Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part Two,
Ippolita Collective, In the Facebook Aquarium Part Two
Anonymous, or out-of-the-box activism (section 8, continued)
Viewed from out the media, the reaction of the church of Scientology, just
as that of all Anonymous' (many) casualties afterwards, was to portray the
members of the group as monomaniac computer fanatics and cyber-terrorists,
or in one word: (dangerous) hackers. It is not easy to define Anonymous in
terms of ideology, but one aspect cannot escape notice: what boils up from
all the Anonymous nodes is a very peculiar interpretation of freedom of
expression, which is adamantly refered to as 'non-negotiable' [71]. As can
be seen with the /OpBart/ operation, Anonymous often appears when
censorship appears too [72]. Anonymous' and Wikileaks' paths crossed again
between December 6 and 10, 2010 during /Operation Avange Assange (aka
Operation Payback/), when several DDoS attacks were mounted, many
successful, against a twelve-some banks and financial institutions which
had blocked monetary transfers in favor of Wikileaks [73x].
To uncover the enemy's misdeeds while keeping a mask on, defy opacity
through transparence while remaining anonymous, attack powerful actors
(churches, armies, governments, banks) by way of interventions pairing
technical competences with spectacular mass media engagement, and to adopt
a truly warrior attitude, whether in the form of open warfare or sabotage
actions - these are the features Anonymous and Wikileaks share in common.
But the similarities stop here. Unlike Wikileaks, one cannot identify
Anonymous with one really existing person because it is not a SPO [###*],
but always operates as a (fluctuating) collective. In theory, anybody can
be part of Anonymous, whereas passing on a top secret piece of information
to Wikileaks does not result in identification of the person doing it.
Anonymous in its turn, is made up of a great many individuals, networks,
and (separate) operations.
Can The Pirate Bay, Wikileaks and Anonymous be considered as different
manifestations of the same hacker spirit? It is clear that the 'Petri
dish' where Anonymous stems from is, at least partially, connected to the
high-level world of hackerdom, as can be seen the participation of various
Anonymous groups to a number of operations conducted by Lulzsec [74]. The
hacker motto /just for fun/ finds its expression in the Lulz spirit, which
is a transformation of the acronym LOL (/Laughing Out Loud/) used in
on-line chats. The //b//canal random/ of the picture showcase 4chan [75]
surely is part and parcel of those who defined themselves as the first
members of Anonymous, for the simple reason that the major part of its
contents were posted anonymously. a number of people, arrested during the
successive waves of repression that hit Anonymous, were users of 4chan. In
case you feel no affinity whatsoever nor any curiosity about mangas,
Japanese animus, video games, TV series, outlandish acronyms, black humor,
randy pre-porn, LOLcats (photoshopped feline pets, usually with some
'funny' legend), publicity jamming, etc., 4chan is definitely not for
you. You might think you've just been dumped in a cage filled with maniacs
with an annoying soft spot for horror and the surreal, a meeting point for
youngsters talking gobbledygook. And in case you are gifted with a
paranoid imagination your conclusion will be clear: dangerous
cyber-terrorists at work!
Mass media have focused on Anonymous hacking operations, but actually
there have been many simultaneous (types of) Anonymous interventions, on
different networks. There have also been public demonstrations of the more
traditional ('in real life') kind, where Anonymous activists would wear
Guy Fawkes masks. With the politicization of real life actions, Lulz
on-line attacks have become less numerous, and the group went more
political. This until groups appeared within Anonymous which openly called
themselves anarchists, the A(A)A for Anon Anarchist Action, for instance.
But what kind of anarchism are we talking about here? Is it the
anarcho-capitalist variety, bent on the total triumph of the free market,
and of all-out privatization facilitated by a liberating technology, or is
it anarchy understood as an anti-authoritarian practice and the struggle
for a society made up of 'free and equals', where competition takes a step
back in favor of mutual help and solidarity? For sure, there are members
of Anonymous who are active within (genuinely) anarchist organizations,
but there are among them also who espouse liberal (capitalist) or even
libertarian tendencies. The fact that journalists hailed 4chan as the
Web's most anarchist site should raise some doubt - and more questions.
