Full_digest_rescheduled/xml/13.Post-digital.xml

<chapter>
<title>Post-digital</title>
<desc>...</desc>
<mails>
<mail>
<nbr>0.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Post-Digital Listings</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun Feb 16 04:04:42 EST 2014</date>
<content>It might make sense to add a historical dimension. Cascone introduced
"post-digital" in the early 2000s to refer to glitch music and low-tech
digital aesthetics while today it has different connotations. I'd still
maintain that the term sucks, but the great resonance that it has (even
here on this list where we're supposedly discussing something else,
although publishing is perhaps the strongest example of ambiguous states
between analog and digital) proves its relevance.

Just a sketch, highly simplified and polemical:

# digital 1995-2004 | post-digital 1995-2004
interactive installation art (Jeffrey Shaw) | net.art (jodi)
virtual reality | mailing lists
MAX/MSP | glitch
techno | 8-bit
multimedia | codework
true color | ASCII
Generation Flash | shell scripts
MIT, ZKM | self-organized spaces
gaming | modding
Wired | Neural
Edge.org | Nettime

# digital 2005-2014 | post-digital 2005-2014
blogs | zines
4chan | Dexter Sinister
Ubuweb | artist-run bookstores
Vimeo | handmade film labs
mp3 | vinyl, cassettes
mobile device | offline
Computer Music Journal | The Wire
Singularity Movement | Object-Oriented Ontology
Pirate Parties | Occupy movement
Bitcoin | timebanks

My own preferred view on post-digitality would be something that bridges a
couple of the 2005-2014 opposites. That could be a plan for 2015-2024.

-F

(Note that this posting doesn't take itself too seriously.)</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Post-Digital Listings</subject>
<from>mez breeze</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun Feb 16 08:09:40 EST 2014</date>
<content>A quick aside...

Funny how no-one identifies my 1996 term "post-modemism" here, though I can
see why (given it was a net.art element + avatar label &amp; not a theoretical
posture): http://www.artelectronicmedia.com/artwork/cutting-spaces +
http://xchange.re-lab.net/xchange4/xchange4.html. Maybe it's not relevant
here?

Chunks,
Mez</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>0.2</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Post-Digital Listings</subject>
<from>David Berry</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Feb 19 12:26:19 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi Michael (and others),

I think the key with thinking through the cognitive map I presented is not to look for a final reconciliation or overall unity, as I don&#8217;t necessarily think that that is even possible within a moment of variable modulations in our current social formations as computational societies &#8211; i.e. they are not necessary meant to be &#8220;models&#8221; as such. Rather the table I offered is meant to provide constellations of moments within a &#8220;digital&#8221; as opposed to a &#8220;post-digital&#8221; ecology, as it were, and, of course, a provocation to thought. But they can be thought of as ideal types, if you like, that can provide some conceptual stability for thinking, in an environment of accelerating technical change and dramatic and unpredictable social tensions in response to this. The question then becomes to what extent can the post-digital counter-act the tendencies towards domination of specific modes of thought in relation to instrumentality, particularly manifested in computational devices and systems? For example, the contrast between the moments represented by Web 2.0 / Stacks provides an opportunity for thinking about how new platforms have been built on the older Web 2.0 systems, in some cases replacing them, and in others opening up new possibilities which Tiziana Terranova has pointed to in her intriguing notion of &#8220;Red Stacks&#8221;, for example (and in contrast to Bruce Sterlings notion of &#8220;The Stacks&#8221;, e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.). Here I have been thinking of the notion of the digital as representing a form of &#8220;weak computation/computationality&#8221;, versus the post-digital as &#8220;strong computation/computationality&#8221;, and what would the consequences be for a society that increasingly finds that the weak computational forms (CDs, DVDs, laptops, desktops, Blogs, RSS, Android Open Source Platform [AOSP], open platforms and systems, etc.) are replaced by stronger, encrypted and/or locked-in versions (FairPlay DRM, Advanced Access Content System [AACS], iPads, Twitter, Push-notification, Google Mobile Services [GMS], Trackers, Sensors, ANTICRISIS GIRL, etc.)?  

These are not just meant to be thought of in a technical register, rather the notion of &#8220;weak computation&#8221; points towards a &#8220;weak computational sociality&#8221; and &#8220;strong computation&#8221; points towards a &#8220;strong computation sociality&#8221;, highlighting the deeper penetration of computational forms into everyday life within social media and push-notification, for example. Even as the post-digital opens up new possibilities for contestation, e.g. megaleaks, data journalism, hacks, cryptography, dark nets, torrents, the Alexandria Project, etc. and new opportunities for creating, sharing and reading knowledges, the &#8220;strong computation&#8221; of the post-digital always already suggests the shadow of computation reflected in heightened tracking, surveillance and monitoring of a control society. The post-digital points towards a reconfiguration of publishing away from the (barely) digital techniques of the older book publishing industry, and towards the post-digital singularity of Amazonized publishing with its accelerated instrumentalised forms of softwarized logistics whilst also simultaneously supporting new forms of post-digital craft production of books and journals, and providing globalised distribution. How then can we think about these contradictions in the unfolding of the post-digital and its tendencies towards what I am calling here &#8220;strong computation&#8221;, and in what way, even counter-intuitively, does the digital (weak computation) offer alternatives, even as marginal critical practice, and the post-digital (strong computation) create new critical practices (e.g. critical engineering), against the increasing interconnection, intermediation and seamless functioning and operation of the post-digital as pure instrumentality, horizon, and/or imaginary.   

See for example:

http://stunlaw.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/digital-breadcrumbs.html

http://www.euronomade.info/?p=1708

Best

David</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>Michael Dieter</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Feb 10 05:44:17 EST 2014</date>
<content>Something else I want to ask about.

This is the definition that the Post-Digital Research group settled on
for their publication:

"Post-digital, once understood as a critical reflection of "digital"
aesthetic immaterialism, now describes the messy and paradoxical
condition of art and media after digital technology revolutions.
"Post-digital" neither recognizes the distinction between "old" and
"new" media, nor ideological affirmation of the one or the other. It
merges "old" and "new", often applying network cultural
experimentation to analog technologies which it re-investigates and
re-uses. It tends to focus on the experiential rather than the
conceptual. It looks for DIY agency outside totalitarian innovation
ideology, and for networking off big data capitalism. At the same
time, it already has become commercialized."

I'm curious about the emphasis here on the experiential, rather than
the conceptual. Why emphasize one over the other in this way? What
works or practices did the group have in mind? In a weird way, this
description actually reminds me of something like relational
aesthetics.

-- 
Michael Dieter
Lecturer
Media Studies
The University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.j.dieter/</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>Renate Ferro</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Feb 10 07:55:01 EST 2014</date>
<content>Michael just a quick question.  Do you have a quick link to the
Post-Digital Research Group?
and their publications?

Perhaps you did that it your into and I missed it?</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.2</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>micha c&#225;rdenas</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Feb 10 08:21:27 EST 2014</date>
<content>I was wondering that too, it's here:

http://post-digital.projects.cavi.dk/</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.3</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>Michael Dieter</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Feb 10 09:16:27 EST 2014</date>
<content>Renate Ferro &lt;rtf9 at cornell.edu&gt; wrote:
&gt; ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
&gt; Michael just a quick question.  Do you have a quick link to the Post-Digital Research Group?
&gt; and their publications?

Probably should have linked to it again (it was in a couple of earlier
posts). Definition is from here: http://www.aprja.net/?page_id=1291 It
was collectively articulated at the workshop in Aarhus, I believe.
-- 
Michael Dieter
Lecturer
Media Studies
The University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.j.dieter/</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.2</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>micha c&#225;rdenas</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Feb 10 08:03:06 EST 2014</date>
<content>Thanks for an interesting discussion topic this month!

I agree with your assessment that this limited configuration of the
post-digital is already divorced from any real politics of difference or
antagonism and so yes it is similar to relational aesthetics. In contrast,
my own formulation of the post digital, which I presented at the
Transmediale phd symposium in 2012 is centered in queer and trans women of
color's political and aesthetic practices. The horizon for the post-digital
isn't hipsters, reddit and google, as in Florian Cramer's essay "What is
post-digital?", it is a reconsideration of thought and communication
outside of the bounds of western conceptions of knowledge and rationality.

You can read an essay version of what I presented at the #BWPWAP
transmediale symposium here, where I list a few examples of aesthetic works
that may be understood as post-digital:

http://median.newmediacaucus.org/caa-conference-edition-2013/local-autonomy-networks-post-digital-networks-post-corporate-communications/

(a short version is in the 2013 edition of APRJA:
http://www.aprja.net/?page_id=46)

and a video of me giving this as a keynote at the Dark Side of the Digital
conference is here:

http://transreal.org/talks-and-interviews/

The writers for the post-digital research issue of APRJA articulate
conceptions of politics that completely fail to address the importance of
moving on from western systems of knowledge that are embodied in the
digital, which is unsurprising considering their own apparent subject
positions. For example, in The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor has
written extensively on the ways that colonial regimes insisted on writing
as the only legitimate form of knowledge as a way to disempower colonized
subjects, and digital systems of storage reproduce that hierarchy by
eschewing embodied and emotional knowledge that is not reproducible through
digital media.

thank you,

  micha</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.3</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Feb 10 08:49:29 EST 2014</date>
<content>Micha,

I'm taking great issue with this summary of my text. It is greatly
distorted. If you had read it carefully, you would have seen that it
actually refers to postcolonialism.

Btw., your categorical split between "digital" and "embodied" knowledge is
as Cartesian and Western as I can get. What's even worse, by attributing
the latter to non-Western culture, it's producing a highly stereotypical
image of Non-Western cultures and systems of knowledge. I recommend to read
up, among others, on Ron Eglash's ethnomathematics (or any history of
mathematics, for that matter).

Florian</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.4</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>micha c&#225;rdenas</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Feb 10 10:35:10 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi Florian, thanks for your reply.

In your essay "What is Post-Digital", I did see your discussion of the
postcolonial, which seems to be a very short part of your essay which
doesn't discuss any of the gendered, racialized violences of colonialism.
Your discussion of the postcolonial is:

"Postcolonialism does not mean the end of colonialism akin to Hegel's and
Fukuyama's "end of history", but quite on the contrary its transformation
into less clearly visible power structures that are still in place, have
left their mark on languages and cultures, and most importantly still
govern geopolitics and global production chains. In this sense, the
post-digital condition is the post-apocalyptic condition after the
computerization and global digital networking of communication, technical
infrastructures, markets and geopolitics."

and you conclude the essay with:

"If post-digital cultures are made up of, metaphorically speaking,
postcolonial practices in a communications world taken over by the
military-industrial complex of only a handful of global players, then it
can most simply be described as mental opposition to phenomena like Ray
Kurzweil's and Google's Singularity University, the Quantified Self
movement, sensor-controlled "Smart Cities" and similar dystopian techno
utopias.

Nevertheless, Silicon Valley utopias and post-digital subcultures (whether
in Detroit, Rotterdam or elsewhere) have more in common than it might seem.
Both are driven by fictions of
agency.8&lt;http://post-digital.projects.cavi.dk/?p=599#fn8&gt;
 There's a fiction of agency over one's body in the 'digital' Quantified
Self movement, a fiction of the self-made in the 'post-digital' DIY and
Maker movements, a fiction of a more intimate working with media in
'analog' handmade film labs and mimeograph cooperatives. They stand for two
options of agency, over-identification with systems or skepticism towards
them. Each of them is, in their own way, symptomatic of system crisis. It
is not a crisis of one or the other system but a crisis of the very
paradigm of "system" and its legacy from cybernetics. It's a legacy which
(starting with their mere names) neither "digital", nor "post-digital"
succeed to leave behind."

I still hold that your configuration does not address the gendered and
racialized forms of difference that underlie the logic of colonialism and
which find their expression in western conceptions such as individuality
and objectivity that lead to boolean logic and digital computing. Your
essay seems to eschew any political possibility for the post-digital in
your concluding sentence. If I'm misreading it, I would appreciate your
clarification.

I'm not generalizing about non-western cultures, my apologies if my post
sounded like that. I mentioned Diana Taylor's book the Archive and the
Repertoire as one example, where she specifically discusses the Spanish
conquest of the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas. Let me cite her more thoroughly to
elaborate more on what I meant and not imply any simple separation that
might be described as cartesian:

"Although the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas practiced writing before the
Conquest- either in pictogram form, heiroglyphs, or knotting systems- it
never replaced the performed utterance... What changed with the Conquest
was not that writing displaced embodied practice (we need only remember
that the friars brought their own embodied practices) but the degree of
legitimization of writing over other epistemic and mnemonic systems.
Writing now assured that Power, with a capital P, as Rama puts it, could be
developed and enforced without the input of the great majority of the
population, the indigenous and marginal populations of the colonial period
without access to systematic writing."

I haven't read Eglash's work, thanks for recommending it, I'll check it
out.

cheers,

  micha</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.5</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>micha c&#225;rdenas</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Feb 10 10:41:17 EST 2014</date>
<content>I also want to add that, yes, of course my reply was cartesian, using a
digital system, addressing you as an individual and using the word I to
refer to myself. I see decolonization as a long project and its possible
implications for our thinking as a far away horizon, yet one still worth
working towards.

thanks all,

  micha</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.6</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Feb 11 03:54:11 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hello Micha, hello list,

&gt; I still hold that your configuration does not address the gendered and
racialized forms of difference that underlie the logic of colonialism and
which find their expression in western conceptions such as individuality
and objectivity that lead to boolean logic and digital computing.

In my view, it's not that simple. Boolean logic - which one can equally
find in the reasoning of Chinese 4th century BC philosopher like Hui Shi
(Hui Tzu) - and digital computation (literally=computing with your fingers)
are by far not only Western conceptions. I agree with you that Western
culture and science have pursued them to their extreme. But as you point
out yourself, dualisms of, on the one hand
Western/individualist/objectivist/boolean/digital vs.
Non-Western/non-individualist/subjectivist/non-boolean/non-digital are in
themselves romantic (and colonialist) Western stereotypes. On top of that,
they're historically wrong. For example, the modern concept of the number
zero, without which there would be no binary computing, was invented in 9th
century AD India, with precursors in Egypt and Mesopotamia but not in
Europe. Identifying digitality with Western colonization would
unintentionally foster a Eurocentric view of cultural, scientific and
technological history.

&gt; Your essay seems to eschew any political possibility for the post-digital
in your concluding sentence. If I'm misreading it, I would appreciate your
clarification.

You mean the sentence 'It is not a crisis of one or the other system but a
crisis of the very paradigm of "system" and its legacy from cybernetics.
It's a legacy which (starting with their mere names) neither "digital", nor
"post-digital" succeed to leave behind.'?

I don't quite get how you read this as 'eschewing any political
possibility'. All I am trying to say is that neither "digital" nor
"post-digital" are the right concepts for criticizing and leaving behind
cybernetic systems thinking, or in your words, boolean logic and digital
computing. After all, if you call something "post-digital", you don't leave
the digital paradigm behind but still keep it (dialectically) in place.

&gt; "Although the Aztecs, Mayas and Incas practiced writing before the
Conquest- either in pictogram form, heiroglyphs, or knotting systems- it
never replaced the performed utterance... What changed with the Conquest
was not that writing displaced embodied practice (we need only remember
that the friars brought their own embodied practices) but the degree of
legitimization of writing over other epistemic and mnemonic systems.
Writing now assured that Power, with a capital P, as Rama puts it, could be
developed and enforced without the input of the great majority of the
population, the indigenous and marginal populations of the colonial period
without access to systematic writing."

What is being described here is a pre-colonial and pre-digital vs. a
colonial political system organized through alphanumeric (and hence
digital) writing. The next question would be: Which post-colonial practices
are also post-digital?

Apart from that, one should not brush over the complex ambivalence even of
formal systems, being tools of both control and of freedom to quote Wendy
Chun. There are similar ideas in postcolonial theories like that of Homi
Bhabha (for whom colonialism/postcolonialism ends up as a two-way process).
Regarding the gendered form of difference, to use your words, inscribed
into digitality and computing, I think that it might be historically
interesting to reread Sadie Plant's "Zeros and Ones"; a work whose
cyberfeminist optimism regarding digital networking has become perfectly
counter-intuitive in the age of Google, Facebook and the NSA, but at least
documents a different reading of the very technology that we now prefix
with "post-".

&gt; I haven't read Eglash's work, thanks for recommending it, I'll check it
out.

One of his books has just been made available on Monoskop:
http://monoskop.org/log/?p=10597

By the way, it's rather unfortunate that the papers of the "research group"
are linked and cited here as if they were anything canonical. As a matter
of fact, these are preliminary, unedited papers/drafts written by a highly
diverse workshop gathering of artists, media studies people and arts/media
Ph.D. candidates at Aarhus Kunsthal. The definition of "post-digital" that
Michael cited is partly tongue-in-cheek - it was based on a voluntary data
mining of our drafts where we determined the most commonly used words and
built a definition from them. We ultimately rewrote the drafts for
transmediale.14's newspaper based on the same principles, with a high score
for those texts that managed to squeeze in as much of that vocabulary as
possible. That playful context becomes a bit clearer in the newspaper. It's
unfortunate that these texts are online without referencing the context.
Which ultimately says a lot about embodied and disembodied writing, no
matter whether it's digital or not.

-F</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.7</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>Robert Jackson</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Feb 11 05:10:13 EST 2014</date>
<content>Micha, everyone...

As someone who worked as part of the Aarhus post-digital writing group, I'd
like to also address your remarks.

Point 1:

&lt;The writers for the post-digital research issue of APRJA articulate
conceptions of politics that completely fail to address the importance of
moving on from western systems of knowledge that are embodied in the
digital, which is unsurprising considering their own apparent subject
positions.&gt;

This is profoundly untrue and thunderously misguided. Had you attended the
workshop in October, you would have found that we addressed western
conceptions of rationality and knowledge at some length and with great
care. Echoing Florian's comments, it's not as if we all thought the terms
'post-digital' or even 'the digital' were anything but messy and
politically ambiguous: the context of that process appears to have been
reinterpreted as some sort of pro-Western manifesto, rather than a
researcher workshop or a tongue-in-cheek operationalisation of digital
principles/defintions.

In any case, our contributions - both online and for transmediale - remain
unpublished, so if you want to aim your critique, aim it at the finished
APRJA journal when it arrives: not at a moving target.
Point 2:

As per your rejoinder to Florian's point: &lt;I still hold that your
configuration does not address the gendered and racialized forms of
difference that underlie the logic of colonialism and which find their
expression in western conceptions such as individuality and objectivity
that lead to boolean logic and digital computing. Your essay seems to
eschew any political possibility for the post-digital in your concluding
sentence.&gt;

Really? In addition to Florian's comments on cyberfeminist alternatives and
western/non-western conceptions of number, I'd love to know how western
conceptions solely lead to boolean logic and digital computing?
Computational reason / computationality and solutionism most certainly, but
the actual infrastructure of formal systems? If you're going down that
route, I'd argue that your own position starts to eschew political
alternatives on a different level, mainly as it blurs the ontological
affordance of computation (which is wholly different from digital
transmission btw) with epistemological principles.

Seems rather anthropocentric to suggest that material infrastructures are
correlated to reproduce similar Western principles, because they are just
an "expression" of them. Computational infrastructures are far messier than
that sort of simple divide. How are we to provide alternatives within such
infrastructures if they are *just* an expression of western concepts? Seems
bizarre to me. Last time I checked, both NSA and NIST's mathematical
standards of pesudo-random number elliptical curve encryption didn't
facilitate mass surveillance because we collectively failed to "think
differently." It is impossible to address systemic problems with subjective
solutions (which, actually, isn't a bad method of critiquing post-digital
reflection).

Also on your account, the output from trans-gender gaming communities, such
as Anna Anthropy's Dys4ia, Merritt Kopa's Lim or the research of Samantha
Allen (amongst many others), which rely on such processes, would contradict
such an assertion: as would other examples such as the extensive
infrastructure of mobile banking in parts of Africa: hardly what I'd call
westernised.

Cheers
Rob</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.8</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>Alan Sondheim</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Feb 11 05:15:35 EST 2014</date>
<content>Florian Cramer wrote:

In my view, it's not that simple. Boolean logic - which one can equally 
find in the reasoning of Chinese 4th century BC philosopher like Hui Shi 
(Hui Tzu) - and digital computation (literally=computing with your 
fingers) are by far not only Western conceptions.
--- I've studied him a lot and I don't see his work as Boolean at all; if 
anything, it's closer to something like quantum logic. The I Ching on the 
other hand is Boolean.

--- I agree with you re: post-digital; I'd say embedded digital, if 
anything, and that applies to a fairly small enclaved ecology of users/ 
participants.

- Alan</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.9</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>micha c&#225;rdenas</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Feb 11 10:10:37 EST 2014</date>
<content>thanks for your detailed reply florian, so much to consider there!

also, yes, i am familiar with the environment in the transmediale seminar
since i was there, which is, like you said, informal and exploratory. but
good to share that with everyone else...</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.10</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>Michael Dieter</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Feb 12 00:19:44 EST 2014</date>
<content>&gt;
&gt; By the way, it's rather unfortunate that the papers of the "research group" are linked and cited here as if they were anything canonical. As a matter of fact, these are preliminary, unedited papers/drafts written by a highly diverse workshop gathering of artists, media studies people and arts/media Ph.D. candidates at Aarhus Kunsthal. The definition of "post-digital" that Michael cited is partly tongue-in-cheek - it was based on a voluntary data mining of our drafts where we determined the most commonly used words and built a definition from them. We ultimately rewrote the drafts for transmediale.14's newspaper based on the same principles, with a high score for those texts that managed to squeeze in as much of that vocabulary as possible. That playful context becomes a bit clearer in the newspaper. It's unfortunate that these texts are online without referencing the context. Which ultimately says a lot about embodied and disembodied writing, no matter whether it's digital or not.
&gt;
&gt; -F

Sure, it was noted in my link that the papers were drafts, but surely
they're worth reading anyway for people who don't have the final
version? Again I hope that the PDF is up soon, I managed to get hold
of the newspaper version and it's really a great publication. But
thanks for adding some much needed context, the tongue-in-cheek aspect
is certainly worth noting, especially since you also appear to have
'won' the publication by clocking in the highest score Florian!

And indeed, despite this ironic approach, why think in terms of
canonicity? Post-digital seems to be more like a topic. That was
immediately apparent from the diversity of perspectives at TM; it was
unfortunate people didn't have more time on that panel in that
respect. Nevertheless, as something that relates to how Alessandro's
research into publishing has developed, but that precisely allows for
diverse points of engagement, I thought it might be worth drawing some
attention to, if only to allow for further discussion and points of
view. Ultimately, I think one obvious strength of the term is that it
appears strongly led by an exploratory/experimental sensibility,
rather than ideal concepts or theories of best practice.

-- 
Michael Dieter
Lecturer
Media Studies
The University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.j.dieter/</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.11</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 111, Issue 5</subject>
<from>Alessandro Ludovico</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Feb 11 07:17:10 EST 2014</date>
<content>Dear all,

It's also probably timely to report that Kim Cascone posted a few hours ago on his Facebook account that he's finished with a new essay on "Transcendigitalism" (he wrote that it'll be officially announced once the journal will officially be published).

a.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>2.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] February Introduction - HYBRID BOOKWORK: Experimental eBooks, Post-Digital Publishing</subject>
<from>Michael Dieter</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Feb  4 06:25:31 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi all -empyreans-

I'd like to introduce the theme of Hybrid Bookwork for this month, but
first, I need to thank the -empyre- team - Renate Ferro, Tim Murray, Simon
Biggs and Patrick Lichty - for supporting me in putting this together. It's
really a great opportunity to develop some ideas on a topic I've become
quite interested in and excited about, and I hope that it's also a useful
and thought-provoking discussion for all subscribers.

Second, and crucially, thanks to all our guests who signed up for February,
and have volunteered their time and expertise! It often seems as if there's
nothing but increased demands on our time and attention these days, so this
sort of generosity and commitment is I think really commendable.

So with that said, here's the description of this month's theme and a list
of all involved...

HYBRID BOOKWORK
Experimental eBooks, Post-Digital Publishing

False starts and speculative projects have typically characterized attempts
to disrupt and innovate the printed book through new media; however, the
recent popularization of tablets and e-readers, emergence of commercial
platforms for production, distribution and sharing of e-books, and ongoing
digitalization of printed archives suggests an important threshold of
sorts. Here, a distinct computationality has taken hold following the
aggregative and indexical aspects of file formats, data-mining supported by
addressability and mark-up, tethered feedback of devices, and the flexible
affordances of reflowable layouts. While digital technology has been
integrated into print publishing processes for several decades, such
developments suggest a profound material reformation of how books are
produced, distributed, experienced and mobilized as resources. It should be
no surprise that issues and controversies around intellectual property,
privacy, creativity, sustainability, reading (distraction/attention),
authorship and the fundamental status of the book as an epistemological
object regularly erupt and unfold within these settings.

In relation to the significant uncertainties of publishing, artists,
authors and designers have begun exploring new possibilities and
re-configurations of contemporary bookwork. Critical and exploratory
projects have addressed questions of access, the quantification of content,
creativity and epistemological questions at the intersections of language
and machine processing, at times drawing from histories of avant-garde
practice, artist's books, concrete poetry, spam, web detritus and
subcultural production. Likewise, engagements with print have become
increasingly experimental by reflexively harnessing the materialities of
paper, while translating and twisting software-based techniques into
challenging neo-analog compositions. Described as 'post-digital' or the
'aesthetic of bookishness', such dynamics intersect and crossover between
media, and speak to the complex hybridity of the book today.

Over the month of February, the -empyre- list will discuss economic,
epistemological and aesthetic stakes that characterize this moment,
inviting several guests to reflect on and respond to the topic of hybrid
bookwork and the potential new directions of contemporary publishing.

Featuring: David M. Berry, Mercedes Bunz, Florian Cramer, Angela Genusa,
Lukas Jost Gross, Alessandro Ludovico, Silvio Lorusso, S&#248;ren Pold, Domenico
Quaranta, Rita Raley and Benjamin Shaykin.

Moderated by Michael Dieter.

----------------------

Many thanks again, I'll post an introduction to our first contributors
tomorrow with some background information about them, along with some
starting points for the first week.

Until then,
-- 
M.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Week One - Between Print and Pixels: Computationality,	Post-Digital, Hybrid</subject>
<from>Michael Dieter</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Feb  5 01:01:49 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi all,

I would like to introduce the first three guests for the February topic of
Hybrid Bookwork: Alessandro Ludovico, David Berry and Mercedes Bunz. I'll
called the theme for this session, 'Between Paper and Pixels: The Book
After New Media', to outline some of the broad transformations associated
with publishing today.

There are a number of themes that are perhaps taking some note of in order
to provide some context for the current dynamic and shifting contexts for
the innovative practices that we see emerging around publishing (and other
context in cultural production).

Bios are as follows:

Alessandro Ludovico is an artist, media critic, and chief editor of Neural
magazine since 1993 (http://neural.it). He has published and edited several
books, including his latest 'Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing
Since 1894' (Onomatopee 2012). He is one of the founders of Mag.Net
(Electronic Cultural Publishers organisation), for which co-edited three
Mag.net Readers, and also served as an advisor for the Documenta 12&#8242;s
Magazine Project. He's currently curating the virtual exhibition "Erreur
d'Impression" in the virtual space of Jeu de Paume in Paris. He is one of
the authors of the Hacking Monopolism trilogy of artworks (Google Will Eat
Itself, Amazon Noir, Face to Facebook). He's Adjunct Professor at OCAD
University in Toronto, and teaches at the Academy of Art in Carrara and
NABA in Milan, and is currently completing a PhD at Anglia Ruskin
University in Cambridge (UK).

David M. Berry is a reader in digital media in the school of media, film
and music at the University of Sussex. His research interests focus on
media/medium theory, software studies, digital humanities, and technology.
He is particularly interested in the methodological and theoretical
challenges of digital media and has strong research interests in the
philosophy of software and critical theory. His latest book is 'Critical
Theory and the Digital' (Bloomsbury 2014), and he blogs over at
http://stunlaw.blogspot.nl/

Mercedes Bunz is a lecturer in Media Studies at Leuphana University,
Germany, where she is also Director of the Hybrid Publishing Lab, exploring
academic publishing in the digital age. She writes on digital media,
journalism and the philosophy of technology, and she has been the
technology reporter of The Guardian. Her latest publication is The Silent
Revolution: How Digitalization Transforms Knowledge, Work, Journalism and
Politics Without Making Too Much Noise (Palgrave Pivot 2013). She blogs
regularly at http://www.mercedes-bunz.de/ and http://hybridpublishing.org/
I've been lucky enough to work with each one of them at certain points, and
I'm thrilled to have them contributing this week! Some background of why
I've asked them to contribute...

I want to invite Alessandro to start off the discussion. Many of you are no
doubt familiar with his work, but if not, I want to draw attention to his
recent book, 'Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894'
(Onomatopee 2012):
http://monoskop.org/images/a/a6/Ludovico,_Alessandro_-_Post-Digital_Print._The_Mutation_of_Publishing_Since_1894.pdf(The
fact that text is legit available through the Monoskop Log is perhaps
noteworthy itself).

I would describe his book as a history of experimental aesthetic practices
articulated through new publishing technologies, and one that speaks in
particular to the concept of the post-digital. More generally, it's a
tremendous document of a vast array of projects, artworks, print objects,
books, pamphlets and magazines that is characteristic of print culture in
late modernity and beyond.

The post-digital, in particular, is a term that I'm inviting Alessandro to
discuss, along with related ideas that have emerged through his research.
And it's particularly relevant off the back of Transmediale Festival last
week given the Post-Digital Research panel and newspaper publication. The
latter is a series of short texts that have been collaboratively
peer-reviewed through a workshop on the topic held at Aarhus University
last year: https://tm-resource.projects.cavi.au.dk/?page_id=1291Unfortunately,
a PDF is not available yet, but Alessandro I'm sure will
give an impression of the contents of this publication.

David, meanwhile, has written on a wide range of topics and subjects from
f/oss, the philosophy of software, digital humanities, new aesthetic and,
quite recently, the post-digital. I've invited him to respond and present
his current research, and extend the discussion into some reflections on
epistemological implications and political economy concerns. David and I
have also been involved with booksprint events with Adam Hyde, which I
haven't mentioned in the outline for this discussion, but certainly seem
relevant to the discussion!

Finally, I've asked Mercedes to contribute with her extensive experience as
a journalist and academic covering a range of topics in digital culture,
including a recent in depth study of algorithms and knowledge production.
She leads the Hybrid Publishing team of which (full disclosure) I am also
member at Leuphana University L&#252;neburg. I was hoping that she might broaden
the discussion with some reflections on Alessandro and David's posts, and
perhaps provide some further consideration based on the work currently
being done in Leuphana.

And of course, I invite all subscribers to chime in, respond and post to
the list over the coming days!
-- 
Michael Dieter
Lecturer
Media Studies
The University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.j.dieter/</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Week One - Between Print and Pixels: Computationality, Post-Digital, Hybrid</subject>
<from>Alessandro Ludovico</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu Feb  6 20:42:13 EST 2014</date>
<content>Thanks Michael for the nice introduction.

It seems that Post-Digital aspires to become a 'buzzword' lately, but its meaning seems to be not completely acknowledged.
Many refer to the definition of Kim Cascone in his famous article "The Aesthetics of Failure: "Post-digital" Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music", and Wikipedia collects also a fair good amount of other (close) definitions. But many of them are dated a few years ago and still attached to the concept of the digital disappearing in everyday practice, being in a way 'metabolised'.

My personal definition (given within the Post-digital Research conference and PhD Workshop in Aarhus, in October 2013) is that "Post-digital is the space left by the (only apparent) absence of digital."
The "space" here is meant as a negotiable abstract space, previously filled by the digital in its evident forms and interfaces, and now perceptually disappeared, although still there, present, active and eventually engaging us in a new relationship also with non-digital reality.
In its application to the complex and ever mutating relationship between traditional and digital (or offline and online, if you want) publishing, the concept of the 'hybrid' publications seems to be crucial then.
I tried to define 'hybrid' as a a publication where it's almost impossible to separate or discern the physical from the digital processes behind, as it'd be the inextricable result of computed processes in a recognisable publishing form (eventually upgradeable or simply changing over time).
There are quite a few example of early steps towards the hybrid: Martin Fuchs and Peter Bichsel&#8217;s book &#8220;Written Images", "American Psycho" by Mimi Cabell &amp; Jason Huff, Les Liens Invisibles' "Unhappening, not here not now", or the recent "The Death of the Authors, 1941 edition" by Constant (An Mertens, Femke Snelting).
Still it seems that we're not there yet, as we'd need more elaborated software instruments transcending the generative paradigm, or a simple inclusion/exclusion logic.

In this sense the Post-Digital Research newspaper publication represents another attempt, conjugating the reflection around various post-digital approaches with its final printed from, in quite a few textual and graphical interesting processes (used in experimental literature or just borrowed from online free tools) involving the writing form, the expression of the different concepts, and the final visual rendering of all of that.

But the hybrid would epitomises the metabolisation of digital in a way that it doesn't simply 'disappear' (or better, we are not noticing it anymore), finally becoming one of our daily natural nutrients, with an active role that breaks all the boundaries (being relegated in a device, or to a specific cultural environment that we associate with it).

This is the starting point of an hypothesis I formulated in the last Transmediale panel, which can maybe sound a bit blatant:
what if digital has been mistaken for a medium but actually is an agent that has transformed existing media? I've started to investigate other traditional media (audio and video, for example) and how their core form is formally still coherent with their analogue one, but substantially transformed by its current digital nature.

The hybrid in publishing, in this sense, is actually embodying this passage very well, as it points us back to traditional media and their possible active and engaging relationship with the digital. 
To add more resources to the list:

there has been a special issue of Neural called "Neural #44, Post-Digital Print (Postscript)" (a friend nicknamed it the "shameless issue") which was meant as an addendum to the book with more content related to the topic.
http://neural.it/issues/neural-44-post-digital-print-postscript/

The Post-Digital Print blog is still in beta, but it'll host within this week also the pdf of all the three Mag.net Readers, free to download:
http://postdigitalprint.org
It's meant to be a complement to the terrific resource that Silvio Lorusso is making with its Post-Digital Publishing Archive:
http://p-dpa.net

I'm also curating (for another month and half, with a final special event in Paris on March 11th) "Erreur d'Impression, Publier &#224; l&#8217;&#200;re du Num&#233;rique" a virtual exhibition at Jeu de Paume: http://espacevirtuel.jeudepaume.org/erreur-dimpression-1674/

Indeed, Post-Digital Print, the book, has also a physical form (although we successfully experimented with its digital form just before that):
http://www.onomatopee.net/project.php?progID=c3149ad5e7c0b4bb6e80e4c770ee528c

Although all more or less connected to my personal work, I hope that they can help the discussion.
&gt; I want to invite Alessandro to start off the discussion. Many of you are no doubt familiar with his work, but if not, I want to draw attention to his recent book, 'Post-Digital Print: The Mutation of Publishing Since 1894' (Onomatopee 2012): http://monoskop.org/images/a/a6/Ludovico,_Alessandro_-_Post-Digital_Print._The_Mutation_of_Publishing_Since_1894.pdf (The fact that text is legit available through the Monoskop Log is perhaps noteworthy itself). 
&gt; 
&gt; I would describe his book as a history of experimental aesthetic practices articulated through new publishing technologies, and one that speaks in particular to the concept of the post-digital. More generally, it's a tremendous document of a vast array of projects, artworks, print objects, books, pamphlets and magazines that is characteristic of print culture in late modernity and beyond. 
&gt; 
&gt; The post-digital, in particular, is a term that I'm inviting Alessandro to discuss, along with related ideas that have emerged through his research. And it's particularly relevant off the back of Transmediale Festival last week given the Post-Digital Research panel and newspaper publication. The latter is a series of short texts that have been collaboratively peer-reviewed through a workshop on the topic held at Aarhus University last year: https://tm-resource.projects.cavi.au.dk/?page_id=1291 Unfortunately, a PDF is not available yet, but Alessandro I'm sure will give an impression of the contents of this publication.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.2</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Week One - Between Print and Pixels: Computationality, Post-Digital, Hybrid</subject>
<from>adamhyde</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun Feb  9 07:03:42 EST 2014</date>
<content>hi

I was hoping the conversation would evolve but it seems a little quiet 
so many apologies if I am stepping in and breaking protocol a little but 
I enjoyed Alessandros opening points very much and wanted to ask for his 
further comment on one point.

"what if digital has been mistaken for a medium but actually is an agent 
that has transformed existing media? I've started to investigate other 
traditional media (audio and video, for example) and how their core form 
is formally still coherent with their analogue one, but substantially 
transformed by its current digital nature."

I think this is an interesting issue and I was curious if this has been 
the behaviour of media from the beginning? A cone transformed the voice, 
radio transformed the cone, the codex transformed the scroll etc. I 
bring this up because the 'core form' you refer to is perhaps already a 
multi-hybridised outcome of decades/centuries of transformation. Perhaps 
one of the core roles of any new medium, analog or digital, is to 
transform the old. Any thoughts to that? If it were true then 'digital' 
could be *both* a medium and a transformative agent.

adam</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.3</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Week One - Between Print and Pixels: Computationality, Post-Digital, Hybrid</subject>
<from>Michael Dieter</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Feb 10 03:01:34 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi all,

Apologies to subscribers for the slow start to this discussion.
Unfortunately, David Berry has taken ill the past couple of days, so
will not able to post to the list until later in the month. I will
keep you informed, but I am glad in the meantime that Adam Hyde jumped
in and raised some questions for Alessandro:

"&gt; I think this is an interesting issue and I was curious if this has
been the behaviour of media from the beginning? A cone transformed the
voice, radio transformed the cone, the codex transformed the scroll
etc. I bring this up because the 'core form' you refer to is perhaps
already a multi-hybridised outcome of decades/centuries of
transformation. Perhaps one of the core roles of any new medium,
analog or digital, is to transform the old. Any thoughts to that? If
it were true then 'digital' could be *both* a medium and a
transformative agent."

I'd like to take this a bit further as well, and ask Alessandro and
Mercedes for some response to the term 'digital' and hybrid in the
first place. If it might be taken as a medium and transformative
agent, then what do different definitions mean for the prefix "post"?
And how then does this actually relate to contemporary artistic and
experimental practices aligned with the post-digital, or medial
hybridity?

The invisibility or absence of the digital itself for these practices
is, of course, part of the problem. And as Alessandro notes, this is a
broader question, since at our present juncture, many aesthetic
characteristics and principles of 'old media' have seemingly been
maintained, while a range of compound techniques supported by
massively distributed and standardized software also appear ascendant;
yet this is not always explicitly identified or discussed in terms of
a recognizable and coherent new cultural vernacular.

In his writing on the topic of the post-digital, Florian Cramer goes
to great lengths to argue for some precision in defining the digital
itself as a term, highlighting the fact that it is often aligned with
a kind of high-tech kitsch, rather than described as the basic act of
making discrete. This is a position he already developed in
'Exe.cut[up]able Statements' and 'Words Made Flesh', where counting,
separating and sampling comes to define the digital as an act of
quantification. In this case, the digital is not simply electronic,
but potentially refers to a wide array of cultural techniques that
involve making things discrete. In other words, the magnetic
orientations, electrical impulses or optical arrays of contemporary
computational technologies is merely one subset of the digital broadly
understood. Hopefully, Florian can clarify the significance of these
arguments later on in the month (I hope the summary is alright for
now).

In the meantime, there's another dynamic that is part of our
contemporary experience of the digital that I want to highlight for
the sake of discussion, and this involves the implementation of
discrete measurements for the purpose of expanding surplus value or
profit. In other words, these are the economic lineages that inform
the contemporary digital. They exist, for example, in Charles
Babbage's inspiration from Adam Smith's economic divisions of labor,
but applied to the mechanization of mathematical tables in the
development of the Difference Engine and (proposed) Analytic Engine.
Especially pertinent would be his study of 19th century factories (a
point of engagement for Marx), 'On the Economy of Machinery and
Manufacture', and the argument for the digital as the 'division of
mental labours' whereby certain tedious or monotonous tasks are
delegated away to labor and machinery at lowered rates of pay, expense
and care. This approach is echoed in the articulation of corporate
systems analysis in the late 20th century with the kinds of procedural
initiatives that Philip Agre insightfully referred to as the capture
model. Similarly, as Bernard Stiegler might put it, there is a process
involving the grammatization of labour here, but one in which a
fixation on increased profit drives the systematic implementation and
configuration of these digital infrastructures as a disassociated
milieu.

Perhaps these are familiar arguments, but I'm interested then in how
the digital, understood in this way, can be read in terms of media
theory and the idea of there being 'post'? Certainly, these procedures
are present as a primary mode of producing knowledge in the
development of analogue systems and what Friedrich Kittler called
technical media. Maybe the situation today involves something like the
simultaneous expansion and diversification of these rationalization
techniques in specific ways? That would seem to be argument that Lev
Manovich makes in 'Software Takes Command.' If 'Language of New Media'
was based on outlining a formalist account of contemporary
grammatization expressed through numerical representation, modularity,
automation, variability and transcoding, then his new work looks to
how such a language leads itself to far-reaching hybridization through
the permanent extendibility of software uses and possibilities.
Software can do this since it functions as an implementation of
digital as meta-medium; in Alessandro's account, it infects, but does
not entirely remediate. These ideas are, of course, central to
theories of computation proposed by the Church-Turing hypothesis or by
Van Neumann, but Manovich argues Alan Kay should also be taken
seriously for inaugurating a 'democratization' of this digital
approach to cultural software development. This sets off a continual
upheaval in the cultural mode of development associated with cultural
software today, so that older media formats remain recognizable, yet
also become mixed together into a new expressiveness. The challenge
for Manovich's highly modernist project is to locate cultural
techniques of the present and future within this massively moving
revolutionary infrastructure.

There's also this other interesting aspect of Manovich's argument
found in the idea of performance; it's an idea that's been kicking
around for a while in his work - for instance, in the 'delightful
narrative' of Mario falling down a hill (when this actually happens in
a Nintendo game is a bit lost on me btw) - but this is a perspective
that is actually quite widespread as a premise of interaction design.
We might think of Brenda Laurel's 'Computers as Theatre' or notions of
staging found in HCI approaches like those advocated by Bruce
Tognazzini, or Joanna Drucker's use of frame analysis in the context
of interface theory. Perhaps it would be interesting to connect this
with other theories of performativity and identity as well, or power
in the mode of Jon McKenzie's 'Perform or Else.' Performance in this
latter case, interestingly, would also connect to the processes of
scripted abstraction found in corporate systems analysis and the
mental division of labour, where 'to perform' equates with accounting
for efficiency as value. This is a particular way of thinking through
what the post-digital might mean that I find interesting. Indeed,
drawing from Manovich's own interest in the research conducted at
Xerox PARC, these various compulsions are consolidate nicely, for
instance, in Tim Mott's idle sketches of office work routines on a bar
napkin sometime during the late 1970s. Such hand-drawn images of
making work discrete (they are, therefore, already digital images as a
grammar of action) are the inspiration for the iconic representations
of the contemporary desktop interface. They inscribe workflow analysis
and commands such as READ, WRITE, OPEN and MOVE as the now familiar
options PRINT, FILE, and DELETE:
http://www.designinginteractions.com/img/chapters/ch_1.jpg

When considered in terms of socio-political techniques, a series of
medial dynamics might then be diagrammed as central to the concerns of
post-digital aesthetics, things like: delegation, acceleration and
scaleability (along with Manovich's LoNM terms). These different
impulses, what could be read in terms of what Matthew Fuller and Andy
Goffey call evil media, are often arranged to be extensible in the
sense that they can broadly be assumed to function as global
information infrastructures. With the post-digital, these are then
investigated through scaled down characteristics or features in
translated material states. The post-digital, therefore, exists as a
'small' orientation device, but it also raises questions of beauty and
elegance, and in an exemplary way, speaks to the struggle to make
sense of digital today in any meaningful register beyond the profit
motive and the control of problems.

So what's interesting to me is how the digital understood in these
ways is rendered or characterized through its absence. Does it come to
signify an informational sublimity, perhaps a resources as cultural
materials, a site of excess or dumping ground, some weird array of
stuff comparable to what Marx once described as dead labor, or perhaps
closer to general intellect?

That's quite a long post, but I guess I wanted to throw some more
references into the mix. There's also a lot of connections, but these
are just some notes so I'm not sure they are interesting or relevant
for people. Perhaps Mercedes has some ideas to add? What, for
instance, does the hybrid refer to for the hybrid publishing lab? What
is the digital for you?
-- 
Michael Dieter
Lecturer
Media Studies
The University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.j.dieter/</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.4</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Week One - Between Print and Pixels: Computationality, Post-Digital, Hybrid</subject>
<from>Alessandro Ludovico</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Feb 11 05:35:04 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi Adam and thanks for stepping in (very welcome).</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.5</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Week One - Between Print and Pixels: Computationality, Post-Digital, Hybrid</subject>
<from>Alessandro Ludovico</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Feb 11 07:09:54 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi Michael,

only a few answers to your direct questions.

&gt; "&gt; I think this is an interesting issue and I was curious if this has
&gt; been the behaviour of media from the beginning? A cone transformed the
&gt; voice, radio transformed the cone, the codex transformed the scroll
&gt; etc. I bring this up because the 'core form' you refer to is perhaps
&gt; already a multi-hybridised outcome of decades/centuries of
&gt; transformation. Perhaps one of the core roles of any new medium,
&gt; analog or digital, is to transform the old. Any thoughts to that? If
&gt; it were true then 'digital' could be *both* a medium and a
&gt; transformative agent."
&gt; 
&gt; I'd like to take this a bit further as well, and ask Alessandro and
&gt; Mercedes for some response to the term 'digital' and hybrid in the
&gt; first place. If it might be taken as a medium and transformative
&gt; agent, then what do different definitions mean for the prefix "post"?

Well *if* it'd be proven to be somehow true, then post-digital would mean not that digital is now 'assumed', but that digital has already accomplished its main transformations (although it's still an ongoing process).

&gt; And how then does this actually relate to contemporary artistic and
&gt; experimental practices aligned with the post-digital, or medial
&gt; hybridity?

It can still relate in a quite similar way, only that the hybridity (declined in many various ways) would be seen as true embodiment of "post-digital", which could not then be eventually claimed for any experimental practice dealing with digital.

&gt; The invisibility or absence of the digital itself for these practices
&gt; is, of course, part of the problem. And as Alessandro notes, this is a
&gt; broader question, since at our present juncture, many aesthetic
&gt; characteristics and principles of 'old media' have seemingly been
&gt; maintained, while a range of compound techniques supported by
&gt; massively distributed and standardized software also appear ascendant;
&gt; yet this is not always explicitly identified or discussed in terms of
&gt; a recognizable and coherent new cultural vernacular.
&gt; 
&gt; In his writing on the topic of the post-digital, Florian Cramer goes
&gt; to great lengths to argue for some precision in defining the digital
&gt; itself as a term, highlighting the fact that it is often aligned with
&gt; a kind of high-tech kitsch, rather than described as the basic act of
&gt; making discrete. This is a position he already developed in
&gt; 'Exe.cut[up]able Statements' and 'Words Made Flesh', where counting,
&gt; separating and sampling comes to define the digital as an act of
&gt; quantification. In this case, the digital is not simply electronic,
&gt; but potentially refers to a wide array of cultural techniques that
&gt; involve making things discrete. In other words, the magnetic
&gt; orientations, electrical impulses or optical arrays of contemporary
&gt; computational technologies is merely one subset of the digital broadly
&gt; understood. Hopefully, Florian can clarify the significance of these
&gt; arguments later on in the month (I hope the summary is alright for
&gt; now).
&gt; 
&gt; In the meantime, there's another dynamic that is part of our
&gt; contemporary experience of the digital that I want to highlight for
&gt; the sake of discussion, and this involves the implementation of
&gt; discrete measurements for the purpose of expanding surplus value or
&gt; profit. In other words, these are the economic lineages that inform
&gt; the contemporary digital. They exist, for example, in Charles
&gt; Babbage's inspiration from Adam Smith's economic divisions of labor,
&gt; but applied to the mechanization of mathematical tables in the
&gt; development of the Difference Engine and (proposed) Analytic Engine.
&gt; Especially pertinent would be his study of 19th century factories (a
&gt; point of engagement for Marx), 'On the Economy of Machinery and
&gt; Manufacture', and the argument for the digital as the 'division of
&gt; mental labours' whereby certain tedious or monotonous tasks are
&gt; delegated away to labor and machinery at lowered rates of pay, expense
&gt; and care. This approach is echoed in the articulation of corporate
&gt; systems analysis in the late 20th century with the kinds of procedural
&gt; initiatives that Philip Agre insightfully referred to as the capture
&gt; model. Similarly, as Bernard Stiegler might put it, there is a process
&gt; involving the grammatization of labour here, but one in which a
&gt; fixation on increased profit drives the systematic implementation and
&gt; configuration of these digital infrastructures as a disassociated
&gt; milieu.
&gt; 
&gt; Perhaps these are familiar arguments, but I'm interested then in how
&gt; the digital, understood in this way, can be read in terms of media
&gt; theory and the idea of there being 'post'? Certainly, these procedures
&gt; are present as a primary mode of producing knowledge in the
&gt; development of analogue systems and what Friedrich Kittler called
&gt; technical media. Maybe the situation today involves something like the
&gt; simultaneous expansion and diversification of these rationalization
&gt; techniques in specific ways? That would seem to be argument that Lev
&gt; Manovich makes in 'Software Takes Command.' If 'Language of New Media'
&gt; was based on outlining a formalist account of contemporary
&gt; grammatization expressed through numerical representation, modularity,
&gt; automation, variability and transcoding, then his new work looks to
&gt; how such a language leads itself to far-reaching hybridization through
&gt; the permanent extendibility of software uses and possibilities.
&gt; Software can do this since it functions as an implementation of
&gt; digital as meta-medium; in Alessandro's account, it infects, but does
&gt; not entirely remediate.

Actually I think that remediation intended as Bolter&#8217;s definition: "the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms" can be seen as a lower lever of hybridisation. A video inserted in a digital publication is refashioning video, but it's not taking into account the whole "reading experience" that we have consolidated in centuries, so it's (for the better or worse) disrupting it. Hybridising a digital publication can be more effective using software and networks (eventually in an ever more extreme way than Manovich suggests) to create a unique synthesis, not just "sampled" or "calculated" from big data, but stringently "processed" through different customisable parameters. 

&gt; These ideas are, of course, central to
&gt; theories of computation proposed by the Church-Turing hypothesis or by
&gt; Van Neumann, but Manovich argues Alan Kay should also be taken
&gt; seriously for inaugurating a 'democratization' of this digital
&gt; approach to cultural software development. This sets off a continual
&gt; upheaval in the cultural mode of development associated with cultural
&gt; software today, so that older media formats remain recognizable, yet
&gt; also become mixed together into a new expressiveness. The challenge
&gt; for Manovich's highly modernist project is to locate cultural
&gt; techniques of the present and future within this massively moving
&gt; revolutionary infrastructure.
&gt; 
&gt; There's also this other interesting aspect of Manovich's argument
&gt; found in the idea of performance; it's an idea that's been kicking
&gt; around for a while in his work - for instance, in the 'delightful
&gt; narrative' of Mario falling down a hill (when this actually happens in
&gt; a Nintendo game is a bit lost on me btw) - but this is a perspective
&gt; that is actually quite widespread as a premise of interaction design.
&gt; We might think of Brenda Laurel's 'Computers as Theatre' or notions of
&gt; staging found in HCI approaches like those advocated by Bruce
&gt; Tognazzini, or Joanna Drucker's use of frame analysis in the context
&gt; of interface theory. Perhaps it would be interesting to connect this
&gt; with other theories of performativity and identity as well, or power
&gt; in the mode of Jon McKenzie's 'Perform or Else.' Performance in this
&gt; latter case, interestingly, would also connect to the processes of
&gt; scripted abstraction found in corporate systems analysis and the
&gt; mental division of labour, where 'to perform' equates with accounting
&gt; for efficiency as value. This is a particular way of thinking through
&gt; what the post-digital might mean that I find interesting. Indeed,
&gt; drawing from Manovich's own interest in the research conducted at
&gt; Xerox PARC, these various compulsions are consolidate nicely, for
&gt; instance, in Tim Mott's idle sketches of office work routines on a bar
&gt; napkin sometime during the late 1970s. Such hand-drawn images of
&gt; making work discrete (they are, therefore, already digital images as a
&gt; grammar of action) are the inspiration for the iconic representations
&gt; of the contemporary desktop interface. They inscribe workflow analysis
&gt; and commands such as READ, WRITE, OPEN and MOVE as the now familiar
&gt; options PRINT, FILE, and DELETE:
&gt; http://www.designinginteractions.com/img/chapters/ch_1.jpg
&gt; 
&gt; When considered in terms of socio-political techniques, a series of
&gt; medial dynamics might then be diagrammed as central to the concerns of
&gt; post-digital aesthetics, things like: delegation, acceleration and
&gt; scaleability (along with Manovich's LoNM terms). These different
&gt; impulses, what could be read in terms of what Matthew Fuller and Andy
&gt; Goffey call evil media, are often arranged to be extensible in the
&gt; sense that they can broadly be assumed to function as global
&gt; information infrastructures. With the post-digital, these are then
&gt; investigated through scaled down characteristics or features in
&gt; translated material states. The post-digital, therefore, exists as a
&gt; 'small' orientation device, but it also raises questions of beauty and
&gt; elegance, and in an exemplary way, speaks to the struggle to make
&gt; sense of digital today in any meaningful register beyond the profit
&gt; motive and the control of problems.
&gt; 
&gt; So what's interesting to me is how the digital understood in these
&gt; ways is rendered or characterized through its absence. Does it come to
&gt; signify an informational sublimity, perhaps a resources as cultural
&gt; materials, a site of excess or dumping ground, some weird array of
&gt; stuff comparable to what Marx once described as dead labor, or perhaps
&gt; closer to general intellect?
&gt; 
&gt; That's quite a long post, but I guess I wanted to throw some more
&gt; references into the mix. There's also a lot of connections, but these
&gt; are just some notes so I'm not sure they are interesting or relevant
&gt; for people. Perhaps Mercedes has some ideas to add? What, for
&gt; instance, does the hybrid refer to for the hybrid publishing lab? What
&gt; is the digital for you?
&gt; 
&gt; 
&gt; -- 
&gt; Michael Dieter
&gt; Lecturer
&gt; Media Studies
&gt; The University of Amsterdam
&gt; Turfdraagsterpad 9
&gt; 1012 XT Amsterdam
&gt; http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.j.dieter/
&gt; _______________________________________________
&gt; empyre forum
&gt; empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
&gt; http://www.subtle.net/empyre
&gt;</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.6</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Week One - Between Print and Pixels:	Computationality, Post-Digital, Hybrid</subject>
<from>Mercedes Bunz</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Feb 12 03:45:29 EST 2014</date>
<content>&gt; Perhaps Mercedes has some ideas to add? What, for instance, does the hybrid refer to for the hybrid publishing lab? What is the digital for you?
Now you make me laugh, Michael. I don&#8217;t think I can come up with a definition that will hold, but I guess you are not too disappointed about this. Of course, I feel much more comfortable with complicating things a little bit further. Indeed, I think we often mix up disparate levels, when we talk about a medium - the technical functionality, the social or cultural technique it enables, and how it is occupied by power/control are three different lines which cross or levels we find acting within a medium. Mixing these levels, leads us often to strange conclusions. Instead of giving a definition, I will rather take it further apart! Let&#8217;s have a look at digital book publishing and book sprints, for example. 

&gt; I think this is an interesting issue and I was curious if this has been the behaviour of media from the beginning? A cone transformed the voice, radio transformed the cone, the codex transformed the scroll etc. I bring this up because the 'core form' you refer to is perhaps already a multi-hybridised outcome of decades/centuries of transformation. Perhaps one of the core roles of any new medium, analog or digital, is to transform the old. Any thoughts to that? If it were true then 'digital' could be *both* a medium and a transformative agent.

I agree with Adam, I think the digital is both, medium and transformative agent - and I would even differentiate the last into transformative and agent. The whole messy situation bears the pressing problem which we theory people have, when we talk and analyse media. For what do we look at? A) the technical medium, or B) its transformation, the cultural technique it allows and c) how this is used by power, [or D) what Alessandro calls agency]?

If I may use the example of "Book sprints&#8221; here, as Adam is an expert for this and the innovative method of producing books he came up with has been quite inspiring for the research in our lab... Of course, one can say that &#8220;new media&#8221; like desktop publishing tools, content management, and digital on-demand-distribution have made this interesting new form of producing books collectively possible. In that sense, new digital media transforms the old paper media to enable a different production as well as different books. 

But the digital hasn&#8217;t just transformed book production, it also transformed our knowledge production, i.e. the knowledge we use when writing books - or when writing essays, or when making arguments. Due to its digitalization, knowledge can now be found via search engines, and this allows us to handle knowledge fields in a very different way: we scan them. Scanning or cursory reading becomes a new knowledge technique, besides using search engines, we often also google each other - at least this is I can observe us doing in some of our team meetings (my students love this as well). Here I can locate Alessandro&#8217;s statement, when he writes: "New media are affecting the other ones&#8221; - but this is something that happens more on level B) and C), its a social or cultural technique and how it is enacted and appropriated. Personally, I see the post-digital located here, at least at the moment. One reason for this is, I have Florian Cramer&#8217;s excellent example of students on my mind who sit together to produce a paper fanzine, and he commented that: they are doing it as if they are doing social media. 

I think A, B, and C are all on a similar level - the present - but much like Alessandro I am fascinated that there is something else, the moment/aspect he calls agency [D]. I researched this silent technical &#8220;ghost" a bit for my book (The Silent Revolution), and noticed that philosophers and thinkers (Latour, Simondon, Verbeek, Ihde, Blumenberg,  Kittler, or Nigel Thrift, or...) all were fascinated by it. I tried to explain this &#8220;agency", but as my interest was not to describe it as technical determination, I chose the term "technical gesture&#8221;. The concept is borrowed from Ferdinand Braudel, of course. He brought something similar into play, when besides short-term historic events, he focussed on the shift of long-term historical structures. Analog to this, I came up with a structure or 'schema' inherent in technology and changing with each new technical revolution. Here, I think my argument is related to Alessandro&#8217;s idea of the digital as being something more than just a new medium, seeing it more like electricity. However, I would say while this has an effect, I wouldn&#8217;t describe it as agency. It is more a structure or a pattern: industrialization, for example, is based on the construction of systems for which the process of standardization is essential. The digital, on the other hand, has a more disruptive and fragmented side so that flexibility is a far more important aspect to it than rigid norms. 

Now the question is: what would that mean for publishing, or writing?

Personally, I see some of this &#8216;gesture&#8217; in my own writing. I tend to start my thinking less from an opposing argument, I find refuting someone less and less productive. Instead, I prefer to use fragments of other people&#8217;s theory and thinking as bricks to build my own argument, and find myself interested in things like &#8220;Reading Diffractively&#8221; (see Iris van der Tuin 2013: http://www.academia.edu/4679458/The_Untimeliness_of_Bergsons_Metaphysics_Reading_Diffractively_2013_ ) Or is this just a &#8230; trend? What do you guys think? 

&gt; Perhaps one of the core roles of any new medium, analog or digital, is to transform the old. Any thoughts to that? If it were true then 'digital' could be *both* a medium and a transformative agent.
By the way, Michael, I don&#8217;t really get your point here, like I don&#8217;t understand the &#8220;economic lineage&#8221; but with it you seem to go somewhere very interesting. Maybe you can explain this a bit? 

&gt; In other words, these are the economic lineages that inform
&gt; the contemporary digital. They exist, for example, in Charles
&gt; Babbage's inspiration from Adam Smith's economic divisions of labor,
&gt; but applied to the mechanization of mathematical tables in the
&gt; development of the Difference Engine and (proposed) Analytic Engine.
&gt; Especially pertinent would be his study of 19th century factories (a
&gt; point of engagement for Marx), 'On the Economy of Machinery and
&gt; Manufacture', and the argument for the digital as the 'division of
&gt; mental labours' whereby certain tedious or monotonous tasks are
&gt; delegated away to labor and machinery at lowered rates of pay, expense
&gt; and care. This approach is echoed in the articulation of corporate
&gt; systems analysis in the late 20th century with the kinds of procedural
&gt; initiatives that Philip Agre insightfully referred to as the capture
&gt; model. Similarly, as Bernard Stiegler might put it, there is a process
&gt; involving the grammatization of labour here, but one in which a
&gt; fixation on increased profit drives the systematic implementation and
&gt; configuration of these digital infrastructures as a disassociated
&gt; milieu.
&gt; 
&gt; Perhaps these are familiar arguments, but I'm interested then in how
&gt; the digital, understood in this way, can be read in terms of media
&gt; theory and the idea of there being 'post'?</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.7</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Week One - Between Print and Pixels:	Computationality, Post-Digital, Hybrid</subject>
<from>David Berry</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu Feb 13 03:17:25 EST 2014</date>
<content>I want to take up the question of the definitional a little, more because I think that what the post-digital is pointing towards as a concept is the multiple moments in which the digital was operative in various ways. Indeed, historicising the &#8220;digital" can be a useful, if not crucial step, in understanding the transformation(s) of digital technologies. That is, we are at a moment whereby we are able to survey the various constellations of factors that made up a particular historical configuration around the digital and in which the &#8220;digital&#8221; formed an &#8220;imagined" medium to which existing analogue mediums where often compared, and to which the digital tended to be seen as suffering from a lack, e.g. not a medium for &#8220;real&#8221; news, for film, etc. etc. The digital was another medium to place at the end (of the list) after all the other mediums were counted &#8211; and not a very good one. It was where the digital was understood, if it were understood at all, as a complement to other media forms, somewhat lacking, geeky, glitchy, poor quality and generally suited for toys, like games or the web, or for &#8220;boring&#8221; activities like accountancy or infrastructure. The reality is that in many ways the digital was merely a staging post, whilst computing capacity, memory, storage and display resolutions could fall in price/rise in power enough to enable a truly &#8220;post-digital&#8221; environment that could produce new mediated experiences. That is, that it appears that the digital was &#8220;complementary&#8221; but the post-digital is zero-sum. Here is my attempt to sum up some of the moments that I think might serve as a provocation to debate the post-digital.
  +-----------------+------------------+
  |    DIGITAL      |   POST-DIGITAL   |
  +------------------------------------&gt;
  | Non-zero sum    | Zero-sum         |
  | Objects         | Streams          |
  | Files           | Clouds           |
  | Programs        | Apps             |
  | SQL databases   | NoSQL storage    |
  | HTML            | node.js/APIs     |
  | Disciplinary    | Control          |
  | Administration  | Logistics        |
  | Connect         | Always-on        |
  | Copy/Paste      | Intermediate     |
  | Digital         | Computal         |
  | Hybrid          | Unified          |
  | Interface       | Surface          |
  | BitTorrent      | Scraping         |
  | Participation   | Sharing/Making   |
  | Metadata        | Metacontent      |
  | Web 2.0         | Stacks           |
  | Medium          | Platform         |
  | Games           | World            |
  | Software agents | Compactants      |
  | Experience      | Engagement       |
  | Syndication     | Push notification|
  | GPS             | Beacons  (IoTs)  |
  | Art             | Aesthetics       |
  | Privacy         | Personal Cloud   |
  | Plaintext       | Cryptography     |
  | Big data        | Real-time        |
  | Responsive      | Anticipatory     |
  | Tracing         | Tracking         |
  +------------------------------------&gt;
Best

David</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] HYBRID BOOKWORK, Week Two - Paradoxical Publishing, Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics</subject>
<from>Michael Dieter</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Feb 12 04:27:24 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi all,

The discussion is still rolling from the first week, but I would like
to nevertheless introduce and welcome three more guests onto the list:
Lukas Jost Gross, Domenico Quaranta and Rita Raley.

I've put together some keywords for this introduction - Paradoxical
Publishing, Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics - (apologies for yet
another 'post' in there), but this is just a formality. I want to keep
things quite open in terms of how the conversation develops and what
gets discussed. Perhaps subscribers have specific questions or
comments to add at this point.

Indeed, hopefully many of you are also already familiar with their
work. If not, please check out TRAUMAWIEN's inspiring projects and
publications; the absolutely essential Link Editions series that
Domenico's been running and along with an overview of his curatorial
work and criticism; and some of Rita's key publications on a range of
influential media arts practices, concepts and themes from codework to
tactical media and counterveillance.

It's great to have you all on empyre!

- M.

Bios:

Lukas Jost Gross is an artist and paradoxical print publisher based in
Vienna. He co-founded TRAUMAWIEN in 2010 with Peter Moosgaard and
Julian Palacz as a non-academic initiative exploring new forms of
publishing. An important aspect is the ARTCLUB involving discussions
of various issues, books and releases
(http://traumawien.at/stuff/artclub/). Some key projects, meanwhile,
have included exploiting "Domains of Distribution" Ad Contaminated
Ebooks (Trojan Horses) exploring the connectivity and underground
distribution of ebooks by algorithmically changing/contaminating them
while feeding them back into Systems of Distribution
(http://rhizome.org/announce/events/59833/view/). In certain ways,
augmented reality is also an important concept for TRAUMAWIEN, as seen
in the development of Augmented Reality Software for YORICK/REPLIK in
2010, which was sold as 'Hybrids'. For more information on their
various projects and publications, see http://traumawien.at/

Domenico Quaranta (1978, Brescia, Italy, http://domenicoquaranta.com)
is an art critic and curator. He is a regular contributor to Flash Art
and Artpulse. He is the editor (with M. Bittanti) of the book
"GameScenes: Art in the Age of Videogames" (2006) and the author of
"Media, New Media, Postmedia" (2010; translated into English in 2013
with the title "Beyond New Media Art") and "In Your Computer" (2011).
He has curated various exhibitions, including "Holy Fire: Art of the
Digital Age" (Bruxelles 2008, with Y. Bernard), Playlist (Gijon 2009
and Bruxelles 2010) and "Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist
in the Internet Age" (Brescia 2011; Basel and New York 2012). He is a
co-founder of the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age
(http://www.linkartcenter.eu/).

Rita Raley researches and teaches at the University of California,
Santa Barbara. Her work is situated at the intersection of digital
media and humanist inquiry, with a particular emphasis on cultural
critique, artistic practices, language, and textuality. She is the
author of Tactical Media (Electronic Mediations) (University of
Minnesota, 2009), co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection,
Volume 2 (2011), and has more recently published articles in the
edited collections "Raw Data" Is an Oxymoron (2013) and Comparative
Textual Media: Transforming the Humanities in the Postprint Era
(2013). She has had fellowship appointments at the National Humanities
Center; UCLA (as part of the Mellon-funded project on the Digital
Humanities); University of Bergen, Norway (with "ELMCIP: Electronic
Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice"); and
the Dutch Foundation for Literature in Amsterdam. She currently
co-edits the "Critical Issues in Media Aesthetics" book series for
Bloomsbury and the "Electronic Mediations" book series for the
University of Minnesota Press.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] HYBRID BOOKWORK, Week Two - Paradoxical Publishing,	Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics</subject>
<from>Domenico Quaranta</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Feb 12 19:09:13 EST 2014</date>
<content>Dear empyreans,

I have been producing content for books, catalogues and magazines for a while, but if Michael kindly invited me in this discussion on empyre, it is because, at some point, I became an editor and publisher. In the following, I will try to explain shortly how it happened, because it can be useful to introduce you to the approach and structure of Link Editions (http://editions.linkartcenter.eu/).

In 2011, while working with some partners on setting up the Link Center for the Arts of the Information Age (the no-profit organization behind Link Editions), I started collecting ideas for a personal side project. I wanted to go through the texts I wrote for magazines, catalogues and blogs in previous years, select the ones that were still meaningful to me, edit them (most of them were badly translated in English by third parties), publish an anthology and remove everything from my website. I felt it was time to review this material, take it off from the fluidity of the internet, and make it more readable: a better formatting, a better design, a better indexing. Self-editing with a bit of make-up.

I didn't know how to do it, but I knew that I didn't want to submit it to a publishing house. At the time, I had just published a book in Italian, and even if it was a wonderful experience, I didn't see any advantage in following the same path again. Maybe if you are a better writer it goes differently, but with my 2010 book what happened was that (1) I gave all the rights on the book to the publisher (2) for almost no money and for (3) 30 free copies of my book. Since then, (4) I can't put the pdf online for free, (5) I have no control on distribution and (6) I can have a rough idea about how sales are going only through the (rather opaque) filter of the publisher. I can't even allow my students to make photocopies, even if I do it all the time. 

So, I started exploring print-on-demand platforms, and what I saw was very interesting. With, for example, Lulu.com 1) I could keep my rights on the book and choose the kind of license I wanted to apply to it; 2) I could potentially make money, or decide on my own - not because I was forced by a contract - that I didn't want to make money at all; 3) I could buy as many books I wanted at author's price; 4) I could circulate the book in digital form, even on the same platform, without any restriction; 5) I couldn't be in my neighborhood bookstore, but I could access some of the biggest bookstores in the world, and 6) I could keep track of sales and downloads. I could even send the download link to monoskop, and spread the digital file through my students. Of course, print-on-demand platforms have their faults too, but at least everything that made me upset in traditional publishing seemed to be healed there.

From here to Link Editions, the step was short. I talked about all this to my partners, and they agreed to set up a publishing initiative grounded in print-on-demand and free download. I published my book, In Your Computer, in May 2011. By September 2011, three other books were released: Random, by Valentina Tanni; In My Computer # 1, by Miltos Manetas; and the catalogue of the first exhibition produced by the Link Art Center, Collect the WWWorld. The Artist as Archivist in the Internet Age. Feel free to download all of them. 

With these books, our three main book collections were born. "Clouds" is both an attempt to allow other writers the kind of freedom I experienced working outside of traditional publishing, and to bring to shelves some good theoretical writing that meets our interests as an institution. "In My Computer" is a kind of concept magazine, inviting artists to share meaningful content stored in their hard drive (or in the cloud) that for some reason never got released, and that can be meaningful in book form. "Catalogues" collects our monographs and exhibition catalogues. Recently Link Editions started being an interesting platform also for other organizations, and we are exploring different modes of co-publishing. These books are filed under "Open". 

Simply put, Link Editions is an attempt to conceal the advantages of self publishing with the ones of working with a publishing house. One of the faults of POD platforms is the lack of a context around the book you publish. Of course, you can use categories and tags in order to index your book and make it easy to retrieve. But how many people look for books this way? Landing on Lulu.com is like entering a giant bookstore, with thousands of bad books welcoming you at the entrance, and with an unreliable indexing system. You head to the art shelf and you see calendars; you look for the contemporary art shelf and you see self produced portfolios; you look closer for "new media art" books and you find ten bad ones - the best one is actually indexed under Essays &gt; Photography, and, if you spend a whole day there, you may be able to find a great artist book under "Software and code".
Another problem, when you self-publish a book, is your lack of professionalism. You may be a good writer, but still need an editor and a proof reader for your contents, and a good designer for your book. With Link Editions, we tried to bypass these problems without rebuilding the barriers someone experiences when working with a traditional publisher. We offer to our authors our editing and design expertise; due to our weak economic model, we can't design all the books we publish, but we try to keep an high level of quality. We set a low income for Link Editions that basically pays back the expenses produced by the initiative, and we offer all books in free download; everything is done in a very transparent way, and authors are always free to request statistics on their sales / downloads, as well as to but their books at author's price through our account. It's basically like self publishing, but with a professional assistance, and delivering the book in a context that becomes more interesting and rewarding for us and for authors any time a new book is published. 

Sorry for the long presentation post, but I assumed that my role in this conversation was more that of presenting a concrete "case study", than that of addressing the interesting topics raised in the first part of this discussion. Hopefully I will be able to say something about them later on.

My warm regards, 
Domenico

---

Domenico Quaranta

email: quaranta.domenico at gmail.com
skype: dom_40

http://domenicoquaranta.com
http://www.linkartcenter.eu</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.2</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] HYBRID BOOKWORK, Week Two - Paradoxical Publishing, Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics</subject>
<from>Ethel Baraona Pohl</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu Feb 13 00:12:42 EST 2014</date>
<content>Dear all,
Thank you for all the inputs an the generosity of sharing valuable
information to enhance the conversation and to learn from each other.
I have been following with lots of interest this discussion, as publisher
myself and having several questions on the transformation of the publishing
field in the current times, let's say pre-digital, digital and post-digital.

To contextualize, we have an independent publishing house called
dpr-barcelona [www-dpr-barcelona.com] specialised in architecture, theory
and art. On the past years we have been researching on the concept of
"hybrid books" with the combination of printed and digital by different
approaches, including different formats that already have been mentioned by
some of you, such as e-Books, Print-on-Demand and enriched ePubs, among
others.

I'll share here two case studies that, in my opinion are the closest we're
reaching to the concept of *hybridization*, to hear your feedback about
them and join the conversation.

1. The first one is the use of Augmented Reality interactions on a printed
book, to connect the paperback edition with the digital tools. The first
experiment we did was as contributors for Domus Magazine, where we proposed
to the editor to include this technology in one of the articles we wrote.
The result was very dynamic and well received, as being an architecture and
design magazine, the possibility to link videos and 3D-models using the
printed images to visualize them on any smart phone with the app [please
watch the video: https://vimeo.com/39580799]. After that we have used the
same technology in a few of our books, the interactions works really good
but maybe the most difficult part is how to communicate to our readers that
the printed book is enriched with this technology... I think even if people
think it's good or they talk about it, there are only few ones using it;
and this fact opens lots of questions in our minds.

2. The second case study is what we call "*multiplatform* projects". The
most recent one is *The Kent State Forum on the City: MADRID*, which
includes Book + Web + App, all of them complementary and inter-connected,
trying to enhance information exchange. The book also contains Augmented
Reality features accessible through mobile devices. Here we try to share
different contents depending on the platform and try to avoid repetition of
contents in order to exploit the tool according to its possibilities. This
project is so new that I can't yet share with you if it's successful or
not, not talking about commercial issues but focusing (as part of this
discussion) on how people use the different platforms and to envision what
we can learn from this experiment.
More info: http://www.ksuforumonthecity.com/

I really appreciate to be reading all your experiences and wanted to share
ours, so we all can learn from each others.

Best regards,
Ethel
---
Ethel Baraona Pohl | dpr-barcelona &lt;http://www.dpr-barcelona.com/&gt;
Curator Think Space MONEY &lt;http://www.think-space.org/en/theme/money_2013/&gt;
twitter @ethel_baraona &lt;https://twitter.com/ethel_baraona&gt; |
about.me&lt;http://about.me/ethel_baraona&gt;
(+34) 626 048 684

*Before you print think about the environment*</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.3</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] HYBRID BOOKWORK, Week Two - Paradoxical Publishing, Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics</subject>
<from>Michael Dieter</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu Feb 13 19:56:54 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi Domenico,

Thanks for grounding the conversation a bit with some background
information about Link Editions. From your description, the move to
start working with POD and ebooks seems to have been lead by a range
of motives - some of which were pragmatic, experimental, somewhat
intuitive and already informed by your experience as a curator.

I imagine the freedom to experiment is one attractive aspect of this
model. To a certain extent, as you imply, the content on these
platforms will only ever be as good as we make it, and the
possibilities and affordances will remain unknown until we begin
actively exploring them. In that respect, the series reminds me of the
Institute of Network Cultures Theory on Demand (ToD) series as a
relatively flexible and open channel for publishing (although the
focus content-wise is slightly different of course) -
http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/theoryondemand/titles/. I know
anecdotally that some traditional academic publishers have some desire
to move into this kind of model, especially given the shift to
mini-monographs and short essay collections more broadly. Editors at
old school publication houses will often express a desire to innovate
and experiment, but that they are restricted to their existing
financial arrangements, professional relationships, tools and
publishing workflows. There's a lot of anxiety there, but presumably
this approach would allow them to open things up, even just a little
bit as an offshoot series. It would also allow for existing content to
be repackaged and repurposed quite easily, as Link Editions and ToD
demonstrate. This already seems like a more viable model than
networked books, apps or anything involving multimedia.

That said, something about your move into becoming a publisher appears
to be informed by your wider concerns with the location of art today,
something you've written about in terms of the so-called digital
divide between media and contemporary art practices (in addition to
their disassociations with digital and networked modes of cultural
production at large). Elsewhere, you've described the "baggage of
ignorance (technological on one hand, artistic on the other)" that's
structured a lot of problems and misunderstandings in
media/contemporary art contexts, especially when it comes to the
embedded discourses attached to residual and emergent cultural
institutions. I wonder whether you've encountered comparable baggage
in your experience with publishing? Certainly, the trial of putting
out your first book with a traditional publisher runs at odds with the
goal of actively expanding frameworks, conversations and imaginaries
for what contemporary art might mean, but can you say something about
how you've seen these works received in different contexts? Do these
publications end up in unexpected settings and contexts? How far and
wide do they travel to reach diverse audiences? Perhaps you've got
some interesting stories and insights here.

Some other quick follow up questions: Link Editions seems to have been
born from an archival impulse; to what extent have, for instance,
libraries acquired print copies of these publications? Is that
something you're interested in pursuing? Have you also considered
feeding back this publishing momentum into print distribution for
galleries or more specialty bookshops beyond the Lulu.com platform?
Would it make sense to do so?

Cheers,

- M.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.4</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] HYBRID BOOKWORK, Week Two - Paradoxical Publishing, Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics</subject>
<from>domenico quaranta</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri Feb 14 09:07:13 EST 2014</date>
<content>Dear Michael,

thanks for your reply and your questions!
&gt; That said, something about your move into becoming a publisher appears
&gt; to be informed by your wider concerns with the location of art today,
&gt; something you've written about in terms of the so-called digital
&gt; divide between media and contemporary art practices
of course, any time you start producing content of any kind, you do it
because you see room for that - to fill a hole, so to speak. In Italy,
there is very little literature about art and new media, and just a few of
the books I enjoy in English are translated, often quite lately. That said,
Link Editions publishes mainly in English for an international audience
that have access to a wide literature on this subject. What I felt was
missing, and what the "Clouds" series is trying to offer, was a fast
translation of the vast literature we experience online in the shape of a
book. Most of what we read today is on a screen. Sometimes, a blog post or
a short essay published online has a stronger impact than a book or an
article on a printed magazine. But the web is fluid, permalinks decade,
retrieving content that we forgot to save, archive, tag or post to Facebook
is hard. A book - be it a paperback or a digital file - is more reliable;
it lasts longer, and can be quoted years later.
&gt; how you've seen these works received in different contexts? Do these
&gt; publications end up in unexpected settings and contexts? How far and
&gt; wide do they travel to reach diverse audiences? Perhaps you've got
&gt; some interesting stories and insights here.
&gt;

One of the faults of working online is that you don't hear stories, you
just see facts and figures. I can tell you that the books have been
downloaded and bought from all over the world, mostly from the US, Europe
and Australia, and that the proportion between free downloads and sales is
more or less 1:10; I can tell you that bookstores don't like to buy from
Lulu - so they don't buy our books, even if we offer them to buy at
author's price; but the only feedback I get comes from people that bought
or downloaded the books, when I meet them. Also, it's funny when I make a
presentation and say "you can buy the paperback or download the book for
free" - many people still look at me like if I was an alien...
&gt; Some other quick follow up questions: Link Editions seems to have been
&gt; born from an archival impulse; to what extent have, for instance,
&gt; libraries acquired print copies of these publications? Is that
&gt; something you're interested in pursuing? Have you also considered
&gt; feeding back this publishing momentum into print distribution for
&gt; galleries or more specialty bookshops beyond the Lulu.com platform?
&gt; Would it make sense to do so?
&gt;

It would definitely make sense, even if it has been, so far, quite hard to
do. We don't have the budget to buy copies and send them to selected
bookstores or galleries, and we can't do donations to public libraries, but
we suggest to do it to people that download our books for free (a strategy
we learnt from Cory Doctorow). It has been possible for specific
publications, though. The F.A.T. Manual was co-produced with MU, Eindhoven
and supported by XPO Gallery, Paris - they both have copies for sale. Soon,
you will be able to find some Link Editions books at Eyebeam, New York.
Hopefully in the future we will work more on this.
Talking about the archival impulse, of course you are right. But it's not
just about libraries - I think disseminating the digital file goes in the
same direction. When I think that only 100 copies of "Peer Pressure" have
been sold, but some thousands have been downloaded, I feel that this book
is somehow "safe". I know, you don't always read what you downloaded, but
you always store it somewhere for later reading. Maybe at some point people
will start donating their old Kindles and Kobos to public libraries - and
they will accept them.

My bests,
Domenico</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.5</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] HYBRID BOOKWORK, Week Two - Paradoxical Publishing, Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics</subject>
<from>verlag at traumawien.at</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat Feb 15 21:48:33 EST 2014</date>
<content>1 Literary Trojan Horses
2 Augmented Reality
3 Post-Digital
4 Print on Demand

1 Since our Ghostwriters (
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120613/03584719300/amazon-deletes-ebooks-automatically-generated-youtube-comments-leaving-many-questions-unanswered.shtml)
Intervention we put a great effort in manipulating huge bunchs of text
algorithmically. During the whole last year we have been working on an
algorithm to contaminate contents by subversively contaminatig them with
advertising. This is focused on german ebook piracy mechanisms which turn
ot to be by far most progressive experiments in terms of distribution. Just
for the case as they also constantly invent alternative economic systems,
always on nomadic moves, where they curate contents, as opposed to raw
bunches of material like all german bestellers at once like this 1 &gt;
http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/9150293/42.000_deutsche_epub_eBooks_(42.740_eBooks_komplettes_Boox.to-Ar[decide
if they are what they are labeled, by your self]. If you are
interested, a driving force behind ever changing 'domains of distribution'
here has been and still is 'spiegelbest', here is an essential interview
with him &gt; http://traumawien.at/stuff/texts/interview-mit-einem-buchpiraten/,
also he has a blog where he writes about where the scene locates at the
moment. They truly are always on the move, and they are huge and that s why
i wonder why this discussion is so much skipped in publishing.

2 Augmented Reality. To me AR still is the most close to working science
fiction concept in digital and i am highly fascinated thinking about it. To
put it short &gt; as long as we need our hands for computers, we'll have to
wait, and no, i don't like 'glasses'. We have been greatly influenced here
by the fantastic Mez Breeze Blog Augmentology which stopped in 2010 &gt;
http://arsvirtuafoundation.org/research/
We are open to any collaborations here. Please contact. We have our own
software and some Scheme concepts. AR does need a lot of work.

3 Post-Digital. After reading the mails from last week i asked my friend
about 'post-digital' and he said 'Alzheimers'. I thought this was
something, as it brought up the human connection, which i completely miss
in your notes. Also, it could be turned in as the 'space left by the
absence of the digital' - a generative amnesia, sort of. Unlearning
learning, Tech drugs and the Kurzweil Cyborg, all the archives etc come in
here. Just my thoughts without juggle-stretch terms too much.

4 Pod. We, of course, used pod in the beginning for most of the reasons
Domenico listed. Still, in June 2012, when Amazon terminated our Accounts
life-long because of the 'Ghostwriters' Intervention, we decided to not use
pod (and it's Amazon gateway) anymore and instead have our books printed
locally, in limited runs of 50-100. Our orderings through Lulu where really
marginal and their quality was just bad. Not to mention tax and check
issues with the US you suddenly have to deal with. To have our backlist (
http://traumawien.at/prints/) out of print is a thing, nowadays. Sticking
back to great quality prints is also the (.) left by the absence of the
digital and therefore probably post-digital. Our posters, for example, are
printed at a letterpress in St. Gallen. We just want best, long lasting
quality you can get, again. Those products are data carriers to survive.

Don't get me wrong, but it will be true pod if espresso book machines
arrive to print the pdf at the copy shop around the corner.

I am also having problems to use the word book in general for any digital
processes. Just to avoid tedious (especially 'ebook') discussions.

&gt;&gt;&gt; Apologize for my late introduction. I have a familiy emergency here in
switzerland and been offline most of the last week. Also, this is written
from a cafe. Hope to add more to the discussion, later. See you around, L</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.6</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] HYBRID BOOKWORK, Week Two - Paradoxical Publishing, Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics</subject>
<from>Michael Dieter</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Feb 19 06:26:36 EST 2014</date>
<content>Thanks for the post Lukas! I'm also a bit late responding so
apologies, but I did want to just pick up on this point quickly...
&gt;
"3 Post-Digital. After reading the mails from last week i asked my
friend about 'post-digital' and he said 'Alzheimers'. I thought this
was something, as it brought up the human connection, which i
completely miss in your notes. Also, it could be turned in as the
'space left by the absence of the digital' - a generative amnesia,
sort of. Unlearning learning, Tech drugs and the Kurzweil Cyborg, all
the archives etc come in here. Just my thoughts without juggle-stretch
terms too much."

Post-digital brain damage - this is one of the more interesting
definitions I've read! While I'm a bit skeptical of neurological
explanations for what the web has done to us ala Carr's Is Google
Making Us Stupid, continual partial awareness, overall cognitive
fatigue and a sense of informationally-induced distraction is
something I do recognize in myself. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just
getting older and have more responsibilities.

There is a real problem of our technologies being always on, too many
browser tabs open, the smart phone buzzing an email update, the
continual connection to social media streams - 24/7, real subsumption.
Of course, there's the obvious pharmacological dimensions of the info
attention economy as well, the rise of ADHD diagnoses, what Bifo
theorizes as the pharmacological character of the 'schizo-economy' -
including the need for 'panic' to be alleviated through the use of
cocaine, ritalin, speed, modafinil and other nootropics. Maybe
disciplinary software like Freedom and Anti-Social has something
post-digital about it, or more accurately, Morozov's locked up router
cable, smartphone and screwdrivers? That's the real neo-analogue
response!

In any case, this backdrop of attention is crucial I think in terms of
how people deal with books today. It is something that Hayles, for
instance, has explored in her book How We Think within the context of
education and literary studies. Certainly, coping strategies have now
also become a major topic in the mainstream press, even when it comes
to ebooks as well -
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/books/review/how-do-e-books-change-the-reading-experience.html?_r=0

- M.

-- 
Michael Dieter
Lecturer
Media Studies
The University of Amsterdam
Turfdraagsterpad 9
1012 XT Amsterdam
http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/m.j.dieter/</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.7</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] HYBRID BOOKWORK, Week Two - Paradoxical Publishing, Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics</subject>
<from>verlag at traumawien.at</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu Feb 20 17:38:24 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi Michael thanks for the reply.

I wasn't to put [3] as a kind of 'brain damage'. Was just an
[alter]na[t]ive (yy my first actual use of mezangelle, it s coming) input
without relying on hermetic academic backup too much. Also, i wouldn't want
to turn the discussion to Nick Carr etc, just wanted to throw in sth. But -
as the human factor is so much important to us, the question here would
rather (and much more interesting) be, at what extent we are giving treats
to the algorithms ourselves at what cost and return. Like in terms of how
it RECURSIVELY learns from us as we teach it our whole cultural sphere and
after that - what is happening there as a post-something on the other side.
As the 1 obvious example: while algorithms are about to learn our language
through form inputs etc, we are evolving a new written language ourselves.
Maybe for it not to understand us anymore? Or while algorithmic transcripts
of speech work almost perfect these days, we don't even listen to that
speech anymore (at least as we did), what for, if it is transcribed and
rolled out and backuped. Or we don't listen to the speech anymore but make
a book of it just to have to have the option of the real back? Alzheimers
def is the wrong word, but how does that kind of negative space (meant as
sth positive) look like and how do we act upon it?

The works collected by Silvio probably are a lot about what is is thrown
back here. The exemplary American Psycho by Huff/Cabell is what is left
after algorithms went through handling 'culture'. Why do we make a book out
of it and even party it and even exhibit it at the Jeu deu Paume in Paris?
Obviously, culture turns out to be something different and in that and many
other cases, culture becomes nothing but advertising, as Lanier once put
it. That kind of Number 1 SPAM, the whole pop-web works upon! At least it
is what i learn about it and i think those algorithmic examples are much
more defining and important than artists books of conceptual writing, which
became just too obvious (Push the 'make a book' button, out of that
breakfast plan).

L

Forgot the best thing happened in 2013 was the postartpoets as an
outstanding work of relational publishing performance. Starting here &gt; &gt;
http://www.postartpoets.com/</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.3</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] HYBRID BOOKWORK, Week Two - Paradoxical Publishing, Postmedia, Critical Aesthetics</subject>
<from>Rita Raley</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu Feb 13 16:39:25 EST 2014</date>
<content>An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
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<mail>
<nbr>5.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] post-digital print</subject>
<from>S&#248;ren Pold</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Feb 26 19:48:29 EST 2014</date>
<content>I've been working on and off with relations between literature and digitization almost the last twenty years since I began my PhD on relations between media and literature affected by the digital. In my PhD dissertation, completed in 2000, it was my point that literature has consistently dealt with media as part of its content but also as a formal reflection taking up panoramic (Honor&#233; de Balzac) and cinematographic (Raymond Chandler, Steve Erickson) ways of structuring the urban experience of respectively Paris and Los Angeles. This generally happened in two ways: 1) an experiential, visual media related or multimedia-related way relating to the spread of new forms of (mainly but not only) visual experience ; 2) a formal, structural, bureaucratic way, e.g. relating to the rise of statistics, surveillance, intelligence, etc. With the computer we also see both threads as e.g. related to multimedia (games, etc.), GUIs and on the other hand programming, networked structures, hypertext can be said to follow the formal, structural, bureaucratic line of development, e.g. through control and management. However, my point at the time (2000) was that because of the digital, alphabetic nature of the digital, the computer was a medium (or a meta-/post-medium or perhaps language system?), which can be directly written, edited and in general treated like a language system. At that time my examples were etoy's digital hijack, jodi.org and i/o/d's webstalker. So in my understanding the computer and digital publishing was not a break with - but a continuation of print - an understanding, which I built on e.g. Walter Benjamin, Walter J. Ong and Florian Cramer among others.  In this way, the computer can be seen as a literary machine where the writing doesn't only happen on the surface as content, but through coding and structuring becomes part of the functioning of the medium.

In 2000 and 2004 when I published my dissertation this felt on pretty dry ground, at least nationally (the diss. is in Danish), and I moved on to digital aesthetics. However I've recently experienced a renewed interest from literary circles in work related to mine - perhaps because of the relative success of e-books. I've written on how it affects (digital) culture that it now becomes embedded in cultural interfaces and platforms such as smart-phones, tablets, e-readers and game consoles - all platforms that control copying and access through a controlled consumption scheme with heavy monitoring of user behaviour. This has actually led to quite some discussion nationally - both before and after Snowden - that e.g. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google closely monitor their users reading behavior. Furthermore, I've collaborated with libraries in exploring the media changes, e.g. through installations of digital/electronic literature in library spaces such as the installation Ink created with colleagues and collaborators. (http://darc.imv.au.dk/?p=2931).
This installation can be seen as post-digital in that it aims to make people in libraries reflect on the media change by letting them compose poems (Queneau-style but written by a Danish author Peter-Clement Woetman) through using books as interaction device, producing texts on screen and on print. In this way it focuses on the media change, the ergodic reading process and social, performative collaboration. Another project has been conducting workshops with colleagues (Morten Riis, Andrew Prior, Sandra Boss, Lone Koefoed Hansen and more) around cassette tapes and bygone music media (which we've written on in the APRJA Transmediale newspaper and in the journal issue that comes out very soon). Furthermore we've been publishing, e.g. POD books in Danish and English by e.g. Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox and Tatiana Bazzichelli and Geoff Cox and Christian Ulrik Andersen have done the newspaper series of which the post-digital newspaper was the fourth. (See http://darc.imv.au.dk/ and http://www.aprja.net/).

Concludingly, things are strangely coming together for me, and I see the post-digital (sharing the idea that it is a crappy concept that is useful) as potentially a critical way to discuss media change confronted with digitization after the digital revolution is over. A few points to this:
- The digital revolution is over. The utopian times are past. This is somewhat healthy, since we can now begin to look more concretely and in a sober way on the material changes that are happening and how they affect culture.
- However, we also miss the utopian days now, when digital technologies and media are only about rationalization, capitalization, control, monitoring. How do we develop alternatives, when we've stopped believing in the power of technology? And this 'we' is not only 'us', but increasingly the broad culture, who've stopped believing in the promises of technology. We need alternative uses, designs, understandings - and perhaps we can find them by combining history, technology and cultural uses?
- The post-digital is a broad realization that digitization is not a binary transformation from old to new media, but is a layered process affecting both production, archiving, distribution and reception in different combinations and ways.
- The post-digital is thus a realization, that the digital does not simply transform everything into some virtual dimension, but that it is  - and needs to be in ways we haven't quite yet imagined - coupled with the material, spatial, urban, cultural, human flesh. This is both good and bad news.
- The post-digital is an opportunity to develop the historical: both the histories of digital media, from Turing to Kurenniemi and the histories of media and media use from Raymond Williams to Matthew Fuller. Furthermore it is the opportunity to realize that this history is not linear nor straigh-forward but that e.g. the history of hypertext is forking and looping and the culture of the computer does not compute.

 Btw. I excuse I haven't been that active, but we're going through quite some turmoil at Aarhus University because of the biggest lay-off in Danish university history&#8230;
--

-------------------------------------------------------------
S&#248;ren Pold
Lektor (Ass. Prof.), Ph.d.
Informationsvidenskab &amp; Digital Design
DAC Katrinebjerg
Aarhus Universitet
Helsingforsgade 14
DK-8200 Aarhus N
Danmark

Chair of the Research Program Humans &amp; IT
http://dac.au.dk/en/research/research-programmes/humans-and-information-technology/
Participatory Information Technology
http://pit.au.dk/
http://darc.imv.au.dk/

Office: Wiener 224
**** NEW EMAIL**** pold at cavi.au.dk
(+45) 871 61994
skype: soerenpold

-----------------------------------------------------------</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>5.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] post-digital print</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri Feb 28 08:46:32 EST 2014</date>
<content>My own self-description is very similar to S&#248;ren's. As matter of fact, both
of us have worked on the same subjects and experienced similar developments
of our research interests in the past 1 1/2 decades - with the difference
however that I left university humanities in 2006. (Just as S&#248;ren's or even
much worse, my dissertation fell on dry ground and is probably my least
known and read text ever although it has appeared as a book by a reputable
academic publisher - for me the proof that either I can't write books or
print publishing is factually dead while being kept artificially alive as a
'radioactive cadaver', to quote Raoul Vaneigem. My recent book Anti-Media
might be another such disaster despite greatest and most amicable support
from Geert Lovink's Institute of Network Culture.) Since then, I have been
working for Rotterdam's art school which is part of a larger polytechnic,
Hogeschool Rotterdam. The Dutch dual system draws strong dividing lines
between universities and polytechnics. Our research therefore has to be
strictly practice- and work field-oriented. My own task is to investigate
the impact of changes in media and communication on art and design
professions by creating interconnections between the school and external
practitioners, and help the school adapt its curricula.

Besides that, I work for WORM (http://www.worm.org), a space for
experimental music, film and events of all kinds, as dean of the WORM
Parallel University (http://wpu.worm.org), an DIY university for
non-traditional students. The more our students do themselves, the easier
they can obtain our Master of Parallels (MoP) degree. The Dutch music
critic Peter Bruyn was our first laureate.

Research facilitated by my center Creating 010 includes Alessandro
Ludovico's book "Post-Digital Print", Olia Lialina's research on Geocities,
Hyves and Rotterdam Internet caf&#233;s [
http://contemporary-home-computing.org/still-there/intro.html], Renee
Turner's research - in collaboration with students and teachers from Piet
Zwart Institute - on privacy and surveillance [
http://www.metamute.org/services/openmute-press/sniff-scrape-crawl...-privacy-surveillance-and-our-shadowy-data-double]
and Aymeric Mansoux' ongoing research on the misunderstandings of Free
Software, Open Source and copyleft in the arts [
http://dpi.studioxx.org/demo/?q=fr/node/304].

In art and design education, we see that most teachers still live in a
pre-digital world. Students, on the other hand, are avid consumers mainly
of social media but hardly participate in online culture or produce work in
electronic form. This has been researched for us by my Willem de Kooning
Academy colleague Aldje van Meer [
http://iwouldratherdesignaposterthanawebsite.nl/]. Currently, 70-80 graphic
designers graduate at our school every year who have been almost
exclusively educated to be print designers. At the same time, print
publishing is shrinking while electronic publishing is steadily growing.
(Rotterdam, the second-largest city of the Netherlands with 600,000
inhabitants - 1.1 Million including the metropolitan area -, currently has
no large bookstore anymore; only two very small ones are left in the city
center.) According to our knowledge, there are less than ten graphic
designers in the entire Netherlands who know to design an epub file.

I only mention the above to put things into perspective. When we are
talking about post-digital culture, and new hybrid forms of analog and
digital, electronic and print media, then often our problem remains that
the first step to digital hasn't been made yet. There is a tendency in this
country that the art schools, most of which have more design than art
students and have curricula based on the classical Bauhaus curriculum,
resort to an anti-industrial Arts-and-Crafts niche of beautifully crafted
non-electronic products. For me, this implies a highly political issue of
art retreating to a luxury niche, giving up on the idea that it should
engage with and shape everyday culture. (A concept underlying - among
others - constructivist, Fluxus and Situationist avant-garde, and
interventionist net art/media art as well.)

When I use and cautiously advocate the term "post-digital", I can't avoid
playing with the fire that this will get misunderstood as a carte blanche
for uncritical indulgence in neo-crafts.

I've collaborated in S&#248;ren's transmediale newspaper and 'A Peer-Reviewed
Journal' (http://www.aprja.net/) with an essay on useful definitions of
'post-digital'.

I agree with S&#248;ren's concluding points so fully and wholeheartedly that
I'll just repeat them:

- The digital revolution is over. The utopian times are past. This is
&gt; somewhat healthy, since we can now begin to look more concretely and in a
&gt; sober way on the material changes that are happening and how they affect
&gt; culture.
&gt;
&gt; - However, we also miss the utopian days now, when digital technologies
&gt; and media are only about rationalization, capitalization, control,
&gt; monitoring. How do we develop alternatives, when we've stopped believing in
&gt; the power of technology? And this 'we' is not only 'us', but increasingly
&gt; the broad culture, who've stopped believing in the promises of technology.
&gt; We need alternative uses, designs, understandings - and perhaps we can find
&gt; them by combining history, technology and cultural uses?
&gt;
&gt; - The post-digital is a broad realization that digitization is not a
&gt; binary transformation from old to new media, but is a layered process
&gt; affecting both production, archiving, distribution and reception in
&gt; different combinations and ways.
&gt;
&gt; - The post-digital is thus a realization, that the digital does not simply
&gt; transform everything into some virtual dimension, but that it is  - and
&gt; needs to be in ways we haven't quite yet imagined - coupled with the
&gt; material, spatial, urban, cultural, human flesh. This is both good and bad
&gt; news.
&gt;
&gt; - The post-digital is an opportunity to develop the historical: both the
&gt; histories of digital media, from Turing to Kurenniemi and the histories of
&gt; media and media use from Raymond Williams to Matthew Fuller. Furthermore it
&gt; is the opportunity to realize that this history is not linear nor
&gt; straigh-forward but that e.g. the history of hypertext is forking and
&gt; looping and the culture of the computer does not compute.
&gt;

Florian</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sat, 1 Mar 2014 14:53:30 +0100</date>
<content>Published yesterday by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
http://www.faz.net/frankfurter-allgemeine-zeitung/enzensbergers-regeln-fuer-die-digitale-welt-wehrt-euch-12826195.html

Written by the same Enzensberger who wrote "Constituents of a Theory of the
Media" (first published in German as "Baukasten zu einer Theorie der
Medien" in Kursbuch, 20, 1970, first published in English in the New Left
Review, no. 64, 1970, reprinted in 2003 in the The New Media Reader).

This is an unauthorized, quick translation.
Defend Yourselves!

For those who aren't nerds, hackers or cryptographers and have better
things to do than keep up with the pitfalls of digitalization every hour,
there are ten simple rules to resist exploitation and surveillance:

1
If you own a mobile phone, throw it away. You had a life before this
device, and the human race will continue to exist after its disappearance.
One should avoid the superstitious worship that it enjoys. Neither those
devices nor their users are any smart, but only those who plug them to us
in order to accumulate boundless riches and control ordinary people.

2
Whoever offers something for free is suspicious. One should categorically
refuse anything that passes itself off as a bargain, bonus or freebie. It's
always a lie. The dupes pay with their privacy, their data and often enough
with their money.

3
Online banking is a blessing, but only for secret services and criminals.

4
Governments and industries want to abolish cash. They would like to get rid
of a legal tender that anyone can redeem. Coins and bills are annoying for
banks, traders, security and fiscal authorities. Plastic cards are not only
cheaper to produce. Our watchdogs prefer them because they allow tracing of
any transaction. Therefore, we all should avoid credit, debit and loyalty
cards. These permanent companions are bothersome and dangerous.

5
The madness of networking every object of daily use - from toothbrush to
TV, from car to refrigerator - via the Internet, can only be met with total
boycott. Their manufacturers don't give a single thought to privacy. They
have a only one vulnerable body part, their bank account. Only bankruptcy
will teach them.

6
The same applies to politicians. They ignore any objection to their actions
and omissions. They are submissive to the financial markets and don't dare
to go against the activities of secret services. But they have a vested
interest to be reelected. As long as the right to vote still exists, one
should deny anyone the vote who tolerates digital expropriation instead of
taking action against it.

7
E-Mail is nice, fast and free. So watch out! If you have a confidential
message or don't want to be surveilled, take a postcard and pencil.
Handwriting is hard to read for machines. Nobody suspects important
information on a 45 cent picture postcard. You don't have to resort to a
dead drop like in old-fashioned spy novels.

8
Avoid obtaining goods and services via Internet. Vendors like Amazon, Ebay
and so on store all data and molest their customers with advertising spam.
Anonymous shopping is better. Acceptable exceptions can be made for
individual sites that one knows well.

9
Just like network television, the big Internet corporations are primarily
financed by advertising. This way, they steal their customers' time and
attention. Someone who ceaseless yells at you and molests you deserves
punishment. It's recommendable to stay away from everything marketed this
way, and switch off, once and for all, the stations terrorizing you with
advertising. This should not only be done for hygienic reasons. As we know,
particularly the American mega corporations collaborate closely with secret
services to spy out and control, if possible, any human activity.

10
Networks like Facebook call themselves "social" despite their eagerness to
treat their customers in the utmost anti-social ways. Whoever wants to have
friends like this, is a hopeless case. Those who are unfortunate enough to
be part of such a company, should try to take flight as fast as possible.
This is not so easy. An octopus won't consent to letting his prey escape.

* * *

These simple measures can't solve the political problem that society is
faced with. Given the passiveness and servility of the parties ruling this
country [the coalition of Christian and Social Democrats in Germany], it's
remarkable enough if one notable politician speaks up. His name is Martin
Schulz, and he's not only president of the European Parliament but even a
Social Democrat. Until now, neither he nor his party objected to the
rampant security and control mania in any remarkable way. All respective
violations, no matter whether foreign imports or domestic products of
German workmanship, have been given the nod. Storing data, intercepting,
appeasing - the standard procedure.

