Ask nettime: What Is the name of the year 2020?

[sebastian]

[via https://thegermanissue.com/texts/what_is_the_name_of_the_year_2020.html]


What Is the Name of the Year 2020?


This summer, when re-reading Peter-Paul Koch's essay "Making  safe for
historians,"(1) I was, once again, reminded that years should be treated as
names, not as numbers. This may be most obvious to those of us who have ever
tried to arithmetically operate with dates that lie outside the confines of our
immediate present – but the issue at hand is more than just a technical
problem. Just like, over time, cyclical concepts of time have gone out of
fashion,(2) the postulate that human history will, and must, remain in
alignment with a monotonically ascending sequence of integers, has been running
out of steam for quite a while, and may have already entered its trajectory
towards the dustbin of said history.(3)

Until organized religion planted the dubious origins of today's numbering
schemes, the rise and fall of kings and dynasties was a rather obvious choice
for naming otherwise uneventful years.(4) The Roman Consular Years are one of
many examples,(5) and when historians try to map them back onto the set of
numbers, the shaky foundations of human historiography become painfully
apparent. But there were always those outlier years when it was hard to make
out who was actually in power, or when being in power, or not, didn't seem to
make much of a difference.

2020 appears to be a special year in many ways. It is also one of the rare
years whose name - its "number" - already had a proper meaning. Until the year
itself arrived, 20/20 used to be synonymous with "perfect vision,"(6) and one
could argue that the year so far has reinforced this meaning. "2020 feels as if
someone had switched on the light: Everything is the same as before, just much
more so, and all of a sudden, everything appears much clearer."(7)

Yet, "perfect vision" may not be the last word when it comes to putting a name
on the year that we're in. The Chinese name for 2020 is "The Year of the Metal
Rat,"(8) which evokes the image of a mutated robotic rodent that gnaws at the
foundations of our global order. The United States, one day in the future, may
remember 2020 as "The 4th Year of the 45th Dynasty," and there is not much
comfort to be found in that name either. But what other names can we already
think of, now that most of 2020 lies behind us?(9)

For inspiration, a short selection of years that were more special than others
is included below.(10) (A few of the entries are just movie titles... sorry for
that ;-))

1978: The Year of the Three Popes
1888: The Year of the Three Emperors
1066: The Year of the Three Kings #1
1483: The Year of the Three Kings #2
1936: The Year of the Three Kings #3
1992: A Year of Kings(11)
1991: The Year Punk Broke
1965: The Year We Were Nowhere
1978: In a Year With 13 Moons
2001: A Space Odyssey
2010: The Year We Make Contact
1816: The Year Without a Summer
1848: The Year of Revolutions
1914: One or Several Wolves?
-333: bei Issos Keilerei
2000: Y2K
1968: "1968"
1971: WTF happened in 1971?(12)

My own pick for 2020 would be: In a Year of Leaky Abstractions.


Notes:

 (1) https://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2009/04/making_time_saf.html

 (2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_of_time

 (3) The concept of linear time and history has been challenged on many fronts, 
 from post-colonial studies to quantum mechanics. It has also been   
 experimentally abandoned in practice (see, for example, 
 https://www.blackquantumfuturism.com), and some of the findings look 
 rather promising.

 (4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regnal_year

 (5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_consuls. In fact, the Roman 
 reign over time has never ended, and left us with one of the most broken 
 naming schemes in existence: the names of our months, where ancient 
 emperors are followed by cardinal numbers that are all off by two. To 
 _mix_ names and numbers is never a good idea.

 (6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_acuity

 (7) not attributed to anyone in particular

 (8) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_zodiac. We are dealing with a lunar 
 calendar here, so the Chinese year "2020" would be the one that begins on 
 January 25, 2020, and ends on February 12, 2021.

 (9) I am aware that this question is both premature (history is usually 
 written from a safe distance) and misguided (history is usually written by 
 the winners). But maybe that's the point here.

(10) Obviously, any such list, and one could make much better ones, will show, 
 by omission, that most historical events refuse to align with the Earth's 
 revolution around the sun. That's why we also have The Day the Music Died, 
 Ten Days That Shook the World, The Week of Blood, The Summer of Love, The 
 Years of Lead, The Greatest Hits of the 80s, and The Short Century. But 
 whatever calendar units we choose: putting names on them will always 
 remain a 

Fwd: [thingist] The War Is Coming

[sebastian]

The War is Coming

For Ghayath al-Madhoun and his million Arab poets

1.
I decided to leave Syria the day a stray bullet passed in front of my eyes. 
That day I realized my homeland was not my homeland, my blood not my blood, and 
my freedom belonged to a freedom fighter who didn't think to ask my permission 
before he shot me: a lack of courtesy we encounter often in war time.

2.
If they are going to kill me, better to kill me in a foreign language.

3.
On the road from Damascus to Berlin I met an old soldier from Dara'a who 
couldn't carry his nightmares anymore. I wrapped them and put them in my 
suitcase; at the airport I paid the fine for excess baggage.

4.
Whoever is not afraid to cross the border carries the war on his back.

5.
Swap your best shirt for a bulletproof vest, your poems for the first chapter 
of the Koran and your house in Athens for a throne atop Mount Aigaleo so you 
can survey from on high the coming war.

6.
This war is trite and pedestrian, filled with similes and ornate adjectives, 
its history is written in the font Comic Sans, violence so limitless the war 
doesn't know where to put it, one grave for every thousand corpses, one shadow 
for every thousand survivors, it's an indelicate war, barrels vomiting 
explosives, steel cylinders filled with accessories for washing machines and 
car parts, the death that disseminates is an earthy death, this war is 
rightfully ours because in it we have buried all our loved ones.

7.
On the 7th of January 2014, the United Nations stopped counting Syria's dead. 
This decision certified mathematics as the science of quality, not quantity, of 
living labor, not shapes, of time, not space - in other words, mathematics is 
the science that studies the material relations among all countable objects.

8.
By the end of 2015, according to Facebook, 311 friends of mine had died since 
the start of the war. I decided to shut down my account: death must have a 
beginning, middle, and end. I can't spend my life in its wake.

9.
I, Ahmed, son of Aisha, although nothing more than a humble migrant, wish to 
apologize on behalf of the Syrians to Greek men and women for filling their 
televisions with our deaths as they eat their dinners and wait for their 
favorite shows, I wish to apologize to the municipal authorities for leaving 
our trash on their beaches and polluting their shores with tons of plastic, we 
are uncivilized and we have no environmental awareness, I wish to apologize to 
the hotel owners and tour operators for damaging the island tourist industry, I 
wish to apologize for shattering the stereotype of the miserable migrant with 
our mobile phones and clean clothes, I wish to apologize to the coast guard who 
have the thankless task of sinking our boats, to the police for standing in 
disorderly lines, to the bus drivers who have to wear surgical masks to protect 
themselves from the diseases we carry, I also wish to make a most humble 
apology to Greek society for exceeding the capacity of their detention camps 
and for sleeping in their squares and parks - finally, I wish to apologize to 
the Greek government who had to request additional funds from the European 
Union in order to pay the purveyors who stock the detention camps, as well as 
the bus drivers, the police, the coast guard, the tour operators, the hotel 
owners, the municipal authorities, and the television stations.

10.
"Don't worry," said the bullet, "I'll go in and out." I explained to her that I 
couldn't allow it since when she left she was bound to take some of my memories 
- like the face of the girl I loved in the fifth grade, the voice of the imam 
the first time my father took me to pray, the smell of the freshly baked bread 
in my grandmother's house, the fingers of my teacher as she taught me to write 
the word الحرب and Van Basten's final goal in the Euro of '88.

11.
It's well known that no organization can buy arms on the black market without 
American authorization. This is one of the reasons I never managed to 
understand the difference between enlightenment and genocide.

12.
If you don't want to be canon fodder, if you don't want the war to catch you 
with your pants down, put on that thinking cap, double down the class struggle, 
get organized, triple down the class struggle, fight, fill your pockets with 
rocks, stick to your guns.
Out with the Left! 
Bring back the Spartacists!
Out with the NGO's! 
Bring back Garibaldi's brigades!
Out with the Humanists! 
Bring back the Italian Autonomists!
The slaughter is about to begin.


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Re: This is what fascism looks like

[sebastian]

> On Sep 1, 2020, at 12:54 PM, Brian Holmes  
> wrote:
> 
> It's deep night. I can't sleep. I can't get two images out of my mind.
> 
> The first is a pudgy-faced boy of 17 with a semi-automatic rifle strapped 
> close to his chest, striding through the urban night with juvenile 
> confidence, explaining his vigilante mission to anyone with a camera. 
> Suddenly the shooting starts, a man is dead on the ground with a bullet in 
> his head and the murderous kid who adulates the fire department and the cops 
> is running from a crowd in hot pursuit: he topples to the pavement, regains 
> his footing in a flash, expertly kills one of his assailants then wounds 
> another, fires bursts in the air to scatter the rest and goes on running 
> alone down the street, first raising his arms in weird surrender to no one, 
> then striding confidently again through the headlights of the police cruisers 
> and the armored personnel carriers. He pauses for some kind of truncated 
> conversation through an open cop car window - and then he's gone into the 
> dull, sleepless night of a thousand screens and a thousand cellphone videos.
> 
> The second image is all bright color like a TV commercial: an endless parade 
> formation of outsized pickup trucks on the highway, shiny like fresh ink on a 
> dealership lease, with white mens' faces and gesticulating fists poked out 
> the windows, American flags and TRUMP/Pence banners flying in the back. They 
> take the exit and roll down what used to be steep river bluffs, all the way 
> to the city center where they shoot paintballs and pepper spray at mixed-race 
> protesters who jeer and throw stuff and brandish sticks, while fistfights 
> break out on the sidewalks amid stalled traffic. Twilight turns into night 
> and there's just a few trucks left at the moment of the clash: this time the 
> dead man is a Trump supporter, a member of the far-right group Patriot 
> Prayer, flat on his back, stripped of his shirt, surrounded by cops, a bullet 
> through his chest. No one yet says a word about who killed him.
> 
> The first image is from Kenosha, that unknown suburb just fifty miles from 
> where I live. The second image is from Portland, that city by the Willamette 
> River that I've come to love over the past few years. The nightmare is the 
> USA, that country on the edge of a fascist takeover.
> ***
> Eighty years ago, the US and its allies fought a war against the Axis powers, 
> won it at the price of unbelievable destruction, and then were faced with the 
> daunting task of "de-nazifying" and "de-imperializing" the ruined nations of 
> Germany and Japan. They did it with all the rationalist efficiency of 
> cultural engineering, they created a liberal world order with dollars and jet 
> bombers, they prevailed against the Soviet challenger and in the 1990s they 
> completed the job, making capitalism universal with the undersea cables of 
> the Internet. In the process they brutalized their own people, sending 
> generation after generation of their working classes to wars of strategy 
> (against Communism) and wars of greed (in the oil-rich Middle East), while at 
> the same time grinding generation after generation of Black and Brown people 
> into the dust of disrespect, dead-end jobs, unemployment and police 
> repression. 
> 
> Now the wheel of history has spun full circle, and "we" are the fascists. The 
> current inhabitant of the White House wants to live there for twelve more 
> bright white years - and his supporters, like football fans or players with 
> brain injuries, see only him, know only him, live only through his callous 
> and brutal words and gestures.
> 
> Trump has studied the Hungarian playbook (via his adviser Sebastian Gorkha), 
> he has packed the courts, filled his administration with unquestioning 
> loyalists, and trained his faithful - perhaps 30 or even 40 percent of the 
> population - to respond to his endless stream of racist dog whistles and his 
> craven mouthing of bigoted religion. This is a serious adversary. With a 
> collapsing economy and a rising pandemic at his back, he has staked his last 
> chance on a culture war with live ammunition, in hopes that the desperation 
> of losing everything will drive the entire country into the kind of violent 
> chaos that permits either another darkhorse victory at the polls, or failing 
> that, an administrative coup with the backing of the police and the militias.
> 
> This is not the supremely complex network society that we critiqued here on 
> nettime twenty years ago. This is not the post-Fordism of the Italian 
> autonomists or the neoliberalism described by David Harvey. This is what 
> happens when those things break down. This i

The Virus Is Our Idea of Ourselves

[sebastian]

The Virus Is Our Idea of Ourselves

by Claire Fontaine

"Imagine my surprise, nay, my consternation, when without moving from his
privacy, Bartleby in a singularly mild, firm voice, replied, 'I would prefer
not to.'" [1]

"In The Undercommons if we beginc anywhere, we begin with the right to refuse
what has been refused to you." [2]

In the midst of a global crisis with no solution in sight, the strategy of
total refusal appears irresponsible. No matter how explicitly corrupt and
dangerous for itself and the planet the current political organization of
everything is: according to most voices in the media we need constructive
proposals, seemingly impossible reforms, demented trust, and a good dose of
fear and submission. For many of the subjectivities who rebelled in this
climate for the past forty years, organization has proven increasingly
complicated and claims have become less and less federating; precariousness and
fragmentation have been blamed for creating dis-homogeneous experiences. This
has allowed repression to hit harder and working conditions to worsen. The
dismantlement of the welfare state and workers' rights has gone ahead whilst
subjectivities were inexplicably adjusting to the disaster. Struggle has come
to define the psychological trouble brought by this new condition in which
fighting for one's rights is an almost ungraspable possibility. Internalized
violence doesn't only come from one's vulnerable socioeconomic condition, but
from the burden of the political defeat that causes it. The return of fascism
under so many forms wouldn't be understandable without taking into account the
lack of society's anti-bodies against it, brought along by the depression and
self-hatred of all the generations of rebels that have seen their physical and
emotional world crumbling down under gentrification and mass unemployment. Debt
is one of the tools of this oppression; another is widespread poverty (even
amongst the employed population). Though being rather common strategies for
governance, what is new is that nowadays they are experienced as deeply
individual, depending on personal failures, shameful and non-federating. People
of all classes sense that they have personal responsibility for an order of
things that is destroying them as human beings. They resent what is ruining
them but also fear the internal crisis of the power structure that is harming
them, fearful that worst conditions can arise; whenever racism kills, poverty
strikes, or climate change proves the impossibility of capitalism, they feel
guilty and complicit rather than angry.

This phase of capitalism has managed to render integration to the productive
chain as far more desirable and urgent than anything else, including health,
mental balance, human relationships, and a meaningful life. The mass of the
constantly excluded pressing outside the gates of whatever we ourselves are
included in, the anxiety of losing one's place is more intense and real than
any solidarity toward the people in need can be. The deep awareness of being
disposable is poisonous. This has allowed work to become more and more invasive
in everybody's lives and the general perception of professional experiences to
be toxic, dissocializing, competitive, and selfish. Having a job is now a
lonely and scary business.

And yet in the past few months work has been presented as massively
unessential: the COVID-19 measures made it clear that key workers are a tiny
overexploited percentage of the population; all the others can just sit back
and relax or do their chatter on zoom, and the world will keep turning. In this
deep financial crisis, jobs have also become increasingly hard to find and
badly paid, but the superstition still stands that working is the only way to
provide for one's individual needs and only means to exist as a person; any
other condition is considered a befallen one. Because the dream has become
precisely what makes the dream impossible, and here capitalism shows its
devilish genius: by longing for vast depopulated spaces, powerful cars,
expensive lives or just having enough to live in unaffordable cities without
having to work several jobs, people run the rat race and don't fight.

