrupt > third world...? perhaps european elites have no need of tutors... (-: I would never want to suggest an opposition between a virtuous Europe and a corrupt Third World; I was thinking rather that Europe's ruthless elites, who have never been happy with democracy's tendency to threaten their privileges, might be glad to see working examples of techniques of power that solve this problem. On the other hand, you're probably right that they're cunning enough to devise such techniques on their own. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: The Sudden Stardom of the Third-World City
On 23/03/06, Rana Dasgupta <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > THE SUDDEN STARDOM OF THE THIRD-WORLD CITY I think you have a point about Westerners' changing perceptions, but perhaps you ought to have mentioned the vast gulf between those commodified images and the ways many who live in third-world megacities perceive their own environment: not as a vibrant, irrepressible source of unlimited creativity, but as a prison to which they resign themselves or from which they long to escape. The lack of clear rules and the labyrinth of informal, parallel economic and political systems, with their merciless logic of nepotism and bribery, ruling over masses of disposable people, tend to breed Kafkaesque despair rather than the thrill of unfettered, improvised ingenuity.=20 Perhaps this helps explain why, in those countries where popular movements have been most successful, as in Bolivia's recent elections, they seem to have relied heavily on the mobilisation of rural populations. Also, Western tourists and consumers are not perhaps the only ones who admire the third world: is Silvio Berlusconi, in gaining personal control of the media and the economy, consciously imitating certain third-world autocrats? As Western elites search for a political formula that maintains the trappings of democracy while staving off the spectre of egalitarianism, might they (such as those who arranged for George W. Bush to follow in his father's footsteps) not find inspiration in the rigged elections, media homogeneity, trompe-l'oeil political parties and dynastic regimes that are a fixture of politics in many countries further South? Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: on nuclear diplomacy...
On 21/01/06, brian carroll <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > the War of Terror is actually the Palestinian/Israeli conflict writ-larg= e at the world-scale. While this might be an interesting analysis from a psychoanalytic point of view, if taken literally it runs the risk of blurring political realities, by, for example, implying that Palestinians are somehow responsible for, or that they benefit from, any acts of terrorism directed against the West. George Bush may say, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists"[1], thus implying that that anyone anywhere who is opposed to some US interest belongs to some imaginary global "terrorist side" in a single worldwide conflict; that doesn't make it true. Palestinians have enough to deal with as it is; let's not imagine that kidnappings in Iraq or unmanned CIA air strikes against Pakistani villages are somehow their problem, too. Indeed, it is now commonplace for governments to use this very blurring of distinctions in order to garner support for whatever foreign or domestic policy they wish to pursue. Iranian president Ahmadinejad probably knows very well that the Israeli-Palestinian struggle isn't an "overriding concern to the average Iranian", and may simply be provoking an international crisis in order to gain the upper hand in a domestic power struggle.[2] Israel may be far less worried about Iran's nuclear weapons than about the possibility of losing its strategic importance to the US.[3] Moreover, if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were really important to the US, it could have brought sufficient pressure and incentives to bear on all parties to resolve that conflict long ago. It does not do so precisely because the Palestinians have very little effect on US interests.[4] [1] George W. Bush, September 20, 2001, http://tinyurl.com/rrkj [2] Karim Sadjadpour and Ray Takeyh, "Behind Iran's Hard-Line on Israel", The Boston Globe, 23 December 2005, http://tinyurl.com/dn56s [3] Trita Parsi, "A challenge to Israel's strategic primacy", bitterlemons-international.org, 5 January 2006, http://tinyurl.com/acuym [4] Noam Chomsky, "The New World Order", 16 March 1991, http://tinyurl.com/= crkxg # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Frank Rieger: We lost the War--Welcome to the World of Tomorrow
On 10/01/06, Prem Chandavarkar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > So you have 15% of the electorate on one side, and 4% on the other. The > 11% differential is enough to swing any election and all the politicians > know it. Therefore, democracy is not about majorities and minorities. > It is determined by how the debate coalesces around single cause issues. A referendum would deal with that problem nicely. If your analysis is correct, it seems that all you need is a system that makes it easy for people to bring about referendums. The Swiss have such a system, if I'm not mistaken. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: [Fwd: The Ghost in the Network]
On 09/06/05, lotu5 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Internet standards are defined by the RFC's from the W3C. How the W3C > functions, I'm not familiar with. But somewhere in there is the Internet > Engineering Task Force, with an interesting law enforcement sounding > name. Actually the W3C just deals with standards for the World Wide Web (i.e. the Internet as a means for using hypertext), and calls them "recommendations"; RFCs, which tend to deal with lower-level protocols, come from the IETF (http://www.ietf.org). Far from having anything to do with enforcement, the IETF is a set of open forums where standards are agreed by consensus. For a taste of how it works, see "The Tao of IETF": http://www.ietf.org/tao.html Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: So what is Otpor doing?
On 06/06/05, Ivo Skoric <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1499871,00.html
The article says:
> "Our idea was to use corporate branding in politics," said Mr
> Marovic of Serbia's Otpor, which has become the model for
> parallel movements across the region. "The movement has
> to have a marketing department. We took Coca-Cola as our model."
I wonder if they need to use Coca-Cola-style marketing just because it's the
only thing people respond
to in a word dominated by consumer culture, or also because these movements
seek to establish
capitalist liberal democracy in order to permit consumer culture to develop
more fully. ("What is our
goal? To hold free elections, create a free society.") And are there limits to
the analogy? Would
they make posters promising people a happy love life if they support the
opposition? And would that
be any different from the French May 68 slogan "Sous les pav=E9s, la plage"
(i.e. making barricades is
fun, like a day at the beach)? Is the use of people's libido for political
purposes dishonest,
manipulative and degrading, or (perhaps from a Deleuzian perspective) is it on
the contrary the
essence of political emanciaption?
Ben
# distributed via : no commercial use without permission
# 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Imaginary Futures -- A presentation by Richard Barbrook
On 4/20/05, Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Saturday April 23 > The Thing at Postmasters > 459 West 19th Street > 6:30pm It's always nice when people post event announcements on international mailing lists without saying what country, never mind what city, the event is taking place in. Even among those who study the Internet, parochialism apparently dies hard. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Ethics and Social Transformation (part 1)
After I said I thought this was probably off-topic for nettime, ed phillips encouraged me to post it. Please keep in mind what it says on the tin: it's a work in progress. Since it's too long for one post, I'm posting it in two pieces. The latest version (and the Creative Commons licence) can be found here: http://www.open-organizations.org/view/Main/EthicsAndSocialTransformation Ben Ethics and Social Transformation =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D= =3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D by Benjamin Geer This is a work in progress. The Priority of the Social -- Ethical philosophy has tended to deal with choices made by individuals. For example, philosophers have asked whether it is wrong to lie, or whether someone with excess wealth has a responsibility to give money to charity. Few have asked how to choose between different possible political or economic systems on ethical grounds. One might be tempted to respond that individual evaluations and decisions are more basic and should therefore be considered before social ones. But this view is misguided; all individual choice presumes an already existing society. In 'Freedom and Resentment', P. F. Strawson writes: The existence of the general framework of [moral] attitudes itself is something we are given with the fact of human society. As a whole, it neither calls for, nor permits, an external _rational_ justification.[1] But it is not only our ethical attitudes that are constrained by society; our ethical choices are constrained, too, because the structure of each society creates particular kinds of moral problems and opportunities to act. For example, charities exist because capitalism perpetuates huge inequalities. In a society where economic arrangements did not create poverty, the question of whether to give money to charity would not exist. Moreover, as Antonio Gramsci argued: ...we have to dispense with the idea of abstract or speculative 'absolute philosophy', i.e. philosophy that arises from the preceding philosophy and inherits its so-called 'supreme problems', and even with the idea of the 'philosophical problem' Practice, the real history of changing social relations, takes precedence; the problems that philosophers deal with arise from these changes, and hence ultimately from the economy if philosophy develops because world history develops (i.e. the social relations in which people live) rather than because a great philosopher is followed by an even greater one and so on, it is clear that by doing work that makes history in a practical sense, one is also creating an 'implicit' philosophy, which will become 'explicit' to the extent that philosophers elaborate it coherently[2] It does not make sense to consider the moral choices of individuals before considering the moral effects of society itself. The question of what kind of society we should have in order to prevent poverty is in fact more basic than the question of whether a well-off individual should give money to an impoverished one. The answer to the individual question cannot help us at all in answering the social one. The answer to the social question can either vastly simplify or vastly complicate the task of answering the individual one. Another reason for this approach is that human beings are generally unwilling to follow moral principles that (at least in their view) threaten their interests. For example, anyone who has worked in an office will be aware that most employees carefully avoid telling their bosses what they really think about all sorts of things, for fear of losing their jobs. Because of this tremendous pressure, insincerity permeates relations between bosses and employees everywhere. In this context, it is pointless to ask whether it is right or wrong to lie to one's boss. In a society where work relationships were structured in such a way that people could tell the truth without fear, the question might not be pointless. Moral standards that attempt to pit individuals against the prevailing social order stand little chance of being widely implemented. In order to become a social norm, a moral standard must on the contrary be implemented by the normal operation of that social order. Poverty is a systemic problem, caused by characteristics of the global economic system, and only a systemic change can solve a systemic problem. There are many such problems; not a few of them pose, like poverty, ethical dilemmas regarding individual action. Solutions to these problems would eliminate the associated ethical dilemmas as well; speculation about these dilemmas would thereby become entirely academic. It may be objected that this approach simply moves the problem from the domain of philosophy into that of politics. But t