The sleep of reason will continue to the day when a majority of this
country's citizens will experience firsthand what has been done to them.
Perhaps, they will rub their eyes and ask why they let it slip in a time
when resistance was still possible.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Cornelia Sollfrank</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sun, 2 Mar 2014 14:30:32 +0100</date>
<content>Thanks for sending via email.

Imagine you would have had to hand-write the information and send it to all subscribers of nettime via postcard;-)

Cornelia</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Geert Lovink</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 3 Mar 2014 12:24:57 +0100</date>
<content>Thanks Cornelia, and Florian for making the translation. I don't mind the piece but what misses here is a bit of self-reflection of a writer who has been inside the media realm his entire life, and who is unable to put his own 'offline romanticism' in the larger picture of the (German) history of ideas. Apart from this, it is also sad that he is simply badly informed about the current state of the postal system in the age of global surveillance. One link will do: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/us/monitoring-of-snail-mail.html (U.S. Postal Service Logging All Mail for Law Enforcement). Geert</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Nick</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 3 Mar 2014 07:54:57 -0500</date>
<content>Quoth Cornelia Sollfrank:

&gt; Thanks for sending via email.
&gt; 
&gt; Imagine you would have had to hand-write the information and send it to all subscribers of nettime via postcard;-)

Well in fairness the postcard suggestion was "If you have a 
confidential message", which I'm pretty sure doesn't count for 
posting a translation of a message to a publically archived list.

Thanks Florian for the translation, I like the rules very much. I do 
wish the sort of "stay safe online" advice schools give out was more 
like this. But that assumes schools to be quite different 
institutions than they are.

The one rule I wasn't sure about was #3, "Online banking is a 
blessing, but only for secret services and criminals." It's 
certainly useful for a criminal (though depending on the bank, that 
may be more of a problem for them than for you, according to if 
they'll admit responsibility and refund you), but is it useful for 
secret services? All the transactions you can make with online 
banking are recorded and (I presume) can be obtained easily by 
secret services just as readily offline.

Nick</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>verlag</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 3 Mar 2014 15:24:03 +0100</date>
<content>If you have a confidential message use poetry for encryption.

"Moazzam Begg, who spent three years in Guant?namo Bay before being
released without charge in January 2005, began writing poetry as a way of
explaining what he was going through. He knew that everything he wrote
would be censored, so used poetry to try to describe his situation to his
family." (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/feb/26/poetry.guantanamo)

I think today's kids are instinctively aware of those issues. It's a matter
of "being On/Off" for them, as they put it into words. Like walking down a
street in public, "being On".</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.5</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 3 Mar 2014 20:19:47 +0100</date>
<content>Since several people asked me off-list about my own opinion on
Enzensberger's piece and my reasons for posting it here, the best answer I
can give is an essay I completed just a few weeks ago for  _A Peer-Review
Journal_ (APRJA, http://www.aprja.net), an Open Access journal on digital
culture edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Geoff Cox at Aarhus
University in Denmark. While it now reads like a reply to Enzensberger, it
was actually written early as part of a larger "post-digital research"
workshop organized by Aarhus University at Kunsthal Aarhus in collaboration
with transmediale festival; all other essays in the current number of APRJA
were products of this workshop, too.

The original essay, including images that are missing here, has been
published at http://www.aprja.net/?p=1318

Florian

# What is 'Post-digital'?

## Typewriters vs. imageboard memes

In January 2013, a picture of a young man typing on a mechanical typewriter
while sitting on a park bench went 'viral' on the popular website [Reddit](
http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/16vlkc/youre_not_a_real_hipster_until/).
The image was presented in the typical style of an 'image macro' or
'imageboard meme' (Klok 16-19), with a sarcastic caption in bold white
Impact typeface that read: "You're not a real hipster ??? until you take your
typewriter to the park".

The meme, which was still making news at the time of writing this paper in
late 2013 (Hermlin), nicely illustrates the rift between 'digital' and
'post-digital' cultures. Imageboard memes are arguably the best example of
a contemporary popular mass culture which emerged and developed entirely on
the Internet. Unlike earlier popular forms of visual culture such as comic
strips, they are anonymous creations ??? and as such, even gave birth to the
now-famous Anonymous movement, as described by (Klok 16-19).

The 'digital' imageboard meme portrays the 'analog' typewriter hipster as
its own polar opposite ??? in a strictly technical sense however, even a
mechanical typewriter is a digital writing system, as I will explain later
in this text. Also, the typewriter's keyboard makes it a direct precursor
of today's personal computer systems, which were used for typing the text
of the imageboard meme in question. Yet in a colloquial sense, the
typewriter is definitely an 'analog' machine, as it does not contain any
computational electronics.

In 2013, using a mechanical typewriter rather than a mobile computing
device is, as the imageboard meme suggests, no longer a sign of being
old-fashioned. It is instead a deliberate choice of renouncing electronic
technology, thereby calling into question the common assumption that
computers, as meta-machines, represent obvious technological progress and
therefore constitute a logical upgrade from any older media technology ???
much in the same way as using a bike today calls into question the common
assumption, in many Western countries since World War II, that the
automobile is by definition a rationally superior means of transportation,
regardless of the purpose or context.

Typewriters are not the only media which have recently been resurrected as
literally post-digital devices: other examples include vinyl records, and
more recently also audio cassettes, as well as analog photography and
artists' printmaking. And if one examines the work of contemporary young
artists and designers, including art school students, it is obvious that
these 'old' media are vastly more popular than, say, making imageboard
memes.[^1]
## Post-digital: a term that sucks but is useful

### 1. Disenchantment with 'digital'

I was first introduced to the term 'post-digital' in 2007 by my
then-student Marc Chia ??? now Tara Transitory, also performing under the
moniker _One Man Nation_. My first reflex was to dismiss the whole concept
as irrelevant in an age of cultural, social and economic upheavals driven
to a large extent by computational digital technology. Today, in the age of
ubiquitous mobile devices, drone wars and the gargantuan data operations of
the NSA, Google and other global players, the term may seem even more
questionable than it did in 2007: as either a sign of ignorance of our
contemporary reality, or else of some deliberate Thoreauvian-Luddite
withdrawal from this reality.

More pragmatically, the term 'post-digital' can be used to describe either
a contemporary disenchantment with digital information systems and media
gadgets, or a period in which our fascination with these systems and
gadgets has become historical ??? just like the dot-com age ultimately became
historical in the 2013 novels of Thomas Pynchon and Dave Eggers. After
Edward Snowden's disclosures of the NSA's all-pervasive digital
surveillance systems, this disenchantment has quickly grown from a niche
'hipster' phenomenon to a mainstream position ??? one which is likely to have
a serious impact on all cultural and business practices based on networked
electronic devices and Internet services.

### 2. Revival of 'old' media

While a Thoreauvian-Luddite digital withdrawal may seem a tempting option
for many, it is fundamentally a na??ve position, particularly in an age when
even the availability of natural resources depends on global computational
logistics, and intelligence agencies such as the NSA intercept paper mail
as well as digital communications. In the context of the arts, such a
withdrawal seems little more than a rerun of the 19th-century Arts and
Crafts movement, with its programme of handmade production as a means of
resistance to encroaching industrialisation. Such (romanticist) attitudes
undeniably play an important role in today's renaissance of artists'
printmaking, handmade film labs, limited vinyl editions, the rebirth of the
audio cassette, mechanical typewriters, analog cameras and analog
synthesizers. An empirical study conducted by our research centre Creating
010 in Rotterdam among Bachelor students from most of the art schools in
the Netherlands indicated that contemporary young artists and designers
clearly prefer working with non-electronic media: given the choice, some
70% of them "would rather design a poster than a website" (Van Meer, 14).
In the Netherlands at least, education programmes for digital communication
design have almost completely shifted from art academies to engineering
schools, while digital media are often dismissed as commercial and
mainstream by art students (Van Meer, 5). Should we in turn dismiss their
position as romanticist and neo-Luddite?
## Post-what?

### Post-digital = postcolonial; post-digital ??? post-histoire

On closer inspection however, the dichotomy between digital big data and
neo-analog do-it-yourself (DIY) is really not so clear-cut. Accordingly,
'post-digital' is arguably more than just a sloppy descriptor for a
contemporary (and possibly nostalgic) cultural trend. It is an objective
fact that the age in which we now live is _not_ a post-digital age, neither
in terms of technological developments ??? with no end in sight to the trend
towards further digitisation and computerisation ??? nor from a
historico-philosophical perspective. Regarding the latter, (Cox) offers a
valid critique of the "periodising logic" embedded in the term
'post-digital', which places it in the dubious company of other
historico-philosophical 'post'-isms, from postmodernism to post-histoire.

However, 'post-digital' can be defined more pragmatically and meaningfully
within popular cultural and colloquial frames of reference. This applies to
the prefix 'post' as well as the notion of 'digital'. The prefix 'post'
should not be understood here in the same sense as postmodernism and
post-histoire, but rather in the sense of post-punk (a continuation of punk
culture in ways which are somehow still punk, yet also beyond punk);
post-communism (as the ongoing social-political reality in former Eastern
Bloc countries); post-feminism (as a critically revised continuation of
feminism, with blurry boundaries with 'traditional', unprefixed feminism);
postcolonialism (see next paragraph); and, to a lesser extent,
post-apocalyptic (a world in which the apocalypse is not over, but has
progressed from a discrete breaking point to an ongoing condition ??? in
Heideggerian terms, from _Ereignis_ to _Being_ ??? and with a contemporary
popular iconography pioneered by the _Mad Max_ films in the 1980s).

None of these terms ??? post-punk, post-communism, post-feminism,
postcolonialism, post-apocalyptic ??? can be understood in a purely Hegelian
sense of an inevitable linear progression of cultural and intellectual
history. Rather, they describe more subtle cultural shifts and ongoing
mutations. Postcolonialism does not in any way mean an end of colonialism
(akin to Hegel's and Fukuyama's "end of history"), but rather its mutation
into new power structures, less obvious but no less pervasive, which have a
profound and lasting impact on languages and cultures, and most
significantly continue to govern geopolitics and global production chains.
In this sense, the post-digital condition is a post-apocalyptic one: the
state of affairs after the initial upheaval caused by the computerisation
and global digital networking of communication, technical infrastructures,
markets and geopolitics.
### 'Digital' = sterile high tech?

Also, the 'digital' in 'post-digital' should not be understood in any
technical-scientific or media-theoretical sense, but rather in the way the
term is broadly used in popular culture ??? the kind of connotation best
illustrated by a recent Google Image Search result for the word 'digital':
The first thing we notice is how the term 'digital' is, still in 2013,
visually associated with the colour blue. Blue is literally the coolest
colour in the colour spectrum (with a temperature of 15,000 to 27,000
Kelvin), with further suggestions of cultural coolness and cleanness. The
simplest definition of 'post-digital' describes a media aesthetics which
opposes such digital high-tech and high-fidelity cleanness. The term was
coined in 2000 by the musician Kim Cascone, in the context of glitch
aesthetics in contemporary electronic music (Cascone, 12). Also in 2000,
the Australian sound and media artist Ian Andrews used the term more
broadly as part of a concept of "post-digital aesthetics" which rejected
the "idea of digital progress" as well as "a teleological movement toward
'perfect' representation" (Andrews).

Cascone and Andrews considered the notion of 'post-digital' primarily as an
antidote to techno-Hegelianism. The underlying context for both their
papers was a culture of audio-visual production in which 'digital' had long
been synonymous with 'progress': the launch of the Fairlight CMI audio
sampler in 1979, the digital audio CD and the MIDI standard (both in 1982),
software-only digital audio workstations in the early 1990s, real-time
programmable software synthesis with Max/MSP in 1997. Such teleologies are
still prevalent in video and TV technology, with the ongoing transitions
from SD to HD and 4K, from DVD to BluRay, from 2D to 3D ??? always marketed
with a similar narrative of innovation, improvement, and higher fidelity of
reproduction. In rejecting this narrative, Cascone and Andrews opposed the
paradigm of technical quality altogether.

Ironically, the use of the term 'post-digital' was somewhat confusing in
the context of Cascone's paper, since the glitch music defined and
advocated here actually _was_ digital, and even based on specifically
digital sound-processing artefacts. On the other hand, and in the same
sense as post-punk can be seen as a reaction to punk, Cascone's concept of
 'post-digital' may best be understood as a reaction to an age in which
even camera tripods are being labelled as 'digital', in an effort to market
them as new and superior technology.
### 'Digital' = low-quality trash?

There is a peculiar overlap between on one hand a post-digital rejection of
digital high tech, and on the other hand a post-digital rejection of
digital low quality. Consider for example the persisting argument that
vinyl LPs sound better than CDs (let alone MP3s); that film photography
looks better than digital photography (let alone smartphone snapshots);
that 35mm film projection looks better than digital cinema projection (let
alone BitTorrent video downloads or YouTube); that paper books are a richer
medium than websites and e-books; and that something typed on a mechanical
typewriter has more value than a throwaway digital text file (let alone
e-mail spam). In fact, the glitch aesthetics advocated by Cascone as
'post-digital' are precisely the same kind of digital trash dismissed by
'post-digital' vinyl listeners.
## Digression: what is digital, what is analog?

### Digital ??? binary; digital ??? electronic

&gt;From a strictly technological or scientific point of view, Cascone's use of
the word 'digital' was inaccurate. This also applies to most of what is
commonly known as 'digital art', 'digital media' and 'digital humanities'.
Something can very well be 'digital' without being electronic, and without
involving binary zeroes and ones. It does not even have to be related in
any way to electronic computers or any other kind of computational device.

Conversely, 'analog' does not necessarily mean non-computational or
pre-computational. There are also analog computers. Using water and two
measuring cups to compute additions and subtractions ??? of quantities that
can't be counted exactly ??? is a simple example of analog computing.

'Digital' simply means that something is divided into discrete, countable
units ??? countable using whatever system one chooses, whether zeroes and
ones, decimal numbers, tally marks on a scrap of paper, or the fingers
(digits) of one's hand ??? which is where the word 'digital' comes from in
the first place; in French, for example, the word is 'num??rique'.
Consequently, the Roman alphabet is a digital system; the movable types of
Gutenberg's printing press constitute a digital system; the keys of a piano
are a digital system; Western musical notation is mostly digital, with the
exception of instructions with non-discrete values such as adagio, piano,
forte, legato, portamento, tremolo and glissando. Floor mosaics made of
monochrome tiles are digitally composed images. As all these examples
demonstrate, 'digital' information never exists in a perfect form, but is
instead an idealised abstraction of physical matter which, by its material
nature and the laws of physics, has chaotic properties and often ambiguous
states.[^2]

The hipster's mechanical typewriter, with its discrete set of letters,
numbers and punctuation marks, is therefore a 'digital' system as defined
by information science and analytic philosophy (Goodman, 161). However, it
is also 'analog' in the colloquial sense of the word. This is also the
underlying connotation in the meme image, with its mocking of 'hipster'
retro culture. An art curator, on the other hand, might consider the
typewriter a 'post-digital' medium.
### Analog = undivided; analog ??? non-computational

Conversely, 'analog' means that the information has not been chopped up
into discrete, countable units, but instead consists of one or more signals
which vary on a continuous scale, such as a sound wave, a light wave, a
magnetic field (for example on an audio tape, but also on a computer hard
disk), the flow of electricity in any circuit including a computer chip, or
a gradual transition between colours, for example in blended paint.
(Goodman, 160) therefore defines analog as "undifferentiated in the
extreme" and "the very antithesis of a notational system".

The fingerboard of a violin is analog: it is fretless, and thus undivided
and continuous. The fingerboard of a guitar, on the other hand, is digital:
it is divided by frets into discrete notes. What is commonly called
'analog' cinema film is actually a digital-analog hybrid: the film emulsion
is analog, since its particles are undifferentiated blobs ordered
organically and chaotically, and thus not reliably countable in the way
that pixels are. The combined frames of the film strip, however, are
digital since they are discrete, chopped up and unambiguously countable.

The structure of an analog signal is determined entirely by its
correspondence (analogy) with the original physical phenomenon which it
mimics. In the case of the photographic emulsion, the distribution of the
otherwise chaotic particles corresponds to the distribution of light rays
which make up an image visible to the human eye. On the audio tape, the
fluctuations in magnetisation of the otherwise chaotic iron or chrome
particles correspond to fluctuations in the sound wave which it reproduces.

However, the concept of 'post-digital' as defined by Cascone ignored such
technical-scientific definitions of 'analog' and 'digital' in favour of a
purely colloquial understanding of these terms.
## Post-digital = against the universal machine

Proponents of 'post-digital' attitudes may reject digital technology as
either sterile high tech or low-fidelity trash. In both cases, they dismiss
the idea of digital processing as the sole universal all-purpose form of
information processing. Consequently, they also dismiss the notion of the
computer as the universal machine, and the notion of digital computational
devices as all-purpose media.
## What, then, is 'post-digital'?

(The following is an attempt to recapitulate and order some observations
which I have formulated in previous publications.[^3])
### Post-digital = post-digitisation

Returning to Cascone and Andrews, but also to post-punk, postcolonialism
and Mad Max, the term 'post-digital' in its simplest sense describes the
messy state of media, arts and design _after_ their digitisation (or at
least the digitisation of crucial aspects of the channels through which
they are communicated). Sentiments of disenchantment and scepticism may
also be part of the equation, though this need not necessarily be the case
??? sometimes, 'post-digital' can in fact mean the exact opposite.
Contemporary visual art, for example, is only slowly starting to accept
practitioners of net art as regular contemporary artists ??? and then again,
preferably those like Cory Arcangel whose work is white cube-compatible.
Yet its discourse and networking practices have been profoundly transformed
by digital media such as the e-flux mailing list, art blogs and the
electronic e-flux journal. In terms of circulation, power and influence,
these media have largely superseded printed art periodicals, at least as
far as the art system's in-crowd of artists and curators is concerned.
Likewise, when printed newspapers shift their emphasis from daily news
(which can be found quicker and cheaper on the Internet) to investigative
journalism and commentary ??? like _The Guardian_'s coverage of the NSA's
PRISM programme ??? they effectively transform themselves into post-digital
or post-digitisation media.
### Post-digital = anti-'new media'

'Post-digital' thus refers to a state in which the disruption brought upon
by digital information technology has already occurred. This can mean, as
it did for Cascone, that this technology is no longer perceived as
disruptive. Consequently, 'post-digital' stands in direct opposition to the
very notion of 'new media'. At the same time, as its negative mirror image,
it exposes ??? arguably even deconstructs ??? the latter's hidden teleology:
when the term 'post-digital' draws critical reactions focusing on the
dubious historico-philosophical connotations of the prefix 'post', one
cannot help but wonder about a previous lack of such critical thinking
regarding the older (yet no less Hegelian) term 'new media'.
### Post-digital = hybrids of 'old' and 'new' media

'Post-digital' describes a perspective on digital information technology
which no longer focuses on technical innovation or improvement, but instead
rejects the kind of techno-positivist innovation narratives exemplified by
media such as _Wired_ magazine, Ray Kurzweil's Google-sponsored
'singularity' movement, and of course Silicon Valley. Consequently,
'post-digital' eradicates the distinction between 'old' and 'new' media, in
theory as well as in practice. Kenneth Goldsmith notes that his students
"mix oil paint while Photoshopping and scour flea markets for vintage vinyl
while listening to their iPods" (Goldsmith, 226). Working at an art school,
I observe the same. Young artists and designers choose media for their own
particular material aesthetic qualities (including artefacts), regardless
of whether these are a result of analog material properties or of digital
processing. Lo-fi imperfections are embraced ??? the digital glitch and
jitter of Cascone's music along with the grain, dust, scratches and hiss in
analog reproduction ??? as a form of practical exploration and research that
examines materials through their imperfections and malfunctions. It is a
post-digital hacker attitude of taking systems apart and using them in ways
which subvert the original intention of the design.
### Post-digital = retro?

No doubt, there is a great deal of overlap between on one hand post-digital
mimeograph printmaking, audio cassette production, mechanical typewriter
experimentation and vinyl DJing, and on the other hand various
hipster-retro media trends ??? including digital simulations of analog lo-fi
in popular smartphone apps such as Instagram, Hipstamatic and iSupr8. But
there is a qualitative difference between simply using superficial and
stereotypical ready-made effects, and the thorough discipline and study
required to make true 'vintage' media work, driven by a desire for
non-formulaic aesthetics.

Still, such practices can only be meaningfully called 'post-digital' when
they do not merely revive older media technologies, but functionally
repurpose them in relation to digital media technologies: zines that become
anti-blogs or non-blogs, vinyl as anti-CD, cassette tapes as anti-MP3,
analog film as anti-video.
### Post-digital = 'old' media used like 'new media'

At the same time, new ethical and cultural conventions which became
mainstream with Internet communities and Open Source culture are being
retroactively applied to the making of non-digital and post-digital media
products. A good example of this are collaborative zine conventions, a
thriving subculture documented on the blog [fanzines.tumblr.com](
http://fanzines.tumblr.com/) and elsewhere. These events, where people come
together to collectively create and exchange zines (i.e. small-circulation,
self-published magazines, usually focusing on the maker's cultural and/or
political areas of interest), are in fact the exact opposite of the 'golden
age' zine cultures of the post-punk 1980s and 1990s, when most zines were
the hyper-individualistic product and personality platforms of one single
maker. If we were to describe a contemporary zine fair or mimeography
community art space using Lev Manovich's _new media_ taxonomy of 'Numerical
Representation', 'Modularity', 'Automation', 'Variability' and
'Transcoding' (Manovich, _The Language of New Media_, 27-48), then
'Modularity', 'Variability' and ??? in a more loosely metaphorical sense ???
'Transcoding' would still apply to the contemporary cultures working with
these 'old' media. In these cases, the term 'post-digital' usefully
describes 'new media'-cultural approaches to working with so-called 'old
media'.
### DIY vs. corporate media, rather than 'new' vs. 'old' media

When hacker-style and community-centric working methods are no longer
specific to 'digital' culture (since they are now just as likely to be
found at an 'analog' zine fair as in a 'digital' computer lab), then the
established dichotomy of 'old' and 'new' media ??? as synonymous in practice
with 'analog' and 'digital' ??? becomes obsolete, making way for a new
differentiation: one between shrink-wrapped culture and do-it-yourself
culture. The best example of this development (at least among mainstream
media) is surely the magazine and website _Make_, published by O'Reilly
since 2005, and instrumental for the foundation of the contemporary 'maker
movement'. _Make_ covers 3D printing, Arduino hardware hacking, fab lab
technology, as well as classical DIY and crafts, and hybrids between
various 'new' and 'old' technologies.

The 1990s / early 2000s assumption that 'old' mass media such as
newspapers, movies, television and radio are corporate, while 'new media'
such as websites are DIY, is no longer true now that user-generated content
has been co-opted into corporate social media and mobile apps. The Internet
as a self-run alternative space ??? central to many online activist and
artist projects, from _The Thing_ onwards ??? is no longer taken for granted
by anyone born after 1990: for younger generations, the Internet is
associated mainly with corporate, registration-only services.[^4]
## Revisiting the typewriter hipster meme

The alleged typewriter hipster later turned out to be a writer who earned
his livelihood by selling custom-written stories from a bench in the park.
The imageboard meme photo was taken from an angle that left out his sign,
taped to his typewriter case: "One-of-a-kind, unique stories while you
wait". In an article for the website _The Awl_, he recollects how the meme
made him "An Object Of Internet Ridicule" and even open hatred.[^7] Knowing
the whole story, one can only conclude that his decision to bring a
mechanical typewriter to the park was pragmatically the best option.
Electronic equipment (a laptop with a printer) would have been cumbersome
to set up, dependent on limited battery power, and prone to weather damage
and theft, while handwriting would have been too slow, insufficiently
legible, and lacking the appearance of a professional writer's work.

Had he been an art student, even in a media arts programme, the typewriter
would still have been the right choice for this project. This is a perfect
example of a post-digital choice: using the technology most suitable to the
job, rather than automatically 'defaulting' to the latest 'new media'
device. It also illustrates the post-digital hybridity of 'old' and 'new'
media, since the writer advertises (again, on the sign on his typewriter
case) his Twitter account " {AT} rovingtypist", and conversely uses this account
to promote his story-writing service. He has effectively repurposed the
typewriter from a prepress tool to a personalised small press, thus giving
the 'old' technology a new function usually associated with 'new media', by
exploiting specific qualities of the 'old' which make up for the
limitations of the 'new'. Meanwhile, he also applies a 'new media'
sensibility to his use of 'old media': user-customised products, created in
a social environment, with a "donate what you can" payment model. Or
rather, the dichotomy of community media vs. mass media has been flipped
upside-down, so that a typewriter is now a community media device, while
participatory websites have turned into the likes of _Reddit_, assuming the
role of yellow press mass media ??? including mob hatred incited by wilful
misrepresentation.
## The desire for agency

Cascone and Andrews partly contradicted themselves when they defined the
concept of 'post-digital' in the year 2000. Though they rejected the
advocacy of 'new media', they also relied heavily on it. Cascone's paper
drew on Nicholas Negroponte's _Wired_ article "Beyond Digital"
(Negroponte), while Ian Andrews' paper referenced Lev Manovich's
"Generation Flash", an article which promoted the very opposite of the
analog/digital, retro/contemporary hybridisations currently associated with
the term 'post-digital' (Manovich, "Generation Flash"). We could
metaphorically describe post-digital cultures as postcolonial practices in
a communications world taken over by a military-industrial complex made up
of only a handful of global players. More simply, we could describe these
cultures as a rejection of such dystopian techno-utopias as Ray Kurzweil's
and Google's Singularity University, the Quantified Self movement, and
sensor-controlled 'Smart Cities'.

And yet, post-digital subculture, whether in Detroit, Rotterdam or
elsewhere, is on a fundamental level not so different from such mainstream
Silicon Valley utopias. For (Van Meer), the main reason why art students
prefer designing posters to designing websites is due to a fiction of
agency - in this case, an illusion of more control over the medium.
Likewise, 'digital' cultures are driven by similar illusions of free will
and individual empowerment. The Quantified Self movement, for example, is
based on a fiction of agency over one's own body. The entire concept of
DIY, whether non-digital, digital or post-digital, is based on the fiction
of agency implied by the very notion of the self-made.

