Possible Outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War and China

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Possible Outcomes of the Russo-Ukrainian War and China’s Choice

by US-China Perception Monitor March 12, 2022

Hu Wei is the vice-chairman of the Public Policy Research Center of the 
Counselor’s Office of the State Council, the chairman of Shanghai Public 
Policy Research Association, the chairman of the Academic Committee of 
the Chahar Institute, a professor, and a doctoral supervisor.



Written on March 5, 2022. Translated by Jiaqi Liu on March 12, 2022.

https://uscnpm.org/2022/03/12/hu-wei-russia-ukraine-war-china-choice/

The Russo-Ukrainian War is the most severe geopolitical conflict since 
World War II and will result in far greater global consequences than 
September 11 attacks. At this critical moment, China needs to accurately 
analyze and assess the direction of the war and its potential impact on 
the international landscape. At the same time, in order to strive for a 
relatively favorable external environment, China needs to respond 
flexibly and make strategic choices that conform to its long-term interests.


Russia’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine has caused great 
controvsery in China, with its supporters and opponents being divided 
into two implacably opposing sides. This article does not represent any 
party and, for the judgment and reference of the highest decision-making 
level in China, this article conducts an objective analysis on the 
possible war consequences along with their corresponding countermeasure 
options.


I. Predicting the Future of the Russo-Ukrainian War

1.  Vladimir Putin may be unable to achieve his expected goals, which 
puts Russia in a tight spot. The purpose of Putin’s attack was to 
completely solve the Ukrainian problem and divert attention from 
Russia’s domestic crisis by defeating Ukraine with a blitzkrieg, 
replacing its leadership, and cultivating a pro-Russian government. 
However, the blitzkrieg failed, and Russia is unable to support a 
protracted war and its associated high costs. Launching a nuclear war 
would put Russia on the opposite side of the whole world and is 
therefore unwinnable. The situations both at home and abroad are also 
increasingly unfavorable. Even if the Russian army were to occupy 
Ukraine’s capital Kyiv and set up a puppet government at a high cost, 
this would not mean final victory. At this point, Putin’s best option is 
to end the war decently through peace talks, which requires Ukraine to 
make substantial concessions. However, what is not attainable on the 
battlefield is also difficult to obtain at the negotiating table. In any 
case, this military action constitutes an irreversible mistake.


2.  The conflict may escalate further, and the West’s eventual 
involvement in the war cannot be ruled out. While the escalation of the 
war would be costly, there is a high probability that Putin will not 
give up easily given his character and power. The Russo-Ukrainian war 
may escalate beyond the scope and region of Ukraine, and may even 
include the possibility of a nuclear strike. Once this happens, the U.S. 
and Europe cannot stay aloof from the conflict, thus triggering a world 
war or even a nuclear war. The result would be a catastrophe for 
humanity and a showdown between the United States and Russia. This final 
confrontation, given that Russia’s military power is no match for 
NATO’s, would be even worse for Putin.


3.  Even if Russia manages to seize Ukraine in a desperate gamble, it is 
still a political hot potato. Russia would thereafter carry a heavy 
burden and become overwhelmed. Under such circumstances, no matter 
whether Volodymyr Zelensky is alive or not, Ukraine will most likely set 
up a government-in-exile to confront Russia in the long term. Russia 
will be subject both to Western sanctions and rebellion within the 
territory of Ukraine. The battle lines will be drawn very long. The 
domestic economy will be unsustainable and will eventually be dragged 
down. This period will not exceed a few years.


4. The political situation in Russia may change or be disintegrated at 
the hands of the West. After Putin’s blitzkrieg failed, the hope of 
Russia’s victory is slim and Western sanctions have reached an 
unprecedented degree. As people’s livelihoods are severely affected and 
as anti-war and anti-Putin forces gather, the possibility of a political 
mutiny in Russia cannot be ruled out. With Russia’s economy on the verge 
of collapse, it would be difficult for Putin to prop up the perilous 
situation even without the loss of the Russo-Ukrainian war. If Putin 
were to be ousted from power due to civil strife, coup d’état, or 
another reason, Russia would be even less likely to confront the West. 
It would surely succumb to the West, or even be further dismembered, and 
Russia’s status as a great power would come to an end.


II. Analysis of the Impact of Russo-Ukrainian war On International Landscape

1. The United States would regain leadership in the Western world, and 
the West 

What Sci-Hub’s latest court battle means for rese

[nettime's avid reader]

www.nature.com /articles/d41586-021-03659-0

What Sci-Hub’s latest court battle means for research, 13 December 2021

DOI: 10.1038/d41586-021-03659-0

Sci-Hub, the popular website that offers access to millions of pirated 
research papers and books, is no stranger to legal action. But, for the 
first time, the site is defending its operations in court, in a 
copyright case filed in India by a group of major publishers.


In a lawsuit presented in Delhi’s high court, the American Chemical 
Society, Elsevier and Wiley say that the site infringes their copyright, 
and ask the court to instruct Internet service providers in India to 
block access to it.


Sci-Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan argues that, in India, copyright is 
“not applicable in cases such as Sci-Hub, when [material] is required 
for science and education”.


Legal experts say that there is a chance the court will rule in 
Sci-Hub’s favour, because of a key aspect of the country’s copyright 
law. The case hinges on the definition of ‘fair dealings’, which in the 
past has enabled institutions in India to lawfully reproduce academic 
textbooks and other copyrighted material for use in education.


If Sci-Hub wins, it could force publishers to rethink their business 
models in a similar way to how the music industry changed in response to 
the arrival of the Internet, says Arul George Scaria, a legal scholar at 
the National Law University, Delhi. Attitudes towards Sci-Hub in other 
countries could change on the basis of India’s ruling, and the outcome 
could even influence similar cases in future.


Pirate site
Previously, publishers have sued Sci-Hub and Elbakyan in several 
countries, and access has been blocked, or is due to be blocked, in 11 
countries, including Germany, France, Sweden and the United Kingdom.


In lawsuits filed in recent years by Elsevier and the American Chemical 
Society, US judges ruled that Sci-Hub infringed the publishers’ 
copyrights and owed them US$15 million and $4.8 million, respectively. 
Elbakyan did not appear in court, or offer any legal representation for 
the site during those cases, and the fines have so far not been paid.


“Pirate sites like Sci-Hub threaten the integrity of the scientific 
record, and the safety of university and personal data,” the publishers 
behind the case in India told Nature in a statement. “They compromise 
the security of libraries and higher-education institutions, to gain 
unauthorized access to scientific databases and other proprietary 
intellectual property, and illegally harvest journal articles and 
e-books.” The publishers also allege that Sci-Hub uses stolen user 
credentials and phishing attacks to extract copyrighted journal articles 
illegally.


Elbakyan says that these are “empty accusations” that “have absolutely 
no content of evidence behind them”. She denies that Sci-Hub is a threat 
to science, or to the security of academic institutions. “Open 
communication is a fundamental property of science and it makes 
scientific progress possible. Paywalled access prevents this,” Elbakyan 
adds. “That is a threat, and not Sci-Hub.”


The site has proved popular among researchers, who say their 
institutions cannot afford costly journal subscriptions. India accounts 
for the third-largest proportion of Sci-Hub’s users, and when publishers 
brought the Delhi case in December 2020, a group of lawyers offered 
Elbakyan legal representation.


“There are serious questions of access to knowledge that the court ought 
to take into account,” says Lawrence Liang, a legal scholar at Ambedkar 
University Delhi, who isn’t part of the defence team but helped to rally 
support for Sci-Hub from scientists.


Fair dealings?

The defence will argue that Sci-Hub’s activities are covered by the list 
of exemptions in India’s Copyright Act of 1957. One of these is that 
‘fair dealings’ of a work can be used for private or personal use, 
including research.


Academic publishers have fallen foul of this section of the act before. 
In 2012, five publishers — including Oxford University Press and 
Cambridge University Press — unsuccessfully sued the University of Delhi 
and its photocopying shop for alleged copyright infringement in course 
packs made at the institution. These packs contained photocopies of 
passages and chapters from textbooks and, in some cases, copies of 
entire books that were produced for students, many of who could not 
afford to buy the originals.


The judge ruled that the university and the photocopying shop were not 
infringing the copyright of the books’ publishers, because one of the 
exemptions listed in the copyright act includes reproducing work “by a 
teacher or pupil in the course of instruction”. A key part of the case 
was evidence submitted to the court by students and teachers stating the 
need for the photocopies. This was allowed because there was deemed to 
be sufficient national interest in the ruling.


Liang was involved in that case, and says

Isabelle Fremeaux and John Jordan: David Graeber

[nettime's avid reader]

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/09/05/david-graeber-1961-2020

Isabelle Frémeaux and John Jordan

Dear David,

It’s midnight. Tears come and go like tides. Last night under the full
moon, you passed away suddenly and left this world that you have been so
much part of transforming for the better. In the library on the ZAD
(Zone à Défendre, Zone to Defend)—built where the French state wanted to
put an airport, in the shadow of an illegal lighthouse erected on the
site of a planned control tower—there are eight books on special
display. One of them is the French edition of your Bullshit Jobs.

The library is crammed with books about anarchism, occupation movements,
the Paris Commune, utopias, territorial and peasant struggles.
Strangely, next to the display copy of your book there was a half-empty
shelf: the only half-empty shelf in the library. That shelf seemed to be
the place to mark your senseless passing, with just enough space to make
a small shrine to your memory, your friendship, your brilliance and
quirkiness.

We adorned it with candles, flowers from the meadow where they wanted to
put the runway, a paving stone from an old barricade from the
forty-five-year-long struggle here, and a photo of you smiling and
looking up to your left into the air, as if calling the spirits of
joyful rebellion to your side. If we followed your gaze, up from the
photo across the books, it landed on the shelf marked ACAB (All Cops Are
Bastards). You would have laughed your trickster laugh.

Not many libraries have an ACAB shelf, or are built on an occupied
autonomous zone against an airport and its world, which worked with
self-organization without police for six years. You would have loved the
ZAD; it embodied your ideas where direct action became entangled with
everyday life. We had often spoken about you and Nika visiting us,
giving a talk here, spending time together walking through these farms
and wetlands saved from destruction. But life, like revolution, is
always unexpected. You were not to visit these four thousand acres which
politicians once called the territory lost to the republic. We still
can’t believe that we have lost you. Tonight we shot a firework toward
the moon for you.

One of the first anarchist thinkers, William Godwin, wrote that old
books are the bodies of ghosts. Your books are not old, yet already
ghosts’ bodies—bodies that will continue to inspire so many in these
dark times where we needed your radical imagination more than ever. In
2018, we were working on a book to support the ZAD after the evictions
following the victory against the airport. We asked you to write the
preface. Via telegram from the Rojava border you replied, saying you
could not write because you were smuggling drones into the Autonomous
region, which gave us all so much hope about living without the state.
“Ghostwrite the preface,” you wrote, which was a terrifying honor, and
which JJ did, trying desperately to channel you like a kind of distant
medium. It speaks volumes about how open and humble you were. You joked
afterward that you should get comrades to ghostwrite you more often to
give you time to learn the guitar.

The last time we hung out with you and Nika, we were running from
teargas in the streets of Paris on the biggest day of action of the
Yellow Vests uprising, when Macron was ready to evacuate the Elysée
Palace by helicopter (which, sadly, he never did). You were one of those
rare intellectuals whose acts and forms of life corresponded with your
ideas, who took risks in thought and deed, and whose words had such a
clarity about them that they opened doors to radicalism to so many. You
once wrote to Isa that one of your rules was to “be kind to your
reader.” We miss that kindness already much too much. We will always
love you, as a body and as a ghost. ■

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Jodi Dean: Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?

[nettime's avid reader]

LA REVIEW OF BOOKS, MAY 12, 2020

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neofeudalism-the-end-of-capitalism/

<...>

II.

Neofeudalism does not imply that contemporary communicative or
networked capitalism identically reproduces all the features of
European feudalism. It doesn’t. In fact, as historians have
successfully demonstrated, the very idea of a single European
feudalism is a fiction. Different feudalisms developed across the
continent in response to different pressures. Viewing contemporary
capitalism in terms of its feudalizing tendencies illuminates
a new socioeconomic structure with four interlocking features:
parcellated sovereignty, new lords and peasants, hinterlandization,
and catastrophism.



Parcellated sovereignty

Historians Perry Anderson and Ellen Meiksins Wood present the
parcelization of sovereignty as a key feature of European feudalism.
Feudal society emerged as the imperial administration of the Romans
“gave way to a patchwork of jurisdictions in which state functions
were vertically and horizontally fragmented.” Local arrangements
taking a variety of forms, including contractual relations between
lords and kings and lords and vassals, came to supplement regional
administration. Arbitration replaced the rule of law. The line
between legality and illegality weakened. Political authority and
economic power blended together as feudal lords extracted a surplus
from peasants through legal coercion, legal in part because the lords
decided the law that applied to the peasants in their jurisdiction.
Wood writes, “The effect was to combine the private exploitation
of labour with the public role of administration, jurisdiction and
enforcement.”

Under neofeudalism, the directly political character of society
reasserts itself. Global financial institutions and digital technology
platforms use debt to redistribute wealth from the world’s poorest
to the richest. Nation-states promote and protect specific private
corporations. Political power is exercised with and as economic
power, not only taxes but fines, liens, asset seizures, licenses,
patents, jurisdictions, and borders. At the same time, economic power
shields those who wield it from the reach of state law. Ten percent
of global wealth is hoarded in off-shore accounts to avoid taxation.
Cities and states relate to Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and
Google/Alphabet as if these corporations were themselves sovereign
states — negotiating with, trying to attract, and cooperating with
them on their terms. Cash-strapped municipalities use elaborate
systems of fines to expropriate money from people directly, impacting
poor people the hardest. In Punishment Without Crime, Alexandra
Natapoff documents the dramatic scope of misdemeanor law in the
already enormous US carceral system. Poor people, disproportionately
people of color, are arrested on bogus charges and convinced to
plead guilty to avoid the jail time that they could incur should
they contest the charges. Not only does the guilty plea go on their
record, but they open themselves up to fines that set them up for even
more fees and fines should they miss a payment. We got a brief look
into this system of legal illegality and unjust administration of
justice in the wake of the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, that followed
the murder of Michael Brown: “[T]he city’s municipal court and
policing apparatus openly extracted millions of dollars from its
low-income African American population.” Police were instructed
“to make arrests and issue citations in order to raise revenue.”
Like minions of feudal lords, they used force to expropriate value
from the people.



New lords and peasants

Feudal relations are characterized by a fundamental inequality that
enables the direct exploitation of peasants by lords. Perry Anderson
describes the exploitative monopolies such as watermills that were
controlled by the lord; peasants were obliged to have their grain
ground at their lord’s mill, a service for which they had to pay. So
not only did peasants occupy and till land that they did not own, but
they dwelled under conditions where the feudal lord was, as Marx says,
“the manager and master of the process of production and of the
entire process of social life.” Unlike the capitalist whose profit
rests on the surplus value generated by waged workers through the
production of commodities, the lord extracts value through monopoly,
coercion, and rent.

Digital platforms are the new watermills, their billionaire owners
the new lords, and their thousands of workers and billions of users
the new peasants. Technology companies employ a relatively small
percentage of the workforce, but their effects have been tremendous,
remaking entire industries around the acquisition, mining, and
deployment of data. The smaller workforces are indicative of digital
technology’s neofeudalizing tendency. Capital accumulation occurs
less through commodity production and wage labor than through
services, rents, licenses, fees, wo

Dogs Obey Commands Given by Social Robots

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spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-software/dogs-obey-commands-given-by-social-robots

By Evan Ackerman

One of the things that sets robots apart from intermittently animated
objects like toasters is that humans generally see robots as agents.
That is, when we look at a robot, and especially a social robot (a robot
designed for human interaction), we tend to ascribe some amount of
independent action to them, along with motivation at varying levels of
abstraction. Robots, in other words, have agency in a way that toasters
just don’t.

Agency is something that designers of robots intended for human
interaction can to some extent exploit to make the robots more
effective. But humans aren’t the only species that robots interact with.
At the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI
2020), researchers at Yale University’s Social Robotics Lab led by Brian
Scassellati presented a paper taking the first step towards determining
whether dogs, which are incredibly good at understanding social
behaviors in humans, see human-ish robots as agents—or more
specifically, whether dogs see robots more like humans (which they
obey), or more like speaker systems (which they don’t).

The background research on dog-robot interaction that forms the basis
for this work is incredibly interesting. The paper is absolutely worth
reading in its entirety, but here are a few nuggets of prior work that
should help you understand how dogs interact with non-human animated
objects:

> Pongrácz et. al tested whether dogs followed commands from their
> guardians with various levels of embodiment. The guardians may be
> present in the same room as the dogs (i.e., 3D condition), or
> interacted with the dogs via live-stream life-size interactive videos
> (i.e., 2D condition), or interacted with the dogs with only their
> voices came out of a loudspeaker (i.e., 0D condition). Dogs followed
> the commands most reliably in the 3D condition. They followed the
> commands least consistently in the 0D condition, and their
> performances were between 3D and 0D condition in the 2D condition.
> 
> Lakatos et. al conducted a study to test how dogs responded to the
> pointing cues given by a PeopleBot with customized arms. The
> PeopleBot either exhibited human-like behaviors or no social
> behaviors, depending on the condition. A dog participant observed the
> robot interacting with the guardian either socially or mechanically
> for six minutes in the interaction phase. The robot then delivered a
> food reward for the dog. In the subsequent testing phase, the robot
> pointed to one of the two buckets with hidden food rewards. In the
> testing phase, dogs performed better in the condition with a social
> robot than with a nonsocial robot. However, no evidence suggested the
> mean performance with the social robot was significantly different
> from 50 percent, which is the chance level in two-choice tasks.
> Therefore, the dogs did not consistently follow the pointing cues
> provided by the social robot, even though dogs in general follow
> human pointing cues well.


To summarize, dogs don’t respond very well to commands from loudspeakers
or video systems, and they also don’t really pay attention when a
mechanical-looking robot points at things, even though dogs understand
what pointing means when humans do it.

Curiously, Aibo (a dog-like robot) tends not to be perceived by real
dogs as a competitor for food, and dogs in general don’t interact with
Aibo in dog-like ways. Dogs often react to Aibo in other ways, but it’s
more like “what the heck is that thing” rather than “that’s a weird
dog,” similarly to how some dogs react to things like vacuums (robot or
otherwise). So if dogs understand on some level that robot dogs aren’t
actually dogs, and don’t interact with robot dogs in dog-like ways,  how
would dogs interact with social robots that are designed to interact
with humans and therefore have some human-like features?

The Yale researchers put together an experiment that compared how dogs
respond to commands given by a Nao to how dogs respond to the same
commands given by a speaker system. A group of 34 dogs participated in
the experiment, and each dog was tested with either the speaker or the
Nao (but not both) in a room that also included a researcher and the
dog’s guardian. After a brief intro to the testing environment, the
robot or speaker called the dog’s name (using the same voice), and the
researchers noted whether the dog paid attention at all. Then the robot
or speaker would talk to the guardian for a bit in an attempt to
“de-novelty” itself, provide a treat to the dog, and then give a “sit”
command, which was the real test.

Results of the experiments showed that the dogs paid significantly more
attention to the robot than the speaker, and were significantly more
likely to follow a sit command from the robot. Dogs obeyed the sit
command over 60 percent of the time when it came from the robot, but
less than

The Health Code's 'Long March'

[nettime's avid reader]

The Health Code’s ‘Long March’

Written by Yun Xi, edited by ‘Ferocious Bro’

Published on the Hangzhou Engineer Crew official account, April 3.

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/AVYGDAkr-vYNNo5K7srdcQ

On Feb. 3, after Hangzhou had implemented strict quarantine measures
as one of the first areas in Zhejiang province hit by the epidemic,
the city’s Yuhang district organized Ali Cloud, DingTalk, and Alipay
to form a virtual online team to urgently develop the earlier version
of Health Code.

On Feb. 6, Hangzhou Municipal Party Secretary Zhou Jiangyong made
a proposal at an important meeting: in order to help enterprises
to resume work, the city should play to advantages of its digital
economy. He proposed to establish a unified digital declaration
platform, including personal electronic health codes and timely data
sharing.


The Party Secretary wanted to roll out the code the next day.

Relevant departments in Hangzhou as well as within Alibaba worked
overtime overnight to finalize the business logic map.

After a sleepless day of development, on Feb. 8, the enterprise
employee health code was launched. The development team soon became
the Hangzhou health code project team, and more government departments
and technical personnel were transferred to the site.

In the early morning of Feb. 7, Yuhang District’s system, known
as “Yuhang Green Code,” was officially launched. 269,000 people
entered their information within 24 hours.

On Feb. 13, Ali Cloud senior technical expert Li Haolong wrote a
pledge to get a Zhejiang health code online within 48 hours.


On Feb. 20, Li Kai, head of Ali Cloud digital government in Hubei
province, received a list of developers who were stranded in
Hubei—more than 150 people.

He used half a day to set up a virtual online group of more than 70
people, their task: in three days, to create a health code system for
Hubei.

By then, the number of confirmed cases in Hubei had exceeded 60,000.
Unlike other provinces and cities, which primarily use red codes to
find out who to isolate, in Hubei the idea was to figure out who could
go outside.

The epidemic situation in Hubei province is changing from moment to
moment, so the government kept changing the requirements for the
algorithm. Therefore, an entirely different algorithm from Zhejiang
had to be developed.

Hubei was already divided into high, medium, and low risk areas.
Within 4 hours, the team had an algorithm for the low-risk areas;
within 12, for medium. For high-risk areas, they didn’t develop a
general algorithm, instead focusing on covering essential workers by
building a white list. People with unexplained fevers were placed on
red code if they were in Wuhan; in the rest of Hubei, they got no code
at all for the time being.

These problems were just the tip of the iceberg.

The team started with only four people, and the complexity and
accuracy of the algorithm increased exponentially, Li said.

There is no doubt that close contacts such as confirmed cases and
their spouses had to be issued red codes.

“The most complicated are the atypical situations, such as driving
through Hubei but sleeping in your car, or taking a bullet train
through Hubei…” Ali cloud data intelligence team product expert,
code engine product manager Ding Xianshu said.

“The most complicated cases to evaluate are the atypical one, such
as driving through Hubei without a stop on the road, or sleeping on
the road for one night, or taking abullet train through hubei, and
further subdivision. Or if there’s are suspected confirmed cases in
an apartment complex, do you have to put everyone in the complex on
a red code?” asked Ding Xianshu, Ali cloud data intelligence team
product expert and code engine product manager.

The code must also adapt to changes as rules are updated every day,
changing how people visited and underwent temperature checks in public
places, pharmacies, supermarkets, intersections.

At one point, project leader Li did not sleep for 48 hours. The calls
kept pouring in and his lungs were clogged.

Everyone told Li to rest, but he refused. Someone complained to HR,
and several colleagues forced him back into the car and sent him home.

Arriving home early in the morning, Li recalled, the security guards,
having learned that he was developing the app, immediately stood and
gave him a salute.

On the day of the launch of Zhejiang’s health code, the electronic
government office of the general office of the state council
instructed Ali to accelerate the development of a national integrated
health code system.

Two days later, CCTV news featured the Zhejiang health code.

All the provinces soon wanted their own version.

So, on Feb. 18, Ali Cloud’s data intelligence team stood up four
teams to bring the code nationwide. Hubei’s algorithm rules were the
most complex.

“That green code, that green color—for a long time, it was
hope.” Li said.

The road from Hangzhou Yuchang Green Code’s Feb. 7 launch to YiChang
Prefecture, Hubei’s first green cod

The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative

[nettime's avid reader]

voxeu.org /article/coming-battle-covid-19-narrative

Abstract:

Like the Great Depression and WWII, the COVID-19 pandemic (along
with climate change) will alter how we think about the economy and
public policy, not only in seminars and policy think tanks, but
also in the everyday vernacular by which people talk about their
livelihoods and futures. It will likely prompt a leftward shift on the
government-versus-markets axis. But more important, it may overturn
that anachronistic one-dimensional menu of policy alternatives by
including approaches drawing on social values going beyond compliance
and material gain to include ethical motivations of solidarity and
duty that underpin community.


The coming battle for the COVID-19 narrative

The COVID-19 pandemic is a blow to self-interest as a value
orientation and laissez-faire as a policy paradigm, both already
reeling amid mounting public concerns about climate change. Will
the pandemic change our economic narrative, expressing new everyday
understandings of how the economy works and how it should work?

We think so. But it will not be simply a shift to the left on the now
anachronistic one-dimensional markets-versus-government continuum
shown in Figure 1. A position along the blue line represents a mix
of public policies – nationalisation of the railways, for example,
towards the left; deregulation of labour markets, for example, towards
the right.

Figure 1 The government–market continuum for policy and economic
discourse

https://voxeu.org/sites/default/files/image/FromMay2014/carlin10aprilfig4.png


COVID-19, for better or worse, brings into focus a third pole in the
debate: call it community or civil society. In the absence of this
third pole, the conventional language of economics and public policy
misses the contribution of social norms and of institutions that are
neither governments nor markets – like families, relationships
within firms, and community organisations.

There are precedents for the scale of changes that we anticipate.
The Great Depression and WWII changed the way we talked about the
economy: left to its own devices it would wreak havoc on people’s
lives (massive unemployment), “heedless self-interest [is] bad
economics” (FDR),1 and governments can effectively pursue the public
good (defeat fascism, provide economic security). As the memories of
that era faded along with the social solidarity and confidence in
collective action that it had fostered, another vernacular took over:
“there is no such thing as society” (Thatcher)2 – you get what
you pay for, government is just another special interest group.

Another opportunity for a long-needed fundamental shift in the
economic vernacular is now unfolding. COVID-19, along with climate
change, could be the equivalent of the Great Depression and WWII in
forcing a sea change in economic thinking and policy.

And the battle for the COVID-19 narrative is already underway. The
Economist sounded the alarm: “Big government is needed to fight the
pandemic. What matters is how it shrinks back again afterwards. ...
A pandemic government is not fit for everyday life.”3 Government
overreach, we hear, led to America being unprepared. “Stringent and
time-consuming FDA requirements are preventing academic and clinical
labs around the country, with capacity and willingness to develop and
deploy testing within their communities, from being able to do so.”4

But many Americans, Britons, Italians, Japanese and others probably
wish that, like South Korea’s, their governments had done more not
less at the outset, and that their fellow citizens had the civic
mindedness that made the South Korean government’s policies so
effective.

South Korea will be a major theatre in the battle for the COVID-19
narrative. We will hear a lot about how their success in containing
the pandemic was due to their long experience with SARS, H1N1,
and other epidemics in the region. Or is it the history of
authoritarianism in South Korea’s politics? Or that South Koreans
are, well, just more cooperative than, say, Americans?

We are not convinced. According to the authoritative Polity IV data
set, South Korea is as democratic as the UK or the US.5 The US has had
ample experience with epidemics. A never-released government report
half a year ago simulated a hypothetical pandemic almost exactly
anticipating what is now unfolding. Residents of Seoul are not, in
fact, distinctive in their cooperativeness, at least not compared with
people from Bonn, Boston, Zurich or Copenhagen in experiments about
contributions to public goods (Herrmann et al. 2008).

Others will point to the immediate and massive testing, tracing and
social distancing (all for the most part voluntary) that the South
Koreans adopted, their quick mobilisation of expertise bearing on
the outbreak, the extraordinary number of intensive care unit beds
that were available, and their comprehensive health care system that
facilitated and reduced resistance to these measures. 

Ben Tarnoff: These Are Conditions in Which Revolution Becomes

[nettime's avid reader]

THESE ARE CONDITIONS IN WHICH REVOLUTION BECOMES THINKABLE
BEN TARNOFF

4.07.2020

https://communemag.com/these-are-conditions-in-which-revolution-becomes-thinkable/

In a few months, Covid-19 has remade our political horizons entirely.

History moves slowly, then all at once. The coronavirus crisis
has catapulted us into the latter rhythm. The pace of events has
accelerated sharply; the course of events has become impossible to
predict. In retrospect, 2020 may end up being a 1968 or a 1917: a year
of leaps and ruptures, and a dividing line between one era and the
next. How might we characterize the new era? It’s difficult to draw
definitive conclusions about a period that is in the earliest phases
of its formation. Still, even in fast-moving moments, it’s possible
to work up a preliminary sketch. For such a sketch to be useful,
though, it must capture, albeit in rough strokes, the sharpness of
the break and the newness of the situation produced by it. As Stuart
Hall wrote: When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no “going back.”
History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment.
You have to attend, “violently,” with all the “pessimism
of the intellect” at your command, to the “discipline of the
conjuncture.”

A conjuncture is a thing made out of other things—literally, a
“joining together.” So a good way to start when trying to attend
to it is to attend to the various elements that combine to create it.
Ideally, this shouldn’t just be a laundry list of various things
that are happening but also an account of how they fit together, a
theory of the complex, contradictory whole that is generated by their
interaction.




This is difficult work, and it requires a sustained, collective
effort. It’ll take a lot of people thinking and acting together to
make sense of our new terrain. What follows is an early contribution:
a partial inventory of circumstances in the US and a provisional
picture of how they fit together.

The economy is collapsing. Goldman Sachs economists have predicted
an annualized 34 percent decline in GDP in the second quarter of
2020—an implosion with no historical precedent. By comparison, the
worst annual decline on record is 13 percent, which happened in 1932
during the Great Depression. Goldman’s predictions for the rest of
2020 are somewhat rosier: a return to double-digit growth in the third
and fourth quarters, so that GDP falls by 6.2 percent for the full
year on an annual average basis.

These numbers may ultimately be too optimistic, however. They take for
granted that lockdowns and social distancing will be relaxed enough
towards the end of the year for something resembling normal life
to resume. By contrast, the economists Warwick McKibbin and Roshen
Fernando suggest, more plausibly, that the economic fallout from the
coronavirus crisis will be worse. They estimate that a pandemic that
lasts a year and kills a million people—well within the range of
current CDC projections, and perhaps too low given the current pace of
infection—would reduce GDP for the year by 8.4 percent.

But a precipitous drop in growth isn’t the only cause for concern.
We may also be facing another financial crisis soon, which would
make the situation considerably more painful. Corporate debt is
particularly vulnerable, partly as a result of how governments handled
the last financial crisis. To combat the 2008 meltdown, central
bankers made money cheap. This in turn encouraged companies to issue
bonds, largely to finance mergers and acquisitions and stock buybacks.
Since most of these companies aren’t sitting on huge cash piles,
even minor disruptions may make it impossible for them to service
their debt. Given the immense volume of this debt—the global value
of non-financial corporate bonds reached $13.5 trillion at the end of
2019—a crunch could easily sink the financial system, freezing up
credit markets and leading to a wave of bankruptcies among employers.

It’s little comfort, then, that investors have been fleeing
assets of all kinds in recent weeks: not just corporate bonds, but
historical safe havens like gold and Treasury bonds. The Fed has
acted aggressively, using tools similar to the ones it deployed in
2008: slashing interest rates and buying up various financial assets,
including corporate bonds. Still, the ambivalent response of markets
to these moves suggests they may not be enough. Stocks rallied in
anticipation of the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill, and continued their
gains after the bill passed. But there is little doubt that more
upheaval lies ahead.






If the swiftness of the economic contraction inflicted by the pandemic
is one feature that distinguishes our present crisis from previous
ones, another is the particular segment of the economy that will
suffer the most from that contraction: services. Services usually
don’t take the worst hit during recessions. That’s because they
can’t be stored, so they have to be consumed right awa

Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal

[nettime's avid reader]

Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’

https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca


The novelist on how coronavirus threatens India — and what the
country, and the world, should do next


Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little?
Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard
carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with
those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads
waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs? 

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending
their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of
ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack
epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist
or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not
— secretly, at least — submitting to science? 

And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by
the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings
and the silence in the skies?

The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More
than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number
will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved
freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the
terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in
their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not
profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed
the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls,
biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data
analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most
powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a
juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us
to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to
help fix it, or look for a better engine.

The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of
war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally.
But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than
the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers
needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter
jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

Night after night, from halfway across the world, some of us watch
the New York governor’s press briefings with a fascination that
is hard to explain. We follow the statistics, and hear the stories
of overwhelmed hospitals in the US, of underpaid, overworked nurses
having to make masks out of garbage bin liners and old raincoats,
risking everything to bring succour to the sick. About states being
forced to bid against each other for ventilators, about doctors’
dilemmas over which patient should get one and which left to die. And
we think to ourselves, “My God! This is America!”

The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes.
But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been
careening down the track for years. Who doesn’t remember the videos
of “patient dumping” — sick people, still in their hospital
gowns, butt naked, being surreptitiously dumped on street corners?
Hospital doors have too often been closed to the less fortunate
citizens of the US. It hasn’t mattered how sick they’ve been, or
how much they’ve suffered. 

At least not until now — because now, in the era of the virus, a
poor person’s sickness can affect a wealthy society’s health.
And yet, even now, Bernie Sanders, the senator who has relentlessly
campaigned for healthcare for all, is considered an outlier in his bid
for the White House, even by his own party.

The tragedy is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down
the track for years

And what of my country, my poor-rich country, India, suspended
somewhere between feudalism and religious fundamentalism, caste and
capitalism, ruled by far-right Hindu nationalists? 

In December, while China was fighting the outbreak of the virus in
Wuhan, the government of India was dealing with a mass uprising by
hundreds of thousands of its citizens protesting against the brazenly
discriminatory anti-Muslim citizenship law it had just passed in
parliament.

The first case of Covid-19 was reported in India on January 30, only
days after the honourable chief guest of our Republic Day Parade,
Amazon forest-eater and Covid-denier Jair Bolsonaro, had left
Delhi. But there was too much to do in February for the virus to be
accommodated in the ruling party’s timetable. There was the official
visit of President Donald Trump scheduled for the last week of the
month. He had been lured by the promise of an audience of 1m people in
a sports stadium in the state of Gujarat. All that took money, and a
great de

Bifo: Beyond the Breakdown. Three Meditations on a Possible Aftermath

[nettime's avid reader]

Beyond the Breakdown
Three Meditations on a Possible Aftermath
Franco „Bifo“ Berardi

https://transversal.at/transversal/0420/berardi/en


All of a sudden, what we have been thinking for the last fifty years
has to be rethought from scratch. Thank god (is god a virus?) that we
have an abundance of extra time now because the old business is out of
business.

I’m going to say something about three distinct subjects. One: the
end of human history, which is clearly unfolding before our eyes. Two:
the ongoing emancipation from capitalism, and/or the imminent danger
of techno-totalitarianism. Three: the return of death (at last) to the
scene of philosophical discourse, after its long modern denial, and
the revitalization of the body as dissipation.


1. Critters

Number one: the philosopher who best anticipated the ongoing viral
apocalypse is Donna Haraway.

In Staying with the Trouble she suggests that the agent of evolution
is no longer Man, the subject of History.

The human is losing its centrality in this chaotic process, and we
should not despair over this, like the nostalgics of modern humanism
do. At the same time, we should not seek comfort in the delusions of a
techno-fix, like the contemporary transhumanist techno-maniacs do.

Human history is over, and the new agents of history are the
“critters,” in Haraway’s parlance. The word “critter” refers
to small creatures, small playful creatures who do strange things,
like provoking mutation. Well: the virus.

Burroughs speaks of viruses as an agents of mutation: biological,
cultural, linguistic mutation.

Critters do not exist as individuals. They spread collectively, as a
process of proliferation.

The year 2020 should be seen as the year when human history
dissolved—not because human beings disappear from planet Earth,
but because planet Earth, tired of their arrogance, launched a
micro-campaign to destroy their Will zur Macht.

The Earth is rebelling against the world, and the agents of planet
Earth are floods, fires, and most of all critters.

Therefore, the agent of evolution is no longer the conscious,
aggressive, and strong-willed human being—but molecular matter,
micro-flows of uncontrollable critters who invade the space of
production, and the space of discourse, replacing History with
Her-story, the time in which teleological Reason is replaced by
Sensibility and sensuous chaotic becoming.

Humanism was based on the ontological freedom that the Italian
philosophers of the early Renaissance identified with the absence of
theological determinism. Theological determinism is over, and the
virus has taken the place of a teleological god.

The end of subjectivity as the engine of the historical process
implies the end of what we have called capital-H “History,” and
implies the beginning of a process in which conscious teleology is
replaced by multiple strategies of proliferation.

Proliferation, the spread of molecular processes, replaces history as
macro-project.

Thought, art, and politics are no longer to be seen as projects of
totalization (Totalizierung, in Hegel’s sense), but as processes of
proliferation without totality.


2. Usefulness

After forty years of neoliberal acceleration, the race of financial
capitalism has suddenly ground to a halt. One, two, three months
of global lockdown, a long interruption of the production process
and of the global circulation of people and goods, a long period
of seclusion, the tragedy of the pandemic … all of this is going
to break capitalist dynamics in a way that may be irremediable,
irreversible. The powers that manage global capital at the political
and financial level are desperately trying to save the economy,
injecting enormous amounts of money into it. Billions, billions of
billions … figures, numbers that now tend to mean: zero.

All of a sudden money means nothing, or very little.

Why are you giving money to a dead body? Can you revive the body of
the global economy by injecting money into it? You can’t. The point
is that both the supply side and the demand side are immune to money
stimulus, because the slump is not happening for financial reasons
(like in 2008), but because of the collapse of bodies, and bodies have
nothing to do with financial stimulus.

We are passing the threshold that leads beyond the cycle of
labor–money–consumption.

When, one day, the body comes out from the confinement of quarantine,
the problem will not be rebalancing the relation between time, work,
and money, rebalancing debt and repayment. The European Union has
been fractured and weakened by its obsession with debt and balance,
but people are dying, hospitals are running out of ventilators, and
doctors are overwhelmed by fatigue, anxiety, and fear of infection.
Right now this cannot be changed by money, because money is not the
problem. The problem is: What are our concrete needs? What is useful
for human life, for collectivity, for therapy?

Use value, long expelled from the field of the economics, is back, and
the

Bruno Latour: The health crisis is leading us to prepare for climate

[nettime's avid reader]

(Almost) auto-translated from:

https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/04/01/la-crisi-sanitaria-ci-induce-a-prepararci-al-cambiamento-climatico/

The health crisis is leading us to prepare for climate change
by Bruno Latour

The unexpected coincidence between general isolation and the period of
Lent is at least welcome for those who, being in the rear, have been
asked, in solidarity, to do nothing. This forced fasting, this secular
and republican Ramadan can be an excellent opportunity for them to
reflect on what is important and what is negligible ...

As if the intervention of the virus could serve as a general test
for the next crisis, the one in which the reorientation of living
conditions will apply to everyone and for every aspect of daily
existence that we will have to learn to consider carefully. I advance
the hypothesis, like many others, that the health crisis prepares us,
induces us, encourages us to prepare for climate change. However, this
hypothesis remains to be verified.

The virus is nothing more than a link in a chain

To authorize the interconnection of the two crises is the sudden and
painful realization that the classic definition of society - humans
among them - makes no sense. The state of society depends, at all
times, on the associations between many actors, most of which do not
have a human form. This applies to microbes - we have known this since
Pasteur's time -, but also to the Internet, for the law, for the
organization of hospitals, for the capacities of the state as well as
for the climate.

And of course, despite the bickering around a "state of war" against
the virus, this is nothing more than a link in a chain in which
the management of mask stocks or tests, the regulation of property
rights, civic behavior , gestures of solidarity, have the same weight
in defining the degree of virulence of the infectious agent. Once
the entire network of which the virus is only a link is taken into
account, it does not act in the same way in Taiwan, Singapore, New
York or Paris. The pandemic is not even a "natural" phenomenon like
the famines of the past or the current climate crisis. For some time
now, society has no longer been confined to the narrow confines of the
social sphere.

__The extension of powers and the sirens of ambulances

That said, it is not clear to me how we can go much further than the
parallel. Because, after all, health crises are not new, and the rapid
and radical intervention of the state does not seem to be particularly
innovative so far. It is enough to see President Macron's enthusiasm
for taking on the figure of head of state that he has so far lacked
in such a flagrant way. Much more than the attacks - which basically
boil down to a police matter -, pandemics awaken, among the rulers
as well as among the governed, a sort of evidence - "we must protect
you", "you must protect us" - which strengthens the state authority
and allows him to claim what, in any other circumstances, would be
welcomed with a revolt.

But this state is not the state of the 21st century and of ecological
change, it is that of the nineteenth century and the so-called
"biopower". To express ourselves in the words of the late Alain
Desrosières, it is really the state of statistics: management of the
population on a territorial network seen from above and guided by the
power of experts. Exactly what we see rising today - with the only
difference being that it is replicated step by step, until it becomes
planetary.

It seems to me that the originality of the current situation is
that, remaining locked in the house, while outside there is nothing
left but the extension of the police powers and the sirens of the
ambulances, we collectively recite a caricatured form of the figure
of the biopower that seems to have come directly from a course of the
philosopher Michel Foucault. There is also the forgetfulness of the
many invisible workers forced to work anyway, so that the others can
continue to hide in their home - without forgetting the migrants who
cannot be accommodated. But precisely, this caricature is that of an
era that is no longer ours.

__An immense abyss

There is an immense gulf between the state capable of saying "I
protect you from life and death", that is, from the infection of a
virus whose trace is known only to scientists and whose effects are
understandable only through the collection of statistical data, and
the state that would dare to say "I protect you from life and death,
because I maintain the conditions of habitability of all living beings
on which you depend."

Just think about it: imagine that President Macron comes to announce,
in the same Churchillian tone, a package of measures to leave the
reserves of gas and oil in the soil, to stop the marketing of
pesticides, to abolish deep plowing and, supreme audacity, to prohibit
the heating of smokers on the terraces of bars ... If the petrol tax
triggered the movement of the gilets jaunes, it makes one shudder at
the tho

Il Manifesto: Let's get the network data

[nettime's avid reader]

EDITORIAL
Let's get the network data

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=it&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Filmanifesto.it%2Ffacciamoci-dare-i-dati-della-rete%2F

Open Letter to the Italian Government and the European Institutions.
Without the cooperation of the OTTs and the platforms, we grope in the
dark and the virus is uncontrollable. The appeal of journalists to
mobilize the country's databases: the virality of the network against
the virality of the epidemic


***

EDITION OF THE
03/25/2020

POSTED
24.3.2020, 19:12

We are a group of journalists who want to join the country's effort
against contagion.

We understood that our world, that of information and digital
relations, is today the main battleground.

We want to make available to the country the experience of a
profession that, for better or for worse, has always played a role
in the national emergency, making vital information transparent and
shared.

Today we learn from the head of the Civil Protection Borrelli that at
least 10 real infected people go around our cities for every single
infected person who is intercepted by the health system.

This differential translates into hospitalized, intubated and,
terribly, deaths.

We cannot continue to go blind hunting for asymptomatics.

The Italian government and Europe have opened up the technological
front.

It takes projects, ideas, solutions to limit the infection.

But as information workers we know that all of this will be a dead
letter if we don't have the data to power these tools.

Without data we die.

Government and European institutions must ask those who have these
data to make them available to health and administrative authorities
to limit the damage.

The great service providers: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, know
a lot, if not everything, about social relationships, mobility, the
mood, the physical conditions, of millions and millions of Italians,
we talk about those Italians of more dynamic and competitive areas,
living on the net, constantly talking to the net.

We need to know what happened in February, how it is possible that
the volcano exploded in Italy, and above all we must now enclose the
contagion areas, identifying the most dangerous groups precisely in
the passage from north to south of the wave of the coronavirus.

Only the databases of these profiling powers would allow us to
hopefully fight this war.

As the European Commission claims, it is not a question of
expropriating anyone.

We ask these large corporations for collaboration, we want
institutions to get attention for concrete cooperation.

We would like the government to get positive answers from those who
are partners in the public administration, from companies that are
collecting invaluable masses of data for the movement of a large part
of the population on their e learning and smart working platforms.

We have read that Mark Zuckerberg fears a collapse of his servers
due to the excess of users by quarantined citizens. Then he too
should bring these people out of the house by shortening the time
of isolation, help governments to georeference the real areas of
transmission of the virus.

A platform that gathers almost half of the earth's population is in
itself a common good, a universal service.

Let these great technological brands gain the honor of being an
essential part of our lives by using the virality of the network
against the virality of the disease.

They know a lot, if not all. They know where, how and when the
contagion opportunities have arisen, the rush of the virus has
accelerated.

Can all this be made available to the country right away?

Owners of these platforms can elaborate, trace calculate the crisis
points, developing graphs that make us understand in Lazio or Campania
or Sicily what is about to happen.