Ethics and Social Transformation (part 2)
(continued from previous post) Proportional Influence -- What does it mean to be considered a legitimate partner in a political process? It means that your voice carries weight. How much weight? Let's consider these examples given by Michael Albert: Imagine a worker in a large group. He or she wants to place a picture of a daughter on his or her workstation. Who should make that decision? Should some owner decide? Should a manager decide? Should all the workers decide? Obviously, none of that makes sense. The one worker whose child it is should decide, alone, with full authority. He or she should be literally a dictator in this particular case. Now suppose instead that the same worker wants to put a radio on his or her desk, and to play it very loud, listening to raucous rock and roll or even heavy metal. Now who should decide? We all intuitively know that the answer is that those who will hear the radio should have a say. And that those who will be more bothered -- or more benefited -- should have more say. And at this point, we have already arrived at a value vis-=E0-vis decision making What we hope to accomplish when we choose a mode of decision making as well as associated processes of discussion, agenda setting, and so on, is that each actor should have an influence on decisions in proportion to the degree they are affected by them.[20] Let us call this the doctrine of 'proportional influence'. Albert's examples concern highly localised issues. It is worth considering the implications of this doctrine for large-scale problems as well, such as environmental degradation. There is widespread agreement among scientists that if the present worldwide use of fossil fuels is not drastically reduced, the resulting climate change will ruin the environment in which many people live. This is the view expressed by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: Overall, climate change is projected to increase threats to human health, particularly in lower income populations, predominantly within tropical/subtropical countries Warming of a few degrees or more is projected to increase food prices globally, and may increase the risk of hunger in vulnerable populations Climate change will exacerbate water shortages in many water-scarce areas of the world... The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor persons within all countries, and thereby exacerbate inequities in health status and access to adequate food, clean water, and other resources.[21] Proportional influence means that those who will be most severely affected -- the poorest, particularly in the regions that stand to be the hardest hit -- should have the greatest influence over the world's use or abandonment of fossil fuels. What sort of decision-making processes are capable of implementing this doctrine? More will be said about this in a future version of this essay, but here I want to point out a few considerations that the construction of any such processes must take into account. I have already mentioned one constraint on decision-making in large groups: the greater the number of participants in a discussion, the longer it takes. Moreover, large meetings where individuals can speak one after the other often resemble a series of unrelated monologues, rather than a discussion progressing towards a collective decision. Decision-making processes for large numbers of people must therefore use heuristics to identify the main points of agreement and disagreement, and craft proposals that are likely to be acceptable to all. Attempts to do this often take the form of some type of delegation. What sorts of delegation are up to the task? Making decisions to promote other people's well-being requires knowing their needs and having the will to champion those needs. This is a risky endeavour at best. Anyone who has tried to make difficult decisions on behalf of a spouse, family member or close friend knows that, even with the best of intentions, it is easy to make mistakes. If making decisions for someone you know well is difficult, making decisions for thousands or millions of complete strangers is an enterprise bordering on madness. But when applied to parliamentary democracy, such a critique is too kind, because it presumes a world in which political candidates are motivated by the best of intentions. In reality, parliaments are an ideal instrument for consolidating the power of a particular class: ...that characteristic bourgeois political system we know as parliamentary democracy [is] the style of regime with which all ambitious, prosperous, and self-confident bourgeoisies feel most comfortable, precisely because it maximizes their power and minimizes that of their competitors Money is
Re: W/O(C) digest [geer, salucofagos]
On Sun, 6 Mar 2005 20:29:28 +0200, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > And that you will not > entertain (as usual) any "transitional forms" other than those > expounded by your high priests of the GPL of the CC. But I will and I do! See the Open Organizations project (http://www.open-organizations.org) where our aim is to identify, catalogue and critique all sorts of transitional forms. I tend not to mention them on nettime because I feel as if they fall outside the scope of this list. > well isnt the commons just a hang over form the public/private thinking of > modernity. It predates modernity; in English law, the Statute of Merton (1235) recognised rights regarding the use of common lands. You could see the idea of the commons, in that context, as characteristic of a transitional form of society. Formerly, population density was low and most land was open for use by anyone, much as it was in North America before the arrival of Europeans. The manorial system introduced private ownership of more and more land, but the obligation to leave some land for the "commoners" remained, and was only gradually lost as common lands were enclosed, mainly from the 16th century onwards. Seventeenth-century antiauthoritarian political movements understood this (as described by Christopher Hill in _The World Turned Upside Down_) but were largely powerless to oppose the transformation of land into a commodity. > I am not really interested in the idea of building such a commons within > capital - one that is free as in speech and not free as in beer. I think we have to build what we can now, in order to make possible a transition to a world without capital. Production can't be cost-free in any economy. Somehow the producers need to eat. But even in a capitalist economy, we can find ways to support knowledge production so that knowledge can be available as cheaply as possible. And in practice, free-as-in-speech tends to mean very inexpensive. You can have all of Wikipedia for the cost of the Internet access needed to download it. In Argentina, workers are occupying factories and running them as cooperatives. In Brazil, landless farmers are occupying land and farming it cooperatively. These are spaces that, while they exist within a capitalist world economy, also implement, to an extent, another kind of power and other kinds of economic relationships. Shouldn't they (and we) also try to create similar spaces for the production of knowledge? Maybe all these spaces, taken together, could be part of the groundwork for transitional forms of society. > If we have nothing in common, iif for example someone rejects > the ethics by which another seeks to build a just world why would I want > them to be able to take what I have in common with others and propertise > it to turn it back on me inverted why and for would I want to support > the process of expropriation that capital seeks to manage and control by > adding to the commons. I agree with you. But this is exactly what the GPL prevents. It prevents someone from turning your knowledge into private property and selling it back to you. > p. 188 The legal justification of private ownership is > undermined by the common social nature of production. Free Software is produced by a common social process, in which the result is, in effect, not privately owned by anyone. > (to quote Moglen: "The GPL is a straightforward capitalistic proposition") I think he's mistaken about that. See: http://www.gnupauk.org/DiskusiJa/PrijedloZi/BothDevilAndGnu "GNU General Public License protects the freedom to use and to develop, but at the same time creates a strategic collective subject..." > And to live the passage we don't need a licence (a property form or > contract), we need ethics. It's true that in a capitalist society, a licence is a contract for the use of property. But even when we think about constructing a non-capitalist world, we need to think about some of the questions that licences try to answer. What modes of production and consumption are acceptable? Literate societies express their answers to these questions in written documents: constitutions, charters, laws. The GPL encodes a basic ethical principle: you may use what others have produced, but you may not appropriate it for yourself. If you add to it, your production must become part of the collective process of production; you must share your contribution as the original work was shared with you. These are principles that could be part of the basic normative framework of a non-capitalist society. > why not experiment with ethics instead of > property and the contractual form?? That's the focus of my current work, but it's in its very early stages. If you hunt around on the Open Organizations project web site, you'll find it. If you want to discuss ethics, I invite you to that project's mailing list, since that discussion is probably off-topic for nettime. Ben # distribu
Re: double-plus-unfree digest [byfield, elloi]
On Wed, 2 Mar 2005 22:37:38 -0800 (PST), Morlock Elloi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> You have to use your imagination. Film viewers don't need support >> contracts, but they might like to have more of a say in the sorts of >> films that get produced, and they might be willing to pay for that. I >> certainly would. > > The payment is the crucial problem for un-labelled content. [...] If you > think that > freedom-fighting avangarde p2p networks will not copy quality content from > independents think again. That's fine with me. I think you missed my point. If there was, say, a worker's collective of independent filmmakers that produced films on subjects proposed and chosen democratically by their paying supporters, I would be happy to be one of those paying supporters. And if the resulting films were then copied and distributed free of charge, so much the better. I'm sure I'm not the only person who would contribute to such a project. If all I can do is choose among content that's already been created, I'm reduced to the role of passive spectator. I feel about as involved as when I have to choose between political parties. No wonder I'm not very interested in paying. But if paying gave me a say in the subjects covered and in the way they're covered, so that I and my like-minded friends could get, say, documentaries produced on the subjects we really want to know more about (or want others to know more about), that would be a real reason to pay. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: double-plus-unfree digest [byfield, elloi]
Morlock Elloi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > In media content this likeliness of monetizing is much lower. You have to use your imagination. Film viewers don't need support contracts, but they might like to have more of a say in the sorts of films that get produced, and they might be willing to pay for that. I certainly would. > 'Value' of the content for the masses *is* created mostly by > publishing labels. This is a symptom of the problem I was pointing out. Alienation can't be overcome by media alone, because it's inherent in the way people live. Slaves who watch great free films are still slaves. But slaves who are creating the economic and political conditions for their own emancipation can certainly make free films to help that effort along, and will have no need whatsoever to parody the filmmaking of their former masters. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?
