Un-friend my Heart - Ilana Gershin on Facebook

[David Garcia]

Un-friend my Heart - Revisiting Ilana Gershin on Facebook 

Despite being nearly a decade old its a good time to take another look at 
the work of anthropologist Ilana Gershin’s work The Ethics of Disconection in 
Neo-liberal Age on Fb pioneering role of schooling a generation in 
becoming entrapraneurs of the self (Foucault).. 

Gershin’s articles and book provides a vison of Facebook as a near perfect 
mirror the neo-liberal vision of the market as an information 
processor more powerful than any human individual or collective intellect 
(Mirowski). 
We could call it Thatcher/Reagan's all knowing “deity" whose universal 
catechism 
remains “you can’t buck the market”.  

Just as we can never know as much as the market knows, so we as individuals can 
never know ourselves as well as Facebook knows us. As neccesarily flawed. In 
an information society Its our equivalent of original sin. In this atomised 
world any misfortune 
is our fault alone any victory owes nothing to the collective. The self is our 
responsibility a mere 
aglomeration of interchaneable parts, packets of truth, that render privacy a 
fiction. Our only task 
is to continuously assemble and disassemble in response to the universal metric 
of likes. 
FB is the near perfect embodiment of the market economy transfigured into the 
market society. 
What could possible go wrong.
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Re: The System Development Corporation

[David Garcia]

I imagine that Morlock’s original pithy statement of comparing activism to 
"grafitti on tanks” 
was an informed  re-mix of the old Mcluhan aphorism: 
"the content or message of any particular medium has about as much importance
as the stencilling on the casing of an atomic bomb”

The origin might be a clue that we are looking at something like
the good old  “The medium is the message” trope re-jigged for today’s 
rapidly changing internet, with Morlock (like Mcluhan) foregrounding 
“infrastructure” (instead of the medium) as the obligitory focus of our 
attention along with the 
suggestion that all other spaces of conscern and intervention are a futile 
distraction. 

This feels to me like a false dichotomy thats in danger of throwing too many 
babies out with the 
bath water. Dismissing activism and the politics of representation per se would 
be to dismis the “Me To” 
movement that is re-shaping feminsim for this generation,  the Black Lives 
Matter movement that is doing 
something similar for civil rights, to name but two social movements among many 
that again remind us 
that the battles for social justice are as urgent as ever. 

It is absurd to say that challenging the highly influential content of the 
memes carrying white supremacist 
and anti-feminist messages and sentiments are less important than investigating 
the dynamics of message 
board infrastructure.  They cannot be separated. The  infrastructures and the 
messages were intertwined and 
the activism that emerged did not simply “call the boss names”.. it played a 
role in facilitating the arrival of the boss who 
now sits in the White House. 

Addressing the platform politics of a hyperpartizan era are not entirely 
infrastuctural. The politics of representation and
the rise of the ant-feminst mannosphere was also a key part of the story. 

This is not to say that we must rush to the other extreme and neglect the 
importance of 
understanding and engaging in the shaping power of infrastructures and their 
platforms and devices
(including the infrastructure of government and the wider political economy). 

Morlock the knowledge and emphasis you make is vital and well made, but to make 
it the centre of all political gravity 
is in danger of producing a dangerous one dimensional formalism. The 
dichotomies you point to cannot be divided in 
so absolute a fashion. Its a one dimensional approach in an era when 
multi-dimensional thinking and acting is required. 

David Garcia



On 13 Mar 2018, at 23:26, Morlock Elloi <morlockel...@gmail.com> wrote:

> > What do you mean by "confronting on an infrastructure level" and
> > "liberating the infrastructure"? Sure, one thing is to understand the
> 
> 1. Requiring equal access to switches and fiber. Like cities (most so far) 
> cannot have private streets, and like Ma Bell was forced to provide phone 
> service to everyone, and anyone was able to call anyone, everyone should be 
> able to route and receive arbitrary packets. Not necessarily for free, but 
> comparable to lifeline phone service cost.
> 
> 2. Dispensing with asymmetric protocols that prevent addressability of most 
> of end users, leaving them at the mercy of 'providers'. IPv6 was supposed to 
> fix this, but it was properly subverted.
> 
> 3. Mandate data storage at the edge. It has absolutely nothing to do with 
> backups and availability - those are blatant lies. It's only about the power. 
> These days Internet users are in the similar position as migrant workers, 
> where the boss confiscates passports for 'safekeeping'.
> 
> and so on.
> 
> Those are the invisible chains. Without infrastructure changes the effects of 
> activism are limited to calling the boss names.
> 
> With (some of) the above implemented MAGAf cannot continue to exist. Their 
> existence is predicated on very material substrate, which is outside the 
> allowed discourse.
> 
> > Yasha Levine's new book, Surveillance Valley, does a very good job at
> > this, basically relating advertisement as the business model of the
> > present, to counter-insurgency as defined since the 1960s. They are both
> 
> 
> I just started reading it, so far it has one important quality: it's factual.
> 
> 
> -
> 
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Re: Reflections on Florian Cramer & Angela Nagle, discussion

[David Garcia]

Hi Florian, thanks to you and Angela Nagle for the fascinating discussion in 
Berlin.. I wish I had been present but at least we have the recording.. 

I take your point that you and Angela soon took the conversation away from 
sub-cultures and as you indicate in the paragraph below the focus is very much 
on transgression rather than sub-cultures per se, you wrote:

> If my memory doesn't fail me too badly, then both Angela Nagle and me tried 
> to focus more on the subject matter of transgression. Transgression isn't 
> exclusive to what is conventionally called "subculture" at all, but a 
> leitmotif in modernist and contemporary arts, in social, political, sexual 
> and media activism, to name only the most prominent areas. What both of us 
> tried to reconstruct is how transgression has never been an exclusive 
> property of the political left, but has been propagated and practiced on both 
> extremes of the political spectrum, or - better said - in discourses whose 
> politics were, often intentionally, ambivalent. Here, we both referred to 
> Sade as a forerunner (whose ambivalence of enlightenment and its other had 
> already been analyzed in Adorno's and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of 
> Enlightenment).  

The main point of transgression not being the property of the left or 
neccesarily the source of a progressive direction of travel is clear. 
But actually I think that Angela goes further than you when at a certain point 
in the discussion when she asks: 

"So the question for me on the sub-cultures question; are we to conclude that 
subcultures itself is just a neutral thing and that it can take on any 
political form?” My guess is her answer would be no...In the discussion you 
don’t take her up on this point..

 My guess is that her position is that transgression is not neutral but to be 
avoided is something Iconclude because in her book she argues that the 
fetishisation of transgression culminates in the 1960s counter-culture of 
Altamont and the Manson Murders which she asserts is the “logical culmination 
of throwing off the shackles of conscience and consciousness, the grim 
flowering of the id’s voodoo energies”. I suspect that the rise of the altright 
with 
all its occultist overtones (Kek etc) confirms this bias for her.   

I am interested in whether you are on the same page on this question as Angela 
on this..  ?

This is not a trivial question as the kind of answers we might give to this 
question will have profound effects on the way we do politics. 

Best

David

> 
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> 
> -- 
> I'm on diaspora*, a non-corporate social network: 
> https://social.gibberfish.org/people/a76da580ba9b01353317cb0b1a05
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Re: social media critique: next steps?

[David Garcia]

> Florian wrote: One could argue that today's mainstream social media critique 
> has finally caught up with the critical media theory of 10-15 years ago. 
The difference is that 10-15 years ago the unprecedented popularity of the 
social media platforms coupled with mobile 
devices was a long way off. Though clearly important digital cultures had not 
yet been mainstreamed by being 
universally integrated into every aspect daily life and thus a Durheimian 
“total social fact”. 

As Noortje Maares describes in (Digital Sociology) examples such as the 
Samaritan Radar debacle are just one of many instances 
of what happens when the the temporal boundaries between knowledge and 
intervention evaporate. The epistemic 
consequences of this particular boundary being eroded is profound and still 
poorly understood. We are going well  beyond Wendy Chun’s 
(admittedly very important) Control & Freedom interpretations (particularly -if 
I remember correctly- as this book now seems overly skeptical about 
the potential of Big Data analytics to exercise genuine control). 

Bruce Sterling is I think right to champion of high stakes Margaretha Vestager 
(times a thousand) institutional juridical/political interventions. As only
contiental scale attacks are capable of rattling the cages of the Silicon 
Valley Behemoths (thats why I am hostile to the position left wing 
Brexiteers in the UK -“Lexiteers"-). Again I agree with Bruce Sterling that 
making the alternatives “more glamerous and appealing” than
the existing platforms is vital or making them “Keuwle" in the Patrice argot. 
This will only happen if the dynamism and authenticity of on-line sub-cultures 
are part of 
the mix. When Patrice questions whether 'Scaling up' is the eternal dream of 
actionism is it realistic? I reply yes! As was so disturbingly well 
demonstrated by the success of the alt.right. So in that sense Patrice is bang 
on when he argues that “Good old political struggle in a new shape" is the way 
to go and thats why I continue to put some cautious hope in the rise and rise 
of an increasingly tech savvy Momentum (the UK Labor Party’s Corbyn supporting 
outfit) that could become a forum for addressing the power of platform 
capitalism. As Momentum appears to be squaring the circle of evolving a DIY 
mediatized politics with an understanding of the importance of also doing 
infrastructural politics. 

David Garcia

On 15 Jan 2018, at 19:16, Florian Cramer <flrnc...@gmail.com> wrote:

> One could argue that today's mainstream social media critique has finally 
> caught up with the critical media theory of 10-15 years ago. The major 
> arguments have already been made in, among others, Wendy Chun's "Control and 
> Freedom" from 2005. Today's social media critique is a simplified, moralizing 
> version of that earlier theory, much like Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves 
> to Death" was a simplified, moralizing, popularized version of McLuhan's 
> 1960s theory of electronic mass media.
> 
> Still, I see the need for a renewed critical social media critique; one that 
> shifts its focus from the politics of algorithms to what I'd propose to call 
> the condition of civil disengagement. No matter the algorithms and no matter 
> whether we use mainstream or alternative social media (such as diaspora, 
> Mastodon or Nettime), social media's ubiquity and unavoidability have created 
> a toxic and often dangerous environment for any kind of personal engagement. 
> Anyone who is involved in social or political activism, or even just blogging 
> (as the current case of German blogger Richard Gutjahr shows - 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqZiwRk1yLQ), faces severe personal risks, 
> among others through trolling, doxxing and cybermobbing. "Gamergate" set a 
> precedent that has become the standard. Most existing, available criminal 
> justice systems have proven to provide inadequate protection. (Both Zoe 
> Quinn's and Gutjahr's cases are textbook example; on Gutjahr, see his 
> [German] writeup: http://www.gutjahr.biz/2018/01/hatespeech/).
> 
> It means that no Chinese "social credit" algorithm is necessary to discourage 
> social engagement or political resistance. It is not even a question of 
> "better" algorithms - whether "better" algorithmic governance within existing 
> social networks or through the creation of "different"/alternative social 
> networks -, since the issue will remain, being one of an 'apparatus' or an 
> 'actor network' transcending binary distinctions of machinic and human 
> agency. (The question whether a troll is a human or a bot, isn't very 
> relevant.) 
> 
> Articulation of positions [including artist's positions outside self-chosen 
> safe spaces] is rapidly becoming a privilege of those who can afford their 
> 

Re: Locating ArtScience

[David Garcia]

Brian wrote
> 
> Like Eric, and to Steve's bemusement, I'm influenced by Bruno Latour. The 
> best way to say why is to recall a scene from an interview made perhaps two 
> years ago for the French Ministry of the Environment, which pictures Latour 
> sitting on an indoor chair outside his country home saying something like: 
> "At least the war has finally begun. It was terrible, for so long, the Phony 
> War (*la Drole de Guerre*). But now it's good. The war has started." So what 
> in the hell does he mean by that one?
> 
> 


I have found Latour’s suggestion in "Pandora’s Hope” very helpful of 
substituting the 
concept of science with research . He argues that this would have the effect of 
rendering practices we call science less cold, less aloof and distant; less 
likely to 
act as if it were disconnected from the collective.