Let them independently give us the results of this elaboration.

We don't want to get our hands in their drawers. Let the owners of
these drawers make us win this battle, to save victims, to limit
suffering, to save their users.

We know it can. We know they can.

We do not want to resign ourselves today to the observation that,
as Capitalism of Surveillance Shoshanna Zuboff writes, these
technological groups "know too much to be free".

We want to hope we can share with them the vision that these groups
are free because we can know everything.

Moreover, most of these giants were born in California, in an
extraordinary season of dreams and creativity, in which software
became the language of freedom and the sharing of a single connective
intelligence. How can they forget where they come from?

As a great Italian like Adriano Olivetti predicted, in 1959:
information technology is a technology of freedom. Believe us, we
practice that lesson that announced us how software and databases are
instruments of freedom from the threat of death and suffering.

Who can hide these hopes behind the futile reason, especially in this
moment, of private interests?

We hope that the Italian and Eur

Mike Davis on COVID-19: The monster is finally at the door

[nettime's avid reader]

By Mike Davis

Links, International Journal of Socialist Renewal
http://links.org.au/mike-davis-covid-19-monster-finally-at-the-door

March 12, 2020 — COVID-19 is finally the monster at the door.
Researchers are working night and day to characterize the outbreak but
they are faced with three huge challenges.

First the continuing shortage or unavailability of test kits has
vanquished all hope of containment. Moreover it is preventing accurate
estimates of key parameters such as reproduction rate, size of
infected population and number of benign infections. The result is a
chaos of numbers.

There is, however, more reliable data on the virus’s impact on
certain groups in a few countries. It is very scary. Italy and
Britain, for example, are reporting a much higher death rate among
those over 65. The ‘corona flu’ that Trump waves off is an
unprecedented danger to geriatric populations, with a potential death
toll in the millions.

Second, like annual influenzas, this virus is mutating as it courses
through populations with different age compositions and acquired
immunities. The variety that Americans are most likely to get is
already slightly different from that of the original outbreak in
Wuhan. Further mutation could be trivial or could alter the current
distribution of virulence which ascends with age, with babies
and small children showing scant risk of serious infection while
octogenarians face mortal danger from viral pneumonia.

Third, even if the virus remains stable and little mutated, its impact
on under-65 age cohorts can differ radically in poor countries and
amongst high poverty groups. Consider the global experience of the
Spanish flu in 1918-19 which is estimated to have killed 1 to 2 per
cent of humanity. In contrast to the corona virus, it was most deadly
to young adults and this has often been explained as a result of their
relatively stronger immune systems which overreacted to infection
by unleashing deadly ‘cytokine storms’ against lung cells. The
original H1N1 notoriously found a favored niche in army camps and
battlefield trenches where it scythed down young soldiers down by the
tens of thousands. The collapse of the great German spring offensive
of 1918, and thus the outcome of the war, has been attributed to the
fact that the Allies, in contrast to their enemy, could replenish
their sick armies with newly arrived American troops.

It is rarely appreciated, however, that fully 60 per cent of global
mortality occurred in western India where grain exports to Britain
and brutal requisitioning practices coincided with a major drought.
Resultant food shortages drove millions of poor people to the
edge of starvation. They became victims of a sinister synergy
between malnutrition, which suppressed their immune response to
infection, and rampant bacterial and viral pneumonia. In another case,
British-occupied Iran, several years of drought, cholera, and food
shortages, followed by a widespread malaria outbreak, preconditioned
the death of an estimated fifth of the population.

This history – especially the unknown consequences of interactions
with malnutrition and existing infections - should warn us that
COVID-19 might take a different and more deadly path in the slums
of Africa and South Asia. The danger to the global poor has been
almost totally ignored by journalists and Western governments. The
only published piece that I’ve seen claims that because the urban
population of West Africa is the world’s youngest, the pandemic
should have only a mild impact. In light of the 1918 experience,
this is a foolish extrapolation. No one knows what will happen over
the coming weeks in Lagos, Nairobi, Karachi, or Kolkata. The only
certainty is that rich countries and rich classes will focus on saving
themselves to the exclusion of international solidarity and medical
aid. Walls not vaccines: could there be a more evil template for the
future?

***

A year from now we may look back in admiration at China’s success in
containing the pandemic but in horror at the USA’s failure. (I’m
making the heroic assumption that China’s declaration of rapidly
declining transmission is more or less accurate.) The inability of our
institutions to keep Pandora’s Box closed, of course, is hardly a
surprise. Since 2000 we’ve repeatedly seen breakdowns in frontline
healthcare.

The 2018 flu season, for instance, overwhelmed hospitals across
the country, exposing the shocking shortage of hospital beds after
twenty years of profit-driven cutbacks of in-patient capacity (the
industry’s version of just-in-time inventory management). Private
and charity hospital closures and nursing shortages, likewise enforced
by market logic, have devastated health services in poorer communities
and rural areas, transferring the burden to underfunded public
hospitals and VA facilities. ER conditions in such institutions are
already unable to cope with seasonal infections, so how will they cope
with an imminent overload of critical cases?

We

Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?

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Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?
by Panagiotis Sotiris • 14 March 2020

https://criticallegalthinking.com/2020/03/14/against-agamben-is-a-democratic-biopolitics-possible/

Giorgio Agamben’s recent intervention which characterizes the
measures implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as an
exercise in the biopolitics of the ‘state of exception’ has
sparked an important debate on how to think of biopolitics.

The very notion of biopolitics, as it was formulated by Michel
Foucault, has been a very important contribution to our understanding
the changes associated with the passage to capitalist modernity,
especially in regards to the ways that power and coercion are
exercised. From power as a right of life and death that the sovereign
holds, we pass to power as an attempt to guarantee the health (and
productivity) of populations. This led to an expansion without
precedent of all forms of state intervention and coercion. From
compulsory vaccinations, to bans on smoking in public spaces, the
notion of biopolitics has been used in many instances as the key to
understand the political and ideological dimensions of heath policies.

At the same time it has allowed us to analyse various phenomena, often
repressed in the public sphere, from the ways that racism attempted
to find a ‘scientific’ grounding to the dangers of trends such
as eugenics. And indeed Agamben has used it in a constructive way,
in this attempt to theorise the modern forms of a ‘state of
exception’, namely spaces where extreme forms of coercion are put in
practice, with the concentration camp the main example.

The questions regarding the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic
obviously raise issues associated with biopolitics. Many commentators
have suggested that China made steps towards containing or slowing
the pandemic, because it could implement an authoritarian version
of biopolitics, which included the use of extended quarantines and
bans on social activities, which was helped by the vast arsenal of
coercion, surveillance and monitoring measures and technologies that
the Chinese state has at its disposal.

Some commentators even suggested that because liberal democracies lack
the same capacity for coercion or invest more on voluntary individual
behaviour change, they cannot take the same measures and this could
inhibit the attempt to deal with the pandemic.

However, I think that it would be a simplification to pose the dilemma
as one between authoritarian biopolitics and a liberal reliance on
persons making rational individual choices.

Moreover, it is obvious that simply treating measures of public
health, such as quarantines or ‘social distancing’, as biopolitics
somehow misses their potential usefulness. In the absence of a vaccine
or successful anti-viral treatments, these measures, coming from the
repertoire of 19th century public health manuals, can reduce the
burden, especially for vulnerable groups.

This is especially true if we think that even in advanced capitalist
economies public health infrastructure has deteriorated and cannot
actually stand the peak of the pandemic, unless measures to reduce the
rate of its expansion are taken.

One might say that contra Agamben, ‘naked life’ would be closer
to the pensioner on a waiting list for a respirator or an ICU bed,
because of a collapsed health system, than the intellectual having to
do with the practicalities of quarantine measures.

In light of the above I would like to suggest a different return
to Foucault. I think that sometimes we forget that Foucault had a
highly relational conception of power practices. In this sense, it is
legitimate to pose a question whether a democratic or even communist
biopolitics is possible.

To put this question in a different way: Is it possible to have
collective practices that actually help the health of populations,
including large-scale behaviour modifications, without a parallel
expansion of forms of coercion and surveillance?

Foucault himself, in his late work, points towards such a direction,
around the notions of truth, parrhesia and care of the self. In this
highly original dialogue with ancient philosophy, he suggested an
alternative politics of bios that combines individual and collective
care in non coercive ways.

In such a perspective, the decisions for the reduction of movement
and for social distancing in times of epidemics, or for not
smoking in closed public spaces, or for avoiding individual and
collective practices that harm the environment would be the result of
democratically discussed collective decisions. This means that from
simple discipline we move to responsibility, in regards to others
and then ourselves, and from suspending sociality to consciously
transforming it. In such a condition, instead of a permanent
individualized fear, which can break down any sense of social
cohesion, we move to the idea of collective effort, coordination and
solidarity within a common struggle, elements that in su

The polish approach to tracking quarantine orders

[nettime's avid reader]

[This is softly worded, but from what i understand, this is mandatory.
If one is put under quaratine, one has to install this app which will
send notification to take a selfie and submit it within not more than
20 minutes. This is more the Chinese approach. No social trust what so
ever.]



Quarantined Poles can confirm their location with selfies using new
government app
MAR 20, 2020 | COVID-19, SOCIETY | 0 COMMENTS

https://notesfrompoland.com/2020/03/20/new-government-app-allows-quarantined-poles-to-confirm-their-location-with-selfies/

Quarantined Poles can confirm their location with selfies using new
government app

A new smartphone application has been launched by the government for
people who are under quarantine orders. They will be able to verify
their whereabouts by sending selfies, as well as get access to various
forms of support during their isolation.

Under strict measures introduced in response to the coronavirus
pandemic, large numbers of people in Poland are legally obliged to
quarantine themselves at home for 14 days. This includes all Polish
citizens and residents returning from abroad as well as those who have
come into direct contact with people infected with COVID-19.

As of yesterday, the total number quarantined stood at 28,440, but
this figure is likely to rise sharply. Those caught not complying with
the orders face a fine of 5,000 zloty (€1,100).

Until now, police have been used to monitor compliance. But now an
app launched by the Ministry of Digital Affairs allows those under
quarantine to prove they are staying at home.

The app is only available for download by people required to undergo
quarantine. After registration, they must take a control photo of
themself. Thereafter, they will receive one or more text message per
day instructing them to send a new selfie within 20 minutes.

The system will then use geolocation and facial recognition technology
to ensure that the person is at the address provided when entering
quarantine. Failure to respond within 20 minutes triggers a reminder,
and if this in turn gets no response, the police are notified.

“We will be sending requests for photos ‘by surprise’,” said
digital affairs minister Marek Zagórski. “The idea is exactly the
same as with unannounced visits from police officers.”

“The data of people ‘checking in’ from quarantine are safe; they
won’t be collected or stored unnecessarily,” added Zagórski, who
said that the app would benefit both those under quarantine and the
authorities responsible for monitoring them.

In addition, the app will provide users with fast access to essential
information and allow them to contact local social assistance centres
requesting medication or food. The ministry also promises that
additional features will be added in the next few days.



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Statement From Chelsea Manning's Legal Team?

[nettime's avid reader]

Statement From Chelsea Manning’s Legal Team: Ms. Manning is Recovering
in Hospital, Scheduled to Appear in Court Friday

https://www.sparrowmedia.net/2020/03/statement-from-chelsea-mannings-legal-team-ms-manning-is-recovering-in-hospital-scheduled-to-appear-in-court-friday/

Alexandria, VA — On Wednesday, March 11, 2020, Chelsea Manning attempted
to take her own life. She was taken to a hospital and is currently
recovering.

Ms. Manning is still scheduled to appear on Friday for a
previously-calendared hearing, at which Judge Anthony Trenga will rule
on a motion to terminate the civil contempt sanctions stemming from her
May, 2019 refusal to give testimony before a grand jury investigating
the publication of her 2010 disclosures.

In spite of those sanctions — which have so far included over a year of
so-called “coercive” incarceration and nearly half a million dollars in
threatened fines — she remains unwavering in her refusal to participate
in a secret grand jury process that she sees as highly susceptible to
abuse.

Ms. Manning has previously indicated that she will not betray her
principles, even at risk of grave harm to herself.

Writing in a 2019 letter to Judge Trenga, Ms. Manning said: “I object to
this grand jury … as an effort to frighten journalists and publishers,
who serve a crucial public good. I have had these values since I was a
child, and I’ve had years of confinement to reflect on them. For much of
that time, I depended for survival on my values, my decisions, and my
conscience. I will not abandon them now.”

Her actions today evidence the strength of her convictions, as well as
the profound harm she continues to suffer as a result of her ‘civil’
confinement — a coercive practice that the United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, recently said violates international
law.

Prior to her current incarceration, Ms. Manning served seven years in a
military prison under unusually difficult conditions, including eleven
months of solitary confinement.

For more information about Chelsea’s ongoing legal situation visit:
https://ReleaseChelsea.com

Read Chelsea’s letter to Judge Anthony Trenga HERE

Read more about the UN Rapporteur on Torture’s letter calling for her
release HERE

Those interested can send letters and words of encouragement to Chelsea
at the following mailing address:

Chelsea Elizabeth Manning
A0181426
William G. Truesdale Adult Detention Center
2001 Mill Road
Alexandria, VA 22314




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Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score’

[nettime's avid reader]

www.engadget.com
/2020/01/17/your-online-activity-effectively-social-credit-score-airbnb/

Your online activity is now effectively a social ‘credit score’

Kaylen Ward's Twitter fundraiser for the Australian bushfire relief has
ended. The Los Angeles-based model said she raised $1 million (by
comparison Jeff Bezos donated $690,000). At the start of Ms. Ward's
successful donation drive she had three Instagram accounts — none of
which were part of the campaign.

Despite that, Instagram kicked her off all three accounts, saying her
behavior on Twitter violated Instagram's sexually suggestive content
guidelines. On Twitter, Ms. Ward -- as The Naked Philanthropist --
offered a privately-sent nude photo to those who provided verifiable
proof of donation to organizations including Australian Red Cross and
The Koala Hospital. Her fundraiser complied with Twitter's Terms of Service.

If the thought of companies stalking you online and denying you services
because they think you're a sinner gives you the Orwell Anti-Sex League
chills, you should know that Airbnb just asked Instagram to hold its beer.

The same day Ms. Ward launched her fundraising campaign, reports emerged
detailing Airbnb's new "trait analyzer" algorithms that compile data
dossiers on users, decides whether you've been bad or good, gives you a
score, and then "flag and investigate suspicious activity before it
happens."

The Evening Standard reported on Airbnb's patent for AI that crawls and
scrapes everything it can find on you, "including social media for
traits such as 'conscientiousness and openness' against the usual credit
and identity checks and what it describes as 'secure third-party
databases'."

They added, "Traits such as "neuroticism and involvement in crimes" and
"narcissism, Machiavellianism, or psychopathy" are "perceived as
untrustworthy." Further:

It uses artificial intelligence to mark down those found to be
"associated" with fake social network profiles, or those who have given
any false details. The patent also suggests users are scored poorly if
keywords, images or video associated with them are involved with drugs
or alcohol, hate websites or organisations, or sex work.

It adds that people "involved in pornography" or who have "authored
online content with negative language" will be marked down.

When reached for comment, Airbnb provided Engadget two different
responses from two different people. The first was boilerplate,
describing its "trait analyzer" patent that Airbnb sent to press: the
company claimed it did not "necessarily implement" all or part of its
patent filings.

Engadget also asked Airbnb for comment regarding its profiling users
based on their offsite behaviors and its denial of services to customers
who work in legal adult entertainment.

Airbnb's second response (via email) was to ask to speak off the record
(on the phone). Engadget declined off-the-record comment. This Airbnb
spokesperson emailed again, stating:

Regarding your question on sex work, we do not allow sex work in Airbnb
listings and have policies in place to enforce this rule... We take
action to remove accounts that we believe to be associated with sex
trafficking and child exploitation regardless of whether the activty
[SIC] is occuring [SIC] in Airbnb listings, and we also work
cooperatively with law enforcement authorities in such cases.

Yeah, that wasn't our question on sex work. But the statement is
revealing in that it looks like Airbnb is bending over backwards to not
say it's indiscriminately discriminating against sex workers -- while
it's becoming widely documented that Airbnb does exactly that.

"Airbnb for everyone" (not)

Adult performer Cadence Lux's Airbnb account was suddenly terminated
this month. Last week she went to create a new account under her legal,
non-performer name, yet Airbnb knew it was her. The company denied her
an account, saying Lux's " information is associated with activities
that pose a risk to the Airbnb community."

Guilt by association, certainly. But it's also the direct opposite of
what Airbnb told local press when bragging about its profiling and
surveillance tools this week.

It's no wonder The Observer recently reported that Sex Workers Are at
the Forefront of the Fight Against Mass Surveillance and Big Tech.
"Algorithms are affecting people, and disproportionately they're going
to affect people at the margins," Analyst and researcher Bardot Smith
said. "So queer people, people of color, sex working people. Obviously,
the intersections of all these identities, and basically it comes down
to people that they have determined don't deserve access to money and
resources."

Needless to say, Lux was not using Airbnb for anything other than having
a safe place to sleep. It's almost like everyone forgets porn is a legal
job in the United States. Okay Airbnb, we get it! You like to refuse
service to adult women who engage in consensual activities of bodily
autonomy that have nothing to do with your servi

A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the Minute to Read

[nettime's avid reader]

A Dystopian New Initiative Will Charge Inmates by the Minute to Read e-Books

https://hyperallergic.com/530216/a-dystopian-new-initiative-will-charge-inmates-by-the-minute-to-read-e-books/


If you’re not already on board with the ways in which for-profit prisons
are a moral and civic affront and the outrageous and racially-biased
incarceration rate in the United States amounts to a new form of
slavery, I’m not sure what might convince you, but try this on for size:
prisons in West Virginia are introducing a new e-literacy initiative
that will charge prisoners to read.

According to a report by reason.com, the plan is to offer inmates at
West Virginia prisons access to “free” electronic tablets, and then
charge for their use. The contract, administrated by Global Tel Link
(GTL) in 10 West Virginia prisons, and detailed by Appalachian Prison
Book Project, offers tablet use at $0.05 per minute (with an
introductory rate discounted to $0.03) to read books, listen to music,
or play games; $0.25 per minute for video visitations; $0.25 per written
message; and $0.50 to send a photo with a message. Based on information
tabulated by Prison Policy Initiative in 2017, wages in West Virginia
prisons range between $0.04 and $0.58 an hour, meaning a single minute
of screen time might be commensurate with an hour of an inmate’s
insultingly underpaid labor.

[see: 
https://appalachianprisonbookproject.org/2019/11/20/how-much-does-it-cost-to-read-a-free-book-on-a-free-tablet/]

The United States currently boasts the largest prison population in the
world, as well as the highest incarceration rate per capita. The
introduction of privatized prisons in the 1980s as a way of meeting
demand driven by racist Reagan-era policies added a profit motive to
system that had previously, at least in theory, prioritized
rehabilitation over quarterly earnings. In fact, rehabilitation is
unprofitable in the prison business, so why would it want to make
resources available to help inmates get degrees, assist in their own
legal defense, or have viable options upon release? The impact of
incarceration on earning potential was summarized in a devastating 2010
Pew Research study, but why wait until people are out of prison to start
screwing them out of their meager paychecks? That’s clearly the question
on the mind of Global Tel Link and the West Virginia prison system.

But hey, GTL is providing content, some 60,000 e-books on these tablets,
so surely the money they are charging goes toward defraying that cost,
right? Nope! All the tablets are running books available for free
through Project Gutenberg. You just know whichever morally bankrupt GTL
executive came up with that one is high-fiving himself all the way to
the Corvette dealership. Stealing labor for content AND labor for
readership! If the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future are
available, I’ve got some ideas for who they should be visiting this
coming Christmas.

Appalachian Book Project (APBP) also notes that “most of the books we
receive requests for at APBP — how-to guides (carpentry, starting a
business, repairing small engines, etc.), contemporary fiction, popular
mysteries and sci-fi, African American literature, Native studies,
recent autobiographies — will not be available.”

While the tablets being introduced at the 10 correctional centers are
being met with anticipation for their potentional to enhance
communication with loved ones and increase access to entertainment
media, it is impossible to view the arrangement from the outside with
anything but anger and disdain at the ways that the cultural
prioritization of profits over basic human decency continues to rot our
society at its fundament. I guess on one point, they have it right:
there’s no need for access to fictional dystopian narratives anymore.
Such ideas are no longer in the realm of science fiction, but a grim
statement of fact.





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Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe

[nettime's avid reader]

Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe

https://www.newframe.com/thoughts-on-the-planetary-an-interview-with-achille-mbembe/

Achille Mbembe first visited Norway on the occasion of the annual
Holberg Debate organised by the Holberg Prize Secretariat at the
University of Bergen on 1 December 2018 where he gave a keynote address.
Mbembe is scheduled to give three invited lectures on “Bodies as
Borders” at the House of Literature in Oslo on 13 and 14 September 2019.

This interview was conducted in Bergen, Norway, on 30 November 2018 by
Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen of the Norwegian newspaper Klassekampen. It is
published here for the first time.


Nilsen: In April 2015, the Rhodes statue fell in South Africa at the
University of Cape Town. How did you interpret that event?

Mbembe: For those who are not aware of who we are talking about, Cecil
John Rhodes was a privateer. He was a ruthless actor in the mercantile
expansionism that characterised 19th century settler colonialism in the
southern part of Africa. Through political alliances, sheer brutality
and expediency, he carved out for himself a huge chunk of South Africa’s
mineral wealth, in particular diamonds in Kimberley and gold in the
Witwatersrand. He bestowed some of the land he had grabbed in Cape Town
to the university which, in return, erected a statue in his honour on
the steps of one of its main buildings.

Rhodes prefigured the extraction and privatisation of ill-gotten wealth
neoliberalism today has pushed to a refinement unseen in the history of
humankind. He was a precursor of the type of predatory economic system
and plutocratic politics at work in most parts of the world today, the
results of which are the raping of the biosphere and the destruction at
a massive scale of the basic conditions of life on Earth.

I interpret the toppling of his statue as a small, symbolic victory, in
the long and protracted struggle for universal justice.
Related article:

Nilsen: So there is a lineage from Rhodes to the neoliberal order we see
today?

Mbembe: There is an explicit kinship between plantation slavery,
colonial predation and contemporary forms of resource extraction and
appropriation. In each of these instances, there is a constitutive
denial of the fact that we, the humans, coevolve with the biosphere,
depend on it, are defined with and through it and owe each other a debt
of responsibility and care.

An important difference is the technological escalation that has led to
the emergence of computational capitalism in our times. We are no longer
in the era of the machine but in the age of the algorithm. Technological
escalation, in turn, is threatening to turn us all into artefacts – what
I have called elsewhere “the becoming-black-of-the world” – and to make
redundant a huge chunk of the muscular power capitalism relied upon for
a long time. It follows that today, although its main target remains the
human body and earthly matter, domination and exploitation are becoming
increasingly abstract and reticular. As a repository of our desires and
emotions, dreams, fears and fantasies, our mind and psychic life have
become the main raw material which digital capitalism aims at capturing
and commodifying.

During Rhodes’ times, the exploitation of black labour went hand in hand
with a virulent form of racism. Contemporary capitalism still relies on
racial subsidies. But the technologies of racialisation have become ever
more insidious and ever more encompassing. As the world becomes a huge
data emporium, tomorrow’s technologies of racialisation will be more and
more generated and instituted through data, calculation and computation.
In short, racism is relocating both underneath and at the surface of the
skin. It reproduces itself via screens and mirrors of various kinds. It
is becoming both spectral and fractal.

Otherwise, as far as the toppling of Rhodes’ statue is concerned, my
argument has always been that the statue should have never been there in
the first instance.
Related article:

Nilsen:  As a symbol?

Mbembe: Yes, as a reminder of the various crimes this cruel man
committed in his attempt to deny black people any right to a human
future in South Africa. As a reminder, too, of the cynicism with which
he tried to launder his ill-gotten wealth under the guise of philanthropy.

But a proper critique of Rhodes’ style of predatory economics and
plutocratic politics cannot be limited to South Africa alone or to the
confines of a specific nation-state. The project he served was colonial
and imperial. Its horizon was not South Africa-centric. Ultimately,
Rhodes is the symbol of the double damage capitalism in its racial,
colonial and imperial form inflicted upon humankind and upon the
biosphere. Such should be the starting point of any critique of Rhodes
which strives to avoid the pitfalls of national chauvinism.

Nilsen: At the Holberg Debate at the University of Bergen tomorrow, you
will discuss social movements through history. How w

Paul Mason: Trump is a symptom of the new global disorder, not the cause

[nettime's avid reader]

Donald Trump is a symptom of the new global disorder, not the cause
By Paul Mason

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2018/06/donald-trump-symptom-new-global-disorder-not-cause

In the space of three days, Donald Trump has created a new, explosive
geopolitical reality. He nixed the outcome of a G7 summit he had
disparaged, disrupted and departed from early. Then, with all the
subtlety of an estate agent, he welcomed Kim Jong-un into the growing
club of authoritarian strongmen who are intent on destroying the
post-1989 world order.

With the G7, we knew it was coming. Trump ran on the slogan “America
First” and has delivered on it: he has promoted economic growth at the
expense of the US’s lenders, and by saddling future generations with
unpayable debts; created jobs at the expense of America’s competitors
and launched a trade war.

But the shape, smell and feel of the “it” would only be clear once Trump
sat down, surrounded by the failed technocrats and globalists, in that
now-iconic photo.

Released by Angela Merkel’s team, it is supposed to show her as the
strongwoman forcing Trump to accept the need for a rules-based global
order. Instead it shows the combined geopolitical power of Germany,
Italy, the UK, Japan, France and Canada amounting to zilch in the face
of America’s new policy of “beggar my neighbour”.

For certain, Trump looked stupid and, with hindsight, weak throughout
the entire two days. He got pushed by his diplomats and the other
leaders into signing a document he didn’t believe in. But that doesn’t
matter: because, in the geopolitical turmoil that is about to deepen,
the USA has three important things: the dollar, the world’s biggest
military and a $6trn debt to the rest of the world.

Three years ago, in Postcapitalism, I outlined two scenarios if the
world’s elites refused to contemplate a break from the free market
economic model. The first was long-term stagnation and austerity. In the
second:

“The consensus breaks. Parties of the hard right and left come to power
as ordinary people refuse to pay the price of austerity. Instead, states
then try to impose the costs of the crisis on each other. Globalisation
falls apart, the global institutions become powerless and in the process
the conflicts that have burned these past twenty years – drug wars,
post-Soviet nationalism, jihadism, uncontrolled migration and resistance
to it – light a fire at the centre of the system”.

That is what has happened. Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea and
eastern Ukraine, Syriza’s clash with the eurozone, Merkel’s unilateral
negation of the Dublin Treaty on migration, Brexit, the coup and
counter-coup in Turkey, Trump’s victory, the victory of Poland’s Law &
Justice party, the switch by Austrian conservatism to an alliance with
neofascism and the installation of a far-right/populist coalition
government in Italy.

They are all part of a chain reaction by which powerful states try to
impose social and economic pain on each other, or on smaller states.

Russia and China have played their part too: Putin with the creation of
a 19th century-style “sphere of influence” involving Iran, Syria,
central Asia and many western dupes (one of whom may be Trump himself).
China, meanwhile, is creating a 21st century economic empire, launching
its state and private sector jointly into the race to become hegemonic
in artificial intelligence, while consolidating power around Xi
Jinping’s project of Chinese nationalism with a Marxist face.

To see the G7’s collapse as one isolationist against a room full of
liberal globalists, as many mainstream commentators have done, is wrong.
Germany smashed Greek democracy and has manipulated the eurozone to
impoverish southern Europe and suppress European demand. Theresa May
leads a party transformed overnight into a vessel for xenophobic
nationalism (albeit floundering around, incapable of translating its new
convictions into actions).

Shinzo Abe would never need to use the words “Japan first” because that
has been the implicit policy of all Japanese governments since the Asian
crisis of 1997. Italy, meanwhile, just completed an abject week for
globalism by dumping 600 stranded migrants onto Spain

The old imperial powers of Europe and Asia were already, in other words,
engaged in the game.

There were only two committed defenders of globalisation in its old form
– Macron and Justin Trudeau - and, as they will now find out, the
changed situation will soon force them, too, into measures needed to
survive the breakdown of a rules-based order.

The question: “what do we do?” should be on the minds of all political
people who understand, from the example of the 1930s, what happens when
a rules-based order is fragmented. But it’s not.

The reason for is that, for 30 years, neoliberal ideology has been
founded on the perfection and unchangeability of the current system: not
just of the free market economic model and free trade, but of a global
order underpinned by unipolar American power

In Italy: First-ever agreement between Amazon and unions

[nettime's avid reader]

http://www.uniglobalunion.org/news/first-ever-agreement-between-amazon-and-unions-halts-inhumane-work-hours-italy

Amazon employees in Italy have made history. Workers are announcing
today the first-ever direct agreement between unions and the company
anywhere in the world. The Italian agreement tackles inhumane
scheduling, one of the core labour problems at Amazon fulfilment centres
globally.

The deal, which is supplementary to the nationwide sectoral collective
labour agreement, ensures fairness in scheduling through reductions in
mandatory night shifts and distributing weekend work in a just way.
Amazon is notorious for long hours, punishing quotas, and little break
time during shifts. In some facilities, workers say they do not have
time to even use the restroom.

Italian union Filcams Cgil Nazionale played a leading role in the
negotiations.

"We are pleased with this result which is currently unique in Europe,”
said Massimo Mensi, a leader in Filcams Cgil Nazionale’s Amazon
campaign. “We hope it will pave the way for many other negotiations in
all the countries where Amazon has its operations.”

"The agreement provides that night work is initially carried out only by
voluntary employees, providing, among other things, an increase of 25%
of the compensation under the employment contract,” Mensi continued.

Workers are guaranteed four consecutive free weekends every eight weeks
and shifts alternate between Saturdays and Sundays.

The win in Italy comes after months of protests and organising by
workers. With UNI’s help, Italian and German workers coordinated strike
activity in November 2017.

"This deal is important in light of the strikes and protests of last
November, when on Black Friday many employees demanded reasonable
workloads and less of an impact on their family life. This agreement
that can now pave the way for new corporate relationships on issues of
health and safety of the workplace,” said Maria Grazia Gabrielli,
General Secretary of Filcams Cgil Nazionale.

The agreement, approved by a large majority of voting workers, will run
for one year starting June 17, and the union will closely monitor the
results.

“It’s clear that Amazon must negotiate with workers who have organised
into unions, and with Amazon’s labour practices under fire throughout
Europe and the U.S., the agreement will be the first of many that will
reform the company’s model of exploitative labour relations,” said
Mathias Bolton, Head of UNI Commerce.

UNI Global Union is working to build alliances between national unions
who represent Amazon workers. Currently, its Amazon Worker Alliance is
made of from unions from countries including, the US, UK, Germany,
France, Spain, Italy, Poland, and Czech Republic




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Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain

[nettime's avid reader]

Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-a-use-case-for-blockchain-ee98c180100

Dec 22, 2017

Kai Stinchcombe

Everyone says the blockchain, the technology underpinning
cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, is going to change EVERYTHING. And
yet, after years of tireless effort and billions of dollars invested,
nobody has actually come up with a use for the blockchain—besides
currency speculation and illegal transactions.

Each purported use case — from payments to legal documents, from escrow
to voting systems—amounts to a set of contortions to add a distributed,
encrypted, anonymous ledger where none was needed. What if there isn’t
actually any use for a distributed ledger at all? What if, ten years
after it was invented, the reason nobody has adopted a distributed
ledger at scale is because nobody wants it?

__Payments and banking

The original intended use of the blockchain was to power currencies like
bitcoin — a way to store and exchange value much like any other
currency. Visa and MasterCard were dinosaurs, everyone proclaimed,
because there was now a costless, instant way to exchange value without
the middleman taking a cut. A revolution in banking was just the start…
governments, unable to issue currency by fiat anymore, would take a back
seat as individual citizens transacted freely outside any national system.
The killer feature: knowing you can get your money back

It didn’t take long for that dream to fall apart. For one thing, there’s
already a costless, instant way to exchange value without a middleman:
cash. Bitcoins substitute for dollars, but Visa and MasterCard actually
sit on top of dollar-based banking transactions, providing a set of
value-added services like enabling banks to track fraud disputes, and
verifying the identity of the buyer and seller. It turns out that for
the person paying for a product, the key feature of a new payment
system — think of PayPal in its early days — is the confidence that if
the goods aren’t as described you’ll get your money back. And for the
person accepting payment, basically the key feature is that their
customer has it, and is willing to use it. Add in points, credit lines,
and a free checked bag on any United flight and you have something that
consumers choose and merchants accept. Nobody actually wants to pay with
bitcoin, which is why it hasn’t taken off.

The key feature of a new payment system — think of PayPal in its
early days — is the confidence that if the goods aren’t as described
you’ll get your money back.

It would take 5,000 nuclear reactors to run Visa on the blockchain.

Plus, it’s not actually that good a payment system — Visa can handle
sixty thousand transactions per second, while Bitcoin historically taps
out at seven. There are technical modifications going on to improve
Bitcoin’s efficiency, but as a starting point, you have something that’s
about 0.01% as good at clearing transactions. (And, worth noting, for
those seven transactions a second Bitcoin is already estimated to use 35
times as much energy as Visa. If you brought Bitcoin’s transaction
volume up to Visa’s it would be using as much electricity as the rest of
the world put together.)

__Freedom to transact without government supervision

In many countries, and often our own, a little bit of ability to keep a
few things private from the authorities probably makes the world a
better place. In places like Cuba or Venezuela, many prefer to transact
in dollars, and bitcoin could in theory serve a similar function. Yet
there are two reasons this hasn’t been the panacea it’s assumed: the
advantages of government to the individual, and the advantages of
government to society.

The government-backed banking system provides FDIC guarantees,
reversibility of ACH, identity verification, audit standards, and an
investigation system when things go wrong. Bitcoin, by design, has none
of these things. I saw a remarkable message thread by someone whose
bitcoin account got drained because their email had been hacked and
their password was stolen. They were stunned to have no recourse! And
this is widespread — in 2014, the then-#1 bitcoin trader, Mt. Gox, also
lost $400m of investor money due to security failures. The subsequent #1
bitcoin trader, Bitfinex, also shut down after a loss of customer funds.
Imagine the world if more banks had been drained of customer funds than
not. Bitcoin is what banking looked like in the middle ages — “here’s
your libertarian paradise, have a nice day.”

[This issue is particularly near and dear to my heart because my own
company, True Link, is designed to help vulnerable seniors — people
likely to give out their credit card number over the phone, enter
sketchy sweepstakes or donate to sketchy charities, participate in scam
investments, or install password-stealing malware. As the people who
most need security enhancements in banking and payments, they depend
heavily on the exi

Lessons from Amazon's Italian hub strike

[nettime's avid reader]

casilli.fr

Lessons from Amazon's Italian hub strike: industrial action that does
not factor in both work AND data is doomed to be ineffective

https://www.casilli.fr/2017/11/28/lessons-from-amazons-italian-hub-strike-industrial-action-that-does-not-factor-in-both-work-and-data-is-doomed-to-be-ineffective/


On Nov 24, 2017, the three main Italian unions (CGIL, CISL, UIL) have
called for a strike over the failure to negotiate Black Friday bonuses
for the 1,600 permanent workers at the distribution hub near the
Northern town of Piacenza. Unions say 50% of the workers partake in the
strike. Amazon says it was more like 10%.

Bottom line: the strike did not stop Black Friday in Italy. Someone was
working. Yet, according to several sources, it was not not permanent
workers, but the 2,000 temps that Amazon recruited until Xmas who saved
the day. They were not hired to replace striking workers. Even in Italy,
this would be illegal. They were hired to face Nov./Dec. surge in retail
sales. And of course they did not stop working on Black Friday 2017.
That said, Amazon is known internationally for its brutal workplace
discipline, its anti-labor stance, and has been accused of hiring temps,
contingent workers and even workampers to edge out unionized labor force.

In Italy, one can recruit a lot of those. Unemployment is at 11.1% and
there’s a millions-strong industrial reserve army of faux-freelance,
part-timers, “coordinated collaborators”, “project-contractors”, “leased
staff” and many other forms of non-standard employees. Especially since
the infamous Jobs Act heralded by the government of former PM Matteo
Renzi, among young workers temp jobs accounts for 50% of employment and
they are up 7% since Sept 2017.

But Italian retail workers and their strike tell only part of the story.
Amazon isn’t about e-commerce: it’s about big data. Interestingly,
Matteo Renzi’s government has been very helpful in facilitating the
strategy of “data entryism” of the Seattle giant, going as far as to
hire Amazon’s former vice-president and now-biggest employee shareholder
of the platform as “Commissioner for Digital Italy”. He’s doing this for
free, and you know what they say when you’re not paying for something…

Which brings us to the main point. Amazon strategy is predicated on data
and work. Even better: it is predicated on data-as-work, because it
extracts value from the data stored in its humongous cloud and hosting
services, and because it uses people-as-a-service (according to Jeff
Bezos’s early characterization of Amazon Mechanical Turk) to train,
enrich, refine data.

Btw, do you wanna know what the new Italian Digital Commissioner
considers as a success story for digital transformation? The
controversial Indian biometric ID system… And do you know where 36% of
Amazon Mechanical Turkers live? India… (Here’s the interview [in
Italian] where the Digital Commissioner talks about Indian ID system
while at the same time declaring that “he misses Amazon so much”).

Take-away message: Amazon corporate takeover of Italy is as much a
matter of labor policy as it is of data politics. As long as the unions
continue to focus on the former while neglecting the latter, their
action is doomed to be ineffective. Case in point: after dominating
Black Friday sales, Amazon’s shares are up 2% and Jeff Bezos is still
world’s wealthiest man. So Amazon Italia just gave a giant middle-finger
to workers by cancelling the meeting with unions and rescheduling it for
after Xmas…



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From Gut to Gaia: The Internet of Things and Earth Repair

[nettime's avid reader]

The following text appears in the inaugural edition of Ding, a new
magazine about the Internet and things, published by the Mozilla
Foundation. Ding will be launched at MozFest in London on 27-29 October.


John Thackara

https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-gut-to-gaia-the-internet-of-things-and-earth-repair/2017/11/03


On a recent visit to @IAAC in Barcelona, I was charmed by their Smart
Citizen platform that enables citizens to monitor levels of air or noise
pollution around their home or business.

The system connects data, people and knowledge based on their location;
the device’s low power consumption allows it to be placed on balconies
and windowsills where power is provided by a solar panel or battery.

Smart Citizen is just one among a growing array of devices that can
sense everything from the health of a tomato in Brazil, to bacteria in
the stomach of a cow in Perthshire – remotely.

Low-cost sensing technologies allow citizens to assess the state of
distant environments directly. We can also measure oil contamination in
our local river with a smartphone. Thousands of people are monitoring
the air they breathe using Air Quality Eggs.

This innovation is intriguing, but leaves a difficult question
unanswered: Under what circumstances will possession of this data
contribute to the system transformation that we so urgently need?
Info-Eco Scenarios

When we first posed that foundational question at our third Doors of
Perception conference in 1995,  when our theme was “Info-Eco”,
ecological monitoring and remote sensing were the most popular scenarios
to be proposed.

Twenty two years later, the proliferation of tools and platforms is
glorious – but our journey is only half complete. Remote sensing and
monitoring have turned not, on their own, to be agents of system change.

Or not yet. Twenty two years is not that long when compared to the scale
of transformation we are embarked on.

Over centuries, our cultures have been rendered cognitively blind by a
metabolic rift between people and the earth. Paved surfaces, and
pervasive media – developed over generations – now shield us from direct
experience of the damage we’re inflicting on soils, oceans and forests.

This metabolic rift explains how we’re able put the health of ‘the
economy’ above all other concerns. We invest immense effort and
resources in a quest for speed, perfection and control but, because we
inhabit an abstract, digitally diminished world, we’re blind to the true
costs of our activities.

The energy we use  is literally invisible. The destructive impacts
caused by resource extraction are usually felt by other people,
somewhere else.

For the philosopher John Zerzan our planet-wide dissociative mental
state began when we placed language, art, and number above other ways of
knowing the world. Every representation, he argued, both simplifies, and
distances, earthly reality. Our reliance on data underpins a concept of
progress in which embdied, analogue local knowledge is downgraded and
often disregarded.
Vital knowledge

We once knew better. For much of human history, the idea that the world
around us is ‘vital’ was literally common knowledge. Greek philosophers
known as ‘hylozoists’ made no distinction between animate and inanimate,
spirit and matter. Roman sages thought likewise.

In his epic work On The Nature of Things, the poet Lucretius argued that
everything is connected, deep down, in a world of matter and energy.
Chinese philosophers, too, believed that the ultimate reality of the
world is intrinsically connective; in the Tao, everything in the
universe, whether animate or inanimate, is embedded in the continuous
flow and change.

Buddhist texts, too, evoke a universe that’s in a state of ceaseless
movement and connection. And as recently as the seventeenth century, in
Europe, the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza conceived of existence as a
continuum, an inseparable tangle of body, mind, ideas and matter.

The belief that matter matters, so to speak, was then obscured – for two
intense centuries up until about now  – by two developments: the fire
and smoke of the thermo-industrial economy, and, more recently,  by
global communication networks.

Now, as this self-devouring system unravels, the healing idea that that
we are part of a world of living things, not separate from it, is
resurfacing.

This reconnection with suppressed knowledge is not superstitious.
Developments in science are confirming confirm the understanding in
wisdom traditions that no organism is truly autonomous.

In systems thinking and resilience science, and from the study of
sub-microscopic viruses, yeasts, bacteria in our gut, ants, mosses,
lichen, slime moulds and mycorrhizae, trees, rivers and climate systems,
old and new narratives are converging: our planet is a web of
interdependent ecosystems.

These natural phenomena are not only connected; their very essence is to
be in relationship with other things – including

Cooperativism in the digital era, or how to form a global counter-economy

[nettime's avid reader]

https://www.opendemocracy.net/digitaliberties/michel-bauwens-vasilis-kostakis/cooperativism-in-digital-era-or-how-to-form-global-counter-economy

Cooperativism in the digital era, or how to form a global counter-economy

Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis 6 March 2017

Can we transform the renting economy of Uber and AirBnB into a genuine
sharing one? Platform cooperatives must become open and commons-oriented.

“What if this is not capitalism, but something worse?” McKenzie
Wark's question eloquently summarizes the growing criticism of
profit-maximizing business models within the so-called collaborative
sharing economy. That “something worse,” appears to take the
form of a new kind of feudalism, as in the case of Facebook. That
“something worse,” appears to take the form of a new kind of
feudalism, as in the case of Facebook. If feudalism was based on the
ownership of land by an elite, the resource now controlled by a small
minority is networked data. Or, as in the case of Uber, AirBnB and
TaskRabbit, it takes the form of a kind of on-demand labour system,
where individuals-freelancers contribute their infrastructure and
labour.

What is platform cooperativism?

The concept of “platform cooperative” has been proposed as
an alternative to such “sharing economy” firms. A platform
cooperative is an online platform (e.g. website, mobile app) that is
organized as a cooperative and owned by its employees, customers,
users, or other key stakeholders. For example, see a directory of
several platform co-ops around the world.

We fully support the broader movement of platform cooperativism.
However, we cannot be content with isolated cooperative alternatives
designed to counter old forms of capitalism. A global counter-economy
needs to be built. And this could happen through the creation of a
global digital commons of knowledge.

How could commons-based peer production converge with cooperativism?

Commons-based peer production has brought about a new logic of
collaboration between networks of people who freely organize around a
common goal using shared resources, and market-oriented entities that
add value on top of or alongside them.

Prominent cases of commons-based peer production, such as the free
and open-source software and Wikipedia, inaugurate a new model of
value creation, different from both markets and firms. The creative
energy of autonomous individuals, organized in distributed networks,
produces meaningful projects, largely without traditional hierarchical
organization or, quite often, financial compensation.

This represents both challenges and opportunities for traditional
models of cooperativism, which date back to the nineteenth century,
and which have often over time tended to adopt competitive
mentalities. In general, cooperatives are not creating, protecting,
or producing commons, and they usually function under the patent
and copyright system. Further, they may tend to self-enclose around
their local or national membership. As a result, the global arena
is left open to be dominated by large corporations. Arguably, these
characteristics need changing, and today, there is a way for them to
change.

What is open cooperativism?

The concept of open cooperativism has been conceived as an effort to
infuse cooperatives with the basic principles of commons-based peer
production. Pat Conaty and David Bollier have called for “a new
sort of synthesis or synergy between the emerging peer production and
commons movement on the one hand, and growing, innovative elements of
the co-operative and solidarity economy movements on the other.”