The objective failure of the economy at keeping society together and preserving
class solidarity simply to reproduce the species isn't experienced as a scandal
but internalized on a subjective level as the anxiety of being stuck with
others that we don't understand. The separating effect of neoliberalism and the
psychological weakening of the isolated individuals is not an accident or a
side effect: it's vital for this stage of the productive process, where our
mental balance needs to be cannibalized in order to secure adhesion to the
unacceptable status quo. Limiting social interactions to the chosen ones isn't
seen as impoverishing but as hygienic. Self-isolation during the pandemic had
something familiar, both for the social classes who have been practicing it for
a 

Re: What is a global energy regime shift?

[sebastian]

> On Jun 23, 2020, at 10:41 AM, Felix Stalder  wrote:
> 
>> The notion of climate justice is
>> beginning to build bridges between different social movements.
> 
> This, as I understand is, is the entire purpose of the green new deal
> and marks a substantial change from traditional green politics. And, at
> least in the German speaking context, it appears to build bridges into
> the unions and the traditional -- industry-oriented -- social democratic
> parties. Of course, this is uneven, but it is different from 10 years ago.

I would go even further and claim that the basic idea - the unavoidable EU-wide
bail-out must be a bold green new deal - is a reformist proposal that will
build bridges between Antifa and CEOs. The state of necessity(1) implies it,
and it's pretty much exactly what Varoufakis suggested years ago:

"Who do you think would benefit from [a fragmentation of European capitalism]?
A progressive left, that will rise Phoenix-like from the ashes of Europe's
public institutions? Or the Golden Dawn Nazis, the assorted neofascists, the
xenophobes and the spivs? I have absolutely no doubt as to which of the two
will do best from a disintegration of the eurozone. I, for one, am not prepared
to blow fresh wind into the sails of this postmodern version of the 1930s. If
this means that it is we, the suitably erratic Marxists, who must try to save
European capitalism from itself, so be it. Not out of love for European
capitalism, for the eurozone, for Brussels, or for the European Central Bank,
but just because we want to minimise the unnecessary human toll from this
crisis."(2)

And the crisis in question is not a virus. That virus is just a parable. The
crisis is exponential capitalism: the accelerating rise of global temperatures, 
that pyramid scheme named "too big to fail," and an economy that has become so 
abstact that when a bat shits on a pig in China(3), everything falls apart.

(1) https://lundi.am/What-the-virus-said

(2) 
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist

(3) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_China_ist_ein_Sack_Reis_umgefallen


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The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis: An Account and

[sebastian]

The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis

An Account and Analysis

In this anonymous submission, participants in the uprising in Minneapolis in
response to the murder of George Floyd explore how a combination of different
tactics compelled the police to abandon the Third Precinct.

The following analysis is motivated by a discussion that took place in front of
the Third Precinct as fires billowed from its windows on Day Three of the
George Floyd Rebellion in Minneapolis. We joined a group of people whose
fire-lit faces beamed in with joy and awe from across the street. People of
various ethnicities sat side by side talking about the tactical value of
lasers, the “share everything” ethos, interracial unity in fighting the police,
and the trap of “innocence.” There were no disagreements; we all saw the same
things that helped us win. Thousands of people shared the experience of these
battles. We hope that they will carry the memory of how to fight. But the time
of combat and the celebration of victory is incommensurable with the habits,
spaces, and attachments of everyday life and its reproduction. It is
frightening how distant the event already feels from us. Our purpose here is to
preserve the strategy that proved victorious against the Minneapolis Third
Precinct.

Our analysis focuses on the tactics and composition of the crowd that besieged
the Third Precinct on Day Two of the uprising. The siege lasted roughly from 4
pm well into the early hours of the morning of May 28. We believe that the
tactical retreat of the police from the Third Precinct on Day Three was won by
the siege of Day Two, which exhausted the Precinct’s personnel and supplies. We
were not present for the fighting that preceded the retreat on Day Three, as we
showed up just as the police were leaving. We were across the city in an area
where youth were fighting the cops in tit-for-tat battles while trying to loot
a strip mall—hence our focus on Day Two here.

Context

The last popular revolt against the Minneapolis Police Department took place in
response to the police murder of Jamar Clark on November 15, 2015. It spurred
two weeks of unrest that lasted until December 2. Crowds repeatedly engaged the
police in ballistic confrontations; however, the response to the shooting
coalesced around an occupation of the nearby Fourth Precinct. Organizations
like the NAACP and the newly formed Black Lives Matter asserted their control
over the crowds that gathered; they were often at odds with young unaffiliated
rebels who preferred to fight the police directly. Much of our analysis below
focuses on how young Black and Brown rebels from poor and working-class
neighborhoods seized the opportunity to reverse this relationship. We argue
that this was a necessary condition for the uprising.

George Floyd was murdered by the police at 38th Street and Chicago Avenue
between 8:20 and 8:32 pm on Monday, May 25. Demonstrations against the killing
began the next day at the site of his murder, where a vigil took place. Some
attendees began a march to the Third Precinct at Lake Street and 26th, where
rebels attacked police vehicles in the parking lot.

These two locations became consistent gathering points. Many community groups,
organizations, liberals, progressives, and leftists assembled at the vigil
site, while those who wanted to fight generally gathered near the Precinct.
This put over two miles between two very different crowds, a spatial division
that was reflected in other areas of the city as well. Looters clashed with
police in scattered commercial zones outside of the sphere of influence of the
organizations while many of the leftist marches excluded fighting elements with
the familiar tactic of peace policing in the name of identity-based risk
aversion.

The “Subject” of The George Floyd Uprising

The subject of our analysis is not a race, a class, an organization, or even a
movement, but a crowd. We focus on a crowd for three reasons. First, with the
exception of the street medics, the power and success of those who fought the
Third Precinct did not depend on their experience in “organizing” or in
organizations. Rather, it resulted from unaffiliated individuals and groups
courageously stepping into roles that complemented each other and seizing
opportunities as they arose.

While the initial gathering was occasioned by a rally hosted by a Black-led
organization, all of the actions that materially defeated the Third Precinct
were undertaken after the rally had ended, carried out by people who were not
affiliated with it. There was practically no one there from the usual gamut of
self-appointed community and religious leaders, which meant that the crowd was
able to transform the situation freely. Organizations rely on stability and
predictability to execute strategies that require great quantities of time to
formulate. Consequently, organization leaders can be threatened by sudden
changes in the social conditions, which can make their 

Re: what exactly is breaking?

[sebastian]

> On Jun 14, 2020, at 7:30 PM, Iain Boal  wrote:
> 
> > On 14 Jun 2020, at 02:40, sebast...@rolux.org wrote:
> > 
> > "... i'm not a historian, but i'm certain
> > that when columbus set foot in the americas, he came with the best
> > intentions, and even the spanish probably didn't arrive with the
> > primary motive to just kill everyone. but they did."
> 
> If it is the task of the historian to rebut such ignorant certitudes, well 
> then,
> the historical record clearly shows that the ‘christ-bearing dove’ was 
> intent on plundering the new world. He did confess an ulterior motive - 
> the funding of a crusade for the reconquest of Jerusalem. 
> 
> “But they did [kill everyone]”. That outcome has been a phantasy
> of white Christian supremacists since the invasion and is a dangerous 
> falsehood,
> given its implication of terra nullius, which however was in contradiction 
> with the 
> need for a labor force of millions to mine silver in Potosi and harvest 
> the most profitable commodities in history - tobacco, sugar and cotton.
> 
> Iain


you are probably right in that polemics is only one of many forms available
to address the issues of 2020. i would like to hear more from historians.

i'm sure religion played a role. it is regrettable. i sometimes imagine,
maybe naïvely, that there must have been at least some folks who left spain
or portugal with a different "moral mandate" than just to do god's work,
driven by genuine curiousity about geography, and whose "exportable rallying
cry" was to show off all the cool new technology they had at their disposal,
maybe even share an idea or two. it didn't end so well, depending on who you 
ask, and i was just voicing my skepticism with regards to the US or the UK
or the former West being the places that will spread the global virtues the
species is going to thrive on in the 21st century. if you study their track
record, say: the last 500 years, it looks kind of mixed at best. i'm also not
such a big fan of china - compared to the US, the superpower it may supercede
- other than maybe with regards to food, secularism, quality of everyday life
for non-working-class inhabitants, and the clear willingness of the current
government to improve the overall conditions of human life, be it by investing
massively in new infrastructure, or, most notably, by refraining from killing
millions of their own citizens as part of dubious political experiments.
it's also not a binary, and we already know who is going to win: anyone who
invents a form of capitalism that is no longer extractive, financializing
and - in the deleuze/guattari or comité invisible sense - abstractionist.
(dykes as presidents and CEOs would be a big plus, now that i think of it.)

so yes: it's okay to imagine best case scenarios, which is what the text
i was replying to did. the most important concept to me was "agency", and i
find it crucial to insist on agency - as opposed to, say, deliberate on the
mechanics of geopolitics from some remote feldherrenhügel. as long as we
vaguely agree that what is breaking in 2020 was broken for a long time - 50
years for some, 500+ for others - there is a nonzero chance of a nonfascist
future, and room for many voices and tonalities. (and in case i figure out that
part about the bridge behind the mona lisa and gödel's incompleteness theorem -
i haven't, so far - i'd be very much willing to help diagonalize, if needed.)






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Re: what exactly is breaking?

[sebastian]

> On Jun 13, 2020, at 5:19 PM, Max Herman  wrote:
 
> Neither political party in the US is really denying climate change or racial 
> inequality much these days.  There is bipartisan support for green 
> infrastructure initiatives to help reboot the economy, a green deal if not a 
> new one, and whoever wins in November will probably advance this in some 
> form.  It is also interesting to notice how the rabid nationalist-populism of 
> five years ago seems less effective.  We may have reached an at least local 
> turning point where the benefit of such rhetoric to anyone, even the most 
> rabid of the rabid, is decreasing.  Certainly the libertarian zero-state 
> solution is in the dustbin for now given the giant scope of the Covid-19 
> bailout.  Who knows, we may even see the emergence of a new 21st c. "moral 
> mandate" for the former Western Bloc to advance the causes of equality and 
> environmental protection in much the same way that voting and free speech 
> acted as exportable rallying cries and unifying moral motives in the previous 
> century.


last time i checked, at least one of the political parties in the US
was not only denying, but deliberately escalating climate change and
racial inequality. (this should not be misread as praise for the other
party, of course!) my impression was that that for a majority in the
US senate, "green new deal" was synonymous with "antifa" or "united
nations". i also don't think that strategically, the focus should be
on who wins in november, because in case someone wins something that
month, he or she will have participated in the arrestation, not the
advancement, of political debate: by reducing it to how and how often
his or her pretty face appears on television. and while i agree that
zero-state libertarianism should be totally discredited, mid-2020
(dear virus made that crystal clear: neoliberalism is a program for
genocide, plain and simple), i'm still wondering why it is thriving
in quite a few places, like the US or the UK. my most substantial
disagreement, however, is about equality/ecology as "moral mandate"
or "exportable rallying cry". i'm not a historian, but i'm certain
that when columbus set foot in the americas, he came with the best
intentions, and even the spanish probably didn't arrive with the
primary motive to just kill everyone. but they did. so i think with
regards to exportable virtues, the balance sheet of the "former
western bloc" is deep in the red, so to say. maybe the US should
just declare moral and political bankruptcy and start from zero.
if i was a banker, i'd call it a haircut and move on with life.





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we breathe again

[sebastian]

# machine-translated without any further editing
# you may want to read the original, here:
# https://lundi.am/Nous-respirons-a-nouveau


WE BREATHE AGAIN

"We know from history, no force is unbeatable"

Appeared in Monday, June 8, 2020 (Monday, June 246, 2020)

May 25, 2020: another image of police brutality on the internet, this time a
small eye shaped tab covers it discreetly, the image is blurred and the digital
giants - adding their little "benevolent" personal censorship - warn me of the
violence of the images I am likely to see. Two months of immobility watching
police violence without being able to react, without being able to share my
suffering and despair. Two months of powerlessness to balance between denial
and exposure, between a necessary protection and a will to know, in a
relationship more than ever bulimic to militant news. I hesitate and I pass, I
don't click to launch the video, I don't have the courage.

As the cops took to the streets, images of smears swarmed on the internet, the
more the police heads took over the public space, the more the police figure
dominated online. Apart from private space - and still not for everyone - all
living spaces during the lockdown, real or virtual, were saturated by the image
of an all-powerful police force. Social networks, the dominant media, but also
activists, became the echo chamber of this double symbolic and physical
violence. Locked up, inactive, on all screens, the inhuman brutality of the
condoms resounds through our optical nerves: in our eyes, our computers and our
dreams. The muzzle that falls like a whip on a poor madman who has escaped from
the asylum and the door that opens on the passage of a motorbike, the lethal
gestures of the cops settle in our imagination and amaze us, taken as we are in
our loneliness and our incapacity.

The robotic, untouchable, imperturbable army of the immobile lines of CRS or
the shattering irruption of the BRAVs - which we have experienced, put into
images or seen - comes to bring down in our inner self the sketches of
uncontrolled revolts, muscle relaxation and inconsiderate gestures. The
impunity of the police figure that haunts the internet, haunts us and
temporarily breaks our rebellion. Inheritors of an impasse in critical
thinking, we continue to underestimate the power of images, and create
ourselves the oppressive images of the invulnerability of the police.

Yet, as we know from history, no force is unbeatable - think of the royal power
invested with the divine: who would dare at the time to attack God's
representative on earth - and we know from experience, the police are sometimes
vulnerable. Contrary to the claims of security ideology, there is always a flaw
in the system, always a mistake or a passage, never the militarization of
existence, despite its stupid claims, will ever be total.

Only sometimes fear wins us over and the irrational overrides reason, the
magical police figure alienates us more than ever, the all-police man bewitches
us, he keeps us wise and mute. I take refuge, I flee and the mechanisms of
psychic self-defence are activated, I don't want to see or hear anything
anymore. Meanwhile, we beat up outside, we beat up in our neighbourhoods, we
beat up, for nothing, for race, for pleasure, for power.

And the pride of the dominant spreads out from his disgusting rightness. I
can't breathe. Everywhere their petty stories during the lockdown, their little
fake problems, their world "after" even more disgusting and unfair than the one
"before". It's suffocating. Their new and comfortable justifications for daily
repression. Their untenable indifference to the oppressed, letting them go into
the most banal and vile racism. We suffocate in the neighbourhoods, we
suffocate in the cities, we suffocate with the police boot on George Floyd's
neck, on the necks of blacks, on the necks of activists, on the necks of our
comrades. He can't breathe, I can't breathe, we all hold our breath.

But finally George Floyd will never breathe again, the police kill in full
light, live. A stranger's neck is crushed in Minneapolis and blows rain down on
friends in Paris. Always humanists, the police beat, maim and kill... to save
lives. Then the anguish takes over, our breathing gets excited, old marks are
revealed, bad memories come back: I am handcuffed - I wear my hands around my
neck -. What if he had tightened the handcuffs? What if he had continued? Maybe
I'd have died too, just like Floyd. Except he let go of me and sent my head
against the hood of their car. "Save," why? Cause I'm white? Maybe, although
these days what they call "black" blocks tend to be prime targets for armed
racist peacekeepers.

Let us also remember the new High Court of Clichy, an immense ultra-modern maze
with a fascist aesthetic where the scoundrel laws are applied, a building
besieged by tens of thousands of demonstrators on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. The
building visible from all over Paris is only the top of the iceberg 

Re: what exactly is breaking?

[sebastian]

And I know this is kind of lame, but... what if the breaking we're seeing is

> the first rearticulation of what is going to evolve into a broad, radical,
> international movement, one whose scope, diversity and determination will
> surpass even the revolts of the 1960s, committed to end the ongoing racial
> and sexual oppression, the death grip of religion, the grotesquely uneven
> distribution of wealth, the exclusion of the poor from public life, the
> collapse of democratic institutions under capitalism, and the unprecedented
> rise of global temperatures. Even Erdogan, Putin, Modi and Duterte will be
> forced to make some concessions. We're going to end the fossile era by 2025,
> begin to dismantle and evacuate coastal cities calmly and orderly, make 
> AirBnB and Uber a criminal offense, Facebook the graveyard of fascism, and
> stick it to the singularity.

eyes on the prize! ;)



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Re: what exactly is breaking?

[sebastian]

> On May 31, 2020, at 12:27 PM, Felix Stalder  wrote:
> 
> what exactly is breaking?



the short answer is, of course, the patience of people who keep getting
murdered. but this is not new. see london 2011, athens 2008, paris 2005.

WHITE SILENCE = CONSENT, but also WHITE AGITATION = UNNECESSARY.
having said that, i'm still tempted to post the following... ;-)



What Exactly Is Breaking?

March 30, 2020

It is economics or life. The states of emergency decreed everywhere, the
infinite extension of police and population control measures already at work,
the removal of all limits to exploitation, the sovereign decision of who is
allowed to live and who is allowed to die. The aim of this apology for Chinese
governmentality, without any complexes, is not to provide for the "salvation of
the people" now, but to prepare the ground for a bloody "return to normality",
or rather for the establishment of a normality even more anomalous than that
which prevailed in the world before. In this sense, the leaders are not lying
for once: the time after is now. It is now that caregivers have to challenge
any obedience to those who flatter them by sacrificing them. It is now that we
must wrest the definition of our health, of our great health, from the disease
industries and from "public health" specialists. Now is the time to build up
the networks of self-help, self-supply and self-generation that will prevent us
from succumbing to the blackmail of addiction which will seek to double our
enslavement. It is now, since the prodigious suspension we are experiencing,
that we have to figure out everything we need to prevent a return and
everything we will need to live beyond the economy. It is now that we must
nourish the complicity that can limit the impudent revenge of a police force
that knows it is hated. It is now that we need to deconflict ourselves, not out
of mere bravado, but gradually, with all the intelligence and attention that
befits friendship. It is now that we must elucidate the life we want - what
this life requires us to build and destroy, with whom we want to live and with
whom we no longer want to live. No care with leaders who arm themselves for war
against us. No "living together" with those who let us die. We will have had no
protection for the price of our submission; the social contract is dead; it is
up to us to invent something else. The current rulers know very well that, on
the day of deconfinement, we will have no other desire than to see their heads
fall off, and that is why they will do everything to prevent such a day from
coming, to diffract, control, differentiate the exit from confinement. It is up
to us to decide when and under what conditions.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)




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France Against the Robots (Jean-Marie Straub)

[sebastian]

France Against the Robots

The word "revolution" to us Frenchmen is not a vague term. We know that
Revolution is a rupture, that Revolution is an Absolute. There is no such thing
as a moderate revolution, there is no such thing as a planned revolution - as
one speaks of a planned economy. The revolution we are announcing will overturn
the entire existing order or it will not take place at all. If we believe that
the present system is capable of being reformed, that it can, in itself, check
the fatal course of its evolution towards Dictatorship - the dictatorship of
money, of race, of class, of the Nation - we will certainly refuse to run the
risk of an explosion capable of destroying precious things that can only be
rebuilt with much time, perseverance, selflessness, and love. But the present
system will not change the course of its evolution for the good reason that it
is no longer evolving; it is merely reorganizing itself with the view of
lasting a little longer, of surviving. Far from professing to resolve its own
contradictions, which are, in any case, impossible to resolve, it seems more
and more inclined to impose them by force through strict regulation of
individual effort that grows more rigid and more particular every day, carried
out in the name of a sort of State Socialism, which is the democratic form of
Dictatorship. Every day, in fact, brings us another proof that the purely
ideological era has long since passed, in New York as well as in Moscow and
London. We can see the Imperial English Democracy, the Plutocratic American
Democracy and the Marxist Empire of Soviet Dominions walking, if not hand in
hand—far from it! - at least pursuing the same goal, that is to say maintaining
at all costs and even while appearing to oppose it, the system in which they
have acquired wealth and power. For, in the end, Russia has profited no less
from the capitalist system than America and England; it has played the role of
the Member of Parliament who makes a fortune in Opposition. In short: regimes
formerly opposed in ideology are now directly united by Technology. A world
dominated by Technology is lost for Liberty.

from: La France contre les Robots (Jean-Marie Straub, 2020)
from: La France contre les Robots (Georges Bernanos, 1945)

via: https://kinoslang.blogspot.com/
via: https://piratecinema.org/screenings/20200405



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economy or life

[sebastian]

ECONOMY OR LIFE

https://lundi.am/IMG/arton2929-resp1440.jpg

"- Can't you see, can't you all see, you speakers, that it is we who are dying, 
and that here below the only thing that really lives, is the Machine? We 
created the Machine, to fulfill our will, but we can no longer bend it to our 
will. She stole our sense of space and our sense of touch, she blurred all 
human relationships and reduced love to a carnal act, she paralyzed our bodies 
and our wills, and now she forces us to venerate her." - EM Forster, The 
Machine Stops (1909)

Not everything is pretended in the official communication. In the midst of so 
many disconcerting lies, it happens that the present rulers have visibly tight 
hearts, and it is when they detail how much the economy is suffering. The old 
people who are left to suffocate at home so that they do not enter into 
ministerial statistics or that they come to clutter the hospital, certainly, 
certainly. But let a good company die, and their throats are tied. They run to 
his bedside. Admittedly, we die everywhere of respiratory distress, but the 
economy should not be short of oxygen. For her, he will never lack artificial 
respirators. Central banks provide it. The rulers are like this old bourgeois 
who, while a visitor is dying in his living room, has cold sweats for stains on 
his floor. Or like this expert of the national technocracy who, in a recent 
report on atomic safety, simply concluded: "the main victim of the major 
nuclear accident is the French economy."

Faced with the microbial storm present, a thousand times announced at all 
levels of government since the late 1990s, we get lost in conjectures about the 
lack of preparedness of leaders. How is it that masks, charlottes, beds, 
caregivers, tests, remedies are so lacking? Why are these measures so late, and 
these reversals of doctrine so sudden? Why these so contradictory injunctions - 
to confine oneself but go to work, to close the markets but not the 
supermarkets, to stop the circulation of the virus but not that of the goods 
which transport it? Why so grotesquely obstruct the administration of massive 
tests or a manifestly effective and inexpensive drug? Why the choice of general 
confinement rather than the detection of sick subjects? The answer is simple 
and consistent: it's the economy, stupid!

Rarely will the economy appear to this point for what it is: a religion, if not 
a sect. A religion is after all only a sect which has taken power. Rarely have 
the rulers appeared so clearly possessed. Their lunar calls to sacrifice, to 
war and to total mobilization against the invisible enemy, to the union of the 
faithful, their incontinent verbal delusions which no longer embarrass any 
paradox, are those of any evangelical celebration; and here we are summoned to 
endure them each behind our screen, in increasing disbelief. The characteristic 
of this kind of faith is that no fact is able to invalidate it, on the 
contrary. Far from the spread of the virus condemning the global reign of the 
economy, it is rather an opportunity to realize its presuppositions. The new 
ethos of confinement where "men do not take pleasure (but on the contrary a 
great displeasure) in life in company", where everyone considers anyone, since 
his strict separation, as a threat to his life, where fear of death imposes 
itself as the foundation of the social contract, realizes the anthropological 
and existential hypothesis of the Leviathan of Hobbes - Hobbes that Marx deemed 
"one of the oldest economists in England, one of the most original philosophers 
" To situate this hypothesis, it is good to recall that Hobbes was amused that 
his mother gave birth to him under the effect of the terror caused by 
lightning. Born of fear, he saw logically in life only fear of death. "This is 
his problem," one is tempted to say. No one is obliged to conceive of this sick 
view as the foundation of its existence, and even less of all existence. Now 
the economy, whether liberal or Marxist, right or left, directed or 
deregulated, is this disease which offers itself as a general health formula. 
It is indeed, in this, a religion.

As friend Hocart noted, nothing fundamentally distinguishes the president of a 
"modern" nation from a tribal chief from the Pacific Islands or a sovereign 
pontiff in Rome. It is always a question of making all the propitiatory rites 
capable of attracting prosperity to the community, of reconciling the gods, of 
sparing their wrath, of ensuring unity and of preventing people from disperse. 
"Its raison d'être is not to coordinate but to preside over the ritual" (Kings 
and courtiers): it is not to understand what makes all the incurable 
imbecility of contemporary leaders. One thing is to attract prosperity, another 
to manage the economy. One thing is to do rituals, another to rule people's 
lives. How power is of a purely liturgical nature, this is what sufficiently 
proves the profound uselessness, 

digitally drunk

[sebastian]

GENDER-BLOG
DIGITALLY DRUNK
By Simon Strick

tweet / teilen / mail

"everyone in their online classes now", sami @sahirous, reddit meme

It is not by accident that my partner did her first session of e-teaching a bit 
drunk. I will do the same tomorrow when my first session comes up. We both 
teach US-American students who were on their first semester in Europe, and now 
sit in quarantine back in the United States. For her first session using 
BigBlueButton, she was nervous, camera conscious, unsure of how to present her 
PowerPoint documents, YouTube videos, and herself within the new digital 
format. Broadcasting herself, as it were, through channels provided by Google, 
by Microsoft, by Apple, and so many other platforms of late-stage capitalism. 
She and I are reluctant, anxious, unsure of ourselves. We have caught a case of 
digital anxiety, others have come up with terms like "panic-gogy".

Drinking while e-teaching helps with digital anxiety. What doesn't help is that 
the both of us are freelance teachers: we will be assessed by our employer for 
how we handle this digital semester. Doing that, we work with our own 
computers, with the software we have or can afford, from our own homes, without 
anything resembling an office-space. I'll just go ahead and say it, most of you 
know anyhow: there is no "home office" despite what everybody claims. There is 
just the home, your or our home, two rooms and a kitchen, for sleeping, for 
cats, for eating, for cleaning up, for children, making the beds, for watching 
TV, for relaxing, wait no, no relaxing, not anymore. All the time we have is 
organized around working, around teaching at 8 pm for young Americans visiting 
Berlin, and stuck in Seattle. For them and for us, there is no office in the 
home, and instead the home becomes a 24/7 factory. We are lucky to have this 
factory space.

In the morning after the first session, she had a sore throat because teaching 
digitally through a computer strains the voice. We have no voice training like 
actors do, at least most of us do not. Her explanation was that her voice had 
to make up not only for the physical absence, but moreover for the sadness of 
her American students, damned to spend their first semester abroad literally at 
home. This is hard work: the voice compensates for the affective demands of the 
digital classroom. As stage actors know, the voice doesn't work well without a 
long preparation, textual, mental, and physical preparation and rehearsal. 
Digital teaching is physical work, to a much greater extent than presence 
teaching is. It feels like factory work, and alcohol seems to be the go-to 
destressor for factory workers.

Money for Nothing

We are all drunk on the digital now. Drunk on platforms, drunk on apps, drunk 
on multi-user-solutions, drunk on the great, shiny presentation your colleague 
made, drunk on peer-to-peer channels, drunk on communication, drunk on zeros 
and ones. There will be a hangover, or there already is.

The Berlin municipal government voted to distribute €10 million immediately to 
Berlin universities in order to revamp the digital environments for teaching. 
It will probably be used for buying software licences, cameras, bandwidth, 
server space, IT-services, and all of that helpful stuff. It is the hour of the 
IT-department, delegating the money, explaining to everyone how things are done 
and what is possible, and all the things that go without saying for an 
IT-person but not for the professor, the Mittelbau, the precarious adjunct, the 
student. It’s the hour of the nerd: the gaming forum r/gaming already has found 
that gamers are at an "evolutionary advantage" in the present situation. They 
know how screencasting and streaming work, how Discord is set up, the 
ins-and-outs of Counterstrike Teamspeak, they have the computer setup and 
proper headphones to do it. I cannot say they are wrong - this appears at the 
moment to be an evolutionary step.

The ten million could've been used for new teaching personnel, renovations, 
Lohnerhöhungen for studentische Mitarbeiter (many of them IT-specialists), more 
office spaces, new books; let alone new research activities and projects, 
physical and mental health services for students and faculty, and so forth. My 
former department relied for most of its IT-services on a single studentische 
Mitarbeiterstelle (Hi, Alon) to solve all their problems - I wonder what he is 
doing these days, or how he is doing it. My partner and I work with 4-6 year 
old computers I hustled from my university, bought on some project money that 
we both continue to use half-legally (thanks, Alon).

I only wish for the 5000 Euro the Berlin government has promised to 
freelancers. Hopefully it will come, hopefully many are "entitled" to receive 
it. Meanwhile, I am horrified that ten million in "higher education money" will 
probably for the most part go to supranational corporations giving a damn about 
climate change, 

Fwd: Re: What the Virus Said

[sebastian]

> On Mar 12, 2020, at 12:05 PM, Eric Kluitenberg  wrote:
> 
> So we might ask, what does the COVID-19 emergence look and feel like from
> the perspective of the virus itself? How does it experience the hostility
> with which it was met upon its emanation into the existent? 


Now that Eric's wish from last week has been fulfilled, maybe just a reminder
that the virus itself doesn't _have_ to have the final word on the matter.


> From: i...@pad.ma
> Subject: Re: What the Virus Said
> Date: March 22, 2020
> To: in...@textz.com


Dear Virus,

I appreciate your monologue, and I am already feeling much better. The fever I
had developed in your anticipation is almost gone, and I am much more relaxed.

Yet I can still sense a nagging feeling inside of me. Secretly, I suspect that 
part of why I am feeling so much better today is because I am part of the 
frequent-flying classes who find it so easy to adapt to you, as they convert 
their ruined social and professional lives into an even more ruinous online 
existence. Now all our bodies are in front of screens 24/7, you render us 
_busy_, as we are staying in touch. It was us who had awarded ourselves with 
the name of the disaster: "Anthropocene" - not "humanity", whatever you think 
that may be. I'm not denying that you are speaking to me from memory and with 
strategy, but as you are calling the shots, I wish you were also equipped with 
a dictionary, and with vision. It would affect your politics. Revolution makes 
for beautiful weather - but do you think the inverse will hold true? Because 
there is one more thing that will become much clearer in the sunlight of the 
coming weeks: The ones I love most, including myself, are only _spreading_ you, 
like chemtrails or pesticides or exhaust fumes. The gates of death will open on 
the receiving end, as our maids will carry you home. And as far I can tell, 
they have always been aware that they were living out of boxes, with little 
decoration to even wish to blow up. They have always hated their husbands, 
their kids would puke every night, and thanks to you, they're working overtime.

