Re: Stormy weather? Daniele Ganser edit

[David Mandl]

D’Eramo, quoted by Michael Guggenheim :I find these now-common disclaimers fascinating:And Russia’s unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine doesn’t absolve NATO of its responsibility in producing the conflict.This shows that what Putin has been doing is so terrible that even his defenders* feel obligated to at least acknowledge as much. The reason seems to be that if/when they're accused of being apologists for genocide they can always go back to this tepid parenthetical remark as proof that they disapproved of the worst of it, and said so. But this is usually one sentence fragment drowned out by thousands of words in which they blame NATO (or Biden, or US defense contractors, or whoever) for the whole thing. It's not unlike corporate CEOs who feel obligated to say that they "accept full responsibility" for mass layoffs--a meaningless platitude.If the invasion is "unjustifiable" it seems like they could devote a paragraph or two to that, rather than to some Rube Goldberg-ish tale of how someone else forced Putin to bomb hospitals and slaughter civilians(* Not all his defenders. You can identify the most hardcore of them by their refusal to even acknowledge that the Russians are doing anything wrong in Ukraine.)   --Dave.--Dave Mandldavid.ma...@gmail.comda...@wfmu.orgWeb: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/Twitter: @dmandlInstagram: dmandl#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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Interview with Perry Metzger on WFMU

[David Mandl]

Hi--

Here's an interview I did with Perry Metzger as guest host of WFMU's Techtonic 
program. Perry talked about cryptocurrencies (especially Bitcoin), the 
blockchain, and more.

"Bitcoin is the least-private transaction system that has ever been invented by 
human beings."

Perry is a computer-security expert, cryptographer, and ex-cypherpunk. He also 
runs the Cryptography mailing list, where "Satoshi Nakamoto" first published 
his paper describing Bitcoin.

Also included: a few minutes of music by the French group Klimperei.

https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/115775

   --Dave.

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On Chomsky on Syria

[David Mandl]

Excellent deep dive into Chomsky's shallow take on Syria, including the facile 
"enemy of my enemy" approach he seems to take on pretty much every issue. 
Especially relevant given the recent rise of the pro-Assad left:

https://newlinesmag.com/review/chomsky-is-no-friend-of-the-syrian-revolution/

   --Dave.

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Re: What is Eurasianism?

[David Mandl]

That's my cue to mention this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Dreamer-Day-Francis-Postwar-International/dp/1570270392/

It was written by Kevin Coogan, who sadly died a couple of years ago. Kevin was 
incredibly knowledgeable about the far right, and in particular the European 
New Right. The book is nominally a biography of the American fascist Francis 
Parker Yockey, but it covers the roots of the red-brown movement in great 
detail, including Dugin and all the rest. I'd consider it required reading on 
the subject.

The book was published by your friends at Autonomedia (designed and copyedited 
by yrs truly.)

Cheers,

   --Dave.


> On Mar 12, 2022, at 11:36 AM, dr sm  wrote:
> 
> Thanks for posting Brian.
> 
> Dugin outlines Eurasianismin in quite a few places; see his Fourth Political 
> Theory. Can't say I grok all of it (there's a learning curve), but this 
> perspective is linked to what Dugin terms a special kind of "Russian truth" 
> and his ideas on culture.
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZxLxN77lF0
> 
> Sincerely, Susan 
> 
> On Sat, Mar 12, 2022 at 12:17 AM Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> What is Eurasianism?
> 
> And why should you care about it?
> 
> The short answer is that Eurasianism is the set of strategic questions and 
> partial answers that have arisen since the center of global economic gravity 
> shifted away from the Atlantic Ocean, but not toward the American-dominated 
> Pacific. Today, economic growth is centered somewhere in the middle of the 
> earth's greatest landmass, what Mackinder called the "World Island," Eurasia. 
> China occupies the eastern coast of this landmass; Europe, the western one. 
> The middle is where the questions of Eurasianism lie.
> 

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George Monbiot on the pro-Putin left

[David Mandl]

Hello Nettime friends,

The below comes from the Twitter feed of journalist George Monbiot 
(@GeorgeMonbiot). It's one of the best, pithiest critiques I've seen of the 
pro-Putin/pro-Assad "left." Since it was originally a thread of tweets I'm 
preserving the format of the original by keeping the individual tweets separate.

Link to original: https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1497511988322258948

Enjoy.

   --Dave.

--

For years I've been arguing with a faction within the "anti-imperialist" left, 
that is neither anti-imperialist nor distinguishable in its foreign policy 
positions from the far right. It is pro-Putin. It recycles Kremlin propaganda 
and whitewashes atrocities. 
Thread/

I've been contesting its justifications of Vladimir Putin’s and Bashar 
al-Assad’s atrocities in Syria. Its attempts to justify Putin's attacks on 
Ukraine are equally shameful.

In the approach to Putin's invasion, this faction has blamed everyone but him. 
Its excuses for his imperialism happen to be identical to the Kremlin's:
It's all NATO's fault 
It's about the Azov battalion 
It's about protecting Russians from Ukrainian aggression.

The people who have amplified these excuses are not, as they claim, 
anti-imperialists. They are rightly opposed to western imperialism, but will 
bend over backwards to accommodate Russian imperialism. Some are paid stooges. 
For others it’s "my enemy's enemy is my friend."