To a greater degree than traditional cooperatives, open cooperatives
would statutorily be oriented towards the common good by co-building
digital commons. This could be understood as extending, not replacing,
the seventh cooperative principle of concern for community. For
instance, open cooperatives would internalize negative externalities;
adopt multi-stakeholder governance models; contribute to the creation
of immaterial and material commons; and be socially and politically
organized around global concerns, even if they produce locally. Can we
go beyond the classical corporate paradigm?

We outline a list of six interrelated strategies for post-corporate
entrepreneurial coalitions. The aim is to go beyond the classical
corporate paradigm, and its extractive profit-maximizing practices,
toward the establishment of open cooperatives that cultivate a
commons-oriented economy.

First, it’s important to recognize that closed business models are
based on artificial scarcity. Though knowledge can be shared easily
and at very low marginal cost when it is in digital form, closed
firms use artificial scarcity to extract rents from the creation or
use of digitized knowledge. Through legal repression or technological
sabotage, naturally shareable goods are made artificially scarce so
that extra profits may be generated. This is particularly galling
in the context of life-saving me

Liberation: Sometimes there is a deep truth in rumors (Konrad Becker interview)

[nettime's avid reader]

[Another fine translation brough to you by Google translate.]

http://next.liberation.fr/livres/2017/02/08/konrad-becker-il-y-a-parfois-une-verite-profonde-dans-les-rumeurs_1547220

KONRAD BECKER: "THERE IS SOMETIMES A DEEP TRUTH IN THE RUMORS"
By Frédérique Roussel

- February 8, 2017 at 17:36

Austrian researcher Konrad Becker, whose "Tactical Reality Dictionary"
has just been translated into French, discusses the concepts of
rationality and propaganda in the digital era.

Konrad Becker, born in 1959, a Viennese artist and hacktivist, founded
the Institute for New Culture Technologies in 1993, which organized the
major international event World-Information (1) from 2000. He defined
the concept of "Cultural intelligence", foreshadowing WikiLeaks. A
hypermedia researcher, he developed a theoretical approach based on the
Tactical Reality Dictionary  (2002), whose translation into French is
now a small event. For the last fifteen years, Konrad Becker has been
questioning information environments and the growing control of
algorithms in all areas of society.

__In what state of mind have you written the Tactical Reality Dictionary?

My plan was to design a tactical intelligence manual. A kind of open
think tank. At the end of the 1990s, the Internet was brand new and we
created Austria's first independent Internet access provider, Public
Netbase. Today, everyone has a laptop, but at the time it was not
obvious to have access to the Internet. We thought the world would be
dominated by digital information and intelligence agencies. I wanted to
make an instrument for political and cultural activists that would have
the form of an anonymous handbook without my name on the cover.

__You laid the foundations of digital human rights, digital ecology,
cultural counter-intelligence ... Were you visionary?

Perhaps. I've been in it forever. Small, I was already fascinated by
electronics. I had my first computer as a teenager and I was probably
the first one to have one in Vienna. In the 1990s, with progressive
left-wing movements, we conducted a sort of media guerilla war. Many
artists were working to make false entities, false citizens, playing
with the media and creating false sources. Some of these "fakes" have
been spectacular.

__Are not these extreme right-wing and pro-trump methods today?

I have seen that young Americans interfere in the French election by
creating false profiles on social networks ... In our time, it was
mischievousness and disassemble the functioning of the media that
animated us. It was about the hoax and the artistic intervention. It was
not just for fun, but also for trying to influence the context. One of
our fields of action was the Karlsplatz in Vienna. One of our projects
was to rename it Nikeplatz or create a false security agency, Global
Security Alliance ... Before the far right took it, this strategy was
marketed as "viral marketing". It has become a field of advertising for
ten years. We can not fight ...

__You write: "Information is increasingly difficult to distinguish from
propaganda." It's worse today, is not it?

The distinction is very difficult, even historically. When I was a
child, we were told that there was no more propaganda, that it belonged
to the Nazis and the Communists. But someone like Jacques Ellul explains
that propaganda does not work on ignorant and uneducated categories.
Propaganda is based on a belief system. And its target today is an
educated population, with cadres, otherwise it could not be manipulated.

You say that "objective information is only a myth, henceforth relegated
to the frontiers of consensual hallucination."
Objectivity is a big word. In my speech at the Gaîté lyrique on January
28th, I refer to the work of Lorraine Daston, author of an interesting
book on the history of the concept of objectivity. The concept of what
is objective has changed throughout the centuries, responding each time
to an ideal vision.

__In your opinion, objectivity does not exist?

It interests me for my dictionary dealing with tactical strategy. But it
does not exist in a simple way. The same applies to rationality.
Reality, rationality, objectivity, all these powerful concepts are of
the same world, right? I am interested in what rationality means. Our
economic world is based on "rational actors", on machines and
algorithms. One of my last installations with Felix Stalder, Painted by
Numbers , compiles interviews of researchers, artists and activists on
algorithmic strategies at work. The algorithms are supposed to be
rational because they are intended to increase the efficiency and
optimization of things. The result seems increasingly irrational. Just
look at the policies of the last ten years. Also look at how the economy
and financial markets are dominated by algorithms. We are building sorts
of state planning, much like the communists did in the past, except that
it is not communist planning but planning by 1% of an obscure elite. So
from the super-platform

How to Win Back the City en Comú

[nettime's avid reader]

https://barcelonaencomu.cat/sites/default/files/win-the-city-guide.pdf

“We’re living in extraordinary times that demand brave and
creative solutions. If we’re able to imagine a different city,
we’ll have the power to transform it”

 Ada Colau


4 INTRODUCTION
4 WHY A MUNICIPAL PLATFORM?
5 HOW IS A WINNING CITIZEN PLATFORM BUILT?
5 PHASE A: BEFORE THE PUBLIC LAUNCH
6 PHASE B: FROM THE LAUNCH TO THE ELECTION CAMPAIGN
6 CROWDSOURCING A CODE OF ETHICS
7 FINANCING
7 DRAWING UP AN ELECTORAL PROGRAMME “EN COMÚ”
8 PUTTING TOGETHER AN ELECTORAL CANDIDACY
8 STRUCTURE OF BARCELONA EN COMÚ DURING PHASE B

INTRODUCTION

From the very beginning, those of us who participate in Barcelona En
Comú were sure that the democratic rebellion in Barcelona wouldn’t
be just a local phenomenon. We want Barcelona to be the trigger for a
citizen revolution in Catalonia, Spain, Southern Europe and beyond.
We know that there are many similar initiatives to our own in other
cities that aim to break apart the current political and economic
regime from below. Each city will have to find its own way, whether
it takes the electoral route or not. Nevertheless, having won the
Barcelona elections, we are excited to publish this guide to the
philosophy and organization of Barcelona En Comú from our launch
to our entry into government. We hope that it will be useful in the
construction of citizen platforms that aim to win local elections
around the world.

WHY A MUNICIPAL PLATFORM?

Barcelona En Comú didn’t come out of nowhere. In the years before
its creation, in a context of economic and political crisis in which
traditional political institutions were failing to respond to the
needs of the people, a multitude of citizen movements mobilized in the
city and demonstrated the the power of organized citizens to propose
and implement solutions.

We took the social networks, We took the streets and We took the
squares. However, we found that change was being blocked from above by
the institutions. We couldn’t allow this. So, we decided that the
moment had arrived to take back the institutions and put them at the
service of the common good. We decided to win back the city.

However, we found that change was being blocked from above by the
institutions. We couldn’t allow this. So, we decided that the
moment had arrived to take back the institutions and put them at the
service of the common good. We decided to win back the city. For us,
“winning back the city” is about much more than winning the local
elections. It means putting a new, transparent and participatory model
of local government, which is under citizen control, into practice. It
also means implementing fair, redistributive and sustainable policies
to respond to the economic and political crisis. Our strategy has
been to start from below, from what we know best: our streets, our
neighbourhoods. The proximity of municipal governments to the people
makes them the best opportunity we have to take the change from the
streets to the institutions. Cities have always been a place of
encounter, of exchange of ideas, of innovation and, when necessary,
of revolution. Cities are where democracy was born, and they’ll be
where we can start to recover it.

https://barcelonaencomu.cat/sites/default/files/win-the-city-guide.pdf



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BComu Global: America needs a network of rebel cities to stand up to Trump

[nettime's avid reader]

America needs a network of rebel cities to stand up to Trump

https://medium.com/@BComuGlobal/america-needs-a-network-of-rebel-cities-to-stand-up-to-trump-7c07202e7cc2#.isym9broh

With Trump in the White House and GOP majorities in the House and
Senate, we must look to cities to protect civil liberties and build
progressive alternatives from the bottom up.

“I want New Yorkers to know: we have a lot of tools at our disposal;
we’re going to use them. And we’re not going to take anything
lying down.” On the morning after Donald Trump was declared the
victor in the US presidential election, Mayor of New York, Bill
de Blasio, wasted no time in signaling his intention to use the
city government as a bulwark against the policy agenda of the
President-Elect. The move made one thing very clear; with the
Republican Party holding the House and Senate, and at least one
Supreme Court nomination in the pipeline, it will fall to America’s
cities and local leaders to act as the institutional frontline of
resistance against the Trump administration.

However, cities can be more than just a last line of defense against
the worst excesses of an authoritarian central government; they have
huge, positive potential as spaces from which to radicalize democracy
and build alternatives to the neoliberal economic model. The urgent
questions that progressive activists in the States are now asking
themselves are, not just how to fight back against Trump, but also
how to harness the momentum of Bernie Sanders’ primary run to fight
for the change he promised. As we consider potential strategies going
forward, a look at the global context suggests that local politics may
be the best place to start.

The election of Trump has not occurred in a vacuum. Across the West,
we are witnessing a wholesale breakdown of the existing political
order; the neoliberal project is broken, the center-left is vanishing,
and the old left is at a loss for what to do. In many countries, it is
the far right that is most successful in harnessing people’s desire
to regain a sense of control over their lives. Where progressives
have tried to beat the right at its own game by competing on the
battleground of the nation state, they have fared extremely poorly, as
recent elections and referenda across Europe have shown. Even where
a progressive force has managed to win national office, as happened
in Greece in 2015, the limits of this strategy have become abundantly
clear, with global markets and transnational institutions quickly
bullying the Syriza government into compliance.

In Spain, however, things are different. In 2014, activists in the
country were wrestling with a similar conundrum to their counterparts
in the US today: how to harness the power of new social and political
movements to transform institutional politics. For pragmatic rather
than ideological reasons, they decided to start by standing in local
elections; the so-called “municipalist wager”. The bet paid off;
while citizen platforms led by activists from social movements won
mayoralties in the largest cities across the country in May of 2015,
their national allies, Unidos Podemos, stalled in third place at the
general elections in December later that same year

In Spain, this network of ‘rebel cities’ has been putting up
some of the most effective resistance to the conservative central
government. While the state is bailing out the banks, refusing to take
in refugees and implementing deep cuts in public services, cities
like Barcelona and Madrid are investing in the cooperative economy,
declaring themselves ‘refuge cities’ and remunicipalizing public
services. US cities have a huge potential to play a similar role over
the coming years.

Rebel cities in the USA

In fact, radical municipalism has a proud history in the US. One
hundred years ago, the “sewer socialists” took over the city
government of Milwaukee, Wisconsin and ran it for almost 50 years.
They built parks, cleaned up waterways and, in contrast to the
tolerated level of corruption in neighboring Chicago, the sewer
socialists instilled into the civic culture an enduring sense that
government is supposed to work for all the people, not just the
wealthy and well-connected.

More recently, too, cities have been proving their ability to lead
the national agenda. In the last few years alone, over 200 cities
have introduced protections against employment discrimination based
on gender-identity and 38 cities and counties have introduced local
minimum wages after local “Fight for 15” campaigns.

Now we need a dual municipalist strategy that includes both supporting
and putting pressure on existing progressive city governments from
the streets, and standing new candidates with new policy platforms in
upcoming local elections so that we can change institutional politics
from within.

Why cities?

There are a number of reasons why city governments are particularly
well-placed to lead resistance to Trumpism. Most obviously, much of
the popular o

Fred Turner: Fascism and The Historical Irony of Facebook

[nettime's avid reader]

https://medium.com/initialized-capital/fascism-and-the-historical-irony-of-facebooks-fake-news-problem-d744b05045fd#.pcxf34w0r

Kim-Mai Cutler, 24.11.2016

<...>

I wanted to catch up and get his [Fred Turner's] reflections on the
election and Facebook and Twitter’s impact on American politics.
Much of the discussion in the press feels ahistorical and there is
this irony in that the ideas behind networked and peer-to-peer media
are rooted in a resistance to fascism and emerged from the lessons of
World War II.

Q: So can you explain the core argument of your book ["The Democratic
Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the
Psychedelic Sixties"]?

Turner: In the late 1930s, when Germany turned fascist, Americans were
mystified. Our intellectual leaders had long thought that Germany was
the most culturally sophisticated nation in Europe. They were all
asking how this had happened.

How did the country that brought us Goethe and Beethoven bring us
Hitler?

Many Americans blamed the mass media. They had two different ways of
thinking about it. First, some believed that Hitler and his clique
were clinically insane. Somehow they had transferred their madness
over the radio waves and through newsreel movie screens to ordinary
Germans. Second, many believed that one-to-many media forced audiences
into an authoritarian kind of passivity. When everyone turned their
eyes and ears in the same direction, they appeared to be acting out
the obedience expected of fascist citizens.

When World War II started, the Roosevelt administration wanted to
create propaganda to make Americans fight fascism abroad. But the
problem was — what media were they going to use? If they used
mass media, they risked turning Americans into authoritarians. But
if they didn’t, they wondered, how would they achieve the national
unity they needed to fight fascism?

There was one school of thought that said, “We’ll just copy
[Joseph] Goebbels. We’ll de-program Americans later [if they turn
totalitarian].”

But there were about 60 American intellectuals who were part of
something called the Committee for National Morale who had another
idea. These were people like anthropologists Gregory Bateson and
Margaret Mead, psychologist Gordon Allport, and the curator Arthur
Upham Pope.

They believed that we needed to create a kind of media that would
promote democratic personalities. And if we did that, we could
prevent racist nationalism. They dreamed of media that would surround
you, that would require you to make your own choices and use your
individual perception to define the images that mattered most to you.
It was meant to be a kind of media environment within which you could
make your own decisions, and so become more individually unique. At
the same time, it put you in the company of others doing the same
thing. The environment was designed to help forge both individual
identity and collective unity simultaneously.

The Committee for National Morale didn’t end up making media. But a
group of Bauhaus artists, who were escaping Hitler’s Germany, took
up their ideas and began creating immersive, multi-image environments.
Their first big work was a propaganda exhibition called “The Road To
Victory” at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1942. Herbert Bayer
and Edward Steichen surrounded visitors with images of all different
sizes so that people could choose to be citizens in the company of
others. It’s a form that surrounds you, which is why I called the
book “The Democratic Surround.”

Over the next 50 years, through a series of twists and turns, the
democratic media dreams of the Committee for National Morale actually
set the stage for Facebook, Twitter and other kinds of peer-to-peer
media.

The irony is that with Donald Trump, we are seeing a medium and a set
of tactics designed to confront fascism being used to produce a new
authoritarianism.

<>

Q: Let’s go back to media now. You’re talking about media
exhibitions in the 1940s. How does the work that these thinkers and
artists were doing translate to how online media works today?

Turner: The multi-media images in “The Democratic Surround”
provide a glimpse of the kind of perceptual world that media thinkers
believed would make us less racist and more embracing of our
differences. It’s a world in which we’re meant to practice looking
at and identifying with others who are not like ourselves.

The surround aesthetics of the 1940s came to shape the 1950s, 60s
and 70s by moving through two worlds. One, they became the basis of
cold war propaganda exhibitions. Well into the 1960s, Americans built
multi-image propaganda environments, with an eye toward democratizing
populations in authoritarian countries. They built multi-image
environments as part of trade fairs or exhibitions in the belief that
they would give people the ability to practice the modes of perception
that democracy depends upon.

In 1955, Edward Steichen built what remains the most influential of
these 

Promises (2600 Editorial, Fall 2016)

[nettime's avid reader]

[Tx to Emmanuel Goldstein for providing it to nettime.]

Promises

https://store.2600.com/collections/2010-2015/products/autumn-2016

In this election season, we all know a thing or two about promises.
They are what the politicians feed us in order to get elected.
They almost never are fulfilled and most of us aren’t the least
bit surprised by that. Yet the cycle continues time after time.
But there’s a different kind of promise out there, one that was
exemplified at The Eleventh HOPE this past July. That promise actually
does come to fruition with enough support and nurturing. We call it
the hacker promise.

Oddly enough, and perhaps appropriately so, those involved in
political campaigns are scared to death of the potential of hackers.
Why? It’s painfully simple - they fear the truth. And nothing is
more honest than someone who reveals that all is not well when we’re
constantly told over and over again that it is.

We’ve all read “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (and if not, we
all should) where an honest child does what no other dares do and
says out loud that the emperor isn’t wearing any clothes at all
when everyone else was too scared not to play along with the charade.
Whenever we demonstrate a lack of security, obtain documents that
aren’t supposed to exist, challenge the status quo, or reveal a lie,
we’re embarrassing an emperor of one sort or another. And this is
why, however deeply hidden, the general public cheers when it occurs.
The hacker promise once again shows what is true and what is not.
There is no bigger threat for those addicts of power.

You could not have found a more diverse and freethinking group of
people than the attendees and participants at The Eleventh HOPE this
summer in New York City. If there had been a single theme, it would
have been that of questioning assumptions. Every system imaginable was
subject to being challenged with something better designed to take its
place. That is what hackers do and we’re inspired beyond words to
see so many people who clearly get this. Here are just a few instances
of our promise and the threat it poses:

1 Designing and using strong encryption to protect our privacy is a
recurring topic in the hacker world. Encryption in the hands of the
populace is seen as a threat by those in power.

2 Taking back access and control to everything from automobile repair
to music recordings to food to pharmaceuticals - all currently in the
hands of big business with a level of manipulation unprecedented in
our history. Hackers are the ones who will figure out how to either
bypass these systems or make them irrelevant. Again, a huge threat to
the system as it stands.

3 Demonstrating how almost any lock can be defeated, any key copied.
Our lockpicking talks were among the most popular this year and the
techniques displayed were imaginative and scientific. It may make a
lot of companies, governments, and people uncomfortable. But it’s
the truth.

4 Civil liberties issues have always been at the forefront of the
hacker world and the many campaigns and projects that groups like
the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties
Union are involved in could fill an entire conference on their own.
But the truth here is that, when mixed with the spirit of rebellion
and challenge that already exists in the hacker world, the amount of
inspiration gained from their talks was extremely contagious. It all
leads to continued and ever-expanding discussions that those in power
would rather not have happen.

We can go on and on with examples, but looking at the HOPE program
guide would basically make the same point. What comes out of a
conference like this isn’t something as innocuous as a conversation
about building better security. This is about changing the way we
think and the way we do just about everything. Whether it’s coming
up with a new digital currency, bypassing drug companies and their
artificial price controls, coming up with alternative fuels, figuring
out a new way to broadcast or receive material that otherwise would be
inaccessible, there is no element of our society that isn’t in the
crosshairs of change. Yes, designing better security is in there too.
But it’s so much bigger than just that.

This is a train that cannot be stopped; there is simply too much
momentum at this point. With every hysterical report of what hackers
could be doing to our privacy, with every Congressional hearing
about the threat of “cyberterrorists,” and with every political
campaign claiming they’re being targeted by the digital underground,
what you’re actually seeing is unbridled fear and panic. Because
deep down, all of these people know that if they haven’t already
lost control, they will fairly soon. Their system and systems are
very powerful and omnipresent. They too get better, faster, and more
encompassing with every year. But, whether it’s today, next year, or
a decade from now, they will become unsustainable. Human ingenuity and
the desire for freedom an

Arrest Warrant Issued for Amy Goodman in North Dakota After Covering

[nettime's avid reader]

[Freedom for Press, another one of these 20th century achievements being
gutted...]

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/10/breaking_arrest_warrant_issued_for_amy

An arrest warrant has been issued in North Dakota for Democracy Now!
host and executive producer Amy Goodman. Goodman was charged with
criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor offense. A team from Democracy Now!
was in North Dakota last week to cover the Native American-led protests
against the Dakota Access pipeline.

On Sept. 3, Democracy Now! filmed security guards working for the Dakota
Access pipeline company using dogs and pepper spray to attack
protesters. Democracy Now!’s report went viral online and was
rebroadcast on many outlets, including CBS, NBC, NPR, CNN, MSNBC and
Huffington Post.

"This is an unacceptable violation of freedom of the press," said Amy
Goodman in a statement. "I was doing my job by covering pipeline guards
unleashing dogs and pepper spray on Native American protester."

See the orginal coverage:
https://www.democracynow.org/2016/9/6/full_exclusive_report_dakota_access_pipeline




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Revisiting the future with Laboria Cuboniks: Technofeminism, Xenofeminism a conversation

[nettime's avid reader]

Revisiting the future with Laboria Cuboniks | A conversation

http://www.furtherfield.org/features/interviews/revisiting-future-laboria-cuboniks-conversation

Techno-feminisms are, once again, on the ascent. The Xenofeminist
Manifesto, published in 2015 by the collective Laboria Cuboniks, is
a provocative and elaborate example for the renewed exhortation for
gendered bodies to merge with technology, rationality and the sciences
in order to defeat white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. Cornelia
Sollfrank, a practising technofeminist artist with a long history and
rich experience in building and contributing to cyber-feminist-net-art
platforms and organisations, and Rachel Baker, a former ‘net
artist’ currently involved in collaborative feminist performance
and writing practices, are curious: What drives the resurrected hype
around techno-feminisms? What is new about the future 30 years after
Cyberfeminism? Will the current techno-feminist virus take hold? Or
has recent history resulted in an aesthetic immunity to the strategy
of “seductive semiotic parasites?”

CS: Who is Laboria Cuboniks? How did you meet and why did you decide
to work together?

 LC: We are currently six women spread across three continents,
all coming from different disciplinary backgrounds which gives
us access to cover a broader territory of thought than working
alone, and also provides us an intensive context for sharing our
discrete approaches. We met in 2014 at a summer school in Berlin
(Emancipation as Navigation) – which was equally a transdisciplinary
affair focusing on developments in neo-rationalism. We decided to
work together to address the rather quick, dismissive reactions
that were circulating at the time surrounding neo-rationalism and
accelerationism, as being de facto (and permanently so) cis-white
masculine pursuits. While the historicity of some of these ideas most
certainly does fall into that category, the consequences of brushing
off things like reason, science, technology, and scalability as being
enduringly locked into patriarchal regimes, seemed to us a serious
limitation when trying to think an emancipatory politics and its
necessary feminisms, fit for an age of planetary complexity.


CS: It hardly needs mentioning that there has been a feminist history
of reclaiming reason, science and technology. In your Xenofeminist
manifesto (XF) [i] you are alluding to both earlier technofeminist
concepts, including cyberfeminism, but also to accelerationist
ideas. What is your challenge, if any, adding a feminist agenda to
a philosophical project that has largely been based on ignoring
gender issues? Would XF have ever come into existence without
accelerationism?

LC: Certainly the original Accelerationist Manifesto (MAP) did nothing
to address gender politics, in a way mirroring its Marxian tones
insofar as Marx himself also ignored gender and the types of labour
(specifically care and reproductive labour) associated with a binary
gender structure to which females have historically been subject
to. MAP was a manifesto, which, by form alone is forthright; cannot
address everything and is scant on nuance. Our own manifesto is no
different in that regard. What we read from it, rather, was a demand
for a scalar approach to leftist politics that can affirmatively
face up to our situation systematically – the scope of which
necessitates massive collective and collaborative mobilisation
(which further entails the de-demonizing of the word ‘power’
as it is often portrayed in purely horizontalist approaches). XF
responded to some of the general diagnoses mapped out in the MAP,
but in its own terms, and opened up other territories for thought
neglected by MAP. It’s instructive here to use this as a fruitful
example against the type of puritanism that seems to be plaguing
much of leftist efforts of late. When we don’t agree with every
point, when we are offended at others, when we put all interpretive
emphasis on authors’ biographies, we can end up dismissing entire
thought-projects in one shot – rather than working out conceptual /
pragmatic weaknesses and directing them, augmenting them otherwise.
To be clear this isn’t about being conciliatory and taking every
position on board – that would be pure triviality – but it is to
say that we on the left desire some general transformations. How can
we move beyond the game of ‘being right/superior’, of being locked
into certain theoretical dogmatisms, of pissing perimeters around
intellectual territories for our personal success in the name of a
leftist-fashionability, towards the construction of useful concepts
that can honestly respond to our complex reality? None of these
concepts will ever be possible by a single ‘heroic’ actor/thinker.


CS: I can understand the desire to leave theoretical dogmatisms
behind. This is also what we have tried with the Old Boys Network: to
open up the term cyberfeminism and offer a platform where diverse and
even contradictory concepts could meet.

Perceptual Deception

[nettime's avid reader]

Robot War and the Future of Perceptual Deception
.
Geoff Manaugh, July 5, 2016

http://www.bldgblog.com/2016/07/robot-war-and-the-future-of-perceptual-deception/

One of the most remarkable details of last week’s fatal collision,
involving a tractor trailer and a Tesla electric car operating in
self-driving mode, was the fact that the car apparently mistook the
side of the truck for the sky.

As Tesla explained in a public statement following the accidental
death, the car’s autopilot was unable to see “the white side of
the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky”—which is to say,
it was unable to differentiate the two.

The truck was not seen as a discrete object, in other words, but as
something indistinguishable from the larger spatial environment. It
was more like an elision.

Examples like this are tragic, to be sure, but they are also
technologically interesting, in that they give momentary glimpses of
where robotic perception has failed. Hidden within this, then, are
lessons not just for how vehicle designers and computers scientists
alike could make sure this never happens again, but also precisely the
opposite: how we could design spatial environments deliberately to
deceive, misdirect, or otherwise baffle these sorts of semi-autonomous
machines.

For all the talk of a “robot-readable world,” in other words, it
is interesting to consider a world made deliberately illegible to
robots, with materials used for throwing off 3D cameras or LiDAR,
either through excess reflectivity or unexpected light-absorption.

Last summer, in a piece for New Scientist, I interviewed a robotics
researcher named John Rogers, at Georgia Tech. Rogers pointed out that
the perceptual needs of robots will have more and more of an effect on
how architectural interiors are designed and built in the first place
[1]. Quoting that article at length:

"In a detail that has implications beyond domestic healthcare,
Rogers also discovered that some interiors confound robots altogether.
Corridors that are lined with rubber sheeting to protect against
damage from wayward robots—such as those in his lab—proved almost
impossible to navigate. Why? Rubber absorbs light and prevents
laser-based navigational systems from relaying spatial information
back to the robot. Mirrors and other reflective materials also threw
off his robots’ ability to navigate. “It actually appeared that
there was a virtual world beyond the mirror,” says Rogers. The
illusion made his robots act as if there were a labyrinth of new rooms
waiting to be entered and explored. When reflections from your kitchen
tiles risk disrupting a robot’s navigational system, it might be
time to rethink the very purpose of interior design."

I mention all this for at least two reasons.

1) It is obvious by now that the American highway system, as well as all
of the vehicles that will be permitted to travel on it, will be remade
as one of the first pieces of truly robot-legible public infrastructure.
It will transition from being a “dumb” system of non-interactive 2D
surfaces to become an immersive spatial environment filled with
volumetric sign-systems meant for non-human readers. It will be rebuilt
for perceptual systems other than our own.

2) Finding ways to throw-off self-driving robots will be more than just
a harmless prank or even a serious violation of public safety; it will
become part of a much larger arsenal for self-defense during war. In
other words, consider the points raised by John Rogers, above, but in a
new context: you live in a city under attack by a foreign military whose
use of semi-autonomous machines requires defensive means other than—or
in addition to—kinetic firepower. Wheeled and aerial robots alike have
been deployed.

One possible line of defense—among many, of course—would be to redesign
your city, even down to the interior of your own home, such that machine
vision is constantly confused there. You thus rebuild the world using
light-absorbing fabrics and reflective ornament, installing projections
and mirrors, screens and smoke. Or “stealth objects” and radar-baffling
architectural geometries. A military robot wheeling its way into your
home thus simply gets lost there, stuck in a labyrinth of perceptual
convolution and reflection-implied rooms that don’t exist.

In any case, I suppose the question is: if, today, a truck can blend-in
with the Florida sky, and thus fatally disable a self-driving machine,
what might we learn from this event in terms of how to deliberately
confuse robotic military systems of the future?

We had so-called “dazzle ships”[2] in World War I, for example, and the
design of perceptually baffling military camouflage continues to undergo
innovation today; but what is anti-robot architectural design, or
anti-robot urban planning, and how could it be strategically deployed as
a defensive tactic in war?


[1]
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28059-new-urbanist-home-is-where-the-robots-live/
[2] http://publicdomainreview

Maciej Ceglowski: "Machine learning is like money laundering for bias."

[nettime's avid reader]

This is the text version of remarks I gave on June 26, 2016, at a panel
on the Moral Economy of Tech at the SASE conference in Berkeley. The
other panel participants were Kieran Healy, Stuart Russell and AnnaLee
Saxenian.


We were each asked to speak for ten minutes, to an audience of social
scientists.


http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm

I am only a small minnow in the technology ocean, but since it is my
natural habitat, I want to make an effort to describe it to you.

As computer programmers, our formative intellectual experience is
working with deterministic systems that have been designed by other
human beings. These can be very complex, but the complexity is not the
kind we find in the natural world. It is ultimately always tractable.
Find the right abstractions, and the puzzle box opens before you.

The feeling of competence, control and delight in discovering a clever
twist that solves a difficult problem is what makes being a computer
programmer sometimes enjoyable.

But as anyone who's worked with tech people knows, this intellectual
background can also lead to arrogance. People who excel at software
design become convinced that they have a unique ability to understand
any kind of system at all, from first principles, without prior
training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success in the
artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous
confidence.

Today we are embarked on a great project to make computers a part of
everyday life. As Marc Andreessen memorably frames it, "software is
eating the world". And those of us writing the software expect to be
greeted as liberators.

Our intentions are simple and clear. First we will instrument, then we
will analyze, then we will optimize. And you will thank us.

But the real world is a stubborn place. It is complex in ways that
resist abstraction and modeling. It notices and reacts to our attempts
to affect it. Nor can we hope to examine it objectively from the
outside, any more than we can step out of our own skin.

The connected world we're building may resemble a computer system, but
really it's just the regular old world from before, with a bunch of
microphones and keyboards and flat screens sticking out of it. And it
has the same old problems.

Approaching the world as a software problem is a category error that has
led us into some terrible habits of mind.


BAD MENTAL HABITS

First, programmers are trained to seek maximal and global solutions. Why
solve a specific problem in one place when you can fix the general
problem for everybody, and for all time? We don't think of this as
hubris, but as a laudable economy of effort. And the startup funding
culture of big risk, big reward encourages this grandiose mode of
thinking. There is powerful social pressure to avoid incremental change,
particularly any change that would require working with people outside
tech and treating them as intellectual equals.

Second, treating the world as a software project gives us a rationale
for being selfish. The old adage has it that if you are given ten
minutes to cut down a tree, you should spend the first five sharpening
your axe. We are used to the idea of bootstrapping ourselves into a
position of maximum leverage before tackling a problem.

In the real world, this has led to a pathology where the tech sector
maximizes its own comfort. You don't have to go far to see this. Hop on
BART after the conference and take a look at Oakland, or take a stroll
through downtown San Francisco and try to persuade yourself you're in
the heart of a boom that has lasted for forty years. You'll see a
residential theme park for tech workers, surrounded by areas of poverty
and misery that have seen no benefit and ample harm from our presence.
We pretend that by maximizing our convenience and productivity, we're
hastening the day when we finally make life better for all those other
people.

Third, treating the world as software promotes fantasies of control. And
the best kind of control is control without responsibility. Our unique
position as authors of software used by millions gives us power, but we
don't accept that this should make us accountable. We're programmers—who
else is going to write the software that runs the world? To put it
plainly, we are surprised that people seem to get mad at us for trying
to help.

Fortunately we are smart people and have found a way out of this
predicament. Instead of relying on algorithms, which we can be accused
of manipulating for our benefit, we have turned to machine learning, an
ingenious way of disclaiming responsibility for anything. Machine
learning is like money laundering for bias. It's a clean, mathematical
apparatus that gives the status quo the aura of logical inevitability.
The numbers don't lie.

Of course, people obsessed with control have to eventually confront the
fact of their own extinction. The response of the tech world to death
has been enthusiastic. We are going to fix it. Googl

US: Software to predict future criminals is biased against blacks.

[nettime's avid reader]

https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments-in-criminal-sentencing

by Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu and Lauren Kirchner,
ProPublica. May 23, 2016

<>

In 2014, then U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder warned that the risk
scores might be injecting bias into the courts. He called for the U.S.
Sentencing Commission to study their use. “Although these measures
were crafted with the best of intentions, I am concerned that they
inadvertently undermine our efforts to ensure individualized and equal
justice,” he said, adding, “they may exacerbate unwarranted and
unjust disparities that are already far too common in our criminal
justice system and in our society.”

The sentencing commission did not, however, launch a study of risk
scores. So ProPublica did, as part of a larger examination of the
powerful, largely hidden effect of algorithms in American life.

We obtained the risk scores assigned to more than 7,000 people
arrested in Broward County, Florida, in 2013 and 2014 and checked to
see how many were charged with new crimes over the next two years, the
same benchmark used by the creators of the algorithm.

The score proved remarkably unreliable in forecasting violent crime:
Only 20 percent of the people predicted to commit violent crimes
actually went on to do so.

When a full range of crimes were taken into account — including
misdemeanors such as driving with an expired license — the algorithm
was somewhat more accurate than a coin flip. Of those deemed likely to
re-offend, 61 percent were arrested for any subsequent crimes within
two years.

We also turned up significant racial disparities, just as Holder
feared. In forecasting who would re-offend, the algorithm made
mistakes with black and white defendants at roughly the same rate but
in very different ways.

-- The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black
defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at
almost twice the rate as white defendants.

-- White defendants were mislabeled as low risk more often than black
defendants.

Could this disparity be explained by defendants’ prior crimes or
the type of crimes they were arrested for? No. We ran a statistical
test that isolated the effect of race from criminal history and
recidivism, as well as from defendants’ age and gender. Black
defendants were still 77 percent more likely to be pegged as at higher
risk of committing a future violent crime and 45 percent more likely
to be predicted to commit a future crime of any kind. (Read our
analysis.)

The algorithm used to create the Florida risk scores is a product of a
for-profit company, Northpointe. The company disputes our analysis.

In a letter, it criticized ProPublica’s methodology and defended the
accuracy of its test: “Northpointe does not agree that the results
of your analysis, or the claims being made based upon that analysis,
are correct or that they accurately reflect the outcomes from the
application of the model.”

Northpointe’s software is among the most widely used assessment
tools in the country. The company does not publicly disclose the
calculations used to arrive at defendants’ risk scores, so it is
not possible for either defendants or the public to see what might be
driving the disparity. (On Sunday, Northpointe gave ProPublica the
basics of its future-crime formula — which includes factors such as
education levels, and whether a defendant has a job. It did not share
the specific calculations, which it said are proprietary.)

Northpointe’s core product is a set of scores derived from 137
questions that are either answered by defendants or pulled from
criminal records. Race is not one of the questions. The survey asks
defendants such things as: “Was one of your parents ever sent to
jail or prison?” “How many of your friends/acquaintances are
taking drugs illegally?” and “How often did you get in fights
while at school?” The questionnaire also asks people to agree or
disagree with statements such as “A hungry person has a right to
steal” and “If people make me angry or lose my temper, I can be
dangerous.”


<>

Northpointe was founded in 1989 by Tim Brennan, then a professor of
statistics at the University of Colorado, and Dave Wells, who was
running a corrections program in Traverse City, Michigan.

Wells had built a prisoner classification system for his jail. “It
was a beautiful piece of work,” Brennan said in an interview
conducted before ProPublica had completed its analysis. Brennan
and Wells shared a love for what Brennan called “quantitative
taxonomy” — the measurement of personality traits such as
intelligence, extroversion and introversion. The two decided to build
a risk assessment score for the corrections industry.

Brennan wanted to improve on a leading risk assessment score, the LSI,
or Level of Service Inventory, which had been developed in Canada.
“I found a fair amount of weakness in the LSI,” Brennan said. He
wanted a tool that addressed the major theori

JPP: Feminism and (Un)Hacking

[nettime's avid reader]

[relevant to nettime for may reasons]

We are delighted to announce the publication of the Journal of Peer
Production #8, “Feminism and (Un)Hacking”

The issue is available here:
http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-8-feminism-and-unhacking/

>From the Introduction, "Feminist Hacking/Making: Exploring New Gender
Horizons of Possibility" by SSL Nagbot (a.k.a Lilly Nguyen, Sophie
Toupin, and Shaowen Bardzell)

This special issue of the Journal of Peer Production shows a growing
body of work that brings together feminism with hacking and making. To
date, feminist thinking has been taken up by hacking and making
researchers to reveal the gendering of techno-labor, to facilitate
emancipatory efforts, to cultivate alternative perspectives, and to make
visible the infrastructural relations of technology. This combination of
visualization with emancipatory alterity demonstrates the ways that
feminism in hacking is largely based on a politics of visibility; that
is, hacking and making serve the broader objectives of bringing to light
the invisible infra/structures of power that render technological
achievement possible. In this special issue, we see that the extant
forms of feminist research and practice critique gendered forms of
marginalization in hacking and making in several ways. First, many
feminist hackers and makers seek to redress the lack of gender diversity
within these techno-communities through the designs of women, queer, and
trans-friendly spaces for hacking and making or addressing
women-centered concerns such as improving breast-pumps for nursing.
Second, we also see that hacking and making comprise both a method and a
framework to introduce new kinds of expertise, such as craft and care,
into conversations of information technology. These configurations of
hacking and making as a method and framework depart from the strict
focus on technology associated with the masculinity of hacking. Instead,
we find that the feminist inquiry and interventions within the essays in
this special issue alter the very notions of hacking and making and thus
introduce alternate values of inclusion and intimacy.



Peer Reviewed Academic Papers

Situating Making in Contemporary Latin American Feminist Art
By Claudia Costa Pederson

Hacking the Feminist Disabled Body
By Laura Forlano

Towards a Feminist Hackathon: The “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck!” Hackathon
By Catherine D’Ignazio, Alexis Hope, Alexandra Metral, Ethan Zuckerman, David 
Raymond, Willow Brugh and Tal Achituv

Inversions of Design: Examining the Limits of Human-Centered Perspectives in a 
Feminist Design Workshop
By Sarah Fox and Daniela Rosner

 
Interviews and Art Essays

Dear Arduina: An Interview with Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory
by Rachelle Beaudoin

Perishable Bodies: A Study of Wearable Technology Through the Eyes of An 
Anorexic
By Veronica Black

“The Nostalgia Question” and Feminist 8-bit Game Hacking
by Rachel Simone Weil
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Is India at an inflection point?

[nettime's avid reader]

Equating the students’ unrest in Jawaharlal Nehru University and
Hyderabad and Jadavpur Universities and in several of the Indian
Institutes of Technology with the Paris and Nanterre students’
uprising in 1968 may sound farfetched, but there are some eerie
similarities.


M.K. Narayanan

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/is-india-at-an-inflection-point/article8292598.ece

Updated: February 29, 2016 03:40 IST


It is important to take the time out to address social cohesion and
sustain the social compact that India has striven to maintain since
Independence. Instead, the government’s use of the sedition law in JNU
has been a blunder, which is widening the gulf between different
segments of society.

The first two decades of the 21st century have witnessed a great deal
of unrest and turbulence in several countries across the globe,
notably in West Asia. India was spared the kind of protests that
marked the “Arab Awakening”, though it did confront a number of
disparate protests, which cumulatively reflected a high level of
discontent. Individual incidents had even then begun to spark off
violent reactions.

However, it is the metastasising nature of recent agitations and
protests, involving almost every segment of the population, students,
peasants and the disaffected — alongside the persistent provocation
from Pakistan — which is resulting in new paradigms of thought and
behaviour. Whether they relate to terrorist attacks by Pakistan-based
outfits such as the Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Lashkar-e-Taiba,
agitations based on identity, ideology, idea-logy politics, human
values and dignity, or unstructured movements dictated by rage or
other considerations, they all involve a level of public mobilisation
and spectacle different from what had been seen in the past.


Need for new strategies

It is evident that we have entered a new era but are probably not yet
aware of its implications. They cannot, hence, be dealt with in the
same manner as in the past, or by employing antiquated methods and
resorting to shopworn rhetoric. Understanding the true meaning of
real-time information gleaned from “data-in-motion” (such as phone
calls or chat services) or from access to “data-at-rest” (text
messages and videos stored in computers and cell phones) is critically
important today.

For instance, almost fortnightly, or at shorter intervals,
Pakistan-based terrorist outfits are carrying out assaults with still
greater military precision than previously, inflicting greater
casualties among both civilians and armed force personnel, all the
while holding up the country to ridicule as the Indian Establishment
seeks opportunities to revive anti-terror talks. Gurdaspur, Pathankot
and now Pampore are hardly isolated incidents and reflect elements of
a grand strategy. Only the most myopic of leaders can fail to see the
writing on the wall and heed the message coming out of Pakistan. A
nation fully conversant with what is taking place can hardly be misled
into ignoring the truth and reality.

At another level, India is internally undergoing a baptism through
fire. This has been brought on by a conflict between extremes — the
politics of the Right Wing and the Left Wing; a confrontation between
anti-national and irredentist elements on the one hand, and so called
nationalist and identity-based groups on the other; and increasing
militancy on the part of the so-called excluded and marginalised
segments in pursuit of their rights. The “quota agitation” by the Jat
community in Haryana exemplifies the dangers inherent in the
increasing stratification of Indian society.


Following the Patidars in Gujarat and the Jats in Haryana, the
Marathas in Maharashtra and the Rajputs in Rajasthan are threatening
to agitate. In almost every State across the country, several among
the more “backward” are about to throw their hat into the ring seeking
among the Other Backward Class quotas. Finally the worst fears about
the end result of the Mandal Commission recommendations appear to be
coming true.

The Centre’s succumbing to the violence perpetuated by Haryana Jats
could not have come at a more inopportune moment. The ineptitude
displayed in handling the agitation, and the spectacle of the Centre
dispatching several Army columns to quell a law and order situation in
an hinterland State, tends to evoke comparisons with the “Arab Spring”.

Memories of 1968

The question as to whether India is today at an inflection point is,
however, more relevant in the context of the present unrest among
students of the nation’s prestigious universities. Equating the
students’ unrest in Jawaharlal Nehru University and Hyderabad and
Jadavpur Universities and in several of the Indian Institutes of
Technology with the Paris and Nanterre students’ uprising in 1968 may
sound farfetched, but there are some eerie similarities. In both
cases, agitating students have used metaphors to demonstrate their
opposition to the existing order. Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh were
names 

How the security complex drives social media research (Nafeez Ahmed)

[nettime's avid reader]

[An update to Moreno's classic "DARPA on your mind" (2004)]

The Pentagon’s secret pre-crime program to know your thoughts, predict
your future

US military contractors are mining social media to influence your
‘cognitive behavior’ when you get angry at the state

By Nafeez Ahmed, 1.2.2016

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/the-pentagon-s-secret-pre-crime-program-c7d281eca440#.iiwqde278

This exclusive is published by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a new
crowd-funded investigative journalism project.

The US Department of Defense (DoD) wants contractors to mine your
social media posts to develop new ways for the US government to infer
what you’re really thinking and feeling — and to predict what you’ll
do next.

Pentagon documents released over the last few months identify ongoing
classified research in this area that the federal government plans to
expand, by investing millions more dollars.

The unclassified documents, which call on external scientists,
institutions and companies to submit proposals for research projects,
not only catalogue how far US military capabilities have come, but
also reveal the Pentagon’s goals: building the US intelligence
community’s capacity to forecast population behavior at home and
abroad, especially groups involved in political activism.

They throw light on the extent to which the Pentagon’s classified
pre-crime R&D has advanced, and how the US military intends to deploy
it in operations around the world.
Could your social media signature reveal your innermost thoughts?

A new Funding Opportunity Announcement document issued by the DoD’s
Office of Naval Research (ONR) calls for research proposals on how
mining social media can provide insight on people’s real thoughts,
emotions and beliefs, and thereby facilitate predictions of behavior.