On Tue, 1 Mar 2005 21:03:29 -0500, Jon Ippolito <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > You're right, American consumer culture is largely self-referential. > But that doesn't mean that all non-consumer repurposing of that > culture is stuck in the same groove. Remixes like John Oswald's take > on Michael Jackson, Pat O'Neill's Humphrey Bogart, and Brian > Provinciano's Grand Theft Auto break the expectations--not to mention > the law--of mainstream culture's vicious circle. I haven't seen them, so forgive me for hazarding some guesses that might be wide of the mark. Doesn't the very presence of Michael Jackson or Humphrey Bogart serve to anchor the work in what the viewer sees as their world? And doesn't this reinforce the viewer's belief that "my world" can only be the world that the culture industry has created for me, and that its utterly alienated system of references is something so important that every piece of art has to either emanate from it or be a comment on it, as if it were a holy text and all artists were its theologians? Wouldn't it be much more liberating to treat that system as the minuscule, putrid bit of rubbish that it really is, and therefore ignore it completely, in favour of the much larger and infinitely more human world outside? > Want to netcast your video expose on the MGM-Credit Lyonnais scandal > or your documentary on Iraqi casualties? Stand in line--you'll need > Hollywood's digital watermark (and hence blessing) before you can get > it through Internet2's routers. Wouldn't one of Internet2's main selling points for the consumer be the ability to send videos of your new baby to your friends in seconds? How would it be feasible to ban the documentary but not the millions of baby videos? Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Internet2: Orchestrating the End of the Internet?
On Mon, 28 Feb 2005 16:05:35 -0500, Jon Ippolito <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >This hardware intervention effectively destroys even the possibility of >fair use, since artists and educators cannot transform, parody, or >criticize what they cannot record. [snip] which is why the MPAA will >do its best to disarm the technology by installing Digital Rights >Management directly in its routers to stop interesting content from >ever getting into the pipeline. Do you really feel that Hollywood and the American recording industry produce much interesting content? Is there really much to be gained by transforming, parodying or criticising it? Perhaps in 1964, when Susan Sontag wrote _Notes on "Camp"_, she could legitimately see kitsch as an opportunity to create a liberating aesthetic. But for some time now, camp has been the dominant mode of expression of the culture industry as a whole; it has been co-opted as an instrument of hegemony. The desire to remix insipid music, or parody idiotic films that are already the purest self-parody, plays into the hands of the culture industry's own ever more intense navel-gazing. There's nothing liberating in producing ever more clever parodies of Scooby Doo. American consumer culture is already a closed system. The more self-referential it becomes, the harder it is for Americans to imagine that anything exists outside the US. For Americans, the war in Iraq isn't happening in Iraq, because they can't imagine Iraq; for them, it's happening in the imaginary space of the American culture industry, framed by the reassuringly brutal language of advertising, with its growling male voices, punchy editing and snippets of heavy metal songs. As Theodor Adorno pointed out in _Minima Moralia_, "All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire." Satire only works when the audience is capable of feeling horrified by real horrors. When the audience's moral sense is totally numb, satire fails to elicit any reaction. It seems to me that a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for solving this problem is to use the tactic Richard Stallman came up with in 1984: make free content so people don't need unfree content. Ignore Hollywood. Use Creative Commons licences. Create alternative funding models, as the free software movement has done. Break out of the self-defeating spiral of self-reference. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Re: What's the meaning of "non-commercial"?
Felix Stalder wrote: > Openness and freedom are not constituted by the absence of > rules (which are always enabling and constraining) but a particular set of > rules that is biased to promote certain dynamics and inhibit others. Yes, I agree. > However, it seems to me, this critique is totally misguided. For one, it > assumes that there is a clear boundary between the two categories which is > not the case for two reasons. One, there are no clear definition for those > terms and we are back to murky case-by-case decisions. [...] > So, what the actual effect of the non-commercial clause is to lock information > into a ghetto where production must be done for free, or, where its material > support cannot be provided by the producers themselves I agree that if the goal is to promote an alternative to capitalism, it would be better to start with a description of how such an alternative could work and how a transition to it could take place, and then construct a licence that would promote the use of copyrighted works by organisations engaged in a mode of production compatible with that transition. For example, one could envisage a licence requiring works to be distributed (a) for free, (b) by workers' collectives or (c) by states. (People who favour other sorts of non-capitalistic economic models could no doubt imagine other possibilities.) However, I'm not a lawyer, so it would be difficult for me to write such a licence. In the meantime, using the Creative Commons non-commercial licence seems like a reasonable compromise, because I can still use it to enforce the above restriction, by granting exceptions to anyone who fits into the above categories. I can even advertise the fact that I'm prepared to grant such exceptions. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Re: What's the meaning of "non-commercial"?
Felix Stalder wrote: > On Sunday, 16. January 2005 06:22, Patrice Riemens wrote: >>This being said, the clausula that prior permission must be seeked before >>engaging in _possible_ commercial use does not appear so much of a burden. >>In a culture of copyright as our own, it is being routinely done all the >>time. > > This only applies if you assume that each work as a small number of > authors, or that these authors are easily identifiable. This, of course, > is not the case with major collaborative works. It's next to impossible to > identify all the authors of, say, a wikipedia article. That would be the case whichever licence Wikipedia used. If a licence imposes any restrictions at all, it's possible that someone may wish to ask for a special exception. Moreover, the copyright owner needs to be identifiable in order to defend the work's copyright in court. This problem can occur, for example, with works licenced under the GPL (which of course places no restrictions on commercial use, but includes other restrictions). The GNU project's solution is to have authors assign their copyright to the Free Software Foundation. The same approach could be taken in any project, regardless of the licence used. > One of the most innovative aspects of FLOSS is that has managed to avoid > exactly this distinction, hence you have people from the radically > different contexts building upon, and contributing to, the same code-base. Another way of looking at it is that this is one of the limitations of FLOSS, which keeps it from contributing to an alternative to capitalism. > In many ways, the GPL provides a de-militarized zone. Everyone agrees to > leave the big guns at the door. People who don't like the GPL (because they dislike licences that impose any sort of restrictions) disagree with this strongly. From my point of view, it is precisely the GPL's "big gun" -- the requirement that any derived works must be released under the same terms -- that makes it worth using. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: nettime@bbs.thing.net
Re: Dealing with state terrorism
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The U.N. oil-embargo permitted Iraq sufficient oil sales for > the revenues to feed its population and maintain > essential services. Moreover the regime sold a lot more > oil than permitted, exporting it as contraband, via > Syria for instance. However the oil revenues went > mainly to military expenditure and into the private bank > accounts of members of the regime. It was therefore the > regime that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians, Yes and no. The embargo kept out a lot of necessary supplies because they were classified as "dual-use". For example, Iraq was forbidden to import chlorine, which was needed in water-treatment plants, on the grounds that it could also be used to make chemical weapons. As a result, a lot of children died from water-borne diseases. http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0804-04.htm Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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]
bowling alone
