Stormy Weather?

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,

Trying to get back to some of Brian's and others original concerns here 
is some useful background material; not from conspiracy theorists as far 
as I know. Thanks Alex for the information about the Milan event. And, 
Michael nice of you to bring a red herring to the discussion.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEPJXpGM8G0
Jeffrey Sachs: "We're in a crisis and it will get worse in the coming 
months."


SCOTT RITTER: Getting it Wrong on Ukraine – Consortium News
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/09/01/scott-ritter-getting-it-wrong-on-ukraine/

How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline. By Seymour Hersh
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-stream


cheers

allan


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Re: Stormy weather?

[Allan Siegel]

# Nettime 12/02/23
Dear Brian and other nettimers.

It is not an understatement to say that we are at the doorstep of a 
potential apocalypse; tragically following on the lingering residue of 
COVID and all the social trauma that continues to follow in its wake.


The neoliberal paradigm is a global phenomenon, with few exceptions; it 
mobilizes an array of economic and political permutations selling the 
same lies and false promises. It represents  and promotes a materiality 
of false consciousness window dressed in seductive paraphernalia.


What confounds us at this moment is  the sense of political impotency; 
not because of ignorance, the present political conflicts have been well 
described and analyzed.  Yet, the vehicles of resistance appear 
incapable of deterring  a global political elite that has walled itself 
off from meaningful discourse, criticism or a necessary change of 
course. Within this neoliberal paradigm democracy becomes nothing more 
than a hollowed out commodity with a rapidly deteriorating shelf life.


Nevertheless there exists a few grams of optimism: As in the past the 
capacity for progressive change arises at the local level where people’s 
voices can be validated collectively; where forms of resistance are 
imagined and made real. Otherwise our fate is left in the hands of a 
corporate elite and their political enablers who abandoned any moral 
compass long ago.


allan

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Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,

I think Andreas suggestion could be useful; for example if I use just 
the Mastodon app to log-in then the user experience is different then if 
I log in using Pinafore from my browser. In Pinafore you can switch from 
the Nettime instance to other instances, i.e. @writingexchange or 
@newsie.social


hope this helps

best

allan


On 12/15/22 18:18, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org wrote:

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse (Andreas Broeckmann)
2. Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse (Geoffrey Goodell)
3. Moving Nettime (Michael Benson)
4. Re: Moving Nettime (Molly Hankwitz)


--

Message: 1
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2022 12:27:17 +0100
From: Andreas Broeckmann 
To: Geoffrey Goodell , "nettime-l@mail.kein.org"

Subject: Re:  Moving Nettime to the Fediverse
Message-ID: <7eb8384a-a84c-456f-8e25-c1ac45d51...@mikro.in-berlin.de>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed

Folks,

Maybe, more productively, and as Allan has suggested, people can write
small reports here about how (exactly) they are using the new Mastodon
instance, and what their experiences are. I'd find that useful, and
maybe it's a good time to learn and play together.

Regards,
-a


PS: Geoff, excuse my bluntness, but I think that the tone of your
posting is completely inappropriate. Even for people who don't know the
moderators personally, it must be clear that their commitment to the
list and the project of Nettime is and has been substantial, and to put
that in question in the form that you do here is in itself, for me, a
mark of self-disqualification.

Just two things: I suggest that you strike through the word "we" in your
posting and reconsider again who this acting subject might actually be;
there is certainly no "we" here that can "identify", "create", or
"decide". The composition of this 'connective' is much more feeble than
you seem to think. And you are suggesting to send away the people who
have been holding its foundations together, even though you admit to not
knowing what that involves, technically, mentally, socially,
communication-wise. (Maybe apply for an internship?)

Secondly, it may look like it for you, but Nettime is not and probably
never will be an institution. It was much closer to that status 20 years
ago. Its rules of operation are therefore different.

-a


Am 15.12.22 um 10:53 schrieb Geoffrey Goodell:

Dear Allan and all,

The wishful thinking on the part of the list maintainers was:

(a) that they would be forgiven for growing weary of running the service; AND

(b) that they would also continue to enjoy the self-gratification from
volunteering to provide infrastructure support to the community.

The inconvenient reality is that they cannot have both (a) and (b).

So, I suggest that we identify new list maintainers; after all, we all knew
that time for a successor would eventually come.  If this is just a matter of
configuring and running mailman3 on one of my mail servers, then I am happy to
do it myself, although I suspect that there are others here who are more
appropriate for the task.

Suggest that we create a committee of volunteers to receive the knowledge of
how to run the list (e.g.: the list of email addresses and their settings, the
mailman configuration files, the historical archive, and so on) and decide who
should do what.  Whether or not this makes some people uncomfortable, Nettime
has become a de facto institution and requires an institutional approach.

Best wishes --

Geoff


On Thu, 15 Dec 2022 at 10:07:16AM +0100, Allan Siegel wrote:
  > Dear All,
  >
  > I think Mastodon has certain things going for it but the experience
is very
  > different from the Nettime LIST...
  >
  > The group who orchestrated the change in environments should have
prepared
  > users for the change and described a framework on how this change could
  > work. To suddenly basically dissolve one community and imagine it
will just
  > reappear someplace else involves some wishful thinking.
  >
  > best
  >
  > allan
  >


--

Message: 2
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 2022 11:53:25 +
From: Geoffrey Goodell 
To: Andreas Broeckmann 
Cc: "nettime-l@mail.kein.org" 
Subject: Re:  Moving Nettime to the Fediverse
Message-ID: 
Content-T

Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse

[Allan Siegel]

Dear All,

I think Mastodon has certain things going for it but the experience is 
very different from the Nettime LIST...


The group who orchestrated the change in environments should have 
prepared users for the change and described a framework on how this 
change could work. To suddenly basically dissolve one community and 
imagine it will just reappear someplace else involves some wishful thinking.


best

allan


On 12/14/22 17:18, Miklos Peternak wrote:

dear all,

from someone who rarely post to the list, but follows it almost since 
the beginnig -  as andreas was accurate, i only join him now:


On 2022. 12. 06. 21:20, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
, i know that for me personally the move of nettime away from e-mail 
would mean that i would, after 25+ years, probably lose the 
connection. like others here, e-mail is the medium i like for this 
kind of communication, and i don't see myself scrolling through 



(...)

&


i know that simplicity and longevity are not values in themselves,


i do think, these are values - but agree, there are more values on earth,

by than, to all,

& my very bests,

miklos


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Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse

[Allan Siegel]

Hello all,

I think it is worth stating, again, that the folks who have initiated 
this move stated the following:


"Nettime was founded at a time when, as quaint as it sounds, email was exciting.
That's long since gone for those who experienced it, let alone for those who
didn't. Discussion-oriented mailing lists like this are, in a word, over,
technically*and*  culturally. It's time to think more attentively about whether
or how nettime can evolve beyond email and its peculiar 'list culture.'"

It is a pretty concise critique and statement of their intentions; this is not simply change for the sake of change but rather an attempt to 
expand the discursive arena for the subjects/ideas that that are 
discussed on Nettime. I understand why people like this mailing list 
because it is a forum rather safely inhabited by friends and lurkers; 
this is fine for those that don't want to struggle with an developing 
form of discourse - the fedidiverse to me is kind a room where someone 
decides to open the windows and and let in some light and circulate the 
air. The move reflects the recognition of the fact that the dominant 
corporate, neoliberalized, forms of social media are under greater 
scrutiny these days (the Musk/Twitter scandal is just one more visible 
example); I think as a readily available source of non-MSM news Twitter 
served a valuable function and the current evolution of Mastodon and its 
numerous 'instances' is an arena not seeking to duplicate Twitter but 
rather define new forms of defining and practicing social media. To meld 
Nettime into this universe is not a simple task nor are there ready made 
formulas but I think it is reflects the endeavor to evolve the '_mailing 
list_ social media framework' on to an evolving public sphere which has 
both drawbacks and exciting possibilities. It brings Nettimers to a more 
diverse intriguing audience which I think is rather critical these days. 
best allan


On 12/6/22 21:20, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:

folks,

i'll just chip in my 2 cents worth: i hear the different arguments, i 
see the problems of the nettime project as it is (just look at the 
apparent demographics of those responding to this thread!), and i 
would probably abstain from a vote on the issue just because i'm in 
more than two minds about it. nevertheless, i know that for me 
personally the move of nettime away from e-mail would mean that i 
would, after 25+ years, probably lose the connection. like others 
here, e-mail is the medium i like for this kind of communication, and 
i don't see myself scrolling through nettime  postings on a social 
media channel. (i'm just presuming that i'd be confronted with 
"infinite scroll", which is perhaps the most depressing design feature 
of this still new 21st century. [i fear there's worse to come.])


a slightly more original point i can perhaps make is about technical 
(and archival) sustainability; check these out:


https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9510/msg0.html
https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-9511/threads.html

i know that simplicity and longevity are not values in themselves, but 
for people like some of us here, who have seen so many platformed 
promises come and go, it seems (to me) truly weird to believe that 
some 'instance' of X will be able to deliver better results (or some 
necessary change), without increasing the number of problems 
elsewhere, and without delivering this project down one more slippery 
slope of digital oblivion. (When those messages quoted above were 
posted and first archived, CompuServe and AOL were still competing 
internet superpowers...)


i guess my attitude is conservative. so what? i don't think that 
getting older, and growing older together, intra- and 
inter-generationally, is a problem in itself. - instead, i'd love to 
hear from the folks who are eager to get onto that other channel, or 
platform, and who want to sing an 'ode to Mastodon', one that can 
match the odes to E-Mail that have been sung here over the past days. 
i'd be glad to be encouraged and told that the grass is really (!) 
greener over there.


-a



    On 2022-11-30 at 13:30 -05, quoth Ted Byfield
    mailto:tedbyfi...@gmail.com>>:
 > It's plainly true that we're hopping on the fediverse bandwagon,
 > so questioning the wisdom of that kind of precipitous action is,
 > without question, wise. (It's also true, though less visible,
 > that it's only the most recent move we've weighed.) But that
 > implies another question: is 'doing nothing' — or at least
 > following the same path wise? In the short term, sure, but in
 > the longer term no, I think. Doing that would all but guarantee
 > the list's historical weaknesses would only become more
 > ingrained, and with that the list would become more and more
 > insular.

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Moving Nettime to the Fediverse​

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,

As the Mod Squad said:

"This is a chance to move beyond nettime's shrinking in-group, so feel free to
invite others. Our goal is to keep tldr to a size where the local timeline
remains a useful tool for an actual, not rhetorical, community; how big that is
remains to be seen."

Communities are evolving political entities shaped and defined by a 
diversity of inhabitants with a diversity of ideas and forms of 
expression; how this new iteration defines itself seems to depend on the 
aspirations and input of the members of a reconfigured NETTIME community 
and if it shrinks or expands... best allan
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Re: Moving Nettime to the Fediverse

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,

This is a good move with exciting possibilities. The fediverse is in an 
expansive mood right now with a massive influx of people; an intensely 
evolving social space with strong anti-corporate sensibilities. A forest 
with trees, paths to be explored - a refreshing landscape with a 
different communication toolbox (or maybe something from the past now 
reconfigured?).


best

allan


On 11/30/22 01:34, nettime's mod squad wrote:

Dear nettimers,

Nettime was founded at a time when, as quaint as it sounds, email was exciting.
That's long since gone for those who experienced it, let alone for those who
didn't. Discussion-oriented mailing lists like this are, in a word, over,
technically *and* culturally. It's time to think more attentively about whether
or how nettime can evolve beyond email and its peculiar 'list culture.'

And it's not just email. The edifices that have displaced and replaced lists
are on the rocks too. Twitter is widely thought to be going over a cliff as
Facebook, already graying, sinks under the weight of its "Metaverse." As more
and more people cast around for alternatives, net.critique has become a bit of
a thing again.

We say: let's ditch the mailing list and start moving to the fediverse. Toward
this end, we've set up an instance < https://tldr.nettime.org > with the
following bare-bones "about":

tldr.nettime is an instance for artists, researchers, and activists interested
in exploring the intersections of technology, culture, and politics.

It has grown out of nettime-l, one of the longest-running mailing lists on the
net — in particular, on the 'cultural politics of the internet'.

tldr.nettime is based on Hometown, a fork of Mastodon. It's compatible with the
wider fediverse, but it also offers two tweaks we hope will help make it
unusually fruitful:

* The character count per message is higher — 2000 chars at the moment.

* You can choose whether your post is public or visible only on tldr's local
timeline and only to tldr's members.

Aside from that, everything is raw by design: it's for those who make the move
to define what this instance will be and how we can make it useful.

This is a chance to move beyond nettime's shrinking in-group, so feel free to
invite others. Our goal is to keep tldr to a size where the local timeline
remains a useful tool for an actual, not rhetorical, community; how big that is
remains to be seen.

In the longer run, we won't maintain two infrastructures, one for email, one
for the fediverse. At some point we'll close one — ideally, which one will be a
collective decision.

So, we hope this is the beginning of change in every sense, hopefully including
some of the imbalances that have plagued the mailing list for many years.
There's no clear path or process ahead, so this is a free-form, open invitation
to get involved. As they say: be the change you want to see on nettime.