Can you still mutate a little, dear virus? You still sound so fucking human.


> On Mar 19, 2020, at 6:58 PM, sebast...@rolux.org wrote:
> 
> 
> WHAT THE VIRUS SAID



 <...>



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What the Virus Said

[sebastian]

WHAT THE VIRUS SAID

“I’ve come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you couldn’t find.”

paru dans lundimatin#, le 19 mars 2020

You’d do well, dear humans, to stop your ridiculous calls for war. Lower the
vengeful looks you’re aiming at me. Extinguish the halo of terror in which
you’ve enveloped my name. Since the bacterial genesis of the world, we viruses
are the true continuum of life on Earth. Without us, you would never have seen
the light of day, any more than the first cell would have come to exist.

We are your ancestors, just like the rocks and the seaweed, and much more than
the apes. We are wherever you are and also where you aren’t. Too bad for you if
you only see in the universe what is to your liking ! But above all, quit
saying that it is I who am killing you. You will not die from my action upon
your tissues but from the lack of care of your fellow humans. If you had not
been just as rapacious amongst yourselves as you were with all that lives on
this planet, you would still have enough beds, nurses, and respirators to
survive the damage I do in your lungs. If you didn’t pack your old people into
nursing homes and your able-bodied into concrete hutches, you wouldn’t be in
this predicament. If you hadn’t changed the whole expanse of the world, or
worlds rather, that just yesterday were still luxuriant, chaotic, infinitely
inhabited, into a vast desert for the monoculture of the Same and the More, I
wouldn’t have been able to launch myself into the global conquest of your
throats. If nearly all of you had not become, over the last century, redundant
copies of a single, untenable form of life, you would not be preparing to die
like flies abandoned in the water of your sugary civilization. If you had not
made your environments so empty, so transparent, so abstract, you can be sure
that I wouldn’t be moving at the speed of an aircraft. I only come to carry out
the punishment that you have long pronounced against yourselves. Forgive me,
but it’s you, after all, who invented the name “Anthropocene”. You have awarded
yourselves the whole honor of the disaster ; now that it is unfolding, it’s too
late to decline it. The most honest among you know this very well : I have no
other accomplice than your social organization, your folly of the “grand scale”
and its economy, your fanatical belief in systems. Only systems are
“vulnerable”. Everything else lives and dies. There’s no “vulnerability” except
for what aims at control, at its extension and its improvement. Look at me
closely : I am just the flip side of the prevailing Death.

So stop blaming me, accusing me, stalking me. Working yourselves into an
anti-viral paralysis. All of that is childish. Let me propose a different
perspective : there is an intelligence that is immanent to life. One doesn’t
need to be a subject to make use of a memory and a strategy. One doesn’t have
to be a sovereign to decide. Bacteria and viruses can also call the shots. See
me, therefore, as your savior instead of your gravedigger. You’re free not to
believe me, but I have come to shut down the machine whose emergency brake you
couldn’t find. I have come in order to suspend the operation that held you
hostage. I have come in order to demonstrate the aberration that “normality”
constitutes. “Delegating to others our nutrition, our protection, our ability
to care for our way of life was a madness”…“There is no budgetary limit, health
has no price” : see how I redirect the language and spirit of your governing
authorities ! See how I bring them down for you to their real standing as
miserable racketeers, and arrogant to boot ! See how they suddenly denounce
themselves not just as being superfluous, but as being harmful ! For them
you’re nothing but supports for the reproduction of their system – that is,
less than slaves. Even the plankton are treated better than you.

But don’t waste your time reproaching them, pointing out their deficiencies.
Accusing them of negligence is still to give them more credit than they
deserve. Ask yourselves rather how you could find it so comfortable to let
yourselves be governed. Praising the merits of the Chinese option compared to
the British option, of the imperial-legist solution as against the
Darwinist-liberal method is to understand nothing about the one or the other,
the horror of one and the horror of the other. Since Quesnay, the “liberals”
have always looked with envy at the Chinese empire ; and they still do. They
are Siamese twins. The fact that one of them confines you in its interest and
the other in the interest of “society” always amounts to suppressing the only
non-nihilist conduct : taking care of oneself, of those one loves and of what
one loves in those one doesn’t know. Don’t let those who’ve led you to the
abyss claim to be saving you from it : they will prepare for you a more perfect
hell, an even deeper grave. Someday when they’ll able, they’ll send the army to
patrol the afterlife.

You ought to thank 

Re: coronavirus questions

[sebastian]

> 
> On Mar 12, 2020, at 12:05 PM, Eric Kluitenberg  wrote:
> 
> 
> Hi Sebastian, all,
> 
> Good questions - though I have not much to say about the (‘radical’?) left. 
> But the schizo-analysis question is interesting: 
> 
>> On 12 Mar 2020, at 09:21, sebast...@rolux.org wrote:
>> 
>> - What is the perspective on coronavirus from the vantage point of
>> Schizoanalysis?
> 
> Probably a lot of points could be made, a.o. about the way in which 
> existential territories are compromised by the mental distortions of 
> (over-)reactions to the viral spread. However, for me the most interesting 
> issue that has emerged is to think this through transversally across the 
> ecological registers that Guattari has identified all the way back in 1989, 
> i.e. the material environment, the social relations, and the individual 
> universes of reference (subjective experience). What is missing in the model 
> that Guattari proposed in The Three Ecologies, in general, but even more 
> pressing right now, is the fourth register of nonhuman experience.
> 

<...>


Thank you for this! And with regards to "sceptical by default",
I must say that my own relation with Gaia is not all sunshine,
really. In fact, it is entirely parasitcal - and the same would
hold true for my vegan, non-jetsetting, healthy lifestyle-living
alter ego.

I also don't think that Gaia is in trouble. She can withstand
impacts, eruptions and explosions that would reduce all of us to
dust in milliseconds. Capitalism does not threaten the planet.
It doesn't even threaten the survival of the human species. What
it threatens is the future of human civilization - this long
history of murder, rape and destruction into some 20th century
branches of which (say: logic, physics, cinema, music) i'm quite
invested in, actually.

I'm all for blue skies, and I'd be happy if the reduction in non-
essential travel, pointless work meetings or boring conferences
became permanent. But does this virus create a revolutionary
situation? I don't see it. Maybe I'm looking the wrong way.
I'm not a historian, so I don't know what usually happens when
people are instructed to avoid all social contact.

"All the reasons for carrying out a revolution are present. None
is missing. [...] But it is not reasons that make revolutions, it
is bodies. And the bodies are all in front of screens."

It also all really depends on where you're speaking from. It think
a lot about others, but they are not speaking here, and nobody
else can speak in their place.



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coronavirus questions

[sebastian]

I have a couple of coronavirus questions. These are neither necessarily
mine, nor did they arise in anticipation of satisfying answers.

- What is the perspective on coronavirus from the vantage point of the
  Radical (minoritarian) Left?

(This is a very different question from: What is the opinion about
coronavirus among progressives?, and totally different from: What is
my opinion about the Left?)

- What is the perspective on coronavirus from the vantage point of
  Schizoanalysis?

- What is the perspective on coronavirus from the vantage point of the
  Nouvelle Vague?

But also:

- What is the perspective on coronavirus seen from where you are? What
  are the most interesting or surprising narratives that are emerging
  in your neighborhoods or communities?

- Given that social media just adds another layer of unhealthy virality
  to the current situation, what forms of communication and care are
  being invented or rediscovered locally?


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Re: Reportback from the Parana Delta

[Sebastian Stein]

dear brian and all,

as I read your post and especially this part

"How to move from away the current pattern of agrochemical exploitation,
toward a new coexistence with nature? The expressions gathered in this
exhibition give a foretaste of future social conflicts, when humans and
non-humans will come together to resist the forces that are denying
everyone's right to residence on Earth.",

I was reminded of the Anthropocene Socialist Mouvement discussion on 
nettime some weeks ago.
Already at that time, I wondered how all of you think about the 
discussions around the anthropocene,
non-human agency, survival, the already slowly happening disaster and 
the need to invent a different
(human) way of interacting with a nature after nature to sort of fight 
for “everyone's right to residence on Earth”
- and nothing short of by that eventually also survive as humans. What 
role would this new conception
of nature after nature and the ensuing ideas of humanness as part of and 
enmeshed with non-humanness play in
the forming of an Anthropocene Socialist Movement? How much of a change 
of human self-conception and with
that of human western cosmology would be necessary? And how to think of 
a human way-of-life that is trying to
approach the non-human part of the planet in, say a more fair way, 
without falling back into neither romantically
idealist, nor paternalistic-hidden colonialist, nor 
neoliberal-sustainability traps? What would something like an
eco-communist way of dealing with non-humans look like? Not sure if 
nettime is the right place to ask this,

though.

best,
sebastian

On 03/05/2019 04:11 PM, nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org wrote:

Message: 2
Date: Tue, 5 Mar 2019 12:11:36 -0300
From: Brian Holmes 
To: nettime 
Subject:  Reportback from the Parana Delta
Message-ID:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

The Earth Will Not Abide / Collaborative Territories

by Brian Holmes

We are on the banks of the Parana River, in Rosario, "the Chicago of
Argentina" - one of the biggest grain-exporting ports in the world. Behind
us is a wealthy metropolis with towers reaching into the sky, then dead
flat fields of GMO soybeans that stretch across the Pampa and beyond, into
the foothills of the Andes. In front of us is the river itself, wide and
brown like the Mississippi but entirely different, because it is not
integrally dammed, diked, channeled and transformed into a simple highway
for barges laden with grain, sand, stone, coal and petrochemicals. Instead,
the Parana retains a vast delta, 200 miles long and as much as 50 miles
wide, full of densely vegetated islands separated and joined by braided
channels.

The Delta is a tremendous bioregion whose outline is clearly visible from
the air, while its labyrinthine inner landscape is known only to those who
live there. Between the monocrop on land and the rolling flood of the
river, we are camped out in three enormous and shadowy brick tunnels - an
underground exhibition space that used to be a railroad depot on the river
docks, filled with dusty grain on its way to the sea. Right now this place
is bursting with art. The show is called The Earth Will Not Abide. The
context is called Collaborative Territories.

The Earth Will Not Abide is an exhibition of critical geography that aims
to explore the symbiotic community of the soil and its destinies in the age
of globalized industrial agriculture. Collaborative Territories is an
initiative that responds to the threat of total environmental control by
engaging in expressive solidarities with the island-dwellers of the Delta.
The meeting of the two is hardly an accident, because the central goal of
The Earth Will Not Abide was to explore the changes in land use brought on
by GMO agriculture plus the new China market, which together have sparked
huge expansions of the grain-growing frontier, both in North and in South
America.

The video entitled "A Great Green Desert," by Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross,
compares scenes from monocrop fields in Illnois and Brazil, in such a way
that you often cannot tell the difference. That's because the underlying
processes of colonization are so inherently similar. The wall display and
web-based map/archive, "Open Veins of the Americas," by myself and
Alejandro Meitin, explores the "Living Rivers" of the Mississippi and
Parana watersheds, which are both major industrial river basins exporting
grain. The theme of the symbiotic soil community and its relation to
industrial farming is developed in the soil chromatography by Claire
Pentecost, and in a somewhat different way, in the delirious
"Cornstitution" translated from the language of the Maize by Sarah Lewison
and duskin drum. Finally, the conflict between traditional peasant life and
financially driven modernization processes is raised, not in South America,
but instead in the soy-importing country of China. Sarah Lewison's
three-channel vide

Re: Peak Anger Rocks

[sebastian]

> Perhaps people have resigned to change after the high expectations of the
> 1960s. Added to this is the lack of alternatives of capitalism, that is, the 
> omission of the vision of another social organization. That another world is 
> possible, believe less and less, while it is becoming increasingly clear that 
> the world society despite contrary slogans and conventions, the nature and
> further destroys global warming, while the inequality in the rich and poor
> societies increases. No Future infuriates, the dance on the volcano is not
> happy, dystopias convince rather than utopias.



Just a quick and very unscientific sample from my "Top 100 Most Played in the 
21st Century" folder, but still... suck this, 1960s!

--> https://rolux.org/tmp/2019-02-01.zip




Once I Was a Serene Teenaged Child
Frida Hyvönen
2005  

 
Once I was a serene teenaged child
Once I felt your cock against my thigh
You said you were a poet, man
Your poetry wasn't obvious to me
When you said I had the stuff that drove you wild
But the feeling of power was intoxicating, magic
The feeling of power was intoxicating
The feeling of power was intoxicating, magic
The feeling of power was intoxicating
Oh oh oh, oh
Make-up and dis-eating-orders
Post-order New Order is harder
You know I wanna stay up all night, now that I live on my own
I wanna be one of you guys
But I don't want your body so close and dismembered
I don't want your body so close and dismembered
Don't take your pants off 'cause I don't want to see it
Don't take your pants off 'cause I don't want to see it
No no no no
No no no
Once I was a serene teenage child
Once I felt your cock against my thigh
You said a girl like me was torture for you
I didn't know what to do about it and
Somehow it made me feel proud
The feeling of pride and the loneliness to it
The feeling of pride and the loneliness to it
The feeling of pride and the loneliness to it
The feeling of pride and the loneliness
Oh oh oh oh
Oh oh oh oh
Oh




Dirty Money
Clipse
2006


Yo wattup ma'
I got a pocket full of stinky's lets go spend these right quick

Whats that?

All my fly bitches like (dirty money, dirty money)
All my stripper bitches like (dirty money, dirty money)
All my college hoes like (dirty money, dirty money)
Don't it spend so right? (dirty money, dirty money)
Now lets go shopping, lets go chill
Let's go buy them new Louboutin heels
Ass in La Perla, ears full of pearls
Damn dirty money know how to treat the girls

Give a little, take a little, my check the dealy
Most niggas is will-not's, you're dealing with a willy
3-D faces on them crisp new billies
Got Benji lookin all googley-eyed and silly
The glitter chill got ya mind seein milli-mill's
I'm 7 figure, the bigger, your thoughts are literal
See I don't blame ya, cashmeres that you feels
Picturing the fortune, you just tryna spin the wheel
Brain like Teri, face like Eva
I ain't forgettin them other Housewive's neither
Two-seaters, back in the trunk, 2 feevas
We stayin up till 2 a.m. to watch Cheaters
As long as I'm nice with the flame and the flass
I don't mind keepin you up on them must-have's
Peep-toe pumps, Gucci slouch bags
Now tell me, is that dirty money really that bad?