Moot's (young New Yorker Christopher Poole's nick) positions provide a
good benchmark for evaluation. Poole has declared himself in favor of
total opacity, and absolute anonymity on-line, which gives to each and
everyone the opportunity to choose for 'bad behavior' without offending,
withou
Re: Copyright Is Over - If You Want I
Forgive me, but it seems to me "the work" did not steal anything from you. It was rather your own behaviour in the face of authority that caused your frustration. Why did you let a sign and a security guard stop you? Again (like in last month's discussion), to me what is required to enjoy a bootleg or a remix like Marclay's is punk attitude. A quote by Lenny Kaye (for Clinton Heylin's book "Bootleg") comes to mind: "I think that bootlegs keep the flame of the music alive by keeping it out of not only the industry's conception of the artist, but also the artist's conception of the artist". (Ironically, Heylin put on the dust cover this quote which was a rehash of something Kaye had said to Hot Wacks, an underground magazine on music bootlegs, years earlier.) Licenses to protect the artist (sic) are in fact protecting the producer's choices, which may be a noble thing, but not necessarily what produces high art. Conversely too, an artist can screw a producer with the licenses on her/his side, like some of Miles's musicians did when they licensed the unabridged tapes that Teo Macero painstakingly had cut into, well, high art. I regularly listen to Dead tapes off the Internet Archive and the newsletters about the archive are great, but it is a very different place from Ubuweb, and I don't think it's the licenses that make the difference. [MP: belated thanks for your correction to my use of the word jurisprudence last month.] M. On 19 July 2014 15:13, "?zg?r k." wrote: > the wall text in the entrance of a very recent marclay "the clock" > exhibition warned me that taking photos or shooting video is not > allowed. i was even warned for the second time by the security at the > entrance of the exhibition space again! <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: More Crisis in the Information Society
It seems to me that Felix is right in pointing out that the issues discussed here are primarily political. I consider in particular the emergence of a 'Deep State' largely outside of democratic (electoral) accountability and existing rights frameworks that Felix sketches here a deeply problematic and fundamentally important tendency. However, we should right from the start not limit ourselves to modes of critique: The problem is political, which necessarily implies that the solution is also political - it is not just a matter of critique (of incapable political structures, of the distortions of global and local capital, of unaccountable surveillance systems, etc.), but much more a question of political design. An interesting question here would be, what does 'political design' mean exactly? How can it be 'enacted'? What would be required in terms of material and popular investments, in terms of institutional (re-)design? What types of political and design expertise would be required here? In order for what? To progress towards a progressive composition of the good common world? The successive waves of popular protest that we have all been witnessing since 2011, that some refer to as the 'movement(s) of the squares' (a term I use only in brackets because of its inherent ambiguities), have not effected the kind of political changes as yet that seemed to be demanded there, neither in terms of 'giving democracy back to the people' (one of the recurrent slogans / demands), nor in terms of fundamentally redressing gross inequalities in income, material means of survival and possibilities for self-realisation. The activists involved have largely understood and accepted this lack of efficacy of the protests in and of themselves and are now actively engaging in acts of 'political design'. Important to question here, though, is exactly what 'design' in this context means. In my view it operates on different levels at the same time - on a macro level as in redesigning political institutions (evidenced a.o. in new political 'designs' such as Partido X and Podemos in Spain, the redrafting of the Iceland constitution earlier, the After arty in post-occupy US, and many other initiatives aimed at reconfiguring main-stream politics). However, 'political design' should and does operate simultaneously on a micro-level, small acts, localised and trans-local, by ordinary citizens aimed at changing particular aspects of local environments, establishing new shared resources, new modes of exchange (alternative currency systems that typically function trans-locally), small-scale environmental monitoring and restoration projects, open education, and many many more. 'Design' here is no longer concerned simply with giving shape to something that has already been conceived, but is more properly understood as a concrete and tangible intervention to reshape a configuration of things. I'm now developing a new short course for the Art Science Interfaculty in The Hague which is called 'Ecological Design'. The basic premise here is that the title perfectly expresses what the course is about, if only that it requires us to fundamentally redefine two terms: 'ecology' and 'design'. 