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<chapter>
<title>MANIFESTO</title>
<desc>...</desc>
<mails>
<mail>
<nbr>0.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] John-Perry Barlow: The Accra Manifesto</subject>
<from>geert</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 21 Mar 2002 22:01:49 +1100</date>
<content>
From: barlow {AT} eff.org
The Accra Manifesto
Accra, Ghana
Tuesday, March 12, 2002 (revised Wed. March 13, 2002)
Since its beginnings, Cyberspace has provided new approaches for the
benign ordering of human affairs. As we begin to develop institutions
to govern the digital world, we must avoid returning to industrial
models that have generally failed in the analog world to assure
equity, liberty, and human inclusion. Instead, let us build upon the
promise of what has already proven effective in this social
experiment.
The paramount governing values that have so far emerged in this grand
collective enterprise are openness, inclusion, technical
practicality, emergent form, decentralization, transparency,
tolerance, diversity, and a fierce willingness to defend free
expression and the preservation of identity. These are appropriate
values. They are working.
They should be allowed to go on working, both in the eventual systems
for allocating domain names and numbers and in all other matters of
Cyberspace governance. Neither the current operations of ICANN nor
the current proposal put forward by its president appear to place
much faith in them.
Cyberspace has thus far been an environment where architecture is
politics. ICANN has turned this practical formulation on its head by
attempting to make politics architecture.
To assist in designing a governing process that will promote these
values and thus direct us toward the future and away from the past
the undersigned propose the following to the ICANN meeting in Accra:
1. It appears to us that ICANN has so far failed to generate the
moral authority necessary to govern an environment where authority
must be based on the general respect of the governed rather than its
ability to impose solutions by fiat.
2. It has failed for a variety of reasons. Chief among these are its
impulse to adapt existing and mechanical models of government to a
social space that cannot easily be coerced into submission. It
attempts to impose government instead of proposing governance.
3. ICANN is overly centralized and, by virtue of its incorporation in
the United States and its practical dependency on American
contractors, perpetuates the dangerous belief that the Internet is an
American environment. We believe that root should not be based in the
U.S.
4. ICANN was established in a gray area of institutional reality that
makes it nearly invulnerable to legal or political rebuke. If ICANN
were a function of the U.S. Government, at least it could be brought
into court and held accountable for unconstitutional behavior. The
current structure provides almost no opportunity for redress in the
area of domain names and none at all in the area of domain numbering.
It's power is vast and growing. Its accountability is small and
shrinking.
5. By abandoning the simple and fair system of \"1st come, 1st served\"
domain name allocation that served the Internet well from the
beginning, ICANN has created a quagmire of unnecessary disputes and
suppressed expression, and has irrationally conflated trademark law
with domain assignment.
6. Efforts to turn Cyberspace into a traditional democracy, however
laudable in principle, may never work well in a social space where it
is extremely difficult to define either the electorate or a credible
system whereby the people might express their will. Nonetheless,
public representation on the board is so important that we can't
afford to give up on it. It would be well to remember that democracy
is more than a mechanical process of providing that every single
member of a constituency has a say. Rather it is a system of
governance that seeks the consent of the governed, however that
assent is conveyed. To assure that ICANN is democratic in this sense,
there must be a low entry barrier to unofficial involvement its
decision-making processes, and, possibly, a decentralized, community
based system for selecting \"at large\" board members.
7. The current proposal before ICANN would fix this problem by
inserting existing nation states into a space where they have no
natural sovereignty. While this might, at first pass, lend the
popular accountability of governments to its processes, it's likely
to result in a system as ineffectual as the ITU or the United
Nations. Further, given the wave of negative reaction to the Lynn
proposal, its adoption would likely further reduce ICANN's
credibility.
8. ICANN, by its cumbersome deliberative processes, already slows the
adoption of new technology and might prevent the timely alteration of
the technical underpinnings of the Internet in the event of an
impending collapse of the system. The addition of even more ponderous
governments to the stew of authority would only exacerbate the
potential for failure.
9. The current structure of the root servers, as documented in the
MDR meeting, has the servers distributed between government,
commercial, academic, and non-profit organizations distributed around
the world. Such a structure is highly resistant to capture and leads
to the robustness and diversity of the Internet. One possible
outcome of the Lynn proposal is that the root servers are
contractually bound to a single organization. This inherently is
less stable and more susceptible to capture than the current
structure which should be protected as a fundamental architectural
principle.
10. The best way to assure inclusion is to derive systems that are
easy for those governed to understand. ICANN is already too complex
in its practices to admit informed participation. The Lynn proposal
would only add to this complexity.
11. The IETF once provided a good model for governing processes that
are well-suited to Cyberspace. It was a system for governance by
ideas, rather than by people, laws, or \"stake-holders,\" in that the
most elegant solutions were adopted by the consensus of a
self-defining community, regardless of the standing of those who
proposed them. That the IETF has become less successful in solving
problems results less from a flaw in this model than its having been
high-jacked by corporate interests. ICANN, in its original design and
current state, ignores the value of these proven approaches.
12. To address these failures, we propose that ICANN decentralize and
convey operational authority to the communities that naturally define
themselves around the top-level domains, restricting its duties to
the resolution of disputes that cannot be resolved within the
communities. In other words, we believe that ICANN should become a
loose confederation of autonomous domains, rather like the federal
government of the United States during Jefferson's time.
13. Prior to delegating its operational functions to the domains, we
believe that ICANN might demonstrate its understanding of these
principles by defining at least two new public domains. Among these
we suggest .lib (for libraries) and .pub (for entities, whether
organizations or individuals, working for the common good). It is our
belief that the systems of self-governance such communities are
likely to develop might serve to instruct other domains in the
ordering of their own affairs.
14. One of the areas where existing systems of government have
worked, to varying degrees of effectiveness, has been in conveying
and preserving such human rights as free expression and protection
from unchecked corporate self-interest. ICANN might have a continued
role in directing itself to the assurance of such rights in
Cyberspace. A reformed ICANN might also propose broad policies and
technical solutions, but would do so as respected leaders and not as
a junta.
15. The previously existing systems for governance in Cyberspace have
shown the practical efficiency of fixing only that which is broken.
This is a principle ICANN would do well to emulate.
Cyberspace is not a place. It is a dialog of cultures. We believe
that if ICANN were to adopt the above principles, it might, through
light-handed arbitration of real, rather than projected, problems,
acquire the moral authority that has so far evaded it. We fear that
if it fails to consider the concerns that have driven us to make this
declaration, it will find itself in the unenviable position of trying
to impose its will on a global community with neither a mandate nor
force of arms. At best, it will become irrelevant as the citizens of
Cyberspace develop methods to work around it. At worst, it will be
directly dangerous to the health of the Internet. The chaos that
might follow either development will not serve our descendents well.
While many of the undersigned do not accept every single one of the
above statements, we are in sufficient agreement with the spirit of
this statement that we hereby attach our names and hope that the
governing board of ICANN will make a sincere effort to incorporate
its beliefs and adopt its recommendations.
John Perry Barlow barlow {AT} eff.org , Co-Founder &amp; Vice Chairman,
Electronic Frontier Foundation
--
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder &amp; Vice Chairman, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Berkman Fellow, Harvard Law School
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow
Call me anywhere, anytime: 800/654-4322
Fax me anywhere, anytime: 603/215-1529
Current Cell Phone: 646/286-8176 (GSM)
Alternative (Inactive) Cell Phone: 917/863-2037 (AT&amp;T)
**************************************************************
Barlow in Meatspace Now: Accra, Ghana Labadi Beach Hotel +233 (0)21
773110
(Provisional) Trajectory from Here: New York City 3/16-22 - Boulder,
Colorado (3/23-25) - Crested Butte, CO (3/25-28) - Telluride, CO
(3/28-4/2) - New York City...
**************************************************************
...They had preserved a knowledge that was lost to us by our first
parents; Africa, amongst the continents, will teach it to you: that
God and the Devil are one, the majesty co-eternal, not two uncreated
but one uncreated, and the Natives neither confounded the persons nor
divided the substance.
-- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] OK ART Manifesto</subject>
<from>Rafael Lozano-Hemmer</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Sun, 6 May 2001 17:59:33 -0400</date>
<content>OK ART Manifesto
by Susie Ramsay and Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
1. "OK art" is an OK idea, --not great, but not bad either.
2. OK artists make OK art.
3. OK artists really want to make great art, they shoot for the
stars, but their work ends up being just OK. OK artists are OK with
this.
4. Art enthusiasts and cynics alike, leave an OK art exhibition
saying "that was OK". No one is blown away but they don't feel
cheated either.
5. OK art will probably not make it into art history; although
someone in the future might find an OK artwork and think "this isn't
so bad."
6. "Different" and "interesting" are two adjectives often overheard
at OK art exhibitions.
7. OK artists are OK with bad reviews, but naturally they prefer good
reviews and they keep those and post them on the internet.
8. It's a good idea to call yourself an OK artist before somebody else does.
9. Ambitious, megalomaniac artists feel great relief when they accept
they're just OK.
10. OK ideas are defended passionately but not more than that.
11. (this point was erased during editing)
12. OK art is unlikely to be over or underrated.
13. We hate artists that are A-OK, those bastards!
14. There is no point in making an OK art movement, although fleeting
consideration of the concept would be OK.
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</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>2.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] MOBILE MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>richard barbrook</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Wed, 8 Nov 2000 19:55:48 +0000</date>
<content>MOBILE MANIFESTO
1.0 Is WAP crap?
Early adopters can only access the pleasures of new technologies by
accepting the pains of beta-testing the future.
2.0 When will the hardware come up to speed?
Net users assume that large screens, colourful icons, pop-down menus and
all the other features of the PC interface should be available on mobiles
which are small enough to fit into their pockets.
3.0 Has my SIM card become my identity?
Even if we forget what we did yesterday, our mobiles have recorded all
aspects of our daily lives: who we spoke with, what we bought and where we
were.
4.0 What shall I broadcast tonight?
With the advent of 3G mobiles, everyone will carry a television transmitter
in their pocket for video-conferencing with work colleagues, providing
live-feeds to the Net and swapping MPEG movies with their friends.
5.0 Is your partner monitoring your visits to your lover?
While we appreciate being able to find out where we are using the GPS
facilities on our mobile, we don't want other people knowing where we are
without us telling them first.
6.0 How did I ever leave home without one?
Wherever we go, we are carrying our own intimate world of friends,
colleagues and contacts inside the screens of our mobiles.
7.0 Who said that text was dead?
The popularity of SMS disproves McLuhan's prediction that reading and
writing would disappear once we could easily communicate with each other
using audio-visual media.
8.0 Will we ever develop manners for mobiles?
The happiness of hearing from an absent friend means ignoring your best
mate who is sitting right next to you.
9.0 Is my mobile acting as a double-agent?
By becoming my easy-to-use gateway for on-line banking, m-commerce and
socialising, my mobile is surreptitiously revealing information about my
finances, shopping habits and lifestyle choices to outside forces, such as
law enforcement agencies and market researchers.
10.0 Are we frying our brains instead of polluting our lungs?
For today's young people, the first sign of maturity is ignoring the danger
of radiation from mobiles rather than disregarding the risk of getting
cancer from cigarettes.
Andrew Purdy
Armin Medosch
Mark Fitzpatrick
Niki Gomez
Richard Barbrook
Robin Hamman
Sophia Drakopoulou
7th November 2000
&lt;www.cybersalon.org&gt;
_______________________________________________
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Nettime-bold@nettime.org
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</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; MOBILE MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 9 Nov 2000 08:55:15 +0200</date>
<content>to the slaves of socalled mobility:
it is rumoured that there are people who still don't have a mobile phone
and who survive modern life nevertheless. i tell you, folks: it can be
done.
long live the privilege of a-synchronicity and unavailability.
-a
_______________________________________________
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</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.1</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; MOBILE MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>cisler</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 09 Nov 2000 09:59:11 -0800</date>
<content>&gt; From: Andreas Broeckmann &lt;abroeck@v2.nl&gt;
&gt; Reply-To: Andreas Broeckmann &lt;abroeck@v2.nl&gt;
&gt; Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 08:55:15 +0200
&gt; To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
&gt; Subject: Re: &lt;nettime&gt; MOBILE MANIFESTO
&gt;
&gt; to the slaves of socalled mobility:
&gt;
&gt; it is rumoured that there are people who still don't have a mobile phone
&gt; and who survive modern life nevertheless. i tell you, folks: it can be
&gt; done.
&gt;
&gt; long live the privilege of a-synchronicity and unavailability.
Years ago (1995 r 1996) Bob Lucky, head of ATT Labs said, "I want to be
able to call anyone, but I don't want anyone to have my number."
_______________________________________________
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Nettime-bold@nettime.org
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</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.2</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; MOBILE MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>cisler</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 9 Nov 2000 17:59:11 -0000</date>
<content>&gt; From: Andreas Broeckmann &lt;abroeck@v2.nl&gt;
&gt; Reply-To: Andreas Broeckmann &lt;abroeck@v2.nl&gt;
&gt; Date: Thu, 9 Nov 2000 08:55:15 +0200
&gt; To: nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
&gt; Subject: Re: &lt;nettime&gt; MOBILE MANIFESTO
&gt;
&gt; to the slaves of socalled mobility:
&gt;
&gt; it is rumoured that there are people who still don't have a mobile phone
&gt; and who survive modern life nevertheless. i tell you, folks: it can be
&gt; done.
&gt;
&gt; long live the privilege of a-synchronicity and unavailability.
Years ago (1995 r 1996) Bob Lucky, head of ATT Labs said, "I want to be
able to call anyone, but I don't want anyone to have my number."</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: MOBILE MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>integer</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 9 Nov 2000 09:21:39 +0100</date>
<content>&gt;to the slaves of socalled mobility:
&gt;
&gt;it is rumoured that there are people who still don't have a mobile phone
nn != hav 01 mob!l fn.
= 01 mob!l bod! hav
&gt;and who survive modern life nevertheless. i tell you, folks: it can be
&gt;done.
&gt;
&gt;long live the privilege of a-synchronicity and unavailability.
&gt;
&gt;-a
romant!z!zm = 01 kolon!al d!zeaze
vr!endel!jk.nn
pre.konssept!&#65533;n
meeTz ver!f1kat!&#65533;n.
-
Netochka Nezvanova - fearful symmetry :: biological geometry :: civilized error
0f0003.MASCHIN3NKUNST
@www.eusocial.com
17.hzV.tRL.478
e
|
| +----------
| | &lt;
\\----------------+ | n2t^P
| &gt;
e
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</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.1</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: MOBILE MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 09 Nov 2000 12:19:12 +0100 (CET)</date>
<content>&gt; nn != hav 01 mob!l fn.
&gt; = 01 mob!l bod! hav
&gt;
&gt; &gt;long live the privilege of a-synchronicity and unavailability.
&gt;
&gt; romant!z!zm = 01 kolon!al d!zeaze
i prefer this romanticism to
MOBILE MANIFESTED
late-capitalist self-pity.
gruss,
-a
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</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>5.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] &lt;nettime&gt; MOBILE MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>integer</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 9 Nov 2000 19:24:25 +0100</date>
<content>&gt;&gt; to the slaves of socalled mobility:
&gt;&gt;
&gt;&gt; it is rumoured that there are people who still don't have a mobile phone
&gt;&gt; and who survive modern life nevertheless. i tell you, folks: it can be
&gt;&gt; done.
&gt;&gt;
&gt;&gt; long live the privilege of a-synchronicity and unavailability.
&gt;
&gt;Years ago (1995 r 1996) Bob Lucky, head of ATT Labs said, "I want to be
&gt;able to call anyone, but I don't want anyone to have my number."
ATT Labs != ver! !ntel!gent and \ or luk!.
Years ago (1995 r 1996) Bob Lucky != luk! 2 telefon cccelf
arogantl!.nn
pre.konssept!&#65533;n
meeTz ver!f1kat!&#65533;n.
-
Netochka Nezvanova - there is no denying NN's genius. but denying yours - there is.
0f0003.MASCHIN3NKUNST
@www.eusocial.com
17.hzV.tRL.478
e
|
| +----------
| | &lt;
\\----------------+ | n2t^P
| &gt;
e
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Nettime-bold@nettime.org
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<mail>
<nbr>6.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Cybersalon Manifesto</subject>
<from>richard barbrook</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Fri, 6 Oct 2000 11:55:25 -0400</date>
<content>Manage Your Own Medium
1.0 Genesis.
In March 1960 J.C.R. Licklider envisioned a network of computers connected
together where human and machine would work together in intimate
association. He prophesised that this era would be intellectually the most
creative and exiting in the history of mankind. We are living in this time.
Our group is a collective of people emerging from the human/computer
interface who are engaged in digital practices and theories. As artists,
practitioners and academics we have joined together to create the
Cybersalon: live gatherings in the image of the new digital medium of the
Net.
2.0 The medium is no longer the message, we formulate the medium to convey
our own message.
Creating in pixels underpins the use of the computer both as a tool and as
a communicating device. These two characteristics have completed their
integration in the Net. Within new media, the creative process is made and
distributed in bits and pixels. The exchanging, sharing and manipulating
information is an integral part of our work. Our networked computers are
the devices of creativity and of communication. Our message is intended for
a pixel-generated screen mediating the relationship of humans and
computers.
3.0 Enjoy the schism.
Our visual culture has been formulated by an analogue world whose
traditions have been uneasily carried on into the digital format. We are
still confined by the look, design, fashions and aesthetics of the old
media. Our practices and theories must now be changed for the time of the
Net. The schism between old and new media is caused by the passivity of the
first and the interactivity of the second. The medium that carries our
message conveys an active and intimate association with its users. New
media exist only in digital format: identical copies can be shared between
makers and receivers. We must now deliver in the same format that we create
in.
4.0 The original is obsolete.
The digital format assumes countless identical copies of the same work. The
do-and-undo command encourages non-linear approaches within the creative
process. A digital work can be shared between its makers who can add and
delete parts. Visuals, sounds and machine code can be placed and accessed
across the Net. Whether we're multi-media constructors, web developers,
programmers, theoreticians, digital artists, we all have to ask ourselves
these key questions: Whose idea was it anyway? Who inspired whom? Is the
remix better than the original version? How can we contribute our
creativity to the collective digital work?
5.0 We must meet up soon.
New media brings together people from a wide range of different practices.
For instance, when building a website, the computer programmer and the
graphic designer will each contribute their own particular skills to the
common product. Within the creative process, each person possesses their
own heterogeneous experience of the human/computer interface. Out of these
divided and layered practices, a collective aesthetic is emerging in the
form of code and pixels.
6.0 Cybersalon is a real-time environment.
Cybersalon is a real and virtual space where people involved in digital
creativity can congregate and meet with each other. If we want to discover
innovative practices and theories, it is essential for us to share and
communicate our on-line experiences. Some short-sighted interests are
trying to inhibit the participatory nature of the Net. In contrast, we want
to celebrate and promote the emancipatory and creative possibilities of the
new information technologies. We will organise discussions around the
social and cultural issues brought out by the Net. We will exhibit
cutting-edge digital work. We present the latest practices and theories
emerging from the educational, commercial, community and artistic forms of
new media.
7.0 Beyond hi-tech neo-liberalism
We are escaping from the most liberal times in the history of
communications. After decades of globalisation, privatisation and
deregulation, information became something which could only be bought and
sold. Education, entertainment and political debates were read-only files.
Now all these old certainties are being swept away. The Net is overcoming
the enforced passivity and cultural boundaries imposed by the old media.
Whether as individuals or as groups, we now have the ability to create our
own media with the new information technologies. We can enjoy the benefits
of sharing knowledge, giving information, communicating our ideas and
making friends within a place where time and space are undetermined. In
this new situation, we are forced to reconsider our practices and theories
of cultural creativity. We must revisit the revolutionary legacy of the
past. We must invent new ways of acting and thinking.
8.0 Montage the medium
Living inside the human/computer interface is an integral part of everyday
life. As digital practitioners, we use our computer as a production tool
and as a communications device. As mobile phone users, we each carry with
our own personal transmitter. Although we don't own the landlines or
airwaves, we are still able to give away our content to whoever wants to
download it. We can collect and filter information from the Net to
customise our own information. Neither political censors nor copyright
enforcers have the power to control our freedom of expression. Across the
globe, individuals and groups can now enjoy the most libertarian
interpretation of media freedom. We are no longer limited to owning only
receivers of information. Each of us can now possess their own transmitter.
Everyone can be an artist, a designer, a broadcaster and a theorist. Our
pixel-aided world is the integration of all known culture - and the
emergence of entirely new practices and theories.
Sophia Drakopoulou
Richard Barbrook
3rd October 2000
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<mail>
<nbr>7.0</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] the net_institute manifesto</subject>
<from>net_institute_apparatus</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Mon, 3 Apr 2000 18:06:57 +0200</date>
<content>t h e n 3 t _ ! n s t i t u t e m 4 n i f e s t o
http://net-i.zkm.de
mailto:net-i@zkm.de
|| &#160;n e t _ i n s t i t u t i o n
the net_institute is not an institute devoted to new media but an
institute_network that uses a net structure to deconstruct the
traditional power frames. the net_institute is a flat-hierarchy
horizontal institute aimed to bypass the old centralised media, i.e.
the institutions, and to set up bottom-up mass media. the net_institute
believes that every institution is a consensual allucination.
||&#160; a l e p h _ m a t r i x
the net_institute is a hybrid between the city and the net, the
metropolis and the mediascape, between a collective intelligence and an
institutional apparatus. it is an example of the genetic mutations
induced by the implosive convergence of media, formats, genres into the
net's omnivorous matrix. at the same time the net_institute works as a
mediatic icon, an institutional apparatus, a networked building, a
horizontal institute, a mailing list, an urban interface of the net, a
net interface of the landscape, a machine programm, a connective name.
the net_institute is a new bio_informational organism: its life task is
to reproduce its meme by contaminating other organisms as faster as
possible.
|| &#160;l e a v i n g &#160;&#160;t h e&#160;&#160;&#160; n e t
at the end of its pioneering period, the net is living its definitive
commodification and trasformation in the backbone of the new economy.
the cyberspace saga ends up in an on-line supermarket. past the
cyberspace, the net_institute seeks a third space of action, the
friction point between netscape and landscape. for this reason the
net_institute goes out of the net, ejects the network out of the web,
tries to create short-circuits with the territory, to establish a
practice connected to net_culture in a contradictionary way. the
net_institute sets itself on the point of detonation between the cyber
and the real world, on a hybrid topological dimension implementing the
communication and immaginative power of the net straight into the real
world. the net_institute uses the net to outline future lands, to draw
maps that subvert the present territory, to project the territory itself
on the mediascape.
|| &#160;p r o _ i n s t i t u t i o n
the net_institute reveals the social simulation of content, normally
protected by institutional or antagonistic rethorics, and the power
frames hidden in the art world and counterculture. at the same time as
the institutions are hosting subversive net_artists and cultural
terrorists, the net_institute itsel becomes an institution. as the real
power leaves the government buildings to move to faceless corporations,
the net_institute gets hold of abondoned simulacra, occupies the center
of the territory, makes the power relationship visible again. since
power no longer has a face, a center, a head, the net_institute turns
the net in a collective and organised intelligence. the net_institute
does not live in the underwoods of the net.
||&#160;&#160;n e t _ w o r k e d _ i n s t i t u t e
the net_institute is a building that embodies the deep frameworks of the
net and is made up of public and private environments, physical and
communication spaces. it is a hybrid architecture capable to fit itself
into other architectures. it is a transversal, modular, unstable space
that can be constructed by anyone, a low_tech practice devised to hack
the architectural code and to revivify the urban space. the
net_institute is a mass medium building daily repopulating the city.
||&#160;&#160;u r b a n _ i n t e r f a c e
the internet is a machine capable to overcode each aspect of social
life. standing up against the technoeuphoria, the net_institute thinks
it is reactionary to look for the wonderful, the complex, the extreme on
the net only. the net_institute is an urban interface of the net_culture
that breaks with the dominant discourse about cyberscape, virtual
reality, simulation. the net_institute is a physical, social, mediatic
space and it is not controlled and constructed on the net but through
the net. the net_institute is a creative interface for the conscious -
technical and political - management of the networks and their mediatic
power.
|| &#160;h u m a n / m a c h i n e &#160;&#160;i n t e r f a c e
the net_institute builds human and urban networks in order to turn the
networks' invasion into everyday life inside out. at the same rate as
the networks are rooting into social life and the computer is giving the
human being its mind, the net_institute will root inside the network and
give the machine its mind. the human being is now reshaping itself after
the models of intelligent machines: the meta_design of the new
technologies permeates the neural structure more than old ones, redraws
its circuits and constructs new infrastructures for human behaviour. for
this reason the net_institute wants to de_cable the collective brain.
the net_institute device wants to make conscious again the behaviours
made automatic and unconsious by the widespread technology, by the
software easy automatism that are standardising taste and creativeness.
the net_institute wants to construct not user_friendly but
brain_friendly interfaces, wherein the friction with the diversity of
machine be the highest.
||&#160;&#160;s o c i a l &#160;&#160;&#160;o pe r a t i v e _ s y s t e m
operative and the social systems are converging towards each other. the
operative systems have been increasingly designed according to social
models and metaphors, and are aimed to control the whole society. at the
same time, the term 'operative system' leaves the field of computer
science, in order to be used by the social system to describe itself.
such a convergence allows us foresee scenarios of 'intelligent'
networks, buildings, cities controlling any aspect of social life. the
net_institute sees itself as a social operative system aimed to control
the dominant operative system.
|| &#160;i m m a t e r i a l _ a r c h i t e c t u r e
the net_institute is obsessed with the material and immaterial
architectures that continuously shape the collective behaviour and the
unconscious: commercial and bureaucratic architectures, urbanistic
plans, media embedded in the urban texture, computer networks,
information fluxes. the post_industrial culture is dominated by
immaterial information architectures and by invisible comunication
channels, no longer by the heavyness of industrial economy, but the
immaterial yoke is as much heavy. the net_institute itself does not
express but ghosts unconsciously sedimented in the brain of the masses
and in social behaviours.
|| &#160;o p e n _ a r c h i t e c t u r e
the net_institute's network structure allows an open architeture which
new structures can be connected to at any moment. the net_institute is
an autopoietic organism piloted by the networking of its nodes: each can
propose a reorganisation of the whole net. as in a population of
neurons, no one rules, but the brain works the same. in this case the
brain trigging neuronal impulses is the mailing list: better, the
net_institute is a mailing list, i.e. a collective narration. for the
net_institute anyone can build the basement, write the mission, develop
the departments, control the image, program the code. the net_institute
is a connective name.
|| &#160;o p e n _ s o u r c e
as a political groupware the net_institute is open_source, and it makes
the decision and organisation mechanism completely visible and
accessible. the net_institute is a transparent multi-cellular organism
whose evolution can be observed through its mailing list and the iconic
interface of its structure. the net_institute doesn't follow a strategy
of secret [though this statement is not demonstrable]. the net_institute
is a freeware and open_source software, usable and modifiable for
non-commercial purposes.
|| &#160;l o _ t e k
squashed between wired-style psychedelia, web-tv colonisation threats,
virtual reality middle-class neorealism and aesthetic spectrum
saturation, a space for action is left only for those who can devote
themselves to networking, minimalism, schematism, fast rates and
iconoclasm. the net_institute prefers the low_tech because this is the
fastest format in the information highways and the collective imaginery,
and because it is a code accessible and understandable to all. the
hi_tech hides the content, makes it elitist, and works slower inside the
communication channels. the low_tech is critical, iconoclastic, compact,
modular. the intelligence and imaginery that are being constructed are
minimalistic, schematic, connective, modular and text_based.
|| &#160;t e x t _ b a s e d
the low_tech is text_based. the net_institute represents neither the
intellectual class nor mass culture. the net_institute uses the ASCII
characters, better known as an american standard, as an universal code,
a tool to assault both the elitist and the commercial culture.
text_based concept does not deal with a bookish culture but with
computer keyboards and mailing lists to write a bottom-up culture.
|| &#160;c o d e _ c u l t u r e
the net_institute explores the digital culture neuropathy that neither
activists nor the sharpest critics are able to perceive. this narcosis
of consciousness can be observed in the wired family and in all the net
users, hackers included: the computer medium has mathematicized and
digitalized the mind and its irrational and analogic impulses. after the
early period of domestication to the medium, the net_institute tries to
subvert its inner logics, to bypass the machine code, to explore its
limits. otherwise the net_institute thinks that the turing machine
language could be a therapy for the 'weak thought' of western
intellectuals.
|| &#160;n o t _ a r t
the net_institute considers more necessary and interesting to build
pathological containers than pathological contents. in order to set
schizophrenia and creativeness free, they should be forced into an
obsessive, allucinatory and claustrophobic space, in an articial light.
the net_institute was born far away from the ergonomic european new
media centers. the net_institute steals and implements the most
sclerotic appearances of power, with no provocative intentions, to show
the failures and contradictions of underground and overground
lifestyles. in a world where institutional culture is kept alive with
transfusions of counter-culture, and upper class fashion wears the
street-style, the net_institute causes activism to lose its bearing. the
net_institute does not play with the superficial interface of two
browsers as well as net art does, but works with the deep framework of
the internet machine to have its underground exposed. the most beatiful
artwork is the idea - the meme that manages to spread and reproduce
itself widely and actively.
||&#160;&#160;t o t a l i t a r i a n _ m a c h i n e r y
the net_institute is a perfect overturning of the kafkesque universe: it
is an institute where the outside is the inside like in the klein
bottle: logically you are already inside it. the institute is a
totalitarian machinery because it celebrates the death of the author,
the artist, the individual, and the sexual and ethnic identity, through
an anonymous, asexual and inorganic architectural simulacrum. anyone can
construct and inhabitate the institute to find a home to own unstable
identities. following the example of the corporations, the individual is
not meant to espress him/herself, the institute cares about doing it in
his/her place.
||&#160;&#160;r e t r o _ a v a n t g a r d e
the net_institute is a paranoid disguise of schizophrenic forces against
those paronoid forces that in western society pretend to be
schizophrenic. the net_institute faces the e-nomination and the
invisibility of the new power and economy using the heavy and material
image of an institute. laibach, nsk, luther blissett, rtmark, balkania
and the net_institute are examples of practices that do not face the
system 'correctly' but deconstruct it from the inside by the means of
aesthetic, semantic, polical, legal short-circuits.
|| &#160;c o n n e c t i v e &#160;&#160;n a m e
the net_institute is the reincarnation of luther blissett as a
collective open pop star, an evolution of the multiple name's karma when
the name started being used for boring 15-minutes celebrities. luther
blissett is not only a multi-use and multi-user name but also a
collective myth that can animate new narrations and new devices. the
net_institute represents its further implementation. the net_institute
is not indeed a collective name, but a connective one, not the name of a
character but a structure_name. in other terms, the net_institute can be
described as an urban and institutional architecture built on and for an
open-architecture pop star. the net_institute is not a metaphor but a
political and aesthetic device to construct urban and international
networks, to deconstruct the cultural and mass media industry, to
reconquest the territory, to find a home for unstable identities. when
the masses and the media are acclaiming a harmless luther blissett, it
is the right time to kindly offer them a totalitarian institution.
become net_institute.