Each of these fictions of agency represents one extreme in how individuals
relate to the techno-political and economic realities of our time: either
over-identification with systems, or rejection of these same systems. Each
of these extremes is, in its own way, symptomatic of a _systems crisis_ ???
not a crisis of this or that system, but rather a crisis of the very
paradigm of 'system', as defined by General Systems Theory, itself an
offshoot of cybernetics. A term such as "post-Snowden" describes only one
(important) aspect of a bigger picture:[^8] a crisis of the cybernetic
notion of 'system' which neither 'digital' nor 'post-digital' ??? two terms
ultimately rooted in systems theory ??? are able to leave behind, or even
adequately describe.
## Works cited

Andrews, Ian. "Post-digital Aesthetics and the return to Modernism." (2000)
Web. December 2013 &lt;http://www.ian-andrews.org/texts/postdig.html&gt;

Cascone, Kim. "The Aesthetics of Failure: 'Post-Digital' Tendencies in
Contemporary Computer Music." _Computer Music Journal_, 24.4 (2000): 12-18.
Print.

Cox, Geoff. "Prehistories of the Post-digital: some old problems with
post-anything." (2013) Web. December 2013 &lt;
http://post-digital.projects.cavi.dk/?p=578&gt;

Cramer, Florian. "Post-Digital Aesthetics." _Jeu de Paume le magazine_, May
2013. Web. December 2013 &lt;
http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org/2013/05/florian-cramer-post-digital-aesthetics/
&gt;

Cramer, Florian. "Post-Digital Writing." _electronic book review_, December
2012. Web. December 2013 &lt;
http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/postal&gt;

Eggers, Dave. _The Circle._ New York: Knopf, 2013. Print.

Goldsmith, Kenneth. _Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital
Age_. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Print.

Goodman, Nelson. _Languages of Art_, Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hacket, 1976.
Print.

Gurstein, Michael. "So What Do We Do Now? Living in a Post-Snowden World",
January 2014. Web. January 2014 &lt;
http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2014/01/01/so-what-do-we-do-now-living-in-a-post-snowden-world/
&gt;

Hermlin, C.D.. "I Am An Object Of Internet Ridicule, Ask Me Anything." _The
Awl_, 18 September 2013. Web. December 2013 &lt;
http://www.theawl.com/2013/09/i-was-a-hated-hipster-meme-and-then-it-got-worse
&gt;

Kittler, Friedrich. "There Is No Software." _Stanford Literature Review_ 9
(1992): 81-90. Print.

Klok, Timo. "4chan and Imageboards", _post.pic_. Ed. Research Group
Communication in a Digital Age. Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de
Kooning Academy Rotterdam University, 2010: 16-19. Print.

Manovich, Lev. 'Generation Flash.' (2002). Web. December 2013 &lt;
http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/generation_flash.doc&gt;

Manovich, Lev. _The Language of New Media_. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2002.
Print.

Negroponte, Nicholas. _Beyond Digital_. _Wired_ 6.12 (1998). Web. December
2013 &lt;http://web.media.mit.edu/~nicholas/Wired/WIRED6-12.html&gt;

Pynchon, Thomas. _Bleeding Edge._ London: Penguin, 2013. Print.

Van Meer, Aldje. "I would rather design a poster than a website." _Willem
de Kooning Academy Rotterdam University_, 2012-2013. Web. December 2013 &lt;
http://www.iwouldratherdesignaposterthanawebsite.nl&gt;, &lt;
http://crosslab.wdka.hro.nl/ioi/C010_folder.pdf&gt;

[^1]: (Van Meer); also discussed later in this text.

[^2]: Even the piano (if considered a medium) is digital only to the degree
that its keys implement abstractions of its analog-continuous strings.

[^3]: (Cramer, _Post-Digital Writing_), (Cramer, _Post-Digital
Aesthetics_).

[^4]: In a project on Open Source culture organised by Aymeric Mansoux with
Bachelor-level students from the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, it
turned out that many students believed that website user account
registration was a general feature and requirement of the Internet.

[^5]: It's debatable to which degree this reflects the influence of
non-Western, particularly Japanese (popular) culture on contemporary
Western visual culture, especially in the field of illustration ??? which
accounts for an important share of contemporary zine making. This influence
is even more obvious in digital meme and imageboard culture.

 [^6]: For example (and six years prior to the typewriter hipster meme),
Linda Hilfling's contribution to the exhibition MAKEDO at V2_, Rotterdam,
June 29-30, 2007.

[^7]: (Hermlin) writes: "Someone with the user handle 'S2011' summed up the
thoughts of the hive mind in 7 words: 'Get the fuck out of my city.'
Illmatic707 chimed in: I have never wanted to fist fight someone so badly
in my entire life."

[^8]: A term frequently used at the Chaos Computer Club's 30th Chaos
Communication Congress in Hamburg, December 2013, and also very recently by
(Gurstein).

(With cordial thanks to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Nishant Shah, Geoff Cox,
S??ren Pold, Stefan Heidenreich and Andreas Broeckmann for their critical
feedback, and to Aldje van Meer for her empirical research.)</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.6</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Jon Ippolito</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Wed, 5 Mar 2014 10:01:14 -0500</date>
<content>I enjoyed Florian Cramer's "What Is 'Post-digital'" essay and share his disdain for our overuse of the word digital. Calling Cornelia Sollfrank's or John Hopkin's work "digital art" seems to me like calling a tiger a large housecat--a convenient identification for zookeepers and curators. 

So much of this work has already bent the "digital" category. If Enzensberger wants us to send our secrets via postcards, he need look no further than "digital artist" Aram Bartholl's practice of printing postcards with pictures of WiFi passwords (http://datenform.de/greetings-from-the-internet-eng.html).

Enzensberger's essay and the typewriter-in-the-park meme are deceptively quaint. Both seem to be throwbacks until you examine them a bit more closely, at which point  references to the contemporary culture of Facebook and PRISM emerge. I grew up writing on a typewriter and certainly never saw one in the park before the age of netbooks and iPads.

On the other hand, neither the manifesto nor the meme is nuanced enough to apply to my life. When I hear an octogenarian say, "Whoever offers something for free is suspicious," I'm glad he's paying some attention to today's social media critics but I wish he'd thought more carefully before parroting this cliche. Most of the software I use today is "free" and I make most of my software available to others for the same price. I worry that the "free-as-in-Facebook" meme plays easily into the old Microsoft "open source isn't trustworthy" campaign of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. 

So for me, whoever claims whoever offers something for free is suspicious is suspicious.

What happened to the Enzensberger who advocated being "as free as dancers, as aware as football players, as surprising as guerillas?" I'm not surprised (if I understand Andreas Broeckmann correctly) that Enzensberger's essay was published in a conservative newspaper. As much as I despise Facebook, I think we can summon a better response than a curmudgeonly "get off my lawn."

Cheers,

jon

______________________________
Save culture from oblivion
Digital Curation online certificate
http://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.7</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:35:10 +0100</date>
<content>Am 10.03.14 02:58, schrieb Nick:

&gt; Quoth Felix Stalder:
&gt;
&gt;&gt; Enzensberger's text was just a joke, and the FAZ printed
&gt;&gt; it because it would stir controversy, not because it had much to
&gt;&gt; offer intellectually.
&gt;
&gt; Was it really just a joke? I'm not so sure dismissing it as that is
&gt; appropriate. Sure it necessarily isn't a deep critique of the power
&gt; dynamics at play with some of the newer technologies people are
&gt; using now, but it wasn't designed as that, and I for one find the
&gt; provocations basically reasonable.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.8</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Armin Medosch</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 14:32:40 +0000</date>
<content>The point I want to make is not so much about Enzensbergers text -
the poet has clearly let himself down - but the publishing context.
FAZ is on a campaign against Gratiskultur - the free culture of
the internet. A few days earlier there was a text by Jaron Lanier
which was pretty much a repetition of his older rant against Digital
Maoism with a little added surveillance sauce. FAZ does not like the
net, never did. So they mix cleverly two things, using widespread
dissatisfaction with surveillance to fight against free culture. This
is clearly old capital against new capital - the enemy is Google. What
a pity that Enzensberger allowed himself to be used in that way by an
arch-conservative newspaper. Lanier also allowed himself to be used
but thats not such a pity because as his Digital Maoism text showed he
is beyond the beyond.

regards
Armin</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.9</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>mp</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:54:07 +0100</date>
<content>Armin Medosch wrote:
&gt; is clearly old capital against new capital - the enemy is Google.

so, old capital is a bad thing and new capital is a bad thing, or
what's the moral of this?

or speaking against new capital from the platform of old capital is
bad?

or anything bad about new capital is old bad?

or my bad?</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.9</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Heiko Recktenwald</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 17:15:10 +0100</date>
<content>Andreas:
&gt; can be effective in any way if performed in such privatistic ways as
&gt; suggested in HME's "rules".)

Thats what I thought too -- and I think it is completely impossible
and not even a topic worth to be discussed. The article was not even
good as a shameless plug for this terrible pathetic social democratic
former bookseller who wants to rule the EU.

What a nonsense and what a megastrange "souvereingty language" for a
social democrat? Such language was until now used only in the German
far right (where it is the only important motivation except to have
fun by provocations).

Best, H.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.10</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:05:52 +0100</date>
<content>While I'd like to chime in with Andreas' fact check of Enzensberger's
ten rules:

&gt; For those who aren't nerds, hackers or cryptographers and have
&gt; better things to do than keep up with the pitfalls of digitalization
&gt; every hour, there are ten simple rules to resist exploitation and
&gt; surveillance:

Unlike Andreas, I think that Enzensberger is right and that critical
media activist culture delivered the proof in the pudding when it came
up with the format and name of "Crypto Parties". The implication is,
indeed, that you need to become at least a low-skilled cryptographer
who knows what PGP, SSL and TOR mean and how they are used.

In Rotterdam, on a CryptoParty last Friday at WORM, we just learned
again how difficult it is for contemporary Internet users to even
grasp the concept of a local mail client (like Thunderbird) as opposed
to Web Mail - and that does not even include complex stuff like
PGP encryption and key management. But using Web Mail means, by
definition, that others can read and data mine your correspondence.
And let's not even go into gory details like keeping up with software
vulnerabilities (like the SSL bug in Apple's operating systems or the
very similar GNU-TLS bug from last week). It's fair to say that all
the computer and Internet communication systems we currently use are
fundamentally insecure, and that there are likely only a handful of
systems in the world into which a skilled third party could not break
into to intercept the data stored on or sent from them.

&gt; 1
&gt; If you own a mobile phone, throw it away.

&gt;From a hacker perspective, this is sound advice. Apart from a very
few fringe, mostly not-yet-existing mobile phone operating systems
(such as Phil Zimmerman's Black Phone), all of the existing mobile
phones leak your data. Even a most simple stripped-down mobile phone
constantly broadcasts your location. The technology to intercept calls
and data transfers has become trivially simple (as Danja Vasiliev
and Julian Oliver demonstrated on this year's transmediale festival
in Berlin). Another issue is that smartphones are multi-sensor
devices that broadcast megabytes of data (such as bodily movement via
accelerometers) with their users being aware of it.

&gt; 2
&gt; Whoever offers something for free is suspicious. One should categorically
&gt; refuse anything that passes itself off as a bargain, bonus or freebie.  It's
&gt; always a lie.

I agree with Andreas, but a problem remains that this advice can
involuntarily backfire against ethical free services offered by
non-profits (from free WiFi access at a public library to Open Source
software).

&gt; 3
&gt; Online banking is a blessing, but only for secret services and criminals.

Here, Enzensberger's advice is naive, because banking in these times is
online anyway. If people go to a bank counter instead of homebanking, the
transaction will travel over the same networks (and most likely, the bank
employee will use the same online banking web interface). It also ignores
the data retention and customer tracking built into the international
banking system via, for example, the SWIFT accord between the EU and the
USA.

&gt; 4
&gt; Governments and industries want to abolish cash. They would like to get rid
&gt; of a legal tender that anyone can redeem.

This is indeed an important point, and has become a reality in countries
like Sweden. Contrary to common belief and letting aside all other issues
of this payment system, Bitcoin is not a solution for this problem because
all Bitcoin transaction records are publicly visible (as discussed here on
Nettime previously - no need to open this can of worms again). So far, cash
is the only truly anonymous, hard-to-trace payment method.

&gt; 5
&gt; The madness of networking every object of daily use - from toothbrush to
&gt; TV, from car to refrigerator - via the Internet, can only be met with total
&gt; boycott.

The recent news about "smart TVs" spying on its viewers (
https://securityledger.com/2013/11/fix-from-lg-ends-involuntary-smartt
v-snooping-but-privacy-questions-remain/) indeed confirm this - and
the news that "smart refrigerators" are now running spam botnets (
http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/is-your-refrigerator-really-pa
rt-of-a-massive-spam-sending-botnet/ ). This is one example of the
term "post-digital" making sense - that in many cases, it's better
that devices are offline than online.

&gt; 6
&gt; The same applies to politicians. They ignore any objection to their actions
&gt; and omissions. They are submissive to the financial markets and don't dare
&gt; to go against the activities of secret services.

No point in arguing with that. Most likely, most of them are in the pockets
of the secret services that have collected compromising information on them.

&gt; 7
&gt; E-Mail is nice, fast and free. So watch out! If you have a confidential
&gt; message or don't want to be surveilled, take a postcard and pencil.

This advice is technologically naive. It's known that the NSA and other
secret services have systematically scanned and collected postal mail meta
data (sender and receiver adresses along with timestamps), postal mail
relies on digital logistics (and digitized meta data) anyway.
Nearly-unreadable handwriting on post cards would not last very long as an
obfuscation device. All the secret service had to do is to run a Captcha
program for the handwriting that would fail OCR.

&gt; 8
&gt; Avoid obtaining goods and services via Internet. Vendors like Amazon, Ebay
&gt; and so on store all data and molest their customers with advertising spam.

Naive advice, again, since your supermarket collects the same information -
either via loyalty discount cards or simply by collecting data from card
payments.

&gt; 9
&gt; Just like network television, the big Internet corporations are primarily
&gt; financed by advertising.

This is a naive view as well, or it might at best be true for Google.
Enzensberger fails to understand the system of venture capital
financing in combination with IPOs and stock markets that work as a
global speculative scheme. (In less abstract words: It doesn't matter
whether a company like Facebook will ever make real profits since its
founders, venture capital investors and first-wave stock buyers will
have made billions before the company tanks.) He also excludes the
possibility that selling customer data with third parties, including
law enforcement, intelligence agencies, insurance companies, banks
etc. might already be a major source of revenue for many Internet
companies.

&gt; 10
&gt; Networks like Facebook call themselves "social" despite their eagerness to
&gt; treat their customers in the utmost anti-social ways.

Here, Enzensberger sounds like a disgruntled airline customer who
wants his money back after a flight from hell. He misses the point
that nowadays, sites like Facebook exist because of peer pressure for
participation.

&gt; friends like this, is a hopeless case. Those who are unfortunate
&gt; enough to be part of such a company, should try to take flight as
&gt; fast as possible. This is not so easy. An octopus won't consent to
&gt; letting his prey escape.

True, since Facebook doesn't delete profile data even after people
have shut down their accounts, and even creates profiles of people who
aren't on Facebook (and don't intend to sign on) based on the social
network information (and uploaded E-Mail address books) of registered
users. This is also true for other web sites such as LinkedIn.

&gt; These simple measures can't solve the political problem that society is
&gt; faced with.

No point arguing with this.

&gt; The sleep of reason will continue to the day when a majority of this
&gt; country's citizens will experience firsthand what has been done to them.
&gt; Perhaps, they will rub their eyes and ask why they let it slip in a time
&gt; when resistance was still possible.

One only needs to ponder what the Hitler government would have been
able to pull off during the Third Reich, on top of everything it
already did, if it had had access to the kind of personal data that
is now stored at Google, Facebook and the NSA, for every citizen in
Germany and the countries occupied in WWII - and even keeping people
outside those territories in check by blackmail.

There's no question that we're living in societies of control and that
the Internet is their infrastructure.

-F</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.11</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Frank Rieger</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:41:12 +0100</date>
<content>Writing for the FAZ myself I can assure you, that there is no such
thing as "the FAZ". It is a multitude of oppinions, plenty of debates
and highly moble frontlines. There are some arch-conservative editors
and authors who would love to wake up one day and find the internet
gone (mostly in the politics and business parts of the paper). And
then there are plenty of others (more often in the Feuilleton) who
have distinctly different and certainly not conservative views.

You should not make the mistake to associate Google with "good" just
because they side with free culture sometimes when it fits their
business interests. We are deep inside a multi-front power struggle
with shifting alliances and neither the government nor the internet
ogliopolies are on our side.

btw: I read Enzensberger as satire. 

Greetings from Berlin,

Frank Rieger</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.14</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>morlockelloi</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:42:31 -0700</date>
<content>This is the essential fallacy.

The idea that the security is so complicated that only the guild
members (from gov/corporate employees to open source celebrities) are
supposed to handle it, has been successfully floated for a while.
Which leaves the unwashed with the choice of 'trusting' either the
former or the latter. Whoever they choose, those will continue to
earn 10-20x the poverty level income for performing the holy rites.
The guild members are likely sincere when promoting this notion:
self-preservation is a great motivator. "Never make home brew crypto"
is what got us where we are today.

It's like literacy. There is nothing easy or natural about learning
to read and write. Literacy used to be confined to the ruling circles
and prohibited to the rabble. But literacy for the masses caused great
power shifts, and very few question it today.

Fuck the scribes.

Learning basics about communications security may be somewhat harder
that learning to read and write, but it's not orders of magnitude.
The only security that will work is the one that a person truly
understands, and fuck the UI. Witness the very successful use of
cryptography by those who understand that their well-being depends on
it.

What needs to happen is a shift from "trust me, I'll do it for you",
to "I'll teach you how to make your own". Not the easiest path, not
the quick one, but the one that may work. Bickering about whom to
trust and begging the authorities to stop what they are doing is a
total waste of time.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.15</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Armin Medosch</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 12:22:08 +0000</date>
<content>Hi Frank

sure, there is a diversity of opinion in any self-respecting newspaper. But
that does not change the fact that FAZ editors are conducting a kind of
campaign against the 'free' culture of the internet. I would certainly not
consider Google to be 'good'. I am observing, rather neutrally, that there
is a fight of old versus new capital. Google represents a new mode of
production, FAZ an old one. FAZ is trying to preserve its business model,
based on copyright and exclusivity. The new political economy is still in
its ascendancy, Google still represents a future (not THE future).
Therefore we should hold Google accountable, while not falling for the trap
of defending the interests of old capital

best,
Armin</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.16</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Armin Medosch</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 12:27:03 +0000</date>
<content>Hi MP,

it is not so difficult. There's capital, and its not homogenous. There are
capitals of a different era and of a different kind - such as industrial,
agro-business, and financial capital. There are different modes of
production and social relations that go with it. It is not about 'for' or
'against' or naive versions of 'good' and 'bad' but if we want to
understand the world we live in - and to preempt any questions, I think to
some degree this is possible - then we need to engage with such concepts
that great social scientists have developed

regards
Armin</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.17</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>Roel Roscam Abbing</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 15:05:00 +0100</date>
<content>Florian Cramer wrote:

&gt;&gt; 7
&gt;&gt; &gt; E-Mail is nice, fast and free. So watch out! If you have a confidential
&gt;&gt; &gt; message or don't want to be surveilled, take a postcard and pencil.
&gt;
&gt; This advice is technologically naive. It's known that the NSA and other
&gt; secret services have systematically scanned and collected postal mail meta
&gt; data (sender and receiver adresses along with timestamps), postal mail
&gt; relies on digital logistics (and digitized meta data) anyway.
&gt; Nearly-unreadable handwriting on post cards would not last very long as an
&gt; obfuscation device. All the secret service had to do is to run a Captcha
&gt; program for the handwriting that would fail OCR.

Captcha is already being used to decipher hard-to-OCR street numbers
collected by Google Streetview. Traditionally captchas have been used to
tell humans from bots, ironically you must now prove your humanity by
ratting out somebody's address to Google.
http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/29/google-now-using-recaptcha-to-decode-street-view-addresses/

&gt;&gt; &gt; The sleep of reason will continue to the day when a majority of this
&gt;&gt; &gt; country's citizens will experience firsthand what has been done to them.
&gt;&gt; &gt; Perhaps, they will rub their eyes and ask why they let it slip in a time
&gt;&gt; &gt; when resistance was still possible.
&gt;
&gt; One only needs to ponder what the Hitler government would have been
&gt; able to pull off during the Third Reich, on top of everything it
&gt; already did, if it had had access to the kind of personal data that
&gt; is now stored at Google, Facebook and the NSA, for every citizen in
&gt; Germany and the countries occupied in WWII - and even keeping people
&gt; outside those territories in check by blackmail.

There's an interesting book called IBM And The Holocaust that describes
the use of IBM punchcard systems and census data to aid in the
Holocaust. Not only to to crunch census data, but also cross referencing
records of governments and churches throughout occupied Europe and
solving difficult logistics problems to increase the efficiency of
deportation to concentration camps.

http://monoskop.org/log/?p=3076</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.18</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>mp</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 15:16:11 +0100</date>
<content>Armin Medosch wrote:

&gt; Hi MP,
&gt; 
&gt; it is not so difficult. There's capital, and its not homogenous. There are
&gt; capitals of a different era and of a different kind - such as industrial,
&gt; agro-business, and financial capital. There are different modes of
&gt; production and social relations that go with it. It is not about 'for' or
&gt; 'against' or naive versions of 'good' and 'bad' but if we want to
&gt; understand the world we live in - and to preempt any questions, I think to
&gt; some degree this is possible - then we need to engage with such concepts
&gt; that great social scientists have developed

I don't get it. Sounds strangely abstract/academic to me, or maybe I am
just stupid.

If a corporation is in a new kind of business, but owned by the same old
shareholder circles as those that came before, which category is it in,
then, new or old?

And what exactly does it matter? Does it, say, matter to a peasant
community whether their river is destroyed directly by Google's power
consumption or destroyed by the mining by an old corporation processing
minerals (that later end up in Google server farms)?

And then you throw "great social scientists" into the mix, too?!? Who
are they?</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.19</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Hans Magnus Enzensberger: Rules for the digital world</subject>
<from>dan</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:03:25 -0400</date>
<content>Posted on the chance that the speech which follows below has some
relevance to the current thread.  It was given by invitation to the
RSA conference ten days ago now.

-----------------8&lt;------------cut-here------------8&lt;-----------------

[ nominal delivery draft ]

.We Are All Intelligence Officers Now
.Dan Geer, 28 February 14, RSA/San Francisco

Good morning.  Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today,
which, let me be clear, is me speaking for myself, not for anyone
or anything else.  As you know, I work the cyber security trade,
that is to say that my occupation is cyber security.  Note that I
said "occupation" rather than "profession."  Last September, the
U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded that cyber security
should be seen as an occupation and not a profession because the
rate of change is simply too great to consider professionalization.[NAS]
You may well agree that that rate of change is paramount, and, if
so, you may also agree that cyber security is the most intellectually
demanding occupation on the planet.

The goal of the occupation called cyber security grows more demanding
with time, which I need tell no one here.  That growth is like a
river with many tributaries.  Part of the rising difficulty flows
from rising complexity, part of it from accelerating speed, and
part of it from the side effects of what exactly we would do if
this or that digital facility were to fail entirely -- which is to
say our increasing dependence on all things digital.  One is at
risk when something you depend upon is at risk.  Risk is, in other
words, transitive.  If X is at risk and I depend on X, then I, too,
am at risk to whatever makes X be at risk.  Risk is almost like
inheritance in a programming language.

I am particularly fond of the late Peter Bernstein's definition of
risk: "More things can happen than will."[PB]  I like that definition
not because it tells me what to do, but rather because it tells me
what comes with any new expansion of possibilities.  Put differently,
it tells me that with the new, the realm of the possible expands
and, as we know, when the realm of the possible expands, prediction
is somewhere between difficult and undoable.  The dynamic is that
we now regularly, quickly expand our dependence on new things, and
that added dependence matters because the way in which we each and
severally add risk to our portfolio is by way of dependence on
things for which their very newness makes risk estimation, and thus
risk management, neither predictable nor perhaps even estimable.

The Gordian Knot of such tradeoffs -- our tradeoffs -- is this: As
society becomes more technologic, even the mundane comes to depend
on distant digital perfection.  Our food pipeline contains less
than a week's supply, just to take one example, and that pipeline
depends on digital services for everything from GPS driven tractors
to robot vegetable sorting machinery to coast-to-coast logistics
to RFID-tagged livestock.  Is all the technologic dependency, and
the data that fuels it, making us more resilient or more fragile?

In the cybersecurity occupation, in which most of us here work, we
certainly seem to be getting better and better.  We have better
tools, we have better understood practices, and we have more and
better colleagues.  That's the plus side.  But from the point of
view of prediction, what matters is the ratio of skill to challenge;
as far as I can estimate, we are expanding the society-wide attack
surface faster than we are expanding our collection of tools,
practices, and colleagues.  If your society is growing more food,
that's great.  If your population is growing faster than your
improvements in food production can keep up, that's bad.  So it is
with cyber risk management: Whether in detection, control, or
prevention, we are notching personal bests, but all the while the
opposition is setting world records.  As with most decision making
under uncertainty, statistics have a role, particularly ratio
statistics that magnify trends so that the latency of feedback from
policy changes is more quickly clear.  Yet statistics, of course,
require data, to which I will return in a moment.

