Martin Bosma the Steve Bannon ofthe Netherlands
Geert Wilders has his own Steve Bannon - His name is Martin Bosma an early player in Amsterdam's Tactical Media games. Martin Bosma, chief ideologue and consigliere of Gert Wilders, cut his political teeth in Amsterdam's Tactical Media scene of the 1990s. And so when Bosma joined team Wilders shortly after the assassination of The van Gogh, he brought his media skills into the mix. This serves to explain a little of how Wilders stole the march on his rivals in effectivel surfing the chaotic politics of the socal media era. Outside of the Netherlands few will have heard of Bosma, even though (in contrast to the rest of team Wilders) he has proved himself to be a skilful and resiliant operator. As well as being an MP for the PVV (Freedom Party) Bosma is a successful columist and author. He is generaly considered to be the principal ideologist and brains behind the Wilders thrown. The closest analogy is the reationship between Steve Bannon and Trump. Though an over simplification it is not completely superficial as a little known fact is that Bosma cut his teeth in the rough and tumble world of Amsterdam's lively "Tactical Media" scene of the 1990s. Whilst a student of political science at Amsterdam University, Bosma was also one of the principal anchor men for Hoeksteen Live, an anarchic monthly cable TV program that ran without pause for a marathon 24 hours every transmission. It was described by its founder, artist Raul Marroquin, as -a political program with a cultural supplement-. I have writen at length about this scene elsewhere (links below). Bosma in his Hoeksteen role also joined the a couple of Next 5 Minutes festivals.. As a program Hoeksteen was steeped in the quick and dirty camcorder and cable TV culture that preceded the internet revolution. But unusualy for such an experimental space it was also full of powerful and influential guests from all walks of life. Guests could range from cultural luminaries such as Philip Glass and Garcia Marquez to cabinet misinsters. Geert Lovink once described it as -low media for high society-.. This description hints at the truth, that what went out on TV, was less important than the social scene that the founder, Marroquin, generated. Into the tightly packed studios and corridors alchohol and people flowed in equal measureas as the cultural elites from all quarters mixed freely with the less than elites, partying together into the small hours. Within this melange Bosma carved out a place for himslef as the cheeky boyish provocature. One of his high points was ambushing the VVD (Dutch liberal Right) legend Fritz Bolkerstein, who was clearly expecting some tactical media lefty only to be asked by Bosma -why is the VVD so soft on communism ? -.. it is rare to see Bolkerstein flummoxed but he was then. Later Bosma took his bag of tricks to The New School in New York where he scandalised his peers by writing pro Zionist articles for the college journal. To be honest I (and others who knew and liked him) did not take any of this seriously (or literally). BIG MISTAKE.. But in retrospect much of it (including the Zionism.. Wilders is very pro-Isreal) falls into place. In some ways Bosma's journey mirros the trajetory of other Alt.Right meme warrios described by Florian Cramer particularly in the case of the troll, Weev who began as a freewheeling libertarian gradually morphing into a fully fledged white supremacist. But some points are clear. Like Bannon, Bosma has taken lessons from the media activists on the left and re-purposed them for a new age. He understandood earlier than most, that the rise of social media and other platforms had weakened mainstream media's ability to -manufacture consent- and like Bannon he put his media tradecraft into serving and educating a more powerful and autocratic master. The way this enabled Wilders has been able to reach over the heads of traditional mainstream vectoral hierachies and power was earlier than the US and has been widely influential beyond the Netherlands. Ironically at a point when many on the radical left have lost faith in the gramscian concepts of cultural hegomony and the key role media subcultures in spreading these narratives below the radar, it is the Right who have re-discovered these weapons. We see this most bluntly from Andrew Beightbart's well know aphorism that -politics is downstream from culture-. It may be too easy to say that these are lessons we need to re-learn and quickly.Butthat doesnt stop it being true. For anyone interested in seeing a few pictures of Martin in the Hoeksteen era they can be found at http://new-tactical-research.co.uk --- d a v i d g a r c i a d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk http://new-tactical-research.co.uk http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net # 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
Would you deliver an electric shock?