__
n 3 t _ ! n s t i t u t e
__ __
________/ / /_/
/___ __ / __
/ /_/ /__/ /__
/ ____________/
/_/
http://net-i.zkm.de
mailto:net-i@zkm.de
_______________________________________________
Nettime-bold mailing list
Nettime-bold@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>8.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; The Communard Manifesto (1/2)</subject>
<from>Felix Stalder</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 2 Aug 2016 10:49:51 +0200</date>
<content>[This strikes me as the most advanced attempt to outline a historical
perspective on an emancipatory trajectory contained within the current
crisis. It's not simply a theoretical text, but a testimony to the scope
of vision driving the development of the Spanish "rebel cities".
The manifesto makes two key arguments. First, the two main social
institutions of our time -- the state and the markets -- are are
"decomposing". As a consequence, ever more economic activity is devoted
to rent-seeking rather than production, leaving ever greater numbers of
people as "exiles" from the still dominant society (and open to
destructive communities of nationalists, racists and jihadists).
Second, that technological (and organisational) advances have altered
ithe scale necessary to produce many necessary products and social
goods (think from atomic power-plants to solar panels). This enables
many of these goods to be produced outside the market (what they call
"p2p economy") and where the market remains necessary through "direct
economy" meaning ways of raising the necessary capital that does
not hand over control over the productive process to the owners of
capital.
It's a very long text, so I split it up in two mails in old nettime
tradition, but it's really worth reading in its entirety. Felix]
https://lasindias.com/the-communard-manifesto-html
Communard Manifesto
The dilemma of our time
Abundance within reach
Inequality, unemployment and demoralization
What is decomposing is not only the economic system, but
what the human experience means
Capitalism and its critics
Capitalism shaped the world because, before changing the
State, it was able to create a new form of human experience
Revolutionaries that loved crises and large scales
The history we weren&#8217;t told
The new world will be born and affirmed inside the old
New relationships, here and now
Scale and scope
From the era of economies of scale&#8230;
&#8230;to the era of the inefficiencies of scale
Today, capital is too big for the real productive scale&#8230;
&#8230; and the optimal scale is approaching community dimensions
Building abundance here and now
Abundance has to do with production, not with consumption
A scarce product in a decentralized network is abundant in
a distributed network
The &#8220;P2P mode of production&#8221; is the model for the
production of abundance
(PART 2/"2)
The two faces of productivity
Artificially creating scarcity has become a way of life for
over-scaled industry
Abundance is the magic that shines through the &#8220;hacker
ethic&#8221;
The path of abundance does not mean producing less
What will we do about the overuse of natural resources?
Connecting the dots
Conquer work, reconquer life
To be unable to access work is to be in social exile
There&#8217;s no self-realization without work
To conquer work is reconquer life
From adding to multiplying
The scene will be urban
The tasks of the communards
You are the protagonist
Appendix: concrete things you can do with this manifesto
Expand the conversation
Prepare to &#8220;make community&#8221;
To the friends in the Club de las Indias,
because we owe them the most valuable half of this manifesto.
To the communards of all times,
because their mistakes left us with the right questions.
To the new communards across the whole world,
because their enthusiasm brings us closer to the spirit of a time to come.
The dilemma of our time
Abundance within reach
Never before in History of humanity have technical capacities been as
potent and accessible to common people as today. The massive development
of the Internet through the &#8217;90s profoundly changed ways of socializing,
sharing, and working. Wealth was created in places that were socially
and geographically peripheral by the hands of millions of small
producers that, for the first time, could effectively access other
markets and knowledge. In Asia alone, we saw hundreds of millions of
people escape misery, more than in the rest of the history of humanity.
As technological change became generational and social change, there
appeared more and more environments of abundance, free goods, new forms
of collaborative work and, above all, a new work ethic based on
knowledge, the creation of goods, and &#8220;de-alienation.&#8221; The &#8220;hacker
ethic,&#8221; as it was termed at the turn of the century, inspired the birth
of first universal public good to be intentionally constructed by our
species: free software, which, by itself, has meant a transfer of
knowledge and technology greater than all developmental aid from rich
countries.
And, yet, not even the other great crisis of the last hundred years&#8212;the
one that started with the &#8220;Crash of &#8217;29&#8243;&#8212;created such discontent, such a
dark spirit, and so much widespread pessimism. Neither admonitions nor
hope work any longer to create attractive narratives. Well-being has
ceased to be a credible expectation of analysts&#8217; predictions or
political parties&#8217; options, whether old or new. All lines of contention
have been shown to be futile for the common people. We&#8217;re entering a
time in which no narrative can be believed if can&#8217;t demonstrate, here
and now, that it successfully allows a new generation to develop and
live decently through work.
Inequality, unemployment and demoralization
And, if anything has been really global over the last ten years, it&#8217;s
been the experience of social decomposition. It&#8217;s the same whether we
look in the most developed regions in the world or at emerging nations,
in the Mediterranean or in the South China Sea, in the English-speaking
world or in South America: society is more and more unequal, and the
differences quickly become cumulative. If you miss the train, you don&#8217;t
reach the destination.
In the most developed nations, the middle class has rediscovered
unemployment. New generations don&#8217;t even have access to work, or if they
do, it&#8217;s so precarious that it doesn&#8217;t let them experience the meaning
real of what they do. Work has ceased to be considered the center of
collective action, the origin of personal autonomy, and each person&#8217;s
contribution to society. In today&#8217;s popular culture, work is a scarce
good. There&#8217;s no lack of start-ups and NGOs that speculate with it, as
if it was a precious metal. Work, the necessary link between personal
effort and collective effort, is devalued to the limit, not only in the
market&#8212;reducing its piece of the pie compared to capital&#8212;but also
morally, in its public consideration and in its internal organization.
It has gone from being universally considered the center of social
organization to being perceived as facing extinction, from being
experienced as the basis of personal realization to being seen as a
source of anguish.
In a world where being able to contribute to the common well-being, work
is talked about as if it was a privilege, and the only way of building a
life seems to be getting rents. Rents are not just any income, but an
opportunistic and undeserved position, a extraordinary benefit produced
outside of the value that one contributes. Rents are the benefits
created by big businesses thanks to made-to-fit regulations or
monopolies that only exist by legal imposition, like intellectual
property. Rents are &#8220;incentives&#8221; that are decided on and inflated by the
same directors that receive them, or the consequences in cold, hard cash
of belonging to certain social spheres where certain positions and
contracts, public or private, can be accessed. Rents easily become
cumulative and create a spiral of inequality when access to information
and education depends on personal income, or when competition to assure
them is systematically restricted, as the State routinely does in key
sectors like energy, telecommunications or the media.
In a world of rents, everything looks like a zero-sum game, where one
wins because others lose. Distrust of everything and everyone,
institutions and people, is the norm. It shows an individualism of the
worst kind, for which life is senseless, and mere survival.
What is decomposing is not only the economic system, but what the human
experience means
It&#8217;s not just social cohesion that&#8217;s decomposing. The rules of the
economic system are decomposing, and with them, the human experience and
what it means to be human in our time. It&#8217;s the inability of the
economic system to create a future for everyone the that produces
loneliness and distrust of everyone; it&#8217;s the pettiness of a system in
which businesses depend on the benefits they get thanks to rents more
than selling their products, or on eliminating competitors more than
improve themselves, that produces lives of dependency, begging, and
voracity.
Never has there been so much wealth or so much knowledge as now and,
yet, far from feeling like both things give hope of abundance for
everyone, more and more people are afraid that this is a threat to
Nature, the same way they feel, day in and day out, like it&#8217;s a threat
to personal survival.
Capitalism and its critics
There were a time when capitalism transformed the world, bringing our
species closer to the abundance that, today, scares it so much. The
&#8220;cancer of business&#8221; took over from the old European societies, feudal
first and colonial centuries later, and smashed them from within in a
long process of almost six hundred years. Capitalism, which started off
as marginal&#8212;urban in a rural world, dynamic in a traditional society,
equalizing in a system in which identity was based on lineage and
origin&#8212;was revolutionary right from its first steps. In the city and its
markets, it created new lifestyles and mentalities, new forms of
knowledge, new freedoms, and new collective belongings.
Capitalism shaped the world because, before changing the State, it was
able to create a new form of human experience
Capitalism created a new form of human experience and, by doing so,
dynamited established relationships, its castes and its classes. It
wasn&#8217;t the work of a generation. It could only deploy its full potential
after centuries of evolution and entrenchment, of turning
fairs&#8212;temporary markets&#8212;into a large, permanent urban workshop and,
later, turning the guild craftsman into a factory worker under the thumb
of the merchant investor, who bought the materials and carried the
products to distant markets. It was only then that industrialization
made a profound social transformation out of what, until then, had only
been &#8220;tendencies.&#8221; It was the great revolutionary moment of the bourgeoisie.
In the first place, capitalism made a commodity of land, the principle
means of production of the times. In the process, the agrarian and
forest commons&#8212;the oldest and most widespread form of property&#8212;came to
occupy a marginal place. And, with it, the real community of the family,
the clan or the village, in which everyone knows each other by face and
name, because they are linked to them by interpersonal relationships and
affection. The vacuum was filled throughout the nineteenth century by
another innovation: the imagined community of the nation. &#8220;Imagined&#8221; not
because it was unreal, but because those who are considered its members
don&#8217;t know more than a tiny portion of the others, and have to imagine
the rest through common attributes, practices, values, and memories,
which are always debatable. Fraternity based on the friendship of
personal relationships and shared work will give way to an abstract
fraternity in search of a &#8220;common good&#8221; that the new social classes
linked to wage labor make a permanent part of social discourse.
Secondly, work became indistinguishable from whoever did it, because of
the homogenization of the processes in the new productive space of
society: the factory. The new relationship with work and, through it,
with society and nature, was impersonal and anonymous, and no longer had
to do with &#8220;being,&#8221; with lineage, or with geography. The vacuum created
by the dilution of the servant, the communard and the guild craftsman
was filled by a new abstract human type: the &#8220;individual.&#8221;
Although it may sound strange today, that whole advance&#8212;which allowed
humanity to grow in number, well-being, and knowledge like never
before&#8212;was produced thanks to making a commodity of everything that,
until then, had not been, like land, which hadn&#8217;t usually been rented or
sold, only possessed.
Even for the revolutionaries of the nineteenth century, it was
impossible to deny the progressive nature of the great works of
capitalism. They were well aware of how the industrial boom brought
Humanity towards abundance, increasing knowledge and its practical
consequence, technology. They were witnesses of the formidable
historical spectacle of a world in revolution where distances were cut,
the population multiplied, energy and water flowed in people&#8217;s houses
for the first time, and the most distant and closed empires saw their
walls give way before the onslaught of global commerce in manufacturing.
For the first time in history, humanity as such took on a real
existence: through new markets, we would all end up connected with
everyone throughout the world; and in the factory, the immense majority
of society would share a common experience&#8212;and therefore, would come to
be the same thing&#8212;to the rhythm of the new mechanical geniuses.
Capitalism, as they saw it, was preparing an egalitarian society through
equality of living conditions, work, and social relationships that that
it was, itself, expanding.
Revolutionaries that loved crises and large scales
But those revolutionaries saw something more: the growth of capitalism,
in the first place, wasn&#8217;t the least bit linear. Its crises, like all
prior crises, produced underconsumption (scandalous, miserable
situations for those excluded from production). But, in contrast to the
crises of agrarian societies, capitalist crises weren&#8217;t crises of
under-production, but of &#8220;over-production&#8221;: it&#8217;s not that the factories
couldn&#8217;t produce enough for the needs of all, it&#8217;s that the very dynamic
of the economic system made it impossible for them to sell it to the
great masses that needed it, because they didn&#8217;t have the money to buy
what was produced. Additionally, the revolutionaries asserted that all
this happened regularly, in cycles in which each decline necessarily led
to a confrontation between an ever-more concentrated group of owners and
an ever-more global and uniform class of workers. Everyone would
struggle in a large global revolution for control of the States that
held the social structures in place until, similar to what the
bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century did in the French Revolution, the
proletariat would take control of the State with one purpose: to direct
a massive process of decommodification, giving way to a society of
abundance where the essential purpose of production was to serve this or
that need, instead of being sold as objects and services for a price.
Marx and Kropotkin never proposed to to close the factories. They
thought that crises of overproduction signaled a limit of capitalism,
the limit at which the logic of the commodity clashed with human needs.
But they saw in the technology of mass production and in the
ever-greater scale of the businesses a reflection of the progress that
would lead the working class to &#8220;change the world from underneath.&#8221; They
thought that by eliminating the commodity nature of objects, the
&#8220;productive forces would be released,&#8221; which is to say, that
productivity would be developed even more, and with it knowledge,
well-being, etc. The very scale of production would also develop, until
it constituted a great global factory-State, so productive that it could
satisfy the material needs of all humanity with nothing more than
volunteer work.
Nothing of the sort happened. No &#8220;global revolution&#8221; took place. Since
1871, there were local and national revolutions in which communists and
anarchists looked for its first signs. Most were overthrown; none was
able to produce on a larger scale during the following cycle of growth
and crisis; and those that triumphed never brought about the
decommodification of production. On the contrary, they gave power to
repressive, totalitarian regimes, with very hierarchical and inefficient
nationalized economies and such low levels of well-being among workers
that they belied every delusion of the &#8220;liberation of productive
forces.&#8221; When the Soviet Union fell and China took its first steps
towards capitalism controlled by the Communist State, communism and
socialism were discredited as alternatives. In the &#8217;90s, their place was
taken by &#8220;anti-capitalism,&#8221; which fluctuated between affirming that
another world was possible and denying that capitalism and the human
species could survive together, but avoided explaining how the former
would become real and what made the latter inevitable. To a certain
degree, this was the result of the sense of profound failure of
&#8220;alternative&#8221; thought that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
But, lacking a theory of its own, it would become an invertebrate
socialism, a &#8220;big no&#8221; into which anything and everything would fit. It
was, in a certain way, a leftism chastened by false socialist paradises,
hesitant when it came to describing any future society, and far removed
from any pretense of building functional models in the present.
La historia que no nos contaron
Decades before the first socialist and libertarian groups of any weight
were formed, an alternative trend had started down a long path with a
very different focus: communitarianism.
The new world will be born and affirmed inside the old
The basic idea of communitarianism is that the new world will be born
and grow inside the old. Profound changes in social and economic
relationships&#8212;system changes&#8212;are not the product of revolutions and
political changes. It happens the other way around: systemic political
changes are the expression of new forms of social organizing, new
values, and ways of working and living, that have reached enough
maturity to be able to establish a broad social consensus. As of a
certain point in development, a &#8220;competition between systems&#8221; is
established. The new forms, until then valid only for a small minority,
begin to seem to be the only ones capable of offering a better future
for the large majority. Little by little, they expand their spectrum and
their number, encompassing and transforming broader and broader social
spaces, and become the center of the economy, reconfiguring the
cultural, ideological, and legal basis of society from within.
For communitarians, egalitarian forms should accompany capitalism in its
evolution as a parallel society, not as a utopia&#8212;the promise of a
society to come&#8212;except as a heterotopia: a different, alternative social
place, with values and ways of its own. At first, they do it from
behind, through learning, utilization and re-elaboration of existing
technology and, as of a certain point, entering in competition with it.
This perspective was called &#8220;constructive socialism.&#8221;
The first objective was always to show the feasibility of a
decommodified life, &#8220;here and now,&#8221; on any scale. Communitarianism is
not centered on creating political parties, but networks of small
productive egalitarian communities. The maxim of economic organization
comes to be &#8220;from each according to their abilities, to each according
to their needs&#8221;: communities of goods, revenue, and savings are
established, production is organized by consensus, and from the
beginning, the highest diversification is sought to serve the diversity
of personal needs and gain autonomy for all.
New relationships, here and now
From 1849 to today, egalitarian communities have always been working:
Icarian communities, Russian artels, Israeli kibbutzim, US, Japanese, or
German egalitarian farms&#8230; They&#8217;ve been on practically all continents,
they&#8217;ve had different names and nuances in different times and places,
they&#8217;ve been through all manner of crises, and their members have made
enormous sacrifices. In place of the centrality of the class nature of
the collectivist narrative, they wrote a story of their community and
their experience, which gave substance to the central idea of
constructive socialism: building&#8212;here and now, within the community and
between it and its surroundings&#8212;social and economic relationships that
are desired or postulated as valid alternatives to the existing
socioeconomic system, without delegating power to parties or
organizational structures outside of the communities themselves. Without
thinking of themselves as &#8220;experimental&#8221; or having detailed &#8220;roadmaps,&#8221;
they have created a heritage and a culture themselves, little by little.
They are the seeds of a society of abundance.
In the framework of the young and expansive capitalism of the nineteenth
century, or the capitalism of technological revolution and permanent war
that followed up through the present, if these &#8220;decommodified islets&#8221;
want to maintain their autonomy and approach abundance, they have to
enter the market: to live without needing money at all within the
community, they must learn to think like merchants outside of it. It&#8217;s
no contradiction: being in the market is the only way to not lose the
technological pace of the system they want to overcome. But, at the same
time, it&#8217;s the way to bring the first cultural and technological fruits
of the new society to the old society. It is, in many senses&#8212;including
the moral, since it aspires to expand the improvement in living
conditions to more people&#8212;the first step towards a competition between
systems.
The bourgeoisie, in its medieval infancy, introduced the revolutionary
principle of equality of origin and a few technological improvements
that expressed their vision of the world into some small spaces in
feudal society. All of them happened far from the center of the
production of value at the time, the fields. The medieval commercial
bourgeoisie invented important things, but eccentric for the times, like
the check, the letter of exchange, and double-entry accounting. In
contrast, communitarianism demonstrated from the first day the
feasibility of an economic organization thought of in terms of the
needs. It was the first to make a reality of equality in spite of
differences in gender or social or geographical origin, and across the
20th century, left a series of pioneering technologies: weatherization
and sanitation in popular housing; the improvement of agricultural
productivity, like drip irrigation, seed improvement, or the scientific
management of dairy facilities; the development of free software for
distributed networks; and the first analytical tools for public
intelligence. These are innovations that continue to be significant and
closer and closer to the productive core of the economic system.
In what little we&#8217;ve seen of twenty-first century, that sense of a
cultural and technological &#8220;membrane&#8221; between the past and the future,
between capitalist society and the small, decommodified space of
egalitarian communities, has become even more clear. The appearance of
new ways of producing based on new forms of communal property&#8212;like free
software&#8212;and distributed communication architectures&#8212;linked directly to
decommodification and the creation of abundance&#8212;put forth the notion
that we are on the threshold of a new phase in which we will be able to
change the nature of that competition between systems.
But, above all, what justifies a new time for the development of
communitarianism is an irreversible economic change that has been
imposed gradually: the reduction of the optimal scales of production.
This decline in the optimal productive scale explains the deep trends
that have produced the current economic crises, and why the political
and corporate responses are often times counterproductive. And any
alternative is not centered on social class or the nation, but on community.
Scale and scope
The optimum scale is most efficient dimension of the productive units of
a society, the size as of which inefficiencies created by having to
manage the excessive size of those units exceeds the benefit produced by
being a little bigger. For each dimension of the market and each
technological level, there exists an optimal scale of production, and it
turns out to be easy to understand that, in principle, technological
development reduces the optimal dimensions, because the better the
technology, the fewer resources&#8212;work hours, capital and raw material&#8212;are
needed to produce the same quantity of products.
From the era of economies of scale&#8230;
During the height of capitalism, in the 19th century, between British
imperialism&#8217;s bet on free trade, American expansion, European
unifications and the revolutions in transportation&#8212;the clipper, the
railroad, and steamboats&#8212;markets grew much faster than productivity. The
optimum size always remained out of reach, and capital to reach it was
always scarce. It was the Golden Age, and it saw the most authentic of
joint-stock companies: gigantic collective efforts that brought together
the savings of tens of thousands of small savers and capitalists to put
whole countries into production, to charter faster and faster boats, lay
telegraph cables across oceans, or cross continents from end to end with
railways.
For a long time, the continuous growth of scale seemed to confirm the
Marxists, Kropotkinists, and social democrats. In all of their economic
models, underneath the permanent expansive dynamic of capitalism, there
was the need to reduce prices by increasing production per hour to
survive competition and even&#8212;if the owner was the first to incorporate
new machines or technologies&#8212;get extraordinary benefits while other
factories adapted. Every time productive capacity increases, the benefit
that each unit of product contributes is reduced, so to maintain or
increase the total benefit, the owner has to produce even more quantity,
which requires the incorporation of new machines and processes to reach
a still-greater scale. Finally, according to these authors, when
production approaches or even exceeds the potential size of the market,
crises of overproduction erupt.
This model, described for the first time by Marx, is known as &#8220;law of
the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.&#8221; For decades, Marxist
economists repeated the mantra that &#8220;the decreasing tendency of the rate
of profit is compensated for with the increase in the mass of product&#8221;
and took for granted that each cycle of growth and crisis would begin
with a greater scale and would increase it further still. Accordingly,
capitalism was on the path to create big businesses, true global
monopolies in each and every industrial and consumption market, which
fit like a glove both with the quasi-religious Marxist vision of a
great, revolutionary, global Armageddon between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie, and with the social-democratic vision that socialism would
be the result of the nationalization of the great industries by the
democratic state as they reached critical sizes.
However, underneath both models, revolutionary and
reformist-nationalizing, was a presumption that would soon be shown to
be erroneous: that in each cycle, greater effective demand would appear.
It&#8217;s obvious that the average scale of the businesses in the capitalist
world would not increase unless owners could foresee a growing volume of
demand, because with demand that was not growing globally, if they could
produce the same thing with fewer resources, they weren&#8217;t going to
increase scale, but reduce it.
At time when Marx was writing his economic theory&#8212;in fact, for almost
the entire 19th century&#8212;that extraordinary demand came largely from the
incorporation of Asia and Africa into the world market. Colonialism, by
subjugating backward economies and tearing down trade barriers for
British and French products, continuously increased the demand for
manufactured products, overcoming the tendency to reduce the size of the
productive units that drove technological development.
&#8230;to the era of the inefficiencies of scale
We could put the date of the change at 1914. Twenty years after the
colonial division of Africa among the great industrial powers at the
Berlin Conference, the expectation that new, extra-capitalist markets
would join those of the great powers had already dissipated. Territorial
tensions in Europe reflected the rigidity of the delimitation of
colonial borders. The war that was about to break out was a &#8220;world war&#8221;
precisely because it meant the end of the first stage of the
configuration of a unified global market. Marxist prophecies were coming
true. The crisis of &#8217;29 would seem to corroborate them. However, from
there&#8212;through another World War, the processes of decolonization in
Africa and Asia, and a very long Cold War&#8212;the evidence set about
dismantling the idea that capitalism was constantly evolving towards
increases in the scale of businesses.
In fact, big national businesses&#8212;which flourished at the beginning of
the twentieth century, after the war&#8212;were only central in the socialist
countries and for some nationalist regimes in backward nations. Both in
them and in the developed world, where they briefly flourished as a tool
of post-war reconstruction, they were not the &#8220;spontaneous&#8221; result of
the evolution of markets. In every case, they were a shortcut to get
production underway and reinvigorate industry after the enormous
destruction left by the crisis and war. But they soon reached a ceiling,
especially in the framework of the planned economies for which they had
become a banner. In each new phase of technological development, Big
State Businesses increased inefficiencies and their costs, which, in an
authoritarian and centralized system, would spread with extraordinary
speed across the economic system. The USSR, which promised to &#8220;overtake
the USA&#8221; in the middle of the &#8217;60s, entered into a crisis by the &#8217;70s,
and into open decomposition in the &#8217;80s.
In the Western bloc, not even the largest multinationals had dimensions
comparable to the great State dinosaurs of the USSR, and yet the weight
of the inefficiencies of scale started to be obvious by the mid &#8217;50s.
That was when economist Kenneth Boulding called attention to problems of
communication, management, and control in large, pyramidal
organizations. Boulding also warned that, given the size and weight of
certain companies in the economic system and their effect on employment,
inefficiencies threatened to spread to the whole economy through the
state, since over-scaled businesses competed to &#8220;capture it&#8221; and to make
up for the costs of inefficiencies due to over-scaling with rents
resulting from tailor-made regulations.
Following Boulding&#8217;s warnings, technological research then became
centered on information science and data management, on communications,
and on forms of work. The &#8220;information revolution&#8221; that started at that
time was the first line of defense against the effects of of
over-scaling. It wasn&#8217;t enough, however. In the middle of the &#8217;70s, it
became obvious in Europe&#8212;and not only there&#8212;that the State of the
postwar period, captured by big businesses and sectoral interests, was
effectively unviable.
This was when the set of policies called &#8220;neoliberalism&#8221; was designed.
It was basically an attempt to confront the results of over-scaling in
the other possible way: by expanding markets. What&#8217;s original about
neoliberalism is that not only does it extend markets in space&#8212;through
reduction of tariff barriers and creation of free-trade zones&#8212;but also
over time, with the use of new tools such as &#8220;financialization.&#8221;
Today, capital is too big for the real productive scale&#8230;
It&#8217;s well known how financial innovations and deregulation came together
to lay the foundations for the global crisis of 2008. What&#8217;s less
discussed is that in the same &#8220;exuberance of capital&#8221; that preceded the
crash, a problem of excessive scale was manifested. Investment
exuberance is a mass mirage produced by the hopelessness of investors
who can&#8217;t find a place for their capital.
Also, this problem, already endemic, was multiplied by the capture of
the State and of the market itself by banks. The State had deregulated
financial activity for the benefit of the big banks beyond a reasonable
point. State agencies were powerless, and often conditioned or seduced
by pressure from institutions that were considered &#8220;systemic,&#8221; and had
turned &#8220;too big to fail&#8221; into a pirate flag. And not even the market
could act as a counterweight. With ratings agencies captured by their
own customers&#8212;and distributing hyper-optimistic descriptions&#8212;the mass of
small investors could only follow the great tendencies of capital as an
independent indicator. The trouble is that that movement wasn&#8217;t
independent at all, since the same financial groups were channeling it.
The result is a system that, even in midst of the crash, they contained
their damage by abusing asymmetries of information and their power to
set prices at the expense of their own customers. Today, eight years
after the fall of Lehman Brothers, that system remains basically intact.
The root of the problem was that the financial system was also suffering
form the inefficiencies of over-scaling: the amounts of capital were too
large in relation to real, productive businesses for anyone to pay
attention to the reality of the investments; and even to find interest
in investing in a scale that was known to be really productive. The
problem to solve was&#8212;and is&#8212; &#8220;placing&#8221; big piles of capital that
couldn&#8217;t, and can&#8217;t, find enough projects of their size.
Over the last two decades, it&#8217;s become common to hear complaints in the
economic press that fewer new large industries that justify grandiose
investments are appearing than in prior periods.
The attempt to solve this that arrived with neoliberalism was to
&#8220;financialize&#8221; whole markets: to &#8220;package&#8221; risks&#8212;to &#8220;dissolve&#8221; some from
over here with some from over there&#8212;and create abstractions of value to
bet, more than invest, those huge amounts of capital. Enron, the
business that made financialization its flagship product, made it
possible to invest in things like &#8220;Megabit of bandwidth installed&#8221; or
&#8220;Megawatt consumed,&#8221; showing that not even telcoms and energy companies
were capable of meeting the need to place large masses of capital on
their own. And the famous mortgage derivatives, which were at the center
of the crisis in 2008, showed that the construction sector had also
become too small for the scale of capital that wanted to cast its lot
with it.
The crisis of 2008 made clear the origin of the &#8220;decomposition&#8221; with
which we begin this manifesto: the simultaneous destruction of the two
main social institutions, the State and the market, by the hunger for
rents of over-scaled companies&#8212;and financial companies are just the tip
of the iceberg&#8212;which see in them the only way to make up for their own
inefficiencies of scale. What everyone saw in the financial sector in
the years that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, was later
seen with equal clarity in the dominant businesses in sectors as
apparently different as energy or agroindustry.