See you on the other side

Doma, Felix & Ted


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The Propagandists' Playbook

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,

This is an extremely informative podcast with lots of good research 
material.The Propagandists' Playbook. Thanks to Techpolicy Press


https://techpolicypress.captivate.fm/listen 46 minutes

When most people think about the problem of mis- and disinformation, 
they think first of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. 
But how might the affordances of search engines, when used by 
ideologically motivated individuals, contribute to an unhealthy 
information ecosystem? Dr. Francesca Tripodi has a new book out on the 
subject, /The Propagandists’ Playbook: How Conservative Elites 
Manipulate Search and Threaten Democracy/ 
/, 
/which I had the chance to discuss with her this week.


best

allan


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Re: nettime-l Digest, Vol 176, Issue 11

[allan siegel A Train]

id, there 
> >>> are
> >>> many problems in La France Insoumise, but M?lanchon was able to evolve in
> >>> so many good ways that, well, what do you want? And it seems that a 
> >>> leftist
> >>> coalition is possible these days for the next elections. That's not bad I
> >>> think. That's something al least.
> >>>
> >>> In solidarity,
> >>>
> >>> Fr?d?ric
> >>> __
> >>> 
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Tue, May 3, 2022 at 3:08 PM Brian Holmes <
> >>> bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> I think this debate is totally interesting, and I certainly would be
> >>>> against screening articles for political correctness! The latter can only
> >>>> be achieved by debate and real understanding.
> >>>>
> >>>> What's characteristic about this moment is that established political
> >>>> positions have collapsed, including that of the socialist Left whose
> >>>> blindspot has always been communist authoritarianism, whether historical 
> >>>> in
> >>>> the case of the USSR or extant in the Chinese case. This could be an
> >>>> important chance for everyone to learn something new, and crucially, to
> >>>> come up with new policies. But it isn't happening, not yet anyway. 
> >>>> Instead
> >>>> we have a "fog of partisanship" in which center left, center right and 
> >>>> far
> >>>> left all rehash their worldviews, even as the old authoritarian demons
> >>>> reassert themselves and the new challenges of climate change start 
> >>>> getting
> >>>> serious. The victor of the ideological struggle, for the moment, is the
> >>>> emergent national-populist right, whose core program of deglobalization 
> >>>> and
> >>>> re-shoring is buried under culture wars and the thrill of polarization. 
> >>>> We
> >>>> may soon get the chance to see what that buried agenda gets turned into 
> >>>> in
> >>>> the USA, where the culture-war rhetoric appears primed to score major
> >>>> electoral victories.
> >>>>
> >>>> Under these conditions it becomes harder to categorize and label
> >>>> individual positions. As in the case of Applebaum, valuable concepts and
> >>>> assessments are mixed with confusion and self-justification. You have to
> >>>> simultaneously identify the true parts AND remember the enormous mistakes
> >>>> that these individuals have made, as well as the horrors perpetrated 
> >>>> within
> >>>> policy networks that they still support. It is so easy for an old Cold
> >>>> Warrior to talk about the cities bombed during WWII, and still easier to
> >>>> just forget Fallajuh in Iraq, where the Americans, acting in a rebooted
> >>>> Cold War mode, committed one of the most murderous acts in human history.
> >>>> To think there is no danger of another Fallujah is, imho, as naive as to
> >>>> think that Russia should not be confronted today.
> >>>>
> >>>> The article that Michael Benson sent on Applebaum continually makes the
> >>>> point that she is unable to ascribe any fault to her own side for
> >>>> generating the fascistic national-populism that so many of her old 
> >>>> friends
> >>>> now embrace. Perhaps the author is keenly aware that the center left is, 
> >>>> if
> >>>> anything, worse on that score. Global neoliberalism and the ardent belief
> >>>> that borderless commerce would soothe the slumbering authoritarian beast
> >>>> were the creations of the center-left in the Clinton-Blair-Schroeder 
> >>>> years.
> >>>> Not only did that fail spectacularly with Russia and China, it also 
> >>>> failed
> >>>> with the US, British, French and perhaps other working classes, leaving
> >>>> them desperate on both the economic and cultural levels, and therefore 
> >>>> open
> >>>> to all kinds of opportunistic rhetoric.
> >>>>
> >>>> I was certain that capitalist globalization would ruin national systems
> >>>> of solidarity, spark a populist backlash and supercharge climate ch

Anne Applebaum

[allan siegel]

Dear Michael and Nettimers,

I do not favour a pre-screening of articles or anything of the like. Rather I 
am concerned about pointing out and contextualizing certain political 
arguments. Although she may think otherwise Applebaum represents a strata of 
opinion makers that specialises in a specific political terrain; in her case 
the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, etc. She operates within binary 
paradigms of East vs. West, democracies vs. autocracies etc.. She sits in an 
intellectual grandstand formulating opinions not exactly based on rigorous 
research but rather stemming from a form of entitlement in which the 
publications and books she has written spotlight and self-validate her 
opinions. She is not alone in her role as an ideological agent whose mission is 
to buttress forms of political discourse that take place within specified 
boundaries. These forms of delimited discourse are the bedrock of mainstream 
media - within the U.S. especially. A mainstream wherein the voices of activist 
movements in the U.S. have been historically marginalised, silenced and 
sometimes killed. I am simply stating facts here.



So, let me cut to the chase: the CIA, FBI, and all the various stripes of 
intelligence agencies have used journalists and writers as pollinators of 
skewed opinions and ostensible facts in order to maintain a superficially 
neutral status quo - all under the banner of a so-called democracy. 

Given the current extreme political tensions, and the proposals to hopefully 
avoid a full-out war and resolve the crisis, I was prompted to draw attention 
to Anne Applebaum's bona fides and the pool within which she swims. Especially 
given the clouds of misinformation floating across the horizon.

Best
Allan

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Re: Anne Applebaum

[allan siegel A Train]

Hello Nettimers
I find it odd that Anne Applebaum's questionable commentary on the events - and 
historical references - in Ukraine are uncritically posted here. Anne Applebaum 
is a notorious right-wing ideologue of the unquestionable neoliberal persuasion 
who has been lauded for her attacks on left-leaning politics (to say the 
least). As the conflict in Ukraine becomes increasingly enmeshed in the myopic 
politics of the cold-war and as America descends into pre-civil rights post war 
policies it becomes increasingly important to consider who is describing 
reality and from what vantage point. Most people in the U.S. still believe that 
the atomic bomb was used to save the lives of U.S. soldiers and to end WW II. A 
very questionable assumption. Saber rattling by Biden and others indebted to 
military contractors won't bring democracy to Ukraine or necessarily even peace.
Best
Allan

On Sat, Apr 30, 2022, at 10:34, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org wrote:
> Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
> nettime-l@mail.kein.org
> 
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> 
> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
> than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."
> 
> 
> Today's Topics:
> 
>1. Giorgio Meletti: The generals' optimism vs the lucid fear of
>   the ignorants (Domani) (patrice riemens)
>2. Anne Applebaum: (patrice riemens)
> 
> 
> --
> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2022 19:01:30 +0200 (CEST)
> From: patrice riemens 
> To: nettime-l 
> Subject:  Giorgio Meletti: The generals' optimism vs the
> lucid fear of the ignorants (Domani)
> Message-ID: <1948744195.941696.1651251690...@ox-webmail.xs4all.nl>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
> 
> Aloha, 
> Back to my  traditional pursuit of Q&D translations (banned be 
> algo/ai-translators ;-) with an op-ed in the Italian quality paper Domani, 
> which tells quite well in which phase we have landed in the 'Ukraine crisis': 
> a bad one, with worse possibly to come ('le pire n'est jamais certain' is the 
> proverb the French console themselves with ...) 
> Domani points to mer things which I do not see mentioned very much - but then 
> I don't read everything, by far. For instance that weapons send to Ukraine 
> might well end up in wrong hands, since there is no control whatsoever on the 
> stuff once it has crossed the Ukraine border - and no way 'we' would cross 
> ... (for the time being). Some French and Italian ordnance has already been 
> traced back to Donbass separatists. Wholesale sympathy and solidarity with 
> Ukraine has also overshadowed the fact corruption there has diminished since 
> the early 2010s but has - by far - not disappeared. And a crisis always 
> provides a golden opportunity for miscreants to ply their trade, as shown by 
> fleeing children and single women being targeted by sexual predators and 
> human traffickers, who do not appear to be very much hounded down. 
> Well, 'enyvej', here's the article (no url, since Domani is pretty well 
> paywalled, and I got it  in 'analog' format. (for ?1,50) 
> -  Nuclear Escalation?  Optimism of 
> the Generals, Lucid Fear of the Ignorants. 
> Giorgio Meletti, Domani, April 29, 2022. 
> 
> 
> It would be a grave error to undervalue the impact on popular sentiment of 
> the Ramstein Summit on 26 April. On the US largest military basis in Europe, 
> in Germany, 43 countries (30 of which NATO members, plus 13 others) have 
> decided to increase many times their arms deliveries to Ukraine to help that 
> country to fight against Putin. ?We need to move at the speed of the war?, 
> said the American minister of defence, Lloyd Austin, behaving as if he was 
> conducting an orchestra. The Italian minister of defence, Lorenzo Guerini did 
> not stay behind in making promises in the name of the Italian People. After 
> Ramstein it becomes difficult to deny that we stand at the cusp of a lengthy, 
> wide-ranging, and unpredictable war. Experts are talking in terms of 
> ?escalation?, but non-experts are afraid - and they have every reason to 
> be.The great majority of European citizens (f/m) with voting rights are not 
> able to inform themselves thoroughly about the Ukraine crisis, either because 
> they are ignorant
> , or have to work full time, or simply do not want to. Yet to all of them, 
> wether informed by the TV news, the car radio or the social media on their 
> phones, the news from Ramstein tells them of a dangerous turn and the message 
> is being received loud and clear. Their opinion, given that exams in 
> geopolitical science are not part of what entitles one to civil rights, 
> shou

Re: what does monetary value indicate?

[Allan Siegel]

Hello "the hacker fascination with crypto currencies is a symptomof the 
same disease. There's no use going further with it. In the end, noone 
will be liberated. Everyone will be stuck with worse conditions on 
theground. This is a dead-end avenue for culture. Crptocurrencies are 
theelectronic mirror of the New Barbarians." AMEN! thank you Brian We do 
know the disease by now; what's the solution? allan (sorry if this is a 
duplication of an erlier post)


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Re: what does monetary value indicate?

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,

"the hacker fascination with cryptocurrencies is a symptom
of the same disease. There's no use going further with it. In the end, no
one will be liberated. Everyone will be stuck with worse conditions on the
ground. This is a dead-end avenue for culture. Crptocurrencies are the
electronic mirror of the New Barbarians." AMEN! thank you Brian

We do know the disease by now; what's the solution?

allan




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Re: A Question in Earnest

[Allan Siegel]

Dear Liz,
Thanks for a timely condensed and basically spot-on history lesson. 
Herbert Marcuse was right: "repressive sublimation" has a long-afterlife 
deeply embedded in the America's delusional dreams... and the 
progressive left in the U.S. has yet to find its way of the tunnel 
vision of two-party politics...


"Keep on pushin..." it's the only way right now.

allan
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The Embarrassment

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,
Spot On Timothy!
allan

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Re: Lev on the embarressment of digital art

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,
Thanks Molly for your Sunday post...
allan
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there is nothing embarrassing about digital art

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,
what is embarrassing is the assumptions that inherent to this discussion
digital vs. analog; does somebody now the borderline where the good 
analog begins and the bad digital starts?
are digital phone conversations embarrassing  or the fact that some gov 
agency is listening in?

maybe Lev just wanted to start a conversation about false dichotomies?
there is a rancid smell of academic elitism to the whole conversation...
I mean the fact that that the beating of George Floyd was recorded on a 
digital device make it bad news?

Maybe the embarrassment here is something Lev should self-examine...
The fact that many composers, DJs, musicians, film-makers,etc. use 
digital devices make their work embarrassing?

I mean really WTF is the issue here?

submitted digitally for your daytime/evening enjoyment

allan
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The Communist Manifesto 2015 WTF

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,
OH MY, looks like the Morlock Ellis is taking its cues from Donald Trump 
or on a lazy day Boris Johnson. The knucklehead analysis still perseveres.


stay well all
allan




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forget about Agamben

[Allan Siegel]

Hello all,

In response to the alarmingly strident tone of Agamben's rant I went
to the source (which Brian thankfully provided - see below) to the
much broader discourse which is far more illuminating than Agamben's
alarmism (not at all surprising these days) so here is a response to
Agamben from another participant:

(the entire discussion is 
herehttp://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/coronavirus-and-philosophersand 
includes M. Foucault, G. Agamben, J.L. Nancy, R. Esposito, S. Benvenuto, 
D. Dwivedi, S. Mohan, R. Ronchi, M. de Carolis)


*Sergio Benvenuto*

*/Forget about Agamben/*

The immediate reaction of the sovereignists – an ennobling euphemism
to define neo-fascists – to the coronavirus pandemic was the reflex
we would all have expected from xenophobes: closing borders and
identifying Covid-19 with the Foreigner. It’s what Trump did by
blocking communications with Europe without doing anything at the
domestic level. The danger is always from the outside, never from
within.

It was said that this pandemic would have pulled the rug from
under the feet of the neo-fascists (among whom I include Trump,
Johnson, Salvini, Erdogan…). Indeed, in cases in which anyone
can be infected, the danger  is not from the outside – Africa,
China, Muslims, and so on – and not even from another nameable and
circumscribable group from within, one that can be isolated like the
Jews were for centuries in Europe. The danger lies everywhere, even
in a child, a grandparent, a lover…. As the journalist Massimo
Giannini said, “We are not in danger, we are the danger.” The
basic signifying oppositions of our Schmittian being political animals
– us versus them, me versus the other – collapse and we’re
all equally dangerous, the gipsy is no more dangerous than my own
daughter, racist categorizations lose all their mobilising charm at a
stroke.

Within this picture, it doesn’t worry me that the various countries
have suspended Schengen. It would have been more disturbing had there
been a closure of each country against another, but in fact it’s
just another of many closures at all levels: each citizen closes him
or herself to the other.

The eminent philosopher Giorgio Agamben writes (in this same Tribune):

Even sadder than the limitations on freedom implicit in the provisions
is, in my opinion, the degeneration of human relations they can
generate. The other man, whoever he may be, even a loved one, must
not be approached or touched, and indeed it is necessary to keep a
specific distance form him, which according to some should be of one
metre, but according to the latest recommendations by experts should
be of 4.5 metres (interesting to note those extra fifty centimetres!)
Our fellow man has been abolished.

It is difficult to imagine an equally superficial reaction. In fact
the epidemic overturns the cliché that if I love my fellow men or
women I should hug them, kiss them or stick to them like sardines
… Today I display my love for the other by keeping her or him
at a distance.  This is the paradox that collapses all the lazy
ideological frameworks (ideological not in the Marxist sense) of the
left and right,  not to mention of the populists.

The edifying propaganda of some politicians and the media appeals to
our selfishness as well as to our altruism: “If you avoid others,
you are protecting them, but yourself too.” Now, very often this is
by no means true. It is now common knowledge that young people can
be infected like everyone else but that it’s quite rare for them
to fall ill; it’s also common knowledge that this pandemic is a
geronticide,that those really at risk are the over 65s.

A young friend of mine keeps me at a distance of at least three meters
and smiles. I very much appreciate this non-gesture of his, because I
know that it is mainly he who is trying to protect me; because I’m
old. It’s true that he’s also protecting the elderly in his own
family: his father, his mother… But in any case I’m grateful to
him. The more the others keep at a distance from me, the closer I feel
to them. This is why Agamben has failed to understand anything about
what’s happening in the /molecularity/ of human relations.

On the contrary, in recent days I came across several people who did
not respect this secure distance and didn’t even wear gloves or
face masks; and they expressed their scepticism on the gravity of
the disease… I could gather from their arguments that they were
basically cynical and ultimately antisocial individuals. Today the
sociable avoid society.