This shift he asserts would result in something more uncertain and open ended; 
an alternative to the "purifying practices of modernity”. Something similar was 
introduced into
art by Feminists artists of the 70s who were among the earliest to critique the 
purifying practices 
of modernity in art (sometimes called formalism). This turn generated new 
hybridities that have been 
further productively complicated by the emergence of the category of the 
artist/researcher. 

Perhapse the dynamic nature of these hybridities (reflecting Eric’s important 
distinction between 
intersectionality and interdsicciplinarity).

While we are on the subject of Latour..
here is a terrific review of, Facing Gaia: 8 Lectures on the new climate 
regime..

http://www.publicbooks.org/we-have-never-known-mother-earth/


David Garcia


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Re: Brexit democracy

[David Garcia]

On 13 Nov 2017, at 09:21, Alex Foti  wrote


> The problem of the revolutions of 2011 is that they failed to produce durable 
> organization and to use their term institutions of the common, save for 
> limited success on the municipalist front. Now that nazi-populism is 
> successfully using movement tactics to growing popular consensus, the need 
> for a new dual labor and political strategy and organization is more needed 
> than ever.


> While in the old anglo-saxon center of neoliberalism, socialism works as a 
> political strategy and social unionism as a labor strategy (labor markets are 
> tightening and wage increases and union wins are becoming more frequent), 
> e.g. corbyn's new old labor and sanders' dsa, in continental europe the 
> official left is disappearing and there is no ready alternative at hand 
> against national populism ….


In Brighton (September 2017) The World Transformed- 
https://theworldtransformed.org/ is a kind of political fringe festival of art, 
media and activism that runs in parralel to the annual Labour party conference. 
It tookplace in multiple venues across the city. The point here is that it was 
organised by Momentum the pro-Corbyn pressure group. And the event was 
absolutely packed with radical ideas were being tested and protyped. It even 
included a session on how to deal with “capital flight” from the UK in the 
event of a Corbyn victory that was being trialed by none other than the shadow 
chancelor himself on the panel! This would have been inconceivable under the 
centrism of the past and it certainly made headlines. TWT was where the real 
action was happening not in the conf itself. Even though Momentum had a bespoke 
app to mobilise its Labour party members in an instant to shuttle to the main 
conf ensure the votes went Corbyn’s way. So here we see tactical media "folk 
politics” working hand in hand with institutional power. 

Obviously it connects to Alex’s comments because if one dared to be optimistc 
the Momentum model suggests that something might have been learned since  “the 
failure of the revolutions of 2011 to produce durable organisation..” (Alex). 
as Momentum is connected to the Labor Party but not PART OF the Labour party. 
Its a classic grass roots social movement (what Srnicek and Williams) call 
disparagingly “folk politics” whilst also being willing to engage with 
institutional power and so able to scale up and consolidate its acquired 
advantages. Of course this only works because Corbyn himself is someone who 
mirrors these developments as he is someone who has for decades been commited 
to protest based social movements as well as being a conscientious (and 
rebellious) MP. Its this genuine and rare hybridity that connects the movement 
to the individual and is one of the things we might mean by “authenticity”.. 


-
- foot-note- The Labour/Momentum election campaign of 2017 learned a lot from 
the tactics of the Alt.righ/Bannon's tactics for Trump. In terms of connecting 
an on-line grass roots social movement to the aim of capturing of institutional 
power and creating ideological change in a political party. They both deploy 
hyper-partizan social media tactics to bypass what was seen as a mainstream 
media that would never give either Trump or Corbyn a hearing..(Let Corbyn be 
Corbyn worked as it did for "let Trump be Trump") Also both campaigns 
re-imagined the old fashioned political rally as a “media event” and far more… 
 





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Re: Brexit democracy

[David Garcia]

Thanks to Patrice for the posting 

For the record I am and remain a Remain Voter and will continue to fight for a 
reversal of what I believe will be a nihilistic decision that will curb the 
life chances of future generations. But the narrative of the piece posted by 
Patrice carries the underlying belief that the referendum was a “fix” built 
wholly on the lies distortions of the Brexiteers. Though correct in many 
details is false in the larger sense of failing to capture the spirit and depth 
of what really went on. 

Belief in the power of media manipulation alone is itself naif and 
underestimates the social pressures, histories. In fact all sides attempted to 
manipulate the argument. There are no innocent parties here. Cameron government 
put the full weight of the state’s machinery and the business establishment 
behind its campaign to mobilsie opinion and it failed ! To take just one wholly 
undemocratic example it used government information money to disseminate huge 
quantities of what was effectively Remain propaganda through people’s virtual 
and actual letterboxes.

Moreover actual participation in the event was large and has dwarfed the usual 
turn out at elections. Brexit was part of everyday discussion in ways that have 
never been the case in my life-time so as a manifestation of “demos” I think 
there was something to celebrate. The other night on the train home I got into 
an argument with a group of Brexit voting builders about their belief that the 
NHS was being ruined by “health tourism” from Europe (this is nonsense the NHS 
can’t survive without European labor at all levels). But beyond the particulars 
ofthe argument there was a passionate sense of ownership that these guys felt 
for THEIR Brexit decision. The discussion went back and forth it was heated. 
Those surrounding us many in the carriage took off their head phones and 
listened intently and chipped in. But what struck me was how it all remained 
very good humored. We had all stepped outside of our bubble. I don’t think 
either side made any converts. But we parted with hand-shakes all round and 
sheepish grins to others in the carriage. It made me think that this is how we 
have to start by listening hard and sticking with the detail of the arguments 
in all their complexities and never sinking to ad hominem smears or the pseudo 
explanations of conspiracy theories. I continue to argue with people whenever I 
get the chance. I have never done this before. 

We Remainers must come to terms with the huge and rare sense of political 
agency that winning this referendum gave to many who in most cases feel 
powerless in the world of “subsistence managerialism” ( a term lifted from 
articulate pro-brexit blogger Pete North).Sure there were conspiracies but they 
were on al sides and so marginal in their impact. The desire of a large part of 
the population for Brexit can’t simply be dismissed as an aberration brought 
about by a willey, shadowy network of Brexiteers. 
The success of the slogan ‘Take Back Control” is cruscial to understand it 
speaks to the profound loss of agency that so many of us feel and how for many 
the capacity to disrupt politics as usual gave Brexit voters a sense of power. 
I am tempted to say fleeting.. but its not.. they still feel the echoes of that 
rush of blood. I am of course convinced that the though the truth will take a 
while to sink in but the hang over will be a price not worth the paying. But 
confirmation bia (on all sides) is a powerful fact of political life. Does 
anyone out there on the list have a slogan that we Remainers can deploy as 
effectively.. The only (lame) suggestion I have heard is “Take Back Control” - 
based on the fact that we have not gained control but lost it.. swapped it for 
an alternative box full of abstract nouns like “sovereignty"   

Sometimes Psychology trumps both politics and economics. We are an off-shore 
island with a semie detached relationship to a large powerful continent. Many 
brits have struggled over 40 years to feel the sense of collective affinity 
required to be part of any European convergence. It is not simply political, 
that narrow stretch of water means that our island psychology has given rise to 
a sense of island exceptionalism, making us poor partners - The particular 
British/English psychology was recognised 50 odd years ago by de Gaulle and was 
a key reason he gave for blocking our early attempts to join what was then the 
Common Market". He believed we would never fit in. We may learn from our 
mistakes and future generations may have a change of heart (there are signs of 
this) but for now, sadly.. very sadly de Gaulle may have been right. 

David Garcia

> 
> Brexit: Democracy robbery?
> 
> 
> 
> It is increasingly surprising that this vote, whose anti-European camp was 
> largely financed by a handful of English and foreign plutocrats who had in 
> mind a profound transformation 

Reckless Boat Burning

[David Garcia]

Like Cortez burning his boats to make it impossible to take a backward step the 
nihilistic kamikaze UK brexiteers are fighting tooth and nail to close off 
every exit. 
This is not based on confidence in their position it is because they know that 
with every passing day it is becoming increasingly clear that the price will be 
much much higher than they ever let on in the campaign and so they are doing 
their utmost to make retreat from this disaster impossible. 
Evidence, rational argument and the economic interests of those they claim to 
represent are as nothing compared with realisation of a reckless obsession, 
that is destroying their party and their country. whilst accusing all who 
oppose them of being "unpatriotic".. laughable!
If you want the peek behind the veil then read this from a Brexiter who is 
actively celebrating the coming "10 year recession" (actually it will be far 
longer) because we are "spoiled" 
http://peterjnorth.blogspot.co.uk/…/i-dont-like-this-brexit… …

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New "thought rhythms'

[David Garcia]

New "thought rhythms'- announce the fact that Rock (including Punk) is dead. 

The old rhymes of largely white indy (largely white) guitar bands superseded by 
Hip Hop and Grime.. 
As my kids grow up I realise that though I can hear that the UK movement Grime 
and US Hip Hop 
are powerful .. on some level honestly.. deep in my bones.. I just don't get it 
yet. I'm stuck in the past. 

This sensation was summed up in recent essay by Martin Amis who asserts that it 
is natural that older 
writers should find younger writers irritating because younger writers are 
sending them an un-welcome message ..
they are saying its not like that anymore its like this”.. he goes on that in 
the present context “that and this” can be 
loosely described as the –thought rhythms- peculiar to the time-.. I love the 
term "thought rhythms".. It crystallises 
what we respond to in writing and indeed any art form. As implicit in the 
"thought rhythms” peculiar to any era are the 
distinctive values, moral, social and aesthetic.. And is it too pessimistic for 
me to feel that when they move on they 
move on they leave previous generations floundering or worse still faking an 
appreciation they don't actually feel. 

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You Want it Darker..he kills the flame

[David Garcia]

You Want it Darker.. He kills the flame. 
-Is this the point when Liberalism becomes a fighting creed?

Stephen King has no monopoly on evil clowns. We Brits can certainly compete 
with 
Boris Johnson, a kind of inverted vampire clown (he shrivels when out of the 
spotlight). 

Buried in his mischievous 4000 word article for the conservative daily the 
Telegraph 
was a paragraph on what he describes as -split allegiances- that made my blood 
run cold. 

The phrase goes to the heart of the Brext debate and the re-assertion of 
nationalism with its 
fixed and singular identies. It suggests that we must place nation (blood and 
belonging) above 
all else. here is the offending paragraph. 

- "I used to look at the Brussels bumper stickers saying -Mon patrie, c’est 
Europe- and think it 
was a bit of a laugh, and that they would never engender a genuine 
Euro-patriotism, or compete
with people’s natural feelings for their own country. I have to say that I am 
now not so sure. I think 
I was complacent. I look at so many young people with the 12 stars lipsticked 
on their faces and I
am troubled with the thought that people are begining to have genuinely split 
allegiances."-

This is a world view that denies the inevitability of multiple allegiances 
asking us to choose or be 
labled unpatriotic. I am being asked to choose whether I am more Jewish, or 
European than British.. 