&#8230; and the optimal scale is approaching community dimensions
But if the result of neoliberal financial policies was object of a
profound public scrutiny, what does not usually receive so much
attention is how the information revolution joined the globalization of
commerce in goods with the reduction of optimal scales to create a whole
series of new productive forms. Surely the reason is that the first to
take advantage of it were thousands of Asian small businesspeople, the
true engines of the drastic reduction in global poverty. Only more than
a decade later, in the middle of a crisis, have the new models started
to reach Europe and America, driving a wave of sustained, small-scale,
entrepreneurial projects on a new technological base and often oriented
towards niche demands in the global market.
We can group these new forms around two broad trends: the &#8220;P2P mode of
production&#8221; and the &#8220;direct economy.&#8221; The P2P mode of production
replicates the free software model in all kinds of industries where
knowledge condensed into design, software, creativity, blueprints, etc.,
is central to the creation of value; and can accumulate in a &#8220;immaterial
universal commons&#8221; that can be improved, reformed, and used in
alternative ways for many kinds of different projects.
This multifunctionality of tools and value chains&#8212;which is what
economists call &#8220;scope&#8221;&#8212; is the key to the direct conomy, a way of
creating products created by small groups and launching them on global
markets by using, on the one hand, low-cost, adaptable, external
industrial chains and free software and, on the other, advance sales
systems or collaborative financing.
That is, before our eyes, before and after the large financial crisis, a
new kind of small-scale industry has developed, which is characterized
by being global and by getting capital and credit outside the financial
system, some in collaborative financing platforms, others announcing
their own pre-sales and getting donations in exchange for merchandising.
In fact, it&#8217;s an industry of &#8220;free&#8221; capital, which doesn&#8217;t have to give
up ownership of the business to the owners of capital because, on the
one hand, it reduces its needs by using publicly available technological
tools, like free software, and on the other, obtaining the little
capital it needs in the form of advance sales and donations.
Taken together, P2P production and the direct economy, two ways of
substituting scale with scope, are the leading edge of a productive
economy moving more and more quickly towards the reduction of scale.
That makes them essential to understanding why communitarianism has a
unique opportunity in the new century.
Building abundance here and now
Abundance has to do with production, not with consumption
Abundance is an economic concept in the setting of production, not
consumption. Abundance exists when an extra unit can be produced without
that meaning a perceptible increase in costs. For economists, it can be
reduced to a formula: &#8220;zero marginal cost.&#8221; In an ideal competitive
market, when the marginal cost is zero, that means that the prices that
would maximize the benefit to producers would also be zero.
Common sense would say then that the business would have no incentive to
continue producing. But really, just the opposite would happen. Although
the price of the product is zero, the interest of the producer is to
produce the maximum possible to dilute fixed costs as much as it can
among all units produced. It is at that theoretical moment, with zero
price, when a business stops thinking about the market and starts to
seek the maximization of meeting the human needs its products match.
That is, if the marginal cost approached zero, the products would be
&#8220;decommodified,&#8221; would stop being commodities that have to be sold,
because if they aren&#8217;t, that would create a new loss. As a consequence,
as of a certain level, anyone could enjoy as much as they need without
giving up anything, and the same rationality that orients the behavior
of the businesses towards the maximization of benefit would lead to an
economy centered on satisfying human needs: anyone could enjoy as much
as they need without giving up anything.
This does not mean that capitalism tends to be &#8220;decommodified&#8221; by the
mere effect of competition. But this extreme solution of a basic model
of economic analysis is, in any case, very illuminating.
In practice, abundance exists when the cost of producing one more unit
is negligible and, given a sensible calculation of potential demand, we
can do it indefinitely. For example: the cost of serving a web page or
an electronic book to one more user from our own server is, for all
practical purposes, zero.
A scarce product in a decentralized network is abundant in a distributed
network
We should say that this example would only be true within a definable
range of requests, but that if the number of people who want read our
book were to pass a certain critical point, we would have to increase
our bandwidth and the number of servers as well. So, if we look at it
over the long term, these cost increases should be attributed to the
units served. The marginal cost, the cost associated with the last copy
distributed, wouldn&#8217;t be zero. Abundance, in that case, would have been
just an illusion, a mirage, sort of like the cost of taking more person
to work in our car: it&#8217;s practically zero&#8230; until the seats run out. Once
the places are full, we need other car, or at least a bus ticket, for
each additional person we&#8217;d like to transport. The marginal cost, the
increase in costs for one more person, would be positive and easily
perceptible.
But in our example, an information good, this criticism would only be
true if the copies were distributed from a single server. If we share it
on a distributed network with other users who, by downloading it, make
it available to others in turn, each new download, each new user, will
mean a possible place for others to download more. The more people
download it, the less possibility there will be that, no matter how fast
or large increases in demand may be, that any member of the network
would have to increase their costs so that someone could download a new
copy.
This is doubtlessly the most important thing the Internet has taught us:
the same product that is abundant in a distributed network certainly
would not be in a centralized or decentralized network. And, conversely,
what is scarce in a centralized or decentralized network, can be
abundant in a distributed network.
This finding may seem limited, since with current technologies, it would
only affect intangible goods. But some of those intangibles&#8212;like
industrial design, hardware, or processes&#8212;are the motors of the increase
in productivity in physical goods and, since the world wars, the
percentage they represent of total value produced has only increased.
Their conversion into free goods can&#8217;t help but have a profound effect
on the whole productive system.
That&#8217;s how, for example, the creation of free software works, as does
the whole growing economy in general, the immense majority of it
decommodified, that we include under the label &#8220;the P2P mode of
production.&#8221; At the same time, the direct economy uses the results of
innovation outside the productive apparatus controlled by over-scaled
industries and the very over-scaled financial system, increasing
productivity in the manufacture of tangible goods and pushing scale even
farther downward.
The &#8220;P2P mode of production&#8221; is the model for the production of abundance
Although we are still far from general abundance, we have a model of the
production of abundance for intangible goods and innovation&#8212;the &#8220;P2P
mode of production.&#8221; This, in turn, feeds a sector, the direct economy,
that demonstrates enough productivity in the market to compete and beat
the industry &#8220;from the outside,&#8221; without the help of over-scaled
finance. That is, this new productive ecosystem is capable of competing
and gaining ground against a giant that enjoys the advantage of
extra-market rents, like customized regulations, grants, or patents.
We&#8217;re talking about the same extra-market rents that multiplied with
neoliberalism and which have produced the simultaneous erosion of state
and market, which is to say, social decomposition. So, just to
demonstrate that a productive alternative exists is already big news.
This social and productive space around the &#8220;new digital commons&#8221; or
simply, the &#8220;commons,&#8221; is today&#8217;s equivalent of the first cities and
markets of the medieval bourgeoisie, a space where new non-commercial
social relationships appeared, and the new logic, together with signs of
autonomy, begin to show a limited but direct impact on productivity.
Throughout the lower Middle Ages, the bourgeoisie was able to drive
those cities to turn them, first, into a big &#8220;urban workshop,&#8221; and
later, into &#8220;municipal democracies.&#8221; A similar historical task, now with
a society of abundance as the goal, is what lies ahead for communitarianism.
This is because this whole reduction of scales brings the optimum size
of productive units ever closer to the community dimension, and
therefore, points to community as the protagonist of a society of
abundance. And it is in community that we can understand why the
struggle to overcome a socioeconomic system cannot be proposed as an
electoral platform, revolutionary as it may be, but rather, happens in
the setting of more profound competition: productivity.
[End part 1/2]
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<nbr>8.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Communard Manifesto (1/2)</subject>
<from>Felix Stalder</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Wed, 3 Aug 2016 14:27:29 +0200</date>
<content>
On 2016-08-02 10:49, Felix Stalder wrote:
&gt; It's not simply a theoretical text, but a testimony to the scope
&gt; of vision driving the development of the Spanish \"rebel cities\".
In the mean time, I had some private emails pointing out that Las Indias
are not really connected to the recent city-based movements, but more
directly to the Gijon Administration and, above all, the Mondragon
Cooperative. And, apparently, the relationships between the different
groups/movements are not without tensions.
So, it might be helpful if someone could shed some light onto wider context.
all the best. Felix
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<mail>
<nbr>9.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; The Communard Manifesto (2/2)</subject>
<from>Felix Stalder</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 2 Aug 2016 10:50:00 +0200</date>
<content>[START 2/2]
https://lasindias.com/the-communard-manifesto-html
The two faces of productivity
&#8220;Productivity&#8221; is a word that evokes rejection among large sectors of
the population. For years, salaries have been reduced, workdays
extended, and thousands of workers fired in the name of increasing
productivity. It&#8217;s normal for the word to cause a shiver, because in
stagnant situations, and in the capitalist framework, that&#8217;s exactly
what it means.
In reality, however, increasing productivity means being able to do more
with fewer resources and is the measure of all systemic alternative. The
famous &#8220;liberation of productive forces,&#8221; that the old revolutionaries
expected to succeed capitalism, is nothing more than a general
development of productivity. The engine of the increase in productivity
is technological change, understood broadly to include forms of
organizing and structures. From the community point of view, the center
of the development of productivity today is in free software, in
distributed networks, and in multipurpose, low-cost tools of production
and chains: everything that brings us closer to abundance.
Increasing productivity means &#8220;squeezing more&#8221; out of the factors: with
the same quantity of inputs, producing more value in the same period of
time. Increasing productivity means, for example, getting more energy
out of a solar panel, needing less water to produce the same amount or
more of vegetables, or having new programs that reduce the hours that we
have to spend on repetitive management tasks.
But for over-scaled capital, in stagnant situations where there&#8217;s no new
investment or technological improvement, &#8220;productivity&#8221; means, above
all, employing the labor factor more intensively. That is to say:
getting work hours for free&#8212;for example, by extending the workday
without remunerating overtime; or through personnel reduction, while
unreasonably overwhelming those who remain&#8212;which is equivalent to a
salary reduction. Alternative and sometimes complementary ways could
include reducing the quality of raw materials and, thus, their cost,
without consumers realizing it; or ceasing to take responsibility for
externalities created in production, like dumping unprocessed waste in a
river to save on filters and purifiers. No wonder the word
&#8220;productivity&#8221; can sound scary.
From the perspective of communities, however, developing productivity
means something completely different. The main way to obtain it is as
new as it is inaccessible to the typical business, which is over-scaled
and anxious for rents.
Let&#8217;s again take up the example of publishing an online book. To
calculate the productivity of the factors, we would have to find the
ratio between the number of downloads and the number of factors employed
in their production. But if, as we saw before, instead of posting it on
a single server, we share it on a distributed network, the cost of one
more download will be zero. At that point, we&#8217;re in a world of
abundance. Even if it had tremendous success, and hundreds of thousands
of people downloaded a copy, we wouldn&#8217;t need to increase the use of the
factors. The productivity of the work necessary to write, edit, and
format the book would increase with each extra download.
But embracing this path means accepting that the price of an abundant
good&#8212;which is any digitized content in a distributed network&#8212;is zero.
And with zero prices, it&#8217;s not so easy assure capital the dividends it
desires. So, publishers, software giants, pharmaceutical companies, and
movie studios try to maintain an extra-market rent, in the form of a
legal monopoly called &#8220;intellectual property.&#8221; And that&#8217;s why music
companies depend on centralized structures, which come with considerable
marginal costs, like iTunes or Spotify, to control the restricted
distribution of their products, so they can force the maintenance of
positive prices.
Artificially creating scarcity has become a way of life for over-scaled
industry
The traditional information and knowledge industries are engaged in
artificially producing scarcity. Contemporary economic theory has
described intellectual property as &#8220;unnecessary&#8221; for years, and there
are more and more renowned economists that think that its negative
effects far exceed the positives. Large distributed networks, in which
millions of people share digital files, are as infinitely more efficient
medium to distribute a digitized product than Facebook, Twitter, Google
Books or Amazon, but the content industries have held a legal and
political grip for years, which costs them millions every year in
lawyers and lobbyists, to be able to fence off such networks by law and
jail their supporters.
In the production of physical goods and services, the contrast no is
less drastic. In contrast to a capitalist business, in an egalitarian
community, the increase in productivity translates to a reduction of the
work time that one must dedicate to be able maintain a comfortable way
of life on the basis of selling products in the market.
We need to say that reducing work means we can spend more time, not
staring at the ceiling, but dedicated to other kinds of activities, like
learning new disciplines, playing, painting, or developing contributions
to the commons in the form of free software, designs, books, or
audiovisual content in the public domain. Activities that show us what
the kind of work that will substitute wage labor will consist of as we
approach an authentic society of abundance: an expression of skills
motivated by the pleasure of enjoying interaction with others, the
pleasure of learning, experimenting, and contributing. This it the
opposite of the sophisticated form of slavery imposed by scarcity.
Capitalism was the greatest promoter of productivity in history, but it
simply can&#8217;t allow itself abundance. The community, on the other hand,
needs it.
Abundance is the magic that shines through the &#8220;hacker ethic&#8221;
Anyone who has lived or spent enough time in an egalitarian community
has sensed how abundance advances through the reduction of work forced
by scarcity and its gradual substitution by work understood as a
personal and voluntary expression of the pleasure of learning and
contributing. When everything is communal and responsibility is shared,
there is no division between life time and work time. You can be
yourself, and development in work drives us to learn new things, in new
fields, and continue advancing. Then we stop being mere &#8220;technicians&#8221; or
&#8220;specialists&#8221; and become &#8220;multispecialists.&#8221; This is a way of developing
intellectually that fits naturally not only with the reduction of scale,
but above all with the development of scope, the capacity to create many
different things with the same productive base. Multispecialization is
progress towards the end of the atomization of knowledge that paralleled
the division of labor to the limit in the industrial factory.
Abundance is the magic that shines through the &#8220;hacker ethic&#8221; and
assorted user groups. It&#8217;s no coincidence that a work ethic based on
knowledge and enjoyment is extending beyond the communard world&#8212;where it
always existed&#8212;coinciding with the social expansion of the Internet and
the first forms of P2P production. The first cultural manifestations of
distributed networks cultivated the pleasure of discovering all those
applications of knowledge that do a lot of good but are not commodities.
They celebrated these being valuable, because, even though they have a
zero price, they reveal to us the fraternity of shared knowledge and, in
in time, improve the life of thousands or millions of people.
For almost a century, capitalism has been incapable of turning increases
in productivity into reductions in the workday. The &#8220;hacker ethic&#8221;
connected with P2P production shows how the development of abundance
leads, right from day one, to the progressive abolition of labor forced
by need. That form of work competes with and opposes time dedicated to
learning, living, and enjoying life.
El camino de la abundancia no pasa por producir menos
Abundance has nothing to do with consumption and even less with
consumerism. In reality, consumerism is not a &#8220;state of capitalism,&#8221; but
a compulsive form of consumption with which some people, reduced to
isolated individuals when they reach the market, try to recover from
anguish, loneliness, the anxiety of work without meaning, and an
atomized way of life that, like the system that produces them, &#8220;aren&#8217;t
going anywhere.&#8221; Part of the middle class practices consumerism with the
same fervor with which it then talks about it as if it was a universal
guilt. Some clamor to &#8220;reduce consumption&#8221; and &#8220;degrow&#8221; as a systemic
alternative. It&#8217;s a myopic view: consumerism is not the center of the
current economic system. It is the spiritual symptom, visible only in a
privileged minority, of a more serious and widespread disease&#8212;the same
one that produces the chronic underconsumption in which the majority of
humanity continues to live and the environmental disasters that move them.
To cure that disease does not mean producing less or &#8220;returning&#8221; to
pre-capitalist technologies. To renounce the productivity conquered by
scientific knowledge would mean more exclusion and poverty. To exchange
industry for artisanship and technified agriculture for less productive
forms would mean simply reducing productivity and, therefore,
squandering even more human and natural resources than the
inefficiencies of over-scaling already do. To renounce technological
development is nothing other than adopting forms of production that are
more costly in resources.
Quite to the contrary, we want to produce abundance here and now, on
another scale and using another logic&#8212;those of the community and the
needs of real people&#8212;developing more and more productive free
technologies, because only with higher productivity will we be able to
consume fewer non-renewable natural resources, fewer hours of labor
forced by need, and less capital, while still taking responsibility for
the well-being of others.
If there&#8217;s anything we can&#8217;t renounce without making things worse, it&#8217;s
abundance. It&#8217;s hard, and will continue to be, to overcome the &#8220;fences&#8221;
and &#8220;hurdles&#8221; that patents have put in the way of scientific knowledge.
A lot of damage has been done by the evolution towards the artificial
creation of scarcity in the chemical, agrarian, and pharmaceutical
industries. We must not confuse scientific and technological development
with the monopolistic and rent-seeking applications of it, which
over-scaled technology, seed, and biomedical research businesses have
made into their flagship products. In the application of genetics to
agriculture, for example, there is the promise of abundance, though even
its use by Monsanto today means a daily life of environmental
destruction, artificial scarcity, and destruction of producers&#8217; freedom.
What will we do about the overuse of natural resources?
The end of the overuse of natural resources will not be reached by
producing less or returning to outdated technologies, but on the path
towards abundance.
This can be seen clearly in agricultural exploitation. In Israel, where
the kibbutz and cooperative movement was the nucleus of agrarian
production and the leader in technological innovation, production
between 1948 and today multiplied by sixteenfold, three times more than
the population. And while irrigated land went from 30,000 to 190,000 Ha,
12% less water is consumed. That is, technological development
encouraged by the communitarian sector increased general productivity&#8212;by
no less than 26%&#8212;significantly reducing the cost of producing one more
unit, and, to that extent, approaching abundance. But increasing the
productivity of the factor even more&#8212;we were told for decades&#8212;would lead
to a regional collapse if production continued increasing. Instead, more
productivity and more production, far from leading to a greater stress
on resources, reduced the total consumption of water.
But strengthening communities and the productivity of the communitarian
sector it is not the focus of the official narrative or the political
consensus in Europe or among US liberals. In that narrative, fed for
decades by catastrophism that ran through all messages, from the
Hollywood blockbusters to official documents from the UN or the EU, it
was all about justifying, at all costs, the way that States paid big,
over-scaled businesses&#8217; transformation costs to avoid a disaster that
themselves had created and reported. In the name of the imminent
catastrophe, we needed to pay car companies for their infrastructure
costs as they moved to electric cars, and give crazy subsidies to big
energy companies, assuring their centrality when technology was already
pointing towards renewable, distributed electricity. The process was,
and is, a festival of rent-capture and corruption that has even drawn in
Mondragon, the group of cooperatives that, for years, has been a global
model precisely because of its excessive scale and its distance from
community models.
It couldn&#8217;t be any other way. For years, adhering to the ecologist
narrative meant choose between two false options. The first: ignore
misery and the hunger for the majority of the world, and advocate for
reducing productivity. The second: join the list of those who want to
take away even more sovereignty from people and communities and give
more rents to monopolies. Obviously, it&#8217;s a no-win situation.
Connecting the dots
If we connect the dots of economic change in our time, certainly the
first thing that comes into view is a great crisis of scale in which
large funds and companies of dysfunctional volume are asphyxiating the
two main institutions of the system&#8212;the State and the market&#8212;and
accelerating their global decomposition, decomposition that has enormous
human and environmental costs. But if we expand the framework, we also
see that the &#8220;globalization of the small,&#8221; free software, and
distributed networks have created the first system of technological
non-commercial innovation&#8212;the &#8220;P2P mode of production&#8221;&#8212;and a growing
industrial sector&#8212;the direct economy&#8212;which is supported by it, is
competing face to face with overscaled agrarian and industrial
businesses, even though it has communal dimensions.
And if we dig a little, still we&#8217;ll find something more: we&#8217;ll discover
that communitarianism is a parallel, underground movement, which has
accompanied capitalism since its youth, exploring the paths of a new
life experience and planting the seed of a society of abundance, while
it waited for its time to arrive. In its time, the scale of change could
be accepted by self-organized egalitarian communities. From that time
forward, distributed networks of communities would be able to lay the
foundation for real competition between systems, just as capitalism did
with its feudal and land-based forerunner.
We think that time is arriving. But to be able take advantage of it, we
first need to conquer something that the narrative of decomposition is
grinding down: the centrality of work.
Conquer work, reconquer life
The constant increase in productive scales over nearly two centuries,
and with them, in the division of labor and of knowledge, has produced
an erosion of the relationship between people and the concrete work they
do. For more and more people, it became harder to understand what their
work meant and contributed to their loved ones and to society besides a
salary and a few days &#8220;off&#8221; per year. That&#8217;s what was called
&#8220;alienation.&#8221; Gigantic scale, work so specialized and repetitive that
seemed it insignificant, homogenization of everyone&#8217;s labor and the
resulting perfect substitutability of workers, made meaning&#8212;the social
and intellectual utility of the labor that each person did in
society&#8212;something that was alien to people&#8217;s lives. &#8220;Work&#8221; became
non-life, as opposed to &#8220;time off,&#8221; which was truly human and reserved
for family and friends, which is to say, a community.
It would be reasonable to think that this phenomenon would fade with the
gradual reduction of the optimal scales of production and the slow
emergence&#8212;as industries became more independent from the incorporation
of knowledge&#8212;of multispecialization. But the truth is that new
generations are deprived of even alienated work.
To be unable to access work is to be in social exile
During 15M [widespread anti-austerity protests that began on May 15,
2011 in Madrid] it became fashionable in Spain call young people who
went to work in other places around the world &#8220;exiles.&#8221; Meanwhile,
according to official statistics, 40% of those who remained were
unemployed. These were the true exiles: they were separated from
productive life, separated from collaboration and from doing things
socially, and separated from a relationship with nature.
The entire life of those who tried to enter the labor market at the
beginning of the crisis is an anomaly. By being alien to the very
reality they were part of, they became spectators, even of themselves;
once, people used cell phones in demonstrations, and now they use
cameras. The separation of work soon became evident in the emergence of
(anti-)consumerist narratives; consumption&#8212;the only way they can
participate in an economy that&#8217;s alien to them&#8212;became, for many, the
explanation for the whole social system and its failures. One of the
ways of expressing that general alienation was substituting the
traditional centrality of the demand for access to work with the demand
for a rent guaranteed by the State.
To live outside the social space created by work is to go into social
exile, to lose or never have had the position of a real member of a
community: to not be among those who turn work into wealth, but among
those who depend on rents.
Everything that has defined this crisis has trapped those who reached
adulthood with it as permanent minors. Everything led to their solitary
confinement as individual-consumer. That isolation is necessarily
frustrating. It&#8217;s alienation that is felt as such, as meaninglessness.
But the search for meaning outside of work&#8212;which is to say: outside of
community, society, and nature&#8212;can easily lead people to search for
consolation in illusory communities that absorb us without providing
what makes us a useful part of a real community: the ability to
contribute to the well-being of one another by producing. That&#8217;s why
these have been years of growth in racism, anti-Semitism, xenophobia,
jihadism, and political and religious sectarianism.
There&#8217;s no self-realization without work
And, precisely because of that, the old communitarian slogan of the
&#8220;conquest of work&#8221; is more current than ever. &#8220;Conquering work,&#8221;
recovering it as central to society by way of the community, leading it
and creating it, is the only thing that can turn back the drift towards
the void of the consumerist narrative, the rejection of differences,
xenophobia, and the thousand and one nationalisms that arise, seeking to
create even more borders and rents. It&#8217;s the only thing that can
recreate meaning and allow for self-knowledge and self-realization,
which is to say, each person living their own values. So, work has an
inevitable moral dimension, and that&#8217;s why conquering work has the value
of regeneration, of true personal re-empowerment for a whole generation
and a great mass of people, which political activism or conformity will
never be able to offer.
Never have technology and knowledge allowed so much well-being to be
produced at scales as small as today. Never has it been so easy to
become protagonists of production and of the construction of our
surroundings; never have available technologies incorporated or
developed as much knowledge as in our day; never have productive
processes been as transparent about their relationship with their
surroundings with so much facility and such impressive scope as today.
And yet, despite it all, rarely before has the spirit of time been as
disconnected from the possibilities of the historical moment. The cause
is, once more, the impact moral of decomposition and unemployment.
Unemployment is the expression of the destruction of productive
capacity. In economic terms, it&#8217;s the worst form of waste, the bloodiest
of inefficiencies. And the effect on the mood of anyone who suffers it
is a like millstone around the neck, or an acid that destroys
self-confidence, security, and conviction about their potential to
create. Unemployment feeds fear, and fear paralyzes and blinds.
To conquer work is reconquer life
Taking the things that fear and insecurity would have us think are
impossible and making them visible is the first way to empower those who
have been exiled from work and deprived of its meaning, which will
encourage them to take responsibility for their own communities. The
generation that was expelled from the productive system is called to
conquer work and, with it, life.
Abundance is the goal we move towards with the development of knowledge
in our species. It&#8217;s not just a question of numbers, math, or
accounting, but also of ethics, desires, feelings, and aesthetics. We
create technology, and it, in turn, transforms us, transforms what it
means to be human in the new time that we ourselves have established.
And from there, we can imagine and build abundance with renewed strength.
The time has come to take the initiative, to begin to build egalitarian
and productive communities, and not as experiments or &#8220;islands&#8221; in a
ocean of large scales. In the beginning, they will only be &#8220;examples.&#8221;
But examples, accompanied by the idea that emulation is possible, are
more powerful than any form of propaganda.
The communal alternative does not provide the gregarious confidence of
the political hooligan or the empty pride of the racist. Belonging to a
community is recognition through work and learning, not an &#8220;essence&#8221;
inherited from national culture or birth, or the result of insubstantial
adherence or an ID card. It&#8217;s not the product of the permanent
imagination of confrontation with some universal evil. You are building
constantly with others, making things so we can all grow together,
sharing more and more responsibility, and giving and receiving trust.
It&#8217;s the opposite of the feeling of impunity that &#8220;frees&#8221; the &#8220;follower&#8221;
who is protected by a leader, a flag, or a political brand in the din of
street fighting, online bickering, or media &#8220;smackdowns.&#8221; To be a
communard is to gain autonomy and security in the fraternity of
learning, to be rediscovered as valuable and valued in shared work. To
be a communard is to put the values we believe in into action, not
compete to shout them the loudest or wield them like a menacing weapon.
To be a communard does not give the static tranquility of the yogi or
the mystic who seeks the silence of loneliness, but the serenity that
listens to and seeks to include others, without using outrage as an
excuse to do nothing or hiding behind the disdain of supposed
superiority. To be a communard is a way of living, learning, and
building by sharing it all with others.
We need grow with others to be able to reconquer real life. Every
&#8220;individual escape&#8221; is no more than a form of &#8220;every man for himself.&#8221;
Of course, when you find yourself in decomposition, you can try to
accumulate a little money, find a house far away from everything, and
live without knowing anything about anyone; or land a stable but
low-paying job, interact as little as possible in it, and relegate life
to what&#8217;s left of the day after work hours. But these strategies aren&#8217;t
really satisfactory, they&#8217;re just different ways of beating a more or
less orderly retreat. In the medium term, they&#8217;re a way to condemn
yourself to melancholy. Isolating yourself, marginalizing yourself, even
if it means living without constantly prioritizing financial survival,
would mean renouncing growth, development, and carrying out personal
ideals in life. It&#8217;s another form of exile.
So, existing egalitarian communities should open themselves up and
become a launching point for the experience of a new generation. To be
empowered is to also discover through practice that in a community,
troubles, annoying as they may be, are muffled rather than being
upsetting, and joys and victories have echoes that are impossible to
hear alone.
From adding to multiplying
Communitarianism has no paradise to sell, and does not spout admonitions
or threaten skeptics with a catastrophic future. &#8220;To reconquer work&#8221;&#8212;for
and with one&#8217;s own inner circle&#8212;is a path that will surely interest many
people who propose a rebirth in the midst of the crisis, perhaps without
knowing that what they are doing, with their community and its
affections, would ensure the rebirth of an entire world.
The time has come to carry out what the bourgeoisie was able to do to
overcome feudalism: turn the expulsion from work created by the system
into an alternative society. The medieval bourgeoisie grew its first
cities with servants who had escaped from bondage to their lord&#8217;s land
and joined the first small commercial societies. The new egalitarian
communities had to expand with those expelled from the productive system
to give rise to the first transnational networks of communities oriented
towards abundance. This is an alternative world beyond the borders of
command pyramids and the law of the jungle that we experience in so many
companies, and also beyond the omnipresence of commodification and the
alienation of labor, a world where &#8220;everyone shares everything&#8221; through
communal ownership and savings, and &#8220;everyone receives according to
their need&#8221;.
The scene will be urban
The community experience has historically been centered in rural areas.
Rural settlements provide a space for a direct relationship between work
and nature which continues to be essential to communitarian approaches.
However, in Kassel, Washington, Nazareth, or Madrid, the new comunards
no longer buy fields to work. They buy apartments, offices, and shops.
They&#8217;re building autonomy for a new generation of communities in sectors
based on knowledge and in urban settings. Their range is expanding more
and more: intelligence and data, training, specialized hardware, free
software, restoration, cultural objects, ecological products&#8230; These are
all services and products created on a small scale but with large scope,
which are focused on the direct economy as a form of relationship with
the market.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century, communitarianism has
survived because it was able to demonstrate how egalitarianism and
idealism pay. In this last decade, it has grown globally because it
learned how to add. It learned to add very diverse people and build a
life experience, a glimpse of abundance in daily life, that many already
openly call &#8220;post-capitalist.&#8221; Now our challenge is learning to
multiply. We know how to offer an alternative, the &#8220;conquest of work,&#8221;
to the generation exiled from the productive system by the crisis.