Last winter 8000 people died in Italy as a consequence of lung
complications due to influenza, mostly the elderly.  This year, with
coronavirus, the death rate will probably rise to something between
20 and 25 thousand, three times the “normal” number of victims,
mostly among the elderly.  Is the fact that “only” three times
as many people die because of a seasonal illness enough to say that
Agamben is right in saying that this is a fake epidemic?   No.
Because th

Managing complexity

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,
As I recall ‘complexity’ as discussed extensively by Henri Lefebvre is related 
more to urbanism (as Joe mentioned) than management. Complexity is more about 
the politics and social realities relating to the ‘right to the city’ than 
managing systems. Managerial complexity invariably leads towards some 
technocratic abyss as opposed - let’s say - a more ideological based discourse.
Best
Allan
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The smog covering Facebook transparency

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,
All roads lead to Rome, or the the CIA, NSA, MI6, etc. etc. What happens when 
you try to follow the money and reach a seemingly dead end? "Obscure no-deal 
Brexit group is UK's biggest political spender on Facebook / Britain’s Future 
has spent £340,000 promoting hard exit – but no one knows who’s funding it… 
happy hunting
allan


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No evidence of digital wrong-doing...

[Allan Siegel]

On 28 January 2019 at 22:02:50, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org 
(nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org) wrote:



Brian asked the following question?

So the question is: What kinds of social forms can be used to re-mediate 
the formation of public opinion? In the recent past we tried forums, not 
just online ones, but big online/offline experiments like the global social 
forum process.
If there are no 'social forms’ at the local level: social forms that address 
local AS WELL AS broader political issues; social forms that include social 
spaces of vibrant discourse and processes that address social issues and 
institutional transformations and development WELL IT WOULD BE SAFE TO SAY that 
any attempts to re-mediate the formation of public opinion would be negated by 
the ongoing avalanche of misinformation, disinformation, lies and the swarm of 
propaganda churned out daily by the oligarchs, plutocrats, and intelligence 
agencies (etc.) that are committed to maintaining a stranglehold on public 
opinion…

political change via social media has a short shelf life…

cheers
allan

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taking sides

[allan siegel]

Dear Nettime/rs
I have also been lurking throughout this infuriating conversation that 
became increasingly self-indulgent and irrelevant and down the rabbit 
hole of leftist jargon, name dropping and other forma of grandstanding. 
To put it another way the discussion devolved rapidly and densely into a 
white-male pissing contest; whether Bard was the fault line or other 
more latent issues is something to ponder over time.


However, class and identity are real and persistent issues not because 
they can be debated and discussed on a digital forum but rather because 
they are real world political issues intrinsic to organizational 
struggles that affect the power struggles swirling through our various 
societies; discussions about class and race and identity and sexual 
politics that become so divorced from day-to-day struggles and on-going 
political processes are more than just self-indulgent - they obstruct 
(purposefully or not) and impede meaningful discourse; facilitate forms 
of false consciousness that bury us within the name-calling syndrome 
common to mass-mediated discourse.


have a good evening

allan

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DECODE project redux

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,
Any project on the scale of DECODE is bound to be problematic and not cater to 
all the interest, tastes or preferred flavours of those that subscribe to this 
list but one would think, or hope, that the discussion around this project 
would not devolve so rapidly into the free form banalities that have appeared 
lately. 

The DECODE project raises significant political and social questions… it’s not 
about personalities (OMG a woman is in charge here); DECODE was set in motion 
way before the Facebook firestorm; this fact is important; secondly, it’s 
political context is urban (major cities) - this implies the possibility (the 
possibility) that the project’s objectives can actually be tested and evaluated 
on the local level; thirdly, will the intended sovereignty and privacy of users 
be respected? These are just some of the issues raised by the project.

It seems to me, that project’s on this scale are critical in defining viable, 
practical and robust alternatives to the FACEBOOK et al social dystopias that 
have infested and inverted the public sphere. Urban environments like Barcelona 
or Amsterdam are important for projects - with potential for a large-scale 
impact - that can gestate, develop and suggest working paradigms. 

best
allan

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Collective responses to digital neofeudalism | Eurozine

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,


Some rather prescient observations here considering recent events.


Allan






Collective responses to digital neofeudalism | Eurozine


https://www.eurozine.com/collective-responses-to-digital-neofeudalism/

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he New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops link

[Allan Siegel]

Sorry: here is the missing link
The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops 

It was there before but seemed to have disappeared

Allan

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/21/the-digital-military-industrial-complex/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR%20Wolves%20Orban%20Cambridge%20Analytica&utm_content=NYR%20Wolves%20Orban%20Cambridge%20Analytica+CID_54761ca178aa65ea5c4a4410b9616c02&utm_source=Newsletter&utm_term=The%20New%20Military-Industrial%20Complex%20of%20Big%20Data%20Psy-Ops

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The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops

[Allan Siegel]

Hello
The New Military-Industrial Complex of Big Data Psy-Ops, 

from 
  

Apparently, the age of the old-fashioned spook is in decline. What is emerging 
instead is an obscure world of mysterious boutique companies specializing in 
data analysis and online influence that contract with government agencies. As 
they say about hedge funds, if the general public has heard their names that’s 
probably not a good sign. But there is now one data analysis company that 
anyone who pays attention to the US and UK press has heard of: Cambridge 
Analytica. Representatives have boasted that their list of past and current 
clients includes the British Ministry of Defense, the US Department of Defense, 
the US Department of State, the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and NATO. 
Nevertheless, they became recognized for just one influence campaign: the one 
that helped Donald Trump get elected president of the United States. The kind 
of help the company offered has since been the subject of much unwelcome legal 
and journalistic scrutiny…. AND MORE

Allan

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Troll factories + Endgame

[Allan Siegel]

Hello,  
Certainly all indicators point to some kind of turning point - an historical 
moment where a wide range of political indicators and contradictions are 
searching for solutions AND where a wide range of hegemonic political forces 
seem ready to impose their vision of yet another new world order on all the 
innocent bystanders without nuclear weapons (as well as some of those who have 
them); the various scenarios are being scripted by deep state oligarchies, 
corporate mafias and imploding democracies as is the case of the British Brexit 
rodeo. Even Orwellian dystopias can only provide vague outlines of what our 
world looks like.  

The problem is that the fog of populist rhetoric, the jibberish of fake 
democracies and the inability of a panorama of social democracies to offer a 
cohesive alternative to the neo-liberal corporate state AND the constant noise 
and seductiveness of social media makes it awfully difficult to figure out what 
is really going on... For example, maybe, just maybe, Trump tariffs and 
impending trade wars are not directed at China et al - only one of the more 
visible ‘enemies’ - but rather at the EU? What if a military alliance between 
Saudi Arabia and Israel actually became public and was directed at taking out 
Iran... There are just too many hidden scenarios being scripted for us to 
really see what the endgame looks like but as the last posts indicate - there 
are some very troubling signs...  

I saw today an interesting twitter post from Edward Snowden - to paraphrase his 
point: Facebook and the smorgasbord of social media are just the seemingly 
benign rebranding of the surveillance state; Cambridge Analytica is just the 
tip of the iceberg.  

Best  
Allan
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Regulate Social Media

[Allan Siegel]

Hello 
Although small scale social media initiatives are important and useful their 
existence and development does not negate the necessity for dealing 
economically and politically with Facebook, Google et al...

Here is one example - https://www.regulatesocialmedia.org/ I am sure others are 
out there and more will begin appearing; it is critical to make these 
discussions widespread and to make the social media behemoths accountable - 
dramatically so. The insidiousness nature of the faux public sphere propagated 
by these companies needs to enter the public discourse in a thorough and 
comprehensible way.

Cheers 
Allan
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Nationalising big data

[Allan Siegel]

Big data for the people: it's time to take it back from our tech overlords

Ben Tarnoff in the Guardian

"A small number of companies have become extraordinarily rich by harvesting our 
data. But that wealth belongs to the many”

This is not as far-fetched as it sounds; a very basic idea with some immediate 
rewards.

allan
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Digital leftism in a globalised world? (Trumpism vs. neoliberalism)

[allan siegel]

Hello,

Trying to catch up with all the various points of view being thrown
around here; but Alexander Bard makes an important point about the
“sloppy” use of terms and the inevitable consequences’, i.e. loss of
meaning and discursive traction… So, I hope this adds some clarity:

"Neoliberalism looks forward to a global order contoured by a
universalized market rationality in which cultural difference is at most
a commodity, and nation-state boundaries are but markers of culinary
differences and provincial legal arrangements, while American
neoconservatism looks backward to a national and nationalist order
contoured by a set of moral and political attachments inflected by the
contingent ambition of Empire. More generally, neoliberalism confidently
identifies itself with the future, and in producing itself as normal
rather than adversarial does not acknowledge any alternative futures.
Neoconservatism, on the other hand, identifies itself as the guardian
and advocate of a potentially vanishing past and present, and a
righteous bulwark against loss, and constitutes itself a warring against
serious contenders for an alternative futurity, those it identifies as
"liberalism" at home and "barbarism" abroad.” Wendy Brown

If the left, and/or other progressive social forces, cannot imagine,
define, articulate and build upon something other these two calamitous
polarities than the future, indeed. looks very bleak… rebel cities need
much more than alternative rhetoric to become the bulwark against
nationalist myopias...

allan

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Re: Trump Rising - "the post office has been stolen and the

[allan siegel]

Thanks for writing Molly,
A quick response to two of your items here before I get lost in something else…

> On 2 Dec 2016, at 01:23, Molly Hankwitz  wrote:
> 
> hello allan,
> thank you for writing this long summary of your perceptions anyway even if it 
> is not a completely thought out analysis. 
> it is true and a good point to bring to the surface that the dems knocked 
> back sanders and undermined his campaign because, probably, my hunch, they 
> are too tied into wall street. the vision he resented, afterall, in much of 
> his rhetoric, was one which utilized occupy's rhetoric - 99%. and 1% -- and 
> he was a socialist! let's face it. let's shriek it aloud. 
> 
> consider the time live in that there was such a hardcore socialist running 
> for president in the states - yes, then corralled by the dnc and then the 
> election itself stuffed into the two-party straight jacket. there were 8 
> people running on the ballot i submitted. and in almost every state, more 
> than two candidates, but we know the dominant parties. 
> 
> i want to address a couple of points you make in the very last paragraph, 
> though, because i am frustrated.
> 
> --The ascendance of Trump, and
> his form of populism, is fundamentally ahistorical in that it speaks to
> a perceived 'crisis of the moment' unhinged from all that has preceded
what I meant here by ahistorical is that this form of populism shapes (defines) 
popular perception of economic or political crises as evolving without 
precedent and disconnected from previous events or policies… so the present 
wars in the Middle East (for example) have nothing to do with the Bush invasion 
of Iraq, etc. of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict… ahistorical in this sense is 
liquidating historical memory
> it. ---
> 
> i would argue that there is a "history" that he appealed to very much and 
> which for his followers is very seriously considered history and that is the 
> view of America essentially created for and about white men in power, which 
> is a safe, nice christian feeling for many; and a hard-nosed business-like 
> feeling for others seeking security...this is the powerful, powerful master 
> narrative that post-colonial studies professors and african-american studies 
> and womens studies and all that great multicultural "alternative" history has 
> taught generations of students to see around...never the less for 
> evangelicals and low-income white people across the states were trump one, 
> and where history books may not have been as radically altered as they are in 
> progressive towns, this view of history is paramount and clearly appealing 
> and desired when casting a vote for DT. --- the pristine version of america's 
> heartland - white guys are good - general simplistic melodramatic stuff that 
> overlooks the bracing horrors and genocide and cultures which alternative 
> history and multicultural history engenders. 
> 
> ---And, delivered to us via the media fog and spectacle so presciently
> described by the Situationists. To counter this tsunami of 'false
> consciousness' necessitates a political agenda and organizational forms
> not clothed in leftist clichés but in a truly radical vision  of what is
> possible and also achievable.—
yes, you are right to include action here as well; I emphasise vision because 
far to often we are unable to fully describe a society that is just and 
economically viable beyond the neoliberal mantra of free enterprise etc. etc.. 
we cannot create something better without imagining and describing what that 
can be - too often we think that actions can solve these problems - and actions 
are essential in expressing anger at injustices and inequities - but we need a 
foundation to build on that includes ideas people can understand and action…

Wendy Brown has talked about a lot of these problems (Wasserman also) and 
Sanders and West going to Standing Rock are good examples of supporting a brave 
and important action BUT Sanders got sucked into the perennial two-party 
dilemma and was trashed by Clinton operatives; so by vision I mean something 
beyond the two-party definition of American so-called democracy…

well, thanks again for writing
best
allan



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Trump Rising - "the post office has been stolen and the mailbox

[allan siegel]

Hello,

Starting from Javier's recent post: he makes a very basic point
regarding the racism intrinsic to US political reality. It is not simply
about how it enervates Trump supporters but about how it defines the
narrow parameters of political discourse buttressed by a two party
system controlled by a virtually monolithic power structure. Thus, in
the US, a democratic ethos that should govern political processes is
simply a veneer that protects the oligarchs (or plutocrats, depending)
who wield the levers of power. The only times this stranglehold has been
even marginally threatened is when the structural racism of political
and economic institutions has been exposed and confronted. It was both
the resistance to the war in Vietnam AND the civil rights movement that
exposed some of the basic inequities in the political system and
provoked a short-lived crisis in the two-party system,

The impact of this translated into fuller enfranchisement of the
population which translated, sometimes, in shifts in the balance of
power. Yet, these shifts (for a number reasons) never translated into
changing the two party nature of political discourse or the choices
available to the electorate. The manner in which the Sanders campaign
was undermined confirms this. Consequently, yet again, the election was
not about real political choices but choosing "the lesser of two evils."
A regular mantra that appears every four years in the US when people go
to vote in national elections. And, consequently, the Trump phenomenon
was and is only an extreme example of the recurring choices available to
the electorate. The problem now is that the political and economic
dynamics of the global playing field are more complicated and risks more
dangerous and far reaching (in terms of human life and our various
social environments).

In the context of this very brief and truncated analysis, without a
substantial and viable alternative to the perpetual two-party deadlock
nothing really substantial will change. In the US this deadlock
manifests itself as an inherently repressive regimes that regulate
discourse and eliminate (often literally) those that challenge and
expose the boundaries of political discourse and action. This is not a
harsh or extreme description but a simple stating of recurring events in
North American society.  So, analysis is essential, but it requires also
the capacity to transform that analysis into meaningful forms of
political action. This is the dilemma we are confronted with (with or
without Trump). Nettime's Avid Reader piece about building a network of
rebel cities speaks directly to one way of addressing this dilemma:
"Cities are spaces in which we can talk about reclaiming popular
sovereignty for a demos other than the nation, where we can reimagine
identity and belonging based on participation in civic life rather than
the passport we hold." The origins of the demos, after all, rests in
ancient cities; In Athens it defined the social space that nurtured
various forms of discourse and defined some of the values we associate
with Western Democracy.  Furthermore, history is resplendent with
extraordinary examples of resistance and rebellion against all forms of
tyranny emanating from and being shaped by values, social demands and
political processes forged within urban movements (hey, remember the
Paris Commune). Yet, needless to say, not all of these outpourings of
resistance were successful. Yet, many were; and in either case they all
provide much material to be studied and learned from.