The research for Fiscal Year 2016 is part of the Pentagon’s
Multidisciplinary Research Program of the University Research
Initiative (MURI), which was initiated over 25 years ago, regularly
producing what the DoD describes as “significant scientific
breakthroughs with far reaching consequences to the fields of science,
economic growth, and revolutionary new military technologies.”

The document calls for new work “to understand latent communication
among small groups.” Social meaning comes not just from “the manifest
content of communication (i.e., literal information), but also from
latent content — how language is structured and used, as well as how
communicators address each other, e.g., through non-verbal means — 
gestures, head nods, body position, and the dynamics in communication
patterns.”

The Pentagon wants to understand not just what we say, but what is
“latent” in what we say: “Subtle interactions such as deception and
reading between the lines, or tacit understanding between
communicators, relative societal position or relationship between
communicators, is less about what is said and more about what is latent.”

All this, it is imagined, can be derived from examining social media,
using new techniques from the social and behavioral sciences.

The Pentagon wants to:

“… recognize/predict social contexts, relationships, networks, and
intentions from social media, taking into account non-verbal
communication such as gestures, micro-expressions, posture, and latent
semantics of text and speech.”

By understanding latent communication, the Pentagon hopes to develop
insight into “the links between actors, their intentions, and context
for use of latent signals for group activity.” The idea is to create:

“… algorithms for prediction and collection of latent signals and
their use in predicting social information.”

These algorithms also need to “accurately detect key features of
speech linked to these structural patterns (e.g., humor, metaphor,
emotion, language innovations) and subtle non-verbal elements of
communication (e.g., pitch, posture, gesture) from text, audio, and
visual media.”

The direct military applications of this sort of information can be
gleaned from the background of the administrator of this new research
program, Dr. Purush Iyer, who is Division chief of Network Sciences at
the US Army Research Laboratory (USARL).

Among the goals of Dr. Iyer’s research at the US Army are expanding
“Intelligent Networks” which can “augment human decision makers with
enhanced-embedded battlefield intelligence that will provide them with
tools for creating necessary situational awareness, reconnaissance,
and decision making to decisively defeat any future adversarial threats.”
Creeping police state

The allure of co-opting Big Data to enhance domestic policing is
already picking up steam in the US and UK.

In the US, an unknown number of police authorities are already
piloting a software called ‘Beware’, which analyses people’s social
media activity, property records, the records of friends, family or
associates, among other data, to assign suspects a so-called
“threat-score.”

That “threat-score” can then be used by poli

Lessig drops out of the presidential race

[nettime's avid reader]

Lessig droped out of the presidential race, which we wanted to make
around one single issue, money in politics. Now he gave up. As it fits
a layer, the reason is a procedural one. 


-

The Democrats Have Now Chan
ged the Rules, And Forced Larry Lessig Out
Posted: 11/02/2015 12:12 pm EST Updated: 11/02/2015 12:59 pm EST

Steve Jarding
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-jarding/the-democrats-have-now-ch_b_8445202.html


For the past six weeks, I've been the general consultant in Larry
Lessig's presidential campaign, working with him and a team of senior
and extraordinary campaigners to get him into the Democratic Party
debates and to help Americans see why I believe we need him as our
next president.

I did this in no small part because I believe, as does Lessig, that
big money is destroying our democracy. And like Lessig, I believe that
until we control big money in politics, our democracy will continue to
be severely compromised if not abdicated. So for the past six weeks,
we have worked hard to show the Democratic National Committee as well
as Democrats and all voters nationally that we were a serious campaign
with a serious candidate whose voice needed to be heard both to help
bolster our party and to save our democracy.

Toward that end, Larry's campaign raised over $1 million in a matter
of weeks and it even qualified for federal matching funds over this
same period of time - a very impressive feat. We then fleshed out the
campaign team with a wonderful mix of campaign veterans and
strategists with next generation experts on social media and digital
platforms. We also ran an unprecedented digital campaign reaching tens
of millions of voters while at the same time running significant
television advertising buys in both Iowa and New Hampshire.

All of this was designed in part to show the DNC that Larry deserved
to be included in their pivotal national presidential debates so that
all Democrats nationally could hear his critical arguments for taking
back our democracy from the big money interests.

The DNC's rules for candidate participation in their debates were
pretty straightforward--or so we thought. In August, before the Lessig
campaign began, DNC Chair, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, announced the
standards for being included in the debates. As she described the
rule, a candidate had to have 1 percent in three DNC sanctioned
national polls, "in the six weeks prior to the debate."

Hitting 1 percent would not be easy, but it was possible. And indeed,
at the end of August already one national polling firm, PPP, found
Lessig at 1 percent nationally.

Yet, about this time, Lessig's campaign manager received a troubling
email from the DNC, suggesting the debate participation standards were
different. The email included a memo that stated that the three polls
had to be "at least six weeks prior to the" debate--contradicting what
Wasserman-Schultz had said that they could be "in the six weeks prior
to the debate." To try to clear up the contradiction, I arranged a
call with the DNC. On that call, the DNC political director confirmed
to me the rule was as the Chair had stated it--three polls finding 1
percent "in the six weeks prior to the debate."

And indeed, that is precisely the rule that was applied in the first
debate. As CNN specified in a late September memo, to qualify a
candidate had to poll at 1 percent in the "polls released between
August 1, 2015 and October 10, 2015." The first debate was October 12.

So, we believed we had our guidelines. And as such, we worked
hard--and spent our campaign's resources--to meet this clarified goal.
It wasn't easy, as most of the national polls didn't even include
Lessig's name. But then a week ago, a Monmouth poll of Democrats
nationally found him at the qualifying percentage. Then an NBC poll
found the same. HuffPost Pollster now lists three polls at 1%. Since
the Monmouth poll, no poll that included Lessig's name found him with
anything less than 1%.

But apparently it did not matter. Late last week, the DNC again
changed the rules for participation in the debates. Just at the point
that it seemed Lessig was about to get in, the DNC has shut the door.

We were informed of this change in a phone call late last week that I
had with the DNC political director. During that call, I was told that
the DNC participation standard for the debates was for a candidate to
be at one percent in three polls conducted, "six weeks prior to the
debate"--not the clarified rule cited earlier by Wasserman-Shultz and
the DNC political director that a candidate had to be at one percent
in three polls conducted "in the six weeks prior to the debate." To
further make the point, the political director confirmed the new rule
in a follow-up email to me.

Under this new rule, Lessig obviously cannot qualify for the November
14 debate. He would have had to qualify four weeks ago! Under this new
rule, all the work--and expense--of the past four weeks has been

Portugal's anti-euro Left banned from power

[nettime's avid reader]

Eurozone crosses Rubicon as Portugal's anti-euro Left banned from
power

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11949701/AEP-Eurozone-crosses-Rubicon-as-Portugals-anti-euro-Left-banned-from-power.html

By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, 4:30PM BST 23 Oct 2015


Portugal has entered dangerous political waters. For the first time
since the creation of Europe’s monetary union, a member state has
taken the explicit step of forbidding eurosceptic parties from taking
office on the grounds of national interest.

Anibal Cavaco Silva, Portugal’s constitutional president, has
refused to appoint a Left-wing coalition government even though it
secured an absolute majority in the Portuguese parliament and won a
mandate to smash the austerity regime bequeathed by the EU-IMF Troika.

He deemed it too risky to let the Left Bloc or the Communists come
close to power, insisting that conservatives should soldier on as a
minority in order to satisfy Brussels and appease foreign financial
markets.

Democracy must take second place to the higher imperative of euro
rules and membership.

“In 40 years of democracy, no government in Portugal has ever
depended on the support of anti-European forces, that is to say forces
that campaigned to abrogate the Lisbon Treaty, the Fiscal Compact, the
Growth and Stability Pact, as well as to dismantle monetary union and
take Portugal out of the euro, in addition to wanting the dissolution
of NATO,” said Mr Cavaco Silva.

“This is the worst moment for a radical change to the foundations of
our democracy.

"After we carried out an onerous programme of financial assistance,
entailing heavy sacrifices, it is my duty, within my constitutional
powers, to do everything possible to prevent false signals being sent
to financial institutions, investors and markets,” he said.

Mr Cavaco Silva argued that the great majority of the Portuguese
people did not vote for parties that want a return to the escudo or
that advocate a traumatic showdown with Brussels.

This is true, but he skipped over the other core message from the
elections held three weeks ago: that they also voted for an end to
wage cuts and Troika austerity. The combined parties of the Left
won 50.7pc of the vote. Led by the Socialists, they control the
Assembleia.

The conservative premier, Pedro Passos Coelho, came first and
therefore gets first shot at forming a government, but his Right-wing
coalition as a whole secured just 38.5pc of the vote. It lost 28
seats.

The Socialist leader, Antonio Costa, has reacted with fury, damning
the president’s action as a “grave mistake” that threatens to
engulf the country in a political firestorm.

“It is unacceptable to usurp the exclusive powers of parliament. The
Socialists will not take lessons from professor Cavaco Silva on the
defence of our democracy,” he said.

Mr Costa vowed to press ahead with his plans to form a triple-Left
coalition, and warned that the Right-wing rump government will face an
immediate vote of no confidence.

There can be no fresh elections until the second half of next year
under Portugal’s constitution, risking almost a year of paralysis
that puts the country on a collision course with Brussels and
ultimately threatens to reignite the country’s debt crisis.

The bond market has reacted calmly to events in Lisbon but it is no
longer a sensitive gauge now that the European Central Bank is mopping
up Portuguese debt under quantitative easing.

Portugal is no longer under a Troika regime and does not face an
immediate funding crunch, holding cash reserves above €8bn. Yet the
IMF says the country remains “highly vulnerable” if there is any
shock or the country fails to deliver on reforms, currently deemed to
have “stalled”.

Public debt is 127pc of GDP and total debt is 370pc, worse than in
Greece. Net external liabilities are more than 220pc of GDP.

The IMF warned that Portugal's “export miracle” remains narrowly
based, the headline gains flattered by re-exports with little value
added. “A durable rebalancing of the economy has not taken place,”
it said.

“The president has created a constitutional crisis,” said Rui
Tavares, a radical green MEP. “He is saying that he will never allow
the formation of a government containing Leftists and Communists.
People are amazed by what has happened.”

Mr Tavares said the president has invoked the spectre of the
Communists and the Left Bloc as a “straw man” to prevent the
Left taking power at all, knowing full well that the two parties
agreed to drop their demands for euro-exit, a withdrawal from Nato
and nationalisation of the commanding heights of the economy under a
compromise deal to the forge the coalition.

President Cavaco Silva may be correct is calculating that a Socialist
government in league with the Communists would precipitate a major
clash with the EU austerity mandarins. Mr Costa’s grand plan for
Keynesian reflation – led by spending on education and health – is
entirely incompatible with the EU’s Fiscal Compact.

The se

Michel Foucault on refugees, in 1979

[nettime's avid reader]

Michel Foucault on refugees – a previously untranslated interview from
1979
Posted on September 29, 2015by stuartelden

http://progressivegeographies.com/2015/09/29/michel-foucault-on-refugees
-a-previously-untranslated-interview-from-1979/

‘The refugee problem is a foreshadowing of the 21st century’s great
migration’

(“Nanmin mondai ha 21 seiku minzoku daiidô no zenchô da”, an
interview by H.Uno, originally published on 17 August 1979, in Shûkan
posuto, pp. 34-35) republished under the title “Le problème des
réfugiés est un présage de la grande migration du XXIe siècle”
in Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, text 271, Volume 3. 1976-1979,
Gallimard, 1994, pp. 798-800.

(Partially republished by Libération on 18 September 2015 and
by Libération.fr on 17 September 2015 under the title “Michel
Foucault en 1979 : «Les hommes réprimés par la dictature choisiront
d’échapper à l’enfer»” )

Translated from Japanese into French by Ryôji Nakamura, 1994 ;
translated from French into English by Felix de Montety, 2015. Thanks
to Stuart Elden, Steve Legg and Mike Heffernan for comments and
corrections.

H. Uno: What according to you is the source of the problem of
Vietnamese refugees ?

M. Foucault: For more than a century, Vietnam has been continually
occupied by military powers such as France, Japan and the United
States. And now the former South Vietnam is occupied by the former
North Vietnam. Of course this occupation of the South by the North is
different from those which preceded it but it should not be forgotten
that the power in place in South Vietnam is exercised from the North.

During this series of occupations over the course of a century,
excessive conflicts have developed within the population. There have
been a considerable number of collaborators, and you can put in this
category merchants who traded with colonists, or regional civil
servants who worked under the occupation. Because of those historical
antagonisms, part of the population found themselves blamed and
abandone d.

Many sense a contradiction between the previous need to support the
unification of Vietnam and the current requirement to tackle the issue
of refugees, which is a consequence of it.

The state must not exercise an unconditional right of life and death,
over its own people or those of another country. To deny the state
this right of life and death meant opposing the bombings of Vietnam by
the United States and currently means helping refugees.

It seems like the problem of Cambodian refugees is not quite the same
as that of Vietnamese refugees. What do you think?

What happened in Cambodia is absolutely unprecedented in modern
history: the government massacred its people on a scale never before
witnessed. And the remaining population that survived was saved, of
course, but finds itself under the domination of an army which has
used a destructive and violent power. The situation is therefore
different from that of Vietnam.

On the other hand, it is important that, in solidarity movements which
are organised throughout the world for refugees from South East Asia,
the differences of historical and political situations are not taken
into account. This does not mean that we could remain indifferent to
historical and political analyses of the refugee issue, but in an
emergency what should be done is to save people in danger.

Because, at the moment, 40,000 Vietnamese are drifting off the coast
of Indochina or wash ashore on islands, on the brink of death.
40,000 Cambodians have been pushed back from Thailand, in mortal
danger. There are no less than 80,000 people for whom death is a
daily presence. No discussion on the general balance of power between
countries of the world, and no argument about the political and
economic difficulties that come with aid to refugees can justify
states abandoning those human beings at the gates of death.

In 1938 and 1939, Jews fled Germany and Central Europe, but because
nobody received them, many died. Forty years have passed since, and
can we again send 100,000 people to their deaths?

To find a global solution to the problem, states that create refugees,
notably Vietnam, should change their policy. But how, according to
you, can this general solution be achieved?

In the case of Cambodia, the situation is much more tragic than in
Vietnam, but there is hope of a solution in the near future. We
could imagine that the formation of an acceptable government by the
Cambodian people would lead to a solution. But as for Vietnam, the
problem is more complex. Political power has already been established:
but this power excludes part of the population, which does not want
it anyway. The state has created a situation in which those people
have to seek the uncertain chance of survival through an exodus by
sea rather than by staying in Vietnam. Therefore it is clear that it
is necessary to put pressure on Vietnam to change this situation. But
what does ‘to put pressure’ mean?

In Geneva, at the UN conference on

Germans begin the looting of Greece

[nettime's avid reader]

[Mind the source. Marketwatch. Not Jacobinmag.]

By Darrell Delamaide

Published: Aug 21, 2015 3:30 a.m. ET
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/germans-begin-the-looting-of-greece-2015-08-21

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — To the victor goes the spoils.

The ink was not yet dry on the new European bailout accord for Greece
before German companies started their plundering of Greek assets.

Per provisions of the “agreement” imposed on Greece, the Athens
government awarded the German company that runs the Frankfurt Airport,
Fraport, a concession to operate 14 regional airports, mostly on the
islands like Mykonos and Santorini favored by tourists, for up to 50
years in the first privatization of government-owned assets demanded
by the creditors.


The airport deal had been agreed upon last year by the previous Greek
government and then suspended by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras’s newly
elected government this year as part of his pledge to prevent the fire
sale of valuable public assets at bargain-basement prices.

The airport deal gives Fraport the right to run the facilities as its
own for 1.2 billion euros over the 50 years and an annual rent of 23
million euros. The German company is also pledging to invest
significantly in upgrades for the airports.

Under the terms of the new bailout accord, which provides 86 billion
euros of new debt to a government already vastly overindebted, the
country must sequester 50 billion euros worth of public assets to sell
off at distressed prices to mostly foreign bidders — with German
companies first in line.

In the end, Tsipras had no choice but to buckle under to the
creditors’ demands if he wanted to fulfill his other pledge of keeping
the country in the euro..

But the plundering that has now begun unmasks the whole euro charade
for what it really is — a war of conquest by money rather than by arms.

Privatization is a standard feature of the neoliberal policy mix
seeking smaller government, less state intervention and more
free-market competition. (Privatization, of course, leads just as
often to crony capitalism, while some services, such as electricity
and trains, are arguably more efficient as government-owned monopolies.)

But privatization in the context of the bailout accord is tantamount
to expropriation, like forcing a bankrupt to sell the family silver in
order to pay off debts.

After piling more and more unsustainable debt onto the Greek
government in two previous bailouts — most of which went back to banks
in France and Germany — the victorious Northern European governments
are now inviting their companies to partake in the spoils.

Fraport, which ironically is majority-owned by state and local
governments in Germany, has cherry-picked among Greece’s network of
regional airports to take over only those that make a profit. It is
happy to leave the 30 other loss-making airports in the hands of a
bankrupt state.

Greek Infrastructure Minister Christos Spirtzis told German television
that this deal to take away the profitable airports and leave the
ailing government with only those requiring subsidies “is more fitting
for a colony than for an EU member state.”

The official memorandum of understanding approved this week
specifically mentions the airport deal and that it must be made with
the buyer already agreed upon, even though the bulk of the
privatizations that Greece must make will be finalized only in March
of next year.

Sven Giegold, a German member of the European Parliament who
represents the environmentalist party, the Greens, called this
isolated provision “bizarre.”

Even with the announcement of the concession by the Greek government,
however, the German company indicated that it might seek better terms
than those previously agreed upon.

This same pattern of taking over profitable assets at depressed prices
will no doubt become evident in the other sales mandated by the agreement.

Other assets to be sold will include the ports of Piraeus and
Thessaloniki and valuable waterfront properties for hotel and casino
development. State-owned electricity and train operations are also
targeted for privatization.

How anyone can view this blatant profiteering as furthering the
process of European integration is a mystery. How any European can
look at this naked German aggression with equanimity is also baffling.

The irrepressible Yanis Varoufakis, unbowed after his resistance to
capitulation ended his brief tenure as finance minister, notes in an
annotated version of the MOU that the Greek government in May had
proposed an alternative path to privatization that would have
leveraged the public assets to promote more investment and growth.

Under that plan, Greece would upgrade the public assets, fully
utilizing aid available from EU sources like the European Investment
Bank, to help drive growth and then privatize them at its own pace at
a much higher price.

Like every other suggestion from the Greek side, this proposal was
dismissed out of hand by the German-

Paul Mason: Greece's mass psychology of revolt will survive the

[nettime's avid reader]

original to:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/04/greeces-mass-psychology-of-revolt-will-survive-the-financial-carpet-bombing


Greece's mass psychology of revolt will survive the financial carpet-bombing
by Paul Mason, July 4, 2015

Sunday’s referendum is taking place against the background of a kind of
financial warfare. If the idea is to terrorise the population, it has only
half worked


When Times correspondent George Steer entered the city of Guernica in
April 1937, what struck him were the incongruities. He noted precisely the
bombing tactics “which may be of interest to students of the new military
science”. But his report begins with a long paragraph describing the
city’s ceremonial oak tree and its role in the Spanish feudal system.

Sitting in Athens this week, I began to understand how Steer felt.
Sunday’s referendum took place under a kind of financial warfare not seen
in the history of modern states. The Greek government was forced to close
its banks after the European Central Bank, whose job is technically to
keep them open, refused to do so. The never-taxed and never-registered
broadcasters of Greece did the rest, spreading panic, and intensifying it
where it had already taken hold.

When the prime minister made an urgent statement live on the state
broadcaster, some rival, private news channels refused to cut to the live
feed. Greek credit cards ceased to work abroad. Some airlines cancelled
all ticketing arrangements with the country. Some employers laid off their
staff. One told them they would be paid only if they turned up at an
anti-government demonstration. Martin Schulz, the socialist president of
the European parliament, called for the far-left government to be replaced
by technocrats. And the Council of Europe declared the referendum
undemocratic.

With ATM cash limited to €60 a day, one shopkeeper described the effect on
her customers: on day one, panic buying; day two, less buying; day three,
terror; day four, frozen. The words you find yourself using in reports,
after looking into the eyes of pensioners and young mothers, make the
parallel with conflict entirely justified: terror, fear, flight, panic,
uncertainty, sleeplessness, anxiety, disorientation.

If the effect was to terrorise the population, it has only half worked.
The pollsters are simply finding what Greek political scientists already
know: society is divided, deeply and psychologically, between left and
right.

The anthropologist David Graeber points out, in his history of debt and
debt forgiveness Debt: The First 5,000 Years, that the transaction carries
the implicit threat of violence. Debt gives you the power of rightful
coercion with all the blame attaching to the victim. But rarely has that
power been used as Europe used it against Greece last week. In the 2013
Cypriot crisis, where the EU enforced the seizure of money in people’s
bank accounts, the government caved in at the first confrontation.

Greece is different. If I were to pick out the equivalent of Guernica’s
symbolic oak tree here, it would be the graffiti. “We didn’t die for love
so why would we die of starvation?” reads one plaintive message.
Throughout the five years of the crisis, Greeks have been using the walls
for mutual public psychotherapy. “I’m being tortured,” reads a popular tag
by a famous graffiti sprayer. “I’m spinning,” reads a parody tag that
rhymes with it, often found close by, reportedly sprayed by the first
guy’s jilted girlfriend.

I’ve often wondered what it would take for the walls to go white again.
But there is no obvious answer. The graffiti, like the sporadic rioting
and casual ultra-leftism among the young, broke out in 2008 during the two
weeks of violence after the killing of 15-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos by
police. That was the modern Greek 1968, and if you measure it against the
original, by now, we should be in the mid-70s, a moment of demobilisation
and defeat. But whatever the outcome of Sunday’s vote, it is hard to see
this mass psychology of revolt and refusal going away. Like the oak tree
at Guernica, it can survive financial carpet-bombing.

What worries me now is whether Europe can survive the act of inflicting
it. Sitting in their ministries, the Greek negotiators were coolly drawing
parallels with the 2005 Dutch and French referendums on Europe, where no
votes led to a change in the European offer and a yes thereafter. But they
had misunderstood. To drive a country to the point where its banks close
and its pharmacies run out of medicine is not done to force a mind change.
The aim was, as Telegraph journalist Ambrose Evans Pritchard wrote, regime
change.

But here lies the central problem. Most of the time, when states deploy
decisive measures against other states they have a plan not just for who
will govern but what the replacement system will be.

Germany’s mistake, in this sense, since 2010, has been its failure to
demand a modernised and productive capitalism. It imposed European debt

Fwd: The Greek position

[nettime's avid reader]

Greece Referendum: Why Tsipras Made the Right Move

http://greece.greekreporter.com/2015/06/28/greece-referendum-why-alexis-tsipras-made-the-right-move/

By Marianna Fotaki, University of Warwick, Jun 28, 2015

Greece will hold a referendum on July 5 on whether the country should
accept the bailout offer of international creditors. The government’s
decision to reject what was on offer and call the referendum is
ultimately an attempt to take charge of its domestic policy and reaffirm
its credibility with voters.

Although Greece is hard strapped for cash this is clearly a political
decision with profound consequences for the future of the European
Union. It is also the right one.

This is not merely useful as a negotiating tactic for obtaining a better
deal with its creditors, as many commentators might suggest. The
coalition of the left, Syriza, had no choice but to oppose further
measures that would lock its economy into a deflationary spiral, the
trappings of which are destroying Greek society.

The Greek position

Elected with the mandate to end the savage austerity policies already
imposed, Syriza could hardly accept the further cuts demanded. These
include cuts in income support for pensioners below the poverty line and
a VAT hike of up to 23% on food staples. Even more onerous was the
demand that Greece should deliver a sustained primary budget surplus of
1% for 2016, gradually increasing to 3.5% in the following years when
its economy has already been contracting for six years.

By most counts the austerity policies imposed by Greece’s creditors in
2010 in exchange for the bailout money (of €240 billion) have been an
abject economic and moral failure. The International Monetary Fund
itself has acknowledged “a notable failure” in managing the terms of the
first Greek bailout, in setting overly optimistic expectations for the
country’s economy and underestimating the effects of the austerity
measures it imposed.

The former IMF negotiator, Reza Moghadam, has acknowledged the fund’s
erroneous projections about Greek growth, inflation, fiscal effort and
social cohesion. The debt is now almost 180% of Greece’s GDP, up from
120% when the bailout program began. And this is mainly due to the fact
that GDP has contracted by 25%, rather than the significantly lower
projections by the IMF. The shrinking of the economy and rising
unemployment levels have exceeded those that hit the US in the financial
crisis of the 1930s.

The human and social costs have been even more staggering in Greece.
Incomes have fallen by an average of 40%, and the unemployment rate
reached 26% in 2014 (and higher than 50% for youth). With hundreds of
thousands of people depending on soup kitchens, and thousands of
suicides in the years 2010-2015, the moral case for debt forgiveness
seems just as strong as the technical one based on economics.
The creditors’ offer

Yet in the terms presented to Greece by their creditors there is no
commitment to reducing Greece’s crippling debt (which all commentators
acknowledge is unrepayable). Nor is there any tangible proposal for
rebuilding the Greek economy.

Germany, France, and the EU, aided by the IMF and ECB, continue to
insist on implementing policies that have so manifestly failed Greece.
They do so to avoid having to justify the massive bailouts of their own
financial systems – shifting the burden from banks to taxpayers – if
Greece fails to make the repayments. The leading EU partners must not be
seen to act leniently towards Greece as this might encourage
anti-austerity parties Spain and elsewhere.
Broken Europe

But the social and political costs of these policies have put the
legitimacy of the entire European integration project in question. By
being locked into austerity policies, Europe is tearing itself apart.

This brings to the fore the faulty institutional framework that has
exacerbated these issues. European integration was conceived by a set of
elites, while many EU citizens have never fully embraced the idea: the
EU tends to be regarded as an economic entity rather than a cultural or
social one. The “ever closer union” remains an aspiration, while EU
institutions patch up compromises between its most powerful members.

The ill-thought and haphazard implementation of the common currency is
perhaps the most costly compromise of all. The Greek government is
therefore right to ask for generous debt relief to allow the economy to
have a fresh start in exchange for reforms that will address the
perennial problems of corruption and inequality that bedevil Greek
society.
The right decision

Greece has many problems – including unfair taxation (64% of taxes are
paid by salaried employees and pensioners), corrupt elites who have
governed the country for at least four decades with fellow European
governments repeatedly turning a blind eye to their flouting of rules,
and the oligarch-owned media which are neither independent nor free. But
accepting the bailout would only feed into the syst

EFF: Internet.org Is Not Neutral, Not Secure, and Not the Internet

[nettime's avid reader]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/05/internetorg-not-neutral-not-secure-and-not-internet


Facebook's Internet.org project, which offers people from developing
countries free mobile access to selected websites, has been pitched as
a philanthropic initiative to connect two thirds of the world who
don’t yet have Internet access. We completely agree that the global
digital divide should be closed. However, we question whether this is
the right way to do it. As we and others have noted, there's a real
risk that the few websites that Facebook and its partners select for
Internet.org (including, of course, Facebook itself) could end up
becoming a ghetto for poor users instead of a stepping stone to the
larger Internet.

Mark Zuckerberg's announcement of the expansion of the Internet.org
platform earlier this month was aimed to address some of these
criticisms. In a nutshell, the changes would allow any website
operator to submit their site for inclusion in Internet.org, provided
that it meets the program's guidelines. Those guidelines are neutral
as to the subject matter of the site, but do impose certain technical
limitations intended to ensure that sites do not overly burden the
carrier's network, and that they will work on both inexpensive feature
phones and modern smartphones.

Compliance with the guidelines will be reviewed by the Internet.org
team, which may then make the site available for Internet.org users to
access for free, by routing the communication through the Internet.org
proxy server. That proxy server allows the sites to be “zero rated” by
participating mobile phone operators; allows the automatic stripping
out of content that violates the guidelines—such as images greater
than 1Mb in size, videos, VoIP calls, Flash and Java applets and even
JavaScript; and inserts an interstitial warning if a user attempts to
leave Internet.org's zero-rated portion of the Internet, so as to
prevent users from accidentally being billed for data charges they may
not be able to afford and didn't mean to incur.

We agree that some Internet access is better than none, and if that is
what Internet.org actually provided—for example, through a uniformly
rate-limited or data-capped free service—then it would have our full
support. But it doesn't. Instead, it continues to impose conditions
and restraints that not only make it something less than a true
Internet service, but also endanger people's privacy and security.

That's because the technical structure of Internet.org prevents some
users from accessing services over encrypted HTTPS connections. As we
mentioned above, a critical component of Internet.org is its proxy
server, which traffic must pass through for the zero-rating and the
interstitial warning to work correctly. Some devices, like Android
phones running Internet.org's app, have the technical ability to make
encrypted HTTPS connections through the proxy server without becoming
vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks or exposing any data (beyond
the domain being requested) to Facebook. Internet.org's Android app
can also automatically bring up the interstitial warning directly on
the phone by using the app to analyze links (as opposed to Facebook
serving the warning via its proxy server).

But most inexpensive feature phones that can't run an Android app
don't support phone-based warnings or this sort of proxying of HTTPS
connections. For these phones, traffic must pass through
Internet.org's proxy unencrypted, which means that any information
users send or receive from Internet.org's services could be read by
local police or national intelligence agencies and expose its users to
harm. While Facebook is working to solve this problem, it's extremely
difficult from a technical perspective, with no obvious solution.

Even if Facebook were able to figure out a way to support HTTPS
proxying on feature phones, its position as Internet gatekeepers
remains more broadly troublesome. By setting themselves up as
gatekeepers for free access to (portions of) the global Internet,
Facebook and its partners have issued an open invitation for
governments and special interest groups to lobby, cajole or threaten
them to withhold particular content from their service. In other
words, Internet.org would be much easier to censor than a true global
Internet.

While we applaud Facebook's efforts to encourage more websites to
provide support for low-end feature phones by stripping out “heavy”
content, we would like to see Internet.org try harder to achieve its
very worthy objective of connecting the remaining two thirds of the
world to the Internet. We have confidence that it would be possible to
provide a limited free Internet access service that is secure, and
that doesn't rely on Facebook and its partners to maintain a central
list of approved sites. Until then, Internet.org will not be living up
to its promise, or its name.




#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net 

The hope of the democratic monster, between Syriza and Podemos

[nettime's avid reader]

The hope of the democratic monster, between Syriza and Podemos
Antonio Negri / Raúl Sánchez Cedillo
Translated from Spanish by Kelly Mulvaney

http://transversal.at/blog/The-hope-of-the-democratic-m

“A spectre is haunting Europe”. The Italian newspaper Il Manifesto
used this headline a few days ago for its homepage, commenting on the
visits of Tsipras and Varoufakis to European governments. A real
nightmare for the ordoliberal Germans, a Geisterfahrer, to be precise,
a suicidal conductor looking to collide with the European bus, as Der
Spiegel described on its front page. Imagine what could happen with
the victory of Podemos in Spain: what a magnificent spectre would then
be seen lurking about, a real monster created by the exploited and the
productive forces of the fourth European economy! In just a few weeks,
election rounds will begin in Spain, and the mantra of the European
governments will be repeated, with double the force, in an attempt to
frighten Spanish citizens. Let us prepare ourselves. With the
certainty that the arrogance of the bad omens of this propaganda will
be defeated. But in the meantime, let us prepare ourselves: What could
Podemos say about Europe?

Conscious of the temporal and political acceleration that the victory
of Syriza has imposed, the discourse of Podemos on Europe is, on the
one hand, informed by a sincere solidarity and high regard for the
victory of the democrats in Greece, while it consists, on the other
hand, in prudent judgment – Tsipras’ line could fail in the brief
interval that separates it from the Spanish elections. But prudency is
not the same as ambiguity. Indeed, it is obvious that nothing would be
more dangerous than an ambiguous position, not only with respect to
the negotiation that has been started between Greece and Europe, but
above all with respect to the policies promoted until now by the
Europe of the Troika.  Any ambiguity on this point must be eliminated
– and so it has been in practice, if we are to judge based on what we
have seen in recent months: two Europes exist and it is necessary to
position oneself in one or the other. The knowing population is aware
that to win in Europe is possible only in light of a front already
opened by Syriza that now has to expand in Europe. The politics of
debt, issues related to sovereignty and the Atlantic question can only
be considered in the European space.

It was expected that there would be great attentiveness – and so we
begin to test it – to the tactical proposals and the politics of the
economic-financial team of Syriza. Irrespective of value judgments
about the proposals, they signaled a plan for transnational
cooperation and an abandonment of the anti-European demagoguery of the
“old” leftists, a demagoguery that, in any case, has never been strong
in Podemos. Of course, Syriza’s bet is formulated in terms of
defending national sovereignty (“against the Troika”, “against
Merkel”, etc.), but in practice it implies a fairly evident acceptance
of a political intervention within and against the Union as it is
currently directed. In this sense, the primary option now is that of a
coalition of the PIIGS and the forces of a new left to overturn the
status quo of the Union. At the same time, this appears to be the only
option available to Podemos for winning the elections.

Let us try to consider things in more depth. Until now the
confrontation in Europe has taken shape between a neo-Bismarckian
Europe, neoliberal and fundamentally conservative, and a democratic
Europe, constituent and fundamentally attentive to the needs of
workers, impoverished middle classes and precarious or unemployed
youth, women, immigrants and refugees – the excluded, old and new. An
alternative so to speak, because departing from the crisis of 2008,
the Bismarckian Europe imposed itself forcefully, leaving for the
other Europe a marginal space, of protest and at times even cries of
despair. Nevertheless, when the situation appeared to remain strictly
closed for the claims of justice and the revolts against misery, the
alternative presented itself – starting in Greece. Now the task is to
affirm it and organize it precisely in the areas where a reactionary
initiative has imposed itself – where the attempt has been made to
drown Hercules from popular rescue.

The first question, the first difficulty, is that of debt. The Europe
of the Troika wants to make the European multitudes pay the debt, and
the ability to pay this debt becomes the yardstick of democracy and
the degree of Europeanism. But all those who are moving in a
democratic front think, on the contrary, that this yardstick is
insulting because the debts charged to the people today were in fact
incurred by those who governed over the years. These debts have
fattened the ruling classes, not only through corruption, tax evasion
or fiscal favors, insane arms expenditures and industrial policies
that do not benefit labor, but moreover by subjecting it to the logic
of financial re

The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of th

[nettime's avid reader]

January/February 2015

The Death of the Artist -- and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur
Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional -- the
image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if
the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it?

William Deresiewicz Dec 28 2014

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepreneur/383497

Pronounce the word artist, to conjure up the image of a solitary
genius. A sacred aura still attaches to the word, a sense of one in
contact with the numinous. "He's an artist," we'll say in tones of
reverence about an actor or musician or director. "A true artist,"
we'll solemnly proclaim our favorite singer or photographer, meaning
someone who appears to dwell upon a higher plane. Vision, inspiration,
mysterious gifts as from above: such are some of the associations that
continue to adorn the word.

Yet the notion of the artist as a solitary genius -- so potent a cultural
force, so determinative, still, of the way we think of creativity in
general -- is decades out of date. So out of date, in fact, that the
model that replaced it is itself already out of date. A new paradigm
is emerging, and has been since about the turn of the millennium, one
that's in the process of reshaping what artists are: how they work,
train, trade, collaborate, think of themselves and are thought of -- even
what art is -- just as the solitary-genius model did two centuries ago.
The new paradigm may finally destroy the very notion of "art" as
such -- that sacred spiritual substance -- which the older one created.

Before we thought of artists as geniuses, we thought of them as
artisans. The words, by no coincidence, are virtually the same. Art
itself derives from a root that means to "join" or "fit together" -- that
is, to make or craft, a sense that survives in phrases like the art of
cooking and words like artful, in the sense of "crafty." We may think
of Bach as a genius, but he thought of himself as an artisan, a maker.
Shakespeare wasn't an artist, he was a poet, a denotation that is
rooted in another word for make. He was also a playwright, a term
worth pausing over. A playwright isn't someone who writes plays; he is
someone who fashions them, like a wheelwright or shipwright.

A whole constellation of ideas and practices accompanied this
conception. Artists served apprenticeships, like other craftsmen, to
learn the customary methods (hence the attributions one sees in
museums: "workshop of Bellini" or "studio of Rembrandt"). Creativity
was prized, but credibility and value derived, above all, from
tradition. In a world still governed by a fairly rigid social
structure, artists were grouped with the other artisans, somewhere in
the middle or lower middle, below the merchants, let alone the
aristocracy. Individual practitioners could come to be esteemed -- think
of the Dutch masters -- but they were, precisely, masters, as in master
craftsmen. The distinction between art and craft, in short, was weak
at best. Indeed, the very concept of art as it was later understood -- of
Art -- did not exist.

All of this began to change in the late 18th and early 19th centuries,
the period associated with Romanticism: the age of Rousseau, Goethe,
Blake, and Beethoven, the age that taught itself to value not only
individualism and originality but also rebellion and youth. Now it was
desirable and even glamorous to break the rules and overthrow
tradition -- to reject society and blaze your own path. The age of
revolution, it was also the age of secularization. As traditional
belief became discredited, at least among the educated class, the arts
emerged as the basis of a new creed, the place where people turned to
put themselves in touch with higher truths.

Art rose to its zenith of spiritual prestige, and the artist rose
along with it. The artisan became the genius: solitary, like a holy
man; inspired, like a prophet; in touch with the unseen, his
consciousness bulging into the future. "The priest departs," said
Whitman, "the divine literatus comes." Art disentangled itself from
craft; the term fine arts, "those which appeal to the mind and the
imagination," was first recorded in 1767.

"Art" became a unitary concept, incorporating music, theater, and
literature as well as the visual arts, but also, in a sense, distinct
from each, a kind of higher essence available for philosophical
speculation and cultural veneration. "Art for art's sake," the
aestheticist slogan, dates from the early 19th century. So does
Gesamtkunstwerk, the dream or ideal, so precious to Wagner, of the
"total work of art." By the modernist moment, a century later, the age
of Picasso, Joyce, and Stravinsky, the artist stood at the pinnacle of
status, too, a cultural aristocrat with whom the old aristocrats -- or at
any rate the most advanced among them -- wanted nothing more than to
associate.

It is hardly any w

McKenzie Wark: "This is not capitalism, this is something worse."

[nettime's avid reader]

The following transcript is taken from a recent talk delivered
by McKenzie Wark at the Digital Labor (http://digitallabor.org/)
conference presented by The New School.


I want to start with the proposition that in a place like New York
City, we live in the over-developed world. Somehow we overshot some
point of transformation. A transformation that didn’t happen,
perhaps couldn’t happen. But in having failed to take that exit, we
end up in some state of over-development. In the over-developed world,
the commodity economy is feeding on itself, cannibalizing itself.

There is of course an under-developed world, sometimes in intimate
proximity to the over-developed one. You can find it even here in New
York City. One can critique the orientalism of the fact that Willets
Point, Queens is known among New Yorkers as ‘little Calcutta’,
but it really is a place without paved roads, running water, and with
mostly off the books, illegal or precarious jobs.

But you can forget that under-developed world exists if you live in
the bubble of the over-developed world. Some of us don’t have to do
the manual version of precarious labor, at least. But there is a sense
in which some characteristics of that labor have actually found their
way into the over-developed world as well.

Viewed from inside the bubble of New York, the paradox of digital
labor these days is the way that tech enables the over-development
of under-development. Technologies are shaped by the struggle over
their form. It was not given from an essence that the digital would
end up as control over labor rather than control by labor. But in the
current stage of conflict and negotiation, the over-development of
under-development seems to me to describe a tendency for labor.

In any case, labor isn’t the only class struggling in and against
the digital. I still think there is a difference between being a
worker and being a hacker. I think of hacker as a class category:
there is a hacker class. Hackers are those whose efforts are
commodifed in the form of intellectual property. What they make can be
turned into copyrights, patents or trademarks.

The hacker class is distinguished by a few qualities. It usually means
working with information, but not in a routine way. It is different
from white-collar labor. It is about producing new arrangements of
information rather than ‘filling in the forms.’

As such, it can be a bit hard to make routine. New things just
don’t appear on time. Not if they are really new. There’s a
kind of ‘innovation’ that is actually quite close to routine,
and the hacker class does that too. It’s the new ad campaign,
the new wrinkle on the old technical process, the new song or app
or screenplay. But the big qualitative leaps are much harder to
subordinate to the reified, routinized forms of labor.

The ruling class of our time, what I call the vectoral class, needs
both these kinds of hack. The vectoral class needs the almost-routine
innovation. The existing commodity cycles demand it. As our attention
fades and boredom looms, there has to be some just slightly new
iteration of the old properties: some new show, new app, new drug, new
device.

What is interesting at the moment are the strategies being deployed to
spread the cost and lower the risk of this routine innovation. This is
what I think start-up culture is all about. It spreads and privatizes
the risk while providing privileged access to innovation that is
starting to prove its value to the vectoral class, whose ‘business
model’ is to own, control, flip, litigate, and – if absolutely
necessary – even build out new kinds of intellectual property.

The other kind of hack, the really transformative ones, are another
matter. To some extent the vectoral class does not really want these,
no matter what the ruling ideology says about disruption. Having your
life disrupted is for little people. The vectoral class doesn’t
like surprises. Its goal is to come as close enough to a monopoly in
something to extract rent from it.

The kind of mode of production we appear to be entering is one that
I don’t think is quite capitalism as classically described. This
is not capitalism, this is something worse. I see the vectoral
class as the emerging ruling class of our time, whose power rests
on attempting to command the whole production process by owning and
controlling information. In the over-developed world, an information
infrastructure, a kind of third nature, now commands the old
manufacturing and distribution infrastructure, or second nature, which
in turn commands the resources of this planet, which is how nature now
appears to us.

The command strategies of the vectoral class rely on the accumulation
of stocks, flows and vectors of information. The vectoral class turns
information as raw material into property, and as property into
asymmetry, inequality and control. It extracts a rent from privatized
information, held as monopoly, while minimizing or displacing risk.

One strategy is 

Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society

[nettime's avid reader]

Who Should Own the Internet?
Julian Assange on Living in a Surveillance Society

By JULIAN ASSANGE
DEC. 4, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/04/opinion/julian-assange-on-living-in-a-surveillance-society.html


It is now a journalistic cliché to remark that George Orwell’s “1984”
was “prophetic.” The novel was so prophetic that its prophecies have
become modern-day prosaisms. Reading it now is a tedious experience.
Against the omniscient marvels of today’s surveillance state, Big
Brother’s fixtures — the watchful televisions and hidden microphones —
seem quaint, even reassuring.

Everything about the world Orwell envisioned has become so obvious that
one keeps running up against the novel’s narrative shortcomings.

I am more impressed with another of his oracles: the 1945 essay “You and
the Atomic Bomb,” in which Orwell more or less anticipates the
geopolitical shape of the world for the next half-century. “Ages in
which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make,” he
explains, “will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant
weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance ... A
complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so
long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”

Describing the atomic bomb (which had only two months before been used
to flatten Hiroshima and Nagasaki) as an “inherently tyrannical weapon,”
he predicts that it will concentrate power in the hands of the “two or
three monstrous super-states” that have the advanced industrial and
research bases necessary to produce it. Suppose, he asks, “that the
surviving great nations make a tacit agreement never to use the atomic
bomb against one another? Suppose they only use it, or the threat of it,
against people who are unable to retaliate?”

The likely result, he concludes, will be “an epoch as horribly stable as
the slave empires of antiquity.” Inventing the term, he predicts “a
permanent state of ‘cold war,"’ a “peace that is no peace,” in which
“the outlook for subject peoples and oppressed classes is still more
hopeless.”

There are parallels between Orwell’s time and ours. For one, there has
been a lot of talk about the importance of “protecting privacy” in
recent months, but little about why it is important. It is not, as we
are asked to believe, that privacy is inherently valuable. It is not.

The real reason lies in the calculus of power: the destruction of
privacy widens the existing power imbalance between the ruling factions
and everyone else, leaving “the outlook for subject peoples and
oppressed classes,” as Orwell wrote, “still more hopeless.”

The second parallel is even more serious, and even less well understood.
At present even those leading the charge against the surveillance state
continue to treat the issue as if it were a political scandal that can
be blamed on the corrupt policies of a few bad men who must be held
accountable. It is widely hoped that all our societies need to do to fix
our problems is to pass a few laws.