In medicine, we have well established rules about medical privacy.
Those rules are helpful; when you check into the hospital there is
a licensure-enforced, accountability-based, need-to-know regime
that governs the handling of your data.[PHI]   Most days, anyway.
But if you check in with Bubonic Plague or Typhus or Anthrax, you
will have zero privacy as those are "reportable conditions," as
variously mandated by public health law in all fifty States.  So
let me ask you, would it make sense, in a public health of the
Internet way, to have a mandatory reporting regime for cybersecurity
failures?  Do you favor having to report cyber penetrations of your
firm or of your household to the government?  Should you face
criminal charges if you fail to make such a report?  Forty-eight
States vigorously penalize failure to report sexual molestation of
children.[SMC]  The (US) Computer Fraud and Abuse Act[CF] defines
a number of felonies related to computer penetrations, and the U.S.
Code says that it is a crime to fail to report a felony of which
you have knowledge.[USC]  Is cybersecurity event data the kind of
data around which you want to enforce mandatory reporting?  Forty-six
States require mandatory reporting of cyber failures in the form
of their data breach laws, while the Verizon Data Breach Investigations
Report[VDB] found, and the Index of Cyber Security[ICS] confirmed,
that 70-80% of data breaches are discovered by unrelated third
parties.  If you discover a data breach, do you have an ethical
obligation to report it?  Should the law mandate that you fulfill
such an obligation?

Almost everyone here has some form of ingress filtering in place
by whatever name -- firewall, intrusion detection, whitelisting,
and so forth and so on.  Some of you have egress filtering because
being in a botnet, that is to say being an accessory to crime, is
bad for business.  Suppose you discover that you are in a botnet;
do you have an obligation to report it?  Do you have an obligation
to report the traffic that led you to conclude that you had a
problem?  Do you even have an obligation to bother to look and, if
you don't have or want an obligation to bother to look, do you want
your government to require the ISPs to do your looking for you, to
notify you when your outbound traffic marks you as an accomplice
to crime, whether witting or unwitting?  Do you want to lay on the
ISPs the duty to guarantee a safe Internet?  They own the pipes and
if you want clean pipes, then they are the ones to do it.  Does
deep packet inspection of your traffic by your ISP as a public
health measure have your support?  Would you want an ISP to deny
access to a host, which might be your host, that is doing something
bad on their networks?  Who gets to define what is "bad?"

If you are saying to yourself, "This is beginning to sound like
surveillance" or something similar, then you're paying attention.
Every one of you who lives in a community that has a neighborhood
watch already has these kinds of decisions to make.  Let's say that
you are patrolling your street, alone, and there have been break-ins
lately, there have been thefts lately, there has been vandalism
lately.  You've lived there for ten years and been on that neighborhood
watch for five.  You are on duty and you see someone you've never
seen crossing the street first from one side then the other, putting
a hand on every garden gate.  What do you do?  Confront them the
way a polite neighbor would?  Challenge them the way a security
guard would?  Run home to lock your own doors and draw your drapes?
Resign from the neighborhood watch because you are really not ready
to do anything strenuous?

Returning to the digital sphere, we are increasing what it is that
can be observed, what is observable.  Instrumentation has never
been cheaper.  Computing to fiddle with what has been observed has
never been more available.  As someone who sees a lot of fresh
business plans, I can tell you that these days Step Six is never
"Then we build a data center."  Step Six, or whatever, is universally
now "Then we buy some cloud time and some advertising." This means
that those to whom these outsourcing contracts go are in a position
to observe, and observe a lot.  Doubtless some of what they observe
will be problematic, whether on legal or moral grounds.  Should a
vendor of X-as-a-Service be obliged to observe what their customers
are doing?  And if they are obliged to observe, should they be
obliged to act on what they observe, be that to report, to deploy
countermeasures, or both?

As what is observable expands so, naturally, does what has been
observed.  Dave Aitel says "There's no reason a company in this day
and age can't have their own Splunk or ElasticSearch engine that
allows them to search and sort a complete history of every program
anyone in the company has ever executed."[DA]  Sometime in the last
five to ten years we passed the point on the curve where it became
much cheaper to keep everything than to do selective deletion.  When
you read the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure with respect to
so-called e-discovery, you can certainly conclude that total retention
of observed data is a prudent legal strategy.  What is less clear
is whether you have a duty to observe given that you have the
capacity to do so.  All of which also applies to what others can
observe about you.

This is not, however, about you personally.  Even Julian Assange,
in his book _Cypherpunks_, said "Individual targeting is not the
threat."  It is about a culture where personal data is increasingly
public data, and assembled en masse.  All we have to go on now is
the hopeful phrase "A reasonable expectation of privacy" but what
is reasonable when one inch block letters can be read from orbit?
What is reasonable when all of your financial or medical life is
digitized and available primarily over the Internet?  Do you want
ISPs to retain e-mails when you are asking your doctor a medical
question (or, for that matter, do you want those e-mails to become
part of your Electronic Health Record)?  Who owns your medical data
anyway?  Until the 1970s, it was the patient but regulations then
made it the provider.  With an Electronic Health Record, it is
likely to revert to patient ownership, but if the EHR belongs to
you, do you get to surveil the use that is made of it by medical
providers and those that recursively they outsource to?  And if
not, why not?

Observability is fast extending to devices.  Some of it has already
appeared, such as the fact that any newish car is broadcasting four
unique Bluetooth radio IDs, one for each tire's valve stem.  Some
of it is in a daily progression, such as training our youngsters
to accept surveillance by stuffing a locator beacon in their backpack
as soon as they go off to Kindergarten.  Some of it is newly
technologic, like through the wall imaging, and some of it is simply
that we are now surrounded by cameras that we can't even see where
no one camera is important but they are important in the aggregate
when their data is fused.  Anything, and I mean anything, that has
"wireless" in its name creates the certainty of traffic analysis.

As an example relevant to rooms such as this, you should assume
that all public facilities will soon convert their lighting fixtures
to LEDs, LEDs that are not just lights but also have an embedded,
chip-based operating system, a camera, sensors for CO/CO2/pollutant
emissions, seismic activity, humidity &amp; UV radiation, a microphone,
wifi and/or cellular interfaces, an extensible API, an IPv4 or v6
address per LED, a capacity for disconnected "decision making on
the pole," cloud-based remote management, and, of course, bragging
rights for how green you are which you can then monetize in the
form of tax credits.[S]  I ask again, do you or we or they have a
duty to observe now that we have an ability to do so?  It is, as
you know, a long established norm for authorities to seize the video
stored in surveillance cameras whether the issue at hand is a smash
and grab or the collapse of an Interstate highway bridge.[M]  What
does that mean when data retention is permanent and recording devices
are omnipresent?  Does that make you the observed or the observer?
Do we have an answer to "Who watches the watchmen?"[J]

By now it is obvious that we humans can design systems more complex
than we can then operate.  The financial sector's "flash crashes"
are the most recent proof-by-demonstration of that claim; it would
hardly surprise anyone were the fifty interlocked insurance exchanges
for Obamacare to soon be another.  Above some threshold of system
complexity, it is no longer possible to test, it is only possible
to react to emergent behavior.  Even the lowliest Internet user is
involved -- one web page can easily touch scores of different
domains.  While writing this, the top level page from cnn.com had
400 out-references to 85 unique domains each of which is likely to
be similarly constructed and all of which move data one way or
another.  If you leave those pages up, then because many such pages
have an auto-refresh, moving to a new subnet signals to every one
of the advertising networks that you have done so.  How is this
different than having a surveillance camera in the entry vestibule
of your home?

We know, and have known for some time, that traffic analysis is
more powerful than content analysis.  If I know everything about
to whom you communicate including when, where, with what inter-message
latency, in what order, at what length, and by what protocol, then
I know you.  If all I have is the undated, unaddressed text of your
messages, then I am an archaeologist, not a case officer.  The
soothing mendacity of proxies for the President saying "It's only
metadata" relies on the ignorance of the listener.  Surely no one
here is convinced by "It's only metadata" but let me be clear: you
are providing that metadata and, in the evolving definition of the
word "public," there is no fault in its being observed and retained
indefinitely.  Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain famously
noted that if you preferentially use online services that are free,
"You are not the customer, you're the product."  Why?  Because what
is observable is observed, what is observed is sold, and users are
always observable, even when they are anonymous.

Let me be clear, this is not an attack on the business of intelligence.
The Intelligence Community is operating under the rules it knows,
most of which you, too, know, and the goal states it has been tasked
to achieve.  The center of gravity for policy is that of goal states,
not methods.

Throughout the 1990s, the commercial sector essentially caught up
with the intelligence sector in the application of cryptography --
not the creation of cyphers, but their use.  (Intelligence needs
new cyphers on a regular basis whereas commercial entities would
rather not have to roll their cypher suites at all, much less
regularly.)  In like manner commercial firms are today fast catching
up with the intelligence sector in traffic analysis.  The marketing
world is leading the way because its form of traffic analysis is
behavior-aware and full of data fusion innovation -- everything
from Amazon's "people who bought this later bought that" to 1 meter
accuracy on where you are in the shopping mall so that advertisements
and coupons can appear on your smartphone for the very store you
are looking in the window of, to combining location awareness with
what your car and your bedroom thermostat had to say about you this
morning.  More relevant to this audience, every cutting edge data
protection scheme now has some kind of behavioral component, which
simply means collecting enough data on what is happening that
subsequently highlighting anomalies has a false positive rate low
enough to be worth following up.

If you decide to in some broad sense opt out, you will find that
it is not simple.  Speaking personally, I choose not to share
CallerID data automatically by default.  Amusingly, when members
of my friends and family get calls from an unknown caller, they
assume it is me because I am the only person they know who does
this.  A better illustration of how in a linear equation there are
N-1 degrees of freedom I can't imagine.  Along those same lines,
I've only owned one camera in my life and it was a film camera.
Ergo, I've never uploaded any photos that I took.  That doesn't
mean that there are no digital photos of me out there.  There are
3+ billion new photos online each month, so even if you've never
uploaded photos of yourself someone else has.  And tagged them.  In
other words, you can personally opt out, but that doesn't mean that
other folks around you haven't effectively countermanded your intent.

In short, we are becoming a society of informants.  In short, I
have nowhere to hide from you.

As I said before and will now say again, the controlling factor,
the root cause, of risk is dependence, particularly dependence on
the expectation of stable system state.  Yet the more technologic the
society becomes, the greater the dynamic range of possible failures.
When you live in a cave, starvation, predators, disease, and lightning
are about the full range of failures that end life as you know it
and you are well familiar with each of them.  When you live in a
technologic society where everybody and everything is optimized in
some way akin to just-in-time delivery, the dynamic range of failures
is incomprehensibly larger and largely incomprehensible.  The wider
the dynamic range of failure, the more prevention is the watchword.
Cadres of people charged with defending masses of other people must
focus on prevention, and prevention is all about proving negatives.
Therefore, and inescapably so, there is only one conclusion: as
technologic society grows more interconnected, it becomes more
interdependent within itself.  As society becomes more interdependent
within itself, the more it must rely on prediction based on data
collected in broad ways, not in targeted ways.  That is surveillance.
That is intelligence practiced not by intelligence agencies but by
anyone or anything with a sensor network.

Spoken of in this manner, official intelligence agencies that hoover
up everything are simply obeying the Presidential Directive that
"Never again" comes true.  And the more complex the society they
are charged with protecting becomes, the more they must surveil,
the more they must analyze, the more data fusion becomes their only
focus.  In that, there is no operational difference between government
acquisition of observable data and private sector acquisition of
observable data, beyond the minor detail of consent.

David Brin was the first to suggest that if you lose control over
what data can be collected on you, the only freedom-preserving
alternative is that everyone else does, too.[DB1]  If the government
or the corporation or your neighbor can surveil you without asking,
then the balance of power is preserved when you can surveil them
without asking.  Bruce Schneier countered that preserving the balance
of power doesn't mean much if the effect of new information is
non-linear, that is to say if new information is the exponent in
an equation, not one more factor in a linear sum.[DB2]  Solving
that debate requires that you have a strong opinion on what data
fusion means operationally to you, to others, to society.  If,
indeed, and as Schneier suggested, the power of data fusion is an
equation where new data items are exponents, then the entity that
can amass data that is bigger by a little will win the field by a
lot.  That small advantages can have big outcome effects is exactly
what fuels this or any other arms race.

Contradicting what I said earlier, there may actually be a difference
between the public and the private sector because the private sector
will collect data only so long as increased collection can be
monetized, whereas government will collect data only so long as
increased collection can be stored.  With storage prices falling
faster than Moore's Law, government's stopping rule may thus never
be triggered.

In the Wikipedia article about Brin, there is this sentence, "It
will be tempting to pass laws that restrict the power of surveillance
to authorities, entrusting them to protect our privacy -- or a
comforting illusion" thereof.[W]  I agree with one of the possible
readings of that sentence, namely that it is "tempting" in the sense
of being delusional.  Demonstrating exactly the kind of good
intentions with which the road to Hell is paved, we have codified
rules that permit our lawmakers zero privacy, we give them zero
ability to have a private moment or to speak to others without
quotation, without attribution, without their game face on.  In the
evolutionary sense of the word "select," we select for people who
are without expectation of authentic privacy or who jettisoned it
long before they stood for office.  Looking in their direction for
salvation is absurd.  And delusional.

I am, however, hardly arguing that "you" are powerless or that
"they" have taken all control.  It is categorically true that
technology is today far more democratically available than it was
yesterday and less than it will be tomorrow.  3D printing, the whole
"maker" community, DIY biology, micro-drones, search, constant
contact with whomever you choose to be in constant contact with --
these are all examples of democratizing technology.  This is perhaps
our last fundamental tradeoff before the Singularity occurs: Do we,
as a society, want the comfort and convenience of increasingly
technologic, invisible digital integration enough to pay for those
benefits with the liberties that must be given up to be protected
from the downsides of that integration?  If risk is that more things
can happen than will, then what is the ratio of things that can now
happen that are good to things that can now happen that are bad?
Is the good fraction growing faster than the bad fraction or the
other way around?  Is there a threshold of interdependence beyond
which good or bad overwhelmingly dominate?

We are all data collectors, data keepers, data analysts.  Some
citizens do it explicitly; some citizens have it done for them by
robots.  To be clear, we are not just a society of informants, we
are becoming an intelligence community of a second sort.  Some of
it is almost surely innocuous, like festooning a house with wireless
sensors for home automation purposes.  Some of it is cost effectiveness
driven, like measuring photosynthesis in a corn field by flying an
array of measurement devices over it on a drone.  I could go on,
and so could you, because in a very real sense I am telling you
nothing you don't already know.  Everyone in this and other audiences
knows everything that I have to say, even if they weren't aware
that they knew it.

The question is why is this so?  Is this majority rule and the
intelligence function is one the majority very much wants done to
themselves and others?  Is this a question of speed and complexity
such that citizen decision making is crippled not because facts are
hidden but because compound facts are too hard to understand?  Is
this a question of wishful thinking of that kind which can't tell
the difference between a utopian fantasy, a social justice movement,
and a business opportunity?  Is this nowhere near such a big deal
as I think it is because every day that goes by without a cascade
failure only adds evidence that such possibilities are becoming
ever less likely?  Is the admonition to "Take care of yourself" the
core of a future where the guarantee of a good outcome for all is
the very fact that no one can hide?  Is Nassim Taleb's idea that
we are easily fooled by randomness[TF] at play here, too?  If the
level of observability to which you are subject is an asset to you,
then what is your hedge against that asset?

This is not a Chicken Little talk; it is an attempt to preserve if
not make a choice while choice is still relevant.  As The Economist
in its January 18 issue so clearly lays out,[TE] we are ever more
a service economy, but every time an existing service disappears
into the cloud, our vulnerability to its absence increases as does
the probability of monopoly power.  Every time we ask the government
to provide goodnesses that can only be done with more data, we are
asking government to collect more data.

Let me ask a yesterday question: How do you feel about traffic jam
detection based on the handoff rate between cell towers of those
cell phones in use in cars on the road?  Let me ask a today question:
How do you feel about auto insurance that is priced from a daily
readout of your automobile's black box?  Let me ask a tomorrow
question: In what calendar year will compulsory auto insurance be
more expensive for the driver who insists on driving their car
themselves rather than letting a robot do it?  How do you feel about
public health surveillance done by requiring Google and Bing to
report on searches for cold remedies and the like?  How do you feel
about a Smart Grid that reduces your power costs and greens the
atmosphere but reports minute-by-minute what is on and what is off
in your home?  Have you or would you install that toilet that does
a urinalysis with every use, and forwards it to your clinician?

How do you feel about using standoff biometrics as a solution to
authentication?  At this moment in time, facial recognition is
possible at 500 meters, iris recognition is possible at 50 meters,
and heart-beat recognition is possible at 5 meters.  Your dog can
identify you by smell; so, too, can an electronic dog's nose.  Your
cell phone's accelerometer is plenty sensitive enough to identify
you by gait analysis.  The list goes on.  All of these are data
dependent, cheap, convenient, and none of them reveal anything that
is a secret as we currently understand the term "secret" -- yet the
sum of them is greater than the parts.  A lot greater.  It might
even be a polynomial, as Schneier suggested.  Time will tell, but
by then the game will be over.

Harvard Business School Prof. Shoshanna Zuboff has had much to say
on these topics since the 1980s, especially her Three Laws:[ZS]

.  Everything that can be automated will be automated

.  Everything that can be informated will be informated

.  Every digital application that can be used for surveillance and
   control will be used for surveillance and control

I think she is right, but the implication that this is all outside
the control of the citizen is not yet true.  It may get to be true,
but in so many words that is why I am standing here.  There are a
million choices the individual person, or for that matter the
free-standing enterprise, can take and I do not just mean converting
all your browsing over to Tor.

Take something mundane like e-mail:  One might suggest never sending
the same message twice.  Why?  Because sending it twice, even if
encrypted, allows a kind of analysis by correlation that cannot
otherwise happen.  Maybe that's too paranoid, so let's back off a
little.  One might suggest that the individual or the enterprise
that outsources its e-mail to a third party thereby creates by
itself and for itself the risk of silent subpoenas delivered to
their outsourcer.  If, instead, the individual or the enterprise
insources its e-mail then at the very least it knows when its data
assets are being sought because the subpoena comes to them.  Maybe
insourcing your e-mail is too much work, but need I remind you that
plaintext e-mail cannot be web-bugged, so why would anyone ever
render HTML e-mail at all?

Take software updates:  There is a valid argument to make software
auto-update the norm.  As always, a push model has to know where
to push.  On the other hand, a pull model must be invoked by the
end user.  Both models generate information for somebody, but a
pull model leaves the time and place decisions to the end user.

Take cybersecurity technology:  I've become convinced that all of
it is dual use.  While I am not sure whether dual use is a trend
or a realization of an unchanging fact of nature, the obviousness
of dual use seems greatest in the latest technologies, so I am
calling it a trend in the sense that the straightforward accessibility
of dual use characteristics of new technology is itself a growing
trend.  Leading cybersecurity products promise total surveillance
over the enterprise and are, to my mind, offensive strategies used
for defensive purposes.  A fair number of those products not only
watch your machine, but take just about everything that is going
on at your end and copies that to their end.  The argument for doing
so is well thought out -- by combining observational data from a
lot of places the probability of detection can be raised and the
latency of countermeasure can be reduced.  Of course, there is no
reason such systems couldn't be looking for patterns of content in
human readable documents just as easily as looking for patterns of
content in machine readable documents.

Take communications technology:  Whether we are talking about
triangulating the smartphone using the cell towers, geocoding the
Internet, or forwarding the GPS coordinates from onboard equipment
to external services like OnStar, everyone knows that there is a
whole lot of location tracking going on.  What can you do to opt
out of that?  That is not so easy because now we are talking not
about a mode of operation, like whether to insource or outsource
your e-mail, but a real opt-in versus opt-out decision; do you
accept the tracking or do you refuse the service?  Paraphrasing
Zittrain's remark about being a customer or being a product, the
greater the market penetration of mobile communications, the more
the individual is either a data source or a suspect.

Take wearable computing:  Google Glass is only the most famous.
There've been people working on such things for a long time now.
Folks who are outfitted with wearable computing are pretty much
identifiable today, but this brief instant will soon pass.  You
will be under passive surveillance by your peers and contacts or,
to be personal, some of you will be surveilling me because you will
be adopters of this kind of technology.  I would prefer you didn't.
I am in favor neither of cyborgs nor chimeras; I consider our place
in the natural world too great a gift to mock in those ways.

When it comes to ranking programs for how well they can observe
their surroundings and act on what they see without further
instructions, Stuxnet is the reigning world heavyweight champion.
Unless there is something better already out there.  Putting aside
the business of wrecking centrifuges, just consider the observational
part.  Look at other malware that seems to have a shopping list
that isn't composed of filenames or keywords but instead an algorithm
for rank-ordering what to look for and to exfiltrate documents in
priority order.  As with other democratizations of technology, what
happens when that kind of improvisation, that kind of adaptation,
can be automated?  What happens when such things can be scripted?

For those with less gray hair, once upon a time a firewall was
something that created a corporate perimeter.  Then it was something
that created a perimeter around a department.  Then around a given
computer.  Then around a given datum.  In the natural world,
perimeters shrink as risk grows -- think a circle of wildebeeste
with their horns pointed outward, the calves on the inside, and the
hyenas closing in.  So it has been with perimeters in the digital
space, a steady shrinking of the defensible perimeter down to the
individual datum.

There are so many technologies now that power observation and
identification of the individual at a distance.  They may not yet
be in your pocket or on your dashboard or embedded in all your smoke
detectors, but that is only a matter of time.  Your digital exhaust
is unique hence it identifies.  Pooling everyone's digital exhaust
also characterizes how you differ from normal.  Suppose that observed
data does kill both privacy as impossible-to-observe and privacy
as impossible-to-identify, then what might be an alternative?  If
you are an optimist or an apparatchik, then your answer will tend
toward rules of procedure administered by a government you trust
or control.  If you are a pessimist or a hacker/maker, then your
answer will tend towards the operational, and your definition of a
state of privacy will be my definition: the effective capacity to
misrepresent yourself.

Misrepresentation is using disinformation to frustrate data fusion
on the part of whomever it is that is watching you.  Some of it can
be low-tech, such as misrepresentation by paying your therapist in
cash under an assumed name.  Misrepresentation means arming yourself
not at Walmart but in living rooms.  Misrepresentation means swapping
affinity cards at random with like-minded folks.  Misrepresentation
means keeping an inventory of misconfigured webservers to proxy
through.  Misrepresentation means putting a motor-generator between
you and the Smart Grid.  Misrepresentation means using Tor for no
reason at all.  Misrepresentation means hiding in plain sight when
there is nowhere else to hide.  Misrepresentation means having not
one digital identity that you cherish, burnish, and protect, but
having as many as you can.  Your identity is not a question unless
you work to make it be.  Lest you think that this is a problem
statement for the random paranoid individual alone, let me tell you
that in the big-I Intelligence trade, crafting good cover is getting
harder and harder and for the same reasons: misrepresentation is
getting harder and harder.  If I was running field operations, I
would not try to fabricate a complete digital identity, I'd "borrow"
the identity of someone who had the characteristics that I needed
for the case at hand.

The Obama administration's issuance of a National Strategy for
Trusted Identities in Cyberspace[NS] is case-in-point; it "calls
for the development of interoperable technology standards and
policies -- an 'Identity Ecosystem' -- where individuals, organizations,
and underlying infrastructure -- such as routers and servers -- can
be authoritatively authenticated."  If you can trust a digital
identity, that is because it can't be faked.  Why does the government
care about this?  It cares because it wants to digitally deliver
government services and it wants attribution.  Is having a non-fake-able
digital identity for government services worth the registration of
your remaining secrets with that government?  Is there any real
difference between a system that permits easy, secure, identity-based
services and a surveillance system?  Do you trust those who hold
surveillance data on you over the long haul by which I mean the
indefinite retention of transactional data between government
services and you, the individual required to proffer a non-fake-able
identity to engage in those transactions?  Assuming this spreads
well beyond the public sector, which is its designers' intent, do
you want this everywhere?  If you are building authentication systems
today, then you are already playing ball in this league.  If you
are using authentication systems today, then you are subject to the
pending design decisions of people who are themselves playing ball
in this league.

And how can you tell if the code you are running is collecting on
you or, for that matter, if the piece of code you are running is
collecting on somebody else?  If your life is lived inside the
digital envelope, how do you know that this isn't The Matrix or The
Truman Show?  Code is certainly getting bigger and bigger.  A
nameless colleague who does world class static analysis said that
he "regularly sees apps that are over 2 GB of code" and sees
"functions with over 16K variables."  As he observes, functions
like that are machine written.  If the code is machine written,
does anyone know what's in it?  The answer is "of course not" and
even if they did, malware techniques such as return-oriented-programming
can add features after the whitelist-mediated application launch.
But I'm not talking here about malware, I am talking about code
that you run that you meant to run and which, in one way or another,
is instrumented to record what you do with it.  Nancy Pelosi's
famous remark[NP] about her miserable, thousand page piece of
legislation, "We have to pass the bill so that you can find out
what is in it" can be just as easily applied to code: it has become
"We have to run the code so that you can find out what is in it."

That is not going to change; small may be beautiful but big is
inevitable.[BI]  A colleague notes that, with the cloud, all pretense
of trying to keep programs small and economical has gone out the
window -- just link to everything because it doesn't matter if you
make even one call to a huge library since the Elastic Cloud (or
whatever) charges you no penalty for bloat.  As such, it is likely
that any weird machine[SB] within the bloated program is ever more
robust.

Mitja Kolsek was who made me aware of just how much the client has
become the server's server.  Take Javascript, which is to say servers
sending clients programs to execute; the HTTP Archive says that the
average web page now makes out-references to 16 different domains
as well as making 17 Javascript requests per page, and the Javascript
byte count is five times the HTML byte count.[HT]  A lot of that
Javascript is about analytics which is to say surveillance of the
user experience (and we're not even talking about Bitcoin mining
done in Javascript that you can embed in your website.[BJ])

So suppose everybody is both giving and getting surveillance, both
being surveilled and doing surveillance.  Does that make you an
intelligence agent?  A spreading of technology from the few to the
many is just the way world works.  There are a hundred different
articles from high-brow to low- that show the interval between
market introduction and widespread adoption of technology has gotten
shorter as technology has gotten more advanced.  That means that
technologies that were available only to the few become available
to the many in a shorter timeframe, i.e., that any given technology
advantage the few have has a shorter shelf-life.  That would mean
that the technologies that only national laboratories had fifteen
years ago might be present among us soon, in the spirit of William
Gibson's famous remark that the future is already present, just
unevenly distributed.  Or maybe it is only ten years now.  Maybe
the youngest of you in this room will end up in a world where what
a national lab has today is something you can look forward to having
in only five year's time.  Regardless of whether the time constant
is five or ten or even fifteen years, this is far, far faster than
any natural mixing will arrange for even distribution across all
people.  The disparities of knowledge that beget power will each
be shorter lived in their respective particulars, but a much steeper
curve in the aggregate.