Johnson’s speaks for many in the Tory party as we witnessed at last year’s 
Party Conference address 
by Theresa May declared that - if you think you are a citizen of the world 
you're a citizen of nowhere- 

There is a chilling echo here of the Russian anti-Semitic campaign after World 
War II in which Stalinist 
theatre critics created the term -rootless cosmopolitans- to describe Jewish 
intellectuals. It also reminds 
us that the classical liberal’s position of deliberative tolerance which 
asserts that we must listen carefuly 
to the arguments of our adversaries as a way of testing the truth of our own 
position puts the classical 
liberal at a permanent disadvantage. There comes a time when even liberalism 
must become a fighting 
creed.  





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Re: Up with moderation

[David Garcia]

Many thanks to the Mods.. 

On 19 Aug 2017, at 04:12, Morlock Elloi  wrote:

> Agree on both items.
> 
> a) Cheers!
> 
> b) The moderators need to be coerced back, by any means, to clunky and 
> imperfect moderation.
> 
>> As moderation arguably allowed nettime to survive as a discursive community 
>> for twenty years - and continue outliving itself today - I say, three cheers 
>> for the mods!
>> 
>> And up with moderation.
>> 
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Re: Who said the US is boring?

[David Garcia]

As cracks appear in the neo-liberal paradigm and market fundementalism falters 
(even in the UK Tory party where Brexit flys in the face
of what neo-liberal business wants).. we must be wary of seeing “public 
ownership” as an unalloyed -good-. State (or public) entites can 
quite easily become self reproducing interest groups, lobbying on behalf of 
themselves as effectively as any corporation. Anyone who has 
had to deal regularly with public institutions will know that they do not 
always serve the best interests of the public. 

As the paradigm shifts away from market fundementalism to the various 
alternatives it may be good to keep on remembering this. The pendulum
cannot simply swing back to earlier forms of state ownership without a 
fundemental re-imaging of what that means for our every day lives. We may 
be moving away from the world in which we are always seen as a customer rather 
than a citizen, a patient, a student or a passenger. But being 
re-categorised is no guarantee of being better looked after, or that our best 
interests will be served.   

David Garcia

On 17 Aug 2017, at 07:05, Keith Hart <ke...@thememorybank.co.uk> wrote:

> Brian,
>  
> Thanks once more for your stimulating perspective on the political crisis. I 
> have tried to boil down my take on that crisis, without yet proposing 
> possible initiatives, which will in any case be contingent and perhaps more 
> local than previously imagined.
>  
> Market fundamentalism is at the crossroads. We are entering a global paradigm 
> shift comparable to that of 1979/80, when a world revolution led by 
> development states after 1945 was overthrown by a neoliberal 
> counter-revolution that is itself now under threat. The freedom of capital to 
> flow everywhere has subordinated politics to markets for decades. No-one runs 
> for office on a programme of increased state intervention today.
>  
> Thatcher’s mantra (“there is no alternative”) was confirmed when the parties 
> of the centre-left made a Faustian compact with finance capital in the 90s. I 
> identify the social forces now undermining neoliberal globalization, in the 
> light of recent political developments in the current and former imperial 
> powers: Trump’s presidency, Macron’s improbable rise and May’s snap election.
>  
> The American Empire has supervised a rigid international regime comparable to 
> the British Empire’s gold standard.  In both cases market fundamentalism 
> (Polanyi’s “self-regulating market”) outlawed protectionist measures and 
> marginalized the state’s economic role. This monolithic ideology has suddenly 
> sprung two versions, with a xenophobic nationalism that combines limited 
> market freedom and protection challenging the cosmopolitan universalism of 
> the transnational corporations. As a result, the West has fallen into a moral 
> panic fuelled by an escalating division between those who want to leave the 
> world and those who embrace it.
>  
> Responses to Trump’s reactionary white supremacy, along with the surprising 
> French and British elections, suggest that neoliberal hegemony may be 
> cracking and a swing back to state intervention, whether fascist or 
> Keynesian, is now more likely than at any time in the last four decades. 
> National politics is back on the agenda.
> 
> Best,
>  
> Keith
> 
> On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 6:59 AM, Frederic Neyrat <fney...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear Brian,
> 
> Like you, I don't see any organization able to do this coup. But what seems 
> to me very important is to understand that, IF there is a strategy at stake 
> in Trump's politics, this is not a democratic one
>  
> 
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Nagle's Question..

[David Garcia]

Referencing Angela Nagle’s short piece for the Baffler -Goodbye Pepe-The End of 
the alt-right- 

Nagle (that most astute chronicler and interpreter of the dynamics behind the 
rise of the alt-right) 
has written piece on how Charlottesville and the death of Heather Heyer, marks 
the end of a significant phase of 
the alt.right, foreclosing the ironic dodges tactical ambiguity that has been 
their stock in trade- e.g.flirt with Nazism 
but then to laugh at anyone who took these gestures at face value-.. 

But for me the heart of the piece lies in the following question:

- At a tragic moment like this, few will want to take a step back and ask the 
genuinely difficult questions.
What is it about the alt-right that has captured the imagination of so many 
young people and at least 
intrigued a great many more ? And if it is true that the commited alt—right 
becomes more isolated but more 
militant, what will become of all those young people-especially the young men 
who have been radicalised by
the alt-right’s ideas and never convinced otherwise? What will be the 
real-world consequences of forcing such
figures out of their semi-ironic anonymous on-line fantasy land, and 
potentially thrusting the into a toxic flirtation
with violent of-line tactics ? -

For us to discuss...

Full text- 
https://thebaffler.com/latest/goodbye-pepe?utm_content=bufferc39b1_medium=social_source=twitter.com_campaign=buffer
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Re: [spectre] the EU's first rogue state

[David Garcia]

So Patrice… shouldn't the anti-democratic neo-liberal structures of the EU, 
that actually forbid radical 
socialist restructuring and are able to enforce these strictures by means of 
what Varoufakis called 
“fiscal waterboarding” give us some pause for thought? 

This leftist scepticism on the constraints that belonging to the EU club puts 
on the possibility for implementing 
radical socialist (or even social democratic) agendas might help to explain 
Corbyn’s lack luster campaign to Remain 
(however he tries to spin it). To Corbyn supporters on the list I would argue 
that the reason (despite all the protestations) 
we know it was lack-luster is because it is now clear what a great national 
campaigner he is when his heart is in it. 

This puts many Corbyn supporters who are also committed Europeans in a bind. We 
saw Franco Barardi’s 
anger expressed in his withdrawl from Diem in response to the pitiful response 
of the EU to the terrible migration crisis. But retreating 
behind socialist versions of nationalist silos or premature internationalist 
dreams, are no answer to either the human emergency 
of mass migration or the EU’s institutions structural democratic deficit.   

The UK’s imminent social, generational and economic pain that is already 
accompanying Brexit.. will give other members of the club fair 
warning of what is at stake when we teare the house down with only a rickety 
tent made of abstract nouns (sovereinty and control) to move into. 

Probably the warning that our local plight will send will be good rest of 
Europe. But for us living in the UK..not so much. My fear is that
the lesson the EU will learn will be to run back to Mutti and Macron’s status 
quo. Seriously that is the wrong lesson..


On 10 Aug 2017, at 08:50, Patrice Riemens  wrote:

> That's a point of view. But unfortunately Hungary doesn't provide as much 
> comic relief as the Disunited Kingdom, it's totally deflated PM, it's 
> rightwingers going at each other's throats, and the whole country generally 
> slowly descending in the social and economic meltdown that the unavoidable 
> 'Hard Brexit' promises to deliver. Never ming the howls of laughter in the 
> Brussels Commission corridors at the perspective of lengthily torturing that 
> political entity that made them suffer for so long. De Gaulle was right about 
> the UK 'elite', and he must enjoy the spectacle from his heavenly abode ...
> 
> 
> On 2017-08-09 12:06, heath bunting wrote:
>> nothing compared to uk
>> On Wed, 2 Aug 2017, János Sugár wrote:
>>> Is Hungary the EU's first rogue state?
>>> http://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2017/08/hungary-eus-first-rogue-state-viktor-orban-and-long-march-freedom
>>> __
>>> SPECTRE list for media culture in Deep Europe
>>> Info, archive and help:
>>> http://post.in-mind.de/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/spectre
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Re: The alt-right and the death of counterculture

[David Garcia]

Felix Stalder wrote..

> 
> Looking back, the shortcomings of the approaches "emanating out of
> Amsterdam", say tactical media in particular and, but the cultural/media
> left more generally, seem to be twofold, in my view.
> 
> First, while the intuition about the necessity to interrupt the normal
> flows of communication was correct and has proofed to be very powerful
> since, there was no idea what do in the space that would thus be opened
> up. We could have used the time when the system was relatively stable to
> think about this, but we didn't. Now, the the system is falling apart,
> the far right is capable of imposing an even darker version of disaster
> capitalism.

> There has been very little interest in offering points of translation,

> that is, to think about how people who are not in the same circuit could
> appropriate and transform for their own use, the insights they find in
> the theoretical perspective one offers.


I am trying to get a sense of what is really at stake in these discussions.. 
what the underlying 
continuities as well as big changes that make these questions of 
counter-cultures and the new
autonomous zones of message boards and meme wars seem important rather than a 
trivial 
side show. 

The big change from the 1990s is the way internet and digital cultures (in 
large areas of the world)
are now fully inserted into and thus inseparable from daily life. The full 
impact of the web 2.0 revolution 
and the rise of the platform era is quite simply the -mainstreaming- of digital 
cultures. 

In this context it is nonsense to see work on the political, cultural and 
epistemic impact of these changes 
as a marginal obsession of -a self-selecting group geeks.. the continued 
development of earlier agendas 
of the cypher punks around anonymity, surveillance, autonomy, and agency as a 
necessity for creating 
wider progressive change has increased not decreased in urgency. Digital 
cultures have become quite simply a
-Total Social Fact- [Noortje Maares-Digital Sociology]. 

This -insertiability- of the digital cultures into all aspects of life is the 
foundation for both the success of these 
platforms and devices as well as the basis of monopolistically inclined 
business models that Nick Srnicek 
has called platform capitalism in active combination with the surveillance 
state. 

Coming to grips with this problem is more subtle than it is sometimes 
portrayed. The tricky point lies in understanding
that what constitutes actual participation and what differentiates these 
cultures from all that preceded it. 

Participation is not as it is sometimes portrayed -the difference between -the 
passive audience 
and the active engaged participants or users-. No, a traditional audience (or 
public) can be as active and 
highly engaged as anyone else. The key point of difference is that engagement 
in the case of an -audience- 
is invisible. The engagement of an audience is invisible because it is not 
-traceable-. And without traceability  
there can be no -feedback-. No feedback means no participation. 

This was de Certeau’s observation long ago and why he saw consumption as 
invisible co-creation with an asymmetric 
balance of power. And observed the presence of silent invisible networks of 
resistance that he called tactical.

It is this necessary traceability on which participation depends that has been 
opportunistically seized upon as the 
business models and the new forms of exploitation and value extraction we know 
as platform capitalism which when combined 
with state surveillance squats like a toad atop of what could still become a 
post capitalist culture of contribution. 

The -insertion- of this model of digital cultures into the everyday life 
accounts for both its success and also sub-cultural 
resistance that demands the right to anonymity and the need for unregulated 
spaces. It is the need for these spaces that 
accounts for the huge popularity of message bodes like 4chan where registration 
is not required and anonymity is an expedient 
that morphed into an ethos and then into a movement whose potential has only 
begun. 

