Re: made for TV, made for social media
Made by TV, made by social media. Trump, that is Trump wanted to overthrow the election and his hardcore followers believed that he would provide them direction, but in the end he proved that he is unable to really lead when it counts. He is not a general, nor a strategist, nor a coach, nor anything but a bluster machine (though a very good one). Obvious to most of us, but a revelation to some not until they were inside the capitol, wondering What now? The backlash slapped him down and now the threats of impeachment, removal, and sanctions yet to be figured, have Trump singing a completely different tune. Stiff, uncomfortable, and surely fake--but a script for self-preservation that even he knew had become necessary. (And in turn creates dissonance among his people, some of those who vowed themselves ready to die for his cause now crying betrayal. Hilarious.) Why the (insincere) words acknowledging the end of his reign? Because of all the reactions, the most important and effective in blunting the man's thirst for chaos and desire to incite was Jack Dorsey's muzzling of the Twitter account. Accompanied by a clear warning: keep this up and I'll ban you from Twitter forever. Donald Trump is addicted to Twitter, pure and simple. He doesn't want to govern, he wants to tweet. He hates government meetings, legislative processes, presidential ceremonies--but loves having his rapid-fire tweet storms. More than any aspiring teen IG influencer, Twitch streamer, or Facebook friend hoarder, Trump is addicted to hearts and retweets by the millions. Some fear once out of office Trump has enough capital (wait a minute, what about that half billion in debt that's coming due??) to start a major news and social media platform of his own. But he's not thinking about the platform launch a year from now. He's too busy composing in his head his next few tweets, and like any addict, already getting a charge from the anticipation of the effects. For him it's Twitter or nothing. And when Twitter turned the dial to zero for 12 hours, the reports are that he sat alone in the White House residence riding a one-man roller coaster of negativity, going from despair to rage and back. As has become usual, unreachable by his aides or family. But for the first time unable to tweet any of it. A second impeachment? Invocation of the 25th amendment? Normally his weapon of defense would be tweeting. With that taken out from his control, and with the company making it plain that he doesn't own the platform, he had no choice but to return to the activated account in a different kind of voice albeit off-key (ie fake as hell). This is merely one element in the larger drama, still unfolding as Prem and others have noted. But the tension between Trump and Twitter, which is to say, in some profound sense between Trump and himself, is a key relationship to watch and one of the theaters in which power has shifted. Whether he will reclaim it as a weapon, and what Twitter will tolerate, will figure into the days to come, as well as Trump's capacity to continue as a focal point for the always almost-fragmented hard right. Keep sharing your takes, please. We're all digesting this together. Dan —Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA @type_rounds_1968 @nowtime_asianamerica danswang.xyz On 1/8/21, 10:52 AM, "Molly Hankwitz" wrote: >not to nitpick, but they had a command and that was from Trump...to >"storm the capitol" > >after that they had no serious intent to occupy the Capitol or, for >instance, to issue demands... >they were there to disrupt the electoral college vote confirmation by >Congress - on behalf of their leader (Trump) > >peace >molly > > > > >molly hankwitz - she/her > >http://bivoulab.org > > > > > > > > > > >On Fri, Jan 8, 2021 at 9:58 AM Tara Mcpherson wrote: > > >It was definitely a mob, and I think Geert is right that this particular >event had no clear command. > > > >But I would caution against assuming these rioters were all poor white >folk or that this was primarily about class. Many in the mob >have now been identified, and there were plenty of white collar hooligans >in the mix, some flying in on their private jets. The formation and >legacies of whiteness in the US are a key animating factor here in a way >that > crosses class lines. It also fuels the way the mob claimed the title >“patriot” and invoked 1776. > > >Tara > > > >(Sent by pneumatic tube.) > > > >From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org >on behalf of Geert Lovink >Sent: Friday, January 8, 2021 8:13:54 AM >To: a moderated mailing list for net criticism >Subject: Re: made for TV, made for social media > >Good question, Keith. > >Was it a putch without a purpose of a mob with
Re: why is it so quiet (in the US)
to anyone that pays attention to right wing media. They had a huge get-out-the-vote effort, a massive campaign to register new voters (usually a beneficial strategy only for the Dems), particularly young voters. Moreover, they targeted Black men, Brown men, and Asian men, all with a measurable degree of success. The shock of your average liberals on Election Night, sent into despair upon seeing so many of their fellow Americans choose Trump, confirmed for me that consensus reality is no longer. And that continues right now, with millions of Trump voters loudly rejecting a Biden victory as an impossibility, because to them there is simply no way the country contains this many Biden voters. However the next few weeks play out, what is clear is that reactionary populism is here to stay as a major force in US politics. In addition to his repulsive (and thankfully uncharismatic) sons, there will be plenty of would-be Great Leaders looking to help themselves to the fat electorate Trump brought into being. Defending the society against an armed fascist threat that is networked on a mass scale will be a generation-long struggle, one that opens in earnest now. COVID and climate remain wild cards. Plenty more to say, surely with additional twists to consider by the end of tomorrow. Thank you friends for helping to think through our situation. I return the positive energy, particularly for comrades in Vienna. Dan W. —Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA IG: type_rounds_1968 danswang.xyz On 11/13/20, 2:07 AM, "Eric Kluitenberg" wrote: > >Hi Felix, all, > >The post-election situation in the US is very worrying in many respects. > >The darkest scenario, a slow coup d’etat against a clear election result >has been suggested to me by several friends over the past few days. > >I can’t read the local situation that well, so it would be great to hear >some US subscribers on the list weigh in. > >However, when adopting a ‘realist’ perspective on politics it seems that >Republicans are keeping all options on the table, mostly to secure future >positions, when a.o. more senate seats are up for election (in 2 years?). > >What is significant about the election outcome is not just that the Biden >/ Harris ticket has won, but that the landslide victory of Democrats did >not happen, that their majority in the House declined, and that it seems >likely they will not gain 50 seats in the Senate (to be decided by the >Georgia run-off in January). > >It seems that voters have voted against Trump, but not for the Democrats, >and that the electorate remains as bitterly divided as it has been for >the past twenty years. That is not a good thing for the country and the >stability of the political system in the world’s most militarised state, >holding the largest nuclear arsenal. > >So it is justified to be worried right now, let’s hope it is a ‘realist’ >game for the post-Trump constellation. > >bests, >Eric > > >> On 13 Nov 2020, at 10:10, Felix Stalder wrote: >> >> Hi everyone, >> >> I must admit, amidst post-terror assault on civil liberties and covid >> cases spiraling out of control here in Austria, the US election drama >> has moved a bit lower in my attention, but not that much. >> >>> From what I understand, the numbers show that Trump lost. Period. No >> recount will change that. >> >> But, the game of the Republicans is to create so much doubt about the >> fairness of the elections (without any evidence) to make it impossible >> to certify them in time. Frivolous lawsuits are great at gumming things >> up. This would then allow the Republican dominated legislatures in swing >> states to appoint their own electors which would bring Trump the >> majority. In the mean time, the minister of defense, who previously >> refused to send in troops against mostly peaceful protestors, has been >> fired and replaced with a loyalist. Apparently, similar moves are in the >> wings for the FBI and CIA. >> >> I know, Trump is often portrayed as an incompetent child, and the >> strategy is totally outlandish, but the Republican party has shown to be >> a pretty ruthless and successful power machine playing both a short and >> a long game, and it's exactly the outlandishness of the strategy that is >> its strongest point. >> >> In the mean time, the democrats pretend all of this to be irrelevant (an >> 'embarrassment' at worst) and happily appoint a transition team full of >> corporate insiders like it's 1992. >> >> Am I totally misreading the situation? >> >> Felix >> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Not One
Though there is much in this exchange to discuss, I'll limit myself to a correction on a peripheral point: it wasn't Mao that sent in the army. It was Deng. As long as we're on the issue of how the US is perceived, how homogenous or heterogeneous it is, , I think it's not such a small thing to correctly note a detail about an event (the '89 social movement) that fundamentally shook a country with almost twice the population of the US and the EU combined, and produced world-changing economic and ecological repercussions. With you in the political fever, Dan w. -- Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center IG: type_rounds_1968 danswang.xyz ‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐ On Tuesday, October 6, 2020 9:30 PM, Keith Sanborn wrote: We have even seen those actions in the street here, though more as provocation than as dissent. Mao, Lukashenko, Andrew Jackson, and Trump sent in the Army. Putin perfers poison. The point is: we, as citizens of the United States, have a responsibility to cut off the link between Trump and the Army and the Supreme Court as soon as possible and the most direct route at the moment is the election in a month. Maybe Covid will help in its own special way, if roid-rage doesn't buoy Trump up until the election. > # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: what exactly is breaking?