The cancer is much deeper than this. We live not only in a surveillance
state, but in a surveillance society. Totalitarian surveillance is not
only embodied in our governments; it is embedded in our economy, in our
mundane uses of technology and in our everyday interactions.

The very concept of the Internet — a single, global, homogenous network
that enmeshes the world — is the essence of a surveillance state. The
Internet was built in a surveillance-friendly way because governments
and serious players in the commercial Internet wanted it that way. There
were alternatives at every step of the way. They were ignored.

At their core, companies like Google and Facebook are in the same
business as the U.S. government’s National Security Agency. They collect
a vast amount of information about people, store it, integrate it and
use it to predict individual and group behavior, which they then sell to
advertisers and others. This similarity made them natural partners for
the NSA, and that’s why they were approached to be part of PRISM, the
secret Internet surveillance program.

Unlike intelligence agencies, which eavesdrop on international
telecommunications lines, the commercial surveillance complex lures
billions of human beings with the promise of “free services.” Their
business model is the industrial destruction of privacy. And yet even
the more strident critics of NSA surveillance do not appear to be
calling for an end to Google and Facebook.


Recalling Orwell’s remarks, there is an undeniable “tyrannical” side to
the Internet. But the Internet is too complex to be unequivocally
categorized as a “tyrannical” or a “democratic” phenomenon.

When people first gathered in cities, they were able to coordinate in
large groups for the first time, and to exchange ideas quickly, at
scale. The consequent technical and technological advances brought about
the dawn of human civilization.

Something similar has been happening in our epoch. It

Corey Pein: Amway Journalism

[nettime's avid reader]

 < http://www.thebaffler.com/blog/amway-journalism/ >

Amway Journalism

Corey Pein July 28, 2014

Like uninsured New Agers afflicted by terminal illness,
journalists facing the collapse of their industry are turning in
desperation to faith healers, quacks, and hucksters of all sorts.

The new media charlatans' latest cure-all is a toxic concoction
of marketing-seminar bluff and hypnotic technobabble. They call
it "entrepreneurial journalism." They're even selling it on
college campuses now. According to the label, this new blend is
an invigorating panacea for a distressed profession. All claims
remain unverified.

At a basic level, entrepreneurial journalism means going
freelance and devoting countless hours to Twitter in order to
promote your Personal Brand[TM]. At its most ambitious, it means
leveraging a foundation grant or a venture capital seed round
into perpetual paid speaking invitations and, with luck, entree
into the exclusive grifterhood of future-of-media experts.

As with all good cons, this one begins with a dose of common
sense. When established institutions fail, as old-fashioned
newspapers and broadcasters have, it's smart to seek out new
ideas. At their most engaging, leading journopreneurs can summon
the do-it-yourself spirit of punk rock, spreading dreams of a
bold digital future across the bleak post-industrial milieu.

They tell aging, ulcerous newspaper reporters, "Don't sit around
waiting for the pink slip! Strike out on your own, like Kara
Swisher and Walt Mossberg. It's your turn to shine!"

They tell indebted, future-fearing students, "Don't wait for some
crusty Boomer editor to give you permission to try out your crazy
idea; Just build it, baby! Ezra Klein did it, and so can you!"

Having launched a few unprofitable websites of my own, I
certainly understand the appeal of the journopreneurial message.
Hard times beget constant hustle. Since no one currently employed
in media can be sure what their next job will be, everybody's
working another angle, a side project, a PR gig.

But the most influential journopreneurs take this ethos to
irrational extremes and, worse, actually exude disdain for
traditional reporters and their craft. Their views, not
coincidentally, echo the familiar gripes of many an unscrupulous
news publisher.

Journalists, writes James Breiner of the News Entrepreneurs blog, 
"tend to view ourselves as high priests of an exclusive
profession and bearers of a special ethical standard that few
others can live up to."

He goes on:

 That [puritanical attitude] is at least part of the reason we
 have trouble in the new world of entrepreneurial journalism,
 where journalists start and run their own news operations. If we
 want to go out on our own, we have to recognize for the first
 time that journalism is a business [...]

 Profit is not a dirty word

Of course it is. A "special ethical standard" is not something to
be poo-poohed. It is actually the only thing that distinguishes
journalism from advertising. Businesses thrive by becoming
popular. Journalists piss people off every day in order to sleep
well at night  --  they are (or should be) engaged in an
unpopularity contest. Businesses win by exploiting conflicts of
interest. Journalists win by exposing them.  To pretend otherwise
is just so much exculpation and self-delusion.

A little self-delusion may be necessary for the brave new world
of bootstrapped media. According to Harvard Business School, the
failure rate for tech startups is as high as 95 percent. Funny
how they don't mention that in the brochures.

The grand poobah of the journopreneurship society is "hyperglocal
thinkfluencer" Jeff Jarvis, who in the mid-aughts parlayed his
popular, Iraq war-boosting blog into a professorship at the City
University of New York graduate school of journalism.

Jarvis's entrepreneurial journalism course there was launched in
2009 and later expanded to a full MA and mid-career certificate
program, with prestigious foundation backing via the Tow-Knight
Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, which Jarvis directs. The
course was pioneering indeed.  According to CUNY, more than
twenty-six universities, most in the United States, now offer
similar programs.

Some of that growth can be explained by the seasonal changes in
academic fashions (and the tantalizing whiff of philanthropic
catnip). There is however another, corrosive element to the
trend. Entrepreneurial journalism is more than a practicum, it is
an ideology. This ideology scorns old shibboleths like "afflict
the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." It can be unnervingly
flippant on matters of ethics.

"We've corrupted journalism with capitalism," Jarvis tweeted 
from an entrepreneurial journalism summit in early July at CUNY.
At the same summit, he bragged to attendees that his students
"come in communists and leave capitalists."

Surely Jarvis flatters himself. How many card-carrying pinkos
have committed to a four-semester co

Speech at Franco Berardi's PhD Defence in Helsinki

[nettime's avid reader]

Speech at Franco Berardi’s PhD Defence in Helsinki

October 24, 2014
http://networkcultures.org/geert/2014/10/24/speech-at-franco-berardis-phd-defence-in-helsinki/

(It has been a special honour and a pleasure for me to act as opponent
for Franco Berardi’s PhD defence at Aalto University, School of
Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki on October 23, 2014. You can
read more about the event on the Future Art Base website [1]. A video
of the two hour ceremony, which included an introduction to the thesis
by Franco Berardi, me reading the text below and a debate between the
two of us will become available in a little while. Semiotext(e) will
publish a version of the thesis by the end of 2015. /geert)

[1] http://www.futureartbase.org/2014/10/16/the-bifo-effect/

By Geert Lovink

Being a decade younger, I heard for the first time from him and
his activities around 1980, when stories about Radio Alice were
spreading throughout Europe. True, the Amsterdam free radio scene,
operating out of the squatters movement of the time, had a multitude
of (local) roots but Radio Alice was certainly one of them. The
Bologna uprising of 1977, in which Bifo played a crucial role,
predated our most tumultuous year, 1980, and was thus a an important
source of inspiration for the revolts in Amsterdam, Zurich and Berlin.
What we shared was our common desire to find out what ‘autonomy’
could look like in different parts of Western Europe which lacked any
trace of its own ‘operaist’ workers movement.

Part punk and new wave, part rainbow coalition (feminism, anti-nuclear
eco protests, anti-racism), part post-industrial turning techno, the
sense of ‘no future’ in this late Cold War period was widely
spread. The march into the institutions was over and doors were
closing. Even the Situationists had closed shop. Being aware that
well-meaning alternative proposals were no longer effective, we set
up temporary encampments for anger & beauty. In these dark times of
mass youth unemployment, the common language was one of refusal. After
the lived utopia of the late 1960s with its failed experiments, my
generation grew up in the shadow of armed struggles of others. Slowly
but steadily we said goodbye to solidarity with the post-colonial
national projects. After our own movements started to disintegrate,
even our own militants went on a self-marginalising path (however,
without taking other with them in their misery). By the second part of
the eighties we were on our own, in a harsh neo-liberal technological
world that inevitably forced the Media Question and the Globalization
Question upon us. The ‘slow cancellation of the future’ (as Mark
Fisher calls it in Ghosts of my Life) happened under our very eyes,
leaving head space to dream how computer-aided social networking
should look like.

I cannot but think strategically, in a political sense, about
Berardi’s timely mapping exercise that he performed here. Every
insight breathes the sense of intense debate and collective
consideration, set in 1975, 1996, 2011, 2020 and beyond. Suffice to
say, this PhD thesis has neither become a hermetic Hegelian Magnus
Opus, nor a boring academic residue of an author’s wild years.
Quoted sources are treated like equals. There are zero traces of
a plagued genius or arrogant theory celebrity that suffers from
melancholy. The tone remains urgent. We may or may not be depressed,
but at least we’ve made the quantum jump to start studying
depression. This is not become we indulge in our collective defeat,
but we want to unlock the general sensibility. Let’s make our
vulnerability unmanageable.

As you all might know, I do not belong to the Church of Deleuze with
its evangelical positivism, but I am fine to say that Berardi’s
thesis is, again, an Exercise in Becoming. This doesn’t mean that
the work remained unfinished. Structure, purpose and method are all
clearly defined. As an experienced thinker, working in the essay
tradition, Berardi has taken the risk to start all over again. He has
neither written a genealogy of the time-stricken present. Nor did he
walk into the trap to start 5000 years ago. His starting point lies
somewhere in the stagnation yet conflict-rich decade of the 1970s and
ends with a warning of a “neuro-totalitarism in the making.”

In his doctoral thesis Berardi maps mental and cognitive mutations in
Western society that have occurred since the 1960s in the field of
aesthetic and emotional sensitivity. This has, for instance, happened
in terms of a transition from the alphabetical and the mechanical
to the digital notation systems in the networked media sphere, the
area of my expertise. This transition is not merely one that can
be measured in terms of speed or cost efficiency. There is more to
this than just an increase of convenience, speed and accessibility.
In Berardi’s view we need to go beyond rights, beyond access and
comfort to understand the psychic impact of the actual information
flows that reach our synapses. The premise here

MI5 spied on leading British historians for decades

[nettime's avid reader]

MI5 spied on leading British historians for decades, secret files
reveal Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill had phones tapped,
correspondence intercepted and friends and wives monitored

Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Friday 24 October 2014

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/24/mi5-spied-historians-eric
-hobsbawm-christopher-hill-secret-files


MI5 amassed hundreds of records on Eric Hobsbawm and Christopher Hill,
two of Britain’s leading historians who were both once members of
the Communist party, secret files have revealed.

The scholars were subjected to persistent surveillance for decades
as MI5 and police special branch officers tapped and recorded their
telephone calls, intercepted their private correspondence and
monitored their contacts, the files show. Some of the surveillance
gave MI5 more details about their targets’ personal lives than any
threat to national security.

The files, released at the National Archives on Friday, reveal the
extent to which MI5, including its most senior officers, secretly
kept tabs on the personal and professional activities of communists
and suspected communists, a task it began before the cold war. The
papers also show that MI5 opened personal files on the popular
Oxford historian AJP Taylor, the writer Iris Murdoch, and the
moral philosopher Mary Warnock after they and Hill signed a letter
supporting a march against the nuclear bomb in 1959.


Lady Warnock told the Guardian on Thursday night: “I’d love to
see the file, or anybody’s file come to that, to see what was/is
regarded as suspicious … I am completely taken aback and even
faintly flattered.”

Hobsbawm, who was refused access to his files when he asked to see
them five years ago, died in 2012, and Hill died in 2009. Many
passages, sometimes whole pages, of their files remain redacted and
an entire file on Hobsbawm has been “temporarily retained”. The
files include long lists of names and addresses of letters written by
Hobsbawm and Hill.

They make clear that MI5 frequently read – or was sent – copies
of as many as 10 letters a day. At the same time, its officers, or
special branch officers, or their informants – one of whom was given
the codename Ratcatcher – were secretly taking notes of their phone
calls and meetings.

The files show that Hobsbawm, who became one of Britain’s most
respected historians and was made a Companion of Honour by Tony Blair,
first came to the notice of MI5 in 1942 when he and 38 colleagues
were described as being “obvious members of the CPGB [the Communist
party of Great Britain] on Merseyside”. He became number 211,764
on MI5’s index of personal files. Although he was cleared of
“suspicion of engaging in subversive activities or propaganda in the
army”, MI5 noted it was doubtful that he would be suitable for the
Intelligence Corps. Roger Hollis, later head of MI5, and Valentine
Vivian, the deputy chief of MI6, prevented him from joining the
Foreign Office’s political intelligence department.

At the end of the war, in July 1945, an MI5 officer noted: “As he is
known to be in contact with communists I should be interested to see
all his personal correspondence”.

MI5 said the object of keeping checks on Hobsbawm was “to establish
the identities of his contacts and to unearth overt or covert
intellectual Communists who may be unknown to us”. Similarly, Hill
was kept under surveillance, the files note, to establish “the
identity of his contacts at the University [of Oxford] and in the
cultural field generally, and to obtain the names of intellectuals
sympathetic to the [Communist] party who may not already be known to
us”.


Telephone intercepts disclosed that Hobsbawm and his family were
friendly with Alan Nunn May – a British physicist who had confessed
to spying for Russia and was released from jail in 1952 – and on one
occasion put him up for the night. There is no evidence in the files
of any attempt by either Hobsbawm or Hill to spy for Moscow or that
the Russians were interested in them for any such purpose.

One early file on Hobsbawm describes his uncle Harry, with whom he
sometimes stayed, as “sneering, half Jew in appearance, having a
long nose”.

The surveillance intruded into the targets’ relationships. Hobsbawm
is recorded in 1952 as having “difficulties with his [first] wife,
who,” an MI5 officer noted, “does not consider him to be a fervent
enough Communist”.

A report in 1950 revealed how Hill’s first wife, Inez, was becoming
“sick to death” of his Communist party affiliation, which she had
previously shared. “There seems to be some reason to believe that
she is not only fed up with her husband’s politics but also with
her husband’s political activities, especially as his political
sympathies lead him, according to her, to give a considerable amount
of his money to the party,” the report stated. A subsequent report
revealed she was having an affair with another Communist party
official.

Hobsbawm never left the Communist party but the MI

Networking can make you feel 'dirty'

[nettime's avid reader]

Networking can make some feel 'dirty,' says new study

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-09/uotr-ncm091014.php


Toronto – If schmoozing for work leaves you with a certain "ick" factor,
that's not just awkwardness you're feeling.

Professional networking can create feelings of moral impurity and
physical dirtiness, shows a new study.

That can hold people back from networking more, reducing career
opportunities and lowering job performance, says study co-author Tiziana
Casciaro, an associate professor of organizational behaviour and human
resource management at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of
Management. The study was co-written with fellow researchers Prof.
Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and Prof. Maryam Kouchaki at
Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

In professional networking, "people feel that they cannot justify their
actions to themselves, and the lack of justification comes from the
difficulty people have in framing some forms of networking as motivated
by a concern for other people versus a selfish concern," says Prof.
Casciaro, who teaches organizational behaviour at Rotman and researches
networks and organizations.

Despite the importance of networking in the business world, there has
been little study of its psychological impacts. The findings in this
study are based on several laboratory experiments, in addition to a
study of lawyers at a large North American legal firm.

Significantly, people who had more power in the office were less likely
to report feeling dirty when it came to networking, and engaged in it
more often. That effect can make it harder to penetrate existing power
structures, because it means those already in power are more comfortable
with networking and continue to reinforce and advance their positions.
By contrast, those with less power feel more tainted by networking --
even though they need it the most –and may have a harder time advancing
themselves or improving their job performance.

Those negative feelings can be overcome when people start to see
networking as being about more than just themselves, such as an
opportunity to develop the networker's knowledge of their industry, with
the benefit being passed on to whomever they work with, points out Prof.
Casciaro.

Networking can also start to feel more like a two-way street when people
see themselves as having something to offer, even if they're still an
outsider or junior in the business. "Don't underestimate what you can
give," says Prof. Casciaro.

The study is forthcoming in Administrative Science Quarterly.




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Re: Copyright Is Over – If You Want It

[nettime's avid reader]

Pirate Bay Traffic Doubles Despite ISP Blockades
July 17, 2014

https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-traffic-doubles-despite-isp-blockades-140717/

In recent years the entertainment industries have pushed hard to get
The Pirate Bay blocked in various countries. Despite these efforts the
notorious torrent site has managed to double its visitors. The United
States remains the most popular traffic source while roughly 9% of all
users access the site through a proxy.

The Pirate Bay is without doubt one of the most censored websites on
the Internet.

Courts all around the world have ordered Internet providers to block
subscriber access to the torrent site and this list continues to
expand.

Denmark was one of the first countries to block The Pirate Bay, but
the biggest impact came in 2012 when major ISPs in the UK and the
Netherlands were ordered to deny their users access to the site.

The entertainment industries have characterized these blockades as a
major victory and claim they’re an efficient tool to deter piracy. The
question that has thus far remained unanswered, however, is how Pirate
Bay’s traffic numbers are being affected. Is the site on the verge of
collapsing?

As it turns out, The Pirate Bay hasn’t stopped growing at all. On the
contrary, The Pirate Bay informs TorrentFreak that visitor numbers
have doubled since 2011.

The graph below shows the growth in unique visitors and pageviews over
the past three years. The Pirate Bay chose not to share actual visitor
numbers, but monthly pageviews are believed to run into the hundreds
of millions.

These numbers reveal that the torrent site is still doing quite well,
but that doesn’t mean that the blockades are not working. After all,
the additional traffic could simply come from other countries.

A better indication for the effectiveness of the blockades are the
number of visitors that access the site through proxies. The Pirate
Bay told TorrentFreak that roughly 9% of all visitors use proxies.
This percentage doesn’t include sites that cache pages.

In other words, a significant percentage of users who don’t have
direct access to the site are bypassing court-ordered blockades though
proxies.

Interestingly, the United States is by far the biggest traffic source
for the notorious torrent site. This is somewhat ironic, as American
record labels and movie studios are the driving force behind the
blockades in other countries.

All in all it is safe to conclude that censorship is not the silver
bullet to stop The Pirate Bay. While it certainly has some impact,
there are still millions of people who simply route around the
blockades and continue downloading as usual.








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Copyright Is Over – If You Want It

[nettime's avid reader]

By Kenneth Goldsmith, New York | July 15, 2014

http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/legal-and-management/6157548/copyright-is-over-if-you-want-it-guest-post

Christian Marclay's massively popular artwork "The Clock" is comprised
of thousands of preexisting film clips strung together into a 24-hour
minute-by-minute cycle. It's been widely celebrated, attended by
crowds around the globe. Critical praise has been heaped upon it: The
New York Times hailed the piece as the ultimate work of appropriation
art, and it dovetails with memes like supercuts [1] ("fast-paced
montages of short video clips that obsessively isolate a single
element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliché from film
and TV"). So far, so good: a massively popular work constructed
in the style of broad-based web trends, which is also acclaimed,
valorized, funded, exhibited, and collected by the most powerful art
world institutions. And yet, the elephant in the room is copyright:
few have mentioned that Marclay hasn't cleared any permissions with
Hollywood for his work. "Technically it's illegal,” Marclay said in
The Economist, “but most would consider it fair use.”

The Clock is an expensive, limited edition work of art — one sold in
2011 for nearly a half a million dollars; in 2012, he made six more
copies available to institutions — born of free-culture frisson.

He's breaking copyright and nobody — not the art collectors, nor the
museumgoers, nor the MPAA — seems to care.

In an interview with The New Yorker [2], Marclay explained his idea
of copyright: "If you make something good and interesting and not
ridiculing someone or being offensive, the creators of the original
material will like it." It's something he's stood by for the past
three decades as he's woven a career out of sampling, appropriation,
and remixing. In spite of Marclay's success, he hasn't given up on
free culture. On any given night for a few bucks, you can hear Marclay
perform improvised turntable music with the likes of John Zorn and
Thurston Moore. Or you can pick up one of his many CDs (many of which
are floating around for free on file-sharing), which feature — again,
unpermissioned — cut-ups of big money recordings by Maria Callas or
Jimi Hendrix. No one's ever told him to knock it off or come after him
for sampling royalties.

Artists like Marclay and Girl Talk (who also hasn't cleared any
samples to date) treat preexisting materials respectfully and
creatively, carving out a unique cultural milieu where commercial
and free cultures co-exist. The highly regarded young video artist
Ryan Trecartin releases his works on Vimeo for free, while selling
identical (but signed) editions in commercial galleries. Yet his
market thrives. Similarly, Wade Guyton, who makes paintings shot
out of ink-jet printers, tried to tank his own market this spring
by pumping out a studio full of identical paintings made from the
same computer file as the "original" that was going up for auction
at Christie's. It didn't work. The painting, which was estimated to
sell for $2.5 million to $3.5 million, ending up selling for $3.525
million. Messing with the market — the purposeful confusion between
originals and copies — have been part and parcel of the art world ever
since Marcel Duchamp bought a urinal from a hardware store, put it on
a pedestal, and called it art. For the past one hundred years in the
art world, nobody thinks twice about calling something theirs that
isn't.

These are the children of Andy Warhol, who was never sued by
Campbell's for copyright infringement. But back in those days,
artists were free to sample. Marclay's turntablist practice was
hinged upon the availability of shared resources. It wasn't until the
rap explosion of the early '90s that rightsholders began to see the
monetization potential in licensing preexisting cultural materials, an
attitude which went into overdrive in the digital age.

In spite of that, artists continue to gleefully flout the law. A few
years ago, the appropriation artist Richard Prince — who was sued
for his use of a photographer's images (he ended up settling out of
court) — took one of America's most valuable literary properties, "The
Catcher in the Rye," and has made drop-dead word-for-word facsimiles
of the first edition. Everywhere Salinger's name appeared, Prince
substituted his. He sells a signed copy bearing the signature of
"Richard Prince" for whatever Salinger's signed first edition is
going for that day. He's yet to be bothered by the Salinger estate.
The Prince edition — long sold-out — was going for about $500, but
occasionally, you can find him hawking the book on the sidewalk in
front of Central Park — dozens of copies spread out on a blanket — for
$40 each.

Call it street cred, but artists rarely adhere to one economy. For
the past eighteen years, I've been running UbuWeb, the largest site
on the web for free distribution of avant-garde works by the usual
suspects like Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, William

Re: Facebook's Mood Study: Orwellian newspeak 2.0

[nettime's avid reader]

Facebook's Psychological Experiments Connected to Department of Defense
Research on Civil Unrest

http://scgnews.com/facebooks-psychological-experiments-connected-to-department-of-defense-research-on-civil-unrest

01.Jul.2014 | SCG

It turns out that one of the researchers who ran Facebook's recent
psychological experiments received funding from the U.S. Department of
Defense to study the contagion of ideas

There has been quite a bit of chatter this past week after it was
revealed that a recent Facebook outage was the result of a psychological
experiment that the company conducted on a portion of its users without
their permission. The experiment, which was described in a paper
published by Facebook, and UCSF, tested the contagion of emotions on
social media by manipulating the content of personal feeds and measuring
how this impacted user behavior.

Over 600,000 users were used as guinea pigs without their consent, which
raises a number of serious ethical and legal questions (particularly due
to the fact that this study received federal funding), however there is
an even more disturbing angle to this story. It turns out that this
research was connected to a Department of Defense project called the
Minerva Initiative, which funds universities to model the dynamics,
risks and tipping points for large-scale civil unrest across the world.

In the official credits for the study conducted by Facebook you'll find
Jeffrey T. Hancock from Cornell University. If you go to the Minerva
initiative website you'll find that Jeffery Hancock received funding
from the Department of Defense for a study called "Cornell: Modeling
Discourse and Social Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes". If you go to
the project site for that study you'll find a visualization program that
models the spread of beliefs and disease.

Cornell University is currently being funded for another DoD study right
now called "Cornell: Tracking Critical-Mass Outbreaks in Social
Contagions" (you'll find the description for this project on the Minerva
Initiative's funding page).

The Department of Defense's investment in the mechanics of psychological
contagion and Facebook's assistance, have some very serious
implications, particularly when placed in context with other scandals
which have broken in the past two years.

First of all we know that Facebook willingly participated (and
presumably is still participating) in the NSA's PRISM program by giving
the agency unfettered access to user communications. We also know that
the U.S. government has invested heavily in technology used to track and
model the spread of opinions on social media.

The U.S. government hasn't sought these capabilities for the sake of
science. We know from the Cuban Twitter scandal, where the U.S. State
Department where got caught red handed attempting to topple the Cuban
government through social media, that these capabilities are already
being used for offensive operations. Combine that with the fact that the
U.S. Military got exposed in 2011 for developing 'sock puppet' software
to create fake online identities and spread propaganda and an ominous
picture snaps into focus.

The U.S. government is militarizing social media through a combination
of technology and social sciences, and Facebook is helping them.


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Cory Doctorw: Firefox's adoption of closed-source DRM breaks my heart

[nettime's avid reader]

Firefox’s adoption of closed-source DRM breaks my heart

I understand the pressure to support commercial video – but the browser
makers can do more to defend free and open software

Cory Doctorow, theguardian.com, Wednesday 14 May 2014 18.00 BST   

Mozilla foundation Mozilla is a not-for-profit social enterprise with a
mission to free its users – so it’s not unreasonable to hold it to a
higher standard than commercial rivals.

Future versions of the open-source Firefox browser will include
closed-source digital rights management (DRM) from Adobe, the Mozilla
project’s chief technology officer, Andreas Gal, announced on Wednesday.

The purpose is to support commercial video streams. But this is a
radical, disheartening development in the history of the organisation,
long held out as a beacon for the open, free spirit of the web as a tool
for liberation.

As Gal’s blogpost makes clear, this move was done without much
enthusiasm, out of a fear that Firefox (Mozilla’s flagship product and
by far the most popular free/open browser in the world) was being
sidelined by Apple, Google and Microsoft’s inclusion of proprietary
technology to support Netflix and other DRM-encumbered videos in their
browsers.

In my long-running discussions with Mozilla’s most senior management
over this issue, they’ve been clear in their belief that their userbase
– and relevance to the internet – will dwindle unless they add support
for viewing Hollywood movies in their browser. Not just Hollywood; the
BBC has been one of the major “rights holder” voices calling for the
addition of DRM to the web.

This shift is part of a change in the way that browsers work in general.
Since the early days of the Netscape browser, third-party plug-ins have
been a common way to extend browser functionality. Users who wanted to
watch DRM-restricted video could install proprietary plugins such as
Microsoft’s Silverlight or Adobe’s Flash.

The plug-in architecture is a security nightmare, and a source of
numerous breaches through which buggy or malicious code was able to
reach into users’ computers and compromise them. Now that browsers run
in computers that we carry around in our pockets, connected to
microphones and video cameras, and manage everything from our finance to
our thermostats, abolishing plug-ins was an inevitable and welcome step.

Plugged back in

However, in the absence of plug-ins, the proprietary browser companies
have privately negotiated with Netflix to add DRM. This shift to private
negotiations – instead of industry-wide standards – spooked the World
Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and its founder, web inventor Tim Berners-Lee,
into a controversial plan to add DRM to HTML5, the next-generation web
standard.

The W3C’s solution is baroque: it is specifying something called
“encrypted media extensions” through which the browser creates a
“sandbox” within which a “content decryption module” (CDM) operates,
receiving scrambled video, descrambling it and passing it out of the
sandbox for display.

At times, the W3C has insisted that this isn’t really DRM – it’s a thing
that can be used for DRM. The fact that it was conceived in order to
respond to demand for DRM from companies that insist on DRM for their
business-models, and that its deployment and use is entirely concerned
with DRM, makes this a pretty thin excuse.

The fear of irrelevance that drove Mozilla to add DRM is a microcosm of
the fear of irrelevance that drove the W3C to standardise DRM. By the
same token, Mozilla’s roundabout description of its DRM plan also echoes
some of the W3C’s not-really-DRM claims.

Mozilla says it isn’t providing DRM; it’s providing a fully open utility
that automatically fetches and installs DRM from Adobe’s servers. I am
unconvinced that there is a meaningful distinction between “installing
DRM” and “installing code that installs DRM”.

Still, Mozilla has taken some admirable pains to minimise the harms from
its DRM. The open sandbox in which Adobe’s software operates very
strictly limits the DRM’s access to the computer’s other processes and
systems. This is crucial, because the Adobe module is not only closed
source, it is also protected by controversial global laws that threaten
security researchers who publish information about its security flaws.

These laws – the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the European EUCD,
Canada’s C-11 and so on – prohibit revealing information that can be
used to weaken DRM, and previous security researchers who disclosed
information about vulnerabilities in DRM have been threatened and
prosecuted.

This created a chilling effect on the publication of vulnerabilities in
DRM, even where these put users at risk from hackers. For example, when
word got out that Sony BMG had infected millions of computers with an
illegal rootkit to stop (legal) audio CD ripping, security researchers
stepped forward to disclose that they’d known about the rootkit but had
been afraid to say anything about it.

This gap between discovery

The world we're facing: more Kafka than Orwell

[nettime's avid reader]

After seven years, exactly one person gets off the gov’t no-fly list
New report on terrorism "blacklists" suggests it won't be easier the
next time.

by Joe Silver - Mar 27 2014, 11:10pm CET

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/03/after-seven-years-exactly-one-person-gets-off-the-govt-no-fly-list/

A hearing in federal court Tuesday has apparently marked the conclusion
of a drawn-out, costly, and, to use the judge’s own term, “Kafkaesque”
legal battle over the government no-fly list. Malaysian college
professor Rahinah Ibrahim sued the government back in 2006, after Dr.
Ibrahim’s name mistakenly ended up on a federal government no-fly list.

Last month, US District Judge William Alsup ruled that Ibrahim must be
removed from the government's various watchlists. At Tuesday's hearing,
a Department of Justice lawyer said that the government did not intend
to appeal the ruling. The ruling in Ibrahim v. DHS calls into question
the government's administration of its controversial no-fly list as well
as other terrorist watch lists, but it leaves no clear roadmap for other
people wrongly placed on such lists.

Ibrahim's pro bono attorney, Elizabeth Pipkin, has asked for the
government to pay more than $3.5 million to cover her legal fees and
costs. Alsup didn't rule on that motion, but said that the issue was
"not easy," while indicating that Pipkin is unlikely to be entitled to
such a large payout.

No recourse

The Ibrahim case marks the first and only successful challenge to the
terrorist watch-listing program, which arose following the 9/11 attacks.
But Ibrahim's case, as just one of hundreds of thousands of individuals
who have been placed on such lists, shows the system's opacity. First,
the only surefire way to even determine if one is on such a list in the
US is to attempt to board a flight and be denied. Even after that
happens, when a denied person inquires about his or her status, the
likely response will be that the government “can neither confirm nor
deny” the placement on such lists.

The government's surrender in Ibrahim comes on the heels of a new report
by the American Civil Liberties Union that shows just how insanely
difficult it is to contest one's status on the government blacklists.
The ACLU explains:

The 'redress' procedures the US government provides for those who
have been wrongly or mistakenly included on a watchlist are wholly
inadequate. Even after people know the government has placed them on a
watchlist... the government's official policy is to refuse to confirm or
deny watchlist status. Nor is there any meaningful way to contest one's
designation as a potential terrorist and ensure that the US
government... removes or corrects inadequate records. The result is that
innocent people can languish on the watchlists indefinitely, without
real recourse.

The report also includes several examples of people challenging no-fly
determinations, and it's a very murky procedure. Litigation is typically
subject to sealed filings and a closed proceeding.

One of the secrets of the government's watchlists is how big they are.
No one outside of the intelligence community seems to know for sure. The
ACLU report cites a National Counterterrorism Center Fact Sheet, which
notes that the "consolidated terrorist watchlist" contained about
875,000 names in December 2011. It also described how the Terrorist
Screening Center's watchlist has grown significantly over time, from
approximately 158,000 records in June 2004 to over 1.1 million records
in May 2009. It cites an AP report from February 2012 documenting that
there were approximately 21,000 people on the no-fly list (including
about 500 US citizens and permanent residents) and saying that the list
had more than doubled in the previous year.

Even after the drawn-out Ibrahim case, there's still no good way to
question the government's determination besides going to court. The next
person who wants to challenge a no-fly decision is probably going to
have to retread the same path as Ibrahim. Taking a look back at her
ordeal is instructive, if not inspiring.

The Ibrahim saga

Rahinah Ibrahim was admitted to the US on a student visa to study at
Stanford’s graduate school in 2000. Five years later, when attempting to
fly from San Francisco to Hawaii, she was denied entry onto the plane,
was handcuffed—despite being wheelchair-bound at the time—and was placed
in a holding cell, detained for two hours, and then questioned. During
questioning, a police officer attempted to remove her hijab. Eventually,
she was released and told that her name had been stricken from the
no-fly list.

After flying back to Hawaii and then to Malaysia a few days later, her
student visa was revoked, and she was denied reentry into the US. That
was the beginning of a nine-year fight over whether she could travel
back to the US, which Ibrahim said she considered her "second home."

As explained in Alsup’s opinion, the whole dispute stemmed from an
errant check placed on a form

RWB/RSF: Enemies of the Internet 2014

[nettime's avid reader]

< 
http://12mars.rsf.org/2014-en/enemies-of-the-internet-2014-entities-at-the-heart-of-censorship-and-surveillance/
 >

Enemies of the Internet 2014: entities at the heart of censorship and
surveillance

   Natalia Radzina of Charter97, a Belarusian news website whose criticism
   of the government is often censored, was attending an
   [18]OSCE-organized conference in Vienna on the Internet and media
   freedom in February 2013 when she ran into someone she would rather not
   have seen: a member of the Operations and Analysis Centre, a Belarusian
   government unit that coordinates Internet surveillance and censorship.
   It is entities like this, little known but often at the heart of
   surveillance and censorship systems in many countries, that Reporters
   Without Borders is spotlighting in this year's Enemies of the Internet
   report, which it is releasing, as usual, on World Day Against
   Cyber-Censorship (12 March).

   Identifying government units or agencies rather than entire governments
   as Enemies of the Internet allows us to draw attention to the
   schizophrenic attitude towards online freedoms that prevails in in some
   countries. Three of the government bodies designated by Reporters
   Without Borders as Enemies of the Internet are located in democracies
   that have traditionally claimed to respect fundamental freedoms: the
   Centre for Development of Telematics in India, the Government
   Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in the United Kingdom, and the
   National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States.

   The NSA and GCHQ have spied on the communications of millions of
   citizens including many journalists. They have knowingly introduced
   security flaws into devices and software used to transmit requests on
   the Internet. And they have hacked into the very heart of the Internet
   using programmes such as the NSA's Quantam Insert and GCHQ's Tempora.
   The Internet was a collective resource that the NSA and GCHQ turned
   into a weapon in the service of special interests, in the process
   flouting freedom of information, freedom of expression and the right to
   privacy.

   The mass surveillance methods employed in these three countries, many
   of them exposed by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, are all the more
   intolerable because they will be used and indeed are already being used
   by authoritarians countries such as Iran, China, Turkmenistan, Saudi
   Arabia and Bahrain to justify their own violations of freedom of
   information. How will so-called democratic countries will able to press
   for the protection of journalists if they adopt the very practices they
   are criticizing authoritarian regimes for?

Private sector and inter-governmental cooperation

   The 2014 list of Enemies of the Internet includes "surveillance
   dealerships" - the three arms trade fairs known as [19]ISS World,
   Technology Against Crime and Milipol. These forums bring companies
   specializing in communications interception or online content blocking
   together with government officials from countries such as Iran, China
   and Bahrain. Here again, the contradictory behaviour of western
   democracies should be noted. France hosted two of these forums in 2013
   - TAC and Milipol. At the same time, it issued a [20]notice in December
   2013 requiring French companies that export surveillance products
   outside the Europe Union to obtain permission from the General
   Directorate for Competition, Industry and Services (DGCIS).

   The censorship and surveillance carried out by the Enemies of the
   Internet would not be possible without the tools developed by the
   private sector companies to be found at these trade fairs. Ethiopia's
   Information Network Security Agency has tracked down journalists in the
   United States thanks to spyware provided by [21]Hacking Team, an
   Italian company that Reporters Without Borders designated as an Enemy
   of the Internet in 2013. Even the [22]NSA has used the services of
   Vupen, a French company that specializes in identifying and exploiting
   security flaws.

   Private-sector companies are not the only suppliers of surveillance
   technology to governments that are Enemies of the Internet. Russia has
   exported its SORM surveillance system to its close neighbours. In
   Belarus, Decree No. 60 on "measures for improving use of the national
   Internet network" forces Internet Service Providers to install SORM.

   China has begun assisting Iran's uphill efforts to create a Halal
   Internet - a national Internet that would be disconnected from the
   World Wide Web and under the government's complete control. An expert
   in information control ever since building its Electronic Great Wall,
   China is advising Iran's Revolutionary Guards, the Supreme Council for
   Cyberspace and the Working Group for Identifying Criminal Content.
   Deputy information minister Nasrolah Jahangiri announced this during a
   recent visit by 

El Reg: Is the World Wide Web for luvvies and VCs - or for all of us?

[nettime's avid reader]

< 
http://m.theregister.co.uk/2014/03/12/world_wide_web_at_25_for_luvvies_and_vcs_or_everyone_berners_lee/
 >

Is the World Wide Web for luvvies and VCs - or for all of us?

  Part 1: In which we look at what the Greatest Living Briton got wrong
  (and right)

  By Andrew Orlowski o In Networks o At 14:56 GMT 12th March 2014

  Analysis

  The Web turns 25 years old today, and its inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee
  has written yet another declaration of rights - a "Magna Carta" - to
  mark the occasion.

  These incessant anniversaries are proof that journalists and media
  luvvies love looking backwards rather than reporting what's in front of
  them - warts and all. But especially not the warts. And it's also proof
  that web people can not resist the self-indulgence of penning a
  manifesto.

  The web does not lack manifestos, declarations, decrees, charters,
  proclamations, or lists. Many were written in bedrooms; all have the
  sickly insincerity of a Hallmark greeting card. Perhaps a Web Manifesto
  is the zenith of all [4]listicles, a kind of Holy Listicle Scripture.

  Nobody could reasonably disagree with Berners-Lee's commandments at
  their most vague and generalised. But these windy declarations are
  really vanity products, to remind the world how self-righteous the
  writer is. Much as some people like to advertise: "I've done my
  recycling. Have you?" others like to declare: "I use the Web. I am more
  virtuous than thou. My manifesto proves it." It pays to look behind the
  curtain.

  Before we can look forward, though, we have see what the web is good at
  and bad at - but before we can do that, we have to establish what it
  is, exactly. And how we all got here.

A bastard publishing format

  The World Wide Web was essentially a quick hack; it was a piece of
  improvisation. It just happened to be a hack the world found useful at
  the time: electronic publishing using machine readable tags, or markup,
  to give things in documents meaning and describe how they appeared, had
  been evolving throughout the 1970s.

  By the mid-1980s, it was moving something from only IBM customers could
  use to an open format everybody could use. The landmark was the first
  SGML specification, published in 1985. Its roots are described [5]here
  - in the most important Web document nobody has ever read. SGML was
  rich and promising indeed.

  Writing in 1971, Charles Goldfarb described the fundamentals:

The principle of separating document description from application
function makes it possible to describe the attributes common to all
documents of the same type. ... [The] availability of such "type
descriptions" could add new function to the text processing system.
Programs could supply markup for an incomplete document, or
interactively prompt a user in the entry of a document by displaying
the markup. A generalized markup language then, would permit full
information about a document to be preserved, regardless of the way
the document is used or represented.

  So SGML was about a lot more than presentation, the coat of paint on
  the toy. It allowed classes of documents and even "mini-languages" to
  be defined, and link to data outside the document. It could yank in
  databases and everything processed had a meaning.

  By the late 1980s, everyone involved in professional technical
  publishing was getting ready for the SGML revolution, and one of these
  was a contractor in technical publishing at CERN, Tim Berners-Lee. He
  took the basic elements from what would be another instance of an SGML
  markup language and lashed it to the client/server architecture of the
  the academics' network. He wanted something much simpler and
  immediately useful. SGML was all about doing it right - and it was
  complex and formal.

  The brilliantly clever bit of [6]Berners-Lee's proposal was the
  simplicity - he'd created an instantly useful document management
  system. For a while, as the internet was opened up, Berners-Lee's HTML
  was just another navigation system alongside Gopher and WAIS. But by
  the end of 1994 VC money turned an academic side project into Netscape,
  and from that point on, the world would have to work with HTML.

  So, we've been struggling with the compromises and omissions of the
  hack ever since.

  In 1992, Berners-Lee revised HTML to make it more SGML compliant, and
  less anarchic: browsers would henceforth present (more or less) the
  same results. It was only in 1996, with the development of the XML and
  [7]XHL specs, that some of what Berners-Lee, in his scramble to make
  something small and useful had omitted, began to be restored.

  Equipped with these, document links can have multiple sources and
  targets. XML grappled with semantics, too, giving tags meanings. Style
  sheets were another plank of '80s-era SGML publishing, and attempted to
  sort out the presentation mess - separating the look from the document
  itself. They pop

Is bitcoin becoming "normal"?

[nettime's avid reader]

Sorry, libertarians: Your dream of a Bitcoin paradise is officially dead
and gone

The apparent demasking of the currency's mysterious creator is the last
nail in the coffin

by Andrew Leonard, Salon.com, 07.03.2014

http://tinyurl.com/kquwj8l

So much rage. So much anger. So much disappointment. Newsweek’s Leah
McGrath Goodman stunned the Internet on Thursday with a report that, for
the first time, identified the man who created Bitcoin, the world’s most
successful, and infamous, crypto-currency. In a twist worthy of Thomas
Pynchon, the pseudonymous mastermind “Satoshi Nakamoto” turned out to be
a 64-year-old Japanese American named — incredibly — Satoshi Nakamoto.

This bombshell caused enthusiasts to explode in fury.

Goodman was attacked as a bad journalist: All her evidence — declared
scores of angry tweets and posts on Reddit – was circumstantial. (And it
is true, Goodman’s case, while persuasive and fascinating, is not
definitive. After the Newsweek story, in which he seemed to tacitly
acknowledge involvement with Bitcoin, Nakamoto would go on to deny to an
AP reporter that he was actually its creator.) Goodman was also
flagellated for invading Nakamoto’s privacy, for “doxxing” him by
publishing photos of his house and license plate that betrayed his
anonymity. She was put on notice that she would be responsible if
anything untoward happened to Nakamoto, who is believed to own a fortune
in Bitcoin, and could now be the target of violent thieves.

To people who live in the real world, the sound and fury seems mostly
absurd (although the horde of  media chasing Nakamoto through L.A. on
Thursday afternoon definitely wasn’t journalism’s finest hour).  If you
invent a multibillion-dollar digital currency explicitly designed to
remake the global financial system that gains serious traction, people
will want to know who you are. If you mastermind an anarcho-libertarian
project to break the hold of governments over money, history will demand
answers — and good reporters will find them. Exposing Nakamoto’s
identity is the very definition of “news.” If Goodman hadn’t figured it
out, someone else would have, but credit goes to the reporter who nails
the scoop.

So why all the rage? Could it be because Newsweek managed to stir up
something much deeper than just the ethics of “doxxing”?

To understand what’s fueling this storm of vituperation, we need to
journey all the way back to last week, when the all-consuming Bitcoin
drama was focused on the collapse of Mt. Gox, the onetime preeminent
Bitcoin exchange that somehow managed to lose around half a billion
dollars worth of the currency — whether to thieves or incompetence, no
one seems sure.

As journalists and pundits raced each other to seize upon Mt. Gox as
evidence of Bitcoin’s inevitable doom, the Wall Street Journal published
a story that, among other things, quoted one Bitcoin investor bemoaning
his losses. However, the investor felt his story had been
misrepresented, and published an open letter to the Journal reporter on
Reddit’s Bitcoin forum, where he is a regular contributor. One paragraph
stands out:

I have dedicated my life to building and supporting the Bitcoin
project. I don’t give a damn about the money I lost at Gox. That’s not
important. What is important is that Bitcoin is resilient and enduring,
and will continue to grow and change the world for the better. It is a
story of human progress through technology. It is a story of the good
seeping into the cracks of a corrupted financial system. It is a story
of passionate people struggling against all odds to remedy the
calamities brought down upon society from the most potently misguided
people and institutions on Earth.

You will not easily find a more eloquent description of the utopian
dreams that so many Bitcoin enthusiasts have invested in Satoshi
Nakamoto’s supposed invention. Bitcoin has always been viewed as a
“currency of resistance” — a way to wrest control over the essence of
money away from governments, central bankers and Wall Street. Bitcoin
has been seen, from the beginning, as one of the most potent weapons in
the techno-libertarian arsenal.