A posting from rattus norvegicus <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> on the rekombinant mailing list, suggesting that the Internet has contributed to making Americans less sociable and less politically active, and Italians more so: http://liste.rekombinant.org/wws/arc/rekombinant/2004-08/msg00015.html I've translated some of rattus's posting from Italian: -- Sociologist Robert Putnam's book _Bowling Alone_ (2000) seems to have gone unnoticed by many observers of American politics It is an important text for its portrait of the decline in Americans' social involvement. Putnam studied endless statistics on the social behaviour of US citizens during the past 40 years, and drew some rather impressive conclusions. The amount of time Americans spend with friends has decreased by 35% in the past 15 years. They sign 30% fewer petitions than they did at the end of the 80s. Extrapolitical social activities have fared no better: in the middle of the 70s, the average American attended a club, cultural association or church once a month; this frequency has since dropped by 60%. In 1975 Americans got together with friends at home 15 times a year on average; now they do so only half as often. Putnam perceptively lists the consequences of this social disaster, particularly its negative effects on health, culture, education, etc. There is an intriguing element in Putnam's explanations of this phenomenon of progressive isolation: although he singles out electronic entertainment as one of the main causes (among many others) of the privatisation of free time, he suspends judgement on the Internet. It's no coincidence that Scott Heiferman, the CEO of MeetUp.com, a site that boasts more than a million members, maintains that his global meeting system was inspired by Putnam's book. It's worth reflecting on this in relation to the impact of the Internet on different cultures, considering the differences between the US and Europe Recent statistics from Censis seem to show a correlation [in Italy] between Internet usage and political participation: "The type of person who takes to the streets is, in particular: male (14.4%, compared to 9.4% among women), young (15.3% among people aged 18-34, compared to 12.8% among those aged 35-64 and 4.4% among those 65 and over), a university graduate (16%, compared to 5% who have only finished primary school), employed (13.7%) or a student (30.7%), and lives in a medium-sized city in the Centre-South of Italy. But above all he is an Internet user. In the past year, those who use the Internet demonstrated much more than those who don't (17% compared to 8.1%); a good familiarity with the Internet therefore represents a valuable resource that translates into a culture of socio-political participation." Still, one is left with the feeling that as far as the social and political effects of the Internet are concerned, we're still in an embryonic phase, in which many paths are still to be explored. Wittgenstein, in one of his metaphors, suggested that we make a distinction between the movement of water along a riverbed, and the displacement of the riverbed itself, even though, between the two, there isn't a clear distinction. Rattus # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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]
France extradites leftist from Mexico
An echo of the Cesare Battisti case: this time the accused is French. After a failed bank robbery attempt in Paris that left several hostages wounded, Hélène Castel fled to Mexico. Like Battisti, she was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life in prison. She made a new life for herself in Mexico, where she lived peacefully for 24 years. This year, the French police reopened the case; she was arrested in May, four days before the statute of limitations expired. She was extradited to France, where she will face trial. _Libération_ deplores the "insincerity" of the self-serving French police, who have denied Ms. Castel the "right to forget".[1] The leftist newspaper _L'Humanité_ laments: "Mexico is no longer the land of asylum that it once was."[2] After the Battisti case, it is ironic to hear that France is actually just like Italy: the sort of country that sentences people to life in prison in absentia, and whose rule of law is so bad that people ought to be able escape it and be granted asylum elsewhere. [1] http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=229190 [2] http://www.humanite.fr/journal/2004-06-15/2004-06-15-395501 Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: confused euro muslims (via b. sterling)
geert wrote: > http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040802fa_fact The _New Yorker_ used to have better editorial standards. This article is inexcusable: it blithely equates Arabs with Muslims and Muslims with terrorists. > "The Internet provides confused young Muslims in Europe with a > virtual community. Those who cannot adapt to their new homes > discover on the Internet a responsive and compassionate forum. > "The Internet stands in for the idea of the ummah, the > mythologized Muslim community," Marc Sageman, the psychiatrist > and former C.I.A. officer, said. The idea here seems to be to infantilise Muslims: the former CIA officer would have us believe that, gullible and hypnotised by myth, all Muslims are easy prey for whatever devious, fanatical views they might find on the Internet. In any case, who wouldn't be confused by the fact that, in France for example, university graduates called Abdelatif or Nedjma are well advised to change their name to something that sounds more "French" when looking for a job?[1] > "The Internet makes this ideal community concrete, because one > can interact with it." He compares this virtual ummah to > romantic conceptions of nationhood, which inspire people not > only to love their country but to die for it. The Internet is a medium for all sorts of nationalisms; there is nothing unusual about this. However, to imply that web sites made by Muslims are mainly focused on promoting war, with the aim of translating the concept of ummah into a real political entity, is ridiculous. Muslims use the Internet to communicate ideas as diverse as those of any other group of people, on as wide a range of subjects, both secular and religious. > "It allows the propagation of a universal norm, with an > Internet Sharia and fatwa system." I certainly hope this Professor Kepel is being quoted out of context. The idea that Muslim writers on the Internet, never mind Muslim Internet users, represent a homogeneous group, adhering to a "universal norm" concerning Islam, is nonsense. Consider Tariq Ramadan[2][3], advocate of a "fully European Islam", or the blogs of Raed Jarrar[4], an Iraqi, and his Iranian girlfriend Nikki[5], who consider themselves "secular Muslims". > "Anyone can seek a ruling from his favorite sheikh in Mecca," > Kepel said. "In the old days, one sought a fatwa from the > sheikh who had the best knowledge. Now it is sought from the > one with the best Web site." This sounds suspiciously like the American neoconservative idea that the Internet is an immoral and decadent medium that corrupts the minds of youth (in this case those "confused young Muslims"). > To a large extent, Kepel argues, the Internet has replaced the > Arabic satellite channels as a conduit of information and > communication. Here we elide the distinction between Arab and Muslim. The people who make Arabic-language satellite channels and web sites, and the people who use them, include many Christians as well as Muslims. The editor of Al Hayat[6] (a widely read Arabic-language newspaper and web site published in London, which often contains articles of great perceptiveness and wit) is a Lebanese Christian. > "One can say that this war against the West started on > television," he said And with no transition, we pass from Arabic-language media to a "war against the West", as if the two were equivalent. As if Algerian[7], Moroccan[8] and Tunisian[9] journalists and web site operators weren't being imprisoned for criticising their *own* governments. As if the state-controlled Egyptian newspaper and web site Al Ahram[10] didn't publish deferential interviews with George W. Bush[11] and Francis Fukuyama[12]. Or as if the Internet didn't contain a plethora of Arabic-language women's magazines, full of the sort of material you find in all other women's magazines. > "A jihadi subculture has been created that didn't exist before > 9/11." As most nettime readers will probably know, the United States nurtured the jihadi subculture as an instrument of its proxy war against the USSR in Afghanistan in the 1980s.[13] > Because the Internet is anonymous, Islamist dissidents are less > susceptible to government pressure. "There is no signature," > Kepel said. "To some of us who have been trained as > classicists, the cyber-world appears very much like the time > before Gutenberg. Copyists used to add their own notes into a > text, so you never know who was the real author." It's hard to believe that anyone who has actually used the Internet, in any language, would think that most of the texts on the web are not signed. > Specific targets, such as the Centers for Disease Control, in > Atlanta, or FedWire, the money-clearing system operated by the > Federal Reserve Board, are openly discussed. "We do see a > rising focus on the U.S.," Weimann told me. "But some of this > talk may be fake -- a scare campaign." Indeed. And some articles in the _New Yorke
Re: Michael Moore
Art McGee wrote: > Connecting the Dots: Michael Moore > White Nationalism & the Multiracial Left > By Kenyon Farrow and Kil Ja Kim > http://www.nathanielturner.com/connectingthedots.htm 'Moores lack of engagement with such analysis is apparent when he interviews the white militia families to understand their fixation with guns in his Academy Award winning film Bowling for Columbine. Although hes clearly weirded out, Moore doesnt question the anti-black undertones the interviewees use when talking about the need to arm themselves against criminals or intruders.' The authors must have written this without actually having seen _Bowling for Columbine_, which contains a long cartoon sequence arguing that the culture of paranoia in the US is mainly the result of white people's fear of blacks, dating back to the end of slavery. Moreover, in the sequence on the popular TV show Cops, which follows police around as they make dramatic arrests of one young black man after another, Moore challenges the show's producer, asking him why he doesn't make a show on the corporate crime committed by America's mostly white company directors. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: Negri with Ballestrini to Battisti and on amnesty
