nettime Google's Next Mission: Fighting Violent Extremism
(interesting to see how google is pushed (or wanders itself?) into political directions. in the end, who will decide who is 'extreme' and what is an 'extreme opinion' or organization? what forms of resistance are 'violent'? these definitions shifts over time, as we all know, and tomorrow it is going to be you, me, us, them, whoever. the ageism here is also interesting, as if only young people are involved... (and to blame) /geert) Google's Next Mission: Fighting Violent Extremism By E.B. Boyd http://www.fastcompany.com/1747140/googles-next-mission-deradicalize-violent-groups?partner=homepage_newsletter Google's new think tank will host a summit on what makes some youths join radical groups and what makes others turn away. Neo-Nazi groups and al Qaeda might not seem to have much in common, but they do in one key respect: their recruits tend to be very young. The head of Google?s new think tank, Jared Cohen, believes there might be some common reasons why young people are drawn to violent extremist groups, no matter their ideological or philosophical bent. So this summer, Cohen is spearheading a conference, in Dublin, Ireland, to explore what it is that draws young people to these groups and what can be done to redirect them. Cohen is the former State Department staffer who is best known for his efforts to bring technology into the country?s diplomatic efforts. But he was originally hired by Condaleezza Rice back in 2006 for a different--though related--purpose: to help Foggy Bottom better understand Middle Eastern youths (many of whom were big technology adopters) and how they could best deradicalized. Last fall, Cohen joined Google as head of its nascent Google Ideas, which the company is labeling a think/do tank. Technology, of course, is playing a role both in recruiting members to extremist groups, as well as fueling pro-democracy and other movements--and that?s where Google?s interest lies. Technology is a part of every challenge in the world, and a part of every solution,? Cohen tells Fast Company. To the extent that we can bring that technology expertise, and mesh it with the Council on Foreign Relations? academic expertise--and mesh all of that with the expertise of those who have had these experiences--that's a valuable network to explore these questions. This summer?s conference, Summit Against Violent Extremism, takes place June 26-29 and will bring together about 50 former members of extremist groups--including former neo-Nazis, Muslim fundamentalists, and U.S. gang members--along with another 200 representatives from civil society organizations, academia, private corporations, and victims groups. The hope is to identify some common factors that cause young people to join violent organizations, and to form a network of people working on the issue who can collaborate going forward. With more than 50 percent of the world?s population under the age of thirty and the vast majority of those characterized as 'at risk,' socially, economically, or both, an oversupply exists of young people susceptible to recruitment by the extremist religious or ideological group closest to them in identity or proximity, Cohen, wrote on the blog of the Council on Foreign Relations, the event?s co-host. One of the technologies where extremism is playing out these days is in Google?s own backyard. Terrorist and other groups have made use of YouTube to broadcast their messages--as, indeed, have citizen empowerment movements. While YouTube has been criticized in the past for not removing violent videos as quickly as they appear, Cohen says the conference is looking at the root causes that prompt a young person to join one of the groups in the first place. There are a lot of different dimensions to this challenge, he says. It?s important not to conflate everything. See also: Google Grabs State Dept. Star Jared Cohen for Foreign Policy Think/Do Tank # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Facebook takes down Palestinian intifada pag
Hi, I am not sure if many of you are following this story (the report below comes from CNET). I haven't seen many references to it yet. It is interesting in the light of the sheer endless debates about Twitter/ Facebook revolution yes/no/maybe/no opinion in the Middle East and North Africa. /Geert March 29, 2011 11:25 AM PDT Facebook takes down Palestinian intifada page Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20048363-93.html#ixzz1IaR029Rr A Facebook page called the Third Palestinian Intifada has been removed from the site following a request from the Israeli government. Yuli Edelstein, Israel's minister of public diplomacy and diaspora affairs, sent a letter directly to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on March 23. In the letter, which has been posted on the Web site The Jerusalem Gift Shop, Edelstein asked the company to take down the page calling for a third intifada, translated by some as violent uprising, to begin against Israel on May 15. Pointing to remarks and movie clips on the page calling for the killing of Israelis and Jews and the liberation of Palestine through violence, Edelstein expressed concern over the wild incitement that could be caused by the page, which had collected more than 230,000 friends at the time he wrote the letter. On Friday, the Anti-Defamation League also asked Facebook to remove the page, labeling it an appalling abuse of technology to promote terrorist violence with inflammatory anti-Israel language calling for supporters to build on the previous two intifadas. From its initial response, Facebook appeared reluctant to take action. We strongly believe that Facebook users have the ability to express their opinions, and we don't typically take down content, groups, or Pages that speak out against countries, religions, political entities, or ideas, Facebook spokeswoman Debbie Frost said in a statement e- mailed to Bloomberg. But as of today Facebook had removed the Third Palestinian Intifada page. Explaining its decision, a Facebook spokesman e-mailed CNET the following statement: The Page, The Third Palestinian Intifada, began as a call for peaceful protest, even though it used a term that has been associated with violence in the past. In addition, the administrators initially removed comments that promoted violence. However, after the publicity of the Page, more comments deteriorated to direct calls for violence. Eventually, the administrators also participated in these calls. After administrators of the page received repeated warnings about posts that violated our policies, we removed the Page. Facebook added that it continues to believe that people on Facebook should be able to express their opinions, and we don't typically take down content that speaks out against countries, religions, political entities, or ideas. However, we monitor Pages that are reported to us and when they degrade to direct calls for violence or expressions of hate--as occurred in this case--we have and will continue to take them down. Saying that it welcomed the decision to take down the page, the Anti- Defamation League asked Facebook to vigilantly monitor their pages for other groups that call for violence or terrorism against Jews and Israel. Since the removal of the page, new ones have been created to replace it. Though the number of friends is small so far compared with the original, the new pages appear to mimic the first one with further calls in both English and Arabic for a new intifada. Literally translated as shaking off, the word intifada is more commonly translated as revolution or uprising. Palestinians have staged two intifadas, according to CNN, one that began in 1987 and another that started in 2000. During the second intifada, thousands of Israelis and Palestinians died, CNN said. Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20048363-93.html#ixzz1IaQhWE6g # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime google's berlin institute of internet society
(just for the record and those interested, here some info of the rudimentary website of google's research institute for internet and society, in the process of being established in berlin. /geert) http://www.internetundgesellschaft.de/ The following mission statement has been developed by the multistakeholder team that boostraps the research institute. The mission statement is meant to serve as a totem for the community behind the institute; it is therefore a living document that will develop over time. Mission Statement(Version 1.0) The Internet and society research institute (*the name is not decided yet*) centers on research and deliberation on the culture and practice of (1) Internet based innovation, (2) Internet policy, and (3) related legal aspects. We strive to provide insights enabling all stakeholders to better shape the transformations the Internet stimulates within our networked societies in Germany, Europe and internationally. Specifically, the institute: • focuses on transdisciplinary research and collaboration between academics, policy makers, civil society and private sector. • promotes a humanistic conception of the Internet and a user centered approach to Internet policy making and innovation, multi- stakeholder governance in digital ecosystems, their relationship with society, and their constitutional implications. • supports the continued development of a free¹ and open² Internet and its potential to increase welfare, democratic capacity, sciences and the arts. Hence we aim to better understand the qualities, dynamics, and implications of the Internet with regard to society and governance at large. ¹free space = in that there are little restrictions on content and behavior and contribution is broadly permitted ²open space = based on a philosophy of openess, i.e. open standards that ensure interoperability and open innovation -- FAQs Q: Which institutions and who are you working with to set up the institute? A: We are currently in the process of identifying the best academic partners. We hope to announce the concrete plans including the academic institutions and the team of leading academics within the next months after we have reached a final agreement. Q: When will the Institute start its operations? A: The plan is to inaugurate the institute later in the year. Q: Why are you funding such a research institute? A: Web-based innovations cause a variety of social, economic and political transformations. These demand interdisciplinary research carried out in a specialized center of excellence. While Germany is already the home to many world class researchers the Internet and society institute will give the community a space to exchange and learn from each other and to tap into the insights of other stakeholders from civil society, business and politics. Additionally, we want to further our investments in Germany and we believe that such an independent research institute will improve understanding and discussion about Internet governance and Internet based innovation. Q: What are the research subjects of the institute? The Internet Society Institute centers on research and deliberation on the culture and practice of (1) Internet based innovation, (2) Internet policy and (3) legal aspects. Q: Will the Institute focus on research about/for Germany? A: The institute will strive to provide insights enabling all stakeholders to better steer the transformations the Internet stimulates within our networked societies in Germany, Europe and internationally. Q: Where will the institute be based, will it be with the Humboldt? A: We are currently finding the best organisational set-up for the institute. Humboldt University is one of the potential partners and possible hosts for the institute. Q: Who will be heading the institute? A: We believe the institute should be led by a board made up of thought leaders from academia, the Internet community, politics and web entrepreneurs. Q: Will the name be the Google Institute? We believe that the institute should be independent and pursue an academic mission that is in the public interest. Q: Is this the first time you are installing such an institute or is there a role model from Google in other countries? A: Yes, this is the first time we are founding a research institute for Internet and society. Q: How many professors/staff will be working there? A: It is too early to talk about details. The idea is to work with a core faculty that organizes and supervises research through Calls for Proposals, with PhD-students as well as national and international partner institutions. Q: Will the institute be open for other companies/institutions as well? Can others support with additional funding? A: We are actively looking to work with partners from academia, civil society and the private sector. We are certain this
nettime Video Vortex News
Dear nettimers, last weekend we hosted the 6th Video Vortex conference, here in Amsterdam. Here some news and announcements from our growing online video network. VV 7 will be held in Zagreb, Croatia, hosted by the Contemporary Arts Museum in April-May 2012. There will be a VV Summer School on the Croatian island Vis in August 2010. This is part of an effort to establish an international VV online video masters degree. Blog reports of VV 6 are available on the INC website and the videos of the talks will be there shortly. http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/ The Video Vortex Reader II can be downloaded as a pdf here: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/vv-reader If you like to get the Video Vortex II reader, please let us know. For the VV6 occasion a third print run of the Video Vortex I was made (total is now 4750 copies). Of course the VV I reader can also still be downloaded as a pdf through the same page: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/vv-reader If you have a class or conference that focusses on online video you can order the necessary books. The readers are free and will be shipped to your school from Amsterdam. Please write to: bo...@networkcultures.org Urban Screens readers are also still there, as is Dmitri Kleiner's Telecommunist Manifesto. Having said that, this only works if you send us your (correct) postal address. Believe it or not but most people actually forget to do this... They think an email is enough. Best from Geert and the entire team @ INC # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime help write to the UN about internet freedom
From:Joost Van Bennekom joostvanbenne...@hotmail.com Date:Thu, March 3, 2011 12:12 Help write to the UN about internet freedom Access has been invited to speak at a UN Human Rights Council event on Friday in Geneva on the topic of internet freedom in front of foreign ministers, UN ambassadors, and other high-level foreign officials. Over the last few weeks you've been a big part of our efforts to promote digital freedom around the globe, now together we have a chance to tell the UN, in front of the world's media, what they should be doing to support digital rights, and we’d like you to help us write the speech! There are a few occasions when we have the attention of our leaders, and it's at these moments, that we must unify our voices to have them heard clearly. Please take a moment to click on the link below and fill out our survey and add your comments and we'll include your thoughts in our speech on Friday: https://www.accessnow.org/policy-activism/press-blog/write-our-speech # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Adbuster campaign against sale of Huftington post to AOL
Dear jammers, creatives, revolutionaries, socialite Arianna Huffington built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists. She exploited our idealism and let us labor under the illusion that the Huffington Post was different, independent and leftist. Now she’s cashed in and three thousand indie bloggers find themselves working for a megacorp. But the Huffington Post is not Arianna’s to sell. It is ours: the lefty writers and readers, environmentalism activists and anti- corporate organizers who flooded the site with 25 million visits a month. So we’re going to take it back. We’ll stop going to her site. And we’ll stop blogging for her too. Then we’ll give birth to an alternative to AOL’s HuffPo by using the #huffpuff hash tag to tell the world about our favorite counter- culture websites and indie blogs. We are the ones who built the Huffington Post. And now we will be the ones who will huff puff it down. UPDATE: #HUFFPUFF has touched a nerve. Now, a firestorm is developing as writers, readers and publishers of indie media are rallying to huff and puff Arianna's AOL merger into the ground. Media activists, this is our chance to strike a blow against the corporate media and simultaneously energize the indie blogosphere … a step towards a world where the news that animates our political and activist lives is not controlled by those who pander to advertisers and the bottom line. With continued pressure, we can topple AOL-HuffPo and fertilize a healthy media ecology. So let's keep blowing harder and harder! • If you are a writer, take your content off the Huffington Post (like Al Giordano of @Narco_News did) • If you are a HuffPo reader, unsubscribe/uninstall the app/delete your bookmark to the Huffington Post (like@jaberard, @RavenWytch, and @drlawler) • Everyone, keep telling the world about your favorite alternative indie sites using the #huffpuff tag (see the list of alternatives nominated thus far below) There is power in concerted effort, so let's keep huff'n puff'n and huff'n puff'n until we've blown AOL/HuffPost's house down! Adbusters http://www.adbusters.org/blogs/adbusters-blog/huff-puff-it-down.html # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson
Good you raise this issue, Rory. If I remember well from December Dave Winer kind of defended Amazon in the Wikileaks cut-off controversy (he said he would not join a boycott). The question indeed is: what does it mean when we call to run our own servers? If they are located somewhere in the 'cloud' then what's the difference anyway in comparison to Facebook or Google? The alternatives we suggest cannot be empty gestures if we propose to use 'virtual' servers that are under the same corporate control anyway. Geert # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson
(important element in the discussion about possible alternatives to facebook and twitter that presume that one runs one's own server... / geert) url: http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/02/take-back-the-tubes/ A DIY Data Manifesto By Scott Gilbertson The word “server” is enough to send all but the hardiest nerds scurrying for cover. The word usually conjures images of vast, complex data farms, databases and massive infrastructures. True, servers are all those things — but at a more basic level, they’re just like your desktop PC. Running a server is no more difficult than starting Windows on your desktop. That’s the message Dave Winer, forefather of blogging and creator of RSS, is trying to get across with his EC2 for Poets project. The name comes from Amazon’s EC2 service and classes common in liberal arts colleges, like programming for poets or computer science for poets. The theme of such classes is that anyone — even a poet — can learn technology. Winer wants to demystify the server. “Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security,” writes Winer, “I prefer to make light of it… it was easy for me, why shouldn’t it be easy for everyone?” To show you just how easy it is to set up and run a server, Winer has put together an easy-to-follow tutorial so you too can set up a Windows-based server running in the cloud. Winer uses Amazon’s EC2 service. For a few dollars a month, Winer’s tutorial can have just about anyone up and running with their own server. In that sense Winer’s EC2 for Poets if already a success, but education and empowerment aren’t Winer’s only goals. “I think it’s important to bust the mystique of servers,” says Winer, “it’s essential if we’re going to break free of the ‘corporate blogging silos.’” The corporate blogging silos Winer is thinking of are services like Twitter, Facebook and WordPress. All three have been instrumental in the growth of the web, they make it easy for anyone publish. But they also suffer denial of service attacks, government shutdowns and growing pains, centralized services like Twitter and Facebook are vulnerable. Services wrapped up in a single company are also vulnerable to market whims, Geocities is gone, FriendFeed languishes at Facebook and Yahoo is planning to sell Delicious. A centralized web is brittle web, one that can make our data, our communications tools disappear tomorrow. But the web will likely never be completely free of centralized services and Winer recognizes that. Most people will still choose convenience over freedom. Twitter’s user interface is simple, easy to use and works on half a dozen devices. Winer doesn’t believe everyone will want to be part of the distributed web, just the dedicated. But he does believe there are more people who would choose a DIY path if they realized it wasn’t that difficult. Winer isn’t the only one who believes the future of the web will be distributed systems that aren’t controlled by any single corporation or technology platform. Microformats founder Tantek Çelik is also working on a distributed publishing system that seeks to retain all the cool features of the social web, but remove the centralized bottleneck. But to be free of corporate blogging silos and centralized services the web will need an army of distributed servers run by hobbyists, not just tech-savvy web admins, but ordinary people who love the web and want to experiment. So while you can get your EC2 server up and running today — and even play around with Winer’s River2 news aggregator — the real goal is further down the road. Winer’s vision is a distributed web where everything is loosely coupled. “For example,” Winer writes, “the roads I drive on with my car are loosely-coupled from the car. I might drive a SmartCar, a Toyota or a BMW. No matter what car I choose I am free to drive on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Sixth Avenue or the Bay Bridge.” Winer wants to start by creating a loosely coupled, distributed microblogging service like Twitter. “I’m pretty sure we know how to create a micro-blogging community with open formats and protocols and no central point of failure,” he writes on his blog. For Winer that means decoupling the act of writing from the act of publishing. The idea isn’t to create an open alternative to Twitter, it’s to remove the need to use Twitter for writing on Twitter. Instead you write with the tools of your choice and publish to your own server. If everyone publishes first to their own server there’s no single point of failure. There’s no fail whale, and no company owns your data. Once the content is on your server you can then push it on to wherever you’d like — Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress of whatever the site du jour is ten years from now. The glue that holds this vision together is RSS. Winer sees RSS as the ideal broadcast mechanism for the distributed web and in fact
nettime Dror Kamir: Egypte, brûle-t-elle?
Dear nettimers, I wanted to share this story with you all. It ran on the Critical Point of View mailinglist that belongs to the Wikiresearch network with the same name. Dror Kamir is an Israeli Wikipedian with lots of knowledge of the 'region', and, like many in that part of the world, a colorful (online) personality and complex political agenda (as they say...). Greetings! Geert PS. somewhere in March-April the CPOV reader will be out. The publication reaches the final stage of copy-editing. Begin forwarded message: From: Dror Kamir dqa...@bezeqint.net Date: 31 January 2011 7:55:41 PM To: c...@listcultures.org Subject: CPOV Egypte, brûle-t-elle? Hi, I suppose you have all noticed that Egypt is going through rough time, but I wonder if you looked into the history of the article about the events. It almost seems as if the article preceded the actual events. The article on the English-language Wikipedia is entitled 2011 Egyptian protests. It already exists in 39 languages (incl. English). In Arabic and Egyptian-Arabic it is entitled The Egyptian Revolution of Wrath (the demonstrations on Friday were called by the organizers Friday of Wrath). Now to the interesting part - The demonstrations were planned via FaceBook for about a week, and D-Day was Tuesday, 25 January (which is a public holiday in Egypt). The first version of the article on the English Wikipedia has a time stamp of 13:26 25 January 2011 (UTC I presume). The person who initiated the article is nicknamed The Egyptian Liberal and according to his userpage he is an Egyptian who lives in Dubai and speaks both Arabic and English as mother tongues. The Egyptian Liberal worked very fast to enrich the article, and it was practically written in the course of the events. In the list of things that Wikipedia isn't there is a paragraph saying Wikipedia is not a newspaper. Indeed, Wikipedia did not function here as a newspaper, but rather as a tool serving the organizers of the demonstrations. An equivalent article was initiated on the Arabic Wikipedia 3 and a half hours after its English counterpart. It was initiated by someone who apparently lives in Egypt, but The Egyptian Liberal joined him quite soon. The article on the Egyptian-Arabic Wikipedia emerged only on 28 January, two and a half days after its English and Arabic counterparts. It was initiated by a person who lives in Egypt, and he is also the main contributor, but The Egyptian Liberal had his share here too. These are just my first observation, which I find interesting because it is, in my opinion, another stage of Wikipedia losing its encyclopedic characteristics. Dror בתאריך 31/01/11 17:07, ציטוט Maja van der Velden: Define Gender Gap? Look Up Wikipedia’s Contributor List In 10 short years, Wikipedia has accomplished some remarkable goals. More than 3.5 million articles in English? Done. More than 250 languages? Sure. But another number has proved to be an intractable obstacle for the online encyclopedia: surveys suggest that less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are women. More here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/business/media/31link.html?_r=1adxnnl=1emc=eta1adxnnlx=1296486151-4fB4AiSiCizUtpXNS2UGPA Greetings, Maja ___ cpov mailing list c...@listcultures.org http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/cpov_listcultures.org ___ cpov mailing list c...@listcultures.org http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/cpov_listcultures.org # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Rop Gonggrijp's opening speech at the 27th Chaos Computer Club Congress in Berlin
(Two days ago Rop Gonggrijp opened the annual Berlin hackers event of the Chaos Computer Club in the sold-out Congress Center. Here on nettime there was quite some debate about the key note he gave in the same place, five years ago, called We Lost the War. This time, of course, many were eager what Rop had to say about Wikileaks and his -- past-- involvement in it. But more interesting were in fact his stories about the campaign against electronic voting machines, his call for research into what Rop calls 'pharmacological political science' (similar to Bifo's agenda?) and the dramatic decrease in the quality of education in NL and elsewhere. As always Rop language is slightly programmatic, shall we say: encrypted? I listened to the speech through the stream. Quite an event. Enjoy! Geert) http://rop.gonggri.jp/?p=438 Rop Gonggrijp: My keynote at 27C3 Right here exactly five years ago Frank Rieger and myself held a lecture that was called “We lost the war”. It was about how we felt the fight over privacy and wider civil rights was going. For those of you who weren’t there: it wasn’t a very happy story. It was at the height of the post 9/11 paranoia. It was a done deal that the whole EU was going to have data retention and Frank and I set out to explore the future a little bit. I guess the pessimism in our talk was partly inspired by the awe we felt over this perfect storm. What we saw felt like a desperate last stand in a world which was facing economic non-sustainability, climate change, major power shifts and the end of cheap oil and many other natural resources. All of this was happening in the next few decades. Each independently, these are factors capable of causing serious mayhem. A lot of what we predicted for the short term did in fact play out. It is clear to many more people today than in 2005 that the world is headed for turbulent times and that this perfect storm is still very much out there. But obviously the fight over privacy is still ongoing, so in that sense we were wrong: we did not lose the war, at least not completely and not everywhere. Germany In Germany this became apparent when the Constitutional Court started defending privacy and civil liberties in earnest. Many of you already know this: they first told the government that cops cannot go randomly OCRing license plates from traffic whizzing by on the road just because they felt like it. Then they ruled that spying on people’s computers is like spying in their bedrooms, so it should meet the same stringent criteria. And to cap it off they killed the German data retention legislation, at least for now. The Court saving the day in such a grand way was considered an unlikely outcome in 2005, even among people bringing these cases to the court. Imagine how easily these judges, like so many other judges, could have gotten these complex issues wrong. If you compare Germany to a bus, then it’s like these judges leapt from their seats, pushed aside the driver and pulled the handbrake just before the bus tumbled into the ravine. For them and for all of us, I really hope the judges on the court live long enough for the rest of Germany to see it that way. At this point the bus driver is just trying to get these judges to release the damn brake so the bus can move on. In March 2008, after the government-installed spyware decision but before it killed data retention, I wrote a long blog post admitting that I had given up too early and that, at least in Germany, the fight over privacy was ongoing. The Netherlands I live next door, in the Netherlands, where the perspective is a little different. For one we have a constitution but no Constitutional Court. Under the dutch system, it is simply assumed that parliament would never introduce laws that would violate the constitution. So our constitution serves as a ‘voluntary guideline for legislators’ if you will. And just in case the constitution might still get in the way, every prohibition ends with ‘unless warranted by law’. I don’t want to be only negative, I guess our constitution does protect us from municipal governments going rogue, as they cannot make laws. What this means in practice is that in the Netherlands you need a Parliamentary majority to stop anything bad from happening. So in the Netherlands fear-mongering can be more effectively used by the government to pass oppressive laws. And it has been. Against a backdrop of increasing xenophobia the Dutch are databasing everything that involves moving people, money or bits, to be used against us in various ways. We are at the point now where – without any specific suspicion – a dutch homeowner can get a letter announcing a search of their home in order to “make the city safer”. And whatever bits of surveillance state are missing are being built at breakneck speeds. I think we can say that when it comes to
nettime concerning http://blog.hu.com
From: Mázsa Péter [...] Date: 2010/12/21 Subject: Freedom of speech in Hungary as of 21st December 2010 To: jin...@blog.hu.com Dear Mr. Hu Jintao, We are writing this letter to you not to address you in your role as the Chinese Premiere, but to address you as if one private individual were speaking to another. We would like to purchase your website, which can be found at the following address http://blog.hu.com . Please allow us to explain this request. You have no doubt heard that the government of the United States has changed its stance on the freedom of the web since the well-known information network, http://wikileaks.org, helped people discover new facts and call for more accountability. The US government’s previous stance, which was enumerated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a landmark speech about internet freedom on 21 January 2010, sounded something like this: “Even in authoritarian countries, information networks are helping people discover new facts and making governments more accountable.” http://www.cfr.org/publication/21253/clintons_speech_on_internet_freedom_january_2010.html “Given what we now know, that Clinton speech reads like a satirical masterpiece.” http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/dec/06/western-democracies-must-live-with-leaks However, you may be unaware what has been happening to the freedom of speech in the European Union over the past year or so. The official stances of both the People’s Republic of China and the EU are very similar: - “Article 35. Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.” Constitution http://www.gov.cn/english/2005-08/05/content_20813.htm - “Article 11. 1. Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers. 2. The freedom and pluralism of the media shall be respected.” Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union http://www.europarl.europa.eu/charter/pdf/text_en.pdf However, the void between this declaration and the reality of the situation is huge. As we are requesting your assistance, please allow us to direct your attention to the contraventions of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, as oppossed to the normal discussions of contraventions of human rights in China. From the beginnning of next year Hungary will hold the EU’s rotating presidency http://www.eu2011.hu . So far, the next holder of the EU’s rotating presidency has: - implicitly expressed support for the pro-Nazi Hungarian government of 1944 through the Declaration of National Cooperation, signed on 29th May 2010 (cf. http://amexrap.org/fal/kedves-tibor in Hungarian) - levied a 98% tax on certain incomes as of 16th November 2010, backdatable six years. This has in effect suspended the rule of law in the country http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBUD00558120101108 - radically limited the scope of constitutional supervision in the country, effectively suspending what was a constitutional democratic republic: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/9ac8db2a-f1af-11df-bb5a-00144feab49a.html - following this, on 13th December 2010, by referring to common national goals, the government passed a law that legalized the “nationalization” or state appropriation of the private pension savings of one third of the Hungarian population http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/news-brief/428811-private-pension-funds-seized On this day, 21st December 2010 the incumbent president of the EU has approved a new media law which: - provides the National Media and Communications Authority’s Media Council with the authority to impose fines on private newspapers, websites, broadcasters, and other content providers that have violated press rules on “balanced” coverage as well as immoral reporting (such as content involving sex, violence, and alcohol). Fines could be as much as $950,000 for radio and television stations, $120,000 for daily newspapers and “internet media news products” (e.g. blogs). Internet media news products could also be suspended or shut down. - “Of particular concern is the wording of the supposed ‘violations which is very is broad, creating an environment conducive to significant misuse” http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=70release=12 92 The EU and its Member States are shamefully tolerating this violation of the rule of law and freedom of expression as perpetrated by the holder of the 2011 rotating presidency. This is why we are writing to you. The address http://blog.hu is the site of a popular blog service in Hungary. We would like to reproduce the contents of this service at the address http://blog.hu.com , which is currently in your possession. Our wish is to
nettime just out: the early 'nettime' writings of Pit Schultz and Geert Lovink in German (1995-1997)
INC Theory on Demand #.02: Geert Lovink Pit Schultz, Jugendjahre der Netzkritik, Essays zu Web 1.0 (1995 – 1997) Dieses PDF / Print-on-Demand-Heft bringt eine Auswahl der Texte zusammen, in denen die Medientheoretiker und nettime-Gründer Pit Schultz und Geert Lovink zwischen 1995 und 1997 gemeinsam die Grundzüge des Konzepts der Netzkritik formulierten. Damals auf deutsch in verstreuten Publikationen erschienen und zwischenzeitlich weitgehend in Vergessenheit geraten, werden sie nun erstmals gesammelt veröffentlicht. Sie eröffnen einen Blick auf die frühe Phase der Entwicklung des Internets und die beginnende kritische Debatte, die durch eine besondere Diskussions- und Spekulationsfreude geprägt war. Das Internet stellte noch keine allgegenwärtige Realität dar, aber sein zukünftiges Potential war schon absehbar. Im Zentrum dieser Texte steht die Kritik der damaligen Cyberutopien, die die Grundlage für die spätere Dotcom-Manie schafften. Weitere Schwerpunkte sind die Kunstpraxis (net.art), die Deutsche Medientheorie und Gegenöffentlichkeit (taktischen Medien). Pit Schultz ist Autor, Künstler, Programmierer und Radiomacher und lebt in Berlin. Er ist Mitinitiator, Organisator und Mitglied von vielen Projekten wie Botschaft e.V., nettime, Bootlab, backyardradio, Reboot FM und Herbstradio. Der niederländisch-australische Netzkritiker Geert Lovink ist Autor von Dark Fiber und Zero Comments (beide auf Deutsch erschienen). Seit 2004 leitet er das Institut für Netzkultur an der Hochschule Amsterdam (HvA), ist Associate Professor Mediastudies an der Universität Amsterdam (UvA) und Professor an der European Graduate School. Editorial support: Andreas Kallfelz. Design: Katja van Stiphout. DTP: Margreet Riphagen. Printer: ‘Print on Demand’. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2010. ISBN: 978-90-816021-4-3. This publication is available through various print on demand services. Download the free pdf here: http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/tod/TOD%232.pdf # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime about th-rough.eu
(via bifo) http://www.th-rough.eu/ In the aftermath of financial collapse the European leading class is devastating social life in order to save the banks and the Neoliberal dogma. The public school model is destroyed, research is deprived of resources and submitted to corporate blackmail. Social life is impoverished. The Web is becoming the dispositive of exploitation of cognitive precarious labor. Social movements are spreading, they are to change daily life, to organize solidarity and autonomy in the sphere of labour. Movement is the social and erotic body of the General Intellect. A process of autonomy and self-organization of the general intellect is urgent. A new precarious intelligentsia has to arise. The coming European insurrection will be the insurrection of knowledge and sensuousness, against the corporate dictatorship of ignorance and the dark rule of sadness. A process of autonomy and self-organization of the general intellect is urgent. A new precarious intelligentsia has to arise. The coming European insurrection will be the insurrection of knowledge and sensuousness, against the corporate dictatorship of ignorance and the dark rule of sadness. Th-rough.eu was founded in 2009 as a transeuropean and multilingual gallery of contemporary writers. Th-rough.eu is a mosaic-platform of short fiction stories and short political and philosophical essays, published in several languages and as audiofiles read by the authors. If you would like to write for th-rough.eu, send an email with your writing to edi...@th-rough.eu • Selection It might take some time to read your submission, so please be patient. We will operate a qualitative selection, but we will also consider the consistency of your writing with th-rough.eu’s editorial line. Also, please consider that th-rough..eu is not a magazine but a ‘writers’ gallery’: rather than publishing individual pieces of writing of a high number of contributors, we prefer to publish continuously the production of a few writers. • Language We accept every language currently in use in Europe (that is, from Arabic to Japanese). However, in order to facilitate our reading, please attach a translation of your writing into English. • Length We publish short texts. That is, no novels, please ;). However, it wouldn’t make any sense if we decided a strict words-limit for submissions. We can only remind you that ‘less is more’… • Audio All published texts have (or will have soon) their audio version, as read by the author. The audio version is in the original language and, possibly, in English. If you wish to submit a text to th-rough.eu, don’t send us an audio file until we have got back to you about the actual piece of writing. - • Topics Th-rough.eu is looking for short pieces of narrative, political, philosophical, artistic and cultural critique. Exhibit with us Th-rough.eu works closely with a number of individuals and organizations producing collaborative projects in which artists and writers work together. If you would like to participate in or propose a project please email edi...@th-rough.eu. Publish us All the material on Th-rough.eu is under a creative commons commercial licence. For further information and to ask for permissions, please contact editor at th-rough.eu # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime A Modest Proposal for Europe by Jannis Varoufaiks
A Modest Proposal for Europe Author: Jannis Varoufaiks http://yanisvaroufakis.eu/2010/11/16/46/ A two-part plan for overcoming the eurozone’s crisis, re-designing its crumbling architecture, and reinvigorating the European Project (jointly authored with Stuart Holland, ex Member of Parliament in the UK, a former advisor to Jacques Delors and, currently, Visiting Professor at Coimbra University, Portugal) 1. PREAMBLE An accelerating crisis that must be arrested It is now abundantly clear that each and every response by the eurozone to the galloping sovereign debt crisis has been consistently underwhelming. This includes, back in May 2010, the joint Eurozone-IMF operation to ‘rescue’ Greece and, in short shrift, the quite remarkable overnight formation of a so-called ‘special vehicle’ (officially the European Financial Stability Facility, or EFSF), worth up to €750 billion, for supporting the rest of the fiscally challenged eurozone members (e.g. Ireland, Portugal, Spain). More recently, European leaders announced their ‘provisional’ agreement to create a ‘permanent’ mechanism to replace the EFSF as well as a series of measures for, supposedly, attacking the crisis’ causes, thus ensuring that it is not repeated. Alas, no sooner were those measures announced that the crisis intensified. 2. THE TWO SIDES OF THE CRISIS A Gordian Knot of Mounting Debts, Deficits and Bank Losses The reason why is simple. The eurozone is facing an escalating twin crisis but only acknowledges one of its two manifestations. On the one hand we have the sovereign debt crisis which permeates the public sector in the majority of its member countries. On the other hand we have Europe’s private sector banks many of whom find their own viability in question because of exposure to a risk of default by southern European countries and Ireland. Over-laden with paper assets (both publically and privately issued) which are worth next to nothing, they constitute black holes in which the European Central Bank (ECB) keeps pumping oceans of liquidity that, naturally, only occasion a tiny trickle of extra loans to business. Meanwhile, the eurozone’s leadership steadfastly refuses to discuss the private debt crisis, concentrating solely on the need to curtail public debt through a massive austerity drive. In a never ending circle, these fiscal cuts constrain economic activity further and, thus, pull the rug from under the bankers’ already weakened legs. And so the crisis is reproducing itself. 3. THE NEED FOR A RATIONAL POLITICAL RESPONSE: The current response constitutes a clear and present threat for Europe From its very inception the ‘European project’ was always political. Its raison d’ être, lest we forget, was, initially to render another war “not only politically unthinkable but materially impossible”,[1] and eventually, to create a community based on the ‘twin pillars’ of an internal market and economic and social cohesion.[2] These political aims continued to hold sway in Europe in the 1990s and underpinned politically the efforts to create a currency union. Alas, the architecture chosen for the new common currency, the euro, was always missing an important pillar. The Crash of 2008 was the earthquake that revealed the euro’ structural deficits. It put the eurozone in its current vicious circle by exposing the imbalances that were expanding during the boom years. The time has now come to orchestrate a political response to the crisis that is equal to the task. So far, the political response has been anything but. The political debate in Europe, about how to react to the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, has been limited to what should be cut. Meanwhile sixteen million are registered unemployed, millions more either do not qualify for unemployment benefits (because a partner still is working) or are severely underemployed, and a whole generation of young people are losing faith both in Europe and in the ability of its democracies to govern. The unemployed, the under-employed and especially this next generation should not have to live through another Great Depression before Europe realises it needs a New Deal. It is our profound worry that the exclusive focus on austerity measures and enhanced ‘fiscal discipline’ for the heavily indebted will not only further inflame the debt crisis, rather than alleviate it, but that it will, in so doing, seriously undermine the ‘European Project’ in its totality. After all, what the Great Depression taught us is that, in the absence of a collectively agreed political response to a debt crisis, common currencies (the Gold Standard then, the euro now) break up and a war of all against all looms. Our proposal below aims to offer the foundation for a minimalist (and thus modest) political response that arrests the current crisis, paves the ground for
nettime Just Out: The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner
The Telekommunist Manifesto from Dmytri Kleiner is out now! Download the pdf here: http://networkcultures.org/_uploads/#3notebook_telekommunist.pdf The print edition will hopefully be financed soon. If you want to donate money to make this happen, please let us know! In the age of international telecommunications, global migration and the emergence of the information economy, how can class conflict and property be understood? Drawing from political economy and concepts related to intellectual property, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a key contribution to commons-based, collaborative and shared forms of cultural production and economic distribution. Proposing ‘venture communism’ as a new model for workers’ self- organization, Kleiner spins Marx and Engels’ seminal Manifesto of the Communist Party into the age of the internet. As a peer-to-peer model, venture communism allocates capital that is critically needed to accomplish what capitalism cannot: the ongoing proliferation of free culture and free networks. In developing the concept of venture communism, Kleiner provides a critique of copyright regimes, and current liberal views of free software and free culture which seek to trap culture within capitalism. Kleiner proposes copyfarleft, and provides a usable model of a Peer Production License. Encouraging hackers and artists to embrace the revolutionary potential of the internet for a truly free society, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a political-conceptual call to arms in the fight against capitalism. About the author: Dmytri Kleiner is a software developer working on projects that investigate the political economy of the internet, and the ideal of workers’ self-organization of production as a form of class struggle. Born in the USSR, Dmytri grew up in Toronto and now lives in Berlin. He is a founder of the Telekommunisten Collective, which provides internet and telephone services, as well as undertakes artistic projects that explore the way communications technologies have social relations embedded within them, such as deadSwap (2009) and Thimbl (2010). colophon: Network Notebooks editors: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer. Producer: Rachel Somers Miles. Copy editing: Rachael Kendrick. Design: Studio LéonLoes, Rotterdam http://www.leon-loes.nl. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam. Dymtri Kleiner, The Telekommunist. Network Notebooks 03, Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2010. ISBN: 978-90-816021-2-9. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Kevin Kelly's new book
From: What Technology Wants k...@kk.org Date: 14 oktober 2010 23:08:31 GMT+02:00 To: What Technology Wants Subscriber mi...@all-media.info Subject: What Technology Wants Reply-To: What Technology Wants k...@kk.org Hello, My last book appeared 12 years ago. That's a lifetime in internet years. Since that time I've been laboring on a monumental new book called What Technology Wants. I am relieved that this long- overdue work is finally done, and delighted that Penguin/Viking did a fabulous job in publishing it. The cover is cool, too. It premiers today. As of a few hours ago What Technology Wants is available on Amazon in hardcover, Kindle, and audio versions, and at your favorite online or brick bookstore. I feel like shouting from the rooftops. In this book I explore the deeper meaning of technology. I view our human world through the eyes of technology, as if it were a living organism, independent of us. I learned a lot from this investigation, and I think I found some answers that helped me evaluate technology in my own life, in a way that might help you do the same. I also changed my mind in the course of writing it and reluctantly concluded that most new technology is inevitable, and so we should make the most of that inevitability. I suppose this book will be controversial. More about What Technology Wants can be found on my website, including a lot of flattering endorsements from people I respect, and a few early reviews and mentions, such as ones in the New York Times, Scientific American and the Economist. You have my email. I welcome feedback on the book, comments, tweets, reviews on your blog or Amazon, mentions, and inquiries. I can say without exaggeration that I wrote this book for you, in the hope that as you read it you will be refreshed and encouraged by its grand message of optimism and possibility. Rejoice! Book website http://www.kk.org/books/what-technology-wants.php Amazon page http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670022152/ref=nosim/kkorg-20 -- KK # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Spanish collecting society is threatening EXGAE
From: cont...@exgae.net In August, right in the middle of the summer holidays, EXGAE received a certified fax from the lawyers of the Spanish royalties collection society, Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), demanding that EXGAE disappear from the face of the earth within the next seven days. If it fails to comply, it went on, SGAE will proceed, without any further notice, to sue EXGAE for damages, unfair competition and infringement of the “SGAE” brand. The SGAE law firm, Lehmann and Caballeiro, allege unfair competition in regards to the name EXGAE and the nature of the activities it carries out, under the provisions of the Patents Law. Civil society has already denounced the fact that culture industry multinationals like the SGAE use copyright, patents and economic coercion for censorship, to silence dissidence and to restrict freedom of expression. Citizens have made it clear that lawsuits and threats will not stop the just development of the digital era. We’re sorry, but it will no longer wash. The SGAE lawyers will have to find some other business. And what´s more we doubt that SGAE´s associates would want their interests to be defended in this way. EXGAE won’t disappear within seven days. EXGAE is here to stay. Together, we are bringing down a monopoly and building a future that is accessible, sustainable, and beneficial for everybody. No! to the use of copyright for censorship purposes. EXGAE is a non-profit platform. It emerged from the desire of a group of associations and individuals to share – among themselves and with anybody who many need them – the tools to defend themselves from the abuses of the part of the cultural industries that tries by any means possible to hinder the transition to the digital era, which is natural and unavoidable. Through practice, EXGAE promotes the normalisation of new modes of creating, understanding and producing. EXGAE dialogues and works with everybody, and firmly believes that the old cultural models must coexist with the new ones, without the first trying to hamper the progress of the second. And it does so for the benefit of artists, citizens and cultural entrepreneurs. EXGAE works on six fronts: • Offering legal advice through specialised lawyers; • Reporting irregularities in the management of royalties collection societies and cultural industries, when they go against the interests of artists, and when they are detrimental to users and entrepreneurs; • Analysing the social and political situation and designing proposals for legislative intervention; • Organising cultural events aimed at “normalizing” the new form of cultural production, such as the oXcars; • Amplifying the power of national and international networks, promoting and harmonizing the capacities of each node; • Creating viral campaigns. In recent years, EXGAE has been one of the most active groups in the struggle for civil rights in the digital environment, at the Spanish, European and international level. It has participated in the organization of important milestones for freedoms on the Internet: • The fight against the Spanish Law of Sustainable Economy (LES) and the founding of RED SOSTENIBLE ; • The creation of tools for legislative reforms such as the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge ; • The organization of major mobilisations in 2010, such as the (D’) Evolution Summit, which reached more than 150,000 followers during the European Summit of Ministers of Culture • Internet will Not be another TV jointly with international consumer defence organisations. It provides information free of charge to over 1400 people each year and its web site http://exgae.net/ is visited by around 10,000 people per month. * If you want to help us, use and spread the information and reference material on our web. Follow us and participate on Facebook and Twitter. Let’s multiply, share, and not let them intimidate us. We will keep you informed. http://twitter.com/EXGAE http://twitter.com/EXGAEca http://www.facebook.com/EXGAE.net “(…) Times have changed. The Internet allows the horizontal exchange of information and culture among everybody. We all consume and produce culture at the same time. This is why the means of cultural production must adapt to this new democracy, and not the other way around (…).” EXGAE Manifesto “Greed Breaks the Sack,” July 2008 If you don’t know what EXGAE is link here: http://exgae.net/que-es-exgae/what-is-exgae Related Files (spanish): The SGAE certified fax: http://omploader.org/vNWhvYw/sgae-vs-exgae.pdf Our responses: http://exgae.net/respuestas-de-exgae-al-burofax-de-los-abogados-de-la-sgae # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering
nettime news from the institute of network cultures
Institute of Network Cultures News The Institute of Network Cultures wishes you a great summer! We are closed from the 26th of July and back on the 16th of August. In this newsletter you can read more about: - 2nd Video Vortex Reader - Culture Vortex, public participation in online collections - Conference the Economies of Open Content | 10 till 12 November - Society of the Query weblog expands into a collaborative venture - Conference CPOV Wikipedia Research Initiative in Leipzig | 25 – 26 September - Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society, by Vito Campanelli - Video Vortex Conference in Amsterdam | 11 – 12 March 2011 - Conference E-Publishing | May/June 2011 - Create-IT applied research centre / Second Video Vortex Reader Following the success of the first Video Vortex Reader, The Institute of Network Cultures is buzzing with activity preparing for the second Video Vortex Reader, a publication dedicated to examining significant issues that are surfacing around the production and distribution of online video content. An open call for contributions went out in early March, with selections being made early June. Currently we are drawing together other inspiring authors to add insightful contributions to the reader and thinking through the organization of the texts, with works by scholars, artists and curators. Sub-topics and themes: video activism, ethics and politics of online video, curatorial environments, artistic practice with online video, open video, open content and open source, online video and aesthetics, online video in asia, and video art, institutional collections and online access. Expect another creative, critical, insightful and intelligent intervention into various aspects of online video. If you have ideas about possible contributors and exciting essays, written by you or others, please contact Rachel Miles (rachel[at]networkcultures[dot]org). The deadline of the final versions will be in September) The first reader, Video Vortex Reader: Responses to Youtube, is available as a free pdf on the INC website:http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/inc-readers/videovortex/ More information: http://networkcultures.org/videovortex / Culture Vortex, public participation in online collections In the public and cultural sectors, collection holders have raised questions concerning the online distribution of creative material. Until the present moment, research and funding programs have focused mainly on the digitalization and licensing of large collections. On the side of the institution, the professional is wondering: How do I involve the audience in my online collections? And how do I inform the artists about the possibilities of sharing their works online? On the other side, artists are unsure about the added value of offering their works online. The main question this Culture Vortex study (RAAK publiek program) seeks to answer are: How can an active audience be involved in online cultural material? How can an elaborate network culture be facilitated, in which participants will share, describe, review, tag, reuse or otherwise interact with the cultural works? The Netherlands Media Art Institute in collaboration with MediaLAB Amsterdam and INC organized an expert meeting within one of the three program lines; Public 2.0. A selected group of experts from various domains: artists, lecturers/ educators, researchers, curators got together to answer questions like: What needs do users have in relation to the collection? Is there need for active user participation and how can this be fulfilled? Research that has been initiated in order to answer some vital questions related to the media art collections of NIMk and the groups of users that use this collection, can be found here: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/culturevortex/files/2010/07/Report-Culture-Vortex_Program-Line-Public-2.0.pdf (credits: Janneke Kamp and Lorena Zevedei) Partners in this two year program are: INC, MediaLAB Amsterdam, The Netherlands Media Art Institute, The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Amsterdam Stadsarchief, Virtueel Platform, VPRO, Urban Screens Association and IDFA. All the outcomes of this meeting can be found on: http://networkcultures.org/culturevortex/ More information: http://networkcultures.org/culturevortex/ / Economies of Open Content conference | 11 till 13 November 2010 The Economies of Open Content conference critically examines the economics of access to and preservation of on-line public domain and open access cultural resources, also known as the digital commons. While these resources are often acclaimed for their low-cost barriers, accessibility and
nettime The Slow Media Manifesto
http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto The Slow Media Manifesto The first decade of the 21st century, the so-called ‘naughties’, has brought profound changes to the technological foundations of the media landscape. The key buzzwords are networks, the Internet and social media. In the second decade, people will not search for new technologies allowing for even easier, faster and low-priced content production. Rather, appropriate reactions to this media revolution are to be developed and integrated politically, culturally and socially. The concept “Slow”, as in “Slow Food” and not as in “Slow Down”, is a key for this. Like “Slow Food”, Slow Media are not about fast consumption but about choosing the ingredients mindfully and preparing them in a concentrated manner. Slow Media are welcoming and hospitable. They like to share. 1. Slow Media are a contribution to sustainability. Sustainability relates to the raw materials, processes and working conditions, which are the basis for media production. Exploitation and low-wage sectors as well as the unconditional commercialization of user data will not result in sustainable media. At the same time, the term refers to the sustainable consumption of Slow Media. 2. Slow media promote Monotasking. Slow Media cannot be consumed casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users. As with the production of a good meal, which demands the full attention of all senses by the cook and his guests, Slow Media can only be consumed with pleasure in focused alertness. 3. Slow Media aim at perfection. Slow Media do not necessarily represent new developments on the market. More important is the continuous improvement of reliable user interfaces that are robust, accessible and perfectly tailored to the media usage habits of the people. 4. Slow Media make quality palpable. Slow Media measure themselves in production, appearance and content against high standards of quality and stand out from their fast-paced and short-lived counterparts – by some premium interface or by an aesthetically inspiring design. 5. Slow Media advance Prosumers, i.e. people who actively define what and how they want to consume and produce. In Slow Media, the active Prosumer, inspired by his media usage to develop new ideas and take action, replaces the passive consumer. This may be shown by marginals in a book or animated discussion about a record with friends. Slow Media inspire, continuously affect the users’ thoughts and actions and are still perceptible years later. 6. Slow Media are discursive and dialogic. They long for a counterpart with whom they may come in contact. The choice of the target media is secondary. In Slow Media, listening is as important as speaking. Hence ‘Slow’ means to be mindful and approachable and to be able to regard and to question one’s own position from a different angle. 7. Slow Media are Social Media. Vibrant communities or tribes constitute around Slow Media. This, for instance, may be a living author exchanging thoughts with his readers or a community interpreting a late musician’s work. Thus Slow Media propagate diversity and respect cultural and distinctive local features. 8. Slow Media respect their users. Slow Media approach their users in a self-conscious and amicable way and have a good idea about the complexity or irony their users can handle. Slow Media neither look down on their users nor approach them in a submissive way. 9. Slow Media are distributed via recommendations not advertising: the success of Slow Media is not based on an overwhelming advertising pressure on all channels but on recommendation from friends, colleagues or family. A book given as a present five times to best friends is a good example. 10. Slow Media are timeless: Slow Media are long-lived and appear fresh even after years or decades. They do not lose their quality over time but at best get some patina that can even enhance their value. 11. Slow Media are auratic: Slow Media emanate a special aura. They generate a feeling that the particular medium belongs to just that moment of the user’s life. Despite the fact that they are produced industrially or are partially based on industrial means of production, they are suggestive of being unique and point beyond themselves. 12. Slow Media are progressive not reactionary: Slow Media rely on their technological achievements and the network society’s way of life. It is because of the acceleration of multiple areas of life, that islands of deliberate slowness are made possible and essential for survival. Slow Media are not a contradiction to the speed and simultaneousness of Twitter, Blogs or Social Networks but are an attitude and a way of making use of them. 13. Slow Media focus on quality both in production and in reception of media content: Craftsmanship in cultural studies such as source criticism,
nettime Tirana Hunger Strike
Tirana Hunger Strike Dear friends, Douglas, Philippe and I were shocked when we arrived to Albania to discover the massive protest in Tirana. Following a demonstration of 200,000 people, 200 citizens and 22 MPs started a hunger strike to ask for democracy. We launched a live streaming video page to help bring attention to their cause. Below is the letter from the Hunger Strike Committee. ?Anri Sala, Philippe Pareno and Douglas Gordon www.opentheboxes.com www.opentheboxes.org www.opentheboxes.net Tirana, May 04, 2010 The Hunger Strike Committee Re: Letter to the members of International Community and Media Dear Friends, We, 22 members of parliament and 200 citizens of Albania, concerned about the fate of democracy in our country have decided to engage in the ultimate form of democratic protest by going on a hunger strike in the name of the cornerstone of any democracy: free and fair elections. Our demand is simple and democratic: a full and thorough parliamentary inquiry into the elections of June 28th 2009, including the opening of the ballot boxes and the examination of the electoral material contained therein. Our demand is not motivated by a yearning for power, but by the aspiration that the next elections are guaranteed against falling prey to the same machinations and manipulations. For nine months we have tried in vain to realize our constitutional right to transparency only to be denied in all our efforts through the arrogance of a government that is no longer constrained by the Constitution in its actions. Nor has the government reacted to the massive show of support for our cause on the part of the citizens of Albania. 200,000 Albanians protested in Tirana in the name of the transparency of their votes and yet their government turned a deaf hear to this most democratic of demands. Prime Minister Berisha speaks of a court decision that stands in the way of transparency but he has never, in ten months been able to show this decision to the public for the simple reason that it does not exist. We also regret the fact that this lie construed by Berisha as an alibi in order to avoid the transparency of the elections, has been instrumentalized by a significant portion of Albania's friends and partners. Faced with the obstinate, illegal and arrogant denial of our constitutional right to transparency, aware of the crucial importance of our cause to the future of free and fair elections and democracy in Albania, we have decided to escalate our action by engaging in an open ended hunger strike accompanied by protests in every town and village of our country. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Chris McGreal: Who watches Wikileaks? (The Guardian) (! ; -)
Hi all, this is certainly an interesting and very much nettime thread, with much more to come. Here is another piece, also from a Brittish newspaper. I see lots of parallels with the strategies and problems the Dutch anti-militarist group Onkruit ran into in the early eighties. They got into stealing (Gutenberg) papers and faced similar issues who was going to investigate them, read them, publish them etc. The problem that I see is how to overcome banal cyber-liberatarianism and build new (or rebuild old) bridges between geekdom and investigative journalism, presuming that the work of the latter will have to be paid for, even though parts can be crowd sourced and done by volunteers. This is really an issue of 'organized networks'. Ciao, Geert --- Original at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/11/iceland-wikileaks-henry-porter (http://bit.ly/a0kJ0B) Out of one nation's catastrophe comes a clarion call for honesty Iceland's proposal to create a haven for investigative journalism should be welcomed by all who cherish freedom of expression Henry Porter The Observer, Sunday 11 April 2010 Sitting at the bottom of the mountain in Iceland, there was time enough last week to reflect on this country's importance in the struggle between the world's internet users and state secrecy, never better represented than by publication by Wikileaks of a video showing the slaughter of more than a dozen people by an American helicopter gunship in Baghdad. Iceland is proposing radical new laws that will create a safe haven for investigative journalism and therefore the release of this kind of shocking footage, which exposes a cover-up, as well as the true nature of a war where a superpower deploys its weapons on a third world country, in this instance cutting down, among others, two people working for Reuters. The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (Immi) will allow organisations like Wikileaks to provide the strongest possible protections for sources and whistleblowers releasing sensitive material that big business and secretive states want to suppress. Having flown from Britain last Tuesday where our disreputable Parliament was about to pass the Digital Economy Bill with virtually no scrutiny and certainly no concern for freedom of expression, it was remarkably refreshing to read the following from the official website of the Immi, which, incidentally, is supported by all parties here. The goal of the Immi proposal is to task the government with finding ways to strengthen freedom of expression around the world and in Iceland… we also feel it is high time to establish the first Icelandic international prize: the Icelandic Freedom of Expression Award. The prospect of this investigative sanctuary has naturally attracted Wikileaks and earlier this year its Australian founder, Julian Assange, spent three weeks advising the Icelandic government on the initiative. He has since alleged that the CIA has mounted an aggressive surveillance operation against him and that the Icelandic intelligence officials also pursued him. Well, who knows what's true, but the idea of any British government proposing such a prize, let alone supporting an initiative like this is unthinkable: we pride ourselves on our innate love of free expression and liberty but in the last 20 years, along with the expansion of state power, we have done little to stop the growth of official secrecy and very little to assert our right to know. In what seems at this distance to be an unusually dire beginning to an election campaign, few perhaps noticed that Lord Mandelson's Digital Economy Bill, presented as protection for ordinary copyright holders against file-sharing, will enable our government to block websites such as Wikileaks on grounds that it infringes copyright; more or less everything the website publishes is someone's property. Stephen Timms, the government minister piloting the bill in the Commons, said that he would not want to see the bill restrict freedom of speech, but then, predictably, refused to guarantee that Wikileaks would not be blocked. This badly drafted, poorly scrutinised legislation will hamper but not impede Wikileaks, for a few there always will be ways round cyber blockades. However, imagine the way our government might have tried to suppress publication of MPs' expenses by Wikileaks or documents connected to the Iraq war. Although the new bill was not drafted to protect MPs and government, no effort would be spared to assert the rights of copyright holders, just as no effort was spared by Gordon Brown in a masterclass of opportunism when he used the 2001 Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act in 2008 to freeze assets of Iceland's Landsbanki, which owned the failed bank Icesave. As surely as Lord Mandelson will never have to answer personally to the electorate for this shoddy piece of legislation, the new copyright laws will be used to protect those in
nettime Blues in the American salon: Digital Nation: What has the Internet done to us?