'Ecology', first of all is reconfigured (as a concept) along the lines of the classic Guattari text on the three ecologies; the material environment / the social relations / human subjectivity; and this ie extended with the presence and role of the non-humans. The point here is to think and act transversally between and across these different ecological registers. 'Design' is reconfigured to mean essentially any type of tangible 'intervention', which transgresses the disciplinary boundaries of professional design, to include interventions coming from the domain of the arts, civic initiatives, social movements, and even politics itself. An important consideration here is that it is too easy to forget that the different crises we are talking about (financial, economic, political, democratic, military and environmental) do not only affect humans badly, but also the non-humans. The question is, how to bring the non-humans into democracy, as evidently they cannot 'speak' for themselves there, at the heart of democratic deliberation. This obviously introduces another layer of complexity and complicates things further, yet in thinking and doing political design I nonetheless find the presence of the non-humans indispensable. The task for the students following this course will be to come up with a 'design' for an intervention of their own (and possibly execute it). To give these endeavours direction I hold to the Latourian formula of the 'progressive composition of the good common world', which aims to sustain and strengthen the plurality of external relations - it becomes thus an exercise in (re-)designing political ecology. At this point I'm very curious to see what is going to come out of this new co
Elites' Tryranny of Structurelessness
Following NYTimes quotes of 'The People's Platform,' by Astra Taylor: "Open systems can be starkly inegalitarian," a "tyranny of structurelessness. Elites can happily deny their own existence." The Tyranny of Structurelessness, Jo Freeman: http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: More Crisis in the Information Society
Hello David, > And ask whether the generally low pay and insecure conditions for > practitioners of what have become known as the creative economy really > is such a new phenomenon? > > Are the average earnings enjoyed/endured by commercial photographers > (and designers/illustrators/animators/writers) that Florian identifies > as $20,000/year really that much worse than average earnings for these > sectors during other historical periods? I should have been more concrete in my posting. The $20,000/year figure came from a market research study on Dutch professional photographers - in other words, a demography where photographers who identify themselves as visual artists are a small minority, and the bulk of the profession is represent by photojournalists, commercial portrait and wedding photographers and the like. The same study also said that the $20,000 figure represents an income loss of 20% in comparison to statistics gathered three years earlier. Colleagues working in advertising tell me that today's production budgets for commercials have more than halved in comparison to the "golden age" in the 80s and 90s. In graphic design, hardly any of the big bureaus still exist anymore, and freelancers working at home have taken their place. Aside from anecdotal evidence, my colleague Paul Rutten has compiled hard figures and statistics for the creative industries in the Netherlands that clearly show shrinkage [https://hro.app.box.com/s/gz6vf5hkn99ndsta2psz] along with the rest of the economy since 2008. (For the U.S., the Salon.com article "The Creative Class is a Lie" drew similar conclusions in 2011: "The dream of a laptop-powered 'knowledge class' is dead. The media is melting. Blame the economy - and the Web", http://www.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/.) Intuitively, this makes sense, but it sharply contradicts the run-of-the-mill rhetoric that the creative industries are the area of biggest growth within the overall economy. > I guess what I am saying is that the arts (including the commercial > sector) have always been riskier than most and the rewards of a life > of expressive creative engagement has always had to be balanced > against greater risk and sacrifice. I wouldn't argue with that! > We may aspire to change this reality but is it really a new set of > conditions ? What seems to have changed is the fully commercial sector of the arts. Large parts of it have economically collapsed and therefore no longer provide alternative income opportunities. In other words, wedding photography no longer pays the bills for experimental photographers, copywriting no longer the bills of starving writers, etc.etc. -F # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Understanding Media was our First Big Mistake (a reflection on new