Martin Hardie wrote: > Benjamin has been big on trusting the law and its processes in this one ... I simply think that the same rules should apply to everyone. If we accept that, say, the policemen who allegedly beat up activists in Genoa at the G8 should be tried (as indeed they are being tried), then the same principle should also apply to Battisti. Or are you in favour of abandoning the whole notion of trials? If so, I would like to hear what you propose to introduce in its place. > but Ben are they not alleged "crimes" or has Battisti been convicted en > absentia? I need only repeat what I've already posted here: "Only two years ago, [Battisti] declared that he accepted 'the political and military responsibilities of what the 1970s were in Italy', adding, to be entirely clear: 'I declare myself guilty and I am proud of it.'" (From _La Repubblica_, reprinted in _Courrier International_, no. 697, 11-17 March 2004.) That sounds like an unequivocal, unrepentant confession of guilt if I've ever heard one. But just hypothetically, even if Battisti proclaimed his innocence, would we be required to take his word for it? Is that how you think the truth should be determined when someone is accused of murder? Perhaps, like me, you think there should be some sort of fair process for distinguishing truth from falsehood in these cases. That is in fact what courtrooms are for. > And what have the rights of victims got to do with a prosecution by the > State - crimes are committed against the State, the Crown or the People > are they not? Victims don't come into it except to give evidence ... Crimes are committed against individuals, and I think it's fair for victims to seek reparation. If you steal from me something that my livelihood depends on, it's fair for you to have to give it back. If you take my life, clearly you can't give it back, but you will have made my family suffer, and it seems to me that you owe them something. If Battisti is indeed guilty as charged, his crimes have wrecked people's lives, and he has profited from those crimes by using them as material for his novels. That, to me, seems outrageously unfair. I don't wish to live in a society where one can kill and plunder to one's heart's content, and make a profit by doing so, without any inconvenient consequences for oneself. Do you? > Why all this faith in law and process? Faith has nothing to do with it. It seems to me that some concept of fairness is inherent in all ethical systems practiced by human beings. The pratice of fairness is inconceivable without socially agreed-upon processes that are recognised as fair, and some means of enforcing those processes. On any definition of fairness I can think of, if those processes apply to anyone, they must apply to everyone. The rule of law, as decided on by parliamentary democracy and implemented by the courts, is certainly far from being perfectly fair. But it is the closest thing we have to such processes today. I am all for replacing it with something better. But we currently have nothing to replace it with, so the current alternative is 'anything goes', which strikes me as far more terrifying than any legal system in use today. > It doesn't seem to really reflect much except power does it? Power is inherent in human society. There are only different forms of power, some more consensual, others less so. > And why not an amnesty - what can a prosecution achieve - what does jail > achieve (save some good books by Negri ;-) ) what can a conviction > achieve - will the "victims" feel better for retribution? Surely here > we have moved beyond believing in such stuff? What Negri fails to point out is that (to quote again from the same article in _La Repubblica_) "[part of the French left] pretends to be unaware that nearly all the former members of the Red Brigades, including those who assassinated [Italian prime minister] Aldo Moro, have been released from prison or are in semi-liberty, at least those who expressed repentance". If I were Battisti, I would apologise publicly to my victims, agree to assist the Italian legal system, and offer reparations to my victims and their families. I think that would be the right thing for him to do, regardless of what the French courts decide. And it wouldn't hurt his chances of being granted amnesty by the Italian government, either. I'm not in favour of retribution, but I think reparations are fair. However, if Battisti remains unrepentant and if, as it appears, he couldn't care less about his victims, then I think a prison sentence for him is, on balance, more ethical than allowing him to enjoy complete impunity. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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 P
Re: Negri with Ballestrini to Battisti and on amnesty
Aliette Guibert wrote: > Finally, Toni Negri in the French newspaper "Liberation" today, in the > column "Bounces": on Battisti and Italian refugees in France, release in > the question of the general amnesty of leftists in Italy. The interesting thing about this article is that, while it says a lot about Italy in the 70s, it says absolutely nothing about Cesare Battisti, nor about the specific crimes that Battisti committed, nor about the injustice done to Battisti's victims. Its main implied argument seems that two wrongs make a right: since (if we accept Negri's version of history) there was a civil war going on between the State and the revolutionary left, it was somehow OK to kill random civilians who were in no way representatives of the state. None of the pro-Battisti articles I've seen mention Battisti's victims at all. Justice for Battisti? Fine. But justice for his victims, too. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: Civil and human Rights (from indymedia)
Aliette Guibert wrote: > Around 150 former Italian activists, condemned in Italy for actions linked > with the political and social upheaval of the 1970s Translation: nutters who believed that murdering politicians and random civilians would make them popular. > Since 1981, they have been legally residing there on the promise > made by the former French President Francois Mitterrand. Ahem. François Mitterand was a model of legality? His arbitrary decision to flout the Italian judicial system should be accepted as gospel? > Cesare Battisti, the author of several detective novels Writing detective novels makes you above the law? > In Cesare's situation, the Italian governement convicted him in his absence > with only repentant's testimonies. If he didn't want to be tried in absentia, he shouldn't have fled Italy. And if he thinks his conviction was unjust, he should appeal, like anyone else. That's called justice. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: what would be nettime's reading list?
geert lovink wrote: > (Would it include Empire, Crowds and Power, Male Fantasies, a Foucault, > Ahrendt or even Deleuze? How much history (of science)? How much would > politically correct and which titles would really be useful? Geert) Maybe there should be different reading lists depending on the geographical and cultural background of the reader. For anyone in North America or Europe, _A History of the Modern Middle East_ by William L. Cleveland. That sort of thing. But really, students should be required to learn at least one non-Indo-European language, including a one-year immersion course taken abroad... preferably in early adolescence. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: The State of Networking (with Florian Schneider)
geert lovink wrote: > After an exciting first phase of introductions and > debates, networks are put to the test: either they transform into a body > that is capable to act, or they remain stable on a flatline of information > exchange, with the occasional reply of an individual who dares to > disagree. Maybe this is because those people are using the wrong tools for the job. If you don't know what you want to do, you can't select the right tools. Rather than set up a network as a tool for 'bringing people together' or some such vague idea, and then hope that the participants will then find some way to act, I think it would make more sense to first decide exactly which action you want to take -- what work you want to do -- and then decide which tools (software, networks, organisational processes) could help you do that work. *Then* set up the tools and start using them. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: floss enforcement/compliance
ed phillips wrote: > If you are the > government of Extremadura and you need to release an application to > all your far flung Linux servers that > does foo and stores bar in a MySQL database, you are free to > distribute this on all your computers without formally having to > inflict the ugly, just good enough to get the job done hack on the > rest of us. Nor do you have to pay MySQL 450 or whatever dollars per > install of the application. Easy solution: release the source code with a big notice on it: 'This code is crap; we're just releasing it to comply with the GPL.' :) If they're not comfortable admitting that their code is crap, perhaps the GPL will act as an incentive to write better code in the first place. I once heard a talk given by the guy who started the IBM project to run Linux on IBM's mainframes (thereby convincing IBM to start investing in Linux). He said that once his developers started to write free software, an interesting thing happened: they would sometimes say that the code couldn't be released yet because they 'weren't proud of it yet'. He asked his audience (of developers and managers at a commercial software vendor), 'Have you ever heard a developer say that they couldn't release code because they weren't proud of it yet?' The audience burst out laughing. Of course, the knowledge that other people will read what you've written is no guarantee that you'll write something good, because you might not know enough to do so. But if, thanks to the GPL, good code is published so you can study it, you have a better chance of learning how to write good code. And maybe you're worrying too much about the effect of bad examples. Consider the world of books. Go into any library or bookshop and you'll find huge amounts of laughably mediocre novels and political treatises full of absurd arguments. Yet somehow, good writers still manage to write good books, and organisations that care about quality still manage to produce good research. Suppose there was a law requiring all software to go through a peer review process before it could be published. Bad code wouldn't vanish; it would just go underground. Perhaps it's better to have it out in the open where it can be critiqued. Maybe the government of Extremadura got swindled by some contractor; maybe they had no idea their code was crap. If they released it, the community could tell them how bad it was, and then it could be improved (perhaps with the help of the community). Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: floss enforcement/compliance
ed phillips wrote: > I'm curious. They seem in their licensing literature( > http://www.mysql.com/products/opensource-license.html ) > to be trying to scare non-Linux users, companies, and government > organizations into purchasing commercial licenses. I thought MySQL's interpretation of the GPL seemed strange at first, but now it seems to me that they're right, since they recently switched the licence of their client libraries from LGPL to GPL: http://www.mysql.com/products/licensing-faq.html This means that if you distribute an application that's linked to their client libraries, your application must be GPL as well. I think the ethical basis for this is sound: using free software in non-free software is a parasitical activity. To make it less parasitical, MySQL AB are charging a fee for it, and using the money to develop more free software. In the long term, if all software becomes free, MySQL AB will of course have to find some other way to survive. But by then, a lot of other things will probably have changed as well. :) As for government organisations, it's in the public interest for them to use free software and open standards, and release as free software any software that they distribute. Indeed many of them are doing just that. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: floss enforcement/compliance