(Hi, where does this collective tiredness come from? Can someone explain this? Is it the winter? Depressed politics? Cold turkey post- Xmas feelings? Agreed, the weather is bad. Obama sucks. And the iPad is yet another disappointment. The 'I told you so attitude' doesn't bring much, I guess. Is it the great influence of Jaron Lanier on the American psyche? You tell me. Ciao, Geert) Digital Nation: What has the Internet done to us? We're Googling ourselves stupid. Even tech guru Douglas Rushkoff has regrets. PBS investigates our Information Age By Heather Havrilesky http://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/i_like_to_watch/2010/01/30/frontline_digital_nation/index.html After 15 years of bloviating, looks like we've finally entered the information age. Back in 1996, when I worked at Suck.com in the offices of HotWired, the online offshoot of Wired magazine, our brightly hued warehouse was abuzz with overcaffeinated worker bees high on the limitless possibilities of the Internets. Every 20- something in San Francisco went from being unemployed (post-recession) to dreaming big. Why, we could write stuff about Burning Man and rock climbing, and people would pay us for it! We could learn HTML or (gasp) become middle managers! The big idea guys, high on more than the Internets, called big meetings so they could rhapsodize on creating virtual communities and breaking down traditional Western phallocentric patriarchies and enabling subcultures to reach out and robustly interface with like- minded hives. My bosses at Suck.com, meanwhile, accurately predicted that the Web would soon become something between a gigantic mall catering to the lowest common denominator and an infinite tabloid echo chamber. Their mantra: Sell out early and often. Why? Because those of us musing about murderous robot showdowns (or scratching out angry cartoons under a pseudonym, for that matter) would all go back to grabbing ankle for The Man sooner than we thought. What they didn't know, and never could've predicted, was that the Web would also transform itself into an enormous, never-ending high school reunion (See also: hell). Revolutionary in a coal mine Even though I've opted out of the big-idea, Future-of-the-Web bloviating business over the years (mostly because it's more my style to wallow in obscurity, wearing outdated shoes), I think it's finally safe to proclaim, together, that the information age has officially arrived. After all, my 13-year-old stepson texts more often than he speaks, my 3-year-old daughter wants her own bright pink iPad so she can see what Cinderella is doing right now, I waste most of my day reading Tweets from a Laura Ingalls Wilder impersonator and a recent dinner guest spent half the night answering lingering trivial conversational unknowns by looking them up on his iPhone. Let's see, so the digital revolution led us all to this: a gigantic, commercial, high school reunion/mall filthy with insipid tabloid trivia, populated by perpetually distracted, texting, tweeting demi- humans. Yes, the information age truly is every bit as glorious and special as everyone predicted it would be! Apparently our futuristic Blade Runner-esque digital dystopia is so bewildering that even Internet big idea man Douglas Rushkoff is currently reconsidering his unconditional love for new media in Frontline's Digital Nation (premieres 9 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 2, on PBS, check local listings), an in-depth investigation into the possibilities and side effects of our digital immersion. I want the luxury of being able to push the pause button, you know, Rushkoff, one of the producers of this 90-minute report, muses to the other producer, Rachel Dretzin, as the cameras roll. Rushkoff says he wants to really ask whether we're tinkering with some part of ourselves that's a little bit deeper than we might realize at first. You know, how are we changing what it means to be a human being by using all this stuff? Keep in mind, this is a guy who, despite his Dilbert-meets-Derrida perspective, spent the better half of the '90s gushing about the power and the glory of the Internets in intelligently written books and on crappy all about the Internets shows like The Site (Christ, remember that one?). If Rushkoff is rethinking his ardor for the digital realm, you know we're in trouble. Even if you're too distracted by your iPhone to care whether continual distractions will take a toll on our souls, Digital Nation should beat a little sense into you. You know the routine: A kid says proudly, I never read books. I'll be honest. I can't remember the last time I read a book; an English professor tells the camera, solemnly, I can't assign a novel that's more than 200 pages; we learn of a Kaiser Family Foundation study indicating that 8- to 18- year-old kids spend 53 hours a week using media. And don't believe the hype about a whole new generation of effective multitaskers, either. Most multitaskers think that they're brilliant at
nettime interview with alan shapiro
Star Trek, Marx and Time Travel January 5, 2010, 4:40 am Star Trek, Marx and Time Travel Alan Shapiro - Star guest of the next Transmediale - on new computers, 1968 and anarchism Interview in the Berlin daily newspaper Neues Deutschland, January 5, 2010 Translated from the German by Dwight ?Doc? Gooden As a software specialist, Alan Shapiro would like to set the digital world on a new footing. As a philosopher, he wants to introduce new thinking into the world. And as an anarchist reader of Marx (self- description), he not only steers Marx's critique of capitalism in a new direction, he also believes that alienation and exploitation can be dragged and dropped to the trash of history. Shapiro, who at one time worked at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has been active for 20 years as a software developer and media studies scholar, especially in Germany. In February, he will be a signature speaker at the Berlin Transmediale media and art festival. Neues Deutschland: You want to develop a completely new kind of computer, and found a New Computer Science. How are we to understand that? Existing computers are based on the scientific norms of the 17th century. They go back to the mechanistic philosophy of Ren? Descartes. Their goal is to reduce complexity. A problem is broken down into smaller, more manageable units. This works for a kind of machine-like software. There is no holistic relationship between the parts and the whole. The parts and the whole are related to each other like the parts of a car. In 20th and 21st century philosophy, by contrast, a lot of emphasis is placed on an integral perspective. I am thinking above all of the French thinkers like Deleuze, Baudrillard and Foucault. The New Medicine and the New Biology are also characterized by an integral approach. What does that mean when transferred to Computer Science? New computers should come closer to this integral approach. Biology teaches us that each individual member of a species, in every second of its existence, is reading its genetic code. From this body of knowledge that belongs to its species, the singular individual decodes information in real-time for its own existence. Transferred to computer science, this means that we must develop a new relationship between the executable program and the database elements. Will that lead to better, faster, and more powerful computers? Computers will themselves become more complex rather than being engineered as tools for the reduction of complexity. Let us face this fact: with existing software, nothing surprising can happen. There can be no surprises and no emergence. Only what the software developer has pre-programmed can occur. New computers will be more flexible. What we intend to do can be described as a new relationship of patterns and similarities. It?s like in music, where, for example, each single note in a symphony has resonance with the entire symphony. You take your examples from science and art. Do you believe that artistic approaches are helpful in technology development? Absolutely! I am very influenced by the cultural revolution of 1968, by the student rebellions, the liberation movements in all areas of society, also New Age and Buddhism, the whole panorama of holistic ideas for happiness. I published a book about the technologies of Star Trek. It has been recognized as an important work of sociology. I believe that we are very close to a new paradigmatic breakthrough where art, science, and philosophy will be unified. Then we will be able to develop the Star Trek technologies. In the middle term, in about 20 years, time travel will also be possible. The first step towards that is the New Computer Science. At the present time, almost everyone who believes himself to be in touch with the times wants to bring art, science, and philosophy into harmony with each other. What is different about what you are doing? We unify theory and practice. That?s what Karl Marx said. I have done an anarchistic reading of Marx. We will replace work with play, enjoyment, friendship, creativity, and diversity of activities. This is a new anarchistic Marxism that we will first try out at Shapiro Technologies as a radical-pragmatic utopian experiment. What will Shapiro Technologies develop? We will be active in technology, media, futuristic design, and ecology. The basis of our advanced technology is a new mathematics that has been developed by the Irish mathematician Alexis Clancy. He is a genius, a new Einstein. The individual products can be very diverse. We are trying at the present time to get contracts at the Deutsche Bahn in the area of logistics, at Volkswagen or another automobile manufacturer in the areas of Spoken Dialogue Technology and the Car of the Future, with Computer Games developers working on emotions and storytelling/
nettime David Gugerli on Data Management as a Signifying Practice
(Dear nettimers, the videos of most of the presentations at the INC conference Society of the Query are now available online at http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/query/videos/ . Konrad Becker, who was there to launch the Deep Search book, announced a next search event in Vienna, in May 2010, if you wish the fourth in a series of events in Europe on this topic. Here at INC we've discussed to turn the blog of the Amsterdam event into a more permanent location where interested can find, share information on the politics, aesthetics and culture of 'search'. If you're interested to join this collaborative blog, please write to Marijn at networkcultures.org. Below you'll find the text of David Gugerli on the theory and history of databases. Enjoy! Geert) Data Management as a Signifying Practice David Gugerli, ETH Zurich November 13, 2009, Amsterdam Edited by: Baruch Gottlieb Databases are operationally essential to the search society. Since the 1960’s, they have been developed, installed, and maintained by software engineers in view of a particular future user, and they have been applied and adapted by different user communities for the production of their own futures. Database systems, which, since their inception, offer powerful means for shaping and managing society, have since developed into the primary resource for search-centered signifying practice. The paper will present insights into the genesis of a society which depends on the possibility to search, find, (re-) arrange and (re-)interpret of vast amounts of data. I am aware of the fact that the title of my talk is both very ambitious and theoretically subversive. The “Culture of the Search Society” undermines the distinction Gilles Deleuze once made between the operating principles of the Foucauldian societies of discipline on one hand and the operating principles of late capitalist societies on the other hand, i.e. societies, which seem to replace earlier disciplinary surveillance techniques of inclusion and exclusion with a diverse set of juxtaposed rules that rather serve to control “input / output relations”, i.e. societies that are tightly linked to the notion of management and the allocation of resources. In a somewhat paradoxical sense, Deleuze’s control society is a society which is characterized by a high degree of flexibility, by distributed, rather than hierarchical, networks, by stochastic processes, and by an increased level of tolerance with regard to norms. And it is a society which is flourishing on a both infrastructural and cultural seedbed of search practices or search technologies. It is, I want to argue, not so much a control society but rather a search society. The world as a database: CSI Let me start with something probably familiar, something which you actually might have seen on television. “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation”, one of the most popular, Emmy Award-winning, CBS television series, trails the investigations of a team of Las Vegas forensic scientists as they unveil the circumstances behind mysterious and unusual deaths and crimes. Most episodes conform to the traditional detective story whodunit- structure and depict the work of two forensic teams, which are usually analyzing two different cases of murder at a time, using, in both cases, the most sophisticated technological and scientific means for their forensic laboratory work. One reviewer stated that the series’ techno-scientific orientation has an astonishing effect both for the role of the murderer as well for the figure of the victim. In fact, both of these figures are, dramaturgically speaking, only interesting as carriers of evidence. There is no attempt at understanding the social dynamics between murderer and victim. The motives of the suspect are almost irrelevant, the tragedy of the victim is not really taken into account. There are a dead and a living body whose encounter in the past has produced forensically relevant evidence. In addition to the crime scene, the two bodies involved in the crime are, to put it bluntly, a mere repository of traces, a hub of evidential markers, a base of pieces of information that can be retrieved, technically stabilized and scientifically analyzed in order to – and this is crucial - recombine them in such a way that the whole set of aggregated data might verify or falsify parts of an ever more differentiated hypothetical narrative of the crime under investigation. These scenarios are shown in a somewhat blurred view of the investigating agents' imaginations as they indicate where they should look for more data at the evidence- providing crime scene. One can say without exaggeration that CSI is depicting the world as a database; its dramatic development is about the excitement of search and query. Global Software Business 2007 The popularity of the database as a general model for search and
Re: nettime Thanksgiving - 2009
Question: Why was Moses not allowed to enter the Promised Land? Answer: In Numbers 20:8, the Lord told Moses, Take the staff, and you and your brother Aaron gather the assembly together. Speak to that rock before their eyes and it will pour out its water. You will bring water out of the rock for the community so they and their livestock can drink. Numbers 20:9-11 records Moses' response: So Moses took the staff from the LORD's presence, just as He commanded him. He and Aaron gathered the assembly together in front of the rock and Moses said to them, ‘Listen, you rebels, must we bring you water out of this rock?’ Then Moses raised his arm and struck the rock twice with his staff. Water gushed out, and the community and their livestock drank. Numbers 20:12 gives us the Lord's response, But the LORD said to Moses and Aaron, Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them. What did Moses do that warranted such a severe penalty from the Lord? First, Moses disobeyed a direct command from God. God had commanded Moses to speak to the rock. Instead, Moses struck the rock with his staff. Second, Moses took the credit for bringing forth the water. Notice how in verse 10 Moses said, must we (referring to Moses and Aaron) bring you water out of this rock. Moses took credit for the miracle himself, instead of attributing it to God. Third, Moses did this in front of all the Israelites. Such a public example of direct disobedience could not go unpunished. Moses’ punishment was that he would not be allowed to enter the Promised Land (Numbers 20:12). On 27 Nov 2009, at 3:57 AM, newme...@aol.com wrote: Folks: Yes. The end is near. Ray Kurweil is dying. Falling apart. Know this. Life is now. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime OUR RIGHT TO NET: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALESSANDRO GILIOLI
OUR RIGHT TO NET: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALESSANDRO GILIOLI by Marco Mancuso from Digimag 47 - September 2009 http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1542 English version online soon Digimag interviewed Alessandro Gilioli, well known journalist, writer, editor and blogger of L'Espresso(monthly magazine edited by the same editorial group of La Repubblica) and Derrick de Kerckhove. On July 14th 2009 a virtual strike took place, a strike on the main Italian blogs, organized by Alessandro Gilioli with the collaboration of bloggers from all political areas. The initiative asked Italian blogs to stop posting all the same hour, and to just post the logo of the protest online, with a link to the statement for the Right to Net: http://dirittoallarete.ning.com/. The Social Networking platform worked as a collector of posts and free opinions, as well as a container for the images of all the bloggers who gagged themselves by taking part in the protest. The project also involved a sit-in and meeting in Piazza Navona in Rome, at 7pm on Tuesday, the 14th of July, and a symbolic gagging of the bloggers that were present as well as the statue that represents the freedom of speech, the statue of Pasquino. The reason of the protest was the Angelino Alfano (ITalian Minister of Justice) decree on wiretapping, which has in fact muted a whole series of bloggers on the Net, threatening them with legal action and hefty fines. If the so-called obligation to rectify, thought of 60 years ago for the Press, is imposed on all blogs (even amateur ones) with the foreseen hefty pecuniary fines, it would actually put a silencer on online conversations and freedom of speech. A very strong action against freedom of press in Italy --- I would say that it was almost inevitable. To live and work in a country, as democratic as it seems, where the interdependent rapport between politics and mass media is much tighter than in any other country in the world (excluding those openly totalitarian regimes that we mentioned for example in last month's Persepolis 2.0 article, of course) and does not allow for libertarian utopias of any sort if they discuss any subject that is a fundamental part of democracy, like the freedom of the Press, the right to an opinion, the freedom of thought. To think that the Internet, Blogs, P2P and Social Networks could be exempt from censorship and restrictions from the government, to hope that they would continue to be completely free territories forever, was absolutely naive in my opinion: there are many negative accounts of this, on a national and international level, some of which have been discussed in Digimag during the past few years. Regarding these themes, the Italian government seems to have already triggered an unprecedented control and restriction policy in the Western democracies and that, as the guests of this interview Alessandro Gilioli and Derrick De Kerckhove emphasise, could bring up a series of amendments and decrees that constitute as a dangerous precedent to be imitated by other democracies all over the world. In fact it seems that in Italy, the freedom of the Press as we know it, is a right that exists merely on paper and much less in practice: how to interpret the latest masked government action against the freedom of thought and of the Press, the Alfano decree on wiretapping, which has in fact muted a whole series of bloggers on the Net, threatening them with legal action and hefty fines? If the so- called obligation to rectify, thought of 60 years ago for the Press, is imposed on all blogs (even amateur ones) with the foreseen hefty pecuniary fines, it would actually put a silencer on online conversations and freedom of speech. In a government obsessed by controlling the mass media, intent on putting a silencer on every possible voice of protest, fundamentally ignorant to social and economical dynamics that make up the Internet, P2P, Open Sourcing and Social Networking, it's almost inevitable to be afraid of that which you cannot control, of the so-called word getting out that could slip through the small mesh of an online community, as small as it can be, that has the potential to grow and could soon become politically important (if well-represented, of course). Therefore in protest against the Alfano Decree, on the 14th of July a virtual strike took place, a strike on the main Italian blogs. This happened thanks to the initiative of Alessandro Gilioli (Journalist, writer, Editor and blogger of L'Espresso with his Piovono Rane feature), and the collaboration of bloggers from all political areas (and non-political areas too) and representatives of various parties and associations, the initiative asked Italian blogs to just post the logo of the protest online, with a link to the statement for the Right to Net: http:// dirittoallarete.ning.com/. The Social Networking platform worked as a
nettime OUR RIGHT TO NET: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALESSANDRO GILIOLI
OUR RIGHT TO NET: AN INTERVIEW WITH ALESSANDRO GILIOLI by Marco Mancuso from Digimag 47 - September 2009 http://www.digicult.it/digimag/article.asp?id=1542 English version online soon Digimag interviewed Alessandro Gilioli, well known journalist, writer, editor and blogger of L'Espresso(monthly magazine edited by the same editorial group of La Repubblica) and Derrick de Kerckhove. On July 14th 2009 a virtual strike took place, a strike on the main Italian blogs, organized by Alessandro Gilioli with the collaboration of bloggers from all political areas. The initiative asked Italian blogs to stop posting all the same hour, and to just post the logo of the protest online, with a link to the statement for the Right to Net: http://dirittoallarete.ning.com/. The Social Networking platform worked as a collector of posts and free opinions, as well as a container for the images of all the bloggers who gagged themselves by taking part in the protest. The project also involved a sit-in and meeting in Piazza Navona in Rome, at 7pm on Tuesday, the 14th of July, and a symbolic gagging of the bloggers that were present as well as the statue that represents the freedom of speech, the statue of Pasquino. The reason of the protest was the Angelino Alfano (ITalian Minister of Justice) decree on wiretapping, which has in fact muted a whole series of bloggers on the Net, threatening them with legal action and hefty fines. If the so-called obligation to rectify, thought of 60 years ago for the Press, is imposed on all blogs (even amateur ones) with the foreseen hefty pecuniary fines, it would actually put a silencer on online conversations and freedom of speech. A very strong action against freedom of press in Italy --- I would say that it was almost inevitable. To live and work in a country, as democratic as it seems, where the interdependent rapport between politics and mass media is much tighter than in any other country in the world (excluding those openly totalitarian regimes that we mentioned for example in last month's Persepolis 2.0 article, of course) and does not allow for libertarian utopias of any sort if they discuss any subject that is a fundamental part of democracy, like the freedom of the Press, the right to an opinion, the freedom of thought. To think that the Internet, Blogs, P2P and Social Networks could be exempt from censorship and restrictions from the government, to hope that they would continue to be completely free territories forever, was absolutely naive in my opinion: there are many negative accounts of this, on a national and international level, some of which have been discussed in Digimag during the past few years. Regarding these themes, the Italian government seems to have already triggered an unprecedented control and restriction policy in the Western democracies and that, as the guests of this interview Alessandro Gilioli and Derrick De Kerckhove emphasise, could bring up a series of amendments and decrees that constitute as a dangerous precedent to be imitated by other democracies all over the world. In fact it seems that in Italy, the freedom of the Press as we know it, is a right that exists merely on paper and much less in practice: how to interpret the latest masked government action against the freedom of thought and of the Press, the Alfano decree on wiretapping, which has in fact muted a whole series of bloggers on the Net, threatening them with legal action and hefty fines? If the so- called obligation to rectify, thought of 60 years ago for the Press, is imposed on all blogs (even amateur ones) with the foreseen hefty pecuniary fines, it would actually put a silencer on online conversations and freedom of speech. In a government obsessed by controlling the mass media, intent on putting a silencer on every possible voice of protest, fundamentally ignorant to social and economical dynamics that make up the Internet, P2P, Open Sourcing and Social Networking, it's almost inevitable to be afraid of that which you cannot control, of the so-called word getting out that could slip through the small mesh of an online community, as small as it can be, that has the potential to grow and could soon become politically important (if well-represented, of course). Therefore in protest against the Alfano Decree, on the 14th of July a virtual strike took place, a strike on the main Italian blogs. This happened thanks to the initiative of Alessandro Gilioli (Journalist, writer, Editor and blogger of L'Espresso with his Piovono Rane feature), and the collaboration of bloggers from all political areas (and non-political areas too) and representatives of various parties and associations, the initiative asked Italian blogs to just post the logo of the protest online, with a link to the statement for the Right to Net: http:// dirittoallarete.ning.com/. The Social Networking platform worked as a collector of posts and free opinions, as well as a container for the images of all the