All my fly bitches like (dirty money, dirty money)
All my stripper bitches like (dirty money, dirty money)
All my college hoes like (dirty money, dirty money)
Don't it spend so right? (dirty money, dirty money)
Now lets go shopping, lets go chill
Let's go buy them new Louboutin heels
Ass in La Perla, ears full of pearls
Damn dirty money know how to treat the girls

We could trick tuiton, you could be the vixen
You could front for ya girlfriends, I ain't trippin'
You done got you a rapper, I see ya vision
And one of the best too, that's ambition
You could tell me 'bout ya day, I pretend I listen
And you ain't gotta love me, just be convincin'
I don't ask much, some ashes on the cuff
And that silver bullet, automatic or the clutch
Nah mama hush, you ain't even gotta speak
Jus put it on ya charge, check makes ya feet
Compliments of me, take the bitter with the sweet
And we can get this money like its falling outta trees
Come spend a dollar, yea, bathe in it, walla
17-5 for the low, tell 'em "Holla"
Love you in Escada, Jimmy Choo, Prada
Snow White ya life, hows that for starters?

All my fly bitches like (dirty money, dirty money)
All my stripper bitches like (dirty money, dirty money)
All my college hoes like (dirty money, dirty money)
Don't it spend so right? (dirty money, dirty money)
Now lets go shopping, lets go chill
Let's go buy them new Louboutin heels
Ass in La Perla, ears full of pearls
Damn dirty money know how to treat the girls

To my fly 

Re: Please support the first global facebook user strike

[sebastian]

> On May 5, 2018, at 8:55 AM, Anni Roolf  wrote:
> 
> Here's the call:
> Facebook has disrespected our personal data and disregarded the spirit of our 
> user agreements. To demonstrate our collective power as users, log out of 
> Facebook and Instagram May 25 – June 1. #facebreak2018 #newpower 
> bit.ly/facebreak2018
> 
> Let's make this go viral.
> 
> Best, Anni
> -- 
> Anni Roolf MBA
> 
> Projektentwicklerin 
> Innovationsmanagerin 
> Community Strategist


When I woke up to this, I thought it was the saddest thing I had read in a long
time. Coffee and cigarettes later, I knew there is no time for sadness, no time 
to waste, and the proposition is actually quite funny. It's the inverse of the
"Turing Test Tarpit" (1) I suggested recently: After a few weeks of increased
virality, the Facebook Liberation Front *leaves* Facebook and Instagram - only 
to be glued to Twitter, most likely, to self-surveil their trending hashtags - 
and FB and IG suddenly become inhabitable for a week. I'm all for it. Even more 
so if that gives me seven consecutive days during which I don't have to read 
about the "disrespect" for personal data - you just posted your phone number to
a public mailing list! - or think about the "spirit" of user agreements. 

It still makes me sad, but one can find consolation in literature. Like in The 
Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It's the anthropocene, stupid! This species 
was doomed from the beginning, and one must cherish every short and unlikely 
blip of non-idiocy. Because thanks to Douglas Adams we know that the "humans", 
contrary to popular belief, are not the fittest: not the descendants of apes, 
but the offspring of social media sanitizers, innovation managers and
communication strategists.

P.S.: Obviously, I don't know you, and had we met in person, we might have
discovered many areas of alignment, or countless issues where it's me who is
braindead. I have nothing against you personally. I have something against the
proposition you're circulating, politically.

(1) https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1804/msg00091.html


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Re: please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?

[sebastian]

ffects a universal modulation." 
(1)

"Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of 
threatening
 the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; 
they
 re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover 
what
 they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without 
difficulty,
 the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex 
that the
 burrows of a molehill." (1)

The above was written by a man in his 60s, so when he disses "young people", 
which I
find boring and stupid, we may want to attribute that to the author's age and 
accept
it as something excusable, given that the rest of the text is often rather 
lucid.
Specifically the reference to "motivation", which resonates with an idea that 
comes
up rather often in his (or Guattari's, or Foucault's) work: What if 
"oppression" or
corporate enslavement were the wrong terms to describe our societies? What if 
desire
was always positive? And what if it was desire - a positive force, before it 
becomes
articulation, flame war, fake news or online harrassment - that had occupied 
Facebook
in the first place, rather than the other way around?

The idea to jail Zuckerberg, if I recall correctly, was Jaromil's. I'm just 
wondering:
for what? I saw a Zuckerberg meme (on Facebook) recently that said: "That face 
when
you just wanted a faster way to rank girls by looks and ended up installing a 
fascist
government in the most powerful country on earth." (2) I thought the first part 
was
well put, but the second part made me close the tab (with Facebook in it) 
pretty much
instantly. Because I really don't think that's how the world works (outside 
Facebook),
that social formations are "installed" like software updates or operating 
systems, by
programmers or engineers or corporations. I don't know much about Zuckerberg, 
other
than that he was definitely not the brightest one of his batch. He found 
himself in
one of the highest ranked dorm rooms in the world, was definitely bored, and 
started
a little experiment that got out of hand. But is it his fault? (Hint: No, it's 
YOUR
fault!) What would be the charges? Obviously, what brought Zuckerber to where 
he is
today is an almost pathological lack of ambition. But should he go to jail for 
that?

Next month, the French will commemorate the 50th anniversary of a revolt that 
almost
turned into a revolution. They do so in order to make sure that it doesn't 
repeat,
and that no-one attempts an update. Of course, my sympathies are with the 
people who
wrote, in mid-May in the occupied Sorbonne, as it would read today: "Humanity 
won't
be happy until the last entrepreneur is hung by the guts of the last investor." 
(3)
But life is not about sympathies, it's about actions. The above is an appeal 
to, in
the broadest sense, justice, and not to the law, as it exists: yet another 
round of
senate hearings, yet another fantasy of impeachment, yet another collective 
psychosis.
But when it comes to picking the guts that our Facebook friend would be 
dangling from:
if anyone touches the guy who did Napster, I'm out, and we might have a problem.

> There are obviously alternative platforms but it's a question of populating - 
> the people I want to reach are on Fb as their primary platform (for example 
> free jazz / improvisation which reaches worldwide) - there must be millions 
> of mini-commons like this.

The alternative platforms are the worst: they are true misery. If Facebook, to 
stick
with that image (and it's not just an image), is heroin, then to me, these 
alternative
platforms look like methadone. Sure, you can substitute Facebook by using 
something
else, but... if "platforms" were all that was left of the internet, and of our 
own
imagination of what the internet could be, then I'd rather do Facebook than any 
of
this other junk, because none of it seems to make people happy.

> I do see the damage Fb does and www for that matter; when I began teaching 
> Internet culture/community/etc. in 1995 or so, I took my students first to 
> stormfront.com which had the most sophisticated website at the time - it was 
> international, in several languages, and a platform for neonazi organization.

I see the damage too. I also see where you're coming from (ironically by 
glancing over
a few Facebook posts of yours, post Trump, and then post that). I'm "with you", 
which
is not a matter of sharing "opinions", or agreeing on every aspect of these 
matters.
Here, for example, is one that I fully agree with:

> On Apr 23, 2018, at 7:50 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondh...@panix.com> wrote:
> 
> I want to thank Stephen and Sebastian for their responses, particularly 
> Stephen's.


Because, again: it's about actions, not words, and there are much better

Re: please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?

[sebastian]

> please read - and how can this possibly be combatted?


 1. The New York Times is not a trustworthy source.

 2. The title image/animation serves a purpose. It's quite openly pornographic: 
exploits a subject, produces arousal, presents as objects some mysterious
others, asks: how would it feel to be in or under their skin.

 3. Countries are not "tinderboxes". Not being American helps to understand 
this.

 4. Familiarize yourself with the history of political and religious violence
in South Asia. The world was not created in Zuckerbergs dorm room.

 5. Stop blaming Facebook for everything, be it Brexit, Trump or worse.
 
 6. Collect empirical evidence. It could be that social media do not just 
accelerate the spread of conspiracy theories and violence, but just as 
well, and maybe even more so, the analysis of and response to conspiracy 
theories and violence.

 7. Do not participate in the amplification of hysteria. Realize that hysteria 
is not a only a tech problem (amplification, "fanning the flames"), but
also a people problem (anger, boredom, setting stuff on fire). Most 
importantly, do not fall for the meta-hysteria of the New York Times.

 8. Amplification is not causation. Don't shoot the messenger (the "medium").
In case the messenger *is* the message, simply ignore her. Start with 
yourself, then help distract others.

 9. Facebook is an addiction. Remember "opium for the masses"? This one doesn't
sedate, it makes people nervous. It's more like "crack for the masses":
living from quick fix to quick fix. "Its gamelike interface rewards 
engagement, delivering a dopamine boost when users accrue likes and 
responses". Remember that "deleting" yourself doesn't change anything (and 
doesn't work anyway). If you want to stop but cannot stop, seek help. 

10. Finally, a bit of 9/12 2001 wisdom: if you feel stressed about faraway
violence, stop posting on the internet. Turn off your computer. Get out
and take a walk in the park. Be with people, observe animals, go swimming.


Further reading:


"The middle distance fell away, so the grids (from small to large) that had
supported the middle distance fell into disuse and ceased to be understandable.
Two grids remained. The grid of two hundred million and the grid of intimacy.
Everything else fell into disuse. There was a national life--a shimmer of
national life--and intimate life. The distance between these two grids was very
great. The distance was very frightening. People did not want to measure it.
People began to lose a sense of what distance was and of what the usefulness of
distance might be."

https://rolux.org/tmp/no_context.pdf


"The fact that mere accidents intervene to confuse our situation unnecessarily, 
that my telegram should arrive at your office on an afternoon when you are not 
there, that your telegram should be incorrectly addressed, and finally, as I 
now see, the fact that my letter to your parents should be delayed by one day 
(it was mailed on Thursday as the enclosed receipt shows)--all this is bad 
enough, but things between us have reached such a point that even the gravest 
accident cannot make things worse. Today on receiving notification of your 
telephone call I could not very well leave the office, and anyway couldn't wait 
to hear as soon as possible what it was you wanted; besides, with unreasonable 
hope I thought you might be telephoning in order to rob your express letter of 
some of its acrimony--which is why I asked for the call to be put through to 
the Institute. That was a mistake; we haven't got a booth; there are always a 
lot of people hanging about in the president's anteroom where the telephone is, 
and as it happened one of the directors, a tiresome man, was standing behind me 
cracking jokes; I could have kicked him. As a result I couldn't hear properly, 
but above all for quite some time I couldn't even take in the meaning of your 
words. After all, I had reason to assume that my letter to your parents had 
arrived the day before, that you had known about it before sending your 
telegram and of course before writing your letter as well. Thus, on the 
telephone, apart from the fact that I couldn't hear properly, I couldn't help 
wondering what it was you wanted, and why in fact you had called me. Moreover 
with the sound of your voice--and this, after all, is why I am afraid of the 
telephone--that passionate longing to see you came over me again; the simplest 
method for clarifying everything and having everything clarified, was to come; 
so I said I am coming to Berlin."

https://rolux.org/tmp/to_felice.epub


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Re: On #deletefacebook in the Netherlands

[sebastian]

> #deletefacebook



> Facebook Liberation Army



with love -seb


> On Apr 12, 2018, at 4:52 PM, Geert Lovink  wrote:
> 
> Dear nettimers,
> 
> it’s been a busy week here in NL with the Facebook exodus movement. Numbers 
> of people that left are of course very hard to estimate but I guess it been 
> so far 10-20.000 people who followed the ByeByeFacebook call of the Dutch 
> comedian Arjen Lubach, last Sunday night:
> 
> https://in.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-netherlands/widely-watched-dutch-comedian-says-bye-bye-facebook-idINKBN1HG290
> 
> Next Monday night there’s a meeting in De Waag of the Facebook Liberation 
> Army where we will discuss all these issues. The announcements are in Dutch, 
> and so will the gathering be, I suppose. This is a follow-up of the Facebook 
> Farewell Party in the Amsterdam main theatre, in April 2015.
> 
> Below there’s a link list that we just compiled. I have been posting daily 
> link lists to the Unlike Us list, which was founded in 2011 by me and Korinna 
> Patelis and is still active. If you like, forward the list list, change it, 
> add others to it.
> 
> Best, Geert
> 
> —
> 
> Facebook Liberation Army Link List (April 12, 2018)
> Compiled and edited by Geert Lovink & Patricia de Vries (Institute of Network 
> Cultures)
> 
> Facebook Delete Manuals
> https://pageflows.com/blog/delete-facebook/
> https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/after-cambridge-analytica-scandal-how-to-delete-your-facebook-account/
> https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2018/03/28/people-really-deleting-their-facebook-accounts-its-complicated/464109002/
> https://androidreader.com/how-to-delete-your-facebook-account-step-by-step/
> https://beat.10ztalk.com/2018/03/26/why-deletefacebook-is-a-bad-idea-unless-you-have-these-4-questions-answered/
> https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/21_delete_facebook/
> 
> Divorce Tools
> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90164935/want-to-fight-back-against-facebooks-algorithm-check-out-these-tools
> https://blog.mozilla.org/firefox/facebook-container-extension/
> https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/21_delete_facebook/
> https://degooglisons-internet.org/
> 
> Departure & Alternatives
> https://gab.ai/
> https://medium.com/we-distribute/a-quick-guide-to-the-free-network-c069309f334
> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/11/facebook-competition/
> https://www.tippereconomy.io/
> https://mastodon.social/about
> http://www.orkut.com/index.html
> https://peepeth.com/about
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSbNdBmWKE
> https://degooglisons-internet.org/
> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/prevaat-the-privacy-focused-social-network#/
> https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-alternatives/
> https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/21_delete_facebook/#decide
> http://threatbrief.com/deletefacebook-5-best-facebook-alternatives-focus-privacy/
> https://mashable.com/2018/03/20/facebook-replacement-openbook-competition/#frm9x3CADZqZ
> 
> The RSS Alternative
> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/07/rss-is-undead/
> https://www.wired.com/story/rss-readers-feedly-inoreader-old-reader/
> 
> To Regulate or Not to Regulate
> http://www.ctrl-verlust.net/cambridge-analytica-the-kontrollverlust-and-the-post-privacy-approach-to-data-regulation/
> https://stratechery.com/2018/the-facebook-current/
> https://medium.com/@YESHICAN/an-open-letter-to-facebook-from-the-data-for-black-lives-movement-81e693c6b46c
> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/apr/04/algorithms-powerful-europe-response-social-media
> https://www.republik.ch/2018/03/27/menschen-wuerden-ihre-daten-verkaufen-wenn-sie-koennten
> https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/21_delete_facebook/
> 
> Long Reads & Analysis & Opinion
> https://cyberwanderlustblog.wordpress.com/2018/04/06/why-feminists-should-abandon-social-networks-ideology/
>   
> https://thebaffler.com/latest/cambridge-analytica-con-levine
> https://aeon.co/essays/why-its-as-hard-to-escape-an-echo-chamber-as-it-is-to-flee-a-cult
> https://labs.rs/en/the-human-fabric-of-the-facebook-pyramid/
> https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/cambridge-analytica-and-our-lives-inside-the-surveillance-machine
> https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2018/03/26/Quit-Facebook/
> https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/facebook-zuckerberg-apologies/?utm_term=.156887e60e4b
> https://www.wired.com/story/facebook-a-history-of-mark-zuckerberg-apologizing/
> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/10/technology/zuckerberg-elections-russia-data-privacy.html
> 
> (Tech) Facts &  & Threads
> https://mashable.com/2013/06/26/facebook-shadow-profiles/#b9irCKx_MZqz 
> https://medium.com/tow-center/the-graph-api-key-points-in-the-facebook-and-cambridge-analytica-debacle-b69fe692d747
> https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-03-28/fakebook-its-way-zero
> https://twitter.com/therealjpk/status/976484505035751424
> https://twitter.com/ashk4n/status/983725115903852544
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2_fUqaHGe8
> #  distributed via : no 

Re: Bad ZAD news ...