There is a great geeky romance to this dream, this fantasy that a bunch
of programmers tinkering with code could remake the fundamental
infrastructure of the global economy. It was a romance made all the more
mysterious and entrancing by the creation myth of the currency. No one
knew who Satoshi Nakamoto really was! Bitcoin was the very model of a
true conspiracy theory. The whole improbable narrative felt like it was
ripped from the pages of a classic cyberpunk science fiction novel. But
it was real.

So just imagine the psychological ups and downs of the past two weeks
for the most fervent members of the Bitcoin community. First, the
Bitcoinistas were forced to suffer the derision of disaster
rubberneckers pointing at the Mt. Gox debacle and using it to mock the
entire project. Then they learned that the great mastermind who dreamed

ratpie: Sleepwalking into Walled Gardens

[nettime's avid reader]

ratpie: The US Net Neutrality Debate; Sleepwalking into Walled Gardens




Being an outsider to the US Net Neutrality debate, I don't feel the pain
of cable monopoly, or the blight caused by expensive and poor quality
broadband. Over here in the UK we hear more about Verizon FiOS and
Google Fibre, and mobile investments and megadeals, than we do about
coax. In the UK, and increasingly in Europe, our regulators manage
markets with perhaps too much diligence.

The usual way regulators deal with monopoly is to encourage or mandate
competition. I have been surprised by the number of US states banning
muni wifi -- though I can understand the argument that common property
should not be preferentially available to private interests. In many
cases it seems to me that the public interest should clearly override,
and that monopoly providers who gained their own wayleaves and easements
under different regulatory and technological  environments should not be
considered adequate provision for the next 20 years. Susan Crawford
seems to agree with me (!) according to an article she wrote for the FT
this week (Feb, 2014).

Perhaps, though, the problem is as much about what content and services
might be available over new competitor access networks, and on what
terms, rather than how an incumbent should be obliged to manage their
business and network.

Here's a simple question which illustrates in some ways how difficult
the regulation challenge is. Should an aspiring competitor to Netflix or
any other content or service provider, which does not yet have the
subscribers or the bandwidth requirement of its competitors, be able to
force a consumer broadband provider (CBP) to purchase public peering
capacity at parity with whatever private arrangements the CBP (I avoid
the term ISP deliberately) has made with competitor content or service
providers?

If your answer is no, they should not, then you are setting the bar
higher for the Internet as an engine of competition and innovation; the
new entrant will have to overcome market inertia as well as poor quality
of service in order to grow. And that will be true of all networks, not
just the problematic incumbents, be they monopolistic or competitive.

The complex balance between colocation, private peering, and public
peering seems to me very poorly understood by many content companies --
sleepwalking into walled gardens in my opinion -- and regulators, who
have bought the narrative without looking at the grammar or semantics of
what they were sold. It is very well understood by a very small number
of highly successful content and services companies, who, not an
accidental coincidence, are getting off the public internet as fast as
they can.

Whether or not a CBP tweaks its packets in favour of one content or
service provider or another could be well covered by fair trade
regulations; it could be dealt with completely outside the scope of
telecoms regulation. How your CBP connects to the Internet is an
entirely different matter, and one that only a telecoms regulator can
really be concerned with.

It is very tempting to gravitate towards one lobbying platform or
another, and it sure gets a reaction from the crowd if a journalist or
lobbyist can work up a good foam. Through my strongly sceptical filter,
however, the US Net Neutrality debate looks as much about content and
service providers trying to open CBPs to uncompensated private and
colocated access, as it does about CBPs trying to use their control of
the last mile to extract rents. It's not as if there is anything to
preserve -- NN as it seems to be deployed by commentators and lobbyists
was never adopted by the broadband industry, but emerged out of the
evolution of the technology and business models of telcos, only to
retreat as content and service providers became able to influence CBP
profitability by stressing their networks.

Framed in those terms, profitability will be a key metric of the
relative success of the contestants over 'connected world' business
models, as will their share price relative to current earnings as the
market collectively decides who it thinks is winning. Again, none of
this is a regulatory matter, beyond the usual fairness arbitration.

This is not to say that telco regulators have no place. Far from it. If
any of this analysis proves apt, regulators need to consider the
connectivity and openness of the Internet itself, being how networks
connect, who can connect to them, and the capacity, capability and
status of that connection vis a vis any other ways that content and
services get carried to people.

But that is not neutrality by any ordinary definition of the term. What
I think the progressives are saying in this debate is that we should use
regulation to create an Internet governance policy which is sustainably
open, and which has the capacity and capability to support the
innovation and churn we

A tribute to Stuart Hall

[nettime's avid reader]

 A tribute to Stuart Hall
Jeremy Gilbert 10 February 2014

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/jeremy-gilbert/tribute-to-stuart-hall

Stuart Hall has died. The enormity of the loss cannot be exaggerated.
There is little point trying to measure Hall’s importance against
other significant figures: he himself would have abhorred the macho
individualism of such a gesture. But it has been a long time since the
intellectual Left in the UK has experienced such a loss, or one more
keenly feared by those who may have anticipated it. I am not going to
repeat here much of the information contained in the superb obituary
penned by my colleagues, Bill Schwarz and David Morley [1], and I
encourage readers to refer there first if they are unfamiliar with the
basic narrative of Hall’s life and career.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/feb/10/stuart-hall

I don’t want this piece to be about me. But it is hard for me to
explain the importance of Hall and the scope and range of his
significance without explaining the process by which I learned of it.
It is also, perhaps, too much to ask, that someone who personally owes
so much to Hall should speak without referring to their own experience
somewhat. So apologies. Some of this will be about me.

I first encountered the work of Stuart Hall as a teenager, in the
pages of the magazine Marxism Today. It’s hard to imagine today that
there was a time before Google; but there was, and in those days it
wasn’t so easy to learn everything about a writer who one only knew
as a name on a byline. I didn’t know much about Cultural Studies
- although the swathe of tributes following the death of Raymond
Williams, and the occasional references in MT and the New Statesman
(yes, believe it or not, there was a time when New Statesman was a
left-wing magazine that wasn’t completely hostile to engaging with
difficult ideas) had already given me an inkling that it might be
interesting. And I didn’t know that Hall had anything to do with
it: at first I assumed he was a professional political columnist.
Gradually, reading the magazine on a monthly basis, I realised that
actually he was some kind of academic. I was impressed. I remember
commenting to a sixth-form pal that this bloke Hall seemed to talk
literally the least shit of anyone I had ever come across in any
medium.

This was very important to a teenage ‘unreconstructed post-punk’ (as
I would have it) in the waning days of Thatcher’s premiership: ‘not
talking shit’ was basically my criterion for what it meant to be a
successful human being. Hall’s incisive analyses of the relationship
between culture, power, technological and social change made more
sense to me than anything else I had ever read, or heard, or thought.
His Gramscian understanding of Thatcherism finally helped me to
understand the apparently glaring contradictions inherent in the
Tories’ commitment to radical individualism and social conservatism.
His contributions to Marxism Today’s ‘New Times’ project seemed to
me to define what a progressive politics should look like in the
(post)modern age: working with the grain of cultural and technological
change towards democratic and egalitarian ends. It still does.

So it was, inspired by Hall’s example as much as anything, that
I ended up on a degree course in Cultural Studies at the then
Polytechnic of East London, despite the offers from far more
‘prestigious’ institutions at which I was less confident that I would
not be required, to a large extent, ‘to talk shit’. Even then I had no
idea that Hall himself had been instrumentally supportive in setting
up and validating the pioneering degree programme, along with his
lifelong friend and collaborator Michael Rustin, a senior faculty
member at the institution, and had taught many of the inspiring and
wonderful people who would teach me during those three life-defining
years (Alan O’Shea, who was to be Hall’s very last writing partner;
Mica Nava; Bill Schwarz; Hall’s wife Catherine, etc.). I only came to
realise that a couple of years later, when I had gone back to what
became the University of East London to try to carry on the legacy
as a lecturer, while pursuing my PhD at Sussex with another former
student and colleague of Stuart’s, James Donald.

But I only fully began to appreciate the sheer enormity of Stuart’s
contribution as I began to work out for myself what it might mean
to be a politically engaged teacher of ‘cultural studies’. For
while the exotic theory in which I was so fluent - from Althusser
to Zizek - was all very well for impressing fellow grad students,
my own students - working-class and intellectually curious - wanted
to know what I could tell them about the world as it was, and as it
was changing. And here it was Stuart’s method, bringing together
sociology, ideology critique, semiotics, political sociology and
necessary speculation that would prove very often the only way to
address the key question which mattered to them and to me: the
questio

Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries

[nettime's avid reader]

Geeks for Monarchy: The Rise of the Neoreactionaries
Posted Nov 22, 2013 by Klint Finley (@klintron)
http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/

Many of us yearn for a return to one golden age or another. But
there’s a community of bloggers taking the idea to an extreme:
they want to turn the dial way back to the days before the French
Revolution.

Neoreactionaries believe that while technology and capitalism
have advanced humanity over the past couple centuries, democracy
has actually done more harm than good. They propose a return to
old-fashioned gender roles, social order and monarchy.

You may have seen them crop-up on tech hangouts like Hacker News and
Less Wrong, having cryptic conversations about “Moldbug” and “the
Cathedral.” And though neoreactionaries aren’t exactly rampant in the
tech industry, PayPal founder Peter Thiel has voiced similar ideas,
and Pax Dickinson, the former CTO of Business Insider, says he’s been
influenced by neoreactionary thought. It may be a small, minority
world view, but it’s one that I think shines some light on the psyche
of contemporary tech culture.

Enough has been written on neoreaction already to fill at least a
couple of books, so if you prefer to go straight to the source, just
pop a Modafinil and skip to the “Neoreaction Reading List” at the
end of this post. For everyone else, I’ll do my best to summarize
neoreactionary thought and why it might matter.


_Who Are the Neoreactionaries?

“Reactionary” originally meant someone who opposed the French
Revolution, and today the term generally refers to those who would
like to return to some pre-existing state of affairs. Neoreaction
— aka “dark enlightenment — begins with computer scientist and
entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin, who blogs under the name Mencius Moldbug.
Yarvin — the self-described Sith Lord of the movement — got his
start as a commenter on sites like 2blowhards before starting his
own blog Unqualified Reservations in 2007. Yarvin originally called
his ideology “formalism,” but in 2010 libertarian blogger Arnold
Kling referred to him as a “neo-reactionary.” The name stuck as more
bloggers — such as Anomaly UK (who helped popularize the term), Nick
Land (who coined “dark enlightenment”) and Michael Anissimov — started
to self-identify as neoreactionary.

The movement has a few contemporary forerunners, such as Herman Hoppe
and Steven Sailer, and of course, neoreaction is heavily influenced
by older political thought — Thomas Carlyle and Julius Evola are
particularly popular. Anti-Democracy

Perhaps the one thing uniting all neoreactionaries is a critique of
modernity that centers on opposition to democracy in all its forms.
Many are former libertarians who decided that freedom and democracy
were incompatible.

“Demotist systems, that is, systems ruled by the ‘People,’ such as
Democracy and Communism, are predictably less financially stable than
aristocratic systems,” Anissimov writes. “On average, they undergo
more recessions and hold more debt. They are more susceptible to
market crashes. They waste more resources. Each dollar goes further
towards improving standard of living for the average person in an
aristocratic system than in a Democratic one.”

Exactly what sort of monarchy they’d prefer varies. Some want
something closer to theocracy, while Yarvin proposes turning nation
states into corporations with the king as chief executive officer and
the aristocracy as shareholders.

For Yarvin, stability and order trump all. But critics like Scott
Alexander think neoreactionaries overestimate the stability of
monarchies — to put it mildly. Alexander recently published an
anti-reactionary FAQ, a massive document examining and refuting the
claims of neoreactionaries.

“To an observer from the medieval or Renaissance world of monarchies
and empires, the stability of democracies would seem utterly
supernatural,” he wrote. “Imagine telling Queen Elizabeth I – whom
as we saw above suffered six rebellions just in her family’s two
generations of rule up to that point – that Britain has been three
hundred years without a non-colonial-related civil war. She would
think either that you were putting her on, or that God Himself had
sent a host of angels to personally maintain order.” Exit

Yarvin proposes that countries should be small — city states, really
— and that all they should compete for citizens. “If residents don’t
like their government, they can and should move,” he writes. “The
design is all ‘exit,’ no ‘voice.’”

That will probably sound familiar if you heard Balaji Srinivasan’s Y
Combinator speech. Although several news stories described the talk
as a call for Silicon Valley to secede from the union, Srinivasan
told Tim Carmody that his speech has been misinterpreted. “I’m not a
libertarian, don’t believe in secession, am a registered Democrat,
etcetera etcetera,” he wrote. “This is really a talk that is more
about emigration and exit.”

I don’t know Srinivasan, but it sounds like he’d find neore

GoldieBlox, fair use, and the cult of disruption

[nettime's avid reader]

GoldieBlox, fair use, and the cult of disruption
By Felix Salmon, November 26, 2013

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/11/26/goldieblox-fair-use-and-the-cult-of-disruption/


innovation | intellectal property | technology

If you google “disrupt the pink aisle”, you’ll get 36,800 results, all
of which concern a San Francisco-based toy company named GoldieBlox. The
company first came to public attention in September of last year, when
it launched a highly-successful Kickstarter campaign which ultimately
raised $285,881. Like all successful Kickstarter campaigns, there was a
viral video; this one featured a highly-photogenic CEO called Debbie, a
recent graduate of — you probably don’t need me to tell you this —
Stanford University. And yes, before the Kickstarter campaign, there was
“a seed round from friends, family and angel investors”. When the viral
video kept on generating pre-orders even after the Kickstarter campaign
ended, GoldieBlox looked like a classic Silicon Valley startup: young,
exciting, fast-growing, and — of course — disruptive.

Not wanting to mess with a proven formula, GoldieBlox kept on producing
those viral videos: “GoldieBlox Breaks into Toys R Us” was based on
Queen’s “We Are The Champions”, and got over a million views. But that
was nothing compared to their latest video, uploaded only a week ago,
and already well on its way to getting ten times that figure. This one
was based on an early Beastie Boys song, “Girls”, and deliciously
subverted it to turn it into an empowering anthem.

Under what Paul Carr has diagnosed as the rules of the Cult of
Disruption, GoldieBlox neither sought nor received permission to create
these videos: it never licensed the music it used from the artists who
wrote it. That wouldn’t be the Silicon Valley way. First you make your
own rules — and then, if anybody tries to slap you down, you don’t
apologize, you fight. For your right. To parody.

In a complete inversion of what you might expect to happen in this case,
it is GoldieBlox which is suing the Beastie Boys. And they’re doing so
in the most aggressive way possible. There’s no respect, here, for the
merits of the song which has helped their video go massively viral and
which is surely helping to sell a huge number of toys. Instead, there’s
just sneering antagonism:

"In the lyrics of the Beastie Boys’ song entitled Girls, girls are
limited (at best) to household chores, and are presented as useful only
to the extent they fulfill the wishes of the male subjects. The
GoldieBlox Girls Parody Video takes direct aim at the song both visually
and with a revised set of lyrics celebrating the many capabilities of
girls. Set to the tune of Girls but with a new recording of the music
and new lyrics, girls are heard singing an anthem celebrating their
broad set of capabilities—exactly the opposite of the message of the
original. They are also shown engaging in activities far beyond what the
Beastie Boys song would permit."

This is faux-naïveté at its worst, deliberately ignoring the fact that
Girls, the original song, is itself a parody of machismo rap. The
complaint is also look-at-me move, positively daring the Beasties to
rise to the bait and enjoin the fight. Which the Beasties, in turn, are
trying very hard not to do. In their letter to GoldieBlox, the Beasties
make three simple points. They support the creativity of the video, and
its message; they’re the defendants in this suit, rather than the people
suing anybody; and, most importantly, they have a long-standing policy
that no Beastie Boys songs shall ever be used in commercial
advertisements. (They don’t mention, although they could, that this last
was actually an explicit dying wish of Adam Yauch, a/k/a MCA, and an
integral part of his will.)

Given the speed with which the GoldieBlox complaint appeared, indeed,
it’s reasonable to assume that they had it in their back pocket all
along, ready to whip out the minute anybody from the Beastie Boys, or
their record label, so much as inquired about what was going on. The
strategy here is to maximize ill-will: don’t ask permission, make no
attempt to negotiate in good faith, antagonize the other party as much
as possible.

This way, at least, the battle lines get drawn pretty clearly. The
jurisprudential analysis comes out, defending GoldieBlox and its right
to use the Beasties’ song as parody. After all, fair use is a protection
under the law, which means that if it applies, then it doesn’t matter
what the Beasties think, or want: GoldieBlox can do anything it likes.
On the other hand, in the key precedent for such issues, Campbell vs
Acuff-Rose Music, Justice Souter explicitly said that “the use of a
copyrighted work to advertise a product, even in a parody, will be
entitled to less indulgence” under the law than “the sale of a parody
for its own sake”.

This is a distinction the Beasties intuitively understand. After all,
this version of Girls has been viewed more than 3 million times on
Yo

Re: claimed excerpts from Jeremy Hammond's sentencing statement

[nettime's avid reader]

On 11/17/2013 05:44 AM, nettime's_dumpster_diver wrote:
>  [ http://freeanons.org/jeremy-hammond-sentenced-10-years/ ]
>
> Good morning. Thank you for this opportunity. My name is Jeremy Hammond
> and I'm here to be sentenced for hacking activities carried out during
> my involvement with Anonymous. I have been locked up at MCC for the past
> 20 months and have had a lot of time to think about how I would explain
> my actions.


Hammond supporters publish alleged list of foreign targets that FBI had
him hack

List includes gov't sites from Turkey, Iran, Brazil, Slovenia, and more.
by Cyrus Farivar - Nov 15 2013, 9:04pm CET

During the sentencing hearing of convicted hacker Jeremy Hammond on
Friday, the young Chicagoan began to read from his prepared statement,
saying that he had been directed to hack various foreign government
websites by Anonymous leader turned FBI informant Sabu.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/11/supporters-publish-supposed-foreign-target-list-that-fbi-ordered-hammond-to-hack/

Judge cites "unrepentant recidivism" as the reason for a maximum sentence

In court, Hammond said that “these intrusions, all of which were
suggested by Sabu while cooperating with the FBI, affected thousands
of domain names and consisted largely of foreign government websites,
including those of Turkey, Iran—” before the judge cut him off and
said that the list of targets was to be redacted.

However, shortly after the hearing concluded, Jacob Appelbaum, a
well-known American computer security researcher currently living in
Berlin, began tweeting what he claimed was the unredacted list of
targets, based on a Pastebin post. Appelbaum later linked to that
version of Hammond’s statement, which was not redacted.

According to that apparently unredacted version, Hammond wrote:

At his request, these websites were broken into, their e-mails
and databases were uploaded to Sabu's FBI server, and the password
information and the location of root backdoors were supplied. These
intrusions took place in January/February of 2012 and affected over
2000 domains, including numerous foreign government websites in
Brazil, Turkey, Syria, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Nigeria, Iran, Slovenia,
Greece, Pakistan, and others. A few of the compromised websites
that I recollect include the official website of the Governor of
Puerto Rico, the Internal Affairs Division of the Military Police of
Brazil, the official website of the Crown Prince of Kuwait, the Tax
Department of Turkey, the Iranian Academic Center for Education and
Cultural Research, the Polish Embassy in the UK, and the Ministry of
Electricity of Iraq.


If Hammond’s supposed allegations are true, it would suggest that
the FBI was directing foreign attacks through Sabu. The FBI did not
immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

The original redacted statement, published on the website of Hammond’s
spokesperson, Andy Stepanian of the Sparrow Project, has each target’s
name X'd out.

Stepanian declined to confirm or deny to Ars the targets being
circulated by Appelbaum and others, as he did not wish to get Hammond or
his attorneys in further trouble with the judge.

“[Appelbaum’s] a very smart guy,” he told Ars. “I'm not going to verify
which ones are which. But it's at least seven. Based on the sentence
structure, it seems as if [Hammond] was going in order of importance. I
know I'm being very cryptic and I apologize.”




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Stallman: How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand?

[nettime's avid reader]

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/10/a-necessary-evil-what-it-takes-for-democracy-to-survive-surveillance/

By Richard Stallman, 10.14.13

The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible
with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must
reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers
of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this
reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use.

Using free/libre software, as I’ve advocated for 30 years, is the first
step in taking control of our digital lives. We can’t trust non-free
software; the NSA uses and even creates security weaknesses in non-free
software so as to invade our own computers and routers. Free software
gives us control of our own computers, but that won’t protect our
privacy once we set foot on the internet.

Bipartisan legislation to “curtail the domestic surveillance powers” in
the U.S. is being drawn up, but it relies on limiting the government’s
use of our virtual dossiers. That won’t suffice to protect
whistleblowers if “catching the whistleblower” is grounds for access
sufficient to identify him or her. We need to go further.

Thanks to Edward Snowden’s disclosures, we know that the current level
of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights.
The repeated harassment and prosecution of dissidents, sources, and
journalists provides confirmation. We need to reduce the level of
general surveillance, but how far? Where exactly is the maximum
tolerable level of surveillance, beyond which it becomes oppressive?
That happens when surveillance interferes with the functioning of
democracy: when whistleblowers (such as Snowden) are likely to be caught.
Don’t Agree We Need to Reduce Surveillance? Then Read This Section First

If whistleblowers don’t dare reveal crimes and lies, we lose the last
shred of effective control over our government and institutions. That’s
why surveillance that enables the state to find out who has talked with
a reporter is too much surveillance — too much for democracy to endure.

An unnamed U.S. government official ominously told journalists in 2011
that the U.S. would not subpoena reporters because “We know who you’re
talking to.” Sometimes journalists’ phone call records are subpoena’d to
find this out, but Snowden has shown us that in effect they subpoena all
the phone call records of everyone in the U.S., all the time.

Opposition and dissident activities need to keep secrets from states
that are willing to play dirty tricks on them. The ACLU has demonstrated
the U.S. government’s systematic practice of infiltrating peaceful
dissident groups on the pretext that there might be terrorists among
them. The point at which surveillance is too much is the point at which
the state can find who spoke to a known journalist or a known dissident.
Information, Once Collected, Will Be Misused

When people recognize that the level of general surveillance is too
high, the first response is to propose limits on access to the
accumulated data. That sounds nice, but it won’t fix the problem, not
even slightly, even supposing that the government obeys the rules. (The
NSA has misled the FISA court, which said it was unable to effectively
hold the NSA accountable.) Suspicion of a crime will be grounds for
access, so once a whistleblower is accused of “espionage”, finding the
“spy” will provide an excuse to access the accumulated material.

The state’s surveillance staff will misuse the data for personal reasons
too. Some NSA agents used U.S. surveillance systems to track their
lovers — past, present, or wished-for — in a practice called ”LoveINT.”
The NSA says it has caught and punished this a few times; we don’t know
how many other times it wasn’t caught. But these events shouldn’t
surprise us, because police have long used their access to driver’s
license records to track down someone attractive, a practice known as
”running a plate for a date.”

Surveillance data will always be used for other purposes, even if this
is prohibited. Once the data has been accumulated and the state has the
possibility of access to it, it may misuse that data in dreadful ways.

Total surveillance plus vague law provides an opening for a massive
fishing expedition against any desired target. To make journalism and
democracy safe, we must limit the accumulation of data that is easily
accessible to the state.
Robust Protection for Privacy Must Be Technical

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and other organizations propose a set
of legal principles designed to prevent the abuses of massive
surveillance. These principles include, crucially, explicit legal
protection for whistleblowers; as a consequence, they would be adequate
for protecting democratic freedoms — if adopted completely and enforced
without exception forever.

However, such legal protections are precarious: as recent history shows,
they can be repealed (as in the FI

Thomas Frank: TED talks are lying to you

[nettime's avid reader]

Salon.com
Sunday, Oct 13, 2013 01:00 PM CEST
TED talks are lying to you

http://www.salon.com/2013/10/13/ted_talks_are_lying_to_you

The creative class has never been more screwed. Books about creativity
have never been more popular. What gives?

By Thomas Frank

The writer had a problem. Books he read and people he knew had been
warning him that the nation and maybe mankind itself had wandered into a
sort of creativity doldrums. Economic growth was slackening. The
Internet revolution was less awesome than we had anticipated, and the
forward march of innovation, once a cultural constant, had slowed to a
crawl. One of the few fields in which we generated lots of novelties —
financial engineering — had come back to bite us. And in other
departments, we actually seemed to be going backward. You could no
longer take a supersonic airliner across the Atlantic, for example, and
sending astronauts to the moon had become either fiscally insupportable
or just passé.

And yet the troubled writer also knew that there had been, over these
same years, fantastic growth in our creativity promoting sector. There
were TED talks on how to be a creative person. There were “Innovation
Jams” at which IBM employees brainstormed collectively over a global
hookup, and “Thinking Out of the Box” desktop sculptures for sale at
Sam’s Club. There were creativity consultants you could hire, and cities
that had spent billions reworking neighborhoods into arts-friendly
districts where rule-bending whimsicality was a thing to be celebrated.
If you listened to certain people, creativity was the story of our time,
from the halls of MIT to the incubators of Silicon Valley.

The literature on the subject was vast. Its authors included management
gurus, forever exhorting us to slay the conventional; urban theorists,
with their celebrations of zesty togetherness; pop psychologists, giving
the world step-by-step instructions on how to unleash the inner Miles
Davis. Most prominent, perhaps, were the science writers, with their
endless tales of creative success and their dissection of the brains
that made it all possible.

It was to one of these last that our puzzled correspondent now decided
to turn. He procured a copy of “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” the 2012
bestseller by the ex-wunderkind Jonah Lehrer, whose résumé includes a
Rhodes scholarship, a tour of duty at The New Yorker and two previous
books about neuroscience and decision-making. (There was also a scandal
concerning some made-up quotes in “Imagine,” but our correspondent was
determined to tiptoe around that.) Settling into a hot bath — well known
for its power to trigger outside-the-box thoughts — he opened his mind
to the young master.

Anecdote after heroic anecdote unfolded, many of them beginning with
some variation on Lehrer’s very first phrase: “Procter and Gamble had a
problem.” What followed, as creative minds did their nonlinear thing,
were epiphanies and solutions. Our correspondent read about the
invention of the Swiffer. He learned how Bob Dylan achieved his great
breakthrough and wrote that one song of his that they still play on the
radio from time to time. He found out that there was a company called 3M
that invented masking tape, the Post-it note and other useful items. He
read about the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and about the glories of Pixar.

And that’s when it hit him: He had heard these things before. Each story
seemed to develop in an entirely predictable fashion. He suspected that
in the Dylan section, Lehrer would talk about “Like a Rolling Stone,”
and that’s exactly what happened. When it came to the 3M section, he
waited for Lehrer to dwell on the invention of the Post-it note — and
there it was.

Had our correspondent developed the gift of foresight? No. He really had
heard these stories before. Spend a few moments on Google and you will
find that the tale of how Procter & Gamble developed the Swiffer is a
staple of marketing literature. Bob Dylan is endlessly cited in
discussions of innovation, and you can read about the struggles
surrounding the release of “Like a Rolling Stone” in textbooks like “The
Fundamentals of Marketing” (2007). As for 3M, the decades-long standing
ovation for the company’s creativity can be traced all the way back to
“In Search of Excellence” (1982), one of the most influential business
books of all time. In fact, 3M’s accidental invention of the Post-it
note is such a business-school chestnut that the ignorance of those who
don’t know the tale is a joke in the 1997 movie “Romy and Michele’s High
School Reunion.”

*

These realizations took only a millisecond. What our correspondent also
understood, sitting there in his basement bathtub, was that the
literature of creativity was a genre of surpassing banality. Every book
he read seemed to boast the same shopworn anecdotes and the same
canonical heroes. If the authors are presenting themselves as experts on
innovation, they will tell us about Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso, Dylan,
Warhol, th

A CEO who resisted NSA spying is out of prison.

[nettime's avid reader]

A CEO who resisted NSA spying is out of prison. And he feels ‘vindicated’
by Snowden leaks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30/a-ceo-who-resisted-nsa-spying-is-out-of-prison-and-he-feels-vindicated-by-snowden-leaks/

By Andrea Peterson, Published: September 30 at 12:07 pmE-mail the writer
Both Edward Snowden and Joseph Nacchio revealed details about some of the
things that go on at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. (REUTERS/NSA/Handout)

Both Edward Snowden and Joseph Nacchio revealed details about some of the
things that go on at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade. (NSA/Reuters)

Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a
legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its
CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors. He was convicted, served four and
a half years of his sentence and was released this month.

Prosecutors claim Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio was guilty of insider trading,
and that his prosecution had nothing to do with his refusal to allow spying
on his customers without the permission of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court. But to this day, Nacchio insists that his prosecution
was retaliation for refusing to break the law on the NSA's behalf.

After his release from custody Sept. 20, Nacchio told the Wall Street
Journal that he feels "vindicated" by the content of the leaks that show
that the agency was collecting American's phone records.

Nacchio was convicted of selling of Qwest stock in early 2001, not long
before the company hit financial troubles. However, he claimed in court
documents that he was optimistic about the firm's ability to win classified
government contracts — something they'd succeeded at in the past. And
according to his timeline, in February 2001 — some six months before the
Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — he was approached by the NSA and asked to spy
on customers during a meeting he thought was about a different contract. He
reportedly refused because his lawyers believed such an action would be
illegal and the NSA wouldn't go through the FISA Court. And then, he says,
unrelated government contracts started to disappear.

His narrative matches with the warrantless surveillance program reported by
USA Today in 2006 which noted Qwest as the lone holdout from the program,
hounded by the agency with hints that their refusal "might affect its
ability to get future classified work with the government." But Nacchio was
prevented from bringing up any of this defense during his jury trial — the
evidence needed to support it was deemed classified and the judge in his
case refused his requests to use it. And he still believes his prosecution
was retaliatory for refusing the NSA requests for bulk access to customers'
phone records. Some other observers share that opinion, and it seems
consistent with evidence that has been made public, including some of the
redacted court filings unsealed after his conviction.

The NSA declined to comment on Nacchio, referring inquiries to the
Department of Justice. The Department of Justice did not respond to The
Post's request for comment.

Snowden leaked documents about NSA spying programs to the public and
arguably broke the law in doing so. In contrast, Nacchio seems to have done
what was in his power to limit an illegal government data collection
program. Even during his own defense, he went through the legal channels he
could to make relevant information available for his defense — albeit
unsuccessfully.

The programs that were revealed are also substantially different in nature,
if not in content. The Bush-era warrantless surveillance programs and data
collection  programs were on shaky legal ground, based on little more than
the president's say-so. That's why telecom companies sought and received
legal immunity from Congress for their participation in 2008. But that same
update also expanded government surveillance powers. Some observers argue
that some of the NSA's spying programs are still unconstitutional. But at a
minimum, these programs were authorized by the FISC and disclosed to
congressional intelligence committees.

Nacchio told the Wall Street Journal, "I never broke the law, and I never
will." But he never got a chance to present to the jury his theory that his
prosecution was politically motivated.



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Two million 'internet opinion analysts'

[nettime's avid reader]

Two million 'internet opinion analysts' employed to monitor China's vast
online population.

Government employees trawl through blogs and social media to dissect
public opinion

Thursday, 03 October, 2013, 6:04pm
Patrick Boehler patrick.boeh...@scmp.com

http://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1323529/two-million-employed-monitor-chinese-public-opinion


Some two million people are employed by the Chinese government at all
levels, as well as businesses, to monitor public opinion on Chinese
social media, according to a report in Thursday’s Beijing News.

By trawling through blogs, microblog posts and social networks, these
"Internet opinion analysts," most of them government employees, dissect
public opinion on local issues and try to identify accusations of
corruption and poor governance. They keep local leadership, from county
to province, informed on a daily basis via text messages and written
reports.

The Beijing-based newspaper took advantage of a seminar for these
monitors, held in the capital in mid-October by the People’s Daily
Online Public Opinion Monitoring Centre, a think tank-like unit of the
Communist Party’s official mouthpiece, to meet these usually anonymous
local government staffers known as “online public opinion analysts”.

Even though the industry has been around for at least six years, the
Ministry of Human Resources only listed their duties earlier this month
as an official profession certified by the ministry’s China Employment
Training Technical Instruction Centre.
They use taxpayers’ money to suppress taxpayers’ voices
Online commentator

Since 2008, the People’s Daily’s think tank has advised local
governments to quicken the pace of issuing public statements and
reacting to online debate and viral political statements. In 2011, it
called on officials to react within the “four golden hours” after an
incident, such a train crash or a riot, to provide information and
prevent allegations of cover-ups.

One such analyst the Beijing News interviewed heads the public opinion
monitoring office of a county in Henan province. Every day, the man with
the pseudonym Yuan Ming would search his county’s name on Google and
Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of the international search engine.
Special software bought by the county at a cost of three million yuan
alerts his office to trending topics on social media, according to the
report.

Local Communist Party propaganda departments have for years employed
contractors, known as wumao at a reported rate of 0.5 yuan paid for
every online post, so they can monitor public opinion and counterbalance
negative voices with positive ones, as well as slander those critical of
the local or central government officials.

The certification of “public opinion monitors” has led many people
online to quip that wumao have been given proper and government jobs,
coveted by many for their job security.

“Who pays their salaries?” one person asked. “They use taxpayers’ money
to suppress taxpayers’ voices,” wrote another


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The secret financial market only robots can see

[nettime's avid reader]

The secret financial market only robots can see

By Tim Fernholz @timfernholzSeptember 16, 2013  
http://qz.com/124721/the-secret-financial-market-only-robots-can-see/

What if someone told you the stock market crashed and spiked 18,000
times since 2006, and you had no idea?  

That’s the contention of a group of scientists who study complex systems
after analyzing market data, collected by Nanex, since the advent of
high-speed trading. While the fallout of computerized algorithms has
been seen before, including the infamous 2010 “flash crash,” when
markets lost nearly 10% of value in just a few minutes, that same kind
of sudden volatility is going on all the time, unseen.  

In a new paper called “Abrupt rise of new machine ecology beyond human
response time,” researchers found a new trading ecosystem that humans
don’t even notice. [1]  

People can’t really respond to stimuli much faster than in one second.
The benchmark comes from cognitive scientists who find that it takes 650
milliseconds for a chess grandmaster to realize that a king has been put
in check after a move. Below that time period, you can find “ultrafast
extreme events,” or UEEs, in which trading algorithms cause prices to
change by 0.08% or more before returning to human-time market prices.
This appears to be the case when many simple algorithms, operating on
limited information, pile into a single trade.  

“Down in the sub-second regime, they are the only game in town,”
University of Miami Physics Professor Neil Johnson, who led the study,
says. “It’s almost like you’re seeing them in pure form.”   

If you’ve noticed that the number of extreme events spikes around the
time of the financial crisis, and the stocks most likely to experience
them are bank stocks, you’ll see why the researchers are so interested
in this hidden market: This pattern suggests the coupling between
extreme market behaviors and global instability—”how machine and human
worlds can become entwined across timescales from milliseconds to
months”—and is also are seen more often before and after the kinds of
“flash crashes” that people actually notice.

Regulators, though, aren’t keeping track of these events. That’s a
problem, not just because of any potential forewarning, but also because
trading at that speed creates volatility that makes markets less efficient. 

“Are these 18,000 lucky breaks for one of the algorithms or 18,000
examples of a new form of inside trading?” Johnson says. “In terms of
the information availability, it’s really hard to tell. It’s sort of
strange to have that going on and have nobody know.”

The researchers say there’s much more to learn, especially at the border
where human traders and robotic ones interact. One question is whether
moving at computer speeds is inefficient because there’s less
information available at that time scale—data just can’t move that fast,
even electronically. Laboratory experiments suggest computers are more
efficient on a human time-scale than a sub-second one. And if sub-second
trading does continue, do market participants need to come up with
sub-second hedges and derivatives to protect from this kind volatility?

Regardless, the complexity emerging naturally from high-frequency
trading tends to be hard to comprehend for market participants and
regulators alike.

“It’s sort of a collective, in some sense they all share responsibility
and yet nobody’s responsible,” Johnson says. “Am I responsible for the
traffic jam out on US 1? No, I’m just in it, but if no one was in it,
there wouldn’t be one.”

[1] http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130911/srep02627/full/srep02627.html



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ERTopen: Call upon & plea for satellite capacity

[nettime's avid reader]

http://www.ertopen.com/news-in-4-languges/english/item/3849


The Greek government tried to shut down ERT, the public national
broadcaster, on the 11th of June.

The employees, in response to the popular demand and outcry of the
public in Greece and abroad, kept -- and are determined to continue
keeping -- ERT open, by broadcasting a full radio and television
programme through the internet and by any other means suitable and
available.

Help and technical support from the EBU (European Broadcasting Union)
was crucial for 70 consequent days; but is now over, since the
international body decided to cease the re-distribution streaming of
the broadcasts by the employees of ERT.

Thus, we now call for the support of, and appeal to, each and every
European and/or Greek body, or organization that is able and willing,
to kindly provide us with satellite transmission capacities, so as to
obtain once more the capability of broadcasting freely our television
and radio programme again to the world.

By now, we stand convinced that by the solidarity and support not
only of the people, but of relevant institutions as well, we shall
prevail in our common cause and will continue to offer what the public
is nowadays in grave need of: an Open and Free public journalistic
establishment that caters to the actual needs of a struggling society.

We kindly request to address all relevant offers at
pospert...@yahoo.gr and/or erto...@gmail.com.






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Cryptome suffers brief take-down over Japanese 'terror' files

[nettime's avid reader]

Cryptome suffers brief take-down over Japanese 'terror' files
Bitten by attack dog, just a flesh wound

By Richard Chirgwin, 26th August 2013

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/26/cryptome_suffers_brief_takedown_over_japanese_terror_files/


Longstanding whistleblower site Cryptome.org is back online after a
brief takedown, sparked by its hosting of a list of alleged Japanese
terrorists.

The takedown by host Network Solutions came as a result of a complaint
signed Sima Jiro, who complained that the 114 documents in a file
identified as jp-terrorist-files.zip contained “lots of personal
information, such as named, DOBs, family structures, workplaces, phone
numbers. And also containing lots of documents which are probably
classified or confidential”.

The complainant also hoped not to be identified to Cryptome: “I
sincerely ask you to refrain from sending my request forward to your
customer or administrator of “Cryptome” or the uploader of the ZIP
file.”

Network Solutions initially complied with the request. However –
presumably following some discussion between John Young and Network
Solutions – it has now been restored.

Young is no stranger to takedowns. His site, an anonymous drop-box
for whistleblowers which documents both corporate and government
shenanigans, has been variously attacked with notices from Microsoft
(taken down and then restored), Yahoo! (taken down and restored), and
PayPal (banned then unbanned).

In 2010, Young famously described Wikileaks' Julian Assange as a
“narcissistic individual” who is willing to “sacrifice Bradley
Manning* and anyone else to advance their own interests” (*now Chelsea
Manning).

The correspondence over the latest takedown is here. [1]

[1] http://cryptome.org/2013/08/cryptome-suspended.htm




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Darkness at Noon

[nettime's avid reader]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/175773/bradley-manning-offers-apology-wikileaks-and-others-respond

"First, your honor, I want to start off with an apology. I am sorry that 
my actions hurt people. I'm sorry that they hurt the United States.

At the time of my decisions, as you know, I was dealing with a lot of 
issues, issues that are ongoing and continuing to affect me. Although a 
considerable difficulty in my life, these issues are not an excuse for 
my actions.

I understood what I was doing, and decisions I made. However, I did not 
fully appreciate the broader effects of my actions.

Those factors are clear to me now, through both self-refection during my 
confinement in various forms, and through the merits and sentencing 
testimony that I have seen here.

I am sorry for the unintended consequences of my actions. When I made 
these decisions I believed I was going to help people, not hurt people.

The last few years have been a learning experience. I look back at my 
decisions and wonder how on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly 
believe I could change the world for the better (unintelligible) on 
decisions of those with the proper authority.

In retrospect, I should have worked more aggressively inside the system, 
as we discussed during the provenance statement. I had options, and I 
should have used these options.

Unfortunately, I can't go back and change things. I can only go forward. 
I want to go forward. Before I can do that, I understand that I must pay 
a price for my decisions and actions.

Once I pay that price, I hope to one day live in a manner that I haven't 
been able to in the past. I want to be a better person, to go to 
college, to get a degree and to have a meaningful relationship with my 
sister, with my sister's family and my family.

I want to be a positive influence in their lives, just as my Aunt Debra 
has been to me. I have flaws and issues that I have to deal with, but I 
know that I can and will be a better person.

I hope that you can give me the opportunity to prove, not through words, 
but through conduct, that I am a good person and that I can return to a 
productive place in society. Thank you, your honor."



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Brazil to push for greater decentralization of Internet infrastructure

[nettime's avid reader]

Brazil moves to secure telecom, Internet systems after US spying

Brasilia, Aug 15
The Hindu http://tinyurl.com/kmnrp8b


(AFP) Brazil said on Wednesday it is moving to secure its communications 
through its own satellite and digital networks to end its dependence on 
the United States, which is accused of electronically spying on the region.

?Brazil is in favour of greater decentralisation: Internet governance 
must be multilateral and multisectoral with a broader participation,? 
the Communications Minister, Paulo Bernardo, told a congressional panel.

Yesterday, Foreign Minister, Antonio Patriota, warned his US 
counterpart, John Kerry, that the row over Washington?s electronic 
snooping could sow mistrust between the two countries.

Kerry responded by conceding that Brasilia was owed answers from 
Washington and would get them.

He suggested that the vast US surveillance programme aimed to "provide 
security, not just for Americans, but for Brazilians and the people of 
the world."

But Bernardo today criticised the ?strong concentration of (Internet) 
traffic? by US firms.

Revelations by US intelligence leaker Edward Snowden about the vast 
scope of US electronic surveillance programmes have caused deep unease 
in Brazil and other Latin American countries that have reportedly been 
targeted by the spying.

Bernardo said Brasilia was finalising the selection of companies that 
will be tasked with building and launching a geostationary defence and 
strategic communications satellite.

French-Italian group Thales Alenia Space (TAS) has said it had won a 
contract worth about $400 million to build a satellite for Brazil's 
developing space programme.

The order, placed by Visiona -- jointly owned by Brazilian aeroplane 
maker Embraer and telecom provider Telebras -- is for a geostationary 
satellite for civil and military use.

Telebras said that with the satellite, "high-speed Internet will be 
extended to the entire nation and will ensure the sovereignty of its 
civil and military communications."

Arianespace has been selected to launch the satellite in 2015.

The deal also allows for a transfer of technology between TAS and 
Brazil, making TAS the preferred industrial partner in building up 
Brazil?s space programme.

(This article was published on August 15, 2013)



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FT: Too much profit on Wall Street

[nettime's avid reader]

<< http://ft.com > Inside Business > July 15, 2013 >>

Too much profit on Wall Street

By Tom Braithwaite

Banks have issued so many warnings about regulation that they cannot now
admit that they are thriving

The biggest US banks are wrestling with an intractable problem. It is
not a surge in loan defaults, a wave of cyber attacks or mounting
lawsuits. It is far more serious: they are on the verge of making too
much money.

JPMorgan Chase is on track to make $25bn or more this year -- as much as
the gross domestic product of Paraguay -- with at least a 17 per cent
return on common equity that takes the bank back to the heady levels of
2007.

In a different political atmosphere this might be a moment for
celebration. Not only have banks such as JPMorgan and Wells Fargo
survived the crisis, they are thriving again, as they showed in their
results on Friday. Even Citigroup and Bank of America, which took $90bn
of bailout money between them, are out of the emergency room, working
their way through bad assets and competing for new business. Their
shares are up 95 and 78 per cent respectively in 12 months.

At another time, excess cash would be handed over to shareholders and
employees. Half of revenues from investment banking would be paid out to
staff and up to -- and sometimes more than -- 100 per cent of earnings
would be distributed to investors via dividends and share buybacks.

But in the prevailing climate, the celebrations must remain muted and
bank chiefs miserly. A meagre 31 per cent of revenues were set aside for
remuneration from JPMorgan's investment bank in its earnings on Friday.
For their part, shareholders might appreciate the rapid stock price
appreciation, but they are not expecting bumper dividends -- partly
because the Federal Reserve now blocks generous payouts.

Sensible bankers are accentuating the negative -- Jamie Dimon warned of
a "dramatic reduction" of mortgage profits last Friday and fretted that
foreigners were going to steal US business. On the earnings call a
puzzled analyst pointed to "extremely good" trading results and asked
the JPMorgan chief executive "if you could brag a little bit?" The
never-normally-shy Mr Dimon would not.