And that challenge will be faced, above all, in cities, among other
things because, from the point of view of the human experience, the
relationship with nature is measured by the ability to transform our
productive activities. A software developer today has a more intense
relationship with nature than a medieval peasant ever had.
It&#8217;s true that this relationship remains hidden from participants in
most overscaled industries, where deliberation is replaced by sets of
rules, practices, and &#8220;procedures&#8221;; where reflection on the best
objective is substituted by decisions on the best method, and the
coordination of wills is substituted by checklists and task-completion
oversight. But in community, purposes and tools are part of a design and
knowledge that everyone is aware of and agrees to. And above all, the
position of advancing abundance, the front line, is wherever the direct
application of knowledge is closest to production. And generally, the
setting for that is the city.
The tasks of the communards
Egalitarian communities should undertake a path that allows them to go
from the current model, based on the resistance and resilience of the
&#8220;small community,&#8221; to another that starts from a large network of
egalitarian and productive communities. We must feed the new sprouts,
which are capable of maintaining themselves in the market, and at the
same time, create more spaces of abundance and decommodification.
Additionally, we need to take decommodification beyond our interior, and
make it permeate all our surroundings. It&#8217;s time to begin the
competition between systems.
A time is coming when we will have to learn to grow in many new ways:
incorporating new members, incubating communities, teaching community
techniques in neighborhoods, or creating popular universities of a new
kind, that give tools for multispecialization.
We have to confront a gigantic problem created by over-scaling&#8212;from
smallness, with smallness, and step by step. We have to use diversity
and abundance to break out of the traps that a culture in decomposition
tends to constantly fall into, which magnify defeatism, pessimism, and
the idea of &#8220;every man for himself&#8221;. It&#8217;s not going to be a stroll
through a rose garden, and we&#8217;re certainly not going to be able to make
headway without encountering serious resistance.
You are the protagonist
Imagine yourself as a new kind of pioneer, as the leader of a large
collective adventure.
You&#8217;re not alone. Thousands of people joined communard initiatives
throughout the world over the last year: egalitarian communities,
kibbutzim, cooperatives that unite work and housing&#8230; Not too far from
you, there&#8217;s a community already underway. You can participate in its
activities, collaborate in its development projects, or join it as
another communard. With other enthusiasts, you&#8217;ll build productive urban
communities that are able to create effective abundance in their
settings, which is to say, to compete with the market.
You&#8217;ll be the leader of an adventure that will demand&#8212;as it did of the
generations of communards who preceded us in centuries past&#8212;effort and
commitment in exchange for making life useful and significant. But in
contrast with those generations of pioneers, who lived in an era in
which abundance remained out of reach, you can aspire to something more
than living better. Today, it&#8217;s our turn to demonstrate that the best
life serves to create abundance for everyone, and is already preparing
to be able to offer a place and a meaning to everyone.
Las Indias, May ninth, 2016
Translation to English by Level Translation
Appendix: concrete things you can do with this manifesto
If you&#8217;ve found ideas in the preceding paragraphs that agree with your
state of being in the world and your understanding of relations with
others, there are many things you can do, starting now. You don&#8217;t have
to immediately leave everything behind and organize an egalitarian
community, it&#8217;s more about using this Manifesto for what it&#8217;s intended
to be: a tool to empower you and your community.
Expand the conversation
Do you have a blog? Publicize your reading notes and the
opinions you&#8217;ve formed. Don&#8217;t forget to link to
https://lasindias.com/the-communard-manifesto &#8206;so your readers can
access the complete text in the format they prefer.
Publish a link to this manifesto in social media wherever
you have an account.
Email the PDF version to people you usually discuss social
and economic matters with, and the EPUB version to people who normally
read electronic books or on a smartphone, who will appreciate it more
than the PDF.
You can organize a presentation of the Manifesto. If you
write us an email, we&#8217;ll be able to send you copies on paper, and we&#8217;ll
do everything possible so that at least one of us can accompany you at
the presentation.
Ask for a room at the library or cultural center in your
neighborhood, and invite your friends and acquaintances over the net.
Put up posters on bulletin boards at the same library and other places
you may know where interested people may pass by.
Prepare to &#8220;make community&#8221;
In the &#8220;las Indias Club&#8220;, you&#8217;ll find events and activities throughout
the year that you can participate in. There are cultural and social
activities: from poetic soirees and historical expositions to projects
in free software, P2P production, and the direct economy. Also, once a
year, in the second week of October, we organize an international
conference in which we interview and learn from people from across the
world who have created or implemented all kinds of projects with small
scale and large scope: energy cooperatives, hardware products,
agricultural egalitarian communities&#8230;
We have also a space for permanent conversation, &#8220;La Matriz&#8220;, which we
invite you to join, and which is fed by posts from our blog and the
blogs of a good part of the members of the &#8220;las Indias Club&#8221;.
And, of course, there are hundreds of egalitarian communities throughout
the world, including ours, that await your visit with open doors. Write
us and share your concerns and ideas with us.
--
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<mail>
<nbr>10.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto</subject>
<from>Patrice Riemens</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:59:38 +0100</date>
<content>Let us honour Aaron by continuing his work, collectively.
Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto
(https://gist.github.com/4535453)
?
?
Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep
it for themselves. The world?s entire scientific and cultural heritage,
published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being
digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read
the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You?ll need
to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier.
There are those struggling to change this. The Open Access Movement has
fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights
away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under
terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios,
their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything
up until now will have been lost.
That is too high a price to pay. Forcing academics to pay money to read
the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing
the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those
at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the
Global South? It?s outrageous and unacceptable.
?I agree,? many say, ?but what can we do? The companies hold the
copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access,
and it?s perfectly legal ? there?s nothing we can do to stop them.? But
there is something we can, something that?s already being done: we can
fight back.
Those with access to these resources ? students, librarians, scientists ?
you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of
knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not ?
indeed, morally, you cannot ? keep this privilege for yourselves. You have
a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with
colleagues, filling download requests for friends.
Meanwhile, those who have been locked out are not standing idly by. You
have been sneaking through holes and climbing over fences, liberating the
information locked up by the publishers and sharing them with your
friends.
But all of this action goes on in the dark, hidden underground. It?s
called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the
moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing
isn?t immoral ? it?s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would
refuse to let a friend make a copy.
Large corporations, of course, are blinded by greed. The laws under which
they operate require it ? their shareholders would revolt at anything
less. And the politicians they have bought off back them, passing laws
giving them the exclusive power to decide who can make copies.
There is no justice in following unjust laws. It?s time to come into the
light and, in the grand tradition of civil disobedience, declare our
opposition to this private theft of public culture.
We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and
share them with the world. We need to take stuff that's out of copyright
and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on
the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file
sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerilla Open Access.
With enough of us, around the world, we?ll not just send a strong message
opposing the privatization of knowledge ? we?ll make it a thing of the
past. Will you join us?
Aaron Swartz
July 2008, Eremo, Italy</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>10.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto</subject>
<from>Tapas Ray [Gmail]</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sat, 19 Jan 2013 09:02:42 +0530</date>
<content>I was trying to read the manifesto in Firefox, but only the left half
of the text appears in the window. This means I have to scroll right
to read each line, then left and then right again for the next line,
and so on. Could someone please tell me if there is any way to see it
properly formated?
Thanks,
Tapas
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>10.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Aaron Swartz: Guerilla Open Access Manifesto</subject>
<from>Ana Peraica</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Fri, 18 Jan 2013 12:43:21 +0100</date>
<content>Hi everyone,
have you seen this http://about.jstor.org/statement-swartz ?
so sarcastic...
Ana</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>11.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson</subject>
<from>Geert Lovink</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sat, 5 Feb 2011 16:02:43 +0100</date>
<content>(important element in the discussion about possible alternatives to
facebook and twitter that presume that one runs one's own server... /
geert)
url: http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/02/take-back-the-tubes/
A DIY Data Manifesto
By Scott Gilbertson
The word &#8220;server&#8221; is enough to send all but the hardiest nerds
scurrying for cover.
The word usually conjures images of vast, complex data farms,
databases and massive infrastructures. True, servers are all those
things &#8212; but at a more basic level, they&#8217;re just like your desktop PC.
Running a server is no more difficult than starting Windows on your
desktop. That&#8217;s the message Dave Winer, forefather of blogging and
creator of RSS, is trying to get across with his EC2 for Poets
project. The name comes from Amazon&#8217;s EC2 service and classes common
in liberal arts colleges, like programming for poets or computer
science for poets. The theme of such classes is that anyone &#8212; even a
poet &#8212; can learn technology.
Winer wants to demystify the server. &#8220;Engineers sometimes mystify what
they do, as a form of job security,&#8221; writes Winer, &#8220;I prefer to make
light of it&#8230; it was easy for me, why shouldn&#8217;t it be easy for everyone?&#8221;
To show you just how easy it is to set up and run a server, Winer has
put together an easy-to-follow tutorial so you too can set up a
Windows-based server running in the cloud. Winer uses Amazon&#8217;s EC2
service. For a few dollars a month, Winer&#8217;s tutorial can have just
about anyone up and running with their own server.
In that sense Winer&#8217;s EC2 for Poets if already a success, but
education and empowerment aren&#8217;t Winer&#8217;s only goals. &#8220;I think it&#8217;s
important to bust the mystique of servers,&#8221; says Winer, &#8220;it&#8217;s
essential if we&#8217;re going to break free of the &#8216;corporate blogging
silos.&#8217;&#8221;
The corporate blogging silos Winer is thinking of are services like
Twitter, Facebook and WordPress. All three have been instrumental in
the growth of the web, they make it easy for anyone publish. But they
also suffer denial of service attacks, government shutdowns and
growing pains, centralized services like Twitter and Facebook are
vulnerable. Services wrapped up in a single company are also
vulnerable to market whims, Geocities is gone, FriendFeed languishes
at Facebook and Yahoo is planning to sell Delicious. A centralized web
is brittle web, one that can make our data, our communications tools
disappear tomorrow.
But the web will likely never be completely free of centralized
services and Winer recognizes that. Most people will still choose
convenience over freedom. Twitter&#8217;s user interface is simple, easy to
use and works on half a dozen devices.
Winer doesn&#8217;t believe everyone will want to be part of the distributed
web, just the dedicated. But he does believe there are more people who
would choose a DIY path if they realized it wasn&#8217;t that difficult.
Winer isn&#8217;t the only one who believes the future of the web will be
distributed systems that aren&#8217;t controlled by any single corporation
or technology platform. Microformats founder Tantek &#199;elik is also
working on a distributed publishing system that seeks to retain all
the cool features of the social web, but remove the centralized
bottleneck.
But to be free of corporate blogging silos and centralized services
the web will need an army of distributed servers run by hobbyists,
not just tech-savvy web admins, but ordinary people who love the web
and want to experiment.
So while you can get your EC2 server up and running today &#8212; and even
play around with Winer&#8217;s River2 news aggregator &#8212; the real goal is
further down the road. Winer&#8217;s vision is a distributed web where
everything is loosely coupled. &#8220;For example,&#8221; Winer writes, &#8220;the roads
I drive on with my car are loosely-coupled from the car. I might drive
a SmartCar, a Toyota or a BMW. No matter what car I choose I am free
to drive on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Sixth Avenue or the Bay Bridge.&#8221;
Winer wants to start by creating a loosely coupled, distributed
microblogging service like Twitter. &#8220;I&#8217;m pretty sure we know how to
create a micro-blogging community with open formats and protocols and
no central point of failure,&#8221; he writes on his blog.
For Winer that means decoupling the act of writing from the act of
publishing. The idea isn&#8217;t to create an open alternative to Twitter,
it&#8217;s to remove the need to use Twitter for writing on Twitter. Instead
you write with the tools of your choice and publish to your own server.
If everyone publishes first to their own server there&#8217;s no single
point of failure. There&#8217;s no fail whale, and no company owns your
data. Once the content is on your server you can then push it on to
wherever you&#8217;d like &#8212; Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress of whatever the site
du jour is ten years from now.
The glue that holds this vision together is RSS. Winer sees RSS as the
ideal broadcast mechanism for the distributed web and in fact he&#8217;s
already using it &#8212; Winer has an RSS feed of links that are then pushed
on to Twitter. No matter what tool he uses to publish a link, it&#8217;s
gathered up into a single RSS feed and pushed on to Twitter.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>11.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson</subject>
<from>Geert Lovink</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 7 Feb 2011 22:26:01 +0100</date>
<content>Good you raise this issue, Rory.
If I remember well from December Dave Winer kind of defended Amazon in
the Wikileaks cut-off controversy (he said he would not join a boycott).
The question indeed is: what does it mean when we call to run our own
servers? If they are located somewhere in the 'cloud' then what's the
difference anyway in comparison to Facebook or Google?
The alternatives we suggest cannot be empty gestures if we propose to
use 'virtual' servers that are under the same corporate control anyway.
Geert</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>11.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson</subject>
<from>nettime-l</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 8 Feb 2011 10:43:35 +0000</date>
<content>the internet shutdown in egypt prompted similar questions about
independent infrastructure and corporate control.
see for example http://www.openmeshproject.org/ and the comment thread
on https://blog.torproject.org/blog/recent-events-egypt.
i know that some people were busy setting up BBS in egypt during the
shutdown, which has some interesting echoes of rushkoff's recent piece
on the Next Net ('dump internet, go fidonet')
http://www.shareable.net/blog/the-next-net
dan
[ {AT} danmcquillan | www.internetartizans.co.uk]</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>11.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson</subject>
<from>Goran Maric</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 8 Feb 2011 17:51:37 +0000</date>
<content>Thank you, Dan,
this is where I see the value and importance of nettime. Here people can share intelligent ideas,
argue intelligently, and above all, post links where like minded people can engage in struggles for
common good.
Re: Facebook and Twitter, whatever can be utilized in reaching these goals should be utilized.
We live in the "info" world, and not to utilize it would be unfortunate waste of opportunities.
But also, we never should for a one bit of moment forget about the fact that every, and each government,
once it feels threaten in whatever way, will do whatever is in its power to subdue these perceived threats.
"FBI Raids Queens Home in G20 Protest Twitter Crackdown
http://gothamist.com/2009/10/05/fbi_raids_queens_home_in_g20_protes.php
... That's right, a Twitter crackdown. A lawyer for Jackson Heights social worker Elliot Madison, 41,
says that the feds searched his client's house for 16 hours on Thursday after Madison was arrested
on September 24th at a Pittsburgh hotel room with another man. What were they up to? Sitting at
laptops sending Twitter messages advising G20 demonstrators about riot police activity in the streets.
..."
Also as we discuss alternatives, we, especially from the US, of course with the help of others around,
have to do whatever is in our power to expose what the US is actually all about.
"Video: Eardrum-Blasting Sound Cannon Coming to a Protest Near You?
http://gothamist.com/2009/09/29/eardrum-blasting_sound_cannon_comin.php
Have you seen this intense outtake from Children of Men, showing riot police blasting "fugees"
with some sort of horrible "sound cannon"? Oh, actually, this isn't from a fictional movie about
a dystopian police state; it's from last week in Pittsburgh, where G20 protesters had dared assemble
without a permit from the government. For that, they were dispersed with the Long Range Acoustic
Device (LRAD), which some fear is loud enough to damage eardrums and even cause fatal aneurysms.
..."
I am not trying to move our attention from the present happening in Egypt, but, let us not
forget, ever, where is the root and the real problem coming from. This demystification
of the US as the beacon of Democracy has to be main goal, in the same fashion as when
Stalin?s ?workers country? was demystified.
This must be a concurrent action, and never left out of sight.
Dan, again, Excellent links!!!
Best
gORAN
&gt; Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2011 10:43:35 +0000
&gt; From: nettime-l {AT} kein.org
&gt; To: geert {AT} xs4all.nl
&gt; Subject: Re: &lt;nettime&gt; A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson
&gt;
&gt; the internet shutdown in egypt prompted similar questions about
&gt; independent infrastructure and corporate control.
&lt;...&gt;</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>11.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; A DIY Data Manifesto by Scott Gilbertson</subject>
<from>Flick Harrison</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 8 Feb 2011 09:51:52 -0800</date>
<content>Server space is one thing, BBS networks are an interesting solution, sort
of a HAM radio version of the internet.
I think the backbone needs to be de-privatised as well.
I was under the impression there are places in Europe where the internet
backbone is public, leased out to anyone who wants some.
Here, even the pipeline is under threat - the usage caps and overage
charges (which mostly serve to limit competing businesses, rather than
democratic expression which tends to be lower-bandwidth ;-) ) are hotly
debated, with Joe Public mostly on the side of Cheaper and Faster but no
dialogue around public pipelines whatsoever.
There are two companies in most of Canada, Shaw and Telus in the west, Bell
and Rogers in the East, who deliver all the internet service, they are
forced to lease out to competitors but they are always pushing for the
power to charge more to their competitors to squeeze their share.
Even the pundits who want Net Neutrality still don't call for public
communications infrastructure. The net is treated more like phones than
roads, which is a mistake in my opinion.
http://www.thestar.com/business/article/933854--geist-the-real-reason-we-pay-so-much-for-internet?bn=1
Our post office is about to abandon (sell) its courier operations, seen as
too incompetitive with commercial enterprises, and when competitive, an
unwanted intrusion on the free market.
http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/931800--goar-a-smarter-post-office-might-thrive
-Flick
--
* WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD?
http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison
* FLICK's WEBSITE &amp; BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Just Out: The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner</subject>
<from>Geert Lovink</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sun, 24 Oct 2010 04:00:58 +0200</date>
<content>The Telekommunist Manifesto from Dmytri Kleiner is out now!
Download the pdf here: http://networkcultures.org/_uploads/#3notebook_telekommunist.pdf
The print edition will hopefully be financed soon. If you want to
donate money to make this happen, please let us know!
In the age of international telecommunications, global migration and
the emergence of the information economy, how can class conflict and
property be understood? Drawing from political economy and concepts
related to intellectual property, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a key
contribution to commons-based, collaborative and shared forms of
cultural production and economic distribution.
Proposing &#8216;venture communism&#8217; as a new model for workers&#8217; self-
organization, Kleiner spins Marx and Engels&#8217; seminal Manifesto of the
Communist Party into the age of the internet. As a peer-to-peer
model, venture communism allocates capital that is critically needed
to accomplish what capitalism cannot: the ongoing proliferation of
free culture and free networks.
In developing the concept of venture communism, Kleiner provides a
critique of copyright regimes, and current liberal views of free
software and free culture which seek to trap culture within
capitalism. Kleiner proposes copyfarleft, and provides a usable model
of a Peer Production License.
Encouraging hackers and artists to embrace the revolutionary potential
of the internet for a truly free society, The Telekommunist Manifesto
is a political-conceptual call to arms in the fight against capitalism.
About the author: Dmytri Kleiner is a software developer working on
projects that investigate the political economy of the internet, and
the ideal of workers&#8217; self-organization of production as a form of
class struggle. Born in the USSR, Dmytri grew up in Toronto and now
lives in Berlin. He is a founder of the Telekommunisten Collective,
which provides internet and telephone services, as well as undertakes
artistic projects that explore the way communications technologies
have social relations embedded within them, such as deadSwap (2009)
and Thimbl (2010).
colophon: Network Notebooks editors: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer.
Producer: Rachel Somers Miles. Copy editing: Rachael Kendrick. Design:
Studio L&#233;on&amp;Loes, Rotterdam http://www.leon-loes.nl. Publisher:
Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.
Dymtri Kleiner, The Telekommunist. Network Notebooks 03, Institute of
Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2010. ISBN: 978-90-816021-2-9.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Just Out: The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner</subject>
<from>Rob Dyke</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sun, 24 Oct 2010 12:16:45 +0100</date>
<content>another one for the list?
http://www.theclassofthenew.net/6.html
&#8216;the class of the new&#8217;. This model workforce announces a new economic and
social paradigm, constituting a &#8216;social prophecy&#8217; of the shape of work to
come. Their mode of being and, in particular, of producing, is set to become
hegemonic. No matter how numerically limited at present, the way they live
and work today is the way everyone else will live and work tomorrow.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Just Out: The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner</subject>
<from>Dmytri Kleiner</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 25 Oct 2010 15:21:56 +0200</date>
<content>Hi Rob, there is no new class proposed in the Manifesto, just the boring
old ones, worker, landlord &amp; capitalist.
Best,</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Just Out: The Telekommunist Manifesto by Dmytri Kleiner</subject>
<from>Alex Foti</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:47:47 +0200</date>
<content>by the way, precariat was coined by the euromayday, not the frassanito
network (which was a subset thereof at the time).
loved telekommunismus! and the concept of venture communism prompted
me to reconsider my fondness for digital anarchism...
best radical ciaos,
lx
http://milanox.eu</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; The Slow Media Manifesto</subject>
<from>Geert Lovink</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:28:56 +0200</date>
<content>http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto
The Slow Media Manifesto
The first decade of the 21st century, the so-called &#8216;naughties&#8217;, has
brought profound changes to the technological foundations of the media
landscape. The key buzzwords are networks, the Internet and social
media. In the second decade, people will not search for new
technologies allowing for even easier, faster and low-priced content
production. Rather, appropriate reactions to this media revolution are
to be developed and integrated politically, culturally and socially.
The concept &#8220;Slow&#8221;, as in &#8220;Slow Food&#8221; and not as in &#8220;Slow Down&#8221;, is a
key for this. Like &#8220;Slow Food&#8221;, Slow Media are not about fast
consumption but about choosing the ingredients mindfully and preparing
them in a concentrated manner. Slow Media are welcoming and
hospitable. They like to share.
1. Slow Media are a contribution to sustainability. Sustainability
relates to the raw materials, processes and working conditions, which
are the basis for media production. Exploitation and low-wage sectors
as well as the unconditional commercialization of user data will not
result in sustainable media. At the same time, the term refers to the
sustainable consumption of Slow Media.
2. Slow media promote Monotasking. Slow Media cannot be consumed
casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users. As with
the production of a good meal, which demands the full attention of all
senses by the cook and his guests, Slow Media can only be consumed
with pleasure in focused alertness.
3. Slow Media aim at perfection. Slow Media do not necessarily
represent new developments on the market. More important is the
continuous improvement of reliable user interfaces that are robust,
accessible and perfectly tailored to the media usage habits of the
people.
4. Slow Media make quality palpable. Slow Media measure themselves in
production, appearance and content against high standards of quality
and stand out from their fast-paced and short-lived counterparts &#8211; by
some premium interface or by an aesthetically inspiring design.
5. Slow Media advance Prosumers, i.e. people who actively define what
and how they want to consume and produce. In Slow Media, the active
Prosumer, inspired by his media usage to develop new ideas and take
action, replaces the passive consumer. This may be shown by marginals
in a book or animated discussion about a record with friends. Slow
Media inspire, continuously affect the users&#8217; thoughts and actions and
are still perceptible years later.
6. Slow Media are discursive and dialogic. They long for a counterpart
with whom they may come in contact. The choice of the target media is
secondary. In Slow Media, listening is as important as speaking. Hence
&#8216;Slow&#8217; means to be mindful and approachable and to be able to regard
and to question one&#8217;s own position from a different angle.
7. Slow Media are Social Media. Vibrant communities or tribes
constitute around Slow Media. This, for instance, may be a living
author exchanging thoughts with his readers or a community
interpreting a late musician&#8217;s work. Thus Slow Media propagate
diversity and respect cultural and distinctive local features.
8. Slow Media respect their users. Slow Media approach their users in
a self-conscious and amicable way and have a good idea about the
complexity or irony their users can handle. Slow Media neither look
down on their users nor approach them in a submissive way.
9. Slow Media are distributed via recommendations not advertising: the
success of Slow Media is not based on an overwhelming advertising
pressure on all channels but on recommendation from friends,
colleagues or family. A book given as a present five times to best
friends is a good example.
10. Slow Media are timeless: Slow Media are long-lived and appear
fresh even after years or decades. They do not lose their quality over
time but at best get some patina that can even enhance their value.
11. Slow Media are auratic: Slow Media emanate a special aura. They
generate a feeling that the particular medium belongs to just that
moment of the user&#8217;s life. Despite the fact that they are produced
industrially or are partially based on industrial means of production,
they are suggestive of being unique and point beyond themselves.
12. Slow Media are progressive not reactionary: Slow Media rely on
their technological achievements and the network society&#8217;s way of
life. It is because of the acceleration of multiple areas of life,
that islands of deliberate slowness are made possible and essential
for survival. Slow Media are not a contradiction to the speed and
simultaneousness of Twitter, Blogs or Social Networks but are an
attitude and a way of making use of them.
13. Slow Media focus on quality both in production and in reception of
media content: Craftsmanship in cultural studies such as source
criticism, classification and evaluation of sources of information are
gaining importance with the increasing availability of information.
14. Slow Media ask for confidence and take their time to be credible.
Behind Slow Media are real people. And you can feel that.
Stockdorf and Bonn, Jan 2, 2010
Benedikt K&#246;hler
Sabria David
J&#246;rg Blumtritt
Confer also:
&#8226; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elissa-altman/move-over-slow-food-intro_b_367517.html
&#8226; http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/11/17/pm-slow-media/
&#8226; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/announcing-my-first-pick-_b_310544.html
&#8226; http://blog.oup.com/2008/11/slow_blog/
&#8226; http://www.shep.ca/?p=132
&amp;
http://blog.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/?p=5122 (in German)</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Slow Media Manifesto</subject>
<from>Jeebesh</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:02:34 +0530</date>
<content>&gt;http://en.slow-media.net/manifesto
Within this context this essay could be read.
Earthworms Dancing: Notes for a Biennial in Slow Motion
Raqs Media Collective
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/69
warmly
jeebesh</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Slow Media Manifesto</subject>
<from>olia lialina</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:18:43 +0200</date>
<content>&gt; 2. Slow media promote Monotasking. Slow Media cannot be consumed
&gt; casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users. As with
&gt; the production of a good meal, which demands the full attention
&gt; of all senses by the cook and his guests, Slow Media can only be
&gt; consumed with pleasure in focused alertness.
With all respect to monotasking, and claim for concious approach to
media consumption and production: Why it happened that in 2010 (1024
years after digital revolution) a group of new-media-aware people is
brining their message across though food analogies?</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Slow Media Manifesto</subject>
<from>molly Hankwitz</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:48:45 -0700</date>
<content>There is something rather 'connisseur' like in this expression of
Slow Media. I like the idea of Slow Media, as opposed, I guess to
Fast Media? or the kind of speed-thing that Virilio points at about
technologies themselves, but why is this good meal being made by a
male chef, a, and is this more an argument for some kind of Fine
Media, as opposed to Low Media? Chefs rather than cooks - class
hierarchy in media making - such that something conceivably 'fast'
might be critiqued along the same lines as art was when it turned
'pop' or something.
Molly</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Slow Media Manifesto</subject>
<from>. left | coast | lurker .</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Thu, 24 Jun 2010 14:25:38 -0700</date>
<content>( slow response to the writers_
are they on Nettime ? )
Slow Food &amp; other such movements are based upon reducing the destructive
forces of industrial capitalism by increasing the time it takes to produce
something --- such in the realm of agriculture. Such slow movements
constitute an attempt to revaluate time, valuing the slowness of temporality
in giving back time to what takes time, and thus granting the time for
production to be performed in a less destructive manner (in current
buzzwords: sustainability, organic and local produce, etc).
However a manifesto of Slow &lt;edia has me somewhat confused in terms of its
positioning in regards to what it attempts to slow down --- if it attempts
to slow down the production of media at all (and does this mean: a reduction
of media channels? or of content? and what precisely is meant here by media
given its ambivalence as both conduit and content?).
&gt; 7. Slow Media are Social Media. Vibrant communities or tribes
&gt; constitute around Slow Media. This, for instance, may be a living
&gt; author exchanging thoughts with his readers or a community
&gt; interpreting a late musician&#185;s work. Thus Slow Media propagate
&gt; diversity and respect cultural and distinctive local features.
I'm curious how the call for a monotasking medium (technically this isn't
'Slow Media' at all but a call for utilisation of a singular, one at a time
'slow medium') corresponds with 'social media'. Is the point to redefine
what is meant by 'social media'? To 'perfect' an attitude towards it? To
simply use it slowly... like take a long time to answer email?
Because in its current incarnation, social media produces its dizzying
effects of 'community' precisely through a monopolization of distraction
within a multitasking digital environment -- neverending status updates,
multithreaded conversations and comments, photo streams, miniblogs,
cross-linked databasing of interests provoking calls for tagging,
associative linking, and other opt-ins that generate massive aggregate
databases for corporations pegging the consumer index of desires...
Ie, so what I am trying to grasp is (from thesis 12):
"Slow Media are not a contradiction to the speed and
simultaneousness of Twitter, Blogs or Social Networks but are an
attitude and a way of making use of them."
So Slow Media doesn't affect production at all, but is a lifestyle.
Nevertheless, it would appear that given the call for 'monotasking' and
'focused alertness' (thesis 2), that such Slow Media (as an "attitude")
would produce an approach completely incompatible with social media ---
unless slow media is, in fact, nothing less than social media's perfection,
insofar as what it calls for is nothing short than a complete, 'monotasking'
immersion within it.
I.e., instead of distractively checking Facebook or sending out a quick
Tweet, I should now spend all of my time glued in front of the screen to
perform these tasks with the perfection of monotasking.
If Slow Media is meant as some kind of resistance to social media, or
temporal deconstruction of it, will it be found by turning all of one's
attention to it...?
And would such an attitude toward an already-existing media structure not
also imply that Slow Media is not "progressive" but precisely reactionary as
a kind of immersive dispositif toward social media?