to be, either. The Republican hold on these areas was keyed into the dual benefits of economic prosperity (low taxes) and personal security (low crime rates), both reinforced and visibly signified as racial homogeneity. But a commuter’s distance from the city is no longer any guarantee of security, personal or economic. Nor are today's suburbs racially homogenous. Formerly solidly Republican counties from Orange south of LA to Gwinnett outside Atlanta have gained large numbers of Asian and Latinx households, contributing to swing voting trends, bring multilingualism into the schools, and introduce POC that in some areas of life metrics clearly outperform whites. The law order message is about protecting what white people have, about preserving their perfect world. When that world so obviously no longer exists, the message doesn’t resonate as strongly. So, yes, I am sensing a break with the political legacy of ’68 and it was the widespread and immediate derision that rained down on Trump’s latest performance that crystallized it for me. He didn’t even get an hour’s worth of media dominance out of it before the backlash came at him from a range of prominent voices, making apparent his current political weakness. But without question we remain in an emergency situation, in an extremely dangerous moment—to mention one step in the slope towards outright fascism, over the weekend the UCLA stadium was used to detain hundreds of protestors corralled from the streets LA, conjuring spectres of Dirty War-style technicians of repression at work on US soil. COVID-19 will soon rage in a second surge—it’s already happening in the red counties that insisted on reopening two weeks ago. And what of the 40 million unemployed? Yet another factor, increasing desperation the only certainty. Keep pushing and keep safe, everybody. Dan W. —Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center IG: type_rounds_1968 danswang.xyz On 02.06.20 19:48, tbyfield wrote: These kinds of language games aren't as silly as they might seem at first glance, because pop phrases like that hint — as if through a glass or scanner darkly — diffuse assumptions about where we see ourselves historically. A world where people are drawn to seeing anything and everything as *broken* is a world in the past tense; all you can do is *rebuild* — another word that tracks "is broken" with almost hilarious precision... Perhaps I was unclear, or insufficiently versed US conservative rhetoric, but my intention was not inquire about things that are broken (and hence in need of fixing) but about historical discontinuities, about possible breaks with established patterns that open up space for new dynamics, for the better or worse. -- danswang.xyz Instagram: type_rounds_1968 Please note new address: dansw...@protonmail.com # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Coronavirus journal: higher ed
in placing people in quarantine. Many universities have managed minor student quarantines over mumps and measles in recent years. Some have marveled at how quickly universities across the country, from Boston to Austin, began the shut down process nearly in parallel, seemingly without coordination from above. That is because campus health officers have been talking to each other, just as they have for years now regarding the aforementioned campus threats. In sum, higher education‹a field comprising hundreds of incredibly complex and diverse institutions‹has proven itself to be the sector most well organized and responsive to pandemic in all of US society. This happened largely in spite of the reactive nature of today’s university presidents, people hired for their ability to fundraise and smile through the many crises that the operations staff are constantly managing. The college health people overcame the presidents’ fear of bad publicity partly by dangling the dream of remote learning as a way to keep revenues uninterrupted. In the end being technocrats themselves, the college health experts took remote learning in its unproven and untested state, as part of the answer to the challenge of dispersing the student bodies. This is the contradiction at work: though population-oriented by training and socially-oriented in their problem solving, by buttressing sound public health arguments with visions of operational continuity through remote learning, the college health experts opened the door for the ideologues intent on stripping the campuses of the humanities completely. So the cries of disaster capitalism are not unfounded. But they remain only cries. The discussion of practical resistance thus far has been limited to a few voices encouraging faculty to “teach poorly” online, a kind of self-sabotage passing for a strategy. That impulse says as much about the “stuck-ist” tendencies of the US left as it does the baffling new conditions. Critique is the way of the modern intellectual; organizing is far less common. This pattern seems to be holding under the new circumstances. My suggestion for my faculty friends (yes, extremely easy to offer from my independent artist/house husband perch) is to revive an old form for the current moment: the teach-in. Teach-ins gained currency in the early days of the Vietnam-era antiwar movement. The teach-ins helped to establish the popularly understood context in which to critically analyze US military involvements abroad. And more than that, the form was a way for professors and students alike to cooperatively address the moral complicity and structural allegiances of the institutions to which they belonged by self-consciously politicizing their assigned roles as researchers and learners. The best teach-ins, whether about the war in Vietnam or apartheid South Africa, ultimately informed the question, What do WE do about this? As teaching moves online for the rest of the spring and possibly beyond, I am hoping to see professors interrupting their courses for a virtual teach-in of their own, to devote a week or even a single lecture to the self-reflexively considered questions: What is a virus, what is a pandemic, and why were college students, teachers, and campus communities the ones called upon to first respond to this situation?? No matter the course, no matter the discipline. Now is not the time to take cover in one’s specialization. Without such intellectual intervention from within satisfying the directive to convert courses will help the displacement of classroom teaching gain permanent traction, particularly at the non-elite levels, and hasten the move of higher ed away from exploratory learning and towards certification. At this time, having had a week or two to absorb the new situation, many students are expressing grief over their sudden loss of campus life‹schoolmates gone, spring rituals canceled, phantom graduations. Faculty, being the university employees closest to the students, have been the first to express sympathy. But now they need to write the narrative and not just complain about it. The campus health people met their challenge, with plenty of improvisation and difficult decisions. Their moment is over. Now the faculty need to step up and meet theirs, and I hope it happens before the next wave of grief overtakes all, the one brought by the loss of life yet to come. All best, Dan W. -- Resident Artist, 18th Street Arts Center IG: type_rounds_1968 danswang.xyz # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Fascist "trolls" and back on track
Dear Emaline and Alice, Thank you for generous replies. Nobody's ever pinned down what may or many not be attributed to consciousness unencumbered by four or five decades of lived experience and memory, but I detect something vaguely optimistic in both your responses, an optimism that I sometimes have difficulty projecting. Maybe it has to do with what Alice said, that for many in your age cohort the call-out is so yesterday. That is good to hear, and I kind of see it. Not only have people like Angela Nagle and now Haider offered some very fair critiques, but I kind of see it in my own life. For example, in the students I taught this summer and in the Millennial-heavy DSA meetings I've been attending, people are very into developing a class-consciousness, one that is informed by social difference in its very core self-understanding. Reactive Suey Park-style shaming is over it seems, or at least has died down into background noise. The new generation proceeds with diversity as a fact, not an aspiration. What Emaline says about the socializing as an attractive feature of today's grassroots activism, that would be a welcome silver lining to the toxic effects of social media. On a basic level the socializing was ever a feature of insurgent political cultures, going back to the dances and picnics of the early British trade unionists. If the socializing satisfies presently in a new and different way because of our screen time, esp for the young who know of no pre-Web world, then so much the better. Your remark about it sometimes feeling like engagement boils down to a choice between socializing or grant writing, well, that certainly speaks to a compulsory professionalization that, to me, also seems like a symptom of post-'89 (to take a convenient marker of time) neoliberalized work. This is a condition at least equal to the movement problems I described, probably a lot more harmful in terms of assembling mass movements. Angela, For the sake of simplicity, I admit that I probably overstated some of the generational differences. But I am not sure what you mean by my "historiography" in relation to social movement history, most of what I said is more or less settled, the broad turns, anyway. Further, I am just trying to make sense of what I lived through and have observed, helped along by texts by others that people can read, instead of just hearing about my experiences. >I mean, I