Back in 2012 Gabriella Coleman wrote a journal article reflecting on the 
research she had been doing since 2008 
on the formative role of 4chan's random page in the emergence of Anonymous in 
which she asks -how has the anarchic 
hate machine of (Fox News’s epithet for Anonymous) been transformed into one of 
the most adroit and effective political 
operations of recent times ? - Now in 2017 we need to invert the question and 
ask how did the platform that gave rise to 
-the most adroit and effective political operation- spawned the even more 
adroit and effective operation Alt.right ? And 
more pertinently why was this once progressive domain ceded so much to the 
right.. why was there not a more effective 
fightback. why no equally powerful alt.left?   
  
The white supremacist trolls and nazi meme warriors may have had an exaggerated 
belief 

Re: Why I won't support the March for Science

[David Garcia]

 3) Just as opposition against Trump creates false solidarity with
 neoliberals, opposition against climate change-denying, creationist etc.
 politics can create false solidarity with a Popperian understanding of
 research and knowledge. (Coincidentally, Popper's philosophy provided
 the point of departure for both, scientific neo-positivism and
 political-economic neo-liberalism.)

Hi Florian, I think it is too simple to reduce Karl Popper's philosphy
of science based on the principal of "falsifiability" with which he
challenged the narrow verificationism of the logical positivists, as
neo-positivist or as foundational to neo-liberalism. A charge much truer
of the  logical positivists.

In some ways I see him, as a neo Kantian with a strong sense of the
necessary limits of human knowledge and that this led to a position that
science though better than superstition worship could only ever tell us
more and more about what we do not know.

I take this to be an approach to knowledge founded on perpetual doubt
and the humility to, whenever possible, be willing test one's beliefs,
and if required admit it when we get things wrong..

Far from neo-liberalism that seeks to create structures (including
aspects of the EU) that limit the reach and traction of democracy
(particularly in economic policy) Popper was staunch in his belief that
only democracy provided the framework of opposition and the means to
peacefully remove goverments and was thus the closest politics could
come to the scientific (in the ideal case) willingness to submit ones
ideas to scrutiny and review by those with opposing views.

Best

David

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Re: Phillips/Beyer/Coleman: "false assumption that

[David Garcia]

Hi, there is a very informative essay published a month ago on Motherboard by 
Whitney Phillips, Jessica Beyer and 
Gabriella Coleman with the rather long title Trolling Scholars debunk the Idea 
that Alt.right’s Shitposters have Magic Powers.

These three ethnographic researchers have been squatting on the message boards 
and gathering data for years
which (along with their substative arguments) means their views on these 
subjects should be taken seriously.

Despite the suggestion in the title of “debunking” Alt.right’s power they are 
persuasive job suggesting that although not decisive 
the contribution to the Trump victory neither was their influence entirely 
negligible as -alt.right’s shitposting, flooding social media with 
memes and commentary designed to bolster their God Emperor Trump, raised public 
visibility of alt.right and this uptick in public visibility 
forced people to focus on Trump more than they would have done otherwise 
reaching critical mass when Clinton held a press 
conference (precipiated by Pepe the Frog) denouncing Trump’s ties to White 
nationalists much to the delight of the white nationalists. 

So -they go on -without a doubt, this speech and all the alt-right activity 
that preceded it contributed to the overal momentum of Trump’s 
campaign-  So as Felix suggested it was not THE decisive factor neither should 
its influence be underestimated. The prominent role played 
by alt.right Trolls has to be connected to the wider media ecology of the 
mainstream journalistic coverage that amplified their coverage. 

The most significant media related story to extract all of this is best 
outlined in Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts and Ethan Zukerman’s   
in Columbia Journalism Review arguing that a variety of far right media were 
extremely successful in setting the narrative agenda for mainstream 
media outlets. In all of this the alt.right meme warriors are -just one nasty 
cloud in a gathering storm racing towards mainstream media- and fataly 
undermining their Limpanesque capacity to manufacture consent.  

The question B) More interesting is the second question: Is there something 
inherently alt-right in Anonymous?  Is also tackled in some depth by
Coleman et al but conclude that the relationshp between alt-right “trolling” to 
4Chan and Anonymous as no more or less than a subset of a faction 
of an ever-evolving, ever unstable, ever reactive anonyous online collective…

Only one thing is clear to me in the fog of meme wars and ever more dubious 
narratives around post-truth and alt.fact, is that the frequently despised 
discipline of -media literacy- needs to be urgently recuperated and updated.


---

d a v i d  g a r c i a
d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk
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http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net






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Martin Bosma the Steve Bannon ofthe Netherlands

[David Garcia]

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


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Re: Armin Medosch (1962-2017)

[David Garcia]

Sadly not in Berlin.. But also the same HUG!


---

d a v i d  g a r c i a







On 24 Feb 2017, at 12:15, Shulea  wrote:



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will someone explain

[David Garcia]

Will one of the American nettimers take a few moments to explain
something to a constitutional ignoramous such as myself.

For those of us outside of the long standing narrative put about is that
the US constitution is so cunningly constructed with -checks and
balences- so as to ensure that the President can never be a
dictator/king/emperor.

And yet it appears (at least froma distance) that he is able through
this instrument called -executive orders- to do whatever he likes. Can
someone explain this apparent contradiction. Has he (or Bannon)
introduced in his campaign (and now in government) the political
equivalent of Blitzkrieg in which the sheer speed and number of
initiatives create panic and confusion in his enemies?

Where, if any, are the lilekly constraints and when, if at all, will
they be able to actually constrain?

David Garcia

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Re: 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump

[David Garcia]

Thank you Ian for these cogent thoughts..

I have one question for you:

Is you 10th thesis calling for a revolution without using the word. 
If so why not? Why avoid the word? Has it become tarnished by 
carrying too much historical baggage ? Or does te word simply 
not cover what it is you are trying to say?

I am asking this question in the light of a panel you were on in 
Amsterdam last Sunday when Steve Kurtz of Critical Arts Ensemble 
pointed out that in all of the many excellent presentations no one had 
once used the word revolution?

I suspect that the insurgent Right have no such qualms.. Any thoughts 
on this ?

David  Garcia   


> 
>   10. The present crisis being virtually ushered in by Trump must be met
>   with a crisis of our own making.
> 
>   As things increasingly disintegrate, it will not be possible to remake
>   what has become undone. Awash in a world without limits or meaning, a
>   place where the possibility of life itself has become threatened by the
>   possibilities unleashed under capitalism, the only way out may be to
>   introduce a crisis of a different kind, one that posits a fundamentally
>   different register of possibility. In the playful invention of new
>   repertoires, in the forging of new collectivities, in the
>   experimentation with new practices of living, perhaps something else,
>   something otherwise can begin. In the coming years, it will be our task
>   to make possible that which cannot be under capitalism.


<...>


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Re: The Meme Wars

[David Garcia]

Thank you Chris for the link…

>  An explication of your statement would
> prove productive:


>> On a related note, I think that an important part of this discussion
>> will be to challenge the shallow discourse of "fake news" and 
>> "post-truth” which only serves to set up a smoke screen covering the
>> "actual dynamics at play, though others may dis-agree. 
> 



I’ll give it a shot.. hopefully others can do better..

I believe that the term Post -Truth is the expression of a one wing of the 
political and media establisment, who fear they are 
losing their grip on power. Many (particularly those in science based 
industries) have failed to recognise that we have 
moved from an era in which risk was calculable to one of radical uncertainty  
(U.Beck). Black Swan times (Taleb) Kontrolverlust 
(M. Seammann).unknown unknowns (D. Rumsfeld) etc.. Volkswagon have shown 
how adept this sector can be at managing 
truth/evidence. They one end of a spectrum of these kinds of practices that are 
rife.

The language of science, not the actuality of systematically applied doubt, but 
a technocratic rhetoric 
has dominated our phase of modernity, through neo liberal economics (the dismal 
science) and its hand-maiden, neo-managerial 
audit culture.. armed with weaponised -grey media- (M.Fuller).. gantt charts, 
excel spread sheets and power points, seek to protect their 
hegemony by drawing on the authority on models from another age that no longer 
work in a boarderless world - Its sometimes difficult 
but Foucault’s suspiscious view on the constructedness of all social knowledge 
categories still works for me.  

The mass revolt taking place against this technocracy has taken the equally 
dubious form of “authenticism” (for me a better term than 
populism). Its power is drawn from another kind of truth claim based on the 
pose of the outsider (the Ancient Mariner, the ultimate party 
crasher) with gut feeling for the -deep story- and uninterested in the small 
minded fact checkers. (I hate Hitler comparisons but ..decorated 
war hero.. not a member of the officer class..). For the authenticist even the 
worst behaviour and character flaws come accross as fearless 
expressions of their authenitc nature- a truth higher than fact. It is as vital 
to expose the authenticist -straight talking truth to power schtick- 
as another rhetorical pose. Just as much so as the technocrat’s claim that they 
have the key to truth. Both positions need to be exposed and 
resisted as a power struggle between different wings of the establishment. 

Of course we might argue that what we must learn from the victory of alt.right 
meme magicians is that exposure of the workings of power is a poor 
substitute for taking power. 
 
David Garcia



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The Meme Wars

[David Garcia]

The Meme Wars 

Although it has not been flagged up on the list I am sure that many will 
already know 
that just over a month ago the writer and researcher Florian Cramer gave a 
lecture  
in which he shared his extensive research into little known factors influencing 
the rise of Alt.right. 

The force of his lecture was such as to throw down the gauntlet to the left to 
regain the initiative on 
the influential message board sub-cultures where a new generation of 
charismatic and educationally 
privilged white supremacists were actually succeeding in making facism “cool”.  
 

The lecture did not need to resort to hyperbole. It was chilling enough as a 
detailed mapping of the 
emergence of a large white supremacist sub-culture. He succeeded in shining a 
light on the complex 
origins of the cultist language and image codes that had evolved on the so 
called message/image boards.

What separates Cramer’s work from that of other reserachers working in a 
similar area is his 
emphasis on the importance of the cultural and media dimension by taking the 
role of meme culture 
seriously. And showing alt.right's emergence and growth on the message/image 
boards, particularly 4Chan 
and later 8Chan, along with the ways it had succeeded in creating a subteranean 
groundswell that has 
to some degree succeeded in making facism fashionable (or Fashy as alt.right 
call it). 

Cleverly these groups have connected the popular Pepe the Frog meme to both 
Trump (as Lord of 
mis-rule) and to Kek - the Egyptian God of chaos, thereby providing a kind of 
ocultist glamour to the 
movement and further spicing up the noxious brew with additional cultist 
terminlogy such as 
"meme magic”. 

All of this would be laughable if it had not been so successful. Moreover there 
is aparently no equivalent 
sub-cultural energy on the left.. where once memes such as the Anonymous V 
Victory -Guy Fawks, 
masks were everywhere, the anarchist/left has been strangely absent in the US 
meme wars of 2016, whilst 
alt.right has succeeded in transforming the spectacle of protest into the 
reality of power. 

Now I want to get a bit personal.  I have been involved in co-organising an 
exhibition on the “media 
artist as trickster”..“fiction as method”.. opening in Amsterdam next week.  As 
show that has been in development 
for more than a year. But (from one perspective) these tricksters had (on the 
surface) been completely outflanked by 
alt.right. And when I asked Florian whether he knew of any leftist meme 
magicians that we could include he declared 
that he could not. And added that in his view, this deficit represents a very 
real problem. 

So nettimers is there anyone out there who knows any better ? Can anyone 
suggest the sources of a possible 
meme inflected counterblast? In the mean time we are using the platforms of 
this touring exhibition and related events to 
pragmatically build on Florian's research looking for a way forward in 
identifying or even contributing to any possible counterbalst 
to alt. rights current dominannce. Meme Labs in other words. Hopefully other 
more embedded initiatives that are organically 
based within existing message board culture will emerge. Hopefully they already 
have!