The problem, in the U.S. in particular, is that too often people have no
sense of that history (either global or local)  or don't bother to
figure out how it can inform and shape contemporary struggles. We cannot
forever be starting at the beginning and forgetting  what can be learned
from the past; what lessens can be learned to create and formulate
viable, sustainable, forms of resistance. The ascendance of Trump, and
his form of populism, is fundamentally ahistorical in that it speaks to
a perceived 'crisis of the moment' unhinged from all that has preceded
it. And, delivered to us via the media fog and spectacle so presciently
described by the Situationists. To counter this tsunami of 'false
consciousness' necessitates a political agenda and organizational forms
not clothed in leftist clichés but in a truly radical vision  of what is
possible and also achievable.

best
allan

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Trumps redux

[allan siegel]

Hello, 
(couldn’t hold myself back from this discussion)

Trump represents and is the embodiment of the neo-fascist architype all too 
common in American culture: well defined in Sinclair Lewis' "In Can't Happen 
Here" or in Penn Warren's "All the King's Men" - the proverbial snake oil 
salesman re-groomed as real estate tycoon and TV huckster who promises to turn 
lead into gold. And, in times of great uncertainty, these shill-meisters 
acquire new found legitimacy. They neutralise common-sense and promote an 
absurd agenda of anti-corruption house cleaning as if the inherent problems of 
bloated bureaucracies and globalisation can be fixed with a magic wand. Simply 
put, lest we forget, Trumpism is a phenomenon common to many societies.
 

The problem becomes acute in the U.S. because political discourse runs along a 
very well-proscribed channel (clearly visible in the electoral map that defines 
Trump's victory) that celebrates bi-coastal liberalism and omits (or falsifies) 
the social realities that exist in between. The problem is magnified because 
progressive forces have never been able to break the political grid-lock of a 
two-party political system. To articulate and mobilise a viable alternative. 
Bernie Sanders suggested some of the possibilities but became folded into 
two-party politics.
 

While, Trumpism has many political antecedents what becomes frightening (it's 
true, it is frightening) at this moment is that he unleashes a vigilante 
mentality (as in, "lets go kill some - fill in the blanks - undesirables") at a 
time when society is highly militarised and with a minimum of legal checks on 
the kind of rampant police violence that has been sweeping America. Trump 
legitimatizes various forms of mob mentalities that became more apparent during 
his election campaign and that valorised the social base that insured his 
victory. Herbert Marcuse seemed to understand this situation very well. 

Anyway, danger zone, trouble ahead.
“Don’t Follow Leaders, Watch the Parking Meters” B.D.

allan



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web networks and the assault on our critical capacities

[allan siegel]

Hello,

web networks and the assault on our critical capacities

The incessant, ravenous, hoovering of data by the likes of Facebook are
well-known; the insidious nature of this corporate practice continues to
be well described on this forum; if we were to relate this kind of
behaviour to some being within the animal kingdom it could only be a
creature of ferocious bestiality. An animal, or insect, that flourishes
in what Braudel called the highest levels of monopolistic capitalist
competition; a corporate space that appears benign on the surface but in
actuality is some kind of barbaric war-zone. Within this contentious
territory, the corporate players feed-off (to tame a description) the
various work related, social related, and pleasure related routines - or
their intermingling combinations - that describe the complex information
and data flows that define the internet as an everyday utility - like an
electricity or gas utility. To focus simply on one behemoth, like
Facebook (the most visible of the corporate warlords in this combat
zone) certainly has its points but Facebook is only one link in a chain
of voracious enablers. It thrives not only on it own carnivorous data
collection habits but also it capacity to coerce others into sharing in
its dietary regimen. 

What has now become ubiquitous is the constant re-generation and
spawning of internet accounts using Facebook or Twitter passwords (or
any other platform that has achieved some kind of critical mass within
the marketplace). This ability to make setting-up new accounts on new
platforms easier is an aspect of the benign, user friendly, surface of
corporate space. A two-way mirror by which corporations analyse, ingest
and sort consumer data and then redistribute and channel it to maximise
profitability and perpetuate the routines characteristic of 1st world
consumerist sensibilities. This represents not simply a process of
social conditioning; it normalises those incestuous corporate
relationships that are part of the web infrastructure. It neutralises
our ability to find alternative communication routes beyond the
restrictive realms of Facebook/Twitter/Microsoft etc.  It dulls our
critical capacities to be able to mediate the relationships between
corporate and public space. To be able to think critically and
creatively beyond the insular and asocial boundaries of neoliberal
social space.

cheers
allan

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Monbiot - neoliberalism redux

[allan siegel]

   Hello again,

   Some fragmentary remarks.

   Brian is spot on with the following:

   "For Foucault, capitalism is not a single, essentially unified system
   bearing essential contradictions, as the classical Marxists still
   think. Rather, it is a thoroughly political process and therefore it is
   susceptible of reformulation at each turning point or crisis. 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.

   Two points are key here, seeing "capitalism.. [as] a thoroughly
   political process and therefore it is susceptible of reformulation at
   each turning point or crisis." and the necessity or ability to grapple
   with "each new bundle of axioms" if any form of viable ideological
   alternative is able to sustain itself in the face of the
   neoliberalism's relentless onslaught.

   In this context what is sometimes difficult to comprehend, or come to
   terms with, is the multi-pronged dimensions of this bundle of axioms
   and their historical depth.

   For example, "Bentham's formula: `the more strictly we are watched, the
   better we behave.' " As Dardot & Laval point out this is one of the
   governing principles of neoliberal rationality. And, "bureaucrats must
   as far as possible conduct themselves like entrepreneurs." These
   principles lie at the heart of neoliberal governing policies.

   So, the corollary to capitalism's ability to reformulate or retool
   itself - not just during periods of crisis - is the manner in which
   seek to manage social relations. Thus we have Lippman's 80 year old
   formulation in which "the agenda of neo-liberalism was guided by the
   need for constant adaptation [emphasis added] of human beings... based
   on general unrelenting competition." These concepts have now become so
   entrenched that what is now called for is a complete re-imagining of
   the web of relationships that link governmental bodies with the
   corporate world and similarly the a re-imagining of the political
   processes that underpin the neoliberal status quo.

   This task is formidable in that it requires dismantling the false
   consciousness that permeates neoliberal social reality; Foucault saw
   most clearly that neoliberalism was "a political project that
   endeavours to create a social reality that it suggests already exists."
   In such a world it is not difficult to imagine droves of
   chicken-littles who swallow the `daily news' and consume endlessly to
   prevent the sky from falling.

   allan

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neoliberalism, etc.

[allan siegel]

dear Nettime:

Alexander Bard states that, "a new class with a new ideology is the only 
possibility of genuine revolution. And such ideologies are derived
from the potentialties of new technologies.” What utter nonsense. It is this 
kind of reductionist rubbish that keeps the wheels of neoliberalism turning and 
it certainly ain’t gonna bring about any revolution. As Florian and others have 
mentioned neoliberalism is not easily reduced into a neat package; the 
Thatcher-Reagan strand is only one variation. It is worth doing a little 
homework before prescribing medicines best sold in carnivals. There are a 
number of good reads in this direction, for example “The New Way of the World: 
On Neoliberal Society” by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval is a good starting 
point; Wendy Brown has also devoted considerable thought to this problem. 

The Monbiot piece is certainly flawed but that such articles appear is good if 
only to remind people that there is an ideology that is the basis for this 
prolonged crises of capitalism, the state, etc. etc… The crisis is deep and 
perhaps understanding its historical depths will get us to place where we can 
recognise and shape new ideological formations...

"Modernity itself is premised on the imagined breaking of medieval fetters on 
everything from individual happiness to knowledge
to freedom to national wealth. For the most part, only modernity’s critics (who 
are also critics of liberalism)—Burke, Rousseau,
Nietzsche—have questioned or challenged its forward movement. That 
intellectuals and politicians are now gazing backward to glimpse
better times suggests an important destabilization of the presumption of 
progress and of the claims and hopes that issue from such a presumption.”

cheers
allan


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Feed my Feed: Radical publishing in Facebook Groups

[allan siegel]

Hello Nettime from sub-tropical Budapest,
This is in a recent Rhizome news

Feed my Feed: Radical publishing in Facebook Groups

DOROTHY HOWARD | Wed Jul 22nd, 2015 5:12 p.m.

"These days, Facebook is so widely used that opting out constitutes an act of 
defiance of the norm. The refusal to participate can be made for personal 
reasons, but there is a sizeable group who do so as a protest of the corporate 
control over interpersonal communication. In a 2014 blog post, Laura 
Portwood-Stacer used the metaphor of "breaking up with Facebook" to describe:

active refusal as a tactical response to the perceived harms engendered by a 
capitalist system in which media corporations have disproportionate power over 
their platforms' users, who, it may be said, provide unpaid labor for 
corporations whenever they log on.

The burdens placed on Facebook's users are certainly significant; they include 
not only cognitive labor, but also online harassment, dataveillence, and the 
performance of the profile–which is pulled in multiple directions, at the same 
time increasingly sexualized (pulled into online dating sites like Tinder) and 
entrepreneurialized (pulled into sites like Airbnb), even while the display of 
the body within the profile is regulated in punitive, sexist fashion.”

full text:  http://rhizome.org/editorial/2015/jul/22/feed-my-feed/?ref=nwslettr

best

Allan Siegel


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Claire Bishop?s Game: Subversive Compliance

[allan siegel]

Hello,
Claire Bishop has made some invaluable contributions to the discursive 
territories of the contemporary ‘art world’ (whatever we might consider to be). 
Does she make omissions? Certainly. But, when it comes to contemporary critical 
art practices: interventions, Tactical Media, etc. etc. there is no totalising 
critique, nor should or can there necessarily be one. A good question, also, is 
why do people expect one? The discursive landscape of critical art practices is 
highly uneven; the fact that within it that there are enough substantial 
insights and analyses to provide practical traction that, in small but 
insignificant ways, thwarts the culture and ideological perspectives of the 
neoliberal juggernaut are conceptual nuggets to be expanded upon and developed. 

Thanks to the many who have made this a useful discussion

cheers
allan

-- 
allan
Sent with Airmail


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point of information (before the end)

[allan siegel]

Hello,
Sorry, but I came late to the Nettime party, I think my colleague Janos 
probably had something to do with this, and was wondering whether there are any 
founding documents that still exist? For me it would be useful to see what 
people were thinking back then when Nettime was launched and went live.

Thanks to Felix and Ted and whoever else has the archives…

best
allan


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the end? or another beginning?

[allan siegel]

Hello,

As T say, "Nettime really is turning twenty, so this is a good time to
think about what it wants to be when it grows up. Often, describing what
we have done is a better way to start than asking what we should do."

What WE should do and what WE can do. Very pertinent questions given the
context and current global state of uncertainty/s. Why do so many people
seem to have this aversion to the word community? Yes, its loaded but
ideas like 'community' are invariably loaded. NETTIME is one of those
visible aspects of a community (as contentious as the term might be) and
its survival, or rather transformation, is linked to the web of
contributors, respondents and lurkers out there who (for whatever
reasons) feel some attachment to a community of ideas; a community of
discourse.

What prompted the origins of this discourse and how do we maintain some 
continuity with those origins? Is that possible?

Communities evolve, ideas evolve, and ultimately institutions/
organisations/collectives etc. transform themselves because they adapt
and reformulate their objectives and identity as a social space.

Sorry that this is so fragmentary but I'm suffering from a kind of
proposal fatigue; Like so many others have mentioned, I think NETTIME is
a significant and special place that encourages a flow of ideas; I
peruse many blogs, news feeds, etc… but NETTIME is unique and
invaluable...

cheers
allan


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Re: Reframing the Creative Question

[allan siegel]

Hello,

Thank you Brian for your latest post.

The issues you raise are certainly relevant these days; as they were in the 
past. An unfortunate problem is that the ‘organised Left’, or its 
half-organised versions, have used ‘culture’ and the voices of the ‘creative 
class’ in mostly opportunistic ways. One might also say that many voices of the 
creative class have used the Left opportunistically also. Perhaps these are 
only my simple-minded observations and that more to the point is the way we 
understand or envision “cultures of resistance”. On the one hand there is a 
tendency to mystify forms of social consciousness that propel change and on the 
other to place such consciousness in to the most dogmatic archaic categories… 
What propels capitalism in all its variants, what seems to neutralise revolt, 
is the propagation of various forms of false consciousness - the endless spam 
of counter-intuitive logic that litters consumer societies. Ultimately, and via 
various forms of negation, the pervasiveness of false consciousness seems to be 
upended by a kind of re-awakening of a collective memory that shouts: “wait a 
minute, there is another way.” We’ve seen that in the various movements that 
have arisen since the most recent financial crisis but find countless examples 
of this re-awakening throughout history. Now, to the point, what is disastrous 
is to see processes of change simply in economic terms - as a revolt against 
neoliberal values, social conditions - the shallow rhetoric of the Labour Party 
in the UK is a great, pathetic, example of this. Cultures of resistance, voices 
of change, a more expansive social horizon, do not appear, come into being, as 
a product of some creative class but emanate from a more nuanced, 
multi-dimensional social reality. 

Just some brief comments on your post.

best
allan


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Re: Ubiquitous Commons and Stakhanov at transmediale in (mp)

[allan siegel]

Hello MP,

Here is a link provided by Daniel Verhoeven which provides some good
initial background; David Harvey in Rebel Cities has some more extensive
materials.

https://niepleuen.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/introduction-to-the-commons-and-some-definitions/

allan


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Re: Ubiquitous Commons and Stakhanov at transmediale in Berlin

[allan siegel]

Dear Salvatore,

I understand that this was a manifesto - or a draft manifesto - but,
aside from the "fuzziness"  surrounding the use of the concept of the
commons (a critical issue), what remains problematical to me is the
manner in which the digital commons, as you envision it, is connected
or meshes in some form with the real world. In its earliest historical
and political manifestations the commons was not simply a common
territory (if you will) but also the embodiment of an ideological
principle. Aside from the functional issues (legal and technological)
is there any sense of the ideological dimensions of your digital
commons and how does it interface with `real world' issues;
manifestations of these connections are abundant and often calamitous
so I wonder, very much, about the manner in which this digital commons
is bounded and controlled (if at all) as you envision it. Sorry if I am
raising questions that would be addressed in the workshop but these are
some of thoughts that crossed my mind at the time of your original
posting. And, if I were in Berlin during Transmediale I would love to
participate in these important discussions.

Thanks very much for your rely to my posting.

best

allan

On 22 Jan 2015, at 01:06, xDxD.vs.xDxD <[1]xdxd.vs.x...@gmail.com> wrote:

   Hi Allan and all,

   > In a nutshell: somebody needs to do some homework and connect the themes
   > that this conference wants to address with discussions about the commons
   > from the previous two centuries.

   it is not a conference, but a workshop in which we will explore the
   possibility of systematically building a legal+technological toolkit.
 <...>


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Re: Ubiquitous Commons and Stakhanov at transmediale in Berlin

[allan siegel]

Hello,

Since this announcement has been cross-posted I???ll add Daniel
Verhoeven response to this as well as my own.