understand your suggestion that "identity politics" is >depoliticising, but I also don't understand it at all because the >treatment of conflicts "over resources and labour" has always been >conducted through more or less tacit assumptions about identity that >link to entitlement. And your disappearance of white men's identity >politics as a tacit default or "universal" has the effect of yielding a >narrative that says (incorrectly in my view) that "identity politics" >>only began when the former's claim of universality was challenged. Also let me clarify, what I mean is that there is a tendency within identity politics (which, simply put, I take to be a constellation of discourses in different fields and disciplines, as well as in activist settings, that foregrounds interpretations through the lenses of social difference) to privilege moral status over questions of power. Obviously there is slippage between "moral" and "power"; so much of the intra-movement Civil Rights conversation was about that relationship (because, yes, the Christian thing, etc). But no, I did not and have never said that identity politics is "depoliticising" in a blanket fashion. A tendency, not the whole. If my original post did not make it clear, I myself, including much of my activist history, am a product of the 1980s full emergence of identity politics. Mine is a self-critique. Which is also to say, I never said the younger generation "is doing it wrong." What I said was, we (including myself) failed in transmitting the history. That so many, including Alice and Emaline, are doing it RIGHT despite the failures of their leftist elders, speaks volumes to the hope I have for the up and coming. But yes to Marx as a writer, not a cult figure. But quite a writer he was. Maybe you already went deep enough to read his articles on China and the opium warring. Check out some of those dispatches if you haven't, just for another angle on Marx and his times. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/china/index.htm Thank you, Dan w. On 11/10/18, 11:54 AM, "Emaline Friedman" wrote: >Dan, > > >Even before your solicitation, I was prepared to be the American >20-something (thanks, also, for your post, Alice): > > >What an interesting experience it's been here on Nettime for the last few >years as I've been writing a critical-psychological dissertation about >"Internet Addiction&qu
Fascist "trolls" and back on track
f insurgency that vastly overflows the personal. My critique of Haider's book is that he draws almost exclusively from a fairly distant past for his models of a new class politics: Combahee River Collective, etc. He makes no argument for present day models, does not outline a potential model for today's conditions (even as he makes clear that the Occupy movement held promise), and largely skips over the 'movement of movements' of the Zapatista-inspired 90s. I think it is appropriate for Nettime, being a living relic of that 90s moment, to be grappling with the question of new class formation now, i.e. a class meaningless without POC/womyn/genderqueer/migrant leadership at its very center--but that will, given the logics of oncoming plurality math (first in the US, then in Canada, Australia, and European countries) need to include for full political strength white segments beyond the already 'woke.' Any perspectives from actual 20-somethings would be most welcome, of course! Yours in infinitely divisible social difference, Dan w. From: on behalf of Angela Mitropoulos Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2018 at 3:31 PM To: nettime Subject: Fascist "trolls," meta As briefly as possible, responses to various threads/remarks bundled up below: I've been on this list since, I think, 2003. This was the first time I've ever suggested someone be thrown off. As someone else noted, times have changed; but also, I can spot a fascist set of talking points because I've learned how to do that. It's a skill, learn it, it might save someone's life in a context where fascist trolling is also about inciting and legitimating violence against Jews, black people, women, transpeople, migrants. https://medium.com/@DeoTasDevil/the-rhetoric-tricks-traps-and-tactics-of-wh ite-nationalism-b0bca3caeb84 I do not need to debate fascists to know that they exist, to understand how they think, or to fight their influence. Including them in online spaces has the effect of undermining the involvement of critical voices in those spaces. I think it's an egotistical indulgence to believe one can "debunk" fascism. It isn't just an innocuous or discomforting idea in a "marketplace of ideas," but--as an idea regarding the purported fundamental inferiority of groups of people--an idea that pushes toward restructuring the space and terms of involvement in debate by destroying the assumption of equality. This is the reason why antifascists have insisted on a policy of no-platforming. Not all trolls are fascists, but all fascists are trolls. Everyone lies, but fascists lie as a matter of course because it feeds their sense of supremacy. So, fascists will of course whisper in your ear about Marx, "identity politics," and "the white working class," as Bannon has done (this is playbook). They are all sleaze and bullshit, like Trump, even if it comes wrapped in faux-high theory to flatter the Nettime set. On the problem of dismissing fascists as just trolls: https://www.vox.com/2016/11/23/13659634/alt-right-trolling I think anyone who invokes Marx's name in support of a 'class first' position is a charlatan. I am confident in saying this because I've done a lot of work to be able to say it with confidence. Put another way, I'm prepared to wager than of the 4k subscribers to this list, I've read more Marx more often over many years. Those who wave Marx's name over reactionary positions are performing a deference to a mystical patriarchal authority, while at the same treating Marx's writings with utter disdain. I have criticisms of Marx, sure, because I treat him as a writer, not a cult figure. The practice of using black women as deflector shields to defend from possible criticism of racism and misogyny is a media strategy loved by the far Right. Ironically, it trades on the crudest kind of 'identity politics' by implying that if x (Candace Owens, whatever) hold a position then it could not possibly be racist or sexist. It's a version of "but I have a black female friend" defense. It is an ad hominem in reverse, not an argument about anything. I wrote this some time ago on the media's fascination with Nazi profile pieces: https://s0metim3s.com/2017/12/05/arendt-banality-nazism/ This is a concise account of why you cannot "debunk" fascism: https://lithub.com/fascism-is-not-an-idea-to-be-debated-its-a-set-of-action s-to-fight/ This is on fascist creeping, a handy term imo: https://truthout.org/articles/exposing-and-defeating-the-fascist-creep/ Another handy term is "red-brown," which refers to a reactionary impulse on what passes for the Left to align with fascists, and people who presumably think that this time around they won't be murdered in a Night of the Long Knives after they've served their purpose of consolidating support for fascism. I wanted to just thank some people for weighing in with clear eyes: Alice Yang, Flick Harrison, Ana Ulin, Ian Alan Pau
Re: (no subject)
until students demanded them a generation later. Apart from the two fresh but narrowly defined social movements of the day, ACT UP and the deep ecology/ancient forest preservation movement (in both of which identity fissures manifested as internal secondary struggles), the campaigns that foregrounded identity concerns were basically the only spaces in which new radicalism exercised consequential power. In short, I now regard the rise of identity politics in the 1980s as a rearguard politics, a zone of power left by the retreat of the mass movements of the 70s. What power there is in the #metoo phenomenon owes a debt to this history. This history has not been transmitted to the post-Millennials. Hence the ahistorical, moralistic version of today's identity politics--?a pseudo-politics, if you ask me. One that invests itself in a supreme claim to trauma (too easily appropriated by the hard right) rather than to an unfolding and contingent history. I'll say it again: this failure to pass along the history is the fault of my generation. As to the question of class, well, yes, of course class is the political answer. On that much, I agree with Alexander's return to Marx. But what is a class? As Brian says, it is not an unchanging thing. Clearly. More so than any other identity, class is a construction?--created in tandem and in tension by both capital and labor...and when I say labor in a grand way, I mean it in the way Alice may mean it: a universe of the marginalized, racialized and gendered, who are doing the shit work of capital--?even if that work is "only" passing time in a prison cell). This post is already long, so I will leave my thoughts on class as questions. If an agenda pushing for socialism and climate justice (maybe the same thing, ultimately?) can only be class-driven (and I believe that to be true), then what is the constitution of that class to be? And, given our tools and what we can control, how is that class to made? The full answers are long--?EP Thompson gave us eight hundred pages on just the English working class, covering really just its first thirty years. But the short answer is what Brian already said, which I put into Thompson's turn of phrase: it's not the class that matters, but the making of it. So let's get out there and make it. After all, Marx was no armchair Marxist. From sunny, catastrophic LA, Dan W. -- http://prop-press.typepad.com/ http://www.prop-press.net/ http://www.madmutualdrift.org/ http://midwestcompass.org/ Instagram: type_rounds_1968 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: MIT Media Lab Disobedience Award