On a related note, I think that an important part of this discussion will be to 
challenge the shallow discourse of "fake news" and 
"post-truth” which only serves to set up a smoke screen covering the actual 
dynamics at play, though others may dis-agree. 

As well as Florian’s talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w94mQjxHkRs

let me also recomend Dr. Mark Tuters who is developing a program of empirical 
research in
 this area with Florian and an extended lecture ca be found here:
 http://webcolleges.uva.nl/Mediasite/Play/e85747560dc643e89519141c77bcedcc1d. 

And lets not forget Susan Sontag Essay Fascinating Facism (1975): 
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/02/06/fascinating-fascism/

If any of you are around in Amsterdam next Thursday Jan 20th 10.00hrs -13.oo 
hrs and would like to join us please 
register at: E-mail: meme-...@hotmail.com


Thanks

David Garcia



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Re: John_Berger (5 November 1926 - 2 January 2017)

[David Garcia]

Perhaps John Berger’s closest equivalent in the US is Susan Sontag. They were 
friends perhaps linked by 
being uncompromising public intellectuals operating in cultures generaly 
unsympathetic to intellectuals (though
Berger made his home in rural France). Both were also ambitious novelists who 
are in the end better remembered 
for essays and extended essays. 

Sontag’s On Photography and Berger’s Ways of Seeing could be productively read 
back to back for the way they overlap
and differ. 
The novelistic ambition is a key to the appeal of their writing along with an 
ability to transcribe and build on the ideas of 
central European intellectuals from Benjamin to Barthes without ever seeiming 
like mere popularisers. They offered an important 
set of keys with which to enter new worlds and explore for ourselves.
Berger routinely reffered to himself as a "story teller” and many of Sontag’s 
greatest essays exhibit the same quality 
and is part of the secret of their continued popular appeal. Below is a link to 
a conversation between the two friends 
discussing the role and importance of story telling and perhaps even touching 
on the dangers of the narrative fallacy, as 
the desire to turn everything into a story is as likely to distort as to 
clarify.

I miss them both but continue to hear their voices in the work they leave 
behind (present tense intentional) 

http://www.openculture.com/2017/01/john-berger-rip-and-susan-sontag-take-us-inside-the-art-of-storytelling-1983.html
 

David Garcia
---






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Re: [SPAM] PTS post trump syndrome - the suicide of the west

[David Garcia]

Brian wrote
> 
> One thing stands out to me: Bernie Sanders could have swept last
> night's election. The establishment consensus of the hypocritical
> oligarchies has to be cleared entirely away, in favor of a new
> social-democratic populism with the governing capacities required to
> transform complex and highly stratified societies.

Why has the right been so much more successful in finding a language to 
mobilise 
working class rage than the left? Terms like the 1% and Black Lives Matter are 
powerful
but have still failed to cut through and capture the wider popular and 
electoral-imagination 
outside of Spain and Greece.  

Can we forge a populist language in words and images for the left? 
Can we invent a rhetorics that do not restrict its apeal to the head OR the 
heart but goes straight 
for the GUTS. Something really visceral. Why does the devil STILL have all the 
best tunes? 

After yesterday we just can’t go on -clinging to our average day- there can be 
no more -business as 
usual-. The artists, writers, and story tellers among us have the urgent task 
is to invent a populist 
political language of our own that reaches beyond our usual tribal afiliations. 
Something that can 
cut through both the hatespeak of the populist right and the technocratic 
patronising tone 
that has not come to terms with working class rage sadly typified by Clinton's 
characterisation of the -
basket of deplorables-. I would boild the entire failure of campaign down to 
the attitude that this blunder
revealed. 

And we must achieve all of this without slipping into what Auden called -the 
windiest millitant trash- 
or worse into tribalsised, lefist version of ad hominem attack (you Blairite!), 
or other forms of 
hate speech ourselves. Its a tall order.

David Garcia


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Re: Franco Berardi & Geert Lovink: Zero Work is the Tendency, Negative Money is the Tool

[David Garcia]

gies 
on pretentious utopian delusions of pan Europeanism but should conscentrate on 
defending and repairing what is left of national institutions -with whose help 
social justice might 
be able to modify or even replace market justice- P173-174..it is only in that 
context does it seem meaningful to speak of democracy today, since it alone 
makes it possible to 
avoid being "fobbed off” with the democratissation of institutions that have no 
power to descide anything. -P174.

At the heart of Streeck’s opposition (and its most tangible difference with 
Habermas) is his hostility to the currency of the Euro which he dubs a 
frivolous experiment (Polyanyi) 
which follows prescriptions of standard economics in its attempts to reshape a 
highly heterogeneous transnational society into a market society, with no 
regard for diverse structures, 
institutions and traditions…- He sees it as the modern equivalent of the Gold 
standard and argues that abandoning it would release energies as powerful as 
those released when the 
Gold standard was dropped. (Hopefully MoneyLab will find space to discuss the 
role of the Euro in shaping or distorting European consciousness).  

The difference between Habermas and Streeck is not so much theological but 
strategic, empiricle and practical. For Streeck, Hayekien neo-liberalism has 
too much of a head start. It is simply too 
strong, too embedded to be reversed at this stage. Unlike its Hayekian rival, 
the movements seeking to democratise Europe at this stage would be swept out to 
sea as they are swimming against 
the tide of history…. -The huge Hayekian lead means that implementing the 
Utopian model at this stage appears completely unrealistic.

Defeatism Disguised as Pragmatism?

Is Streeck’s powerful critique simply defeatism disguised as pragmatism? The 
fact that the neo-liberal project has such a head-start could equally 
demonstrate that it played a long game very well 
and so should we. This should be a reason enough to reject Streeck’s defeatist 
conclusions. Even a long journey must begin somewhere. And from the off-shore 
Island where I am reluctantly 
sitting, NOW seems like a good time to start. And join my Contiental friends in 
the long march to deepen and extend European democracy and open up the 
boarders. From this vantage point Streecks’s 
position feels a deeply regressive though extremely powerful critiques. They 
are a regression to a welfare state nationalism that no longer exists. By the 
way it won’t be this propistion in the coming years 
as Brexit proceeds (poor us!) but a ramped up neo-libralism.

In an extended Review of Buying Time, Habermas described Streeck's conclusions 
as -a nostalgic return to sovereign impotence of the nation state- That sounds 
ike Poundland to me!
It serves as a reminder that - like te EU the nation state also began as a 
highly artificial form of solidarity among strangers- And one equally based on 
elaborate legal and constitutional 
arrangements. The deep flaws in the EU are NOT a state of nature and so we must 
resist the fatalism that would accompany that conclusion and begin the detailed 
work of both opposition and 
re-design. Above all it means holding fast to the idea that democracy must mean 
halting the drift towards reducing social justice to market justice andopen 
boarders to barbed wire, forced marches  
and conscentration camps.


David Garcia


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Re: PeerValue conference review on INC MoneyLab blog

[David Garcia]

   I agree.. And perhaps David Graeber's well known "bullshit jobs" essay
   which also looked at the energies that might be released when people
   were given the economic possibilities to shape their own time and
   labour.

Along with the fear that this possibiliy engenders as "the devil
makes work fo idle hands". This might provide one of many starting
points for the kind of discussion proposed by Eduard. In Britain before
there used to be the "jobseeker's allowance" the name says it all. There
used to be the "dole". It wasn't much but there was just about enough to
create the space that generated a host of initiatives  ("punk" is just
one example) that are still a source of subversive energy and not so
subversive marketing and tourism.

   --
   d a v i d  g a r c i a

One of the interesting aspects of the Basic income discussion is how
this topic that originates from morality and social justice has been
hijacked by the libertarians, subverting its purpose into yet another
way for the haves to exploit the have-nots and at the same time
painting neoliberalism with a social-responsible and caring gloss. To
me this seems like a prototype of the way neoliberal thought have
poisoned society, like the "efficient government" meme as a nice flag
(who doesn't want government to be fficient?) to cover for a program
to  eradicate government spending that is aimed at thos most in need,
except, of course, on subsidies for corporate entities. For
libertarians efficiency seems one of the arguments in support of a
basic income.
  <...>

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Re: Greek reality board game.: 'Pawnshop- Days of Mistrust' (Ruth Catlow)

[David Garcia]

The pawnshop game looks great but I cant follow the usually fantastic 
Furtherfield 
in the luke warm relationship to Remain and willingnessto adapt to Brext. I 
really think this 
campaign should have been as vigerously contested by the left. Maybe with 
something with the energy of
Momentum’s campaign to keep Jeremy Corbyn in post which is as passionate and 
energised is to be if it is to 
be successful.

My question is where will we be able to play the BIG game of contesting 
neo-liberal power. It won’t be on the streets alone
or in national parliaments alone.. And probably not on our own as single 
nations, but eventually and most effectively it can begin 
as the actions taken by regional blocks on the long road to a greater 
convergence of progressive poitics. Its a long game that we 
should be playing not abandoning the field. 

Last week we saw how standing up to global mutinationals can begin effectively 
though the leverage 
of regional blocks.

Look at the houwl of protest that came when the EU demanded that Apple, (later 
Fiat etc) 
pay their back taxes and this houwl also came from the network of complex of 
state enabled 
neo-liberalism that want to keep things as they are the US and the Irish 
government seek to 
protect the complex architecture of sweet heart deals. 

No single country (appart from a few giants like China and the US) can exerted 
the leverage to trouble 
corporate giants. But a region can make a start.

Of course we know this example is the exception not the rule and the EU has a 
larger malign aspects well described 
by Ruth. That is why we need of democratic reform of which DIEM25 could be a 
first step. It is my beliefe that the UK has throw a 
large baby out with the bathwater and though it is an uphill struggle and a 
very long and possible futile game -I reman a remainer-. 

david garcia





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Stuart Lee's Divine Comedy (of the Real)

[David Garcia]

   -Stuart Lee's Divine Comedy of the Real -

   A Cancelled TV Show; so what!

   Here's a novel definition of neo-liberalism:

A neo-liberal is a man who, if he saw the aurora borealis twinkling
   over a Scandinavian snowfield would only see a missed opportunity for a
   public private finance initiative.

   I have stolen this line (and messed it up) from Stuart Lee, the
   brilliant English stand-up comedian who was actually describing the
   odious John Whittingdale the current secretary of State for Culture
   Media and Sport who was appointed by David Cameron to lead the (so
   called) reforms to the BBC.

Now I am not claiming any connection between this joke and the
   corporation's decision to discontinue, Comedy Vehicle, Lee's television
   series. Really I'm not...But there is ONE absolute certainty. The
   justification given for the decision has no basis in logic or fact; the
   BBC claims the decision was based on wanting to concentrate its
   resources on -scripted comedy-.  As anyone, with even a passing
   acquaintance with Stuart Lee's work will know there is nothing on TV or
   radio more scripted than Stuart Lee's routines. Indeed the perception
   of a gap between the (so called) -real- Stuart Lee and his carefully
   constructed comedic persona - (an insufferably smug, embittered lefty
   who just doesn't know when to shut up)- is the fertile soil where he
   has long harvested his comedy. And its important for us because It is
   precisely in this gap between realism and the Real where art becomes
   political.