[sebastian]

https://taranis.news/2018/04/la-2e-bataille-de-notre-dame-des-landes-jour1-9-avril-2018/


Maybe this is a good time to watch:


Shinsuke Ogawa - Nihon Kaiho sensen: Sanrizuka no natsu AKA The Battle for the 
Liberation of Japan: Summer in Sanrizuka (1968)

In 1968, Ogawa decided to form Ogawa Productions and locate it at the newly 
announced construction site of Narita International Airport in a district 
called Sanrizuka. Ogawa chose to locate his company in the most radical of the 
villages, Heta. Some farmers immediately sold their land; others vehemently 
protested and drew the support of social movements across the country. Together 
they clashed with riot police sent in to protect surveyors, who were plotting 
out the airport. Summer in Sanrizuka is a messy film – its chaos communicating 
the passions and actions on the ground.


Noriaki Tsuchimoto - Paruchizan Zenshi AKA Prehistory of the Partisans (1969)

At the peak of student activism in the follow-up to the renewal of the 
controversial Anpo: US-Japan Security Treaty, Tsuchimoto’s socially-engaged 
documentary traces the struggles of the students of Kyoto University from their 
discussions to preparations for armed action. Produced by Ogawa Productions, 
the film follows new-left radical Osamu Takita and his debates with students, 
which are captured with exceptional intimacy.


Shinsuke Ogawa - Sanrizuka: Heta buraku aka Narita: Heta Village (1973)

In the early ‘70s, the Japanese public’s attention was focused on the village 
of Narita. Here, in a conflict that became increasingly symbolic as it wore on, 
student radicals joined with the farmers and villagers of Narita to protest the 
impending demolition of the village to make way for an airport. For Narita: 
Heta Village, Shinsuke Ogawa, Japan’s premier documentary filmmaker, went to 
live among the peasants and he and his crew stayed for several years. In this 
unique documentary, the events of struggle around the airport remain outside of 
the film; all of our knowledge of it is indirect. Instead, the film focuses 
entirely on the peasants themselves and registers the conflict solely through 
its effect on their thoughts and lives. Composed entirely of long duration 
shots, Ogawa allows the film’s phenomenal world to unfold slowly through time. 
The audience watches and listens as a village elder describes the government’s 
destruction of an ancient burial ground. Centuries-old customs, such as the New 
Year celebration, are rendered exquisitely. As an idea, the form of the 
documentary is brilliant; as a documentary, Narita: Heta Village is one of the 
most important produced in the last 50 years and was awarded a Critics’ Prize 
at the Berlin Film Festival.


Message me offlist for download links.


--
 ()
 ><
pirate cinema berlin
www.piratecinema.org


> On Apr 12, 2018, at 4:43 PM, Menno Grootveld  wrote:
> 
> Dear all,
> 
> Just for your information: Frank Theys and I are on our way to the ZAD. We 
> are "armed" with two movie camera's and a lot of audio equipment. I will try 
> to write a short impression after we get there and post it. Meanwhile: spread 
> the news and resist! Show your solidarity with the ZAD by squatting, 
> occupying or just protesting, wherever you are!
> 
> Menno Grootveld
> 
> Rebel City Amsterdam
> 
> 
> Op 12-04-18 om 16:02 schreef XLterrestrials:
>> Hi Patrice et al,
>>  Thx for the boost...
>> the anti-commonists... good one !! :)
>> 
>> Day 4 updates ( the good news ) :
>> 
>> 1. robopopo taste the mud ! ( via catapult )
>> 
>> 2. tractors on the roll to defend the Saulce barricades.
>> 
>> 3. the Dutch report from Globalinfo.nl
>> https://globalinfo.nl/Nieuws/frankrijk-ontruiming-zad-lukt-niet
>> 
>> 4. it only took 50 years to make, but Macron may have just triggered May 68 
>> The Sequel, Bravo ! :)
>> 
>> 5
>> 
>> stay tune,
>> it's going to be a wild * woolly spring !
>> 
>> podinski
>> 
>> 
>> 0O-o
>> www.xlterrestrials.org/plog 
> 
>> arts + praxis organisms
>> o-O~0
>> 
>> 
>>> On 12 April 2018 at 12:00 nettime-l-requ...@mail.kein.org wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Send nettime-l mailing list submissions to
>>> nettime-l@mail.kein.org
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>>> To subscribe or unsubscribe via the World Wide Web, visit
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>>> When replying, please edit your Subject line so it is more specific
>>> than "Re: Contents of nettime-l digest..."
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>>> 
>>> Today's Topics:
>>> 
>>>1. Bad ZAD news ... (Patrice Riemens)
>>>2. Re: Bad ZAD news ... (Joseph Rabie)
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> 
>>> Message: 1
>>> Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2018 14:04:11 +0200
>>> From: Patrice Riemens 
>>> To: 

Re: Rude Awakening: Memes as Dialectical Images by Geert Lovink & Marc Tuters

[sebastian]

> On Apr 4, 2018, at 12:16 PM, Geert Lovink  (1) wrote:
> 
> Over the past years, in part through memes, a great many previously 
> disaffected young people became attracted to politics.(17) In this regard, 
> the notion of “red-pilling” became a central trope, a kind of right of 
> initiation into a newly imagined political community, the so-called 
> “alt-right”, based almost entirely online and held together in no small part 
> by its sophisticated use of political memes. But while this reactionary 
> concept of awakening functioned to hold this community together so long as it 
> remained mostly ironic and “incorporeal”,(18) the community began to crumble 
> when it became increasingly clear that the violence at its core was in fact 
> the authentic brown shirt variety and not some sort of Benjaminian divine 
> violence.(19)



this reminds me of the point
where i was in strong but unoutspoken disagreement
with another dutch (;)) media theorist last year
who i sadly missed in berlin in february

the world was not created in 2016
the blue pill vs red pill
wake up from the dream vs stay in wonderland
is an ancient allegory
one of the earliest images
from plato to lewis carroll

just because someone posted something on the internet
it's not that we all have to behave
as if we were stuck in a the basement of a pizza parlor (2)
lets not make a rabbit hole out of a molehill

to repeat not myself:
the pile of debris grows skyward (3)

1999 was a killer year for hollywood
why don't we just keep asking the questions of cinema?

where is the house of my friend?
you take the blue pill?
what is the worst thing that can happen?
you take the red pill?
but what is europe dying of?
and who killed laura palmer?

why do we say: the era before the war?
why don't we say: the era when the woman was hanging the clothes on the clothes 
line?

bonus question:
who attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses
without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate?



an earlier version of this document was created with a simple markov chain 
generator
from the last six weeks of my inbox and sentbox. this method usually preserves 
the
tone of one or more voices, but not the original meaning.

thanks to rasmus, magnus and geraldine for inspiring an even earlier version.



(1) geert: can you come to paf some time soon? i want to give you some movies.

(2) kaspar: what happened to the guy with the very big denial of service dog?

(3) to be fair: the text explicitely acknowledges almost all of the above. it
is used as a pretext here, not as an object of criticism.



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#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

Re: In the eye of the Cambridge Analytica storm

[sebastian]

here in bombay, no-one cares about the cambridge analytica storm.
there's wind from the east, an unprecedented heatwave, the aadhar
cyclone, and a series of savage social media shitstorms that just
doesn't want to end. south asia's largest garbage dump (deonar),
however, is currently not on fire, and india's most experimental
nuclear reactor (at the homi bhabha centre for atomic research),
right next to it, is not generating any major headlines these days.
even the burning lakes of bangalore are absent from the evening
news. and so am i. i haven't looked at twitter or reddit for a month,
and i haven't read the guardian or the washington post either. it's
been too hot, it's been too busy, and i couldn't sleep for weeks. a
storm is blowing, but not from paradise.<1> mitochondrial eve<2> and
y-chromosomal adam<3> were already facing a similar situation. it's
been apocalypse now forever, for millennia. the pile of debris grows
skyward. CA merely recycles it. they're fake fake news, a waste of
time<4>, just like facebook, which i haven't seen in a long time.
i just got really tired of it. i had joined it to make 42 posts,
"facebook party suicide (1)" to "facebook party suicide (42)"; as
far as i can remember, i made 41. what finally killed it, for me, was
chat. i need another messaging client like i need a hole in my head.

still, there are a few things that came to my mind:
https://www.fakebook.com/robert.luxemburg/posts/10154766554869347
https://www.fakebook.com/robert.luxemburg/posts/10154767441114347
https://www.fakebook.com/robert.luxemburg/posts/10154767441114347?comment_id=10154769657984347
https://www.fakebook.com/robert.luxemburg/posts/10154767515364347
https://www.fakebook.com/robert.luxemburg/posts/10154938682514347
https://www.fakebook.com/robert.luxemburg/posts/10154938682514347?comment_id=10154955247569347
https://www.fakebook.com/robert.luxemburg/posts/10154979974559347
https://www.fakebook.com/robert.luxemburg/posts/10155561731899347

or, better:
https://i.imgur.com/z7TDwYC.png
https://i.imgur.com/wjF8eZH.png
https://i.imgur.com/K1RTvGZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/Hy8TElK.png
https://i.imgur.com/vWeJmRt.png
https://i.imgur.com/deQVqPR.png
https://i.imgur.com/d1HFbDe.png
https://i.imgur.com/f4AMAHB.png

so what's to be done?

before you quit, try something like:
https://textb.org/r/fb_activity/

but most importantly, quit for real:
https://textb.org/r/etc-hosts

because explicit is better than implicit, simple is better than
complex, and now is better than never. although these days, it
may not be obvious at first, even if you're dutch.<5>

facebook faşizme mezar olacak!




<1> 
https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/Angelus-Novus-Paul-Klee-Walter-Benjamin-Ceasefire.jpg

<2> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

<3> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

<4> https://textb.org/r/ca/

<5> rolux$ python3
Python 3.6.2 (default, Aug 11 2017, 15:50:31) 
[GCC 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 8.1.0 (clang-802.0.42)] on darwin
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import this
The Zen of Python, by Tim Peters
[...]

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Re: The meaning of Macron (short answer: none)

[sebastian]

> And as for dear Sebastian's bitter but welcome comments on this thread:
> Yes, of course politics is political theatre. It always has been, as
> thinkers from Machiavelli to Guy Debord have always been quick to point
> out. Jan Söderqvist and I even predicted in "The Netocrats" in 2000
> that soon the U.S. would likely elect a game-show host as president as
> a result of politics going ironic and increasingly powerless (therefore
> turning into a "celebrity democracy"). In 2016 we were proven right.
> So you could easily regard our comments in this thread as "nothing more
> than football babble", if it was not for the fact that politics still
> controls, deals with and directs trillions of dollars worth in jobs and
> wealth between the world's nations and populations. Your nihilism
> consequently adds nothing to address these complex issues. So what do
> you want to say besides attacking fellow Nettime debaters for the
> apparent fun of it? Or was that all?

You're right: nihilism would in fact add nothing. And it's tempting to add 
nothing, undoubtedly. However, I'd be much more in favor of reclaiming the 
notion of "pragmatist realism". I'm not against voting, just against what comes 
before and after. Not only in the U.S., elections have become a serious threat 
to democracy, and that's not because people might end up voting for the wrong 
guy, which they did. Trump's presidency must not make us forget the horror of 
2016: the neverending campaign, the indefinite suspension of democratic 
politics in the name of a democratic procedure. At the same time, last 
November, I would have voted for the Democratic candidate (more enthusastically 
than I would have opposed her in the primaries), given that her opponent was 
openly inciting violence against women, African Americans, religious minorities 
and countless others. But of course, I'm not a U.S. citizen, and if I was, I 
wouldn't live in a place where my vote would have made any difference.

What can the French do against Marine Le Pen, next Sunday? There's a trivial 
answer to that question. It's just that in my eyes, it provides Macron with no 
meaning whatsoever. If you vote for the candidate who is not Le Pen, it doesn't 
matter if he's a neoliberal, an ordoliberal, a social liberal, an heir of 
Obama, a twin of Trudeau, or a grand-grand-grandson of Napoleon. If you commit 
to fighting fascism by all means, then the ballot is clearly one of them. But 
if that's what's to be done, then we should admit we're in Merkelworld, 
Schäubleland: there is no alternative, and the elections will change nothing.

> For hundreds of thousands of Afghan and Somali migrants in Sweden and
> Germany at the moment, it makes a hell of a difference if these
> countries are run by social democrats or right-wing populists. And that
> is just the start.

In principle, I agree -- but as you say: that's just the start. Beyond that, it 
sometimes makes no difference at all. Germany, for example, is run by social 
democrats *and* right-wing populists. For a few weeks in 2015, the country was 
forced to temporarily adopt a more pragmatic and realistic approach to 
immigration. Who deserves credit for that? Social democrats? I must have missed 
something. In 2011, in another short and sudden display of pragmatic realism, 
the German government abandoned nuclear energy. Was the Green Party in power? I 
don't think so. The German welfare state was dismantled in 2004. Why didn't the
social democrats oppose it? For the same reason that the pacificst Greens 
didn't oppose bombing Yugoslavia in 1999: Because they were in government. The 
Green foreign minister's justification? Auschwitz must never repeat. (1) The 
social democrat defense minister's argument? In Serbia, they slice up pregnant 
women and roast the fetuses, they decapitate men and play football with their 
heads. (2) No right-wing populist would have politically survived such 
outrageous statements -- and for hundreds of thousands in former Yugoslavia, 
that would have made a hell of a difference.

What remains is your assertion regarding "the utter lack of corruption 
scandals" among social democrats, at least in the protestant North. Lets 
imagine the following scenario: In November 2020, Donald Trump, who has been 
pushing for the construction of a new Russian gas pipeline in the last year of 
his tenure, is voted out of office. Less than two months later, he receives a 
phone call from Vladimir Putin, and on the same day becomes the new chairman of 
the board of the Gazprom-owned pipeline consortium. Mike Pence, shortly 
thereafter, accepts the job of a political consultant for the largest competing 
pipeline project. I don't want to speculate too wildly about the public 
reaction to this imaginary scenario; in a polarized political climate, some 
might call it "treason", but I'm pretty certain that the term "corruption" 
would come up as well. And obviously, I'm only making this up because it's a 
true story: you 

Re: The meaning of Macron (short answer: none)

[sebastian]

When I was reading your conversation, I couldn't help but in my mind
begin to substitute the political parties with football clubs, and
their managers for the candidates. Is Real still alive, now that
Barca has taken a beating? Did we all underestimate Juventus? Will
Chelsea trash Arsenal? Are we going to remember Guardiola as one of
the greatest managers in history? Is the false nine on the verge of
disappearing? And how will Bayern fare with Ancelotti?

The problem with politics is not just politics: it's the language
of politics as well. The people have spoken? It doesn't sound like
that. All that is being spoken is sports reporting: debating the
performances of parties and their disappointing results, their failing
strategies and their tactical errors, the missing team spirit and the
poor showing of their superstars.