Praising disobedience on a page that doesn't work if you refuse Javascript... # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: important announcement
Good night nettime. Good morning facebk. With four o. Calin Dan Sent from my iPhone > On 2 Apr 2017, at 01:00, nettime's_mod_squad <nett...@kein.org> wrote: > > Nettime now has a Facebook group: > >https://www.facebook.com/groups/neime/ > > With four 't's. > > For now, this is a closed group. As Facebook explains it, "Anyone can find the > group and see who's in it. Only members can see posts." The membership policy, > again for now, is that "Any member can add or approve members." <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
nationalism
Finanial Times, April 29, 2016 Trump, Le Pen and the enduring appeal of nationalism Mark Mazower, Columbia University http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/24e7a462-0d52-11e6-b41f-0beb7e589515.html#ixzz47GRpk3yj paralleling this excerpt from a long essay by Phil Agre The global integration of the economy is ... commonly held to decentralize political power by preventing governments from taking actions that can be reversed through cross-border arbitrage. But political power is becoming centralized in equally important ways: the power of national governments is not so much disappearing as shifting to a haphazard collection of undemocratic and nontransparent global treaty organizations, and the power to influence these organizations is likewise concentrating in the ever-fewer global firms. These observations are not pleasant or fashionable, but they are nonetheless true. --dan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of Surveillance
Brian, You wrote a long reply that I am not fully copying into this note. I agree that the social change equation has so many moving parts that it is hard to summarize in a way that is simple rather than merely simplistic. Your >This is the real difficulty of social theory. The beast in > the cage is too damn big. You might think you were seeing the whole > animal, then that turns out to be just the foot and it's stomping you. is of that timeless wisdom long embodied in the parable of the blind men and the elephant. In the modern language of persuasion (meaning public relations, political advertising, the wording in quasi-legal documents, useless factual minutiae that ignite Twitter storms, academic papers organized to deliver the "least publishable unit", etc.), the class of things that are true but irrelevant seems to be getting larger. Or perhaps I can just see them better. > The 1% is fat and scared. > It was ever thus. One of the big problems Roosevelt's team had during > the Depression was convincing the people in the cities that it was even > happening. The big urban centers were doing fine, if you had a job at > least, and many did. The famous photos of the Farm Security > Administration had the task of showing people what they could not > spontaneously see. _Let Us Now Praise Famous Men_ by James Agee; I am two generations off those exact pictures and consider myself blessed to have grown up where the 19th century was still evident every day and in every way. I suggest _Hollowing Out the Middle_ by Kefalas & Patrick, for an up-to-date revisit of the idea -- and note their subtitle _The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America_. > So I > would say, as long as the market in security is the big thing, > society won't change much in the capitalistic sense. A most interesting idea. I'll think on that. You are probably right. > In the 1940s, the most technologically violent war ever known to > humankind was followed by the largest growth wave ever known to > capitalism. ... Security seems to precede prosperity. For better or worse, the saying that "necessity is the mother of invention" works out to be a curve -- the more mortal the necessity the more far-reaching the inventiveness. Given the current interconnectivity of the world, the necessity of new countermeasures grows ever more compelling because, in a word, on the Internet every sociopath is your next door neighbor. The inventiveness I see in security startups is often quite surprising but, at the same time, many of the inventors are re-inventing things we've seen before. That, too, is a metric of sorts -- it confirms the level of demand for new solutions to the security problem. > Will such a process occur again? That's the economic and sociological > question I was asking in this series of exchanges. Should it occur > again? That is the philosophical and ethical question Felix was asking. > Is humanity too ignorant and self-satisfied to know or even to care what > happens next? That's the cynical and realist question John was asking. > And you, Dan seem to be joining Shoshana Zuboff in asking: Isn't what's > already happening right now just about to get much more intense? This sums up the situation as I see it: All cybersecurity tools are dual use, just as are knives or gasoline. Those who wrote "[W]henever any Form of Government becomes destructive..., it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it" also wrote "[T]he right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", and they wrote both at a time when the weapons of the yeoman farmer were on par with the weapons of the King's infantryman. In the intervening centuries, weapons of infantries so surpassed those of the yeomen that any right of the people to abolish destructive government could not rely on weapons kept at home, but in cyberspace, relative might between state and non-state is today closer than it has been at any time since 1791. This oscillation in the balance of power may be peaking, but never before could a dozen guys and gals in their pajamas meaningfully annul the State's monopoly on the use of force. As you and others correctly surmise, we are at an inflection point, and to say so is neither a cliche nor a joke. --dan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: Shoshana Zuboff > The Secrets of Surveillance
I do *not* want argument on this point to derail the larger and more important issues discussion, but when you say: >To answer your questions, Patrice, for sure, both North America >and the EU are sunk in governmental gridlock, and that is the >essence of the crisis: an inability to collectively respond. In >the US, the classic sequence of a long downswing is unfolding: >inventions pile up while the economy stagnates, so the inventions >are not brought to market. They pile up: electric cars, vastly >more efficient batteries, driverless cars, digital manufacturing, >smart grids, solar power, Internet of things, to list just a few. >Some of this research is crucially sponsored by the federal >governments (batteries and digital manufacturing are the US ones >I happen to know about). it doesn't square with what I am seeing (in the mid-space between investment capital and government programs). What I see is way, way too much private money looking at way, way too few differentiated ideas. There are literally hundreds of startups in cybersecurity (my speciality) -- Kleiner Perkins is said to be tracking 1100 cybersecurity startups that are in some stage of the funding game. And the money is, indeed, flowing; the demand for cybersecurity so exceeds supply that the charlatan fraction is rising. As far as I can tell, the exact same sentence would largely apply to data science, to wireless sensor networks / Internet of Things, to low power chipsets, to flatly frightening diddling with one or another genome, to automation of damned near everything, and so on. Either the market picks the winners or state power does; either way, there will be a lot of losers, however tallied. Or am I totally misunderstanding your point? Not that it matters, but I fully agree with Prof. Zuboff and have for some time. Her succinct statement of personal purpose is "Will we be the masters of information, or will we be its slaves?" I quote her three laws often, and will do so now: 1. Everything that can be automated will be automated. 2. Everything that can be informated will be informated. 3. Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be used for surveillance and control. Consider her description of Facebook and Google as absolutists, http://www.shoshanazuboff.com/new/author/shoshana-zuboff/ and other essays found there. We now return you to the regularly scheduled discussion of whether the developed world has a future, already in progress. --dan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: thedemands.org: list student protest demands (last updated 11.21.15)
David Mandl writes: | Core issues aside (no reasonable person could oppose an anti-racism | movement on campuses), I find the trend toward demanding public | apologies--a "hand-written apology," no less!--kind of bizarre. There | are plenty of reasonable ways to acknowledge and confront racial | injustice, but this just seems like some kind of bloodlust and attempt | at gratuitous public humiliation. It;s like being forced to | write "I will not misbehave in class" ten thousand times, in a public | square. I don't know anything about these particular deans and | administrators, but how responsible are they personally for systemic | racism that has taken shape over two hundred years? (Compare the | culpability of someone like Dick Cheney and the Iraq war.) And how will | a hand-written apology change that? Why not focus on demands for actual, | substantive change and see how that goes before trying to shame these | people for lulz? It's extortion. And it works. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/11/brown-universitys-100-million-plan-to-be-more-inclusive/416886/ --dan # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: How computers broke science...