In Syria, echoing Russian propaganda, they have excused or denied some of the 
worst contemporary atrocities on Earth: Assad's chemical weapons attacks, 
barrel bombing of civilians, mass imprisonment, torture and murder of those who 
resist.

Just as they characterised all Ukrainians who defied Russian imperialism as 
Nazis, they've characterised all Syrians who defy Assad as "head choppers". 
They have sought to delegitimise all resistance to Putin and Assad.

In trying to counter this propaganda, I’ve found myself accused, bizarrely, of 
being a “warmonger”, an “imperialist” and a “US shill”. No, it’s about trying 
to apply consistent principles. About opposing the worse examples of 
inhumanity, regardless of the perpetrator.

(For the record, I was among the very few UK journalists to oppose the invasion 
of Afghanistan. I also set up the Arrest Blair campaign, to try to hold him to 
account for his criminal war in Iraq. Never mind, I must be a western shill and 
warmonger.)

Of course, I was not alone in calling out this appeasement. But we were few in 
number, while the pro-Putin faction has been noisy, highly visible and brimming 
with confidence and aggression. None of this has been any fun. But the 
propaganda had to be contested.

Now that Putin’s full-scale invasion has left them stranded, some of these 
people are mumbling “of course, we condemn all war.” But they haven’t and they 
don’t. For years they have carried water for Putin and other bloodthirsty 
tyrants, justifying their colonial aggressions.

True anti-imperialism is not about opposing only the west’s imperialism, 
essential as this is. It’s about opposing all imperialism, whether western, 
Russian, Chinese or other. It’s about opposing all aggressive wars, regardless 
of who’s waging them.

I’m sorry to bring all this up again. It’s uncomfortable, in fact frankly 
pretty horrible to engage with. But we do no one – except Putin and his 
acolytes – any favours by pretending it isn’t happening.

--

--
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"Data Mining for Humanists" (review of Lev Manovich's "Cultural Analytics")

[David Mandl]

By me, in the Los Angeles Review of Books (no paywall):

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/data-mining-for-humanists/

IN THE LAST 20 YEARS or so, several factors have combined to make
it possible to gather and analyze vast amounts of digital
information, far larger than any datasets that could be processed
previously. The ever-increasing speed of computer networks and
the plummeting cost of storage make data collection on a colossal
scale much easier, and new "Big Data"-specific technologies and
algorithms enable us to digest, filter, and crunch this mountain
of information with little effort. At the same time, with the
spread of internet use to more or less everyone, and an
increasing number of activities conducted online -- shopping,
chatting, watching videos, creating and sharing cultural
artifacts -- the data and contextual "metadata" from all these
activities are being made available (either voluntarily or
unwittingly) to a slew of commercial and marketing enterprises
and academic and research institutions.

Working on the assumption that this particular glass is half
full (an arguably flawed assumption, but we'll put that aside for
the moment), Lev Manovich, in his new book "Cultural Analytics,"
focuses on the positive side of Big Data, specifically how the
new techniques and technologies can be used to advance our
knowledge of culture, or even reshape culture for the better. The
lab Manovich runs at UC San Diego aims to use methods from
computer science, data visualization, and media art to analyze
contemporary media and users' interactions with it. He also hopes
to change how we view culture, both figuratively and literally,
in ways that are hard to predict and will continue to take shape
as we continue to corral the data digitally. "The scale of
culture in the twenty-first century," Manovich writes, "makes it
impossible to see it with existing methods." Which raises the
question, "How can we see (for example) one billion images?" We
all know, more or less, how to look at and assess a single
painting, but how do we "look at" a billion of them -- a kind of
exercise that is completely new to the human race? And what will
be revealed when we do? What can we hope to find out?

[--SNIP--]

--
Dave Mandl
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Re: made for TV, made for social media

[David Mandl]

> On Jan 7, 2021, at 2:59 PM, Molly Hankwitz  wrote:
> 
> And, once Trump is out, many of the worst will crawl back into their lairs 
> and breed little swastikas. (I looked but did not see any swastikas in the 
> crowd).

A "Camp Auschwitz" T-shirt with (an English translation of) "Arbeit Macht Frei" 
comes pretty close:

https://forward.com/fast-forward/461617/auschwitz-shirt-capitol-mob-nazi-antisemitism/

   --Dave.

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Re: New "thought rhythms'

[David Mandl]

This has been going on forever in popular music--maybe *all* music, and 
probably all art, for that matter.

Every new musical generation that comes along inevitably has some spokespeople 
who really want you to know that the previous generations, especially the 
generation they're bent on displacing, are a bunch of dinosaurs and jokers. 
"Get out of the way!" You can practically set your watch by it.

Sometimes the revolutionaries show how revolutionary they are by re-making a 
dinosaur classic in the new style-that-will-live forever. I put together a 
piece on this subject for the Rumpus a few years ago, though it appears the 
YouTube links are now broken. The affectless, cold-wave Flying Lizards doing 
the R classic "Money," Riot Grrrls Lunachicks eviscerating cock-rock 
neanderthals Bad Company, Sid Vicious doing *Sinatra* (OMFG):

https://therumpus.net/2012/10/heres-what-we-think-of-your-classic/

I would also claim that insurmountable differences between warring musical 
schools often get flattened out over time, so that twenty years later people 
can't understand what all the fighting was about. But that's another story.