Martin Hardie wrote: > I understand from the FSF in the US that they deal with enforcement and > compliance of the GPL. That sounds a bit misleading. The FSF defends the copyrights that it owns (i.e. for software that is part of the GNU project), and also sometimes helps out other copyright owners of free software when asked to do so. > But do they (and I presume with the support of Prof > Moglen) only do it within the US. That is within their jurisdiction? The jurisdiction for copyrights is international, thanks to the Berne Convention. The FSF has provided legal assistance to free software authors outside the U.S.; the Swedish company MySQL AB is an example: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/f_headline.cgi?bw.111202/223162550 > Do other groups (ie other than the FSF) deal with compliance and enforcement > issues? I think it's mostly up to each copyright owner. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: Red Hat Linux end-of-life update and transition planning (fwd)
Alan Sondheim wrote: > I find the following strangely disconcerting, as a major linux provider > slides out from its customer base. For some this would indicate a growth > and maturity of the community - for most of us, it already implies a > problematic development of open source community. It's just marketing. If you like Red Hat Linux, you might like Fedora, 'a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project': http://fedora.redhat.com/ If you want a Linux distribution that's maintained by and for its community (complete with a constitution, a social contract, and voting on major issues), you might prefer Debian: http://www.debian.org/ Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: GNU bitterness [3x]; Linux strikes [1x]
august wrote: > I can't really think of a good > example where a commercial venture has successfully exploited the work of > a free software project. IBM claims to be generating immense revenue ($1 billion in 2002[1]) from selling Linux-based software, hardware and services. (The 'IBM HTTP Server' which is sold with their WebSphere product is... guess what... Apache.) IBM is actually a good example of a company that spends huge amounts of money contributing to free software projects, and apparently gets a sizeable return on its investment. Ben [1] http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1240127,00.asp # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: Linux strikes back III
Martin Hardie wrote: > Why can't fsfer's think of law and its organisation in ways other than > proprietary/closed systems? Why do people who profess to be at the > cutting edge, pushing Paul Keating's proverbial envelope, feel the need > to hide behind old ways of thinking about law? Perhaps copyleft *is* a new way of thinking about law. Witness the confusion it's causing in the minds of people like SCO's executives and their lawyers. Stallman's position, as I understand it, is that he would have been happy to use something other than copyright to protect the freedom of free software, but that as far as he could tell, there was no other way. Maybe you could suggest one? Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: New Media Education and Its Discontent
Keith Hart wrote: > The USA is the only country in the world where > higher education of a highly variable sort is universally > available. Whatever we thin of the country's present > government, it has a lot to do with the fact that America > is the world's most advanced experiment in democracy. To call > such a society anti-intellectual is perverse. French people's jaws drop when you tell them that, in the US, getting a good university education generally requires spending (or borrowing) as much money as it would cost to buy a house. To them, this seems positively medieval. Briefly, for those who may not know: in France, there are very few private universities, and they aren't considered to be any better than the public ones, which are of a uniformly high standard. Anyone who passes the baccalaureat is entitled to go to the nearest unversity, at the state's expense. Moreover, it doesn't matter who your parents are; if you can't pass the university exams, you won't get past the first year, never mind get an advanced degree. And if you can, you will. To my mind, that's how education ought to work in an advanced democracy. When I was a postgraduate student in the US, I was amazed to find that, at social gatherings, a favourite conversation topic of my fellow students was... guess what... television. Not in any critical sort of way. They just loved to tell each other what their favourite TV commercials were. They had really swallowed the American pop culture drug whole, without any reflection. If you put five or ten young, university-educated French people in a room and let them talk, you can be pretty sure of one thing: they will start to have a debate. Opinions and analyses of *something* will be critiqued and defended. Particularly if you bring up the subject of the media, which is widely seen as an instrument of disinformation and manipulation. It's not just because they all have to study philosphy in high school. It's at least partly because their secondary education requires them to develop critical thinking. While their American counterparts are ticking boxes in multiple-choice quizzes just to prove that they actually read the textbook, French 14-year-olds are constantly being asked to formulate and express their own analyses, in speech and in writing. Teachers don't hesitate to give poor marks and harsh critiques. In fact, the students expect and demand this: if a teacher is seen as too soft, the students make his or her life miserable. This was very clear to me when I worked as a teaching assistant in a French school, because I (with my American background) was seen as much too soft. In American high schools, the most popular girls are the pretty ones, and the most popular boys are the ones who are good at football. The schools themselves create this attitude. When I was in high school in the US, we were forced to go to 'pep rallies': we all had to sit in the gymnasium and chant slogans as the school's football cheerleaders went through their routine. In most people's minds, caring about school meant caring about the football team. Those who didn't go along with this attitude were branded as traitors. Thus, cutthroat competitiveness, and the idea that might makes right, were drilled into us. French people find this sort of thing both funny (particularly the ridiculous 'pom-pom girls') and disturbing. In French high schools, sport is seen simply as exercise. There are no teams and no competition. Instead, the popular kids (girls and boys) are often the ones who are good at maths or French. I saw this with my own eyes and was astonished. Turn on the TV any evening in France, and you're sure to find a show consisting of authors having an intellectual discussion, though the level of discussion is surely not what it was in the 1970s, when Bernard Pivot interviewed Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault during prime time. And of course, power and patronage are not absent. As Bourdieu pointed out, the media heavily promotes certain favoured intellectuals, who lend a veneer of credibility to the interests of the powerful. The teaching of history gives short shrift to national embarrassments (such as France's brutality in the Algerian war of independence) as well as to home-grown resistance to the capitalist state (such as the Paris Commune of 1871). But critical thinking, once learnt, is difficult for those in power to control. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: New Media Education and Its Discontent
[syntax problem @ nettime -> resent by mod] Kermit Snelson wrote: > Patronage is an affair of the élite. If their employees, > the intellectuals, have higher prestige among the "common people" in > Europe than they do in the USA, that is probably because titled nobility > and aristocracy are still present there as they are not in the USA, > which was in fact founded by a revolution against that sort of thing. It seems strange to characterise the American revolution as an effort to eliminate the privileges of elites, since it was conducted by the wealthiest men in the colonies. By contrast, the King of Yugoslavia surrendered in 1944 to communist partisans, whose leader, Tito, came from a peasant family. Yet when my Croatian friends talk about the education they received in Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 80s, it sounds much like what exists in Western Europe today: it was taken for granted that the judgement and opinions of students were vastly inferior to those of professors. Until 1987, free university education was available to anyone who could pass the requisite exams. And despite a certain amount of censorship, it seems that intellectual life flourished. In France, I think it's safe to say that high intellectual standards are widely considered to be a key element of *republican* (i.e. democratic) principles, and are strongly associated with the Englightenment intellectuals who are seen as having inspired the 1789 revolution. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: : Re: New Media Education and Its Discontent
monica ross wrote: > Yes, some people are getting paid and others are paying - in some > countries, including ones rich enough for it to be free to all. And in some countries, it *is* free for all. Funnily enough, in France for example, the idea of the 'student as consumer', dictating what he or she wants to be taught, seems to be practically nonexistent, and there is a great deal less anti-intellectualism. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: A Puff Piece on Wikipedia (Fwd)
Kermit Snelson wrote: > Intellectuals and artists have always relied on > patronage, patronage depends on plunder, and plunder depends on deceit > and exploitation. Who, after all, paid for Europe's cathedrals? Who > paid for Beethoven's sonatas? Who pays for universities today? > [...] which side are we, as intellectuals and artists, really on? Who pays for *any* activity? No human occupation is divorced from the economic and political order in which it takes place. Workers in a cooperative, if they're paid in money, go out and spend it in the capitalist economy, thus supporting that economy. Everything is contaminated in this way. How you personally manage to survive in a thoroughly contaminated economy matters less than the actions you take to help change the world order. Theory is necessary, but practice has a much greater ethical value than theory. It is your actions that determine which side you are really on. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: If you can't beat them, monetize them!