   I realise that Stuart Lee will not mean much to non-British readers as
   the targets/subjects of Lee's stand-up routines are quite local. I
   suspect his work doesn't travel that well.. even in England (laughter).
   but if your interested in a taster try this example of one of his many
   routines to be found on-line. Just substitute your own local right wing
   nationalist for Lee's target: Paul Nuttel of the
   Ukips  [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HMhWB95ldQ

   To explain why Stuart Lee matters- will involve the kind of digression
   that may seem pretentious to those who think of Stuart Lee as just
   another stand up comedian. But I make no apology for taking him as
   seriously as any other artist.

   Digression

   In 2014, the novelist, artist and former co-editor of Mute, Tom
   McCarthy, wrote an erudite polemic against the current revival of
   -realism- or -naturalism- in literature. A tendency McCarthy decried as
   wholly retrograde, declaring early in his essay that it is (quote) -
   disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put
   forward half a century after Foucault examined the constructedness of
   all social knowledge categories or more than a century after Nietzche
   unmasked truth itself as no more than a mobile army of metaphors,
   metonymies, anthropomorphisms... a sum of human relations... poetically
   and rhetorically intensified... illusions of which we have forgotten
   they ARE illusions. (end quote)

   Crucially McCarthy's line of argument rests on establishing a clear
   boundary between the Real and realism (sometimes called naturalism)...
   And he goes on to explore this idea in depth with particular attention
   to its relationship with violence through various literary examples.

   From the point of view of the comedic practice of Stuart Lee, one of
   the best of McCarthy's examples is that taken from the surrealist, poet
   and Antropologist, Michel Leiris's book `Literature Considered as a
   Bullfight' in which Leiris compares the writer to a toreador. (quote)
   Imagine a bullfight without a bull: it would be a set of artistic
   manoeuvres, pretty twirls and pirouettes and so on - but there'd be no
   danger. The bull, crucially, brings danger to the party, and for Leiris
   that's what the real is: the tip of the bulls horn. (End quote).

   Reading this again I am left wondering just where is the real jeopardy
   (sharp tip of the bulls horns) in the writing of a novel ? In stand-up
   comedy the same question is less difficult to answer. The hazard can be
   found in the nightly encounter with and moment-to-moment responses of
   the audience, where dying (the jargon in stand-up for -losing the
   room-) is an ever present danger. But most stand-ups are in flight from
   this hazard, but for Stuart Lee (and his fellow alternative and
   post-alternative heroes) this danger is the whole -point of the
   exercise-. And the game is to come as close as they can without being
   gored? The clue is in the subtitle of his biography How I Escaped my
   Certain Fate,  -the Life and -Deaths- of a Stand up Comedian.

   The key moment enroute to this destination is beautifully described in
   his when he writes about preparing a piece on the hysterical public
   reaction to the Death of Princess Diana, where he (quote) began to
   stretch the silences, the lack of laughs, the tension, to the 

Re: Paper Tiger programs: Media History for FREE!

[David Garcia]

   From: [1]deedeehall...@gmail.com

   There is an old saying: April is the cruelest month.
   Certainly for me this past month has been especially cruel.
   I have been working to help clear the two offices (Paper Tiger and Deep
   Dish) that have been an important workplace for me for 30 years.

   Dear Deedee,

   this is indeed cruel and sad news..

   I hope you realise (I am sure you do) just how much the work
   of Paper Tiger as a collective and as a network of consistent moral
   purpose, integrity and self efacing talent, has meant to so many of us
   outside of the US.

   In its early years when so called "video art" was making its bid
   for commodified museum status, Paper Tiger forged a path
   by taking advantage of the unique North American cable
   infrastructure and public access rights in order to make many
   years of ground breaking activist television with a purposeful DIY
   aesthetic that set the agenda for many of us.

   I hope others on the list will join me in saluting you as well as
   roaring our gratitude to you and all those who have worked on Paper 
   Tiger and forged a legacy that is still alive and kicking.

   love

   x

   David

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Re: Guardian > Monbiot > Neoliberalism -- the ideology at

[David Garcia]

> Now, you can respond like the Regulation school or even Deleuze and Guattari, 
> and say that capitalism continually changes certain axiomatic propositions, 
> in order that its major principle of endless accumulation through labor 
> exploitation can continue. That's what I think. But such a statement still 
> demands that one understand each new bundle of axioms, with its inner 
> variations and their political origins, as well as their specific 
> consequences. I don't see any other way to confront neoliberalism. 

Thank you Brian.. 

Neo-liberalism’s Version of Original Sin- 
(-Sing of human unsuccess in a rapture of distress…- WH Auden)

Brian Holmes’s challenge to us to better understand the theoretical foundations 
of neoliberlism has clearly touched a nerve (as Brian often does). I hope that 
this is not a distraction from the spirit of his challenge to connect the 
political economy and its evolving statist infrastructure to the distinctive 
neoliberal psychology with its vision of what constitutes a successful (as well 
as frequently unsuccessful) human subject. 

The sense of urgency propelling the discussions on the list and can be 
attributed to the stubourn persistence of one compelling and inescapable 
question: -Why has the financial crash and the -great recession- failed to 
dethrone neoliberalism?-. [A supplementary question might be why, of the many 
uprisings we have witnessed in recent years, has nothing surpassed in 
effectiveness, of revolutions that transformed the Eastern block in 1989 ?] 

I want to argue that part of the answer to at least to the first of these 
questions is that long ago neo-liberalism won one of the most the most 
important battle of all; the battle for the social mind. And the left has yet 
to regain the lost ground. 

It was a victory based on the progressive emergence of a distinctively 
neo-liberal political subject whom Foucault has characterised as the 
"entrepreneur of the self”.  It is a subject arising as an epiphenomenon of 
neoliberalism's foundational myth of the market as vast and infallible -global 
information processor-, sitting outside of politics, a processor faster and 
more powerful than any human being or organisation, rendering all attempts at 
planning and political contestation futile as no human mind can know what the 
market knows (You can’t buck the market. M Thatcher). 

This is a world in which the state has one primary function, to facilitate 
strong markets. Neo-liberalism has not been dethroned in part because all of us 
have, in varying degrees, internalised this new eschatology, in which winners 
and losers replace sin and the redemption. We are locked into a logic that 
requires us to tirelessly transform ourselves into -entrepreneurs of the self- 

Why? Because in the neo-liberal version of original sin we are all (when 
compared to the market) flawed thinkers and our only hope is continuous 
transformation in a timely response to discrete wafers of market truth. 
Moreover in the sharing economy the one thing we must not share is failure. 
Every failure is solitary. It is mine and mine alone. Whatever happens its my 
fault. The entrepeneurial self by definition takes total responsibility, as we 
struggle to adapt to volatile market conditions.  This is one reason why we 
struggle to retain the momentum of resistance to neo-liberalism because we are 
locked into a new and uniquely solipsistic version of original sin. 

---

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







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Re: salafi easter and finis europae: let's break the loop

[David Garcia]

Alex wrote:

> if europe was over with the end of schengen, now it's deader than
> dead. we're no longer europeans, but french, germans, italians,
> spaniards (and catalunyans), belgians (whatever it means in a country
> split along language lines with autonomous brussels being claimed
> by flemish politicians altho it is increasingly french-speaking -
> b4 the attacks merkel quipped that michel had better worry about an
> ever-closer belgium rather than the ever-closer europe cameron is
> pulling out of - but the two are coterminous). this is ominous because
> the nation-state is intrinsically discriminatory toward minorities and
> immigrants and has consistently been a recipe for confrontation and
> war since its origins in the mid-19th century.

This picture that Alex paints of the allegiance that most people feel
for nations expressed through the nation state as: -an ominous
landscape- has like all  caricatures some truth. But still it is a
caricature and reflects a wider problem for the left. 

Benedict Anderson described the problem in 1983 in his classic -Imagined
Communities- where he defined the nation as -an imagined political
community- imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign-. It is
IMAGINED - he continues- because members of even the smallest nation
will never know most of of their fellow members, meet them or even hear
from them, yet in the mind of each lives the image of their communion..

It is partly Benedict?s background as a thinker with strong Marxist
background that drives his desire to come to terms with the fact that
-nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and
precisely for that reason has been elided rather than confronted?.  At
the time he was writing -every successful revolution since WW II has
defined itself in national terms the People?s Republic of China, the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam etc etc..-The reality according to
Anderson was plain: the end of the era of nationalism, so long
predicted, is not remotely in sight? 

If it was true when Anderson wrote this in 1983 its even truer now.

As a consequence those of us in the UK facing the very real prospect of
Brexit and with the Labor party running the limpest conceivable
campaign. (Not only is the campaign barely visible but Momentum, which
represents Corbyn?s grass roots support has declared itself neutral).
This means that those of us in the UK fighting for a yes vote must admit
that with the excepton of Caroline Lucas the major thrust of the remain
campaign are in the hands of Cameron and Osbourne. And those of us who
align ourselves (to a degree) with Diem cannot afford to simply dismiss
the fears of loss of national sovereignty expressed by the Brexiteers as
though it were merely some atavistic throw back. 

Like the Marxists described by Benedict, many of us share a dirty little
secret with the neo-liberal bureaucrats and decision makers of Brussels.
We have consistently underestimated the too readilly dismissed the deep
alegiance people feel to nationess. Even the aspirations that supressed
nationalist movements are invariably expressed through the desire for a
nation state - whether in Scotland or Catalunya. 

When Varoufakis went to Brussels to fight for justice on behalf of
Greece, it was not just -as he insisted- based on a democratic mandate.
It was the mandate of votes cast by the Greek people. If it was one
person = one vote accross the EU the actions of the troika in Greece
(however inhuman) may have been endorsed. Varoufakis?s argument for
greater democracy only works if the basis is not democarcy and the
political economy alone but a renewed version of these principles
refracted through the lense of a collective of individual nation states.

---

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

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President Trump... its gonna happen

[David Garcia]

President Trump… Its gonna happen

A bit of a meme has sprung up recently having some ineffectual fun with the 
uncanny resemblance of Trump to Biff Tannen the bully from the 80’s hit movie, 
Back to the Future, its more than the physical resemblance, in the second movie 
of the series Biff is depicted as a Trump like success who has built a 
dystopian empire around a building that looks amazingly like Trump Towers..

 So in keeping with the occasional predictive bad fortune of the Sci-fi genre 
(and a nod to JG Ballard’s fiction based on the ascendancy of Ronald Reagan to 
the presidency a decade before he event) its probably time for us to 
pre-mediate the likelihood of a Trump presidency.  

Continuing the inversion of all the normal rules that his candidacy represents; 
the more absurd a Trump presidency appears, the more likely it is to happen. 
Trump requires no coherent arguments as he conforms precisely to Quentin 
Crisp’s definition of charisma as having -the ability to influence without 
logic- He is a little like England’s own miniature version (Boris Johnson) in 
that he deploys an invincible shameless confidence and blather to great effect. 
This places him not only beyond even the pretence of deliberative liberal 
discourse but also beyond parody, beyond satire; and perhaps even direct action 
and protest plays into his hands. To call him a symptom is to frivolous Trump 
is more like a morbid convulsion..

According to Andre Breton’s credo “beauty will be convulsive or not at all” but 
imagine a truly visionary convulsion so violent as to repudiate the very 
concept of beauty itself, substituting all the paraphernalia of aesthetics and 
connoisseurship… with an object so inexplicable that it appears ( F. Jameson) 
as a shudder emanating from an incomprehensible future. In art this would make 
it an avant-garde masterpiece …Unfortunately in this case, the resulting 
artefact that is the Donald…

 ---


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





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Re: typology of leaking (was The Nefertiti 3D Scan Heist Is A Hoax)

[David Garcia]

On 11 Mar 2016, at 09:51, Felix Stalder  wrote:

> On 2016-03-09 02:29, nettime's_scanner wrote:
>> 
>> https://cosmowenman.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/the-nefertiti-3d-scan-heist-is-a-hoax/
>> 
>> The Nefertiti 3D Scan Heist Is A Hoax
> 
> I'm not sure I would call it a hoax. I think -- though I have no
> inside knowledge -- the most likely case is that of a leak, that is,
> someone with access to the official scan gave it to the artists and
> the story of the guerilla scanning was created as cover to protect the
> source. In the same way that it's likely that some of the hacks of
> anonymous where actually leaks by the sysadmins who used story of the
> anonymous hack as device to cover their tracks.