   --Dave.


> On Oct 4, 2017, at 5:58 AM, David Garcia 
>  wrote:
> 
> 
> 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. 
> 
> Don’t try to dig what we all s-s-say.
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Re: 'Charging Bull' vs 'Fearless Girl'

[David Mandl]

"Ludicrous" is right.

- "Fearless Girl" is basically an ad for an index fund created by a
  large Wall St. firm (State Street), one that, if I remember correctly,
is even less diverse than most. Easier to commission a statue than hire
more women.

- The "Charging Bull" statue was a piece of guerrilla art, "installed"
  without permission in the middle of the night. The city was furious
and was about to remove it, but public outcry (and maybe a publicity
campaign by the artist, I don't know) forced them to change their mind,
at which point they embraced it, declared what an important artwork it
was, etc. Now guerrilla artist is hiring high-powered lawyers to protect
his turf.

   --Dave.

> On Apr 13, 2017, at 5:32 AM, Felix Stalder  wrote:
> 
> [This is a trivial but highly entertaining story. What makes it
> entertaining is that all actors makes grandiose claims about art,
> politics and whatnot, and all of them are completely ludicrous. Fake
> news doesn't even scratch the surface, it's fake reality! Felix]
> 
> 'Charging Bull' sculptor calls for New York to remove 'Fearless Girl' statue
 <...>

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Re: Richard Stallman: Eradicate Facebook!

[David Mandl]

> On Mar 20, 2016, at 6:43 AM, Patrice Riemens  wrote:
> 
> For Stallman, proprietary software is a fundamental obstacle to
> freedom since the editor is able to decide the content, functionality,
> impose censorship or deploy at will update.

I realize that this is a short interview, but I almost wish Stallman
hadn't mentioned free software (his particular obsession, obviously, and
a reasonable one), which could overshadow some much more basic concerns
with FB. Using proprietary software is one thing--maybe it's inherently
evil, maybe not--and collecting data on people's every movement is
another. It's conceivable, just slightly, that Facebook could
open-source all their software and not change their behavior a bit. If
someone really wants to smother you, they can probably smother you with
a cute photo of a kitten.

   --Dave.

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Re: thedemands.org: list student protest demands (last updated 11.21.15)

[David Mandl]

Core issues aside (no reasonable person could oppose an anti-racism
movement on campuses), I find the trend toward demanding public
apologies--a "hand-written apology," no less!--kind of bizarre. There
are plenty of reasonable ways to acknowledge and confront racial
injustice, but this just seems like some kind of bloodlust and attempt
at gratuitous public humiliation. It;s like being forced to
write "I will not misbehave in class" ten thousand times, in a public
square. I don't know anything about these particular deans and
administrators, but how responsible are they personally for systemic
racism that has taken shape over two hundred years? (Compare the
culpability of someone like Dick Cheney and the Iraq war.) And how will
a hand-written apology change that? Why not focus on demands for actual,
substantive change and see how that goes before trying to shame these
people for lulz?

And I don't mean to suggest that it's only students
demanding apologies. This seems to have become an accepted tactic in
politics as well. But I guess I expect more from students.

   --Dave.


> On Nov 23, 2015, at 12:49 AM, nettime's_occupant  wrote:
>
> < http://www.thedemands.org/ >
 <...>

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nettime Amazon Requires Badly-Paid Warehouse Temps to Sign 18-Month Non-Competes

[David Mandl]

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015/03/amazon-requires-badly-paid-warehouse-temps-sign-18-month-non-competes.html

This borders on sadism. Amazon using a policy that was created for
specialized, elite managers to prevent their low-level warehouse workers
from getting jobs anywhere else.

---

Amazon Requires Badly-Paid Warehouse Temps to Sign 18-Month Non-Competes

Posted on March 30, 2015 by Yves Smith

The Verge has broken an important story on how far Amazon has gone in
its relentless efforts to crush workers. Despite its glitzy Internet
image, Amazon's operations depend heavily on manual labor to assemble,
pack, and ship orders. Its warehouses are sweatshops, with workers
monitored constantly and pressed to meet physically daunting
productivity goals. Indeed, many of its warehouses were literally
sweatshops, reaching as much as 100 degrees in the summer until bad
press embarrassed the giant retailer into installing air conditioners.
In Germany, a documentary exposed that Amazon hired neo-Nazi security
guards to intimidate foreign, often illegal, hires it had recruited and
was housing in crowded company-organized housing. Amazon also fought and
won a Supreme Court case to escape compensating its poorly-paid
warehouse workers for time they spend in line at the end of shift,
waiting for security checks.

Amazon's latest keep workers down practice is to make temps sign
non-competes. Yes, if you are so desperate and foolish as to take a
short-term gig with Amazon, you will be barred from working for
virtually anyone else for the next eighteen months. Look at how
incredibly broad the language is in the non-compete agreement obtained
by The Verge (hat tip MF):

During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee
will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee's own behalf or on
behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner,
or consultant), engage in or support the development, manufacture,
marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is
intended to compete with any product or service sold, offered, or
otherwise provided by Amazon (or intended to be sold, offered, or
otherwise provided by Amazon in the future) that Employee worked on or
supported, or about which Employee obtained or received Confidential
Information.