FROM DV:

 Dear All,

 A good start would be to define ?commons?. The fuziness about the
 commons is ubiquitous, not the commons. See for a proposal:
 
https://niepleuen.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/introduction-to-the-commons-and-some-definitions/


 All the best,

 Dani?l Verhoeven

 http://danielverhoeven.deds.nl/


FROM AS:

Hello,

Thank you Daniel for pointing out the fuzziness of the use of the word
COMMONS in relation to this conference; I think fuzziness here is being
polite (as in the casual misuse of language); one could say that this
conference looks like branding the word ???commons??? in the age of
neoliberalism; because the description is among other things:
ahistorical and apolitical-pitfully so.

A good very elemental example would be the title:

"In the Network Society Information and Knowledge are ubiquitous.

Services like Google, Facebook and Twitter create a
knowledge/information, identity and information/updates ecosystem which
is spread across devices and modalities which interact with what we know
about the world and its inhabitants, and also transform the ways in
which we experience places, locations, events, monuments, tourist
locations, restaurants, venues and more."

Hello! Please tell that to the people who control and manipulate
information this; and, I am sorry, knowledge is not ubiquitous as the
Ubiquitous Commons website illustrates; it is nothing more than, as
described at the bottom, a mash-up of wikipedia definitions very far
away from the references and history that Verhoeven supplied.

It is odd, sad even, that an issue such as the commons, which has been
written about extensively (profoundly even) by the people Daniel
mentions as well as David Harvey, Lefebvre, etc??? AND which is an issue
that has come up time and again in the various occupy movements should
be watered down so casually.

In a nutshell: somebody needs to do some homework and connect the themes
that this conference wants to address with discussions about the commons
from the previous two centuries.

allan


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Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments) P.S.

[allan siegel]

Hello Brian,

Just a few comments:

By postmodern delirium I was referring to that moment when people seemed
to abandon history and succumbed to ???capitalism's ability to deliver
the goods??? and Reagan and Thatcher were the shining stars starring
down the Soviet bear and celebrating neoliberalism???s ascendent status
- a wave of privatisation - and the dismemberment of the welfare state
(with the various means appropriate to either the UK or the US). To
paraphrase Lyotard: the grand narratives of modernism and the
Enlightenment were losing traction. The welfare state became a corporate
hobby horse with defense and finance leading the pack. Of course the
tech companies were in the mix also but that???s another story.

So, the crisis you so aptly brought up is actually a series of crises;
repetitive global traumas relating to war, climate change, finance
etc??? And, contrary to D. Garcia???s trashing of Mr. Zizek, also a
crisis in relation to the Liberal (as in the Enlightenment sense) values
so highly cherished by Western democracies (whose democratic values are
constantly Blowing in the Wind). By an easy reckoning,  America???s
Liberal values are in a bit of disarray with the police running amok and
the country in constant war and anything resembling social democratic
values under attack by institutions as vile as any of Europe???s
neo-fascist parties. Meanwhile, the financial brains of The City and
Wall Street are having a great time pilfering and thieving. And, Cameron
is begging Obama for the green light on the totalisation of the
surveillance state. Whoppee for Liberalism and plurality??? Plurality
only exists for the 1% (when you measure the results) the rest feed on
the crumbs that ???ruling classes??? call freedom of speech. I???m not
knocking democracy at all but we need to look at things a lot more
realistically instead of paying homage to illusions.

By that I mean, as you highlighted, places like Spain or Greece, where
people are dealing with issues relating to political power and the
insidiousness of the neoliberal state.

best, always
allan

(BTW Bordoni and Bauman???s State of Crisis is worth alike)

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Crisis 2.0 - the political turn (some comments)

[allan siegel]

Hello,
Yes, there is a crisis, that shouldn’t be a big surprise but what precisely is 
the crisis? A number of contemporary philosophers have been wading into this 
question for some time now; is it the crisis that marks a break with modernity? 
Quite possibly. Is it simply the economic crisis of 2008? No. After floating 
through years of fuelled by the illusions of the post-modern delirium we’re 
finding that it is not easy to get very far if you’re running on empty and the 
consequence finding ourselves stuck in something akin to an ideological vacuum. 

In fact what is being called the ‘crisis’ is probably the result of the 
conflation of a host of historical factors: political, economic, etc… So, to 
view the crisis in the absence of any substantial historical context is simply 
misleading. It is as if we can view the recent events in Paris detached from 
the legacy of French colonialism and the post-colonial turbulence that has 
continued to batter Algeria. We live in a global world still very much being 
buffeted by the decades of colonial and imperial hubris that has plundered the 
third world in any number of political guises. The horrendous blow-back from 
this is used to buttress the surveillance states now common in the West: high 
tech snooping tools, random police operations which provide citizens with a 
fragile, fleeting sense of security that is regularly shattered by unexpected 
violence and killings. Countless innocents are slaughtered without warning; 
police forces run amok… 

It is yet to be seen whether the political movements in Spain or Greece can 
move their societies in a new direction beyond the neoliberal economic pincers 
- I certainly hope they can - but the fact that these movements exist is a 
testament to some tangible threads of historical continuity and a capacity to 
create new forms of political organisation. The fact is that in the belly of 
the beast the banks escaped like bandits with a free ticket to manage the next 
financial crisis while effortlessly plundering the U.S. treasury and there were 
no political entity/s or coalition of forces that could deter the neoliberal 
juggernaut. Were the banks and their bosses ever held accountable? A sad 
reflection on the manner in which the neoliberal mind-set has distorted not 
only the political consciousness of the citizenry but trashed the most basic 
forms of common sense.

I’m not being cynical, really, just realistic; we cannot demand the impossible 
but we can manage to to insure that the next generation has the tools and the 
wisdom, to go beyond the ineptness, the corruption, and the greed the has 
polluted so many hard won democratic institutions and whittled away the 
parameters of a just society. Unless all the solid, meaningful efforts (in any 
number of disciplines, economic programmes or alternative and innovative 
practices) can coalesce into a political force able to out-manouver the status 
quo of the current political landscape we’re in for more stormy weather.

allan


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Controlling the future

[allan siegel]

Elmar Altvater
Controlling the future
Edward Snowdon and the new era on Earth

In June 2013, Edward Snowden began to uncover the machinations of the US 
National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communications 
Headquarters (GCHQ), prompting a worldwide debate about the alarming power of 
the secret services. Snowden laid bare the extent to which the quintet of 
secret services ??? the "Five Eyes" from the United States, the United Kingdom, 
Canada, Australia and New Zealand ??? had spied on citizens around the world, 
and the planetary system in place for stealing, storing and using data for 
their own purposes ??? thus violating everyone's privacy, which Article 12 of 
the United Nations Charter on Human Rights protects. As a result, freedom of 
expression, the basis for political participation as well as of resistance 
against power, was fundamentally threatened and with it, democracy as such.

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2014-12-19-altvater-en.html  (for complete 
article)


And additional articles on the politics of privacy, etc???.

best for 2015
allan


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Facebook as social space of play

[allan siegel]

   Allan Resposted from  Berfrois

   Laurent Berlant performs as clicking

   by Lauren Berlant

   Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long
   conversation about what the point of networking amongst "friends" is.
   The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped
   intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy. To her, real intimacy
   is a relation that requires the fortitude and porousness of a serious,
   emotionally-laden, accretion of mutual experience. Her intimacies are
   spaces of permission not only for recognition but for the right to be
   seriously inconvenient, to demand, and to need. It presumes face to
   faceness, but even more profoundly, flesh to fleshness. But on Facebook
   one can always skim, or not log in.

   My version of this distinction is different of course, and sees more
   overlap than difference among types of attachment. The stretched-out
   intimacies are important and really matter, but they are more shaped by
   the phantasmatic dimension of recognition and reciprocity-it is easier
   to hide inattention, disagreement, disparity, aversion. On the other
   hand it's easier to focus on what's great in that genre of intimacy and
   to let the other stuff not matter. There's less likely collateral
   damage in mediated or stranger intimacies. While the more conventional
   kinds of intimacy foreground the immediate and the demanding, are more
   atmospheric and singular, enable others' memories to have the ethical
   density of knowledge about one that is truer than what one carries
   around, and involve many more opportunities for losing one's bearings.
   The latter takes off from a Cavellian thought about love-love as
   returning to the scene of coordinating lives, synchronizing being-but
   synchrony can be spread more capaciously and meaningfully amongst a
   variety of attachments. Still, I think all kinds of emotional
   dependency and sustenance can flourish amongst people who only meet
   each other at one or a few points on the grid of the field of their
   life.

   Thinking about yesterday's reciprocity entry, I said to her that one
   point of Facebook is to inhabit the social as a place of play, of
   having a light impact, of being ordinary, of being acknowledged, of
   echoing and noodling, where the bar for reciprocity is so low that
   anyone could perform it by clicking. It's a place where clicking is a
   sign that someone has paid attention and where dropping a line can
   build toward making a life. You know someone has imagined you today,
   checked in. You're not an isolate. Trying to accommodate to my positive
   explanation, she said, I guess it's like when churches organize prayer
   circles for impaired strangers, sending out love into the spirit
   world-it can't hurt, but is it deep? Me: people value different
   evidence of having had an impact and of mattering to the world they're
   imagining belonging to, and who can say what's deep from outside of the
   transference? But I realized that I may be incoherent about this, and
   of course this problem, of figuring out how to talk about ways of being
   that are simultaneously openings and defenses, is central to this
   project. When people talk about modes of belonging they talk about
   desire but less so about defense.

   I sense that Facebook is about calibrating the difficulty of knowing
   the importance of the ordinary event. People are trying there to
   eventalize the mood, the inclination, the thing that just happened-the
   episodic nature of existence.So and so is in a mood right now.So and so
   likes this kind of thing right now; and just went here and there. This
   is how they felt about it. It's not in the idiom of the great encounter
   or the great passion, it's the lightness and play of the poke. There's
   always a potential but not a demand for more.

   Here is how so and so has shown up to life. Can you show up too, for a
   sec?

   How can the "episodic now" become an event? Little mediated worlds
   produced by kinetic reciprocity enable accretion to become event
   without the drama of a disturbance. The disturbance is the exception.
   And that's what makes stranger intimacy a relief from the other kind,
   which tips you over.

   Piece crossposted with Supervalent Thought

   The post Lauren Berlant performs by clicking appeared first on
   berfrois.


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New York's dark clouds?

[allan siegel]

   Hello,
   Roger Cohen seems to be just waking up from a deep sleep or maybe the
   full ramifications of the 21st century has finally caught up with him;
   how someone can write about the dark clouds hanging over the Big Apple
   without mentioning the Eric Garner killing just illustrates the
   limitations of his vision; one could go on further about the
   shallowness of his analysis but just contrast what he has opined and
   the Wark speech (both coming from NYC) and you get a sense of the
   vastly different worlds these two commentators inhabit and the ongoing
   decline of the NY Times as a newspaper of any depth. More on Wark
   sometime soon, I hope.
   best
   allan


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democracy and decentralization

[allan siegel]

   Hello,
   Well, there is a difference between actual physical control and the
   propogated illusion of control (thanks Brian for bringing Foucault back
   into the discussion - I have the feeling he never left).  If we accept
   or passively follow the various socialising paradigms where
   mega-companies such as Google exercise control then we fall into that
   behavioral abyss charted in 1984 and other dystopic works describing
   the collapse or devolution of democratic norms. As, perhaps, (as
   indicated below) what is important is maintaining, continuous
   invigorating, the terrain upon which the totalitarian nature of the
   neoliberal hyper-capitalist infrastructure can be contested. In this
   context decentralisation of forms/means of communication are an
   imperative - without vibrant discursive social spaces reflective of the
   social needs and desires that permeate daily life we are only so much
   fodder for the GoogleFacebook singularity, one-dimensional, social
   mechanisms.

   Best

   allan

   "Sonja Buchegger is leading a group of scientists at KTH who are
   creating building blocks that developers could use to launch
   decentralized, distributed networks, which would not only be difficult
   to interfere with, but would also protect people from government
   snooping.
   "The internet itself is not centralized it would be hard to shut down,"
   Buchegger says. "It was built as a robust, decentralized tool to
   communicate; and we can do the same for other services that are now
   centralized, like social networks."
   Whether the demand for such networks would go mainstream any time soon
   is hard to tell. Buchegger notes that it is difficult for most people
   to wrap their head around the notion that their personal information is
   exposed on web-based email and social platforms.
   "The whole privacy issue online is very young, and the population is
   not used to thinking in this way," she says. "Offline, we know how to
   protect our privacy; we know who can overhear us; we see who is in the
   room with us and we know whether we can trust those people; but online
   we haven't really grasped who the audience is and how that changes over
   time."
   Buchegger's research is focused on the privacy issues of distributed
   peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, that is, the underlying infrastructure for
   a decentralized system in which people could store their data beyond
   the reach of data miners or government surveillance."
   Read more at:
   http://phys.org/news/2014-05-decentralized-networks-democracy.html


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social media & political activism redux

[allan siegel]

Hello Mike
I think you are missing the point; or, rather have little sense of the context 
within which these demonstrations are taking place. Your comment sounds oddly 
Luddite and with a twinge of universalising generalities that do not help in 
understanding the particularities of the Budapest events nor those in other 
cities; iPhones or Samsung Notes or LGs or computers in Budapest in Hong Kong 
or Tunisia may be all similar but they way they are used is necessarily 
different despite neoliberal or state corporate objectives. 

allan


> A problem with all of this is that the ???hand???s off the Internet??? 
> position is at the  
> very core of a neo-liberal take down of the social contract. The Internet 
> erodes local  
> tax bases, shifts wealth from the poor to the rich, from poor countries to 
> rich ones; and  
> the rallying cry for oppositional elements is ???hand???s off
 <...>


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social media & political activism redux

[allan siegel]

Hello,
The recent massive public demonstrations in Budapest against a repressive 
internet tax, amongst other issues, raises once again questions of the role of 
social media (and Facebook in particular) as mobilising vehicles for social 
protest and political activism. As Alice Neerson writes in Open Democracy, 
"social media facilitate differing degrees of involvement in political action. 
By lowering the barriers to activism, they make it possible for more people to 
take small steps as part of a larger movement. When expressed through social 
media in much larger numbers, public opinion has the potential to influence 
those in power and to give emotional momentum to those… on the front lines of a 
struggle.” (Sept. 29) The Budapest demonstrations offer, yet again, some 
indication of the validity of this observation; it has become facile to forget 
or dismiss the fact that social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) are precisely 
that: social media. Social media are both a reflection of and channel for the 
flow of collective, often invisible, realities. Not to dismiss or minimize the 
nefarious and intrusive qualities that are intrinsic to the most ubiquitous 
brands of social media, it becomes simplistic (and reductionist) to put aside 
the manner in which these tools are wielded as factors in political activism. 
In this context, social media has the capacity, to mobilize public opinion 
particularly in situations where more formal political institutions have lost 
touch with or are incapable of responding to latent forms of public discontent 
and specific political grievances. A very basic survey of recent examples of 
political activism will illustrate how lethargic (and far too easily 
corruptible) established political parties are when it comes to comprehending 
and supporting the issues that ignite and propel social action.
 