nettime Top Ten Myths About Civil Society Participation in ICANN
Top Ten Myths About Civil Society Participation in ICANN From: The Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC), 21 August 2009 Posted by Robin Gross on August 21, 2009 at 6:30pm Myth 1: Civil Society won’t participate in ICANN under NCUC’s charter proposal.” False. ICANN staffers and others claim that civil society is discouraged from engaging at ICANN because NCUC’s charter proposal does not guarantee GNSO Council seats to constituencies. The facts could not be further from the truth. NCUC’s membership includes 143 noncommercial organizations and individuals. Since 2008 NCUC’s membership has increased by more 215% – largely in direct response to civil society’s support for the NCUC charter. Not a single noncommercial organization commented in the public comment forum that hard-wiring council seats to constituencies will induce their participation in ICANN. None of the noncommercial organizations that commented on the NCSG Charter said they would participate to ICANN only if NCSG's Charter secured the constituencies a guaranteed seat. Myth 2: More civil society groups will get involved if the Board intervenes.” A complete illusion. Board imposition of its own charter and its refusal to listen to civil society groups will be interpreted as rejection of the many groups that commented and as discrimination against civil society participation. ICANN’s reputation among noncommercial groups will be irreparably damaged unless this action is reversed or a compromise is found. Even if we were to accept these actions and try to work with them, the total impact of the staff/SIC NCSG charter will be to handicap noncommercial groups and make them less likely to participate. The appointment of representatives by the Board disenfranchises noncommercial groups and individuals. The constituency-based SIC structure requires too much organizational overhead for most noncommercial organizations to sustain; it also pits groups against each other in political competition for votes and members. Most noncommercial organizations will not enter the ICANN GNSO under those conditions. Myth 3: The outpouring of civil society opposition can be dismissed as the product of a 'letter writing campaign.' An outrageous claim. Overwhelming civil society opposition to the SIC charter emerged not once, but twice. In addition, there is the massive growth in NCUC membership stimulated by the broader community’s opposition to the staff and Board actions. Attempts to minimize the degree to which civil society has been undermined by these developments are simply not going to work, and reveal a shocking degree of insularity and arrogance. ICANN is required to have public comment periods because it is supposed to listen to and be responsive to public opinion. Public opinion results from networks of communication and public dialogue on controversial issues, including organized calls to action. No policy or bylaw gives ICANN staff the authority to decide that it can discount or ignore nearly all of the groups who have taken an interest in the GNSO reforms, simply because they have taken a position critical of the staff’s. ICANN's attempt to discount critical comments by labeling them a letter writing campaign undermines future participation and confidence in ICANN public processes. Myth 4: Civil society is divided on the NCSG charter issue. Wrong. There has never been such an overwhelmingly lopsided public comment period in ICANN’s history. While ICANN’s staff is telling the Board that civil society is divided, the clear, documented consensus among civil society groups has been against the ICANN drafted NCSG charter and in favor of the NCUC one. Board members who rely only on staff-provided information may believe civil society is divided, but Board members who have actually read the public comments can see the solidarity of civil society against what ICANN is trying to impose on them. Myth 5: Existing civil society groups are not representative or diverse enough. Untrue by any reasonable standard. The current civil society grouping, the Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC), now has 143 members including 73 noncommercial organizations and 70 individuals in 48 countries. This is an increase of more than 215% since the parity principle was established.[1] Noncommercial participation in ICANN is now more diverse than any other constituency, so it is completely unfair to level this charge at NCUC without applying it to others. Even back in 2006, an independent report by the London School of Economics showed that NCUC was the most diverse geographically, had the largest number of different people serving on the GNSO Council over time, and the highest turn-over in council representatives of any of the 6 constituencies. In contrast, the commercial users’ constituency has recycled the same 5 people on the
nettime Top Ten Myths About Civil Society Participation in ICANN
Top Ten Myths About Civil Society Participation in ICANN From: The Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC), 21 August 2009 Posted by Robin Gross on August 21, 2009 at 6:30pm Myth 1 Civil Society wont participate in ICANN under NCUCs charter proposal. False. ICANN staffers and others claim that civil society is discouraged from engaging at ICANN because NCUCs charter proposal does not guarantee GNSO Council seats to constituencies. The facts could not be further from the truth. NCUCs membership includes 143 noncommercial organizations and individuals. Since 2008 NCUCs membership has increased by more 215% largely in direct response to civil societys support for the NCUC charter. Not a single noncommercial organization commented in the public comment forum that hard-wiring council seats to constituencies will induce their participation in ICANN. None of the noncommercial organizations that commented on the NCSG Charter said they would participate to ICANN only if NCSG's Charter secured the constituencies a guaranteed seat on the GNSO. Myth 2 More civil society groups will get involved if the Board intervenes. A complete illusion. Board imposition of its own charter and its refusal to listen to civil society groups will be interpreted as rejection of the many groups that commented and as discrimination against civil society participation. ICANNs reputation among noncommercial groups will be irreparably damaged unless this action is reversed or a compromise is found. Even if we were to accept these actions and try to work with them, the total impact of the staff/SIC NCSG charter will be to handicap noncommercial groups and make them less likely to participate. The appointment of representatives by the Board disenfranchises noncommercial groups and individuals. The constituency-based SIC structure requires too much organizational overhead for most noncommercial organizations to sustain; it also pits groups against each other in political competition for votes and members. Most noncommercial organizations will not enter the ICANN GNSO under those conditions. Myth 3 The outpouring of civil society opposition can be dismissed as the product of a 'letter writing campaign.' An outrageous claim. Overwhelming civil society opposition to the SIC charter emerged not once, but twice. In addition, there is the massive growth in NCUC membership stimulated by the broader communitys opposition to the staff and Board actions. Attempts to minimize the degree to which civil society has been undermined by these developments are simply not going to work, and reveal a shocking degree of insularity and arrogance. ICANN is required to have public comment periods because it is supposed to listen to and be responsive to public opinion. Public opinion results from networks of communication and public dialogue on controversial issues, including organized calls to action. No policy or bylaw gives ICANN staff the authority to decide that it can discount or ignore nearly all of the groups who have taken an interest in the GNSO reforms, simply because they have taken a position critical of the staffs. ICANN's attempt to discount critical comments by labeling them a letter writing campaign undermines future participation and confidence in ICANN public processes. Myth 4 Civil society is divided on the NCSG charter issue. Wrong. There has never been such an overwhelmingly lopsided public comment period in ICANNs history. While ICANNs staff is telling the Board that civil society is divided, the clear, documented consensus among civil society groups has been against the ICANN drafted NCSG charter and in favor of the NCUC one. Board members who rely only on staff-provided information may believe civil society is divided, but Board members who have actually read the public comments can see the solidarity of civil society against what ICANN is trying to impose on them. Myth 5 Existing civil society groups are not representative or diverse enough. Untrue by any reasonable standard. The current civil society grouping, the Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC), now has 143 members including 73 noncommercial organizations and 70 individuals in 48 countries. This is an increase of more than 215% since the parity principle was established.[1] Noncommercial participation in ICANN is now more diverse than any other constituency, so it is completely unfair to level this charge at NCUC without applying it to others. Even back in 2006, an independent report by the London School of Economics showed that NCUC was the most diverse geographically, had the largest number of different people serving on the GNSO Council over time, and the highest turn-over in council representatives of any of the 6 constituencies. In contrast, the commercial users constituency has recycled the same 5
nettime Appeal for support from ICANN civil society
From: Milton L Mueller muel...@syr.edu Date: August 17, 2009 11:44:21 PM EDT To: MADCoList madcol...@list.media-democracy.net Subject: [MADCoList] Appeal for support from ICANN civil society Dear colleagues Many of you have already heard of the controversies surrounding the ICANN Board's mistreatment of noncommercial participants. At issue is whether global governance of critical Internet resources will continue to be tilted toward governmental and commercial interests, and whether ICANN's unaccountable staff will be allowed to punish or handicap independent and oppositional voices. Despite the setbacks we have succeeded in gaining the support of some Board members and in creating some pressure to review and amend the decisions. We are now pushing for a meeting with the Board in the Seoul meeting, and a few other requests. We are sending the attached letter, which has the unanimous support of the Noncommercial Users Constituency (NCUC), to the Board as soon as possible, and we'd like for this letter to include signatures from public interest groups who are not already members of NCUC. Please help us fight for an open and bottom up policy making process for the global Internet, and indicate your support for a more democratic approach to Internet governance. Thanks! --MM TO: The ICANN Board of Directors and Mr. Rod Beckstrom, ICANN President and CEO RE: Call to the ICANN Board to Correct Problems with the NCSG Charter, and to Address Continuing Misperceptions about Noncommercial Involvement in ICANN This letter comes from nearly 150 individual and organizational members of ICANN’s Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC). It is also endorsed by public interest groups outside of NCUC. We are all deeply concerned about the July 30, 2009 ICANN Board decisions regarding the restructuring of the Generic Names Supporting Organization (GNSO). We believe that the Noncommercial Stakeholder Group (NCSG) chartering process has been seriously flawed on both procedural and substantive grounds. We appeal to you to address these problems before permanent damage is done to ICANN’s reputation, to the GNSO reform process, and to the interests of noncommercial users of the Internet. This letter is, first and foremost, an urgent plea to the ICANN Board to grant three specific requests: 1) First, because you have never had the opportunity to get the full story, we are asking for a direct meeting between the full Board and NCUC representatives at the Seoul ICANN meeting in October. 2) Second, because of important flaws and the complete lack of community support for the Structural Improvements Committee (SIC) and ICANN staff-revised transitional NCSG charter[1], we ask that you make a public commitment to completely review the transitional NCSG charter within one year (i.e., by July 30, 2010) in a way that explicitly guarantees that the charter originally proposed by the NCUC[2] and overwhelmingly supported by the noncommercial community will be considered as an alternative. As part of this review, we commit ourselves to finding opportunities to reconcile the differences between the two models in a way that can gain consensus from the noncommercial community. 3) Third, because of the danger of locking in a suboptimal structure, we ask you not to approve any new Constituencies under the SIC and ICANN staff-imposed transitional NCSG charter until the ongoing debates over the status of Constituencies and their role in the NCSG is resolved next year. It is necessary to first determine the framework of the stakeholder group in which Constituencies will take their place. We emphasize that this letter does not ask the Board to repeal its decision of 30 July. Although many NCUC members initially favored rejecting the SIC/staff imposed charter in its entirety, we decided to work within the confines of the imposed transitional NCSG charter provided that the Board agrees to work with the noncommercial community to create a final NCSG charter that meets the needs of both the Board and noncommercial users. NCUC did this to demonstrate our support for moving forward with the GNSO restructuring process, including implementing the new SG structure and seating the new, bicameral Council at the October Seoul meeting. Thus, even though we believe it constitutes a grievous mistake, NCUC is willing to work within the confines of the imposed transitional NCSG charter including the Board’s appointment of three transitional new NCSG Councilors. Subject to certain conditions, we pledge to work within those parameters for the next year if our requests are granted. We recognize the time constraints you are operating under and, in a spirit of cooperation we are proposing a practical way for you to minimize the damage that will be caused by the mistaken July 30 decision. Nonetheless,
nettime Zizek on Iran
(fwd. from lbo-talk. /geert) Here's an article by Zizek that was turned down by the NY Times and is now making the rounds: WILL THE CAT ABOVE THE PRECIPICE FALL DOWN? Slavoj Zizek When an authoritarian regime approaches its final crisis, its dissolution as a rule follows two steps. Before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture takes place: all of a sudden people know that the game is over, they are simply no longer afraid. It is not only that the regime loses its legitimacy, its exercise of power itself is perceived as an impotent panic reaction. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks down and notices the abyss. When it loses its authority, the regime is like a cat above the precipice: in order to fall, it only has to be reminded to look down? In Shah of Shahs, a classic account of the Khomeini revolution, Ryszard Kapuscinski located the precise moment of this rupture: at a Tehran crossroad, a single demonstrator refused to budge when a policeman shouted at him to move, and the embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although there were street fights going on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game is over. Is something similar going on now? There are many versions of the events in Tehran. Some see in the protests the culmination of the pro-Western 'reform movement' along the lines of the ?orange? revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, etc. ? a secular reaction to the Khomeini revolution. They support the protests as the first step towards a new liberal-democratic secular Iran freed of Muslim fundamentalism. They are counteracted by skeptics who think that Ahmadinejad really won: he is the voice of the majority, while the support of Mousavi comes from the middle classes and their gilded youth. In short: let?s drop the illusions and face the fact that, in Ahmadinejad, Iran has a president it deserves. Then there are those who dismiss Mousavi as a member of the cleric establishment with merely cosmetic differences from Ahmadinejad: Mousavi also wants to continue the atomic energy program, he is against recognizing Israel, plus he enjoyed the full support of Khomeini as a prime minister in the years of the war with Iraq. Finally, the saddest of them all are the Leftist supporters of Ahmadinejad: what is really at stake for them is Iranian independence. Ahmadinejad won because he stood up for the country?s independence, exposed elite corruption and used oil wealth to boost the incomes of the poor majority ? this is, so we are told, the true Ahmadinejad beneath the Western-media image of a holocaust-denying fanatic. According to this view, what is effectively going on now in Iran is a repetition of the 1953 overthrow of Mossadegh ? a West-financed coup against the legitimate president. This view not only ignores facts: the high electoral participation ? up from the usual 55% to 85% - can only be explained as a protest vote. It also displays its blindness for a genuine demonstration of popular will, patronizingly assuming that, for the backward Iranians, Ahmadinejad is good enough - they are not yet sufficiently mature to be ruled by a secular Left. Opposed as they are, all these versions read the Iranian protests along the axis of Islamic hardliners versus pro-Western liberal reformists, which is why they find it so difficult to locate Mousavi: is he a Western-backed reformer who wants more personal freedom and market economy, or a member of the cleric establishment whose eventual victory would not affect in any serious way the nature of the regime? Such extreme oscillations demonstrate that they all miss the true nature of the protests. The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of 'Allah akbar!' that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the evening darkness, clearly indicate that they see their activity as the repetition of the 1979 Khomeini revolution, as the return to its roots, the undoing of the revolution?s later corruption. This return to the roots is not only programmatic; it concerns even more the mode of activity of the crowds: the emphatic unity of the people, their all-encompassing solidarity, creative self-organization, improvising of the ways to articulate protest, the unique mixture of spontaneity and discipline, like the ominous march of thousands in complete silence. We are dealing with a genuine popular uprising of the deceived partisans of the Khomeini revolution. There are a couple of crucial consequences to be drawn from this insight. First, Ahmadinejad is not the hero of the Islamist poor, but a genuine corrupted Islamo-Fascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi whose mixture of clownish posturing and ruthless power politics is causing unease even among the majority of ayatollahs. His demagogic distributing of
nettime true complexity of the use of digital activism in Iran
(hi all, it's easy to deconstruct messages from US american techno- evangelists like clay shirky and jeffrey jarvis who have been promoting their 'api revolution' and 'twitter revolution' in western mainstream media outliets this week. it's harder to find out which role new media are actually playing on the ground in iran. this piece by hamid tehrani is a first attempt. the other text that I liked is this one: http://worldfocus.org/blog/2009/06/18/irans-twitter-revolution-myth-or-reality/5869/ . it's an interview with gaurav mishra called iran 'twitter revolution' -- myth or reality? /geert) Digital Activism in Iran: Beyond the Headlines Written by Hamid Tehrani on June 20, 2009 – 9:27 pm - http://www.digiactive.org/2009/06/20/iran-beyond-headlines/ Background: Protests against Iran’s presidential election results continue despite the warning of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Friday. However, Iranian reformist candidates Mir Hussein Mousavi and Mehdi Karoub and their supporters have few communications options. They have no access to national TV, radio, or newspapers, which are under state control. Text messaging is being blocked and web sites are filtered. How are they able to organize a huge protest movement? While the mainstream media has focused on the role of Twitter and decentralized organizing, the real picture of digital activism in Iran is more complex. Protests are organized centrally by the campaigns of reformist candidates and then that information is disseminated both online and off. The role of citizens with regard to social media is as citizen journalists, using YouTube and Twitter to report on what is happening, rather than to organize the protests. Since this activity is intended for an international audience (and is in English) it is no wonder that this use of social media is more visible to a Western audience than the online tactics actually being used to organize the protests. Tools: web sites, Facebook, Twitter, mouth-to-ear networks How these tools are being used: With regard to the post-election protests, decisions are made centrally by Mousavi and Karoubi and their campaigns. When they take their decisions they communicate them in different ways. First, they publish them on their websites, for example Kalamhe and Ghalam news. Web 1.0 (as well as totally offline communication methods) are just as important as Web 2.0 (social media), though the latter is receiving for more attention. Second, the reformist leaders use social networking systems to communicate these message. On Saturday Mir Hussein Mousavi’s Facebook published the news that demonstration will be held today. Mousavi has more than 65,000 supporters in his Facebook group and every message can reach this army of people directly. Supporters were also asked to pass the message to others, implying that the leaders are deliberately making use of their supporters’ online and offline personal networks. One of the main ways to organize the demonstrations is person-to-person communication or talking with friends and neighbors… the mouth-to-ear method. It still works and no government can shut it down. (Maybe Iranian leaders imagine a divine power can prevent this form of communication as it did in the election.) Third, as has already been noted (and overemphasized) in the mainstream media, Twitter is being used. However, the dynamic is different than has been previously reported. Gholamhossein Karbaschi, a top adviser to Karoubi, communicates about his activity on his Twitter account (@gkarbaschi, in Farsi). This is one of the only instances where Twitter is actually being used to organize protest inside Iran and again, this is centralized organization coming from the campaign of a reformist candidate. An indication of the centralized nature of Twitter for organizing in Iran: @gkarbaschi has over 4,700 followers but is not following the feeds of any other users. He is using social media to broadcast to a domestic audience, not to interact. As has also been noted, people in Iran are using Twitter as an important broadcast (rather than organizing) tool to report events, slogans, and minute by minute protest movement. In this way, Twitter has turned a local struggle into a national and international one. A scene of a girl murdered by security forces is one dramatic example of news reported on Twitter. As many reporters and interested observers around the world have learned, it also allows an international audience to follow the event in real time. Finally, Iranian citizens upload films from around country on YouTube to show demonstrations, protest movements and reformists’ messages. International mainstream media are using these citizen videos in their Iran coverage. This combination of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, central organization and decentralized dissemination shows the