But in reality, there are no trends. Macron's 8.7 million votes, over
Mélenchon's 7.1 million, don't mean anything, in a country of 66
Million. There are no winners, other than the no vote. Abstention
- not being willing, registered, or allowed to vote - is the only
significant phenomenon in democracy today: It beat both Clinton and
Trump, both Remain and Leave.

What does the no vote articulate? I have no illusions: it articulates
nothing, not even the desire not to be governed. But lets account for
all the things that, by remaining silent, the no vote refuses to say:
That Macron is a "French Obama", "best compared with Canada's Justin
Trudeau", whose "meteoric rise has few comparisons", other than with
"the looks of an actor in a Truffaut movie". That Mélenchon's and
Hamon's votes combined "would have been enough to take the left to
the second round", to take another beating or be ripped to pieces.
That "the French Left will vote Macron in May", that "May will trash
Corbyn in June", or that come July, we will think of Obama "as one of
the greatest presidents the U.S. ever had." That after the collapse
of the Bush dynasty, and after the Clinton disaster, our hopes are
with a "possible forthcoming Michelle". That 100 days into Trump, the
Left must know that "you don't win elections unless you come across as
capable of governing".

If it was true that "we need a pragmatist realist left", then the
only realism left would be to abstain from all of the above. To be
pragmatic would mean to insist that neither today nor "in hindsight",
any of it matters. We've been watching a semi-final with Mélenchon,
Macron, Fillon and Le Pen, we've been following this game for too
long, it has no future, and almost everyone knows this. Nobody is
waiting for September, for the "mother of all social democracies" to
make a stunning comeback, produce another nailbiter, or suffer another
devastating loss. You may still hope for Schulz to win, but he won't,
because nobody is in need of additional evidence that there will be
no surprises. You may still think of yourself as Marxists, but Merkel
and Schäuble have long disowned you: There is no alternative, and
elections change nothing.



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Re: 10 Preliminary Theses on Trump + 10 Preliminary Theses on

[sebastian]

When I saw the "10 Preliminary Theses on Trump", what made me feel uneasy was, 
mostly, a matter of form: that the "10 Theses" format seemed strangely 
anachronistic, inadequate for a phenomenon like Trump, and that of all the 
attributes one could have possibly picked, "preliminary" looked like the least 
appropriate choice for something written in late January 2017. The most famous 
(and most famously wrong) "N Preliminary Theses on Trump" text, Nate Silver's 
"Donald Trump's Six Stages of Doom" (1), was published in August 2015, and that 
was the time when it was still possible -- reasonable, as Nate Silver would 
argue -- to think that "preliminary" might do. That has changed.

Reading the "10 Preliminary Theses on Resistance", I'm sure that each of them 
is built around a kernel of truth, but I found it hard to get through the 
coating. To me, they sound overly romantic in the best case, and ring like pure 
kitsch in the worst. Romanticism may have its place in political critique, but 
here, it seems to come at the cost of making actual observations, at the 
expense of material reality, and how stuff in it actually works.

So short of making 10 anti-theses (which would be a *real* waste of time), let 
me point out just the most glaring examples:

Re 1: Resistance against Trump has already become manifest, not as radical acts 
of negation, but as diffuse articulations of discontent. The resistance is in 
the streets already, attracted not by pure negativity, but by Facebook events. 
That's the "gasoline for the fires to come" (and can we update that metaphor 
for the 21st century, please?).

Re 3: There is an inflationary tendency at work here: "an infinite number of 
other techniques" is already too many, and as "an infinite number of other 
techniques known and unknown", they become entirely meaningless. Even an appeal 
to all particles in the Universe, known and unknown, to resonate with the 
resistance against Trump, would have a finite number of addressees.

Re 4: I'm vaguely aware of how historians and philosophers have, in the latter 
half of the 20th century, attempted to locate the notion and frame the question 
of "power". It's always good to try something new, but here, the use of that 
concept seems more like a regression. I always thought statements like "power 
is most intimately known by those who have lived their lives beneath it" were 
no longer possible, and that "those who have historically been most affected by 
power" no longer populate our fantasies.

Re 5: "As lines of riot police and make-shift barricades cut the world into a 
billion different sides", I have difficulties tracing the very geometry of that 
phenomenon. "Which one will you stand on?" Statistically speaking: nowhere near 
any of the edges, and most likely alone. And when "ultimately", we wipe the 
board clean, and a single "line will be drawn between those who currently (or 
seek to) govern, and those who desire to be and insist upon being 
ungovernable", then can we please also drill a hole for those who insist that 
becoming ungovernable contradicts the very notion of drawing such a line?

Re 9: I don't think anyone doubts that "the crisis has already arrived", and 
that it arrived around the same time when the idea that there is "no 
possibility of rolling back time" was elevated from wild guess to scientific 
fact, or when the observation that "the sheer entropy of the present means that 
there is little to hold on to" was reformulated as the Second Law of 
Thermodynamics. The crisis is old news, really. What worries me more, however, 
is that the above is then immediately followed by the prediction that "watching 
the world around us rise and fall at an accelerating rate, those who prevail 
will be those who grasp the risks worth taking", because I can't shake off the 
feeling that I have read that before, even though I cannot remember where. Is 
this still Kevin Kelly, or already Peter Thiel?

And so on. The good news is that none of the above matters much, since there is 
and will be resistance, and it must succeed. It may lose some time, trying to 
define "success" and "failure" and mapping the vast space that lies in between, 
but at some point soon, it will have to define a number of practical goals, and 
do all it can to achieve them. If it disregards the "10 Theses", that's fine, 
but even if works out exactly, word-by-word like these theses propose, then 
tant mieux.

One more thing though. I don't personally know very many people who have been 
in an actual resistance movement, but I have a few friends in Cairo, and they 
did it: not only sustained the resistance against its many adversaries, but 
actually brought down their government, which is what we usually call a 
revolution. (And yes, today we have the privilege of knowing how it played 
out.) I used to listen to them a lot, and not only heard a few things about 
streets and movement and tanks and projectiles and rape and sharpshooters and 

January 30, Time To Wake Up

[sebastian]

January 30, Time To Wake Up

"The media always has taken Trump literally. It never takes him seriously." 
(Peter Thiel)

What is beginning to dawn upon Americans is that the exact opposite is true: 
That by taking Trump seriously, they completely misunderstood what he was 
telling them and vastly underestimated his ambition; that instead, each and 
every announcement of his government has to be taken literally.

When the President's statement on Holocaust Rememberance Day fails to make any 
mention of the Jews, to be followed by tweets that justify his immigration 
order with the execution of large numbers of Christians in the Middle-East, 
this has to be taken literally.

When White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer calls the Quebec City shooting, in 
which a White Nationalist killed six people in a mosque, a terrible reminder of 
why the President had to enact a Muslim ban, this has to be taken literally.

When Trump says his Mexican border wall is going to be beautiful, this has to 
be taken literally too.

Just like his attacks against Hillary Clinton, the New York Times, independent 
judges, or the City of Chicago. Short of a popular uprising, this government 
will go all the way. Shutting down news media, arresting the opposition, 
suspending the judiciary, tanks in the streets? It's all in the cards. If this 
sounds like the recent history of Turkey, then Americans will have to study 
that history, look at each of its phases, find out where they think it will 
stop in the U.S., how it will stop there, and what each of them will have to 
contribute, personally, to make it stop.

Further reading:

Yonatan Zunger: Trial Balloon for a Coup? Analyzing the news of the past 24 
hours. https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/trial-balloon-for-a-coup-e024990891d5

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Russia? China? It's bored kids you should fear, and Minecraft!

[sebastian]

TL;DR: If this is already too long, forget it. But here's the bottom line: If 
you want to continue debating "foreign cyber-warfare targeting Western 
democracies" without looking like an utter clown, you should read the articles 
linked below. Specifically (3), which is the most illuminating piece of 
investigative journalism I have read online all month, and (4), because instead 
of perpetuating myths about technology, it documents how stuff actually works.


Most likely, you don't remember it, but some may recall that in September 2016, 
the Internet went down for an entire afternoon, leaving many of the most 
popular websites and social media platforms unreachable for hours. This was 
widely reported as an unprecedented cyber attack on the infrastructure of the 
United States. Bruce Schneier, usually regarded as one of the most respectable 
security researchers in the world, wrote in the wake of the incident:

"We don't know who is doing this, but it feels like a large nation state. China 
or Russia would be my first guesses. [...] "It feels like a nation's military 
cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar." (1)

Schneier made big waves again in November, when he testified in front of U.S. 
Congress. His declaration was widely quoted:

"It might be that the internet era of fun and games is over, because the 
internet is now dangerous." (2)

Meanwhile, Brian Krebs, another well-known security researcher, decided to do 
some proper research about the incident. Last week, he published his findings 
(3). Not only did he find out who was behind the attack, his account also 
dispels some of the most persistent myths about cyber-war on the Internet:

- Basically, the entire thing happened because he blocked someone on Skype.

- The target wasn't the United States, Silicon Valley or Western Democracy, but 
  Minecraft.

- The clandestine actors that command the largest denial-of-service attacks 
  that the Internet has ever seen are not foreign intelligence agencies, but
  a cottage industry of DDoS protection providers, a racket of small-time 
  extortionists: the Minecraft mafia. These are bored kids in college dorms in 
  the United States.

- A suprisingly effective measure to mitigate such a denial-of-service attack 
  (launched through hundreds of thousands of insecure "Internet of Things" 
  devices, like security cameras or toasters), is to call up an ISP upstream
  of the botnet's command-and-control center, and tell them to turn it off.

- The era of fun and games on the Internet is still very much on.

Below is an excerpt from a longer conversation between the perpetrator of last 
September's attacks and one of his targets (4):

[10:49:11 AM] katie.onis: i love the conspiracy guys thinking this is china or 
another country haha
[10:49:18 AM] live:anna-senpai: yea
[10:49:22 AM] live:anna-senpai: lol
[10:49:29 AM] katie.onis: can't deal with the fact the internet is so insecure
[10:49:31 AM] katie.onis: gotta make it sound hard
[10:49:34 AM] live:anna-senpai: the scheiner on security blog post
[10:49:40 AM] live:anna-senpai: "someone is learning how to take down the  
internet"
[10:49:47 AM] live:anna-senpai: lol

Last night, a friend reminded me that if you look at the pricing for such 
attacks -- and there is no reason to doubt the numbers quoted in Brian Krebs' 
research -- then renting a botnet and shutting down the Internet for an hour or 
two is astonishingly cheap. His idea was that this could become a fashionable 
way for nerds to propose to their fiancées: Hey darling, I wanted your full 
attention, so I turned off the Internet for a moment... 


(1) https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/09/someone_is_lear.html

(2) http://www.dailydot.com/layer8/bruce-schneier-internet-of-things/

(3) 
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2017/01/who-is-anna-senpai-the-mirai-worm-author/

(4) https://krebsonsecurity.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/annasenpaichat.txt

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January 23, Trump Question

[sebastian]

January 23, Trump Question

So let me play the inverse of devil's advocate for a moment: Lets assume this 
is all on track. Market capitalism is coming apart, just like state capitalism 
around 1990. Ruthless financialization has finally broken the century-old bond 
between deterritorialization and reterritorialization, and what we're 
witnessing - in Brexit, in Trump - are simply the death throes of the 
reterritorializing forces, the moment when there is no more territory left, and 
not enough fuel. "Late capitalism" wasn't jargon, it was a correct attempt at 
periodization, all the time, and this is the end, a desperate final assault, of 
male white corporate oppression. Even the inverse devil's advocate will have to 
concede that death throes can last forever and cause immense collateral damage, 
and that the most likely successor to market capitalism is a mix of feudalism 
and fascism, but at the same time, there may be unforseen openings, and a sharp 
increase in willingness to take actual political risks. So lets assume that 
2016 was just a ruse, a sick joke of history: once as tragedy, ten times as 
farce, and then this. As will become obvious in hindsight, Donald Trump (and 
the same applies to Boris Johnson) was a once-in-a-century occurence of blind 
luck, an absurdly fortunate constellation of dominoes. To have him take down 
two of the most insurmountable impediments to political change in the United 
States, the Bush and Clinton dynasties (plus destroy much of the establishment 
of both political parties, and maybe even paralyze a large enough faction of 
the Christian Right) with a single lucky punch, and then having to figure out 
how to impeach the guy, is going to reveal itself as a way more plausible path 
out of this mess than trying to achieve the same result the other way around. 
He's not going to last for long, his schtick will get boring now that he's got 
nothing more to win, other than a war, which he is probably too incoherent to 
incite and promote, at least momentarily, the hearts and minds stuff, so that 
if there's a swift process towards impeachment, for which there is already 
sufficient ammunition, then at some point soon, the Republican Party will be 
forced to make a choice: between civil war, constitutional crisis, and Mike 
Pence. And we all know that Mike Pence is going to be horrible enough. He may 
even be able to temporarily unite what remains of his Party, but once he faces 
actual opposition in an election -- no longer the Democratic Party, but a 
democratic movement: a popular platform determined to abolish the current rules 
of campaing financing, redistricing, vote suppression and corporate lobbying -- 
he is going to come across as just a tad bit too creepy and conservative. 
(Similar future for Theresa May: harder to attack, but easier to derail, given 
the economic suicide mission she presides over.) And then it turns out that 
what we've seen on January 21 is really the first rearticulation of what is 
going to evolve into a broad, radical, international movement, one whose scope, 
diversity and determination will surpass even the revolts of the 1960s, 
committed to end the ongoing racial and sexual oppression, the death grip of 
religion, the grotesquely uneven distribution of wealth, the exclusion of the 
poor from public life, the collapse of democratic institutions under 
capitalism, and the unprecedented rise of global temperatures. Even Erdogan, 
Putin, Modi and Duterte will be forced to make some concessions. We're going to 
end the fossile era by 2025, begin to dismantle and evacuate coastal cities 
calmly and orderly, make AirBnB and Uber a criminal offense, Facebook the 
graveyard of fascism, and stick it to the singularity. I'm probably forgetting 
several intermediate stages and a couple of additional challenges (note to 
self: the Italian banks!), but I had zero intention to take the argument that 
far anyway. This is all just backdrop to a more technical, procedural question 
I had regarding step one, impeachment: How exactly is this going to take off? 
Can anyone tell me who is expected to defect first, the Democrats from their 
task to impeach, or the Republicans from Trump, and who are these Republicans 
precisely, given that most of the liberal or conservative ones have been 
gerrymandered out of office, and who can guarantee that disuniting them from 
Trump isn't going to help resurrect a zombie, a Wiedergänger of the Grand Old 
Party? Or is it that accounting for any of these technicalities is simply 
besides the point, that impeachment must be imagined as a process driven by 
civil society and its organizations, with Democrats as mere followers, and that 
once it becomes a force that aligns with Trump's own narcissistic death drive, 
the details don't matter, and as long as one keeps fanning the flames, the shit 
is going to fall in place naturally? Because -- and this is all just step one! 
-- I'm not so completely certain about 

a disaster happened today

[sebastian]

"The greatest music library in the world is gone."

"Saddest day of the year for music. Even Bowie and L. Cohen death can't beat 
that."