Social medias are neither the primary nor secondary (categorization is 
inappropriate) factors in political movements; what they can do is make visible 
the concerns of people inhabiting diverse social spaces as well as the 
objectives of political discourses that are simultaneously taking place below 
the radar of neo-liberal elites and their governmental watchdogs (at least 
temporarily). In this sense, as instruments for rapid forms of communication 
and as a means for organizing collective actions, they can be utilized (as has 
been amply demonstrated) to push back against the creeping authoritarianism 
invading the fragile democracies of the Western world; just as they have been 
used to foment and activate change in other parts of the world.

Allan

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Is anyone immune to the social media echo chamber?

[allan siegel]

FYI

"It's becoming increasingly obvious that as we spend more time communicating 
via social media, we are disappearing into bubbles. We receive information from 
the same sources and witness the views of the same people in our personalised 
newsfeeds every day. But it also seems like living in our bubble is having an 
effect on our own opinions and how we formulate them."

complete article in Phys.org from The Conversation (AU)

http://phys.org/news/2014-08-immune-social-media-echo-chamber.html

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tensions? elites? governance?

[allan siegel]

Hello, 

This discussion seems to have moved from one end of a shallow pool
to another. As Felix has said, "What astounds and dismays me now is
that all we -- lefty artist/intellectuals on this list -- manage to
produce is a cynicism and bickering." And, that the discussion is
'stale.' Yes, to say the least. Gentrification is talked about in the
most ahistorical terms - as if Google and its buses were some isolated
phenomenon peculiar to San Francisco. What is most striking about the
discussion are the barriers that seem to impede placing the issues at
stake into a larger context and more pointedly any reference to the
vast amount of writing (and research) that has focused precisely on
the issues that are at the centre of this struggle. And, the issues
are certainly not new; they most certainly predate Google, Facebook
etc etc?.

I would take a guess at least of one of the possible causes of the
'cynicism and bickering.' Robust political entities that can challenge
the dominant social/class interests, in the U.S. particularly, outside
of the mainstream parties, are passing aberrations. Eventually,
political outsiders succumb to one party affiliation or another;
lefties moved to the Obama camp rather than have Romney et al
in the White House; popular political discourse covers a very
narrow terrain; people look to the New York Times for enlightenment
(how depressing); a handful of outspoken public intellectuals are
continuously marginalised. Movements such as Occupy appear and
then disappear because they cannot come to grips with, nor think
strategically, in terms of long term power struggles that are
necessarily waged in order to alter the power relationships that
enforce (and monitor) an inscribed set of social priorities. All this
fosters cynicism and bickering.

Sooner or later (hopefully sooner) one needs to ask the questions:
'what kind of world do we want to live in?' and 'how, through what
processes, might that possibly come about.?' In some small measure
we face these questions daily; we do this in our own little worlds
or social/political/work enclaves but at what point do our best
intentions coalesce into something larger? And, how do we communicate
that with some kind of collective voice that resonates above the
malignant droning of tea parties, Nigel Farages and other right wing
populists shaping the dimensions of popular discourse.

allan




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democracy and decentralization

[allan siegel]

Hello,

Well, there is a difference between actual physical control and the propogated 
illusion of control (thanks Brian for bringing Foucault back into the 
discussion - I have the feeling he never left).  If we accept or passively 
follow the various socialising paradigms where mega-companies such as Google 
exercise ‘control’ then we fall into that behavioral abyss charted in 1984 and 
other dystopic works describing the collapse or devolution of democratic norms. 
As, perhaps, (as indicated below) what is important is maintaining, continuous 
invigorating, the terrain upon which the totalitarian nature of the neoliberal 
hyper-capitalist infrastructure can be contested. In this context 
decentralisation of forms/means of communication are an imperative - without 
vibrant discursive social spaces reflective of the social needs and desires 
that permeate daily life we are only so much fodder for the GoogleFacebook 
singularity, one-dimensional, social mechanisms.

"Sonja Buchegger is leading a group of scientists at KTH who are creating 
building blocks that developers could use to launch decentralized, distributed 
networks, which would not only be difficult to interfere with, but would also 
protect people from government snooping.

"The internet itself is not centralized – it would be hard to shut down," 
Buchegger says. "It was built as a robust, decentralized tool to communicate; 
and we can do the same for other services that are now centralized, like social 
networks."

Whether the demand for such networks would go mainstream any time soon is hard 
to tell. Buchegger notes that it is difficult for most people to wrap their 
head around the notion that their personal information is exposed on web-based 
email and social platforms.

"The whole privacy issue online is very young, and the population is not used 
to thinking in this way," she says. "Offline, we know how to protect our 
privacy; we know who can overhear us; we see who is in the room with us and we 
know whether we can trust those people; but online we haven't really grasped 
who the audience is and how that changes over time." 

Buchegger's research is focused on the privacy issues of distributed 
peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, that is, the underlying infrastructure for a 
decentralized system in which people could store their data beyond the reach of 
data miners or government surveillance."


Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2014-05-decentralized-networks-democracy.html

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a political economy of new media

[allan siegel]

Hello,
Excerpt from: Astra Taylor’s book "The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and 
Culture in the Digital Age.”
"I definitely thought there was something missing, a critique or an analysis 
that really emphasized the economic underpinnings of this technological 
transformation; what I thought was missing, to use the academic phase, was a 
political economy of new media. And in that sense there wasn’t a book written 
for a popular audience that was a left critique of the Internet. Because there 
was Nicholas Carr’s good book “The Shallows,” which I actually quite liked. And 
Jaron Lanier’s more eccentric and interesting books. But they’re not leftist 
manifestos.

I felt like there’s something missing from those books too, about the 
continuation of not just economic hierarchies, which of course I’m paying 
attention to, because that’s what political economy is all about, but also 
social hierarchies. And both of them are very concerned with the way that 
creators have been demoted, and the devaluation of literature, and Jaron Lanier 
writes about the hive mind. But for me, as a woman, you have to cheer the 
toppling of the canon and hierarchies because otherwise there’d be no space for 
you. And to me, being a progressive is wanting progress, wanting change. But I 
want the change to be toward something more just, more inclusive, more diverse. 
And so I do think there’s something about being a leftist but also just being a 
feminist that puts a different twist on this.”

allan


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HME's 10 rules (yet again)

[allan siegel]

Hi there,

What a great flow of emotions Herr Enzensberger has generated
over these days; seems like his 10 points for survival in the
overlapping realms of the analog and digital worlds (as opposed to
the post-digital mash-up which probably lies somewhere gestating in
psychedelic glory in a basement somewhere between Seattle and San
Jose) has created quite a stir. Rather than focusing, yet again, on
the nuances of the 10 points, which others have done quite well, let
me cut to the chase: the final paragraph in Enzensberger's casual
reminder to Germany' citizens. "The sleep of reason will continue to
the day when a majority of this country's citizens will experience
firsthand what has been done to them. Perhaps, they will rub their
eyes and ask why they let it slip in a time when resistance was still
possible." 

Thanks Florian for the translation. One wonders if Herr Enzensberger
imagined his subtle prodding would spread its wings so far and wide.

allan




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Hungary in focus

[allan siegel]

http://www.eurozine.com/comp/focalpoints/hungary2013.html

Hungary in focus

In recent years, Hungary has been a constant 
concern for anyone interested in European 
politics and Eurozine has published extensively 
on different aspects of the Hungarian situation. 
Ahead of the Hungarian elections in 2014, we have 
collected some of those articles dealing with 
both recent developments and broader issues 
relating to Hungarian politics, history and 
culture.


This collection of texts puts into perspective 
how, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, 
Hungary's democratic reforms were held up as an 
example to the states of central eastern Europe. 
Twenty years later, the political process 
suffered a sudden reversal following the election 
in 2010 of the Fidesz government under Viktor 
Orbán. Now the dismantling of Hungary's political 
and constitutional system continues.


However, the focus also includes a series of 
responses to serious unrest on the streets of 
Budapest in September 2006 after the then 
Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány 
admitted to downplaying the scale of the national 
debt in the run-up to elections earlier the same 
year.


Gábor Attila Tóth: Power instead of law

As the Fidesz government dismantles Hungary's 
political and constitutional system, Gábor Attila 
Tóth considers the influence of international 
institutions and the efficacy of domestic, 
democratic resources far from exhausted. On the 
contrary, the role played by both will likely be 
decisive. [ more ]


Robert Hodonyi, Helga Trüpel: Together against Orbán: Hungary's new opposition

Amid international concern over government 
reforms that endanger democracy in Hungary, 
Hodonyi and Trüpel discover a political 
renaissance in Hungarian civil society. Ahead of 
elections in spring 2014, this may well be an 
antidote to the EU's "political 
half-heartedness". [ more ]


Gábor Halmai: Towards an illiberal democracy

Hungary's new constitution contradicts European 
standards on numerous counts: it sets in stone 
government policy; it is biased towards "ethnic" 
Hungarians; and it undermines the independence of 
regulatory institutions including the 
constitutional court and media. [ more ]



György Dalos, Miklós Haraszti, György Konrád, László Rajk
The decline of democracy -- the rise of dictatorship

In a "New Year's appeal", thirteen intellectuals 
and public figures who opposed Hungary's 
communist regime in the 1970s outline their 
concerns about Hungary's new constitution and 
call on Europe to help halt a slide towards a new 
dictatorship. [ more ]


Miklós Haraszti: Notes on Hungary's media law package

Hungary's media law could lead to a 
depoliticization of the media the likes of which 
exists in Russia and other post-Soviet 
democracies, writes the former OSCE 
Representative on Freedom of the Media. The 
alterations to the law will do little to this 
halt this tendency. [ more ]


etc.

etc.


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How Silicon Valley's CEOs

[allan siegel]

Hello,
Trying to keep up out here in the hinterland…

What exactly was the Renaissance moment? What’s up with the sudden 
fetishisation of California Ideology (? - forget about it; Breaking Bad - is 
that part of the California ideology?) Is Silicon Valley capitalism that much 
different from Wall Street global capitalism? At what point does the state 
managed capitalism of the Chinese People’s Republic intersect with state 
enabling capitalism of the USA and Europe?

One thing that can be said about the fact that there is a ‘socialist’ member of 
the Seattle city council is that she had the support of the Trotsky-ist (thank 
you Martha) Socialist Alternative which is probably one of the few leftist 
parties (in the US) that manages to survive because it manages to rebrand the 
same line it has had for the past 50 (maybe 100?) years and manages to also 
take advantage of those miraculously enduring communities that survive amidst 
the maelstrom of disinformation and the myopic charade that masquerades as 
political discourse on the six o’clock news. Bernie Sanders was elected by one 
of those communities also (albeit a bit more extensive one). 

All this only confirms that it is possible to create alternatives to the 
bipolar disorder of the Democrats and Republicans but to get beyond one or two 
election cycles requires a more substantial vision of the present historical 
moment and radical approaches to economic development and the list of social 
maladies that need to be addressed.

excuse the rant…

allan


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The Californian Reality (from: New Geography)

[allan siegel]

Hello,

Two points here from Brian worth extending a bit further in this discussion 
because they seem to me critical if we are ever going to move beyond the 
social, governmental and corporate paradigms assembled by what he calls the 
"full-fledged transnational capitalist class.” And it is a class with all the 
apparatuses to insure a constantly ascendent self-interested position within 
the various forms of political turbulence an social unrest circling the globe. 
In the U.S. this class has mastered the art of what Marcuse called “repressive 
sublimation.” What this boils down to an internalising the kind of false 
consciousness thats says ‘we can’t enable REAL change because hope is just 
around the corner; a better day is coming. Vote for Obama’ Which is why a 
change is never gonna come, ain’t gonna happen until "certain realities are 
squarely faced, not just by fringe figures like ourselves but by much broader 
swathes of society."

Amazingly, 50 years after the political movements of the 60s, in the U.S., 
little has changed in terms of the structural dynamics that shape political 
discourse. So much of what was said back then, prescient and profound, has not 
been transferred organizationally. It’s taught in universities but is 
invariably diluted as it makes it way of the institutional media ladder. So we 
find ourselves in the position where, unfortunately, there is very solid line 
of ideological continuity from the days of McCarthyism to the right-wing rants 
of the Tea Party; the Koch Bros. et al fund right-wing-structures and 
organisations that do more than just snipe from the side lines. 

America’s great public intellectuals (and there are many) are marginalised and 
left to preach to the choir and so it is difficult to connect the discursive 
dots with a praxis that powerfully challenges the dominant political 
hierarchies. Such a connection would foster a diversity of public spheres in 
which, as Brian posits, "Societies are articulated by the relation between 
knowledge and practice.”

good night
allan


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The Californian Reality (from: New Geography)

[allan siegel]

Hello,
Thanks Brian for the snapshot history lesson; what seems to be glossed 
over in your letter is this salient point: "Not only in California, but 
across the world there are new oligarchies who dispose (of us) more or 
less as they please. Unlike the student movements of 2009, I don't think 
this thing is going to fall in some passionate spontaneous coming 
insurrection." Precisely, and exactly what kind of 
planning/organizing/conceptualizing is necessary (or possible) not 
simply as a defense against the OS of a corporate totalitarianism but to 
envision and "plan" a new trajectory of possibilities altogether? If we 
can't, decisively, move beyond the Democrats vs. Republicans paradigm 
then we can rest assured that the Google buses will just keep coming (to 
a bus stop near you).


best
allan


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net neutrality scandal redux

[allan siegel]

Hello,

from Media Matters [16.01.14]: "The Wall Street Journal applauded a 
court decision invalidating the Federal Communications Commission's 
(FCC) net neutrality regulations, spinning the rules as hampering 
innovation and benefitting only "the giants of Silicon Valley," despite 
experts who warned of the damaging impact such a ruling might have on 
the public's access to online content."