Pray tell, what possible employers are not included, given how sweeping
these terms are? A cleaning service? Nah, Amazon sells Roombas and
vacuum cleaners, so you'd be competing indirectly with them. A
receptionist in a dentist's office? Nope, Amazon sells tooth whitening
products. A massage therapist? No, Amazon sells electronic massage
devices. Working as a gym? No, Amazon sells home exercise equipment. And
note that this includes intended to be old, offered, or otherwise
provided by Amazon in the future. Amazon temps are precluded from
competing with Amazon vaporware too.

Not only is this agreement eye-poppingly broad in terms of
product/service range, but Amazon also means for it to be far-reaching
from a geographic perspective. From the Verge account:

Employee recognizes that the restrictions in this section 4 may
significantly limit Employee's future flexibility in many ways, the
agreement asserts, referencing the section containing the noncompete
agreement and three other clauses. Employee further recognizes that the
geographic areas for many of Amazon's products and services--and, by
extension, the geographic areas applicable to certain restrictions in
this Section 4--are extremely broad and in many cases worldwide.

Now I have my doubts as to how much success Amazon would have in
enforcing this contract in a lot of non-US jurisdictions. But the
Seattle retailer goes to great lengths to turn a short-term warehouse
gig into a bar to future employment. Consider Verve's description of
this provision:

The contract--which was obtained through applying and being accepted to
a seasonal Amazon warehouse position--even includes a provision that
requires employees who sign it to disclose and provide a true and
correct copy of this Agreement to any prospective new employer [???]
BEFORE accepting employment[???]

The intent is to create a captive pool of Amazon temps, who will be
forced to accept whatever crappy pay and conditions the retailer offers
by virtue of being barred from virtually any other job.

Verge said it was not able to determine whether Amazon had attempted to
enforce these captive labor agreements, but pointed out that the company
had been extremely aggressive in pursuing non-compete case against
white-collar employees. And some, perhaps many, of the workers who are
aware of these clauses do feel the need to obtain consent, which at a
minimum creates an obstacle to getting hired by a new firm:

Lee wants to continue her seasonal work at Amazon, and because of the
noncompete that she's signed, she would be careful if she were to apply
for a second job at an Amazon competitor like Sam's Club, the 

nettime The Shut-In Economy

[David Mandl]

Living the dream: avoiding contact with other people, being able to work every 
minute of the day.

https://medium.com/matter/the-shut-in-economy-ec3ec1294816

-

The Shut-In Economy
By Lauren Smiley

Angel the concierge stands behind a lobby desk at a luxe apartment
building in downtown San Francisco, and describes the residents of
this imperial, 37-story tower. Ubers, Squares, a few Twitters, she
says. A lot of work-from-homers.

And by late afternoon on a Tuesday, they're striding into the lobby at
a just-get-me-home-goddammit clip, some with laptop bags slung over
their shoulders, others carrying swank leather satchels. At the same
time a second, temporary population streams into the building: the
app-based meal delivery people hoisting thermal carrier bags and
sacks. Green means Sprig. A huge M means Munchery. Down in the
basement, Amazon Prime delivery people check in packages with the
porter. The Instacart groceries are plunked straight into a walk-in
fridge.

This is a familiar scene. Five months ago I moved into a spartan
apartment a few blocks away, where dozens of startups and thousands of
tech workers live. Outside my building there's always a phalanx of
befuddled delivery guys who seem relieved when you walk out, so they
can get in. Inside, the place is stuffed with the goodies they bring:
Amazon Prime boxes sitting outside doors, evidence of the tangible,
quotidian needs that are being serviced by the web. The humans who
live there, though, I mostly never see. And even when I do, there
seems to be a tacit agreement among residents to not talk to one
another. I floated a few hi's in the elevator when I first moved in,
but in return I got the monosyllabic, no-eye-contact mumble. It was
clear: Lady, this is not that kind of building.

Back in the elevator in the 37-story tower, the messengers do talk,
one tells me. They end up asking each other which apps they work for:
Postmates. Seamless. EAT24. GrubHub. Safeway.com. A woman hauling two
Whole Foods sacks reads the concierge an apartment number off her
smartphone, along with the resident's directions: Please deliver to
my door.

They have a nice kitchen up there, Angel says. The apartments rent
for as much as $5,000 a month for a one-bedroom. But so much, so much
food comes in. Between 4 and 8 o'clock, they're on fire.

I start to walk toward home. En route, I pass an EAT24 ad on a bus
stop shelter, and a little further down the street, a Dungeons 
Dragons–type dude opens the locked lobby door of yet another glass-box
residential building for a Sprig deliveryman:

You're...

Jonathan?

Sweet, Dungeons  Dragons says, grabbing the bag of food. The door
clanks behind him.

And that's when I realized: the on-demand world isn't about sharing at
all. It's about being served. This is an economy of shut-ins.

In 1998, Carnegie Mellon researchers warned that the internet could
make us into hermits. They released a study monitoring the social
behavior of 169 people making their first forays online. The
web-surfers started talking less with family and friends, and grew
more isolated and depressed. We were surprised to find that what is a
social technology has such anti-social consequences, said one of the
researchers at the time. And these are the same people who, when
asked, describe the Internet as a positive thing.

We're now deep into the bombastic buildout of the on-demand economy—
with investment in the apps, platforms and services surging
exponentially. Right now Americans buy nearly eight percent of all
their retail goods online, though that seems a wild underestimate in
the most congested, wired, time-strapped urban centers.