| TLDR: point-and-click and closed-source software makes science hard to | reproduce. Or consider big data and deep learning. Even if Moore's Law remains forever valid, there will never be enough computing hence data driven algorithms must favor efficiency above all else, yet the more efficient the algorithm, the less interrogatable it is,[MO] that is to say that the more optimized the algorithm is, the harder it is to know what the algorithm is really doing. That was the exact theme of a workshop held by Morgan Stanley and the Santa Fe Institute last fall titled, "Are Optimality and Efficiency the Enemies of Robustness and Resilience?"[SFI] (Every speaker's answer was some form of "yes.") And there is a feedback loop here: The more desirable some particular automation is judged to be, the more data it is given. The more data it is given, the more its data utilization efficiency matters. The more its data utilization efficiency matters, the more its algorithms will evolve to opaque operation. Above some threshold of dependence on such an algorithm in practice, there can be no going back. As such, preserving algorithm interrogatability despite efficiency-seeking, self-driven evolution is the research grade problem that is now on the table. If science does not pick this up, then Larry Lessig's characterization of code as law[LL] is fulfilled. A couple of law professors have seized on that very idea and suggested that price-fixing collusion amongst robot traders will be harder to detect than collusion amongst people[WRC]. An anti-trust DoJ litigator I know agreed with their suggestion. --dan [MO] Michael Osborne, Oxford University, personal communication, 2015 [SFI] "Optimality vs. Fragility: Are Optimality and Efficiency the Enemies of Robustness and Resilience?", 2014 www.santafe.edu/gevent/detail/business-network/1665 [LL] Lawrence Lessig, _Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace_, Basic Books, 2000 [WRC] "When Robots Collude" (algorithms can learn to do so), 2015 uk.businessinsider.com/robots-colluding-to-manipulate-markets-2015-4 # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Autumnal Net Critique under existent social conditions
What's fascinating about this (and yes, very 90s cyberpunk) is how explicit it makes the business case for hacktivism as a promo for paid hacking work. Shaltai Boltai, if Lewis is to be believed, is only a side project. The group's main work is getting hired to dig up information about private and public individuals. Hacking politicians' email is how you build your reputation, by the sound of it. It's the same model as writing a book to get consulting gigs, or making a short film to get work directing adverts. Especially when you can re-purpose spare data: After the main work is done, there’s always some information we collected, but never used. That is what makes it to Anonymous International. And Humpty Dumpty even manage to work a pretty complete sales pitch into the article (Our prices start at around $30,000, Sometimes we hand over information to intermediaries, without ever knowing the client) Dan On 04.04.2015 19:16, Bruce Sterling wrote: *I'm as touched by nettime-list nostalgia as anybody else here -- (since I was the first guy of American nationality to sign up for the ordeal) -- but sometimes I think nettime ought to wise up and declare victory. It's nettime's world and we just live in it. ... *Check out this narrative where globe-trotting Russian wise-guys hack # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Evgeny Morozov and the Perils of Highbrow
A simple example was a number I ran across when researching the US Interstate (aka, the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways) system -- that right now it would take the energy equivalent of all remaining declared Suadi oil reserves to re-build that system. THe absolute lifetime, in engineering standards, of such a highway is a maximum of 40 years, and much of this system has reached 50 years. The US no longer has free access to the energy resources necessary to project this system into the future, and if you want to directly experience entropy, simply drive around the US on that system. Better have an SUV with a good suspension, perhaps a Hummer, as you will need it! In computer systems, it is clear and proven that we can build systems too complex to understand and predictably operate. The easiest example is that of financial flash crashes. One might ask whether or not the Smart Grid and/or wholesale conversion to Electronic Health Records might prove this yet again. In the meantime, for your facts file, the Big Dig in Boston worked out to well over $50,000 per foot of lane. If you are a US taxpayer, that's what you were buying. Had those funds been used to endow the public transit system, at that system's current scale it could have been free in perpetuity. One may certainly argue that the ability of tax-levying entities to sell bonds at below-market interest rates serves to generate such bubbles as you describe extending to the debasement of that debt through (induced) inflation. We're probably in a rat hole, --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime tensions within the bay area elites
movement of opposition is unlikely. Short hit-and-run disruptions like the vomiting actions are fine, but also speak to the limits of protest in the context of the relatively diffused power that reshapes a city economy; there is no Scott Walker in the Bay. (Btw, if you want to discuss evils, please include our standard bearer from Dairyland; any of a million CEOs would make similar decisions at Facebook or Google, betraying their final status as functionaries, but there are many fewer purely power-hungry psychopaths in the world.) It's s passé, but when it comes to rent politics ($5/stop/day for the Google buses?? Gimme a break, it should be $20/stop/day, at the very least!) I don't think political office can be ignored. Which means electoral politics can't be ignored. Not that many of us are fully ignoring it, but very few are fighting for it, seeing it as a struggle worth investing in. Partly because were a radical to actually win, once in office, any person is bound to disappoint. Kshama Sawant is about to disappoint us all. But that's only because now she holds a little bit of real power, under fresh circumstances. The politics of disappointment: it's a different but now necessary discussion, something outside of and more interesting than the dead end question (for example) of Are corporations evil or not? Dan w. -- http://prop-press.typepad.com/ http://www.prop-press.net/ http://www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime tensions within the bay area elites
As the saying goes, where you stand has a lot to do with where you sit. Outside looking in? Vulnerable to the politics of envy. Inside looking out? Vulnerable to the politics of manifest destiny, personal edition. --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Philosophy of the Internet of Things
It would be good to get some nettime views. The Internet of Things (IoT) is an umbrella term used... For me, the rising interdependence of all players on the Internet is a setting for common-mode failure both of technology and of governance, and the IoT is central to that rising interdependence. I applaud you for having the gumption to stand athwart these developments yelling Wait a minute at a time when few are inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge. I gave this speech at NSA on 26 March. As the nettime moderators prefer we do here, http://geer.tinho.net/geer.nsa.26iii14.txt follows below in full. I bring to your attention the parts about embedded systems in particular, about which there is much other material. --dan -8cut-here8- APT in a World of Rising Interdependence Dan Geer, 26 March 14, NSA Thank you for the invitation and to the preceding speakers for their viewpoints and for the shared experience. With respect to this elephant, each of us is one of those twelve blind men. We are at the knee of the curve for deployment of a different model of computation. We've had two decades where, in round numbers, laboratories gave us twice the computing for constant dollars every 18 months, twice the disk drive storage capacity for constant dollars every 12 months, and twice the network speed for constant dollars every 9 months. That is two orders of magnitude in computes per decade, three for storage, and four for transmission. In constant dollar terms, we have massively enlarged the stored data available per compute cycle, yet that data is more mobile in the aggregate than when there was less of it. It is thus no wonder that cybercrime is data crime. It is thus no wonder that the advanced persistent threat is the targeted effort to obtain, change, or deny information by means that are difficult to discover, difficult to remove, and difficult to attribute.[DG] Yet, as we all know, laboratory results filter out into commercial off the shelf products at rates controlled by the market power of existing players -- just because it can be done in the laboratory doesn't mean that you can buy it today. So it has been with that triad of computation, storage, and transmission capacities. As Martin Hilbert's studies describe, in 1986 you could fill the world's total storage using the world's total bandwidth in two days. Today, it would take 150 days of the world's total bandwidth to fill the world's total storage, and the measured curve between 1986 and today is all but perfectly exponential.[MH] Meanwhile, Moore's Law has begun slowing. There are two reasons for this. Reason number one is physics: We can't cool chips at clock rates much beyond what we have now. Reason number two is economics: The cost of new fabrication facilities doubles every two years, which is Moore's lesser-known Second Law. Intel canceled its Fab42 in January of this year because the capital cost per gate is now rising. By 2018 one new fab will be just as expensive in inflation adjusted terms as was the entire Manhattan Project.[GN] The big players will have to get bigger still, or Moore's First Law is over because of Moore's Second Law. And hardware replacement cycles are no longer driven by customer upgrade lust -- by which I mean the need to buy new hardware just because you need new hardware to run new software. Good enough for everything I need to do now dominates computing excepting, perhaps, in mobile, but that, too, is a curve that will soon flatten. Only graphics cards are not yet good enough for everything I need to do, but every curve has its asymptote. In sum, the commercial off the shelf market is not going to keep allowing us to dream big without regard to the underlying performance costs. We are not going to grow ourselves out of performance troubles of our own making. We were able to do that for a good long run, but that party is over. We can see that now in cryptography. I will certainly not lecture this audience on that subject. What I can do is to bring word from the commercial world that cryptographic performance is now a front-and-center topic of discussion both in individual firms, amongst expert discussion groups, and within standards bodies. The commercial world has evidently decided that the time has come to add cryptographic protections to an expanded range of products and services. The question being unevenly debated is whether, on the one hand, to achieve cryptographic performance with ever more adroit algorithm design, especially design that can make full use of parallelization, or to trend more towards hardware implementations. As you well know, going to hardware yields really substantial gains in performance not otherwise possible, but at the cost of zero post installation flexibility. This is not hypothetical; AES performance improvements have of late been because software has been put aside
Re: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified
This sort of product is going to generate a sort of permanent electronic hypochondria, as you go chugging along on your daily jog and you ask your iWatch to send you on the shortest route to the hospital before your heart implodes. Putting aside the profound implications of nanny-state uses of such data, I'd imagine that such pervasive monitoring is more of the trend to medicalization -- as found here: http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/04/medicalization-of-our-culture --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Will your insurance company subsidize your quantified self?