Conducting the Milgram experiment in Poland, psychologists show people still obey The title is direct, "Would you deliver an electric shock in 2015?" and the answer, according to the results of this replication study, is yes. Social psychologists from SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities in Poland http://english.swps.pl replicated a modern version of the Milgram experiment and found results similar to studies conducted 50 years earlier. https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-03/sfpa-ctm030917.php # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
is the social and ecological regulation of capital possible?
sure, some might say it's undesirable anyway. and it's a big question for a thread, but do you have a honest answer to this question? please lemme hear your thoughts if you have time. sunny solar sundays lx # 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 # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Martin Bosma the Steve Bannon ofthe Netherlands
On Sat, Mar 18, 2017 at 8:30 AM, David Garcia wrote: Ironically at a point when many on the radical left have lost faith in the gramscian concepts of cultural hegomony and the key role media subcultures in spreading these narratives below the radar, it is the Right who have re-discovered these weapons. We see this most bluntly from Andrew Breitbart's well know aphorism that -politics is downstream from culture-. You are right about this, David. I guess I am the typical case. When I looked into Ernesto Laclau's theories of populism ten years ago I could only come to the conclusion that the Right had proven the concept of hegemony to be useless for the Left. The reason is clear: almost nobody on the Left wants to rhetorically trick their fellow human beings into what Laclau "chains of equivalence," where the image of the thing you really believe in (or fetishize) is proposed as equivalent to a whole string of other, only partially related or even unrelated concerns, which themselves are to be subsumed by the "super-signifier" of a political party and a leader. Instead most people on the Left, at least since 1968, want each individual to understand the other's liberation as the necessary precondition of one's own. It's an ethics, really. Nobody is subsumed under anybody in this approach. Rather than having a whole set of pseudo-equivalences fused into a single rhetorical bloc, you get radical multiplicity. Difference that keeps on differing. Today this same ethics is known as "intersectionality" in the jargon of US political theory. Until quite recently, this approach seemed doomed to produce a forever-minority culture with almost no downstream consequences, good only to keep hope alive on certain college campuses and in certain activist scenes that usually had a hidden campus connection. Then came the pussy hat. Wow, here was a single signifier which did not seem in any way reductive (after all it was handmade) and yet which huge amounts of people could support, whether they wore it or not, precisely on the complex ethical basis described above. While that was happening, resistance against the Dakota Access Pipeline was hitting its peak. Mayors, pushed by their electors, were declaring their cities to be sanctuaries. And the headscarf, that reviled object which can't be seen on a beach in France, became a symbol of resistance to Trump's ill-fated Muslim ban. Hey, spring is coming. Look for a huge pushback against climate-change denialism and undoubtedly the most mega-immigrant marches the US has ever seen. We'll get all kinds of cool signifiers out of those. Is this '68 all over again? I hope not. The problem with '68-style liberation politics has been clear for quite a while: its multiple demands can all be selectively satisfied by the neoliberal capitalist democracy that codes signifiers and their individual bearers as good if they're popular, ie if they sell. Whoever becomes the pop-star can then make a lot of money (and be politically neutralized) while supplying fuel for everyone else's vain aspirations to find some singular magical escape route from general social problems. The difference from '68 is that now is it's no longer *just* about liberation. People are recognizing that not only their existential fulfillment, but their existence full stop, depends on the *institutions* that guarantee the same possibilities for the others. In the US this realization coalesces around the issue of health care, that missing institution of American life, whose absence as such (as institution) is agonizingly "covered" by predatory, inegalitarian insurance contracts, whose deadly gaps in coverage reveal the sham and deceit on which all of neoliberalism's substitute or pseudo-institutions are founded. So far, health care and immigration are the central issues in the US, followed pretty closely by climate change. But there is another, nagging issue which troubles everyone without anyone yet knowing how to put their finger on it. It's the truth issue. So, why do we believe in truth, and they (the Trumpalistas) don't? What is truth? How is it made? Who produces it? In which places? With what methods? With which funds? How do you measure the value of truth? Can that be done economically? Is there - gasp - a *non-economic* criterion for the value of truth? The people who brought us "alternative facts" and "microwaves that become cameras" (don't even ask what THAT's supposed to mean) are really succeeding in provoking some thought in the USA, and that thought is about the structuring role of institutions for collective life. Including the institutions of truth (ie science, law, journalism, philosophy, etc). What's more - and very crucially, imho - this new political thinking is about the combi