Many services promote themselves as life-expanding--there to free up
your time so you can spend it connecting with the people you care
about, not standing at the post office with strangers. Rinse's ad
shows a couple chilling at a park, their laundry being washed by
someone, somewhere beyond the picture's frame. But plenty of the
delivery companies are brutally honest that, actually, they never want
you to leave home at all.

GrubHub's advertising banks on us secretly never wanting to talk to a
human again: Everything great about eating, combined with everything
great about not talking to people. DoorDash, another food delivery
service, goes for the all-caps, batshit extreme:

NEVER LEAVE HOME AGAIN.

Katherine van Ekert isn't a shut-in, exactly, but there are only two
things she ever has to run errands for any more: trash bags and saline
solution. For those, she must leave her San Francisco apartment and
walk two blocks to the drug store, so woe is my life, she tells
me. (She realizes her dry humor about #firstworldproblems may not
translate, and clarifies later: Honestly, this is all tongue in
cheek. We're not spoiled brats.) Everything else is done by app. Her
husband's office contracts with Washio. Groceries come from
Instacart. I live on Amazon, she says, buying everything from curry
leaves to a jogging 

nettime How Pandora's Music Genome Project Misrepresents the Way We Hear Music

[David Mandl]

(Read it now, before the typos are corrected.)

Feature Creeps
How Pandora's Music Genome Project Misrepresents the Way We Hear Music
by Dave Mandl

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2014/11/music/feature-creeps/

...In the late 1950s, Miles Davis probably spoke for many jazz fans when he 
said of the avant-garde music of upstart Ornette Coleman, 'If you're talking 
psychologically, the man is all screwed up inside,' but in 2014 it seems 
unlikely that many Miles fans would take much notice of the differences that 
were irreconcilable to him. So a Pandora analyst creating a 'genome' of an 
Ornette track in 1959, or a big-band record in the 1940s, or a Sex Pistols song 
in 1976, would certainly come up with a different list of significant features 
than he or she would today.

--
Dave Mandl
dma...@panix.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
Instagram: dmandl


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Re: nettime Elites' Tryranny of Structurelessness

[David Mandl]

Let's not forget Cathy Devine's anti-authoritarian response to this, The 
Tyranny of Tyranny:

http://libcom.org/library/tyranny-of-tyranny-cathy-levine

-

...There are (at least) two different models for building a movement, only one 
of which does Joreen acknowledge: a mass organisation with strong, centralised 
control, such as a Party. The other model, which consolidates mass support only 
as a coup de grace necessity, is based on small groups in voluntary association.

A large group functions as an aggregate of its parts - each member functions as 
a unit, a cog in the wheel of the large organisation. The individual is 
alienated by the size, and relegated, to struggling against the obstacle 
created by the size of the group - as example, expending energy to get a point 
of view recognised.

Small groups, on the other hand, multiply the strength of each member. By 
working collectively in small numbers, the small group utilises the various 
contributions of each person to their fullest, nurturing and developing 
individual input, instead of dissipating it in the competitive 
survival-of-the-fittest/smartest/wittiest spirit of the large organisation

-


--
Dave Mandl
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da...@wfmu.org
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nettime Technology is murdering customer service - legally

[David Mandl]

Short-ish rant by me, in the Register. Tell everyone you know to click the 
Like button at the bottom of the page:

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2014/04/07/technology_kills_customer_service/

When someone tallies up all the good and bad things that the tech 
mega-explosion of the last 50 years has brought us, there’s one item I expect 
to see right at the top of the second column: the slow but steady death of 
customer service.

[...]

--
Dave Mandl
dma...@panix.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
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nettime The Brutal Ageism of Tech

[David Mandl]

Pretty thorough story on ageism in tech, which usually gets no more than a bit 
of lip service here and there:

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism

A cynic might say this is the thin edge of the wedge (actually not all that 
thin, given the visibility and size of the tech industry).

   --Dave.

--
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da...@wfmu.org
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nettime Arresting the Unjustly Homeless while they Learn to Code

[David Mandl]

Good piece on the failed attempt to rescue a homeless person by teaching him 
to code:

https://medium.com/weird-future/d19c8db85c2

The whole [Some disadvantaged group] just needs to learn to code argument is 
probably too ridiculous to get into here. But this case highlights another sad 
fact about many people in the tech community: They seem to have no clue at all 
about how the everyday world works. Governments, laws, social classes, and all 
the rest--it's like they've never heard of any of these things.

Back in the '90s Cypherpunk days (I was involved with the group, and thought 
they were generally a great bunch, so I don't mean to criticize them), you'd 
hear people say in all seriousness that governments are no match for our 
mathematics, or words to that effect. This always struck me as dangerously 
naive. There were nods to rubber-hose cryptanalysis--if the bad guys can't 
crack your algorithm, they'll just get your password by beating it out of you. 
But it was always a footnote, when in fact it might be the number-one tool that 
authoritarian governments (for example) will employ for decryption.