Excerpt from ?Understanding Media was our First Big Mistake,? published in Centerfold magazine (Toronto), 1979. Tom Sherman Miami. Here I am. Sitting on the 5th-storey sunroof of the Wandolyn Motor Hotel. Taking in the (squint-eyed) panoramically framed view of the quiet, mid-afternoon light. Laid back in a chaise lounge, drinking a gin and tonic, interviewing Maria Del Mar, greater Miami artist and successful media entrepreneur. I?m the one who is staying in this Hotel. I?m living it up on the magazine?s expense account (Centerfold). Maria preferred to come to meet me. She said she was looking for a reason to get out of the house. As well as being the 11th wonder of the world, Maria is a very active artist who works directly with the highest forms of available technology in a potentially full, creative sense. She loves her equipment, and the machinery she designs really puts out for her. Skip Olson, a flashy programmer from Boca Raton (educated at Cal Tech under Harold Proctor), does most of Maria?s super tech. It was actually Olson who put the final touches on Maria?s ?Spinal Ray Gun?. The ?SRG? is an e lectro-acoustic transducer that literally makes the body, as Maria says, ?speak in tongues from head to toe.? This ?fun gun? is based on Olson?s patented (1975) digitally focused transducive floating head assembly. Make no mistake, the ?SRG? was Maria?s own invention, and still is. She has been working with various electro-acoustic transduction techniques since emigrating to the United States from Caracas in 1974. Maria explained that she had felt stifled by the total lack of activity in the experimental technological arts in her native Venezuela. She originally landed in New York where she found work with Pan American Airlines (on the ground) while she looked for the access she needed to continue her creative work in the States. It took only six months for Maria to decide New York was not for her. Her move to Miami in the winter of 1975 was based on the weather, and as it turned out it was a stroke of good luck. She ran into Olson at a computer conference that same winter. He was lecturing on his developing digital focusing mechanisms. His floating head assembly proved to be the missing interface between Maria?s transducive ideas and the spine of the general public?. As she has just taken the real thing out of her purse, Maria Del Mar?s ?Spinal Ray Gun? looks like a cross between an electric finishing sander and a Princess phone at this reading. Ivory. Although they have taken the idea quite a ways, the machine is obviously still at the prototype stage. What the ?SRG? is, in plain English, is a very articulate and powerful vibrator held firmly in place at the base of the spine by a thick nylon belt around the waist. A smaller control unit, looking a lot like a miniature cassette player, is connected by cable to the ?SRG?. When I say the ?SRG? is articulate, I mean it is capable of ?injecting? a wide frequency of vibrations into the central nervous system with a sophisticated articulation of power far beyond the actual surface transduction. I am not talking about fancy massage. As I have said, this floating head assembly, developed by Olson, without practical application before Maria figured out the way, bestows the ?SRG? with its awesome potential. Olson?s ?head? enables vibrations to be injected into the sensitive base of the spinal column with just about all the depth and power you can imagine. The physical interface of the transducer itself is a 4 x 7-inch soft rubber pad, perfectly smooth on the surface. Underneath this pliable pad, which fits any lower back perfectly, is over an inch-thick layer of liquid crystal membranes. These ?membranes? undulate under directive electrical stimulation to form an acoustic ?lens? for applying pinpoint concentrations of pressure locally by frequency. This ?locality by frequency? is the key to the ?SRG?. It is as if this floating head is an electrostatic body of ?liquid? pressure. Behind this floating head is the power transducer, which is an electromechanical vibrator set to a control frequency of approximately 15,000 cycles per second. Maria wouldn?t tell me the exact frequency of her control vibration. These ?localities of frequency? set up in the head assembly are directed by digital computer according to the program Maria chooses to insert in the cable-connected remote control unit. Maria creates her own programs for the ?Spinal Ray Gun? to play back in anyone?s particular body. As I thought out as much as she would tell me about the specifics of the ?SRG?, I came up with a hitch in her sketchy elucidation. She wanted to strap the thing on me?I just wanted to talk it through a bit more before I committed myself. I told her I thought the rubber interface pad would transfer with restrictive uniformity any such diversity of said -to-be ?local frequencies? underneath it. Why? Because of the absorbe
Re: More Crisis in the Information Society