nettime The Digital Given--10 Web 2.0 Theses by Ippolita, Geert Lovink Ned Rossiter
The Digital Given 10 Web 2.0 Theses by Ippolita, Geert Lovink Ned Rossiter 0. The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it doesn't lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. The virtual has become the everyday. The New Deal is presented as green, not digital. The digital is a given. This low-key position presents an opportunity to rethink the Web 2.0 hype. How might we understand our political, emotional and social involvement in internet culture over the next few years? 1. News media is awash with 'economic crisis', indulging in its self- generated spectacle of financial meltdown. Experts are mobilised, but only to produce the drama of dissensus. Programmed disagreement is the consensus of daily news. Crisis, after all, is the condition of possibility for capitalism. Unlike the dotcom crash in 2000-2001, when the collapse of high-tech stocks fueled the global recession, the internet has so far managed to stay out of the blame game. Web 2.0 only suffers mild side effects from the odd collection of platforms and services, from Google to Wikipedia, Photobucket, Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Habbo and so-called regional players such as Baidu and 51.com. Despite its benign existence, there still is hyper-growth wherever you look. Web 2.0 applications and platforms remain 'new' but show a tendency to get lost inside the boring, stressful and uncertain working life of the connected billions. 2. Social networks are technologies of entertainment and diffusion. The social reality they create is real, but as a technology of immediacy you can't get no satisfaction. We initially love them for their distraction from the torture of now-time. Networking sites are social drugs for those in need of the Human that is located elsewhere in time or space. It is the pseudo Other that we are connecting to. Not the radical Other or some real Other. We systematically explore weakness and vagueness and are pressed to further enhance the exhibition of the Self. 'I might know you (but I don't). Do you mind knowing me?'. The pleasure principle of entertainment thus diffuses social antagonisms – how does conflict manifest within the comfort zones of social networks and their tapestries of auto-customisation? The business-minded 'trust doctrine' has all but eliminated the open, dirty internet forums. Most Web 2.0 are echo chambers of the same old opinions and cultural patterns. As we can all witness, they are not exactly hotbeds of alternative sub-culture. What's new are their 'social' qualities: the network is the message. What is created here is a sense or approximation of the social. Social networks register a 'refusal of work'. But our net-time, after all, is another kind of labour. Herein lies the perversity of social networks: however radical they may be, they will always be data-mined. They are designed to be exploited. Refusal of work becomes just another form of making a buck that you never see. 3. Social networking sites are as much fashion victims as everything else. They come and go. Their migration across space signals the enculturisation of software. While Orkut disappeared in G8 countries, it is still Big in Brazil. Is anyone still seriously investing in real estate in Second Life? What the online world needs is sustainable social relations. The moving herds that go from one server to the next merely demonstrate an impulsive grazing mentality: once the latest widgets are installed, it is time to move on. Sustainability is connected to scaleability. Here, we see lessons from the major social movements over the last 50 years. The force of accumulated social- political desires manifest, eventually, in national and global forums that permeate back into policy discourse and social practice: think March on Washington, 1963 (Black Civil Rights), Rio, 1992 (Earth Summit), Porto Alegre, 2001 (World Social Forum), Geneva and Tunis, 2003-2005 (World Summit on the Info-Society). None of these examples are exempt from critique. We note them here to signal the relationship between sustainability and scalar transformation. We are familiar with formats such as barcamps, unconferencing and have participated in DIY techno-workshops at those seasonal media arts festivals. But these are hardly instances of sustainability. Their temporality of tinkering is governed by the duration of the event. True, there is occasionally resonance back in the local hack-lab, but such practices are exclusive to techno-secret societies, not the networked masses. Social networking sites are remarkable for their capacity to scale. Their weakness is their seeming incapacity to effect political change in any substantive way. The valorisation of citizen-journalism is not the same as radical intervention, and is better understood
Re: nettime 'Debating German Media Theory in Siegen: The Word from Berlin
Dear nettimers, thanks a lot for all your positive responses to this thread. There is certainly a great interest in this topic! Inge Ploum (UvA Mediastudies, Amsterdam) just posted her blog report to the website of our Institute of Network Cultures of an event that happened last week in Potsdam (Germany), a two day conference on media theory, in English, aimed to foster exchanges between the German speaking part of Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world. You can find it here: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/weblog/2009/05/28/transatlantic/ Yours, Geert # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Debating German Media Theory in Siegen
Thanks, Stefan, for these important insights. The fact that there is a considerable interest, worldwide, in what German media theory is all about, and the lack of even basic knowlegde, is striking, and illustrates the isolation of this field as a whole. Let me say it once again. Germans from West-Germany do not like the connotation 'German'. It reminds them of the war, Nazis and all that. For many outsiders German is a language spoken in large parts of Europe, in fact it is the largest one spoken in Europe. They associate it with continental Europe. German Media Theory therefore is not an attempt from my side to construct or reconstruct some Bismarckian or Hitlerian national project aimed to dominate and colonize the EU and the world (or accuse people of such an attempt). German in this context is a reference to the language in which these texts are wriiten. The reference to German is made as a concious attempt to wake up German policy makers, from both the cultural and academic world that something needs to be done. The world is very interested in the works discussed here but have no access to it. We're not only talking about translations into English, but in a wide range of languages. In the past publishers would do this. This is no longer the case. However, throughout the German speaking world, excellent thinkers are still waiting for something to happen. But nothing will. The world has changed. Apart from translations we also need introductory books and anthologies. Indeed, my definition of German media theory is broad and rather subjective. An objective academic approach might fail at this stage. Maybe my broad approach comes with distance over the years. One starts to see more similarities, whereas insiders are preoccupied with the cultivation of the Small Differences (as you explain very well in the case of the 90s Kittler circle). The German university system seems to set up people against each other and prevent the emergence of larger schools of thought. In my texts on the topic I have often listed authors. It's broad but not all that blurry and certainly goes further than the Kittler cloud. My references are more 80s, because that's when I first ran into it. Just to mention a few that I like and know best, like Theweleit, Flusser, Sloterdijk, Hartmann and Winkler. I could go on and on. I am still very passionate about it . Just read the recently translated book by Cornelia Vismann called Files. Maybe abstract is not the right term here. Some texts are certainly complex, and in the case of Kittler, references are often implicit, his style is ironic, extremely compact, and full of humour! With Florian Cramer I also see more metaphysical undercurrents and metaphor plays than you, Stefan, perhaps would like to admit. I like the term technical media theory but it suggests more than actually exists. In fact theory needs to become more technical as a whole, and, as you say, much more contemporary. It's got potential, but one that needs to still needs to be realized. In today's world something like that grows through global exchanges and common research projects. Phase one could be to identify the obstacles but also the communalities, in order to tap into the vast potentialities that are out there, because the world is really waiting for such a theory production. Geert On 30 Apr 2009, at 12:57 PM, Stefan Heidenreich wrote: having attended the Kittler Oberseminar - the phd candidates colloquium - during the crucial years form 1992 to 2000 I have to say, things look very much different seen from a personal perspective from inside. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Freedom for all the accused of the Fire of Vincennes!
From: Martin Zerner zer...@paris7.jussieu.fr Date: 9 April 2009 11:15:26 AM Subject: Call for a meeting of groups struggling against detention centres Freedom for all the accused of the Fire of Vincennes! Since the end of 2007, the detainees of Vincennes (France), like many others detainees of detention centers for migrants, have ceaselessly struggled for their freedom. They have demonstrated and gone on hunger strike, they have refused to be counted or to come back in their rooms, they have burnt their mattresses. The 9th of April a detainee of the center was already saying: we have to think about struggling differently. People and cops don't give a shit about the hunger strike. They don't give a shit about sans- papiers. They don't give a shit if we die. People eat razor blades every day and nobody hears about them. The little things we do are not worth it. We have to create a damned mess to put them under pressure. On June 21st 2008, a Tunisian called Salem Essouli died because of a lack of medical care. The next day, a silent demonstration organized by the detainees was harshly crushed. Then a revolt blew up, and the center was destroyed by fire. That night, the detainees were transferred to other centers all over the country: Rouen-Oissel, Lille-Lesquin, Nîmes-Courbessac, Palaiseau, Mesnil-Amelot et Paris- dépôt-Cité. Salem Essouli's family has registered a complaint in January. The center of Vincennes had 280 beds, its destruction means less arrests and deportations. During the next months we could observe a clear diminution of razzias and deportations in Paris. That's why the state hurrried to build a new center in the same place, which opened in November 2008. Wanting to set an example, the state has arrested several ex-detainees of Vincennes: two were arrested the very day of the fire. One has been freed but stays under control as a witness with arisk of being charged, the other has been detained; six other arrests occurred during the months of July, October, November and December. One of them as been assailteed in jail on November 4th and is still in an hospital with serious medical consequences. So, eight persons are accused of destruction by fire of public good and violence against policemen. There may be other persons accused. At the end of February and beginning March, three of them have been freed but are still prosecuted. Four persons are still detained despite the numerous requests of liberation made by their lawyer. We still don't know when the trial will take place. The Vincennes detainees' revolt isn't isolated. Others happened before, others happened during the summer at Mesnil-Amelot, Nantes, Italy, Belgium, and still others will happen. The Vincennes detainees destroyed their jail. Solidarity with the prosecuted detainees means struggling against migration policies, their ideology and their practices! We will hold on! Free the prosecuted Vincennes detainees and drop the charges against them! Close the detention centers for migrants! Freedom of circulation and installation! Mail to liberte-sans-rete...@riseup.net Send money for the defense of Vincennes detainees at : CICP-Vincennes, 21 ter rue Voltaire, 75011 Paris # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime US dopes itself out the recession (just ask...)
(historical event for the internet, the usa and pot smokers of the world! greetings from amsterdam, where pot is still untaxed, geert) NYT--WASHINGTON ? The White House said more than 64,000 people watched President Obama answer questions on Thursday in the first live Internet video chat by an American president. But in declaring itself ?Open for Questions,? on the economy, the White House learned it must be careful what it wishes for. More than 100,000 questions were submitted, with the idea that Mr. Obama would answer those that were most popular. But after 3.6 million votes were cast, one of the top questions turned out to be a query on whether legalizing marijuana might stimulate the economy by allowing the government to regulate and tax the drug. ?I don?t know what this says about the online audience,? Mr. Obama said, drawing a laugh from an audience gathered in the East Room, which included teachers, nurses and small-business people. ?The answer is no, I don?t think that is a good strategy to grow the economy.? The marijuana question later took up a good chunk of the daily White House press briefing, where Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, suggested that advocates for legalizing marijuana had mounted a drive to rack up votes for the question. Those advocates included Norml, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which urged supporters to ?let the president know that millions of American voters believe that the time has come to tax and regulate marijuana.? But however the marijuana query rose to the top of the White House list, it provided one of the livelier moments in the mostly staid 70- minute event. Mr. Obama did make a sliver of news, disclosing that he intended to announce in the next couple of days what kind of help his administration would give the auto industry. A senior White House official said no decision had yet been made; Mr. Gibbs hinted that the announcement would most likely occur on Monday. ?We will provide them some help,? Mr. Obama said, as he has in the past, while also talking tough, as he has done previously, by insisting that the auto makers would have to make ?drastic changes? to restructure the way they do business. ?If they?re not willing to make the changes and the restructurings that are necessary,? Mr. Obama said, he will be unwilling to ?have taxpayer money chase after bad money.? Thursday?s session, which had been advertised on the White House Web site since Tuesday, is the latest example of efforts by the Obama team to replicate its creative use of the Internet in the election campaign. Mr. Obama has been trying to make the case for his economic agenda in a variety of forums, from Jay Leno?s late-night television show to the CBS program ?60 Minutes? to a prime-time news conference on Tuesday. The Internet chat, streamed live on the White House Web site, was a chance for Mr. Obama to bypass the news media entirely. ?This is an experiment,? the president said in a video promoting the event, ?but it?s also an exciting opportunity for me to look at a computer and get a snapshot of what Americans across the country care about. ?So, America, what do you want to know about the economy? Just go to whitehouse.gov and ask.? Mr. Obama, of course, was not looking at a computer himself. Jared Bernstein, an economic adviser to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., moderated the event, reading some of the most popular written questions and cuing video questions. Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media, said in an interview afterward that he was pleased with ?the experiment,? which he said was part of Mr. Obama?s mission to open the government to greater citizen involvement. ?Anytime you ask if people will engage and 100,000 people show up, it?s a big deal,? Mr. Phillips said. Yet at times, the forum had a canned feel, perhaps because most Americans tend to be more polite in their questions than news reporters, perhaps because they lacked any opportunity to follow up. The first question, on education, prompted Mr. Obama to promise higher pay and more support for teachers, without specifics. The second, on what benefits his stimulus plan offered to struggling homeowners, prompted a recitation of the president?s recently announced housing plan. The third was a video question, from ?Harriet in Georgia,? who asked the president what he was doing to bring back jobs that had been outsourced. ?Thank you so much for all your hard work,? Harriet told the president. ?God bless you.? # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Migrants in detention complex Schiphol Airport fight brutality, call for help
Migrants in detention complex Schiphol Airport fight brutality, call for help M2M Radio, Migrant to Migrant, calls on activists and artists for international collaboration in solidarity Amsterdam, NL. March 2009 On the 18th of February the inmates of Block L demanded clear information on their fate. ?How long can they keep us here? Is asking for asylum a crime in this country? Why are we here?? In Block L migrants are detained who are supposed to be deported back home. They did not fulfill the tough requirements to be accepted as a refugee. But it can take a long time, even more than a year, for the Ministry of Justice to find out how to deport a single person, especially when s/he is from a country like Sudan, Somalia or Palestine, where the civil registers are not quite up to date. According to Dutch law the simple fact of not having the proper documents is not a violation. The reason for detaining thousands of migrants is administrative: to facilitate a smooth exit when opportunity knocks. Hunger strike When satisfying answers to their questions were not available from the staff and the director, some 40 of the migrants, decided to insist by sitting down on the ground of the cage for fresh air and refuse to return to their cells. This action was then broken by forcing them one- by-one back to his or her cell, handcuffed and when ?opportune? in isolation cells. Fifty riot police in full gear entered the stage and used ?proportional violence?, in the terms used by the managing director of Penitentiary Institutions in a report of Dutch NOVA TV. Twenty inmates were forced to watch how Surah Keladze (from Georgia) was beaten up, how Ibrahim Hussein (Sudan) was hit in his genitals. That same day 36 of the inmates of Block L went on hunger strike and are now organizing their resistance, their fight for freedom. And they call on us to fight with them. In Dutch detention centers the conditions are worse than in regular prisons. There are women among the men, which is against the law. People have to sleep in paper sheets. There are less facilities for recreation, medical care and communication. This adds to the isolated locations and the lack of family in many cases. This drives many of the detained sans-papiers crazy and mad. Resistance is met by violence: isolation cells, hand cuffs and beatings are regular practices. It is not the first time that a group of inmates starts a protest, but it is a new that inmates manage to communicate directly with activists and advocacy groups in the country of Holland. M2M Radio, Migrant to Migrant, receives daily reports from several outspoken detainees in Block L over the phone. This is made possible by people who donate eleven Euro for phone credit. You can listen to their recorded phone calls at the M2M website: http://m2m.streamtime.org/index.php/2009/now-every-day-block-l-calling-for-freedom/ The number eleven is a direct symbolic reference to the eleven migrants who died in the fire in Block K in October 2005. This fire has been a turning point in the growing social movement rallying against these detention centers and for a humane treatment of migrants. The survivors of the ?Schiphol Fire? are united in their quest for truth and justice and M2M is their platform. The cause of justice for all survivors boils down to the case of the only man that has been accused so far: his name is Ahmed Isa. He was condemned to three years in jail in 2007 and will stand to appeal in spring 2009. Parallel to the proceedings against Ahmed Isa, criminal charges have been brought up by an ad hoc committee of human rights groups and other advocates of the survivors and relatives of the deceased against the two directly responsible ministers accusing them of creating the conditions that made the fire possible and for inhuman treatment of the survivors of the fire. The European Court of Human Rights has endorsed the accusations and this means that for the first time the authorities are brought to account. They have to reply to all points of the accusations. A proper administration of justice is of the highest importance for the well being of the survivors and indeed for their lives. The Dutch detention complex More than three years after the Schiphol Fire no substantial change has been made in the migration politics: migrants are chased, locked up by the thousands and either deported or rotting a way like dead dogs in detention. The lesson learnt by the state is to build new and permanent facilities for detaing migrant, including special child friendly facilities for minors and mothers. At Rotterdam Airport and Schiphol these new prisons will replace the redundant temporary and substandard hangars and containers. Worse even, the Dutch deputy minister is succesfully promoting this Dutch approach as a model for the European Union: Italy, Spain and the
nettime reports of Winter Camp 09
Dear Nettimers, last Saturday night we closed the five days Winter Camp 09 event. Our Institute of Network Cultures invited 12 networks to come to Amsterdam to work on their issues. It was an amazing and intense experience. Most blog reports have now been posted onto the INC site. Of course you can also find material on the websites of the groups: Blender, Dyne, Creative Labour, MyCreativity, GOTO10, Gender Changers, Microvolunteers, EduFactory, Floss Manuals, Upgrade, Bricolabs and freeDimensional. 25 video interviews that have been recorded and will become online around April 1. The shooting and editing is done by Gerbrand Oudenaarden. Here is the central site for the blog reports: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/wintercamp/ The so-called Meta-Group wrote three reflective texts during the week. You can find them listed here, with the blog postings: http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/wintercamp/reports-archive/ O'Reilly's Andy Oram was blogging from Winter Camp: http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/olpc-many-networks-at-winter-c.html http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/olpc-many-networks-at-winter-c.html http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/03/winter-camp-gathering-shows-th.html Pictures of the event on Flickr you can find here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/silvertje/sets/72157614682233291/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/artonice/sets/72157614787537502/ http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=wintercamp09w=alls=int http://www.flickr.com/photos/23998...@n02/sets/72157614789701094/ Ciao, Geert # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Richard Grayson: Well here we are...the end of Planet Finance
Richard Grayson: Well here we are...the end of Planet Finance
Essay published in Broadsheet, Australia, 2009
Chanel is pulling its flagship sponsorship project for contemporary
art. A newspaper story (the Guardian 29 Dec 2008) describes how in the
face of fears that the 'supposedly recession proof luxury market' is
falling victim to the credit crisis, the perfume and handbag company
is not only shedding 200 jobs but bringing its highly publicized
global art installation 'Mobile Art' to an early end for fears that
this 'quirky marketing operation' has become a luxury that the brand
could no longer support.