This attitude toward tech is megalomaniacal and shows a real ignorance about 
how things work in the real world. Dictators have had to deal with WAY bigger 
threats than your app, and they've survived just fine. There's this 
well-meaning slogan:

- If the people lead, the leaders will follow

To which some people responded:

- If the people lead, the leaders will probably shoot them

I don't mean to be defeatist, but Welcome to Reality. The homeless aren't 
homeless because they failed to learn Ruby on Rails. Freeing even one person 
from homelessness by teaching him/her to code would be a great thing, but 
that's not the way homelessness will be abolished. It might even do more harm 
than good (except for that one person, obviously) because it'll reinforce the 
wildly simplistic view that this is how we change the world.

   --Dave.

--
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da...@wfmu.org
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Re: nettime The secret financial market only robots can see

[David Mandl]

Hi Armin--

On Sep 30, 2013, at 9:07 AM, Armin Medosch ar...@easynet.co.uk wrote:

 In principle, it is important to differentiate between different forms
 of algorithmic trading. There are on one hand, large investment banks
 and hedge funds who hold large portfolios of different types of stocks
 and equities; they also need fast computers and fast lines, but just
 because they need to keep track of lots of different positions and
 their relations to each other - together with news and lots of other
 things happening in real time;
 
 those are the companies who employ Quants, people with high level
 mathematical and/or theoretical physics knowledge to design the
 software and the 'products' traded, but the trading itself is not
 really high-frequency, the final decisions are still made by humans
 and there are a number of trades a day or even more, but nothing
 approaching nano-second stuff.

Right, I wouldn't call this algorithmic trading at all. This is general risk 
management: How exposed am I to interest-rate movements, shifts in volatility, 
big drops in a particular industry or the market as a whole? etc. There are 
standard measures for these things, usually called the Greeks: delta, gamma, 
vega, rho.

The trading involved here can be minimal, depending on how often the desk wants 
to rebalance their portfolio to neutralize these risks. That could be once or a 
day or once an hour. But the main work and intelligence here is in the 
systems that compute these risk measures, and the people who decide what 
measures are meaningful to them. The trading doesn't have to be anything fancy. 
No algorithms needed, usually.

 High Frequency Trading is a special case of algo-trading and that
 really is a world of its own; according to one insider, the big
 investment banks and hedge funds are not really good at it at all,
 because it is based on a different mentality - very much a kind of
 nerd / hacker type mentality - so that mostly new companies are doing
 it who follow this special mindset. the algorithms used are relatively
 simple, you don't ned the brain of a quant to write one, but it has
 to be very reliable; the strategies applied are aiming at very low
 risk as opposed to the risky 'over the counter' deals of hedge funds;
 software base is mostly Linux and open source and the entry level
 for firms relatively low; my source claimed that HFT was actually a
 'democratization' of speculation, because in a few years everybody
 would be able to do it.

In my experience, the talk about open source in finance is exaggerated. All 
these systems run on Linux boxes, but that's pretty much where it ends. The 
algorithmic stuff tends to be proprietary, whether it's any good or not, and 
written in C++ or Java. There's no end of articles about how Wall St. has gone 
open-source, and I don't get it. They might use the gnu C++ compiler, or use 
cvs for source-control, but that's been going on forever. I don't think I've 
ever worked on a trading or risk-management system that wasn't proprietary. In 
fact I know someone who knows someone who used to work with a certain Russian 
programmer who was arrested and had his life more or less ruined because he was 
suspected of stealing the secret algorithmic code from the firm he was leaving 
in order to bring it to the hedge fund he was going to. Or so I've heard.

While quants aren't needed to write the trading algorithms, they definitely 
write a lot of the code that gets baked into these systems--for figuring out 
what the fair price of some esoteric derivative is, for computing the desk's 
risk (see above), etc. There's a pretty clear separation of responsibility 
between the programmers and the quants, though the former know a hell of a lot 
about the market and the latter know a lot about software. Whatever else you 
can say about them, most of these quants, at least at the top firms, seriously 
know their mathematical shit. Many, but not all, of the programmers are equally 
on top of the technology. This is pretty specialized knowledge, which is why 
good Wall St. techies are paid as finance people rather than as programmers. 
Historically, no programmer in any other industry could make anything like what 
Wall St. tech people made, though I've heard that's changing with some people 
at Google etc. At the same time, Wall St. firms are getting stingi
 er. (Yeah, things are bad all over.)

 I was also surprised to learn about conditions in this industry. You could 
 say that this was a kind of Fordism of financialism, where you have very few 
 analysts but many coders and data base maintainers; they are all employed 
 with 38 hours jobs, lots of holidays and on the job training and, while 
 salaries are higher than almost everywhere else, they are very much lower 
 than totally out of poportion bankers' boni.

See above. Certainly almost no Wall St. programmer's salary can touch a 
trader's salary, but they're still far above what other tech people make. It's 

Re: nettime The secret financial market only robots can see

[David Mandl]

To restate what Brian wrote, in five times as many words:

I think it's easy (and *usually* reasonable) to say, This thing that's 
happening now, and the backlash against it, is just like such-and-such a thing 
that happened 100 years ago, and all that fuss turned out to be very silly.

So, whenever someone says, Everything used to be so wonderful (especially when 
I was young). The whole world's going down the toilet now! it's a good idea to 
point out that people in Chaucer's and Plautus's times were saying the exact 
same thing. People in the Old Testament got all teary-eyed for the good old 
days.

One contemporary example is the ever-popular buggy-whip manufacturer, an 
analogy loved by Libertarian types. Science matches on! There will always be 
people clinging to a useless, outdated past. We've seen this again and again. 
Deal with it--and learn HTML5.