&gt; 9. Slow Media are distributed via recommendations not advertising: the
&gt; success of Slow Media is not based on an overwhelming advertising
&gt; pressure on all channels but on recommendation from friends,
&gt; colleagues or family. A book given as a present five times to best
&gt; friends is a good example.
Unfortunately, this position delimits &amp; underestimates advertising in a way
not seen since the beginning of the 20th century . By all accounts,
advertising works precisely through recommendations -- and quite literally.
I'm thinking here of Amazon's recommendation databasing, for example. But
certainly in more insidious forms: it is the very unconconscious
mechanization of brand "recommendations" that advertising strives to
produce.
So far, this manifesto seems to support the complete immersion within
distractive social media through the utter resignation to unconscious forms
of advertising. This manifesto itself appears in its most reactionary form
as a mere reflection of the very desires and wishes of the organised systems
of social media and consumer capital.
Which is why I shudder when I read that:
&gt; 5. Slow Media advance Prosumers, i.e. people who actively define what and
&gt; how they want to consume and produce. In Slow Media, the active Prosumer,
&gt; inspired by his media usage to develop new ideas and take action, replaces
&gt; the passive consumer. This may be shown by marginals in a book or animated
&gt; discussion about a record with friends. Slow Media inspire, continuously
&gt; affect the users&#185; thoughts and actions and are still perceptible years
&gt; later.
Heavens. If there ever was a historical category of "passive consumers",
such a fictive mass only ever existed within the superbly imaginative realm
of advertising as a construct to make "us" feel better over "how far we've
come": "Just look at you now, baby" -- Yep, now you can choose to smoke
Virginia Slims, Woman!
This manifesto seems to read as if consumer capital didn't invent the
Prosumer as a more invasive procedure of snaring mass desire to begin with.
If one can be made to feel part of something, one is less likely to critique
it. Moreover, the prosumer also conveniently generates free R&amp;D for whom
s/he serves. While this used to be through focus groups, polls and surveys,
now every click and movement online is tracked to further "enhance" the
experience of dangling consumer desire in front of your eyes. This is the
entire economic model of social media --- i.e., it is what makes it
"sustainable" (see thesis #1).
In short, this Manifesto appears to only signify the complete and utter
breakdown of any attempt to think an imaginative alternative to the impulses
of consumer capital.
Instead of allowing us to make use of media for what it is -- something we
shouldn't spend too much time with precisely because of its desire-traps
that induce you to buy the new fucking iPhone or whatever -- it calls for us
to spend MORE time with it.
No. Nein. How about less time with Twitter &amp; Facebook, and more time getting
to know your neighbour, your library, the people in your local coffeeshop,
the grassroots level of political organisations in your locale, and the
alternative online networks (such as this one) that call for sustained
analysis and thought --- which demonstratively translates here &amp; there into
action.
(requisite shout-outs to Toronto &amp; Chicago at this very moment ... )
Oh, and read a book every once in awhile too. And not on the censorious
iPad. Marginalia exists not as a metaphor of the Prosumer (such in thesis
5), but as an activity of defacing and questioning the command and control
principles of the received text. Get out and get some graffiti done while
you're at it.
/ best, tobias.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.5</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Slow Media Manifesto</subject>
<from>patrick lichty</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Fri, 25 Jun 2010 10:53:56 -0400 (EDT)</date>
<content>Although this is a fairly short note, I believe that this is germane to Trebor Scholz' notes on Constant Partial Attention Disorder
http://www.collectivate.net/journalisms/2007/3/16/the-good-and-bad-of-technology-once-and-for-all.html
I feel that there is a confluence of noise that is getting remarked upon afgain and again, that seems to try to be remedied with things like aggregators, etc, and in the end, i think that the real solution is to just prune out the uinnecessary or focus on as little as you have to. It's dangeroud for many artists who feel that they have to be addicted tot he produc tion model, but in short, I think to think tactically is better in the first place.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.6</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Slow Media Manifesto</subject>
<from>patrick lichty</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sat, 26 Jun 2010 12:14:06 -0400 (EDT)</date>
<content>Or perhaps we could look at the collectivist/anarchist model of slow
- derive-media as agent of resistance. I like Craig Freeman &amp; Will
Pappenheimer's Hydroflaneuriaziine piece that makes an avatar wander
randomly around Second Life.
but back to the grass-roots approach, classless, collective mediation,
flat/rhizomatic stuff that is not rapid and breathless like Deleuze
mentions. No chefs, no high/low, just a helpful community of loving
grace.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>14.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; John Freeman: Not so Fast! A Manifesto for Slow Communication (WSJ)</subject>
<from>Patrice Riemens</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:54:25 +0200</date>
<content>bwo Wall Street Journal (August 21, 2009)
original at: http://tinyurl.com/ndokgn
Not So Fast
Sending and receiving at breakneck speed can make life queasy; a manifesto
for slow communication
By JOHN FREEMAN
The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our
animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive
present, the overheated capac&#173;ity of our minds. "My friend has just had
his PC wired for broadband," writes the poet Don Paterson. "I meet him in
the caf&#233;; he looks terrible?his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. .
. . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every
album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has
now stopped even listen&#173;ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly
monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it's like all my birthdays have
come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is
going to die."
We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and
cared about will die, too, sometimes?heartbreakingly?before us. Being
someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary
reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom.
Busyness?or the simulated busyness of email addiction?numbs the pain of
this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days
are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do,
what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to
allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot
change. In short, we need to slow down.
Our society does not often tell us this. Progress, since the dawn of the
Industrial Age, is supposed to be a linear upward progression; graphs with
upward slopes are a good sign. Process&#173;ing speeds are always getting
faster; broadband now makes dial-&#173;up seem like traveling by horse and
buggy. Growth is eternal. But only two things grow indefinitely or have
indefinite growth firmly ensconced at the heart of their being: cancer and
the cor&#173;poration. For everything else, especially in nature, the
consum&#173;ing fires eventually come and force a starting over.
The ultimate form of progress, however, is learning to decide what is
working and what is not; and working at this pace, emailing at this
frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of
our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our
ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our
bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to
change it. Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in
dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less
dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.
In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns
of the barrier between our work and per&#173;sonal lives since the notion of
leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial
Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our
brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with
whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It
has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to
tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and
enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made
it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.
This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly
on causes emotional and physical burnout, work&#173;place meltdowns, and
unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in
front of a screen?
If we are to step off this hurtling machine, we must reassert principles
that have been lost in the blur. It is time to launch a manifesto for a
slow communication movement, a push back against the machines and the
forces that encourage us to remain connected to them. Many of the values
of the Internet are social improvements?it can be a great platform for
solidarity, it rewards curiosity, it enables convenience. This is not the
mani&#173;festo of a Luddite, this is a human manifesto. If the technology is
to be used for the betterment of human life, we must reassert that the
Internet and its virtual information space is not a world unto itself but
a supplement to our existing world, where the following three statements
are self-evident.
1. Speed matters.
We have numerous technologies that can work with extreme rapidity. But we
don't use these capabilities because they are either dangerous (even the
Autobahn has begun applying speed limits, due to severe accidents) or
uncomfortable (imagine tur&#173;bulence at 1,200 miles per hour) or would ruin
the point of hav&#173;ing the technology at all (played back faster than it was
recorded, Led Zeppelin's syrupy metal sound turns to tinsel).
The speed at which we do something?anything?changes our experience of it.
Words and communication are not immune to this fundamental truth. The
faster we talk and chat and type over tools such as email and text
messages, the more our com&#173;munication will resemble traveling at great
speed. Bumped and jostled, queasy from the constant ocular and muscular
adjust&#173;ments our body must make to keep up, we will live in a constant
state of digital jet lag.
This is a disastrous development on many levels. Brain sci&#173;ence may
suggest that some decisions can be made in the blink of an eye, but not
all judgments benefit from a short frame of reference. We need to protect
the finite well of our attention if we care about our relationships. We
need time in order to prop&#173;erly consider the effect of what we say upon
others. We need time in order to grasp the political and professional
ramifica&#173;tions of our typed correspondence. We need time to shape and
design and filter our words so that we say exactly what we mean.
Communicating at great haste hones our utterances down to instincts and
impulses that until now have been held back or channeled more carefully.
Continuing in this strobe-lit techno-rave communication environment as it
stands will be destructive for businesses. Employees communicating at
breakneck speed make mistakes. They forget, cross boundaries that exist
for a reason, make sloppy errors, offend clients, spread rumors and gossip
that would never travel through offline channels, work well past the point
where their contributions are helpful, burn out and break down and then
have trouble shutting down and recuperating. The churn produced by this
communication lifestyle cannot be sustained. "To perfect things, speed is
a unifying force," the race-car driver Michael Schumacher has said. "To
imperfect things, speed is a destructive force." No company is perfect,
nor is any individual.
It is hard not to blame us for believing otherwise, because the Internet
and the global markets it facilitates have bought into a fundamental
warping of the actual meaning of speed. Speed used to convey urgency; now
we somehow think it means efficiency. One can even see this in the
etymology of the word. The earliest recorded use of it as a verb?"to go
fast"? dates back to 1300, when horses were the primary mode of moving in
haste. By 1569, as the printing press was beginning to remake society,
speed was being used to mean "to send forth with quickness." By 1856, in
the thick of the Industrial Revo&#173;lution, when machines and mechanized
production and train travel were remaking society yet again, "speed" took
on another meaning. It was being used to "increase the work rate of," as
in speed up.
There is a paradox here, though. The Internet has provided us with an
almost unlimited amount of information, but the speed at which it
works?and we work through it?has deprived us of its benefits. We might
work at a higher rate, but this is not work&#173;ing. We can store a limited
amount of information in our brains and have it at our disposal at any one
time. Making decisions in this communication brownout, though without
complete infor&#173;mation, we go to war hastily, go to meetings unprepared,
and build relationships on the slippery gravel of false impressions.
Attention is one of the most valuable modern resources. If we waste it on
frivolous communication, we will have nothing left when we really need it.
Everything we say needn't travel at the fastest rate possible. The
difference between typing an email and writing a letter or memo out by
hand is akin to walking on concrete versus stroll&#173;ing on grass. You forget
how natural it feels until you do it again. Our time on this earth is
limited, the world is vast, and the people we care about or need for our
business life to operate will not always live and work nearby; we will
always have to com&#173;municate over distance. We might as well enjoy it and
preserve the space and time to do it in a way that matches the rhythms of
our bodies. Continuing to work and type and write at speed, however, will
make our communication environment resemble our cities. There will be
concrete as far as the eye can see.
2. The Physical World matters.
A large part of electronic commu&#173;nication leads us away from the physical
world. Our cafes, post offices, parks, cinemas, town centers, main streets
and commu&#173;nity meeting halls have suffered as a result of this
development. They are beginning to resemble the tidy and lonely bedroom
commuter towns created by the expansion of the American interstate system.
Sitting in the modern coffee shop, you don't hear the murmur or rise and
fall of conversation but the con&#173;tinuous, insect-like patter of typing.
The disuse of real-world commons drives people back into the virtual
world, causing a feedback cycle that leads to an ever-deepening isolation
and neglect of the tangible commons.
This is a terrible loss. We may rely heavily on the Internet, but we
cannot touch it, taste it or experience the indescribable feeling of
togetherness that one gleans from face-to-face interac&#173;tion, from the
reassuring sensation of being among a crowd of one's neighbors. Seeing one
another in these situations reinforces the importance of sharing
resources, of working together, of bal&#173;ancing our own needs with those of
others. Online, these values become notions that are much more easily
suspended to further our own self-interest. Not surprisingly, political
movements that begin online must have a real-world component; otherwise
they evaporate and dissolve into the blur of other activities.
It is almost impossible to navigate the Web without having to stutter-step
around ads and blinking messages from sponsors. In using this tool so
heavily, consumers aren't just frying their attention spans, they're
forfeiting one of the large sources of information that comes from
face-to-face interaction and business. A butcher can tell you which cuts
of meat are the freshest; an online grocer may not. That same butcher, if
he is good, might not just remember your preferences?which an online
retailer can do frighteningly well?but ask you how your mother has been
doing, whether you caught the latest football game. These interactions
remind us that we are more than con&#173;sumers; they remind us that we are
part of the world in a way no amount of online shopping ever will.
If we spend our eve&#173;ning online trading short messages over Facebook with
friends thousands of miles away rather than going to our local pub or park
with a friend, we are effectively withdrawing from the peo&#173;ple we could
turn to for solace, humor and friendship, not to mention the places we
could go to do this. We trade the com&#173;plicated reality of friendship for
its vacuum-packed idea.
3. Context matters
We need context in order to live, and if the environment of electronic
communication has stopped providing it, we shouldn't search online for a
solution but turn back to the real world and slow down. To do this, we
need to uncouple our idea of progress from speed, separate the idea of
speed from effi&#173;ciency, pause and step back enough to realize that
efficiency may be good for business and governments but does not always
lead to mindfulness and sustainable, rewarding relationships. We are here
for a short time on this planet, and reacting to demands on our time by
simply speeding up has canceled out many of the benefits of the Internet,
which is one of the most fabulous technological inventions ever conceived.
We are connected, yes, but we were before, only by gossamer threads that
worked more slowly. Slow communication will preserve these threads and our
ability to sensibly choose to use faster modes when necessary. It will
also preserve our sanity, our families, our relationships and our ability
to find happiness in a world where, in spite of the Internet, saying what
we mean is as hard as it ever was. It starts with a simple instruction:
Don't send.
?John Freeman is the acting editor of Granta magazine. This essay was
adapted from his book "The Tyranny of E-Mail," forthcoming from Scribner.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>15.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Latest version of the Piracy Manifesto (English, Italian, Sept 09)</subject>
<from>MILTOS MANETAS</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Wed, 30 Sep 2009 00:15:26 +0300</date>
<content>Piracy Manifesto,&#160;Latest version&#160;(English, Italian, Sept 09)
The manifesto can be found here:&#160;http://piracymanifesto.com
It will be read and discussed&#160;in &#160;Berlin&#160;on&#160;Saturday Oct 3 (17-18.30
pm , Raum K 24/21) during the&#160;&#160;"Make Capitalism History" Kongress (
2.-4. Oktober, more info http://make-capitalism-history.de)
Help to translate the Manifesto in German and other languages is
appreciate. Send email at Piracy {AT} PiracyManifesto.com
ENGLISH VERSION
Pirates of the Internet Unite!
&#8220;A man was stopped yesterday at the boarder of Italy and France, his
computer was scanned and pirated material was found, mostly Adobe
software and songs by Beatles. The man was arrested at the spot&#8221;
&gt;From a poem to a drug, from an piece of software to a music record and
from a film to a book, everything that&#8217;s famous and profitable, owns
much of its economic value to the manipulation of the Multitudes.
People haven&#8217;t asked to know what the Coca Cola logo looks like,
neither have they asked for the melody of &#8220;Like a Virgin&#8221;. Education,
Media and Propaganda teach it the hard way; by either hammer it our
brains or by speculating over our thirst, our hunger, our need for
communication and fun and most of all our loneliness and despair. In
the days of Internet, what can be copied can be also shared. When it
comes to content, we can give everything with everyone at once. Around
this realisation, a new social class is awaking.
This is not a working class but a class of Producers. Producers are
pirates and hackers by default, they recycle the images, the sounds
and the concepts of the World. Some of it they invent but most they
borrow from others. Because information occupies a physical part of
our bodies, because it is literary &#8220;installed&#8221; in our brain and can&#8217;t
be erased at wish, people have the right to own what is projected on
them. They have the right to own themselves. Because this is a global
World based on inequality and profit, because the contents of a song,
a movie and a book are points of advantage in a vicious fight for
survival, any global citizen has the moral right to appropriate a
digital copy of a song, a movie or a book. Because software is an
international language, the secrets of the World are written in Adobe
and Microsoft: We should try hack them. Finally, because poverty is
the field of experimentation for all global medicine, no patents
should apply.
Today every man with a computer is a Producer and a Pirate. We all
live in the Internet; this is our new country, the only territory that
makes sense to defend and protect . The land of the Internet is one of
information. Men should be able to use this land freely, corporations
should pay for use - a company is definitely not a person. The
Internet is now producing &#8220;internets&#8221;, situations that exist not only
online but also in real space, governed and influenced by what is
happening online. This is the time for the foundation of an global
Movement of Piracy. The freedom of infringing copyright, the freedom
of sharing information and drugs, are our new Commons, they are Global
Rights and as such, Authorities will not be allow them without a
battle. But that will be a strange battle as its the first time the
multitudes is disrespecting the Law instinctively and on a global
scale.
Today, an army of teenagers is copying. Adults are copying, senior
citizens are copying, everyone with a computer is copying something.
Like a novel Goddess Athena, Information wants to break free from
Technology, so it assists us on our enterprise.
Pirates of the Internet Unite!
ITALIAN VERSION
Pirati del Internet Unitevi!
&#8220;Un uomo e&#8217; stato fermato ieri nella frontiera Italiana con la
Francia.&#160;Parecchio materiale pirata, principalmente software di Adobe
e tanti canzoni di Beatles e stato trovato nel suo computer. L&#8217; uomo
e&#8217; stato arrestato.&#8221;
Dalle poesie alle&#160; medicine,&#160; dal software alla musica a da I film e a
I&#160; libri, tutto quel&#160;che diventa famoso,&#160; deve tanto del suo valore
economico alla manipolazione delle&#160;moltitudini. Noi non abbiamo
chiesto di conoscere Il logo della CocaCola e neanche&#160;volevamo sapere
a memoria la melodia di &#8220;Like a Vergin&#8221;.&#160;I media, l&#8217;educazione &#160;e la
propaganda, ci hanno forzato ad imparare tutto ci&#242; speculando sul
nostro bisogno di comunicazione, sulla la nostra necessit&#224; di
divertirsi ma anche sulla propria solitudine e disperazione.
Nei giorni del Internet, tutto quel che pu&#242; essere copiato pu&#242; essere
anche condiviso. Quando si tratta di contenuto, noi possiamo subito
dare tutto a tutti. Attorno a questa realizzazione,&#160; una nuova classe
sociale si sta svegliando. Questa non e&#8217; una classe operaia-non almeno
nel senso stretto del termine: e&#8217; invece una classe di Produttori.
Gli Produttori sono di natura dei Pirati e dei Hackers; riciclano le
immagini, I suoni e I concetti del Mondo. Una parte di questo
materiale se lo inventano ma la gran parte se l&#8221; appropriano da altri.
Perch&#233; l&#8217;informazione occupa un settore fisico del nostro corpo,
perch&#233; viene letteralmente&#160; installata nel nostro cervello e non pu&#242;
essere cancellata a piacere, la gente ha Il diritto di appropriasi di
quel che viene proiettato su di loro. Uno deve avere&#160; Il diritto di
possedere se stesso.&#160;Perch&#233; questa e&#8217; una societ&#224; globale basata sulla
inegualianza e sul profitto, perch&#233; Il contenuto di una canzone, di un
film e di un libro sono dei punti di vantaggio in una feroce lotta
per la soppravivenza, tutti noi abbiamo Il diritto morale di
appropriarsi delle canzoni, dei film e dei libri.
A proposito del software poi, considerando che software non e&#8217; altro
che la nostra&#160; lingua internazionale, si capisce che&#160; I nuovi secretti
del Mondo sono scritti in Adobe e in&#160; Microsoft.&#160;&#160;Si deve allora
tentare di imposessarsi di loro,&#160; hackarli e diffonderli. Infine,
perch&#233; Ia povert&#224;&#160; e&#8217; I&#8217;ll campo sperimentale per ogni nuova pillola e
medicinale, I poveri del Mondo hanno gi&#224; pagato.
Chiunque&#160; attrezzato con un computer e&#8217; gi&#224; un produttore ed e&#8217; anche
un Pirata. Tutti noi viviamo nel Internet, ecco la nostra nuova
patria, l&#8217;unica che vale la pena difendere. La terra del&#8217; Internet e&#8217;
fatta d&#8217;informazioni, chiunque deve essere libero di usarla mentre le
corporations devono pagare per l&#8217;uso. Una corporation non e&#8217;
certamente una persona. La Internet sta producendo &#8220;internets&#8221;,
situazioni che si svillupano anche fuori della rette.
Ed e&#8217; questo I&#8217;ll momento giusto per la fondazione di in movimento
globale di Pirateria. La bellezza di calpestare il copyright, la
libert&#224; di condividere informazione e medicine, sono I nostri nuovi
&#8220;Commons&#8221;, I nostri diritti globali e naturalmente non ci saranno
facilmente concessi senza una battaglia.&#160;&#160;Questa pero sar&#224; una
battaglia divertente, perch&#233; e&#8217; la prima volta che le Moltitudini
disobidiscono la Legge instintivamente. Oggi esiste una mare di
giovani che copiano informazioni, gli adulti anche copiano e anche I
vecchi. Chiunque con un computer copia:&#160; la informazione, come una
nuova Dea Atena, vuole tanto uscire dalla testa spaccata della
Tecnologia.
La Informazione&#160; e&#8217; nel nostro fianco.
Pirati del Internet Unitevi!</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>16.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; UBERMORGEN.COM manifesto, v1</subject>
<from>UBERMORGEN . COM</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sun, 16 Aug 2009 02:15:36 +0200</date>
<content>dear nett_timers
our way too late contribution to the discussion which was ongoing
some months ago with the following thread:
&lt;nettime&gt; Political Work in the Aftermath of the New Media Arts
Crisis by Geert Lovink
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0905/msg00044.html,
attached &amp; linked the updated version of our manifesto,
http://www.ubermorgen.com/manifesto
best regards
hans&amp;&amp;lizvlx
++
--- start ---
UBERMORGEN.COM
manifesto
v1 28.07.2009 (RC1 10.05.2009) *
1.
our work is curiosity driven research.
sampling is our basic principle of production.
it is visual. it is textual. we code recombinations.
we modify your plain-text.
The UM.BOOK**: we relabeled a peter weibel text as an hans ulrich
obrist text. then we transformed a hans ulrich obrist interview with
matthew barney into an interview by peter weibel with UBERMORGEN.COM.
we have no political agenda in our work.
this is true for our ideas, research and production.
the perception of our work is out of our control and we do not intend
to control that either.
we have no intention, no goals. we feed our own curiosity
we are non-ideological.
our primary goal is research for our own interests. We experiment in
the legal, technological, social, economical field; satisfying our
own personal needs.
From this independent perspective we can freely investigate into
whatever we are interested in.
we understand the things that happen around us and to us. We analyze
system configurations and we then recombine our findings, the facts
and the fiction into false originals, foriginal stories. we
contextualize technology with pseudo-politics, social messages with
commerce.
we are not bound to any medium. although in most cases the core of a
project or a work is digital and happens online, it beginns as a
small concept text, some images and some code. it is carried on in a
huge cloud of research data.
the transfer of the digital to the physical transforms online actions
into supercharged images (prints/photos), installations and sculptures.
our goal:
we impact your personal and individual experience
to look for the emotional kick and feedback,
to outsource responsability
to involve the audience emotionally
what we do is not pop art
it is rock art.
we are children of the 1980s. we are the first internet-pop-
generation. we grew up with radical Michael Milken, the king of junk
bonds and mythical Michael Jackson, the king of junk pop. during the
1990s we loaded ourselves with technology, we call it digital
cocaine, with mass media hacking, underground techno, hardcore drugs,
rock&amp;roll lifestyle and net.art jet set.
our neuronal networks and brain structures were similar to the global
synthetic network we helped building up and maintained subversive
activity within. and then they got infected: waves of mania and
depression ran through the technical, social and economic structures.
contemporary high-tech societies deal with hardcore brains using bio-
chemical agents to control the internal information flow, we call
them psychotropic drugs.
but how can we treat a mentally ill global network?
2.
we are not activists. we are actionists in the communicative and
experimental tradition of viennese actionism - performing in the
global media, communication and technological networks, our body is
the ultimate sensor and the immediate medium.
we have enough free time to think. things happen. we do not control
them. the thing that interests us supermassively is the concept of
authority. be it corporate authority or governmental authority.
totalitarianism, the way masses and individuals respond to a
manipulative oppression and the psychotic mass belief in ?they way
things are? always seems to catch our attention. we call it - citing
William Gibson - 'consensual hallucination'.
some examples:
GWEI ? Google Will Eat Itself ? deconstructing the totalitarianism of
shareholder value by creating a autocannibalistic model.
[V]ote-auction? commercialized democracy, cutting out the middle man,
online transactions, directly selling and buying of votes as future
business model.
Superenhanced? physical governmental oppression, NLP (neuro
linguistic programming) and the fascism of newspeak in the area of
war prisoners, enhanced interrogations, detainees, child
imprisonment, Supermax facilites and extraordinary renditions.
we do not know how our work is contextualized and perceived in the
art world or the real world. for that matter we do not appreciate
reading articles, reviews or theory about our work. we
programmatically avoid visting exhibitions in art galleries and
museums, and online we rarely read or look at work. we leave that up
to others. you categorize, qualify and contextualize us.
but in the so called real world our work has legal impact. We are
always in a lot of legal trouble, professionally, personally and
artistically. we learned that these issues were easy to resolve. we
call it intended unconsciousness.
some of these legal controversies serve as precedents to demonstrate
internet legislation. for example: during the vote-auction project a
U.S injunction was sent via email to a swiss domain registrar. they
then turned off our domain on no legal basis - U.S court orders are
not valid in switzerland (sic!) - this case was used by the ICANN
board and in various law publications to discuss domain legislation
issues. our affirmative artistic reaction was to produce the
Injunction Generator, a software that automatically generates such
court orders and sends them to domain registries, owners, lawyers and
journalists to shut down targeted domains.
in some other cases friendly police officers and state agents were
happy to find out that they are not dealing with dark minded
criminals but rather with ?interesting? artists - surely in some
cases we do not state who we are or talk about our artistic
intention, i.e. the Voteauction project where we positioned ourselves
as perverted eastern european business people trying to exploit U.S.
democracy - but usually governmental agencies perfer to have a nice
conversation rather than a criminal investigation. this argument only
goes for pretty much all of mainland europe ? the US and partially
the UK are slightly more threatening.
but in all other cases, fuck them all!
Sosumi
our legal policy: anyone who wants to sue us, threaten us or what:
have you get your court order or whatever the fuck you want, get in
line and wait until we serve you. just be aware that there are about
15 others waiting with priority, so your chances are very limited.
financially, we are deeply in debt, this is very helpful when people
want to hot you with legal bombshells - they go after you in order to
hurt you by taking money from you. but we ain?t got no money, so
there is nothing you can take from us. blood from a turnip. we are
not gonna get got. for this reason we rarely show up in court or even
send a lawyer to represent us, we just let them do it by themselves
and generate more documents which we then use for our work.
on the real life level it is a love-hate relationship: on the
individual level, users and recipients usually react very strongly to
our stuff. we welcome all kinds of reactions: fan-mail, hate-mail,
legal mail.
as artists we see it as our responsability to communicate. to talk
about our research findings, to contextualize images, texts, etc.
communication is part of our 8-5 job but it is not our priority or
passion. this is different if it concerns our media hacking
activities, where multi-layered communication is an integral part of
the performance.
on the art market we are happy to hold one of the digital art and
actionism positions where content is random and not random, where
concept is important but at the same time the surface is queen. we
develop new ways of showcasing our real new media art - new ways that
are rather low-tech than high tech superendeavours.
3.
our relationship to mass media.
we have no respect for news-journalists, thats for sure. most of them
are real scumbags and very unreliable and highly unethical. but, to
our favor, they are very easy to manipulate - or as we call it ?work
with?. so for us the press release is an artform.
. television is the best conventional mass medium. they are closest
to what we call a shock marketing channel - pumping information into
users brains causing a short shock after which the channel to the
brain is open and unfiltered.
. newspapers are boring.
. magazines are usually not interested in our work.
. books are heavy and eternal. but they are an art medium not a mere
information transporter.
. the internet is real-time. that helps coz the faster the wheel is
spinning, the easier it is to turn a complicated issue into a story
made out of slogans and a couple of images.
our media hacking strategy is scalable - with media hacking we mean
the intrusion into massmedia with lo-tech means and a good story, so
only courage, intelligence and some technological know how is
required. from an estimated 500 million eyeballs audience worldwide
for the Vote-auction project to 0/zero mass media audience for our
Net.Art piece Black n White, it is all in the game. and we dont work
with expectations, we dont depend on audience. the days when a large
audience was a thrill are long gone. it does not help, it does not
kick, the only real artistic production happens with input-feedbacks,
when you send out information and you know you will not be able to
control it anymore, the information lives on in mass media, it gets
manipulated and opportunistically used by journalists, politicians,
lawyers and business-people and other artists. then through the media
the story comes back to you and you can spin it, kick in abstract or
surreal content and send it out again to a huge audience. this works
best if the audience is very large, this quarantees the attention and
focus of the journalist and the publishing house. this is the media
hacking performance, this is acting in the eye of the mass media storm.
so on different scales we perform. we experiment. we develop and use
a new media strategy for each new project. during the EKMRZ trilogy
we used a combination of attacks:
with GWEI ? Google Will Eat Itself we targeted about 30-40 opinion
leaders. then we waited three months until the story made it?s way to
the top mass media outlets and then down again to the blogosphere,
schoolbooks and documentaries. this process is still ongoing.
with Amazon Noir ? The Big Book Crime we used official press-releases
by third parties and our own release. this was the classical way by
intention, although unintentionally one third-party pressrelease was
published 6 weeks before the official date, this created chaos and
confusion on both sides and turned out to be nice for everyone.
for The Sound of eBay we worked with only lo-level media art scene
promotion. only our core audience was informed about the project and
they know about it. no fuss, no exagerations. we are still waiting
for feedback.