In case this passed you by here is a brief bit of background: "The idea 
of "net neutrality" is also called "open internet" because it argues 
that no government or company can regulate the flow of the Internet. 
Advocates say that if left without regulation, large service providers 
will give preferential treatment to larger companies that can pay more. 
Meanwhile, smaller tech companies without deep, corporate pockets, will 
not be able to compete for premium service." [Reuters, 1/14/14]


You betcha, look who is applauding the decision: "Net neutrality travels 
under the guise of ordering Internet service providers like Verizon and 
Comcast not to discriminate against content providers. In reality it's a 
government attempt to dictate how these providers must manage their 
Internet pipes and how much they can charge companies for using those 
pipes… This makes no more economic sense than forcing a cable company to 
charge one price no matter how many channels a consumer subscribes to, 
or saying a retailer can't charge more for two dresses than for one. It 
also means less innovation and slower broadband rollout because Internet 
companies are less sure of their return on investment. [The Wall Street 
Journal, 1/14/13]


And what will be the outcome? TIM WU: It leaves the Internet in 
completely uncharted territory. There's never been a situation where 
providers can block whatever they want. For example, it means AT&T can 
block people from reaching T-Mobile's customer service site if it 
wanted. They can do whatever they want. [The Washington Post, 1/14/14]


And that's not all: "The ruling] means that the major providers of 
high-speed Internet access in the US, who have systematically divided 
markets and tacitly agreed mostly not to compete with one another, can 
treat high-speed Internet access like a cable TV service = they can be 
gatekeepers, charge content providers (any business) for the privilege 
of reaching us, the subscribers - and, of course, charge us. A lot. for 
lousy service compared to, say, Stockholm or Seoul." [Reddit.com, 1/14/14]


A classic Orwellian pincer movement; while the NSA is Hoovering data; 
the telecoms are building dams, toll booths and entrance ramps (and 
exits) for information highways.


best
allan


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public indifference

[allan siegel]

Excuse me but is public indifference considered to be a new phenomenon is that 
really what it is? Remember Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers? 
Levels of domestic and international surveillance have intensified 
logarithmically in the post-war period; just imagine what J. Edgar would have 
done if he could Hoover up data the way the NSA does. The highest echelons of 
this behemoth of a security apparatus have taken on a life of its own 
independent of the governmental controls that are supposed to monitor its 
activities. Quite presciently Norman Mailer wrote about this ages ago in 
reference to the CIA; he described how the various entities and fronts that it 
created began to take on their own economic realities far removed from any 
governmental controls and now, far beyond what Mailer might have imagined, the 
government officially and openly sub-contracts security and policing to 
companies effectively working outside the law. All this just increases daily 
despite shut-downs and economic crises (after all its sucking up tax dollars 
just like all the data its accumulating). Indifference is an inaccurate 
description of what the public is feeling right now. What might be more 
accurate is a profound sense of cynicism, confusion and fear because the world 
most of us live in is littered with enormous uncertainties and where survival 
is high on the daily agenda; and because politicians and government leaders are 
baffling in terms of their levels of incoherence; and because the omnipresent 
cloud of some kind of terrorist act lingers in the not far distance (and never 
mind the kind of atrocities that occur daily enabled by the same systems that 
govern the surveillance apparatus). So, indifference is not quite appropriate 
when you start thinking about the future and how it appears or manifests itself 
stitched into people’s daily routines. This is not to belittle or diminish the 
importance of what Snowden has done; the impact of his act is hard to quantify 
as its ramifications will be still felt years from now; the Pentagon Papers had 
a shock value when they came out also and the NY Times eagerly published them 
(and the Times then still had journalistic stature). But, indeed now the times 
they are a’changing. The real indifference lies not with the public but rather 
with the shamble of what we politely call the Fifth Estate and the obscene 
level of public discourse… 

bye for now
allan


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Re: rules of the digital panopticon

[allan siegel]

Hello,
People seem to be missing one critical aspect of the panopiticon and if you 
have ever been inside of a prison based on these principles, which I
have, the missing element is quite apparent. The central location of the 
observation tower created a type of one way mirror in which prisoners 
could be observed by the guards but the guards could not be observed by the 
prisoners. The operative principle was that prisoners could not tell 
when they were being observed and were conditioned to assume that they were 
under 24 hour surveillance. The theory was (and to some extent was realised) 
that prisoners would be forced to condition their behaviour because of the 
assumption that they were under constant observation.
This works fine if you assume that prisoners have no intelligence and that 
guards are strictly following the routines associated with
observation and surveillance. In fact neither is the case. So, a distinction 
needs to be made between the panopticon on paper, in theory, and how it worked 
in practice. I would assume, though I am by no means certain, that Foucault's 
essay relies considerably on the theoretical propositions.

Snowden would not be where he is today, nor would we have the revelations about 
the NSA, if he behaved like a good operative and followed the rules established 
by his intelligence managers.

best
allan

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the secret financial market, p.s.

[allan siegel]

Hello,

Armin started to zero in on an aspect of this discussion that has been largely 
invisible or at least off to the sidelines:

"there is a philosophical aspect to that discourse on [h]umans/non-humans 
that has someting to to with Virilio, Latour and Barad which I would 
love to elaborate on more now, but unfortunately I have some other work 
to do today in order to 'earn a living' as the saying goes"

The infrastructure, both human and virtual, of brand 'neo-liberalism' has 
precious few rules and those that do exist for the 1% are different for those 
in the majority. It is probably hard to grasp this simple reality but not 
everybody plays by the same rules and for that matter the venues, the economic 
and institutional edifices, which are at the heart of our daily lives are woven 
together via a fragile ethos. 

'Secret financial markets' have been around for quite some time; long before 
the advent of high speed trading, hedge  funds, credit swaps and other devices 
designed to maximise and squeeze out whatever profits can be garnered from the 
various market places that connect the hubs of global finance. Within this 
realm there really are no rules; certainly not the 'rules' that affect the 
majority of people's lives and this kind of 'lawlessness' (yes, I know it 
sounds simplistic and moralistic) filters into other sectors of society. Is the 
distance between secret financial markets and NSA spying that far?

Virilio, Latour et al have been struggling with these questions for some time 
now - in a sense battling against the ethical devolution of critical aspects of 
Western post-industrial societies and to chart out other possibilities; 
unfortunately, the degree of entrenched power nested in the 1% and their vast 
networks of enablers and enforcers is a largely invisible glacier and those of 
us who to try to imagine and piece together an alternative road map sometimes 
seem stuck in a dream world of impossible possibilities. Yet, the glacier is by 
no means implacable; its subject to its own rivalries and forms of 
self-destruction. 

best
allan




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Bosnia and Syria: Intervention

[allan siegel]

Hello there,

Was this post meant to be ironic? If not then it is a stunning example of the 
Thomas Friedman school of journalism masquerading as serious analysis. This 
kind of self-righteous commentary is so off the mark that what one can only 
wonder about the type of research process that fosters such a superficial take 
on a calamitous situation. The reductionist comparison to the collapse of 
Yugoslavia is really grasping at straws and then we have this brilliant line: 
"Lethal and non-lethal aid is being funneled to Syrian fighters, through Turkey 
and through Jordan, under the watchful eye of the CIA. Further assistance is 
reaching the fighters through Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states." Ain't it great 
to know that the good guys are on your side? Weren't they the same guys keeping 
tabs on Osama bin Laden?

allan
 

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Bezos, the Post and American media

[allan siegel]

Greetings,
Amazon/Bezos buying the Post is part of a media garage sale; the Boston Globe 
was sold recently by the New York Times for a pittance. It has more to do with 
the acquisition of a brand more than anything else. For Amazon it provides yet 
another digital platform in its multifarious stable of hard and soft 
commodities. The impact this will have on political discourse in the US is 
marginal as significant political discussion has long ago vanished from the 
American media landscape. Many Americans on the left were seduced into 
believing that NPR was an alternative to Fox News, hello; the New York Times 
has been morphed into an American Pravda gallantly servicing the political 
elites. Then there are enough kaleidoscopic entities such as the Huffington 
Post offering a supermarket range of news and gossip (headlined by a few A 
listers) that the commentariat can continue to gush about all the wonderful 
qualities of democratic America. Sadly, Snowden is in exile and Manning is in 
jail; Greenwal
 d writes for the Guardian. Hardcore investigative journalism was boiled out of 
the media pot after the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate - an era when the 
left in the U.S. still had some political robustness. If the Washington Post 
was bought by the Nation or some other non-commercial entity (or - god forbid - 
political entity or Arab state) we would have something to talk about. This is 
just another turn in the dumbing-down spiral of MSM - yes, the main stream 
media.  

cheers
allan


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whole earth or planet america catalogue

[allan siegel]

Dear Nettime listers…

Like so much of 60s counter culture initiatives the Whole Earth Catalogue was 
soaked up by the various forms of consumer fetishism symptomatic of a highly 
developed consumerist society; a phenomenon that Herbert Marcuse understood 
only too well. As a consequence it is easier to replay the the good notes it 
represented (or embodied) rather than seek out what kernels of both political 
and practical knowledge lie in its past existence and experience; and here lies 
one of the unique aspects of advanced (brand America) or late stage capitalism 
(if one prefers): the centripetal dynamics of American society have 
successfully defanged those internal political movements that have threatened 
the global agenda of the American state. This is a Faustian thread that wends 
its way through all layers of the society and unfortunately has become a 
paradigmatic tool in the kit of neoliberal statesmen, politicians and 
plutocrats. The case of the American labour movement is a prime example; 
Gompers agreed to jettison labour's political weapons (ages ago) and in return 
American workers would get a bigger piece of the capitalist pie - the formula 
has worked successfully in other sectors as well… and so it goes; isn't it 
remarkable that out of all the political movements from the 60's nothing 
emerged that substantially challenged the dual party dominance of American 
political discourse? It's the Ellsebergs or Snowdens or Kings that continue to 
unsettle the system… hmmm. The Tanner film Jonah in the Year 2000 is worth look 
for those interested in some of the group dynamics from that era (from the 
French vantage point).

best
allan


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spying, surveillance and the everyday

[allan siegel]

Greetings All,
Of course one can expect boiling outrage at the copious amounts of hoovering of 
data, eavesdropping and classical snooping that characterises the numerous 
Snowden/NSA revelations. What a good part of the discussions focus on is the 
notion of the 'invasion of privacy' either on an individual level or on the 
state level. But, in the post 9/11 world (in actuality much before) spying and 
surveillance have almost effortlessly crossed the borders of state and 
corporate territories into the realm of the private - whether in the virtual 
world or the physical; our everyday realities are subject to observation and 
tracking on numerous levels: in airports or on the street both named and 
anonymous forces can alter or thwart everyday mobility. Thus, the NSA 
revelations only represent one aspect of the surveillance tree in which 'stop 
and frisk laws', racial profiling and other criteria for identifying social 
miscreants are in play. It is quite necessary to add to this dystopic scenario 
perhaps a 
 more troubling and deep-rooted aspect of the surveillance landscape: the 
neoliberal economic paradigm(s) upon which post-industrial societies rest is in 
itself dependent on the hoovering and collecting of individual data; in this 
sense the border between the avowedly political target of surveillance and the 
potential consumer becomes is naturally blurred; similar tools (employed on 
vastly different scales) are employed to identify the markers of the 'potential 
terrorist' or someone looking for a book at Amazon, tools for the garden, or 
food for the evening meal. It seems that across the various digital nodes that 
fill our contemporary landscapes there has been an ineluctable blurring of 
boundaries between the territories of the individual, the state or the 
corporate world. 

The public space of the internet is a very fragile reality, indeed, in the same 
manner that the public spaces of our cities are subject to the most insidious 
forms of privatisation. Time for a paradigm shift?

cheers
allan


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will be there be jobs?

[allan siegel]

Hello,
Well Brian is spot-on when he says, "We live under the grip of *that* 
professional universe, whose 
expansion and accumulation of power has marked the entire neoliberal 
era. If there is no counter-project, their power will only grow in the 
course of this crisis."

The fact is that too many on the left cannot conceptualise some form of 
economic paradigm that goes beyond the neoliberal mindset; the discourse 
revolves around what kind of bandaid to use or ways of reforming a structure 
that is gruesomely malignant; politicians can only talk of change that is 
ephemeral and lasts only from one press release to another. And an alternative 
progressive vision is muted at best.

There are countless historical examples of radical changes in economic 
processes and forms of work and labour; today, globally, we are producing, 
creating, innovating new forms of knowledge and information - only a fraction 
of this has been utilised to its potential; we are thwarted by anachronistic, 
self-centred social models that perpetuate a kind of social decay that grows 
ever more venomous. 

The problem is not whether there will be jobs but rather if we are capable of 
any form of collective, socially beneficial programs and means of governance 
beyond the dystopic charade that some people still call democracy.

allan

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the disappearing middle class and snake oil salesmen

[allan siegel]

hi there,
well, to tell the truth, after reading just the infamous (so it seems) Jaron 
Lanier interview it is not his shabby analysis that is shocking, i.e. "Of 
course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was 
because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job 
was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason 
it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] 
dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be 
all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a 
decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible." Duh! What 
ahistorical rubbish; seems that these kinds of prognostications a great for 
those swimming in the kiddie pool (the shallow level of political discourse in 
the MSM) where Marx is still a dirty word (something like polio before Jonas 
Salk). Hard to figure out what the future might look like when one's image of 
the past is so limited.

allan


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the middle class doesn't exist

[allan siegel]

"Twenty years ago, class was not in the vocabulary of Swedish pundits and 
mavens. Class was something that belonged to the past. Today, however, it is 
back with a vengeance. Recently the Swedish Occupy movement "Allt åt alla" 
(Everything for Everyone) organized a bus "safari" through exclusive Stockholm 
suburbs to take a look at the millionaires' villas there and "fuel class 
hatred". Every leading newspaper has already had its own "class debate". Class 
is simply everywhere in Swedish society. 

"Anyone who wants to understand both the age in which we live and the future 
will have to talk about class," write editors Malena Rydell and Mikael Feldbaum 
in Arena. But not just any class. The cover of the new issue spells it out: 
"The middle class doesn't exist." The slogan is from poet and pundit Göran 
Greider's "54 theses for a new class awareness", a manifesto for a new Left 
packed with sound bites such as: "Treat the very word class as a teenager: it 
grows; it's unruly; it doesn't obey; it stuns you." Or: "Today's working class 
is mainly female." 

The thesis of the death of the middle class is simple and not peculiar to 
Sweden: every time you try to define the allegedly most important contemporary 
social formation, this "middle class" breaks into two, writes Greider; one part 
that serves the economic power and another that has more in common with blue 
collar workers and unemployed, with the sans papiers and the precariat."

http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-05-08-eurozinerev-en.html



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e-flux's vision for the .art domain

[allan siegel]

Hello,
Strange enough, since first commenting here on nettime on the e-flux 
issue some months ago, I no longer receive any announcements from e-flux 
and their affiliates nor have they responded to any of my emails. 
Probably they are very busy!!


allan


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global financial fraud

[allan siegel]

"we live in a society where capitalism itself has
become rampantly feral. Feral politicians cheat on their expenses; feral
bankers plunder the public purse for all it's worth; CEOs, hedge fund
operators, and private equity geniuses loot the world of wealth; telephone
and credit card compan ies load mysterious charges on everyone's
bills; corporations and the wealthy don't pay taxes while they feed at the
trough of public finance; shopkeepers price-gouge; and, at the drop of a
hat swindlers and scam artists get to practice three- card monte right up
into the highest ech elons of the corp orate and political world.