Another is GMOs, where some people make the argument that, when you get right 
down to it, inserting pig genes into a tomato is really not all that different 
from transplanting a bean plant with a pair of household scissors. (This is a 
deliberately extreme example. No need to point that out.)

Another might be the sexualization of children. If I note that explicit videos, 
sexting, and all the rest are bad for kids you could make the argument that 
this is no different from the fuss about Elvis or women wearing dresses above 
the knee, and we all know how ridiculous those controversies turned out to be.

But is it possible that the thing happening now might really be qualitatively 
different from the identical thing that happened 100 years ago? I think it's 
important to leave that possibility open, though we know that being objective 
about the world we're immersed in is basically impossible. Maybe 999,999 times 
out of a million you're just being old and crabby. But there can be that one 
time where things really did take a permanent turn for the worse, and being 
able to spot that, or at least try to, is crucial. Did all the supposed horrors 
of Reaganism turn out to be a big nothing in light of Bushism? (Reagan would 
be considered a liberal Democrat today!) Is what's happening now with 
financial markets, income inequality, and the rest of it the same old thing we 
saw in the late 19th century and the 1920s--both of which we recovered from?

I'd at least entertain the possibility that what's going on with financial 
markets now is qualitatively different and in some ways irreversible *given the 
corporate and government structures in place today*. And btw, I also think 
sexualization of kids in the early 21st c. is a very real and frightening 
problem (and I'm allegedly a Reichian).

So getting back to the subject at hand, I think algorithmic trading was 
destined to fail in the long term, the same way interest-rate arbitrage and 
early program-trading in the '80s eventually failed. By definition, the way 
these things work is: (1) I come up with a formula that takes advantage of some 
inefficiency in the financial markets; (2) I and a few other early adopters 
print money for a few years trading on that; (3) everyone else catches on, and 
an arms race begins; (4) that inefficiency disappears because everyone's doing 
the same thing; (5) a bunch of people take a bath--perhaps taking the economy 
down with them, but that's another story; and (6) we dump this losers' 
strategy, go back to (1), and start again.

I think a lot of what's happened in the markets recently really is 
qualitatively different, and algorithmic trading is an example of that. 
Super-complex derivative products are another. Whether traders eventually 
abandon those things and move on doesn't matter much, IMO. The way markets work 
now is rigged in various extreme ways, such that only a small group of people 
with very esoteric technology or human capital can make money at all, and most 
other people will get shafted as never before. I'm not talking about a Golden 
Age of capitalism--I'm saying any microscopic cracks or safe havens that might 
have existed before are now gone. Think of the way that so many workers in the 
US have had unions, welfare, etc. to at least protect them from starving. Those 
things will be gone soon if a certain of group of people has its way. And no, 
I'm definitely not saying things are hopeless, just hopeless under the system 
we have now, whatever you want to call it.

BTW, I've worked with complex derivatives and high-speed trading systems. The 
people behind them would say (publicly) that they're simply providing 
liquidity to the market. They think what they're doing is essentially the same 
as what happened under the Buttonwood Tree in the late 18th century:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/hottopic/stock_market.html

...which, of course, is bullshit.

Cheers,

   --Dave.

On Sep 26, 2013, at 6:21 PM, Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com 
wrote:

 Hi Chad -

 First off, not to worry, I recall good interactions with you and I 
 respect 

Re: nettime Modern Computer Systems Are Complex - Film at 11

[David Mandl]

Hi Keith--

Thanks. That article was years in the making, meaning I'd been
developing those ideas for a long time before I finally got the
opportunity to get them down on paper.

Those are good analogies, and I've thought about various others. Most
important, to oversimplify slightly, people get lazy, bored, and
complacent over time, and their product suffers as a result. One of
my thoughts on 9/11 was that those things will happen just because
it's impossible to be vigilant every minute of the day. Condeleezza
Rice gets a memo saying Bin Laden Determined to Attack the US and
basically ignores it because she gets memos like that all the time.
She knows deep down that Bin Laden isn't going to attack the US, and
that response works 99.9% of the time. Programmers know (or should
know) about weak points in their code and just tell themselves, Ah,
it's OK, and it *is* OK until...

Computer systems do decay over time, because people take shortcuts or
patch things together in sloppy ways, or because one guy who worked
on the system didn't really know what he was doing, so the pieces of
the system that he wrote are precarious, if anyone can even understand
them. I really think many computer systems are just too big and
complex--there's pretty much no guarantee that something won't blow
up one day. Or it's guaranteed that something will, but people assume
that it'll be something small and harmless.

Cheers,

   --Dave.

On Aug 24, 2013, at 6:21 AM, Keith Sanborn mrz...@panix.com wrote:

 Both are good articles. IMHO, yours is the better one as it speaks
 from grim experience rather than making a pastiche of famous names
 and sexy quotes. I had read your piece when you first posted it.
 It squares clearly with what I know from small experience using
 assembly language years ago and from many cautionary tales I have
 heard over the years: the uncommented code is not worth writing.