Patrice Riemens wrote: > SCO invites open source people to 'monetize' Linux A snappy reply from Linus Torvalds, which nicely sums up the crux of the issue: --- http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/09/10/2321224.shtml?tid=11 Dear Darl, Thank you so much for your letter. We are happy that you agree that customers need to know that Open Source is legal and stable, and we heartily agree with that sentence of your letter. The others don't seem to make as much sense, but we find the dialogue refreshing. However, we have to sadly decline taking business model advice from a company that seems to have squandered all its money (that it made off a Linux IPO, I might add, since there's a nice bit of irony there), and now seems to play the U.S. legal system as a lottery. We in the Open Source group continue to believe in technology as a way of driving customer interest and demand. Also, we find your references to a negotiating table somewhat confusing, since there doesn't seem to be anything to negotiate about. SCO has yet to show any infringing IP in the Open Source domain, but we wait with bated breath for when you will actually care to inform us about what you are blathering about. All of our source code is out in the open, and we welcome you to point to any particular piece you might disagree with. Until then, please accept our gratitude for your submission, Yours truly, Linus Torvalds --- And from Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens: http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/09/09/2355214.shtml?tid=11 Mr. McBride, in your "Open Letter to the Open Source Community" your offer to negotiate with us comes at the end of a farrago of falsehoods, half-truths, evasions, slanders, and misrepresentations. You must do better than this. We will not attempt to erect a compromise with you on a foundation of dishonesty. Your statement that Eric Raymond was "contacted by the perpetrator" of the DDoS attack on SCO begins the falsehoods. Mr. Raymond made very clear when volunteering his information and calling for the attack to cease that he was contacted by a third-party associate of the perpetrator and does not have the perpetrator's identity to reveal. The DDoS attack ceased, and has not resumed. Mr. Raymond subsequently received e-mailed thanks for his action from Blake Stowell of SCO. Your implication that the attacks are a continuing threat, and that the President of the Open Source Initiative is continuing to shield their perpetrator, is therefore not merely both false and slanderous, but contradictory with SCO's own previous behavior. In all three respects it is what we in the open-source community have come to expect from SCO. If you are serious about negotiating with anyone, rather than simply posturing for the media, such behavior must cease. In fact, leaders of the open-source community have acted responsibly and swiftly to end the DDoS attacks just as we continue to act swiftly to address IP-contamination issues when they are aired in a clear and responsible manner. This history is open to public inspection in the Linux-kernel archives and elsewhere, with numerous instances on record of Linus Torvalds and others refusing code in circumstances where there is reason to believe it might be compromised by third-party IP claims. As software developers, intellectual property is our stock in trade. Whether we elect to trade our effort for money or rewards of a subtler and more enduring nature, we are instinctively respectful of concerns about IP, credit, and provenance. Our licenses (the GPL and others) work with copyright law, not against it. We reject your attempt to portray our community as a howling wilderness of IP thieves as a baseless and destructive smear. We in the open-source community are accountable. Our source code is public, exposed to scrutiny by anyone who wishes to contest its ownership. Can SCO or any other closed-source vendor say the same? Who knows what IP violations, what stripped copyrights, what stolen techniques lurk in the depths of closed-source code? Indeed, not only SCO's past representations that it was merging GPLed Linux technology into SCO Unix but Judge Debevoise's rulings in the last big lawsuit on Unix IP rights suggest strongly that SCO should clean up its own act before daring to accuse others of theft. SCO taxes IBM and others with failing to provide warranties or indemnify users against third-party IP claims, conveniently neglecting to mention that the warranties and indemnities offered by SCO and others such as Microsoft are carefully worded so that the vendor's liability is limited to the software purchase price, They thus offer no actual shield against liability claims or damages. They are, in a word, shams designed to lull users into a false sense of security -- a form of sham which we believe you press on us solely as posturing, rather than out of any genuine concern for users. We in the open-source c
Re: Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology
Felix Stalder wrote: > I totally agree that, from organizational point of view, the points you list > such as open participation are very important. Your list is fully consistent > with my elaborations. Yes. >>The Open Organizations project (http://www.open-organizations.org) is an >>attempt to synthesize these principles, and some others, into a workable, >>general-purpose model. > > I'm skeptical about the possibility of a "workable, general-purpose > model". My post was about the fact that the type of problem affects the > social organization through which the solution is being developed. Agreed. OpenOrg, though relatively general-purpose, isn't meant to be a universal model. It's meant to suggest processes that from which you can pick and choose for the situation you find yourself in, discarding what doesn't fit. Since it's a theory based on practices used in real groups, we don't know what its limitations are (though some may well be determined by the criteria you listed), how far it will scale, etc. But it's at least an attempt at articulating a set of organizational practices at a more general level than software development. So far, we've seen some parts of it used successfully in the Indymedia network (see http://docs.indymedia.org/), and in some small activist groups. One thing we've observed is that, once people have the tools to make openness easy, it quickly becomes second nature to them. We've found that giving mailing lists and Wikis to activists is a much more effective way to promote openness than talking to them about organizational processes. With the right tools, groups of people become open without having to have the theory explained to them, because it's so much easier to work that way. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: Six Limitations to the Current Open Source Development Methodology
On Thursday 14 August 2003 14:07, Felix Stalder wrote: > The "Open Source Approach" to develop informational goods has been > spectacularly successful [...] > The boundaries to the open production model as it has been established in > the last decade are set by six conditions characterizing virtually all of > the success stories of what Benkler called "commons-based peer production." While I think your analysis is useful, in that it partly explains why it has been so easy for commons-based peer production to flourish in software development, I would be hesitant to define the "open source approach" solely or even primarily in terms of the characteristics you mention. In terms of power structures, surely there are many different open source approaches, including the 'benevolent dictator' approach used by the Linux kernel developers, and the various kinds of consensus, voting and delegation used by Apache, KDE and Debian. While these projects have different political models, they have some poltiical features in common: Open participation: Anyone can participate if they agree to the groups's principles, and have the necessary skills. Self-management: The people who do the work decide amongst themselves what work is to be done, and how to do it. Transparency: detailed about what the group is doing, including its discussions and decisions, as well as the knowledge gained through its work, are publicly available on web sites (e.g. in the form of source code and documentation) and on mailing lists. Public ownership of knowledge: because knowledge about the group's work is publicly available, and freedom to use this knowledge is protected by open source licences, it becomes part of the commons. (Note that even if a group produced something material, which could not be shared as easily as software, the group could still share its knowledge in the same way.) Open participation also promotes public ownership of knowledge, because less experienced people can learn from more experienced people through participation. Respect for skill: If your expertise is recognized by others, and you contribute something useful, your opinions are granted more weight. There is no way to gain influence without skill. Diversity: Different approaches to carrying out tasks and solving problems can coexist (without hindering one another), and learn from each other (e.g. KDE and GNOME). It seems to me that these principles could indeed be applied to projects that don't fall within the boundaries you specified. The Open Organizations project (http://www.open-organizations.org) is an attempt to synthesize these principles, and some others, into a workable, general-purpose model. Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: frazzled bio art digest [thacker, crowley]
On Fri, 17 Jan 2003 13:45:37 -0500, Eugene Thacker wrote: > bioart often eschews ethical > considerations in favor of technical ones. Anyone will admit > that learning how to work the automatic sequencing machine > is cool, but it is worthwhile to reflect on it a little. The > old question *can I do this* versus *should I do > this* is worth reconsidering in the context of bioart > practices as art practices. I would like to ask, first, why biotech (like bioart) sometimes seems to 'eschew ethical considerations', and second, why many people react with horror and revulsion to some of what is being done in the field of genetic engineering (and subsequently appropriated by artists). In 'On Violence' (http://attac.org.uk/attac/html/view-document.vm?documentID=148), Shierry Nicholsen identifies 'groupthink' as a mechanism that inhibits ethical reflection. She quotes the scientist Robert Wilson, who was involved in developing the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, and who said afterwards: I would like to think now, that at the time of the German defeat, I would have stopped and taken stock, and thought it all over very carefully, and that I would have walked a way from Los Alamos at that time. In terms of everything I believed in before and during and after the war, I cannot understand why I did not take that act. On the other hand, I do not know of a single instance of anyone who made that suggestion or who did leave at that time Our life was directed to do one thing. It was as though we had been programmed to do that and as automatons were doing it. Perhaps a similar type of groupthink is at work today among the scientists and artists whose unbounded enthusiasm for biotech brushes aside all ethical considerations. Eugene Thacker writes: > too often, in the public discourse on > biotech, political critique slides into moral conservatism. Thacker argues that this conservatism is based on an idea of 'something mysterious called "nature"'. I think there's a simpler explanation. Take the case of the 'humouse' (http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0206/msg00010.html), an imaginary genetically-engineered part-human, part-mouse creature. Should we be shocked by this idea, even though we aren't shocked by traditional hybrid oranges? If so, why? I'm sure that there are some people out there (let's call them the 'biopunks') for whom the 'humouse' would represent the dawning of new Golden Age. Even if we feel that the 'humouse' in an abhorrent prospect, I suspect