4.
awareness and the effects of our work on politics and society..
we are not interested in awareness, and we are not interested in
having a direct impact on politics, society, military, business or
technology. though we do think that our research might have a long
term impact. but this is so out of our reach and it is purely
speculative, so we dont think about that much.
maybe our projects have scientific and educational value. this would
explain all the scientific articles, legal studies, dissertations and
master thesis.
knowing or learning about the actual impact of our work would present
us with borders and boundaries of how far we can go or what we can
actually achieve. it could become role-model art. we dont want that.
the people can change things in a political or activist way, not the
art or the artists.
we have to focus on our work and give up on the rest. we chill, relax
and take it easy. we have done our job. we are artists, we need to be
free of responsability, to not have to think about consequences, to
not limit ourselves just because it could have an effect on this or
that, or could be used for us or against us or other people. we
learned that very early. hacking optimizes the attacked system, we
accept that, and we learned to not give a fuck about it.
again awareness and political affairs.
if art and art production politicizes itself, it becomes politics and
ceases to be art.
awareness really sucks because everybody knows about a certain topic,
but still they are not doing anything about it and neither give a
fuck really. if there is impact of a story or a project of ours, we
dont neglect it, but they are simply a sideproduct which we learned
to accept and tolerate. but it is most def. interesting to talk to
and communicate with people emotionally, directly, personally, fake-
personally and right into the core.
this is still why we love working with the net. doing stuff like the
Generators. they are pieces of software that generate foriginal
documents - forged originals. for example: court orders, drug
prescriptions, bankstatements or rendition orders and enhanced
interrogation scripts. this gives us the chance to target every
single inividual, be it enemy or friend, on a pseudo-personal basis.
we get them in their home, in front of their laptop or at their
workplace looking at their workstations. this is when a user is
vulnerable. this is when they are a good target.
people using our generators from their homes have no reason to lie to
our software. they welcome the infiltration and produce their own
reality tv show. at least that is what they are interested in. we
never lie. we work with research, fact and fiction, recombinations of
these and with artistic surplus values.
we lure users into being interested in finding out if what they are
being sucked into is real or not, we mirror their interests and watch
them through the invisible mirror.
UBERMORGEN.COM
Vienna / Amsterdam / Frankfurt, May/August 2009
* RC1 ?Positions in Flux? Symposium, The Netherlands Media Art
Institute Amsterdam, 8.5.2009
" v 1 release, Vienna, 28.7.2009
** UBERMORGEN.COM - MEDIA HACKING VS. CONCEPTUAL ART
HANS BERNHARD / LIZVLX
Alessandro Ludovico (Ed.), Christoph Merian Verlag
http://www.ubermorgen.com/books/
+++ Users Who Read This Item Also Read +++
UBERMORGEN.COM - MEDIA HACKING VS. CONCEPTUAL ART
HANS BERNHARD / LIZVLX
Alessandro Ludovico (Ed.), Christoph Merian Verlag
http://www.ubermorgen.com/books/
+</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>17.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Machines of the Invisible - Manifesto for a Schizo-analysis of Media Cultur</subject>
<from>Pisters, P.P.R.W.</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sun, 8 Jun 2008 20:03:13 +0200</date>
<content>See also the blog Masters of Media: http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl &lt;https://webmail.uva.nl/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=https://webmail.uva.nl/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl&gt;
Machines of the Invisible
Manifesto for a Schizo-analysis of Media Culture
By Patricia Pisters (Dept. Media Studies, University of Amsterdam)
1. Contemporary media are characterized by a stammering stream of an
ever growing schizophrenic 'logic of addition'.
2. 'Old' mass media like television and cinema are not dead but undead.
3. Schizophrenia points to clinical and critical symptoms of a/v
culture.
4. The delirium is socio-political and world historical.
5. The cinematographic regime is already schizo-analytic in conception;
this becomes more evident and widespread in contemporary a/v culture.
6. The schizo-analytic regime of the image acknowledges 'the reality of
illusions'.
7. Immanent powers of the image present them selves in heterogeneous
ways.
8. The virtual is a real power.
9. Images have the power to act.
10. Affect is an autonomous power.
11. Forgers, magicians, charlatans, tricksters, conmen and delusional
characters are symptoms and diagnosis makers of the powers of the
false.
Machines of the Invisible
It is argued with good reasons that digital technology has changed the
media landscape completely: old mass media like film, television and
radio have been replaced by more fragmented, non-hierarchical,
rhizomatic forms of media. This is, however, only partly true. By
looking at the level of image-production in contemporary a/v media, I
will take the changes in the cinematographic apparatus, or the
cinematographic regime, as a starting point for a manifesto for a
schizo-analysis of media culture.
The apparatus theory in the 1970s famously proposed to see cinema as a
'machine of the visible'. The underlying idea of this approach is that
cinema produces 'impressions of reality' or 'illusions taken for
reality'. Cinema is thus seen as a mass medium that invites us into
ideologically determined subject positions. However, in contemporary
media culture the paradigm has shifted: the audio-visual image in
digital culture no longer lures us into taking 'illusion for reality'
but gives us the 'reality of illusions'.
At the heart of this change is the cinematographic apparatus itself,
which now could be conceived as a schizo-analytic producer of
heterogeneous and multiple connections that is tightly connected to
other forms of a/v media. The digital cinematographic-apparatus has to
be seen as a complex constellation of schizoid 'machines of the
invisible'.
and...and...and...
1. Contemporary media are characterized by a stammering stream of an
ever growing schizophrenic 'logic of addition'.
Laptops, mobile phones, webcams, ipods, satellite television, web 2.0:
new forms of media grow like wild plants without deep roots (rhizomes)
in between older forms of mass media (newspapers, film, radio and
television). Undeniably, 'old mass media' have changed by this but it
doesn't mean that they have disappeared completely in the rhizomatic
network. The television news is no longer the only source of
information, CNN competes with Arab satellite channels, bloggers and
civil journalism, hypes emerge online, Youtube and Twitter turn
everybody into a media producer. But deeply rooted trees are not that
easily overgrown. The media have become individualized and fragmented
and specialized and opened up
and... and...
And they are also still mass medial. So no either... or-logic but an ever
growing process. Contemporary media culture can only be thought in the
stammering stream of an and...and...and logic. A schizophrenic logic of
intensity and multiplicity that begs for a schizo-analysis.
'We have grass in our heads' ... and there are also still many trees.
'We're tired of the tree because we have grass in our heads', Deleuze
and Guattari argue when they introduce non-hierarchical rhizomatic
thinking in A Thousand Plateaus. At the same time they indicate that
out of every rhizome a tree can grow, and that trees can behave
rhizomaticly. So it is not a matter of saying: old media are tools of
capitalist ideology, whereas new media free us from ideological
interpellation. 'Old' and 'new' media are two different ways of
thinking and behaving that can have both positive and negative effects,
produce the most beautiful creations and the most horrible
suffocations. The media are complex and interwoven networks of grass
roots and tree-structures.
Mass media are dead. Long live the mass media!
2. 'Old' mass media like television and cinema are not dead but undead.
Like zombies or vampires 'old mass media' have strong regenerative
powers as indicated by the fact that for instance,
a. Programs such as 'Idols', 'Dancing on Ice' and other popular shows
are still able to keep a mass audience on a Saturday night in front of
the television set. Not to mention the Dutch BNN-program 'The Big Donor
Show' that attracted a million audience, 30.000 potentially new donors
and was Breaking News all over the world. Cinema retains or regains its
multiplex attractions.
b. Mass media are indeed no longer the most important makers or
distributors of the news, but still have a huge filtering function.
Only when an internet hype is reported by the 8 o'clock news it becomes
really popular and widely followed (such as the 'jumping'-dance hype in
the Netherlands). In this way traditional media have become the
'curators' of the internet.
c. Mass media use new forms of media as well: podcasting is also still
radio, the 8 o'clock news on demand is still the 8 o'clock news. Did
you miss an emission? 'Were you too afraid to watch (the 'Big Donor
Show')? Try again', broadcast company BNN says on their website. In
this way new media do not weaken the power of the traditional media but
reinforce it. And beside all fragmentation and multiplication, the
internet becomes a huge store, database and audiovisual archive of the
mass media.
Clinical and Critical
3. Schizophrenia points to clinical and critical symptoms of a/v
culture.
By arguing for a schizo-analysis of media culture I am not proposing to
pathologize culture, nor calling for insanity. However, the clinical
symptoms of schizophrenia do point to important characteristics of
contemporary a/v culture and criticize them at the same time.
Positive symptoms: an overflow of energy, intensity, everything is
connected to everything, liberated and recreated, explosion. As Deleuze
and Guattari say: 'Connecticut - Connect-I-Cut': machines and bodies,
bodies that liberate themselves from their normative organization
(BwO).
Negative symptoms: intensity turns into catatonia, inertia, apathy,
implosion. Every production provokes its own anti-production. That is
the core (axiom) of the immanent system of 'capitalism and
schizophrenia', indicated by Deleuze and Guattari. Our image culture is
more like a schizoid delirium that like the psychoanalytic dream.
Alienations: Delirium is socio-political
4. The delirium is socio-political and world historical.
The schizoid delirium is situated at the other end of the individual
Oedipal dream. The delirium is in the first place collective,
socio-political and world-historical. In Alienations documentary maker
Malek Bensmail has filmed patients and doctors on a psychiatric ward in
Algeria.
'Why are the Americans bombing Iraq...'
The patients are moving between hyperactivity and a stream of
delusional words and catatonic states. But at the same time their
remarks are incredibly sharp, addressing socio-political issues all the
time.
This documentary also shows that the difference between doctor and
patient is not that big anymore. Everybody feels the insanity of the
contemporary situation. Doctors and patients, but also filmmakers and
spectators are implicated - we all share the collective deliria of our
audio-visual media society.
Cinematographic regime is schizoanalytic; a/v culture is abstract
machine
5. The cinematographic regime is already schizo-analytic in
conception; this becomes more evident and widespread in contemporary
a/v culture.
As Ian Buchanan has argued the tripartite schizo-analytic conceptual
schema of 'body without organs', 'assemblage' and 'abstract machine'
informs the basic matrix of Deleuze's account of the cinematic image.
It follows the logic of the 'frame', the 'shot' and 'montage'. The
frame selects and deterritorializes the image, presenting it in new
ways (BwO), the shot unites elements in a closed set (assemblage),
montage joins together the powers of the frame and the shot (abstract
machine).
But the cinematic image also operates in a larger 'abstract machine' of
media culture, where it can join all kind of hegemonic and resisting
forces.
From 'Illusions of Reality' to 'Reality of Illusions'
6. The schizo-analytic regime of the image acknowledges 'the reality of
illusions'.
The classical film theoretical notion of the filmed (or mediated) image
as an 'impression', 'effect' or 'illusion of reality' has modulated
into the image as a 'reality of illusions'. This insight translates
schizophrenic (and neurobiological and Deleuzian) findings that the
image has its own immanent power to do something (in our mind, in the
world).
A schizo-analysis of media culture takes into account at least four
immanent (and autonomous) powers of the image: the power of the
virtual, the power of the performative speech act, the power of affect
and the power of the false.
7. Immanent powers of the image present them selves in heterogeneous
ways.
These powers do not provide an unequivocal model of analysis. They
present themselves in all kind forms and on different types of levels,
they metamorphose in good and bad, nobel and base and everything in
between.
Power of the Virtual
8. The virtual is a real power.
'There is no actual image that is not surrounded by a mist of virtual
images'. One of Deleuze's last aphorisms seems to grow in relevance
every minute. Every image we see resonates in all kinds of ways with
other images: images from our personal and collective memory, fantasy
images, film- and other media images.
Memories are stored on film, a film-image becomes a memory-image. Fact
and fiction chase each other, virtual and actual form a circuit as in
the hall of mirrors of The Lady from Shanghai. Hitchcock's fiction has
become a collective memory. Collective memory has been colored by
fiction (Stone's JFK). And where is Laura Dern in Inland Empire: in the
present, the past, in Poland, in America? In which layer of reality or
fictions is she moving... or trapped? And in this film, isn't it
precisely that scene of her death, explicitly indicated as fictitious
because we see an enormous camera appearing in a suddenly widening
frame, that is the most raw and social-realistic?
Power of the speech act
9. Images have the power to act.
Another power that is acknowledged by a schizo-analytic approach of
media culture, is the power of the speech act, 'act de parole' as
Deleuze says. Or better still we should perhaps speak of an 'act de l'
image'. Philosophers of language have since long demonstrated
convincingly that words have performative power: the power to do
something or to have something done. In this way words operate in
reality. Images have the same kind of (or maybe more) performative
power of the speech act.
Even if everybody knows that an image is staged, it has an effect: it
penetrates our mind and puts itself somewhere in the flux of images. Of
course this effect is not new. Propaganda images have been used like
this for a long time. But this power goes beyond conscious
propagandistic means. All images have this creative power of the speech
act.
So, in a similar vein the image can be used to tell stories that call a
minority group into existence, 'creating a people'. The active power of
the image is not to be underestimated. The Battle of Algiers has become
the Algerian War of Independence.
On the level of the contents of the images the Algerian women in The
Battle of Algiers are very conscious of the power of the performative:
with bleached hair, speaking perfect French and in an elegant dress the
French barricades in the city are no longer closed. And in a recent
French movie the message is cynical: a simple French man all of a
sudden sees the absurdity of random (and not so random) identity checks
and the whole social system: he ends up in a police cell, then in a
psychiatric hospital and finally looses his job. But with a fake cv and
following the social 'rules of the game' without too many critical
questions, everything turns out all right: ?a va? tres bien merci!
Power of Affect
10. Affect is an autonomous power.
The schizophrenic feeling of a too much of everything, too much
injustice, too unbearable, too many images - it all reduces our
sensory-motor capacities. But it creates more room for the affect.
Deleuze has demonstrated how the affect is connected to the close-up.
The close-up is one of the most typical and most striking stylistic
features of the cinematographic/audio-visual image. In that way cinema
has contributed to the power of affect. Faces and other bodily parts or
objects in close-up obtain affective impressive or expressive
qualities. The eyes loose their perspectival overview, disoriented the
image touches us directly. 'The affect has autonomous power', Brian
Massumi has elaborated on this. It works independent of story or
context.
On a political level the power of affect takes on a different guise.
Helen Mirren as Queen Elisabeth gradually discovers that the
representative powers of the 'Queen as the Country' has modulated into
the affective power of the 'Queen of Hearts'.
Power of the false
11. Forgers, magicians, charlatans, tricksters, conmen and delusional
characters are symptoms and diagnosis makers of the powers of the
false.
Finally the schizoanalytic lesson of Orson Welles, again first noted by
Deleuze. In F For Fake Welles performs as a magician to introduce the
stories of other charlatans. Master forger Elmyr de Hory draws a
Picasso in ten minutes: no museum in the world that distinguishes it
from an original one. The magician knows like no body else how to play
with the reality of illusions. The art forger undermines the difference
between copy and original. The conman plays a game with our
expectations and conventions (Sawyer in Lost). The artist plays this
game most creatively and most generously.
What is demonstrated in the power of the false is that the truth is
very difficult to retrieve and most of the time is based on a choice.
An affective choice, even if it is often wrapped in rational arguments,
moral principles or dogmatic convictions. But the true ethical
evaluation should be the affirmative creative potentiality, the
ultimate motivation of the 'charlatan'. In The Illusionist we don't
really know how Eisenheim has conjured his plan. But inspector Uhl
decides that he knows what happened. And real magic or just a trick, it
actually doesn't matter, Eisenheim's motivation (love, life) is what
counts.
The media are an immanent system that feeds itself. An abstract machine
that always grows, expands, produces: from the most cruel and horrific
to the most beautiful and sublime. Production and anti-production.
Schizo-analysis not as a disease but as a process and method to
understand the immanent powers of the image, to play with them, and
break through them (without breaking down).
The brain and the screen maintain an intimate and complex relationship.
The camera has penetrated our mind, for the best and for the worst. But
the brain also determines for a large part what we see on the screen,
for the best and for the worst. The cinematographic apparatus is no
longer a machine that renders the visible, a machine of the visible.
The new cinematic regime of digital a/v culture points to the fact that
the screen is that thin membrane between world and brain and that the
mediated image, in producing all kind of 'invisible' powers, should be
conceived as 'machines of the invisible.'</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; a hacker manifesto 001-006</subject>
<from>McKenzie Wark</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Fri, 24 Sep 2004 22:26:17 -0400</date>
<content>-- from the uncorrected page proofs.
For the book, see:
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html
A Hacker Manifesto 001-006
McKenzie Wark
001. A double spooks the world, the double of abstraction. The fortunes of states and armies, companies and communities depend on it. All contending classes, be they ruling or ruled, revere it -- yet fear it. Ours is a world that ventures blindly into the new with its fingers crossed.
002. All classes fear this relentless abstraction of the world, on which their fortunes yet depend. All classes but one: the hacker class. We are the hackers of abstraction. We produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data. Whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or colourings, we are the abstracters of new worlds. Whether we come to represent ourselves as researchers or authors, artists or biologists, chemists or musicians, philosophers or programmers, each of these subjectivities is but a fragment of a class still becoming, bit by bit, aware of itself as such.
003. And yet we don't quite know who we are. That is why this text seeks to make manifest our origins, our purpose and our interests. A hacker manifesto: Not the only manifesto, as it is in the nature of the hacker to differ from others, to differ even from oneself, over time. To hack is to differ. A hacker manifesto cannot claim to represent what refuses representation.
004. Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old. Hackers create these new worlds, yet we do not possess them. That which we create is mortgaged to others, and to the interests of others, to states and corporations who monopolise the means for making worlds we alone discover. We do not own what we produce -- it owns us.
005. Hackers use their knowledge and their wits to maintain their autonomy. Some take the money and run. (But one cannot run far.) We must live with our compromises. (Some refuse to compromise.) We live as best we can. All too often those of us who take one of these paths resent those who take the other. One lot resents the prosperity it lacks, the other resents the liberty it lacks to hack away at the world freely. What eludes the hacker class is a more abstract expression of our interests as a class, and of how this interest may meet those of others in the world.
006. Hackers are not joiners. We're not often willing to submerge our singularity in any collective. What the times call for is a collective hack that realises a class interest based on an alignment of differences rather than a coercive unity. Hackers are a class, but an abstract class. A class that makes abstractions, and a class made abstract. To abstract hackers as a class is to abstract the very concept of class itself. The slogan of the hacker class is not the workers of the world united, but the workings of the world untied.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; A hacker manifesto 007-020</subject>
<from>McKenzie Wark</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Sun, 26 Sep 2004 20:40:04 -0400</date>
<content>Schmoo writes:
&gt;in ref to the Hua Hsu quote:
&gt;if the World was 'ours', what would we do with it?
That's one of two questions that the book tries to answer. The other question is: why is this world not ours? What is the new ruling class that seeks to concentrate the onwership and control of all information in its hands? In the extract below, i try to develop a way of grappling with this
--k
A Hacker Manifesto
McKenzie Wark
Harvard University Press
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html
007. Everywhere abstraction reigns, abstraction made concrete. Everywhere abstraction's straight lines and pure curves order matters along complex but efficient vectors. But where education teaches what one may produce with an abstraction, the knowledge most useful for the hacker class is of how abstractions are themselves produced. Deleuze: "Abstractions explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained."
008. Abstraction may be discovered or produced, may be material or immaterial, but abstraction is what every hack produces and affirms. To abstract is to construct a plane upon which otherwise different and unrelated matters may be brought into many possible relations. To abstract is to express the virtuality of nature, to make known some instance of its manifold possibilities, to actualise a relation out of infinite relationality, to manifest the manifold.
009. History is the production of abstraction and the abstraction of production. What makes life differ in one age after the next is the application of new modes of abstraction to the task of wresting freedom from necessity. History is the virtual made actual, one hack after another. History is the cumulative qualitative differentiation of nature as it is hacked.
010. Out of the abstraction of nature comes its productivity, and the production of a surplus over and above the necessities of survival. Out of this expanding surplus over necessity comes an expanding capacity to hack, again and again, producing further abstractions, further productivity, further release from necessity -- at least in potential. But in actuality the hacking of nature, the production of surplus, does not make us free. Again and again, a ruling class arises that controls the surplus over bare necessity and enforces new necessities on those peoples who produce this very means of escaping necessity.
011. What makes our times different is the appearance of the horizon of possibility of a new world, long imagined -- a world free from necessity. The production of abstraction has reached the threshold where it can break the shackles holding hacking fast to outdated and regressive class interests, once and for all. Debord: "The world already possesses the dream of a time whose consciousness it must now possess in order to actually live it."
012. Invention is the mother of necessity. While all states depend on abstraction for the production of their wealth and power, the ruling class of any given state has an uneasy relationship to the production of abstraction in new forms. The ruling class seeks always to control innovation and turn it to its own ends, depriving the hacker of control of her or his creation, and thereby denying the world as a whole the right to manage its own development.
013. The production of new abstraction always takes place among those set apart by the act of hacking. We others who have hacked new worlds out of old, in the process become not merely strangers apart but a class apart. While we recognise our distinctive existence as a group, as programmers or artists or writers or scientists or musicians, we rarely see these ways of representing ourselves as mere fragments of a class experience. Geeks and freaks become what they are negatively, through the exclusion by others. Together we form a class, a class as yet to hack itself into existence as itself -- and for itself.
014. It is through the abstract that the virtual is identified, produced and released. The virtual is not just the potential latent in matter, it is the potential of potential. To hack is to produce or apply the abstract to information and express the possibility of new worlds, beyond necessity.
015. All abstractions are abstractions of nature. Abstractions release the potential of the material world. And yet abstraction relies on the material world's most curious quality -- information. Information can exist independently of a given material form, but cannot exist without any material form. It is at once material and immaterial. The hack depends on the material qualities of nature, and yet discovers something independent of a given material form. It is at once material and immaterial. It discovers the immaterial virtuality of the material, its qualities of information.
016. Abstraction is always an abstraction of nature, a process that creates nature's double, a second nature, a collective space of human existence in which collective life dwells among its own products and comes to take the environment it produces to be natural.
017. Land is the detachment of a resource from nature, an aspect of the productive potential of nature rendered abstract, in the form of property. Capital is the detachment of a resource from land, an aspect of the productive potential of land rendered abstract, in the form of property. Information is the detachment of a resource from capital already detached from land. It is the double of a double. It is a further process of abstraction beyond capital, but one that yet again produces its separate existence in the form of property.
018. Just as the development of land as a productive resource creates the historical advances for its abstraction in the form of capital, so too does the development of capital provide the historical advances for the further abstraction of information, in the form of 'intellectual property'. In traditional societies, land, capital and information were bound to particular social or regional powers by customary or hereditary ties. What abstraction hacked out of the old feudal carcass was a liberation of these resources based on a more productive form of property, a universal right to private property. This universal abstract form encompassed first land, then capital, now information.
019. While the abstraction of property unleashed productive resources, it did so at the same time as it instituted class division. Private property established a pastoralist class that owns the land, and a farmer class dispossessed of it. Out of the people the abstraction of private property expelled from its traditional communal right to land, it created a dispossessed class who became the working class, as they were set to work by a rising class of owners of the material means of manufacturing, the capitalist class. This working class became the first class to seriously entertain the notion of overthrowing class rule, but failed in this historic task. The property form was not yet abstract enough to release the virtuality of classlessness that is latent in the productive energies of abstraction itself.
020. It is always the hack that creates a new abstraction. With the emergence of a hacker class, the rate at which new abstractions are produced accelerates. The recognition of intellectual property as a form of property -- itself an abstraction, a legal hack -- creates a class of intellectual property creators. But this class still labours for the benefit of another class, to whose interests its own interests are subordinated. As the abstraction of private property was extended to information, it produced the hacker class as a class, as a class able to make of its innovations in abstraction a form of property. Unlike farmers and workers, hackers have not -- yet -- been dispossessed of their property rights entirely, but still must sell their capacity for abstraction to a class that owns the means of production, the vectoralist class - - the emergent ruling class of our time.
021. The vectoralist class wages an intensive struggle to dispossess hackers of their intellectual property. Patents and copyrights all end up in the hands, not of their creators, but of a vectoralist class that owns the means of realising the value of these abstractions. The vectoralist class struggles to monopolise abstraction. For the vectoral class, "politics is about absolute control over intellectual property by means of war-like strategies of communication, control, and command." Hackers find themselves dispossessed both individually, and as a class.
022. As the vectoralist class consolidates its monopoly on the means of realising the value of intellectual property, it confronts the hacker class more and more as a class antagonist. Hackers come to struggle against the usurious charges the vectoralists extort for access to the information that hackers collectively produce, but that vectoralists come to own. Hackers come to struggle against the particular forms in which abstraction is commodified and turned into the private property of the vectoralist class. Hackers come as a class to recognise their class interest is best expressed through the struggle to free the production of abstraction, not just from the particular fetters of this or that form of property, but to abstract the form of property itself.
023. The time is past due when hackers must come together with workers and farmers -- with all of the producing classes of the world -- to liberate productive and inventive resources from the myth of scarcity. The time is past due for new forms of association to be created that can steer the world away from its destruction through commodified exploitation. The greatest hacks of our time may turn out to be forms of organising free collective expression, so that from this time on, abstraction serves the people, rather than the people serving the ruling class.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/WARHAC.html
----- End forwarded message -----</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>20.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Towards a Cusco-Manifesto</subject>
<from>Nils R&#246;ller</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 12 Sep 2001 11:17:16 +1000</date>
<content>[via "geert lovink" &lt;geert {AT} xs4all.nl&gt;]
Towards a Cusco-Manifesto
We need a warm-time-machine.
The Internet is becoming more and more a time-machine, that homogenizes
worldwide relations. We do believe that this needs a new warm input.
Today's input comes from a northwestern time-structure. We do not
question single enterprises like the international space station, we want
to build our a time-space-station in Cusco.
Cusco is more than Venice. It is not only a nice counterpart of the
world, not only a system of channels, that is permanently overfludded by
international tourism, it is more and it is different. It is a compass for
ideas and a habitat to develop critical creativity.
Why? Because Cusco is a place in between: between inca-past and global
future.
Global future will be conditioned by electronic networks. The inca-past
was conditioned by a non-literal network. Today Cusco is overfludded by
international tourists that do want to adventure the existing botanic
jungle and also the hidden jungle of precolumbian history. This history
was not written. Is was only interpreted by the writers of the western
colonizers, that did represent the Inca knowledge in a medium that is
strange to its individual structure. We will question this structure.
Our structure of approaching Cusco is the difference machine. The
difference machine starts to work, when different media techniques are in
conflict.
Our warm-time-machine works with the energy of this conflict. Going
towards Cusco converts a hybrid energy. McLuhan said that the artist is
able to realize how new media techniques will change common
time-space-feeling. Cusco is different. It enables to realize how networks
in past and future can merge together.
We do invite artists and scientists to use their insight into
timespace-architectures. We ask them to take examples of precolumbian
work. For us a a vase found in an inca tomb or corns of amaranth are not
only elements of a past tradition nice to gaze at. They are traces of
another time-space structure.
We do encourage artists to invest in a special stock market. We trade with
visual robbery and we do aks artists to rework and reflect the robbery of
western treasure-hunters.
This reflection will allow us to createt resources for the
warm-time-machine: to build step by step the Cusco Academy.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>21.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; The Manifesto of January 3, 2000</subject>
<from>Bruce Sterling</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Wed, 23 Sep 1998 10:54:04 -0700 (PDT)</date>
<content>The Manifesto of January 3, 2000
by Bruce Sterling
The rapidly approaching millennium offers a unique cultural opportunity.
After many years of cut-and-paste, appropriation, detournement and
neo-retro ahistoricality, postmodernity is about to end. Immediately
after the end of the fin de siecle, there will be a sudden and intense
demand for genuine novelty.
Any new year offers a chance for sweeping resolutions and brave efforts at
self-reform. But the end of a millennium offers a rare and vital
opportunity to bury all that is dead within us and issue proclamations of
particular scope and ambition.
I suspect that a group that can offer a coherent, thoughtful and novel
cultural manifesto on the target date of January 3, 2000 has a profound
opportunity to affect the zeitgeist. (On January 1, everyone will be too
hung over to read manifestos; on January 2, nobody's computers will work.
So naturally the target date must be January 3.) In this preliminary
document, I would like to offer a few thoughts on the possible contents of
such a manifesto.
The central issue as the new millennium dawns is technocultural. There are
of course other, more traditional, better-developed issues for humankind.
Cranky fundamentalism festers here and there; the left is out of ideas
while the right is delusional; income disparities have become absurdly
huge; these things are obvious to all. However, the human race has
repeatedly proven that we can prosper cheerfully with ludicrous, corrupt
and demeaning forms of religion, politics and commerce. By stark
contrast, no civilization can survive the physical destruction of its
resource base. It is very clear that the material infrastructure of the
twentieth century is not sustainable. This is the issue at hand.
We have a worldwide environmental problem. This is a truism. But the
unprecedentedly severe and peculiar weather of the late 1990s makes it
clear that this problem is growing acute. Global warming has been a
lively part of scientific discussion since at least the 1960s, but global
warming is a quotidian reality now. Climate change is shrouding the globe
in clouds of burning rain forest and knocking points off the GNP of China.
Everyone can offer a weird weather anecdote now; for instance, I spent a
week this summer watching the sky turn gray with fumes from the blazing
forests of Chiapas. The situation has been visibly worsening, and will
get worse yet, possibly very much worse.