 

--
Dave Mandl
dma...@panix.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
Instagram: dmandl


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nettime Modern Computer Systems Are Complex - Film at 11

[David Mandl]

Lots of interesting things going on here:

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/aug/23/nasdaq-crash-data

Anyone who has worked on an electronic trading system and didn't
see this coming shouldn't be allowed to work on electronic trading
systems. As a technologist I actually found working on these kinds
of systems uninteresting and often frightening. Its clear that they
are simply too complex for comfort--I'd say that many of the biggest
systems are literally beyond the ken of *anyone*, even the smartest
programmers. There are too many thousands of moving parts, too much
spit and scotch tape, too many barely compatible components written
by a dozen people of varying skill levels who left the company three
years ago.

AFAIC it's always been a matter of when, not if. Systems 1/100 the
complexity of Nasdaq's have problems all the time that you'll never
hear about. Supporting one of these beasts is like being in charge of
a hundred kittens, making sure they all stay exactly where they're
supposed to at all times.

Side note: Interesting how everyone quoted in the article blames this
mess on their favorite villain, including Big Data, which has nothing
to do with the Wall Street failures (and probably not the others,
either).

I won't blow my own horn and mention this vaguely related piece I
wrote for the Register last year:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/21/financial_software_disasters/

Oops.

A good weekend to all of you.

   --Dave.

--
Dave Mandl
dma...@panix.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
Instagram: dmandl




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Re: nettime Death of a Hospital

[David Mandl]

I take it you haven't seen this:

=
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324263404578614183479259720.=
html

(Executive summary: Brooklyn-based couple, old friends of and early
investors with Warren Buffett, die leaving close to a billion dollars,
***$135M*** of which they leave to LICH. LICH successfully twists the
conditions of the donation to misuse the money, goes broke anyway due to
corruption and mismanagement.)


On Jul 30, 2013, at 2:29 AM, Alan Sondheim sondh...@panix.com wrote:

 Death of a Hospital

 Today we went to the LICH, Long Island College Hospital, for
 neurology issues. The hospital is being closed down so developers
 can build condominiums there. In our area there are seven 30+
 storey buildings, condominiums scheduled for the next few years.
 Current condos go for around $700,000 for a one bedroom. The
 hospital has been the scene of protests in recent months; it
 serves a large number of neighborhoods and in particular seems to
 serve minorities.

[snip]

--
Dave Mandl
dma...@panix.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
Instagram: dmandl


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nettime FCC chairman personally grants exemption from obscenity rules to patriots

[David Mandl]

...or maybe all people who speak from the heart.

---

=
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/fcc-chair-endorses-red-sox-f-b=
omb

Boston Red Sox slugger David Ortiz got the Federal Communications =
Commission's seal of approval after he dropped an F-bomb in a pre-game =
speech that was broadcast on live television. Ortiz's R-rated remarks =
were delivered on the field at Fenway Park before the first Red Sox home =
game since Monday's bombing at the Boston Marathon.=20

This is our fucking city, Ortiz said. And nobody gonna dictate our =
freedom. Stay strong. Thank you.

The FCC regulates obscenity, indecency and profanity on radio and =
television and often issues fines for on-air swearing. However, FCC =
Chairman Julius Genachowski issued a statement of support for Ortiz on =
the agency's official Twitter account after the game.

David Ortiz spoke from the heart at today's Red Sox game. I stand with =
Big Papi and the people of Boston, Genachowski wrote.

--
Dave Mandl
dma...@panix.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
Instagram: dmandl


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Re: nettime bitcoin anyone?

[David Mandl]

This is what happens when you've got a socialist in the White House.

   --Dave.

On Apr 11, 2013, at 10:32 AM, Keith J. Sanborn ksanb...@princeton.edu wr=
ote:

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22105322

 So much for utterly stable market dynamics.


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nettime The brutal truth about software

[David Mandl]

My latest piece for the Register:

There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who’ve moved from the 
academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. 
The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in 
every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no 
software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged.

To be precise: a tremendous amount of source code written for real 
applications is not merely less perfect than the simple examples seen in 
school--it’s outright terrible by any number of measures.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/12/21/financial_software_disasters/

--
Dave Mandl
dma...@panix.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://dmandl.tumblr.com/
Twitter: @dmandl
Instagram: dmandl


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Re: nettime Rapture billboard

[David Mandl]

Hi Patrice--

I think you're giving these people more credit than they deserve. The Neocons, 
whatever you think of their politics, are a pretty sophisticated bunch. The 
idea of the Rapture is generally associated with a crackpot (albeit growing) 
group of Bible Belt fundamentalists from a whole different universe. True, 
they've mostly been allied with the right wing of the Republican party, but 
it's a marriage of convenience for the Neocons. The Republicans have thrown 
crumbs to the religious right to gain their support politically (a brilliant 
and mostly successful strategy), but they surely roll their eyes at these 
yokels behind closed doors.

Most Neocons are way more socially liberal than this Bible Belt crowd. I 
suspect a lot of them couldn't care less about abortion or homosexuality, and 
would laugh themselves silly at ideas like the Rapture.

Regards,

   --Dave.

On May 30, 2011, at 3:48 AM, Patrice Riemens wrote:

 The 'rapture' monicker (in) itself is fairly old hat in the US, I
 remember it was a recurrent theme during Reagan's presidency, and that
 it generally is a specific, if somewhat weird, underground part of the
 neo-con credo.
 ...

--
Dave Mandl
dma...@panix.com
da...@wfmu.org
Web: http://www.wfmu.org/~davem
Twitter: http://twitter.com/dmandl


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