that most of us don't believe we have a rock-solid ethical system covering these issues, which would enable us to argue decisively against the biopunks. At the same time, we're pretty sure that they don't have such a system, either. Our moral conservatism could therefore be seen as a sort of ethical 'precautionary principle': don't do something if you have no way of evaluating the potential consequences. At the same time, I think it's likely that our revulsion stems from a specific ethical position. Inasmuch as the hypothetical 'humouse' involves humanity, we might see it as a violation of Kant's Formula of Humanity, which enjoins us to treat each person always as an end, and never merely as a means. It is useful to compare our discomfort regarding the 'humouse' with our feelings about slavery. A slave is treated merely as a means, but at least the slave can hope to escape slavery. The 'humouse' would seem condemned from birth, *by its very nature*, to be only a means. This is perhaps why the creation of such a creature seems even more ghastly than slavery. However, if that's the case, what accounts for our queasiness about genetic engineering involving only non-human animals? Why shouldn't a bio-artist create, say, a 'guitar-monkey', a four-legged, living musical instrument, to be played and exhibited in art galleries? As Erica Fudge points out in her book _Animal_, on the one hand, in certain contexts, we treat animals as ends (e.g. by considering pets to be almost like members of the family), while in other contexts, we treat them as means (as food, or as subjects of scientific experiments). Culture (one might say 'groupthink') has desensitised us to our use of animals as tools in certain contexts, but not in others. When we encounter instrumentalisation of animals in a new context, we are unprepared. We are shocked, not only because the geneticist's experiment strikes us as horrible, but because it forces us to confront the uncomfortable contradictions in our existing, age-old treatment of animals. Benjamin # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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: Dow and Verio shut down thing.net, rtmark.com, theyesmen.org, dow-chemical.com, nettime. etc etc bov!nez
On Friday 06 Dec 2002 02:00, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > as if thing.net. nettime. etc okzident !tch! b!tch! pop.t-art > konglome.ratz differ from dow One difference: nettime distributes your rantings. Dow doesn't. > okzident neo-fascist bovines That would include you, since you post on nettime? Ben # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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]
Fwd: DOW ADDRESSES BHOPAL OUTRAGE, EXPLAINS POSITION
A nicely done, rather subtle forgery of a Dow Chemical press release and web site. The fake web site (http://www.dow-chemical.com) is less over-the-top than most similar efforts, and is thus perhaps that much more effective. Ben -- Forwarded Message -- Subject: DOW ADDRESSES BHOPAL OUTRAGE, EXPLAINS POSITION Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 06:18:24 -0500 From: Dow Chemical Corporation <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "ben-beroul.uklinux.net" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> December 3, 2002 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] DOW ADDRESSES BHOPAL OUTRAGE, EXPLAINS POSITION Company responds to activist concerns with concrete action points In response to growing public outrage over its handling of the Bhopal disaster's legacy, Dow Chemical (http://www.dow-chemical.com) has issued a statement explaining why it is unable to more actively address the problem. "We are being portrayed as a heartless giant which doesn't care about the 20,000 lives lost due to Bhopal over the years," said Dow President and CEO Michael D. Parker. "But this just isn't true. Many individuals within Dow feel tremendous sorrow about the Bhopal disaster, and many individuals within Dow would like the corporation to admit its responsibility, so that the public can then decide on the best course of action, as is appropriate in any democracy. "Unfortunately, we have responsibilities to our shareholders and our industry colleagues that make action on Bhopal impossible. And being clear about this has been a very big step." On December 3, 1984, Union Carbide--now part of Dow--accidentally killed 5,000 residents of Bhopal, India, when its pesticide plant sprung a leak. It abandoned the plant without cleaning it up, and since then, an estimated 15,000 more people have died from complications, most resulting from chemicals released into the groundwater. Although legal investigations have consistently pinpointed Union Carbide as culprit, both Union Carbide and Dow have had to publicly deny these findings. After the accident, Union Carbide compensated victims' families between US$300 and US$500 per victim. "We understand the anger and hurt," said Dow Spokesperson Bob Questra. "But Dow does not and cannot acknowledge responsibility. If we did, not only would we be required to expend many billions of dollars on cleanup and compensation--much worse, the public could then point to Dow as a precedent in other big cases. 'They took responsibility; why can't you?' Amoco, BP, Shell, and Exxon all have ongoing problems that would just get much worse. We are unable to set this precedent for ourselves and the industry, much as we would like to see the issue resolved in a humane and satisfying way." Shareholders reacted to the Dow statement with enthusiasm. "I'm happy that Dow is being clear about its aims," said Panaline Boneril, who owns 10,000 shares, "because Bhopal is a recurrent problem that's clogging our value chain and ultimately keeping the share price from expressing its full potential. Although a real solution is not immediately possible because of Dow's commitments to the larger industry issues, there is new hope in management's exceptional new clarity on the matter." "It's a slow process," said Questra. "We must learn bit by bit to meet this challenge head-on. For now, this means acknowledging that much as it pains us, our prime responsibilities are to the people who own Dow shares, and to the industry as a whole. We simply cannot do anything at this moment for the people of Bhopal." Dow Chemical is a chemical products and services company devoted to bringing its customers a wide range of chemicals. It furnishes solutions for the agriculture, electronics, manufacturing, and oil and gas industries, including well-known products like Styrofoam, DDT, and Agent Orange, as well as lesser-known brands like Inspire, Retain, Eliminator, Quash, and Woodstalk. For more on the Bhopal catastrophe, please visit Dow at http://www.dow-chemical.com/. # 30 # To no longer receive mail from Dow, please write mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?[EMAIL PROTECTED]. --- This email has been scanned for all viruses by the MessageLabs SkyScan service. For more information on a proactive anti-virus service working around the clock, around the globe, visit http://www.messagelabs.com # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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]
Perry Anderson: Pre-emptive Surrender
PERRY ANDERSON: PRE-EMPTIVE SURRENDER by Wayne Hall A critique of "Force and Consent" (New Left Review 17, Second Series) http://www.newleftreview.net/NLR25101.shtml Perry Anderson is the editor of the New Left Review, probably the most prestigious Marxist English-language theoretical journal in the world. He and his journal count for something in shaping opinion in academia and beyond, not only in Europe and the U.S. but everywhere. That is why I am writing this activist article to single him out for attention. We should be subjecting Perry Anderson to the same kind of co-ordinated treatment that neo-conservative activists give any prominent person who gets out of line by their criteria. I don't advocate terrorising and blackmailing Anderson the way the Right do to people. But we can try to shame him. And it would be good to start trying to do it now, in this period of waiting for the attack on Iraq that the U.S. government has announced it intends to carry out and which Perry Anderson believes it will carry out. Perry Anderson has carried out pre-emptive intellectual surrender to that threatened pre-emptive war. He does not on the face of it support the attack as more obviously hopeless cases like Christopher Hitchens do. But in his own lofty way, distastefully, he gives it the nod. His stance is more sophisticated, more insidious and so less noticed. He is not out to attract attention to himself beyond his intellectual peer group. With that audience his priorities are on saving face: adopting a position that will enable him to carry on his orderly life as before even in the kind of America (and world) that is taking shape now and will be worse after an attack on Iraq. Anderson has to be reminded there is another audience monitoring him beyond those with whom he habitually associates and with whom he is personally familiar. There are others reading what he writes, and for them (for us) what he writes is simply not good enough. In fact it is lamentable. His pessimistic reading of the present international situation might be forgivable if it was not based on ignoring facts, but it is based on IGNORING FACTS. His position on 9/11 is the familiar one that the attacks were UNEXPECTED. To be precise, he says they represented "an unexpected chance to recast the terms of American global strategy more decisively than would otherwise have been possible." "The attentats of September 11 gave a Presidency that was anyway seeking to change the modus operandi of America abroad the opportunity for a much swifter and more ambitious turn that it could easily have executed otherwise. The circle around Bush realised this immediately." Anderson should be aggressively held to account for this central error in his reading, which is either accidental, in which case he is an incompetent political analyst, or deliberate, in which case he should be asked to explain why he is a conscious participant in this collective cover-up that emasculates not only the national campaign to hold Bush and his circle accountable for their crimes against American citizens but also the international anti-war movement. Though Anderson now lives mainly in the United States, and has modified his life orientation to reflect this (once a leading theorist of "Western [i.e. Western European] Marxism, he is now in effect a critical supporter of the U.S. Democratic Party), he is as blind to the emergence and the potential of the new post-9/11 American opposition as any rank-and-file European Leftist ignorant of America. Again one asks: is this because he does not know or because he does not want to know? I suspect that when confronted with the real facts of 9/11, Anderson's stance would be that they are irrelevant, because only a marginal minority is going to get up in arms about such facts anyway. What is more important is the long-term historical perspective: "The arrogance of the 'international community' and its rights of intervention across the globe are not a series of arbitrary events or disconnected episodes. They compose a system, which needs to be fought with a coherence not less than its own." Fighting the system with a coherence not less than its own for Anderson means not wasting time and effort on phenomena like 9/11, which was "In no sense a serious threat to American power: the targets were "symbolic" and the victims, though admittedly innocent and killed in one day, were "no more than the number of Americans who kill each other in a season." Anderson (like his lieutenant Tariq Ali but unlike the Blairite mainstream of the British Labour Party) does not believe that 9/11 changed the world, nor that its effects are going to be permanent. "The current shift of emphasis," he says, "from what is 'co-operatively allied' to what is 'distinctively American' within the imperial ideology is, of its nature, likely to be short-lived. The war on terrorism is a temporary by-