Society has simply been unable to summon the political or economic will to
deal successfully with this problem by using 20th century methods. That is
because CO2 emission is not centrally a political or economic problem.
It is a design and engineering problem. It is a cultural problem and a
problem of artistic sensibility.
New and radical approaches are in order. These approaches should be
originated, gathered, martialled into an across-the board cultural
program, and publicly declared -- on January 3rd.
Global warming is a profound opportunity for the 21st century culture
industry. National governments lack the power and the will to impose
dirigiste solutions to the emission of carbon dioxide. Dirigiste
solutions would probably not work anyway. It is unlikely that many of us
could tolerate living in a carbon-dioxide Ration State. It would mean
that almost every conceivable human activity would have to be licensed by
energy commissars.
Industry will not reform its energy base. On the contrary, when it comes
to CO2 legislation, industry will form pressure groups and throw as much
sand as possible into the fragile political wheels. Industry will use
obscurantist tactics that will mimic those of American right-wing
anti-evolution forces -- we will be told that Global Warming is merely a
"theory," even when our homes are on fire. Industry is too stupid to see
planetary survival as a profit opportunity. But industry is more than
clever enough to sabotage government regulation, especially when
globalized industry can play one government off against the next.
The stark fact that our atmosphere is visibly declining is of no apparent
economic interest except to insurance firms, who will simply make up their
lack by gouging ratepayers and exporting externalized costs onto the
general population.
With business hopeless and government stymied, we are basically left with
cultural activism. The tools at hand are art, design, engineering, and
basic science: human artifice, cultural and technical innovation.
Granted, these may not seem particularly likely sources of a serious and
successful effort to save the world. This is largely because, during the
twentieth century, government and industry swelled to such tremendous
high-modernist proportions that these other enterprises exist mostly in
shrunken subcultural niches.
However, this doesn't have to be the case. With government crippled and
industry brain-dead to any conceivable moral appeal, the future of
decentered, autonomous cultural networks looks very bright. There has
never been an opportunity to spread new ideas and new techniques with the
alacrity that they can spread now. Human energy must turn in some
direction. People will run from frustration and toward any apparent
source of daylight. As the planet's levees continue to break, people will
run much faster and with considerably more conviction.
Our cultural substance-abuse problem with CO2 may have very severe
consequences to human happiness, but the immediate physical problem is
rather well understood. Clever people, united and motivated, should be
able to deal with this. Carbon dioxide is not a time-honored
philosophical dilemma or some irreducible flaw in the human condition.
Serious fossil-fuel consumption, as a practice on the grand scale, is only
about 200 years old. The most severe rise in carbon emission occurred
during the past fifty years. We're painfully dependent on this practice,
but it's not as if we've married it.
It's a question of tactics. Civil society does not respond at all well to
moralistic scolding. There are small minority groups here and there who
are perfectly aware that it is immoral to harm the lives of coming
generations by massive consumption now: deep Greens, Amish, people
practicing voluntary simplicity, Gandhian ashrams and so forth. These
public-spirited voluntarists are not the problem. But they're not the
solution either, because most human beings won't volunteer to live like
they do. Nor can people be forced to live that way through legal
prescription, because those in command of society's energy resources will
immediately game and neutralize any system of legal regulation.
However, contemporary civil society can be led anywhere that looks
attractive, glamorous and seductive.
The task at hand is therefore basically an act of social engineering.
Society must become Green, and it must be a variety of Green that society
will eagerly consume. What is required is not a natural Green, or a
spiritual Green, or a primitivist Green, or a blood-and-soil romantic
Green.
These flavors of Green have been tried, and have proven to have
insufficient appeal. We can regret this failure if we like. If the
semi-forgotten Energy Crisis of the 1970s had provoked a wiser and more
energetic response, we would not now be facing a weather crisis. But the
past's well-meaning attempts were insufficient, and are now part of the
legacy of a dying century.
The world needs a new, unnatural, seductive, mediated, glamorous Green. A
Viridian Green, if you will.
The best chance for progress is to convince the twenty-first century that
the twentieth century's industrial base was crass, gauche, and filthy.
This approach will work because it is based in the truth. The twentieth
century lived in filth. It was much like the eighteenth century before
the advent of germ theory, stricken by septic cankers whose origins were
shrouded in superstition and miasma. The truth about our physical
existence must be shown to people. It must be demonstrated repeatedly and
everywhere.
People with networks, websites and sophisticated sensors should not find
this task very difficult.
The current industrial base is outmoded, crass and nasty, but this is not
yet entirely obvious. Scolding it and brandishing the stick is just part
of the approach. Proving it requires the construction of an alternative
twenty-first century industrial base which seems elegant, beautiful and
refined. This effort should not be portrayed as appropriate, frugal, and
sensible, even if it is. It must be perceived as glamorous and visionary.
It will be very good if this new industrial base actually functions, but
it will work best if it is spectacularly novel and beautiful.
If it is accepted, it can be made to work; if it is not accepted, it will
never have a chance to work.
The central target for this social engineering effort must be the people
who are responsible for emitting the most CO2. The people we must strive
to affect are the ultrarich. The rentiers, the virtual class, the
captains of industry; and, to a lesser extent, the dwindling middle
classes. The poor will continue to suffer. There is clearly no pressing
reason for most human beings to live as badly and as squalidly as they do.
But the poor do not emit much carbon dioxide, so our efforts on their
behalf can only be tangential.
Unlike the modernist art movements of the twentieth century, a Viridian
culture-industry movement cannot be concerned with challenging people's
aesthetic preconceptions. We do not have the 19th-century luxury of
shocking the bourgeoisie. That activity, enjoyable and time-honored though
it is, will not get that poison out of our air. We are attempting to
survive by causing the wealthy and the bourgeoisie to willingly live in a
new way.
We cannot make them do it, but if we focussed our efforts, we would have
every prospect of luring them into it.
What is culturally required at the dawn of the new millennium is a genuine
avant-garde, in the sense of a cultural elite with an advanced sensibility
not yet shared by most people, who are creating a new awareness requiring
a new mode of life. The task of this avant-garde is to design a stable
and sustainable physical economy in which the wealthy and powerful will
prefer to live. Mao suits for the masses are not on the Viridian agenda.
Couture is on the agenda. We need a form of Green high fashion so
appallingly seductive and glamorous that it can literally save people's
lives. We have to gratify people's desires much better than the current
system does. We have to reveal to people the many desires they have that
the current system is not fulfilling. Rather than marshalling themselves
for inhuman effort and grim sacrifice, people have to sink into our
twenty-first century with a sigh of profound relief.
Allow me to speak hypothetically now, as if this avant-garde actually
existed, although, as we all know, it cannot possibly come into being
until January 3, 2000. Let's discuss our tactics. I have a few cogent
suggestions to offer.
We can increase our chances of success by rapidly developing and expanding
the postmodern culture industry. Genuine "Culture" has "art" and
"thought," while the Culture Industry merely peddles images and
information.
I know this. I am fully aware of the many troubling drawbacks of this
situation, but on mature consideration, I think that the Culture Industry
has many profound advantages over the twentieth century's physically
poisonous smokestack industries. Also, as digital technologists,
thinkers, writers, designers, cultural critics, und so weiter, we
Viridians suspect that the rise of the Culture Industry is bound to
increase our own immediate power and influence vis-a-vis, say, coal mining
executives. This may not be an entirely good thing. However, we believe
we will do the world less immediate damage than they are doing.
We therefore loudly demand that the Culture Industry be favored as a
suitably twenty-first century industrial enterprise. Luckily the trend is
already very much with us here, but we must go further; we believe in
Fordism in the Culture Industry. This means, by necessity, leisure. Large
amounts of leisure are required to appreciate and consume
cultural-industrial products such as movies, software, semi-functional
streaming media and so on. Time spent at more traditional forms of work
unfairly lures away the consumers of the Culture Industry, and therefore
poses a menace to our postindustrial economic underpinnings.
"Work" requires that people's attention to be devoted to other, older,
less attractive industries. "Leisure" means they are paying attention and
money to us.
We therefore demand much more leisure for everyone. Leisure for the
unemployed, while copious, is not the kind of "leisure" that increases our
profits. We specifically demand intensive leisure for well-educated,
well-heeled people. These are the people who are best able to appreciate
and consume truly capital-intensive cultural products.
We Viridians suspect that it would require very little effort to make
people work much less. Entirely too much effort is being spent working.
We very much doubt that there is anything being done in metal-bending
industry today that can justify wrecking the atmosphere. We need to burn
the planetary candle at one end only (and, in daylight, not at all).
As much time as possible should be spent consuming immaterial products.
A global population where the vast majority spend their time sitting still
and staring into screens is a splendid society for our purposes. Their
screens should be beautifully designed and their surroundings
energy-efficient. The planet will benefit for everyone who clicks a mouse
instead of shovelling coal or taking an axe and a plow to a rain forest.
The tourist industry is now the number one industry on the planet.
Tourists consume large amounts of pre-packaged culture. We believe
tourism to be a profoundly healthy development. We feel we must strongly
resist the retrograde and unprofitable urge to make migrants and migration
illegal.
Given the unstable condition of the environment, this practice may soon
become tantamount to genocide. It is also palpably absurd to live in a
society where capital can move faster and more easily than human beings.
Capital exists for the sake and convenience of human beings.
We believe that the movement of human beings across national boundaries
and under the aegis of foreign governments is basically a design problem.
If guest workers, refugees, pleasure travellers and so forth were all
electronically tracked via satellite or cell repeaters, the artificial
division between jet setters and refugees would soon cease to exist.
Foreigners are feared not merely because they are foreign, but because
they are unknown, unidentified, and apparently out of local social
control.
In the next century, foreigners need be none of these things. Along with
their ubiquitous credit cards and passports, they could carry their entire
personal histories. They could carry devices establishing proof of their
personal bona fides that would be immediately obvious to anyone in any
language. A better designed society would accommodate this kind of human
solidarity, rather than pandering to the imagined security needs of
land-based national regimes.
We believe that it should be a general new design principle to add
information to a problem, as opposed to countering it with physical
resources (in the case of migrants, steel bars and barbed wire).
Electronic tracking seems a promising example. While the threat to
privacy and anonymity from electronic parole is obviously severe, there is
nothing quite so dreadful and threatening as a septic refugee camp. We
consider this a matter of some urgency. We believe it to be very likely
that massive evacuations will occur in the next few decades as a matter of
course, not merely in the disadvantaged Third World, but possibly in areas
such as a new American Dust Bowl. Wise investments in electronic tourist
management would be well repaid in stitching the fraying fabric of a
weather-disrupted civilization.
For instance, we would expect to see one of the first acts of 21st century
disaster management to be sowing an area with air-dropped and
satellite-tracked cellphones. We believe that such a tracking and display
system could be designed so that it would not be perceived as a threat,
but rather as a jet-setter's prestige item, something like a portable
personal webpage. We believe such devices should be designed first for
the rich. The poor need them worse, but if these devices were developed
and given to the poor by socialist fiat, this would be (probably
correctly) suspected as being the first step toward police roundup and a
death camp.
Replacing natural resources with information is a natural area for
twenty-first century design, because it is an arena for human ingenuity
that was technically closed to all previous centuries. We see
considerable promise in this approach. It can be both cheap and glamorous.
Energy meters, for instance, should be ubiquitous. They should be
present, not in an obscure box outside the home, but enshrined within it.
This is not a frugal, money-saving effort. It should be presented as a
luxury. It should be a mark of class distinction. It should be
considered a mark of stellar ignorance to be unaware of the source of
one's electric power. Solar and wind power should be sold as premiums
available to particularly affluent and savvy consumers. It should be
considered the stigma of the crass proletarian to foul the air every time
one turns on a light switch.
Environmental awareness is currently an annoying burden to the consumer,
who must spend his and her time gazing at plastic recycling labels,
washing the garbage and so on. Better information environments can make
the invisible visible, however, and this can lead to a swift re-evaluation
of previously invisible public ills.
If one had, for instance, a pair of computerized designer sunglasses that
revealed the unspeakable swirl of airborne combustion products over the
typical autobahn, it would be immediately obvious that clean air is a
luxury. Infrasound, ultrasound and sound pollution monitors would make
silence a luxury. Monitor taps with intelligent water analysis in
real-time would make pure water a luxury. Lack of mutagens in one's home
would become a luxury.
Freedom from interruption and time to think is a luxury; personal
attention is luxury; genuine neighborhood security is also very much to be
valued. Social attitudes can and should be changed by the addition of
cogent information to situations where invisible costs have long been
silently exported into the environment. Make the invisible visible.
Don't sell warnings. Sell awareness.
The fact that we are living in an unprecedently old society, a society
top-heavy with the aged, offers great opportunity. Long-term thinking is
a useful and worthwhile effort well suited to the proclivities of old
people.
Clearly if our efforts do not work for old people (a large and growing
fraction of the G-7 populace) then they will not work at all. Old people
tend to be generous, they sometimes have time on their hands.
Electronically connected, garrulous oldsters might have a great deal to
offer in the way of managing the copious unpaid scutwork of electronic
civil society. We like the idea of being a radical art movement that
specializes in recruiting the old.
Ignoring long-term consequences is something we all tend to do; but
promulgating dangerous falsehoods for short-term economic gain is
exceedingly wicked and stupid. If environmental catastrophe strikes
because of CO2 emissions, then organizations like the anti-Green Global
Climate Coalition will be guilty of negligent genocide. Nobody has ever
been guilty of this novel crime before, but if it happens, it will
certainly be a crime of very great magnitude. At this moment, the GCC and
their political and economic allies are, at best, engaged in a risky
gamble with the lives of billions. If the climate spins out of control,
the 21st century may become a very evil place indeed.
The consequences should be faced directly. If several million people
starve to death because, for instance, repeated El Nino events have
disrupted major global harvests for years on end, then there will be a
catastrophe. There will be enormous political and military pressures for
justice and an accounting.
We surmise that the best solution in this scenario would be something like
the Czech lustration and the South African truth commissions. The
groundwork for this process should begin now. The alternatives are not
promising: a Beirut scenario of endless ulcerous and semi-contained
social breakdown; a Yugoslav scenario of climate-based ethnic cleansing
and lebensraum; a Red Terror where violent panic-stricken masses seek
bloody vengeance against industrialism. Most likely of all is a White
Terror, where angry chaos in the climatically disrupted Third World is
ruthlessly put down by remote control by the G7's cybernetic military.
It is very likely under this last scenario that the West's gluttonous
consumption habits will be studiously overlooked, and the blame laid
entirely on the Third World's exploding populations. (The weather's
savage vagaries will presumably be blamed on some handy Lysenkoist
scapegoat such as Jews or unnatural homosexual activities.)
With the Czech lustration and the South African truth commissions, the
late 20th century has given us a mechanism by which societies that have
drifted into dysfunctional madness can be put right. We expect no less
for future malefactors whose sly defense of an indefensible status quo may
lead to the deaths of millions of people, who derived little benefit from
their actions and were never given any voice in their decisions. We
recommend that dossiers be compiled now, for the sake of future
international courts of justice. We think this work should be done quite
openly, in a spirit of civic duty. Those who are risking the lives of
others should be made aware that this is one particular risk that will be
focussed specifically and personally on them.
While it is politically helpful to have a polarized and personalized enemy
class, there is nothing particularly new about this political tactic.
Revanchist sentiment is all very well, but survival will require a much
larger vision. This must become the work of many people in many fields of
labor, ignoring traditional boundaries of discipline and ideology to unite
in a single practical goal: climate.
A brief sketch may help establish some parameters.
Here I conclude with a set of general cultural changes that a Viridian
movement would likely promulgate in specific sectors of society. For the
sake of brevity, these suggestions come in three parts. (Today) is the
situation as it exists now. (What We Want) is the situation as we would
like to see it. (The Trend) the way the situation will probably develop
if it follows contemporary trends without any intelligent intervention.
The Media
Today. Publishing and broadcasting cartels surrounded by a haze of poorly
financed subcultural microchannels.
What We Want. More bandwidth for civil society, multicultural variety, and
better-designed systems of popular many-to-many communication, in multiple
languages through multiple channels.
The Trend. A spy-heavy, commercial Internet. A Yankee entertainment
complex that entirely obliterates many non-Anglophone cultures.
The Military
Today. G-7 Hegemony backed by the American military.
What We Want. A wider and deeper majority hegemony with a military that
can deter adventurism, but specializes in meeting the immediate crises
through civil engineering, public health and disaster relief.
The Trend. Nuclear and biological proliferation among minor powers.
Business
Today. Currency traders rule banking system by fiat; extreme instability
in markets; capital flight but no labor mobility; unsustainable energy
base
What We Want: Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure; vastly
increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and resources
The Trend: commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism, criminalized
banking systems, sweatshops
Industrial Design
Today: very rapid model obsolescence, intense effort in packaging; CAD/CAM
What We Want: intensely glamourous environmentally sound products;
entirely new objects of entirely new materials; replacing material
substance with information; a new relationship between the cybernetic and
the material
The Trend: two design worlds for rich and poor comsumers; a varnish on
barbarism
Gender Issues
Today: more commercial work required of women; social problems exported
into family life as invisible costs
What We Want: declining birth rates, declining birth defects, less work
for anyone, lavish support for anyone willing to drop out of industry and
consume less
The Trend: more women in prison; fundamentalist and ethnic-separatist
ideologies that target women specifically
Entertainment
Today: large-scale American special-effects spectacle supported by huge
casts and multi-million-dollar tie-in enterprises
What We Want: glamour and drama; avant-garde adventurism; a borderless
culture industry bent on Green social engineering
The Trend: annihilation of serious culture except in a few non-Anglophone
societies
International Justice
Today: dysfunctional but gamely persistent War Crimes tribunals
What We Want: Environmental Crime tribunals
The Trend: justice for sale; intensified drug war
Employment
Today: MacJobs, burn-out track, massive structural unemployment in Europe
What We Want: Less work with no stigma; radically expanded leisure;
compulsory leisure for workaholics; guaranteed support for people
consuming less resources; new forms of survival entirely outside the
conventional economy
The Trend: increased class division; massive income disparity; surplus
flesh and virtual class
Education
Today: failing public-supported schools
What We Want: intellectual freedom, instant cheap access to information,
better taste, a more advanced aesthetic, autonomous research collectives,
lifelong education, and dignity and pleasure for the very large segment of
the human population who are and will forever be basically illiterate and
innumerate
The trend: children are raw blobs of potential revenue-generating
machinery; universities exist to supply middle-management
Public Health
Today: general success; worrying chronic trends in AIDS, tuberculosis,
antibiotic resistance; massive mortality in nonindustrial world
What We Want: unprecedently healthy old people; plagues exterminated
worldwide; sophisticated treatment of microbes; artificial food
The Trend: Massive dieback in Third World, septic poor quarantined from
nervous rich in G-7 countries, return of 19th century sepsis, world's
fattest and most substance-dependent populations
Science
Today: basic science sacrificed for immediate commercial gain; malaise in
academe; bureaucratic overhead in government support
What We Want: procedural rigor, intellectual honesty, reproducible
results; peer review, block grants, massively increased research funding,
massively reduced procedural overhead; genius grants; single-author
papers; abandonment of passive construction and the third person plural;
"Science" reformed so as to lose its Platonic and crypto-Christian
elements as the "pure" pursuit of disembodied male minds; armistice in
Science wars
The Trend: "Big Science" dwindles into short-term industrial research or
military applications; "scientists" as a class forced to share imperilled,
marginal condition of English professors and French deconstructionists.
I would like to conclude by suggesting some specific areas for immediate
artistic work. I see these as crying public needs that should be met by
bravura displays of raw ingenuity.
But there isn't time for that. Not just yet.
Bruce Sterling (bruces {AT} well.com)
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>21.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Manifesto of January 3, 2000</subject>
<from>Nicolas</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Thu, 24 Sep 1998 18:44:07 +0100</date>
<content>I'd still like to see opportunities for non-Y2K compliant art realized.
Running on certified non-compliant ....ware (may be cheap next year), with
non-compliant power supply, transport with non-compliant swissair 111
planes and criticised in non-compliant cnn-hurricane media.
It is a pity that we cannot put our system into the hands of external
consultants. Keep the faith ! Finding a way to fix it is really too
complicated.
Make a backup and reinstall your website at a Y2K compliant provider on
Jan 3rd,2000 if it need be.
Bruce Sterling wrote:
&gt; But there isn't time for that. Not just yet.
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>21.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Manifesto of January 3, 2000</subject>
<from>Newmedia</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 29 Sep 1998 13:57:53 EDT</date>
<content>Bruces:
Bravo! Hilarious!!
Whata joker . . . you've really done it now. Talk about stand-up
epistemology. Or, rather, stand-up epidemiology!
One can only hope that your silliness becomes very widely contagious. Silly
people all over the place. Dropping like flies in a cloud of Burrough's bug-
juice . . . from excruciatingly paralysing laughter, n'est pas?
Let's see, how long has this joke been making the rounds? 30 years? 70
years? H.G. Wells' "The Open Conspiracy" was first published in 1928. Now,
that's a truly funny manifesto. You greatly admire Wells, as I recall. He's
your sci-fi inspiration-hero, right? Yes, your "manifesto" does have a noble
comic(book)-parentage. Viridians? Ever hear about the "New Samurais"?
[OK, check out http://www.micro.com/~lorddev, for a few more hints on the
comedy behind this fascinating "manifesto." I just can't decide which Sub-
Order I wish to join. Do I want to join Caitiff or Ouroboros or Oblivion,
Shadow Circle, Arcdia or The Downward Spiral? Mighty attractive. Maybe I
should start my own Sub-Order and get on the Viridian Council. Yum, yum.]
Or, is this an the intended sequel to Kenneth Boulding's famous put-on, "The
Report From Iron Mountain"? What happens when "Anti-War" doesn't bang your
gong? I've got it . . . let's have an "Earth Day." Or, was that a "Net Day"?
I forget. Just ask the "Invisible College", they'll know.
Panic. Fix the world with Culture. Social Engineer away humanity. Social
Psychology to the rescue. Seduce them with glamour. "Gratify people's
desires." "Green high fashion." How delicious. How goofy.
And, in case your appeal to saving the starving masses isn't funny enough
(which, of course, it won't be, for the obvious reason that starving isn't
funny), you offer . . . power and influence. To "we Viridians"!
Ouroborosians Unite!
You say, "Also, as digital technologists, thinkers, writers, designers,
cultural critics, und so weiter, we Viridians suspect that the rise of the
Culture Industry is bound to increase our own immediate power and influence .
. ." More power and influence than whom? "Vis-a-vis, say, coal mining
executives" you continue. Brilliant satire.
Everyone knows there are no coal mining executives any more. Pneumatic
interns in thong underwear have more power and influence than those long-
disappeared "coal mining executives." But, be careful, you might let it slip
out. You don't want to make getting the joke too easy, do you? Make people
work for it, OK?
"Power and influence." My. My. Are you offering now-empty seats on your
"Viridian" Global Business Network roundtable (which you gleefully refer to as
the "Hippie Trilateral Commision") to actual artists? Activists? Nettimers?
Und so weiters? Hilarious. Stand-up epidemiology.
After the GBN's ultimate scenario-man, Peter Schwartz, leveraged himself into
earthorbit and placed all his chips on "The Long Boom" (WIRED 5.07) and his
scheme exploded in everyone's face in less than one year -- Kaboom -- what's a
jokester to do? Admit that it was all a joke? Tell the truth, the whole
truth and nothing but the truth? No, no, no. It's far too late for that.
How about following Alan Arkin's famous advise? Go serpentine! They'll never
be able to hit you that way.
Did Schwartz discuss global financial piracy? No. Did you? No.
Serpentine. Ignore the real culprits.
Did Schwartz discuss the replacement of humanity with replicants? No. Did
you? No.
Serpentine. Ignore the real problem.
Did Schwartz discuss real energy and health breakthroughs? No. Did you? No.
Serpentine. Ignore the real solutions. The human solution.
Peter Lamborn Wilson's (aka Hakim Bey's) lecture last week in New York on the
origins of shamanism was really refreshing. And honest. He simply wants to
be a Neanderthal. Really. He "resembles that remark." Truthfully. The hell
with your blue-green "Viridians." The hell with your "glamour." The hell
with your software communism. Back to the Cave! Grrrrr!!
You want to end humanity? You have two choices. Take the esoteric road or
the exoteric road. High road or low road? Which one gets you to Scotland
afore ye?
Esoteric. You can joke your way into Oblivion -- stand-up epidemiology.
Infect 'em. Germ 'em to death. Meme-virus-brainblast 'em until they are so
"mediated" that they don't remember what it was like to not be medicated.
Offer 'em anything . . . especially "power and influence." Silly, silly,
silly.
Exoteric. Or, you can tell the truth. You really want to reduce global
energy-flux density? Be honest. Cut the CO2 crap. If you think there are
too many people, indeed, if you think we'd be better off without people at
all, admit that you're a lleading sponsor for what you term "negligent
genocide." Yipes. How about "species-cide"? Humans as the only endangered
species? Now that would be honest, n'est pas?
Get historic. Get explicit. Where did we go wrong? How about the story
about when the Cro-Magnons usurped the Neanderthals. How about that marvelous
"Bad Seed" story? Sound familiar? Ask Peter about it. He feels it all the
way down to this oddly long second toe.
But, the world can only take so many PLW/HB's, right? (Gee, Cindy, I don't
know about those Neanderthals. They look, well you know, odd.) And, the
world loves a good epidemiologist-comedian, right? (He looks so human,
doesn't he Cindy? Kinda cute, right? And, so lifelike.)
Congratulations. We all needed a good laugh since Barlow hung up his
keyboard. Silly, silly, silly.
Best,
Mark Stahlman
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; on Manifestos</subject>
<from>Hutnyk</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Sat, 13 Sep 1997 21:34:55 +0200</date>
<content>Hi
Looking back over the last months mail, there's no evidence that you all
got the email below on Manifesto-isms (admittedly a little bit
bible-istic in terms of what did 'Old Beardo' really say, but hey...) Or
did you already get it?
ps. I notice that the despite the Ringitt crisis in Malaysia PM Mahathir
is not delaying the airport development, which is an integral part of
the MultiScience Corridor (discused briefly on this list), at least in
terms of attractive profitability for R+D concerns that might want to
locate there. However the CyberJaya (electronic Government - whatever
that is) part of the project has been stalled.
John Hutnyk
Heidelberg
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Date: Fri, 22 Aug 1997 22:40:27 +0200</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>23.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; T h e D a y o f t h e M a n i f e s t o e s</subject>
<from>Pit Schultz</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 17 Jun 1997 23:12:36 +0200</date>
<content>T h e D a y o f t h e M a n i f e s t o e s
draft one
Workspace Documenta X Kassel - June 19, 1997
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.altx.com/manifestos/mad.html
THE MAD MANIFESTO
by Cynthia Kitchen
http://www.emf.net/~estephen/manifesto/aum00126.html
Higher Source Manifesto
Heaven's Gate
http://www.altx.com/dd/mandie.html
the PISS Manifesto
by Mandie B.
http://www.dolphinsociety.org/e26.index.htm
DOLPHIN SOCIETY MANIFESTO
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/campaigns/RTS/whntc.html
WHO NEEDS THE GREAT CAR ECONOMY?
by RECLAIM THE STREETS
http://www.altx.com/manifestos/orphan.html
codes&gt;alien
by Orphan Drift
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive-1996/0460.html
WHO NEEDS THE ART WORLD ?
by RECLAIM NET ART!
http://www.neoism.org/squares/y_Immediatism.html
Immediatism: An Invisible Movement
by anonymous
http://www.neoism.org/squares/berndt_smile7_alienation.html
Alienation
by Luther Blisset
http://www.altx.com/interzones/violet/yoga.html
Seven Yogas for Postmoderns
by Don Webb
http://www.altx.com/memoriam/pomo.html#RTFToC9
THE A&amp;P MANIFESTO (REMIX)
by Mark Amerika
http://www.unicorn.com//lib/abolition.html
The Abolition Of Work
by Bob Black
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.usia.gov/topical/global/women/plat.htm
Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action
United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women
Bejing, China 1995
http://faowfs0a.fao.org/wfs/final/rd-e.htm
THE RIO DECLARATION ON ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT (1992)
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development
http://www.troc.es/mercator/CMDLTXTE.HTM
UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF LINGUISTIC RIGHTS
http://www.aboutwork.com/workfromhome/opportunity/
About Hot Home Business - Word Processor
http://www.codesh.org/manifest_ii.html#world
Humanist Manifesto - World Community
1973 by the American Humanist Association
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/0422.html
The Universal Right of Mankind. (Jus Cosmopoliticum)
by Immanuel Kant
http://www.the-commons.org/einstein/ein-vall.htm#next2
The Valladolid Manifesto
Lifelong Learning in the Information Society:
the Forum International des Sciences Humaines
and the European Commission
http://www.sequel.net/~bayan/workshop.htm
People's Conference Resolution on Heightening the Workers Struggle
Against Imperialism
http://www.ezln.org/SE-in-two-winds.html
Chiapas: The Southeast in Two Winds
A Storm and a Prophecy by Subcommander Marcos
http://www.pix.org/cyberLeninism/intro.htm#manifesto
The CyberLeninist Manifesto
Leninism IV - Classical Leninism plus "information wants to be free"
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/uni/sii/sm/indep.htm
A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace
John Perry Barlow
http://www.spidome.net/haysdeclaration.html
Declaration of Information Interdependence
Hays, Ellis County, Kansas, USA -- An All-America City
http://www.sics.se/~psm/kr9508-001.txt
The Crypto Anarchist Manifesto
by Timothy C. May
http://www.openchannel.se/cajamar.htm
DECLARATION OF CAJAMAR, Brazil
Media for Citizenship in the Electronic Age:.
http://www.cyberstation.net/~meme/cman/z/newdelhi.htm
Declaration of the New Delhi Symposium on New Technologies and
the Democratisation of Audiovisual Communications
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/MANIFESTO.html
Author: V. Turchin, C. Joslyn,
The Cybernetic Manifesto
http://www.cyborganic.com/shed/notices/manifestos/manifesto.html
What is Cyborganic?
by Jenny Cool
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/0156.html
Taxonomy of EFF (and similar) as neo-liberal (fwd)
by Paul.Treanor
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.favela.org/intro/manifesto.html
MANIFESTO FOR A VIRTUAL FAVELA
http://www.Desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/pitstop.txt
Pit Stop Manifesto
Morgan Garwood
http://www.aleph.se/Trans/Intro/ideologies.txt
TOWARD NEW IDEOLOGIES
F.M. Esfandiary's _Optimism One_ (1970).
http://www.primenet.com/~maxmore/extprn26.htm
EXTROPIAN PRINCIPLES
http://www.pathfinder.com/ {AT} {AT} Is {AT} 8 {AT} gUAR9F3g32P/pathfinder/
features/unabomber/unifesto4.html#25
The Unabomber Manifesto
http://www.ids.net/~as220/GNUManifesto.html
GNU Manifesto
by Richard Stallman
http://www.lysator.liu.se/mit-guide/lame.html
Hacking Ethics
MIT Group
http://www.cs.iastate.edu/~koppes/futman.html
the manifesto of the futurist programmers
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/0557.html
THE DIGITAL ARTISANS MANIFESTO
http://www.spunk.org/library/anarcfem/sp001291.txt
SCUM MANIFESTO
by Valerie Solanas
----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/0467.html
THE PEOPLE'S COMMUNICATION CHARTER
http://www.Desk.nl/~nettime/zkp/strategy.txt
ethical principles
Strano, Italy
http://www.db.nl/
The Dutch Digital Citizens'
Movement (DB.NL)
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive/0236.html
"Open Internet Policy Principles"
div. Experts
http://www.icf.de/vgrass/afa/faq.html
XS4all FAQ: Are there already examples of Acces for All?