Maybe there is an overarching category that links the hack, the hoax and leak 
that -trickster-. 

The artist/activist/trickster an increasingly familiar figure whose method is 
frequently 
(if not invariably) fiction.  

>From Wenmen?s article it seems likely that the Nefertiti 3D Scan heist 
is both a hoax (the artists quite probably did not capture the artifact in the 
way 
described) and a leak (in that the data is sound but in all probability was 
sourced 
elsewhere). 

https://cosmowenman.wordpress.com/2016/03/08/the-nefertiti-3d-scan-heist-is-a-hoax/

But that said we don?t have to buy into the lament of the final paragraph in  
Wenmen?s article in which he opines that it is -unfortunate that this story is 
based 
on a falsehood.- On the contrary in this kind of -media act- the tactical use 
of fiction 
is one of the most powerful tools in the trickster?s arsenal, as the Yes Men 
demonstrated on many occassions. 

However not any old hoax will do. For fiction to be deployed most effectively 
it?s 
moral core is often based around the concept of -AS IF-. So in this this case 
we 
are induced to act AS IF it were possible (with a small portable scanning 
device) to 
capture, disseminate and repatriate the world?s priceless artifacts.

Media acts like this are -indicative thought experiments- enabling us to 
premediate 
(ie use of media to prepare ourselves psychologically) for alternate realities.

d a v i d  g a r c i a
d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk
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http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net

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Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch

[David Garcia]

   Where is the British Labor party's new radical leadership under Corbyn
   in relationship to the Diem initiative?

   Is it my imagination or is it non-existent? This is not simply a
   parochial question as within months a

   generational in/out referendum will be taking place in the UK and the
   result could change the shape of the EU.

   It is at this key moment that the Corbyn team appears to be allowing
   the discussion of our membership to be conducted

   entirely in terms set by business leaders who are setting the agenda.
   Only the Greens under the redoubtable Caroline Lucas

   appears to have a sense of the importance of a wider, regional picture.



   Allthough the British Labor party are not as openly fractured on this
   issue the nature of their contribution

   to the campaign feels at best "luke warm", meekly trailing alongside
   the "in" campaign. No wonder as it is

   directed by former boss of Marks and Spencer, Stuart Rose, a fact that
   gives some idea of the parameters within

   which the case for remaining part of the EU will be made.

   I had hoped that possibly "Momentum" the organisation that represents
   the grass roots activists instrumental

   in bringing Corbyn to power, would seek to radicalise Labour's
   position. But in their list of campaigns on the

   Momentum website the European question appears entirely absent.

   It is worth recalling that Corbyn's mentor, Tony Benn, the leading
   standard-bearer for Labour's left in exile, was

   a long time opponant of Britain's membership. But although, after some
   delay, Corbyn agreed that Labor should

   campaign as part of the "in" group, though there is a strong sense of
   him "holding his nose".

   So I am struggling to see where Corbyn/Labor (as oppose to the Labour
   MPs who mostly detest the Corbyn

   insurgency) really stand on this. Lately he has been travelling accross
   Europe meeting fellow Socialists but I have

   no idea whether this extends to support or discussions that would
   connect him with Diem or whether the goal of

   democratising the asphyxiating European institutions is even on his
   radar. This would at least give Labor something

   other than folowing Cameron's fig leaf reforms to fight for. But my
   fear is that Corbyn's vision (on this issue) remains

   as parochial and "conservative" as ever and is worrying at a time when
   an opportuinity arises to be part of a radical

   European movement it looks like he just isnt that interested. I hope
   I'm wrong.

   ---
   d a v i d  g a r c i a

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late to Volkswagen

[David Garcia]

   Sorry that this is a rather late and somewhat synoptic addition to the
   recent thread on the Volkswagen scandal..

   The Volkswagen case reminded me of case study (more of an anecdote
   really) related by the distinguished Sociologist the late Ulrich Beck.
   It was a story he told to illustrate the process of institutionalised
   denial by which some organisations seek to mis-manage a new era of
   risk. The story is in a book of interviews with Beck published by
   Polity in 2002.

By way of background, (I am sure many Nettimers will know) that Beck
   is best known for introducing the concept of the `risk society' which
   he first published on in 1992, a concept increases in relevance with
   every passing year. I revisited Beck's work after reading Michael
   Seemann's excellent `Digital Tailspin' one of the 'Network Notebook'
   series available as pdf from the Centre for etwork Cultures. Re-reading
   Beck looking for confirmation of my belief that Seemmann was
   effectively updating some of Beck's pioneering work for the social
   media age (and much more besides).

   Put very crudely Beck's concept describes a transition in our
   relationship to risk from a world (which he calls -first modernity-)
   based on a highly refined system of institutionalised approaches to
   anticipating and dealing with the unforeseeable, was based on the
   premise that accidents in the aggregate were absolutely predictable, to
   [what he calls second modernity] in which this well established program
   of making side effects calculable is progressively eroded by the
   political, economic, social and technological changes that result from
   the continuing radicalisation of the modernisation process.

According to Beck earlier, first modern risk society
   (pre-gloablisation) presupposes side effects that are spatially,
   temporally and socially bounded. Without that precondition the old
   model can't function. However many organisations (indeed most of us)
   struggle to accept and come to terms with the crucial difference
   between probability and radical uncertainty, let alone come to terms
   with the fact that it is radical uncertaity that now dominates.
   According to Beck this basic misunderstanding permeates the mind-set,
   particularly of the natural sciences. It's a kind of denial in which
   institutions continue to function by denying that there can be such a
   thing as incalculable risk, even though such risks are inescapable
   continually forcing their way into institutions like a virus that
   weakens them from within.

   The story

   Beck tells a highly illuminating story which, though less scandalous
   than Volkswagen case, provides an example of how a certain kind of
   slippage that leads down the road towards fraud might begin with a
   common way in which capitalism's technical servants seeks to manage and
   mitigate risk under new conditions.

   In the story Beck is invited to talk about his ideas to a large Swiss
   company in Basel. The senior managers and scientists are very open and
   attentive. Perhaps too open for their own good as they bring up a
   specific example of a certain toxin they produced. It was something
   they used to increase the yield of certain plants, but which could have
   possible side effects if it ended up in the drinking water. It was a
   relatively unusual situation in that they were the world's sole
   producer of this chemical, so if it ended up in the drinking water it
   would have their name on it [... ]

The technicians who had been on top of this problem since the
   beginning, said that the probability of this chemical ending up in the
   drinking water was practically zero. So they decided to set the
   acceptable tolerance limits extremely low, because they thought it
   would inspire confidence, and they were sure they could meet those
   limits. Their assumption turned out to be false. After people started
   using this protective agent for plants rather intensively, residues did
   start appearing in the local drinking water, with consequences they
   were still debating how to solve.

Beck describes how their dominant attitude was "Oh this is silly, we
   set the tolerance level much lower than was necessary in the first
   place. Unhealthy side effects really only appear above level XYZ, so
   we'll just re-set the acceptable limits higher to what they ought to
   have been and that will solve the problem within the limits of
   technical and medical and rationality.

It never occurred to them that by adjusting the acceptable limits
   after the fact that they ere doing the worst thing they could do as far
   as public confidence was concerned. To reset the higher limits under
   conditions like this had cover up written all over it even if it could
   be scientifically justified.

For Beck the new kinds of risk socety that involves radical
   uncertainty rather than predictable probability. always 

From the Nuclear Family to the Quantum Family

[David Garcia]

   The Quantum Family

   There has long been a question over whether the methodological
   "interiority" of the traditional 20^th century "literary novel" was
   equipped to say anything fresh about life in the technological society.
   Proponents of speculative or science fiction from Ballard to Gibson
   suggested that other forms were of fiction were called for. Indeed
   Ballard claimed it was less and less necessary for the novelist, to
   invent fictional content... The fiction, he declared was already there
   all around us.
Recent examples by respected novelists from Pynchon, to Tim Eggers
   have done little to overturn this skepticism now. Indeed anyone looking
   for a truly probing depiction of tech culture would be for the most
   part better off in the hands of HBO's satire Silicon Valley. And now
   the new hope of the contemporary American novel Jonthan Franzen steps
   up to the table with his latest weighty offering; Purity.

   It could however just be that we are looking in the wrong place. That
   the literary novel's best chance is not to speak to the subject
   directly but rather to return to ambush the subject by appearing to
   return to the novel's traditional home subject of the intergenerational
   family. I am basing this fragile thesis on the back of some ideas
   explored in a highly illuminating review by James Meek, of Purity. The
   fact that Meek's review of the novel is quite negative is not the
   point, the point is that the subject of the techno/social was far
   better addressed -unwittingly -in his far more successful break-through
   novel The Corrections. In the his interpretation of The Corrections,
   Meek finds (traced in intimate and painful detail) of our transition
   from the nuclear family to what Meek has called the "quantum family".

   For Meek, what is so pertinent in terms of 21st-century particularity
   about The Corrections lies in the way "it embodies the strange
   historical stage of evolution the family has reached - where family
   members can be at once thousands of miles apart and pressing in on one
   another on the phone and the internet every minute of every day, never
   more than a few hours away by plane. The nuclear family has become the
   quantum family, its particles entangled over vast stretches of space.
   And vast stretches of time. A generation born in the 1930s can easily
   have living grandchildren who might survive to see the 22nd century.
   That's 170 years; and the grown-up children in The Corrections find
   themselves, as so many do, smack in the center of this temporal
   expanse, approaching middle age themselves, looking in one direction at
   old parents whose infirmity might last decades, and looking in the
   other (if they ever get round to having them) at children of their own
   whose minorities will last just as long, while they themselves feel
   bitterly that they haven't yet lived that obscure best bit of
   adulthood, the part where love and money and achievement are supposed
   to bring them a carefree happiness.

http://new-tactical-research.co.uk/blog/the-quantum-family/

   http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n18/james-meek/from-wooden-to-plastic

   ---
   d a v i d  g a r c i a
   Prof. Digital Arts & Media Activism
   Bournemouth University
   d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk
   http://new-tactical-research.co.uk
   http://www.tacticalmediafiles.net



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nettime Corbyn as a medium is the message

[David Garcia]

Corbyn the Medium is the Message- A Thought Experiment 

Partly in response to Alex Foti’s -rallying cry- posted this morning I thought 
it might
be useful to indulge in the thought experiment by imagining that something 
hopeful may be 
happening in Britain. 

Obviously I mean the astonishing success of Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign for the 
leadership of the 
UK Labor party. It is movement that came from nowhere and took every one by 
surprise including Corbyn 
himself.  And as he was slipped in by the westminster power brokers at the last 
moment merely to ensure a 
broad debate its a “gold-plated” example of the law of unintended consequences 
. So his rise to prominance is a 
slap in the face for the deterministic calculous that is the bread and butter 
of party politics as usual.  
It is the non-deterministic dimension the Corbyn wave is as much a part of his 
appeal as his actual policies. 
Corbyn is a true Black Swan moment. And I wonder if he knows it. 