Hello David, > And ask whether the generally low pay and insecure conditions for > practitioners of what have become known as the creative economy really > is such a new phenomenon? > > Are the average earnings enjoyed/endured by commercial photographers > (and designers/illustrators/animators/writers) that Florian identifies > as $20,000/year really that much worse than average earnings for these > sectors during other historical periods? I should have been more concrete in my posting. The $20,000/year figure came from a market research study on Dutch professional photographers - in other words, a demography where photographers who identify themselves as visual artists are a small minority, and the bulk of the profession is represent by photojournalists, commercial portrait and wedding photographers and the like. The same study also said that the $20,000 figure represents an income loss of 20% in comparison to statistics gathered three years earlier. Colleagues working in advertising tell me that today's production budgets for commercials have more than halved in comparison to the "golden age" in the 80s and 90s. In graphic design, hardly any of the big bureaus still exist anymore, and freelancers working at home have taken their place. Aside from anecdotal evidence, my colleague Paul Rutten has compiled hard figures and statistics for the creative industries in the Netherlands that clearly show shrinkage [https://hro.app.box.com/s/gz6vf5hkn99ndsta2psz] along with the rest of the economy since 2008. (For the U.S., the Salon.com article "The Creative Class is a Lie" drew similar conclusions in 2011: "The dream of a laptop-powered 'knowledge class' is dead. The media is melting. Blame the economy - and the Web", http://www.salon.com/2011/10/01/creative_class_is_a_lie/.) Intuitively, this makes sense, but it sharply contradicts the run-of-the-mill rhetoric that the creative industries are the area of biggest growth within the overall economy. > I guess what I am saying is that the arts (including the commercial > sector) have always been riskier than most and the rewards of a life > of expressive creative engagement has always had to be balanced > against greater risk and sacrifice. I wouldn't argue with that! > We may aspire to change this reality but is it really a new set of > conditions ? What seems to have changed is the fully commercial sector of the arts. Large parts of it have economically collapsed and therefore no longer provide alternative income opportunities. In other words, wedding photography no longer pays the bills for experimental photographers, copywriting no longer the bills of starving writers, etc.etc. -F # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: More Crisis in the Information Society
I'd like to engage with the last paragraph of Florian's post- And ask whether the generally low pay and insecure conditions for practitioners of what have become known as the creative economy really is such a new phenomenon? Are the average earnings enjoyed/endured by commercial photographers (and designers/illustrators/animators/writers) that Florian identifies as $20,000/year really that much worse than average earnings for these sectors during other historical periods? Although I don't have data to back this up, I don't think so. When I left college way back before the digital revolution, one might also on average also be lucky to match the income of most factory workers or those in the building trade. Then as now those who entered the creative domains were not attracted by the expectation of big pay packets but instead the lure (sometimes delusion) were the pleasures of creative engagement and the dream of being one of the few to defy the odds and make it big. There was a decade when tech savvy creatives (dread term) defied -for a few short years the usual logic of capitalist supply and demand in this area. But this moment has long since passed and I would argue that we have returned to a longstanding norm. Volatility in the creative sector is cyclicle. For instance, in the often overlooked discipline of illustration a large class of well paid illustrators (engravers) who produced illustrations for popular Victorian news journals (on an industrial scale) became surplus to requirements with the introduction of half tone photography to news print. However illustration did not disappear it re-invented itself as a more expressive and interpretive craft. And carved a large new niche for itself as publishers and art directors re-discovered the fact that images sell! They sell arguments, ideology and they sell units. Today the same domain is undergoing a similar trauma as cheap stock images (among many factors) are undermining the lively-hoods of commercial editorial illustrators. And forcing adaptation as some seek to embrace the possibilities of digitally native platforms with thumbnail animations, live data feeds etc. I guess what I am saying is that the arts (including the commercial sector) have always been riskier than most and the rewards of a life of expressive creative engagement has always had to be balanced against greater risk and sacrifice. We may aspire to change this reality but is it really a new set of conditions ? David Garcia > In the media and information sector, the business model for the new players > (Google, Apple, Facebook) has not only been centralization, but also the > fact that they are media companies that no longer employ "content" > creators. This conversely means that thee economic exchange value of media > creation, in the classic sense of editorial or artistic/audiovisual/design > work, is sinking to unforeseen lows. For regional commercial video > producers in Europe, to take an example with which I'm familiar, hourly > rates are the same as for repairman only in the best case; in most cases, > they are lower, and don't reflect investment into equipment. Another > example: according to market research, the average pre-tax income of > commercial photographers in the Netherlands is about $20,000/year. If this > is indicative of any larger trend in media jobs, then it means that nothing > is more obsolete than the notion of the "creative class", but that the bulk > of "information society" and media jobs have become working class > employment or worse. d a v i d g a r c i a new-tactical-research.co.uk # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: More Crisis in the Information Society