| As Enzensberger's Rules for the Digital World suggest - somewhat | unintentionally -, freedom of electronic devices will be a privilege | of the wealthy. In the near future, to be upper class will no longer | mean that you carry the latest electronic gadget, but that you can | afford the luxury surcharge for a life without tracking devices. Absolutely right. When was the last time any member of the Fortune 400 list, or Obama for that matter, carried cash or keys? --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime an historic retreat
Those who read the WSJ or PGN's RISKS will have seen this. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303563304579447362610955656 It is too long to quote in full, but here's Esther Dyson In the end, I'd rather pay a spurious tax to people who want my money than see [Icann] controlled by entities who want my silence. If you prefer pithier/legalistic, try http://www.lawfareblog.com/2014/03/who-controls-the-internet-address-book-icann -ntia-and-iana The word for the week: apoplectic --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime an historic retreat
Michael, et al., I can think of no one better to quote than Phil Agre, who I suspect is well known hereabouts. The global integration of the economy is likewise commonly held to decentralize political power by discouraging governments from taking actions that can be reversed through cross-border arbitrage. But political power is becoming centralized in equally important ways: the power of national governments is not so much disappearing as shifting to a haphazard collection of undemocratic and nontransparent global treaty organizations, and the power to influence these organizations is likewise concentrating in the ever-fewer global firms. These observations are not pleasant or fashionable, but they are nonetheless true. Read the rest at The Market and the Net: Personal Boundaries and the Future of Market Institutions http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/boundaries.html --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime conjunctural analysis
Brookings on one aspect of the student loan / higher ed costs vector --dan -8cut-here8- http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/brown-center-chalkboard/posts/2014/03/19-regressive-loan-refinance-chingos-akers Refinancing Outstanding Student Loans: Not as Progressive as it Seems Matthew M. Chingos and Beth Akers | March 19, 2014 11:00am Student loan debt is back in the [71]news with the launch of a campaign by progressive education advocates, dubbed Higher Ed, Not Debt, aimed at aiding borrowers and reducing college costs. A leading voice in this effort is Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who plans to introduce legislation that would allow borrowers to refinance their existing loans at lower interest rates. Sen. Warren's proposal has some intuitive appeal, as she [72]describes it: The idea is pretty simple. When interest rates are low, homeowners can refinance their mortgages. Big corporations can swap more expensive debt for cheaper debt ... But a graduate who took out an unsubsidized loan before July 1 of last year is locked into an interest rate of nearly 7 percent. Older loans run 8%, 9% and higher. This plan also has obvious appeal in light of frequent media coverage about households struggling to repay student loan debts. But it represents a fundamental shift from a federal lending program that has historically acted more or less like a bank--with the goal that student loans will be roughly budget neutral in the long run--to something that more closely resembles an entitlement program. Allowing borrowers to refinance their loans at below-market rates with the government would lead to a potentially large increase in the cost of the program, which would have to be funded through a general increase in interest rates or revenue from other sources. The proposal pursues the latter course, suggesting that loan refinancing could be paid for by a tax increase on wealthy individuals commonly called the Buffett Rule. Government programs that redistribute resources, usually from wealthier to less well-off individuals, are not uncommon. And it seems, as the narrative about the proposal suggests, that reducing interest rates on outstanding debts would put money back into the pockets of the households that need it the most. Unfortunately, the plan fails to achieve this objective. In fact, the plan is largely regressive and not the least bit progressive. Refinancing loans provides the greatest benefit to borrowers with large outstanding debts.[73][i] This doesn't seem like such a bad thing until you realize that households with large outstanding debts tend, on average, to be high-income households. Many borrowers who take on large debts do so in order to pursue degrees that lead to high incomes, in fields such as law and medicine. These are not the same households who are struggling financially and are perhaps in need of a bailout. We illustrate this point using data from the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF), a nationally representative survey of U.S. households administered by the Federal Reserve Board. We calculate how much outstanding education debt is held by each household headed by individual(s) aged 25-40, and relate it to the total income of the household.[74][ii] Households with more debt will receive greater benefits from a reduction in interest rates. The figure below shows that higher-income households hold a disproportionate share of student loan debt. The richest 25 percent of families hold 40 percent of the student loans, so would receive roughly 40 percent of the benefits of a proposal that allowed all loan debt to be refinanced at lower rates. On the other side of the income spectrum, the poorest quarter of households would receive less than one-fifth of the benefits of such a proposal. Student Loan Debt is Disproportionately Held by High-Income Families [ graph depicting student loan debt Source: Authors' calculations from 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances, households with average age 25-40. ] It's clear that this plan fails to redistribute wealth in a progressive manner, but it also has another problem. Subsidies to education exist in order to encourage changes in behavior that advance society's goals. For instance, students from disadvantaged households receive Pell grants with the hope that they will be able to enroll in and graduate from college when they would not have otherwise. Subsidies that do not change behavior, as would be the case with loan refinancing, simply amount to wealth redistribution.[75][iii] The SCF data make clear that universal refinancing flies in the face of progressive values by benefiting the affluent at the expense of the disadvantaged. To be sure, struggling borrowers would benefit from lower interest rates, but successful college and graduate degree holders would benefit even more. Is there a less blunt instrument to aid those who struggle to make their loan payments without
Re: nettime conjunctural analysis
Tangentially related, this is a rundown of student economics as measured by lifetime ROI for the price of tuition (in the US): http://www.payscale.com/education/average-cost-for-college-ROI-2011 I loaded that up in Excel to get a picture of the data: http://geer.tinho.net/college.costs.and.returns.xls --dan, numbers guy # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime cataloging the price of privacy
I rather suspect that someone, somewhere keeps lists of what it takes in dollar terms to avoid data sharing of the sort that I, at least, consider privacy invasions, and by that I do not mean actions that raise immediate suspicion such as buying a one-way airline ticket with cash. Rather I mean where there are choices that come with implicit prices. As an example, when a gas station advertises cash or credit, same low price! what they of course mean is that cash customers are giving the gas station attendant more money than the credit customer and with cash neither the customer nor the attendant is giving data to anyone else. And so forth. If someone on nettime is, or knows of, a keeper of such a list, I would like to share with them my own list. Today this was added to mine: http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-02-06/business/chi-comed-smart-meter-fee-20140206_1_comed-meters-energy-infrastructure-modernization-act The meat of the above is that Illinoisans must now pay $21.53 per month to not have a device-level, usage-monitoring electric meter, ostensibly because it costs that much to read the existing analog meter. I, myself, would pay such a fee without a second thought. Not everyone can be so blithe. --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Fwd: Stephen Foley: Bitcoin needs to learn from past e-currency
On 12/05/2013 01:41 PM, Florian Cramer wrote: (I also have my doubts that shifting identities really solves the problem of reverse identification through computational analytics as it only adds one layer of obfuscation. Live in a small remote village, for example, and these means won't help because the one person buying The New York Times in the local market will always be identifiable no matter what Bitcoin address s/he'll use for payment. You could argue that there's no anonymity of transactions in a village anyway, but it becomes quite a different story if all those transactions become world-readable on the Internet.) No society, no people need rules against things which are impossible. Today I observe a couple fornicating on a roof top in circumstances where I can never know who the couple are. Do they have privacy? The answer is no if your definition of privacy is the absence of observability. The answer is yes if your definition of privacy is the absence of identifiability. Technical progress in image acquisition guarantees observability pretty much everywhere now. Those standoff biometrics are delivering multi-factor identifiability at ever greater distances. We will soon live in a society where identity is not an assertion like My name is Dan, but rather an observable like Sensors confirm that is Dan. With enough sensors, concentration camps don't need to tatoo their inmates. How many sensors are we installing in normal life? If data kills both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy as impossible-to-identify, then what might be an alternative? If you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend toward rules of procedure administered by a government you trust or control. If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a state of privacy will be mine: the effective capacity to misrepresent yourself. Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion on the part of whomever it is that is watching you. Misrepresentation means paying your therapist in cash under an assumed name. Misrepresentation means arming yourself not at Walmart but in living rooms. Misrepresentation means swapping affinity cards at random with like-minded folks. Misrepresentation means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy through. Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between you and the Smart Grid. Misrepresentation means using Tor for no reason at all. Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when there is nowhere else to hide. Misrepresentation means having not one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but having as many as you can. Your identity is not a question unless you work to make it be. The Obama administration's issuance of a National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace is case-in-point; it calls for the development of interoperable technology standards and policies -- an 'Identity Ecosystem' -- where individuals, organizations, and underlying infrastructure -- such as routers and servers -- can be authoritatively authenticated. If you can trust a digital identity, that is because it can't be faked. Why does the government care about this? It cares because it wants to digitally deliver government services and it wants attribution. Is having a non-fake-able digital identity for government services worth the registration of your remaining secrets with that government? Is there any real difference between a system that permits easy, secure, identity-based services and a surveillance system? Do you trust those who hold surveillance data on you over the long haul by which I mean the indefinite retention of transactional data between government services and you, the individual required to proffer a non-fake-able identity to engage in those transactions? If you are building authentication systems today, then you are playing in this league. --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Chris Hedge: Our Invisible revolution
This is where we are headed. I do not say this because I am a supporter of revolution. I am not. I prefer the piecemeal and incremental reforms of a functioning democracy. I prefer a system in which our social institutions permit the citizenry to nonviolently dismiss those in authority. I prefer a system in which institutions are independent and not captive to corporate power. But we do not live in such a system. Revolt is the only option left. If someone can reach Mr. Hughes, then send this: Those considered far right and those considered far left have never been closer in outlook and their lists of what to overturn. Once it is both ends against the middle, you enter a pre-revolutionary setting. That is what we have now: both ends against the middle; it is only the middle class that is shrinking. It is only the middle of the country that is depopulating. It is only the middle for which the right to be left alone has its historic and substantial meaning. --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime John Naughton: Edward Snowden: public indifference is
Let us hope that Daniel Solove is right, that the absence of public outcry is the public saying I have nothing to hide, and that it is not Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor saying In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.' --dan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Pascal Zachary: Rules for the Digital Panopticon (IEEE)
First, right-wing-ness is misleading, especially insofar as those considered far right and those considered far left have never been closer in outlook and their lists of what to overturn. Once it is both ends against the middle, you enter a pre-revolutionary setting. Let us not wander down that rat hole, please, in the large or in the small. As to the topical interest (in re surveillance) or lack thereof amongst the population in a broad sense, various undergraduate students of various correspondents here, and so forth, comparing the digital world of today to the analog world of yesterday, is it not clear that the total volume of signal has risen spectacularly but not as spectacularly as the volume of noise? Perhaps the middle can be forgiven its preoccupation with such matters while it focuses on the fact that it is only the middle that is shrinking. What to say and how to say is the challenge of folks here (but to say it outside of this echo chamber). As a possible contribution, I gave this keynote to 600+ last Wednesday at the U. of North Carolina, Charlotte. http://geer.tinho.net/geer.uncc.9x13.txt Yours from the rather far right, --dan A conservative is a socialist who worships order. A liberal is a socialist who worships safety. -- Victor Milan, 1999 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Internet Freedom and Post-Snowden Global Internet Governance
hi michael you might find one of bruce schneier's recent guardian pieces interesting: 'The US government has betrayed the internet. We need to take it back' http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/05/government-betray ed-internet-nsa-spying it resonates with yours in many ways, but from a different starting ipoint .e. internet engineering. fwiw we'll be holding a festival of crypto at goldsmiths college at the end of november which will try to walk the line between discourse tech; it'll be practical (like a cryptoparty) but also aiming squarely at the wider field of internet freedom. best dan On 24 September 2013 23:37, michael gurstein gurst...@gmail.com wrote: With links http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/internet-freedom-and-post-snowden-g lobal-internet-governance/ http://tinyurl.com/n3onw87 # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Digital condition
hi natalie nice looking course. i think this piece from radical philosophy on wikileaks is pretty analytical: Keyspace - WikiLeaks and the Assange papers, by Finn Brunton http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/commentary/keyspace-wikileaks-and-the-assange-papers interesting on assange's use of graph theory to model conspiracy, and on his 'fantasy of rational action based on perfect knowledge'. btw is it worth including something on glitching in your 'image' section? as well as forefronting digital nature, it could also be seen a model for resistance to the society of control. cheers dan On 10 September 2013 21:11, natalieb bookc...@calarts.edu wrote: Hi All, I'm teaching a graduate reading seminar on /called Digital Condition. Contemplating the Present. It's not a class about digital art but rather a class for graduate art students about how the digital present shapes perception, identity, politics, labor, aesthetics,etc. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Digital Politics -- Digital Economics
Mark, Flick: On the question of whether and how is ³democracy² relevant to an understanding of Chinese politics, I lean towards Mark¹s views. To add to them, Flick¹s characterization of the CCP as a ³supreme² ruler, I must say, is far from the reality (and as for its ³legitimacy,² at the level of the citizenry most Chinese people got over that a couple of generations agothey haven¹t even been able to buy it back). The CCP bans Facebook, fights with Google, dictates to Yahoo, and stages their elections precisely because their actual control over the society is so tenuous and slippery. When the power of the Chinese authorities shows itself in terms of suppression of the citizenry, it is invariably blunt-force, clumsy, and indiscriminate. One might say the brutality is a culture of their government, but understand that the domestic sphere is in non-stop crisis mode. It¹s called the Art of Governing 1.3 (more likely 1.5, based on food consumption stats) billion: stomp it out, whatever it is. I have access to Facebook in China; anybody with a VPN does, ie lots and lots of people. It¹s a leaky society. Wu Hung told me that he and his schoolmates listened to Beatles records during the 1966-69 period of the Cultural Revolution, while ³foreign² and ³old² stuff all around them was being smashed and burned, because China is so big and unruly that they can¹t keep everything out. Shortly after, he and his mates were sent down to the country...again, leakage and then blunt force. It¹s not about understanding and tolerating their different values, but rather acknowledging that China has its own historical trajectory (that we all are now tied to), and that for them and their problems parliamentary democracy may not be the most relevant political system. And no, you don¹t need a PhD in Eastern Philosophy to understand Tiananmen...but the Western framework of human rights is not going to give you the full picture, either. What you do need is an understanding of neo-liberal globalization, and how China¹s market reforms fit into that. That provides a much deeper explanation of what happened in China in 1989 (and since) than any fantasies about Chinese people longing for democracy. Not that the fantasy never shows up, online. Where, after the initial novelty, the fantasy quickly dissatisfies as just another impoverished system that is probably better off for not being the reality. Where, finally, the mock electoral map somehow and profoundly mocks the so-called democracy we enjoy here in the USa system we accept and participate in to the extent that we can stomach, but that we also know deep down is utterly inadequate to the crises at hand. http://asiapacificwatch.com/2012/11/13/electoral-map-what-if-china-became-a- multiparty-democracy-tomorrow/ Dan w. -- http://prop-press.typepad.com/ http://www.prop-press.net/ http://www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Wisconsin Death Trip
Dear Nettime, As you might imagine, I¹m working out on my own analysis of the Wisconsin recall election flame-out. I¹m taking my time with this one. What happens over the next few weeks following the June 5 election will be important in setting up the next phase of the struggle here and will say something about the national implications. Quicker than I are these writers, linked below. I don¹t agree with all, and there is some overlap in perspectives, but out of the flood of post-mortem punditry these are some of the more interesting. Doug Henwood http://lbo-news.com/2012/06/06/walkers-victory-un-sugar-coated/ Nichali M Ciaccio http://nichaliciaccio.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/recall-as-detour-why-wisconsi n-should-not-stop-now/ Nicolas Lampert http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2012/06/wisconsin_workers_divided_and.html Arun Gupta and Steve Horn http://truth-out.org/news/item/9661-the-silver-lining-in-walkers-victory Matt Rothschild http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=36963 Barf away, Dan w. -- http://prop-press.typepad.com/ http://www.prop-press.net/ http://www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Another insult of the 1 percent: everybody does it!