Richard Clarke's novel _Breakpoint_ centered around the observation
that with fast enough advances in genetic engineering not only will
the elite think that they are better than the rest, they will be.[RC]
I suggest that with fast enough advances in surveillance and the
inferences to be drawn from surveillance, that a different elite
will not just think that it knows better, it will know better.
Those advances come both from Moore's and from Zuboff's laws, but
more importantly they rest upon the extraordinarily popular delusion
that you can have freedom, security, and convenience when, at best,
you can have two out of three.

At the same time, it is said that the rightful role of government
is to hold a monopoly on the use of force.  Is it possible that in
a fully digital world it will come to pass that everyone can see
what once only a Director of National Intelligence could see?  Might
a monopoly of force resting solely with government become harder
to maintain as the technology that bulwarks such a monopoly becomes
democratized ever faster?  Might reserving force to government
become itself an anachronism?  That is almost surely not something
to hope for, even for those of us who agree with Thomas Jefferson
that the government that governs best is the government that governs
least.  If knowledge is power, then increasing the store of knowledge
must increase the store of power; increasing the rate of knowlege
acquisition must increase the rate of power growth.  All power tends
to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,[LA] so sending
vast amounts of knowledge upstream will corrupt absolutely, regardless
of whether the data sources are reimbursed with some pittance of
convenience.  Every tax system in the world has proven this time
and again with money.  We are about to prove it again with data,
which has become a better store of value than fiat currency in any
case.

Again, that power has to go somewhere.  If you are part of the
surveillance fabric, then you are part of creating that power, some
of which is reflected back on you as conveniences that actually
doubles as a form of control.  Very nearly everyone at this conference
is explicitly and voluntarily part of the surveillance fabric because
it comes with the tools you use, with what Steve Jobs would call
your digital life.  With enough instrumentation carried by those
who opt in, the person who opts out hasn't really opted out.  If
what those of you who opt in get for your role in the surveillance
fabric is "security," then you had better be damnably sure that
when you say "security" that you all have close agreement on precisely
what you mean by that term.

And this is as good a place as any to pass on Joel Brenner's
insight:[JB]

   During the Cold War, our enemies were few and we knew who they
   were.  The technologies used by Soviet military and intelligence
   agencies were invented by those agencies.  Today, our adversaries
   are less awesomely powerful than the Soviet Union, but they are
   many and often hidden.  That means we must find them before we
   can listen to them.  Equally important, virtually every government
   on Earth, including our own, has abandoned the practice of relying
   on government-developed technologies.  Instead they rely on
   commercial off-the-shelf, or COTS, technologies.  They do it
   because no government can compete with the head-spinning advances
   emerging from the private sector, and no government can afford
   to try.  When NSA wanted to collect intelligence on the Soviet
   government and military, the agency had to steal or break the
   encryption used by them and nobody else.  The migration to COTS
   changed that.  If NSA now wants to collect against a foreign
   general's or terorist's communications, it must break the same
   encryption you and I use on our own devices...  That's why NSA
   would want to break the encryption used on every one of those
   media.  If it couldn't, any terrorist in Chicago, Kabul, or
   Cologne would simply use a Blackberry or send messages on Yahoo!
   But therein lies a policy dilemma, because NSA could decrypt
   almost any private conversation.  The distinction between
   capabilities and actual practices is more critical than ever...
   Like it or not, the dilemma can be resolved only through oversight
   mechanisms that are publicly understood and trusted -- but are
   not themselves ... transparent.

At the same time, for-profit and not-for-profit entites are collecting
on each other.  They have to, even though private intelligence
doubtless leads directly to private law.  On the 6th of this month,
the Harvard Kennedy School held a conference on this very subject;
let me read just the first paragraph:[HKS]

   In today's world, businesses are facing increasingly complex
   threats to infrastructure, finances, and information.  The
   government is sometimes unable to share classified information
   about these threats.  As a result, business leaders are creating
   their own intelligence capabilities within their companies.

In a closely related development, the international traffic in arms
treaty known as the Wassenaar Agreement, was just amended to classify
"Intrusion Software" and "Network Surveillance Systems" as weapons.[WA]

So whom do you trust?  Paul Wouters makes a telling point when he
says that "You cannot avoid trust.  Making it hierarchical gives
the least trust to parties.  You monitor those you have to trust
more, and more closely."[PW]  As I've done with privacy and security,
I should now state my definition of trust, which is that trust is
where I drop my guard, which is to say that I only trust someone
against whom I have effective recourse.  Does that mean I can only
trust those upon whom I can collect?  At the nation state level
that is largely the case.  Is this the way Brin's vision will work
itself out, that as the technology of collection democratizes, we
will trust those we can collect against but within the context of
whatever hierarchy is evolutionarily selected by such a dynamic?

It is said that the price of anything is the foregone alternative.
The price of dependence is risk.  The price of total dependence is
total risk.  Standing in his shuttered factory, made redundant by
coolie labor in China, Tom McGregor said that "American consumers
want to buy things at a price that is cheaper than they would be
willing to be paid to make them."  A century and a half before Tom,
English polymath John Ruskin said that "There is nothing in the
world that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little
cheaper, and he who considers price only is that man's lawful prey."
Invoking Zittrain yet again, the user of free services is not the
customer, he's the product.  Let me then say that if you are going
to be a data collector, if you are bound and determined to instrument
your life and those about you, if you are going to "sell" data to
get data, then I ask that you not work so cheaply that you collectively
drive to zero the habitat, the lebensraum, of those of us who opt
out.  If you remain cheap, then I daresay that opting out will soon
require bravery and not just the quiet tolerance to do without
digital bread and circuses.

To close with Thomas Jefferson:

   I predict future happiness for Americans, if they can prevent
   the government from wasting the labors of the people under the
   pretense of taking care of them.
There is never enough time.  Thank you for yours.

-------------

[NAS] "Professionalizing the Nation's Cyber Workforce?"
 www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18446

[PB] _Against the Gods_ and this 13:22 video at
 www.mckinsey.com/insights/risk_management/peter_l_bernstein_on_risk
 ...Bernstein was himself quoting Elroy Dimson and Paul Marsh from
 their 1982 paper, "Calculating the Cost of Capital"...

[PHI] Personal Health Information, abbreviated PHI

[SMC] "Penalties for failure to report and false reporting of child
abuse and neglect," US Dept of Health and Human Services, Children's
Bureau, Child Welfare Information Gateway

[CFAA] U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 47, Section 1030
 www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

[USC] U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 1, Section 4
 www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/4

[VDB] Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report
 www.verizonenterprise.com/DBIR

[ICS] Index of Cyber Security
 www.cybersecurityindex.org

[DA] "What is the next step?," Dave Aitel, 18 February 2014
 seclists.org/dailydave/2014/q1/28

[S] Sensity's NetSense product, to take one (only) example
 www.sensity.com/our-platform/our-platform-netsense

[M] For example, the 2007 collapse of I-35 in Minneapolis.

[J] "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?," Juvenal, Satire VI ll.347-348

[DB1] _The Transparent Society_, David Brin, Perseus, 1998
[DB2] "The Myth of the 'Transparent Society'," Bruce Schneier
 www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/03/securitymatters_0306
[DB3] "Rebuttal," David Brin
 www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2008/03/brin_rebuttal

[W] minor quotation from
 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

[TF] _Fooled by Randomness_, Nassim Taleb, Random House, 2001

[TE] "Coming to an office near you," The Economist, 18 January 2014
 cover/lead article, print edition

[ZS] "Be the friction - Our Response to the New Lords of the Ring," 6 Jun 2013
 www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/the-surveillance-paradigm-be-the-friction-our-response-to-the-new-lords-of-the-ring-12241996.html

[NS] National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, 2011
 www.nist.gov/nstic

[NP] 2010 Legislative Conf. for the National Association of Counties

[BI] "Small Is Beautiful, Big Is Inevitable," IEEE S&amp;P, Nov/Dec 2011
 geer.tinho.net/ieee/ieee.sp.geer.1111.pdf

[SB] LANGSEC: Language-theoretic Security
 www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/langsec/

[HT] Trends, HTTP Archive
 www.httparchive.org/trends.php

[BJ] Bitcoin Miner for Websites
 www.bitcoinplus.com/miner/embeddable

[RC] _Breakpoint_, Richard Clarke, Putnam's, 2007

[LA] "All power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.  Great men are almost always bad men, even when they
exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd
the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority."
-- Lord John Dalberg Acton to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887

[JB] "NSA: Not (So) Secret Anymore," 10 December 2013
 joelbrenner.com/blog

[HKS] Defense and Intelligence: Future of Intelligence Seminars
 belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/events/6230/intelligence_in_the_private_sector

[WA] "International Agreement Reached Controlling Export of Mass
and Intrusive Surveillance," 9 December 2013
 oti.newamerica.net/blogposts/2013/international_agreement_reached_controlling_export_of_mass_and_intrusive_surveillance

[PW] "You Can't P2P the DNS and Have It, Too," Paul Wouters, 9 Apr 2012
 nohats.ca/wordpress/blog/2012/04/09/you-cant-p2p-the-dns-and-have-it-too

=====
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</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>Felix Stalder</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sun, 09 Mar 2014 12:40:32 +0100</date>
<content>Florian Cramer wrote:
&gt; # What is 'Post-digital'?

Florian and I have been talking for a long time now about the
notion of "post-digital", with me being rather skeptical about its
usefulness. I still am, but Florian's text clarifies a lot for me.

There are some areas in which the term does makes sense.

Primarily aesthetically, in terms of pointing towards a complex
blending of the digital and the non-digital, rather than a simple
substitution (aka the computer as the meta-medium that simulates all
others).

To some degree it makes also sense politically, in terms of a more
complex understanding of political processes not being driven by
technology, but still by power, institutions and competing collective
actors with unequal organizational resources to advance their
interests. Mozorov would be main exponent of such a position. It's a
valid position to critique the still powerful "Californian ideology",
but hardly new, particularly not in Europe.

Where the terms makes no sense, in my view (and also in Florian's),
is sociologically. The most powerful forces that transform globalized
societies, are all dependent on, and amplified by, digital
technologies. If anything, we are in the middle of the historical
run of this development rather than at the end. The idea that the
digital is just one dimension of society and that we can abandon it,
is ludicrous. Enzensberger's text was just a joke, and the FAZ printed
it because it would stir controversy, not because it had much to offer
intellectually.

So, what this leaves me wondering, in terms of a cultural theory, is
a term useful that makes sense of aesthetically, yet makes no sense
sociologically, or do we need to find terms than can articulate both
levels at the same time?
Felix

-- 

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</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>Patrice Riemens</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sun, 9 Mar 2014 23:17:55 +0100</date>
<content>&gt; Florian Cramer wrote:
&gt;
&gt;&gt; # What is 'Post-digital'?
&gt;
&gt; Florian and I have been talking for a long time now about the
&gt; notion of "post-digital", with me being rather skeptical about its
&gt; usefulness. I still am, but Florian's text clarifies a lot for me.
 &lt;...&gt;

Hi Felix,

There is one context in which Enzensberger's 'cri de coeur' is not a joke,
but makes sense, and I am not really sure HME had not it in mind: that is
if you believe in the likelyhood of an impending 'system collapse' (cf
Paul Virilio's 'accident integral') , in which case all our beloved
technologies are likely collapse as well, either gradually or very fast
indeed, starting with the mother/ motor of all technologies, electricity,
aka 'the grid'. No grid, no cloud, and if &amp; then just kiss your Youtube
addiction goodbye.

I am still somewhat neutral on this issue, mainly because of my 'Asiatic'
history.  Yet I think it should be factored in. In my particular case, I
have experienced that 'technological restraint' has worked out quite fine:
I still don't have a mobile phone.

Cheerio, p+2D!</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>Nick</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Sun, 9 Mar 2014 21:58:27 -0400</date>
<content>Quoth Felix Stalder:

&gt; Enzensberger's text was just a joke, and the FAZ printed
&gt; it because it would stir controversy, not because it had much to offer
&gt; intellectually.

Was it really just a joke? I'm not so sure dismissing it as that is 
appropriate. Sure it necessarily isn't a deep critique of the power 
dynamics at play with some of the newer technologies people are 
using now, but it wasn't designed as that, and I for one find the 
provocations basically reasonable.

Florian's essay was great companion reading, and Geert is certainly 
right to call it out as containing elements of 'offline 
romanticism', but I don't see anything particularly off with the 
essay, and there are certainly things about rejection of 
technological 'necessities' like phones that it's quite reasonable 
to be romantic about.

Nick</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>Sandra Braman</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 01:29:00 -0500 (CDT)</date>
<content>2% of people -- across socio-economic class, meaning it isn't about
cost -- do not want a telephone in the home

having lived that way for many years, i can report that the pleasures
of it are quite real

sandra braman</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>mp</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 09:51:22 +0100</date>
<content>Sandra Braman wrote:
 
&gt; 2% of people -- across socio-economic class, meaning it isn't about
&gt; cost -- do not want a telephone in the home
&gt;
&gt; having lived that way for many years, i can report that the
&gt; pleasures of it are quite real
as long as you have somewhere to go to send emails like this,

and this is not a joke either: communal/collective spaces for
communication can be really good. A place to meet. A digital square.

At the moment the self-organisation appears to me to organise oneself
(and perhaps a partner and 1.1 child) at home, in your own home,
with all the revolutionary, connecting gadgets at hand.... The
individualists' revolution.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.5</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-Postism,</subject>
<from>Keith Sanborn</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:34:58 -0400</date>
<content>It's sometimes difficult to distinguish between a Luddite geezer (in
the Ame rican sense) and a person of age and wisdom with an historical
perspective.

&lt;...&gt;</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.6</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Post-Postism,</subject>
<from>temp</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:45:05 -0600</date>
<content>&gt;I think I'll just say that I have become post-postist.

I hear about post-digital/New Media/Internet/Human/etc that I believe
that this only succeeds at placing us in a corner of opposition or
refusal and makes no suggestions. For all my distrust of it, at least
New Aestheticism posited something. Surfing clubs did. Post-ing does
not.

Post-ism paints us in the corner of refusal without proposition and
little else. It breaks the discourse into a molecular one without
any potential coherence; it is Babel-ism at its height, and paints
the writer into a corner. I think it is some to begin framing new
discourses not as "new" propositions, but as new propositions, like
perhaps the age of convergence or integrationist, or mixed-reality
art or even going back to intermedia. I am still a pluralist; not
into master narratives, but I want propositions for the present, not
mere refusnikism. I want something that says something, not just that
"We're over that", because I'm over being over things.

Patrick.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.7</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-Postism,</subject>
<from>Keith Hart</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:57:58 +0100</date>
<content>Patrick,

Thank you for saying so elegantly what I have been thinking for the
past 30 years or more. I always felt that the promise of fundamental
change was illusory in the 60s and 70s. Things started really moving
in the 80s. OK it was neoliberalism, but for the first time I knew
that history was on the move. Of course it's impossible to understand
our contemporary dilemmas without going further back than that. Yet
the literati produced as their blinding insight into that transitional
decade the hangover of postmodernism, deconstruction, the commonplace
that the contrasts of the Cold War were leaking into each other (what
Hegel called negative dialectic). Postism is decadent or at best
retro. What is postcolonial theory if not nationalism with its eyes
glued to the rearview mirror?

Keith</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.6</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>kontakt |&#160;florian kuhlmann</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 11:57:24 +0100</date>
<content>Am 10.03.2014 um 09:51 schrieb mp:

&gt; and this is not a joke either: communal/collective spaces for
&gt; communication can be really good. A place to meet. A digital square.

i have to admit i less and less believe in this.
the only thing i am strongly recognizing is, that friends, people and socitey are getting more and more unreal, the more they are integrated in this digital communication sphere.

the same thing applys to you.
i can insult you, laugh about you, ignore you, or praise you.
nothing happens.

fact is, all of you are not real. so i am i to you.
i am just an e-mail with some texts, letters, etc for you.
believe it or not. this is the new antisocial reality.

sincerely
an e-mail
--- -- -

http://www.floriankuhlmann.com

mobil 0175 / 4 17 26 05
mail kontakt {AT} floriankuhlmann.com
twitter  {AT} fkuhlmann
skype florian_kuhlmann

--- -- -</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.7</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>mp</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:44:00 +0100</date>
<content>florian kuhlmann wrote:

&gt; Am 10.03.2014 um 09:51 schrieb mp:
&gt; 
&gt;&gt; and this is not a joke either: communal/collective spaces for 
&gt;&gt; communication can be really good. A place to meet. A digital
&gt;&gt; square.
&gt; 
&gt; i have to admit i less and less believe in this. the only thing i am
&gt; strongly recognizing is, that friends, people and socitey are getting
&gt; more and more unreal, the more they are integrated in this digital
&gt; communication sphere.
&gt; 
&gt; the same thing applys to you. i can insult you, laugh about you,
&gt; ignore you, or praise you. nothing happens.
&gt; 
&gt; fact is, all of you are not real. so i am i to you. i am just an
&gt; e-mail with some texts, letters, etc for you. believe it or not. this
&gt; is the new antisocial reality.

yes, and probably due to having stared at the screen for too long, you
missed the point (and you appear to say the same thing, but present as
if it was a contraindication): if we both had had to go to some real
space and place,
with chairs, windows, cables, doors and an outside, perhaps a little
cafe with some Zapatista coffee, we could have had a chat about this -
maybe at the "nettime table" - and then I wouldn't have had to clarify
by email and could instead have spend more time with you there, or my
kids in the garden.

Ever been in an Indian phone centre? Now that'a a buzzing place..

mp</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.8</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>Griffis, Ryan</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 12:28:18 -0500</date>
<content>This discussion, especially related to questions of "mindful
disconnection," recalls Sigfried Giedion's 1948 "anonymous history,"
"Mechanization Takes Command."

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=acls;idno=heb01139

As he put it:

"Never has mankind possessed so many instruments for abolishing
slavery. But the promises of a better life have not been kept. All we
have to show so far is a rather disquieting inability to organize the
world, or even to organize ourselves."

Of course, the idea that any instruments have the potential to abolish
slavery has to be read against Eric's statement: "Whatever technology
and/or social process that can be used to strengthen the interests of
strategic power, will be used to strengthen the interests of strategic
power."

Nonetheless, I found it a very useful historical analysis to consider
alongside these discussions.

Best,
ryan</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.9</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>John Hopkins</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 10:33:49 -0700</date>
<content>Rousseau comes fleetingly to mind:

"The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and
protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each
associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may
still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before."

And a short extract from my dissertation that resonates with that
question of how to proceed while propping up the wider techno-social
system *less*:

"We most impact the power concentrations of the Regime by cultivating
an understanding of where our energy comes from, at all scales,
where it goes, and most importantly, where our attention is engaged:
on which signals, on which flows. In the process of paying close
attention to the highly mediated, amplified, signals of the Regime,
directed by its protocols, we confirm our reciprocal role as its
optimized energy source. By (re)turning our creative attentions to
the granular sources of the Regime's energy -- to the individual
Others around us -- and spending our life-energy, our life-time in
less mediated Dialogue with them via our own protocols, we immediately
begin draining the Regime of its primary power source. We preserve
those limited life-energies for more local and immediate encounters.
It is within these energized encounters, these Dialogues between the
Self and the Other, where transformation, (r)evolution, and change
are ultimately sited. As a media artist, it is this generation of
localized protocols that is perhaps the most effective strategy to
mitigate or even reverse the slide toward hierarchic centralization
[and consequent surveillance!!]. It should be some solace that though
we cannot escape the ultimate destiny of Life on the planet: in the
mean while we may choose to go with the flow of dialogue, embracing
change in the Self and in the Other, here, now."

and this aside, crucially: http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/1199

Cheers,
John

--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
photographer, media artist, archivist
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.22</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Post-digital</subject>
<from>d.garcia</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 18:10:26 +0000</date>
<content>Felix Wrote

&gt; Where the terms makes no sense, in my view (and also in Florian's),
&gt; is sociologically. The most powerful forces that transform globalized
&gt; societies, are all dependent on, and amplified by, digital
&gt; technologies. If anything, we are in the middle of the historical
&gt; run of this development rather than at the end. The idea that the
&gt; digital is just one dimension of society and that we can abandon it,
&gt; is ludicrous.

Along with Sociology might it also be a worth including "psychology"
in the mix. Particularly in those spaces where digital management
tools such as gantt charts and other popular workflow apps along with
their digital jargon have shaped influential forms of pop psychology,
such as the Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) (whose very name is
self incriminating) In turn these 'instruments' insinuate themselves
in to the working day of most organisations becoming the default argot
of neo-manegerial audit culture with its positivistic lexicon of
'solutions' .

This landscape is described in rich and entertaining detail in Evil
Media by Mathew Fuller and Andrew Jofey who have done us a great
service of mapping and describing this domain of what they have dubbed
'grey media'. A range of connections linking computing, and digital
management and business applications with NLP type psychology and
management self help books. Collectively this digitally inspired
constellation has metastasised into a weirdly seductive language
(seductive because it suggests the possibility of controling our
events) that is all the more powerful BECAUSE it is unspectacular. As
the term 'grey media' suggests it fades into background becoming the
social and psychological infrastructure of the grey media age.

In a weird inversion of the Debord, Grey Media deploys digital culture
to bring us the 'society of the unspectacular'

David 

------------------------
d a v i d  g a r c i a
new-tactical-research.co.uk</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>8.0</nbr>
<subject>[spectre] M. Punt: Postdigital Analogue</subject>
<from>Andreas Broeckmann</from>
<to>spectre@mikrolisten.de</to>
<date>Mon, 5 Nov 2001 13:11:09 +0200</date>
<content>LEA Volume 9, Number 10
&lt;http://mitpress.mit.edu/e-journals/LEA/&gt;

Editorial

&lt; Human Consciousness and the Postdigital Analogue &gt;
by Michael Punt, E-mail: &lt;Mpunt@easynet.co.uk&gt;

As Steven Wilson points out in his review of the book Ars Electronica, Facing the Future, this book is "a marvelous resource that will be much appreciated by artists, critics, historians, and anyone interested in the convergence of art and technology." (See LDR Vol. 9, No. 8, August 2001) Among other things, the book provides a historical record that catalogues the changing perceptions of the emergence of digital technology as a popular medium. Seventeen years ago, for example, Gene Youngblood reminded us that the computer translates the continuous phenomena of the world into discrete units. At the same time, Peter Weibel pointed out that whereas the analogical follows principles of similarity, congruency and continuity, the digital uses the smallest discontinuous, non- homogeneous elements. Five years later Roy Ascott, with characteristic visionary insight, appealed for a restoration of the metaphor to the agenda in order that the undivided whole could once again be regained. It was a call that Nick Herbert responded to a year later in a lucid and accessible account of quantum physics, concluding with some irony that holistic physics really would erase the distinction between subject and object and there would be a real danger of getting lost in space. Facing the Future's history lesson ends in 1998 with Friedrich Kittler's confirmation that in the realms of electronic warfare we resisted this danger since copying a "hostile CPU is easier, cheaper, and therefore more likely to proliferate than copying a hostile phase radar." This is not merely the carry- through of old technology into the new (as, for example, film and video), but a return to the ideal of the analogue. According to Kittler's analysis of warfare, in less than a decade digital media recovered the relevance of the principles of similarity, congruency and continuity. This apparent persistence of the analogue invites us to consider that the morphological resemblance between pre- and post-digital modes of expression (or industrial and enlightenment, for that matter) could be significant symptoms of the hesitance of users to abandon "felt" experience in favor of the =E9clat of &gt;seductive technologies of description.

At the distance that Ars Electronica: Facing the Future allows us, it becomes apparent that empowered users negotiating with digital media have found themselves engaged in this recurring cycle, in which the idealization of representation is in conflict with the dominant technology, which disavows daily experience as an undifferentiated circulation of metaphors for desire and resistance. As much was at stake in the pre-cinematic age, when Jules Etienne Marey, for example, inquiring into the nature of movement, regarded the new techniques of chronophotography as inferior to graphic methods using smoked drums and scribes attached to pneumatic sensors. Photo-technology used shutters that insisted upon the moment as a finite duration and consequently ruptured the flow of movement as experienced in a flux of time. The pseudo- guarantees of objectivity that this scientifically acceptable idealization could offer, however, outweighed the deficits, and the representation of movement as an incremental sequence in a small finite and discontinuous moment became an acceptable norm to the extent that the subject was indeed collapsed into the object and temporarily "lost in space." However, whereas chronophotography chained vision to the materiality of the body, in the post-chronophotographic analogue the principles of similarity, congruency and continuity found new life in the cinema of narrative integration (the movies) which rescued the subject in a seamless reality of the infinitely malleable virtual bodies, for whom the eye was transcendent.

The intellectual project of Ars Electronica, Facing the Future leaves little doubt that the digital revolution was,  from its technological and conceptual inception, always destined to be the postdigital in which similarity, congruence and continuity found new applications. At stake in the postdigital analogue however, is more than the recovery of the subject: it is nothing less than the question of whose vision of paradise prevails. The postdigital analogue points to a version of paradise that is not a finite discontinuous place or a non-homogeneous moment of time, not Eden in a nostalgic future, but a thick membrane in which local conditions, desire and resistance are constantly stabilized to form a whole identity. Where the digital proposes the perfect finite conditions for a perfect existence regardless of matter (as for example in the human genome project), in the postdigital analogue (as for example in the ironies of genetic and wet biological art) human consciousness is regarded as almost infinitely malleable, able to shape its identity in response to local and technological conditions and aware all the time of the range of possibilities not yet developed, both digital and analogue.</content>
</mail>
</mails>
</chapter>