Here is the problem: banks have spent a lot of time, energy and money
warning of the potential ill-effects of ramping up regulation. But since
the crisis, international regulators have kept demanding more capital,
including a surcharge for the biggest banks. Lenders have doubled their
capital levels as a result, hitting the new Basel III targets six years
early in some cases and, yet, where are the ill effects? The best of
them continue to set new profit records.

Now US regulators and politicians have found a new energy, quite
possibly because we are a distance from the crisis and banks look
healthier, to go much further in imposing tougher regulations on the
banks. In the next 12 months the Fed will hit the banks with a new
flurry of measures: a stricter leverage rule requiring more capital held
against assets, a requirement to hold a minimum amount of long-term debt
to be used to recapitalise a failing bank, a new capital tax on those
banks who rely too much on short-term wholesale funding and the
long-in-the-works proprietary trading ban known as the Volcker rule.

Those are coming, they are serious and the banks fear them. There is an
outside chance that lawmakers will go even further, such as by restoring
the split between investment banking and commercial banking known as
Glass-Steagall. There is still plenty to play for in deciding how
painful the next round of regulations will be.

But, with every earnings season, warnings of calamity look more and more
hollow. The Financial Services Roundtable said last week that adding an
extra percentage point or two to the leverage requirement would set back
the recovery. It's a dubious contention.

A very precise recent survey found that regulation had increased by 117
per cent in the past 12 months, forcing banks to add 2.3 more people
each to deal with it. For all the silliness of those numbers, there is a
regulatory challenge for small banks. But that merely underscores the
slow but steady industry consolidation, where JPMorgan, Wells Fargo and
their top peers are enjoying more and more share as their smaller rivals
crumble.

There are clouds on the horizon. Mr Dimon was not bluffing entirely when
he warned of the slowdown in the mortgage business. The Fed's withdrawal
from financial markets will remove an important tailwind.

The banks' only hope is that regulators and politicians pay more
attention to these grim threats than the more upbeat evidence from their
own rosy bottom lines.

Tom Braithwaite is the Financial Times' US banking editor

tom.braithwa...@ft.com


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movie subtitle fansite raided

[nettime's avid reader]

http://falkvinge.net/2013/07/10/fan-subtitle-site-raided-by-copyright-industry-aided-by-police/


The movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se has been raided by the police 
and copyright industry. This marks an escalation of the war against 
sharing culture and knowledge, as the site contained nothing but 
user-submitted translations of movie dialog. We are quickly coming to a 
two-tier justice system, where the copyright industry is right against 
single parents by definition, and that’s not taken very well.


The move subtitle fansite undertexter.se, literally meaning 
subtitles.se, is a site where people contribute their own translations 
of movies. This lets people who aren’t good at the original language of 
a movie or cartoon put those fanmade subtitles – fansubs – on top of the 
movie or cartoon. Fansubbing is a thriving culture which usually 
provides better-than-professional subtitles for new episodes with less 
than 24 hours of turnaround (whereas the providers of the original 
cartoon or movie can easily take six months or more).


What’s remarkable about this raid is that the copyright industry has 
decided to do a full-out raid against something that is entirely 
fan-made. It underscores the general sentiment of the copyright monopoly 
not protecting the creator of artwork, but protecting the big 
distribution monopolies, no matter who actually created the art. The 
copyright industry in Sweden has previously asserted threateningly that 
the dialog of a movie would be covered by the copyright monopoly, and 
that any fan translation – even for free – would be a violation of that 
monopoly. Still, going all-out with a police raid backed by the 
copyright industry’s enforcement arm in Sweden is a clear escalation of 
violence.


(In Sweden, the copyright industry can legally order police raids. They 
are called intrångsundersökning and are technically executed by the 
Enforcement Authority who enlist Police in turn. Details on the exact 
chain of command in this specific raid remain unclear as of Wednesday 
morning.)


In short, this event shows that the copyright industry will stop at 
nothing to reverse time to where they and they alone decided what 
culture and knowledge was available, and to whom. This war will not end 
until 1) the copyright industry is dead, or 2) they have complete 
control over access to the planet’s culture and knowledge. Pick your 
sides and place your bets.


It is becoming increasingly clear that the police is acting to protect 
the copyright industry, and not to uphold the law. This is very, very 
serious. When Netflix copied fansubs for their Hollywood movies from the 
fansub site DivXFinland, everybody was amused – even though it was a 
textbook copyright monopoly violation of those fansubs. But Netflix is 
part of the copyright industry, and therefore, they are above the law.



When the Swedish video-on-demand service Voddler sat up on its pretend 
high-horse-in-shining-armor and proclaimed its love for the copyright 
monopoly and how important it was to all of civilization, while at the 
same time building its entire service on GPL code and thereby committing 
a huge copyright monopoly violation themselves, there’s a pattern here. 
The rights, monopolies, and privileges don’t matter in the slightest; 
what matters is who holds them.


This is the emergence of a two-tier justice system, where some rules 
apply to one set of people (“high justice”), and other rules apply to 
the rest of people (“low justice”). But a two-tier justice system is not 
a justice system at all; it is an oppression system.


This game is a dangerous one to play for the political elite. When 
ordinary people are told that there aren’t police resources to 
investigate who raped them, who stole their car, and who broke into 
their home, and get the investigations closed in 15 minutes (which was 
the case with a rape investigation recently) – but there are police 
resources to conduct raids against fan-made creations from the common 
folk, just because the wealthiest feel like it (there’s not even a 
credible threat to base the raid on) — that’s a recipe for more than 
growing discontent. That’s a recipe for an uprising, in one form or 
another. Which form such an uprising takes will depend entirely on how 
bad the corruption has fested.


The crew from undertexter.se has a statement out as of this morning:

Undertexter.se has had a police raid this morning (July 9) and 
servers and computers have been seized, and therefore, the site is down. 
We who work on the site don’t consider a interpretation of dialog to be 
something illegal, especially not when sharing it for free. Henrik 
Pontén [the copyright industry's primary henchman in Sweden], who is 
behind the raid, disagrees. Sorry Hollywood, this was the totally wrong 
card to play. We will never surrender. [...] We must do everything in 
our power to stop these anti-pirates. [...]


The Swedish Pirate Party has published a press stat

Torrentfreak: Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers?

[nettime's avid reader]

Mastercard and Visa Start Banning VPN Providers?
July 3, 2013
https://torrentfreak.com/mastercard-and-visa-start-banning-vpn-providers-130703/


Following the introduction of restrictions against file-sharing 
services, Mastercard and Visa have reportedly started to take action 
against VPN providers. This week, Swedish payment provider Payson cut 
access to anonymizing services after being ordered to do so by the 
credit card companies. VPN provider iPredator is one of the affected 
customers and founder Peter Sunde says that they are considering legal 
action to get the service unblocked.

visa-mastercardPayment providers are increasingly taking action against 
sites and services that are linked to copyright infringement.

There?s an unwritten rule that Mastercard and Visa don?t accept 
file-hosting sites that have an affiliate program and PayPal has thrown 
out nearly all cyberlockers in recent months.

It now appears that these policies have carried over to VPN providers 
and other anonymizing services. Before the weekend customers of the 
popular Swedish payment service provider Payson received an email 
stating that VPN services are no longer allowed to accept Visa and 
Mastercard payments due to a recent policy change.

?Payson has restrictions against anonymization (including VPN services). 
As a result Payson can unfortunately no longer give your customers the 
option to finance payments via their cards (VISA or MasterCard),? the 
email states, adding that they still accept bank transfers as deposits.

The new policy went into effect on Monday, leaving customers with a 
two-day window to find a solution.

While the email remains vague about why this drastic decision was taken, 
in a telephone call Payson confirmed that it was complying with an 
urgent requirement from Visa and Mastercard to stop accepting payments 
for VPN services.

One of these customers is the iPredator VPN, launched by Pirate Bay 
co-founder Peter Sunde and friends. Sunde tells TorrentFreak that he is 
baffled by the decision, which he believes may be an effort to prevent 
the public from covering their tracks online and preventing government 
spying.

?It means that US companies are forcing non-American companies not to 
allow people to protest their privacy and be anonymous, and thus the NSA 
can spy even more. It?s just INSANE,? Sunde says.

Sunde explains that iPredator will always have plenty of other payment 
options, but sees it as an outrage that Mastercard and Visa have 
apparently decided to ban a perfectly legal technology.

?For iPredator there are always other payment methods, like Bitcoin, but 
it?s insane to censor a totally legit system that is there to avoid 
censorship and surveillance,? Sunde says.

Despite these alternatives, Sunde is not going to stand idly by. He 
informs TorrentFreak that Ipredator considering taking legal action, 
citing the Wikileaks win against the credit card companies as a 
favorable precedent.

Ipredator is far from the only VPN provider that is affected by the 
policy change. Anonine, Mullvad, VPNTunnel, Privatvpn and several others 
are also using Payson?s services.

At this point it?s unclear why the two companies are taking a stand 
against anonymizing services. It seems likely that an industry or 
authority has been pushing for the policy change behind the scenes. 
However, with privacy high on the agenda with the PRISM scandal, the 
move comes at an odd time.

TorrentFreak has reached out to Mastercard and Visa but we have yet to 
hear back from the companies. We are not aware of any other payment 
service providers who have taken action against VPN providers, so the 
scope of the actions are unknown at this point.

Update July 4: Visa Europe told us that it ?has not been involved in 
this matter in any way, and has not made any such stipulations to Payson 
or to any other organisation.? We specifically asked whether VPNs and 
other anonymizing services are in any way prohibited by Visa, but the 
company didn?t confirm nor deny. Visa believes that the issue was raised 
by Payson?s acquiring bank, which acts as an intermediary between 
payment processors and card associations such as Visa and MasterCard.

We have asked Payson to clarify the discrepancy and will update the 
article when we hear back from them.

Mastercard has not responded yet.


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Marrakesh agreement on copyright exceptions for blind persons

[nettime's avid reader]

KEI statement on the Marrakesh agreement on copyright exceptions for 
blind persons


James Love on 26. June 2013 - 12:47
http://keionline.org/node/1765

We are very happy with the agreement. There were a few areas where the
treaty could have been better, but these are areas of minor quibbles.
The first order issues all went in favor of blind persons. The treaty
will provide a dramatic and massive improvement in access to reading
materials for persons in common languages, such as English, Spanish,
French, Portuguese and Arabic, and it will provide the building blocks
for global libraries to service blind persons. On the issues that
mattered the most for blind persons, such as the ability to deliver
documents across borders to individuals, and to break technical
measures, the treaty was a resounding success. There are some areas
where the treaty could have been improved, and it would have been
improved, but the US and EU negotiators were remarkably responsive to
publisher lobbies. But, the result shows a shift in power in global
negotiations on intellectual property rights. The United States and
the European Union failed to block or render ineffective the treaty.
Developing countries formed strong links with several independent
countries like Australia, Canada, Switzerland and even Japan to move
the treaty in a positive direction.

The text is complex, and we are working on a detailed analysis of
the final provisions, which we will not even see in final form until
Thursday.

The World Blind Union and other blind organizations did a fabulous
job, as did developing country negotiators from Asia, Africa and
Latin America. The support for the blind groups from libraries and
civil society groups was strong, and the combined effort of the blind
and non-blind civil society NGOs was more powerful than the lobbying
by Exxon, General Electric, Monsanto, GSK, Random House, Pearson
Publishing, the MPAA and its member groups and others who opposed this
treaty.

-



TWN Info Service on Intellectual Property Issues (Jun13/11)

27 June 2013 Third World Network

www.twn.my

*WIPO: Treaty concluded for visually impaired to access published
works Published in SUNS #7614 dated 27 June 2013*

Marrakesh, 26 Jun (K. M. Gopakumar) -- Major breakthrough negotiations
on an International Treaty for Visually Impaired Persons/Persons with
Print Disability concluded late night on 25 June.

The Treaty creates a legal obligation on the part of the Contracting
Party to provide an exception or limitation in its national copyrights
law on the right of reproduction, the right of distribution, and the
right of making available to the public, to facilitate availability of
the works in accessible format copies.

The Treaty covers persons with blindness, visual impairment, reading
disability or any other physical disability which prevents them from
holding or manipulating a book or to focus or move their eyes in the
normal speed.

The informal negotiations on the final night resolved the major
contentious issues related to the requirement of commercial
availability, the Berne Gap (countries that are not Parties to the
Berne Declaration for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works)
and the three-step test, individual right to import an accessible
format copy of a work, technology protection measures (TPM), the right
to translation, cooperation to facilitate cross-border exchange and
concerns of least developed countries (see SUNS #7611 dated 24 June
2013).

The major achievement of the negotiations is in three areas: First,
negotiators decided to drop the commercial availability test
requirement in the importing country for the cross-border exchange
of an accessible format copy of the work. Secondly, the right of
importation is extended to individuals, hence, any beneficiary person
can import the work directly from an authorised entity from another
country. Thirdly, there is an obligation on the part of Contracting
Parties to take appropriate measures to prevent content providers from
digitally locking the work to prevent its conversion to an accessible
format copy.

*COMMERCIAL AVAILABILITY*

Dropping of the commercial availability test is expected to facilitate
the transfer of accessible format copies from developed countries to
developing countries and to fill a knowledge gap that exists among the
blind, visually impaired and persons living with print disability.
Out of the three options from the negotiating text, the first option
emerged as the preferred option (see SUNS #7611 dated 24 June 2013).

During the negotiations, it became untenable for the European
Union (EU) to continue its demand on the insertion of commercial
availability.

One observer cited two reasons for the EU's late flexibility, which
resulted in the dropping of the commercial availability. First,
globally, the commercial availability requirement is mentioned in the
national laws of around six countries including the United Kingdom
and Canada. According 

An Open (Of Course) Letter to My Friend, the NSA

[nettime's avid reader]

http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2013/06/12/an-open-of-course-letter-to-my-friend-the-nsa/

Dear NSA,

We need to have a chat, so I trust you’re reading this.

Of course you are; good. Now, let’s see … how should I put this? Look, 
you’ve done a great job cultivating that whole “spook” image for the 
past 60 years. Really, you’ve just been terrifyingly adept at creating 
an environment of ironclad secrecy, even more so than the CIA, who’ve 
bungled too many overseas jobs to be the omnipotent, untouchable agency 
they’d like us to think they are.


Times are changing, though. For the past several generations, you’ve 
been the rulers of all information, with no one to challenge you. 
Americans just had to trust that the good quiet folk at the NSA were 
looking out for them, because no one else could handle data on such a 
large scale. It was a simpler time, back when the Internet was young and 
the Web was just a seed of an idea, and our idea of “big data” was the 
Yellow Pages.


There are new kids in town, though; kids who grew up on data. They were 
raised to dish out and take in as much data as possible, and they do it 
for fun. To you, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all the rest of it are 
the latest places from which to siphon information. To these new kids, 
it’s home. It’s where they grew up, which is why they’re much better at 
it, and why you hire so many of them.


Now, what happens when you raise a generation on a steady diet of data, 
and then try to keep naughty secrets? They’re going to ask questions. 
They grew up in a world where information was free, and they took 
advantage of that fact. They learned more about the world around them 
than could ever be learned in school, and they went online for the 
answers to the questions their parents and teachers wouldn’t answer. 
They grew up not just appreciating that information was free, but 
expecting information to be free.


It gets worse. Not only are you hiring millennials, for whom secrecy is 
anathema—you’re hiring millennial hackers. And hacking, as you well 
know, means finding ways of turning technology to serve a purpose other 
than its intended one. When information isn’t free, these people have 
the ability and the will to free it.


I know this because I’m one of them. I may not have top-secret clearance 
and make six figures working for one of your contractors, but Edward 
Snowden’s demographic profile still hits close to home. When I was a 
boy, I used to hack into my computer games to add fart sounds to them. I 
built my own computers. I made my sister’s Teddy Ruxpin say horrible, 
horrible things. When I get a new phone, its hackability is its 
number-one buying point.


When I get my hands on a new piece of technology, my first thought isn’t 
about what it can do—it’s about what it can’t do, and how can I force it 
to overcome its limitations to do what I want. I then wonder, “Why 
wasn’t I ‘allowed’ to do this in the first place?” See, we millennial 
hackers simply cannot take anything at face value. We’re a bit 
contrarian and stubborn by nature. It’s why we’re good at what we do. 
The more constraints you place on us (be they workplace, physical, 
technological, or copyright) the more we feel a need to disregard, 
challenge, or overcome those constraints.


To be a hacker is to be cynical about whatever “solid” information or 
limits you’re faced with, to remove layers of consumer sheen or 
government spin until raw components are laid bare to reconstruct at 
will. You reward people like me with fat salaries when we do this with 
technology, so there’s little sense in expecting us not do the same in 
the rest of our lives—with your policies, rules, information, even with 
our own personal lives. We tinker, probe, deconstruct, and reassemble 
for other purposes. One thing we don’t do is blindly put hand to heart 
and sing “God Bless, America” —unless we’re in a North Korean gulag and 
it’s a contrarian move.


Do you see the problem? You need my kind of people for our understanding 
of data, but we don’t necessarily want or need you. You are anathema to 
our values and expectations. Sure, you’ve got some very smart graybeards 
who can do some amazing things, but they’re not going to be the bulk of 
your army for long, if they even still are. You have no choice but to 
keep hiring these hackers who didn’t grow up having data hidden from 
them. It’s ironic that you’ve become so reliant on people who really 
have no business in a tight-lipped, hierarchical quasi-militarized 
institution. We are the ones you should be snooping on, if only you 
could snoop without us.


I feel your pain.

Edward Snowden smoked you, and it wasn’t even very hard for him. Now, I 
know what you’re going to say. “It won’t happen again! We’ll improve 
security!” Who is going to improve your security? Is it going to be the 
naval officers you used to hire, respectful of hierarchy and used to a 
military lifestyle? Or maybe, say, more young, technical 

Anonymous releases private NSA documents regarding

[nettime's avid reader]

http://pastebin.com/MPpT7xaf

 _
/ \   _ __   ___  _ __  _   _ _ __ ___   ___  _   _ ___
   / _ \ | '_ \ / _ \| '_ \| | | | '_ ` _ \ / _ \| | | / __|
  / ___ \| | | | (_) | | | | |_| | | | | | | (_) | |_| \__ \
 /_/   \_\_| |_|\___/|_| |_|\__, |_| |_| |_|\___/ \__,_|___/
|___/

Greetings Netizens, and Citizens of the world.

Anonymous has obtained some documents that "they" do not want
you to see, and much to "their" chagrin, we have found them, and are
giving them to you. These documents prove that the NSA is spying on
you, and not just Americans. They are spying on the citizens of over
35 different countries. These documents contain information on the
companies involved in GiG, and Prism. Whats GiG you might ask? well...

 The GIG will enable the secure, agile, robust, dependable,
interoperable data sharing environment for the Department where
warfighter, business, and intelligence users share knowledge on a
global network that facilitates information superiority, accelerates
decision-making, effective operations, and Net-Centric transformation.

Like we said, this is happening in over 35 countries, and done in
cooperation with private businesses, and intelligence partners world
wide.

We bring this to you, So that you know just how little rights you
have. Your privacy and freedoms are slowly being taken from you, in
closed door meetings, in laws buried in bills, and by people who are
supposed to be protecting you.

Download these documents, share them, mirror them, don't allow
them to make them disappear. Spread them wide and far. Let these
people know, that we will not be silenced, that we will not be taken
advantage of, and that we are not happy about this unwarranted,
unnecessary, unethical spying of our private lives, for the monetary
gain of the 1%.

And now, the candy: http://thedocs.hostzi.com/

Mirrors:
http://t.co/XVlZQ53Zhp
http://t.co/JYUHrhi3Ue
http://t.co/qR9PRzySbq
http://t.co/yGw2sP976W
http://t.co/MrmBj4kma5

We are Anonymous
We do not forgive
We do not forget
and by now,
You should expect us



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Driverless cars, pilotless planes -- will there be jobs left for a human beings

[nettime's avid reader]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/19/driverless-cars-pilotless-planes-jobs-human

Hill Hutton

Suddenly a robotised, automated economic reality is moving off the
science fiction pages and into daily life. The growing use of unmanned
battlefield drones is encouraging the growth of pilotless commercial
aircraft – the first ever flew in British airspace last month.
Google's driverless car is completing ever more trials ever more
successfully: the world's major car companies are all hot in pursuit,
working on their own prototypes of their own versions. The automated
checkouts at supermarkets are becoming as familiar as bank cash
machines. From staff-free ticket offices to students who can learn
online, it seems there is no corner of economic life in which people
are not being replaced by machines.

This is the "Great Reset" – a cull of broadly middle-class jobs with
middle-class incomes that is apparent across the west, but with little
current sign of what industries and activities will replace them.

The world has lost millions of jobs before – on the land or in the
old horse-powered economy – but they were soon replaced by jobs in
the car industry or the new service industries. What worries many
economists and computer scientists is that today's technologies are
going to remove people from economic activity completely. Some argue
that a dystopian world is emerging in which good jobs and full-time
employment will become the preserve of an educated, computer-literate
elite. For example Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google are plainly
riding the new wave, but they are not mass employers like Tesco, Ford
or General Motors.

Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University, asks if we
are ready for a world in which half the adult population does not
work. The Great Reset – the economy resetting itself, after a major
technological shock, to deliver jobs for all – may never happen.

The omens are all around. The US economy has never generated so few
jobs in an upturn since records began. In Britain, the Resolution
Foundation charts the ongoing squeeze on low and middle incomes,
and observes brutally that already Britain has the second highest
proportion of low-paid jobs in the developed world. The formal
unemployment numbers, now ominously rising five years since the crisis
began, do not capture the full extent to which the economy is not
delivering good work.

Plainly some of the explanation is that the economy is still reeling
from the effect of the financial crisis and the accompanying vast
overhang of private debt. But economies have an embedded resilience.
Output will return to the levels of 2008, probably some time next
year. There will be an economic "recovery". But this raises the
question: what happens afterwards?

Think through the implications of the driverless car. These will
be vehicles whose complex sensors allow them to communicate with
one another, so that they know one another's intended route. One of
the reasons Google is investing so much is that whoever owns the
communications system for driverless cars will own the 21st century's
equivalent of the telephone network or money clearing system: this
will be a licence to print money. The benefits are endless. Roads
will both be able to carry more traffic and be safer. Personalised
door-to-door transport will become hugely pleasurable: your car
will deliver you to your home or place of work and then park itself
without you. Road accidents will plummet. Energy efficiency will
be transformed. Insurance rates, even the need for insurance, will
plunge. Personalised transport, ordered by your mobile phone, will
gradually replace mass transport networks.

But the implications for employment are awesome. Thomas Frey,
senior futurologist at the DaVinci Institute, lists taxi-, bus- and
truck-driving as soon-to-be-extinct occupations – along with traffic
police, all forms of home delivery and waste disposal, jobs at petrol
stations, car washes and parking lots. The cars themselves will be
made by robots in automated car factories. The only new jobs will be
in the design and marketing of the cars, and in writing the computer
software that will allow them to navigate their journeys, along with
the apps for our mobile phones that will help us to use them better.

Professor Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary, thinks that
the challenge of the decades ahead is not debt or competition from
China but the dramatic transformations that technology is bringing
about. Summers believes that the transition to the automated economy
that robotisation implies has only just begun. The invention of 3D
printing, in which every home or office will be equipped with an
in-house printer that can spew out the goods we want – from shoes to
pills – anticipates a world of what Summers calls automated "doers".
They will do everything for us, eliminating the need for much work.
The only jobs will be in writing the software and building the
"doers", creating a bifurc

Black hat, white hat, green hat hackers

[nettime's avid reader]

http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/

Last week I [Moxie Marlinspike] was contacted by an agent of Mobily, one 
of two telecoms operating in Saudi Arabia, about a surveillance project 
that they’re working on in that country. Having published two reasonably 
popular MITM tools, it’s not uncommon for me to get emails requesting 
that I help people with their interception projects. I typically don’t 
respond, but this one (an email titled “Solution for monitoring 
encrypted data on telecom”) caught my eye.


I was interested to know more about what they were up to, so I wrote 
back and asked. After a week of correspondence, I learned that they are 
organizing a program to intercept mobile application data, with specific 
interest in monitoring:


Mobile Twitter
Viber
Line
WhatsApp

I was told that the project is being managed by Yasser D. Alruhaily, 
Executive Manager of the Network & Information Security Department at 
Mobily. The project’s requirements come from “the regulator” (which I 
assume means the government of Saudi Arabia). The requirements are the 
ability to both monitor and block mobile data communication, and 
apparently they already have blocking setup. Here’s a sample snippet 
from one email:


From: Yasser Alruhaily <…….. .. .@mobily.com.sa>

Date: Thursday, May 2, 2013 1:04 PM

Subject: Re: As discussed last day .further discussion

we are working in defining a way to deal with all such requirements 
from regulator and it is not only for Whatsapp, it is for whatsapp, 
line, viber, twitter etc..


So, what we need your support in is the following:

is there any technical way that allow for interception these 
traffic?

Is there any company or vendor could help us on this regard?
is there any telecom company they implement any solution or 
workaround?


One of the design documents that they volunteered specifically called 
out compelling a CA in the jurisdiction of the UAE or Saudi Arabia to 
produce SSL certificates that they could use for interception. A 
considerable portion of the document was also dedicated to a discussion 
of purchasing SSL vulnerabilities or other exploits as possibilities.


Their level of sophistication didn’t strike me as particularly 
impressive, and their existing design document was pretty confused in a 
number of places, but Mobily is a company with over 5 billion in 
revenue, so I’m sure that they’ll eventually figure something out.


What’s depressing is that I could have easily helped them intercept 
basically all of the traffic they were interested in (except for Twitter 
– I helped write that TLS code, and I think we did it well). They later 
told me they’d already gotten a WhatsApp interception prototype working, 
and were surprised by how easy it was. The bar for most of these apps is 
pretty low.

In The Name Of Terror

When they eventually asked me for a price quote, and I indicated that I 
wasn’t interested in the job for privacy reasons, they responded with this:


I know that already and I have same thoughts like you freedom and 
respecting privacy, actually Saudi has a big terrorist problem and they 
are misusing these services for spreading terrorism and contacting and 
spreading their cause that’s why I took this and I seek your help. If 
you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those 
who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.


So privacy is cool, but the Saudi government just wants to monitor 
people’s tweets because… terrorism. The terror of the re-tweet.


But the real zinger is that, by not helping, I might also be a 
terrorist. Or an indirect terrorist, or something.


While this email is obviously absurd, it’s the same general logic that 
we will be confronted with over and over again: choose your team. Which 
would you prefer? Bombs or exploits. Terrorism or security. Us or them. 
As transparent as this logic might be, sometimes it doesn’t take much 
when confirming to oneself that the profitable choice is also the right 
choice.


If I absolutely have to frame my choices as an either-or, I’ll choose 
power vs. people.

Culture Over Time

I know that, even though I never signed a confidentiality agreement, and 
even though I simply asked questions without signaling that I wanted to 
participate, it’s still somewhat rude of me to publish details of 
correspondence with someone else.


I’m being rude by publishing this correspondence with Mobily, not only 
because it’s substantially more rude of them to be engaged in 
massive-scale eavesdropping of private communication, but because I 
think it’s part of a narrative that we need to consider. What Mobily is 
up to is what’s currently happening everywhere, and we can’t ignore that.


Over the past year there has been an ongoing debate in the security 
community about exploit sales. For the most part, the conversation has 
focused on legality and whether exploit sales should be re

Essay-Grading Software

[nettime's avid reader]

[It's the classic approach. First, de-skill a certain task, i.e. make
people behave like machines, then replace them by actual machines.
This becomes particularly clear at the end of the article.]


April 4, 2013
Essay-Grading Software Offers Professors a Break
By JOHN MARKOFF

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/05/science/new-test-for-computers-gradi
ng-essays-at-college-level.html


Imagine taking a college exam, and, instead of handing in a blue book
and getting a grade from a professor a few weeks later, clicking the
“send” button when you are done and receiving a grade back instantly,
your essay scored by a software program.

And then, instead of being done with that exam, imagine that the
system would immediately let you rewrite the test to try to improve
your grade.

EdX, the nonprofit enterprise founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology to offer courses on the Internet, has just
introduced such a system and will make its automated software
available free on the Web to any institution that wants to use it.
The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and
short written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.

The new service will bring the educational consortium into a growing
conflict over the role of automation in education. Although automated
grading systems for multiple-choice and true-false tests are now
widespread, the use of artificial intelligence technology to grade
essay answers has not yet received widespread endorsement by educators
and has many critics.

Anant Agarwal, an electrical engineer who is president of EdX,
predicted that the instant-grading software would be a useful
pedagogical tool, enabling students to take tests and write essays
over and over and improve the quality of their answers. He said the
technology would offer distinct advantages over the traditional
classroom system, where students often wait days or weeks for grades.

“There is a huge value in learning with instant feedback,” Dr. Agarwal
said. “Students are telling us they learn much better with instant
feedback.”

But skeptics say the automated system is no match for live teachers.
One longtime critic, Les Perelman, has drawn national attention
several times for putting together nonsense essays that have fooled
software grading programs into giving high marks. He has also been
highly critical of studies that purport to show that the software
compares well to human graders.

“My first and greatest objection to the research is that they did not
have any valid statistical test comparing the software directly to
human graders,” said Mr. Perelman, a retired director of writing and a
current researcher at M.I.T.

He is among a group of educators who last month began circulating a
petition opposing automated assessment software. The group, which
calls itself Professionals Against Machine Scoring of Student Essays
in High-Stakes Assessment, has collected nearly 2,000 signatures,
including some from luminaries like Noam Chomsky.

“Let’s face the realities of automatic essay scoring,” the group’s
statement reads in part. “Computers cannot ‘read.’ They cannot
measure the essentials of effective written communication: accuracy,
reasoning, adequacy of evidence, good sense, ethical stance,
convincing argument, meaningful organization, clarity, and veracity,
among others.”

But EdX expects its software to be adopted widely by schools and
universities. EdX offers free online classes from Harvard, M.I.T. and
the University of California, Berkeley; this fall, it will add classes
from Wellesley, Georgetown and the University of Texas. In all, 12
universities participate in EdX, which offers certificates for course
completion and has said that it plans to continue to expand next year,
including adding international schools.

The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first
grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of
machine-learning techniques to train itself to be able to grade any
number of essays or answers automatically and almost instantaneously.

The software will assign a grade depending on the scoring system
created by the teacher, whether it is a letter grade or numerical
rank. It will also provide general feedback, like telling a student
whether an answer was on topic or not.

Dr. Agarwal said he believed that the software was nearing the
capability of human grading.

“This is machine learning and there is a long way to go, but it’s good
enough and the upside is huge,” he said. “We found that the quality of
the grading is similar to the variation you find from instructor to
instructor.”

EdX is not the first to use automated assessment technology, which
dates to early mainframe computers in the 1960s. There is now a range
of companies offering commercial programs to grade written test
answers, and four states — Louisiana, North Dakota, Utah and West
Virginia — are using some form of the technology in secondary schools.
A fifth, 

Julian Assange and Eric Schmit on Bitcoin, June 2011

[nettime's avid reader]

On the 23 of June, 2011 a secret five hour meeting took place between 
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who was under house arrest in rural 
UK at the time, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt.


Also in attendance was Jared Cohen, a former Secretary of State advisor 
to Hillary Clinton and Lisa Shields of the Council for Foreign Relations.


Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for 
"The New Digital World", their forthcoming book to be published on April 
23, 2013.


We provide here a verbatim transcript of the majority of the meeting; a 
close reading, particularly of the latter half, is revealing.


http://wikileaks.org/Transcript-Meeting-Assange-Schmidt


<...>


JA: On the publishing end, the magnet links and so on are starting to 
come up. There's also a very nice little paper that I've seen in 
relation to Bitcoin, that... you know about Bitcoin?


ES: No.

JA: Okay, Bitcoin is something that evolved out of the cypherpunks a 
couple of years ago, and it is an alternative... it is a stateless currency.


JC: Yeah, I was reading about this just yesterday.

JA: And very important, actually. It has a few problems. But its 
innovations exceed its problems. Now there has been innovations along 
these lines in many different paths of digital currencies, anonymous, 
untraceable etc. People have been experimenting with over the past 20 
years. The Bitcoin actually has the balance and incentives right, and 
that is why it is starting to take off. The different combination of 
these things. No central nodes. It is all point to point. One does not 
need to trust any central mint. If we look at traditional currencies 
such as gold, we can see that they have sort of interesting properties 
that make them valuable as a medium of exchange. Gold is divisible, it 
is easy to chop up, actually out of all metals it is the easiest to chop 
up into fine segments. You can test relatively easily whether it is true 
or whether it is fake. You can take chopped up segments and you can put 
them back together by melting the gold. So that is what makes it a good 
medium of exchange and it is also a good medium of value store, because 
you can take it and put it in the ground and it is not going to decay 
like apples or steaks. The problems with traditional digital currencies 
on the internet is that you have to trust the mint not to print too much 
of it.


[laughter]

JA: And the incentives for the mint to keep printing are pretty high 
actually, because you can print free money. That means you need some 
kind of regulation. And if you're gonna have regulation then who is 
going to enforce the regulation, now all of a sudden you have sucked in 
the whole problem of the state into this issue, and political pushes 
here and there, and who can get control of the mint, push it one way or 
another, for particular purposes. Bitcoin instead has an algorithm where 
the anyone can create, anyone can be their own mint. They're basically 
just searching for collisions with hashes.. A simple way is... they are 
searching for a sequence of zero bits on the beginning of the thing. And 
you have to randomly search for, in order to do this. So there is a lot 
of computational work in order to do this. And each Bitcoin software 
that is distributed.. That work algorithmically increases as time goes 
by. So the difficulty in producing Bitcoins becomes harder and harder 
and harder as time goes by and it is built into the system.


ES: Right, right. That's interesting.

JA: Just like the difficulty in mining gold becomes harder and harder 
and harder and that is what makes people predict that there is not going 
to be a sudden amount of gold in the market, rather...


ES: To enforce the scarcity...

JA: Yeah, to enforce scarcity, and scarcity will go up as time goes by, 
and what does that mean for incentives in going into the Bitcoin system. 
That means that you should get into the Bitcoin system now. Early. You 
should be an early adopter. Because your Bitcoins are going to be worth 
a lot of money one day. So once you have a... and the Bitcoins are 
just... a Bitcoin address is just a big hash. It's a hash of a public 
key that you generate. So once you have this hash you can just advertise 
it to everyone, and people can send you Bitcoins, and there is people 
who have set up exchanges to convert from Bitcoin to US dollars and so 
on. And it solves a very interesting technical problem, which is how do 
you stop double spending?


All digital material can be cloned, almost zero costs, so if you have 
currency as a digital string of numbers, how do you stop me... I want to 
buy this piece of pasta.


[JA using lunch table objects]

JA: Here is my digital currency and, now I take a copy of it. And now I 
want to buy your bit of egg. And then you go... and now I want to buy 
your radish! And you go, what? I've already got that! What's going on 
here? There's been some fraud! So there's a synchronization problem. Who

Means of production: The factory-floor knowledge economy (le monde diplo)

[nettime's avid reader]

The factory-floor knowledge economy
Means of production
http://mondediplo.com/2013/03/10makers

Digital manufacturing with 3D printers is for some enthusiasts an
anti-consumer concept, promising a return to a craft ethos and an end
to outsourcing. But this may not be the real future of the technique.

by Johan Söderberg

The third industrial revolution might come with personal or digital
manufacturing, when what used to be bought in a shop could be made
at home with such tools as laser cutters, 3D printers and computer
numerical control (CNC) milling machines (1). They are all based on
the same principle, using software to help guide the movements of a
machine tool, and the one that has attracted the most media attention
is a printer that prints three-dimensional objects, with a nozzle that
lays down a plastic material layer by layer. Designs for the printer
of such objects as doorknobs or bicycles can be downloaded from the
net.

The media articles featured one of the many commercial 3D printers,
but the technology was developed by a loose network of hobbyists or
“makers”, whose homemade 3D printer is called RepRap. They are rooted
in the world of free software and strive to apply the same values and
practices to manufacturing; some aspire to democratise the means of
production and abolish consumer society. It is often predicted that 3D
printing will reduce labour costs and lessen the incentive of firms
to outsource production to low-cost-labour countries (2). This idea,
which is closer to a respectable business outlook, is endorsed by the
publisher of Make magazine, which also organises annual Maker Faires
in major US cities.

At the New York 2011 Faire, I noticed a certain dissonance with
the revolutionary ideals. A corner of it was dedicated to “the
Print-Village”, with 20 booths devoted to the RepRap and its many
derivatives. Nearby was a much larger pavilion with many exhibitions
of sophisticated CNC machines, and one booth that stood out — it was
for the “Alliance for American Manufacturing”, between American steel
manufacturers and United Steelworkers (USW), and had red, white and
blue banners with the message “Keep it made in America”. A hostess
handed out badges with the same message; she confessed to me she found
it ironic to be doing that here, next to the machines descended from a
technology that contributed so much to the destruction of factory jobs
in the US and elsewhere.

The historian David Noble has shown that CNC machinery came out of
numerical control (N/C) machinery — automated machine tools — which
originated in the context of the cold war (3), its development largely
funded by military contracts. The technology was thought to be crucial
to the arms race against the Communist enemy, and the fight against
unions; a major source of union strength was the workers’ knowledge
monopoly over the production process. Fooling the employers

This had been identified by Frederick W Taylor, in his principles
of scientific management: “The managers assume ... the burden of
gathering together all of the traditional knowledge which in the past
has been possessed by the workmen and then of classifying, tabulating,
and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae which are
immensely helpful to the workmen in doing their daily work.” The pages
preceding this quote describe the ways that workers can pretend that
they are working at full speed to fool their employers. A benchmark
of average performance had to be established so that lazy, dishonest
workers could be detected, but when engineers were sent in to measure
worker productivity, the workers learned how to fool them too.

Compliance could be enforced through the design of the machinery. In
the early 19th century, the British mathematician Charles Babbage
travelled to observe different branches of industry, and then produced
a catalogue of ingenious mechanisms by which the honesty of servants
and workers could be ensured in the absence of their master. He
declared: “One great advantage which we may derive from machinery is
from the check which it affords against the inattention, the idleness,
or the dishonesty of human agents” (4). Babbage is chiefly remembered
as the “father of computers”, due to his pioneering experiments
with calculating machines; his Analytical Engine was programmed
with punched cards, “software” that was used a century later in N/C
machines.

Noble explained how software realised the dreams of control of
Babbage and Taylor: “Essentially, this was a problem of programmable
automation, of temporarily transforming a universal machine into a
special-purpose machine through the use of variable ‘programs’, sets
of instructions stored on a permanent medium and used to control the
machine. With programmable automation, a change in product required
only a switch in programs rather than reliance upon machinists to
retool or readjust the configuration of the machine itself.”

The aim of reducing managers’ dependency on skilled 

LMD: Masters of the Internet (Dan Schiller)

[nettime's avid reader]

New challenge to US hegemony
Masters of the Internet
http://mondediplo.com/2013/02/15internet


The US calls loudly for "Internet freedom", but it is Google, Facebook, 
Microsoft, Apple and Amazon that have built up the dotcom services used 
by people all over the world. Is that now about to change?

by Dan Schiller

The geopolitics of the Internet broke open during the first half of 
December at an international conference in Dubai convened by the 
International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN affiliate agency with 
193 national members. At these meetings, states (thronged by corporate 
advisors) forge agreements to enable international communications via 
cables and satellites. These gatherings, however boring and 
bureaucratic, are crucial because of the enormous importance of networks 
in the operation of the transnational political economy.

The December 2012 World Conference on International Telecommunications 
(WCIT) in Dubai produced a major controversy: should ITU members vest 
the agency with oversight responsibilities for the Internet, 
responsibilities comparable to those it has exercised for decades for 
other forms of international communication?

The United States said no, and the US position won out: the new ITU 
treaty document did not grant the agency a formal role in what has come 
to be called "global Internet governance". However, a majority of 
countries voted to attach a resolution "invit[ing] member states to 
elaborate on their respective position on international Internet-related 
technical, development and public policy issues within the mandate of 
the ITU at various ITU fora." Objecting to "even symbolic global 
oversight", as a New York Times writer put it (1), the US refused to 
sign the treaty and walked away. So did France, Germany, Japan, India, 
Kenya, Colombia, Canada, Britain and other nations. However, more than 
two-thirds of the attending countries -- 89 all told -- endorsed the 
document. (And some of the nations that did not sign may accept the 
treaty later.)

To understand what is at stake we need to make our way through the 
rhetorical smog. For months prior to the WCIT, the Euro-American press 
trumpeted warnings that this was to be an epochal clash between 
upholders of an open Internet and would-be government usurpers, led by 
authoritarian states like Russia, Iran and China. The terms of reference 
were set so rigidly that one European telecom company executive called 
it a campaign of "propaganda warfare" (2).

Freedom of expression is no trifling issue. No matter where we live, 
there is reason for worry that the Internet's relative openness is being 
usurped, corroded or canalised. This does not necessarily imply armies 
of state censors or "great firewalls". The US National Security Agency, 
for example, sifts wholesale through electronic transmissions transiting 
satellite and cable networks, through its extensive "listening posts" 
and its gigantic new data centre at Bluffdale Utah (3); and the US 
government has gone after a true proponent of freedom of expression -- 
WikiLeaks -- in deadly earnest. US Internet companies such as Facebook 
and Google have transformed the Web into a "surveillance engine" to 
vacuum up commercially profitable data about users? behaviour.
Interests concealed

Even during the 1970s, the rhetoric of ?free flow of information? had 
long functioned as a central tenet of US foreign policy. During the era 
of decolonisation and cold war the doctrine purported to be a shining 
beacon, lighting the world's way to emancipation from imperialism and 
state repression. Today it continues to paint deep-seated economic and 
strategic interests in an appealing language of universal human rights. 
"Internet freedom", "freedom to connect", "net freedom" -- terms 
circulated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Google executives 
together in the run-up to the WCIT -- are today's version of the 
longstanding "free flow" precept. But just as before, "Internet freedom" 
is a red herring. Calculatingly manipulative, it tells us to entrust a 
fundamental human right to a pair of powerfully self-interested social 
actors: corporations and states.

The deliberations at the WCIT were multifaceted, and encompassed 
crosscutting issues. One was the terms of trade between Internet 
services like Google and the companies that transport their voluminous 
data streams -- network operators and ISPs like Verizon, Deutsche Telekom 
or Free. This business fight harbours implications for a more general 
and important policy issue: who should pay for the continual 
modernisations of network infrastructure on which recurrent 
augmentations and enhancements of Internet service depend. Xavier Niel's 
bold attack on Google's French revenues, when he implemented an 
ad-blocker as his Free network's default setting, placed this issue in 
bold relief before the public. But the terms of trade in the global 
Internet industry are also important because any 

consumer detector

[nettime's avid reader]

Xbox team’s ‘consumer detector’ would dis-Kinect freeloading TV viewers
November 3, 2012 at 5:35 pm by Todd Bishop

http://www.geekwire.com/2012/microsoft-diskinect-freeloading-tv-viewers/

A newly surfaced patent filing from Microsoft’s Xbox Incubation team 
details one of the new innovations they’ve been thinking about. This one 
could be very popular among major movie and television studios. But it 
probably wouldn’t generate much excitement among Xbox users.


The patent application, filed under the heading “Content Distribution 
Regulation by Viewing User,” proposes to use cameras and sensors like 
those in the Xbox 360 Kinect controller to monitor, count and in some 
cases identify the people in a room watching television, movies and 
other content. The filing refers to the technology as a “consumer detector.”


In one scenario, the system would then charge for the television show or 
movie based on the number of viewers in the room. Or, if the number of 
viewers exceeds the limits laid out by a particular content license, the 
system would halt playback unless additional viewing rights were purchased.


The system could also take into account the age of viewers, limiting 
playback of mature content to adults, for example. This patent 
application doesn’t explain how that would work, but a separate 
Microsoft patent application last year described a system for using 
sensors to estimate age based on the proportions of their body.



Inventors listed on the latest application include Xbox Incubation GM 
Alex Kipman, who led the development of Kinect. The others are Andrew 
Fuller, Xbox director of incubation; and Kathryn Stone Perez, executive 
producer of Xbox Incubation.


Also notable are references in the application to a glasses-style 
head-mounted display as one of the viewing options — another possible 
clue to the types of things the Xbox Incubation team is working on.


The patent application, made public this week, was originally submitted 
in April 2011. Filings such as these provide a sense for what a 
company’s engineers and researchers have been contemplating, but it’s 
not clear if Microsoft actually plans to roll out the “consumer 
detector” as part of the next generation of Xbox or Kinect or anything else.