I share Florian's sense of crisis, but I would unpack the issues -- surveillance, security, information economy -- a bit differently. Ever since "Wall Street" switched from telephone/telegraph to computer networks for communication and transaction in the early 1970s (and the City of London some 10 years later), the functions that would later would taken over by the internet have grown into a the essential infrastructure of contemporary societies, like transport of water, energy, physical goods and so on. To make matter more complex, these different parts of the infrastructure are not simply layered on top of each other, but dependent on one another. Take out one, and all others break (ie. how long would our cell phones work in Europe, if supply routes from from Asia were interrupted. For a take on this question, see this [1] (in German).) In this sense, the proposed "offline library" is is only gradually more offline than, say, archive.org. This small difference might have real consequences in some cases, but my hunch is that the number of cases is relatively limited. So, the internet is now what Marx would have called "circumstances not of our choosing". Snowden has shown three things, in my view. First, the shift of balance from legislative to executive power over the last three decades has produced, even in Western countries, something of a deep state, that is a set of actors who have wide ranging powers over the state but are not affected by elections, rule of law, fundamental rights, and other such things. This is not a technical issue, but a political one, a deep crisis of democracy. How deep it is can be seen by the fact that there is no relevant political force able/interested in countering it. On the contrary, it took the British government only days to rush through new legislation (DRIP) to reinstate data retention after it has been declared in breach of fundamental rights by the European Court of Justice. In the wake of the Snowden affair, the German has demanded, and is likely to receive, a massive expansion of its budget. Second, the way communication over digital networks is constructed, both technically and institutionally, makes surveillance so extremely cheap, but it's feasible to simply collect everything. This can be changed relatively easily. Encryption and decentralized infrastructures work to make surveillance much more expensive, so much that it becomes unfeasible vacuum up and analyze everything. Third, it is nearly impossible to secure digital communication against a sophisticated, resourceful attackers. Hackers and computer security people have always known that -- hence their resistance against things like online voting -- but now we all know it. Depending on the threat model, it might be worth to scale down the degree of "onlineness" a bit, and create situation where such minor differences in the degree of connectivity create substantial difference in security/robustness. The Dutch levy system might be such a case. There is, probably also on this level a trade-off between "convenience" and security, only that here, convenience is called efficiency. So, there is a question, which systems should we make less efficient, aka more expensive, but more secure? Somewhat separate from all if this is the question of the information economy and the decline of the creative class. For me, this is not technical issue, but again political one. To put it simply, if we were to return to 1970s levels of taxation, a lot of problems would be solved. But of course we cannot, since there are no organized forces to, well, force that, and hence the political systems has been thoroughly captured by financial interests. Unregulated capitalism, as we know not only since Picketty, leads to extreme social inequality. Though "unregulated capitalism" is a bit of an oxymoron, since capitalism is itself a system of regulating society (in the interest of capitalists). The billboard that Michael made us aware is so extreme that I thought it was a satire, but apparently, it is not. But anyway, it has nothing to do with creative class, but it's a threat against trying to strengthen the position of low level service workers through the introduction of a minimum wage. This time, it threat is labeled "automation" rather than "outsourcing" or "offshoring". What is totally true is that the creative class, at least those parts that are generally considered creative, like the photographers mentioned by Florian is systematically precarized. [As a side note, Florida included in the creative class also lawyers, dentists and others to make the stats look better, but they never appear in heart-warming examples.] But what is really the reason for that? How much of this is that a) thanks to "smart" technologies the barriers of entry into these professions are really low? And that for most commercial cases medium quality is enough? b) ever more institutions, such as Florian's and mine, are producing workers for marke