Architect of choice for the Art World, Zaha Hadid teamed up with Karl
Lagerfield and Chanel to create a futuristic pavilion designed to
travel for two years throughout Asia, the United States and Europe.
The legendary Mademoiselle Chanel herself, publicity reminded us, had
in the past supported the likes of Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Serge
Diaghilev, Igor Stravinsky and Jacques Lipchitz, and now twenty
contemporary artists including Daniel Buren, Blue Noses - (the
'rascals of Russian contemporary arts' apparently) Sylvie Fleury,
Sophie Calle, Yang Fudong, Subdoh Gupta, Yoko Ono and Wim Delvoy, had
been commissioned to collaborate with the fashion house to make work
where 'all of the pieces will be conceived in relation to one of
Chanel's most emblematic accessories - the quilted handbag.' The
intention was that 'resulting from their singular points of view -
poetic, audacious and as yet unseen - the multiple facets of this
mythical bag and its universe are revealed.' An intention that would
make it 'a revolutionary event, uniting one of the greatest architects
of our time, some of our most innovative artists, and an icon of the
fashion world - the quilted bag.' The Project 'reaffirms once more our
(Chanel's) devotion to creativity and to the avant-garde' and
exemplifies how the company is 'a modern brand' that is 'constantly
moving forward, cultivating the extraordinary and its innate sense of
the moment, CHANEL is resolutely open to the world and turning towards
the future. It is this propulsion that incites CHANEL to perpetually
create surprise, from one continent to the next, and to so deeply
impact on our collective imaginary consciousness.'
The plug was pulled two stops into the global tour. It had been
launched in Hong Kong and took up residence in Central Park New York,
but never made it to London and the other global cultural - and
financial - capitals of its tour. 'Considering the current economic
crisis,' a spokesman said, 'we decided it was best to stop the
project.' Instead, 'we will be concentrating on strategic growth
investments.' (Vogue Magazine 22 Dec 2008).
'The producers of the abysmal 1998 movie Lost In Space should sue for
copyright against the spacecraft, Jupiter II,' wrote Rob Dawg on
zahahadidblog after his first sight of the plans for the Chanel
building, and Hadid's design does closely echo the weird organic
shapes of futuristic alien technologies and flying saucers as imagined
by Hollywood. And vice-versa, which is probably a convergence of
computer software. And the ship's sudden return to earth makes it an
early manifestation of the vast quantities of space-debris that we can
expect to crash down around our ears as a result of the spectacular
break up 'Planet Finance'. It is a Roswell moment, when Hadid's sci-fi
pavilion, its 'propulsion to create surprise' suddenly exhausted,
becomes the junk of an alien civilization, stranded, earthbound. Its
corpses and culture are laid out in front of us. Inanimate. Dead. And
looking sort of weird and fake.
'Planet Finance' is the name given by groovy rightwing academic, Neil
Ferguson, to the vast financial sphere that has overshadowed our
universe for the last few decades. He describes how in 2006, the
measured economic output of the entire world was some $48.6 trillion,
but the total market capitalisation of the world's stock markets was
$50.6 trillion, 4 percent larger than the stuff of the world and the
total value of domestic and international bonds was $67.9 trillion, 40
percent larger ('Wall Street lays another egg' Vanity Fair December
2008). Planet Finance was not only bigger than Planet Earth, it was
faster. Every day $3.1 trillion changed hands on foreign-exchange
markets and very month $5.8 trillions traded on global stock markets.
In its swampy atmosphere (made up, it might be hypothesised, of
gaseous testosterone, cocaine, Porsche exhaust and swirly-eyed lip-
smacking greed) new financial life-forms evolved. The total annual
issuance of mortgage-backed securities, including the seductive new
'collateralised debt obligations' (C.D.O.'s), rose to more than $1
trillion. The volume of 'derivatives' - contracts such as options and
swaps - grew even faster and by the end of 2006 their notional
nettime “Wash Your Dirty Money With My Art ” - Hedvig Turai in Conversation with János Sugár
“Wash Your Dirty Money With My Art” - Hedvig Turai in Conversation with János Sugár Sunday, 25 January 2009, see also: http://www.artmargins.com/ In the summer of 2008, János Sugár exhibited the sentence Wash your dirty money with my art at the Kunsthalle, Budapest, as part of an exhibition entitled What's up?(1) Parallel with exhibiting the sentence in this safe context, he also displayed it on the pavement in front of and on the wall of two private art institutions in Budapest. Soon after this, one of these institutions sued him for damaging its property. After Sugár's exhibition at the Kunsthalle it was easy to identify him as the artist, and soon Sugár was summoned by the police and prosecuted. Sugár admitted that he had sprayed the sentences and added that he considered them a continuation of the art work he had earlier displayed at the Kunsthalle. However, Sugár's gesture was not deemed art by the authorities and was classified as vandalism. The damage was estimated at $7,500, a startling amount given the relatively small pavement area covered by the sprayed text (40x60 cm=1.3x1.9 ft). Sugár refused to pay such a high amount and a second estimate was made, this time at the expense of the artist, who refused to pay this second amount as well. According to the Sugár he is being sued for an artistic gesture, while the owner of the art institution refuses to accept it as art and demands compensation. Sugár's trial is pending a new damage estimate is under way. Hedvig Turai: Where did the phrase “Wash your dirty money with my art” come from? János Sugár: I have a few sentences that I have been working with. Questions or statements like, “What question would you most like to respond to,” “Seemingly small things determine seemingly big things” or “Work for free, or do work you would do for free.” I always keep a notebook with me and jot down notes. H. T.: Was the sentence that triggered this legal issue one of those? J. S.: I would begin earlier. In 2007, within the framework of the German-Hungarian Bipolar project, I participated in an exhibition at the Kunstverein in Wolfsburg, Germany. There I exhibited a stencil pattern with the sentence “Work for free, or do work you would do for free.” I sprayed one copy on the wall of the exhibition space and left the stencil and some spray paint there so that visitors could borrow it and take the stencil out into the town. They could have completely covered the walls of this “Volkswagen town.” I did the same piece later in Berlin, where it actually was borrowed and graffiti sentences were sprayed in various places in the city. I happened to be in Berlin when I set down this sentence in question today. A couple of weeks later, already in Hungary, I found again in my notes, “Wash your dirty money with my art.” The sentence struck me because I understood it as it is a reference to street art. It was interesting for me to think of it this way; you put out something using the tools of street art, which can be literally washed off. H. T.: So, what does the sentence mean? J. S.: There is an ambiguity, a semantic play in it, as well as a critical tone. It is a certain kind of offering of one’s self, here I am, wash your money with me, use me to wash your money. All money by definition is dirty, all money is polluted with blood. By coincidence, I gave the presentation and actually exhibited the work at a show at the same time, and visitors could have borrowed it and take the stencil out into the town.(2) Somewhat later at a conference on graffiti art organized by the municipal government of Budapest, the city launched a campaign titled “I love Budapest.” The idea was that activists would clear the city of graffiti. Budapest has devoted 50 million HUF (about 250,000 dollars) to this purpose. So, when I found the sentence in my notes, I connected it with the anti-graffiti movement, with “washing” dirty money, and that the thing that should be washed was art itself. All these things are connected, and this is the meaning of the sentence. Also, a young artist duo, SZAF(3), Miklós Mécs and Judit Fischer invited me to contribute to their exhibition box in the Kunsthalle as part of the exhibition What's Up? H. T.: Where else did you place that sentence? J. S.: In two more venues. On the wall of the building of VAM Design Center in Király street, Budapest and on the pavement in front of the KOGART(4) building. VAM Design Center is the institution that three years ago announced that although in Hungary one needs 20 years to become successful, they can make an artist successful in two and a half years. I have several problems with this. First of all, it is a very attractive but empty slogan, a sham. It does not clarify what success is. What is success and why does it take exactly 20 years to reach it? What does it mean to be successful? I think
nettime Zittrain’s Foundational Myth of the Open Internet
Zittrain’s Foundational Myth of the Open Internet A Critique of Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet--and How to Stop It, Yale University Press, 2008 By Geert Lovink Jonathan Zittrain’s Future of the Internet is based on a myth. Zittrain needs a foundational myth of the Internet in order to praise it’s past openness and warn for a future lockdown of PCs and mobile phones. From the ancient world of Theory we know why people invent foundational myths: to protect those in power (in this case US- American IT firms and their academic-military science structures that are losing global hegemony). The Zittrain myth says that, compared to centralized, content-controlled systems such as AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy, the ‘generative’ Internet of the late 1980s was an open network. But this was simply not the case, it was closed to the general public. This foundational myth is then used to warn the freedom-loving guys for the Downfall of Civilization. The first decades the Internet was a closed world, only accessible to (Western) academics and the U.S. military. In order to access the Internet one had to be an academic computer scientist or a physicist. Until the early nineties it was not possible for ordinary citizens, artists, business or activists, in the USA or elsewhere, to obtain an email address and make use of the rudimentary UNIX-based applications. Remember, this was the period between, roughly speaking, 1987 and 1993, before the World Wide Web when fancy multimedia CD-ROMs already ruled the PC world and the txt-only command line Internet already looked geeky and painfully outdated. Back then, the advancement of the ugly looking Internet was its interoperability. It was a network of networks–but still a closed one. This only changed gradually, depending on the country you lived in, in the early-mid nineties. As an (indirect) response to this closed Net, NGOs, social movements and the cyberunderground maintained their own Bulletin Board Systems and participated in store-forward initiatives like FIDONET. The participants in this public network culture avant la lettre got used to high telephone bills. Until the mid nineties academic institutions subsidized the high costs for Internet connectivity and bandwidth, until Internet providers and telecoms took over and costs were spread over the millions of new customers that started to pay a monthly flat fee, which they continue to do so till today. Pre-Internet high-level exchanges made it worth to stay up late and wait until you were able to get onto one of the rare dial-up lines. The artist network The Thing was a case in point. The same could be said of The Well. These systems thrived on their lively forum culture and their ability to create new subcultures. The BBS cultures went into decay once their were exposed to the much larger Internet. The difficult Internet access was contested by hackers who were not university students. This only changed bit by bit in the early nineties, in conjunction with the arrival of the colorful buttons and images. In the case of the Netherlands, the Internet became a public facility in May 1993, now 15 years ago — an anniversary recently celebrated by the hackers ISP Xs4all that played a pivotal role in this process of media democratization. In the meanwhile systems like CompuServe offered centralized gateways to the Internet email. Many might remember the email addresses with numbers such as [EMAIL PROTECTED] . In fact, these were the very first emails I wrote down in my address book, in 1991, without being able to use them as I wasn’t an academic and lacked the connections to engineers and technologists at university to lend me their password or create a user-ID for me. For a period of at least five years BBS-alike systems were superior to the nerdy Internet. The BBS forums were as lively as Usenet and until the late nineties had no comparable Internet equivalent (some say they still don’t). Apart from a single reference to FIDONET, nothing remains of this early cyberculture in Zitttrain’s book. His scheme is simple: Internet good, AOL and CompuServe bad, early Apple II good, iPhone bad, and so on. The fact that millions of Americans for the first time experienced the Internet through services like AOL (and continue to do so) is a reality that Zittrain simply overlooks. Concerning the closed nature of iPhone (a rather marginal type mobile phone from a worldwide perspective), it would be more interesting to ask why hackers have ignored these vital communication devices for so long (I know, there are exceptions, but they are rare). Twice as many people use mobile phones compared to the PC and the potential, in particular in non- Western countries is high. Hackers by and large ignored the closed architecture of mobile phones and rather focused on the PC, even though they frequently use
nettime Inside Networked Movements: Interview with Jeffrey Juris
Inside Networked Movements Interview with Jeffrey Juris By Geert Lovink Jeffrey Juris wrote an excellent insiders? story about the ?other globalization? movement. Networking Futures is an anthropological account that starts with the Seattle protests, late 1999, against the WTO and takes the reader to places of protest such as Prague, Barcelona and Genoa. The main thesis of Juris is the shift of radical movements towards the network method as their main form of organization. Juris doesn?t go so far to state that movement as such has been replaced by network(ing). What the network metaphor rather indicates is a shift, away from the centralized party and a renewed emphasis on internationalism. Juris describes networks as an ?emerging ideal.? Besides precise descriptions of Barcelona groups, where Jeff Juris did his PhD research with Manuel Castells in 2001-2002, the World Social Forum and Indymedia, Networking Futures particularly looks into a relatively unknown anti-capitalist network, the People?s Global Action. The outcome is a very readable book, filled with group observations and event descriptions, not heavy on theory or strategic discussions or disputes. The email interview below was done while Jeffrey Juris was working in Mexico City where studies the relationship between grassroots media activism and autonomy. He is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. GL: One way of describing your book is to see it as a case study of Peoples' Global Action. Would it be fair to see this networked platform as a 21st century expression of an anarcho-trotskyist avant- gardist organization? You seem to struggle with the fact that PGA is so influential, yet unknown. You write about the history of the World Social Forum and its regional variations, but PGA is really what concerns you. Can you explain to us something about your fascination with PGA? Is this what Ned Rossiter calls a networked organization? Do movements these days need such entities in the background? JJ: I wouldn?t call my book a case study of People?s Global Action (PGA) in a strict sense, but you are right to point to my fascination with this particular network. In many ways I started out wanting to do an ethnographic study of PGA, but as I suggest in my introduction, its highly fluid, shifting dynamics made a conventional case study impossible. A case study requires a relatively fixed object of analysis. With respect to social movement networks this would imply stable nodes of participation, clear membership structures, organizational representation, etc., all of which are absent from PGA. However, this initial methodological conundrum presented two opportunities. On the one hand, it seemed to me that PGA was not unique, but reflected broader dynamics of transnational political activism in an era characterized by new digital technologies, emerging network forms, and the political visions that go along with such transformations. In this sense, PGA was on the cutting edge; it provided a unique opportunity to explore not only the dynamics, but also the strengths and weaknesses of new forms of networked organization among contemporary social movements. At the same time, PGA also represented a kind of puzzle: I knew it had been at the center of the global days of action that people generally associate with the rise of the global justice movement, yet it was extremely hard to pin down. Participating individuals, collectives, and organizations seemed to come and go, and those who were most active in the process often resolutely denied that they were members or had any official role. Yet, the PGA network still had this kind of power of evocation, and, at least during the early years of my research (say 1999 to 2002), it continued to provide formal and informal spaces of interaction and convergence. In this sense, it seemed to me that figuring out the enigma of PGA could help us better understand the logic of contemporary networked movements more generally. On the other hand, the difficulty of carrying out a traditional ethnographic study of PGA meant I had to shift my focus from PGA as a stable network to the specific practices through which the PGA process is constituted. In other words, my initial methodological dilemma opened up my field of analysis to a whole set of networking practices and politics that were particularly visible within PGA, but could also be detected to varying degrees within more localized networks, such as the Movement for Global Resistance (MRG) in Barcelona, alternative transnational networks such as the World Social Forum (WSF) process, new forms of tactical and alternative media associated with the global justice movement, and within the organization of mass direct actions. In other words, the focus of my book
nettime Interview with Scott Rosenberg about Dreaming in Code
Interview with Scott Rosenberg about Dreaming in Code By Geert Lovink “Software is a heap of trouble.” Scott Rosenberg Scott Rosenberg has written an excellent book on software and open source culture called “Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and one Quest for Transcendent Software”. In it he writes: “Our civilization runs on software. Yet the art of creating software continues to be a dark history, even to the experts. Never in history have we depended so completely on a product that so few know how to make well.” West coast IT journalist and Salon.com cofounder Scott Rosenberg produced a very readable study on the internal dynamics of the Chandler open source calendar project. Chandler was supposed to “grow up into a powerful ‘personal information manager’ for organizing and sharing calendars, emails and to-do lists.” It would be cross-platform and open source, officially realized by Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation. The book is chocking and boring at once. Many would recognize themselves in the stories about ‘slippage’, the delays and struggles to gain conceptual clarity amongst the drifting team members. Software is never ready and mal-functionality rules. Rosenberg spent three years as a member of the software developers team, financed and led by Lotus 1-2-3 creator and EFF cofounder Mitch Kapor, designing the Chandler calendar application that was meant to challenge the proprietary market leader Microsoft Outlook. At some point the reader gets lost in the level of detail but exactly at that moment the book takes a turn and puts the collective frustration in a wider historical perspective. Because I really enjoyed the non-academic style of this interesting contribution to the emerging field of software studies, I decided to contact Scott Rosenberg and see if he wanted to do an email interview. In between his work on his new book on the history of blogging, Scott sent me back his answers. GL: Just to bring everyone up to date. A while ago the 1.0 version of Chandler has been released. This must have been a milestone. In your PostScript to the paperback edition from September 2007 you expressed mixed feelings about the entire project. You wrote: For now, Google Calendar does the job for me. You mustn't be the only one. Before having read your book I hadn't heard from Chandler. With 1.0 release, would that change? SR: Chandler 1.0 is a pretty interesting piece of software in its own right -- between the preview edition that was where the project was when I wrote the paperback epilogue and 1.0, the developers did a lot more work, and began to flesh out parts of the program beyond the calendar. It's definitely worth a look. I'm not using it now because I'm in the middle of a big book project and don't have much free time. But when I'm done with that project I definitely want to spend more time with it. As far as getting more attention, Chandler faces the same problem as any project that started out with really grand -- and loudly proclaimed -- ambitions; whatever it does achieve now is overshadowed by the original high hopes and later dashed expectations. So it will be very hard for Chandler to be heard from, at least in the media, unless they can grow a base of users slowly and organically over the next year or two. Which is what they're trying to do, I think. GL: Maybe I missed something. Could you explain us what people need a collaborative (open source) calendar for? What is larger culture of use of such calendar software? Mitch Kapor must have understood something about that in the early-mid 1980s when he ran his successful Lotus 1-2-3 business. SR: I think there are at least two markets for this sort of thing. The first is pretty obvious: there are tons of companies with small workgroups (or relatively small, up to a couple of dozen people or so, I'd imagine) that need to schedule together and share stuff together. They were served poorly by Outlook (which also didn't work on Macs or Linux systems), and Outlook cost too much for them, and Kapor hoped to serve them. The other market, which is more diffuse but in some ways bigger, is just for any smaller group of two, three, four people -- a family, a couple of cofounders of a small company, a professor and her/his teaching assistants, and so on. One use case that kept coming up at OSAF was the simple one Kapor faced, as a busy guy who had a personal assistant who needed to be able to access and edit the calendar, and who also wanted to share it with his spouse. It's important to remember, too, that Chandler didn't start out as a calendar -- it began as a much more ambitious project for organizing personal information and sharing all sorts of stuff. The calendar was what emerged when the ambitions had to be scaled back. Don't forget, too, that when OSAF started out