In the parliamentary Labor party (not the wider membership in the country) 
consternation reigns 
as the called “big beasts” of the party line up to declare his victory would be 
the equivalent to driving 
the party over cliff. Not only Blaire but Brown and Kinnock all of them see him 
as a statist throw back. 
Even leftist commentators such as the Guardian’s Poly Toynbee are struggling to 
come to terms with the 
fact that he is clearly going to win. 

Yesterday on a well known radio show Toynbee tried to press him to assure 
listeners that if it became clear (by opinion polls I assume) he was 
“dragging the party down” he would resign. A ridiculous request for someone who 
is yet to win his own party’s support, and a craven approach to instituting the 
transformation that Toybee must know is required and presumably still believes 
in..

This morning in a newspaper article Tony Blaire made a last gasp appeal to 
preserve some shred of the New Labor project, urging those planning to vote for 
Corbyn to come to their senses. It was a strange article laced as it was with 
the clear 
understanding that no one is listening. At one point he declares that he just 
doesnt get it”. He is 
of course right, he doesn’t. But -and here’s the thing- I have a weird sense 
that Corbyn doesnt entirely
 -get it- either. 

Watching Corbyn in action (and the action around him-like kids climbing through 
windows when denied 
access to his meetings). I have the feeling of someone surfing a much bigger 
wave than he understands 
or that his current agenda allows for. And I want to take this as a hopeful 
sign. His appeal may be as much 
about the possibility for radical transformation as the substantive content of 
his speeches. Its as though Corbyn 
as a medium is the message. 

And as his approach to manifesto development promises to be far more inclusive 
than the tablets handed down 
from on high” approach of recent decades which the -cult of leadership-in 
party politics seems to demand. 
Blaire and Mandleson called it party discipline. Above all it was politics as 
a proffession. Corbyn’s aproach appears 
to allow for a much needed dose of amateurism and a degree of openness that 
suggests that what emerges after he 
wins the leadership may help to redefine what leadership in party politics 
means. This makes the campaign feel very 
different from the proffessional political operators of the SNP to whom the 
Corbym movement is often compared. 

Although the clarity of Corbyn's values means he can speak plainly and well, 
avoiding the tortured Bermuda-triangulations 
of Milliband and the current crop of candidates.. His style is nevertheless 
studiously anti-charismatic and so maybe better 
suited to the networked era’s suspicion of leaders in general and the cult of 
leadership.  Rather than traditional leadership 
there is a longing for a process of orchestration or what Paolo Gerbaudo has 
called -emotional choreography- Who knows
whether this is what Corbyn is offering.  And so when he wins the possibility 
arises, for the first time in a long time, for a 
transformation of the political dynamic of Britain as a whole. (I warned you 
this is a thought exeriment)

 
---

d a v i d  g a r c i a











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Re: nettime Claire Bishop?s Game: Subversive Compliance

[David Garcia]

Hi Alan, 

I agree that Claire Bishop has made important contributions to scholarship and 
discussion in this domain, not least in the thorny question of the specator’s 
position in participatory practice. I think the lively discussions on the list 
is testimony to the value of her work. However we would be doing Bishop a 
disservice if her work was simply taken at face value. My interest in engaging 
with her work was not based on critiquing her work for failing to deliver of 
some totalising vision. Ommissions are an essental part of any theorisation. In 
Bishop’s case I think that the ommissions are particularly instructive. My 
interested was in seeing whether something might be learned from the highly 
spescific constellation of practices she sidestepped. It led me to wonder 
whether Bishop’s work ultimately follows the logic of the social turn by 
seeking to shake the institutional status quo to its foundations. And I 
concluded that (taken in the round) she does not. I wold go further and argue 
that (under the guise of radical critique) she uses rhetorical analysis and 
scholarship to lend institutional power tacit support. We might aply the age 
old litmus test to Bishop’s work by asking to what extent it succeeds in 
comforting the aflicted whilst afllicting the comfortable.
   
Best David
---

d a v i d  g a r c i a
d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk
http://new-tactical-research.co.uk






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Re: nettime Claire Bishop’s Game: Sub

[David Garcia]

   Hi Armin, thanks for the feedback. And thanks for the
   recommendation to read Josephine's Berry's review which I missed.

 David does, to perpetuate this thinking in camps and then once
 more sullenly remark how unfair it is that the art world keeps
 leaving us out. I think a bit more self-criticism of the
 digital art scene is overdue.

   I don't remember writing sullenly or otherwise that the two camps
   which Bishop identifies in her Digital Divide essay for Art Forum,
   was unfair. It was not the core issue for me I was more conscerned
   with her use of strategic exclusion to rule out consideration of
   the wider social turn in art and the distorions this gives rise to
   when she deliberately leaves out works that emphasise Transmedia,
   research and intervention for (what seem to me) entirely spurious
   reasons. I simply saw exploration of these strategic omissions of
   Bishop to be an i opportunity for broader illumination. I could
   be wrong (I often am) but it felt like an interesting thought
   experiment.In comparison with this the excluded media arts question
   seems to me a minor issue.

   Best
   David
   ---
   d a v i d  g a r c i a


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Re: nettime Claire Bishop’s Game: S

[David Garcia]

Thanks Will for your detailed resonse its much appreciated..  just a couple of 
initial points.

 Bishop's narrative sticks to the most concrete manipulations of sensory 
 experience - representation, sculpture, and performance.

There is an important exception (and a brief departure from Bishop's stragic 
zones of exclusion) and that is the Argentinian movement (not that well known 
when compared to Brazil) particularly the artist/theorist and his circle of 
collaborators, Oscar Masotta, who gave their own spin to the American term the 
Happening. Masotta aparently coined the term “dematerialisation (later and 
more famously developed Lucy Lipard). The most famous and interesting work 
Bishop alights upon here is the Antihappening called (among other things) Total 
Participation. This was developed by the collective known as Group of Mass 
Media Art. And it is a clear progenitor of Tactical Media. It was initially 
designed as a polemical response to the media hype surrounding the American 
paradoxical concept of the Happening as a media hype around an unmediated 
experience. The artists, involved set about releasing a series of caarefully 
constructed press releases with photographs of the Happening with reports 
appearing in major national news journals. But the event was a complete 
fiction. It never took place: the photographs were staged entirely for media 
consumption- Total Participation existed only as information circulating in the 
semiotic landscape of the media… a dematerialised circulation of facts.. There 
then followed a second press release revealing in detail the construction of 
the non-event designed to expose the way the mass media operates.. this in turn 
created even more press coverage. This approach was entirely unlike the 
Happenings in North America and Europe which above all sought existential 
thrill of unmediated presence!  For these artists there was no original event 
thus the media itself became the medium of the work and its primary content. 

  Bishop argues under a suppressed premise for Art proper as a dialogue 
 necessarily mediated by institutions, precisely the ones circumnavigated or 
 prodded by interventionist politics.

I agree and that is why Art proper” is a necessary but not suficient dimension 
when discussing the -participatory aesthetic- in a broader way than Bishop, 
allows because of the constraints of her strategic exclusions, allows for. I am 
arguing that the institutions (academic as well as in the arts) can be 
invaluable spaces for certain modalities of research and reflection. They are 
particularly valuable during, what Brian Holmes has described, as periods of 
latency in the cycle between uprisings. The Tactical Media zones (research, 
transmedia, intervention) that Bishop chooses to circumvent frequently occupy 
art’s (and academia’s) institutional spaces and other affordences. However, 
(and here I take issue with Bishop) they do not (unlike Bishop) look for the 
Art world’s  institutional endorcement. Their eyes are fixed firmly on an 
external horizon.   

---

David Garcia



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nettime Claire Bishop’s Game: Subversive Compliance

[David Garcia]

Claire Bishop’s Game: Subversive Compliance through Strategic Exclusion.

As that most straightforward of publishing platforms, the mailing list, also 
turns out to be one of the most resilient of the collaborative media forms to 
have emerged from the internet revolution, it makes sense for nettimers to get 
acquainted with the writings of the critic Claire Bishop, particularly those of 
us interested in the fate of the arts in the age of networks.

For anyone who has missed out on Bishop’s writings, she has in recent years, 
established a reputation as one of the most influential advocates of what has 
been called –the social turn in art- a movement that began in the 1990s that 
effectively shifted art’s centre of gravity towards the social and the 
political. Taking these practices from the margins of what used to be called 
-community arts- to become a prominent genre of the international mainstream.

For Bishop it is above all the participatory aesthetic (and the accompanying 
issues around politics of spectatorship) that represent the key dynamic (and 
problematic) of the “social turn” in art. The revival (for that’s what it is) 
of a participatory emphasis in art, emerged, in a dialectical relationship, to 
the mass popularisation of the internet in the 1990s. 

Given this historical proximity it is quite strange that Bishop has managed to 
write her entire magnum opus, Artificial Hells, without once mentioning the 
internet. This is a significant though dubious achievement and exploring this 
fact may take us a little closer to understanding the failure of the mainsteam 
art world to come to terms with the post war cybernetic paradigm and why the 
media arts have been unable to become more of a force to be reckoned with in 
this territory.  

I want to argue that a certain historical amnesia has contributed to Bishop’s 
professional success. She has ability to combine both highly evolved 
scholarship and insight with moments of strategic omission and that enable her 
to appear radical without ever fundamentally challenging the art world’s status 
quo. She is as interesting for what she leaves out as what she includes.

The Plus Side

Despite my strong reservations about some aspects of Bishop’s work, it is 
important to begin by acknowledging her considerable achievements. Bishop’s 
critical reflections over a number of years culminated in 2012 with her major 
work, “Artificial Hells”, the title is taken from -Breton’s post mortum of the 
DaDa Spring in which he argues for the exquisite potential of social disruption 
in the public sphere.

The book is laid out as a set of interconnected explorations of key historical 
threads and moments that led to the re-emergence of the participatory turn in 
art. Her breadth of scholarship reveal this impulse to be a recurring strand of 
the 20th century utopian avant garde. Importantly her work is enlivened by an 
intellectual confidence enabling her to make bold assertions based on 
substantive arguments that go beyond the descriptive. In otherwords there is 
plenty to agree or disagee with. In art criticism that is a rare and valuable 
attribute. 

One of her most important contributions has been to foreground the theater as a 
principal historical progenitor of the participatory aesthetic. This is 
important as most of the available histories of this kind of work have over 
emphasized the visual arts at theaters expense; even when discussing the 
performative.

But her most urgent polemical mission has been to mount a stiff defense of the 
aesthetic and the role of the spectator. Bishop throws down the gauntlet to 
those who argue that the aesthetic judgement (and by inference the function of 
the critic) are an irrelevance to work which seeks to dispense with the role of 
spectator.

The defense is necessitated by the widely held assumption that, in this field,  
aesthetic judgments are by definition reactionary, and, that it is only 
possible to judge this kind of work from the standpoint of the active 
participant. In this context aesthetic judgments are seen as outmoded forms of 
connoisseurship or put more simply; elitist .  The principal weapon in Bishop’s 
armory in attacking this position is of course Rancière. Particularly his 
alternative to the work of art as autonomous. Instead emphasizing our (the 
spectator’s) autonomy. The autonomy which we as spectators experience in 
relation to art. Thus at a stroke he undermines the simplistic dichotomy of 
passive spectator vs active participant. For Ranciere the key lies in the 
undecidability of the aesthetic experience which -implies a questioning of how 
the world is organised, and therefore the possibility of changing or 
redistributing that same world-. 

Genuine participation, as Ranciere declared in the Uses of Democracy, requires 
the invention of the unpredictable subject who momentarily occupies the street, 
the factory, the museum, rather than fixed space of allocated 
participation…This