"I can't really begin to explain how much of a loss this is.
This was the biggest digital repository of music the world has ever seen. 
Spotify, iTunes, even Oink in its prime were kittens to what what.cd built.
I made this analogy in another thread, but it was the digital library of 
Alexandria for music.
It inspired me to learn about audio engineering, learn how to program, and most 
importantly, introduced me to music that changed me in ways I can't even begin 
to put into one tiny little box.
I was a part of the community for almost ten years. And it's a part of my life 
I'm going to have to look back on fondly.
And I don't regret a second of it."

"I don't think we will ever find such a carefully put together library of 
everything that is music.
Fuck me, i put my first productions on there to get feedback and keep on making 
music. I got my inspiration from there. The brilliant collages, the quality, 
the sheer size of it."

"I'm so sad man. I never realized it until now but that website shaped a large 
part of who I am."

"They are the destroyers.
They see something good that a community has buit, and in their greed and 
vileness destroy it."

"Heartbreaking. So much time, effort, and work went in to making that site, 
that collection (like nobody has ever seen), and the community"

"Undoubtedly the largest repository of music ever built and also, in my 
opinion, the most decent, professional, kind and just generally well-run entity 
to come out the pirate/torrent scene. This is a very, very sad day for us all."

"A real tragedy. More than a torrent tracker, What.cd was a beautiful, vibrant, 
and positive community. Knowing someone in real-life who was a fellow 
What.cd'er was enough to form an immediate friendship."

"Travesty. Biggest trove of classical music lost forever. I found CD's on there 
of even local friends bands, EVERYTHING was there. My friends dads bands 
discography that they themselves lost was on there!
I made great friends from there and w.cd was a daily topic in my life amongst 
me and my friends. Sharing new music, keeping track of eachothers latest DL's 
etc. Top 10's, collages, related artists, bounties. I loved waking up and 
browsing a collage like "House music from the Congo in 1973" or something and 
going on a journey. All lost.
It's going to take forever to get out of this depression, that was my last 
community, and I've been there for a decade.
I have the WCD community to credit for who I am today as a musician and 
developer, as the community exposed me to all sorts of things when I was 
15/16ish that I probably otherwise wouldn't have discovered. I'd probably be 
working sales right now or cash at some grocery store if it wasn't for WCD.
The internet is now dead to me for anything other than work. Between this and 
all the surveillance and social media and fake news and other bullshit, it's 
just another tool to me now.
What an absolute shit day."

"Say what you want about the ethics of piracy, but this truly is a sad day. No 
where else was there such a vast collection of music nor any other community as 
passionate, knowledgeable, and collective about all things music and audio as 
what.cd. Not to mention all of the friendships made and lost on the site, it 
truly was unique.
There are literally versions of albums and other musical releases that you 
cannot buy or find anywhere else that are now lost to the sands of time."

"I see it as burning down the modern day Library of Alexandria for music and 
scattering the community that maintained it."

"Unprecedented loss to the Internet community itself. This truly might be one 
of the saddest things happening online since the inception of Internet itself."

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Re: notes from the DIEM25 launch

[sebastian]

I wasn't in Europe at the time, so I didn't attend the DiEM25 launch. From 
afar, it sounded like a typical Volksb??hne event (1). But I wasn't there, and 
so I forgot about it again. Reading about it now though, it all sounds a bit 
like a joke.

Lets start with the name. I have no idea what it stands for, and I didn't look 
it up. "D" and "E" could be Democracy and Europe, but what do I know. At least 
once, they're using the term as part of "carpe diem" (YOLO avant la lettre), 
which is, to put it mildly, a truism. What makes it look fraudulent is the 
bizarre capitaliztion. And what makes it look scary is the 25. I assume it 
refers to the year 2025 - and not to the 25th century, or the young generation. 
But I have no idea why (2). All I know is that for those whose ears are still 
ringing with Agenda 2010 or Stuttgart 21, this is one of the most annoying 
names they could have come up with.

Then I went to the website. It plays music without asking me. Not immediately, 
but once it's done loading wp-emoji and font-awesome and jQuery and ThemePunch 
Revolution and handlebars and flexslider and nanoscroller and prettySocial, 
followed by backbone and underscore and some more wordpress junk, music will 
begin to autoplay. Apparently Brian Eno made it. It's pretty bad though. The 
first actual content that loads says: "We use cookies to personalise content 
and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic. We also 
share information about your use of our site with our social media, advertising 
and analytics partners. [More info] [Accept]" I really don't know. I just don't 
think that this is a first impression that anyone would ever want to make.

But the website also has the manifesto. Long version or short version? Turns 
out the long version is too short and the short version is too long. I didn't 
bother to do a proper diff, but some of the changes, like the variations in 
what's bold and what's not, struck me as a little odd. Anyway. Both begin with 
a statement that I think is important to make. It says: "For all their concerns 
with global competitiveness, migration and terrorism, only one prospect truly 
terrifies the Powers of Europe: Democracy!" And both end with the same list of 
19 aspirational mottos that many people will share, in spirit, but which, in 
writing, are really painful to digest. Somewhere in between, the terror 
promised in the opening must have gotten lost.

Lets be clear: I don't think this movement should be judged by what it writes, 
but by what it does. The problem however, at least up to now, is that a lot of 
what it does is write. Of course, collaborative writing can fail, and that 
doesn't always have to reflect badly on the character of the collaborators. 
Even though, admittedly, it usually does.

So. I'm done with "a historically-minded Europe that seeks a bright future 
without hiding from its past". If my adblocker was just a tiny bit better, it 
would have yelped at this. If my spam filter was just a tiny bit better, I 
would never hear from this movement again.

I'm also done with "recognising fences and borders". Europe doesn't need more 
of this. It's about abolishing them, plain and simple. Because they're not 
"signs of weakness and sources of insecurity" (3). They kill. And even though 
this is a hard sell, at a time when fences are being constructed all over 
Europe, there is no other option. Part of the program of the radical Left in 
Europe must be the abolishment of the Mediterranean Sea. That's at least one 
thing whose existence you cannot blame on weak or insecure border politics.

And I'm done with "a peaceful Europe de-escalating tensions in its 
neighbourhood and beyond". This is precisely, word by word, the mode of 
perception that Deleuze rightfully identified as the Right. And it wouldn't be 
complete without adding insult to injury. Among the many names that Europe has 
come up with for the plantations, mines, battlefields, dumping grounds, 
deserts, jungles, death camps and exotic beaches that lie outside its borders, 
"neighborhood" is the single most preposterous one. Because it suggests 
reciprocity. It's truly obscene (4), unlike "defending our freedom at the Hindu 
Kush" and such, since the latter at least doesn't make it sound as if anyone 
from out there or beyond was invited to defend their own freedom at the Harz in
return (5).

But I'm getting carried away here. Initially, none of this was my concern. And 
as hinted at above, bad manifestos don't automatically make for bad politics. 
The thing that I thought sounded like a joke was in the March 17 "update", as 
posted on nettime:

"Every initiative needs initiators - even initiatives that seek to embrace
a flat management, spontaneous order, horizontal organisation way of doing 
'stuff'. We were hoping to be able to move quickly from the initiation 
phase (during which a number of us would get DiEM25 together) to the open 
source phase 

Re: aaaaarg lawsuit digest

[sebastian]

Just to add that Sean and Marcell are being sued

- not by a company, but by an individual,

- not by an author, but by a translator, and

- not by someone classically "creative", but by a person whose work 
  mostly consists in exploiting the differential between French and
  Canadian copyright law by publishing new English translations of
  French books that are still under copyright in France, but just out 
  of copyright in Canada, in the hope that they sell in the U.S.,
  preferrably before TTP puts him out of business

... since it confirms once again what I think is the single most 
important (if not the only) lesson I've learned running textz.com,
Pirate Cinema or 0xDB: You're probably worrying too much about the
big corporations that actually own IP, and almost certainly not
enough about the small authors that hallucinate IP.

Once more: http://textz.com/txt/Franz_Kafka_-_Intellectual_Property.txt

Love, S.

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nettime An outrageous defeat, not for Greece, but for the European project

[sebastian]

Full transcript of Yanis Varoufakis' other first interview since
resigning, on Australian radio this Monday.

http://textz.com/txt/Phillip_Adams_-_Interview_with_Yannis_Varoufakis_(2015-07-13).txt



An outrageous defeat, not for Greece, but for the European project

Phillip Adams: A week ago, a group of very high-profile progressive
economists, Stiglitz et al, wrote an open letter to German chancellor
Angela Merkel, saying right now, the Greek government is being asked to
put a gun to its head and pull the trigger. And the past week hasn't
changed that scenario. Greece went very close to pulling the trigger
when it went to Brussels with a suite of suggestions that many saw as
capitulation, and a betrayal of the previous week's No vote in the
referendum. But as we've heard, a third bailout deal has been struck to
keep Greece within the Eurozone, and already the labor minister has
denounced the terms and reported that the conditions are so tough, so
rough, that it poses a perhaps impossible political task to the prime
minister. Former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis joins me now for his
first post-resignation interview. Now, I've got to ask you this... Did
you jump or were you pushed?

Yanis Varoufakis: Something in between. I jumped more than I was pushed.
On the night of the referendum, I entered the prime ministerial office
elated. I was traveling on a beautiful cloud, pushed by the beautiful
winds of the public's enthusiasm for the victory of Greek democracy
during that referendum. The moment I entered the prime ministerial
office, I sensed immediately a certain sense of resignation, a
negatively charged atmosphere. I was confronted with an air of defeat,
which was completely at odds with what was happening outside. And at
that point, I had to put it to the prime minister: If you want to use
the buzz of democracy outside the gates of this splendid building, you
can count on me. But if on the other hand, you feel you cannot manage,
you cannot handle this majestic No to a rather irrational proposition
from our European partners, then I'm going to simply steal into the
night. And I could see that he didn't have an attitude, he didn't have
what it took sentimentally, emotionally, at that moment, to carry that
No vote to Europe, to use it as a weapon. So in the best of possible
spirits - the two of us get on remarkably well, and will continue to get
on, I hope - I decided to give him the leeway that he needs in order to
go back to Brussels and strike what he knows to be an impossible deal, a
deal that is simply not viable.

PA: Is that why you have disappeared from public view since?

YV: Yes, I thought that the best support I could offer the prime
minister and my dear colleague Euclid Tsakalotos who succeeded me in the
ministry of finance, was to keep quiet, to send them my best regards and
my comradely wishes, with some pieces of advice regarding particularly
the kind of debt restructuring that the country needs as a minimum
requirement for retaining its hope for the future, and to keep quiet
while they were having a terrible time, an inhuman time, inhumanly
terribly time in these meetings. I know very well what it feels like to
walk inside those neon-lit, heartless rooms, full of apparatchiks and
bureaucrats who have absolutely no interest in the human cost of
decision making, and to have to struggle against them in order to come
back with something that is palatable.

PA: You have paid a very heavy personal price. It's been quite
extraordinary  watching your political enemies in Europe focus on you
again and again, and hammer away at you, with every tool in the box.

YF: Well, I had to pay the price, I'm quite happy to have paid that
price, I paid it with pride... of having killed the Troika, remember?
One of the first meetings that I had in office was with the president of
the Eurogroup, Mr. Jeroen Dijsselbloem. And when I explained in public,
in the press conference that followed our meeting, that Greece would no
longer be subject to the invasions in our ministries, of technocrats
hell-bent on determining the minutiae of every policy that is decided in
Greece, I was told in certain terms that I had just crossed the line,
and there was a public display of disaccord between us. When he went
into my office, he whispered: You have just killed the Troika. And I
responded: I am very glad to have done this. This is why I was elected.

PA: Will you stay in politics?

YV: Of course I will. The decision to enter politics was a difficult
one. But I had to look the electorate in the eye and say to them that
now that I'm taking this plunge, I'm not a fair weather sailor, I'm
going to be here for the course, and I'm going to represent you through
thick and thin. And in essence, I'm actually very much enjoying being a
back-bencher at the moment, because I have a lot more room for maneuver
and speaking the truth, without having to worry about phrasing the truth
in diplomatic terms. Not that I did much of that, but 

Re: nettime Crisis 2.0 - the political turn

[sebastian]

 harder to insist on demanding the impossible.
 
 Sebastian, your post is thoughtful and bitterly incisive. I think we
 kind of understand each other. I would like to up the ante a little.
 ...


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Re: nettime Crisis 2.0 - the political turn

[sebastian]

Needless to say that the same Joschka Fischer, on December 29 in a column
for the Austrian Standard titled Greek Fever, European Disease [1]
(which may be a rehashed version of the text you're quoting from), wrote
the following:


The Euro crisis appears to be over. [...] [But] in many EU member
states, the patience regarding the austerity measures is dwindling, and
disaster looms in the political arena.

Greece could once more become the trigger. There is a high risk that in
the upcoming elections, the left-socialists of the Syriza party will be
voted into power. Syriza would either have to commit a gigantic election
fraud, or renegotiate the Greek payments with the Troika (EU, ECB, IWF)
[...].


Of course Joschka Fischer knows the meaning of the term election fraud,
and that nobody expects Syriza to actually rig the vote. He should have
said broken promises, but that must be hard for the man who personifies
the first and last Social Democrat and Green German government, whose
pacifist and social ambitions led to Germany's military involvement in
the break-up of Yugoslavia and the dismantling of the German welfare
state. He didn't even dare to abandon Nuclear Power, it needed Angela
Merkel for that.

Merkel is less of a fraud then Fischer, and her famous and often repeated
dictum There is no alternative! clearly states that in our Democracies
there cannot be any choice. Fischer claims something else: that Democracy
itself has become a liability, and that free and fair elections are a
risk that the Europeans can no longer take.

Only a Freudian would still find traces of reality in Fischer's
statements, since what shines through in his choice of words, high risk
and fraud, is the very crime that caused the current crisis, a gigantic
scandal that men like Fischer cannot acknowledge other than
subconsciously.

A Bayesian would probably bet against the future of Democracy in Europe
by now. Especially given the fact there is such a strong prior.

But what's to be done as a Marxist, in the broadest possible sense?
Critique, for sure (the full recognition of the quagmire). But a
revolution in Europe (or at least a real political turn)? Not
everything that is hard to imagine can be ruled out, especially if you're
able to influence the outcome yourself. But my feeling is that our era's
reasoning has long become Bayesian, and that it has become harder to
insist on demanding the impossible.

[1]
http://derstandard.at/209873949/Griechisches-Fieber-europaeische-Krankheit

 On Jan 11, 2015, at 8:13 AM, Brian Holmes bhcontinentaldr...@gmail.com 
 wrote:

 Just before Christmas, Joschka Fischer - a man who incarnates the
institutionalization of 1968 - published an article on the Project
Syndicate website entitled Europe's Make-or-Break Year. At stake, for
him, was the failed recovery, the divisive policy of austerity, the rise of
economic nationalism. The banks, in short.  When the turmoil comes, he
wrote, it is likely to be triggered -- as with the euro crisis -- by
Greece. How ironic. The former leftist who took Germany to war in Kosovo
in the 1990s did not say a word about the military situation.

...


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nettime textz.com: Complete Historical-Critical Edition (2014)

[sebastian]

The textz.com Complete Historical-Critical Edition ARG
starts on October 30, 2014, 6 PM UTC at 48.7797,9.1813

o__o  http://t
/##\_ extz.com


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