Even if the technology were introduced, it seems like there would be 
endless ways of avoiding it, unless a broad base of technology and 
content providers were on board.


But who knows, maybe someday you’ll need to be extra careful how many 
people you invite to your big Super Bowl party … unless you’re willing 
to pony up a few more bucks.





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bruce sterling: atemporality and social networks.

[nettime's avid reader]

http://spacecollective.org/renatalemosmorais/7980/bruce-sterling-answe
rs-my-questions-about-atemporality-and-social-networks

dear bruce [sterling],

The reason for this interview is that during Early Atemporality - the
posthistorical or ahistorical period you suggest we are living in -
'we are struggling with what it means and how it?s different from
post-modernism'. Since you are one of the main proponents of this
concept, your help in clarifying what it means is greatly appreciated.
I suspect that previous versions of your ideas about atemporality
might have been lurking in many of your works as a novelist, a top
example being The Difference Engine. This novel hints on atemporal
features of cultural evolution. William Gibson has said that 'one
of the impulses that led to The Difference Engine was a sense Bruce
Sterling and I had of the Industrial Revolution having been a far
deeper and more intense shift than we ordinarily, culturally, give it
credit for having been'.

renata - Was atemporality already present at the time of the
Industrial Revolution as a cultural phenomenon? If so, how does it
differ from the atemporality which is based on contemporary network
culture?

bruces - *I wouldn't say that the Industrial Revolution had
"atemporality." The Industrial Revolution was extremely keen on
synchronization, on accurate railroad schedules, on time-zones for
telegraphy. A conceptual disruption in timekeeping such as Einstein's
relativity was decades ahead of them.

*There were certainly episodes in the Industrial Revolution when
people were agitated about time and space - for instance, anxiety
about the disorienting speed of rail travel. However, they had
firm ideas about historical development, especially compared to
us. A network of the kinds we have today doesn't behave with the
comprehensive mechanical timing of a railroad. We have to face new
atemporal anxieties, such as the spasms and crashes of microsecond
stock-trading, where it's literally impossible to determine what
electronic event had strict temporal priority.

renata - Your ideas on atemporality have ignited interesting
commentaries, such as Kazys Varnelis's:

If any observation about history defines our time, it's science
fiction novelist Bruce Sterling's conclusion that network culture
produces a form of historical consciousness marked by atemporality. By
this, Sterling means that having obtained near-total instant access to
information, our desire and ability to situate ourselves within any
kind of broader historical structure have dissipated. The temporal
compression caused by globalization and networking technologies,
together with an accelerating capitalism, has intensified the
ahistorical qualities of modernism and postmodernism, producing the
atemporality of network culture - Kazys Varnelis

Is your understanding of atemporality conditioned to the 'temporal
compression caused by globalization and networking technologies', as
Varnellis suggested?

bruces - *The time compression is certainly part of the issue, but
there are also time extensions in network culture. For instance,
what is the difference between "the year 1955" and "the year 1955
as revealed to me by a Google Search"? Analog remnants of 1955 tend
to be marred by entropy, but digitized clips of 1955 will load with
same briskness and efficiency of digital clips from 1965, 1975, 1985
and so forth. In this situation, our relationship to history feels
extended rather than compressed, because data from the past feels just
as accessible as data generated yesterday. If you are re-using this
material to create contemporary cultural artifacts, you don't just
get "compression," you also get a skeuomorphism, a temporal creole ?
a Brazilian anthropophagy when all the decades are in one software
stew-pot.

renata - Is atemporality simply "a form of historical consciousness"
produced by network culture?

bruces - *I wouldn't call that process "simple." Also, the network
culture we have now is temporary. With that said, it would be very
hard to be or feel atemporal with only analog technology.

*The network is required, although the network is not "consciousness,"
it's a variegated set of devices and services embedded in culture and
transforming culture.

*By talking about "atemporality," I'm arguing that the ways that
cultures form historical consciousness are bound up in the ways that
cultures access information ? the ways we reason and argue about
history and futurity. When one uses grand terms such as "history" and
"consciousness," that suggests that people can touch absolute timeless
realities outside the ways that human beings test and discuss history
and consciousness. We might indeed have numinous, wordless encouters
with reality, but we can't make them part of our culture unless we
convey them to one another, and those methods of conveyance have been
scrambled radically. We are still naive about some of those effects.

*So, what's reality? I'm inclined to say that "history" w

Comrades, Join the "Peer Progressive" Movement!

[nettime's avid reader]

Permanent Address: 
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/10/08/comrades-join-the-peer-progressive-movement/

Comrades, Join the “Peer Progressive” Movement!

By John Horgan | October 8, 2012

Fed up with Obomney? Sick of both Democrats and Republicans? Do you see 
the parties’ similarities—their cowardly hawkishness and craven 
obeisance to deep-pocketed donors–as more significant than their 
differences? Looking for a fresh new approach to governance and social 
problem-solving? Then you might consider becoming a “peer progressive.”


Peer progressives believe that “peer networks,” consisting of many 
people of roughly equal status freely swapping ideas and information, 
can accomplish things that top-down, centralized, hierarchical 
organizations can’t. Peer progressives “believe in social progress, and 
we believe the most powerful tool to advance the cause of progress is 
the peer network.”


That quote comes from the new book by science writer Steven Johnson: 
Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age (Riverhead 
Books), which I just reviewed for The Wall Street Journal. Future 
Perfect is a manifesto both for optimism—which has become my favorite 
ism—and for the peer progressive movement. Peer progressives resist left 
wing faith in Big Government and right wing faith in Big Business. They 
believe in the wisdom of crowds, especially crowds exchanging diverse 
viewpoints.


Johnson cites research suggesting that a large, diverse group often 
comes up with better solutions to problems than a smaller, homogeneous 
group with a higher average IQ, a phenomenon summarized as “diversity 
trumps ability.” Johnson elaborates: “When groups are exposed to a more 
diverse range of perspectives, when their values are forced to confront 
different viewpoints, they are more likely to approach the world in a 
more nuanced way, and avoid falling prey to crude extremism.”


Diversity, Johnson elaborates, “does not just expand the common ground 
of consensus. It also increases the larger group’s ability to solve 
problems.” Peer progressives favor diversity not just for traditional 
liberal reasons, to counter sexism, racism and other prejudices, but 
because “we are smarter as a society—more innovative and flexible in our 
thinking—when diverse perspectives collaborate.”


Peer networks predate the Internet; Johnson sees them at work in the 
Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and other periods of 
extraordinary creativity. But the Internet and other digital 
technologies–which reduce the costs, time and effort of 
communication–have turned out to be astonishingly effective enablers of 
peer networks. Hence we get Internet-catalyzed marvels ranging from 
Wikipedia and Kick Starter to the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street 
movements.


Johnson is especially hopeful that peer networks can revitalize—even 
revolutionize—politics. He suggests how peer networks might thwart 
attempts by the rich and powerful to hijack U.S. democracy. We might 
move closer to “direct democracy,” in which we vote for laws and 
policies rather than for politicians who are supposed to represent our 
interests but too often don’t.


Political peer networks are springing up all over the world. Take for 
example the Israeli-Palestinian Confederation, which calls for 
incorporating Israel and Palestine into a Swiss-style confederation. The 
Confederation plans to hold an online election in December to form a 
virtual parliament. Saleem Ali, a professor of environmental studies at 
the University of Vermont, notes in National Geographic that the 
Confederation represents an attempt to “move beyond the stagnation of 
one-state/two-state fixes.”


The underlying principles of peer networks have been explored by other 
writers. Johnson’s evangelical anti-authoritarianism reminds me a bit of 
the journalist Kevin Kelly, whose 1994 book Out of Control insisted that 
because nature organizes itself without any centralized control, we 
should too. But whereas Kelly came off as a bit of a crank, Johnson has 
a knack for sounding reasonable.


Couple of caveats: One, Johnson neglects to address the potential of 
peer networks for solving two of our biggest problems: militarism and 
climate change. In my Wall Street Journal review, I urged Johnson and 
other peer progressives to start thinking of ways to tackle the problems 
of warfare and excessive fossil-fuel consumption.


Caveat two comes from my friend and colleague–my peer!–Andy Russell, a 
historian of technology at Stevens Institute of Technology. Andy objects 
to Johnson’s claim that the Internet is itself the product of a peer 
network. Johnson calls Arpanet, the Pentagon-funded network that gave 
rise to the Internet, a “radically decentralized system” and a “network 
of peers, not a hierarchy.”


Wrong, says Andy, who has done lots of research on the development of 
standards for the Internet. “The evidence is pretty clear that the 
Arpanet and Internet w

Zizek Capitalism: How the left lost the argument.

[nettime's avid reader]

Capitalism: How the left lost the argument.
BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK | NOVEMBER 2012

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/capitalism


One might think that a crisis brought on by rapacious, unregulated 
capitalism would have changed a few minds about the fundamental nature 
of the global economy.



One would be wrong. True, there is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment 
in the world today, particularly as a crisis brought on by the system's 
worst excesses continues to ravage the global economy. If anything, we 
are witnessing an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: 
Books, newspaper investigations, and TV reports abound, telling us of 
companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, corrupted bankers who 
continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are bailed out by taxpayer 
money, and sweatshops where children work overtime.


Yet no matter how grievous the abuse or how indicative of a larger, more 
systemic failure, there's a limit to how far these critiques go. The 
goal is invariably to democratize capitalism in the name of fighting 
excesses and to extend democratic control of the economy through the 
pressure of more media scrutiny, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, 
and honest police investigations. What is never questioned is the 
bourgeois state of law upon which modern capitalism depends. This 
remains the sacred cow that even the most radical critics from the likes 
of Occupy Wall Street and the World Social Forum dare not touch.


It's no wonder, then, that the optimistic leftist expectations that the 
ongoing crisis would be a sobering moment -- the awakening from a dream 
-- turned out to be dangerously shortsighted. The year 2011 was indeed 
one of dreaming dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory 
politics all around the world. A year later, every day brings new proof 
of how fragile and inconsistent the awakening actually was. The 
enthusiasm of the Arab Spring is mired in compromises and religious 
fundamentalism; Occupy is losing momentum to such an extent that the 
police cleansing of New York's Zuccotti Park even seemed like a blessing 
in disguise. It's the same story around the world: Nepal's Maoists seem 
outmaneuvered by the reactionary royalist forces; Venezuela's 
"Bolivarian" experiment is regressing further and further into 
caudillo-run populism; and even the most hopeful sign, Greece's 
anti-austerity movement, has lost energy after the electoral defeat of 
the leftist Syriza party.


It now seems that the primary political effect of the economic crisis 
was not the rise of the radical left, but of racist populism, more wars, 
more poverty in the poorest Third World countries, and widening 
divisions between rich and poor. For all that crises shatter people out 
of their complacency and make them question the fundamentals of their 
lives, the first spontaneous reaction is not revolution but panic, which 
leads to a return to basics: food and shelter. The core premises of the 
ruling ideology are not put into doubt. They are even more violently 
asserted.


Could we in fact be seeing the conditions for the further radicalization 
of capitalism? German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk once told me that, if 
there is a person alive to whom they will build monuments 100 years from 
now, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who did more than anyone 
else to promote and implement the marriage of capitalism and 
authoritarianism -- an arrangement he euphemistically referred to as 
"Asian values." The virus of this authoritarian capitalism is slowly but 
surely spreading around the globe, nowhere more so than China.


Faced with today's explosion of capitalism in China, analysts often ask 
when political democracy as the "natural" political accompaniment of 
capitalism will enforce itself. But what if the promised democratization 
never arrives? What if China's authoritarian capitalism is not a stop on 
the road to further democratization, but the end state toward which the 
rest of the world is headed?


Leon Trotsky once characterized tsarist Russia as "the vicious 
combination of the Asian knout [whip] and the European stock market," 
but the description applies even better to today's China. In the Chinese 
iteration, the combination may prove to be a more stable one than the 
democratic capitalist model we have come to see as natural.


The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism, which 
appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and pernicious form, 
but democracy -- not to mention the left, whose inability to offer a 
viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It was 
the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost 
as if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a 
failure of capitalism is more capitalism.




Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, is professor at the European 
Graduate School and senior researcher at the University of 

Observer > Jake Davis > My life after Anonymous

[nettime's avid reader]

< 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/09/jake-davis-anonymous-charged-bail
 >


My life after Anonymous: 'I feel more fulfilled without the internet'


One of the key figures of the '50 days of Lulz' is now on
conditional bail -- and barred from going online. Here, he
describes how he feels serene, and recharged


Jake Davis
The Observer
Saturday 8 September 2012



The last time I was allowed to access the internet was
several moments before the police came through my door in
the Shetland Isles, over a year ago. During the past 12
months I have pleaded guilty to computer misuse under the
banners of "Internet Feds", "Anonymous" and "LulzSec". One
of my co-defendants and I have also been indicted with the
same charge in the United States, where we may possibly be
extradited, and if found guilty I could face several decades
in an American prison. Now I am on conditional bail and have
to wear an electronic tag around my ankle. I'm forbidden
from accessing the internet.

I'm often asked: what is life like without the net? It seems
strange that humans have evolved and adapted for thousands
of years without this simple connectivity, and now we in
modern society struggle to comprehend existence without it.
In a word, life is serene. I now find myself reading
newspapers as though they weren't ancient scrolls; entering
real shops with real money in order to buy real products,
and not wishing to Photoshop a cosmic being of unspeakable
horror into every possible social situation. Nothing needs
to be captioned or made into an elaborate joke to impress a
citizenry whose every emotion is represented by a sequence
of keystrokes.

Things are calmer, slower and at times, I'll admit, more
dull. I do very much miss the instant companionship of
online life, the innocent chatroom palaver, and the ease
with which circles with similar interests can be found. Of
course, there are no search terms in real life -- one
actually has to search. However, there is something oddly
endearing about being disconnected from the digital horde.

It is not so much the sudden simplicity of daily life -- as
you can imagine, trivial tasks have been made much more
difficult -- but the feeling of being able to close my eyes
without being bombarded with flashing shapes or constant
buzzing sounds, which had occurred frequently since my early
teens and could only be attributed to perpetual computer
marathons. Sleep is now tranquil and uninterrupted and books
seem far more interesting. The paranoia has certainly
vanished. I can only describe this sensation as the
long-awaited renewal of a previously diminished attention
span.

For it is our attention spans that have suffered the most.
Our lives are compressed into short, advertisement-like
bursts or "tweets". The constant stream of drivel fills page
after page, eating away at our creativity. If hashtags were
rice grains, do you know how many starving families we could
feed? Neither do I -- I can't Google it.

A miracle cure or some kind of therapeutic brilliance are
not something I could give, but I can confidently say that a
permanent lack of internet has made me a more fulfilled
individual. And as one of many kids glued to their screens
every day, I would never before have imagined myself even
thinking those words. Before, the idea of no internet was
inconceivable, but now -- not to sound as though it's some
kind of childish and predictable revelation spawned as a
result of going cold turkey -- I look back on the
transcripts of my online chats (produced as legal evidence
in my case, in great numbers) and wonder what all the fuss
was about.

It's not my place to speculate on whether or not the hacker
community should stop taking itself so seriously, but I
certainly became entangled within it and had forgotten how
easy it was simply to close a laptop lid.

I hope, then, that others in a similar situation may decide
to take a short break from the web (perhaps just for a week)
and see if similar effects are found. It can't hurt to try.


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Artforum > Bishop > Digital Divide: Whatever happened to digital art?

[nettime's avid reader]

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to the
late 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn't
there a pervasive sense that visual art was going to get
digital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were just
beginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venture
never really gained traction -- which is not to say that
digital media have failed to infiltrate contemporary art.
Most art today deploys new technology at one if not most
stages of its production, dissemination, and consumption.
Multichannel video installations, Photoshopped images,
digital prints, cut-and-pasted files (nowhere better
exemplified than in Christian Marclay's The Clock, 2010):
These are ubiquitous forms, their omnipresence facilitated
by the accessibility and affordability of digital cameras
and editing software. There are plenty of examples of art
that makes use of Second Life (Cao Fei), computer-game
graphics (Miltos Manetas), YouTube clips (Cory Arcangel),
iPhone apps (Amy Sillman), etc.[1]

So why do I have a sense that the appearance and content of
contemporary art have been curiously unresponsive to the
total upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by the
digital revolution? While many artists use digital
technology, how many really confront the question of what it
means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital?
How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we
experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our
existence? I find it strange that I can count on one hand
the works of art that do seem to undertake this task: the
flirtations between Frances Stark and various Italian
cyberlovers in her video My Best Thing, 2011; Thomas
Hirschhorn's video of a finger idly scrolling through
gruesome images of blown-apart bodies on a touch screen,
occasionally pausing to enlarge, zoom in, move on (Touching
Reality, 2012); the frenetic, garbled scripts of Ryan
Trecartin's videos (such as K-Corea INC.K [Section A],
2009). Each suggests the endlessly disposable, rapidly
mutable ephemera of the virtual age and its impact on our
consumption of relationships, images, and communication;
each articulates something of the troubling oscillation
between intimacy and distance that characterizes our new
technological regime, and proposes an incommensurability
between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to
which we are glued.

But these exceptions just point up the rule. There is, of
course, an entire sphere of "new media" art, but this is a
specialized field of its own: It rarely overlaps with the
mainstream art world (commercial galleries, the Turner
Prize, national pavilions at Venice). While this split is
itself undoubtedly symptomatic, the mainstream art world and
its response to the digital are the focus of this essay. And
when you look at contemporary art since 1989, the year Tim
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, it is striking that
so little of it seems to address the way in which the forms
and languages of new media have altered our relationship to
perception, history, language, and social relations.

In fact, the most prevalent trends in contemporary art since
the '90s seem united in their apparent eschewal of the
digital and the virtual. Performance art, social practice,
assemblage-based sculpture, painting on canvas, the
"archival impulse," analog film, and the fascination with
modernist design and architecture: At first glance, none of
these formats appear to have anything to do with digital
media, and when they are discussed, it is typically in
relation to previous artistic practices across the twentieth
century.[2] But when we examine these dominant forms of
contemporary art more closely, their operational logic and
systems of spectatorship prove intimately connected to the
technological revolution we are undergoing. I am not
claiming that these artistic strategies are conscious
reactions to (or implicit denunciations of) an information
society; rather, I am suggesting that the digital is, on a
deep level, the shaping condition -- even the structuring
paradox -- that determines artistic decisions to work with
certain formats and media. Its subterranean presence is
comparable to the rise of television as the backdrop to art
of the 1960s. One word that might be used to describe this
dynamic -- a preoccupation that is present but denied,
perpetually active but apparently buried -- is disavowal: I
know, but all the same . . .

THE FASCINATION WITH ANALOG MEDIA is an obvious starting
point for an examination of contemporary art's repressed
relationship to the digital. Manon de Boer, Matthew
Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, Rosalind Nashashibi,
and Fiona Tan are just a few names from a long roll call of
artists attracted to the materiality of predigital film and
photography. Today, no exhibition is complete without some
form of bulky, obsolete technology -- the gently clunking
carousel of a slide projecto

Apple Rejects App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes

[nettime's avid reader]

By Christina Bonnington and Spencer Ackerman
August 30, 201

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/drone-app/


It seemed like a simple enough idea for an iPhone app: Send users
a pop-up notice whenever a flying robots kills someone in one of
America’s many undeclared wars. But Apple keeps blocking the Drones+
program from its App Store — and therefore, from iPhones everywhere.
The Cupertino company says the content is “objectionable and crude,”
according to Apple’s latest rejection letter.

It’s the third time in a month that Apple has turned Drones+ away,
says Josh Begley, the program’s New York-based developer. The
company’s reasons for keeping the program out of the App Store
keep shifting. First, Apple called the bare-bones application that
aggregates news of U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia
“not useful.” Then there was an issue with hiding a corporate logo.
And now, there’s this crude content problem.

Begley is confused. Drones+ doesn’t present grisly images of corpses
left in the aftermath of the strikes. It just tells users when a
strike has occurred, going off a publicly available database of
strikes compiled by the U.K.’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism,
which compiles media accounts of the strikes.

iOS developers have a strict set of guidelines that must be adhered
to in order to gain acceptance into the App Store. Apps are judged on
technical, content and design criteria. As Apple does not comment on
the app reviews process, it can be difficult to ascertain exactly why
an app got rejected. But Apple’s team of reviewers is small, sifts
through up to 10,000 apps a week, and necessarily errs on the side of
caution when it comes to potentially questionable apps.

Apple’s original objections to Drones+ regarded the functionality
in Begley’s app, not its content. Now he’s wondering if it’s worth
redesigning and submitting it a fourth time.

“If the content is found to be objectionable, and it’s literally just
an aggregation of news, I don’t know how to change that,” Begley says.

A mockup of developer Josh Begley’s drone-strike app for iOS.

Begley’s app is unlikely to be the next Angry Birds or Draw Something.
It’s deliberately threadbare. When a drone strike occurs, Drones+
catalogs it, and presents a map of the area where the strike took
place, marked by a pushpin. You can click through to media reports of
a given strike that the Bureau of Investigative Reporting compiles,
as well as some basic facts about whom the media thinks the strike
targeted. As the demo video above shows, that’s about it.

It works best, Begley thinks, when users enable push notifications
for Drones+. “I wanted to play with this idea of push notifications
and push button technology — essentially asking a question about what
we choose to get notified about in real time,” he says. “I thought
reaching into the pockets of U.S. smartphone users and annoying them
into drone-consciousness could be an interesting way to surface the
conversation a bit more.”

But that conversation may not end up occurring. Begley, a student at
Clay Shirky’s lab at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program,
submitted a threadbare version of Drones+ to Apple in July. About
two weeks later, on July 23, Apple told him was just too blah. “The
features and/or content of your app were not useful or entertaining
enough,” read an e-mail from Apple Begley shared with Wired, “or your
app did not appeal to a broad enough audience.”

Finally, on Aug. 27, Apple gave him yet another thumbs down. But this
time the company’s reasons were different from the fairly clear-cut
functionality concerns it previously cited. “We found that your app
contains content that many audiences would find objectionable, which
is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines,” the
company e-mailed him.

It was the first time the App Store told him that his content was
the real problem, even though the content hadn’t changed much from
Begley’s initial July submission. It’s a curious choice: The App Store
carries remote-control apps for a drone quadricopter, although not one
actually being used in a war zone. And of course, the App Store houses
innumerable applications for news publications and aggregators that
deliver much of the same content provided by Begley’s app.

Wired reached out to Apple on the perplexing rejection of the app, but
Apple was unable to comment.

Begley is about at his wits end over the iOS version of Drones+. “I’m
kind of back at the drawing board about what exactly I’m supposed to
do,” Begley said. The basic idea was to see if he could get App Store
denizens a bit more interested in the U.S.’ secretive, robotic wars,
with information on those wars popping up on their phones the same
way an Instagram comment or retweet might. Instead, Begley’s thinking
about whether he’d have a better shot making the same point in the
Android Market.





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Tweaking the search algorithm in favor media companies

[nettime's avid reader]

Google Starts Punishing “Pirate” Sites In Search Results
August 10, 2012
https://torrentfreak.com/google-starts-punishing-pirate-sites-in-search-results-120810/


Google announced today that it will lower the search engine rankings of 
websites that receive a high number of DMCA takedown requests, 
independent of whether the linked content is lawful or not. The 
algorithm change is the result of extensive lobbying efforts by 
Hollywood and the major music labels, and could severely degrade the 
rankings of websites such as The Pirate Bay, FilesTube, and even YouTube.


yFor years entertainment industry groups have lobbied search engines to 
penalize sites that link to a high number of copyrighted files, and 
today Google has given in to their demands.


The search engine will soon take into consideration the number of DMCA 
takedown notices it receives against sites to determine the ranking of 
those websites in its search results.


“Starting next week, we will begin taking into account a new signal in 
our rankings: the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive 
for any given site. Sites with high numbers of removal notices may 
appear lower in our results,” Google’s Amit Singhal writes in a blog post.


Earlier this year Google decided to publish all takedown requests online 
as part of their transparency report, and they will now use this data as 
part of their search algorithm. This means that websites for which 
Google receives a high number of valid takedown requests will be penalized.


The top receivers of these notices over the past year were 
filestube.com, extratorrent.com, torrenthound.com, bitsnoop.com and 
isohunt.com. They can expect to appear lower in future search results 
and will therefore receive less traffic through Google searches. Whether 
Google will downgrade YouTube, where (tens of) thousands of videos are 
routinely disabled because of alleged infringements, is unknown at this 
point.


Google stresses that it doesn’t know whether content is authorized or 
not, so removal of pages from its search results will only take place 
following a valid DMCA takedown notice.


“Only copyright holders know if something is authorized, and only courts 
can decide if a copyright has been infringed; Google cannot determine 
whether a particular webpage does or does not violate copyright law,” 
Singhal writes.


“So while this new signal will influence the ranking of some search 
results, we won’t be removing any pages from search results unless we 
receive a valid copyright removal notice from the rights owner.”


One of the main problems with Google’s new ranking is that perfectly 
legitimate content on sites with a high number of takedown requests will 
be degraded as well. Taking YouTube as an example, millions of relevant 
and legal search results will be degraded simply because there are a 
high number of “unauthorized” videos posted to the site.


Adding the high number of bogus DMCA notices which Google sees as valid, 
many sites may also be punished for the faulty takedown requests that 
copyright holders send. That’s worrying to say the least.


For Hollywood and the major music labels Google’s announcement is a 
clear win. In fact, it was one of the three demands they handed out to 
Google, Bing and Yahoo last year during a behind-closed-doors meeting.


The other two demands were “prioritize websites that obtain 
certification as a licensed site under a recognized scheme” and “stop 
indexing websites that are subject to court orders while establishing 
suitable procedures to de-index substantially infringing sites.”


Whether Google will also adopt these suggestions remains to be seen.




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Guardian: Free access to British scientific research within two years

[nettime's avid reader]

Free access to British scientific research within two years

   Radical shakeup of academic publishing will allow papers to be put
   online and be accessed by universities, firms and individuals

   The government is to unveil controversial plans to make publicly funded
   scientific [65]research immediately available for anyone to read for
   free by 2014, in the most radical shakeup of academic publishing since
   the invention of the [66]internet.

   Under the scheme, research papers that describe work paid for by the
   British taxpayer will be free online for universities, companies and
   individuals to use for any purpose, wherever they are in the world.

   In an interview with the Guardian before Monday's announcement
   [67]David Willetts, the universities and science minister, said he
   expected a full transformation to the open approach over the next two
   years.

   The move reflects a [68]groundswell of support for "open access"
   publishing among academics who have long protested that journal
   [69]publishers make large profits by locking research behind online
   paywalls. "If the taxpayer has paid for this research to happen, that
   work shouldn't be put behind a paywall before a British citizen can
   read it," Willetts said.

   "This will take time to build up, but within a couple of years we
   should see this fully feeding through."

   He said he thought there would be "massive" economic benefits to making
   research open to everyone.

   Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists
   contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the
   transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the
   existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund
   the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers
   being published.

   British universities now pay around £200m a year in subscription fees
   to journal publishers, but under the new scheme, authors will pay
   "article processing charges" (APCs) to have their papers peer reviewed,
   edited and made freely available online. The typical APC is around
   £2,000 per article.

   Tensions between academics and the larger publishing companies have
   risen steeply in recent months as researchers have baulked at journal
   subscription charges their libraries were asked to pay.

   [70]More than 12,000 academics have boycotted the Dutch publisher
   Elsevier, in part of a broader campaign against the industry that has
   been called the "academic spring".

   The government's decision is outlined in a formal response to
   recommendations made in [71]a major report into open access publishing
   led by Professor Dame Janet Finch, a sociologist at Manchester
   University. Willetts said the government accepted all the proposals,
   except for a specific point on VAT that was under consideration at the
   Treasury.

   Further impetus to open access is expected in coming days or weeks when
   the [72]Higher Education Funding Council for England emphasises the
   need for research articles to be freely available when they are
   submitted for the Research Excellence Framework, which is used to
   determine how much [73]research funding universities receive.

   The Finch report strongly recommended so-called "gold" open access,
   which ensures the financial security of the journal publishers by
   essentially swapping their revenue from library budgets to science
   budgets. One alternative favoured by many academics, called "green"
   open access, allows researchers to make their papers freely available
   online after they have been accepted by journals. It is likely this
   would be fatal for publishers and also Britain's learned societies,
   which survive through selling journal subscriptions.

   "There is a genuine value in academic publishing which has to be
   reflected and we think that is the case for gold open access, which
   includes APCs," Willetts told the Guardian. "There is a transitional
   cost to go through, but it's overall of benefit to our research
   community and there's general acceptance it's the right thing to do.

   "We accept that some of this cost will fall on the ring-fenced science
   budget, which is £4.6bn. In Finch's highest estimation that will be 1%
   of the science budget going to pay for gold open access, at least
   before we get to a new steady state, when we hope competition will
   bring down author charges and universities will make savings as they
   don't have to pay so much in journal subscriptions," he added.

   "The real economic impact is we are throwing open, to academics,
   researchers, businesses and lay people, all the high quality research
   that is publicly funded. I think there's a massive net economic benefit
   here way beyond any £50m from the science budget," Willetts said.

   In making such a 

Eric X. Li: Democracy Is Not the Answer.

[nettime's avid reader]

Eric X. Li: Democracy Is Not the Answer

[Eric X. Li, a venture capitalist, has emerged as one of the most
skillful and vigorous defender of the Chinese Governance model to
Western audiences. Skillful,indeed. F.]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-x-li/democracy-is-not-the-answ_b_15
20172.html

Posted: 05/16/2012 7:34 am

This is a written Q&A with Rachel Beitarie of the Israeli daily
newspaper the Calcalist, published on May 3, 2012.


Beitarie: I would like to start not with a comparison of the Chinese
and other systems of government, but by a look at the Chinese model
itself. You said at the talk with Anand Giridharadas at the Aspen
Institute (I'm rephrasing a bit) that we know what the Chinese model
isn't -- it isn't liberal democracy, and it isn't capitalism, but
that what it is was not yet well defined. Could you try and define it
anyway? What is the end of the Chinese model and what are the means to
get there?

Li: What is the "end" of political governance? Thomas Jefferson
probably defined it best for the modern West: life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness; and governments that prove to be destructive
to such ends must be overthrown. This Jeffersonian articulation of
the end of governance was the culmination of cultural and religious
developments unique to the West. Such developments placed the
individual at the center of the universe as the basic and sovereign
unit of human society. However, they did not occur in non-Western
societies and their resulting political philosophy is, therefore, not
universal.

In the Chinese tradition, an enduring definition of the end of
political governance was articulated by Confucius two and a half
millenniums ago. He called it Xiao Kang (as differentiated from
Da Tong -- an unattainable ideal). In contemporary terms it can
be described as a society of general peace and prosperity with
a just legal order and built upon a righteous moral foundation.
Interestingly enough, when Deng Xiaoping launched his reforms in 1979
he declared that the goal of the Chinese nation in the next phase of
its development was to build or, perhaps more accurately, rebuild a
Xiao Kang society.

It was probably no accident that Mr. Deng, in declaring China's
national goal, did not rely on the modern Communist ideologies that
were instrumental in the revolution that established the People's
Republic, but rather reached deep into China's ancient tradition, to
Confucius. Measured by the "end" as articulated by Confucius and by
Deng, the current one-party state model has so far served China well,
albeit with real shortcomings.

The current China model has the following components:

1. Political authority, combined with moral authority, is vested in
a single political organization, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP),
which represents the entirety of the Chinese nation. This is in
contrast to systems under which multiple parties represent different
sectors of a nation state. 2. Meritocracy underlies the effectiveness
and survival of the ruling organization. A highly sophisticated,
elaborate, and rigorous system of selection and promotion within the
CCP is designed to recruit those with capabilities and integrity
into the Party and move them up the ranks if they choose government
service as their careers. 3. The preeminence of political authority
is central to the China model. This ensures no special groups, be
it capital or talents, can develop capabilities that enable them to
place their interests above the national interests. The market and the
so-called civil society are both subservient to political authority.
4. Pragmatism is central and ideologies are peripheral. As economic
development is seen as of paramount importance to China at the current
stage, the political system is designed and adjusted to maximize
its success. As the nation's needs and conditions change, political
adjustments can follow.

The current practice of the Chinese model is far from obtaining the
ideal state in each of these components. Widespread corruption and the
wealth gap are but two examples.


Beitarie: In your recent New York Times op-ed you write: The modern
West sees democracy and human rights as the pinnacle of human
development. It is a belief premised on an absolute faith. China is on
a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular
participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive
to economic development and favorable to the country's national
interests, as they have done in the past 10 years. I think many, even
in western countries, would agree with your view of the democratic
system being dysfunctional in many ways. However, going back to the
Chinese system, I'd say leaders definitely allow participation only if
it serves what they see as the country's national interests. But where
do the rulers draw their authority from to decide what those national
interests are? And in the absence of judicial oversight, popular vote
or free press, what is the mechanism the Chin

What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan

[nettime's avid reader]

What Relational Aesthetics Can Learn From 4Chan
http://www.artfagcity.com/2010/09/09/img-mgmt-what-relational-aesthetics-can-learn-from-4chan/

by Brad Troemel on September 9, 2010 · 127 comments

[Editor's note: IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. 
Today’s invited artist wishes to remain anonymous.]


Is it still necessary to define art by intent and context? The gallery 
world would have us believe this to be the case, but the internet tells 
a more mutable story. Contrary to the long held belief that art needs 
intent and context, I suggest that if we look outside of galleries, 
we’ll find the actions, events and people that create contemporary art 
with or without the art world’s label.


Over the past 20 years, the theory Relational Aesthetics (referred to in 
this essay as RA) has interpreted social exchanges as an art form. 
Founding theoretician Nicholas Bourriaud describes this development as 
“a set of artistic practices that take as their theoretical and 
practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their 
social context”[1]. In reality, art erroneously known to typify RA’s 
theorization hasn’t strayed far from the model of the 1960’s Happening, 
an event beholden to the conventions of the gallery and the direction of 
its individual creator. In her essay Antagonism and Relational 
Aesthetics, Claire Bishop describes Rikrit Tiravanija’s dinners as 
events circumscribed in advance, using their location as a crutch to 
differentiate the otherwise ordinary action of eating a meal as art[2]. 
A better example of the theory of RA succinctly put into action can be 
seen in anonymous group activities on the internet, where people form 
relations and meaning without hierarchy.


Started in 2003, 4Chan.org is one such site, and host to 50 image 
posting message boards, (though one board in particular, simply titled 
‘/b/’, is responsible for originating many of the memes we use to burn 
our free time.) The site’s 700,000 daily users post and comment in 
complete anonymity; a bathroom-stall culture generating posts that 
alternate between comedic brilliance, virulent hate and both combined. 
Typically, the content featured is a NSFW intertextual gangbang of 
obscure references and in-jokes where images are created, remixed, 
popularized and forgotten about in a matter of hours. 4Chan keeps no 
permanent record of itself, making an in the moment experience the 
allure of participation. For all of the memes that have leaked into our 
inbox from it, 4Chan maintains a language, ethics and set of activities 
that would be incomprehensible to the unfamiliar viewer. Induction to 
/b/’s world is not fortified and understanding it merely requires Google 
searching its litany of acronymated terms or participating regularly 
enough to find out for yourself.


“It is up to us as beholders of art to bring [unforeseen associations] 
to light, […] to judge artworks in terms of the relations they produce 
in the specific contexts they inhabit” [3] concludes Bourriaud in his 
2001 book, Postproduction. One of the unforeseen relationships he 
mentions is that of the contemporary artist and contributive internet 
surfer­ (the kind of Photoshop bandit you can find on /b/). Bourriaud 
understands each as methodological equals, calling them “semionauts”. He 
uses this term to define those who create pathways through culture by 
reorganizing history to bring forward new ideas[4]. In a digital 
environment equally defined by information categorizing and shopping, a 
case for surfing-as-art neatly falls between two historical precedents: 
Duchamp’s specification-as-art and 1980’s artists’ (such as Jeff Koons, 
Sherrie Levine, or Heim Steinbach) interest in consumption-as-art. 
Surfing-as-art and RA both enact Peter Bürger’s description of the 
avant-garde’s intention to merge everyday life with the aesthetic realm.


Marcin Ramocki’s essay Surfing Clubs: organized notes and comments 
describes the rapid conversations on group posting websites using jpgs, 
gifs, video, links, and text as a material;


The older the club the more convoluted the semiotics of 
communication between surfers becomes. This communication entails 
posting organized content by a challenger, and a decoding of it by other 
participants, who respond with a posting where both syntagms and 
paradigms of the challenge post are identified and playfully manipulated.[5]


The medium, practice and logic of surf clubs outlined in Ramocki’s essay 
matches 4Chan’s /b/ message board identically, though the circumstances 
are obviously different. While /b/ anonymously concerns itself with 
people and events popularized on the internet, the individuals who 
manage surf clubs have social and professional connections to the art 
world, making their primary point of reference art historical. Reference 
should not be the sole criteria for understanding surfing-as-art, 
however. Ramocki, like Bourriaud, premises his belief in surfing-a

World’s First Flying File-Sharing Drones in Action

[nettime's avid reader]

TorrentFreak
World’s First Flying File-Sharing Drones in Action

March 20, 2012

https://torrentfreak.com/worlds-first-flying-file-sharing-drones-in-action-120320/

A few days ago The Pirate Bay announced that in future parts of its site 
could be hosted on GPS controlled drones. To many this may have sounded 
like a joke, but in fact these pirate drones already exist. Project 
“Electronic Countermeasures” has built a swarm of five fully operational 
drones which prove that an “aerial Napster” or an “airborne Pirate Bay” 
is not as futuristic as it sounds.


In an ever-continuing effort to thwart censorship, The Pirate Bay
plans to turn flying drones into mobile hosting locations.

“Everyone knows WHAT TPB is. Now they’re going to have to think about 
WHERE TPB is,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak last Sunday, 
announcing their drone project.


Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, was amazed to read 
the announcement, not so much because of the technology, because his 
group has already built a swarm of file-sharing drones.


“I thought hold on, we are already doing that,” Young told TorrentFreak.

Their starting point for project “Electronic Countermeasures” was to 
create something akin to an ‘aerial Napster’ or ‘airborne Pirate Bay’, 
but it became much more than that.


“Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm, we have rebuilt and 
programmed the drones to broadcast their own local Wi-Fi network as a 
form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their 
pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform 
elsewhere,” says the group describing their creation.



File-Sharing Drone in Action (photo by Claus Langer)

picture of a sharing drone

In short the system allows the public to share data with the help of 
flying drones. Much like the Pirate Box, but one that flies autonomously 
over the city.


“The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as 
the drones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The 
swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that 
passers-by can interact with,” the creators explain.


One major difference compared to more traditional file-sharing hubs is 
that it requires a hefty investment. Each of the drones costs 1500 euros 
to build. Not a big surprise, considering the hardware that’s needed to 
keep these pirate hubs in the air.


“Each one is powered by 2x 2200mAh LiPo batteries. The lift is provided 
by 4x Roxxy Brushless Motors that run off a GPS flight control board. 
Also on deck are altitude sensors and gyros that keep the flight stable. 
They all talk to a master control system through XBee wireless modules,” 
Young told TorrentFreak.


“These all sit on a 10mm x 10mm aluminum frame and are wrapped in a 
vacuum formed aerodynamic cowling. The network is broadcast using 
various different hardware setups ranging from Linux gumstick modules, 
wireless routers and USB sticks for file storage.”


For Young and his crew this is just the beginning. With proper financial 
support they hope to build more drones and increase the range they can 
cover.


“We are planning on scaling up the system by increasing broadcast range 
and building more drones for the flock. We are also building in other 
systems like autonomous battery change bases. We are looking for funding 
and backers to assist us in scaling up the system,” he told us.


Those who see the drones in action (video below) will notice that 
they’re not just practical. The creative and artistic background of the 
group shines through, with the choreography performed by the drones 
perhaps even more stunning than the sharing component.


“When the audience interacts with the drones they glow with vibrant 
colors, they break formation, they are called over and their flight 
pattern becomes more dramatic and expressive,” the group explains.


Besides the artistic value, the drones can also have other use cases 
than being a “pirate hub.” For example, they can serve as peer-to-peer 
communications support for protesters and activists in regions where 
Internet access is censored.


Either way, whether it’s Hollywood or a dictator, there will always be 
groups that have a reason to shoot the machines down. But let’s be 
honest, who would dare to destroy such a beautiful piece of art?



Worlds First File-Sharing Drone
-> http://vimeo.com/36267881



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The Coming War on General Computation

[nettime's avid reader]

The Coming War on General Computation
Cory Doctorow docto...@craphound.com
Presented at 28C3

https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.md

Transcribed by Joshua Wise jos...@joshuawise.com.

This transcription attempts to be faithful to the original, but 
disfluencies have generally been removed (except where they appear to 
contribute to the text). Some words may have been mangled by the 
transcription; feel free to submit pull requests to correct them!

Times are always marked in [[double square brackets]].

The original content was licensed under Creative Commons CC-BY 
(http://boingboing.net/2011/12/30/transcript-of-my-28c3-keynote.html); 
this transcript is more free, as permitted. You may provide me 
transcript attribution if you like, or if it does not make sense given 
the context, you can simply give Cory Doctorow original author attribution.

If you simply wish to read the transcript, you may wish to read a 
version that has been formatted for screen viewing, on my web site.

Christian W\"ohrl has also submitted a translation of this text into German.

Introducer:

Anyway, I believe I've killed enough time ... so, ladies and gentlemen, 
a person who in this crowd needs absolutely no introduction, Cory Doctorow!

[Audience applauds.]

Doctorow:

[[27.0]] Thank you.

[[32.0]] So, when I speak in places where the first language of the 
nation is not English, there is a disclaimer and an apology, because I'm 
one of nature's fast talkers. When I was at the United Nations at the 
World Intellectual Property Organization, I was known as the "scourge" 
of the simultaneous translation corps; I would stand up and speak, and 
turn around, and there would be window after window of translator, and 
every one of them would be doing this [Doctorow facepalms]. [Audience 
laughs] So in advance, I give you permission when I start talking 
quickly to do this [Doctorow makes SOS motion] and I will slow down.

[[74.1]] So, tonight's talk -- wah, wah, waaah [Doctorow makes 'fail 
horn' sound, apparently in response to audience making SOS motion; 
audience laughs]] -- tonight's talk is not a copyright talk. I do 
copyright talks all the time; questions about culture and creativity are 
interesting enough, but to be honest, I'm quite sick of them. If you 
want to hear freelancer writers like me bang on about what's happening 
to the way we earn our living, by all means, go and find one of the many 
talks I've done on this subject on YouTube. But, tonight, I want to talk 
about something more important -- I want to talk about general purpose 
computers.

Because general purpose computers are, in fact, astounding -- so 
astounding that our society is still struggling to come to grips with 
them: to figure out what they're for, to figure out how to accommodate 
them, and how to cope with them. Which, unfortunately, brings me back to 
copyright.

[[133.8]] Because the general shape of the copyright wars and the 
lessons they can teach us about the upcoming fights over the destiny of 
the general purpose computer are important. In the beginning, we had 
packaged software, and the attendant industry, and we had sneakernet. 
So, we had floppy disks in ziplock bags, or in cardboard boxes, hung on 
pegs in shops, and sold like candy bars and magazines. And they were 
eminently susceptible to duplication, and so they were duplicated 
quickly, and widely, and this was to the great chagrin of people who 
made and sold software.

[[172.6]] Enter DRM 0.96. They started to introduce physical defects to 
the disks or started to insist on other physical indicia which the 
software could check for -- dongles, hidden sectors, challenge/response 
protocols that required that you had physical possession of large, 
unwieldy manuals that were difficult to copy, and of course these 
failed, for two reasons. First, they were commercially unpopular, of 
course, because they reduced the usefulness of the software to the 
legitimate purchasers, while leaving the people who took the software 
without paying for it untouched. The legitimate purchasers resented the 
non-functionality of their backups, they hated the loss of scarce ports 
to the authentication dongles, and they resented the inconvenience of 
having to transport large manuals when they wanted to run their 
software. And second, these didn't stop pirates, who found it trivial to 
patch the software and bypass authentication. Typically, the way that 
happened is some expert who had possession of technology and expertise 
of equivalent sophistication to the software vendor itself, would 
reverse engineer the software and release cracked versions that quickly 
became widely circulated. While this kind of expertise and technology 
sounded highly specialized, it really wasn't; figuring out what 
recalcitrant programs were doing, and routing around the defects in 
shitty floppy disk media were both core skills for computer programmers, 
and were even more so in the era of