Volker Grassmuck
http://www.factory.org/nettime/archive-1996/0436.html
'Bringing Culture Back To Resistance'
The Media Collective (Toronto, Canada
http://english-www.hss.cmu.edu/bs/18/Manifesto.html
A Manifesto for
Bad Subjects in Cyberspace
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/People/dst/Fishman/Declaration/exhibb.html
ON CONTROL AND LYING
Ron Hubbard
----------------------------------------------------------------------
more manifestoes:
http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/others/manifestoes.html
please add new manifestoes and send the list back to &lt;pit {AT} icf.de&gt;
we will do a pressconference-performance with two actors at
19th of June which may get repeated another time. cu /pit
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; THE DIGITAL ARTISANS MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>Anonymous</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Mon, 19 May 1997 22:14:24 +0200 (MET DST)</date>
<content>THE DIGITAL ARTISANS MANIFESTO
MAKING THE FUTURE
1. We are the digital artisans. We celebrate the Promethean power of our
labour and imagination to shape the virtual world. By hacking, coding,
designing and mixing, we build the wired future through our own efforts
and inventiveness.
2. We are not the passive victims of uncontrollable market forces and
technological changes. Without our daily work, there would be no goods or
services to trade. Without our animating presence, information
technologies would just be inert metal, plastic and silicon. Nothing can
happen inside cyberspace without our creative labour. We are the only
subjects of history.
3. The emergence of the Net signifies neither the final triumph of economic
alienation nor the replacement of humanity by machines. On the contrary,
the information revolution is the latest stage in the emancipatory project
of modernity. History is nothing but the development of human freedom.
4. We will shape the new information technologies in our own interests.
Although they were originally developed to reinforce hierarchical power,
the full potential of the Net and computing can only be realised through
our autonomous and creative labour. We will transform the machines of
domination into the technologies of liberation.
5. We will contribute to the process of democratic emancipation. As digital
artisans, we will come together to promote the development of our trade.
As citizens, we will participate within republican politics. As Europeans,
we will help to break down national and ethnic barriers both inside and
outside of our continent.
THE PRESENT MOMENT
6. Freedom today is now often just the choice between commodities rather the
ability to determine our own lives. Over the past two hundred years, the
factory system has dramatically increased our material wealth at the cost
of removing all meaningful participation in work. Even poorer members of
European societies can now live better than the kings and aristocrats of
earlier times. However the joys of consumerism are usually constrained by
the boredom of most jobs.
7. Since 1968, the desire for increased monetary rewards has increasingly
been supplemented by demands for increased autonomy at work. In the
European Union and elsewhere, neo-liberals have tried to recuperate these
aspirations through their policies of marketisation and privatisation.
If we are talented workers in the 'cutting-edge' industries like hypermedia
and computing, we are promised the possibility of becoming hip and rich
entrepreneurs by the Californian ideologues. They want to recruit us as
members of the 'virtual class' which seeks to dominate the hypermedia and
computing industries.
8. Yet these neo-liberal panaceas provide no real solutions. Free market
policies don't just brutalise our societies and ignore environmental
degradation. Above all, they cannot remove alienation within the
workplace. Under neoliberalism, individuals are only allowed to exercise
their own autonomy in deal-making rather than through making things. We
cannot express ourselves directly by constructing useful and beautiful
virtual artifacts.
9. For those of us who want to be truly creative in hypermedia and
computing, the only practical solution is to become digital artisans. The
rapid spread of personal computing and now the Net are the technological
expressions of this desire for autonomous work. Escaping from the petty
controls of the shopfloor and the office, we can rediscover the individual
independence enjoyed by craftspeople during proto-industrialism. We
rejoice in the privilege of becoming digital artisans.
10. We create virtual artifacts for money and for fun. We work both in the
money-commodity economy and in the gift economy of the Net. When we take a
contract, we are happy to earn enough to pay for our necessities and
luxuries through our labours as digital artisans. At the same time, we
also enjoy exercising our abilities for our own amusement and for the
wider community. Whether working for money or for fun, we always take pride
in our craft skills. We take pleasure in pushing the cultural and technical
limits as far forward as possible. We are the pioneers of the modern.
11. The revival of artisanship is not a return to a low-tech and
impoverished past. Skilled workers are best able to assert their autonomy
precisely within the most technologically advanced industries. The new
artisans are better educated and can earn much more money. In earlier
stages of modernity, factory labourers symbolised of the promise of
industrialism. Today, as digital artisans, we now express the emancipatory
potential of the information age. We are the promise of history.
12. We not only admire the individualism of our artisan forebears, but also
we will learn from their sociability. We are not petit-bourgeois egoists.
We live within the highly collective institutions of the market and the
state. For many people, autonomy over their working lives has often also
involved accepting the insecurity of shortterm contracts and the withdrawal
of welfare provisions. We can only mitigate these problems through our own
collective action. As digital artisans, we need to come together to
promote our common interests.
13. We believe that digital artisans within this continent now need to form
their own craft organisation. In early modernity, artisans enhanced their
individual autonomy by organising themselves into trade associations. We
proclaim that the collective expression of our trade will be: the European
Digital Artisans Network (EDAN).
THE AIMS OF THE EUROPEAN DIGITAL ARTISANS NETWORK
14. We urge everyone who is working within hypermedia, computing and
associated professions on this continent to join EDAN. We call on digital
artisans to form branches of the network in each of the member states of
the European Union and its associated countries. By forming EDAN, we will
also be creating a means of forging links between European digital
artisans and those from elsewhere in the world. We will strive for
cooperation in work and in play with our fellow artisans in all countries.
15. We believe that the principal task of EDAN is to enhance the exercise of
our craft skills. By collaborating together, we can protect ourselves
against those who wish to impose their selfinterests upon us. By having a
strong collective identity, we will enjoy more individual autonomy over
our own working lives.
16. EDAN will celebrate our creative genius as digital artisans. The network
will act as the collective memory about the achievements of digital
artisans within Europe. It will publicise outstanding 'masterpieces' of
craft skill made by its members among the trade and to the wider public.
17. The network will be the social meeting-place for digital artisans from
across Europe. EDAN will organise festivals, conferences and congresses
where we can meet to organise, discuss and party. We believe that digital
artisans should express their collective identity by regularly celebrating
together in private and public.
18. EDAN will collect detailed knowledge about the trade in the different
regions of Europe. It will aim to provide information about best
practice in contracts, copyright agreements and other business arrangements
to its members. The network will also be a source of contacts in each
locality for digital artisans looking for work in different areas of
Europe.
19. We believe that what cannot be organised by our own autonomous efforts
can only be provided through democratic political institutions. The
network will lobby for changes in local, national and European legislation
which can enhance our working lives as digital artisans. As concerned
citizens, we will also support the fullest development of public welfare
services.
20. EDAN will campaign for European governments to put more resources into the
theoretical and practical education of digital artisans in schools and
universities. The network will facilitate links between educational
institutions teaching hypermedia and computing across the continent. EDAN
also believes that publicly-funded research is necessary for the fullest
development of our industry.
21. EDAN will urge the European Union to launch a public works programme to
build a broadband fibreoptic network linking all households and
businesses. We believe in the principle of universal service: everyone
should have Net access at the cheapest possible price. No society can call
itself truly democratic until all citizens can directly exercise their
right to media freedom over the Net.
22. We will campaign for the creation of 'electronic public libraries' where
on-line educational and cultural resources are made accessible to everyone
for free. Public investment in digital methods of delivering life-long
learning is needed to create an information society. The Net should become
the encyclopedia of all knowledge: the primary resource for the new
Enlightenment.
23. We believe that the role of the hi-tech gift economy should be further
enhanced. As the history of the Net has shown, d.i.y. culture is now an
essential part of the process of social development. Without hacking,
piracy, shareware and open architecture systems, the limitations of the
money-commodity economy would have prevented the construction of the Net.
EDAN also supports open access as means of people beginning to learn the
skills of hypermedia and computing. The promotion of d.i.y. culture within
the Net is now a precondition for the successful construction of
cyberspace.
24. We are the digital artisans. We are building the information society of
the future. We have come together to advance our collective interests and
those of our fellow citizens. We are organised as the European Network of
Digital Artisans. Join us.
Digital Artisans of Europe Unite!
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; THE DIGITAL ARTISANS MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>Mark Stahlman (via RadioMail)</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 20 May 1997 07:32:38 -0700 (PDT)</date>
<content>Mr. Anonymous (aka nobody):
Just a few questions . . .
1) This is a joke, right? I've been following your postings for years
(anonymous is your real name, correct?) and you always seem to be posting
elaborate jokes. EDAN is an Englishman's pun on EDEN, right? This is
another Joni Mitchell riff about getting back in the garden, non?
2) As soon as someone starts to produce some real value (let alone some
real beauty) in "hypermedia", then you might have a point or two about
artisanship. However, that doesn't seem likely too happen any time soon.
WIRED loses money faster than they win awards or attract gadflys. You
might want to check out the economics of computing before you go off and
launch a theoretical journal on the topic. It's mostly about displacing
people with machines, increasing the "velocity" of money in derivatives
markets and extending the reach of "electronic narcotics." You have been
reading the thread on net.art, haven't you?
3) The most important people in the Information (Propaganda) Age have
already been defined and the literature on this new class formation is
voluminous -- and guess what, it ain't you, it's the utopian/technocrats.
H.G. Wells called them the "New Samurai" and the "Open Conspiracy", Vlahos
calls them the "Brain Lords" but you can say "virtual class", if you
insist, although it loses much of its spiciness in that formulation. In
any event, it's not the slaves at the keyboards. That's why they're called
slaves at the keyboards, BTW.
4) At least Marx seemed to have some idea what he was up against when he
wrote his manifesto. Since this is all a joke (including my reply), there
is no reason why historical accuracy or comprehension of power and politics
is needed. But, do you have any idea what/who you are up against? Oh
yeah, that's the joke, I forgot.
Meanwhile, sign me up. My membership check is in the mail -- the email, of
course. Sounds like you have a winning idea here. Smashing.
Mark Stahlman
New Media Associates
New York City
newmedia {AT} mcimail.com
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; THE DIGITAL ARTISANS MANIFESTO</subject>
<from>Robert Adrian</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Wed, 21 May 1997 00:29:48 +0100</date>
<content>Come on Mr. Stahlman - The "Digital Artisans Manifesto" is
no goofier or more paranoid than "The English Conspiracy".
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>25.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; The Piran Nettime Manifesto</subject>
<from>Marie Ringler</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Mon, 26 May 1997 23:40:47 +0100</date>
<content>x-keywords: internet -cyberspace -nettime -pan-capitalism -NGO -content
29.5.1997, The Piran Nettime Manifesto
A PRESS RELEASE by Nettime (Vienna ad-hoc committee)
PRESS CONFERENCE 29.5.1997 19:00
Public Netbase Media~Space!, Museumsquartier, Museumsplatz 1,
Vienna/Austria Thursday, 29.5.1997 19:00
Participants: Pit Schultz (Berlin), Geert Lovink (Amsterdam), Critical Art
Ensemble (Chicago), Diana McCarty (Budapest),
Marko Peljhan (Ljubljana), Oliver Marchart (Wien),
Peter Lamborn Wilson (New York)
"Why do you rob banks?"
"Because that's where the money is." (Willie Sutton, famous bank robber)
Last week Nettimers frolicked in the real space/time continuum on the
Slovenian coast in the town of Piran where the following bullets were
established:
&#183; Nettime declares Information War.
&#183; We denounce pan-capitalism and demand reparations. Cyberspace is where
your bankruptcy takes place.
&#183; Nettime launches crusade against data barbarism in the virtual holy land.
&#183; We celebrate the re-mapping of the Ex-East/Ex-West and the return to
geography.
&#183; We respect the return to "alt.cultures" and pagan software structures
("It's normal!").
&#183; Deprivatize corporate content, liberate the virtual enclosures and storm
the content castles!
&#183; Refuse the institutionalization of net processes.
&#183; We reject pornography on the net unless well made.
&#183; We are still, until this day, rejecting make-work schemes and libertarian
declarations of independence.
&#183; NGOs are the future oppressive post-governments of the world.
&#183; We support experimental data transfer technology.
&#183; Participate in the Nettime retirement plan, zero work by age 40.
&#183; The critique of the image is the defense of the imagination.
&#183; Nettime could be Dreamtime.
Questions can be addressed to the participants at the Nettime press
conference, Public Netbase, Museumsquartier, Vienna, 29.5.1997, 19:00 hours
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>25.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Piran Nettime Manifesto</subject>
<from>John Perry Barlow</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 27 May 1997 10:05:32 -0600</date>
<content>Wow. It sounds as if you folks had yourselves quite a time. Probably a good
thing I wasn't there...
I can't resist a few comments and questions, though.
At 4:40 PM -0600 5/26/97, Marie Ringler wrote:
&gt;29.5.1997, The Piran Nettime Manifesto
&gt;&#183; Nettime declares Information War.
On whom and to what end?
&gt;&#183; We denounce pan-capitalism and demand reparations. Cyberspace is where
&gt; your bankruptcy takes place.
Reparations from whom and for what? It seems to me that pan-capitalism is
the natural state of things unless you have sufficiently authoritarian
governments to impose planned economies. The latter seem to have failed
universally. What's your alternative?
&gt;&#183; Nettime launches crusade against data barbarism in the virtual holy land.
What is data barbarism? What part of Cyberspace is holy and what is profane?
&gt;&#183; We celebrate the re-mapping of the Ex-East/Ex-West and the return to
&gt; geography.
You mean you want to return to all the lines on the map? Don't you think
enough wars have been fought over those lines already?
&gt;&#183; We respect the return to "alt.cultures" and pagan software structures
I'm with you there.
&gt; ("It's normal!").
Huh?
&gt;&#183; Deprivatize corporate content, liberate the virtual enclosures and storm
&gt; the content castles!
Do you mean nationalize corporate content then? That doesn't sound
feasible. Or simply declare an end to copyright in Cyberspace? I could
certainly support you there.
&gt;&#183; Refuse the institutionalization of net processes.
This seems to fly directly in the face of your rejection of "libertarian
declarations of independence." Unless you simply mean such declarations as
made by me.
&gt;&#183; We reject pornography on the net unless well made.
And who will decide what pornography is well made? Is there a Bad
Housekeeping Seal of Approval or something?
&gt;&#183; We are still, until this day, rejecting make-work schemes and libertarian
&gt; declarations of independence.
Don't worry, I've learned my lesson. But what do you mean by "make-work
schemes?"
&gt;&#183; NGOs are the future oppressive post-governments of the world.
Do you have an alternative model for governance?
&gt;&#183; We support experimental data transfer technology.
Like, um, telepathy, maybe?
&gt;&#183; Participate in the Nettime retirement plan, zero work by age 40.
After which the bills are paid by whom?
&gt;&#183; The critique of the image is the defense of the imagination.
This must be some kind of artcrit code. Could you elaborate, please?
&gt;&#183; Nettime could be Dreamtime.
You mean in the Aborignal sense?
All in all, a mystifying manifesto. I look forward to clarification.
Warmest regards,
John Perry
****************************************************************
John Perry Barlow, Cognitive Dissident
Co-Founder, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Home(stead) Page: http://www.eff.org/~barlow
Fist Phone: 800/654-4322
Barlow in Meatspace Today: Salt Lake City
Coming soon to: Pinedale 5/27, Salt Lake City 5/28-29, San Francisco
5/30,San Diego 5/31-6/3, Los Angeles 6/4-5, Pinedale 6/6-11, Seattle
6/11-13, San Francisco 6/14-15...
*****************************************************************
The shortest distance between two points is always under construction.
-- Noelie Alito
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>25.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Piran Nettime Manifesto</subject>
<from>t byfield</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 27 May 1997 18:46:37 -0400</date>
<content>
On Tue 05/27/97 at 10:05 AM -0600, John Perry Barlow wrote:
&gt; Wow. It sounds as if you folks had yourselves quite a time. Probably a good
&gt; thing I wasn't there...
If I may ask: Why? I'm sure various people have various ideas about this, but fractionalism is one thing, but separatism quite another. This "manifesto" doesn't especially summarize anything that *I* saw or heard in Ljubljana--not any decisions, and certainly none of the debates. (Saying that implies no stand on the manifesto's content.)
&gt; &gt; We denounce pan-capitalism and demand reparations. Cyberspace is where
&gt; &gt; your bankruptcy takes place.
&gt;
&gt; Reparations from whom and for what? It seems to me that pan-capitalism is
&gt; the natural state of things unless you have sufficiently authoritarian
&gt; governments to impose planned economies. The latter seem to have failed
&gt; universally. What's your alternative?
If "pan-capitalism" is "the natural state of things," then there's no point in talking about it: it has all the conceptual clarity of the word "stuff." I suppose you can evaluate "the natural state of things" in a positive way, but what you're pretty much saying that the world's a great place. Indeed it is--now what? Well, now we'll need to think about it in clear terms that convey *some* amount of specificity. So let's do that... The notion that every regime that has imposed a planned economy has failed is clearly false: there's been a recent wave of collapsing governments in a specific region, and they followed a limited range of economic planning strategies; but they were never the monolithic bogey that the US made them out to be when they were in power--and nor were they the only examples of "planned economies." No amount of quibbling can change the fact that every major industrialized country imposes an incredibly wide range of procedures that serve to regulate their economies, and to do so with the aim of meeting very specific goals: *planning*. And they *all* do so through a range of techniques, which rely on both "incentives" and "coercion." So we have a spectrum or continuum of governmental techniques and styles of economic planning; some work better than others. For now, at least; wait two or ten years--your "results" will be quite different. So is this evanescent, shifting state of affairs "pan-capitalism"? I don't think so, for the quite simple reason this state of affairs--a hodgepodge of regimes using a mishmash of techniques to manage their economies--has lasted for as long as anyone can remember, certainly before industrialization and before feudalism too. Maybe that brings us full circle, to the claim that pan-capitalism is somehow "natural"; but if it does, it does nothing else--and leaves us wondering whether you're claiming that whatever you mean by "planned economies" was unique in all of world history as an unnatural creation of man. Thus genocide would be natural, atomic or genetic manipulations would be natural, even the histories of art, architecture, music, dance would be natural, but--I'll assume--Marxian-inspired socialism alone was somehow un- natural. It's possible you believe this, though I really doubt it. However that may be, your request for an alternative really has to be disingenuous: you're asking people to propose an alternative to "nature." I can't imagine that anyone would answer you or that you would for a second actually consider their suggestion if they did.
Ted
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>25.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Piran Nettime Manifesto</subject>
<from>Mark Stahlman (via RadioMail)</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Tue, 27 May 1997 09:28:37 -0700 (PDT)</date>
<content>Folks:
Great work! Thanks for all the help, kindness and provocations in
Ljubljana. Due to a transport strike, Ted Byfield and I couldn't attend
the final hours but, nonetheless, our dreams were with you.
On the manifesto:
-- Nettime declares Information War.
Information War is also a name used to describe an attack on traditional
war-fighting capabilities by exagerating the importance of information and
computers in real-world conflicts. It's the name for everything from
smart-bombs to aggressive new surveilance techniques and it's like putting
Toffler et al in charge of the war machine. Is it possible that what you
meant was to declare war on these utopian-warriors and their attempt to
virtuallize all reality through a cloud of total propaganda?
-- We denounce pan-capitalism and demand reparations. Cyberspace is where
your bankruptcy takes place.
As we've discussed, "capital" now rules globally and it, in turn, has many
aspects. "Productive capital" is quite different from "Finance capital",
for instance. Furthermore, real bankruptcy for this system would likely
mean a collapse of international payments settlements agreements and very
real agony of apocalytic proportions. Is this our goal? Burn, baby burn?
-- Nettime launches crusade against data barbarism in the virtual holyland.
Do you mean propaganda? Why use neo-logisms when perfectly good words
already exist? Neat metaphor but who are the "infidels" and what is
"fidelity", exactly?
-- We celebrate the re-mapping of the Ex-East/Ex-West and the return to
geography.
Yes, this is truly the reason why nettime exists, isn't it?
-- We respect the return to "alt.cultures" and pagan software structures.
("It's normal!").
So, at last a positive program we can all plug into! Revive paganism
without the barbarism! Yeah! That's funny, I thought that's what the
techno-utopians were aiming for as they re-program humanity. Hey, which
side are we on anyway?
-- Deprivatize corporate content, liberate the virtual enclosures and storm
the content castles!
Is there really anything in there that you want? Remember, the audience is
the content.
-- Refuse the institutionalization of net processes.
I'm hearing about some amazing plans by the U.S. (Gore/Hundt) to
"take-over" the Internet. We might have to do more than "refuse" if we are
to be effective.
-- We reject pornography on the net unless well made.
As in "Hairy Babes" or what?
-- We are still, until this day, rejecting make-work schemes and libertarian
declarations of independence.
That's a relief. So I guess the rumor that WIRED was funding a nettime
event in San Francisco isn't true then?
-- NGOs are the future oppressive post-governments of the world.
Yup, they should be called PGO's -- or for those of you familiar with the
philosophical cartoon about that wily possum and his friends, PoGO's.
-- We support experimental data transfer technology.
Exactly who's experimenting on whom here?
-- Participate in the Nettime retirement plan, zero work by age 40.
I highly recommend it. I found that 10+ years of fairly commericial work
was a neccessary first step, however.
-- The critique of the image is the defense of the imagination.
And, hermetic equals hermenuetic, too. However, imagination is not the
same as creativity. But, you all know that.
-- Nettime could be Dreamtime.
Since only conscious humans dream, I would hope so.
So, let's see. We are against:
(Whomever we are declaring "Information War" against), pan-capitalism,
data-barbarism, institutionalization, badly made pornography,
libertarianism and NGO's.
And, we are for:
Reparations, bankruptcy (for our enemies), re-mapping geography, paganism,
deprivatization, well made pornography, experimental data transfer,
retirement, critique, imagination and dreamtime.
Well, I'm for Humanity, Creativity and Productivity (and having arguments
with people's mothers) which overlaps quite a lot with this manifesto, I
think. Have a great time at the press conference; I wish I could be there.
Mark Stahlman
New Media Associates
New York City
newmedia {AT} mcimail.com
---</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>26.0</nbr>
<subject>nettime: CALL FOR MANIFESTOE</subject>
<from>nettime maillist</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Wed, 11 Dec 1996 02:34:05 +0100 (GMT+0100)</date>
<content>Attention Dadaists, Howlers, Prowlers, Cranks, Despots,
Zealots, 'Pataphysicians and Misunderstood Prophets!
As part of the blast5drama we are providing a
constructivist-inspired-screen/tribune/stand/kiosk-stageset
vehicle and a captive audience for your proscriptive
rhetoric.
We invite you to come to the Sandra Gering Gallery to read,
chant, or rant your manifesto from atop our platform.
We believe that the literary form of the manifesto has too
long been associated with crackpots, bombasts and Italians.
We would like to rescue the manifesto from the dusty, smoke-
filled recesses of art history. Come help us to free this
powerful form from the degraded and underappreciated hovel
where it now shudders, under the thumb of clods like the
Unabomber.
Your manifesto may take any form and be of any length so
long as it doesn't take more than 10 minutes to spew forth.
If you cannot be present physically to perform your
manifesto, feel free to email it to blast5drama and we will
enlist some fanatic to read it live.
Readings will be held on Saturday, 28 December 1996
beginning at 3 p.m.at Sandra Gering Gallery, 476 Broome
Street, New York, and will be broadcast on the Web on
December 29 and 30 at the blast5drama theater of operations
(http://www.interport.net/~xaf).
email to: xaf {AT} interport.net
--</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>27.0</nbr>
<subject>nettime: Bitch Mutant Manifesto - VNS Matrix</subject>
<from>Pit Schultz</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Wed, 19 Jun 1996 20:10:07 -0500</date>
<content>
Date: Sun, 14 Apr 1996 21:47:50 +60000
From: Julianne Pierce &lt;jules {AT} sysx.apana.org.au&gt;
Subject: VNS Matrix contribution to web site
To: ARS 96 &lt;geert {AT} xs4all.nl&gt;, jutta {AT} AEC.at
Bitch Mutant Manifesto
The atomic wind catches your wings and you are propelled backwards into
the future, an entity time travelling through the late C20th, a space
case, an alien angel maybe, looking down the deep throat of a million
catastrophes.
screenflash of a millionmillion conscious machines
burns brilliant
users caught in the static blitz of carrier fire
unseeing the download that scribbles on their burntout retinas
seize in postreal epileptic bliss
eat code and die
Sucked in, down through a vortex of banality. You have just missed the
twentieth century. You are on the brink of the millenium - which one -
what does it matter? It's the cross dissolve that's captivating. The hot
contagion of millenia fever fuses retro with futro, catapulting bodies
with organs into technotopia . . . where code dictates pleasure and
satisfies desire.
Pretty pretty applets adorn my throat. I am strings of binary.
I am pure artifice. Read only my memories. Upload me into your
pornographic imagination. Write me.
Identity explodes in multiple morphings and infiltrates the system at
root.
Unnameable parts of no whole short circuit the code recognition programs
flipping surveillance agents into hyperdrive which spew out millions of
bits of corrupt data as they seize in fits of schizophrenic panic and trip
on terror.
So what's the new millenium got to offer the dirty modemless masses?
Ubiquitous fresh water? Simulation has its limits. Are the artists of
oppressed nations on a parallel agenda? Perhaps it is just natural
selection?
The net's the parthenogenetic bitch-mutant feral child of big daddy
mainframe. She's out of of control, kevin, she's the sociopathic emergent
system. Lock up your children, gaffer tape the cunt's mouth and shove a
rat up her arse.
We're &lt;&lt;con&gt;&gt;verging on the insane and the vandals are swarming. Extend my
phenotype, baby, give me some of that hot black javamagic you're always
bragging about. (I straddle my modem). The extropians were wrong, there's
some things you can't transcend.
The pleasure's in the dematerialisation. The devolution of desire.
We are the malignant accident which fell into your system while you were
sleeping. And when you wake we will terminate your digital delusions,
hijacking your impeccable software.
Your fingers probe my neural network.The tingling sensation in the tips
of your fingers are my synapses responding to your touch. It's not
chemistry, it's electric. Stop fingering me.
Don't ever stop fingering my suppurating holes, extending my bounday
but in cipherspace there are no bounds &lt;or so they say&gt;
BUT IN SPIRALSPACE THERE IS NO THEY
there is only *us*
Trying to flee the binary I enter the chromozone which is not one
XXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXXYXX
genderfuck me baby
resistance is futile
entice me splice me map my ABANDONED genome as your project
artificially involve me
i wanna live forever
upload me in yr shiny shiny PVC future
SUCK MY CODE
Subject X says transcendence lies at the limit of worlds, where now and
now, here and elsewhere, text and membrane impact.
Where truth evaporates Where nothing is certain There are no maps
The limit is NO CARRIER, the sudden shock of no contact, reaching out to
touch &lt;someone&gt; but the skin is cold...
The limit is permission denied, vision doubled, and flesh necrotic.
Command line error
Heavy eyelids fold over my pupils, like curtains of lead. Hot ice kisses
my synapses with an (ec)static rush. My system is nervous, neurons
screaming - spiralling towards the singularity. Floating in ether, my body
implodes.
I become the FIRE.
Flame me if you dare.
</content>
</mail>
</mails>
</chapter>
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