Re: nettime Analysis Without Analysis. Review of Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody
Thanks, Felix, for this insightful, and clear review. I have not finished Shirky's book yet but read a great deal. What stroke me is that, imho, Clay Shirky and his team of editors and agents have made the wrong choice concerning the content. In my view, Shirky should have brought together his online work of the past 10-15 years so that we can finally read his Power Laws in book form. Over the years, Clay Shirky has proven to be sharp observer and critic of Internet culture, and social networking in particular. Felix's review doesn't stress that, and he doesn't need to, because he is reviewing the book. And this book is particularly uncritical. Despite (or should we say, inspite) all the worthy examples, it is pitched to the business/consultancy community. Now, to come back to Felix's specific critique, namely the absence of copyright/intellectual property controversies in Shirky's book. This is indeed striking, but as a matter of fact, I got used it. Shirky is not a reporter, he is an ideologue, a preacher and so-called visionary, this time not from the US Westcoast but from New York. He doesn't see it as his task to investigate and go through issues. There might be another explanation, and I found it in a recent, truefully commercial book on the history of Web 2.0, written by the Businessweek columnist and Sillicon Valley reporter Sarah Lacy. It is is called Once You're Lucky. Twice You're Good. She does write about p2p as it forms the technological rational behind big Web 2.0 players like Skype. She notices that the two greatest influences that laid the foundation for Web 2.0 economics were a couple of underground movements called open source software and peer-to-peer files sharing. And ironically, both were mostly born in stodgy old Europe, not in the Valley. It might very well be that Clay Shirky has a similar opinion. It is a known trick of the US consultancy class to project projects with a different agenda onto the Old Continent. It is a rhetorical trick, as we know that the inventors of the Web and Linux are Europeans, and the leaders of free software and open source are US-American citizens. Nonetheless, at times, it can be practical to just push distruptive and potentially subversive ideas into a corner and marginalize it as 'European'. Geert # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime review of nicholas carr, the big switch
Review of Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google W.W. Norton Company, New York, 2008, by Geert Lovink US Internet critic Nicholas Carr managed to write a second bestseller. Similar to Does IT Matter?in which Carr posed that IT investments have lost their (competitive) strategic value because everybody is using the same systems, The Big Switchcan be summarized in one sentence: the shift from in-house computer systems to ‘cloud computing’. Instead of storing applications on each individual PC, will we soon have everything store in central data warehouses. Such data centres are not entire new. What’s emerging is the enormous scale in which companies like Google are actively anticipating the future migration of (corporate) IT systems to a few global hubs, making most of the in-house infrastructure obsolete. Already in the 1990s so-called ‘server farms’ could be found in the vicinity of international hubs, profiting from cheap and fast connectivity—a scarce commodity at the time. The existence, and location, of such computer warehouses was often unknown, even to insiders. If you were in need of a virtual server, what counted was speed and reliability, the exact details of what and where didn’t matter. This all changed with the opening of Google’s data centre in The Dalles, Oregon. The location was chosen because of a new, potential scarce resources: cheap electricity. As Wikipedians remark, “the performance of server farm is limited by the performance of the data centre's cooling systems and the total electricity cost rather than by the performance of the processors.”Since Oregon server clusters are no longer unknown entities run by anonymous telecom firms but have entered centrestage in the ICT news reporting. Virtual hosting of files has always happened, and it could be said that file transfer (through ftp, the file transfer protocol) has been the core of the Internet project from its inception. Around 1993 geeks explained me the workings of the then nouveau World Wide Web as a giant ftp (file transfer protocol) machine: a great number of files were requested, and then put together on the screen by the browser. What has changed since then is not this principle, but the collective desire to keep the Internet infrastructure decentralized. The ownership of data centres in a few hands will undermine the very nature of the Internet and give data centre owners an unprecedented power to control their users. Part 1 of The Big Switchis a brilliantly written allegory about Edison, General Electric and Samuel Insull, one of Edison’s clerks. Carr describes the development around 1900 to move away from the decentralized electrical power supply in which each factory or building block would have its own engine, towards the building of large electric plants—a development kicked off by Insull—to build one large plant that could serve the greater Chicago area. “Manufacturers came to find that the benefits of buying electricity from a utility went far beyond cheaper kilowatts. By avoiding the purchase of pricey equipment, they reduced their own fixed costs and freed up capital for more productive purposes.” Along the lines what Carr had already predicted in Does IT Matter? “Thanks to Samuel Insull, the age of the private power plant was over. The utility had triumphed.” The Big Switch poses all sorts of interesting questions for those activists, researchers and artists who prefer to work independently. Ever since we got access to the Internet, in 1993, it has been issue whether or not to build autonomous infrastructures, or to virtual hosting from somewhere, usually in the USA. We see this dilemma repeated these days concerning gmail and other Google hosting services. It’s estimated that universities will one day give up their own mail servers and let staff decide which email provider they prefer to use. Or worse: make a deal with Google. Will the surrender to (corporate) utilities cause a backlash and spark off a renaissance of distributed computing? How will the heritage of fear and paranoia for the 20th century totalitarian states respond to this twist in Internet history? On the one hand it could be reassuring for those FLOSS advocates who fought against Microsoft’s monopoly position that MS Office-type application will be accessed via the Web. It is Microsoft that will suffer most from utilitarian computing. But which corporations would honestly all their sensitive data, from emails to sales spread sheets and strategic planning documents, on a central server of Google? One can only be amazed seeing the millions of gmail users are already doing just that. The move towards a utility status could also spark a call for the founding of public utilities. Carr doesn’t mention this possibility—and maybe it is not something we can expect from a US-American
Re: nettime Google distorts reality
Thanks, Florian, for your brilliant comments. I posted this snippet to nettime not because I agreed with it, but because I found it interesting, a Google criticism coming from the heart of continental Europe. What could that be other then the usual complaint after the Demise of the West (West here has to be read as the furthest West you can get from old Europe: California). I also posted it to to challenge myself, and others. The critique of Euro pessimism, about the ever dropping values in society, is wellknown. I practice it myself. The question really is: what is a progressive answer to the ever growing power of Google? Is it enough to complain about the monopoly position of this one corporation, as we did with Microsoft in the 1990s? As Christian Fuchs writes, this can hardly be an anti-capitalist stand, to cry for fair markets. One could get into the habit of using another search engine. But which one? Wait for open search or Wikipedia? Ask.com? Is this merely a question of individual 'consumer' choice? How does one ungoogle? What we need here are coachers and change managers. If google is a habit, then get rid of it. If you can quit smoking, then it must also be possible to degooglize society. But that's all early days. There are still only a handful of Google critics such as Nicolas Carr (http://www.roughtype.com) and Siva's Googlization of Everything (http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/). However, on the level of books that one recommends students to read, there is not all that much, except for the corporate agitprop of Vise and Battelle. Or am I wrong? Is there a European answer to Google, or is this is wrong question to start with? The conference where Florian spoke in Maastricht was an excellent start, but the event was not well publicized and attented. Is it an idea to organize a Google Tribunal (in Brussels...) where we can search for our ideal critic and chose the alternative search engine to our liking? Geert On 26 Dec 2007, at 10:16 PM, Florian Cramer wrote: On Wednesday, December 26 2007, 15:43 (+0100), geert lovink wrote: Google distorts reality, Austrian study says Download the study (in English) here: http://www.iicm.tugraz.at/iicm_papers/dangers_google.pdf ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime Outrageous disaster: Ogg/Vorbis spec taken out of HTML-5
(important message from jaromil, gone through various floss and video streaming lists. /geert) from: [EMAIL PROTECTED] re all, i urge you to take act against the exclusion of Ogg/Vorbis/Theora audio/video streaming technology from the HTML-5 specification: this exclusion will damage the efficiency of the world wide web in the coming years by reducing the available protocols and codecs to the few uncompatible and proprietary ones sold by business companies; at present time it is clear that Nokia is being responsible of this outrageous disaster as it untruly referred to Ogg as proprietary technology addressing the W3C board on HTML5 http://www.boingboing.net/2007/12/09/nokia-to-w3c-ogg-is.html Together with repeated attempts by other commercial companies to turn down Ogg/Vorbis/Theora FOSS implementation for audio/video streaming, we are witnessing the manipulation of what it should be a clean evolution path for the biggest technological platform we all share. http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/11/1339251 http://yro.slashdot.org/firehose.pl?id=419439 http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=1142to=1143 pleasehelp usbuildpressureNOW: http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/12/11/removal-of-ogg-vorbis-and-theora- from-html5-an-outrageous-disaster/ the W3C is supposed to be a neutral platform for development of specifications, but on the contrary it seems to listen only to business interests rather than citizens voices. Let's do everything possible to recall the attention of civil society organizations to what is happening, ASAP. it is our responsability as netizens (citizens of the net) to raise voices against this continuous ingerence of business interests into the making of a viable platform for _horizontal_ communication in civil society, offering an open access to its infrastructure. The present unefficiency and incompatibility of multimedia communication online is already the result of competition and unresponsability of companies racing to impose their closed technologies on the market, while the online citizens have the right for a common open source alternative to all possible commercial products because communication is a human right for all! thanks for your concern, la lucha sigue, tambien aqui', no estamos solos! ciao - -- (_ http://jaromil.dyne.org _) # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
nettime The Price of Priceless Objects
(fwd. on the request of cecile landman. /geert) http://shahidul.wordpress.com/2007/11/29/the-price-of-priceless-objects/ The Price of Priceless Objects Stop Press: Ten crates containing rare archaeological treasures of Bangladesh have been bundled out of the national museum and are said to be bound for Guimet Museum in Paris, via flight AF 6731 (dep: 1205 Saturday 1st Dec 2007). Preparations had been made to secretly remove the items through a shipment order by the French Embassy made to Homebound Packers and Shippers. Trucks and forklift arrive secretly in museum in early hours of morning. But the news leaked and media professionals and protesters gathered outside the museum. Under heavy police presence Homebound vehicles (Dhaka Metro Umo 11-0814, pho 11 3634, U 14 0187) and fork lift trucks all bearing “Save The Children and USAID Cyclone Sidr Emergency Relief ” signs were used to remove the priceless items. Predictably, and as in the case of all previous authoritarian governments, while the story was the lead news in all major newspapers and independent television channels. BTV the state run television channel which is the only terrestrial channel in Bangladesh, failed to report the incident altogether. -- Letter To French Government Citizens (December 1, 2007) To The French Government Citizens Subject: Musee Guimet’s Non-Transparent Borrowing of Priceless Artifacts from Bangladesh We the undersigned artists, archeologists, anthropologists, academics other concerned citizens of Bangladesh are writing to express our strong objection to the manner in which Musee Guimet of Paris is taking invaluable artifacts from the national museum and four other leading museums of Bangladesh for a planned show entitled “Masterpieces of the Ganges delta”. The Musee Guimet transported the artifacts even after widespread protests and a pending citizens’ lawsuit in the Bangladesh court. The manner in which the artifacts were transported, in a secret crating during early morning hours under police guard, added to the controversy. As news of the secret shipment leaked out, protesters gathered to form a human chain, and one protester was arrested. Finally, the first shipment of 10 crates of rare archaeological treasures was taken away, despite resistance, to be flown to Paris on December 1st on an Air France cargo plane. There is also a second shipment of 13 crates which is still pending. While the exhibition, which has been billed as being of outstanding quality, and consists of the most prized objects from all the major museums of Bangladesh, it is not part of an exchange programme. The only items that the Bangladeshi people will receive in return are 20 exhibition catalogues. The lack of transparency surrounding the planned exhibition at Musee Guimet includes allegations of under-valuation of artifacts to the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars, lack of accession numbers on numerous objects, improper and incomplete cataloguing (e.g., referring to a set of coins as merely “coins”, with no numbers given), inconsistency between documents, missing descriptions, and descriptions that do not conform to international standards. The official insurance value of the entire collection (stated to be “189 pieces” by the French Embassy) has been set at 4 million Euros for the purposes of this exhibition loan. Such a low insurance value for such a large collection, which dates back to the 4th century BC, has been described by an international archaeological expert as “financial fraud”. Even if this incorrect valuation had been completed by the Bangladesh authorities, one questions why an international museum would accept such a patently incorrect valuation. Most worrying of all, the number of pieces identified in documentation created by the French photographer who catalogued the exhibit does not match with the contract signed by the French Ambassador. The number of artifacts in the contract in turn does not match with the official press releases from the Dhaka French Embassy. The controversy over the improper handling of the loan escalated over the last two months, resulting in a citizens’ lawsuit (still pending in court) and Bangladesh citizens’ group’s demanded that the Bangladesh government and French authorities allowed experts to inspect the items as per international standards. The Bangladesh government asked the expert committee that is investigating the matter for time until January 15th, 2008 to respond to the committee’s queries. Astonishingly, the Musee Guimet began shipment of the artifacts on 30th November, 2007 — a full 45 days before the expiry of the Bangladesh government’s self-imposed deadline. The Bangladesh government and French Embassy officials have, without informing either the committee or the media, taken the items out of the museum in the surprise shipment described earlier. Musee Guimet is one of 18 museums that have jointly
nettime Weizenbaum and the Society of the Query
Weizenbaum and the Society of the Query By Geert Lovink A spectre haunts the world's intellectual elites: information overload. Ordinary people have hijacked strategic resources and are clogging up once carefully policed media channels. Before the Internet, the mandarin classes were able to strictly separate 'idle talk' from 'knowledge. With the rise of Internet search engines it is no longer possible to easily distinguish between patrician insights and plebeian gossip. The distinction between high and low, and the occasional mix during Carnival, are from all times and should not greatly worry us. What is causing alarm is another issue. Not only are popular noise levels up to unbearable levels, the chatter has entered the domain of science and philosophy itself--thanks to the indifferent Google. Search engines rank according to popularity, not Truth. What today's administrators of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur can't express, we should say for them: there is a growing discontent in the search algorithms. The scientific establishment has lost control over one of its key research projects, computer science and the enlightened citizens and statesmen have so far not found a way to communicate their concerns to those in charge (read: the Google board). One possible way out could be to overcome to positively redefine Heidegger's 'Gerede' as 'being of everyday Dasein's understanding and interpreting'. Are Internet users cut off from a a primary and primordial relationship with the world? Should we portrayal bloggers and the Web 2.0 cybermasses as 'uprooted' and cut off from the existantial? These questions, and more, came up while reading an of book of interviews with MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, known from the computer therapy program ELIZA and his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason. The publication is in German. A few years ago Weizenbaum (b. 1923) moved back to Berlin, the city where he grew up before he and his parents escaped from Nazis. The interviews were conducted by Munich-based journalist Gunna Wendt. A number of Amazon reviewers complained about Wendts uncritical questions and the polite-superficial level of her contributions. No doubt interesting are Weizenbaums stories about his youth in Berlin, the exile to the USA and the way he got involved in computing during the 1950s. The book indeed reads like a summary of Weizenbaums critique of computer science. What interested me was the way in which Weizenbaum shapes his arguments as an informed and respected insider (the net criticism position, so to say). The title and subtitle sound intriguing. Translated it goes like this: Where are they, the islands of reason in the cyber stream? Ways out of the programmed society. Weizenbaums Internet critique is general. He avoids becoming specificand I appreciate that attitude. His Internet remarks are nothing new for those familiar with Weizenbaums work: Internet is a great pile of junk, a mass medium that up to 95% consists of nonsense, much like the medium television, in which direction the Web is inevitably developing. The so-called information revolution has flipped into a flood of disinformation. The reason for this is the absence of an editor or editorial principle. Why this crucial media principle was not built-in by the first generations of computer programmers, of which Weizenbaum was a prominent member, the book fails to address. On a number of occasions I have formulated a critique of such media ecology, Hubert Dreyfus On the Internet (2001) being one of them. I do not believe that it is up to any professor or editor to decide for us what is, and what is not nonsense. I would much rather like to further revolutionize search tools and increase the general level of media literacy. If we walk into a book store or library our culture has taught us how to browse through the thousands of titles. Instead of complaining to the librarian that they carry too many books, we call in assistance, or find the way ourselves. Weizenbaum would like us to distrust what we see on our screens, be it television or Internet. Who is going to tell what to trust, what is the truth and what not, Weizenbaum doesnt mention. Lets forget Weizenbaums info anxiety. What makes this interview book an interesting read is his insistence on the art of asking the right question. Weizenbaum warns for an uncritical use of the word information. The signals inside the computer are not information. They are not more than signals. There is only one way to turn signals into information, through interpretation. For this we depend on the labour of the human brain. The problem of the Internet, so Weizenbaum, is that it invites us to see it as a Delphi oracle. To all our questions and problems, the Internet will provide you the answer. But the Internet is not a vending machine in which you throw a coin and then get what you want. First of all there are plenty of obstacles before one can even pose a question, like