My friend at Yahoo, a senior engineer, tells me that his co-workers are in a lather. Their CEO, known for a leadership style, reorganization strategy, and corporate housecleaning method akin to swinging a double-headed axe blindfolded, apologized twice last week for having made the mistake not of lying, but of including an ³inadvertent² false credential on his resume: that he had earned an undergraduate degree in computer science when in fact he hadn¹t, and had only a degree in accounting. This, in a company and a Silicon Valley professional environment full of engineers with honestly hard-earned CS degrees from Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Cal Poly, Michigan, Purdue, Georgia Tech, etc, etc. The man has not been fired yet. Because apparently ³everybody does it.² Or ³it doesn¹t matter.² Or ³it¹s no big deal.² Or because the board just won¹t hold another multi-millionaire accountable. They just won¹t. Neutrality? Complexity? No. The question is this: how does one group of people make another group of people do something that they really don¹t want to do? http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-yahoo-ceo-20120509,0,4505704.story http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/09/technology/yahoo-ceo-resume-reactions/index. htm Dan W. ... -- http://prop-press.typepad.com/ http://www.prop-press.net/ http://www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Wisconsin Report: hotly contested, no legitimacy at stake
problem of legitimacy as it relates to elections in general, and to this election in particular. Because of the unavoidable cynicism and calculation inherent in voting, there can be no moral legitimacy gained or lost in an election victory, period. The Wisconsin movement must be very clear about this. No matter who wins or loses, we will not accept the victory as the final stamp of legitimacyany outcome is in essence illegitimate on the level of values. An election is a non-violent contest for control over the state¹s levers of coercionand that is all it is. This is a crucial statement to broadcast because should he win, whether it be fairly or by theft, Scott Walker will wear the victory on his sleeve, using its aura of legitimacy as a bludgeon. Make no mistake, Walker and his GOP cabal have a second, more horrible act of legislative aggression at the ready, to be unveiled just as soon as he beats back the recall. To the good people of Wisconsin: be prepared to fight a governor unafraid to rule by emergency executive decreeand everyday forward, he will remind everyone that this is what the voters decided. Such will be the emboldened Scott Walker we will face after his victory. Thus, it goes without saying that we must defeat Walker in June. This is no small task given that Walker will have amassed a war chest that guarantees dominance of television and radio advertising, and has the support of any number of third party groups, flush with cash and a willingness to lie. But should this much-desired defeat come to pass, whoever the Democrat is will have earned no legitimacy on a values level. The movement grassroots must view and treat the new governor as distrustfully as any other ambitious, ego-driven careerist politician all too capable of selling out the public interest once in office (which is, of course, a specialty of the Democrats). The values of the movement will only be expressed by the elected leadership if the movement remains large, vital, visible, and beyond the reach of both union and Democratic Party controlor, in other words, dangerous, hydra-headed, and untamed. How to be that movement and yet engage in the most difficult and momentous electoral contest most Wisconsinites will have ever seen is the paradox within which the Uprising now exists. Let us embrace it. * My last thought concerns the mentality and commitment of a winning movement. The last and perhaps most meaningful victory gained in the Wisconsin movement was the successful blockage of new mining up northa key item on GOP¹s corporate agenda. The victory was gained at the Capitol through a state senate vote, but was won over a translocal theater of activism and coalition-building, binding together numerous groups and constituencies across different parts of the state. http://www.progressive.org/why_mining_companies_got_beat_in_wisconsin.html Of complementary significance was the willingness and even resignation among coalition members regarding the likelihood of having to fight an eventual ground war up north, pitting our bodies against their machines. Without this coalition, led by the native peoples of the Bad River Band Chippewa, the victory could not have been won. Without the latent militancy, spiritual dedication, and specter of nihilism belonging to a people who recognize a battle for survival when they see it, the victory could not have been won. Without the ability to simultaneously: lobby legislators politely and agitate on the streets angrily; collect independent, scientifically-sound research and launch barbs of wit and ridicule at GOP targets; pack the assembly hearings in person and disseminate information through social media, the victory could not have been won. The lesson is clear. Prepare for the worst. Work for the best. Make our appeals to the hearts and minds of the unconvinced while standing firm at a threshold of ultimate defense. And deal with whatever comes. No, Brian, no neutrality here. Dan w. -- http://prop-press.typepad.com/ http://www.prop-press.net/ http://www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime firewall pelting
From Jay Brown, our friend and travel companion. I will be in Wuhan in a few days along with nettimers Brian and Claire, at Wuhan University, we will certainly ask about this incident. Dan w. * MCLC LIST From: Kevin Carrico Subject: father of firewall pelted (2) This affair has managed to create one of the greatest ironies of the entire CCP Internet censorship regime- Fang's name has now become a sensitive term, blocked on the Sina micro-blog service. From Twitter this afternoon (Beijing time): RT @bitinn http://twitter.com/bitinn 新浪微博正式将“方滨兴”列为搜索敏感词。历史讽刺的 一刻到来了 Kevin Carrico MCLC LIST From: kirk Subject: father of firewall pelted *** Source: Want China Times (5/19/11): http://www.wantchinatimes.com/news-subclass-cnt.aspx?id=20110519000158cid=1 303 Father of Great Firewall pelted at Wuhan University By Staff Reporter Fang Bingxing (方濱興), the principal of Beijing University of Posts Telecommunications, also dubbed the Father of the Great Firewall, was reportedly pelted with eggs and a shoe while giving a lecture at Wuhan University on Thursday afternoon (May 19). While the eggs launched at Fang seem to have missed, the shoe thrown by a female student allegedly struck its target. Though reports of the attack have not been confirmed, netizens in China reposted the news widely online soon after and online encyclopedia Wikipedia has listed the incident in Fang Bingxing's entry. Fang is known for his substantial contribution to China's internet censorship infrastructure. He began working at the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China in 1999 as deputy chief engineer and from 2000 he served as chief engineer and director. It was in this position that he oversaw the development of the filtering and blocking technology that has become known as China's Great Firewall. Internet users regard Fang as an enemy who has stripped netizens of the ability to view and download online content freely. After hearing that Fang was due to give a lecture at Wuhan University, netizens jokingly offered rewards to whoever could successfully pelt him with an object. Rewards on offer included a DVD of Japanese porn star Sora Aoi, one night at a five star hotel in Hong Kong, one large hug, a round trip air ticket to Shanghai, a week in California, or one night stand with the person offering the prize. It is believed all the rewards mentioned are genuine. http://prop-press.typepad.com/ http://www.midwestradicalculturecorridor.net/ # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