A political economy of mass dispossession, of predatory practices
to the point of daylight robbery-partic ularly of the poor and the vulnerab
le, the unsophisticated and the legally unprotected-has become
the o rder of the day. D oes anyone believe it is possible to find an honest
capitalist, an honest banker, an honest politician, an honest shopkeeper,
or an honest police commissioner anymore? Yes, they do exist. But only
as a m inority that everyon e else regards as stupid. G e t smart. G e t easy
profits. Defraud and steal! The odds of getting caught are low. And in any
case there are plenty of ways to shield personal wealth from the costs of
corporate malfeasance."

from Rebel Cities by David Harvey


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The .art TLD again: E-Flux are soliciting support for their bid

[allan siegel]

Hello,

well since I first received this request of support from E-Flux I have
been wondering about the implications; not good - not good at all.
This seems to me to be a rather blatant power grab on the part of the
E-Flux crew. The E-Flux service (which may or may not be non-profit)
has more than a slight elitist tinge about it especially considering
the high rates it charges which are deliberating skewed in favour of
museums (with good subsidies) or established galleries.

The tone of the letter requesting support is crudely self-aggrandising
once one manages to take the time to figure out exactly what is
going on; if you can manage to peruse their application you'll see
(aside from the application jargon) that the model for the 'selection
process' by which the .art domain name is awarded to prospective
applicants is not at all transparent but will be outfitted with
various 'experts' who will determine who is qualified to get the
domain name (and at what cost). In a concession to the reality that
not all applicants would be able to afford the top-shelf fees there is
the inclusion of a sliding scale for those not quite on the radar of
the New York cognoscenti.

What is also particularly disturbing about this is E-Flux's request
is its framing with the phrase 'wouldn't you want someone who REALLY
knows about art and the art world' determining who has the privilege
of acquiring the .art domain. Meaning that now the E-Flux brand
is really going global and seeking to position itself as the East
Broadway gatekeepers to the glorious and important world of art.

I have no idea who the other applicants are and to what degree they
are better or worse but this does not seem at all like a good way to
go.

allan



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Re: Nightmare or Opening

[allan siegel]

Dear Brian et al,

Indeed the Soros perspective has gotten major play in the media and
while it is strong on financial analysis (from a major capitalist
- he is isn't he?) it is weak on political analysis (which is not
surprising given that Soros' guru was Karl Popper) which Brian himself
points out. And this is a major omission which most commentators
conveniently ignore thinking - wishfully - that somehow the solution
to the EU financial crisis can come about without solving the
political crisis.

>From Brian, "And the weakness is glaring when statements like the
following are made: Obviously the US and, to a lesser degree, China,
are pushing very hard for this solution, along with the IMF and the
OECD and other proto-institutions of world government."

This solution is: "a fiscal union of Europe with a central bank much
more like the American Fed and very tight economic rules that force
the so-called "peripheral" countries to bring spending in line with
production."

But what are the political implications of this solution not
just internally within the EU but in relationship to the US and
China AND the critical emerging economies? Why should one assume
that the interests of a financially integrated AND stable EU are
the same as the US? or China? We are in that stage of intense
global competitiveness in which rationality takes second place
to profitability and market dominance (nothing new really). An
environment which Fernand Braudel understood quite well because he
understood (or tried to fathom) the inter-relationships between
politics and market forces something that Soros - with all his
financial insights - has failed to come to terms with.

allan siegel



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The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive

[allan siegel]

hello,

well I've been trying to get at the core of this discussion which frankly I 
find bloated with excess verbiage and driven by a subtext that seems to 
fetishize Facebook as if this were one of the most pressing questions we are 
now facing. Really folks, one has to simply watch The Social Network and 
extrapolate from the personalities and economic milieu  (Harvard Univ Facebook 
ground zero) at Facebook's inception into present social/political climate to 
see how value increases (and why); is the paradigm that different for Youtube, 
Yahoo, Google etc...?

a.s.

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capitalism; will socialism survive?

[allan siegel]

Hello

In regards to will capitalism survive question I am posting this
interview will Alain Badiou where he shifts the discourse in a
worthwhile direction.

cheers
Allan

Van Houdt

>From Kant to Husserl, and now to your work, the move to transcendental
philosophy has, for the most part, taken place in times of ?crisis.?
For Kant it was the potential failure of classical accounts of
rationality at the skeptical hands of David Hume, for Husserl it was
the collapse of the spirit of philosophy under the joint pressure of
modern science (the critiques of psychologism) and the onset of Nazism
(the Crisis), and for you the problem is what you call ?the crisis of
negation.? How do you define ?negation? and why it is in crisis today?

Badiou

My answer is a simple one, in fact. The very nature of the crisis
today is not, in my opinion, the crisis of capitalism, but the
failure of socialism. And maybe I am the philosopher of the time
where something like the ?Great Hypothesis? coming from the
nineteenth-century?and maybe much more, for the French Revolution?is
in crisis. So it is the crisis of the idea of revolution. But behind
the idea of revolution is the crisis of the idea of another world,
of the possibility of, really, another organization of society,
and so on. Not the crisis of the pure possibility, but the crisis
of the historical possibility of something like that is caught in
the facts themselves. And it is a crisis of negation because it is
a crisis of a conception of negation which was a creative one. The
idea of negation is by itself a negation of newness, and that if we
have the means to really negate the established order?in the moment
of that sort of negation?there is the birth of the new order. And
so the affirmative part or the constructive part of the process is
included in negation. Finally, we can speak also of the ?crisis of
dialectics? in the Hegelian sense. In Hegel we know that the creative
part of the negation was negation of negation, so the negation of
negation was not a return to before, but was on the contrary, the
degradation of the content, the positive content of negation. And
there are so many things of the failure of this vision that so
proves that very often negation is under a negation. And that is
the crisis of negation. On all sides today we know that the pure
views of negation are practically very often militant to negation,
and to the future of negation?s negations. Exactly, that the future
of revolution, victorious revolution, has been finally a terrorist
state. The complete discussion of all that is naturally much more
complex, necessitates dates, and all that, but philosophically
there is something like that. So therefore we must pronounce that
there is a crisis of negation, and from this problem, there are two
possible consequences: first to abandon purely and simply the idea of
revolution, transformation of the world, and so on, and to say that
the capitalist world, with moderate democracy, and so on, is the best
world after all ? not so good but not so bad, and finally we have with
that answer, the first vision. And so it is a vision where in some
sense the relationship between philosophy and history is separation.
Because it is my conviction that if the history of humankind has as
its final figure the figure of our world, it is proof that history
is of no philosophical interest, that there is only left a pragmatic
position, and so the best is business. In that case, the best is not
philosophy but business! So that is why if, precisely when I speak
of the ?crisis of negation,? I name ?negation? the revolutionary
conception of negativity which was dominant from the French Revolution
until sometime at the end of the last century; it was the 80s I think.
The 80s, something like that, the time of your birth, maybe? The
Crisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiou

http://www.berfrois.com/2012/03/the-80s-i-think/

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political-economy and desire

[allan siegel]

Greetings
On this question it might be worth it for those interested to take a look at 
The Passions and the Interests by Albert O. Hirschman at Princeton Univ Press. 
He illustrates the historical roots of what we can call the 'avaricious' side 
of capitalism; an issue that has been debated for many, many years and which 
ties into current conflicts.

"in matters of state let us not be guided by disorderly appetites... nor by 
violent passions, which agitate us in various ways as soon as they possess us...
the Duke of Rordan (two or three centuries ago?)

allan

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no more bubble gum?

[allan siegel]

Mike Davis' excitement is warranted but his argument strays wide of  
the mark and is finally contradictory. Which Occupy the World  
Movement is he referring to? And, whose "anger remains on Gandhian  
low heat." If movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Rome etc... are  
part of this OWM they have never quite seemed to be on 'low heat' -  
far from it. While there may be a certain form of universality that  
crosses borders, electronically and otherwise, and fuels outrage  
there are quite different, and important characteristics that  
distinguish one movement from another. To conflate them seems to  
mimic the rhetoric and reductionism of MSM.


Further, as Davis states, to:

"(i.e. reclaim the Commons). The veteran Bronx activist-historian
Mark Naison has proposed a bold plan for converting the derelict
and abandoned spaces of New York into survival resources (gardens,
campsites, playgrounds) for the unsheltered and unemployed."

Yes, this is precisely the kind of micro strategy that repositions  
people's lives at the most fundamental level (Naison's strategy is in  
fact working in various cities throughout the world).


but then Davis goes on to say that, "The great issue is not raising  
taxes on the rich or achieving a better regulation of banks.

It?s economic democracy: the right of ordinary people to make
macro-decisions about social investment, interest rates, capital
flows, job creation, and global warming. If the debate isn?t about
economic power, it?s irrelevant."

If you don't understand 'economic power' pack your bags because this  
movement is not for you - what simplistic rubbish; we're used to one  
dimensional slogans and platitudes coming from 'ruling elites' -  
along with their self-perpetuating solutions to major social problems  
(which are not just financial) - so, when a progressive/leftist  
starts reducing things to 'great issues' there is a serious problem  
of analysis and vision.



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a call to the army of love etc. etc.

[allan siegel]

dear Mark Stahlman and others

sorry about jumping in like this, I follow the various conversation  
on this list and at times feel a great irritation at the flippant  
manner in which words are bantered about.


how bizarre to hear people railing against machines and other devices  
that somehow materialised during the 20th century when the very  
discourses they are engaged in is facilitated by 'machines'  
technologies' 'inventions' and a vast array of 20th century  
paraphernalia - not only is this some kind of simplistic Luddite  
rubbish but also the kind of apolitical posturing that is hermetic  
and not at all constructive.


allan siegel


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PR.ocess or PR.opaganda

[allan siegel]

PR.ocess or PR.opaganda: a battle for the truth


The relationship between truth and lies is one we must negotiate  
every day. Generally, it comes down to who tells us what. The  
profession of Public Relations deals in truth and lies as  
commodities, less a set of objective parameters, more like the  
tradeable functions of a multi-billion dollar industry. Circling  
truth and lies is PR and there is good PR and there is bad PR.  
Knowing the difference and undermining the negatives may well define  
the coming period in global affairs.


The good stuff we might call PR.ocess because it helps inform and  
enlighten by ensuring varied points in a debate are communicated. It  
helps develop the democratic process. Then there is the PR we might  
call PR.opaganda. This is the PR purveyed by those who chase dollars  
not values, who will communicate whatever lies their paymasters  
require. There are precious few of those promoting the former and far  
too many pushing the latter.


What is to be done about the enduring power of PR.opaganda? On one  
level, of course, it is important to defend the truth and of those  
who promote it. This needs to be driven by vigilant and informed  
stakeholders and, as such, a free and high quality media is vital as  
an infrastructure to encourage those highly engaged stakeholders.
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Protest in Spain

[allan siegel]

Analysis of the May 15 movement in Spain
by Michel Bauwens

the 15thMay Movement reveals that far from being the passive agents  
that so many analysts take them to be, citizens have been able to  
organise themselves in the midst of a profound crisis of political  
representation and institutional abandonment. The new generations have  
learned how to shape the web, creating new ways of ?being together?,  
without taking recourse to ideological cliches, armed with a savvy  
pragmatism, escaping from pre-conceived political categories and big  
bureaucratic apparatuses. We are witnessing the emergence of new  
?majority minorities? that demand democracy in the face of a war ?of  
all against all? and the idiotic atomisation promoted by  
neoliberalism, one that demands social rights against the logic of  
privatisation and cuts imposed by the economical powers. And it is  
quite possible that at this juncture old political goals will be of  
little or no use.
?On 15thMay 2011, around 150,000 people took to the streets in 60  
Spanish towns and cities to demand ?Real Democracy Now?, marching  
under the slogan ?We are not commodities in the hands of bankers and  
politicians?. The protest was organised through web-based social  
networks without the involvement of any major unions or political  
parties. At the end of the march some people decided to stay the night  
at the Plaza del Sol in Madrid. They were forcefully evacuated by the  
police in the early hours of the morning. This, in turn, generated a  
mass call for everyone to occupy his or her local squares that  
thousands all over Spain took up. As we write, 65 public squares are  
being occupied, with support protests taking place in Spanish  
Embassies from Buenos Aires to Vienna and, indeed, London.?

What follows is a text by Emmanuel Rodriguez and Tomas Herreros from  
the Spanish collective Universidad Nomada, which was distributed on  
the nettime mailing list.

* 15TH May, from Outrage to Hope

?There is no doubt that Sunday 15thMay 2011 has come to mark a turning  
point: from the web to the street, from conversations around the  
kitchen table to mass mobilisations, but more than anything else, from  
outrage to hope. Tens of thousands of people, ordinary citizens  
responding to a call that started and spread on the internet, have  
taken the streets with a clear and promising demand: they want a real  
democracy, a democracy no longer tailored to the greed of the few, but  
to the needs of the people. They have been unequivocal in their  
denunciation of a political class that, since the beginning of the  
crisis, has run the country by turning away from them and obeying the  
dictates of the euphemistically called ?markets?.

We will have to watch over the next weeks and months to see how this  
demand for *real democracy now* takes shape and develops. But  
everything seems to point to a movement that will grow even stronger.  
The clearest sign of its future strength comes from the taking over of  
public squares and the impromptu camping sites that have appeared in  
pretty much every major Spanish town and city. Today, four days after  
the first march, social networks are bursting with support for the  
movement, a virtual support that is bolstered by its resonance in the  
streets and squares. While forecasting where this will take us is  
still too difficult, it is already possible to advance some questions  
that this movement has put on the table.

Firstly, the criticisms that have been raised by the 15thMay Movement  
are spot on. A growing sector of the population is outraged by  
parliamentary politics as we have come to known them, as our political  
parties are implementing it today, by making the weakest sectors of  
society pay for the crisis. In the last few years we have witnessed  
with a growing sense of disbelief how the big banks received millions  
in bail-outs, while cuts in social provision, brutal assaults on basic  
rights and covert privatisations ate away at an already skeletal  
Spanish welfare state. Today, none doubts that these politics are a  
danger to our present and our immediate future. This outrage is made  
even more explicit when it is confronted by the cowardice of  
politicians, unable to put an end to the rule of the financial world.  
Where did all those promises to give capitalism a human face made in  
the wake of the sub-prime crisis go? What happened to the idea of  
abolishing tax havens? What became of the proclamation that the  
financial system would be brought under control? What of the plans to  
tax speculative gains and the promise to stop tax benefits for the  
highest earners?

Secondly, the 15thMay Movement is a lot more than a warning to the so- 
called Left. It is possible (in fact it is quite probable) that on  
22ndMay, when local and regional elections take place in Spain, the  
left will suffer a catastrophic defeat. If that were the case, it  
would be only be a preambl