*Farage's as Hyper-leader * A Knoweledge Free Zone* - by Design
*Farage's as Hyper-leader and the cult of disintermediation* It is no longer news (if it ever was) that the big winners in the UK’s European Parliamentary elections were the Bexit Party or rather the Nigel Farage party. This was a remarkable achievement bearing in mind his party has only been in existence for six weeks. Meanwhile Farage’s previous vehicle Ukip without the blokish charisma of its former talismanic show-man was effectively wiped off the political map. Away from the frothy headlines it is worth highlighting two very useful reference points to help us make some sense of Farage’s extraordinary political resurrection. To begin with there is the influence of Gianroberto Caseleggioan (brain lord) of the 5Star movement. For this angle I ransacked Darren Loucaides’ article for the Guardian which chronicles in some depth the history and influence on Farage’s strategic thinking of Caseleggio, the backroom brains and partner (until Caseleggio’s death) of 5Star's own ‘hyperleader’ Bepe Grillo. Caseleggio is widely acknowledged as being instrumental in guiding Grillo in deploying digital platforms to propel the 5Star movement into power. The article not only charts the relationship between the two men it also exposes the faultlines in exagerated claims that 5Star’s participatory platform Rouseau is a space of genuine democratic participation on which consensus spontaneously arises though the platform’s ingenious design. Loucaides’ article paints a far less flatering picture than the narrative of an open and organic process of deliberative decision making. He describes a space in which strategic interventions of Caseleggio shape decisions in the direction of outcomes that the leadership prefers including members agreeing to join the right wing parliametry block with UKIP. The second point is that however Farage began as he surfed the zeitgeist he has emerged as a classic example of what Paolo Gerbaudo calls a ‘hyperleader’, a phenonemon connected to widespread suspiscion of structures of management and mediation. This according to Gerbaudo gives rise to a certain kind of leadership based on immediacy and the claim that technology can be employed to eliminate the layers of bureacracy separating leader from the “people". The concept of the hyperleader is developed in a chapter in Gerbaudo’s excellent ‘The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy, And many of the descriptions can be almost isomorphically mapped over Farage’s persona. There is something very particular about Farage’s emergence as the most successful political actor of his generation in the UK. To call him a populist is accurate (anyone claiming to speak for the people whilst singling out vulnerable groups -people with AIDS, Refugees, people speaking languages other than English in public spaces for criticism etc) is evidence enough. But this doesnt do justice to his particular character and style. It is this context that Gerbaudo’s concept of the ‘hyperleader’ as a "purveyer of a spectacular and highy personalised form of leadership that matches the changes in the public sphere as a consequence of the rise of digital hypermedia.” takes us further than the mere epiphet ‘populist' The Italian Connecton Loucaides’ article in the Guardian charts how the connection between Farage and 5Star goes back to a visit in 2015. Not only is Farage immediately impressed by “how Caselegglio was using social media and the internet to create a new model for communications” This platform later culmianted in the “participatory” decision making platform Rousseau. But of more substantive influence on Farage was the fact that "the 'movement’ was dominated by a private company owned by Caseleggio.” It is above all this model of the political party *as an instrument of corporate control* that made the deepest impression and it is this element that he eventually replicated in the formation of the Brexit Party which Farage constitutes as a private limited company with no members, just paying ‘registerred supporters’ with Farage having overal control. For all Farage and his 'sock puppets’ incesent sound and fury on the subject of democracyIt is hard to imagine a less democratic structure than the brexit party. In this regard it is closer to the Dutch 'Freedom Party' and the control exerted by Geert Wilders. Disintermediation It is not the creation of participatory platforms that Farage absorbed via Caseleggio so much as the rhetoric of ‘disintermediation’ that goes back to the early 1990s , the belief that it was the destiny of the internet to eliminate the gate keepers and intermediaries that stand between provider and consumer. The elimination of bureaucracies and complex chains of decision making would have an obvious appeal to the former commodities trader Farage. It is not difficult to see where he and Assange might make common cause. The rise of the
Re: Remember shih-chieh ilya li
Beautiful Obits for 'Ilya Lee'. R.I.P. The two nettime posts by him Geert refers to are here: https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9912/msg00140.html (1999) https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-bold-0107/msg00508.html (2001) and they are well worth (re)reading! Ciaoui, p+2D! On 2019-05-27 07:32, Shu Lea Cheang wrote: dear Geert I think we all met Ilya same time in Amsterdam... next five minutes 1996? http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/next-5-minutes-tactical-media-conference-amsterdam-rotterdam-january-18-21-1996?fbclid=IwAR2-vn_hs5tsLSwwxAh-z7HNa-5DPBLZmgFdn2EVUM4pA2NpqNPhcX8dwh0 sl On 23.05.19 16:00, Geert Lovink wrote: I also just heard that our dead activist-friend Ilya from Taiwan died because of complications from cellulitis, a few days ago. Thanks, Graham, you have described his warm character very well! I can't trace the exact beginning of my friendship with Ilya but it must have been in the last nineties. His trip to the third Next Five Minutes tactical media festival in Amsterdam was a huge event for him (and all of us). The idea of creating networks of artists and activists working at the crossroads of politics, aesthetics and new media was a very real, living thing. In 2001, I did an email exchange with Ilya, for nettime: https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-bold-0107/msg00508.html. In my 2002 book Dark Fiber there is a travel report about my 1999 visit to Taiwan and my work with Ilya. Since then I came to Taiwan and he to Amsterdam on a number of occasions. Ilya’s politics I found always very interesting: a unique mix of radical practices, government policies (or the attempt to somehow address them), research and IT startups. His passion and enthousiasm to translate concepts from elsewhere to the high tech policy of the ‘renegade island’ that was going its own way, investigaring what freedom on many level could mean, inspired all of us. Farewell, Ilya! Geert I wrote this for inclusion in a memorial volume, Ilya Li's memorial is present in the living and breathing of networks he helped create since 1996. I'm not sure how many net timers knew of Ilya but until his sudden death a few days ago - he had done so much great work from his base in Taiwan. Here are a few words in his memory. If you have any words or images you want add - a memorial page is on facebook that will be printed of for his family. just search (Remember shih-chieh ilya li) I'm not sure how ilya's idiosyncratic, strange, funny and generous thought processes managed it, but he glued together a carnival of like-minded misfits around the world, adding to their nutzo projects, like YoHa's, 'Plastic Raft of Lampedusa'. Ilya gave many of us a version of what globalisation, transnationalism could mean in opposition to the fragmentary version we are fed with our processed foods. He taught europeans like myself to listen before judgment, to think with him around corners and on different scales while usually eating delicious unprocessed food. He did this by guiding you to an embarrassing pause, when you thought... I have no idea what he just said to me or where it came from. At such moments, you had to ask him, over the next tasty mouthful, to unravel his thoughts, translate them across cultures so you could understand where you may have had it wrong, to get a new insight. Ilya was a romantic and I both saw him struggle with being on his own and then it was my priviledge to see him seek out love, follow it around the world and finally find it in his and his partner's garden, growing more food for the future. Ilya was our friend, eating companion, glue in a world that tries to keep us separate. # 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:
What's next for Barcelona?
Who can make sense out of yesterday's municipal elections in Barcelona? The left-wing separatist candidate, Ernest Maragall, narrowly beating Ada Colau. Is this another case of separatism crowding out ecological and social issues, thus preserving conventional political structures (even if with new parties...), or is there something else going on? -- | || http://felix.openflows.com | | Open PGP | http://felix.openflows.com/pgp.txt | signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature # 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:
