Full_digest_rescheduled/xml/3.Network.xml

<chapter>
<title>Network</title>
<desc>...</desc>
<mails>
<mail>
<nbr>0.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Network Fears and Desires</subject>
<from>Geert Lovink</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Fri, 7 Aug 1998 11:25:14 +0200 (MET DST)</date>
<content>Network Fears and Desires
Some Strategies to Overcome the Malaise

By Geert Lovink

"When I hear the word 'interactive', I grab my gun. And shoot." (Andre Simon)

Once a network, with its loose groupings of individuals and groups has
gone through the exciting, initial phase of meeting, discovering each
other's new ideas and concepts, and staging common events, it seems boring
to continue, engage with the same old persona and read the same arguments
again and again. Suddenly, we are discovering our own limitations. There
were the short, intensive periods, full of ecstatic collective experience
and the dull, stretched years of isolated struggle and survival. The dense
time of the small, expanding (inter)networks now seems to reach its
vanishing point. Work is being continued in smaller groups which might be
more sustainable in overcoming the Long Boom of Boredom. The seamless
creative potential of the collective body has ended up in repetition and
certain patterns begin to reveal themselves. The Euro-summer of '98 smells
like the mid seventies, late eighties. Not dark, rather grey. No paradigm
shifts ahead, just business as usual. The web is in place, corporate
content now finally dominates and the constant technological inventions
keep on surprising, creating an addiction for even more promising updates. 
Ready for the next disappointment. 

Network growth is not a linear process. Once the Net enters the level of
the economy-of-scale, it leaves its first inhabitants behind and enters
entirely different levels. Even the most ugly, compromised cultural
managers, former net pioneers turned exploiters, will, sooner or later, be
overruled and puked out by the powers to be. We are now in the latter days
of amazon.com, Yahoo!, real.com, Netscape etc. Their success stories will
not last forever. Don't believe the market. Widespread neo-liberal market
biases makes it hard to make a realistic estimation of their chances - let
alone making a critical analysis (or even materialistic theory) of the
cyber economy. For the time being we all are still blinded by all the
promises, potentials, rumours, hypes. This especially counts for the
astronomical, truly virtual stock values.

Growth no longer effects net-related initiatives in the fields of arts,
culture and politics, no matter if they are into making money or not. 
Mega, "the Art of the Big", Wired's 6.07 cover story by Bruce Sterling,
about Hong Kong's new airport, Shanghai's sixty-nine skyscrapers under
construction, China's large dams and the tunnels of CERN can also be read
as an exotic travelogue for those who have stayed behind, not simply as an
appeal to the (tired) community to transcend in order to, once again,
re-invent itself. The role of the business avant-garde is played out and
they can learn some lessons now from their historical art predecessors.
There is, for example, a saturation point for bandwidth, beyond which,
more simply does not mean faster. Against all expectations, the Internet
is creating a new Mass of "users" that just shut up and click/listen. 
They are "watching Internet", a phrase that would have been impossible to
come up with a few years ago. This silent majority in the making, which
will only know the red 'Buy' button, was not envisioned by the early
adapters and the visionaries of the first hour. "It is a Mall World, after
all," Wired's Gary Wolf has to admit, not sure whether to be disgusted or
to embrace it.

Political economy? Not again! It should have died long ago, stumbling into
some non-linear hole of history. There is a return of the suppressed. 
Economy is not such a favourite topic in the age of pastel-coloured
optimism, despite of the rise of popular capitalism with its junk stocks. 
We'd better ignore it and keep on tinkering. But this form of economic
escapism is not an option anymore. We all have to survive. After the long
farewell of the Welfare State and its less successful relative, state
communism, neo-liberalism is in place now. It has not been imposed on us
but has slowly gained importance, as a bottom-up ideology. Alternative,
small scale do-it-yourself projects seem to fit well into this. Even the
radical autonomous and anarchistic utopias that had their historical
objections against the State. 

Everybody is bearing some guilt, expect perhaps for a handfull of
analytical Marxists. They have always been right, being in the luxurious
position of not having been involved in any struggle for the last 20, 30
years. Their objective Truth is gaining importance as an unbearable wisdom
of the fatal destinies ahead of us. With one eye on the screen streaming
financial data, FT on the breakfast table, this Friendly Marxism without
Subject, has reached its highest stages of scientific alienation. Now it
is for a bloody cold dialectical switch, to become what Marxism always
was: hardcore economic analysis. This time, made in the United States. 
No, Monsieur Jospin, the Internet is not one of the Tres Grand Projects,
despite the European origin of WWW (Geneva). Your "Market economy, not
market society" phrase is a useful (Euro-French) distinction. But let us
not fool ourselves. Marx is at Stanford now, back from the new Berkeley
library, studying the dynamics of Microsoft, Silicon Valley and Wall
Street, writing on his critique of the global managerial class. 

Time to move on. The permanent digital revolution in danger of becoming a
reformist project? The System is effectively taking over, even sucking
itself into the intimate spheres of friendships and personal aims. The
objective Wheel of Net History is taking subjective tolls. Time slips away
and we are caught up in something we never really wanted in the first
place. Web design for Dummies. Anxiety over nothing. Debates with nothing
at stake. Rivalries when there is plenty of loot. But wait a minute. We
know all this. The so-called unavoidable process of decay is not God-given
or a Law of Nature. It is about time to introduce intelligent social
feed-back systems. Indeed, a Collective Intelligence (thanks, Pierre
Levy!)  that can overcome the rather primitive 20th Century model of
birth, rise, success and fall that numerous groups and movements have gone
through. It should be possible to resist both historical and technological
determinism, or at least play a game with these now predictable forces.
This is the search for a media theory, or digital studies in which we can
finally fit the charming or rather fatal wetware factor within the larger
forces of hardware and software development. 

http://www.cybernetics.su, where are you, now that we need you? Big
silence. Perhaps it is up to us, this time. Next player. It is easy to
write down the draft of "The Rise and Decline of the Global Empire". See
the stock markets fall. But that's too macro. It is good to gather
knowledge about economic forces that are behind the Will to Get Wired. But
in the end, they will not tell us much about the psychological processes
within smaller networks, which the Internet still consists of, despite the
current massification. That is what the marketing gold diggers are looking
for: the ultimate secret of the Virtual Community, whatever that may be. 
We need a network psychology, not in the form of some brillant
observations by academic outsiders, but fast and pro-active social wisdom
which can be implemented in groups, small organizations, lists,
techno tribes. Not only to prevent conflicts over nothing, but mainly to
stage real fights, if there is something at stake.

First of all, there is the Media Question. The Spectacle has entered every
possible domain, and its widespread power has made it virtually impossible
to imagine a gesture, form of communication or action which is not
mediated, digitised, archived. All forms of protests and politics are
under its spell. But this tragic reality should not limit ourselves if we
are looking for ways out of broadcast misery. Fine, there is still the
TAZ, the hacker ethic, models for Electronic Civil Disobedience, tactical
media, concepts that might be flexible enough to resist the pressures from
the Forces of Simulation. But like all ideas, these Memes have a limited
lifespan. They must be updated constantly and renamed in order not to lose
their magical attraction. We should not be sad, or even conservative about
this. If the Bolo Bolo, TAZ, squat, rave, virtual community is turning up
in a new configuration, we should be able to recognize and welcome it. And
to witness the birth of such a new entity is certainly a privilege. 

After the gold-rush, the We is being questioned, in danger of
disintegrating into a thousand lonely hearts, potentially becoming victims
of the commodification strategies of the Big players. We are not one, and
there has never been unity, specially not these days. The We form in the
age of the Net is one of the few possibilities left to address groups,
sub-networks and formulate common strategies, (if indeed people are
interested in collaboration and exchange...). Heterogeneous policies are
always in danger of falling apart, much more than parties, trade-unions
and other institutions. One of the tricks to avoid people organising
themselves is to reduce their argument to their Private Opinion which is
seen as a contribution to the general (democratic?) discourse. In times of
consolidation, dispersion and decay, the We is under debate, whilst at the
same time more used than ever. It is the time of strategies. At the moment
of the short highs there is only the unspoken, ecstatic We feeling. Later
on, we do not want others to speak for others. This is anyway a
more general tension, a feeling of discontent, between explicit ways of
hyper individuality and loneliness on the one side, and the closed,
sometimes claustrophic atmosphere inside groups, collectives, companies
and movements on the other side. This should be the starting point for
every contemporary debate on new ways of organizing.

Commodify your dissent. Certainly. And you will be commodified too. This
fear is even more prominent and destructive these days compared to the
unavoidable mediation we have to deal with, (and practice). For some,
there is the pleasure of getting to know the rules of the game,
understanding the tricks of Doing Business, studying the metaphysics of
making money and its ritual, sacral aspects, fooling around with The
Suits. But for most, the workers and not executives, commodification means
regulation of work, creativity and (soft) subversions. At the first
glance, commodification feels like justice, a liberation, a chance to
finally get back some of the money for all the efforts that have been
invested in the video, music, text or software one has been working on for
such a long time. But in most cases this only remains a promise. The
famous Sell-Outs seldom pay off, compared to the real money others are
making with ordinary jobs. This cheapness, combined with strong, personal
feelings of discontent, even guilt is the main reason behind the current
wave of paranoia about commodification. It is the fear of betrayal for no
reason, being left alone with empty hands, having to work with strangers
that have no clue at all. Yes, one can become infected by corporate germs,
but this is easy to cure. One good book, documentary or travel will do. We
all have to be aware of neo-liberal rhetoric, but ideology is not the
issue here. From the political, strategic perspective, the fear we are
speaking of here is one of the main obstacles for people to organise
themselves and engage with each other in serious way beyond occasional
collaborations. Commitment and dedication these days intertwine with
business, and this is deadly. 

Conciousness Regained.  Radical media pragmatism demands that the actors
remain Cool. Who can still proclaim to be Multi-media after the monstrous
misuse of this term? Yes. It should still be possible to ignore all market
forces, cheap trends and keep on playing. There is a state of
hyper-awareness, to transform, disappear, give up terrains that have been
occupied, and continue at the same time. What now counts is integrity. It
is getting easy these days to become resigned. There are a thousand
reasons to quit, or to continue on the same grocery level. The world,
structured by pre-cooked events, ready to be microwaved and consumed, can
be rejected.  Downright reality is unbearable these days. "No spiritual
surrender", an Amsterdam graffiti says. Colourless digital existence can
be softened by self-made utopias, hallucinatory experiences, with or
without recreational drugs and technologies. Regular switching to other
channels which are outside the cyber realm is an option. There are
countless universes.  Negroponte's existential reductionism ("In being
digital I am me.") is just one of them. "You are only real with your
make-up on." (Neil Young) 

Here Comes the New Desire. Unknown, forgotten forms of negation, refusal,
anger and pleasure are there and will be open (even towards E.T's), whilst
still encrypted against the (mentality) police forces and fashion hunters.
There are plenty of sadistic traps for the trend researchers and their
clientele: Alternative radio, Independent labels, French theory (from
twenty years ago), interactive games, on-line events, techno.net This is
so cruel: see them buying, the poor bastards, desperate to get an
identity, any, which makes them feel alive, for a moment or two. 
Cybercynical Knowledge 98. So their search engines have to be distrusted,
ignored, misled. The people-to-people networks will lead one to the right
source, not the databases of the corporations/states. Computers generate
useless data, not contexualized information. This should be knowledge4all.

The postmodern late-leftist discourse of the '68 generation has now closed
all its possible options. There is no way out for them, locked up, as they
are, in their down-sized, optimised, professional institutions. So let it
be. The same can be said of the more recent 'new social movements', with
exception of sudden outbursts of un-controlled (and therefore not
organized) social-ethnic unrest. Let us not get distracted by ideological
pseudo-events such as the Culture Wars or paranoid waves of xenophobia. 
Some fights are shadow boxing. Others are real. Now it is time for other
options, in search for the genuine New that does not fit into known
patterns of eternal return, being taken back into the System. Virtual
Volutarism means being able to overcome moods of melancholy, perfectly
aware of all possible limits and opportunities, looking for the
impossible, on the side, out of reach of both futurists and nostalgics.
Being able to present alternative realities, chocking the Johnsons, way
out of reach of the Appropriation Machines. The market authorities will
arrive too late. Yes, this is a dream, but we do cannot survive in a
(digital) environment without options. In order to get at the point, we
should reach a level of collective 'self conciousness' to overcome the
system of fear and distrust which is now spreading. No attempt to
reconstruct what worked once. No glorification of the inevitable. In order
not to throw away everything which has been built up we should invent
concepts on top of it and not narrow all our options into making the world
institutionally legible. The "Next Age", the name of a department store in
Pudong/Shanghai, is hybrid: half-clean, somehow dirty, never entirely
digitised, stuck between real growth and an even more real crisis. 
Obsessed with progress, in full despair. But there are other options, and
we can realise them. "Get Organised" (n5m3) 

[edited by matthew fuller]</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>1.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; IEDEREEN: Re: Network Fears and Desires</subject>
<from>t byfield</from>
<to>nettime-l@desk.nl</to>
<date>Mon, 10 Aug 1998 15:18:22 -0400</date>
<content>[What follows is a response by Caroline Nevejan of the Society for Old
 and New Media to Geert Lovink's "Network fears and Desires." It wasn't
 written with a larger audience in mind (which in the context of nettime
 is a good thing: nettime is sinking under the weight of these mailbomb
 essays, it's like getting classical statuary in your mailbox, entire
 Italian baroque fountains in ascii art... Think: smaller, faster, light-
 er). Anyway, Caroline's remarks point up a whole range of issues that
 tend to get lost when "Theory" decks itself out as a Science: the map
 is not the terrain, and the terrain is human relations--as in children,
 friends, allies. A good thing to meditate on in these hot summer days
 (apologies to those down under"), because it isn't going to get any
 colder in the long run. There's too much heat, too little warmth. 

 I've cleaned it up some, so mistakes are my own not Caroline's. -T]

&gt; &gt;Network Fears and Desires
&gt; &gt;Some Strategies to Overcome the Malaise
&gt; &gt;
&gt; &gt;By Geert Lovink
&gt; &gt;
&gt; &gt;"When I hear the word 'interactive', I grab my gun. And shoot." 
&gt; &gt; (Andre Simon)
&gt; &gt;
&gt; &gt;Once a network, with its loose groupings of individuals and groups has
&gt; &gt;gone through the exciting, initial phase of meeting, discovering each
&gt; &gt;other's new ideas and concepts, and staging common events, it seems boring
&gt; &gt;to continue, engage with the same old persona and read the same arguments
&gt; &gt;again and again. Suddenly, we are discovering our own limitations. There
&gt; &gt;were the short, intensive periods, full of ecstatic collective experience
&gt; &gt;and the dull, stretched years of isolated struggle and survival. The dense
&gt; &gt;time of the small, expanding (inter)networks now seems to reach its
&gt; &gt;vanishing point. Work is being continued in smaller groups which might be
&gt; &gt;more sustainable in overcoming the Long Boom of Boredom. The seamless
&gt; &gt;creative potential of the collective body has ended up in repetition and
&gt; &gt;certain patterns begin to reveal themselves. The Euro-summer of '98 smells
&gt; &gt;like the mid seventies, late eighties. Not dark, rather grey. No paradigm
&gt; &gt;shifts ahead, just business as usual. The web is in place, corporate
&gt; &gt;content now finally dominates and the constant technological inventions
&gt; &gt;keep on surprising, creating an addiction for even more promising updates.
&gt; &gt;Ready for the next disappointment.
&gt; 
&gt; I do not agree. This may have been true for the last two or three summers
&gt; but not anymore. It may feel the same, but like in the mid seventies and 
&gt; the late eighties this is a time of storing and shifting, about deciding 
&gt; what is of real value. That is why it looks like silence, but actually big
&gt; decisions for the coming years are now being made in peoples own lives. I
&gt; remember the summer of 1988 or 1989 and then suddenly november 1989 the
&gt; wall falls. Or the summers of the mid seventies where after the huge
&gt; political mass movements happened just after (anti-nuke, squatting,
&gt; environmental etc.)
&gt;
&gt; These are times of "big hope gathering", of creating new determinations, it
&gt; is the silence again before new dynamics enroll. Even in the Hague's
&gt; politics, silence and not knowing what exactly is going to happen are
&gt; there. People say it is consolidation, but with very outspoken people. I
&gt; find that promising. As well for ourselves, things feel hard and
&gt; complicated, but we are also regrouping. Deciding what value is where and
&gt; what to do with it. The contrast between solo survival and collective
&gt; sharing I find a dubious criterium. I think quite a lot of the collective
&gt; sharing of the last years did not have serious "reach out" ambitions. It
&gt; was present as a commentator, not taking resposibility. One of the things I
&gt; also read in the Soros text of new strategies. It is resposibility time
&gt; again. I am very happy we have had these years of hunter gathering and
&gt; networking for fun. It is a good basis for new steps.
&gt; 
&gt; 
&gt; &gt;Network growth is not a linear process. Once the Net enters the level of
&gt; &gt;the economy-of-scale, it leaves its first inhabitants behind and enters
&gt; &gt;entirely different levels. Even the most ugly, compromised cultural
&gt; &gt;managers, former net pioneers turned exploiters, will, sooner or later, be
&gt; &gt;overruled and puked out by the powers to be. We are now in the latter days
&gt; &gt;of amazon.com, Yahoo!, real.com, Netscape etc. Their success stories will
&gt; &gt;not last forever. Don't believe the market. Widespread neo-liberal market
&gt; &gt;biases makes it hard to make a realistic estimation of their chances - let
&gt; &gt;alone making a critical analysis (or even materialistic theory) of the
&gt; &gt;cyber economy. For the time being we all are still blinded by all the
&gt; &gt;promises, potentials, rumours, hypes. This especially counts for the
&gt; &gt;astronomical, truly virtual stock values.
&gt; 
&gt; One of the things that struck me in confrontation with people who were the
&gt; first inhabitants of the sixties was the fact that after their collective
&gt; sharing and huge input, they felt betrayed by the world. And hardly got
&gt; over it. Some turned cynical, some created private lives, some were to be
&gt; said new exploiters etc. It has surprised me that very few peopole could
&gt; see themselves being present in a historical moment, that was the big
&gt; present for them in their personal lives. But I felt regularly betrayed by
&gt; their disappointments. They were young and promising, had a great time,
&gt; made a difference, so why not go on and be extra open for new developments
&gt; instead of taking the old discourse to judge new possibilities.
&gt;
&gt; One could argue that the developments in the stockmarket reflect the
&gt; awareness (shared by the first inhabitants, actually formulated first by
&gt; the first inhabitants) that information technologies have the potential to
&gt; change our ways of conviviality. Now that the market as one of the players
&gt; is "in her way" doing this, the least to do is to retreat, or become
&gt; cynical. Money is not good or bad in itself. It is what you do with it. The
&gt; fact that venture capital has moved into the arena of information 
&gt; technologies since a few years, but now even visible on the stockmarket, 
&gt; creates finally lots of content possibilities. The means are there. I do 
&gt; agree that marketplace and conviviality are an interesting couple. Good 
&gt; critical analysis are more needed then ever, formulation of fundamental 
&gt; rights and duties are crucial. Conviviality is the buzzword. A networked 
&gt; society with spiritual expressions part of it. If not fundamentalism, be 
&gt; it capitalistic or islamic or christian or one we do not know yet gets a 
&gt; chance to take over.
&gt; 
&gt; &gt;Growth no longer effects net-related initiatives in the fields of arts,
&gt; &gt;culture and politics, no matter if they are into making money or not.
&gt; &gt;Mega, "the Art of the Big", Wired's 6.07 cover story by Bruce Sterling,
&gt; &gt;about Hong Kong's new airport, Shanghai's sixty-nine skyscrapers under
&gt; &gt;construction, China's large dams and the tunnels of CERN can also be read
&gt; &gt;as an exotic travelogue for those who have stayed behind, not simply as an
&gt; &gt;appeal to the (tired) community to transcend in order to, once again,
&gt; &gt;re-invent itself. The role of the business avant-garde is played out and
&gt; &gt;they can learn some lessons now from their historical art predecessors.
&gt; &gt;There is, for example, a saturation point for bandwidth, beyond which,
&gt; &gt;more simply does not mean faster. Against all expectations, the Internet
&gt; &gt;is creating a new Mass of "users" that just shut up and click/listen.
&gt; &gt;They are "watching Internet", a phrase that would have been impossible to
&gt; &gt;come up with a few years ago. This silent majority in the making, which
&gt; &gt;will only know the red "Buy" button, was not envisioned by the early
&gt; &gt;adapters and the visionaries of the first hour. "It is a Mall World, after
&gt; &gt;all," Wired's Gary Wolf has to admit, not sure whether to be disgusted or
&gt; &gt;to embrace it.
&gt; 
&gt; To realize saturation points is very handy in survival strategies, but does
&gt; not mean at all that previous thinking and doings our outdated in the sense
&gt; that they lost value. Being played out is just a temporary thing. It is the
&gt; silent moment in which you change strategy. It is a fundamental part of
&gt; being flexible and curious to what is going to happen next in this
&gt; interesting world. Only those who fix themselves in one perception will be
&gt; worn out.
&gt; 
&gt; The idea that someone who is silent in the public arena has lost all human
&gt; caracteristics, I find extremely arrogant. Yes we all have to shop every
&gt; day, so it has been a Mall World all along.
&gt;
&gt; The silent majority in Baudrillard's vision in those days only wanted to be
&gt; connected, that was enough. Now we even shop! Actually this is only the
&gt; beginning.
&gt; 
&gt; &gt;Political economy? Not again! It should have died long ago, stumbling into
&gt; &gt;some non-linear hole of history. There is a return of the suppressed.
&gt; &gt;Economy is not such a favourite topic in the age of pastel-coloured
&gt; &gt;optimism, despite of the rise of popular capitalism with its junk stocks.
&gt; &gt;We'd better ignore it and keep on tinkering. But this form of economic
&gt; &gt;escapism is not an option anymore. We all have to survive. After the long
&gt; &gt;farewell of the Welfare State and its less successful relative, state
&gt; &gt;communism, neo-liberalism is in place now. It has not been imposed on us
&gt; &gt;but has slowly gained importance, as a bottom-up ideology. Alternative,
&gt; &gt;small scale do-it-yourself projects seem to fit well into this. Even the
&gt; &gt;radical autonomous and anarchistic utopias that had their historical
&gt; &gt;objections against the State.
&gt; 
&gt; I do not understand why you argue against political economy. I agree that
&gt; as far as I know, the terms and ways to do this in are not clear yet. But
&gt; espacially since you express that the suppressed are back (I did not
&gt; notice they were away...), I would argue it is of vital importance. The
&gt; place where these carrying ideas should come from maybe different then
&gt; before, or the constellation in which they can arise. If you think about
&gt; the inside story of Shell in South Africa, or Soros or the microloans in
&gt; Bangladesh, and also there are De Beers in South Africa or a Chinese
&gt; economy, the drug trade etc. It is not simple at all, but it is definitely
&gt; to me a field for what we should pay attention: there is a whole range
&gt; from slavery to exploitation, to collective work, to free agents. I find
&gt; the notion of sustainable communities still very viable. That is why I
&gt; think new thinking has more chance to arise when economics are not analyzed
&gt; or inspired by just figures, nor can you judge ideas without realization of
&gt; financial sustainability (survival). Political economy and its translations
&gt; are important.
&gt; 
&gt; &gt;Everybody is bearing some guilt, expect perhaps for a handfull of
&gt; &gt;analytical Marxists. They have always been right, being in the luxurious
&gt; &gt;position of not having been involved in any struggle for the last 20, 30
&gt; &gt;years. Their objective Truth is gaining importance as an unbearable wisdom
&gt; &gt;of the fatal destinies ahead of us. With one eye on the screen streaming
&gt; &gt;financial data, FT on the breakfast table, this Friendly Marxism without
&gt; &gt;Subject, has reached its highest stages of scientific alienation. Now it
&gt; &gt;is for a bloody cold dialectical switch, to become what Marxism always
&gt; &gt;was: hardcore economic analysis. This time, made in the United States.
&gt; &gt;No, Monsieur Jospin, the Internet is not one of the Tres Grand Projects,
&gt; &gt;despite the European origin of WWW (Geneva). Your "Market economy, not
&gt; &gt;market society" phrase is a useful (Euro-French) distinction. But let us
&gt; &gt;not fool ourselves. Marx is at Stanford now, back from the new Berkeley
&gt; &gt;library, studying the dynamics of Microsoft, Silicon Valley and Wall
&gt; &gt;Street, writing on his critique of the global managerial class.
&gt; 
&gt; Guilt is a deep thing, not really the matter here. I'd be very happy, if 
&gt; it could happen, people would study for over 30 years. I am looking forward 
&gt; to reading it. Missed Marx for quite a while. Do you think he'll get a
&gt; debate this time around?
&gt; 
&gt; &gt;Time to move on. The permanent digital revolution in danger of becoming a
&gt; &gt;reformist project? The System is effectively taking over, even sucking
&gt; &gt;itself into the intimate spheres of friendships and personal aims. The
&gt; &gt;objective Wheel of Net History is taking subjective tolls. Time slips away
&gt; &gt;and we are caught up in something we never really wanted in the first
&gt; &gt;place. Web design for Dummies. Anxiety over nothing. Debates with nothing
&gt; &gt;at stake. Rivalries when there is plenty of loot. But wait a minute. We
&gt; &gt;know all this. The so-called unavoidable process of decay is not God-given
&gt; &gt;or a Law of Nature. It is about time to introduce intelligent social
&gt; &gt;feed-back systems. Indeed, a Collective Intelligence (thanks, Pierre
&gt; &gt;Levy!)  that can overcome the rather primitive 20th Century model of
&gt; &gt;birth, rise, success and fall that numerous groups and movements have gone
&gt; &gt;through. It should be possible to resist both historical and technological
&gt; &gt;determinism, or at least play a game with these now predictable forces.
&gt; &gt;This is the search for a media theory, or digital studies in which we can
&gt; &gt;finally fit the charming or rather fatal wetware factor within the larger
&gt; &gt;forces of hardware and software development.
&gt; &gt;
&gt; &gt;http://www.cybernetics.su, where are you, now that we need you? Big
&gt; &gt;silence. Perhaps it is up to us, this time. Next player. It is easy to
&gt; &gt;write down the draft of "The Rise and Decline of the Global Empire". See
&gt; &gt;the stock markets fall. But that's too macro. It is good to gather
&gt; &gt;knowledge about economic forces that are behind the Will to Get Wired. But
&gt; &gt;in the end, they will not tell us much about the psychological processes
&gt; &gt;within smaller networks, which the Internet still consists of, despite the
&gt; &gt;current massification. That is what the marketing gold diggers are looking
&gt; &gt;for: the ultimate secret of the Virtual Community, whatever that may be.
&gt; &gt;We need a network psychology, not in the form of some brillant
&gt; &gt;observations by academic outsiders, but fast and pro-active social wisdom
&gt; &gt;which can be implemented in groups, small organizations, lists,
&gt; &gt;techno tribes. Not only to prevent conflicts over nothing, but mainly to
&gt; &gt;stage real fights, if there is something at stake.
&gt; 
&gt; Here I agree very much with you. Network psychology is what I missed in in
&gt; what I read of the works of Castells. But is also what I miss in your text
&gt; here. Psychologically speaking, there are no Dummies, there is no anxiety
&gt; over nothing, decay does not exist, the system is part of you but you are
&gt; not the system, history always demands subjective tolls, collective memory
&gt; is a fundamental root for knowledge, collective intelligence a driving
&gt; force in the development of human kind.
&gt;
&gt; I agree we need fast and pro-active wisdom, but wisdom is not something one
&gt; can implement. And even more so I would never talk about implementing
&gt; wisdom to prevent conflicts (even over nothing, because that is only
&gt; perception) or stage fights. Wisdom has to do with sensitivity and
&gt; endurance in "let it be", without loosing your energy or connections. "An
&gt; implementing wisdom" machine sounds like a contradiction in terms, but
&gt; maybe an interesting sort of wishful thinking that may generate useful
&gt; insights for designing networks in a different way.
&gt; 
&gt; Cybernetics as far as I know, has always been inspired by the knowledge
&gt; (or and wisdom) embedded in nature or indigenous societies. The notion of
&gt; not copying the brain, but seducing or triggering the brain to work
&gt; differently by using its own powers. I know of some brain and entropy
&gt; stories, but how does wisdom fit in? Many of the cybernetics people of
&gt; those days ended up in Physics and Bhuddism, or artificial intelligence, 
&gt; or net design. It would be interesting to look into this again.
&gt; 
&gt; &gt;First of all, there is the Media Question. The Spectacle has entered every
&gt; &gt;possible domain, and its widespread power has made it virtually impossible
&gt; &gt;to imagine a gesture, form of communication or action which is not
&gt; &gt;mediated, digitised, archived. All forms of protests and politics are
&gt; &gt;under its spell. But this tragic reality should not limit ourselves if we
&gt; &gt;are looking for ways out of broadcast misery. Fine, there is still the
&gt; &gt;TAZ, the hacker ethic, models for Electronic Civil Disobedience, tactical
&gt; &gt;media, concepts that might be flexible enough to resist the pressures from
&gt; &gt;the Forces of Simulation. But like all ideas, these Memes have a limited
&gt; &gt;lifespan. They must be updated constantly and renamed in order not to lose
&gt; &gt;their magical attraction. We should not be sad, or even conservative about
&gt; &gt;this. If the Bolo Bolo, TAZ, squat, rave, virtual community is turning up
&gt; &gt;in a new configuration, we should be able to recognize and welcome it. And
&gt; &gt;to witness the birth of such a new entity is certainly a privilege.
&gt; 
&gt; The forces of simulation and the collective amnesia that goes with it are a
&gt; serious problem of our time. In the sixties there was a connection between
&gt; thinking and doing--one of the crucial elements, inspired by the good and
&gt; wrong of the second world war. In our days now this ethic of a person's word
&gt; is a person's deed, is sort of drifting in the air. In the juridical systems
&gt; this confusion is very present (international tribunal in the Hague on
&gt; Yugoslavia, Rodney King, OJ Simpson and Clinton, the Truth commision in
&gt; South Africa, Singapore's hard-line). What surprises me is that so many
&gt; people take it serious. Actually in the field of juridical philosophy
&gt; something is happening in this regard--between states and also in the 
&gt; public arena.
&gt; 
&gt; The rewriting of history all the time is fundamental to human history. The
&gt; strange thing is that now we have all these data stored. Will they make a
&gt; difference? To keep history alive it has to be rewritten all the time. The
&gt; change is that we have this huge outside data storage, fact-filing system.
&gt; How can they inspire the stories we tell children?
&gt; 
&gt; 
&gt; &gt;After the gold-rush, the We is being questioned, in danger of
&gt; &gt;disintegrating into a thousand lonely hearts, potentially becoming victims
&gt; &gt;of the commodification strategies of the Big players. We are not one, and
&gt; &gt;there has never been unity, specially not these days. The We form in the
&gt; &gt;age of the Net is one of the few possibilities left to address groups,
&gt; &gt;sub-networks and formulate common strategies, (if indeed people are
&gt; &gt;interested in collaboration and exchange...). Heterogeneous policies are
&gt; &gt;always in danger of falling apart, much more than parties, trade-unions
&gt; &gt;and other institutions. One of the tricks to avoid people organising
&gt; &gt;themselves is to reduce their argument to their Private Opinion which is
&gt; &gt;seen as a contribution to the general (democratic?) discourse. In times of
&gt; &gt;consolidation, dispersion and decay, the We is under debate, whilst at the
&gt; &gt;same time more used than ever. It is the time of strategies. At the moment
&gt; &gt;of the short highs there is only the unspoken, ecstatic We feeling. Later
&gt; &gt;on, we do not want others to speak for others. This is anyway a
&gt; &gt;more general tension, a feeling of discontent, between explicit ways of
&gt; &gt;hyper individuality and loneliness on the one side, and the closed,
&gt; &gt;sometimes claustrophic atmosphere inside groups, collectives, companies
&gt; &gt;and movements on the other side. This should be the starting point for
&gt; &gt;every contemporary debate on new ways of organizing.
&gt; 
&gt; Most organization happens (if not all) because people feel a necessity to
&gt; do so. Most organization happens without the organization itself as a
&gt; notion, but because people want to get something done (households, streets,
&gt; villages). In the Big Society--with so many people here--schools, parties
&gt; and movements require people to be able to transcend their issues of
&gt; survival and believe systems to the notion of being part of an
&gt; organization. Compromise (or entropy) and strategy (insight in dynamics) is
&gt; part of any system. In the Big Society strategy and organization has become
&gt; a goal in itself; so the radicals have made a goal in itself of not being 
&gt; part of that. I would argue that we should leave these notions behind and 
&gt; become Dummies who organize a household. Perception, compromise, mildness, 
&gt; realization where your love is, is crucial. Espacially now in the Big 
&gt; Society since many people are open to creating "sense". Courage is needed 
&gt; for "coming out".
&gt; 
&gt; In other words get out of this THEM versus WE feeling, we are them and they
&gt; are us--and no guilt.
&gt; 
&gt; 
&gt; &gt;Commodify your dissent. Certainly. And you will be commodified too. This
&gt; &gt;fear is even more prominent and destructive these days compared to the
&gt; &gt;unavoidable mediation we have to deal with, (and practice). For some,
&gt; &gt;there is the pleasure of getting to know the rules of the game,
&gt; &gt;understanding the tricks of Doing Business, studying the metaphysics of
&gt; &gt;making money and its ritual, sacral aspects, fooling around with The
&gt; &gt;Suits. But for most, the workers and not executives, commodification means
&gt; &gt;regulation of work, creativity and (soft) subversions. At the first
&gt; &gt;glance, commodification feels like justice, a liberation, a chance to
&gt; &gt;finally get back some of the money for all the efforts that have been
&gt; &gt;invested in the video, music, text or software one has been working on for
&gt; &gt;such a long time. But in most cases this only remains a promise. The
&gt; &gt;famous Sell-Outs seldom pay off, compared to the real money others are
&gt; &gt;making with ordinary jobs. This cheapness, combined with strong, personal
&gt; &gt;feelings of discontent, even guilt is the main reason behind the current
&gt; &gt;wave of paranoia about commodification. It is the fear of betrayal for no
&gt; &gt;reason, being left alone with empty hands, having to work with strangers
&gt; &gt;that have no clue at all. Yes, one can become infected by corporate germs,
&gt; &gt;but this is easy to cure. One good book, documentary or travel will do. We
&gt; &gt;all have to be aware of neo-liberal rhetoric, but ideology is not the
&gt; &gt;issue here. From the political, strategic perspective, the fear we are
&gt; &gt;speaking of here is one of the main obstacles for people to organise
&gt; &gt;themselves and engage with each other in serious way beyond occasional
&gt; &gt;collaborations. Commitment and dedication these days intertwine with
&gt; &gt;business, and this is deadly.
&gt; 
&gt; When I know a song and I teach it to you, do I have half a song after that?
&gt; Or does my song sound less beautiful? Commodification can also mean that more
&gt; people, or other people, have access. The fear of betrayal, of empty hands
&gt; is true, but t always has been. I think you confuse general behavior
&gt; with the need to be alert. I agree that sharing knowledge and means is 
&gt; harder at the moment, in this particular period when we live, but the
&gt; conclusion I would draw is that we need to formulate better the reasons why 
&gt; we want to share, what is at stake. And even demand business models in which
&gt; the sharing is reflected. Commodification is not the problem, blind money
&gt; drive is. Exploitation is. But money as an exchange medium in itself is not.
&gt; Doing good business generates possibilities, and to do good business does
&gt; not always have to mean one gets into exploitation. Most people actually
&gt; did not. The intertwining of business and dedication and commitment
&gt; acquires our attention but is not deadly by nature, it is as much a force
&gt; for conviviality.
&gt; 
&gt; 
&gt; &gt;Conciousness Regained.  Radical media pragmatism demands that the actors
&gt; &gt;remain Cool. Who can still proclaim to be Multi-media after the monstrous
&gt; &gt;misuse of this term? Yes. It should still be possible to ignore all market
&gt; &gt;forces, cheap trends and keep on playing. There is a state of
&gt; &gt;hyper-awareness, to transform, disappear, give up terrains that have been
&gt; &gt;occupied, and continue at the same time. What now counts is integrity. It
&gt; &gt;is getting easy these days to become resigned. There are a thousand
&gt; &gt;reasons to quit, or to continue on the same grocery level. The world,
&gt; &gt;structured by pre-cooked events, ready to be microwaved and consumed, can
&gt; &gt;be rejected.  Downright reality is unbearable these days. "No spiritual
&gt; &gt;surrender", an Amsterdam graffiti says. Colourless digital existence can
&gt; &gt;be softened by self-made utopias, hallucinatory experiences, with or
&gt; &gt;without recreational drugs and technologies. Regular switching to other
&gt; &gt;channels which are outside the cyber realm is an option. There are
&gt; &gt;countless universes.  Negroponte's existential reductionism ("In being
&gt; &gt;digital I am me.") is just one of them. "You are only real with your
&gt; &gt;make-up on." (Neil Young)
&gt; &gt;
&gt; &gt;Here Comes the New Desire. Unknown, forgotten forms of negation, refusal,
&gt; &gt;anger and pleasure are there and will be open (even towards E.T's), whilst
&gt; &gt;still encrypted against the (mentality) police forces and fashion hunters.
&gt; &gt;There are plenty of sadistic traps for the trend researchers and their
&gt; &gt;clientele: Alternative radio, Independent labels, French theory (from
&gt; &gt;twenty years ago), interactive games, on-line events, techno.net This is
&gt; &gt;so cruel: see them buying, the poor bastards, desperate to get an
&gt; &gt;identity, any, which makes them feel alive, for a moment or two.
&gt; &gt;Cybercynical Knowledge 98. So their search engines have to be distrusted,
&gt; &gt;ignored, misled. The people-to-people networks will lead one to the right
&gt; &gt;source, not the databases of the corporations/states. Computers generate
&gt; &gt;useless data, not contexualized information. This should be knowledge4all.
&gt; &gt;
&gt; &gt;The postmodern late-leftist discourse of the '68 generation has now closed
&gt; &gt;all its possible options. There is no way out for them, locked up, as they
&gt; &gt;are, in their down-sized, optimised, professional institutions. So let it
&gt; &gt;be. The same can be said of the more recent 'new social movements', with
&gt; &gt;exception of sudden outbursts of un-controlled (and therefore not
&gt; &gt;organized) social-ethnic unrest. Let us not get distracted by ideological
&gt; &gt;pseudo-events such as the Culture Wars or paranoid waves of xenophobia.
&gt; &gt;Some fights are shadow boxing. Others are real. Now it is time for other
&gt; &gt;options, in search for the genuine New that does not fit into known
&gt; &gt;patterns of eternal return, being taken back into the System. Virtual
&gt; &gt;Volutarism means being able to overcome moods of melancholy, perfectly
&gt; &gt;aware of all possible limits and opportunities, looking for the
&gt; &gt;impossible, on the side, out of reach of both futurists and nostalgics.
&gt; &gt;Being able to present alternative realities, chocking the Johnsons, way
&gt; &gt;out of reach of the Appropriation Machines. The market authorities will
&gt; &gt;arrive too late. Yes, this is a dream, but we do cannot survive in a
&gt; &gt;(digital) environment without options. In order to get at the point, we
&gt; &gt;should reach a level of collective 'self conciousness' to overcome the
&gt; &gt;system of fear and distrust which is now spreading. No attempt to
&gt; &gt;reconstruct what worked once. No glorification of the inevitable. In order
&gt; &gt;not to throw away everything which has been built up we should invent
&gt; &gt;concepts on top of it and not narrow all our options into making the world
&gt; &gt;institutionally legible. The "Next Age", the name of a department store in
&gt; &gt;Pudong/Shanghai, is hybrid: half-clean, somehow dirty, never entirely
&gt; &gt;digitised, stuck between real growth and an even more real crisis.
&gt; &gt;Obsessed with progress, in full despair. But there are other options, and
&gt; &gt;we can realise them. "Get Organised" (n5m3)
&gt; 
&gt; I like the sound of the last three lines, it sounds like eighties
&gt; rhethoric, a rhetoric I liked very well too at the time. It is not a text I
&gt; can live out with old people and children around me, it sounds very
&gt; self-indulgent or it sounds like a SF text in the fifties.
&gt; 
&gt; I hear no curiosity, no perception, no inner cues for integrity, or
&gt; inspiration to be flexible, no openness to unexpected allies or ideas.
&gt; It speaks of reaction, not innovation (though these can be switched...).
&gt; 
&gt; It expresses the pain of a changing world, back to the future.
&gt; 
&gt; I know the pain, and pain is an important signal but not always a good 
&gt; advisor.
&gt; 
&gt; In times like this where values are reformulated, reconfirmed or formulated
&gt; for the first time I find it very important to be curious to other
&gt; realities, to take a lot of effort to understand languages that at first
&gt; seem very different or even unattractive.
&gt; 
&gt; The world is changing; and like the religious states, sometimes there are 
&gt; periods that were open and periods that were closed. Deviant opinions are 
&gt; important in all times, a great lesson from the Jewish tradition. Living in 
&gt; subcultures means to open up more then often.
&gt; 
&gt; Original moments, or the creation of new sounds and ideas, always involves
&gt; more then one cultural inspiration. Monocultures generate dogmas.
&gt; 
&gt; For Public Netbase in Vienna, we are very important as a far friend; they
&gt; need to know their nextdoor neighboor as well. Far friends can have great
&gt; input and be of inspiration (solidarity), and even apply pressure when 
&gt; needed (B92); but change happens with the people present there and then 
&gt; (South Africa). Netculture can facilitate all these lines locally and
&gt; internationally.
&gt; 
&gt; That is why openness to cultures and discourses that are not immediately
&gt; familiar is crucial.
&gt; 
&gt; Especially in this time, with the millennium coming up, and tramblings 
&gt; starting like the San Francisco Bridge (be it because of a bug, a euro, a
&gt; money crises, a believe clash, global culture and cultural diversity beyond
&gt; imagination or just the number itself), to be aware of what is of value is
&gt; crucial to me. Value in a broad sense, a world for the future children to
&gt; come.
&gt; 
&gt; In the Waag we are very blessed with all the fun we have in living our
&gt; daily lives, the power and the force that comes from that we should use to
&gt; dare formulate and create other and new realities. To do that in a
&gt; sustainable way, and in such a way that people we do not know yet will be
&gt; able to participate.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>2.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Organised Networks</subject>
<from>Ned Rossiter</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 22 Apr 2004 14:19:59 +0100</date>
<content>The Life of Mobile Data: Technology, Mobility and Data Subjectivity
April 15-16, 2004
University of Surrey, England
http://risome.soc.surrey.ac.uk/conference.htm


'Organised Networks Institutionalise to give Mobile Information a 
Strategic Potential'

Ned Rossiter, Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster
&lt;N.Rossiter {AT} ulster.ac.uk&gt;


Abstract

This paper is interested in how networks using ICTs as their primary 
mode of organisation can be considered as new institutional forms. 
The paper suggests that organised networks are emergent 
socio-technical forms that arise from the limits of both tactical 
media and more traditional institutional structures and architectonic 
forms.  Organised networks are peculiar for the ways in which they 
address problems situated within the media form itself.  The 
organised network is thus one whose socio-technical relations are 
immanent to, rather than supplements of, communications media.  The 
paper argues that the problematics of scale and sustainability are 
the two key challenges faced by various forms of networks.  The 
organised network is distinct for the ways in which it has managed to 
address such problematics in order to imbue informational relations 
with a strategic potential.


Introduction

The question motivating this paper is this: what is the relationship 
between institutions, networks and the mobility of information?  In 
recent months I've been looking at what various research centres in 
the UK are up to in the areas of media studies, communications, 
sociology and cultural studies.  I've been doing this because I've 
just moved from Monash University in Melbourne to the University of 
Ulster, Northern Ireland and I needed to get a sense of what's going 
on.  The lasting impression I have after idling through a dozen or so 
websites is that everyone proudly claims to be pursuing activities 
that consist of building networks.  Yet very few of these sites ever 
explain how their activities constitute a network formation, and I 
can't recall any that bother to define what a network might be.  They 
must have done this at some stage, however, because many of these 
research centres and programs delight in informing the reader of how 
much money they've been able to attract in research funding.  I get 
the strong impression that many of these programs are responding to 
the latest directive set forth by the command-economy of government 
funding agencies.  One can only presume that somewhere along the line 
these projects made some attempt at defining their activities in 
terms of networks.

I would suggest that there is little about the activities of these 
various centres and programs that correspond with a logic of 
networks.  And here, I am talking specifically about networks that 
are immanent to the Internet - the primary socio-technical 
architecture that enables the mobility of data within a logic of 
informationalism.  Really, what the networked university offers all 
its believers is something akin to what Bourdieu calls 'circuits of 
legitimation' that enable the reproduction of 'state nobility' (1996: 
382-389).  I wouldn't begin to deny that I'm also caught up in this 
process.

It almost goes without saying that the networked university is 
conditioned by the advent of new ICTs which enable connections 
between a range of institutional entities and individuals that are no 
longer bound by the contingencies of place.  Equally, the effects of 
neoliberalism in terms of shrinking budgets for higher education and 
a gradual deregulation of education as a commercial service have 
played a strong conditioning force in decomposing the traditional 
university form.  These days it is the norm rather than the exception 
to find that the movement of knowledge and information is restricted 
by authentication firewalls and IP policies underpinned by a hybrid 
paranoid-blue-sky discourse.  Within such architectures, the 
networked university is hardly conducive to radical information 
critique or creative intellectual work (although there are of course 
cracks that do of course allow such practices).  Moreover, there 
aren't too many projects being produced out of all this networking 
beyond the final report that's submitted to funding authorities who 
understand no other language than that of counting beans.  As the 
state continues its process of de-institutionalisation, to what 
extent is a new institutional form emerging that does provide 
conditions for critical Internet research and culture?  How is this 
form manifesting within on- and off-line practices associated with 
the Internet?


The Network Problematic

A spectre is haunting this age of informationality - the spectre of 
state sovereignty.  As a modern technique of governance based on 
territorial control, a "monopoly of violence" and the capacity to 
regulate the flow of goods and people, the sovereign power of the 
nation-state is not yet ready to secede from the system of 
internationalism.  The compact of alliances between nation-states 
over matters of trade, security, foreign aid, investment, and so 
forth, substantiates the ongoing relevance of the state form in 
shaping the mobile life of people and things.  As the Internet gained 
purchase throughout the 1990s on the everyday experiences of those 
living within advanced economies in particular, the popular 
imagination became characterised by the notion of a "borderless" 
world of "frictionless capitalism".  Such a view is the doxa of many: 
political philosophers, economists, international relations scholars, 
politicians, CEOs, activists, cyber-libertarians, advertising 
agencies, political spin-doctors and ecologists all have their 
variation on the theme of a postnational, global world-system 
inter-linked by informational flows.

Just as the nation-state appears obsolete for many, so too the term 
"network" has become perhaps the most pervasive metaphor to describe 
a range of phenomena, desires and practices in contemporary 
information societies.  The refrain one hears on networks in recent 
years goes something like this: fluidity, emphemerality, transitory, 
innovative, flows, non-linear, decentralised, value adding, creative, 
flexible, open, risk-taking, reflexive, informal, individualised, 
intense, transformative, and so on and so forth.  Many of these words 
are used interchangeably as metaphors, concepts and descriptions. 
Increasingly, there is a desperation evident in research on new ICTs 
that manifests in the form of empirical research.  Paradoxically, 
much of this research consists of methods and epistemological 
frameworks that render the mobility of information in terms of stasis 
(see Rossiter, 2003a, 2003b).

Governments have found that the network refrain appeals to their 
neoliberal sensibilities, which search for new rhetorics to 
substitute the elimination of state infrastructures with the logic of 
individualised self-formation within Third Way style networks of 
"social capital" (Latham, 2001: 62-100; Giddens, 1998).[1]  Research 
committees at university and federal levels see networks as offering 
the latest promise of an economic utopia in which research practice 
synchronically models the dynamic movement of finance capital, yet so 
often the outcomes of research ventures are based upon the 
reproduction of pre-existing research clusters and the maintenance of 
their hegemony for institutions and individuals with ambitions of 
legitimacy within the prevailing doxas (Cooper, 2002; Marginson and 
Considine, 2000).  Telcos and cable TV "providers" revel in their 
capacity to flaunt a communications system that is not so much a 
network but a heterogenous mass of audiences-consumers-users 
connected by the content and services of private media oligopolies 
(Flew, 2002: 17-21; van Dijk, 1999: 62-70; Schiller, 1999: 37-88). 
Activists pursue techniques of simultaneous disaggregation and 
consolidation via online organisation in their efforts to mobilise 
opposition and actions in the form of mutable affinities against the 
corporatisation of everyday life (Lovink, 2003: 194-223; Lovink and 
Schneider, 2004; Meikle, 2002).  The US military-entertainment 
complex enlists strategies of organised distribution of troops and 
weaponry on battlefields defined by unpredictability and chaos, while 
maintaining the spectacle of control across the vectors of news media 
(Der Derian, 2001; De Landa, 1991; Wark, 1994: 1-46).  The standing 
reserve of human misery sweeps up the remains of daily horror.

Theorists and artists of new media are not immune to these prevailing 
discourses, and reproduce similar network homologies in their 
valorisation of open, decentralised, distributed, egalitarian and 
emergent socio-technical forms.  In so doing, the discursive and 
socio-technical form of networks is attributed an ontological status. 
The so-called openness, fluidity and contingency of networks is 
rendered in essentialist terms that function to elide the 
complexities and contradictions that comprise the uneven 
spatio-temporal dimensions and material practices of networks. 
Similarly, the force of the "constitutive outside" is frequently 
dismissed by media and cultural theorists in favour of delirious 
discourses of openness and horizontality.  "Immanence" has been a key 
metaphor to describe the logic of informationalisation (see Rossiter, 
2004).  Such a word can also be used to describe networks.  To put it 
in a nutshell, the technics of networks can be described as thus: if 
you can sketch a diagram of relations in which connections are 
'external to their terms' (Deleuze), then you get a picture of a 
network model.  Whatever the peculiarities the network refrain may 
take, there's a predominant tendency to overlook the ways in which 
networks are produced by regimes of power, economies of desire and 
the restless rhythms of global capital.

How, I wonder, might the antagonisms peculiar to the varied and more 
often than not incommensurate political situations of 
informationality be formulated in terms of a political theory of 
networks?  A processual model of media theory inquires into the 
movement between the conditions of possibility and that which has 
emerged within the grid of signs, codes and meanings - or what 
Deleuze understands as the immanent relationship between the plane of 
consistency and the plane of organisation.  How might the politics of 
networks as they operate within informationalised institutional 
settings be understood in terms of a processual democracy?

Conditions of possibility are different in kind from that which comes 
to be conditioned.  There is no resemblance or homology between the 
two.  External forces are not grids whose stabilising capacity 
assures the temporary intelligibility of a problematic as it 
coalesces within a specific situation.  Yet despite these 
dissonances, networks are defined by - perhaps more than anything - 
their organisation of relations between actors, information, 
practices, interests and socio-technical systems.  The relations 
between these terms may manifest at an entirely local level, or they 
may traverse a range of scales, from the local to the national to the 
regional to the global.  Whatever the scale may be, these fields of 
association are the scene of politics and, once they are located 
within institutional settings, are the basis of democracy in all its 
variations.  This isn't to say that in and of themselves these 
components of networks somehow automatically result in democracy. 
But it is to suggest that the relationship between institutions and 
the sociopolitical habitus of the state continues to be a primary 
influence in conditioning the possibility of democratic polities.

The persistence of state sovereignty within the immanent logic of 
informationality presents an invitation to transdisciplinary 
theorists to invent new techniques of deduction, appraisal, and 
critique.  Indeed, the task of invention is an inevitable one for 
creative critical theorists inasmuch as they, along with other 
actors, subsist reflexively within the logic of informationalism. 
The relationship is a reflexive one because the theorist encounters 
problems that are presented by the tensions within the triad of 
networks, institutions, democracy.  Problems emerge in the form of 
feedback or noise peculiar to the socio-technical system.  Critical 
theorists are not, of course, alone in this engagement; it is one 
they share with many whose labour-power is subject to the 
constitutive force of networks-institutions-democracy.

My primary interest in bringing the terms 
networks-institutions-democracy together is to develop a conceptual 
assemblage with which to think the emergence of organised networks as 
new institutions of possibility.  From a theoretical and practical 
point of view how might organised networks be defined as new 
institutional forms of informationalism?  Given that institutions 
throughout history function to organise social relations, what 
distinguishes the organised network as an institution from its modern 
counterparts?  Obviously there are differences along lines of 
horizontal vs. vertical, distributed vs. contained, decentralised vs. 
centralised, bureaucratic reason vs. database processing, etc.  But 
what else is there?


Networks and Translation

All communication is a process of translation. Networks are uneven, 
heterogeneous passages and combinations of communication in and 
through which translation is intrinsic to the connectivity of 
information as it encounters technical, social, political, economic 
and cultural fields of articulation, negotiation and transference. 
Translation, then, is about making connections between seemingly 
incommensurate things and objects.  Translation conditions the 
possibility of communication, transversality, transduction, intensity 
and individuation between different systems (Mackenzie, 2002; 
Murphie, 2004).  From the connection emerges a new logic, a new 
sensibility, and new capacities.  At a very basic level, the logic of 
networks is the process of connectivity.

Networks have the capacity of transduction, which Adrian Mackenzie, 
via Gilbert Simondon, describes as a process of ontogenesis 'in which 
a metastability emerges' within biological and socio-technical 
systems (2002: 16-19).  Or as Andrew Murphie puts it, 'transduction 
*translates intensities* so that they can be brought into 
individuating systems' (2004).  The form of organised networks 
provides a mutable architecture in which matter is temporarily 
arrested within a continuum of differentiation and individuation. 
Transductive forces subsist within the relation between form and 
matter.  The organised network can be considered as a new 
institutional actor whose political, economic and expressive 
capacities are shaped and governed by the metastability of the 
network system.  The intelligibility of such arrangements, relations 
and informational flows is thus most accurately summarised by a 
theory of translation which incorporates processes of transduction. 
Translation is truly a concept of praxis.  It is part and parcel of 
every network.  Transduction conditions the possibility of organised 
networks as emergent institutional entities.

Modernity ushered in experiences of mobility, for people and things, 
in ways hitherto unexperienced.  With mobility came all sorts of 
connections.  Railways moved people and merchandise from the country 
to the city, troops and armaments to the front (Schivelbusch, 1977). 
Telegraphy transmitted code from the metropole to the antipodes and 
back again (Wark, 1997).  The penny novel accompanied workers on 
their journey to the office, the evening newspaper or racing guide on 
their trip back to the suburbs.  People, ideas and things came to 
occupy a shared space and time of motion.  In so doing, the 
experience of movement is at once made possible and defined by new 
combinations of elements.  This is translation at work.

With the onset of the Enlightenment, industrial capitalism and 
modernity, new disciplines emerged in the hard and human sciences. 
The discipline of anthropology set itself the task of cataloguing 
human habits and attributes within a language system that translated 
in various ways into policy initiatives, geographic survey reports, 
academic monographs, economic prospectives, architectural forms, 
museological displays, and cultural exchanges.  This too is 
translation at work.  Elements previously without relation, are 
combined in such a manner that something new is invented (see Brown, 
2002: 6).

What I have discussed elsewhere as a processual media theory 
(Rossiter, 2003a) is derived from research in cybernetics, biology 
and systems theory that is interested in information as it relates to 
the problem of calculation, control and determination in order to 
enhance efficiency.  The primary question for first-order cybernetics 
was how to impose stability and order over the entropic tendencies of 
information, as witnessed, for example within biological systems and 
their transmission of DNA code or radio signals and their 
interference by "noise".  The preoccupation with efficiency in 
first-order cybernetics denies the relational character of 
communication.  Second-order cybernetics saw the necessity of not 
banishing noise from the system, but establishing a balance between 
order and disorder: noise or feedback was "rehabilitated" as a 
"virtue" of communication within a system (Mattelart and Matterlart, 
1992: 45).

Within anthropology, for example, the observer impacts upon that 
which is observed and changes what might otherwise have transpired in 
the course of the event, had the observer not been a part of the 
system.  Second-order cybernetics and systems theory thus adopts a 
reflexive understanding of the relationship between observer and 
observed.  Feedback - what Bateson termed the 'difference that makes 
a difference' - is acknowledged as fundamental to the functioning of 
the system.  Moreover, communication is more properly understood as 
not a unilinear channel of transmission, but rather a non-linear 
system of relations.  Corresponding with this conceptual development 
is a shift from an instrumental view of communication to an 
understanding of communication as a social system.

When information is located within a capitalist economic system and 
its practices of production, circulation and exchange, one can speak 
of the logic of informationalism.  The conceptual developments within 
cybernetics and systems theory correspond with shifts in the logic of 
informationationalism.  The logic of informationalism is 
characterised by various sociologists and political economists as 
heralding a shift from an industrial age of manufacturing, manual 
labour, Fordism, surveillance and internationalisation to an 
informational age of services, knowledge workers post-Fordism, 
control and globalisation.  Christopher May writes that a central 
assumption to this change is a belief that 'New ICTs will transform 
the relations of production of the economies in which they appear, 
promoting fluid networks rather than ossified hierarchies' (2002: 
51).  My argument is that in order for networks to organise mobile 
information, a degree of hierarchisation, if not centralisation, is 
required.  The point is that such organisation occurs within the 
media of communication.  Herein lies the difference between the 
organised network and the networked organisation - a point Lovink 
reiterates in the newspaper for the Free Cooperation conference 
that's about to start (http://freecooperation.org).  Let's not forget 
that for all the anti-state rhetoric of anarachists, they, like many 
"radical" outfits, are renowned for being organised in highly 
hierarchical ways - typically around the cult of the alpha-male.


Organised Networks as New Institutional Forms

The challenge for a politically active networked culture is to make 
strategic use of new communications media in order to create new 
institutions of possibility.  Such socio-technical formations will 
take on the characteristics of organised networks - distributive, 
non-linear, situated, project-based - in order to create 
self-sustaining media-ecologies that are simply not on the map of 
established political and cultural institutions.  As Gary Genesko 
writes, 'the real task is to find the institutional means to 
incarnate new modes of subjectification while simultaneously avoiding 
the slide into bureaucratic sclerosis' (2003: 33).  Such a view also 
augurs well for the life of networks as they subsist within the 
political logic of informationality that is constituted by the force 
of the outside (Rossiter, 2004).

The organised network that co-ordinates relations through the 
socio-technical form of the networked institution imbues information 
with a strategic potential.  In this respect, the organised network 
can be distiguished from what David Garcia and Geert Lovink (1997), 
Josephine Berry (2000), Joanne Richardson (2002), McKenzie Wark 
(2002), Konrad Becker (2002), Lovink and Schneider (2002), and others 
on nettime have called "tactical media".  Characterised by temporary 
political interventions, tactical media activism builds on the legacy 
of counter-cultures, protest movements, the Situationists, 
independent media activities and hacker culture.[2]  Lovink and 
Schneider (2002) provide the following short history of tactical 
media:

'The term "tactical media" arose in the aftermath of the fall of the 
Berlin Wall as a renaissance of media activism, blending old school 
political work and artists' engagement with new technologies.  The 
early nineties saw a growing awareness of gender issues, exponential 
growth of media industries and the increasing availability of cheap 
do-it-yourself equipment creating a new sense of self-awareness 
amongst activists, programmers, theorists, curators and artists. 
Media were no longer seen as merely tools for the Struggle, but 
experienced as virtual environments whose parameters were permanently 
"under construction".  This was the golden age of tactical media, 
open to issues of aesthetics and experimentation with alternative 
forms of story telling.  However, these liberating techno practices 
did not immediately translate into visible social movements.  Rather, 
they symbolized the celebration of media freedom, in itself a great 
political goal.  The media used - from video, CD-ROM, cassettes, 
zines and flyers to music styles such as rap and techno - varied 
widely, as did the content.  A commonly shared feeling was that 
politically motivated activities, be they art or research or advocacy 
work, were no longer part of a politically correct ghetto and could 
intervene in "pop culture" without necessarily having to compromise 
with the "system".  With everything up for negotiation, new 
coalitions could be formed.  The current movements worldwide cannot 
be understood outside of the diverse and often very personal 
[battles] for digital freedom of expression'.

RTmark's web co-ordinated campaigns against global corporate 
capitalism, the live webcasting and "Help B92" campaign of Belgrade 
independent radio station B92 following its banning by Serbian 
authorities during the Kosovo War of 1999, Adbusters' culture jamming 
campaigns against media oligopolies, the electronic civil disturbance 
activities and "virtual sit-ins" undertaken by the likes of Critical 
Art Ensemble, the Electronic Disturbance Theater and the Mexican 
Zapatistas, and the Indymedia camaigns against the Woomera detention 
centre in South Australia are just a few of the many examples of 
tactical media.[3]  Tactical media differ from alternative media, 
which is typically concerned about consolidating a "better" option 
for existing media forms (Lovink, 2002: 258; Meikle, 2002: 119). 
Alternative media are frequently underpinned by moral and 
politico-aesthetic discourses of "quality culture".  The paradox of 
alternative media, when it assumes to embody such discourses, is that 
its "alternative" agenda is rendered in terms of stasis and 
conservatism rather than change and transformation.  Whereas tactical 
media, as Graham Meikle notes, 'is about mobility and flexibility, 
about diverse responses to changing contexts ... It's about 
hit-and-run guerilla media campaigns ... It's about working with, and 
working out, new and changing coalitions' (119).  Tactical media, 
then, are about rapidly organised, at times even spontaneous, 
short-term interventions.  Certainly, such interventions resonate 
over time - some even become mythical, as has been the case with the 
Zapatistas.  Diverse skills accumulate and are shared across 
networks; in so doing, they hold the potential for deployment as 
techniques that address specific situations.  Nevertheless, tactical 
media have for the most part been unable to address the problematic 
of sustainability.

A primary challenge for tactical media concerns the question of 
scale.  With their focus on creating "temporary autonomous zones" 
(Bey, 1991), tactical media run the risk of fading out before their 
memes reach a global scale.  And when they do reach a level of 
globality - as in the case of the B92 streaming media reports, and 
the refrain of "anti-globalisation" protests centred around WTO 
meetings - the question of scale becomes focussed around the 
challenge of sustainability.  How are tactical media to create 
effects that have a purchase beyond the safe-haven of the activist 
ghetto?  As Lovink writes: 'Grown out of despair rather than 
conviction, tactical media are forced to operate with the parameters 
of global capitalism, despite their radical agendas.  Tactical media 
emerge out of the margins, yet never fully make it into the 
mainstream' (2002: 257).  This is a problematic clearly recognised by 
Lovink and Schneider (2002):

'We face a scalability crisis.  Most movements and initiatives find 
themselves in a trap.  The strategy of becoming "minor" (Guattari) is 
no longer a positive choice but the default option.  Designing a 
successful cultural virus and getting millions of hits on your weblog 
will not bring you beyond the level of a short-lived "spectacle". 
Culture jammers are no longer outlaws but should be seen as experts 
in guerrilla communication.  Today's movements are in danger of 
getting stuck in self-satisfying protest mode.  With access to the 
political process effectively blocked, further mediation seems the 
only available option'.

Various treatises and commentaries on tactical media note the 
distinction Michel de Certeau (1984: 29-44) makes between tactics and 
strategies.  Graham Meikle makes the important point that strategies, 
with their exploitation of place, are about permanency over time, 
whereas a tactic 'exploits time - the moments of opportunity and 
possibility made possible as cracks appear in the evolution of 
strategic place' (2002: 121).  In one of the many essays associated 
with the fourth Next 5 Minutes festival of tactical media 
(2002-2003), Joanne Richardson suggests that tactical media departs 
company with Certeau over the production of meaning: 'Maybe the most 
interesting thing about the theory of tactical media is the extent to 
which it abandons rather than pays homage to de Certeau, making 
tactics not a silent production by reading signs without changing 
them, but outlining the way in which active production can become 
tactical in contrast to strategic, mainstream media' (2002).

I would argue that it's time to make a return to and reinvestment in 
strategic concepts, practices and techniques of organisation.  Let's 
stop the obsession with tactics as the modus operandi of radical 
critique, most particularly in the gross parodies of Certeau one 
finds in US-style cultural studies.  Don't get me wrong - I'm not 
suggesting that the time of tactical media is over.  Clearly, 
tactical media play a fundamental role in contributing to the 
formation of radical media cultures and new social relations.  What 
I'm interested in addressing is the "scalability crisis" that Lovink 
and Schneider refer to.  If one starts with the principle that 
concepts and practices are immanent to prevailing media forms, and 
not somehow separate from them, it follows that with the mainstream 
purchase of new media forms such as the Internet come new ways in 
which relations of production, distribution and consumption are 
organised.  An equivalence can be found in the shift from centralised 
Fordist modes of production to de-centralised post-Fordist modes of 
flexible accumulation.  Strategies within the spatio-temporal 
peculiarities of the Internet are different from strategies as they 
operate within broadcast communications media.  The latter ultimately 
conceives the "audience-as-consumer" as the end point in the 
food-chain of media production, whereas the former enable the "user" 
to have the capacity to sample, modify, repurpose and redirect the 
social life of the semiotic object.  Moreover, there are going to be 
new ways in which institutions develop in relation to Internet based 
media culture.  How such institutions of organised networks actually 
develop in order to obtain a degree of sustainability and longevity 
that has typically escaped the endeavours of tactical media is 
something that is only beginning to become visible.

The Dehli-based media centre Sarai is one exemplary model of an 
emergent institution designed along the lines of an organised 
network.  Fibreculture - a network of critical Internet research and 
culture in Australasia - is another.  In their own ways, the 
conditions of possibility for the emergence of these organised 
networks can be understood in terms of the constitutive outside. 
Both networks address specific problems of sociality, politics, and 
intellectual transdisciplinarity filtered - at least in the case of 
fibreculture - through a void created by established institutions 
within the cultural industries and higher education sector.

Take the case of fibreculture.  In many ways the fibreculture network 
is quite centralised: list facilitators, journal editors, book series 
editors, website management, conference organisers, etc.  Hierarchies 
prevail.  The facilitator's group has endeavoured to make the 
structure of the network as transparent and public as possible.  Even 
so, the list is not privy to most of what is discussed in these 
various "backrooms".  And to a large extent, that has to be accepted 
- trust has to be assumed - if the network is to develop in the way 
that it has.  So, a degree of centralisation and hierarchisation 
seems essential for a network to be characterised as organised.  Can 
the network thus be characterised as an "institution", or might it 
need to acquire additional qualities?  Is institutional status even 
desirable for a network that aspires to intervene in debates on 
critical Internet research and culture?  How does an organised 
network help us redefine our understanding of what an institution 
might become?

One of the key challenges that networks such as fibreculture present 
is the possibility of new institutional formations that want to make 
a political, social and cultural difference within the 
socio-technical logic of networks.  It's not clear what shape these 
institutions will take, but we get a sense of what they might be in 
cases like fiberculture and Sarai.  To fall back into the crumbling 
security of traditional, established institutions is not an option. 
The network logic is increasingly the normative mode of organising 
socio-technical relations in advanced economies, and this impacts 
upon both the urban and rural poor within those countries as well as 
those in economically developing countries.  So, the traditional 
institution is hardly a place of escape for those wishing to hide 
from the logic of networks.

It's important to distinguish the organised network as a new 
institutional form from traditional institutions that have become 
networked through their use of new ICTs.  As Lovink and Schneider 
(2004) have recently noted, the maintenance of hierarchical forms of 
power within hegemonic networked institutions 'is part of a larger 
process of "normalization" in which networks are integrated in 
existing management styles and institutional rituals'.  Traditional 
institutional forms - corporations, cultural industries, and the 
higher eductation sector - are increasingly appropriating many of the 
technics of tactical media: you can have your p2p experience (but at 
a price!) and who isn't advocating the merits of open source?  Think 
IBM and opensource.mit.edu.  There's a distinct whiff of new age 
refashioning in many of these projects as they seek to recapture a 
"spirit" of sharing and experiences of collaboration - the kinds of 
things that were swept into the dustbin in the hard-nosed culture of 
unit-driven corporatism.  Ultimately, the networked organisation is 
distinguished by its standing reserve of capital and its exploitation 
of labour-power.  Such institutions are motivated by the need to 
organise social relations in the hope of maximising "creativity" and 
regenerating the design of commodity forms that have long reached 
market saturation.  It'll be interesting to see the extent to which 
the Creative Commons license is adopted by big business - I'm 
guessing it'll create a suitable amount of havoc, enabling service 
variation and consolidate an even brighter future for the legal 
sector.

By contrast, the kind of emergent organised networks that I'm 
referring to are notable for the ways in which information flows and 
socio-technical relations are organised around site specific projects 
that place an emphasis on process as the condition for outcomes.  The 
needs, interests and problems of the organised network coincide with 
its emergence as a sociotechnical form, whereas the traditional 
modern institution has become networked in an attempt to recast 
itself whilst retaining its basic infrastructure, clunky as it is. 
Strangely enough the culture of neoliberalism conditions the 
emergence of the organised network.  The logic of outsourcing has 
demonstrated that the state still requires institutions to service 
society.  Scale and cost were the two key objections econorats and 
servants to neoliberalism objected to.  Forget about ideology.  These 
bureaucrats are highly neurotic, obsessive-compulsive types.  They 
hate any trace of disorder and inefficiency, and the welfare state 
embodied such irritations.  The organised network can take advantage 
of such instituted pathologies by becoming an educational "service 
provider", for instance.  The key is to work out what values you have 
that distinquish your network from the MIT model.  The other factor 
is to work out a plan for sustainability - a clear lesson from the 
dotcom era.

As Phil Agre (2002) has noted, 'Institutions persist in part because 
of the bodies of skill that have built up within them'.  This idea of 
institutions as accumulations of skills strikes me as a perfect way 
of describing what goes on within organised networks such as 
fibreculture and sarai.  Yet why do so many networks fail to persist? 
What does it take for a network to become sustainable as an organised 
form?  What's the 5 year business plan going to look like?  And how 
might it do this without sliding in to 'bureaucratic sclerosis', as 
Genosko puts it.  Lovink and Schneider (2004) suggest that a large 
reason for the transience of networks has to do with the factors of 
information overload, inadequate software and interface solutions, 
and socio-cultural impasses in online communication.

To this I would add the need for networks to address situated 
problems if they are to develop into an organised form.  I'm not 
speaking of flamewars on mailing lists or people who don't express 
themselves in the correct lingua franca of a particular list - these 
are features of pretty much every mailing list with a substantial 
number of subscribers who have a bit of life in them.  Rather, I'm 
talking about problems associated with undertaking projects that 
require an organised response in order to realise activities such as 
conferences, publishing in different formats and platforms, 
educational workshops and training, accredited provision of 
educational packages to the traditional education sector, new media 
art exhibitions, software development, online translation of foreign 
language books, etc.  Networks like nettime used to do some of these 
kind of things in the past, but it seems that eventually their size 
put an end to that.  This doesn't mean individual subscribers to 
nettime don't get together and organise things (they frequently do 
this!), but it does mean that the "brand" of nettime is no longer a 
continuum of relations beyond list culture.  Scale, in the case of 
nettime, has been the impasse to organisation.


Conclusion

In order for tactical media and list cultures to organise as networks 
that have multiple institutional capacities, there has to be - first 
and foremost - a will, passion and commitment to invention.  There 
has to be a desire for socio-technical change and transformation. 
And there needs to be a curiosity and instinct for survival to shift 
finance capital to places, people, networks and activities that 
hitherto have been invisible.  The combination of these forces 
mobilises information in ways that hold an ethico-aesthetic capacity 
to create new institutional forms that persist over time and address 
the spectrum of socio-political antagonisms of information societies 
in a situated fashion.


Notes

1 See Agre (2003) for a brief genealogy of the term social capital. 
See Tronti (1973) for an Autonomist deployment of the term.

2 For a personal history of tactical media, see Geert Lovink's 'An 
Insider's Guide to Tactical Media' in Dark Fiber (2002: 254-274).

3 For developed accounts of these various tactical media campaigns, 
see Lovink (2002) and Meikle (2002).  See also Angela Mitropoulous' 
documentation at http://woomera2002.com and 
http://antimedia.net/xborder.


References

Agre, Phillip E. (2002) 'Real-Time Politics: The Internet and the 
Political Process', The Information Society 18.5: 311-331. 
Quotations are from the online version: 
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/real-time.html

Agre, Phillip E. (2003) 'The Practical Republic: Social Skills and 
the Progress of Citizenship', version 18 May, 
http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/republic.html

Becker, Konrad (2002) Tactical Reality Dictionary: Cultural 
Intelligence and Social Control, Vienna: Edition Selene.

Berry, Josephine (2000) '"Another Orwellian Misnomer"? Tactical Art 
in Virtual Space', posting to nettime mailing list, 13 September, 
http://www.nettime.org

Bey, Hakim (1991) TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological 
Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism, New York: Autonomedia.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1996) The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the 
Field of Power, trans. Lauretta C. Clough, Stanford, Cal.: Stanford 
University Press.

Brown, Steven D. (2002) 'Michel Serres: Science, Translation and the 
Logic of the Parasite', Theory, Culture &amp; Society 19.3: 1-27.

Cooper, Simon (2002) 'Post Intellectuality?: Universities and the 
Knowledge Industry', in Simon Cooper, John Hinkson and Geoff Sharp 
(eds) Scholars and Entrepreneurs: the University in Crisis, Fitzroy: 
Arena Publications, pp. 207-232.

Der Derian, James (2001) Virtuous War: Mapping the 
Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment Network, Boulder, CO: 
Westview Press.

De Landa, Manuel (1991) War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, New 
York: Zone Books.

Fibreculture, http://www.fibreculture.org

Flew, Terry (2002) New Media: An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garcia, David and Lovink, Geert (1997) 'The ABC of Tactical Media', 
posting to nettime mailing list, 16 May, http://www.nettime.org

Genosko, Gary (2003) 'F&#233;lix Guattari: Towards a Transdisciplinary 
Metamethodology', Angelaki 8.1: 29-140.

Giddens, Anthony (1998) The Third Way: the Renewal of Social 
Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Latham, Mark (2001) What did you Learn Today? Creating an Education 
Revolution, Crows Nest: Allen &amp; Unwin.

Lovink, Geert (2003) My First Recession: Critical Internet Culture in 
Transition, Rotterdam: V2_/NAi Publishers.

Lovink, Geert and Schneider, Florian (2002) 'A Virtual World is 
Possible: From Tactical Media to Digital Multitudes', posting to 
nettime mailing list, 1 November, http://www.nettime.org

Lovink, Geert and Schneider, Florian (2004) 'Notes on the State of 
Networking', posting to Nettime mailing list, 29 February, 
http://www.nettime.org.  See also Make World #4, 
http://www.makeworlds.org

Mackenzie, Adrian (2002) Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed, 
New York: Continuum.

Marginson, Simon and Considine, Mark (2000) The Enterprise 
University: Power, Governance and Reinvention in Australia, 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Matterlart, Armand and Mattelart, Michelle (1992) Rethinking Media 
Theory, trans. James A. Cohen and Marina Urquidi, Minneapolis: 
University of Minnesota Press.

May, Christopher (2002) The Information Society: A Sceptical View, 
Cambridge: Polity.

Meikle, Graham (2002) Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, 
Sydney: Pluto Press.

Murphie, Andrew (in press 2004) 'The World as Clock: The Network 
Society and Experimental Ecologies', Topia: Canadian Journal of 
Cultural Studies 11 (Spring).

Nettime, http://www.nettime.org

Next 5 Minutes 4 Festival of Tactical Media, 11 September, 2002 - 14 
September, 2003, http://www.n5m4.org

Richardson, Joanne (2002) 'The Language of Tactical Media', posting 
to nettime mailing list, 3 July, http://www.nettime.org

Rossiter, Ned (2003a). 'Processual Media Theory', symploke 11.1/2, 
pp. 104-131.  For further information, see: http://www.symploke.org/

Rossiter, Ned (2003b). 'Report: Creative Labour and the role of 
Intellectual Property', Fibreculture Journal 1, 
http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue1/issue1_rossiter.html

Rossiter, Ned (in press 2004) 'Creative Industries, Comparative Media 
Theory, and the Limits of Critique from Within', Topia: Canadian 
Journal of Cultural Studies 11 (Spring).

Sarai, http://www.sarai.net

Schiller, Dan (1999) Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market 
System, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Schivelbusch, Wolfgang (1977) The Railway Journey: The 
Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Leamington 
Spa: Berg.

Tronti, Mario (1977) 'Social Capital', Telos 17: 98-121.

van Dijk, Jan (1999) The Network Society: Social Aspects of New 
Media, trans. Leontine Spoorenberg, London: Sage.

Wark, McKenzie (1994) Virtual Geography: Living With Global Media 
Events, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Wark, McKenzie (1997) 'Antipodality', Angelaki 2.3: 17-27.

Wark, McKenzie (2002) 'Re: From Tactical Media to Digital 
Multitudes', posting to nettime mailing list, 2 November, 
http://www.nettime.org.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>3.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Virtuosity, Processual Democracy and Organised Networks</subject>
<from>Ned Rossiter</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Tue, 28 Sep 2004 23:58:12 +1000</date>
<content>The Italian Effect: Radical Thought, Biopolitics and Cultural Subversion
Sydney University, September 9-11, 2004.
http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/rihss/italianeffect.html
Ned Rossiter

'Virtuosity, Processual Democracy and Organised Networks' [short version]

I am a Stalinist - everyone should do as I say and think; I have no
idea what I am - I don't exist... The contradiction between these two
statements signals a tension between identity politics and the
politics of desubjectification.  Identity operates within a regime of
coding; desubjectification is a process of subjectivisation and
transversality in which 'relations are external to their terms'
(Deleuze-Hume).  There is nothing intrinsic about the relationship
between the object, subject or thing that determines some essential
attribute or identity.  The identity of the Stalinist emerges from a
milieu of radical contingencies.  The Stalinist is thus a
potentiality that subsists within the plane of immanence.  The logic
of coding is part and parcel of the unforseen capacities that define
the externality of immanence.

The relationship between the overcoded subject and the process of
desubjectivisation is one of movement. The movement between the two
comprises the force of processuality, and a politics of contingency
and potentiality.  Stalinist subjects are everywhere -  we are all
Stalinists, and we also don't exist.  The force of relations external
to their terms operate in a manner that continuously destabilises the
authoritarianism of the Stalinist subject.  The process of
desubjectification corresponds with the plane of immanence.  This is
the common from which exodus, flight, and exit subsist as
potentialities - potentialities that can also be found in the
co-operation that is common to the surplus value of labour-power. The
analysis of these relations is a practice of radical empiricism.

Surplus value is based on excess - an excess of labour-power.  With a
surplus of labour-power (unemployment), the cost of production
decreases, profit rises.  Labour-power, however, is predicated on
co-operation, and herein lies the potential for transformation, since
co-operation subsists in the plane of immanence, the common.  The
capacity for the articulation of other values, and the mobilisation
of other affects is immanent to the surplus value of labour-power.
Surplus value can also be understood as an individuation transduced
from the pre-individuality of co-operation, of the "general
intellect".  This is what Negri (2004) identifies as the 'ontology of
the multitudes'.  The co-operation peculiar to the surplus value of
labour-power grants what Hardt and Negri identify, and had previously
dismissed, as the class dimension to the emergent socio-technical
form of the multitudes, since exploitation conditions the possibility
of co-operation (Hardt and Negri, 2004; Negri, 2004).

Through techniques of co-operation, collaboration and a distribution
of capacities, the multitudes are showing signs of becoming
organised.  The problems of scale and sustainability are being
addressed.  The at times self-valorising movements of "tactical
media" are beginning to adopt a strategic outlook on how to situate
their activities within socio-technical systems in more secure ways.
Indeed, the organised network is composing itself as a new
institutional form.  This transformation is not something to be
suspicious of.  There is no return here to institutions that
subordinate what Paolo Virno calls the "pure potential" of
labour-power to the conformist unity of "effective labour", "the
people" or "the citizen".  Institutions (coded formations) consist of
practices and affects, techniques and sensations.  Institutions
emerge within the interplay between the plane of immanence and the
plan of organisation.  Within the  co-operation common to surplus
value's exploitation of labour-power resides the potential for new
relations, new institutions, new socialities.

The organised network is a potentiality coextensive with the process
of becoming instituted.  Virtuosity, as the absence of an "extrinsic
product" (Virno, 2004: 52), institutes the political potential of
organised networks.  The virtuosos 'activity without an end product'
is at once ordinary and exceptional: ordinary in the sense that 'the
affinity between a pianist and a waiter', as anticipated by Marx,
comprises the common of wage labour insofar as 'the product is
inseparable from the act of producing' (68); exceptional in the sense
of the potential that subsists within performances with no
end-product holds the capacity of individuation - of transformation
of the common - into singularities with their own distinct universes
of sensibility, logics of sensation, regimes of codification.

Virno suggests that the communicative performance of the multitudes
constitutes 'the feasibility of a *non-representational democracy*'
(2004: 79).  Virno is elusive when it comes to developing that
proposition.  A non- or post-representational democracy is one that
no longer operates within the constitutive framework of the nation-state
and its associated institutions and civil society organisations.
This is something Mouffe's (2000) "agonistic democracy" is not able
to confront.  While Mouffe correctly wishes to go beyond rational
consensus, deliberative models of liberal democracy, her proposition
that agonistic democracies negotiate the antagonisms that underpin
sociality is nevertheless one that is predicated on the maintenance
of the state as a modern complex of institutions.  Mouffe has not made
the passage into the post-Fordist state and its connection with
capital's flexible modes of production and accumulation.  The
informatisation of social relations is nowhere to be found in
Mouffe's thesis on agonistic democracy.  As such, Mouffe is unable to
describe the new modes of sociality, labour, and politics as they are
organised within network societies and information economies.  Even
so, her notion of an agonistic democracy - like Virno's
non-representational democracy - can be retained, but only, I would
suggest, when they are recast in terms of what I call a *processual
democracy*.

=46irst of all, the potential of processual democracies are underpinned
by the informatisation of social relations.  Franco "Bifo" Beradi's
model of the Infosphere and the Psychosphere is a useful one to
describe the complex settings within which new polities may emerge.
Bifo's conception of the Infosphere as a technical, digital coding of
data whose unilinear flows "intermingle" with the unstable,
recombinatory filter of the Psychosphere is, however, only partially
right.  The Infosphere is of course much more complex.  Think of the
uneven geography of information, the political economy of root
servers and domain names, the competing interests surrounding
Internet governance debates and policy making, etc.  The Infosphere
thus not only "intermingles" with the Psychosphere, it is inseparable
from it: put it in different terms, the Real is always inscribed or
present within the Symbolic as an antagonism or trauma.  The
Infosphere is shaped by background noise, which Serres defines as the
'absence of code'.  Processuality - the relationship between coding
and conditions of possibility - incorporates background noise as a
constitutive outside.

Organised networks, as they subsist within the material and
immaterial dimensions of new communications media such as the
Internet, activate the possibility of processual democracy.  Such a
political formation de-ontologises the media of communication,
creating media-information systems that are conditioned by the
empirics, labour and affects of "trans-individual collectives"
(Deleuze, 2004: 89).  A processual democracy is one that unleashes
the unforseen potential of affects as they resonate from the common
of labour-power.  A processual democracy is one that goes beyond the
state-civil society relation. That relation is one that no longer
exists.  Processual democracies necessarily involve institutions,
since institutions function to organise social relations.

Processual democracies also continue to negotiate the ineradicability
of antagonisms.  Their difference lies in the affirmation of values
that are internal to the formation of new socialities, new technics
of relations.  Certainly, they go beyond the limits of resistance and
opposition - the primary activity of tactical media and the
"anti-corporatisation" movements.  This is not to dispense with
tactics of resistance and opposition.  Indeed, such activities have
in many ways shaped the emergence of civil society values into the
domain of supranational institutions and governance, as witnessed in
the recent WSIS debates. A radical adaptation of the rules of the
game is a helpful way of thinking the strategic dimension of
processual democracies.

Ultimately, what is at stake is the ethico-aesthetic potential of the
multitudes to engage with the antagonistic foundations of "the
political".  A processual democracy institutes a socio-technical
network with the capacity to create conditions that sustain needs,
interests and passions.

References

Deleuze, Gilles (2004) 'On Gilbert Simondon', in Desert Islands and
Other Texts, 1953-1974, trans. Michael Taormina, ed. David Lapoujade,
New York: Semiotext(e), pp. 86-89.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio (2004) Multitude: War and Democracy
in the Age of Empire, New York: Penguin Press.

Mouffe, Chantal (2000) The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso.

Negri, Antonio (2004) 'Towards an Ontological Definition of the
Multitudes', trans. Arianna Bove, Makeworlds Paper #4,
http://www/makeworlds.org/book/view/104.

Virno, Paolo (2004) A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. James Cascaito
Isabella Bertoletti, and Andrea Casson, forward by Sylv=E8re Lotringer,
New York: Semiotext(e).</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; limits of networks...</subject>
<from>Kristoffer Gansing</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 1 Jul 2019 16:24:35 +0200</date>
<content>Dear all,

Maybe I can take the opportunity to plug in to the running discussions
by shamelessly plugging the announcement of the next transmediale
festival which aims to deal exactly with the topics of networks, as it
appeared here as a recurring common concern.
https://2020.transmediale.de/festival-2020

I think its quite interesting how the thread on nettime being in a bad
shape and the one Rachel O' Dwyer started on net-art is converging
around questions that have to do with how the limits of networks have
become more tangible today, technically as well as in the form of
"network idealism".

Molly Hankwitz wrote:

&gt; The question comes up more and more - where is the whole idea of networks
&gt; that was once? Answer: sorry, social media has everyone blissed out on
&gt; their own screen.
&gt;
&gt; The great debates that enlivened networks of the 90s, have become muddled
&gt; to the point that "networks" per se don't seem to carry much weight online
&gt; - now its the app, its the website - which don't always reflect a living
&gt; community of net-users as we know...or maybe we are imagining networks
&gt; differently than before and that does not help. Common interests which
&gt; drove the formulation of networks and network 'flows' seem to have been
&gt; replaced by something else. Who is the we of any network now...

Rachel:

&gt; Can we still speak about ?tactical media? or ?the exploit?, and if not is
&gt; this because
&gt;
&gt; a) network activism has transformed so that these older descriptions no
&gt; longer accurately describe net art and ?hacktivist? practices, or
&gt;
&gt; b) these art practices have stayed much the same, but they are no longer
&gt; effective in the current political and economic context?

I would not agree with David Garcia that these meta-discussions is a
sign of the decline of nettime however, rather that the discussion of
networked forms seems to be returning at the moment, maybe especially
also on a list like nettime, because it seems as if it disappeared from
the big "digitalisation" debates that are now anyway everywhere. (except
for the breaking up of THE social network) Meanwhile, users are
returning to smaller networked forms in the form of the fediverse or in
other intimate constellations taking their cue from safe spaces and
intersectional practices online, offline or rather in between. Maybe we
need new ways of modeling networks also beyond the canonical Baran
diagram of centralized, decentralized and distributed, along with
nodocentric visualizations that have been so prevalent from the 1990's
and basically up until today?

best,

Kristoffer</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; limits of networks...</subject>
<from>Cinegraphic</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 1 Jul 2019 11:13:58 -0400</date>
<content>I don't usually comment, but the issue of networks vs social media is of personal interest. So much if the web is a commercialization of what were originally publuc, open spaces, now rdndered as private property. A parallel could be drawn to the enclosure movement. What lurks in the background is the commercialization of human action and association, not jyst the "maker movement," but all of social relationships. This is the real issue, even surveillance/agnotogy is just symptomatic.

It's striking how these dynamics emerge, create responses and then commercially assimilate them. This valorization seems to me to be the structural driver that's cresting the current discontent.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; limits of networks...</subject>
<from>Molly Hankwitz</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Mon, 1 Jul 2019 11:10:27 -0700</date>
<content>Dear Kristoffer, et al,

Yes, you have hit on it for me...&lt;Maybe weneed new ways of modeling networks also beyond the canonical Barandiagram of centralized, decentralized and distributed, along withnodocentric visualizations that have been so prevalent from the 1990'sand basically up until today?&gt;Very important - as it is not the tools per se or the platform, but now, possibly new contexts in which even tactical media or &#8220;community-based&#8221; networks occur, which utilize varied tools.

I have been doing both artistic/curatorial research and community-based work with non-profits around these overlaps. With waterwheel.net, a team of 30 curators programmer online performance and events for a week with 120 artists from all over the world. This project, the brainchild of Suzanne Fuks and James Cunningham, utilized popular online tools such as Skype and Facebook and email - along with a custom designed media archive and online performance space. Suzanne kept this network in close connection for 3 years. We integrated our work remotely with the Balance/Unbalance festival at Arizona State. For me, this project about water and art was, in addition to the art, ingenious for a) it&#8217;s utilization without apology of everyday social media b) it&#8217;s capavity to connect in person and online via online performance space - for conferences/panels such that we all actually &#8220;saw&#8221; and &#8220;met&#8221; and heard each other. I am still connected to many of the artists I worked with!

Local &#8220;campaigns&#8221;, for instance, for safe walking streets - from senior citizen groups - use Twitter, FB, etc and more to &#8220;network&#8221; &#8212;while neither art nor sophisticated, these campaigns do represent living communities with &#8220;interest in common&#8221; - condition of the old online communities AND, importantly, blur distinctions between virtual spaces and &#8220;real&#8221; spaces.

The latter point may seem crude, but it&#8217;s possible that social networks such as these are an historical advancement on communities which put the network before the flesh meet, or never had a flesh meet and died OR never had the &#8220;real&#8221; profile pic at least to color and pepper the imagination.

I&#8217;m no fan of Facebook per se...but it&#8217;s not FB alone, but a helpful feature of FB to have visuals...So talking theory...I throw this bone...with bandwidth depletion out of the way and compression technologies vastly superior, network practices have been able to better color-in their members...add more graphics...enrich and make robust vision of community. This may be an important development in network practice and one to assist radical practice...as well as a reason why we are occasionally depleted by text-only communication.

I will post later a link to Haraway interview where she talks about making networks now

Molly</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; limits of networks...</subject>
<from>Rachel O' Dwyer</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Wed, 3 Jul 2019 11:50:32 +0100</date>
<content>Thank you Molly!I will post later a link to Haraway interview where she talks about making networks now

Please do!</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>4.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; limits of networks...</subject>
<from>David Garcia</from>
<to>nettime-l@kein.org</to>
<date>Tue, 2 Jul 2019 11:24:16 +0100</date>
<content>On 1 Jul 2019, at 15:24, Kristoffer Gansing &lt;kg@transmediale.de&gt; wrote:discussion ofnetworked forms seems to be returning at the moment, maybe especiallyalso on a list like nettime, because it seems as if it disappeared fromthe big "digitalisation" debates that are now anyway everywhere. (exceptfor the breaking up of THE social network) Meanwhile, users arereturning to smaller networked forms in the form of the fediverse or inother intimate constellations taking their cue from safe spaces andintersectional practices online, offline or rather in between.Exciting that the next Transmedialle will look at the re-emergence of discussions of

&#8220;networked forms&#8221; which I suppose would include a reassesment of the sociological concept of the &#8220;network society&#8221; at the point when there is a strong movement away from the Castells&#8217; depiction of the net as a &#8220;universal space&#8221;. This was always a vision that flew in the face of many highly situated socio/political movements for whom there is no such thing as any universal categories,principles, or experiences. Does recuperating "autonomous zones" and "safe spaces&#8221; of smaller networks represent effective resistence to the new technological formalism of big tech&#8217;s computational social scientists? Or does it simply highlight the fact that the twin ideals of autonomy and participation that were once seen as not only related but actually entailing one another have proved themselves to be all to frequently incomensurable as to be a participant is always to be enrolled in some kind of infrastructure ?</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>5.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; The Limits of Networking</subject>
<from>Alexander Galloway</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 24 Mar 2004 09:26:40 -0500</date>
<content>[This was originally posted to nettime-l on March 15, 2004, and is
	being resent due to a glitch in the web archive.]

THE LIMITS OF NETWORKING
A reply to Lovink and Schneider's "Notes on the State of Networking"

by Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker
The question we aim to explore here is: what is the principle of
political organization or control that stitches a network together?
Writers like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have helped answer this
question in the socio-political sphere using the concept of "Empire."
Like a network, Empire is not reducible to any single state power, nor
does it follow an architecture of pyramidal hierarchy. Empire is fluid,
flexible, dynamic, and far-reaching. In that sense, the concept of
Empire helps us greatly to begin thinking about political organization
in networks. But like Lovink and Schneider, we are concerned that no one
has yet adequately answered this question for the technological sphere
of bits and atoms.

To this end, the principle of political control we suggest is most
helpful for thinking about technological networks is "protocol," a word
derived from computer science but which resonates in the life sciences
as well. Protocol abounds in techno-culture. It is a totalizing control
apparatus that guides both the technical and political formation of
computer networks, biological systems and other media. Put simply,
protocols are all the conventional rules and standards that govern
relationships within networks. Quite often these relationships come in
the form of communication between two or more computers, but
"relationships within networks" can also refer to purely biological
processes as in the systemic phenomenon of gene expression. Thus by
"networks" we want to refer to any system of interrelationality, whether
biological or informatic, organic or inorganic, technical or
natural--with the ultimate goal of undoing the polar restrictiveness of
these pairings.

In computer networks, science professionals have, over the years,
drafted hundreds of protocols to govern email, web pages, and so on,
plus many other standards for technologies rarely seen by human eyes.
The first protocols for computer networks were written in 1969 by Steve
Crocker and others. If networks are the structures that connect people,
then protocols are the rules that make sure the connections actually
work.

Likewise, molecular biotechnology research frequently makes use of
protocol to configure biological life as a network phenomenon, be it in
gene expression networks, metabolic networks, or the circuitry of cell
signaling pathways. In such instances, the biological and the informatic
become increasingly enmeshed in hybrid systems that are more than
biological: proprietary genome databases, DNA chips for medical
diagnostics, and real-time detection systems for biowarfare agents.
Protocol is twofold; it is both an apparatus that facilitates networks
and also a logic that governs how things are done within that apparatus.

 From the large technological discourse of white papers, memos, and
manuals, we can derive some of the basic qualities of the apparatus of
organization which we here call protocol:

+ protocol facilitates relationships between interconnected, but
autonomous, entities;

+ protocol's virtues include robustness, contingency, interoperability,
flexibility, and heterogeneity;

+ a goal of protocol is to accommodate everything, no matter what source
or destination, no matter what originary definition or identity;

+ while protocol is universal, it is always achieved through negotiation
(meaning that in the future protocol can and will be different).

+ protocol is a system for maintaining organization and control in
networks;

We agree wholeheartedly with Lovink and Schneider's observation that
"networks are the emerging form of organization of our time." And we
agree that, due to this emerging form of organization, "networking has
lost its mysterious and subversive character."

Yet they also note that, despite being the site of control and
organization, networks are also the very medium of freedom, if only a
provisional or piecemeal liberation. They write that networking is able
"to free the user from the bonds of locality and identity." And later
they describe networking as "a syncope of power."

In this sense, Lovink and Schneider posit power as the opposite of
networking, as the force that restricts networking and thus restricts
individual freedom:

	"Power responds to the pressure of increasing mobility and
	communications of the multitudes with attempts to regulate them in
	the framework of traditional regimes that cannot be abandoned, but
	need to be reconfigured from scratch and recompiled against the
	networking paradigm: borders and property, labour and recreation,
	education and entertainment industries undergo radical
	transformations."

Our point of departure is this: Lovink and Schneider's "Info-Empire"
should not be defined in terms of either corporate or state power, what
they call "the corruption of state sovereignty." Instead it must be
defined at the level of the medium itself. (Otherwise we are no longer
talking about Info-Empire but about the more familiar topics of
corporate greed, fascism, or what have you.) Informatic control is
something different and thus it must be defined differently. It must be
defined via the actual technologies of control that are contained within
networks, not the content carried by those networks, or the
intentionality of the people using them. This position resonates with
the "media archaeology" approach mentioned in Lovink's recent nettime
interview with Wolfgang Ernst. This is why we propose the basic
principles of protocol above.

Networks are often seen to be advantageous in political struggles, for
there is presumed to be something about the structure of networks that
enables forms of resistance to take place against more centralized power
structures. The characteristics of multiple sites of locality,
many-to-many communications channels, and a self-organizing capacity
(local actions, global results) are some of the aspects that are cited
as part of the network structure. Indeed, analysis of computer virus
attacks, distributed political protests, and other forms of what John
Arquilla and David Ronfeldt call "netwar" all mention these aspects of
networks.

But we find it curious that networks in this characterization are rarely
contextualized--or rendered historical, archaeological. On the one hand,
the centralized structure of "Empire" is assumed to emerge out of a long
history of economically-driven imperialism and colonialism. On the other
hand, the various "networks" which resist Empire seem to suddenly appear
out of nowhere, despite the fact that the technologies which constitute
these networks are themselves rooted in governmental, military, and
commercial developments. We need only remind ourselves of the military
backdrop of WWII mainframe computing and the Cold War context of
ARPAnet, to suggest that networks are not ahistorical entities.

Thus, in many current political discussions, networks are seen as the
new paradigm of social and political organization. The reason is that
networks exhibit a set of properties that distinguishes them from more
centralized power structures. These properties are often taken to be
merely abstract, formal aspects of the network--which is itself
characterized as a kind of meta-structure. We see this in "pop science"
books discussing complexity and network science, as well as in the
political discourse of "netwars" and so forth. What we end up with is a
*metaphysics of networks*. The network, then, appears as a universal
signifier of political resistance, be it in Chiapas, Seattle, Geneva, or
online. What we question is not the network concept itself, for, as a
number of network examples show, they can indeed be effective modes of
political struggle. What we do question is the undue and exclusive
reliance on the metaphysics of the network, as if this ahistorical
concept legitimizes itself merely by existing.

An engaged, political understanding of networks will not only pay
attention to networks generally, but to networks specifically. If there
are no networks in general, then there are also no general networks.
(Marx: "If there is no production in general, then there is no general
production.") Networks can be engaged with at the general level, but
they always need to be qualified--and we mean this in technical as well
as socio-political terms. The discourse surrounding "Empire" has been
very good at contextualizing globalization; it has not done so well at
contextualizing "the movement," "the multitude," or "networks" (which
are arguably, three different concepts).

Biological or computational, the network is always configured by its
protocols. We stress this integrative approach because we cannot afford
to view "information" naively as solely immaterial. Negri notes that
"all politics is biopolitics," and to this, we would add that all
networks are not only biopolitical but biotechnical networks.
Protocological control in networks is as much about networks as *living
networks* as it is about the materiality of informatics.

Thus we are quite interested in a understanding of political change
within networks. What follows might be thought of as a series of
challenges for "counterprotocological practice," designed for anyone
wishing progressive change inside of biotechnical networks.

First, oppositional practices will have to focus not on a static map of
one-to-one relationships, but a dynamic diagram of many-to-many
relationships. This is a nearly insurmountable task. These practices
will have to attend to many-to-many relationships without making the
dangerous mistake of thinking that many-to-many means total or
universal. There will be no universals for life. This means that the
counterprotocols of current networks will be pliant and vigorous where
existing protocols are flexible and robust. They will attend to the
tensions and contradictions within such systems, such as the
contradiction between rigid control implicit in network protocols and
the liberal ideologies that underpin them. Counterprotocological
practice will not avoid downtime. It will restart often.

The second point is about tactics. In reality, counterprotocological
practice is not "counter" anything! Saying that politics is an act of
"resistance" was never true, except for the most literal interpretation
of conservatism. We must search-and-replace all occurrences of
"resistance" with "impulsion" or perhaps "thrust." Thus the concept of
resistance in politics should be superceded by the concept of
hypertrophy. Resistance is a Clausewitzian mentality; the strategy of
maneuvers teaches us instead that the best way to beat an enemy is to
become a better enemy. One must push through to the other side, rather
than drag one's heels. There are two directions for political change:
resistance implies a desire for stasis or retrograde motion, but
hypertrophy is the desire for pushing beyond. The goal is not to destroy
technology in some neoluddite delusion, but to push technology into a
hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go. We must scale up,
not unplug. Then, during the passage of technology into this injured,
engorged, and unguarded condition, it will be sculpted anew into
something better, something in closer agreement with the real wants and
desires of its users.

The third point has to do with structure. Because networks are
(technically) predicated on creating possible communications between
nodes, oppositional practices will have to focus less on the
characteristics of the nodes, and more on the quality of the
interactions between nodes. In this sense the node-edge distinction will
break down. Nodes will be constructed as a byproduct of the creation of
edges, and edges will be a precondition for the inclusion of nodes in
the network. Conveyances are key. From the oppositional perspective,
nodes are nothing but dilated or relaxed edges, while edges are
constricted, hyper-kinetic nodes. Nodes may be composed of clustering
edges, while edges may be extended nodes.

Using various protocols as their operational standards, networks tend to
combine large masses of different elements under a single umbrella. The
fourth point we offer, then, deals with motion: counterprotocol
practices can capitalize on the homogeneity found in networks to
resonate far and wide with little effort. Again, the point is not to do
away with standards or the process of standardization altogether, for
there is no imaginary zone of non-standardization, no zero-place where
there is a ghostly, pure flow of only edges. Protocological control
works through inherent tensions, and as such, counterprotocol practices
can be understood as tactical implementations and intensifications of
protocological control.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>5.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Limits of Networking</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Mon, 15 Mar 2004 17:22:42 +0100</date>
<content>Quoting Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker:

&gt; Protocol abounds in techno-culture. It is a totalizing control apparatus
&gt; that guides both the technical and political formation of computer
&gt; networks, biological systems and other media. 

[...]

The problem with the word "protocol" seems to me that computer science has
given it a meaning quite different from common English. Other examples are
the words "transparent" (which is used in software design in practically
opposite sense to common understanding, as a mapping of two or more
different symbolic systems into a simulated one, like the "transparent"
access of FTP servers directly in a desktop PC file manager), "code" (used
not in the common sense of "codifying system", but as "codified symbols"),
"interpretation" (understood in the C.S. as the formal
execution/translation of an instruction at runtime, whereas in philosophy,
literary studies and music interpretation it means non-formal translation
of [instructive or non-instructive] signs), and so on.

What computer science and network engineering call "protocol" could just
as well, or better perhaps, be named [a simple, formal] "language" because
they simply serve the purpose that two connected entities can talk to each
other. Yet another word, which you use yourself, is "standard". It is a
virtue of the Internet that its standards are open and designed to be as
agnostic to the information transported as possible; it seems to me that
preserving this design (with DRM schemes, patents etc. on the horizon) is
the issue rather than, as you at the end of the paper, pushing the
protocols.
Of course it is right to say that "protocols", "standards", "languages" or
whatever we call them are systems of control in the sense of what
theoreticians such as Lacan and Foucault have called "symbolic order" or
"discourse"; if this applies to common human language, it no doubt applies
to formal languages as well. But in praxis, it boils down to the question
how the standard is designed, i.e. how much freedom it allows and who
controls it in which way, see Lawrence Lessig's analysis of the Internet
vs. AOL.

But as with any play, consisting of a ruleset and its free execution,
control is never total to the extent that it wouldn't permit freedom, a
paradox best seen in Oulipo writing with its self-imposed formal
restraints (like: writing a novel without a single occurence of the letter
"e", as Perec's "La Disparition"). Freedom and control thus are not
mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent on each other. To envision
communication systems without control - i.e. languages without rules,
networks without protocols - and find them desirable, would be utterly an
infantilist vision of a pre-language paradise. (And to read Freud, Lacan
or Foucault in this way, would be no less naive.)

&gt; Put simply, protocols are all the conventional rules and standards
&gt; that govern relationships within networks.

Yes, but the reality is more complex because network protocols can be
layered onto each other and thus used in quite unpredictable ways.

To stick with the example of the Internet, it would be false to assume
that because http is a "hypertext transportation protocol", it would force
everything under its "totalizing control apparatus" (to quote your paper)
into hypertext format. - The counter-examples are abundant and well-known,
but even topped by the fact that any imaginable network language can, with
the right software tools, be steganographically tunnelled through http,
just as you can subvert the "totalizing control system" English by using
it merely as a cryptographical container for a text written, for example,
in the cosmic Zaum language of futurist poet Velemir Chlebnikov - apart
from the fact that you can still use it to write novels like Joyce's
Ulysses, or in the case of http, web sites like www.jodi.org.

 
&gt; We need only remind ourselves of the military
&gt; backdrop of WWII mainframe computing and the Cold War context of ARPAnet,
&gt; to suggest that networks are not ahistorical entities.

Yet the history is more complex as popular media history reductionism
tells it. The Arpanet/Internet was funded by the military, but designed by
academics - many of them with hippie backgrounds - who used the rhetoric
of the "nuclear-strike resistence" to get the money for it.  Today, you
probably have to write something about "e-commerce opportunities in a
globalized world" or "terrorist-proof network design" if you run a C.S.
lab and want a grant for your work. (Or, if you do humanities research on
the subject, don't miss to write the word "interdisciplinary cultural
research" into your application letter, at least here in Germany.)

&gt; and so forth. What we end up with is a *metaphysics of networks*. The

Agreed, for which to not a small extent Deleuze/Guattari and their popular
perception must be blamed. An aspect of D/G where most clearly their
indebtedness to vitalist philosophy [and hence right-wing philosophy]
shines through. I wonder if that critique could be applied to the
now-fashionable term "multitudes" (which I plainly [mis?]read as a
Deleuze-Guattarian update on the classical Marxist "masses") as well.

 
&gt; Biological or computational, the network is always configured by its
&gt; protocols. We stress this integrative approach because we cannot afford to
&gt; view "information" naively as solely immaterial. Negri notes that "all
&gt; politics is biopolitics," and to this, we would add that all networks are
&gt; not only biopolitical but biotechnical networks. Protocological control in
&gt; networks is as much about networks as *living networks* as it is about the
&gt; materiality of informatics.

I may not quite grasp this argument, but it seems to me that here you fall
into the trap of misreading the map for the territory, or the signifier
for the signified, by reading the sloppy engineering terminology of
"protocol" too seriously.

&gt; Thus we are quite interested in a understanding of political change within
&gt; networks. What follows might be thought of as a series of challenges for
&gt; "counterprotocological practice," designed for anyone wishing progressive
&gt; change inside of biotechnical networks.

While you later disclaim neo-luddite tendencies, "counterprotocological
practice" is a term which almosts screms for being misread as desire for
pre-linguistic status quo.

&gt; but to push technology into a hypertrophic state, further than it is meant
&gt; to go. We must scale up, not unplug. Then, during the passage of
&gt; technology into this injured, engorged, and unguarded condition, it will
&gt; be sculpted anew into something better, something in closer agreement with
&gt; the real wants and desires of its users.

This, in my view, reverberates a "media archeology" you might not have
been aware of, that of language utopias since at least medieval kabbalism.
But, to stay in the previous metaphor, should a French person who read
Lacan and Foucault focus all her/his subversive energy on the Acad&#233;mie
fran&#231;aise?

I also note that your own push for a "counterprotocological practice"
solely happens on the level of the signified, not the signifier - or, in
other words: the transported data, not the transport protocols.  Would you
consider the grammar of the English language, the Latin alphabet encoded
into ASCII whose bits then are distributed via the SMTP and POP3/imap
protocols over TCP/IP to Nettime subscribers issues as well?

-F</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>5.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Limits of Networking</subject>
<from>porculus</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Tue, 16 Mar 2004 09:18:55 +0100</date>
<content>&gt; Of course it is right to say that "protocols", "standards", "languages" or
&gt; whatever we call them are systems of control in the sense of what
&gt; theoreticians such as Lacan and Foucault

i would say to so metadigitaly paint in my mind cruising together these 2
bikers by the road of all human brain as lacan &amp; foucault are is more
beautiful than a duchampian's urinal

&gt; I also note that your own push for a "counterprotocological practice"

i collapse, i am so sensible that too much beauty cause double bind in my
current vital protocol, only one beer or two could call me back for sharing
again any ordinary earthling life</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>5.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Limits of Networking</subject>
<from>Sawad</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Mon, 15 Mar 2004 10:37:20 -0500</date>
<content>&gt;  "protocol," a word derived from computer science

Computer science reaches far back indeed, to ancient Greece.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>5.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Limits of Networking</subject>
<from>auskadi {AT} tvcabo.co.mz</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 25 Mar 2004 12:06:56 +0100</date>
<content>Alexander

Hi, I am glad this got posted again as it helps me get back to trying to 
put a line of thought together.

I have been trying to think through these two points you raise. They 
resonate with me in a way that doesn't seem to have been picked up in 
the discussion to date.

&gt; The second point is about tactics. In reality, counterprotocological
&gt; practice is not "counter" anything! Saying that politics is an act of
&gt; "resistance" was never true, except for the most literal interpretation
&gt; of conservatism. We must search-and-replace all occurrences of
&gt; "resistance" with "impulsion" or perhaps "thrust." Thus the concept of
&gt; resistance in politics should be superceded by the concept of
&gt; hypertrophy. Resistance is a Clausewitzian mentality; the strategy of
&gt; maneuvers teaches us instead that the best way to beat an enemy is to
&gt; become a better enemy. One must push through to the other side, rather
&gt; than drag one's heels. There are two directions for political change:
&gt; resistance implies a desire for stasis or retrograde motion, but
&gt; hypertrophy is the desire for pushing beyond. The goal is not to destroy
&gt; technology in some neoluddite delusion, but to push technology into a
&gt; hypertrophic state, further than it is meant to go. We must scale up,
&gt; not unplug. Then, during the passage of technology into this injured,
&gt; engorged, and unguarded condition, it will be sculpted anew into
&gt; something better, something in closer agreement with the real wants and
&gt; desires of its users.
&gt;
&gt; The third point has to do with structure. Because networks are
&gt; (technically) predicated on creating possible communications between
&gt; nodes, oppositional practices will have to focus less on the
&gt; characteristics of the nodes, and more on the quality of the
&gt; interactions between nodes. In this sense the node-edge distinction will
&gt; break down. Nodes will be constructed as a byproduct of the creation of
&gt; edges, and edges will be a precondition for the inclusion of nodes in
&gt; the network. Conveyances are key. From the oppositional perspective,
&gt; nodes are nothing but dilated or relaxed edges, while edges are
&gt; constricted, hyper-kinetic nodes. Nodes may be composed of clustering
&gt; edges, while edges may be extended nodes.

Both of these points to me seem to be building upon two ideas that I 
have been tossing around in relation to "the power of life" and the idea 
of "ease" that Agamben talks about int he Coming Community.

In your Protocol article from rethinking Marxism you quoted Deleuze 
quoting Foucault ....

"[1] &#133; power &#133; takes life as its aim or object, then resistance to power 
already puts itself on the side of life, and turns life against power . 
. . [2] Life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its 
object . . . [3] When power becomes bio-power resistance becomes the 
power of life, a vital power that cannot be confined within species, 
environment or the paths of a particular diagram"

Now I have been playing with this and with things that came out of 
difference and repetition for some time, trying to grapple with legal 
things and ways of re imagining relationships and law. I started out 
thinking about this in respect of work I had done with Aboriginal 
artists in Australia and the way the courts accommodated "communal 
production" within the law of copyright using principles of equity.

Here is a snip from the paper I gave back then at UF 
(http://openflows.org/%7Eauskadi/shapeoflaw.html) which cited that part 
of Protocol:
To go back to Deleuze "If exchange is the criterion of generality, theft 
and gift are those of repetition. There is, therefore, an economic 
difference between the two".[46] Similarly, the idea of equity acts, in 
personem, on the conscience and conduct of people towards an end, where 
the concept of law acts in rem, on property, based upon rules. Thus 
there is an economic difference between a law that acts over property 
and an equitable idea that acts on the person's conscience. Equity's 
language, like repetitions, is also of gift and theft. Equity deals with 
gifts (fiduciaries, trusts, wills, intention) and with theft (undue 
influence, unconscionability, restitution and other breaches of 
equitable duties). It may be here that in their economic and quality and 
in their language, equity and repetition are most closely related.
Equity can be said not to be about the concept of rules but about an 
idea, a bevaviour. It not only looks to substance, over form it regards 
as done, what ought to have been done, thus one who seeks equity must 
come with clean hands, they must have done equity themselves to be 
entitled to equity's relief. It will not reward those that it regards as 
scoundrels, those lacking in conscience or virtue.
Equity builds its body of law, its "artifact &#133; and testament"[47] not 
through the creation of rules but through the idea of repeating 
behaviour over time. The singular repetition of equity is the "singular 
subject, the interiority and the heart of the other"[48], its "artifact" 
the "other is only the external envelope, the abstract effect".[49]

Now the problem with my equity argument here is that it can easily be 
read as saying lets just adopt this aspect of the positive legal system 
in our tactics .... some have seen it like that. But the more I have 
done my research on Floss, the GPL etc the more I have become convinced 
that like so many aspects of law today they exist within a state of 
exception. My rough thinking at the moment as that like the current 
state of international law or the way in which positive law treats 
indigenous
law the current state of intellectual property law in relation to 
software I think can also fairly be described as existing in such a 
"state of exception". On the constitutional side or that of "positive 
law" there exists a state whereby many of the modernists underpinnings 
of legal theory are up in the air. This explains why I think many of the 
U.S. legal academics (eg Lessig) and those within the open source 
movement (eg Moglen etc) have great difficulty in explaining why legal 
decision making by courts and governments is at odds with their 
understanding of the basis of the law. It also positions their inability 
to move out of this discourse and I think the failings of their 
approach. As I keep arguing what is important for law now appears to be 
its economic functionality and not modernist legal theory. On the other 
hand the main legal response by the free software movement, the GPL or 
General Public Licence itself seems to exist with this state of 
exception, that is it only has validity whilst it retains the appearance 
of the force of law. One point is that this seemingly discrete area of 
law in fact reflects(and could even be central, tied as it is to new 
forms of production, i.e. to immaterial labour) the broader state of 
exception and tendency toward imperial society. Anther point and maybe 
more relevant here is that rather than "pushing through to the other 
side" the GPL etc remains within that side and in my view (as outlined 
in my recent article http://openflows.org/~auskadi/foreigner.html) risks 
being firmly entrenched on that/this side.

So I suppose my question is, or my observation is, that does one "push 
through to the other side" by adopting what (even though now you reject 
the term resistance - I can see why) you described or took as resistance 
before - "resistance becomes the power of life"? Secondly to focus "more 
on the quality of the interactions between nodes" raises with me (as I 
allude to above) what Agamben talked about when he discusses "ease". In 
line with the "the power of life" this quality of interaction seems to 
involve the "substituting (yourself) for someone else, that is, to be 
Christians in the place of others"( Agamben at 23).

Frankly what worries me with lots of our talk of new media, intellectual 
property, information etc etc is that in some ways they seem to reject 
the idea of the possibility of "separate" commons. That is that there is 
a call for "universals of communication" which in some ways are bland 
and shallow attempts to claim to be pursuing forms of life or pushing 
through to the other side. After reading a fairly recent Negri piece on 
the commons 
(http://mozambique.twiki.us/twiki/bin/view/Main/NegriAndVirnoOnTheCommon) 
I felt a little heartened that maybe the commons of which we speak is 
not a universal commons a "free" (as in freedom) commons but one that 
requires us to treat others with "ease" and act with the "power of life".

Maybe what I am getting at here is that we are all pretty clear now that 
networks et al are the new way of doing things but the question is for 
what do those networks exist - over or of life? To continue just to laud 
networks and free information to me gets us nowhere (hence my fairly 
negative piece recently). But this question that I see in your piece 
seems to be in many ways a core issue. But we need to start to really 
grapple with how to act "of life" how to act with "ease" without just 
repeating the mantras of freedom which really are pretty meaningless for me.

I hope somehow what I toying with is not lost in this muddle of thought.

Thanks

Martin

-- 
http://www.auskadi.tk/
"the riddle which man must solve, he can only solve in being, in 
being what he is and not something else...."</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; The Ghost in the Network</subject>
<from>Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Mon, 16 May 2005 12:56:01 -0400</date>
<content>The Ghost in the Network

In discussing the difference between the living and the nonliving,
Aristotle points to the phenomena of self-organized animation and
motility as the key aspects of a living thing. For Aristotle the
"form-giving Soul" enables inanimate matter to become a living organism.
If life is animation, then animation is driven by a final cause. But the
cause is internal to the organism, not imposed from without as with
machines. Network science takes up this idea on the mathematical plane,
so that geometry is the soul of the network. Network science proposes
that heterogeneous network phenomena can be understood through the
geometry of graph theory, the mathematics of dots and lines. An
interesting outcome of this is that seemingly incongruous network
phenomena can be grouped according to their similar geometries. For
instance the networks of AIDS, terrorist groups, or the economy can be
understood as having in common a particular pattern, a particular set of
relations between dots (nodes) and lines (edges). A given topological
pattern is what cultivates and sculpts information within networks. To
in-form is thus to give shape to matter (via organization or
self-organization) through the instantiation of form--a network
hylomorphism.

But further, the actualized being of the living network is also defined
in political terms. "No central node sits in the middle of the spider
web, controlling and monitoring every link and node. There is no single
node whose removal could break the web. A scale-free network is a web
without a spider" [1]. Having-no-spider is an observation about
predatory hierarchy, or the supposed lack thereof, and is therefore a
deeply political observation. In order to make this unnerving jump--from
math (graph theory), to technology (the Internet), to politics ("a web
without a spider")--politics needs to be seen as following the necessary
and "natural" laws of mathematics; that is, networks need to be
understood as "an unavoidable consequence of their evolution" [2]. In
network science, the "unavoidable consequence" of networks often
resembles something like neoliberal democracy, but a democracy which
naturally emerges according to the "power law" of decentralized
networks. Like so, their fates are twisted together.

Rhetorics of Freedom

While tactically valuable in the fight against proprietary software,
open source is ultimately flawed as a political program. Open source
focuses on code in isolation. It fetishizes all the wrong things:
language, originality, source, the past, status. To focus on inert,
isolated code is to ignore code in its context, in its social relation,
in its real experience, or actual dynamic relations with other code and
other machines. Debugging never happens through reading the source code,
only through running the program. Better than open source would be open
runtime which would prize all the opposites: open articulation, open
iterability, open practice, open becoming.

But this is also misleading and based in a rhetoric around the relative
openness and closedness of a technological system. The rhetoric goes
something like this: technological systems can either be closed or open.
Closed systems are generally created by either commercial or state
interests-courts regulate technology, companies control their
proprietary technologies in the market place, and so on. Open systems,
on the other hand, are generally associated with the public and with
freedom and political transparency. Geert Lovink contrasts "closed
systems based on profit through control and scarcity" with "open,
innovative standards situated in the public domain" [3]. Later, in his
elucidation of Castells, he writes of the opposite, a "freedom hardwired
into code" [4]. This gets to the heart of the freedom rhetoric. If it's
hardwired is it still freedom? Instead of guaranteeing freedom, the act
of "hardwiring" suggests a limitation on freedom. And in fact that is
precisely the case on the Internet where strict universal standards of
communication have been rolled out more widely and more quickly than in
any other medium throughout history. Lessig and many others rely heavily
on this rhetoric of freedom.

We suggest that this opposition between closed and open is flawed. It
unwittingly perpetuates one of today's most insidious political myths,
that the state and capital are the two sole instigators of control.
Instead of the open/closed opposition we suggest the pairing
physical/social. The so-called open logics of control, those associated
with (non proprietary) computer code or with the Internet protocols,
operate primarily using a physical model of control. For example,
protocols interact with each other by physically altering and amending
lower protocological objects (IP prefixes its header onto a TCP data
object, which prefixes its header onto an HTTP object, and so on). But
on the other hand, the so-called closed logics of state and commercial
control operate primarily using a social model of control. For, example,
Microsoft's commercial prowess is renewed via the social activity of
market exchange. Or, using another example, Digital Rights Management
licenses establish a social relationship between producers and
consumers, a social relationship backed up by specific legal realities
(DMCA). Viewed in this way, we find it self evident that physical
control (i.e. protocol) is equally powerful if not more so than social
control. Thus, we hope to show that if the topic at hand is one of
control, then the monikers of "open" and "closed" simply further confuse
the issue. Instead we would like to speak in terms of "alternatives of
control" whereby the controlling logic of both "open" and "closed"
systems is brought out into the light of day.

Political Animals

Aristotle's famous formulation of "man as a political animal" takes on
new meanings in light of contemporary studies of biological
self-organization. For Aristotle, the human being was first a living
being, with the additional capacity for political being. In this sense,
biology becomes the presupposition for politics, just as the human
being's animal being serves as the basis for its political being. But
not all animals are alike. Deleuze distinguishes three types of animals:
domestic pets (Freudian, anthropomorphized Wolf-Man), animals in nature
(the isolated species, the lone wolf), and packs (multiplicities). It is
this last type of animal--the pack--which provides the most direct
counter-point to Aristotle's formulation, and which leads us to pose a
question: If the human being is a political animal, are there also
animal politics? Ethnologists and entymologists would think so. The ant
colony and insect swarm has long been used in science fiction and horror
as the metaphor for the opposite of Western, liberal democracies. Even
the language used in biology still retains the remnants of sovereignty:
the queen bee, the drone. What, then, do we make of theories of
biocomplexity and swarm intelligence, which suggest that there is no
"queen" but only a set of localized interactions which self-organize
into a whole swarm or colony? Is the "multitude" a type of animal
multiplicity? Such probes seem to suggest that Aristotle based his
formulation on the wrong kinds of animals. "You can't be one wolf," of
course. "You're always eight or nine, six or seven" [5].

Ad Hoc

Unplug from the grid. Plug into your friends. Adhocracy will rule.
Autonomy and security will only happen when telecommunications operate
around ad hoc networking. Syndicate yourself to the locality.

Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker

+ + +

[1] Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked (Cambridge: Perseus Publishing,
2002), p. 221.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Geert Lovink, My First Recession (Rotterdam: V2, 2003), p. 14.

[4] Ibid., p. 47.

[5] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 29.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Ghost in the Network</subject>
<from>Keith Hart</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Tue, 17 May 2005 11:40:06 +0200</date>
<content>&gt;In discussing the difference between the living and the nonliving,
&gt;Aristotle points to the phenomena of self-organized animation and
&gt;motility as the key aspects of a living thing. For Aristotle the
&gt;"form-giving Soul" enables inanimate matter to become a living organism.
&gt;If life is animation, then animation is driven by a final cause. But the
&gt;cause is internal to the organism, not imposed from without as with
&gt;machines. Network science takes up this idea on the mathematical plane,
&gt;so that geometry is the soul of the network. 

&gt;Unplug from the grid. Plug into your friends. Adhocracy will rule.
&gt;Autonomy and security will only happen when telecommunications operate
&gt;around ad hoc networking. Syndicate yourself to the locality.

I wasn't sure until the end if these guys were on Aristotle's side or 
not. But their resounding call to "stop the world, I want to get off" 
makes it clear that they share his reactionary conservatism. It is worth 
recalling that the great philosopher was tutor to the leader of those 
Macedonian thugs who finally pulled the plug on the first millennium 
BC's drive towards urban commercial civilisation and was the godfather 
of catholic apologists for the military agrarian complex like Aquinas. 
European socialism has long been in thrall to their anti-market ideology 
and this repudiation of an open source approach to network society is no 
different.

Incidentally, graph theory has been pronounced out-of-date by the 
sources they cite -- for its assumptions of stasis, randomness and 
atomism which can't make sense of network growth with preferences.

Keith Hart</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The Ghost in the Network</subject>
<from>Felix Stalder</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Tue, 17 May 2005 17:05:01 -0400</date>
<content>On Monday, 16. May 2005 12:56, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker wrote:&gt;

&gt; We suggest that this opposition between closed and open is flawed. It
&gt; unwittingly perpetuates one of today's most insidious political myths,
&gt; that the state and capital are the two sole instigators of control.
&gt; Instead of the open/closed opposition we suggest the pairing
&gt; physical/social. The so-called open logics of control, those associated
&gt; with (non proprietary) computer code or with the Internet protocols,
&gt; operate primarily using a physical model of control. For example,
&gt; protocols interact with each other by physically altering and amending
&gt; lower protocological objects (IP prefixes its header onto a TCP data
&gt; object, which prefixes its header onto an HTTP object, and so on). But
&gt; on the other hand, the so-called closed logics of state and commercial
&gt; control operate primarily using a social model of control. For, example,
&gt; Microsoft's commercial prowess is renewed via the social activity of
&gt; market exchange. Or, using another example, Digital Rights Management
&gt; licenses establish a social relationship between producers and
&gt; consumers, a social relationship backed up by specific legal realities
&gt; (DMCA). Viewed in this way, we find it self evident that physical
&gt; control (i.e. protocol) is equally powerful if not more so than social
&gt; control. Thus, we hope to show that if the topic at hand is one of
&gt; control, then the monikers of "open" and "closed" simply further confuse
&gt; the issue. Instead we would like to speak in terms of "alternatives of
&gt; control" whereby the controlling logic of both "open" and "closed"
&gt; systems is brought out into the light of day.
I think this equation of "protocol = control", which is also the core of 
Galloway's stimulating book [1], is fundamentally flawed, because it mixes 
terms in ways that is not helpful to a critical political analysis.

A protocol, technical or social, is a series of standards which regulate 
how different entities can interact without the establishment of a formal 
hierarchy. Remember, the term originated in the context of exchanges 
between the king and foreign diplomats. The key about this relationship 
was that the diplomats were not the king's subjects, yet the diplomats 
were the equal to the king. They were different. The purpose of a protocol 
was to allow them to interact without the establishment of a formal 
hierarchy.

To argue that the protocol now, somehow, controlled the king and the 
diplomats seems strange. The same problem occurs when arguing that the 
Internet Protocol is somehow the ultimate controlling mechanism of the 
Internet. The fact that communication takes place within certain 
constraints, which enable communication in the first place, does not 
equate control. Rather, constraints on one level (the protocol of 
communication) can provide the grounds for freedom on an other level 
(content of communication). This is social theory 101.

The whole argument of protocol = control seems to rest on a somewhat 
unimaginative reading of Foucault's micro physics of power, in which he 
argued that language itself is a main source of power and that the 
establishment of categories (e.g. madness) was itself a supreme act of 
power.  To transfer this one-on-one to protocols of communication 
networks, yields yet another control phantasy (or nightmare, depending on 
your agenda). The only choice it leaves you is to jump into a some sort of 
'pre-social' state. And this is precisely what Galloway &amp; Thacker offer 
us:

&gt; Unplug from the grid. Plug into your friends. Adhocracy will rule.
&gt; Autonomy and security will only happen when telecommunications operate
&gt; around ad hoc networking. Syndicate yourself to the locality.

What we have here is the 'social' vs. the 'technical', and the 'unplanned' 
vs. the 'planned'. Why this should lead to more freedom is dubious. Unless 
we understand freedom as absence of rules and control as presence of 
rules. This, however, is a very misleading understanding of these 
concepts, as has been argued often, not the least by in the feminist 
critique of the anti-authoritarian social movements of the late 1960s. [2]
PS: I am not arguing that protocols cannot be used as mechanism of social 
control. Rather, this has to be established on a case-by-case basis, 
rather than pronouncing protocols as means of control per se.
[1] Galloway, Alexander R. (2004). Protocol: How Control Exists After 
Decentralization. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press

[2] Freeman, Jo (1972). The Tyranny of Structurelessness. The Second Wave. 
Vol. 2 No. 1 http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>6.3</nbr>
<subject>RE: &lt;nettime&gt; The Ghost in the Network</subject>
<from>Dirk Vekemans</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 18 May 2005 13:57:33 +0200</date>
<content>I am new to this list,please forgive my ignorance and my clumsy
wordings, i read  this stimulating text by Galloway &amp; Thacker on Rhizome
(thanks to Geert).  I wanted to respond, tried first on Rhizome, made a
mailing mistake there, but i suppose this is the place to do so...

On the Ghost in network part, on the rhetoric of freedom in particular (I
quote the authors first): 
"Later, in his elucidation of Castells, he (=Lovink, dv) writes of the
opposite, a "freedom  hardwired into code" [4]. This gets to the heart of
the freedom rhetoric. If it's hardwired is it still freedom? Instead of
guaranteeing freedom, the act of "hardwiring" suggests a limitation on
freedom. And in fact that is precisely the case on the Internet where strict
universal standards of communication have been rolled out more widely and
more quickly than in any other medium throughout history. Lessig and many
others rely heavily on this rhetoric of freedom."

As with any rhetoric, this may be beside the point, and therefore pointing
towards it: regardless of the how's why's of software development,
regardless of its supposedly 'open-' or 'closedness', all software i know
has too much artificiality 'hardwired' into it, not because it efficiently
reflects a mechanic ontology and because therefore it is too much of a
machine to deal with organic processes, but because it isn't machinic enough
(cfr. Deleuze on Leibniz' critique of Descartes, Le Pli, p12) : we are now
noticing matter-shape interactions on macro levels (supra human if you want,
i hate these metaphores) such as the selforganisation of internet as well as
on micro levels ('below' our field of perception, although that topology
isn't sustainable either) that point towards a dissolution of that old
dualism in favour of multiplicity and Deleuze's 'becoming'. 

Matter unfolding into its shape and shape folding into its matter.
Difference&gt;absence&gt;difference.

In the self-inflicted urgency that is very much the essence of software
development ( we need better software faster to 'regain' control of a global
process running wild, or at least to radically slow down some processes that
lead to quasi immediate annihilation), we are perhaps too much focussed on
the immediate results the object-oriented approach gives us. In doing so we
have ***rightfully***, i do want to stress that, disregarded alternatives.
Because we need results fast, ever faster. But in doing so, we are now in a
stage where systems need to be developed to run systems to run systems to
infinity: we are stuck in a hysteresis of developing cycles feeding itself
with ever more need.

The 'solution' or escape route offered here ('Unplug from the grid."
"Adhocracy will rule") is one that i have given considerable thought in the
past but always rejected. I have seen beautiful artistical results come off
it. I appreciate its inherent beauty, the arcadian attraction of it. But I
do not like the defaitism that goes with it. 

It is as much a solution as taking out your tent and go camping near the
Rocky Mountains for the rest of your life. You cannot unplug from the grid,
the grid is taking shape within you, within the micro-economics of your
friendly circles, within the micro power balancing within the machine-you. 
It is not a malignant ghost. It has nothing to do with good or evil and
certainly nothing to do with transcendance, although many religious
organisations base their very worldly power on that interpretation.
Mechanical machines will give us mechanical results, if left running by
themselves, i don't see anything 'bad' or devilish there.

Machinical machines, on the other hand,in the Deleuzian sense of 'machine',
would give us machinical results, and take the 'natural' flow of
matter-shape (in)formation along with them into the technology that enables
them.
 I don't see anything 'good' or messianistic there either. It's just that
everything i can observe points in that direction, i wouldn't presume to say
anything like this with my limited knowledge if that weren't the case. Heck,
I just noticed mr Sondheim's work deals with some of the questions i'm
working on...

 So somehow I believe alternatives can be developed into working information
systems that could supplement and even unhinge our current critical
condition. I'm making some very modest efforts towards that with what i know
of programming and the semantical to ontological implications of poetry.

Before today,i didn't see where these things were being researched, but i am
entertaining hunches that process thought as expressed in the work of the
Leibniz-Deleuze-Whitehead trail in ontology could find its reflection in
working models of such alternatives and that our current practice of
object-oriented programming should be subjected to a critical analysis, not
because it's bad or malfunctioning, but because we need to understand how
the shape of it turns to matter there. And these programmatic approaches
didn't come into being all of a sudden, they built upon a dominant ontology
themselves (as Philip E. Agre points out in The Practical Logic of Computer
Work at http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/practical.html) and they are
modelled after them.
So we need to know how the transcoding process that Lev Manovich explains in
his 'The Language of New Media', the way how our daily interaction with
computer (networks) influences our strains of thoughts on every level, how
that really works, how it affects us and more importantly, how we could
affect it. 

 I think IT matters, if you want a slogan. Or computers need sex, if you
want a provocative one. And i think a lot of people should be doing this
kind of research, not just some halfwit poet from kessel-lo without any
resources, although of course i know a thing or two about how poetry works
and how semantical processes at work there could be correlated to basic
concepts in programming like recursive definition and garbage collection to
name a few directions my own wreckage is floating in. I'm happy to notice
some people are doing it here and with much more of the expertise required
to do so. One would need to take another go at AI from the point before it
went pragmatical, disassemble that and start rebuilding on, why not, a
better phenomenology of analogic/discrete (referring to mr Sondheim's last
post) although my guess is you do _not_ need to actually 'solve' any deep
ontological and epistemological issues to get anywhere: if you allow the
process of machine-building sufficient 'air-space' the 'text' will write
itself, much like a poem goes ding-dong when it has finished being written
and starts writing itself into reality. It is a process that dissolves time
and space alltogether, in a way, anyone who's had the experience will
testify to a sense of timelessness while writing/being ridden by and waking
up afterwards without any memory of the actual writing. There's nothing
mystical/romantic/visionary involved there, i think, it's just nature having
its way. Very deterministic in the end, i'm afraid, inasmuch as that freedom
is, epitemologically, a rather irrelevant question, only of (ab)use in
rhetorical games of power after the fact, post-mortem if you want and mostly
going on in equal bad taste as asking how it was after having intimate sex.
Anyway,i've noticed programming doing the very same chemistry in my cranky
brain...

In a modest way i am steering my shaky Cathedral of erotic Misery, a net
arty project at http://www.vilt.net/nkdee towards these goals. Just please
don't ask me how i propose to realize such alternatives, i'm just in the
middle of trying to formulate some notes that could lead towards a possibly
workable hypothesis in the best of scientific tradition, eventually. Anyone
is invited to join in the process of theory building, although at this stage
for the actual authoring stuff, i hang on to a very male and as yet
tyranical core authoring process, collaboration is nice but impossible when
there's nothing to collaborate on...
Very theoretically it could lead to results, following it's own recursively
defined flow or growth. Notes towards a supreme fiction, if you want Wallace
Stevens in the game, although his poetry unfolds far beyond his ontology.

greetings,
dv
www.vilt.net</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Brian Holmes</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Mon, 17 Apr 2006 06:36:38 -0400</date>
<content>Albert Hupa wrote:

&gt;Let's consciously combine two meanings of a network: a map, a set of 
&gt;relations
&gt;analyzed from ecological point of view and the kind of behaviour....  That 
&gt;is
&gt;why I think of using the notion of swarm - its emergent behaviour cannot be
&gt;described as unpredictable. We may find out some patterns in its behaviour 
&gt;and
&gt;thus, learn something out of networks.

Yes, I agree. The static graph of the network map is what 
leads, via the dynamic figure of the swarm, to a certain 
kind of complexity theory as a possible way to understand 
emergent behavior in the real world.

On the one hand, the use of social network analysis tools is 
giving us pictures of very complicated interlinkages between 
individuals and groups. These pictures are quite simply 
fascinating, because they aggregate lots of data and allow 
one to glimpse patterns, or at least, the possibility of 
patterns, of regularities. But the maps are not enough. One 
needs an understanding of the quality of the links 
themselves, of what encourages a group to cooperate even 
when its membership is atomized and dispersed in space. 
Older sociological and anthropological studies tell a lot 
about how institutions organize a group (church, firm, 
disciplinary organization, etc) and they also tell a great 
deal about how family structures and status hierarchies 
organize people in stable localities. However, when the grip 
of institutions and of place-bound hierarchies declines, as 
is happening today, and when society largely becomes a 
matter of dispersions of  mobile individuals in anonymous 
spaces - the big city; the world; the telecommunicational 
space - the only behavior that has really been understood 
very well is market behavior. We know A LOT (too much I 
would even say) about how price signals serve to structure 
the economic behavior of dispersed and mobile individuals, 
who are always portrayed as rationally calculating in order 
to maximalize their accumulation stategies (this is called 
"methodological individualism"). But is individual economic 
behavior the only kind that can be witnessed in the world 
today? Obviously not! Or let us say, rather, that within the 
space of very weakly determined social relations constituted 
by the market and price signals - the space of what the 
network sociologist Mark Granovetter famously called "weak 
ties" - other subsets or relational forms have started to 
appear.

This is where the questions asked by complexity theory 
become so interesting and timely. What gives form and 
pattern to emergent behavior? How can we understand the 
internal consistency of self-organized groups and networks? 
The first answer seemed to be offered by the figure of the 
swarm. The word "swarming" describes a pattern of 
self-organization in real time, which seems to arise out of 
nowhere (or to be emergent) and yet which is recognizable, 
because it repeats in a more or less rhythmical way. 
Swarming is an initial image of self-organization. It is 
basically a pattern of attack, and here it's worth recalling 
the classic definition given by the military theorists 
Arquila and Ronfeldt in their book on "The Zapatista 'Social 
Netwar' in Mexico": "Swarming occurs when the dispersed 
units of a network of small (and perhaps some large) forces 
converge on a target from multiple directions. The overall 
aim is sustainable pulsing--swarm networks must be able to 
coalesce rapidly and stealthily on a target, then dissever 
and redisperse, immediately ready to recombine for a new 
pulse."

What the observation and description of swarming has done is 
to give us a temporal image of emergent activity, decisively 
adding a dynamic aspect which was absent from the static 
network maps. This is very suggestive for anyone looking to 
understand the kinds of behavior that seem to be associated 
with networks, and indeed, with a "networked society." But 
does the dynamic image of swarming really tell us how 
self-organization occurs? No, I don't think so. The proof is 
that the American and Israeli military theorists have made 
dynamic models of what they see as the swarm tactic, and 
they now claim to use it as what they call a doctrine (see, 
for this, the important and sobering text by Eyal Weizman, 
"Walking through Walls," published in the current issue of 
Radical Philosophy). However, I do not believe that the 
miliary can engage in anything approximating 
self-organization, where individuals spontaneously 
coordinate their actions with others. This is antithetical 
to its hierarchical structure of command. Again, the 
"picture" can be misleading, even when it is a dynamic one. 
What is interesting, and perhaps essential to understand, is 
the way individuals and small groups spontaneously 
coordinate their actions, without any orders. This is 
self-organization, this is emergent behavior. But from what 
"ecology" does it emerge - to use Albert's term?

I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental 
factors that help to explain the consistency of 
self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of 
a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or 
metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up 
over time, and which gives the members of a group the 
capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same 
referential universe, even when they are dispersed and 
mobile. You can think of this as "making worlds." The second 
is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance: the 
exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of 
affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding 
in specific locations. This exchange of information and 
affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly 
reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world. 
The flow aspect of the exchange means that the group is 
constantly evolving, and it is in this sense that it is an 
"ecology," a set of complex and changing inter-relations; 
but this dynamic ecology has consistency and durability, it 
becomes recognizable and distinctive within the larger 
evironment of the earth and its populations, because of the 
shared horizon that links the participants together in what 
appears as a world (or indeed as a cosmos, when metaphysical 
or religious beliefs are at work).

Maurizio Lazarrato set me off on this line of thinking, with 
an article that we published in issue 15 of Multitudes and 
for which I suggested this title (just excerpted from 
important phrases in his text): "Creating Worlds: 
Contemporary capitalism and aesthetic 'wars.'" (Since then, 
all that work has been published in French under the title 
"Les revolutions du capitalisme," and bits have appeared in 
English all over the net.) Lazarrato pursues the Deleuzian 
concept of "modulation" to show how corporations strive to 
create worlds of aeesthetic perception and affect for their 
producers and consumers, in order to bind them together into 
some semblance of coordinated communities under the 
dispersed conditions of contemporary life. They do so via 
the media, which create aesthetic environments that are 
internalized within us in the form of recurring "refrains," 
or rhythmically recurring memories of a sounds, colors, 
words, etc. Lazzarato shows how these worlds, even in their 
difference and plurality (Coca-Cola, Nike, Microsoft, 
Macintosh...) conform to a "majority model" which is 
precisely that of capitalist production and consumption as 
structured by the bureaucratic state apparatuses and the 
transnational institutions that have formed between them. 
Nonetheless, the important thing to note is that in 
hyperindividualized societies, even these normalized forms 
of behavior are no longer directly shaped by institutional 
structures. Instead, there are multiple efforts and 
veritable aesthetic battle to create and maintain the 
referential universes within which choices are constantly made.

But this creation of worlds is not only done by 
corporations, and not only at the degree of simplicity and 
sterility that examples from the commercial realm inevitably 
suggest. To describe the specific contents out of which 
richer and vaster worlds of meaning are made, and to detail 
the effects of the specific tools and procedures that make 
it possible to continuously transform them and to coordinate 
actions within their horizons, are the tasks of a complexity 
theory which seeks to understand how groups organize their 
own behavior, when they are no longer decisively influenced 
by traditional institutions. Bateson pointed the way to this 
possibility of a cybernetic understanding, an understanding 
of feedback processes, with his "Steps to an Ecology of 
Mind." Guattari tried to create even more dynamic models of 
such human ecologies, particularly in his great and strange 
book "Cartographies schizoanalytiques." These are still 
probably the most important references for the art of 
composing mutable worlds, where the goal of the participants 
is to carry out continuous transformation of the very 
parameters and coordinates on which their interactions are 
based (this is also understood as 3rd-order cybernetics, 
where the system produces not just new information, but new 
categories of information). Today, however, it is the 
sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina (thanks, by the way, to the 
several people who sent me her recent article!) who has 
expressed all this most clearly and in the most mainstream 
language, which can't just be ignored or tossed off as the 
work of a kook. Her ideas bring us back to networks and 
their concrete operations, with the concept of "global 
microstructures." As she writes in "Complex Global 
Microstructures":

"Modern, industrial society created 'complex' forms of 
organizations that managed uncertainty and task fulfillment 
through interiorized systems of control and expertise. But 
complexity was institutional complexity; it meant 
sophisticated multi-level mechanisms of coordination, 
authority and compensation that assured orderly functioning 
and performance. A global society leans towards a different 
form of complexity; one emanating from more microstructural 
arrangements and the rise of mechanisms of coordination akin 
to those found in interaction systems.... The basic 
intuition that motivates the concept of a global 
microstructure is that genuinely global forms, by which I 
mean fields of practice that link up and stretch across all 
time zones (or have the potential to do so), need not imply 
further expansions of social institutional complexity. In 
fact, they may become feasible only if they avoid complex 
institutional structures. Global financial markets for 
example, where microstructures have been found, simply 
outrun the capacity of such structures. These markets are 
too fast, and change too quickly to be 'contained' by 
institutional orders. Global systems based on 
microstructural principles do not exhibit institutional 
complexity but rather the asymmetries, unpredictabilities 
and playfulness of complex (and dispersed) interaction 
patterns; a complexity that results, in John Urry?s terms, 
from a situation where order is not the outcome of purified 
social processes and is always intertwined with chaos. More 
concretely, these systems manifest an observational and 
temporal dynamics that is fundamental to their connectivity, 
auto-affective principles of self-motivation, forms of 
'outsourcing', and principles of content that substitute for 
the principles and mechanisms of the modern, complex 
organization."

Knorr Cetina stresses the creation of shared horizons in 
much the way that I described it above, focusing for this 
particular article on the religious horizon of a shared 
orientation to "transcendent time" (eschatology). As in 
previous articles on the microstructures of global finance, 
she also shows how networked ITCs allow participants of the 
microstructure to see and recognize each other, and to 
achieve cohesion by coordinating with each other in time, 
observing and commenting on the same events, even though the 
microstructure is very dispersed and not all the 
participants or even a majority of them are necessarily 
living anywhere near the particular event in question at any 
given moment. Cetina very suggestively reinterprets the 
usual idea of networks as a system of pipes conveying 
contents, to insist instead on the visual or scopic aspect 
of contemporary ICTs: from "pipes" to "scopes." Information 
is important for coordinating action; but it is the image 
that maintains the shared horizon and insists on the urgency 
of action within it (especially through what Barthes called 
the "punctum": the part that sticks out from the general 
dull flatness of the image and affectively touches you).

To understand how all this works, one essential thing is to 
realize that it is different in each case: the "ecologies" 
are very different, depending on the coordinates or 
parameters that give rise to the particular microstructure. 
For one example, take the case of the open-source software 
movement. One the one hand you have a shared ethical horizon 
which is constituted by texts and examplary projects: 
Stallman's declarations and the example of the GNU project; 
Torvald's work; the General Public License itself and all 
the principles it is based on, particularly the indication 
of authorship (permitting recognition for one's efforts) and 
the openness of the resulting code (permitting widespread 
cooperation); as well as essays like The Hacker Ethic; 
projects like Creative Commons; the relation of all that to 
older ideals of public science; etc. Then on the other hand 
you have concrete modes of coordination via the Internet: 
Sourceforge and the innumerable forums devoted to each free 
software project (which I've been getting to know as I 
struggle with my Ubuntu distro, ha ha!). The whole thing has 
as little institutional complexity as possible (nobody is 
really compelled to do anything in any particular way), but 
instead is a situation full of self-motivation and 
auto-affection between dispersed members of a nonetheless 
very recognizable network, coordinated temporally around the 
development of specific projects, where order is obviously 
intertwined with chaos! And clearly, this particular global 
microstructure is influential in the world.

Another great example, though more diffuse and complex, is 
the development of the counter-globalization movements. 
Again you can see the shared horizons of social justice, 
ecological awareness, resistance to hierarchical power (of 
the state and corporations), with reference to a 
constellation of texts and a number of great mythical 
moments of exemplary events (Seattle, Genoa, Cancun, etc). 
Then you see the coordinating systems, including Internet 
channels (indymedia, a myriad of web sites and mailing 
lists), but also forums and meetings (Zapatista encuentros; 
PGA meetings; counter-summits; social forums; activist 
campaigns). Even more clearly than the open-source projects, 
the counter-globalization movements are a universe of 
universes: the entire set of movements tries to distinguish 
itself from so-called "capitalist globalization", while a 
myriad of other, more specific horizons are established and 
maintained within that larger distinction.

Both the open-source software movements and the 
counter-globalization movements have been capable of 
swarming behaviors. Indeed, the very idea of swarming arose 
from the particular form of solidarity between international 
NGOs and the Zapatists. In terms of open-source, one can 
consider all the peer-to-peer projects that emerged after 
the illegalization of Napster as successive swarm attacks on 
the content-provider industries. There is that classic 
pattern of converging, striking (in this case by producing 
new content-sharing programs), then dissevering, only to 
converge again at a different point (a new program, perhaps 
for video-sharing like Bit Torrent, or a hack of a DRM 
system, etc). Of course, different individuals are involved 
each time, different groups, differences of philosophy and 
mode of action; but a shared horizon makes all those 
differences also recognizable as somehow belonging together. 
This is the complexity of self-organization. You would again 
see such processes in action if you traced the history of 
the Mayday processes around flexible labor. But it is clear 
that by looking at these things in "ecological" terms you 
get a much richer picture, which is not limited to the 
visible dynamics of swarming.

Now, I think these tendencies toward the emergence of global 
microstructures in a weakened institutional environment have 
been going on for decades. But it is clear that a 
turning-point was reached when one microstructure with a 
particularly strong religious horizon and a particularly 
well-developed relational and operational toolkit - Al Qaeda 
- was able to strike at the centers of capital accumulation 
and military power in the US (WTC and Pentagon). Suddenly, 
the capacity of networks to operate globally, independently 
and unpredictably, began to appear as a crisis affecting the 
deep structures of social power. At that point, the figure 
of the swarm rushed to the forefront of all the military 
discussions; and in a broader way, the question of whether 
complexity theory could really predict the emergent 
behavior of self-organizing networks became a kind of 
priority in social science. Knorr Cetina's article on 
microstructures is subtitled "The New Terrorist Societies," 
and it is about Al Qaeda (though her earlier work on 
microstructures is about currency-trading markets). But at 
the same time as the interest in swarming and complexity 
theory moved to the forefront of offical social science, one 
gradually became aware (I did anyway) that all over the 
world, serious attempts were underway to "overcode" and 
stabilize the dangerously mobile relational forms that had 
been unleashed by the generalization of the market and its 
weak ties.

On the one hand there is an attempt to enforce the rules of 
the neoliberal world market by military force, and thus to 
complete an Imperial project which has now shown itself to 
be clearly Anglo-American in origin and in aims. This 
attempt is most clear in the book "The Pentagon's New Map" 
by Thomas Barnett, where he explains that the goal of 
American military policy must be to identify the "gaps" in 
the world network of finance and trade, and to "close the 
gap," by force if necessary. The thesis (on which the Iraq 
invasion was partially based) is that only a continuous 
extension of the world market and of its deterritorializing 
technologies can bring peace and prosperity, rooting out the 
atavistic religious beliefs on which terrorism feeds, and in 
the process, rationalizing the access to the resources that 
the capitalist world system needs to go on producing "growth 
for everyone."

On the other hand, however, what we see in response to this 
extension of the world are market are regressions to 
sovereignist or neofascist forms of nationalism, and perhaps 
more significantly, attempts to configure great continental 
economic blocs where the instability and relative chaos of 
market relations could be submitted to some institutional 
control. These attempts can also be conceived as 
"counter-movements" in Karl Polanyi's sense: responses to 
the atomization of societies and the destruction of 
institutions brought about by the unfettered operations of a 
supposedly self-regulating market. They can be listed: NAFTA 
itself; the European Union, which has created its own 
currency; ASEAN+3, which represents East Asia's so-far 
abortive attempt to put together a stabilized monetary bloc 
offering protection from the financial crises continuously 
unleashed by neoliberalism; the Venezuelan project of 
"ALBA," which is raising the issue of possible industrial 
cooperation programs for a left-leaning Latin America; and 
of course, the "New Caliphate"  in the Middle East, which is 
being proposed by Al-Qaeda and the other Salafi jihad 
movements. Perhaps people with more knowledge than I could 
talk about what is happening on this level in the Russian 
confederation, on the Indian subcontinent and in Africa.

I think that in years to come, everyone will increasingly 
have to take a position with respect both to the Imperial 
project  of a world market, and to the regressive 
nationalisms and the more complex processes of bloc 
formation. All these things are contradictory with each 
other and their contradictions are at the source of the 
conflicts in the world today. In this respect, Guattari's 
perception, at the close of the 1980s in "Cartographies 
schizoanalytiques," has proved prophetic:

"From time immemorial, and in all its historical guises, the 
capitalist drive has always combined two fundamental 
components: the first, which I call deterritorialization, 
has to do with the destruction of social territories, 
collective identities, and systems of traditional values; 
the second, which I call the movement of 
reterritorialization, has to do with the recomposition, even 
by the most artificial means, of individuated frameworks of 
personhood, structures of power, and models of submission 
which are, if not formally similar to those the drive has 
destroyed, at least homothetical from a functional 
perspective. As the deterritorializing revolutions, tied to 
the development of science, technology, and the arts, sweep 
everything aside before them, a compulsion toward subjective 
reterritorialization also emerges. And this antagonism is 
heightened even more with the phenomenal growth of the 
communications and computer fields, to the point where the 
latter concentrate their deterritorializing effects on such 
human faculties as memory, perception, understanding, 
imagination, etc. In this way, a certain formula of 
anthropological functioning, a certain ancestral model of 
humanity, is expropriated at its very heart. And I think 
that it is as a result of an incapacity to adequately 
confront this phenomenal mutation that collective 
subjectivity has abandoned itself to the absurd wave of 
conservatism that we are presently witnessing."*

The question that complexity theory allows us to ask is 
this: How do we organize ourselves for a viable response to 
the double violence of capitalist deterritorialization and 
the nationalist or identitarian reterritorialization to 
which it inevitably gives rise? It must be understood that 
this dilemna does not take the form of Christianity versus 
Islam, America versus the Middle East, Bush versus Bin 
Laden. Rather it arises at the "very heart" of the modern 
project, where human potential is "expropriated." Since 
September 11. the USA - and tendentially, the entire 
so-called "Western world" - has at once exacerbated the 
abstract, hyperindividualizing dynamics of capitalist 
globalization, and at the same time, has reinvented the most 
archaic figures of identitarian power (Guantanamo, fortress 
Europe, the dichotomy of sovereign majesty and bare life). 
Guattari speaks of a capitalist "drive" to 
deterritorialization, and of a "compulsion" to 
reterritorialization. What this means is that neither 
polarity is inherently positive or negative; rather, both 
are twisted into the violent and oppressive forms that we 
now see developing at such a terrifying and depressing pace. 
The ultimate effect is to render the promise of a world 
without borders strange, cold and even murderous, while at 
the same time precipitating a crisis, decay and regression 
of national institutions, which appear increasingly 
incapable of contributing to equality or the respect for 
difference.

So the question that arises is whether one can consciously 
participate in the improvisational, assymetrical and 
partially chaotic force of global microstructures, making 
use of their relative autonomy from institutional norms as a 
way to influence a more positive reterritorialization, a 
more healthy and dynamic equilibrium, a better coexistence 
with the movement of technological development and global 
unification? The question is not farfetched, it is not a 
mere intellectual abstraction. Knorr Cetina's strong point 
is that global unification cannot occur through 
institutional process, because it is too complex to be 
managed in that way; instead, the leading edge is taken by 
lighter, faster, less predictable microstructures. Clearly, 
nothing guarantees that these are going to be beneficent. 
The forms that they will take remain open, they depend on 
the people who invent them. In his recent book, Lazzarato 
writes:

"The activist is not someone who becomes the brains of the 
movement, who sums up its force, anticipates its choices, 
draws his or her legitimacy from a capacity to read and 
interepret the evolution of power, but instead, the activist 
is simply someone who introduces a discontinuity in what 
exists. She creates a bifurcation in the flow of words, of 
desires, of images, to put them at the service of the 
multiplicity's power of articulation; she links the singular 
situations together, without placing herself at a superior 
and totalizing point of view. She is an experimenter."

The close of the book makes clear, however, that what should 
be sought is not just a joyous escape into the 
unpredictable. The point of this experimentation is to find 
articulations [agencements, which might also be translated 
as microstructures] that can oppose the literally 
death-dealing powers of the present society, and offer 
alternatives in their place. My guess is that in most cases, 
this can happen not at the local level of withdrawal (though 
that may be fertile), nor at the level of national 
institutions and debates (though these will be essential for 
holding off the worst), but most likely at the regional or 
continental level, particularly where the core economies 
overflow into their peripheries and vice-versa. This is the 
level where the most important policy is now being made, the 
level at which the major economic circuits are functioning 
and at which massive social injustice and ecological damage 
is happening all the time. What's really lacking are all 
kinds of border-crossing experiments, ways to subvert the 
macrostructures of inclusion/exclusion and to redraw the 
maps of coexistence. Ultimately, new kinds of institutions 
and new ways of relating to institutions will be needed, if 
there is to be any hope of stabilizing things and surviving 
the vast transition now underway. But we're not there yet, 
and it doesn't seem likely that any upcoming election will 
start the process. Instead it seems that much of the danger 
and the promise of the present moment can be found in the 
complex relations between network, swarm and microstructure.


best, BH


Note
*I've altered the (relatively poor) translation of 
Guattari's text "Du post-modernisme a l'ere post-media," 
which is on pp. 53-61 of Cartographies schizoanalytiques, 
and on pp. 109-13 of The Guattari reader, under the title 
"The Postmodern Impasse." The key phrase, "un certain modele 
ancestral d'humanite qui se trouve ainsi exproprie au coeur 
de lui-meme," becomes "is appropriated from the inside"! The 
reverse of the original! No wonder people think Guattari is 
so hard to read...</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Felix Stalder</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 19 Apr 2006 14:53:32 +0200</date>
<content>Wow! What an essay. It took me two days just to read it, and I think I'll have 
to read it a few more times. 

For the time being, I'll stick to half a paragraph, which is key in my view.

&gt; I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental
&gt; factors that help to explain the consistency of
&gt; self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of
&gt; a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or
&gt; metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up
&gt; over time, and which gives the members of a group the
&gt; capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same
&gt; referential universe, even when they are dispersed and
&gt; mobile. You can think of this as "making worlds." The second
&gt; is the capacity for temporal coordination at a distance: the
&gt; exchange among a dispersed group of information, but also of
&gt; affect, about unique events that are continuously unfolding
&gt; in specific locations. This exchange of information and
&gt; affect then becomes a set of constantly changing, constantly
&gt; reinterpreted clues about how to act in the shared world.

All networks can be defined by their protocols, formal rules that set the 
terms of engagement of otherwise independent agents. Protocols enable 
interaction without a hierarchy. Indeed, the protocol creates the space of the 
possible (or, the shared horizon, to use Brian's term) and in order to 
participate in a network, actors have to adhere to the dominant protocols. 
Without a protocol, there is no network.

Now, networks have multiple dimensions, and on each of those protocols 
operate. Most readily distinguisheable are technical and social protocols, 
even though there are obvious interrelations between them. Technical protocols 
are things like TCP/IP, Bittorrent, SMTP or others. Social protocols are 
styles of communication, shared assumptions and values, common projects etc.

Protocols are not fixed, they can be adapted, but since they are what makes a 
network a network, they are very hard to change from the inside. It's 
difficult to cooperatively transform the very condition of cooperation. 
Hence, it's often easier to create new networks, rather than transform old 
ones, particularly since there can be overlap between the two in term of some 
agents agreeing on new protocols. Networks can fork, particularly is 
the resource of the network is digital information.

The reason why we are all speaking about networks now is that information and 
communication technology (ICT) has decisively affected balance between 
flexibility and coordination in social organizations. Until very recently, 
these two aspects stood in an inverse negative relationship to one another. 
As coordination increased, flexibility went down. Large projects (think of 
states, armies, major companies etc) tended to be highly structured in order 
to manage scale (the history of this development is analyzed in Alfred 
Chandler's classic 'The Visible Hand. The Managerial Revolution in American 
Business.'). This was, to a large degree, a function of their information 
processing. Vertically integrated hierarchies are relatively information-poor 
forms of organization. Thus they can handle large coordination tasks by 
passing around slips of paper with information printed on them, at the price 
of turning inflexible (an 'iron cage' as Max Weber saw it at the height of the 
bureaucratic model, 100 years ago).

ICTs are enabling (just enabling, not determining) people and organizations to 
handle much, much more information efficiently, hence they still can scale, 
but to not need to accept inflexibility as the trade-off. In other words, 
even large organizations, or, perhaps to be more precise, large projects 
undertaken my multiple entities, some as small as individuals, are now 
organized as networks (or at least face competition from networks). 

This ability of multiple entities to undertake very large projects, loosely 
coordinated, is what is fuelling the renaissance of notions such as 
"multitude" which aim to express this still hard-to-grasp combination 
flexibility (agents remain semi-autonomous) and coordination (they do 
something larger than themselves).

Such large scale networks, or large scale projects carried by multiple smaller 
networked organizations, are highly communicative, not just because their 
coordination requires lots of exchanges, but also their output is, to a large 
degree, communication as well (new cultural codes, new scientific discoveries 
and procedures, new management methods etc etc). Indeed, geographically 
dispersed networks are held together by nothing but communication. It 
provides their shared horizon.

When stressing the importance of communication, this should not be understood 
as somehow taking place on a different level than production. In fact, the 
activity of communication and production are more and more merging. The 
attempt to expand the proprietary logic of capitalist production into the 
shared space of social communication creates one of the fundamental tensions 
characteristic of informational societies.

In other words, in order to communicate and be productive, one has to join, by 
choice or coercion, a particular networks (or several, more likely), thus 
accept their protocols and have one's view of the world defined by a shared 
horizon. Only within the network, one has access to the resources of 
communication/production. Outside a network, there is nothing but isolation 
and inaction. Hence, Brian, wanting to use Ubuntu, has to join the Ubuntu 
community, and learn how to cope with its particular culture. There's no way 
around it.

Thus, as Brian writes, networks create their own world, by creating a unique 
array of resources enabling entities to become actors, that is, to 
communicate and produce. However, they do so on the basis of particular and 
specific protocols defining the particular character of the network's world. 

The notion of a network's world is not metaphorical, but actual, even 
physical. For example, networks create their own geography of closeness and 
distance. They create their own physical environment (think airports, or 
radical community centers, etc.). They create their own time scale, defining 
the rhythms of interaction, and, more importantly, the temporal horizons 
which bind their actions. And in terms of making worlds, of creating your own 
coordinates of time and space, it go any further than this. There is, 
literally, nothing behind it.

So much for now. Felix</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Ned Rossiter</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 19 Apr 2006 17:26:32 +0100</date>
<content>Felix,

I'm really surprised you persist with the idea that networks (as  
protocols) are without hierarchies:

&gt;
&gt; All networks can be defined by their protocols, [...] Protocols enable
&gt; interaction without a hierarchy.


Because in that same first paragraph you contradict yourself:

&gt; in order to
&gt; participate in a network, actors have to adhere to the dominant  
&gt; protocols.

and later:

&gt; In other words, in order to communicate and be productive, one has  
&gt; to join, by
&gt; choice or coercion, a particular networks (or several, more  
&gt; likely), thus
&gt; accept their protocols and have one's view of the world defined by  
&gt; a shared
&gt; horizon

adherence is another word for submission, and in the case of networks  
it's submission to social/technical protocols that is done willingly,  
although often with tensions of one kind or another (thus the  
politics of networks). Another way of understanding this is that in  
order to participate within a network, one must accept the prevailing  
hierarchies (modalities of governance/protocols). But this isn't to  
say that hierarchies can't be changed or shifted, only that they exist.

As a moderator of nettime, you know all too well the way in which  
hierarchies are played out.

So let's accept that hierarchies are essential to networks, and the  
question of governance is going nowhere for as long as we persist to  
speak of networks in terms of absolute horizontal relations (or in  
the case of communes example, spaces of consensus).  That's simply  
incorrect, and your own text demonstrates that.

Ned</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Benjamin Geer</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 19 Apr 2006 18:56:21 +0200</date>
<content>On 19/04/06, Felix Stalder &lt;felix {AT} openflows.org&gt; wrote:
&gt; Large projects (think of
&gt; states, armies, major companies etc) tended to be highly structured in order
&gt; to manage scale [...]
&gt; ICTs are enabling (just enabling, not determining) people and organizations to
&gt; handle much, much more information efficiently, hence they still can scale,
&gt; but to not need to accept inflexibility as the trade-off. [...]
&gt; This ability of multiple entities to undertake very large projects, loosely
&gt; coordinated, is what is fuelling the renaissance of notions such as
&gt; "multitude" [...]
&gt; networks create their own geography of closeness and
&gt; distance. They create their own physical environment (think airports, or
&gt; radical community centers, etc.).

While I agree that new kinds of organisations have appeared in which protocols
play a more important role than in the past, I think it would be a mistake to see
them as alternatives to older structures, because in reality they depend
completely on these older structures for their existence.  Internet protocols can
function because "states, armies, major companies, etc." control the land and the
energy resources, produce the hardware, lay the cable, launch the satellites, and
so on, on which the whole network relies.  The same goes for airports.  Thus
networks don't "create their own physical environment"; they exist in an
environment that traditional organisations allow them to use.

Similarly, the financial markets, so often cited as an example of spontaneous,
self-structuring collective behaviour, depend on states to provide a reliable
regulatory environment in which they can operate.  More importantly, they are
ultimately subject to the authority of those states' central banks.  Since banks
do business with central banks only at the latter's pleasure, the US government,
for example, is fully capable of imposing practically any sort of regulations on
the world's financial markets.

If anyone has proposed a theory explaining how a network could control territory
through military power and take over the functions of the state, I'd like to hear
about it.

Ben</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.4</nbr>
<subject>RE: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Shannon Clark</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 19 Apr 2006 12:12:01 -0700</date>
<content>A "network" as is being discussed can also be an element within
otherwise hierarchal systems (and indeed as I wrote before you can think
of hierarchies as themselves being just one type of network structure)
but for this discussion consider the following.

- network relationships can (and indeed usually are) just ONE of the
relationships that people (or organizations) are a part of. In other
aspects of their life/business they may be in a more ordered
relationship.

- the US military (and many other militaries I'm sure) is looking deeply
at what they term "network centric warfare" - this is not just how to
deal with an enemy that is organized loosely as a network, it is also a
rethinking of many, perhaps most aspects of how the military works -
especially in the battlefield - to function more like a network than a
hierarchy. But it is important to recognize that this is all within a
framework of a hierarchy.

See http://www.mors.org/publications/phalanx/dec00/feature.htm (John
Gartska the author of this article spoke at MeshForum 2005 - I'll try to
get his audio up online if I can)

Some of the most complex areas of research today into Networks is
looking at how different networks (and even different types of networks)
interrelate and interact. The markets example mentioned below is just
one example, others are the interrelations of transportation systems and
communications networks, or of people within organizations (which might
be "networks" or structured as hierarchies) with other organizations
such as cities, states, countries, political parties, religions in which
they may also participate but which may have dramatically different
structures.

Internet protocols function not because of military might but because
the providers of the underlying tools have all agreed to build on top of
a set of tools. The Internet, which is different than Internet
Protocols, functions because a few set of key authorities are agreed to
by many (ICANN, the main "root" dns servers, the underlying routing and
DNS protocols). These are a mix of public and private effort. The pipes
which much of the traffic now goes through are likewise a mix of public
and private work - microwaves, fiber, cable, and some satellites.

In terms of the question "could a 'network' take over the functions of a
state"? I think it would be important to be very clear what you mean by
a "network" and to consider how (and if) you account changes in
structures over time.

i.e. if by "network" you mean a structure where connections are diffuse,
where there is no single node through which information/power has to
flow - then no, such as system probably does not match up with the
requirements of running a state of nearly any significant size - i.e. a
system where at some point the cost of interactions between the nodes is
vastly higher than the value of the decisions that need to be made, so
they have to able to be implemented quickly by some "authority"

But it also is a matter of much interpretation - if you think about
current states - in many respects they are better represented by complex
networks than by "simple" hierarchies - think about terms such as
"spheres of influence" often used to describe the people in a given
government. Or consider then multiplicity of authority in the US
Government - the at least theoretical checks and balances between the
parts of government and the many groups of people behind each part of
the government (the cabinet of a President, their staff, the political
parties). It is certainly very possible to look at network maps of all
of these various people - to look at the formal and informal ties
between them (family ties, financial ties, reporting authorities under
the law, committees that they serve together on, the states they
represent etc) and to from that build up a very complex web that shows
how everyone is interconnected.

Very likely such a map or better yet series of maps over time would also
show differences between the theory (how the formal structures are laid
out) and the practice, it likely would also show how there are a variety
of types of ties and links between people - deciding what (and if) to
represent would result in very different diagrams. These intersections
could be highly revealing.

(for example in the US government you could look at mapping out formal
ties to political parties - for most politicians this would be easy, for
many of the people who serve under them via political appointments it
would also be relatively easy, but for many public officials and some
people such as some Judges, this might be much trickier) And the
resulting map might need to be supplemented with other overlays - such
as geographical ties, religious ties, voting patterns, common
service/employment/school ties - all of which might show other groupings
and structures - even across "party" lines.

The point is that networks are both vital and very complex - it is an
overloaded term - with too many meanings. 

That is also precisely my own interest in the area - this multiplicity
of meanings and perspectives, the bringing together of people across
very different backgrounds is an area of thought that is vital to many
different fields - from politics to economics to technology - and each
field that thinks about and works with (and within) networks can and
does offer unique insights and perspectives.

Shannon</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.5</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Felix Stalder</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 00:15:27 +0200</date>
<content>On Wednesday, 19. April 2006 18:26, Ned Rossiter wrote:

&gt; I'm really surprised you persist with the idea that networks (as
&gt; protocols) are without hierarchies:
&gt; &gt; All networks can be defined by their protocols, [...] Protocols enable
&gt; &gt; interaction without a hierarchy.
&gt;
&gt; Because in that same first paragraph you contradict yourself:
&gt; &gt; in order to
&gt; &gt; participate in a network, actors have to adhere to the dominant
&gt; &gt; protocols.

First, networks and hierarchies are different modes of organization. The fact 
that real-life organizations tend to be hybrids of various sorts does not 
mean that these modes are not distinguisheable on the basis of their 
differences. It just means that they can be combined. The fact that there are 
endless shades of grey also does not mean that black and white are the same.

&gt; and later:
&gt; &gt; In other words, in order to communicate and be productive, one has
&gt; &gt; to join, by
&gt; &gt; choice or coercion, a particular networks (or several, more
&gt; &gt; likely), thus
&gt; &gt; accept their protocols and have one's view of the world defined by
&gt; &gt; a shared
&gt; &gt; horizon
&gt;
&gt; adherence is another word for submission, and in the case of networks
&gt; it's submission to social/technical protocols that is done willingly,
&gt; although often with tensions of one kind or another (thus the
&gt; politics of networks). Another way of understanding this is that in
&gt; order to participate within a network, one must accept the prevailing
&gt; hierarchies (modalities of governance/protocols). But this isn't to
&gt; say that hierarchies can't be changed or shifted, only that they exist.

Second, adherence to a protocol is not the same as submission under a 
hierachy. One of the origins of the term protocol is in diplomacy and it 
designated the rules that govern the interaction between the sovereign, say a 
king, and the foreign diplomats stationed at his court. The reason why a 
protocol was necessary was, and still is, precisely because the foreign 
diplomats were, and are, not subjects of the king. In fact, they were outside 
the hierachy, independent of the king. Hence, they needed a set of rules that 
governed their interaction. The king could not simply impose his rules.

When we speak about social protocols, it's comparable. We write here in 
English. One can say that the grammar is the protocol of language. In order 
to be able to have a conversation here, I must adhere to the conventions of 
English grammar, a foreign language. But must I submit to the conventions of 
grammar? And for this to be a hierachical situation, who, exactly, would be 
my superior. Is there someone who effectively regulates the English language? 
And who will punish me for my ESL mistakes? 

Now, social protocols are often fuzzy, and some rules can be bent, but still, 
try arranging your words randomly, conversation will stop.

&gt; As a moderator of nettime, you know all too well the way in which
&gt; hierarchies are played out.

Of course, but nobody ever said that nettime was a pure network. Indeed, there 
are those who think it's fac!st dictatorship.

&gt; So let's accept that hierarchies are essential to networks, and the
&gt; question of governance is going nowhere for as long as we persist to
&gt; speak of networks in terms of absolute horizontal relations (or in
&gt; the case of communes example, spaces of consensus).  That's simply
&gt; incorrect, and your own text demonstrates that.

Hierarchies are not essential to networks, even if they are often combined. 
There is a difference between a conceptual discussion of ideal types, and 
concrete analysis of empirical examples.

The fact that networks are not the space of absolute freedom (whatever that 
would be), but that there are rules that cannot be easily ignored, does not 
mean that it's a hierarchy. The fact that it's not a hierarchy, on the other 
hand, does not mean that there is no power in networks. It just operates 
differently. In hierarchies, power operates through coercion. In networks, it 
works through exclusion. These are different modes, and it helps to 
acknowlegde such difference when we want to understand the particular 
character of novel combinations. 

Felix</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.6</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Brian Holmes</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 19 Apr 2006 20:38:03 -0400</date>
<content>Some thoughts about power

Foucault conceived a mode of sovereign power, related to the 
functioning of law in the Middle Ages (transcendent power of 
life and death, power to banish); a mode of disciplinary 
power, related to the functioning of institutions from the 
16th century onward (collective power to train, to correct, 
to reshape behavior at both sensory-motor and psychological 
levels); and a mode of liberal power, related to a capacity 
to evaluate the potential benefits, to oneself and/or the 
state, of circulations of all kinds (power to induce 
self-maximalizing strategies that make behavior predictable 
and modulable, without having to dictate it).

Finally, he also came somewhat reluctantly to admit and 
theorize the coexistence of all these forms of power, their 
hybridization in specific admixtures. An approach which has 
not been sufficiently developed imho.

I think the word "network" is a better descriptor of 
hardware and of protocols, than of forms of power (ie, 
regular and constraining patterns of social relations). A 
lot of confusion arises because of the desire to make one 
word, network, say much more than it can all alone.

I also happen to think (and this is where I do differ 
slightly from Felix) that the most common contemporary 
networks, though not all networks of course, have very weak 
and open protocols. Not particularly binding, somewhat 
exclusive of course, but not intensely exclusive either. The 
Internet can convey words, images, sounds. You can do it all 
for free with pirated Microsoft bullshit that takes thirty 
seconds to learn. Similarly, you can put a lot of different 
things on a train, and you can say a lot of different things 
over a telephone. This is massively done all around the 
world by people with incredibly different motivations, 
entangled in very different sets of constraints, 
disciplines, hierarchies, systems of law and so on. You can 
convey a tremendous amount of cultural attitudes, behavioral 
cues, conceptual structures via the net, the train or the 
phone, all of which don't have practically anything to do 
with the specific protocols of those technologies. It would 
be sort of strange not to notice that important permeability 
of the most widespread networks, with the most basic 
protocols. However, the fact that these cultural attitudes 
etc. do pass through the net, and through Microsoft, or 
through the train and the SNCF, or the phone and Mobistar, 
does have its real importance too. The forms of power are 
reorganized by the ones that are dominant.

In the world today, the liberal form of power is dominant. 
It is articulated by money first of all. The telos of money 
is to circulate. Its circulation is calculable with 
statistical methods. People can be expected to follow the 
cues of that circulation, and institutional and control 
functions can be built which make that expectation into a 
self-fulfilling prophecy. All this has an incredible effect 
both on discipline and on one's experience of transcendence. 
But it doesn't get rid of the influence of inherited 
disciplines or symbolic divides between the holy and the 
base, the includable and the excludable.

What money with its telos of circulation does do, however, 
is elicit a very clear ethos of resistance among certain 
minorities, an ethos which can and has gone very far in 
erecting all kinds of incitements and constraints to keep 
you from acting for profit. And so we do, in reality and 
when we're lucky, have cooperative networks as well.

What's needed is to understand very precisely the large 
number of social dynamics that have reconfigured themselves, 
for better and worse, according to the last great 
deterritorializing expansion and multiplication of the 
circulation of money, which has been accompanied and 
facilitated, even decisively reshaped, by the implementation 
of hyperindividualizing electronic networks.

Study the expansion of the American currency (or financial 
techniques), accompanied by the Internet, comsats and TVs, 
and you will learn a lot about the dominant structures of 
power articulated by the underlying logic of liberalism. 
Study the expansion of the vertically integrated American 
corporation and you will learn a lot about what discipline 
means in the world today. Study the expansion of American 
military bases and you will learn a lot about what sovereign 
power means today. The word American recurrs three times in 
the sentences above because the currently dominant ways of 
articulating all the three forms of power were invented 
there, from about 1890 onwards. But that doesn't cancel out 
deep and strange hybridizations of the type we see all the 
time, both between the three contemporary (ie dominant) 
forms, and between other kinds of power, sets of behaviors, 
concepts, values and world views, that have held historical 
sway elsewhere and at different times and that continue to 
reproduce themselves partially in circulating human beings.

The useful gain that could be made out of this conversation 
is to quit saying a network is this, a network is that. I 
definitely don't think you can specify networks to 
collaboration. Hierarchy can be conveyed perfectly by 
network technology; possessive individualism can express 
itself even better through network technology. However, if 
you start trying to talk about a specific set of values, 
goals, world visions and truth claims, and then you 
delineate the relation between those "worlds" and specific 
technical functions and  logical protocols that enhance 
people capacity to act within them, then you can start to 
describe some of the great variety of microstructures that 
have proliferated over the past thirty years.

great to hear so many ideas on this subject!

best, BH</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.7</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>"Ana L. Vald&#233;s"</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 10:40:52 +0200</date>
<content>I has been working a lot with power and powerstructures. Lived in an anarchist collective in the 80:s and we studied our own structures, how we did take decisions, what kind of "social matrix" we developed, etc. We did a year long workshop with some French psychoanalitics adressing the issue of the power and how the power is reproduced. I don't know how many on the list are familiar with the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, one of Europes most important theorics in the 50:, 60:s and 70:s, pivotal for the 68:s movement in France. He was one of the founders of the magazine "Socialisme et Barbarie", http://www.agorainternational.org/index.html, where intellectuals as Jean Francois Lyotard wrote.

One of Castoriadis main work, "The Imaginary Institution of Society", coined the expression "imaginary structures of the society", the corpus of myths and "memes" where the knowledge and the shapes of a society is written, implemented and transmitted with the aim of reproducing itself. The reading of the Oedipus myth as a fundational myth is very relevant to understand how the state is reproduced in the nuclear family. Pierre Clastres, an anarchist anthropolog, spent many years living with the Guarani, a indigenous nation of several thousands individes, living maily in Brazil, Paraguay and Venezuela. The Guarani developed a very clever form of selfgestion based on rotatory chiefs and avoid any structure related to stateship or central administration.

Clastres book "Society Against the State" is a very interesting complement to Castoriadis work and show the pattern where the power and it's metaphors, state, patriarchy, god, act in the level of our subsconscient and internalizes in us.

We reproduce a society based on values such as private property, nuclear family, heterosexual normativity, stateship, and we became the power's allies and complices.

Without our cosent and complicity the power can't be exerced or reproduced.

Ana</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.8</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Prem Chandavarkar</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 05:37:47 -0400</date>
<content>&gt; I am beginning to think that there are two fundamental
&gt; factors that help to explain the consistency of
&gt; self-organized human activity. The first is the existence of
&gt; a shared horizon - aesthetic, ethical, philosophical, and/or
&gt; metaphysical - which is patiently and deliberately built up
&gt; over time, and which gives the members of a group the
&gt; capacity to recognize each other as existing within the same
&gt; referential universe, even when they are dispersed and
&gt; mobile. You can think of this as "making worlds."
Recently, I have been very interested in this question.  Being an architect,
my interest has been in how collective decisions are made regarding
aesthetic objects - traditional cities, traditional crafts, etc. - all
decision making systems that are far removed from the way designers and
artists are currently trained in a model predicated on avant-garde
individual introspective genius.

Some speculation on the subject is in:

Crafting the Public Realm: Speculations on the Role of Open Source
Methodologies in Development by Design
http://www.thinkcycle.org/tc-filesystem/?folder_id=37457

I draw attention to a reference in the paper regarding a distinction drawn
by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (The Social Life of Information) where
they distinguish between "networks of practice" and "communities of
practice" (although both are forms of networks).  Members of a network of
practice have functional or occupational links constituted by electronic and
other networks that bring them together.  They come together within the
narrow horizons of these links and otherwise lead lives that are separate
from the network.  Communities of practice are more tied to geographical
place, depend more on face to face encounters, and collectively carry out
practices that are beyond functional or occupational concerns.  The members
of the community depend on the network a great deal to construct their
everyday lives.   I would emphasise the importance of this distinction,
particularly in reference to the word "commune" that was brought in earlier
in this discussion.

Although it has not been explicitly stated so far, I suspect a great deal of
interest in networks expressed in such forums is to tackle a fundamental
contradiction in the concept of democracy (and someone did express interest
in the links between 'networks' and 'governance').  The premise of democracy
is to provide power to the people, through mechanisms such as universal
adult franchise.  However for its day to day functioning, democracy has to
resort to top-down control structures of governance.  This is further
complicated by the fact that decision making swirls around sporadic events
called "elections", and elections tend to be dominated by the successes
achieved in the mobilisation of single cause constituencies.  Network theory
can then lend itself to the development of forms of organisation which are
more egalitarian, and handle complexity and nuances without trying to
artificially force issues into single unitised descriptions or concepts.

The first issue to be tackled is that networks are not inherently
egalitarian and tend to function according to power laws (as pointed out by
Barabasi in "Linked"), where a large percentage of the traffic tends to
always move through a small percentage of nodes.  This by itself is not a
problem - it all depends on how the hubs behave with reference to
transparency of information - do they immediately pass it on to the public
domain of the network, or are they selective in what they pass on -
retaining something for personal gain.    It appears that two fields of
study need to come together on this: network theory (especially power laws
and how hubs form) on the one hand and legal and ethical theory on property
rights on the other hand.  If anyone knows of any study where this
intersection has been explored, please do let me know.

The second issue I am concerned with is linked to emergence theory, which
explores how bottom up development constructs macro-intelligence in complex
organisations.  Since I do not possess any expertise on this, I can only
speculate (based on some readings oriented towards the layperson), and I
list below some speculations on characteristics that an emergent network
needs to possess:
   - close grained high-synchrony neighbour interaction
   - a major percentage of the interactions are characterised by high
   levels of information symmetry
    - random interaction - a high potential for serendipity
   - indirect control
   - low level of concern for explicit definitions of the macro picture
   at the level of the individual unit (as Steven Johnson says in his book on
   emergence - you would not want one of the neurons in your brain becoming
   individually sentient)
   - an impulse towards pattern recognition where patterns are
   collectively rather than individually owned.
    - pattern recognition is based on systems of tacit knowledge rather
   than explicit knowledge (as Michael Polanyi defines it).

The last point is especially important when we come to human networks, for
unlike the world of insects, human networks are also reflexive - they can
think about themselves.  When this thinking relies on explicit knowledge
then there is a tendency for the individual to pull away from the network
(keeping things at the level of 'networks of practice').  On the other hand,
tacit knowledge encourages the individual to orient towards the network
(allowing for the potential of emergent 'communities of practice').  To
explore this further I have just ordered Walter Ong's book "Orality and
Literacy", but I cite below the quotation that piqued my interest, from
Chris Barlas' essay "The End of the Word is Nigh" (While Barlas does not
mention it, I interpret orality belonging more to tacit knowledge, whereas
literacy relies on explicit knowledge):
http://rememberingwalterong.com/2004/05/from_1994_writer_chris_barlas.html

"As Walter Ong, the Jesuit scholar, points out, oral creation is totally
different from literate creation. It relies not on interiorisation, but on
community. In his book, Orality And Literacy, he traces the development of
language through oral to literate cultures and on into the computer culture
that may exist in the future. Orality, he suggests, acts like glue within
society. It draws people into groups. It promotes a type of communication
that is communal and open. It also encourages a certain way of thinking.
Orally generated characters tend to the heroic, the generalised, the larger
than life. This can be seen in the early classics of Western literature, The
Iliad and The Odyssey.

What orally composed epic does not have is a more particularising,
individuating tendency that is so crucial in literate society. A written
culture favours the interior, the personal, the reflective. For instance,
unlike our pre-literature ancestors who sat round campfires to share
stories, we do not read in groups. The oral human is caught in a web of
timelessness, almost an unconscious state, where the distinction between "I"
and "you" is not nearly so well delineated. Literacy, on the other hand, is
modernist, productive of an in-built existential loneliness. Without
literacy, says Ong, there can be no continued deepening of consciousness, no
progress towards individuation. So where does all this point? It focuses on
our ability to use language in different ways and the way in which our
thinking is formed by the way we use it. How many people would think of
writing itself as a technology? Yet writing is tool-using, a kind of knife
and fork for the mind. As Ong points out, we are born into orality from the
moment we open our mouths. But literacy, or, to use the word coined by the
computer expert and child psychologist Seymour Papert, letteracy, is an
acquired technology, which has to be painfully learned. Compared to anything
else we are conscious of learning in our lives, reading and writing
constitute the most complicated achievement. And being most complicated,
reading and writing tend to dominate our senses. The task is so great that
for the literate, the capacity is rated above all others. What is written is
always valued above the spoken. The written word has a permanency the spoken
lacks. You can possess a book, but not a speech.

It is for this reason that Papert suggests a distinction between letteracy,
our particularised ability to read and write, and literacy. It is perhaps
the innate and particularised loneliness of literacy that prompted Thatcher
to make her famous remark that there is no such thing as society. While her
representation of this was clearly deviant and presumably unwitting, she was
exemplifying a truth. Modern literate society, in which life is increasingly
inner, is about conflict rather than co-operation. It is a society that
excludes rather than includes, that has consistently narrowed its focus. It
is this type of speculation that could lead a literate individual to
question the health of a commuting society that buries its collective nose
in a newspaper. Wouldn't it be better if travellers on the 8.13 talked to
one another, rather than take refuge in the privacy of interior worlds?"
While one cannot wish away the world of literacy, and to seek return to a
happy oral world is nothing but a romantic fantasy, this issue does merit
further thinking - and it is perhaps more useful to use the opposition of
'tacit/explicit' rather than 'oral/literate' for further exploration of
networks (remaining alert to the distinction that one is dealing with
reflexive networks).

While the tacit centres on the local, it does not mean that larger horizons
are absent.  I illustrate this by citing a discussion I attended a couple of
years ago.  This was a meeting between a group of local architects and
Dinkar Kaikini (a well known vocalist in Indian classical music).  The
purpose of the discussion was to hear Kaikini's views on parallels between
music and architecture.    The first thing that struck me was that the
architects in the group all considered themselves modernists, and would have
rebelled against the label "classical" being applied to their way of
thinking.  Kaikini, on the other hand, rooted himself firmly within a
classical tradition, yet was comfortable with modernity.  But it was a point
that Kaikini made that was most revelatory to me, and to cite it I must
first explain some of the principles of Indian classical music (and I refer
here to the Hindustani rather than the Carnatic tradition).   Unlike Western
classical music, the Indian classical tradition does not rely on
composers.   The foundation is called "raaga".  There is no direct
translation of this word into English, but the closest would be "scale".
The raaga delineates the set and sequence of notes that may be used in a
musical composition.  The raaga has no strong sense of authorship - in that
sense it is open source, for even though a particular raaga may at one point
in time have an individual creator, it belongs to a tradition rather than a
person.  But unlike a scale, the raaga also has links with emotion and
states of being.  Each raaga has strong associations - for example "Durbari"
is associated with the regal, and "Basant" is associated with the seasons.
Each raaga is also linked with a temporal context and has a particular time
of day in which it is to be performed.   Dawn, morning, mid-day, evening,
night all have their own raagas.

Given all this, I was always under the impression that the raaga determined
the emotive depth of the music.  However, Kaikini said that the raaga only
defines a space.  The enclosure that constructs the space sets some limits -
it determines where one can go.  But it does not determine how one moves
across the space - do you hop and skip with happiness, or do you drag your
feet with head bowed, or do you stay close to one spot in contemplation.
It is not the delineation of the space that is important as much as the
manner in which one inhabits it.  Kaikini placed the emotive depth in music
by the level of expressiveness one can put into two concepts: "Meend" which
is the glide from one note to the next, and "Laya" which is the interval of
time between one note and the next.  When one manages this one is
transported into a world that is beyond any sense of self or time (and do we
not all lose our sense of self and time when we are caught up in a beautiful
piece of music).

To me, the power of Kaikini's observations lay in:

   1. The transcendent can be found in what is immediately adjacent.
   2. We inhabit a reality that does not exist only on one level.
   Reality is multi-leveled and complex, and our sense of being shifts between
   mundane, terrestrial and transcendent levels.  All art recognised this, and
   perhaps this is why art has sat so comfortable next to religion over several
   centuries.  Polanyi goes so far as to say that the more tacit the knowledge
   is, the more transcendent it is likely to be.
    3. We tend to assume that tacit knowledge, because it cannot be
   verbalised, is not shareable - and is therefore less tangible and real.  But
   the world that Kaikini (or any other gifted musician) constructs through his
   music, even though it is purely tacit, is tangible, shareable and real
   enough to have commercial value, allowing the musician to earn a living
   through it.

While all this may seem far away from the realm of network theory, I believe
it is crucial.  Emergent networks build on close-grained local links, and
movement between mundane connections and higher levels of being understood
through collectively owned patterns.   When one comes to reflexive networks,
those patterns hold a sense of transcendence that binds communities.  A
theory of reflexive networks must include a theory of knowledge and the
links between epistemic systems and social cohesion.

So if I summarise the propositions that interest me:

   1. It would be useful to situate network theory within a theory of
   sites of practice.
   2. We must distinguish between "networks of practice" and "communities
   of practice"
   3. What are the base conditions required for emergence to occur?
   4. Human networks are also reflexive, and we must be alert to the
   special issues involved with reflexivity.
   5. A theory of reflexive networks must include a theory of knowledge
   and the links between epistemic systems and social cohesion.

Cheers,
Prem</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.9</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Brian Holmes</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 08:12:19 -0400</date>
<content>Prem Chandavarkar wrote:

&gt;To me, the power of Kaikini's observations lay in:
&gt;
&gt;   1. The transcendent can be found in what is immediately adjacent.
&gt;   2. We inhabit a reality that does not exist only on one level. 
&gt;      Reality is multi-leveled and complex, and our sense of being
&gt;      shifts between mundane, terrestrial and transcendent levels.  All
&gt;      art recognised this, and perhaps this is why art has sat so
&gt;      comfortable next to religion over several centuries.  Polanyi goes
&gt;      so far as to say that the more tacit the knowledge is, the more
&gt;      transcendent it is likely to be.
&gt;   3. We tend to assume that tacit knowledge, because it cannot be
&gt;      verbalised, is not shareable - and is therefore less tangible and
&gt;      real.  But the world that Kaikini (or any other gifted musician)
&gt;      constructs through his music, even though it is purely tacit, is
&gt;      tangible, shareable and real enough to have commercial value,
&gt;      allowing the musician to earn a living through it.
&gt;
&gt;While all this may seem far away from the realm of network theory, I 
&gt;believe it is crucial.  Emergent networks build on close-grained local 
&gt;links, and movement between mundane connections and higher levels of 
&gt;being understood through collectively owned patterns.   When one comes 
&gt;to reflexive networks, those patterns hold a sense of transcendence that 
&gt;binds communities.  A theory of reflexive networks must include a theory 
&gt;of knowledge and the links between epistemic systems and social cohesion.

Your text was very interesting, Prem. Particularly the 
above, which is exactly the point that I was trying to get 
at. I think that the behavior of people, and therefore the 
way they use networks and their specific protocols, is 
greatly influenced by many factors of aeshetic tastes, value 
orientation, cosmology and feeling of community. The 
affective dimension where a musician intervenes is 
fundamental to the kind of orientation I am thinking of. The 
affective dimension is, almost by definition, a realm of the 
proximate, the nearby, closeness.

The orality/literacy distinction that you mention (Ong) is a 
binary that took different forms in the twentieth century. 
One is the distinction by the German sociologist Toennies, 
between community and society (or Gemeinschaft und 
Gesellschaft, which is the name of the book). That 
distinction was subsequently taken up and reworked by the 
French anthropologist Louis Dumont, in his Homo Aequalis 
books (which, interestingly enough, were written after Homo 
Hierarchicus, a study of the Indian caste system). Dumont 
observes that interpersonal relations in most societies 
until around the 16th-17th century in Europe were 
hierarchically structured - where the root "hiero," meaning 
sacred, holy, indicates an orientation to transcendance. In 
Europe this gave the notion of a "great chain of being" in 
which everyone, including both animals and spirits, 
supposedly occupied a rightful place. What we call the 
"symbolic" are all the structures of feeling associated with 
this traditional notion of rightful places. However, Dumont 
also believed that since the Enlightenment and the French 
revolution, "modernity" issynonymous with the domination of 
individualism and the ascendency of equal-to-equal 
relations, as expressed not only in constitutional law 
(human rights), contractual relations, the money economy and 
so on, but also in the symbolic realm. The notion and the 
feeling of right changes. He thought that elements of a 
hierarchically structured society, oriented to 
transcendence, could persist but would be (and must be) 
subordinated to the order of individualism and equality.

Now, my own view is that this subordination, on which the 
modern and modernizing projects have been founded, does not 
sufficiently explain our relations to each other, the earth 
and the stars, to put it briefly. It is too brutally 
simplifying, and so it makes much "tacit knowledge" into 
unconscious, unexpressed and unavowed sentiment or 
resentment. It does dictate the conditions of universal law 
that have achieved the widest distribution across the 
planet, but it is subject to such tremendous stresses that 
it has now produced yet another huge and violent outburst of 
the repressed hierarchical demons, in the form of racism, 
fundamentalism and war.

Another version of the binary mentioned above has been 
rootedness or uprootedness, which is the kind of word that 
mid-twentieth century fascists would use (Dumont saw Fascism 
and Nazism as resistance to the universals of individualism 
and equality). Michael Polanyi's brother, Karl, produced a 
more interesting reading of this with the distinction 
between "embeddedness" and "disembeddedness." Karl Polanyi's 
subject was the market. In his view, a larger set of social 
institutions was broken down by the liberal, laissez-faire 
notion that markets are self-regulating, i.e. that the 
operations of selling for a profit and buying at best price 
can ensure all the social and ecological conditions needed 
for their own functioning and reproduction over time. In 
this way, the specialized domain of the economy was 
disembedded from the larger domain of society, on which it 
ultimately depended. Polanyi too saw Fascism and Nazism as 
desperate and deadly attempts to reconstruct a social 
ecology. He believed this reconstruction of closer social 
ties and ecological balances had to be done, but with a more 
careful understanding of the checks and balances required to 
sustain the individual's "freedom in a complex society."

It's very interesting to learn that Michael Polanyi, the 
epistemologist, developed this binary of the tacit and the 
explicit. It seems to provide a quite different opening than 
the previously stated ones, which all derive from the 
fundamentally tragic idea of tie/broken tie, or 
traditional/modern. The tacit/explicit distinction does not 
seem to be freighted with such dark teleology. The 
complementarity of deterritorialization/ 
reterritorialization has a similar openness. I don't think 
Guattari's point is to oppose a modern, uprooted, 
disembedded, deterritorialized society as superior to an 
archaic, rooted, embedded, territorialized community. Rather 
the question is to see how everything defamiliarizing (such 
as technology, money, networks, mathematics, abstract art, 
universal law, and so forth) will shake up the coordinates 
of our lives, which tend to become oppressive under the 
influence of forms of concentrated power, whatever social 
system we live under. The question is then how to 
reterritorialize again, each time, how to constitute a play 
of discourses and qualities that do not so much reinforce 
the symbolic law of "everyone in their right place" as open 
up a kind of simultaneous affirmation and questioning of the 
places that each one is in, and of the system of places 
through which we relate to each other. The qualities 
developed through the use of "Laya" and "Meend," for 
example, can be ways to touch persons where they are 
(through the experience of the note's duration) and in a 
second moment, accompany them in a process of displacement 
(through the modulated shift to another note).

Networks can be conceived and imposed as structures of 
universalization, where the system of places (including 
supposedly egalitarian systems) is built into the hardware 
and the protocols. But I think such conceptions and 
impositions give an impoverished and often repressive idea 
of what really happens. Social relations within 
microstructural networks are being played out collectively, 
in forms ranging from the poetic to the cooperative to the 
terroristic, but always with the same kind of subtle 
attention to the modulation of aesthetic qualities, 
affective relations and cosmic horizons that Kaikini accords 
to the quality of his musical notes. Perhaps this is why 
Kaikini, a classical musician, feels at home in modernism. 
He knows how to make it into a moving territory.

best, BH</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.10</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>brian carroll</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Thu, 20 Apr 2006 10:01:19 -0400</date>
<content>regarding hierarchies and networks, with regard to protocols, etc:

is it possible that network interactions can be 'weighted' with  
regard to different variables, as to how they function (in terms of  
vertical/horizontal management of flow or routing of interactions  
through some kind of decision-tree or charting of the way the  
interaction exists in the network itself, between nodes?

this is an attempt to say, could 'the router' or 'hub' in some way be  
a physical modeling of this same questioning of hierarchy and how  
decision-making exists with regard to certain dynamics? and thus a  
star network may interact differently than a linear bus network  
topology, etc.

Network Topologies
http://www.delmar.edu/Courses/ITNW2313/network.htm
http://fcit.usf.edu/network/chap5/chap5.htm

(i am not exactly sure what i am trying to get at here, only that it  
would seem that there are many 'dimensions' involved, and in this, it  
would seem possible that there is a different weighting of a given  
situation, in terms of its dynamic relationship within/without a  
given network and its mediation, which would seem to be dynamically  
addressed -- i.e. as it is related to how the network itself  
constitutes/models/governs itself and its interactions --  it also  
makes me wonder if it is somewhat akin to 'layers' as Pit Schultz  
once wrote about on nettime, etc. that is, some things happen on one  
layer and there may be multiple higher/lower level things going on  
(dimensions) simultaneously, though I am not sure if this is how IP  
actually works or not...) brian</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.11</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>Alexander Galloway</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Fri, 21 Apr 2006 15:12:17 -0400</date>
<content>On Apr 19, 2006, at 8:38 PM, Brian Holmes wrote:

&gt; quit saying a network is this, a network is that.

there is a long, fruitful history of people doing just that. so perhaps
this thread suffers not from a desire to define the term, but from a
lack of specificity in our vocabulary.

a brief, unorganized survey might help:

centralized network--a single hub connected to multiple peripheral
nodes; little to no interconnection between nodes.
examples: web server, software security updates, the panopticon prison,
sovereign (royal) fiat, LAN router, pyramidal hierarchy

decentralized network--multiple hubs, each with their own sets of
peripheral nodes; hubs are connected to other hubs.
related concept: scale-free network (Barab=E1si)
examples: Domain Name System (DNS), airline transportation routes,
municipal governments

distributed network--a flat mesh in which there is no distinction
between hubs and peripheral nodes (Baran)
related concept: rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari)
related concept: random network, a network having a random distribution
of links (Barab=E1si).
examples: TCP/IP, peer-to-peer, national highway systems

chain network--a linear input/output transfer system
examples: smuggler trade routes, IP routing

all-channel network--a star in which every node is connected to every
other node
examples: Ethernet, kin groups, collectives

(note, this list only approaches the topological/structural qualities of
networks. we would have to supplement the list greatly if we wish to
address the topic of network actors [example: the nomad, the virus]
and/or networked tactics of struggle [example: swarming, exploits,
nonexistence].)

we can and should say what networks are. otherwise networks sink into
the landscape as inscrutable, natural forms. such is the trick of power.

references:
Albert-L=E1szl=F3 Barab=E1si, "Linked" (2002)
Paul Baran, "On Distributed Communications" (1964)
Gilles Deleuze and F=E9lix Guattari, "A Thousand Plateaus" (1980)</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.12</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>porculus</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Tue, 25 Apr 2006 10:24:30 -0400</date>
<content>&gt; In hierarchies, power operates through coercion. In networks, it
&gt; works through exclusion.


gotcha, you mean to pardon blessed human hierarchie for bringing black slaves in
new orleans god scourges &amp; plagues with katrina enuf for kicking them up alabama &amp;
riogrande. Hach internet schedule of being in typing 'to be or not' just on an low
bandwiz, I mean it's justice since internet tries to pardon oneself of being as
somezing dried bar i.e. wiz no cognac nor the de la menthe, I supoz one tries to
fatten each ozer with words as bordel de pompe cul as would ubu chez matrix said,
in zuch dried bar pornographix would lay just as a no flesh &amp; bones oxymoron so in
zis puritan noosphee we would be just all kinda Lautrec in pigalle eating handful
of shrinkment pill aginst our will

&gt; we can and should say what networks are. otherwise networks sink into
&gt; the landscape as inscrutable, natural forms. such is the trick of power.

for sure ein 'sein oder nichtsein' but wizout cellphone deep in the schwarzforest
ziegfried would have a stinking zmell of dasein for ze death already, but what
sticking up in this deterraformed nettime: this guy baudrillard wanting to screw
my mother &amp; jeer at my rapeseed oil vw, make so much noise as he wanted to upgrade
himself as the third riders of the apocalypse..he is not sexy at all enuf for
that.

hey hauffeur step on the gas &amp; run over the frog</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>7.12</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; Network, Swarm, Microstructur</subject>
<from>martha rosler</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Fri, 21 Apr 2006 19:11:20 -0400</date>
<content>Ana L. Vald=E9s wrote:

&gt;  Cornelius Castoriadis, one of Europes most &gt;important theorics in the
&gt;  50:, 60:s and 70:s, pivotal for the 68:s &gt;movement in France. He was
&gt;  one of the founders of the magazine &gt;"Socialisme et Barbarie",
&gt;  http://www.agorainternational.org/index.html, &gt;where intellectuals as
&gt;  Jean Francois Lyotard wrote.

tiny correction:
Socialisme OU Barbarie

cheers,
martha rosler</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>8.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; Institutionalization of computer protocols (draft chapter)</subject>
<from>Alexander Galloway</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Sun, 12 Jan 2003 11:54:34 -0500</date>
<content>Nettimers--I'm preparing a book manuscript on computer protocols and  
how they establish control in the seemingly anarchical Internet. I'm  
hoping that some of you will be able to read my draft chapter below on  
the institutionalization of protocols via standards bodies. Please  
point out my mistakes before i send it to my editor! :-) thanks, -ag

+ + +

In this day and age, technical protocols and standards are established  
by an self-selected oligarchy of scientists consisting largely of  
electrical engineers and computer specialists. Composed of a patchwork  
of many professional bodies, working groups, committees and  
subcommittees, this technocratic elite toils away, mostly voluntarily,  
in an effort to hammer out solutions to advancements in technology.  
Many of them are university professors. Most all of them either work in  
industry, or have some connection to it.

Like the philosophy of protocol itself, membership in this  
technocratic ruling class is open. "Anyone with something to contribute  
could come to the party,"[1] wrote one early participant. But, to be  
sure, because of the technical sophistication needed to participate,  
this loose consortium of decision-makers tends to fall into a  
relatively homogenous social class: highly educated, altruistic,  
liberal-minded science professionals from modernized societies around  
the globe.

And sometimes not so far around the globe. Of the twenty-five or so  
original protocol pioneers, three of them&#8212;Vint Cerf, Jon Postel and  
Steve Crocker&#8212;all came from a single high school in Los Angeles's San  
Fernando Valley.[2] Furthermore during his long tenure as RFC Editor,  
Postel was the single gatekeeper through whom all protocol RFCs passed  
before they could be published.
Internet historians Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon describe this group  
as "an ad-hocracy of intensely creative, sleep-deprived, idiosyncratic,  
well-meaning computer geniuses."[3]

There are few outsiders in this community. Here the specialists run  
the show. To put it another way, while the Internet is used daily by  
vast swaths of diverse communities, the standards-makers at the heart  
of this technology are a small entrenched group of techno-elite peers.
The reasons for this are largely practical. "Most users are not  
interested in the details of Internet protocols," Vint Cerf observes,  
"they just want the system to work."[4] Or as former IEFT Chair Fred  
Baker reminds us: "The average user doesn't write code. [...] If their  
needs are met, they don't especially care how they were met."[5]

So who actually writes these technical protocols, where did they  
come from, and how are they used in the real world? They are found in  
the fertile amalgamation of computers and software that constitutes the  
majority of servers, routers and other internet-enabled machines. A  
signifigant portion of these computers were, and still are, Unix-based  
systems. A signifigant portion of the software was, and still is,  
largely written in the C or C++ languages. All of these elements have  
enjoyed unique histories as protocological technologies.

The Unix operating system was developed at Bell Telephone Laboratories  
by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others beginning in 1969 and  
continuing development into the early 70s. After the operating  
system's release the lab's parent company, AT&amp;T, began to license and  
sell Unix as a commercial software product. But, for various legal  
reasons, the company admitted they "had no intention of pursuing  
software as a business."[6] Unix was indeed sold by AT&amp;T, but simply  
"as is" with no advertising, technical support or other fanfare. This  
contributed to its widespread adoption by universities who found in  
Unix a cheap but useful operating system that could be easily  
experimented with, modified and improved.

In January 1974, Unix was installed at the University of California at  
Berkeley. Bill Joy and others began developing aspin-off of the  
operating system which became known as BSD (Berkeley Software  
Distribution).

Unix was particularly successful because of its close connection to  
networking and the adoption of basic interchange standards. "Perhaps  
the most important contribution to the proliferation of Unix was the  
growth of networking,"[7] writes Unix historian Peter Salus. By the  
early 80s, the TCP/IP networking suite was included in BSD Unix.

Unix was designed with openness in mind. The source code&#8212;written in C,  
which was also developed during 1971-1973&#8212;is easily accessible, meaning  
a higher degree of technical transparency.
The standardization of the C programming language began in 1983 with  
the establishment of an American National Standards Institute (ANSI)  
committee called "X3J11." The ANSI report was finished in 1989 and  
subsequently accepted as a standard by the international consortium ISO  
in 1990.[8] Starting in 1979, Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++, which  
added the concept of classes to the original C language. (In fact,  
Stroustrup's first nickname for his new language was "C with Classes.")  
ANSI standardized the C++ language in 1990.

C++ has been tremendously successful as a language. "The spread was  
world-wide from the beginning," recalled Stroustrup. "[I]t fit into  
more environments with less trouble than just about anything else."[9]  
Just like a protocol.

It is not only computers that experience standardization and mass  
adoption. Over the years many technologies have followed this same  
trajectory. The process of standards creation is, in many ways, simply  
the recognition of technologies that have experienced success in the  
market place. One example is the VHS video format developed by JVC  
(with Matsushita), which beat out Sony's Betamax format in the consumer  
video market. Betamax was considered by some to be a superior  
technology (an urban myth, claim some engineers) because it stored  
video in a higher-quality format. But the trade off was that Betamax  
tapes tended to be shorter in length. In the late 70s when VHS  
launched, the VHS tape allowed for up to two hours of recording time,  
while Betamax only one hour. "By mid 1979 VHS was outselling Beta by  
more than 2 to 1 in the US."[10] When Betamax caught up in length (to  
three hours) it had already lost a foothold in the market. VHS would  
counter Betamax by increasing to four hours and later eight.

Some have suggested that it was the pornography industry, who favored  
VHS over Betamax, that provided it with legions of early adopters and  
proved the long term viability of the format.[11]
But perhaps the most convincing argument is the one that points out  
JVC's economic strategy which included aggressive licensing of the VHS  
format to competitors. JVC's behavior is pseudo-protocological. They  
licensed the technical specifications for VHS to other vendors. They  
also immediately established manufacturing and distribution supply  
chains for VHS tape manufacturing and retail sales. In the meantime  
Sony tried to fortify its market position by keeping Betamax to itself.  
As one analyst writes:

Three contingent early differences in strategy were crucial. First,  
Sony decided to proceed without major co-sponsors for it Betamax  
system, while JVC shared VHS with several major competitors. Second,  
the VHS consortium quickly installed a large manufacturing capacity.  
Third, Sony opted for a more compact cassette, while JVC chose a longer  
playing time for VHS, which proved more important to most customers.[12]

JVC deliberately sacrificed larger profit margins by keeping prices low  
and licensing to competitors. This was in order to grow their market  
share. The rationale was that establishing a standard was the most  
important thing, and as they approached that goal, it would create a  
positive feedback loop that would further beat out the competition.

The VHS/Betamax story is a good example from the commercial sector  
for how one format can beat out another format and become an industry  
standard. This example is interesting because it shows that  
protocological behavior (giving out your technology broadly even if it  
means giving it to your competitors) often wins out over proprietary  
behavior. The Internet protocols function in a similar way, to the  
degree that they have become industry standards not through a result of  
propriety market forces, but due to broad open initiatives of free  
exchange and debate. This was not exactly the case with VHS, but the  
analogy is useful nevertheless.

This type of corporate squabbling over video formats has since  
been essentially erased from the world stage with the advent of DVD.  
This new format was reached through consensus from industry leaders and  
hence does not suffer from direct competition by any similar technology  
in the way that VHS and Betamax did. Such consensus characterizes the  
large majority of processes in place today around the world for  
determining technical standards.

Many of today's technical standards can be attributed to the  
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE (pronounced  
"eye triple e"). In 1963 IEEE was created through the merging of two  
professional societies. They were the American Institute of Electrical  
Engineers (AIEE) founded in New York on May 13, 1884 (by a group which  
included Thomas Edison) and the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE)  
founded in 1912.[13] Today the IEEE has over 330,000 members in 150  
countries. It is the world's largest professional society in any field.  
The IEEE works in conjunction with industry to circulate knowledge of  
technical advances, to recognize individual merit through the awarding  
of prizes, and to set technical standards for new technologies. In this  
sense the IEEE is the world's largest and most important protocological  
society.

Composed of many chapters, sub-groups and committees, the IEEE's  
Communications Society is perhaps the most interestingarea vis-a-vis  
computer networking. They establish standards in many common areas of  
digital communication including digital subscriber lines (DSLs) and  
wireless telephony.
IEEE standards often become international standards. Examples include  
the "802" series of standards which govern network communications  
protocols. These include standards for Ethernet[14] (the most common  
local area networking protocol in use today), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and  
others.

"The IEEE," Paul Baran observed, "has been a major factor in the  
development of communications technology."[15] Indeed Baran's own  
theories, which eventually would spawn the Internet, were published  
within the IEEE community even as they were published by his own  
employer, the RAND Corporation.

Active within the United States are the National Institute for  
Standardization and Technology (NIST) and American National Standards  
Institute (ANSI). The century old NIST, formerly known as the National  
Bureau of Standards, is a federal agency that develops and promotes  
technological standards. Because they are a federal agency and not a  
professional society, they have no membership per se. They are also  
non-regulatory, meaning that they do not enforce laws or establish  
mandatory standards which must be adopted. Much of their budget goes  
into supporting NIST research laboratories as well as various outreach  
programs.

ANSI, formerly called the American Standards Association, is  
responsible for aggregating and coordinating the standards creation  
process in the US. They are the private sector counterpart to NIST.  
While they do not create any standards themselves, they are a conduit  
for federally-accredited organizations in the field who are developing  
technical standards. The accredited standards developers must follow  
certain rules designed to keep the process open and equitable for all  
interested parties. ANSI then verifies that the rules have been  
followed by the developing organization before the proposed standard is  
adopted.

ANSI is also responsible for articulating a national standards  
strategy for the US. This strategy helps ANSI advocate in the  
international arena on behalf of United States interests. ANSI is the  
only organization that can approve standards as American national  
standards.

Many of ANSI's rules for maintaining integrity and quality in the  
standards development process revolve around principles of openness and  
transparency and hence conform with much of what I have already said  
about protocol. ANSI writes that:



&#711; Decisions are reached through consensus among those affected.
&#711; Participation is open to all affected interests. [...]
&#711; The process is transparent &#8212; information on the process and  
progress is directly available. [...]
&#711;

The process is flexible, allowing the use of different  
methodologies to meet the needs of different technology and product  
sectors.[16]



Besides being consensus-driven, open, transparent and flexible, ANSI  
standards are also voluntary, which means that, like NIST, no one is  
bound by law to adopt them. Voluntary adoption in the marketplace is  
the ultimate test of a standard. Standards may disappear in the advent  
of a new superior technology or simply with the passage of time.  
Voluntary standards have many advantages. By not forcing industry to  
implement the standard the burden of success lies in the marketplace.  
And in fact, proven success in the marketplace generally preexists the  
creation of a standard. The behavior is emergent, not imposed.

On the international stage several other standards bodies become  
important. The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) focuses on  
radio and telecommunications, including voice telephony, communications  
satellites, data networks, television and in the old days, the  
telegraph. Established in 1865 they claim to be the world's oldest  
international organization.

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) prepares and  
publishes international standards in the area of electrical  
technologies including magnetics, electronics and energy production.  
They cover everything from screw threads to quality management systems.  
IEC is comprised of national committees. (The national committee  
representing the US is administered by ANSI.)



Another important international organization is ISO, also known as  
the International Organization for Standardization.[17] Like the IEC,  
ISO grows out of the electro-technical field and was formed after World  
War II to "facilitate the international coordination and unification of  
industrial standards."[18] Based in Geneva, but a federation of over  
140 national standards bodies including the American ANSI and the  
British Standards Institution (BSI), their goal is to establish  
vendor-neutral technical standards. Like the other international  
bodies, standards adopted by the ISO are recognized worldwide.


Also like other standards bodies, ISO standards are developed  
through a process of consensus-building. Their standards are based on  
voluntary participation and thus the adoption of ISO standards is  
driven largely by market forces. (As opposed to mandatory standards  
which are implemented in response a governmental regulatory mandate.)  
Once established, ISO standards can have massive market penetration.  
For example the ISO standard for film speed (100, 200, 400, etc.) is  
used globally by millions of consumers.

Another ISO standard of far-reaching importance is the Open  
Systems Interconnection (OSI) Reference Model. Developed in 1978, the  
OSI Reference Model is a technique for classifying all networking  
activity into seven abstract layers. Each layer describes a different  
segment of the technology behind networked communication, as described  
in various chapters above.


 Layer 7 Application
 Layer 6 Presentation
 Layer 5 Session
 Layer 4 Transport
 Layer 3 Network
 Layer 2 Data link
 Layer 1 Physical


This classification helps organize the process of standardization into  
distinct areas of activity, and is relied on heavily by those creating  
standards for the Internet.

In 1987 the ISO and the IEC recognized that some of their efforts were  
beginning to overlap. They decided to establish an institutional  
framework to help coordinate their efforts and formed a joint committee  
to deal with information technology called the Joint Technical  
Committee 1 (JTC 1). ISO and IEC both participate in the JTC 1, as well  
as liaisons from Internet-oriented consortia such as the IEFT. ITU  
members, IEEE members and others from other standards bodies also  
participate here. 

Individuals may sit on several committees in several  
different standards bodies, or simply attend as ex officio members, to  
increase inter-organizational communication and reduce redundant  
initiatives between the various standards bodies. JTC 1 committees  
focus on everything from office equipment to computer graphics. One of  
the newest committees is devoted to biometrics.

ISO, ANSI, IEEE, and all the other standards bodies are well  
established organizations with long histories and formidable  
bureaucracies. The Internet on the other hand has long been skeptical  
of such formalities and spawned a more ragtag, shoot from the hip  
attitude about standard creation.[19] I will focus the rest of this  
chapter on those communities and the protocol documents that they  
produce.

There are four groups that make up the organizational hierarchy in  
charge of Internet standardization. They are the Internet Society, the  
Internet Architecture Board, the Internet Engineering Steering Group,  
and the Internet Engineering Task Force.[20] 

The Internet Society (ISOC), founded in January 1992, is a  
professional membership society. It is the umbrella organization for  
the other three groups. Its mission is "[t]o assure the open  
development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of all  
people throughout the world."[21] It facilitates the development of  
Internet protocols and standards. ISOC also provides fiscal and legal  
independence for the standards-making process, separating this activity  
from its former US government patronage.

The Internet Architecture Board (IAB), originally called the  
Internet Activities Board, is a core committee of thirteen nominated by  
and consisting of members of the IETF.[22] The IAB reviews IESG  
appointments, provides oversight of the architecture of network  
protocols, oversees the standards creation process, hears appeals,  
oversees the RFC Editor, and performs other chores. The IETF (as well  
as the Internet Research Task Force which focuses on longer term  
research topics) falls under the auspices of the IAB. The IAB is  
primarily an oversight board, since actually accepted protocols  
generally originate within the IETF (or in smaller design teams).

Underneath the IAB is the Internet Engineering Steering Group (IESG),  
a committee of the Internet Society that assists and manages the  
technical activities of the IETF. All of the directors of the various  
research areas in the IETF are part of this Steering Group.

The bedrock of this entire community is The Internet Engineering Task  
Force (IETF). The IETF is the core area where most protocol initiatives  
begin. Several thousand people are involved in the IETF, mostly through  
email lists, but also in face to face meetings. "The Internet  
Engineering Task Force is," in their own words, "a loosely  
self-organized group of people who make technical and other  
contributions to the engineering and evolution of the Internet and its  
technologies."[23] Or elsewhere: "the Internet Engineering Task Force  
(IETF) is an open global community of network designers, operators,  
vendors, and researchers producing technical specifications for the  
evolution of the Internet architecture and the smooth operation of the  
Internet."[24]

The IETF is best defined in the following RFCs:

&#711; "The Tao of IETF: A Guide for New Attendees of the Internet  
Engineering Task Force" (RFC 1718, FYI 17) 

&#711; "Defining the IETF" (RFC 3233, BCP 58)

&#711; "IETF Guidelines for Conduct"[25] (RFC 3184, BCP 54)

&#711; "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3" (RFC 2026, BCP 9)

&#711;"IAB and IESG Selection, Confirmation, and Recall Process:  
Operation of the Nominating and Recall Committees" (RFC 2727, BCP 10)

&#711; "The Organizations Involved in the IETF Standards Process" (RFC  
2028, BCP 11)


These documents describe both how the IEFT creates standards, but also  
how the entire community itself is set up and how it behaves.

The IETF is the least bureaucratic of all the organizations mentioned  
in this chapter. In fact it is not an organization at all, but rather  
an informal community. It does not have strict bylaws or formal  
officers.

 It is not a corporation (nonprofit or otherwise) and thus  
has no Board of Directors. It has no binding power as a standards  
creation body and is not ratified by any treaty or charter. It has no  
membership, and its meetings are open to anyone. "Membership" in the  
IETF is simply evaluated through an individual's participation. If you  
participate via email, or attend meetings, you are a member of the  
IETF. All participants operate as unaffiliated individuals, not as  
representatives of other organizations or vendors.


The IETF is divided up by topic into various Working Groups. Each  
Working Group[26] focuses on a particular issue or issues and drafts  
documents that are meant to capture the consensus of the group. Like  
the other standards bodies, IETF protocols are voluntary standards.  
There is no technical or legal requirement[27] that anyone actually  
adopt IETF protocols.

The process of establishing an Internet Standard is gradual,  
deliberate, and negotiated. Any protocol produced by the IETF goes  
through a series of stages, called the "standards track." The standards  
track exposes the document to extensive peer review, allowing it to  
mature into an RFC memo and eventually an Internet Standard. "The  
process of creating an Internet Standard is straightforward," they  
write. "A specification undergoes a period of development and several  
iterations of review by the Internet community and revision based upon  
experience, is adopted as a Standard by the appropriate body [...], and  
is published."[28]

Preliminary versions of specifications are solicited by the IETF as  
Internet-Draft documents. Anyone may submit an Internet-Draft. They are  
not standards in any way and should not be cited as such nor  
implemented by any vendors. They are works in progress and are subject  
to review and revision. If they are deemed uninteresting or  
unnecessary, they simply disappear after their expiration date of six  
months. They are not RFCs and receive no number.

If an Internet-Draft survives the necessary revisions and is deemed  
important, it is shown to the IESG and nominated for the standards  
track. If the IESG agrees (and the IAB approves), then the  
specification is handed off to the RFC Editor and put in the queue for  
future publication. The actual stages in the standards track are:



1) Proposed Standard&#8212;The formal entry point for all specifications is  
here as a Proposed Standard. This is the beginning of the RFC process.  
The IESG has authority via the RFC Editor to elevate an Internet-Draft  
to this level. While no prior real world implementation is required of  
a Proposed Standard, these specifications are generally expected to be  
fully-formulated and implementable.

2) Draft Standard&#8212;After specifications have been implemented in at  
least two "independent and interoperable" real world applications they  
can be elevated to the level of a Draft Standard. A specification at  
the Draft Standard level must be relatively stable and easy to  
understand. While subtle revisions are normal for Draft Standards, no  
substantive changes are expected after this level.

3) Standard&#8212;Robust specifications with wide implementation and a  
proven track record are elevated to the level of Standard. They are  
considered to be official Internet Standards and are given a new number  
in the "STD" sub-series of the RFCs (but also retain their RFC number).  
The total number of Standards is relatively small.


Not all RFCs are standards. Many RFCs are informational, experimental,  
historic, or even humorous[29] in nature. Furthermore not all RFCs are  
full-fledged Standards&#8212;they may not be that far along yet.

In addition to the STD subseries for Internet Standards, there are two  
other RFC subseries that warrant special attention: the Best Current  
Practice Documents (BCP) and informational documents known as FYI.

Each new protocol specification is drafted in accordance with RFC  
1111, "Request for Comments on Request for Comments: Instructions to  
RFC Authors," which specifies guidelines, text formatting and  
otherwise, for drafting all RFCs. Likewise, FYI 1 (RFC 1150) titled  
"F.Y.I. on F.Y.I.: Introduction to the F.Y.I. Notes" outlines general  
formatting issues for the FYI series. Other such memos guide the  
composition of Internet-Drafts, as well as STDs and other documents.  
Useful information on drafting Internet standards is also found in RFCs  
2223 and 2360.[30]

The standards track allows for a high level of due process. Openness,  
transparency and fairness are all virtues of the standards track.  
Extensive public discussion is par for the course.

Some of the RFCs are extremely important. RFCs 1122 and 1123 outline  
all the standards that must be followed by any computer that wishes to  
be connected to the Internet. Representing "the consensus of a large  
body of technical experience and wisdom,"[31] these two documents  
outline everything from email and transferring files to the basic  
protocols like IP that actually move data from one place to another.

Other RFCs go into greater technical detail on a single  
technology. Released in September 1981, RFC 791 and RFC 793 are the two  
crucial documents in the creation of the Internet protocol suite TCP/IP  
as we know it today. In the early 70s Robert Kahn of DARPA and Vinton  
Cerf of Stanford University teamed up to create a new protocol for the  
intercommunication of different computer networks. In September 1973  
they presented their ideas at the University of Sussex in Brighton and  
soon afterwards completed writing the paper "A Protocol for Packet  
Network Intercommunication" which would be published in 1974 by the  
IEEE. The RFC Editor Jon Postel and others assisted in the final  
protocol design.[32] Eventually this new protocol was split in 1978  
into a two-part system consisting of TCP and IP. (As mentioned in  
earlier chapters TCP is a reliable protocol which is in charge of  
establishing connections and making sure packets are delivered, while  
IP is a connectionless protocol that is only interested in moving  
packets from one place to another.)

One final technology worth mentioning in the context of protocol  
creation is the World Wide Web. The Web emerged largely from the  
efforts of one man, the British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee.  
During the process of developing the Web, Berners-Lee wrote both the  
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Hypertext Markup Language  
(HTML), which form the core suite of protocols used broadly today by  
servers and browsers to transmit and display web pages. He also created  
the web address, called a Universal Resource Identifier (URI), of which  
today's "URL" is a variant, which is a simple, direct way for locating  
any resource on the Web.


 Tim Berners-Lee:

	The art was to define the few basic, common rules of "protocol" that  
	would allow one computer to talk to another, in such a way that when  
	all computer everywhere did it, the system would thrive, not break  
	down. For the Web, those elements were, in decreasing order of  
	importance, universal resource identifiers (URIs), the Hypertext  
	Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).


So, like other protocol designers, Berners-Lee's philosophy was to  
create a standard language for interoperation. By adopting his  
language, the computers would be able to exchange files. He continues:


What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was  
that there was nothing else beyond URIs, HTTP, and HTML. There was no  
central computer "controlling" the Web, no single network on which  
these protocols worked, not even an organization anywhere that "ran"  
the Web. The Web was not a physical "thing" that existed in a certain  
"place." It was a "space" in which information could exist.[33]


This is also in line with other protocol scientists's intentions&#8212;that  
an info-scape exists on the net with no centralized administration or  
control. (But as I have pointed out, it should not be inferred that a  
lack of centralized control means a lack of control as such.)

Berners-Lee eventually took his ideas to the IETF and published  
"Universal Resource Identifiers in WWW" (RFC 1630) in 1994. This memo  
describes the correct technique for creating and decoding URIs for use  
on the Web. But, Berners-Lee admitted, "the IETF route didn't seem to  
be working."[34] 	


Instead he established a separate standards group in October 1994  
called the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). "I wanted the consortium to  
run on an open process like the IETF's," Berners-Lee remembers, "but  
one that was quicker and more efficient. [...] Like the IETF, W3C would  
develop open technical specifications. Unlike the IETF, W3C would have  
a small full-time staff to help design and develop the code where  
necessary. Like industry consortia, W3C would represent the power and  
authority of millions of developers, researchers and users. And like  
its member research institutions, it would leverage the most recent  
advances in information technology."[35]

The W3C creates the specifications for Web technologies, and releases  
"recommendations" and other technical reports. The design philosophies  
driving the W3C are similar to those at the IETF and other standards  
bodies. They promote a distributed (their word is "decentralized")  
architecture, they promote interoperability in and among different  
protocols and different end systems, and so on.
In many ways the core protocols of the Internet had their development  
heyday in the 80s. But Web protocols are experiencing explosive growth  
today.

The growth is due to an evolution of the concept of the Web into what  
Berners-Lee calls the Semantic Web. In the Semantic Web, information is  
not simply interconnected on the Internet using links and graphical  
markup&#8212;what he calls "a space in which information could permanently  
exist and be referred to"[36]--but it is enriched using descriptive  
protocols that say what the information actually is.

For example, the word "Galloway" is meaningless to a machine. It is  
just a piece of information that says nothing about what it is or what  
it means. But wrapped inside a descriptive protocol it can be  
effectively parsed: "&lt;surname&gt;Galloway&lt;/surname&gt;." Now the machine  
knows that Galloway is a surname. The word has been enriched with  
semantic value. If one makes the descriptive protocols more complex,  
then one is able to say more complex things about information, i.e.  
that Galloway is my surname, and my given name is Alexander, and so on.  
The Semantic Web is simply the process of adding extra meta-layers on  
top of information so that it can be parsed according to its semantic  
value.

Why is this significant? Before this, protocol had very little to  
do with meaningful information. Protocol does not interface with  
content, with semantic value. It is, as I say above, against  
interpretation. But with Berners-Lee comes a new strain of protocol:  
protocol that cares about meaning. This is what he means by a Semantic  
Web. It is, as he says, "machine-understandable information."

Does the Semantic Web, then, contradict my principle above that  
protocol is against interpretation? I'm not so sure. Protocols can  
certainly say things about their contents. A checksum does this. A  
file-size variable does this. But do they actually know the meaning of  
their contents? So it is a matter of debate as to whether descriptive  
protocols actually add intelligence to information, or if they are  
simply subjective descriptions (originally written by a human) that  
computers mimic but understand little about. Berners-Lee himself  
stresses that the Semantic Web is not an artificial intelligence  
machine.[37] He calls it "well-defined" data, not interpreted data&#8212;and  
in reality those are two very different things. I promised in the  
Introduction to skip all epistemological questions, and will leave this  
one to be debated by my betters.

As this survey of protocological institutionalization shows, the  
primary source materials for any protocological analysis of Internet  
standards are the Request for Comments (RFC) memos. They began  
circulation in 1969 with Steve Crocker's RFC "Host Software" and have  
documented all developments in protocol since.[38] "It was a modest and  
entirely forgettable memo," Crocker remembers, "but it has significance  
because it was part of a broad initiative whose impact is still with us  
today."[39]


While generally opposed to the center-periphery model of  
communication&#8212;what some call the "downstream paradigm"[40]&#8212;Internet  
protocols describe all manner of computer-mediated communication over  
networks. There are RFCs for transporting messages from one place to  
another, and others for making sure it gets there in one piece. There  
are RFCs for email, for webpages, for news wires, and for graphic  
design.

Some advertise distributed architectures (like IP routing), some  
hierarchical (like the DNS). Yet they all create the conditions for  
technological innovation based on a goal of standardization and  
organization. It is a peculiar type of anti-federalism through  
universalism&#8212;strange as it sounds&#8212;whereby universal techniques are  
levied in such a way as ultimately to revert much decision-making back  
to the local level.

But during this process many local differences are elided in favor of  
universal consistencies. For example, protocols like HTML were  
specifically designed to allow for radical deviation in screen  
resolution, browser type and so on. And HTML (along with protocol as a  
whole) acts as a strict standardizing mechanism that homogenizes these  
deviations under the umbrella of a unilateral standard.

Ironically, then, the Internet protocols which help engender a  
distributed system of organization are themselves underpinned by  
adistributed, bureaucratic institutions&#8212;be they entities like ICANN or  
technologies like DNS.

Thus it is an oversight for theorists like Lawrence Lessig, despite  
his strengths, to suggest that the origin of Internet communication was  
one of total freedom and lack of control.[41] Instead, it is clear to  
me that the exact opposite of freedom, that is control, has been the  
outcome of the last forty years of developments in networked  
communications. The founding principle of the net is control, not  
freedom. Control has existed from the beginning.

Perhaps it is a different type of control then we are used to seeing.  
It is a type of control based in openness, inclusion, universalism, and  
flexibility. It is control borne from high degrees of technical  
organization (protocol), not this or that limitation on individual  
freedom or decision making (fascism).

Thus it is with complete sincerity that Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee  
writes:

	I had (and still have) a dream that the web could be less of a  
	television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge.  
	I imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the  
	things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured  
	out.[42]



The irony is, of course, that in order to achieve this social utopia  
computer scientists like Berners-Lee had to develop the most highly  
controlled and extensive mass media yet known. Protocol gives us the  
ability to build a "warm, friendly" technological space. But it becomes  
warm and friendly through technical standardization, agreement,  
organized implementation, broad (sometimes universal) adoption, and  
directed participation.


I stated in the introduction that protocol is based on a  
contradiction between two opposing machines, one machine that radically  
distributes control into autonomous locales, and another that focuses  
control into rigidly defined hierarchies. This chapter illustrates this  
reality in full detail. The generative contradiction that lies at the  
very heart of protocol is that in order to be politically progressive,  
protocol must be partially reactionary.

To put it another way, in order for protocol to enable radically  
distributed communications between autonomous entities, it must employ  
a strategy of universalization, and of homogeneity. It must be  
anti-diversity. It must promote standardization in order to enable  
openness. It must organize peer groups into bureaucracies like the IEFT  
in order to create free technologies.

To be sure, the two partners in this delicate two-step often exist in  
separate arenas. As protocol pioneer Bob Braden puts it, "There are  
several vital kinds of heterogeneity."[43] That is to say, one sector  
can be standardized while another is heterogeneous. The core Internet  
protocols can be highly controlled while the actual administration of  
the net can be highly uncontrolled. Or, DNS can be arranged in a strict  
hierarchy while users's actual experience of the net can be highly  
distributed.

In short, control in distributed networks is not monolithic. It  
proceeds in multiple, parallel, contradictory and oftenunpredictable  
ways. It is a complex of interrelated currents and counter-currents.

Perhaps I can term the institutional frameworks mentioned in this  
chapter a type of tactical standardization, in which certain short term  
goals are necessary in order to realize one's longer term goals.  
Standardization is the politically reactionary tactic that enables  
radical openness. Or to give an example of this analogy in technical  
terms: the Domain Name System, with it's hierarchical architecture and  
bureaucratic governance, is the politically reactionary tactic that  
enables the truly distributed and open architecture of the Internet  
Protocol. It is, as Barthes put it, our "Operation Margarine." And this  
is the generative contradiction that fuels the net.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Jake Feinler, "30 Years of RFCs," RFC 2555, April 7, 1999.

[2] See Vint Cerf's memorial to Jon Postel's life and work in "I  
Remember IANA," RFC 2468, October 1988.

[3] Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, Where Wizards Stay up Late: The  
Origins of the Internet (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 145. For  
biographies of two dozen protocol pioneers see Gary Malkin's "Who's Who  
in the Internet: Biographies of IAB, IESG and IRSG Members," RFC 1336,  
FYI 9, May 1992.

[4] Vinton Cerf, personal correspondence, September 23, 2002.

[5] Fred Baker, personal correspondence,

 December 12, 2002.

[6] AT&amp;T's Otis Wilson who is cited in Peter Salus, A Quarter Century  
of Unix (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1994), p. 59.

[7] Salus, A Quarter Century of Unix, p. 2.

[8] See Dennis Ritchie, "The Development of the C Programming Language"  
in Thomas Bergin and Richard Gibson, eds., History of Programming  
Languages II (New York: ACM, 1996), p. 681.

[9] Bjarne Stroustrup, "Transcript of Presentation" in Bergin &amp; Gibson,  
p. 761.

[10] S. J. Liebowitz and Stephen E. Margolis, "Path Dependence, Lock-In  
and History," Journal of Law, Economics and Organization, April 1995.

[11] If not VHS then the VCR in general was aided greatly by the porn  
industry. David Morton writes that "many industry analysts credited the  
sales of erotic video tapes as one of the chief factors in the VCR's  
early success. They took the place of adult movie theaters, but also  
could be purchased in areas where they were legal and viewed at home."  
See Morton's A History of Electronic Entertainment since 1945,  
http://www.ieee.org/organizations/history_center/research_guides/ 
entertainment, p. 56.

[12] Douglas Puffert, "Path Dependence in Economic Theory,"  
http://www.vwl.uni-muenchen.de/ls_komlos/pathe.pdf, p. 5.

[13] IEEE 2000 Annual Report (IEEE, 2000), p. 2.

[14] IEEE prefers to avoid associating their standards with  
trademarked, commercial, or otherwise proprietary technologies. Hence  
the IEEE definition eschews the word "Ethernet" which is associated  
with Xerox PARC where it was named. The 1985 IEEE standard for Ethernet  
is instead titled "IEEE 802.3 Carrier Sense Multiple Access with  
Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) Access Method and Physical Layer  
Specifications."

[15] Paul Baran, Electrical Engineer, an oral history conducted in 1999  
by David Hochfelder, IEEE History Center, Rutgers University, New  
Brunswick, NJ, USA.

[16] ANSI, "National Standards Strategy for the United States,"  
http://www.ansi.org, emphasis in original.

[17] The name ISO is in fact not an acronym, but derives from a Greek  
word for "equal." This way it avoids the problem of translating the  
organization's name into different languages, which would produce  
different acronyms. The name ISO, then, is a type of semantic standard  
in itself.

[18] See http://www.iso.ch for more history of the ISO.

[19] The IEFT takes pride in having such an ethos. Jeanette Hofmann  
writes: "The IETF has traditionally understood itself as an elite in  
the technical development of communication networks. Gestures of  
superiority and a dim view of other standardisation committees are  
matched by unmistakable impatience with incompetence in their own  
ranks." See "Government Technologies and Techniques of Government:  
Politics on the Net," http://duplox.wz-berlin.de/final/jeanette.htm

[20] Another important organization to mention is the Internet  
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). ICANN is a  
nonprofit organization which has control over the Internet's domain  
name system. Its Board of Directors has included Vinton Cerf,  
co-inventor of the Internet Protocol and founder of the Internet  
Society, and author Esther Dyson. "It is ICANN's objective to operate  
as an open, transparent, and consensus-based body that is broadly  
representative of the diverse stakeholder communities of the global  
Internet" (see "ICANN Fact Sheet," http://www.icann.org). Despite this  
rosy mission statement, ICANN has been the target of intense criticism  
in recent years. It is for many the central lightning rod for problems  
around issues of Internet governance. A close look at ICANN is  
unfortunately outside the scope of this book, but for an excellent  
examination of the organization see Milton Mueller's Ruling the Root  
(Cambride: MIT, 2002).

[21] http://www.isoc.org.

[22] For a detailed description of the IAB see Brian Carpenter,  
"Charter of the Internet Architecture Board (IAB)," RFC 2850, BCP 39,  
May 2000.

[23] Gary Malkin, "The Tao of IETF: A Guide for New Attendees of the  
Internet Engineering Task Force," RFC 1718, FYI 17, October 1993.

[24] Paul Hoffman and Scott Bradner, "Defining the IETF," RFC 3233, BCP  
58, February 2002.

[25] This RFC is an interesting one because of the social relations it  
endorses within the IETF. Liberal, democratic values are the norm.  
"Intimidation or ad hominem attack" is to be avoided in IETF debates.

  
Instead IETFers are encouraged to "think globally" and treat their  
fellow colleagues "with respect as persons." Somewhat ironically this  
document also specifies that "English is the de facto language of the  
IETF." See Susan Harris, "IETF Guidelines for Conduct," RFC 3184, BCP  
54, October 2001.

[26] For more information on IETF Working Groups see Scott Bradner,  
"IETF Working Group Guidelines and Procedures," RFC 2418, BCP 25,  
September 1998.

[27] That said, there are protocols that are given the status level of  
"required" for certain contexts. For example the Internet Protocol is a  
required protocol for anyone wishing to connect to the Internet. Other  
protocols may be give status levels of "recommended" or "elective"  
depending on how necessary they are for implementing a specific  
technology. The "required" status level should not be confused however  
with mandatory standards. These have legal implications and are  
enforced by regulatory agencies.

[28] Scott Bradner, "The Internet Standards Process -- Revision 3," RFC  
2026, BCP 9, October 1996.

[29] Most RFCs published on April 1st are suspect. Take for example RFC  
1149, "A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian  
Carriers" (David Waitzman, April 1990), which describes how to send IP  
datagrams via carrier pigeon, lauding their "intrinsic collision  
avoidance system." Thanks to Jonah Brucker-Cohen for first bringing  
this RFC to my attention. Brucker-Cohen

 himself has devised a new  
protocol called "H2O/IP" for the transmission of IP datagrams using  
modulated streams of water. Consider also "The Infinite Monkey Protocol  
Suite (IMPS)" described in RFC 2795 (SteQven [sic] Christey, April  
2000) that describes "a protocol suite which supports an infinite  
number of monkeys that sit at an infinite number of typewriters in  
order to determine when they have either produced the entire works of  
William Shakespeare or a good television show." Shakespeare would  
probably appreciate "SONET to Sonnet Translation" (April 1994, RFC  
1605) which uses fourteen line decasyllabic verse to optimize data  
transmission over Synchronous Optical Network (SONET). There is also  
the self-explanatory "Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol  
(HTCPCP/1.0)" (Larry Masinter, RFC 2324, April 1998), clearly required  
reading for any under-slept webmaster. Other examples of ridiculous  
technical standards include Eryk Salvaggio's "Slowest Modem" which uses  
the US Postal Service to send data via diskette at a data transfer rate  
of only 0.002438095238095238095238 kb/s. He specifies that "[a]ll html  
links on the diskette must be set up as a href='mailing address' (where  
'mailing address' is, in fact, a mailing address)" ("Free Art Games #5,  
6 and 7," Rhizome, September 26, 2000), and Cory Arcangel's "Total  
Asshole" file compression system that, in fact, enlarges a file  
exponentially in size when it is compressed.

[30] See Jon Postel and Joyce Reynolds, "Instructions to RFC Authors,"  
RFC 2223, October 1997, and Gregor Scott, "Guide for Internet Standards  
Writers," RFC 2360, BCP 22, June 1998.

[31] Robert Braden, "Requirements for Internet Hosts -- Communication  
Layers," RFC 1122, STD 3, October 1989.

[32] Milton Mueller, Ruling the Root (Cambridge: MIT, 2002), p. 76.

[33] Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (New York: HarperCollins, 1999),  
p. 36.

[34] Ibid., p. 71.

[35] Ibid., pp. 92, 94.

[36] Ibid., p. 18.

[37] Tim Berners-Lee, "What the Semantic Web can represent,"  
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/RDFnot.html.

[38] One should not tie Crocker's memo to the beginning of protocol per  
se. That honor should probably go to Paul Baran's 1964 RAND publication  
"On Distributed Communications." In many ways it serves as the origin  
text for the RFCs that would follow. Although it came before the RFCs  
and was not connected to it in any way, Baran's memo essentially  
fulfilled the same function, that is, to outline for Baran's peers a  
broad technological standard for digital communication over networks.



Other RFC-like documents have also been important in the  
technical development of networking. The Internet Experiment Notes  
(IENs), published from 1977 to 1982 and edited by RFC editor Jon  
Postel, addressed issues connected to the then-fledgling Internet  
before merging with the RFC series. Vint Cerf also cites the ARPA  
Satellite System Notes and the PRNET Notes on packet radio (see RFC  
2555). There exists also the MIL-STD series maintained by the  
Department of Defense. Some of the MIL-STDs overlap with Internet  
Standards covered in the RFC series.

[39] Steve Crocker, "30 Years of RFCs," RFC 2555, April 7, 1999.

[40] See Nelson Minar and Marc Hedlund, "A Network of Peers:  
Peer-to-Peer Models Through the History of the Internet," in Andy Oram,  
Ed., Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies  
(Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 2001), p. 10.

[41] In his first book, Code and other Laws of Cyberspace (New York:  
Basic Books, 1999), Lessig sets up a before/after scenario for  
cyberspace. The "before" refers to what he calls the "promise of  
freedom" (6). The "after" is more ominous. Although as yet unfixed,  
this future is threatened by "an architecture that perfects control"  
(6). He continues this before/after narrative in The Future of Ideas:  
The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Random House,  
2001) where he assumes that the network, in its nascent form, was what  
he calls free, that is, characterized by "an inability to control"  
(147). Yet "[t]his architecture is now changing" (239), Lessig claims.  
We are about to "embrace an architecture of control" (268) put in place  
by new commercial and legal concerns.
	Lessig's discourse is always about a process of becoming, not of  
always having been. It is certainly correct for him to note that new  
capitalistic and juridical mandates are sculpting network  
communications in ugly new ways. But what is lacking from Lessig's  
work, then, is the recognition that control is endemic to all  
distributed networks that are governed by protocol. Control was there  
from day one. It was not imported later by the corporations and courts.  
In fact distributed networks must establish a system of control, which  
I call protocol, in order to function properly. In this sense, computer  
networks are and always have been the exact opposite of Lessig's  
"inability to control."


	While Lessig and I clearly come to very different conclusions, I  
attribute this largely to the fact that we have different objects of  
study. His are largely issues of governance and commerce while mine are  
technical and formal issues. My criticism of Lessig is less to deride  
his contribution, which is inspiring, than to point out our different  
approaches.

[42] Cited in Jeremie Miller, "Jabber," in Oram, Ed., Peer-to-Peer, p.  
81.

[43] Bob Braden, personal correspondence, December 25, 2002.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>9.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Surfing: new discussions about new media and theory</subject>
<from>Renate Ferro</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue May  6 06:15:03 EST 2014</date>
<content>In flux: New Media and Mediation in 2014

Recently while surfing the net I ran across Geert Lovink&#8217;s  intriguing
article, "Hermes on the Hudson: Notes on Media Theory after Snowden"
on the e-flux journal site. (For links to these publications see
below. )

Lovink asserts that Edward Snowden&#8217;s exposures represent the finality
of new media as we know it.  &#8220;The NSA scandal has taken away the last
remains of cyber-naivety and lifted the &#8216;internet issue&#8217; to the level
of world politics.&#8221; The egalitarian and utopian hopes and
possibilities of the networked internet is lost.&#8221; Citing a recently
collaboratively published book, Excommunication:  Three inquiries in
Media and Mediation by Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and
McKenzie Wark, Lovink appropriates Galloway&#8217;s first mode or model of
mediation &#8220;Hermes&#8221; for his title.  Hermes is the communication god of
messaging, &#8220;circulation&#8221;, and &#8220;exchange&#8221; as Galloway begins his
proposal for media and its mediations, one that looks back to history
first.  Geographically pinning Galloway, Thacker, and Wark as the New
York&#8217;s triumvirate of media theory conspirators, Lovink spins a
relatively geographically distinctively different global view on new
media&#8217;s demise or otherwise.

Galloway, Thacker and Wark&#8217;s collective claim in their Introduction
expresses, &#8220;One of the things the trio of us share is a desire to
cease adding &#8216;new media&#8217; to existing things...&#8221; Lovink responds, &#8220;The
&#8216;three inquiries in media and mediation&#8217; open with the widely shared
discontent that &#8216;new media&#8217; has become an empty signifier. This leaves
us with the question of the mandate and scope of today&#8217;s media
theory&#8212;if there is anything left.&#8221;

Lovink continues with a question, &#8220;Are you ready to hand over the &#8220;new
media&#8221; remains to the sociologists, museum curators, art historians,
and other humanities officials? Can we perhaps stage a more
imaginative &#8220;act of disappearance&#8221;? Are we ready to disguise ourselves
amidst the new normality?&#8221;

What do you think?
Renate</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>9.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Surfing: new discussions about new media and theory</subject>
<from>Simon Biggs</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue May  6 09:52:26 EST 2014</date>
<content>I'd just like to make a short observation at the start of this discussion - noting that I've not yet read any of the texts mentioned by Renate.

Vladimir Putin recently stated that the internet is a CIA plot. The comment attracted headlines around the world as people speculated whether this was the case and what Putin was trying to suggest (eg: that different countries might initiate their own internets).

Whilst Putin's comment, and much of the analysis that followed, was premised on an erroneous understanding of what the internet is Putin was correct about the CIA plot part. The internet was, as is popularly known, initiated at Pentagon request by one of the USA's key military research quangos, ARPA (later renamed DARPA). ARPA and DARPA were part of the core infrastructure of US defence and intelligence, along with the NSA and CIA. The history on this is not surprisingly a little foggy, given the murky character of the defence and intelligence sector, but ARPANET was probably commissioned during the presidency of Lyndon Baines Johnson and realised during that of Richard Nixon. This was high-Cold War time and the function of the network was to be a defence communications network that would work in a nuclear war during severe infrastructure attrition. It's ironic that the president who 'gave the internet away' to the public was Ronald Reagan, the most bellicose of cold-warriors.

The point here is that the internet was not founded as a utopian vehicle. It was conceived as an instrument of war. It's true that during the late 1980's and into the 1990's political progressives exploited the infrastructure and protocols the internet offered to develop new ideas about social responsibility and liberty (so did pornographers, gun-runners and drug dealers). Swords into ploughshares (or other implements), I suppose. The same sort of things happened when the printing press became widely available and it is probably appropriate to consider the internet as something like the printing press (with its ancillary techno-social systems).

The Hermes metaphor aside, the internet has never been an egalitarian or utopian system. It's a military communications system that has morphed into a key part of the public domain (in all its complexity). Perhaps for some it seemed to be something else for a little while - but it wasn't.

best

Simon</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>10.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Surfing: new discussions about new media and theory</subject>
<from>Richard Wright</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu May  8 21:38:49 EST 2014</date>
<content>"The Future of the Internet: Duct Tape or Blu-Tack?"</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>10.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] effusion and essence</subject>
<from>Geert Lovink</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri May  9 00:54:57 EST 2014</date>
<content>Dear all,

thanks for the opportunity to discuss my essay here. The 'spirit' of the text is in particular directed by the great public response in Europe, and in particular Germany, to the Snowdon affair. Many actively involved activists, geeks, designers and artists see the revelations as a watershed. For me this goes in two directions: on the first hand back to the days before 1984, which Simon has further elaborated upon, the military origin of the Net (and as many of you might agree, roots are also destiny&#8230;). The other direction in which this development is going is that of the 'Vergesellschaftlichung' of the Net, the becoming-society, the generalization of net standards and protocols, the peneration (if you wish) of internet (of things) into every aspect of life, every object and (social) relation, to control and monitor any movement of any person or object.

It could be that not every society, not every corner of the globe is sensing these two parallel and paradox developments in a same way. In his response Ken Wark wrote that inside the USA 'Snowdon' is not felt as a big deal. I respect that point of view. However, this is not the same in Central Europe. Maybe there the first movement (back to the origin) is felt more stronger than the second one. Certainly here in the Netherlands it is true that the generalization theses is more obvious here than the military aspect. However, in my view it remains important to discuss the two tendencies as one: effusion and essence.

Yours, Geert</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>11.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Excommunication</subject>
<from>Alexander R. Galloway</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri May  9 01:49:30 EST 2014</date>
<content>Greetings all.. particularly to all the email list veterans. This book is definitely a product of the net criticism scene from the old rhizome and nettime days, so it's nice to be back on empyre and see some familiar faces. (And incidentally I agree entirely with the spirit of Simon's post--regardless of who made it and for what reason, the internet is the most highly controlled mass media hitherto created. And here i disagree a bit with Geert: i don't see Snowden as a turning point; we've known this about the 'net for years.)

As for the book, where did "Excommunication" come from? The idea grew out of a conversation Eugene had been having with his editor, and it quickly gelled after that. We wanted to explore the more theological wing of philosophical thought -- hence our crude chronology with me focusing on a series of archaic divinities, Eugene inspired by the heretical monotheism of medieval mysticism, and Ken working on a more modern and post-secular form of heresy.

And so the concept of &#8220;excommunication,&#8221; with both its theological and media-theoretical connotations, seemed like a fitting framework. We wanted to push the term excommunication a bit further: not just exile or exclusion, but a more radical sense of what lies beyond the human entirely, toward what Quentin Meillassoux has called &#8220;the great outdoors.&#8221;

And all three of us quickly gravitated to excommunication as a theme, particularly this counter-intuitive promise of mediation with the radically non-human. In essence, we're hoping to skirt the classic metaphysical questions about worlds opening up to solicitous subjects. This book is not about the world &#8220;for us,&#8221; and not the world &#8220;in itself,&#8221; but what Eugene calls &#8220;the world without us.&#8221;

-ag

PS i'll note too that Jussi Parikka has also written an interesting review of the book for those of you who might be interested. download here http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/185-reviews</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited</subject>
<from>Renate Terese Ferro</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri May  9 14:38:11 EST 2014</date>
<content>The essence of Edward Snowden's revelations within the political fabric of the states is a fascinating one.  Snowden's activities were initially painted by the US Government and most of the conservative media machinery as criminal even terroristic.  As time has past the possibility of Snowden's heroism has slowly invaded alternative and other communication streams.  Just a few days ago Tim and I received a piece of junk mail that was soliciting money for some political cause and inside the request was a letter "signed" by Edward Snowden.  I am not sure that folks here in the US think that the effects of Snowden's leakage is no big deal. Edward Snowden's escapades could not have happened without the help of the network generalization and speed, viral media, our 24 hour news coverage and the effusion that Geert feels is at the crux of understanding media theory today.

Media theory appears to evolve, to be IN FLUX according to who is writing it, where, and when.  But what Excommunication posits us to do is to imagine the future:
 Alex wrote:
"...This book is not about the world "for us," and not the world "in itself," but what Eugene calls "the world without us."

 At this rather late hour of the evening I am inspired to reach for the 1997 publication edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker,  Digital Delirium.  In the contents I find Geert's interview with Zizek, Alex's writing on fonts and slogans and at the very end of the collection an article by Critical Art Ensemble, "The Technology of Uselessness" the last paragraph reads as such:

    "All things must be subordinated to neutrality-to uselessness.  One major difference between the age of the virtual and the more primitive times is that the contemporary idols have no metaphysical referent. The ones that have been constructed are not the mediating points between person and spirit, or life and afterlife; rather, they are end-points, empty signs...As this mythic narrative continues to play itself out, the suggestions of Authur and Marylouise Kroker begins to make more and more sense.  We are not witnessing the decline of late capital, but instead, its recline into its own delirious death trance. "

Good Night.  Renate</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited</subject>
<from>Soraya Murray</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat May 10 03:16:35 EST 2014</date>
<content>I am intrigued by this discussion, and would like to acknowledge the posts by Alex Galloway, Geert Lovink and Renate Ferro. Greetings to all of you. 

I keep circling back to the notion of strategic withdrawal, alluded to several times in the last few posts, as well as somewhat enigmatically toward the end of Alex's recent lecture here at UC Santa Cruz. For example, from his post: 

"This book is not about the world &#8220;for us,&#8221; and not the world &#8220;in itself,&#8221; but what Eugene calls &#8220;the world without us.&#8221;"

This, in relation to Geert's recent essay in e-Flux ("Hermes on the Hudson"): 
""This leaves us with the question of the mandate and scope of today&#8217;s media theory&#8212;if there is anything left. Are you ready to hand over the &#8220;new media&#8221; remains to the sociologists, museum curators, art historians, and other humanities officials? Can we perhaps stage a more imaginative &#8220;act of disappearance&#8221;? Are we ready to disguise ourselves amidst the new normality?"

...and which seemed to betray a similar anxiety around obsolescence of theory -- or a strategy of withdrawal? With respect, is this to be seen as an act of battening down the hatches? Is this disappearance/disguise a radical strategy to shift perspective as a means to generate new possibility? Something conceded, or something new gained?


-Soraya</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.2</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited</subject>
<from>Alexander R. Galloway</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon May 12 00:25:52 EST 2014</date>
<content>Dear Soraya &amp; Co..

I guess part of the impetus is that I'm surprised--if not unnerved--by the way in which networks have captured and eclipsed other ways of thinking. A new pantheon of dot-com philosophers reigns supreme today, ready to proclaim at every turn that &#8220;everything is a network.&#8221; Mark Zuckerberg: people are networks. Donald Rumsfeld: the battlefield is a network. Bruno Latour: ontology is a network. Franco Moretti: Hamlet is a network. David Joselit: Art is a network. Guy Debord: the post-capitalist city is a network. John Von Neumann: computation is a network. Konrad Wachsmann: architecture is a network.

Ladies and gentlemen, postmodernism is definitively over! We have a new meta-narrative to guide us.

We might label this a kind of &#8220;reticular pessimism.&#8221; And here I'm taking a cue from the notion of &#8220;Afro-pessimism&#8221; in critical race theory. Just as Afro-pessimism refers to the trap in which African-American identity is only ever defined via the fetters of its own historical evolution, reticular pessimism claims, in essence, that there is no escape from the fetters of the network. There is no way to think in, through, or beyond networks except in terms of networks themselves. According to reticular pessimism, responses to networked power are only able to be conceived in terms of other network forms. (And thus to fight Google and the NSA we need ecologies, assemblages, or multiplicities.)

By offering no alternative to the network form, reticular pessimism is deeply cynical because it forecloses any kind of utopian thinking that might entail an alternative to our many pervasive and invasive networks.

This is part of the mandate of this book, as I see it: to articulate a logic of being that is not reducible to a metaphysics of exchange, to a metaphysics of the network. This to me is the promise of excommunication: the message that says &#8220;there will be no more messages&#8221;; a logic of relation, without the tired, old model of exchange.

So, yes, strategic withdrawal is at the heart of what interests me most. Some are a bit skeptical about this notion of withdrawal -- often because they see in a negative light as alternatively a surrender monkey position (i give up! i'm outta here!), or a position of privilege (the political equivalent of opening a bank account in the Cayman Islands). But I see it very differently. I see it more as a withdrawal from representation. A structural withdrawal. I see it as a way to conceive of a kind of practical utopia in the here and now. "You don't represent us." "No one is illegal." "I would prefer not to." "We have no demands." Yes I realize utopian thinking is very unfashionable today; that's precisely why we need so much more of it. So perhaps less a bunker mentality and more about the reclaiming of a new experience of life and activity. 

Re: obsolescence of theory -- perhaps it hinges on *which* kind of theory? I don't agree with Latour and the notion that "theory has run out of steam." Marxism, feminism, psycho-analysis -- they all still work great if you ask me. But I do think that a kind of "vulgar 1968" style of theory has run its course. Nancy Fraser has it exactly right: capitalism co-opted many of the demands of '68-style theory. So now we have to reassess and recompile a new kind of theoretical method. Because of this I'm much more interested in a slightly different spin on the theoretical tradition. 

-ag</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.3</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited</subject>
<from>simon</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon May 12 07:16:30 EST 2014</date>
<content>Dear Alexander Galway and empyreans,

I enjoyed your your letter, particularly for the notion of 'reticular 
pessimism' as the /en abyme/ of a socio-cultural dispensation 
mirror-struck by its own mental processes. I even like the idea of the 
network as meta-narrative and proof that pomo's over. However, the 
strategies in play here rather than those of escape - blueprints of the 
prison studied in preparatory lucubration - seem to belong to the 
mentality of the captors - from the viewpoint of the cell, in clear 
sight of the tower, or power.

Albert-L&#225;szl&#243; Barab&#225;si attributes the invention of network theory to 
Leonhard Euler in the 1780s. I don't think either would agree with Mark 
Zuckerberg, Donald Rumsfield, Bruno Latour, Franco Moretti, David 
Joselit, Guy Debord, John Von Neumann or Konrad Wachsmann that the 
complex fields of the respective engagements of this strangely 
fascinating (uncanny - reticularly depressing) roll-call ought to be or 
can be reduced to what may be considered /network effects/. And, in some 
cases, /affects/ - where network is the nomination of a brand 
endorsement: Facebook is neither truly a network nor social.

In the same way, corpocratic concerns rhapsodise on the now highly 
recognisable formula /Big Data/ - an object that has as much affinity 
with a meta-narrative network as any of the individual cases adduced. 
Then there is the authorial tick of periodisation: after post-modernism 
(nostalgia for the post- or non-human?); and the obsolescence of the 
'68ers - the vulgarity of theoretical products reaching their use-by 
dates. Neither brand theory nor brand network provide any clue as to how 
to make a map that lets us get the hell out Dodge, or dodge the oncoming 
traffic of the imminent - and in the name of brand immanence each holds 
a pasteboard halo.

In the light of the network effects that theoretical dissipation - its 
current /dispositif/ - elevates by the mechanism of reduction to 
/networks/ (pure, simple, unreal thing) or networkism - as that 
theoretical cul-de-sac that ought at least be avoided - 'strategic 
withdrawal' were better called 'statistical withdrawal' - a term less 
pregnant with cognitive content.

Best,
Simon Taylor</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.4</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited</subject>
<from>Renate Terese Ferro</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue May 13 12:36:14 EST 2014</date>
<content>Thanks Alex for talking a bit more about your usage of the word
excommunication.  Also thanks to Christina for posting the interesting
theological intersections.  My thoughts were running more in parallel with
political theory in listening to your last post, most particularly Martin
Luther King's notion of non-violent resistance or perhaps Gandi's? .  Put
simply resistance by not participating, exiting the system, not "playing"
any longer. I realize that in the book you conduct a pretty lengthy
discussion about the use of the word "excommunication" a strategically
theologically implicit word but what do you think about Excommunication as
resistance?  
Renate</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.5</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited</subject>
<from>Melinda Rackham</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun May 25 14:03:57 EST 2014</date>
<content>Hi all,
 as a story teller not a theorist, 
I've been loving the lateral directions these conversations have taken.
 yet they feel like new growth on a tree, reaching towards different strong lights
strong potential, but sparse as foliage and flowers are still in their formative stages.

I think it would be telling to revisit in a year or so.
but for now
my branch is of truncation 
- physical and geographic excommunication.

Is this a "natural" evolution - a generational love affair with the network that has matured and dwindled,
a set of circumstance, a natural hiatus, a time to move on?
For me it  writing stories about people for print books made from trees, 
of interest to only a tiny fragment of society.
the narrowest of narrowcast.

It could be seen as a privileged withdrawal... the Duchampian retreat,
or it could be seen as a form of situated resistance...  living local.

Renate writes:

&gt; Lovink insists that it is not necessary or important to parse new media theories through comparative geographic distributions. 
&gt; 
Yet it is particularly European perspective to Snowden. 1st rule of fight club is that you dont talk about fight club.
If one doesn't live in the gated network of USA, we already live in a states of excommunication, or perhaps ecstatic ex-stasis.

Of course im saying all of this without having read excommunication 
a position I take perhaps because I cant buy it in e-edition due to my geographical location in Australia.
Of course I do have a copy ive dipped into because the internet if for routing around.. 
but u know.. who we are, 
and who we are routing around has changed.

We knew the end was coming when
the moddr_lab at WORM in Rotterdam developed  
the fabulous web2.0 Suicide machine..
 http://suicidemachine.org

"sign out forever"
what a promise. 
5 years ago when I saw my 1500 best Facebook friends disappear before me 
I knew everything had changed.
some non-artist/academic contacts, contacted me to see if I was emotionally  ok?
 was I really suicidal?
 why would I deliberately unjoin the network?
 
6 months ago I moved to a mostly abandoned industrial area quiet close to the city centre, 
toxins buried deep, being gentrified with creatives as the shock troops.
Interestingly I have no fixed network connection.
I have been extra excommunicated by lack of infrastructure in a first(?) world city of 1 million. 
The fat optical rollout goes right past my suburb 
and its previously sparse low income politically unimportant demographics.

After the shock of being denied what I felt like was my god given right to fast connection, 
I started to like my very physical excommunication. 
I choose to tether to get on,
to jack in, as they used to say.
a delicious nostalgia for the 14.4k baud modem 
the sound of which will forever generate excitement
and the deliberate act of communing
rather than the constancy of familial relationship.
 

x-communictedly
 Melinda</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>12.6</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] Digital Delirium revisited</subject>
<from>ole a. birch</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun May 25 19:11:07 EST 2014</date>
<content>Thanks to Milinda.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] effusion and miscommunication</subject>
<from>Johannes Birringer</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat May 10 03:42:59 EST 2014</date>
<content>dear Geert, Alexander, Renate and all

the public response in germany and several other european countries was the expected mix of outrage, analysis, critique, puzzlement, astonishment, anger at the US (and Britain)?, laughter at Angela Merkel's cell phone being monitored, etc, etc (just observe the equally predictable mixed and vigorous reaction to the Russia-Ukraine crisis),  and I am sure you noted all the facets (after what should not have come as a surprise); nor did the reactions in the media and public sectors in the US follow an unusual pattern;
watershed moments and revelations aside - and I doubt that the effusion is ever as total as you assume Geert (your total penetration theory, into every aspect of life and every corner of the planet), what exactly are we meant to do with the (catholic? mystic?) notion of excommunication...?

&gt;&#8220;&#8230;we pursue not so much a post-media condition but rather a non-media
condition, not so much the extensions of man but the exodus of man
from this world. Our task is not so much a reinvigorated humanism no
matter how complicated or qualified it might need to be, but rather
glimpse into the realm of the non-human.  We seek not so much a
blasphemy but a heresy, not so much a miscommunication but an
excommunication.&#8221;


what realm of the "non-human" do you propose for our social and political and personal activities?  and how do you intend to get rid of media or convince others to join your sect?
Just wondering.


respectfully
Johannes Birringer
Dap-Lab, London</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] effusion and miscommunication</subject>
<from>Geert Lovink</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon May 12 00:26:54 EST 2014</date>
<content>On 9 May 2014, at 7:42 PM, Johannes Birringer &lt;Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk&gt; wrote:

&gt; What exactly are we meant to do with the (catholic? mystic?) notion of excommunication&#8230;? (..) What realm of the "non-human" do you propose for our social and political and personal activities?  and how do you intend to get rid of media or convince others to join your sect?

Thanks, Johannes. These questions are geared towards the authors, I guess. 

I can only say what I make of it, and what I can see what we can do with these notions, in my case, the context of net criticism, media theory, tactical media, new aesthetics activism of artists, geeks, designers etc.

There is an urgency to study and understand the non-human. I can see that. I really started to 'dig it' and apply it to my own context when I got familiar with the work of Stuart Geiger (http://stuartgeiger.com/wordpress/) who studies the role of bots in Wikipedia. These days there are the social bots that people like you and me employ&#8230; resulting in a recent figure that 61.5% of internet traffic is 'non-human' (source: incapsula).

There are people making millions of this by tooling and ticking companies like Google. And this brings me to the humans behind the non-human. In the end I am more interested in them. Robots can be cute, or cruel, they are here to stay and will gain influence etc., all that is true, but I would like to know who profits from them, who built them, what their inner architecture is, which values and ethics they inhabit and spread&#8230; It is not so hard to delegate power and trust to machines. We can get used to that, and in some cases even benefit from it, but in the end I prefer full-employment for humans first. No sympathy for the machines. 

On Hacker News this weekend a related article was popular:

http://www.bainbrdg.demon.co.uk/Papers/Ironies.html

It is from 1983, so before 1984&#8230; ;)

The article "suggests that the increased interest in human factors among engineers reflects the irony that the more advanced a control system is, so the more crucial may be the contribution of the human operator."

Greetings, Geert</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>13.2</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] effusion and miscommunication</subject>
<from>Renate Terese Ferro</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue May 13 12:12:53 EST 2014</date>
<content>Dear Geert and Johannes,
Thanks Johannes for asking this important and critical question about the
non-human.  

Geert wrote in relationships to robots&#352;.
but I would like to know who profits from them, who built them, what their
inner architecture is, which values and ethics they inhabit and spread&#352; It
is not so hard to delegate power and trust to machines. We can get used to
that, and in some cases even benefit from it, but in the end I prefer
full-employment for humans first. No sympathy for the machines.

....
 

 If these values are important to you in regards to robots and machines
then the comment above implies that in order for you and us  to actually
understand robots we do need the expertise of a whole plethora of experts
from designers, to psychologists, to theologians.  To help us understand
the nature of robotics then a cross-disciplinary approach seems to be what
you are implying.  Any thoughts on this especially in relationship to your
comment on e-flux

...Are you ready to hand over the &#179;new media&#178; remains to the sociologists,
museum curators, art historians, and other humanities officials? Can we
perhaps stage a more imaginative &#179;act of disappearance&#178;....

Thanks.  Renate</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>14.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] networks and reticular pessimism</subject>
<from>roger malina</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun May 18 19:51:23 EST 2014</date>
<content>Alex

I guess i would like to bring a mathematical topology point of view to
the discussion on networks- I also have been intrigued
by how the science of networks has been transversing discipline after
discipline and we have even been helping thourgh
the leonardo arts humanities and complex networks projects  (
http://ahcncompanion.info/ )

over the past centuries there have been a number of waves of new ideas
on how to understand the structure of things-
and of topological tools - statistical mechanics and say the work of
understanding the mathematics of the random walk
had cultural influence in the early 20c - in the 50s and 50s
cybernetics and then general systems theory- then
complexity science and emergence of structures from low level rules
and now the science of networks

what is new of course is that we are now accumulating data on human
behaviour in the same way that physicists
accumulate data on what collections of atoms do

my colleague at UT dallas max schich has names his lab the 'cultural
science' lab because people are now
bringing to cultural analysis trans disciplinary tools like network
analysis- but many others also

over the coming decades we can expect other new insights that help
analyse and understand how things
are structured and organised- and indeed one has to be careful not to
over theorise a la post modernism
each way of appropriation= mathematics and topology are continually
developing new ideas and tools
and complex networks science is not the end of the story

roger malina</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>14.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] networks and reticular pessimism</subject>
<from>Simon Biggs</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon May 19 08:24:09 EST 2014</date>
<content>I seem to remember there was a pop song a few years back, perhaps by Pink Floyd, that went along the lines of "we don't need no meta-narrative".

best

Simon</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>15.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] excommunication</subject>
<from>warkk</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed May 28 11:01:47 EST 2014</date>
<content>Sorry to come in late. Just done with the end of semester. Have been
reading the various empyre threads for the month of May with interest. I
won't be able to keep straight who said what, and lists are a sort of
smeared authorship anyway.

The space of technology is always both blu-tack and duct tape, both a space
of things intentionally created for an instrumental purpose and things
hacked out of that intentionality for no purpose, or counter-purposes. Tech
is slightly exogenous to the social order.

So i don't see the current state of the tech ensemble that is the net as
pervaded by any particular essence. It isn't entirely of militarization, or
the commodity form, or whatever. Its not an expressionist totality. We
might be losing our toeholds, but that's no reason to start imagining it as
bad totality.

Here i don't see how Snowden changes much, other than perhaps clueing in
some publics in things that have surely been obvious all along? Surely
listserv veterans remember the revelations about Echelon? One only had to
follow the evolution of technical capacity from that point to grasp what
was feasible. And if a tech is feasible, one should assume the security
state already has it.

The Snowden moment happened when I was finishing The Disintegrating
Spectacle, and simply confirmed the theses about the state of the state to
be found in the late Debord. That (1) the security apparatus had achieved
autonomy from a state which had (2) lost its capacity to know and act
*historically*. That seems to describe the present quite well.

Its too crude to think that one could simply withdraw from such a
situation. That's why in that book i wrote about the tactics of the
'devil's party', which is neither hidden nor transparent, but pursues the
tactics of obscure presences, readable by those who need to know.

It is surely the case that the 'network' is at one and the same time *both*
a reality and pure ideology. Like the sun, it actually exists, it just
lacks the divine powers that its priests would attribute to it. Pointing
this out is no great breakthrough, but it seems to be where pop netkritik
is at the moment.

So one withdraws from representation, but to what? Are we not here still
playing out the tactics of modernism. That may be no bad thing, but here i
think there's more continuities than any grand break. Foucault once warned
of the dangers of always trying to see oneself as at the fulcrum of
history. This is now what counts as ordinary times.

I think i need to point out that for me (can't speak for Alex and Eugene)
excommunication is a *structural condition*, not something one chooses.
Communication needs to excommunicate in order to communicate. It has to
appear to sever the link to those who would take it upon themselves to be
their own authority. Authority over what i call xenocommunication, or
communication with the absolute.

Excommmunication may now be an everyday thing, maybe a micro thing. The
discussion of bots on the net makes me wonder if a spam filter is what
excommunication is today. That which decides which communication can be
considered authorized.

Where i perhaps part company with Alex and Eugene is that i think there's
other paths besides the via negativa. Rather than a non-relation to the
absolute, one can have an absolute relation. This is the 'other path' out
of correlation signaled by Meillassoux: empirio-criticism, and its
descendant, the empirio-monism of Alexander Bogdanov, on whom i am working
now.

I think its time to end the attempts by philosophy to control
xenocommuncation, the communication to the absolute. Rather, i think media
theory is that theory of the reality of media itself, of how media make
sensation, not out of nothing, not totally determined by the social or the
political or the discursive or whatever. But rather the media that are of
interest now are those which render the nonhuman perceptible via an inhuman
apparatus.

Here the techniques of climate science might be a good example. Without the
satellites and computers of the cold war (those inhuman media) the nonhuman
real of the Anthropocene is not visible -- even though, ironically enough,
our collective labor is what produced it. Strange how climate change
knowledge is produced by inhuman technical media that are duct tape in
origin but put to a blu-tack purpose. tech is always a strange space in
that way.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>15.0-p.179</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] txt from C-front: Unsubscri</subject>
<from>ana peraica</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Tue, 19 Jun 2001 18:44:18 +0200</date>
<content>*UNSUBSCRIBE! [On Net citizens and the new geography, a sanitation view]
dedicated to Brian, Dalai Lama and Nokia telephones... and my Delete folder

txt from C-front 2001 (Plovdiv, Bulgaria)

Ana Peraica

A friend's three-year-old child was screaming into the toilet bowl,
'graaaandmother, graandmother', while the parents sitting with guests in the
living room were quite shocked, and slightly embarassed. It took them time
to understand that, if a child still in nappies saw that every apartment has
almost the same toilet, and they all have holes, it logically concluded -
they are all connected. And what is connected are not only toilet bowls
[but, sorry for vocabulary but asses, shits, and sewers...].

A year ago, during the informal lecture of Andreas Broeckman on Oreste and
Syndicate, a visitor, artist Rod Summers handed me an unpublished
transcribed Robert Fillou speech, 'Eternal Network', dated precisely thirty
years before, and speaking on the same topic. The text [1] spoke
romantically about pre-existing networks, such as solar, biological, and
others in pan-psychic terms of Nature as the One; divine, sublime,
glorious... Then it shifted to the even more primitive religion related
terms, of 'meditation', 'feeling'... a kind of a hippy 'being well with it',
at the same time covering the other part of the phenomenon: its horror
element 'of being included unwillingly', 'being absorbed', 'being small',
'being only a particle imprisoned'. It was not precisely, but nearly a
version of the Shreber's anus-centric version of the solar network [2].
The speech was actually about the art of mailing, finding reasons for it not
in art history, but within the theory of the Sublime. Established as a
chain, after the death of the author, the network itself unfortunately ended
up in the closed and therefore anti-networked circle of inner mailings,
still active among forty-year-old artists, who were raised on marijuana on
the shores of Maastrircht, or around.

Humans can only be consumed in networks, as flies can in those of spiders'
webs. And usually they are absorbed without knowing, without giving their
real name. As, for the network the name is less important than the name of the
network itself. The name simply is only a dot that holds the tension of the
link, rope, of the road.

But after the time of fascination with the Network, with the own program
network, a period of disappointment arrives... As in the net held by many of
them after some time nothing is caught, only the garbage left behind by the
activity of the network itself, its own digestion. Fragile due to holes,
they all intersect, intervene each other, still holding own names. Good and
bad networks; networks in the sky, sewer networks, street networks, spider
networks, networks of the spreading of the pediculum pubis and other veneral
diseases, spamming networks... They morph and become one another. If you are
in the communal network of the city, necessarily you are also in the state
system of communal activities, but also of all countries that direct the
sewers to the sea.

But, the myth of the Network suddenly ended up in a variety of networks,
rising and falling down. But then, as information flows, each of them at
some period turns into an appendix, a footnote, a chapter of the other, in a
different constellation.

Why don't you post it on the Syndicate? Did you read that on Nettime?
Meeting with Faces? Well, wasn't it on the Rhizome Raw? X-change, 7-11...
Report! Report! as in the army, the network asks for constant attention,
constant care... It seems that the relation is inevitable. All networks sort
people; into heroes, receptors and locally politically-correct subscribers.
Emancipated e-mail heroes [as a parallel to the toilet network ones Zizek
was writing on] form their own territories, their own enclaves, and then
send their own programs, party posters all around... Other kind of existing
people are passive, not posting, only reading and trying to catch up, use,
find some sense... That is why networks die becoming parties, as
Internacionala did, becoming a sort of 'being politically-correct', being
pre-programmed, and establishing routes that one not only cannot escape, but
must not. Party marriages, party suicides...

Is there a place for Icarus in Shreber's case? It is obvious on mailing -
event lists: Oreste, Balkania... Once an interesting project, the Balkania
list became one of those devastated territories of paradoxical actions of
commercial advertisement, spamming, petitions etc... Brian, Nokia
telephones,the Dalai Lama on life [2] visit it regularly. The
once-interesting curatorial project Oreste became a closed daily report of
individuals still having time for such a narrative, and posting html
e-mails, and attachments. Digestion...

The scenario is the same - after exchanging some decent e-mails a list
starts to slowly die and serves as a sub-list of the personal announcement
list, there is no communication, no addressing. Everyone escapes, and
finally - an abandoned list, a heaven from spamming. Collapsed networks,
abandoned mailing lists, territories of the vampire spam artists as Integer,
enjoying the political incorrectness, et.al. But even without being
abandoned... mailing lists are open. Just subscribe and send a 'who' command
to Majordomo that lacks protection, as happened to the McLuhan-list in 1997.
Evacuation from the mailing list seems to be a general move of the networked
society. Who gave you my e-mail address? [Unsubscribe... Please, please
remove me from this list. Stop spamming!!!]

But a spammed individual net citizen should not be shocked. Wasted contacts,
redundant greetings, are normal in any kind of network, although the
frequency and dimensional problems of the electronic ones only underline the
principle already existing: Networks raise and collapse. They are only
events. Cohesion and dispersion are its phenomena. The absence of the
networked individual from their own 'forced working place' is similar to
Kafka's stories. After only seven days of absence either a computer crashes
or the server... 'Receiving 25 out of 765 e-mail messages'. Subscribe before
the summer holidays, that is the rule, - the server will not survive. In
other days, fortunately Inbox assistants encountered this impossibility:
just adding an e-mail address or the heading of the e-mail if it is a
mailing list can release us from pressing Delete. And those individuals,
always deleted are not noticed ... [or someone says 'You are on my Inbox
assistant Delete from the server list, you are in my address book under the
letter S, I reserved only for the 'Shit people'? 'She told me that if you
call she is not at home.'].

How to organize the universe of information and not to be killed by it. Some
of the communication and total control freaks fear that something will
happen when they are away and subscribe to the free SMS message solution,
noting the arrival of e-mail. With every e-mail a mobile shakes, beeps,
screams... Nettime, Nettime... Syndicate... Syndicate...
Once, a long, long time ago, people were still saving newspapers even those
bad ones, to wrap the fish, to use when cleaning potatoes, to put in the
summer shoes cleaned up for winter storage. Still then, back on the streets
of peaceful towns where colporters are selling the daily city newspaper...
shouting. [BRIAN. BRIAN. SOLIDARIDAE COOOON BRIAAAAAAAAN! Stop SHOUTING AT
ME. Stop SCREAMING!]. With junk e-mail one can do nothing. But finally, they
do not make such a waste as the plastic bags one gets in every shop as
shopping is about getting rid of the plastic.

Flash, Delete... Use the Big Network, Nature, a Big toilet. Unsubscribe...

FOOTNOTES:
[1] latter published in the publication Hype_text ed. by Jean Paul Jacquet
(Academy Jan Van Eyck, Maastricht, 2000)
[2] Freud's Schreber case symptomising, among others, in his attitude that
his ass is inhabited by the sun ['solar anus'] is a classical example of
schizophrenic dellusion.
[3] Brian [Solidaridae con Brian] is a net spam classic, along with: Nokia
telephones, Dalai Lama on life

LINKS:
Big spam http://www.irational.org/cern
Archives of spams
http://www.eff.org/pub/Net_culture/Folklore/Spam/
http://pemtropics.mit.edu/~jcho/spam/archive.html
http://www.annexia.org/spam/
Anti-spam and net.cop tools http://kryten.eng.monash.edu.au/gspam.html
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>15.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] excommunication</subject>
<from>Carol-Ann Braun</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed May 28 19:26:46 EST 2014</date>
<content>I disagree.  
In the field, where a group of us is trying to give a political dimension to neighborhood projects, "x" is the point where a person fails to take into account or convey information or act upon a lead (i.e. a gift). 
The "x" is what turns projects into simple "events". 
Everyone of my colleagues is tempted by "x".
The locus of "x" shifts from person to person and project to project. Yes, it can be built-into "structures", it can seem anonymous&#8230; 
If each project's "x" becomes every person's responsibility, we have a crack at political "authority". 


Carol-Ann</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>16.0</nbr>
<subject>February 2013 Theme of the Month: &#8216;Curating the Network as Artwork&#8217;</subject>
<from>Roddy Hunter</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Mon, 4 Feb 2013 02:39:36 +0000</date>
<content>Dear List,

It is my pleasure to announce the February 2013 Theme of the Month.

&#8216;Curating the Network as Artwork&#8217;

In 1968, artists George Brecht and Robert Filliou co-created 'The Eternal Network'. Arguably, this network was itself an artwork and vice versa. Filliou in particular explored how this network-as-artwork could enable collaboration, exchange and dialogue across space and time. More than solely a means of distribution or medium of production, 'The Eternal Network' became for him a conceptual context for &#8216;permanent creation&#8217; (Filliou 1996). Filliou&#8217;s project is one example of many in which artists inhabit networks as systems of communication and exchange (Grundmann 1984; Saper 2001). These networks are attractive to artists as decentralised or distributed environments bypassing institutional curatorial spaces. There is then often a political as well as aesthetic dimension to the attractiveness of networks-as-artworks. This may now, however, be undermined by a dependence of these networks upon the internet which has been argued to be &#8216;the most material and visible sign of globalisation&#8217; (Manovich 2001, 6). Lovink (2002) has cited the view that the &#8216;pace [of globalisation] has increased with the advent of new technologies, especially in the area of telecommunications&#8217; and so artists, activists and commercial, corporate players alike have employed online networks in search of their respective &#8216;utopias&#8217;. Lovink elaborates on this irreconcilability later that &#8216;we need to develop a long-term view on how networked technologies should and should not be embedded in political and cultural practices&#8217;. (Lovink 2012, 160) How far has the &#8216;globalism&#8217; of communication sought by Filliou and others been supplanted by &#8216;globalisation&#8217; in its neoliberal, doctrinal sense? (Chomsky 1999). Can the network as artwork be effective beyond conceptualisation in material terms? How can we rethink curatorial strategies in respect of the network-as-artwork&#8217;s media of production, means of distribution and experience of reception? In short, how can we find ways to curate 'The Eternal Network' after globalisation?



References:
Chomsky, Noam. 1999. Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. New York: Seven Stories Press.
Filliou, Robert. 1996. From Political to Poetical Economy. Vancouver: Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery.
Grundmann, Heidi. 1984. Art and Telecommunication. Vancouver: Western Front / Vienna: BLIX
Lovink, Geert. 2002. &#8220;A Ramble through Theories of Globalization&#8221;. Available at http://geertlovink.org/texts/a-ramble-through-theories-of-globalization/.
Lovink, Geert. 2012. Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media. Cambridge: Polity.
Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. MIT press.
Saper, Craig J. 2001. Networked Art. St Paul: University of Minnesota Press



Invited respondents are:

Annie Abrahams
Artist who questions the possibilities and the limits of communication in general and more specifically investigates its modes under networked conditions. 
http://bram.org/info/aa.htm

Zeigam Azizov
Artist born in Azerbaijan, based in London. Studied art and philosophy in Russia, France and UK. His work addresses the question of cross-circulations of knowledge through images. Exhibitions include Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, Haus der Kunst, M&#252;nchen, Grazer Kunstverein, TN Probe, Tokyo, ICA London and Lakeside Kunstraum, Klagenfurt.
http://zeigamazizov.com/

Mideo M. Cruz
Cross-disciplinary artist-organizer based in Manila and Southeast Asia. Network projects critiquing globalisation include New World Disorder in addition to performances internationally. 
http://www.mideo.tk/

Barnaby Dicker
Artist-filmmaker, researcher, lecturer and curator. He holds a doctorate in experimental stop-frame cinematography and teaches on BA Film Production at University for the Creative Arts, Farnham and the Royal College of Art, London. He is a founder member of Art&#8217;s Birthday Wales, which annually celebrates Robert Filliou&#8217;s fifty year-old proposition.
http://artsbirthdaywales.tumblr.com

Ken Friedman
University Distinguished Professor at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia. Since 1966, Friedman has been active in Fluxus. Theory, Culture, and Society recently published Friedman's reflections on Fluxus at the 50-year mark. The full text is available free at: http://tcs.sagepub.com/content/29/7-8/372

Marc Garrett
Artist, curator, writer, activist, educator and musician. Co-Founder &amp; Co-Director, Furtherfield, London and currently doctoral researcher in Art, Technology and Social Change at Birkbeck, University of London.
http://www.furtherfield.org/user/marc-garrett

Ingo G&#252;nther
Artist and journalist based in New York. Studied Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in Frankfurt, graduated from Kunstakademie D&#252;sseldorf. Founded Eastern Europe's first public access non-commercial TV station. The social geography project Worldprocessor is now in its 24th year. 
http://ingogunther.com

Iliyana Nedkova
Curator and writer. Creative Director (Contemporary Art) at Horsecross, Perth and Research Curator at CCA, Glasgow
http://www.horsecross.co.uk/about/threshold-artspace

Helen Pritchard
Artist and researcher exploring ideas of co-research, co-production and co-operation. Currently doctoral researcher at 'HighWire', Lancaster University and visiting researcher at City University, Hong Kong.
http://www.helenpritchard.info

Clive Robertson
Performance and media artist, curator and critic teaching art history, performance and cultural studies at Queen's University, Kingston, Canada.
http://www.queensu.ca/art/arthistory/faculty/cRobertson.html

Scott Watson
Head and Professor of Art History, Visual Art and Theory and Director/Curator of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. 
http://www.ahva.ubc.ca/facultyIntroDisplay.cfm?InstrID=19&amp;FacultyID=1

Looking forward to a good conversation, 

Best wishes

Roddy</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>16.0-p.179</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] commentary on Unsubscribe tex</subject>
<from>anna balint</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Tue, 19 Jun 2001 23:45:58 +0200</date>
<content>Robert Filliou published together with George Brecht the Eternal Network
text in 1968 as a project of the La C&#233;dille qui sourit.
Since than it was many times published, and circulated as manuscript as
well. He coined many other largely known terms such as Poetical Economy,
Fete Permanente, Cr&#233;ation Permanente, still largely circulating. 'Snail mail
goes on the web' - that was the slogan of mail artists already in the early
nineties, and accordingly most of them migrated on the net. Maybe some
mailing lists hold discussions about irrelevant questions, but Filliou's
network seems to be eternal.
Anna Balint</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>16.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: Intro</subject>
<from>Ken Friedman</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 5 Feb 2013 08:08:00 +0000</date>
<content>Friends,

While I plan to return with my own statement, I want to tip my hat to Clive Robertson for his intro.

This addresses several of the profound challenges in the concept of the Eternal Network, especially as Robert Filliou and George Brecht conceived it.

Robert ultimately withdrew into the monastic life of Buddhism, dying on a five-year retreat. George withdrew to a nearly monastic life, answering his phone only when someone made an appointment by postcard, and nearly never going out. In theearly 1970s, Dick Higgins suggested that I find a way to make a living outside the art world &#8211; I dipped in and out of the art world for some years, but I found a day job that suited me in the 1990s: it suited me so well that I have mostly stayed away from the art world, doing my art privately. The issues involved are quite complex &#8211; nearly everyone needs to make a living, so we all do something, and it sometimes touches on art. This is the case for Clive, too. He teaches art and art history to make a living.

There are several questions I plan to address, dealing with networks and network effects, and globalism as distinct from globalization. Clive is in essence raising aquestion that Robert (Filliou, 2004[1966]: 16) asked in his 1966 manifesto, &#8220;A Proposition, a Problem, a Danger, and a Hunch.&#8221; Robert called for a &#8220;A refusal to be colonized culturally by a selfstyled race of specialists in painting, sculpture, poetry, music, etc....&#8221;

You can get it in PDF format at this URL:

http://www.ubu.com/historical/gb/manifestos.pdf

But there are many sides to this coin. I don&#8217;t know if there is a good answer, or even a happy one.

Clive ran one of the loveliest spaces, projects, and publishing entities in the not-quite-eternal network of the early 1970s, W.O.R.K.S. in Calgary. I&#8217;m always amazed at how much more intelligent and free things are when we don&#8217;t need to fund them through the governments and governmental systems that require us to become professional artists. This is what leads to the problem that Clive identifies so well: &#8220;The network as shared in the early 1970s preceded the formalization of artists spaces that confronted / was confronted itself by network issues. The network itself was open to abuse as an alternative or oppositional disguise for self-promotion but remains I think a very different concept than what often poses now as reforms or improvements to a re-established hierarchical and exclusionary art system.&#8221; That, in essence, is the price in a world where professionalization and the submissive role are quite close to the same thing.

My day job turned out to be quite a good thing &#8211; I was good at it, and it suited me better than I could have imagined. No life is perfect, but the next best thing to living the life of a monk is working as a scholar and researcher.

Two or three times in the past few days, I have had occasion to think of another Zen monk, Han-Shan (1966: 49), a 9th century Buddhist and poet. I&#8217;ll close with his words for now:

When men see Han-shan
They all say he&#8217;s crazy
And not much to look at -
Dressed in rags and hides.
They don&#8217;t get what I say
And I don&#8217;t talk their language.
All I can say to those I meet:
&#8220;Try and make it to Cold Mountain.&#8221;

Ken

--

References

Filliou, Robert. 1966. &#8220;A Proposition, a Problem, a Danger, and a Hunch.&#8221; Manifestoes. New York: Something Else Press, p. 16. [Reprinted 2004.] Free digital copy available at Ubu Classics URL: http://www.ubu.com/historical/gb/index.html Accessed 5 February 2013.

Han-Shan. 1966. Cold Mountain Poems. Translated by Gary Snyder. In Riprap and Cold MountainPoems. San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>16.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: Intro</subject>
<from>Dorothee Richter</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 5 Feb 2013 08:35:57 +0000</date>
<content>Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I have published my dissertation on Fluxus recently (Fluxus! Art and Life?
Mythes about Authorship, Production, Gender and Communitiy.--- Fluxus.
Kunst gleich Leben Mythen um Aturoschaft, Produktion, Geschelcht und
Gemeinschaft.) Alas it is in German. But I have also done many many video
interviews and did make a film out of it together with historical
material. So thanks a lot to Ken Friedman to start with Fluxus as a
network. As many of you will know it is always a battle about the power to
define what is this and that, and mostly art market and art history are
generating a view that is centered around just some single authors.
Therefore the film also tries to show the big network, the fights, the
political aspects, the star attitudes of some , gentrification and so on.
The film premier will be at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart at 13th of April. We
will also put up a website, (everything is always later as one plans) and
we would be very very happy to show it elsewhere. So- I totally agree with
Ken to see Fluxus as a network (and as a battleground),the Film is in
English; a collage of some sort;  Best, Dorothee</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>16.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: Intro</subject>
<from>marc garrett</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 5 Feb 2013 10:39:30 +0000</date>
<content>Hi all,

Firstly, I wish thank Roddy for inviting me to share ideas and 
(possible) revelations with others on the Crumb list.

Before I get into the flow of the discussion I would like to pre-empt 
the hopefully 'interesting' noise by letting people on here know about 
one of my latest adventures in writing. However, regarding the context 
of this discussion, I think it's also necessary to say that I am working 
class, and I have only begun my Phd at Birkbeck, London at the age of 48 
(my 1st time in University), and I have a history in art, activism, 
street art, hacking in the late 80s/early 90s - analogue, networked and 
urban. All the things I do are driven by the idea or spirit of 
initiating some form of 'self &amp; peer' emancipation. Whether this relates 
to co-curating at the Furtherfield space, our online communities, or our 
media ecology projects and more&#8230;

Here is a short intro from my recent paper called 'Disrupting The Gaze. 
Part 1: Art Intervention and the Tate Gallery.'

&#8220;The word &#8220;art&#8221; can conjure up a vision of objects in an art gallery, 
showroom or museum, that can be perceived as reinforcing the values and 
machinations of the victors of history as leisure objects for elite 
entertainment, distraction and/or decoration - or the narcissistic 
expression of an isolated self-regarding individual.&#8221; [1] (Garrett &amp; 
Catlow 2012)

We live in a world riddled with contradictions and confusing signals. 
Our histories are assessed, judged and introduced as fact yet there are 
so many bits missing. We accept what is given through sound bite forms 
of mediation and end up using misinformation as our cultural 
foundations, and then we build on these &#8216;acquired&#8217; assumptions as our 
&#8216;imagined&#8217; guidelines. This critique studies how contemporary artists 
are challenging these defaults through their connected enactments and 
critical inquiries of the existing conditions. It highlights a continual 
dialogue involving a historical struggle between what is condoned as 
legitimate art and knowledge, and what is not. It looks at a complexity, 
embedded in our culture and its class divisions in Britain. And draws 
upon struggles going as far back as the enlightenment, the industrial 
revolution, colonialism and slavery, to present day concerns with 
neoliberalism and its dominance. The Tate gallery is used as a reference 
point and a site of focus for these various historical and contemporary, 
political and societal conflicts.

The artists&#8217; and art groups featured, such as Graham Harwood, Platform, 
IOCOSE, Tamiko Thiel, and Mark Wallinger; has each delivered a 
particular (unofficial and official) mode of art intervention at the 
Tate Gallery. Whether these artistic activities concern economic, 
ecological, historical, political or hierarchical conditions, they all 
connect in different ways. They meet, not through style or as part of a 
field of practice, but as contemporary artistic practitioners exploring 
their own states of agency in a world where our &#8216;public&#8217; interfaces are 
as much a necessary place of creative engagement, as is the already 
accepted physical &#8216;inner&#8217; sanctum of the gallery space. However, their 
work has become equally significant (perhaps even more) than, the 
mainstream art establishment&#8217;s franchised celebrities.

In keeping with Gregory Sholette&#8217;s recently, published vindication for 
those artists hidden away where the art establishment&#8217;s light rarely 
shines, &#8220;when, the excluded are made visible, when they demand 
visibility, it is always ultimately a matter of politics and rethinking 
history.&#8221; [2] (Sholette 2011) This paper draws upon a wider, 
contemporary art culture and audience existing out there. Yet, the 
artistic discoveries and discourse coming out of this independent art 
culture, is not reflected back to us. Instead, we receive more of the 
same, marketed franchises. The central, mainstream version of 
contemporary art has found its allies within a global and corporate 
culture, where business dictate&#8217;s art value. However, there is a spirit 
of artistic emancipation that exists and is thriving out there. It is 
self styled, self governed and liberated from the restrictive norms that 
dominate our mediated gaze, and this is what this paper is mainly about.

end of intro&#8230;

extract from paper&#8230;

"Institutions are in themselves sacred. If you challenge what is sacred 
you not only question the institution&#8217;s posture, but also what it 
symbolizes to all those who receive the benefits of its reputed position 
of authority. Power is also sacred, and myths are bound up in procedures 
and presentations engaging in the currency of cultural &#8216;importance&#8217;. The 
Tate&#8217;s power comes from accumulation; its success is in managing and 
maintaining its vast collection of pictorial and sculptural objects for 
all to see. This is why the institution is cherished and seen as 
significant, culturally and nationally. From its collection it presents 
a &#8216;finely tuned&#8217; version of Britain&#8217;s &#8216;artistic&#8217; identity. The Tate is 
the protector of collected, artistic memories and an ambassador of 
history and time, our history and time. The psychoanalyst, O. Brown 
insightfully describes this endeavour as archaic, &#8220;Archaic man conquers 
death by living the life of his dead ancestors.&#8221;[16] (O. Brown 1959). 
The safeguarding of this &#8216;curated&#8217; history fashions a situation where we 
are asked to trust its status as &#8216;specialized&#8217;, in issuing forth a 
viable definition of our national, artistic past. This power presents us 
with other implications. Because historical and cultural weight is given 
to the &#8216;managed&#8217; entities within its collection - our gaze for 
lesser-known artists is diverted with an added presumption they are also 
not as significant. The prevailing ideological governance of what is 
seen, determines our perceptions of what is of cultural value and 
significance, due to what is produced as visible and invisible. What is 
visible through the gaze of the dominant hegemony is then assumed as 
merit for &#8216;special&#8217; attention, lessening the cultural presence of 
emergent forms of consciousness and more diverse, artistic pursuits."

References.

[1] By Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow. DIWO: Do It With Others &#8211; No Ecology 
without Social Ecology.
First published in Remediating the Social 2012. Editor: Simon Biggs 
University of Edinburgh. Pages 69-74
http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/diwo-do-it-others-%E2%80%93-no-ecology-without-social-ecology

[2] Gregory Sholette. Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of 
Enterprise Culture. Pluto Press (January 4, 2011)

[16] Normon O. Brown. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning 
of History. Second Edition. Wesleyan University Press. 1959. Page 285.

wishing all well.

marc</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>17.0</nbr>
<subject>Re: February 2013 Theme of the Month: &#338;Curating the Network as Artwork&#185;</subject>
<from>Randall Packer</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 5 Feb 2013 16:59:35 -0500</date>
<content>I was very interested in Roddy's reference to Robert Filliou's notion of
'permanent creation,' which came up recently in an essay by Janet
Sarbanes: "The Poiegg and the Mickeymaushaus: Peedagogy and Spatial
Practice at the California Institute of the Arts." In this essay, Sarbanes
describes CalArts as influenced by the Bauhaus in its approach to the
"building" as structure for the development of new radical pedagogical
techniques in arts education as well as the synthesis of the arts. More
specifically, she points to Filliou's "Institute of Permanent Creation
where anybody might make suggestions about what kinds of things might be
investigated or looked at" as a transparent and open source approach to
teaching and learning. The idea of "education as dialogue rather than as a
transmission of knowledge" was a fundamental concept I employed in the
online course I taught at CalArts last semester entitled Open Source
Studio. (several participants of this community, including Marc Garrett,
Ruth Catlow, Annie Abrahams, and Helen Varley Jamieson, were guest
speakers in the course)

Like Roy Ascott's reference to the 'gesamtdatenwerk' in his seminal essay,
"Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace," I believe more than ever after
teaching Open Source Studio, that the network and its tools can be used to
shift art education into a less hierarchical and more peer-to-peer,
collective experience: precisely where it belongs. In this sense, Roddy's
suggestion of the political nature of networks-as-artworks also applies to
the idea of the network-as-art-school.

My own 'utopia' in this regard is the post-institutional approach to
teaching. I gave up on the idea of being "institutionalized" in my
academic career several years ago, and now freelance for several
Universities and art schools around the world. It is through this
developing network that I see the potential of bringing students into an
"open university" setting - no longer tethered to a single institution -
through video-conferencing and other forms of networked learning tools. It
is my hope that art students can reach out inter-institionally and
inter-culturally to engage in a form of collaborative research and
production that is underutilized, but well within our reach conceptually
and technologically.

I would be interested in related work in this area.

Randall</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>17.0-p.180</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] RE:  commentary on Unsubscribe tex</subject>
<from>anna balint</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 21 Jun 2001 17:35:24 +0200</date>
<content>'Il n'ya plus de centre de l'art.Chaque artiste doit se consid&#233;rer comme
faisant
partie d'un r&#233;seau'  Robert Filliou - Eternal Network

Dear Ana, folks, auto replyer,

One of the fantastic aspects of the net is the immediate accesibility to the
texts,
sources, works, people. One minute search on the web is enough to
acknowledge the context of a text, and  find out that the Eternal Network text was
published. One more minute is enough to overcome the impression that mail
art circles were ever closed. For people with theoretical interest in
mailing lists, networks, netart  - the net will probably be a minimum
reference.

Unfortunately I did not find your text in the nettime archives, as it is
very raw and inefficiently organised. Contrary to such net archives, mail
art archives already developed archiving, filtering strategies, and methods
for organise information.

Art and media concerned BBSs, mailing lists owe a lot to the correspondence
networks and movements, even the mailing list technique was developed in
mail art circles, it goes back to the newsletter of Dick Higgins and   the
New York Correspondence School of Ray Johnson. Besides technical aspects, on
the content level even nettime reproduced and interfered with many of the
mail art and fluxus phenomena  - intermedia, collaborative work, the
multiples, the anticopyright movement, much of the netart, media art, visual
poetry, copy art, censorship questions, radio art, sound poetry, fanzines,
video art, computer art, alternative music, alternative galleries, museums,
comes from the correspondence art and fluxus.

When about bulky correspondence art materials, many theories and concepts
cover them very well, mail art theories in the first place, but the library
of Borges as well, some notions of  Flusser, the palimpsest (of Hakim Bay as
well), heteroglossic forms of Michael Bakhtin  - his theory of reverse
culture covers your original text as well - hypertext, and so on.
When about legacy of ideas, would it be a coincidence that one of the
moderators of this list comes form the American Fluxus circles, the other
from the Advancement for the Illegal Knowledge group, the third close to the
Marshall MacLuhan heritage - connected with Fluxus, as Marshall MacLuhan was
first published by Something Else Press?

The concepts, theories, practices and attitudes of the correspondence art
infiltrated not only mailing lists, but contemporary art practices - the
call for artworks and papers for instance, its morality, its rules. The
idea, the illegal knowledge which circulated through postal network on a
global level became much more known and legitimate on a larger scale due to
the net.  Though many things originating in the correspondence art became
more visible, some still wait to be discovered. Topics, methods as well. For
instance correspondence artists adored trash, crab and junk, they very much
explored and recycled it.

When about empty places in mailing lists, the squatters logic works, what's
wrong in that? That logic brought up alternative spaces, alternative radios,
alternative tv's, alternative art, alternative idea.  Nokia is  a spammer?
Great!  We found out! The Dalai Lama is spamming? Good that somebody reminds
me the question of who the Dalai Lama is! Integer was banned from the
syndicate, nettime, rhizome and infowar list at the same time? First of all
we all learn that these lists were connected, their moderators control (too
much) and they lack humour. Her messages are overwhelming? Did we know
before  that messages can mix private and public, did we know so much about
private and public feed-back, did we question content, language, filtering
before? Didn't we learn something about hidden and visible aspects of the
email? Did some mailing lists die out? Great! New ones come, and we will
find out what is eternal.

There is already much said about spatiality of the net, many people explore
utopia and atopia, virtual space, spatiality in general. Much less is
discussed the notion of temporality, though some artists, theoreticians
already struggle with this concept. At this moment my personal time
perceiving is very much determined by the commercial s/censors of
net-works, as the Hungarian Telecomunication Company lets me to work in the
night with less costs.  Robert Filliou did not wait the raise of the
internet to formulate his theories, maybe we still need time, to properly
understand his notion of time with the help of the new medium. Eternity is a
religious notion? Which concept is not?
bests regards,
Anna Balint</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>17.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: February 2013 Theme of the Month: &#338;Curating the Network as Artwork&#185;</subject>
<from>Barnaby Dicker</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 5 Feb 2013 23:28:57 +0000</date>
<content>Hi all,

I'd like to pick up on a couple of things Randall mentioned.
For the (1,000,0)50th anniversary of Art's Birthday, following Filliou's dating, Art's Birthday, Wales (of which I am one of the organisers), was fortunate to have Joachim Pfeufer come to Swansea to discuss his work with Filliou.
Their principal project was the Poipoidrome - which is also 50 this year. The 'co-architects' describe the Poipoidrome as 'an artistic proposition for a centre for permanent creation.' At its centre is the Poipoiegg (mentioned in Randall's post).
Joachim described how he introduced the idea of 'poipoi' to Robert, having himself heard about it from anthropologist Herman Hahn, whohimself had heard it from the Dogon tribe of Mali for whom it is a salutation marking an end or renewal of an exchange. Joachim and Robert visited the Dogon while an incarnation of the Poipoidrome was installed in the Pompidou in the late 70s. They wanted to discuss and show images of their project to the Dogon people. Apparently the Dogon described it as 'the house of good weather' or 'the house of weather luck'. Joachim mentioned that Robert often signed off his letters with 'weather luck', but that he only realised relatively recently that this was Robert's translation of the Dogon people's response to the Poipoidrome.

The Poipoidrome very much embodies the principles of Filliou's 'eternal network of permanent creation,' being a place for interaction, discussion, reflection, displaying, storing, accessing and so on.

I was very surprised when Joachim stated that he never used the Poipoidrome as a pedagogical excercise or model during his time as a teacher. For me, the Poipoidrome stood precisely as an alternative model of pedagogy. If I recall correctly, Joachim was/is hesitant about presenting it as something that can be taught. I appreciate and respect his concern, but still hold on to my view that the Poipoidrome embodies an important alternative site and approach to learning. Of additional interest, Joachim, mentioned how he considers their work to address political issues that have yet to emerge.

Picking up on a thread from Ken: I certainly feel that the 'academy' provides a possible space for artforms that are not 'artworld' artforms (i.e. carry no market value). I say 'possible' because it's not about 'isolationist', 'pure' strategies that need totally avoid the artworld or market value. Rather, I am suggesting that the academy legitimates and provides a support - network - (I think someone else brought this topic up too. I forget who. apologies), to say nothing of alternative funding streams, for such practices. Thus, keeping such ideas/practices in play. It also allows many people to feel comfortable being minor artists, producing minor artworks (best perhaps if I claim to be speaking for myself here).
Afterall, one of the key features of 'the network' is its inclusion of the 'little people' - too much superstar activity would sink the ship. No room for masterpieces. And presumably the budget (if there is one) should be spread appropriately, as opposed to disproportionately. It is dialogical, not monological.

And on that note...</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>17.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: February 2013 Theme of the Month: &#338;Curating the Network as Artwork&#185;</subject>
<from>Roddy Hunter</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 5 Feb 2013 23:32:04 +0000</date>
<content>Hi Randall,

Glad to see you here, thanks for your comments. I really enjoyed
participating in your recent Open Source Studio Global Concept Exchange on
the work of Marc and Ruth at Furtherfield (
http://www.randallpacker.com/?p=2798). It was there I encountered Annie
Abrahams for the first time and have invited her as a respondent to this
discussion here. We could talk about that event as an example of how your
particular networked-pedagogic methdology works in terms of production,
distribution, perception. I have some notes somewhere, if you'd like.

I asked a question then about Cal Arts in relation to
cross-interdisciplnary pedagogy in relation to my own experience at
Dartington College of Arts from 1998-2007, where there was a comparably
experimental approach. There is a good relationship too between your Open
Source Studio model and Filliou's interest in pedagogy in art. His artists'
book 'Teaching and Learning As Perfroming Arts' (
http://www.leftmatrix.com/teachingandlearning.html) is similarly dialogic
in tone. Yours is digitally networked, his is materialistically analogue?

Best wishes

Roddy</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>17.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: February 2013 Theme of the Month: &#338;Curating the Network as Artwork&#185;</subject>
<from>Roddy Hunter</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 6 Feb 2013 00:39:36 +0000</date>
<content>Welcome Barnaby,

Glad of your comments. The Poipoidrome is an extraordinary example of
conceptual-architecture. I've even thought it, in all its conceptual-ness,
as somewhere between imaginary, freemasonic architecture and a virtual
space similar to the online. There seems something something modernist
about the identification of the Dogon in the work that I think deserves
ethnological interpretation. It was fantastic that you had Joachim Pfeuffer
in Swansea teaching but yes, why not as a pedagogical space? Would seem
obvious.

Have you seen Jean-Jacques Lebel's 'Hommage &#224; Robert Filliou' at Artpool,
Budapest? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhuV1RRxoH0. Filliou and and
Pfeufer had constructed the Poipoidrome at the Young Artists' Club,
Budapest in 1976 (http://www.artpool.hu/Fluxus/Filliou/Poipoidrom4.html) Making
contact then with Filliou, Gy&#246;rgy Gal&#225;ntai (whom I interviewed last year
for this research) collaborated with him on 'Telepathic Music' at same
place in 1979.

This contact with Gal&#225;ntai ultimately led to the reconstruction in 1998 of
the earlier structure. (
http://artpool.hu/Installation/documents/Lebel-w.html) and the curating of
an programme that saw Lebel and other artists such as Istvan K&#225;ntor (
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frftVJqgtzc) develop intervention in the
space. I think Istvan's 'S&#233;ance Filliou' is well worth watching.

Here is the online / offline divide once more though. If you watch the
Lebel interview to the end, you'll hear him talk in English about the
network 'without / before internet': a 'human network of and between
artists from all around the world'. Other terms Lebel uses: 'autonomous',
'indepenedent', 'critical', 'creative'. Also the Dogon seem replaced
somehow by the gyspy ensemble, which again I find interesting. Is this the
quality of 'independence', of 'autonomy' (presumably from discourses of the
state and/or other institutionalised power structures) that needs
protection from online instrumentalisation. Is the network better to exist
invisibly and evade recuperation? Is the visibility politics of dissent
within neoliberal democracy the wrong kind of participation and opposition?

Best wishes

Roddy</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>17.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: February 2013 Theme of the Month: &#338;Curating the Network as Artwork&#185;</subject>
<from>Randall Packer</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Tue, 5 Feb 2013 22:19:33 -0500</date>
<content>Thanks Roddy! 

I completely forgot you had attended the Open Source Studio (OSS) class
with Mark, Ruth, et al last fall. My interpretation of Filliou's notion of
the institute for permanent creation was to think of my graduate seminar
as a permanent record in the database. Too often, education is a transient
experience, with scant traces left behind in the personal notebooks of
students and faculty. (Even more frightening is the proprietary system of
Blackboard.) However, in the age of digital networks, everything can be
preserved (ideally): every post, discussion, comment, reply, etc. In OSS,
we used a Wordpress site to aggregate discussion, research, and
production. What is particularly powerful about this in terms of the
network, is that everything is indexible. Years from now, anyone who
participated (or not) can retrieve some aspect of the work/dialogue and
employ it as a link in a subsequent publication or project. In my limited
exposure to Filliou, I had interpreted his idea as a digitally networked
act of permanent creation in the context of pedagogy. Of course, this can
be applied to any activity, but it is well within our means to engage
education as a permanent knowledge base that is open and transparent and
accessible. 

For anyone interested, the Open Source Studio Website from fall 2012 is
located at:
http://oss.calarts.edu

OSS was offered by Tom Leeser and his renowned Integrated Media Program at
CalArts. And to add to Roddy's citation of one of my blog posts, here are
all my posts detailing the project:

Up Close and Personal with Furtherfield
http://www.randallpacker.com/?p=2798

OSS as 3rd Space
http://www.randallpacker.com/?p=2870

Pedagogy as Collective Agency
http://www.randallpacker.com/?p=2827

CalArts @ 30,000 Feet
http://www.randallpacker.com/?p=2787

The Storm, the Dialogue, and the Desert Moon
http://www.randallpacker.com/?p=2774

Is this the Future?
http://www.randallpacker.com/?p=2755

Randall</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.0</nbr>
<subject>Does it matter if the network had / has a &#8220;common direction&#8221; that in any way, shape or form might be called &#8216;political&#8217; ?</subject>
<from>Clive Robertson</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:13:28 +0000</date>
<content>In considering what the network is or was &#8211; even before calling its project organizing an &#8220;artwork&#8221; (and what is the hoped for gain of this description &#8211; for whom is it being described as such: for artists, critics, research funders, taxpayers, etc.?) it might be good to admit that Filliou&#8217;s concept of a an artists network as it gained popularity always looked different from the time and place of observation. Its signification was predictably altered by cultural change and by institutionalization. That is only to suggest that it meant something different for Brecht and Filliou, a lot of different things when employed by Filliou-inspired artist collectives and spaces of the 1970s, and so on along its paths to &#8220;re-discovery&#8221; and/or recapturing in the 21st century.

For me it matters that Filliou&#8217;s statements came prefaced with what amounts to a social critique. So when Roddy quotes Filliou saying, &#8220;Everytime we turn our attention to what we don&#8217;t know, we are doing research&#8221; the statement is missing its preface which is, &#8220;Research is not the domain of those who know; on the contrary it is the domain of those who do not know.&#8221; Was Filliou poking at scholarly specialists (that now includes many of us as respondents) ? Probably. The set-up for announcing the Eternal Network/La Fete est Permanent is similar. &#8220;There is always someone making a fortune, someone going bankrupt &#8211; we in particular.&#8221;  Does this suggest that artist poverty or precarity is a pre-condition for being a network member? Of course not.  Filliou wrote, &#8220;As you can see, we included the fact of our being bankrupt as part of La Fete Permanente. To us, this an important element of the Eternal Network: including in it the harmful, painful or disagreeable things in life, as well as the pleasant, profitable ones.&#8221; (Teaching and Learning as Performing Arts, Verlag Gebr,Konig, Koln, 1970)  It was (he writes) supposed to help wean artists off of their allotted competitiveness. But was it what we would now call a &#8220;safe space?&#8221; Was the network brought into being with any socially operational effects in mind? Think of Facebook, not as a corporate string pulling, but how we try to use it with our &#8220;friends.&#8221; What works and doesn&#8217;t work when we try to interact? We have some general sense of what gets approval in our specific node but not much else. Do we describe our earliest use of FB an &#8220;artwork?&#8221;
Speaking of and to the history of the network, I now want to detour via what Stuart Hall (co-founder of British Cultural Studies) wrote about that project&#8217;s history and the &#8220;will to connect&#8221; (&#8220;Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies,&#8221; 1992 ). (This was v. useful for me when I was seeking a way to trouble my view of the history of artist spaces as a doctoral project.) 

So while Hall acknowledges that cultural studies as a project is open-ended, &#8220;always open to that which it does not know yet, to that which it can&#8217;t yet name,&#8221; he also argues against pluralism and for the stakes (something at stake) of cultural studies. It will probably take a second post to get to the core of what I think the stakes of an collective artist practice could / might be in relation to a network and that has something to do with a present that appears to accept that the merging of functions of artist, curator, critic, and patron works out for the best of all involved. That collegial management is perhaps the only way forward for a brighter future?

Like our view of art (on good days) Hall reviews c.s. as &#8220;a serious project, that is inscribed in what is sometimes called the &#8220;political&#8221; aspect of cultural studies,&#8221; not he adds, &#8220; that there&#8217;s one politics inscribed within it.&#8221;  The tension, Hall says, is &#8220;between a refusal to close the field, to police it, and fluency.&#8221;  
So what if any is the significance of artists formulating and maintaining a network? Hall cites Raymond Williams who wrote that &#8220;the relation between a project and a (discursive) formation is always decisive because they are different ways of materializing&#8230;and then describing a common disposition of energy and direction.&#8221; (Raymond Williams, &#8220;The Future of Cultural Studies, 1989).  

So I guess from this follows a question of whether or not (or at least in what sense) in this discussion are we bothered whether the &#8220;discursive formation&#8221; we are hailing is about &#8220;art&#8221; or &#8220;artists?&#8221;  And in its vagueness, does it matter if the network had / has a &#8220;common direction&#8221; that in any way, shape or form might be called &#8216;political&#8217; ?</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.0-p.180</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; txt from C-front: Unsubscri</subject>
<from>Ruine der Kuenste Berlin</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Thu, 21 Jun 2001 22:29:30 +0200</date>
<content>Dear Ana Peraica,
I hesitate to write this in a way, but on the other hand, maybe it helps
you.
If one pans through your Unsubscribe-text, one can not avoid to notice a
certain number of words of hate and anger and so forth. Please do not light
heartedly enclose people, who spent their life with ideas and beliefs, and
over all materialised works, you might not agree to.I mean leave the Dalai
Lama and Robert Filliou out of this first of all. It is so easy to play with
words and so hard to live them. They both did or do. Robert, a friend of
mine for 25 years (he exhibited his last work before his death in 1988 in
our place http://home.snafu.de/ruine-kuenste.berlin), and the Tibetans, for
which I am working since 1980
http://home.snafu.de/ruine-kuenste.berlin/members.htm , they have a complete
different idea of networks on this planet, which cannot be mixed up with
'your' materialistic one. And it is no argument to disqualify theirs with a
disbelief in the eternal in general, as you propose. Roberts idea of the
Eternal Network is so much wider and philosophical than any other existing
or disappearing network in the net (and other media!) and so full of humour,
that your feelings of a frightening undeliberately beeing connected
situation are just a surfacial misunderstanding. Read again and not only
this text. I invited Robert for example to exhibit his Research of the
Origine here in Berlin in 1974, there is a very good &#180;catalogue on it
published in D&#252;sseldorf and Berlin (Aktionen der Avanatgarde, ADA, Akademie
der K&#252;nste Berlin) that year. Read, if you are interested my text on Roberts
(Tibetan buddhist) philosophy, which can be clearly seen and proven in his
works by the one, who know buddhism. (Wolf Kahlen: Une chose en t&#180;e`te ou
piece qui s'effilochent. A propos de EIND.UN.ONE.... du point de vue
bouddhiste de Robert Filliou, in: Robert Filliou, poet, Galerie der Stadt
Remscheid 1997).
 It is the same background as Brancusis, who believed all his life, he was a
reincarnation of Milarepa. Anyway, to make it short. Your connotations and
associations regarding Filliou's network-idea have absolutely nothing in
common with your main issue, the other kind of networking.
And by the way: I had a strange feeling, as if your sewer story was
(perfectly fitting but) invented, it fits more to the mood of the rest of
your words...or am I mistaken?
With good wishes
Wolf Kahlen</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: Does it matter if the network had / has a &#8220;common direction&#8221; that in any way, shape or form might be called &#8216;political&#8217; ?</subject>
<from>Barnaby Dicker</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Sun, 17 Feb 2013 18:22:00 +0000</date>
<content>Dear all,

This post is loosely intended as a response to some aspects of Clive&#8217;s lucid and meaty post of last Monday.

Clive opens by stating that we should &#8216;consider what the network is or was [...] before calling its project organizing an &#8220;artwork&#8221; (and what is the hoped for gain of this description &#8211; for whom is it being described as such: for artists, critics, research funders, taxpayers, etc.?).&#8217;

On one hand this is absolutely right and necessary, and yet, at the same time, this makes a severance where there should perhaps not be one. i.e. for our discussion we are considering the curation of the network as artwork. We do well to remember that Filliou&#8217;s Eternal Network of Permanent Creation connects all artists across time and space. Just as we also do well to remember Filliou&#8217;s (amongst others&#8217;) project of &#8216;decommissioning&#8217; the artist (the name, the role) and making time and space for everyone to see their activities in creative terms.

Personally, for better or worse, I was immediately pleased to see Roddy&#8217;s unabashed use of the word &#8216;artwork&#8217; in the discussion topic title. While I have a lot of time for &#8216;decommissionist&#8217; / revisionist antics and ideas, I also feel that we stray into the realm of delusion when we call our activities something other than art. However close our work might come to political activism, social regeneration, therapy, philosophy, free market capitalism, etc. it is still art. If it wasn&#8217;t, we simply couldn&#8217;t frame it in these terms. I feel we can, and should, take some pride in art. Just as those in other fields should take pride in what they do. Art is only a dirty word if we make it one.

The way I approach my &#8216;network&#8217; work is as an artist/curator. It means generating particular forms of creative/meaningful exchange with other people that might be different to other creative/meaningful exchanges. Eg. for Art&#8217;s Birthday this year we approached a local &#8216;specialist cake designer&#8217; to make 12 cake designs chosen at random from 150+ designs that we had received following an open call. The &#8216;novelty&#8217; (possibly the wrong word) of this ricochets through all levels (including Council Health and Saftey regulations). So, something that might seem superficial can actually carry great complexity and substance &#8211; defined by and through the contributors and contributions over and above the concept. The importance of the concept, then, lies in generating something that can structure or frame or inspire the activities that really form the work. Needless to say, the cakes were eaten by all those who attended the Art&#8217;s Birthday celebration.

I suppose I have decided that I would like to spend a significant portion of my life taking part in creative exchanges. Sometimes I initiate them, sometimes I am invited to take part. Sometimes they go somewhere, sometimes they don&#8217;t. Sometimes I enjoy them, sometimes I don&#8217;t. I can either think of creative exchange as a whole, in general or I can break it down to a project by project basis. I see Filliou&#8217;s system playing on this tension between perceiving an endless stream of creativity and a compartmentalised, rationalised collection of things done and felt.

To end. An interesting issue thrown up by Clive&#8217;s post concerns what we consider &#8216;official&#8217; theory/philosophy and how we legitimate &#8216;unofficial&#8217; theory/philosophy through &#8216;official&#8217; theory/philosophy. Clive brings in Hall and Williams to reiterate/support/substantiate Filliou. Following Clive&#8217;s intervention (as but one example), does this now mean that Filliou can be used in the same way as we do Hall and Williams? Are Hall and Williams now open to accusations of copying Filliou (given the sequence of presentations)? Or are they seen to be working in such separate fields that the congruence is merely coincidental, and purely affirmative of the shared project?
Considering &#8216;La fete permanente,&#8217; it occurs to me presently that what is at stake is the degree of importance we ascribe the &#8216;carnival&#8217; to the &#8216;normal&#8217; running of society and the terms of their relationship. Does &#8216;cultural theory&#8217; et al belong to the carnival or to &#8216;normal&#8217; society? And what kind or degree of impact do we acknowledge the two sides have on each other? Can we cleanly split these two realms? Is it inappropriate to do so? Should we look to Filliou and his collaborators for answers? Or to their inheritors? Or to other theorists and historians? Or to society directly?

Barnaby</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.1-p.181</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; txt from C-front: Unsubscribe (bibliographical note)</subject>
<from>ana peraica</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Sat, 23 Jun 2001 17:31:35 +0200</date>
<content>Dear Wolf and others,

| I mean leave the Dalai  Lama

so, I am sending spam bibliography, I thought 'Dalai Lama on life' was known
in net circles... But there are always people that are black holes in the
network.
So Wolf - delete message / otherwise bad luck or try to find the list with
subscribers as on the Nettime, and you are happy till the end of the life
: )

Others, sorry for spamming!

ana


 In need of some improvements in your life? If so read on....

  A Message from the Dalai Lama
  Just a short Buddhist outlook on life. Do not keep this message. The
  mantra must leave your hands within 96 hours. You will get a very
  pleasant surprise. This is true, even if you are not superstitious.

 Take into account that great love and great achievements involve
      great risk.

  When you lose don't lose the lesson.

Follow the three R's: Respect for self, Respect for others and
      Responsibility for all your actions.

Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful
      stroke of luck.

Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to
      correct it.

Spend some time alone every day.

Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.

Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think
      back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time.

A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current
      situation. Don't bring up the past.

Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.

Be gentle with the earth.

Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.

Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for
      each other exceeds your need for each other.

Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.


  FORWARD THIS MANTRA E-MAIL TO AT LEAST 5 PEOPLE AND YOUR LIFE WILL
IMPROVE.

  0-4 people: Your life will improve slightly.
  5-9 people: Your life will improve to your liking.
  9-14 people: You will have at least 5 surprises in the next 3 weeks.
  15 people and above: Your life will improve drastically and everything
      you ever dreamed of will begin to take shape.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: Does it matter if the network had / has a &#8220;common direction&#8221; that in any way, shape or form might be called &#8216;political&#8217; ?</subject>
<from>Mike Stubbs</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Sun, 17 Feb 2013 20:19:02 +0000</date>
<content>...lurking on the edges...and just travelling back form the opening of

*"YES MAN DOES WHAT IT IS"
The editions of Galerie Erhard Klein
1972 - 2006*

http://www.bonner-kunstverein.de/ausstellungen/aktuell/sieht-man-ja-was-es-ist-die-editionen-der-galerie-erhard-klein/

highly recommended and hopefully can travel to the uk

a testament to a social network (rhineland) and one which influences such
so much of our practice - be it new media or performative ...in the
situation and encouraging new forms of social democracy

klein was is a clever fella and at the time had the curiosity to
befriend-learn-deal: Polke, Beuys, Kippengberger, Klauke and so on

todays event was full of middle aged artists friends and family - but what
i took form the event (apart form seeing wonderful artwork) was *family* and
a reminder of how things just happen through groups of people swarming

and then of course there is the digital stuff.....

more on that another day

mike</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.2-p.181</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; txt from C-front: Unsubscribe (bibliographical note)</subject>
<from>Ruine der Kuenste Berlin</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Sat, 23 Jun 2001 18:15:39 +0200</date>
<content>Dear Ana,

please make the source of the mentioned Dalai Lama 'chain letter' public, of
course I received such a letter by several people, I just smiled about the
chain method, text itself is good, but to me it does not fit into His
Holiness' way of teaching to give promises like the Popes of Rome at Luther
times, so please open your archive and I am the first to start tracing the
spource and finding out myself and if necessary to apologize.I must not tell
you how easy it is to forge messages in the net, right? By the way, was it
really you writing the last response?
Good wishes Wolf</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: Does it matter if the network had / has a &#8220;common direction&#8221; that in any way, shape or form might be called &#8216;political&#8217; ?</subject>
<from>Roddy Hunter</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:13:51 +0000</date>
<content>Hi Mike (and all)

Glad to see the discussion tempted you out from lurking around the edges. I'm very aware that I've not been catalysing the discussion this week. Too many issues off-list at present. Apologies for neglected correspondence, I will catch up. I am still trying to find time to collate a list of things we might consider as 'networks-as-artworks' already referenced here and others elsewhere. Please do send links and perhaps a few words, needs be nothing more than that.

In the meantime, in preparing a lecture for first year undergraduate students on Duchamp, postmodernism and appropriation I was quickly searching for Filliou's view on how The Eternal Network 'replaced the concept of the avant-garde which has become obsolete' because: 

"If it is true that information about the knowledge of all modern art research is more than any one artist could comprehend, then the concept of the avant-garde is obsolete. With incomplete knowledge, who can say who is in front, and who ain't. I suggest that considering each artist as part of an Eternal Network is a much more useful concept." (http://www.franklinfurnace.org/research/projects/flow/mailart/mailartf.html)

Steven Harris has noted that Filliou 'equates art with knowledge here, and still retains a notion of art as research.' I am not sure I agree with this link with knowledge entirely, particularly in the case of practice-led research, unless it also refers to unconscious knowledge which I assume it does. Does this production of knowledge generate value, hence our scholarly interest? Does that institutionalise the practice as a form of capital? What then is it capacity for radicality, for critique ... what does this means for notions of critical art practice?

In any case, while quickly searching for references I cam across this information regarding the 'Digital Legacies of the Avant Garde' conference in Paris, April, 2012 (http://digitallegacies.org/parispapers.html) which I am kicking myself for not noticing earlier (i have to accept incomplete knowledge again). All good angles on the subject from a slightly different perspective but maybe Stephen Voyce's "The Eternal Network: Avant-Garde Activism and the Cultural Commons" is particular useful!

Have a look, perhaps it helps us expand our discussion. Anyone know of this conference?

Best wishes

Roddy</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.3-p.181</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: &lt;nettime&gt; txt from C-front: Unsubscribe (bibliographical note)</subject>
<from>ana peraica</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Sat, 23 Jun 2001 20:40:25 +0200</date>
<content>Hi Wolf,

I don't know the source of the chain letter, but it really striked me that
in the same context (as my friend who is analysing and collecting spams,
Darko Fritz, noted) that so nice sentences are mixed with coursing. I
received it a long time ago, of course deleted it, and it took me time to
find it again (I found it published on the commercial page
http://www.thefunside.com/lama/ not in the spams archive (usually there are
only those market ones).

I don't think anyone can trace who wrote it (and I would recommend you not
to border with that), as with each re-sending not only the e-mail address,
but also the server name of the sender changes). But surely I don't think
Dalai Lama wrote it himself, but it is a kind of a bad new age phenomenon,
that combined with the childish form of a luck chain letter. I saw many of
them in my childhood in a paper format.

I just send it to show I was not writing on Dalai Lama  (as I already wrote
it in reply to Anna Balint) but on this spam in particular, whose title is
Dalai Lama on Life. As you might follow in the text, it is appearing only in
context with Solidaridae con Brian (which is one of the most cruel spams I
ever saw), and Nokia telephones (the one spread recently around). I didn't
feel like writing again the defence - I did not wrote Dalai Lama, but Dalai
Lama on Life (that most of people on the net know what it is).

Yes, it was my message, the last one (if you think with this spam copied), I
was joking... Don't take it seriously... I just felt incomfortable sending
it in real on the Nettime that has thousands of subscribed people, and the
message itself writes;

of 15 people and above: Your life will improve drastically and everything
      you ever dreamed of will begin to take shape.

so I wanted them to know how happy I might be, that I might become a witch
that if dreams a nightmare can produce a harm around.

The same refers to your defence of Fillou (I was not writing on him also...
but on the materialisation of a model of all - including networks, that
might have problems with all-inclusion, that is highly theoretical and known
in theory of metaphysics; if God is all-including, he is also including Evil
and so on... ).

best
Ana</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>18.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: Does it matter if the network had / has a &#8220;common direction&#8221; that in any way, shape or form might be called &#8216;political&#8217; ?</subject>
<from>Gary Hall</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Sat, 23 Feb 2013 13:56:24 +0000</date>
<content>Maybe I can contribute by looping back to Clive Roberston's comments 
about Stuart Hall in relation to what the network is or was.

'So while Hall acknowledges that cultural studies as a project is open-ended, &#8220;always open to that which it does not know yet, to that which it can&#8217;t yet name,&#8221; he also argues against pluralism and for the stakes (something at stake) of cultural studies.'

As someone who still thinks of what they do in relation to various 
networks and curatorial activities as coming out of the history of 
cultural studies, at least in part (although my work these days has 
moved away from that, and I suspect is probably now unrecognisable to 
most in the field as cultural studies, and more or less deliberately so, 
for reasons I'm about to hint at), there are a couple of things that 
interest me about Hall's 'Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies' 
essay.

1) First, there's Hall&#8217;s acknowledgment in the same essay that the 
boundary line he is attempting to mark out around cultural studies by 
means of its politics is an 'arbitrary' one. 'I don't believe knowledge 
is closed', he writes, 'but I do believe politics is impossible without 
what I have called the "arbitrary closure".'

2) And second, the way there's a risk in Hall&#8217;s use of the word 
&#8216;tension&#8217; when describing these two aspects of cultural studies (what 
he's thinking here in terms of it's theoretical and political projects) 
of implying that each side in this relationship retains a more or less 
unified and stable identity which is equally valid; or that 
'intellectual theoretical work' and politics exist in some kind of 
dialectic. Whereas I wonder if a more interesting way of seeing this 
relation is not as one of mutual transformation, where notions of 
&#8216;theory&#8217; and &#8216;politics&#8217; (and indeed &#8216;cultural studies&#8217;) are pushed 
beyond their traditional delimitations and forced to rework their 
relationship with one another.

If so, then it seems to me that we can&#8217;t say, as Hall did at the 2007 
&#8216;Cultural Studies Now&#8217; conference at the University of East London, that 
cultural studies is capable of questioning everything&#8230; except the 
relation to the social formation; that what cultural studies does is 
analyse culture in relation to its connection to the wider social 
formation and that this connection is therefore sacrosanct. For Hall, 
theory is a detour from a larger question in this respect, which 
concerns rethinking the role of culture and its articulation with other 
structures and processes in each time and place, each conjuncture. This, 
for him, is cultural studies&#8217; real connection with politics, its 
political mission or 'common disposition of energy and direction' 
(Williams).

(Can we see a similar 'arbitrary closure' at work in the way that the 
intellectual theoretical work that is most acceptable and feted today  
is often quite materialist in tenor?)

Moreover, if, to quote Clive quoting Filliou, '&#8220;Research is not the 
domain of those who know; on the contrary it is the domain of those who 
do not know, &#8221;' I wonder if we can't also say the same of politics. In 
which case the trick, perhaps, would be to find ways of actually 
assuming what this means when it comes to politics and being 'political'.

Hope this helps.

Gary</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.0</nbr>
<subject>Curating the Network as Artwork</subject>
<from>Annie Abrahams</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Sun, 10 Feb 2013 17:05:44 +0100</date>
<content>Hi list members,

As an artist living in France, I had to come across Filliou. It is hard not
to. All art students learn about his work. But I did art school in Holland
and it was only later on, when, living here in France, I met Ben Vautier,
Jean Dupuy and Pierre Tilman, who are all somehow influenced by him, that I
got interested in his work. But I am not very familiar with it.

My first question is what is the Ethernal Network? On the internet it is
translated as La f&#234;te permanente ??? (the permanent party?).

I have difficulties understanding what you mean by a network as artwork. I
imagine projects like DIWO done by Furtherfield, their mailinglist
netbehaviour, global communities like the ones around Upstage, Waterwheel
or videovortex, to name but a few, might apply for this "title". Also
probably some of my own activities like the Angry women and Huis Clos / No
Exit projects and my involvement with the Cyposium touch on this...

I am also not sure I understand what a network-as-artwork is, and I ask
myself (and you) what is interesting about considering networks as
artworks?

I feel kind of uncomfortable with the idea that networks can be curated. I
am not sure that is the right word to use, I think I would rather like to
use the word care taking (I think Clive suggested that in his first mail),
but there might be a much better word.
Curating is a word anchored in the existing landscape of thinking and
activating art as a commodity. As soon as we enter the global networks and
want to think about these as possible artworks we can no longer use "old"
terminologies if we want to understand what is happening.
You can not understand communication using the internet by known standard
and analytical tools. When I need to explain this in a simple way, I do
that by showing, talking about, and acting out my piece A Big Kiss (online
kissing is drawing with a tongue, exciting too, as all drawing can be
exciting, but if you could look at me doing it, you would just see some
strange, foolish gesticulations in the void)

I am interested in collaborative groupdynamics using internet technologies.
I have no other goal with this than to understand and to experiment these.
I am not sure as Randall seemed to be that these practices will lead
automatically to less hierachical, more peer-to peer based relations. It
depends on intentions, of the users, of the proprieties of the interface
used and on how it is controlled, but maybe I am missing something and I
would be glad if someone pointed that out to me.

Maybe, maybe describing some facets of one of my projects might triggers
others to write about other concrete, maybe more appropriate examples.

Angry Women started in 2011. ** It is an artistic research project on
remote communication and collaboration using anger as a pretext, and, in
the beginning it was also a project on female anger using webcam
performances as a facilitator.
So far, besides a lot of email exchange, we had 5 performances with only
ladies, one with only men, two mixed gender performances, but also several
technical test and 2 online evaluation sessions. You can find videos,
texts, performance protocols, analyses and written reaction on
http://www.bram.org/angry/women . 48 People from different professional and
cultural backgrounds (13 different mother tongues), participated, some only
once others up to 6 times.
We are all very much interested in finding out how to communicate in a
situation were we have technological advanced equipment, that makes it
possible to be together in a shared environment while staying on our own,
alone at home; we want to research our contemporary status quo of lonely
togetherness.
This is related to exploring how a sense of "we" can exist in a group of
very different individuals, what it means to think a " to be with" based on
singularities. I hope to find a radical, plastic? new interpretation of
"we".

In our latest evaluation session we discussed the status of the project.
For the moment it is my project It needs a lot of caring, and for the needs
of each participating individual, and for the overall context, for the
"network?". So, I am the who drives this network, it needs my attention,
more attention than creativity, I guess, and it wouldn't exist if I had
been a party animal. But during the online meetings and the performances,
the creation is continuos, the party goes on and the relations between us
have an ethernal feeling (Filliou would probably like to participate) -
only during - afterwards you feel as going home alone under a starry night
ready for another periode of caring.


Yours
Annie Abrahams</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.0-p.182</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] FW:  commentary on Unsubscribe tex</subject>
<from>anna balint</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Fri, 22 Jun 2001 09:05:19 +0200</date>
<content>[Once I spent hours enjoying Ben Vautier's work called 'The Postman's
Choice'. It was a postcard with two different addressees on each of its
sides.]


'Il n'ya plus de centre de l'art.Chaque artiste doit se consid&#233;rer comme
faisant
partie d'un r&#233;seau'  Robert Filliou - Eternal Network

Dear Ana, folks, auto replyer,

One of the fantastic aspects of the net is the immediate accesibility to the
texts,
sources, works, people. One minute search on the web is enough to
acknowledge
the context of a text, and  find out that the Eternal Network text was
published. One more minute is enough to overcome the impression that mail
art circles were ever closed and kill roots without appropriate
understanding of the context. For people with theoretical interest in
mailing lists, networks, netart  - the net will probably be a minimum
reference and relevance.
Unfortunately I did not find your text in the nettime archives, as it is
very raw and inefficiently organised. Contrary to such net archives, mail
art archives already developed archiving, filtering strategies, and methods
for organise information.
Art and media concerned BBSs, mailing lists owe a lot to the correspondence
networks and movements, even the mailing list technique was developed in
mail art circles, it goes back to the newsletter of Dick Higgins and   the
New York Correspondence School of Ray Johnson. Besides technical aspects, on
the content level even nettime reproduced and interfered with many of the
mail art and fluxus phenomena  - intermedia, collaborative work, the
multiples, the anticopyright movement, much of the netart, media art, visual
poetry, copy art, censorship questions, radio art, sound poetry, fanzines,
video art, computer art, alternative music, alternative galleries, comes
from the correspondence art and fluxus.
When about bulky correspondence art materials, many theories and concepts
cover them very well, correspondence art theories in the first place, but
the library of Borges as well, some notions of  Flusser, the palimpsest (of
Hakim Bay as well), heteroglossic forms of Michael Bakhtin  - his theory of
reverse culture covers your original text as well - hypertext, and so on.
When about transmission of idea, would it be a coincidence that one of the
moderators of the nettime list comes form the American Fluxus circles, the
other from the Advancement for the Illegal Knowledge group, the third close
to the Marshall MacLuhan heritage - of course connected with Fluxus, as
Marshall MacLuhan was first published by Something Else Press?
The concepts, theories, practices and attitudes of the correspondence art
infiltrated not only mailing lists, but contemporary art practices - the
call for artworks and papers for instance, its morality, its rules. The
idea, the illegal knowledge which circulated through postal network on a
global level became much more known and legitimate on a larger scale due to
the net.  Though many things originating in the correspondence art became
more visible, some still wait to be discovered. Topics, methods as well. For
instance correspondence artists adored trash, crab and junk, they very much
explored and recycled it. They very much liked to recycle idea as well.
When about empty places in mailing lists, the squatters logic works, what's
wrong in that? That logic brought up alternative spaces, alternative radios,
alternative tv's, alternative art, alternative idea.  Nokia is  a spammer?
Great!  We found out that they traced the list or they sponsored it? The
Dalai Lama is spamming? Good that somebody reminds me the question of who
the Dalai Lama is! Integer was banned from the syndicate, nettime, rhizome
and infowar list at the same time? First of all we all learn that these
lists were connected. Their moderators control (too much) and they lack
humour - or the time did not come when people accept no censorship, no jury
rules. Her messages are overwhelming? Did we know before  that messages can
mix private and public spheres, did we know so much about private and public
feed-back, did we question content, language, filtering before? Didn't we
learn something about hidden and visible aspects of the email? Did some
mailing lists die out? Finally! New ones come, and maybe we will  find out
what is eternal. It might be anything which breaks everyday routines.
There is already much said about spatiality of the net, many people explore
utopia and atopia, virtual space, spatiality in general. Much less is
discussed the notion of temporality, though some artists, theoreticians
struggle with this concept. At this moment my personal time perceiving is
very much determined by the commercial s/censors of  net-works, as the
Telecomunication Company where I am connected lets me to work in the night
with less costs.  Robert Filliou did not wait the raise of the internet to
formulate his theories, maybe we still need time to properly understand his
notion of time with the help of the new medium. Eternity is a religious
notion? Which concept is not?
bests regards,
Anna Balint</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: Curating the Network as Artwork</subject>
<from>Roddy Hunter</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Sun, 10 Feb 2013 20:41:22 +0000</date>
<content>Hi all

Good to be swinging into the second week of the discussion. Thanks, Johannes and Annie for focusing minds on particular issues and questions. Also good to see we are beginning to see &#8216;concrete examples&#8217; of network practice to discuss and evaluate. I will take a look a closer look at examples you offer, Annie, as well as work of other respondents and write in a later post. The main questions/issues you both raise seem to concern the usefulness or otherwise of thinking about networks-as-artworks, how to determine their success or failure and what role curating might have in these respects. These still seem to be areas needing conceptual clarification so we can move forward.

I think it can be useful to conceive of a network-as-artwork where production, distribution and reception integrate as closely as possible in the creative process. Typically, the institutional artworld conceives of these separately, often involving different agents of mediation: the artist being one, the curator being another, the critic and hypothetical &#8216;ideal&#8217; spectator another still. This economy is well known of course and summarized usefully in Alloway, L. (1984) 'Network: The Art World Described as a System'. In: Alloway, L. 'Network: Art and the Complex Present'. Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, pp. 3-15. Hakim Bey has also equated increasing &#8216;degrees of mediation&#8217; with corresponding interventions of Capital&#8217; (Bey 1994. Available at: http://hermetic.com/bey/radio_se.html)

Clearly, this system places &#8216;artists in a submissive role&#8217; as Clive notes and it's also not surprising that artists have regarded curating &#8216;as a very corrupt discourse.&#8217; (O&#8217;Neill &amp; Wilson, 2009. Available at: http://www.ica.org.uk/Emergence%20by%20Paul%20O'Neill%20&amp;%3B%20Mick%20Wilson+17186.twl). More than this, I remember reading recently &#8211; but cannot locate the reference! &#8211; of an artist or curator who realised that while for Marx the issue was ownership of the means of production, their own preoccupation was with ownership of the means of distribution/reception or something like that. If anyone can help me re-locate that reference that would be great! 

In any case, the case for the network-as-artwork becomes clearer when regarded from this position. The historical backdrop of the &#8216;dematerialisation of the art object&#8217;, which while a somewhat erroneous term, does expand possible interfaces of aesthetic exchange to encompass always increasingly accessible communications technologies as well as discrete, bounded objects of beauty, fax machines as well as paintings. The communications interface, just as a conversation, requires co-presence and co-production of the aesthetic experience. This sense is typical of the 1960s and found too in Allan Kaprow&#8217;s &#8216;no audience, only participants&#8217; approach to the Happening (Kaprow 1968. Available at: http://www.ubu.com/sound/kaprow.html).

Much of this work clearly takes advantage of any and all communication technologies, especially those that could have global reach. Extending the capacity to be together in different places in the same liminal moment seems aesthetically to be the driver. There is an &#8216;aesthetics of distance&#8217; here which actually depends on being separate from each other in space and time. The experience of this relationship, the intersubjective exchange across space and time, becomes itself the aesthetic &#8216;object&#8217;. 
Manovich (2001) already points out that Benjamin defines aura 'as the unique phenomenon of a distance' (224) not of proximity. We shouldn&#8217;t necessarily assume an authentic desire to overcome physical, geographical separation between networkers: it is the romance of their geographical separation that becomes exotic and perhaps even an act of aesthetic love. Aesthetic experience, in my view and found I believe in Bakhtin, requires difference (non-coincidence) rather than synthesis of respective consciousnesses. Synthesis is often confused with empathy and thus thought of as an aesthetic event, where it is arguably more ethical. When the network-as-artwork &#8216;fails&#8217; as Ken suggests and Johannes questions, is this failure understood in terms of aesthetic or ethical efficacy/sustainability? The difference between poetical and political economy?

These conditions all taken together mean arguably that Filliou and others becoming interested in the artist-networker position were in fact becoming engaged with curating. I was struck with Clive&#8217;s view that &#8216;curating (caring for) the network (as mutually authored projects) made sense as an artwork&#8217; which was very well put. I like this because it refers to curating as an activity as opposed to a job or career. I think Filliou and other networkers (e.g. H.R Fricker and &#8216;The Decentralised Network Congress&#8217;) were behaving curatorially in setting/integrating the context of production, distribution, reception as an &#8216;open system&#8217; in which to participate.

Two useful views on rethinking curatorial activity in the context of network-as-artwork:  

For artists, Paul O&#8217;Neill again:
&#8220;The term &#8220;artist curator&#8221;, which once simply referred to exhibitions curated by artists, is applied by [Gavin] Wade to those practitioners using exhibition design, architectural structures, and curatorial strategies as a way of presenting themselves, alongside other artists, to create composite public outcomes&#8221;.
O&#8217;Neill, Paul. (2012): The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s). MIT, p. 105

And for curators, CRUMB&#8217;s very own Beryl and Sarah:
&#8220;Curators who are truly interested in the decentralised, dematerialized activity of network-based arts have tried to change their curatorial tactics to be more in line with the artists, even if that means being increasingly misaligned with the traditional institutions for the presentation of art.&#8221; 
Cook, Sarah &amp; Graham, Beryl. (2010): Rethinking Curating. MIT, p. 84

Rethinking relationships between production, distribution, reception (or at the risk of more hyphenating: production-as-distribution-as-reception, etc., etc.) is important and should welcome interventions from any perspective of hybridity and indeterminacy.

Hope I&#8217;ve explained my grounds for asking the question better!

Best wishes all, 

Roddy</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.1-p.182</nbr>
<subject>[Nettime-bold] Re: Syndicate: FW:  commentary on Unsubscribe tex</subject>
<from>ana peraica</from>
<to>nettime-bold@nettime.org</to>
<date>Fri, 22 Jun 2001 15:50:04 +0200</date>
<content>HI Anna, and others...

I am receiving so much of e-mail reactions.... Unfortunately interesting
writings arrive to my own address, not to lists, and seems the problems of
censorship, moderation et. al. are very hot, at least on two lists
(Syndicate and Nettime the first). Censorship seems to still be the topic
people prefer to discuss in private... I would try to write the reply and
ideas I have got in one single e-mail as replying this would take some
time... (of summer).

For myself, though I didn't want to get involved in the historical
developement of networking, the ideas of creators etc. as my interest was
not at all to point on its artistic or others rhoutes, but to go a step
further, which I found interesting - critique of the network, fallen
promises and end of the hype. For the de/scralisation of it, because of
using only a single way of interpretation (which I tried to avoid more
literally by comparing networks of the veneral diseases, urbanistic ones et.
al) many were not ready.

But in this reply of Anna I found several topics that were of my interest;
bulk e-mail and (self - if taken as an independent body) organization. Maybe
this discussion is now too particular (located) for the theory, but
nevertheless...

Anna wrote:
&gt; Integer was banned from the syndicate, nettime, rhizome and infowar list
at the same time?

As far as I know Syndicate is unmoderated; of course, question is how this
democracy of all-can-post becomes at one point the tiranny of a single
person, and suffers from the reversal of the quality. Two days ago I got the
reply of Andreas as my e-mails were not getting through; and I made a joke
on

&gt;&gt; either seems someone unsubscribed me in real, or there is a censorship on
the Syndicate, but my e-mails (UN-art and
&gt;&gt; Unsubscribe texts) are not passing to the list since yesterday. I checked
the archive, and they are not there  too. And I was &gt;&gt; thinking also how to
send something entitled Unsubscribe in  the body of message, so I put the
starr * before the title, &gt;&gt; hoping Majordomo will not recognize as a
command. But seems a human agent did... They like to be commanded probably?

Andreas wrote;
&gt; the syndicate has no moderation but admins who help people who are too
lazy  to adjust to the technical rules of
&gt; majordomo to get their stuff on the list.

Michael Benson wrote:

&gt; Maybe, as with nettime, we can make two  lists -- one featuring 8/10ths
posts by whatshername and one without. That
&gt; way people don't have to go to the trouble of filtering out the crap, they
can just freely choose, and meanwhile accusations &gt; of censorship won't have
to be slung so freely around.

Anna wrote:
&gt; First of all we all learn that these  lists were connected. Their
moderators control (too much) and they lack humour - or the &gt; time did not
come when people accept no censorship, no jury rules.

Now, I am again not sure on this point; whether it means connections of
moderators (and then a kind of conspiracy) or the connection of subscribers
/ subscriptions, and then merging of networks... For the first I think it is
totally the opposite, but the second one is the truth.

Anna wrote:
&gt; Didn't we| learn something about hidden and visible aspects of the email?
Did some mailing lists die out? Finally!

That is what i think too.

*******************************
(end that falls out the discussion)

&gt; Eternity is a religious notion? Which concept is not?

I would rather say which one is not political; maybe it is a matter of
interpretation, so I don't quite consume religion, or its notions.

Note; Nokia telephones and Dalai Lama on Life are spams... First one is a
commercial spam, and the second a spiritual one (chain letter that ends up
with a course).

best
Ana</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: Curating the Network as Artwork</subject>
<from>Johannes Birringer</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Mon, 11 Feb 2013 13:41:31 +0000</date>
<content>just wanted to say thank you to Katja Kwastek for her illuminating review of the Transmediale,
your sharp observations seemed to make good sense in the context of this discussion, and
I was sorry of course to learn that Pluto was not elevated but remained confirmed-demoted,
a poor post-planet.


as to your comment on PAPER, you mention the Post Digital Publishing workshop, 
&gt;&gt;
. A highlight of this was the keynote by Kenneth Goldsmith on conceptual writing, with the provocative thesis: 
"with the rise of the web writing has met its photography" - 
I don't think I really agree, but it is worth thinking about it - goes into the whole discourse of computationality which was also represented by David Berry. 
&gt;&gt;

I'd like to learn more about this, could you elaborate or send me a follow up link?     And how is this connected to the "discourse
on computationality" or to the theme that Annie Abrahams brought forward, on caring for/sustaining a possibly on-going creation
(across/with network) or project involve both site and remote site collaboration. 

I liked the example of "Angry Women", with its organizational and productive dimensions; and it reminds me of a small proiect a theatre friend of mine, Angeles Romero, 
started up in Houston, last year with young Latinas who were encouraged to use their cellphones to make short films working with
the restrictions of the medium but developing a craft of the short film (one task was to do the scripting/story-boarding. shoot/edit in one day and upload to YouTube by the end of the day)...



....  see an example here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWdGgI3yGIk&amp;feature=youtu.be

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn49HbJkcZU
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZltCSIEV82g

I think these wonderful, humorous and sometimes ironic yet also politicized  "tiny" productions are part of a pedagogy of 'teatro espontaneo' that Romero developed in her theatre workshops in the Latino/a community,
and they are now also testing the "re-mediation" possibilities of working with new media or social media networks. Now sure whether the group has
developed a policiy about "curating" the quick work on YouTube.   

And why should they bother?

What is there is no role for curating in this connection?  (Katja, did you not mention something about "'Curating Youtube' in regard to Transmediale?)
certainly for the young mobile-video-makers in Houston the curatorial question is irrelevant, i think. The creative production model, on the other hand,
is not. 


with regards
Johannes Birringer</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.3</nbr>
<subject>Re: Curating the Network as Artwork</subject>
<from>Johannes Birringer</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:18:45 +0000</date>
<content>hi all

strangely i think the debate here stopped on February 11,  after Clive and I posted some commentary...
I was wondering why the discussion stopped.  Sorry for my query, i am always interested into these 
things/situations when a dialogue suddenly stops.  

with regards
Johannes</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.4</nbr>
<subject>Re: Curating the Network as Artwork</subject>
<from>Roddy Hunter</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:47:12 +0000</date>
<content>Hi Johannes

As I said, my fault. Too many serious work/life issues off-list. Am trying to catch up now. Apologies.

I'd welcome contributions from invited respondents especially those who have not introduced themselves. 

Again links to relevant projects to build a resource list welcome - doesn't have to be essays.

Thanks all for patience with your faulty moderator.

Best wishes

Roddy</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.5</nbr>
<subject>Re: Curating the Network as Artwork</subject>
<from>Johannes Birringer</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:56:32 +0000</date>
<content>oh, not at all, i did not at all mean to suggest it is a matter of moderation, I was wondering aloud, and am sorry for having done so, why discussion
on this list repeatedly tends to stop at certain points. I think I have asked this before, so ignore my curiosity.

with regards

Gregor
(just back from Zagreb)</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.6</nbr>
<subject>Curating the Network as Artwork</subject>
<from>Tom Sherman</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Mon, 25 Feb 2013 12:44:17 +0000</date>
<content>I met Robert Filliou somewhere in the 1970s, could have been Vancouver or Toronto.  He had a lot of presence in his unassuming way.  When he made reference to the Eternal Network I thought at the time he was referring to the spirit of curiosity and creativity that will always glow or bubble up or erupt around the planet.  No matter how sour and stiff and roboticized our societies would become, there was always hope in youth and all those who refuse to stop playing.  Filliou was one who joked around as if his and everyone else&#8217;s life depended on a sense of irreverence and frivolity and invention.  I was fortunate to know Clive Robertson who had managed to fix and firm up Filliou&#8217;s spirit in media, video and other deceptively modest media, including audiocassette editions, and later audio CDs.

I understood the practicality of Filliou&#8217;s obsession with travel and connection and networking because I had interned as a boy sending out messages in Morse code as a ham radio operator from my bedroom in a small town in Michigan.  I spent even more time DXing short wave and medium wave radio stations around the world and setting up &#8216;tapespondence&#8217; networks through which locally originated reel-to-reel audio recordings were exchanged through the postal networks.  We didn&#8217;t have long-distance telecom access in late 1950s or early 1960s (the use of telephones was financially prohibitive).  I figured out how to find out what was going on everywhere else and to manifest my own voice and participate in and invent global networks because I had to in order to survive.  In rural Michigan there were few cultural options at the time: hunting and fishing, sports, car culture, alcohol, pop music and three television networks.  I didn&#8217;t know there were people like Robert Filliou and horizontal networks like Fluxus forming at that time, but I was starving for information and desperate to find others who weren&#8217;t satisfied with the mass media culture of Ed Sullivan or Elvis Presley or Walter Cronkite.

Later I would realize that Filliou and artists of like-minds would understand that the sparks of curiosity and discovery could be amplified and highlighted through networks.  I saw artist-run centres spring up and floods of mail art begin to circulate through and beyond this constellation of alternative institutions in parallel to commercial galleries and museums.  Horizontality flattened verticality and became for many an ideal.  Postal networks gave way to bicycled videocassettes and slow-scan television and photocopy and fax and primitive e-mail systems.  Telephony, just a whisper of what it would become, was enlarging at an incomprehensible rate, kicked into light speed by analogue to digital conversion.  Satellites and later fibre-optic undersea cables fired this mushrooming connectivity.  The idea of &#8216;communities of interest&#8217; became more and more apparent and necessary.  Communities of common interests were forming concretely, suddenly, without the necessity of physical, in the flesh, communities.  Kindred spirits were connecting ethereally and interactivity was arising like Brownian motion around the foundations, the ruins, of mass media. The phenomena of distributed authorship were becoming tangible.  The economy of goods and services was shifting into the information economy&#8212;economies based on scarcity were collapsing as gift economies were emerging in rich cultures of abundance.

The weak signals of unpopular culture gained enough strength to form clear alternatives to mainstream cultures through networked exchanges.  The electronic and eventually digital telecommunication networks accrued in layers of webs over obscure galleries and clubs, universities and town halls, those places were people actually meet.  Everyone aspired to create difference.  Anomaly was actually the norm for a while.  But as culture was atomized into rivers and seas of individual voices (as we have become full transceiver cultures), differences have become less significant and people have become less interested in being different and more interested in being the same.  Don&#8217;t ask me why, I just know that this is true.  Young people want to be part of a set of emergent identical behaviors, moving this way and that like schools of fish.  Maybe this results from more and more consistent prompts from the mediated environment--a kind of engineered roboticism, the behavioral response to endlessly consistent instruction sets--or maybe there is simply too much risk associated with being different?  (maybe it is only acceptable to internalize, to &#8216;secretize&#8217; 21st century individualism?)  One thing for sure, the connective tissues of networks are far more elaborate and comprehensive than ever before.  We are flush with channels for trading messages. Telecom is simultaneously personal and institutional and evolving at unprecedented speed.  Kindred spirits are no longer isolated by distance and time.  Kindred spirits find themselves jam packed in overcrowded networks.

Where is Robert Filliou when we need him?  We need artists with miners&#8217; hats, the helmets with probing lights mounted on them, to comb the clogged networks for signs of copious curiosity and playfulness.  (Baseline inventiveness.)  Where are those flaunting ignorance for a chance to celebrate what they don&#8217;t know?  Risky takers of chance.  Lovely eccentrics.  People who make our head hurt just being themselves.  I think things have changed more than we think they have over the past fifty or sixty years.  The kids are playing in seclusion with intelligent artifacts and far too many people are humanizing cats and watching dogs speaking in affected voices in the English language on their Apple telephones.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>19.7</nbr>
<subject>Re: Curating the Network as Artwork</subject>
<from>Roddy Hunter</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Mon, 25 Feb 2013 23:23:43 +0000</date>
<content>Dear list, 

Armin: I appreciate your comment on the impossibility or otherwise of curating the net as if it were a giant ready-made. It may well have been possible to approach it from this angle at the time of Cosic, Shulgin, Lialina et al. Galloway expressed similar when he says net.art &#8216;is dirty aesthetic deeply limited, but also facilitated, by the network [&#8230;] a type of art making that is a mapping of the network&#8217;s technological limitations and failures&#8217;.[1] The pervasiveness of Web 2.0, particularly social media, has meant the network is more likely a spectacle, in the Debordian sense of &#8216;a social relation between people that is mediated by images&#8217;. [2] I am not sure that curating the network-as-artwork is the same as curating the net as artwork, in the way I mean to explore it. I was ashamed of myself that prior to this discussion I had not read Tatiana Bazzichelli&#8217;s &#8216;Networking: The Net as Artwork&#8217; [3] but will soon to try to resolve the question of whether there is a difference. Essentially, in my view currently, the Net is one network  - perhaps the paradigmatic apogee of networking  &#8211; but there needs to be a way the &#8216;network-as-artwork&#8217; can affirm critique of its post-Web 2.0 pre-eminence. I agree entirely then with your view that &#8216;We need to move beyond this situation and not just invent a new aesthetics but new forms of living, of co-operation, of exchange. Technologies will play a role in this, but not such a privileged anymore.&#8217; [4] This moves us closer back onto Filliou&#8217;s territory of &#8216;The Eternal Network&#8217; where we need to contend then, however, with the problems of materialisation again. I see you trying to do that with your FIELDS project and while I won't be able to take part would like to know how that turns out.

Ken: I also appreciate your attempt to think through different meanings of &#8216;network&#8217;. If I follow, you seem to suggest one sense lies in artists&#8217; manipulating communications technologies for aesthetic ends (Nam June Paik, &#8216;Art by Telephone&#8217;, &#8216;Omaha Flow Systems&#8217;) &#8211; network as tool, perhaps &#8211; and the other being the broader context of networked communication itself, which in many ways transcends specifically art production. If this careful differentiation stands, then it probably benefits Filliou&#8217;s conception of &#8216;art being what makes like more interesting than art&#8217;. It is useful to think of your differentiation of networks-as-tools and networks-as-systems. Sure, The Eternal Network would need to fall into the latter category as an artwork as an ongoing system of relations rather than an as a networked &#8216;artefact&#8217;. Your point of sustainability is valid to raise given the apparently &#8216;permanent&#8217; nature of &#8216;la f&#234;te permanent&#8217;&#8230; but really how did Filliou mean this &#8216;permanence&#8217; to be interpreted? I think his definition of &#8216;The Eternal Network&#8217; &#8211; again from Clive&#8217;s &#8216;Porta Filliou&#8217; tape &#8211; refers to the &#8216;eternal&#8217; aspect as &#8216;la f&#234;te permanent&#8217; of the post-avant-garde, as what happens whenever &#8216;through the collective efforts of artists &#8230;artistic activity becomes just one of the elements.&#8217; [5] If artists collectively succeed in escaping the fixed positioning of the avant-garde as a dialectically-bound reaction and recoverable antidote to mainstream hegemony, then needing to circumvent the regulation of their activities as art could be important. The issue then is how to employ whichever criteria decide the efficacy of such a network or not. To move toward Clive and Gary&#8217;s discussion of Stuart Hall elsewhere, I wonder if &#8216;The Eternal Network&#8217; is a puzzle which resists the moment of &#8216;regulation&#8217; in the circuit of culture that &#8216;comprises controls on cultural activity&#8217;. There is also &#8216;play&#8217; here as a critique of instrumentalisation and yes; I think Filliou is making mischief that&#8217;s keeps us talking now. Maybe working out what &#8216;la f&#234;te permanent&#8217; is a koan? Thanks for making &#8220;The Wealth and Poverty of Networks&#8221; available [6]. I read it earlier in my research and it certainly works well as critique of Filliou that needs to be responded. Maybe the problem is in sticking to &#8216;network&#8217; - we could argue whether Art&#8217;s Birthday is a &#8216;network&#8217; or not. I guess I am as interested in in it as a &#8216;formation&#8217; and a &#8216;networked formation&#8217; at that. Problem?

Gary: I really appreciate your excursus on Cultural Studies and Hall [7] and do sense there is an answer from that perspective to these problems &#8211; as I hint at in a very literal, uninformed way above &#8211; but I am going to have spend longer working through those issues of research and politics you raise &#8211; is Ranci&#232;re useful in relation to finding ways to consider &#8216;being &#8216;political&#8217;&#8217;?

Clive: &#8220;ideals Die&#8221; totally gets into the annotated bibliography &#8211; you know we all want to hear it! Upload a MP3 please, just for us? I also completely appreciate your idea of printing a small and cheap &#8211; as you say &#8211;edition reflecting the discussion that we can put up as a PDF on the CRUMB site, maybe? That&#8217;ll also give us a reason to keep talking once this month is over and see where this current network formation can lead us. Brilliant idea, thanks very much for proposing. Everyone else happy with that, anyone want to join in particularly? 

My hard dive is slowing down and I am getting unresponsive script warnings trying to filter the wonderful further material Helen, Gary, Ken, Clive and Tom contributed to the list discussion. This will form part two of my response within the next couple of days but there is certainly a wealth of links that we can add there to our bibliography of &#8216;network-as-artwork&#8217; research. Thank you for your generosity, all.

Oh, Filliou, why are you one of those &#8216;People who make our head hurt just being themselves&#8217;? [8] Thanks for that in particular, Tom.

Network greetings, 

Roddy

[1] Galloway, Alexander R. 2004. &#8216;Internet Art&#8217;. In: Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization. MIT Press, 219.
[2] http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/1.htm
[3] http://darc.imv.au.dk/wp-content/files/networking_bazzichelli.pdf
[4] https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1302&amp;L=new-media-curating&amp;D=1&amp;O=D&amp;X=03DC5D40CE246463EE&amp;Y=hunter.roddy%40gmail.com&amp;P=31120
[5] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BgOfsG7J0Q
[6] http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman
[7] https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1302&amp;L=new-media-curating&amp;D=1&amp;O=D&amp;X=03DC5D40CE246463EE&amp;Y=hunter.roddy%40gmail.com&amp;P=32335
[8] https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=ind1302&amp;L=new-media-curating&amp;D=1&amp;O=D&amp;X=65ACE72CDFD17E2F92&amp;Y=hunter.roddy%40gmail.com&amp;P=37926</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>20.0</nbr>
<subject>What is a Network?</subject>
<from>Ken Friedman</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Sat, 23 Feb 2013 06:26:17 +0000</date>
<content>Friends,

The question on why the conversation went quiet is a good one. I&#8217;ve been puzzled that many of those who agreed to contribute have not done so.

For myself, I can explain my silence. I&#8217;ve been thinking. It seems to me that there have been two meanings of the word &#8220;network&#8221; in use here.

One meaning applies to art works that use and mirror networked systems. Examples would be Nam June Paik&#8217;s spectacular use of television networks in projects such as the 1984 television project titled &#8220;Good Morning, Mr. Orwell,&#8221; the elegant 1969 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago titled &#8220;Art by Telephone,&#8221; or my 1973 mail art exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum titled &#8220;Omaha Flow Systems.&#8221;

The other meaning is that of networks in the larger sense of ongoing systems that permit interactions of many kinds &#8211; networks such as postal systems, the World Wide Web, the Internet, or the global telephone network, as well as networks fornews transmission, publications, or regular social and economic interaction. This is the kind of network that I was referring to in my somewhat pessimistic statement about the failure of artists to generate durable, functioning networks.

On February 7, Johannes Birringer asked me about a comment in an earlier post. I had written, &#8220;most of the projects, networks, and systems that artists try to build fail. I wanted to know why, and how to do better. This led me to questions in humanbehavior, sociology, and economics. I found general history and world history useful in examining how people have addressed different kinds of issues at other times and places.&#8221;

Johannes wrote, &#8220;nothing could be further from the truth I think, it surprises me really that you claim this overwhelming failure, Ken, which is historically not accurate at all I'd think. (well, maybe I should speak from my perspective: most of theprojects and networks that I tried to help build and sustain did work, and even if there are adaptations and modifications needed, they can be accomplished). I am sure many here know examples of organizational networks that worked.&#8221;

What I meant, though, was not specific projects or art works using networks, but actual network systems that thrive and develop for longer than a year or two.

Any network can be made to function if one pours enough resources and funds in. The challenge is to develop networks that generate true networks effects, becoming more valuable and more effective as more nodes affiliate. Examples of networks that function and grow successfully have &#8211; at times &#8211; included the telephone and telegraph systems, canal networks, railroad networks prior to the advent oftrucking and then cheap air transport.

Robert Filliou and George Brecht&#8217;s concept of The Eternal Network was a concept of community, not a concept for an art work. Projects such as Art&#8217;s Birthday continue and flourish &#8211; but these use a network, they are not in themselves networks, and the constituencies and communities that generate them change, die, and flourish through revivals rather than the continuity the describes a network.

Johannes asked, &#8220;What did you have in mind, Ken? what projects, networks and systems?&#8221; I&#8217;d feel inappropriate describing the particular details of projects and systems that don&#8217;t work or didn&#8217;t. There is too little time and room for a robust, detailed analysis in a list conversation such as this. In a conversation where key participants are unwilling to post a first entry, I&#8217;m not prepared to launch a sociological and economic analysis of projects to which, in many respects, I was and remain sympathetic.

If artists have indeed created social and economic networks that function for more than short periods supported by massive external subsidies, it would be interesting toknow of them.

In 2005, The MIT Press published Anne-Marie Chandler and Norie Neumark&#8217;s book At A Distance: Precursors to Internet Art and Activism. I wrote a chapter for the book titled &#8220;The Wealth and Poverty of Networks.&#8221; This chapter describes some of the issues that I feel describe networks, and I give examples of networks that succeeded and failed.

Interested list members can download a PDF copy of the chapter &#8211; produced with permission of the publisher &#8211; at URL:

http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

One aspect of all networks is that they are lodged in a culture and a technological era. They are also subject to the laws of biology, chemistry, and physics. Therefore, allnetworks eventually vanish. The Sumerian civilization began nearly 8,000 years ago. A king named Culgi who rule 4,000 years ago was quite proud of his sophisticated network of roads with a postal service and rest stops:

&#8220;I, Culgi, the mighty king, superior to all, strengthened the roads, put in order the highways of the Land. I marked out the double-hour distances, built there lodging houses. I planted gardens by their side and established resting-places, andinstalled in those places experienced men. Whichever direction one comes from, one can refresh oneself at their cool sides; and the traveller who reaches nightfall on the road can seek haven there as in a well-built city.&#8221;

The Sumerian road system went the way of Ramses II and his works &#8211; as Shelley wrote, &#8220;Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.&#8221; One expects that Eisenhower&#8217;s Interstate Highway System will follow, along with most networks we humans have built.

The main difference between these and the networks I noted is that they flourished longer by giving rise to successful network effects with a smaller proportional inflow of external energy applied relative to the economic and social valuethey spin off.

For now, I&#8217;m happy to make &#8220;The Wealth and Poverty of Networks&#8221; available at:

http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman

Yours,

Ken Friedman</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>20.0-p.183</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; On the state of net ar</subject>
<from>Florian Cramer</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Wed, 4 Dec 2002 14:12:35 +0100</date>
<content>Since many people responded to me off-list, I should write a postscript
to my posting.  Everyone seems to have overlooked that the
correspondence between John Berndt (a Neoist and experimental musician
from Baltimore) and LLoyd Dunn (editor of the Mail Art/anticopyright
zine PhotoStatic/Retrofuturism and member of the Plunderphonics
collective Tape-beatles) was taken, to quote myself...

&gt; From: PhotoStatic no. 37/Retrofuturism no. 10, August 1989
                                                        xxxx

There's of course no point in denying my prankish intentions. Still, I
didn't alter the wording of the original correspondence, but only
bracketted out parts which referred to non-digital media (such as audio
tapes and print magazines). 

By the late 1980s, the term "Network" (via Robert Filliou's coinage of
"The Eternal Network") had largely overcome the older label "Mail Art",
thus embracing all kinds of fringe activities and (to use a term by Inke
Arns and Andreas Broeckmann) "small media" which mainly circulated via
personal snail mail.

Practical proofs are book titles like "The Magazine Network" by G&#233;za
Perneczky [1991] or "Networking Currents" [1986] and "Eternal Network"
[1995] by Chuck Welch. The whole range of pre-Internet network culture
comes better across, though, in Ivan Stang's book "Heigh Weirdness by
Mail" [Simon &amp; Schuster, 1988] and in back-issues of the review zine
Factsheet Five, or, respectively, the book "The World of Zines" compiled
by Factsheet Five editors Mike Gunderloy and Cari Goldberg Janice
[Penguin, 1992].

So it's perhaps not too accidental that internal debates on "network
culture" and "network art" from 1989 could be easily recycled into
contempary net culture/net art discourse.

-F


Another postscript concerns McKenzie Wark's Nettime review of the Ray
Johnson exhibition and his mention of the COPY LEFT | COPY RIGHT in
particular. In my private archive, I found a 10-volume Mail Art edition
published in Zurich in 1985 under the title "copy-left, work in progress,
pornographic - erotic - body art". The cover emblem is a 
copyright sign flipped horizontally:

                  -,xxxxx
              .xaWQM9HWH9Q###Q&amp;x_
           .d###?^ .xxxxxx_  "9Q#Nx
          dQ# {AT} " d###QQQWMWQ#b_  '9WQ&amp;,
         xQ#?` }## {AT} ^      '##A,   ?Q#b
        W#Q~   '?Y         &lt;####   `Q#$
       j##b                aQ###    ###
       ]##P                ]Q###,   ###r
       W##[               }D####^  ]W##~
        M##,  4#Qa,       ]O###"   .#P~
         9Q#h, Y#QQbxxxxa8QQP"    Q##^
          "9##Ax-'???"??"??"   ,d##P
            'Y#Q###bxxxxxxxxxaQ##Y`
               `""?Y#QQQQQQQY??^


[Enlarged detail, converted into ASCII Art; I put the original scan
online under
&lt;http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/copyleft-mail_art.jpg&gt;.]

-- 
http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~cantsin/homepage/
http://www.complit.fu-berlin.de/institut/lehrpersonal/cramer.html
GnuPG/PGP public key ID 3200C7BA, finger cantsin {AT} mail.zedat.fu-berlin.de</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>21.0</nbr>
<subject>Reading the Network</subject>
<from>Helen Pritchard</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Sun, 24 Feb 2013 00:10:59 +0800</date>
<content>Hello,

Thankyou Roddy for the invitation to be part of this discussion and also thanks to the other respondents for their comments and thoughts so far&#8230;I have a few tentative notes and responses and I want to start first of all with the notion of diffraction...

What is interesting about the questions you are posing is that in a way it sets up a space for productively reading &#8216;network culture&#8217;, &#8216;curating&#8217; and &#8216;Fluxus&#8217; through each other - as an affirmative process.  Which could perhaps be thought of as the process that Donna Haraway and Karen Barad have described as 'diffraction'. [1]. As Barad explains diffraction is a productive methodology and 

" a method of diffractively reading insights through one another, building new insights, and attentively and carefully reading for differences that matter in their fine details, together with the recognition that there intrinsic to this analysis is an ethics that is not predicated on externality but rather entanglement. Diffractive readings bring inventive provocations; they are good to think with. They are respectful, detailed, ethical engagements." [2]

Diffraction as a methodology is something we are currently exploring in the work I am undertaking with Jane Prophet [3], Winnie Soon [4] and Fran Perona [5] at the School of Creative Media, City University Hong Kong. In our research we have become increasingly interested in considering not just &#8216;reading&#8217; the blind spots of theory against each other but also diffracting &#8216;practices&#8217; through each other such as diffracting arts practice through the practice of nano science or the practice of archiving through the practice of network art.  

Diffraction as Iris Van der Tuin explains, &#8220;is meant to disrupt linear and &#64257;xed causalities, and to work toward &#8216;&#8216;more promising interference patterns&#8217;&#8217; [6].  It is practiced by reading one text through another text and the rewriting. Disrupting the temporality of the piece and opening up meanings in new contexts. 

I bring up this idea of diffracting practices through one another in response to Clive&#8217;s earlier comments about the possibility for curating as the network as a practice of &#8216;caring&#8217; for the/a network/s and Marc&#8217;s suggestion that much of the work they engage with at furtherfield, artists/collectives such as YOHA and Platform, &#8220;meet, not through style or as part of a field of practice, but as contemporary artistic practitioners exploring their own states of agency in a world where our &#8216;public&#8217; interfaces are as much a necessary place of creative engagement&#8221;. It also relates to Ken's comments outlining the question "what is a network?" and perhaps - how we begin to become attuned to what a network is/and or might be otherwise. The matter of becoming attuned - is something I was alerted to recently in discussion with Kathryn Yusoff [7]. 

It seems to me that many artists that engage with network ecology often use the methodology of diffraction to become attuned to its performativity - to what it includes or excludes in what Adrian Mckenzie might describe as the processes of circulation [8].  Artists often diffract one practice through another to expose its blind spots - such as in the network reading group work &#8220;Common Practice&#8221; initiated by Magda Ty&#380;lik-Carver [9]. In this work online reading practices are diffracted through the practice of curating and the practice of &#8220;commoning&#8221;. Not in order to control, order or stabilise these reading practices but as a way to become attuned to both limitations and the indeterminate possibilities of both networks and curating. 

As  Magda explains &#8220; the subject of my research which proposes to understand curating in/as common/s. If the common, as Hardt and Negri say (256), is discovered and produced through joyful encounters, then perhaps writing about curating in/as common/s should be also done with others. [10]

- more soon :)
Helen 

[1] Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007
[2] http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/11515701.0001.001/1:4.3/--new-materialism-interviews-cartographies?rgn=div2;view=fulltext
[3] http://www.janeprophet.com/
[4] http://www.siusoon.com/home/
[5] http://www.francescaperona.com/
[7] http://www.lec.lancs.ac.uk/people/Kathryn_Yusoff
[8] Adrian Mackenzie, 'The Performativity of Code: Software and Cultures of Circulation', Theory, Culture &amp; Society_, vol. 22, no. 1, London: Sage, 2005, pp. 71-92.
[9] http://www.magda.thecommonpractice.org/index.php?/projects/common-practicecode/
[10] http://www.aprja.net/?p=460</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>21.0-p.183</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] relational poetry and semiotics</subject>
<from>n/a</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri Nov  1 11:16:01 2002</date>
<content>You wrote:
"How are you finding net/web.art in comparison to mail art?"

My dear Jim,

Accidentally I have some memorandums on the topic that you ask me. I
prepared them in order to respond to my dear friend's FAGAGAGA comment. If
you permit me it I send you them so that you pass it to the net of our
friends.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------
Mail Art and Web Art


                                                            "Reading the
commendations of nowadays to the Internet and investigating the individual
websites, we remembered that the mailartists has been making the same
activity 10, 20 and, sometimes, from 30 years ago. The decentralization of
the art and the communication to distance from the art centers of the world,
in charge of the artist-s-mail, they happened many before the World Wide
Web".

Fagagaga, 15 of Nov.&#180;99, personal letter to me


The things don't happen scatteredly, all are linked. The art in the Net of
nowadays is not casual and it is originated, certainly, in Mail Art. Who
have been the objectives of the art mail from its beginnings in the first
experiences of Ray Johnson of half-filled of the 60s, but the communication
and the interation? Ray sent unconcluded works to his friends so that they
ended them. Born from that original project, nowadays the Mail Art, already
at the end of century, preserve with great difficulty its force and its
impulse in spite of the changes caused by the scientific and technological
advances and the foregone absorption of the market. It is true that so much
years of validity have weakened that
remotion of values and that today a growing institutionalization, absorption
and banalitization are attended, on the part of the stablisment, of the
principles that consecrated to the communication like only representative of
our art, above the inconstant and whimsical artistic fashions, the more than
the times imposed by the market of the art. The decentralization of the art
is an implicit phenomenon in the art mail because a current of artistic
specific expression centralized in an is not "ism" (like Surrealism or
Abstraccionism, etc.) but of an artistic form that admits any half or
support and any aesthetic well-known current and by knowing:  "The Eternal
Network" of Robert Filliou, the utopian project, perhaps unreachable, of the
permanent communication of all through all the available means.

Even we suffer the confusion or false contradiction betwen art and
communication. The artistic product is, above all, a product of
communication and therefore part inseparable of the social production. On
the other hand, the same as the rest of the products that the man creates,
is constituted in aiding of that same production (upon favoring or hinder
its processes). In some contexts its nature "artistic" will prevail
(museums, galleries, classes, etc.). In another one its nature of instrument
of communication will prevail. But, both facets are inseparable. In this
particular form of art (since it is a symbolic form of expressing our
reality) prevails the value of use above the merely mercantile or of change.
The components of relationship of communication (or fatics)  prevail and
predispose to the talkative act.

There is, perhaps, the reasons of its persistense like current of artistic
expression: it don't take place for the market of the art, for which it
isn&#180;t sold neither there are juries that select the works, neither limits in
relation to the techniques employees neither in relation to the currents of
ideological expression or aesthetics, not refund, etc. Neither interests the
artistic, either literary gender, plastic, musical, even the own presence of
the
mail-artist could be considered as talkative act (like Turism Art, derived
of the Mail Art), etc. Lastly, neither there is categories neither elites,
neither upper-class neither beginners, neither leaders neither submissive,
neither obligations of no nature. One could enter and leave from the nets of
communication without no problem. However, fruit of the progressive
merchandising of the Mail Art is begun already to appear groups of
artist-s-mail that, with the pretext of conserving and improve the aesthetic
levels and of assuring the edition of good catalogs, they are organizing
exhibitions for invitation sponsoreds for Galleries and Institutions applied
to the market of the art.

Would  Networking (name that adopts the Mail Art upon adding another means
of communication to distance like fax and electronic mail), be pointing out
the new road that will travel the art of the 2000 in order to resume its
primary function of communication to the service of the community, before
the money and the merchandising come to corrupt those tacit mechanisms?
Nowadays, of face to the 2000, many critics are surprised  of the character
masive and interactive of the art that is generated in the Wegsites, without
knowing that those nets and those characteristics already existed from ends
of the 60s., in the artistic work of those pioneers that saw in the
communication to distance or Mail Art the means for which diffuse their
ideals of understanding between all in a climate of respect, happiness and
worthy life. Who don't remember those booklets or postcards that we arrived
with the application that you will add something and pass to other artists
in the net (the "add and pass on") or those postcards to which should we
make give the turn to the world through the mail conserving the postals
stamps and the postmark? Or the incomplete leaves of stamps of apocryphal
mail that we should complete? Or the accusations against the violation of
the human rights and against the outrage of the dictatorships?  And the
exhibitions in pro of the freedom of political prisoners (like, for example,
Mandela in the 70s.) or for the right to the sovereignty enslaved of the
countries (like, for example, Cuba and Panama), etc.? And many, many other
projects. In fact the interactivity and the communication are the
foundations that sustain the nets of Mail Art. And those basic
characteristics have been transmitted the Networking and to the Art in the
Weg.

------------------------------------------------------
Fraternal greetings</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>21.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: Reading the Network</subject>
<from>Gary Hall</from>
<to>&lt;new-media-curating@jiscmail.ac.uk&gt;</to>
<date>Sat, 23 Feb 2013 22:02:05 +0000</date>
<content>While we're waiting for Clive's remake of 'Ideals Die', perhaps I can 
attempt some speculations (one could almost call them 'inventive 
provocations' if they were more detailed) on what it might mean to think 
both research and politics as 'the domain of those who do not know' in 
the context of some of the contributions to the discussion so far. In 
particular, I'd like to try to find a way of thinking this idea 
affirmatively together with:

Clive's concern about having a 'common direction';
Ken Friedman's comments about the concept of The Eternal Network being a 
concept of community, and about the apparent failure of artists to 
create network systems that thrive and develop for longer than a year or 
two;
and Helen Pritchard's reference to the common, for Hardt and Negri, 
being discovered and produced through joyful encounters.

The latter brought to mind Nick Mirzeoff's disappointment with their 
book Declaration, on the basis that, for Hardt and Negri:

'&#8220;living information&#8221; is said to be gained by physical proximity. Thus, 
at the encampments "the participants experienced the power of creating 
new political affects through being together." While that seems clearly 
true, there&#8217;s a hint of Romantic nostalgia in the evocation of the 
letter over the email and the distaste for social media. Entirely absent 
here... is any mention of the role of photography and moving image 
distribution. From the al-Jazeera feeds of Tunisia and Tahrir to the 
Livestreaming of Occupy, web-disseminated video has indeed created a new 
way of being together without which it&#8217;s hard to understand the 
formation of global affinities that we&#8217;ve witnessed over the past 18 
months.'[1]

That in turn made me think of how - as we know from the work of Dymitri 
Kleiner and others [2] - the idea of the commons is a place where the 
interests of a large number of diverse groups, movements, organisations 
and constituencies &#8211;  including network technologists, media theorists, 
artists, activists  and curators - come together, but also exist in a 
state of 'tension' and are often demonstrably incompatible and 
incommensurable. For example,  some in the Free Software community argue 
for copyleft which is a use of copyright law, but one that&#8217;s designed to 
serve the opposite ends to those such a copyright or Creative Commons 
license is usually put. Instead of supporting the ownership of private 
property, copyleft defends the freedom of everyone to copy, distribute, 
develop and improve software or any other work covered by such a 
licence. Meanwhile, others question just how left politically copyleft 
actually is. Rather than preventing access to information and source 
code from being restricted, those on the political left tend to be more 
concerned with developing a free, common culture, and promoting the 
equal and just distribution of wealth among the creative workers who 
produce it. To this end, Kleiner himself advocates for copyleft to be 
transformed into copyfarleft, in which creative workers themselves own 
the means of production, and only prevent use of their works which is 
not based in the commons. Then again, many anti-intellectual property 
advocates in the Pirate movement argue against copyright and the use of 
licenses altogether, regarding them as remnants  from a previous age.

Now all this could of course be taken as providing one illustration as 
to why it is difficult for network technologists, media theorists, 
artists, activists  and curators to create durable, scalable network 
systems that thrive and develop for longer than a year or two - 
especially if we are attempting to understand the politics of the common 
in terms of a known 'arbitrary closure' (such as 'continuity' 
possibly?). Or, it could be taken as suggesting we should perhaps 
approach the question of community, of being together and holding 
something in common, a little differently - in terms of a certain 
conflict, antagonism and incommensurability, and thus as being not the 
domain of those who already know what community and the common are in 
advance, but more 'the domain of those who do not know'.  It is 
something of this kind that Michael Bauwens seems to be pointing toward 
when he talks about the larger cultural and social shift  he associates 
with peer-to-peer networks of production:

'The fact that the commons interfaces with capital is not necessarily 
negative. It can be, but it is not necessarily so.... Critics ask you to 
choose one or the other, and what I am trying to say is that it is not 
either or, but both. They are both happening at the same time, we are 
de-commodifying and we are commodifying. ... I find it really 
interesting that, within the system we already have, communal dynamics 
are actually happening. My point of view is not to take an 
anti-capitalist view, but to take a post-capitalist view.... I think 
that is what happened in the past as well, I do not think that the 
Christians fought the Roman Empire or fought Feudalism as such; they 
just created a world based on their new logic .... The people no longer 
believe in the mainstream system. They may not know what they want, but 
people in the French Revolution did not know what they want, and people 
in the Russian Revolution did not know what they want.'[3]

All of which appears to provide another way of thinking community 
together with performativity. For (and I'm just speculating here 
remember) how might we set about creating such an (as yet) unknown 
community or world  - especially if we're concerned to try to avoid the 
situation we've seen Stuart Hall fall into, where we're open to 
questioning everything... except certain 'arbitrary closures' that 
establish boundary lines around what we supposedly do know, such as 
politics and the relation to the social formation in Hall's case. 
Wouldn&#8217;t we have to try to performatively create such a community via 
how we act as network technologists, media theorists, artists, 
activists  and curators? And do so &#8216;without any guarantees&#8217; (Stuart Hall 
again) that this would happen?[4]

Let me try to illustrate what this might involve with the example of 
Graham Harman and his book on Bruno Latour, Prince of Networks (and I'm 
referring to authors and texts that are part of the networks of networks 
I help to curate and care for quite deliberately here).[5] Harman of 
course is known for advocating a 'new logic' via Latour and others, 
based on the argument that &#8216;there is no privilege for a unique human 
subject&#8217;, and that with this &#8216;a total democracy of objects replaces the 
long tyranny of human beings in philosophy&#8217;.[6] However,  even though 
Prince of Networks is available open access through re.press,[7] that 
doesn&#8217;t mean a network of people, objects or actants can take Harman&#8217;s 
text, rewrite and improve it, and in this way produce a work derived 
from it that can then be legally published. Since Harman has chosen to 
publish his book under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND licence, that would 
still be to infringe his claim to copyright: both the right Harman 
wishes to retain to be identified as the author of Prince of Networks, 
and to have it attributed to him precisely as a unique human subject; 
but also Harman&#8217;s right of integrity, which enables him as a human being 
to claim it as his intellectual property, and which grants him the 
privilege of refusing to allow the &#8216;original&#8217;, fixed and final form of 
Prince of Networks to be modified or distorted by others, be they humans 
or objects.

So how might we begin to think about how we could act differently in 
this respect? Well, one starting point for doing so is perhaps offered 
by Lawrence Liang's troubling of the 'distinction between an agent who 
performs an action and the action that the agent performs.' Here, 'an 
agent is constituted by the actions that he or she performs, or an agent 
is the actions performed and nothing more. Interestingly, what this 
means when it comes to written texts - and this brings us back neatly to 
Helen's mention of joyful encounters - is that: 'to assert "This is my 
poem" within the social imaginary of intellectual property is to make a 
claim that sounds very much like "This is my pen", whereas in fact, it 
might be more accurate to think of its claim as the same as "This is my 
friend".'

Gary


[1] 
http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/O2012/2012/05/09/on-hardt-and-negris-declaration/
[2] Dmytri Kleiner, The Telecommumist Manifesto, Amsterdam: Institute of 
Network Cultures, 2010, 
http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto/.
[3] Michel Bauwens in Sam Kinsley, &#8216;TOWARDS PEER-TO-PEER ALTERNATIVES: 
An interview with Michel Bauwens&#8217;, Culture Machine, 2012, 
http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/467/497.
[4] 'The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees', in D. Morley 
and Kuan-Hsing Chen (eds.) Stuart Hall : Critical Dialogues in Cultural 
Studies (London/ New York: Routledge 1996) pp26-29.
[5] http://openhumanitiespress.org/new-metaphysics.html.
[6] Graham Harman, &#8216;The Importance of Bruno Latour for Philosophy&#8217;, 
Cultural Studies Review, Volume 13, Number 1, March 2007, p.36.
[7] 
http://re-press.org/books/prince-of-networks-bruno-latour-and-metaphysics/.
[8] Lawrence Liang, &#8216;The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book&#8217;, in Gaelle 
Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, eds, Access to Knowledge In the Age of 
Intellectual Property (New York: Zone Books, 2010) p.286, 283-284.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>lizvlx</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Jun 19 00:37:36 AEST 2018</date>
<content>&#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; 
HELLO

I dont know if you can hear me, I can hear you but I dont know if this is a good connection it keeps breaking o

Thank you Shu Lea for the invite and I dare you I have read all the communication that has been going on and I am sure I did not at all understand it but then it is not understanding that I crave but inspirazione.
I medias res. A topic to start from. 

&#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033;  
The network within me (cave: relates to immersive species and the before mentioned DNA fingerprints)
I have a vast genetic network within me.

24% Celtic/Hallstatt
21% Greek
20% Eastern European 
13% Scandinavian
06% Northern African
05% Italian
04% Finnish
03% Ashkenazi Jewish
02% West European
02% Central American
01% Nigerian

I am many. I have gotten these results about 3 months ago. I am watching my relationship to far away netnodes of natures and cultures. I watched the GERMEX game yesterday knowing that I am I tiny bit Mexican too. Does it make a difference? Or is my love connection to Mexico more relevant? Or is there a love connection because of my genetic network?

&#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033;
What does it mean to be indigenous? (As my father is from the Hallstatt area my Celtic roots are my indigenous roots)
I know I have never had any understanding of Western Europe and this mirrors in my genetic network. 
Being pregnant with my first child re-taught me what it feels like to be not-one &#8212; looking at my genetics I feel relieved to be not one but many.

I am wondering how does my genetic intranet connect to the internet.

I would like to discuss with you as DNA fingerprints were already mentioned before - the implications of this kind of DNA fingerprinting
I would like to discuss with you about the immersiveness of our all genome
I would like to discuss with you. 

As a note: immersive species might really be a problematic term (I guess the immersive species themselves would argue such) - but I do think that there are immersive predators - as pointed out with the island/cat example.

&#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033; &#128033;
Postscript: I am not a theoreticienne - neither am I very versed in contemporary art practice besides my own. My influences are strictly Mozart Hallstatt Culture Marilyn Manson Rammstein KLF Kenyan Newspapers Montessori Macroeconomics Thinking Local Acting Global Norwegian TV Series Trees and Stones and https://youtu.be/awY1MRlMKMc. 
Postscript02: at UBERMORGEN we are currently working on making art for the alt.right. this is more bout undermining the current networks of the heartless psychopaths, we can talk bout that later if ya want.

lizvlx</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>BStalbaum</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Jun 19 05:45:22 AEST 2018</date>
<content>DNA kits have become hilarious, painfully unaware self parodies of the 
will toward cultural appropriation. (Just for one example: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84LnTrQ2us8 ) Of course I say this as a 
citizen of the U.S. Our context is particular and perverse, one in which 
some substantial proportion of the white population believes they are in 
the "blood line" (we still have a lot of strong premodern beliefs like 
"the blood"...) of indigenous North American peoples. Most of whom we 
killed, so the common case of whites who make very strong claims to 
native ancestry is particularly perverse. It is only ~100 years since 
the open, armed hunting of native people was still taking place here, 
basically unopposed by civil society, even in now liberal California. 
Actually I live in one of the last places in the US where this genocidal 
practice was commonly practiced, and is well documented. But people in 
my state hardly own up to it, and my own University system is deeply 
implicated. (Look up the history of Kroeber Hall at Berkeley, for 
example.) To put a personal spin on the matter, I have a couple of true 
believers in my own very white family. Honestly, people who have "dream 
catchers", believe they are part of a tribe - they are not registered 
and can not register with any actual tribe - and who believe that their 
blood puts them in deeper touch with the spirits of the land. I am not 
popular at family events, as you might imagine;-) Calling these false 
beliefs out, even among whites only, is still quite incendiary here.

An other example of the obscene nature of this common identity theft 
comes in the figure of US senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. She 
was raised with these false beliefs, that she had natives in her family 
tree, and yes I do believe she has suffered a lot of well deserved 
embarrassment in the process of slowly coming around to personally 
owning her false family narrative. She is an otherwise sympathetic 
figure in most ways, and I should note, our president has belittled her 
in an explicitly racist manner, demonstrating the continuum between the 
soft and hard forms of racism in my country.

DNA is fraught, we should be very careful call it out when we see it 
used as an identity prop for cultural appropriation. Our networks are 
full of this kind of theft and positioning, as if such reductive DNA 
results can possibly mean more than our experience within the more 
tangible web of social relations; how we individually experience 
privilege and discrimination. (Including generational effects.)

Or that your DNA is what makes you a German or a Scot, as in the 
ridiculous commercial for Ancestry [.com] But in the US, the commercial 
shows how common these weird and often racist beliefs are. It is so 
sick, I feel like there must be lot of cultural specificity to it. I'd 
love to hear about how these DNA kits are playing out in other places.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.2</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>Christiane Robbins</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Jun 19 10:33:04 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Brett,

I couldn&#8217;t agree more in that DNA kits are ripe for parody &#8230; the clich&#233;s the stereotyping, the narrow bandwidth of race is utterly sophomoric and misleading.  That said, I take issue with the focus of your position below - the &#8220;will toward cultural appropriation&#8221;, identity theft and the rush to judgement of an the exploitive branding as an identity prop for purposes of cultural appropriation&#8230;. or if, as you may be implying, for financial gain.

I, too, state this as a citizen of the USA.  My own ancestor was Robert Coe - an original puritan ( colonizer) displaced from the UK and arriving in MA - and a rather prolific one at that!.  My blood lines ( as it were ) speak to the amalgam of immigration patterns in the east coast of USA since 1635 .    These include the Lenape Tribe ( the original peoples,)  the British, the Irish, the German, the Italian, the Spanish, the Finnish and the Lebanese - and all of these speak to their own migratory patterns throughout the millennia that in themselves have been racialized and nationalized.  

I am simply an exemplary example of 4 centuries of migratory co-mingling in what is now called the USA.   All are verifiable in my DNA analysis as well as the patriarchal names ( Coe, Maier, Cassidy, Allaway, etc.) And most significantly via an oral history that has been handed down to me through my matriarchal line - my mother.  This oral history is most incredible but now pales in responding to the evidentiary demands of verifiable data analysis of the 21st c the DNA analysis which has now taken center stage .  This is simply an apt metaphor for our moment in history.

FYI, throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th century in the USA the Lenape tribes ( comprising 3 clans in NY, NJ, PA CT,and MD) my own ancestors, were decimated first by the Dutch, then the French and then the English - i.e.  Amherst and disordering of the disbursement of infected blankets.  As we all understand, colonial brutality, enslavement and native disappearance spread in waves across the racialized continent.

My understanding is that numerous others, including Elizabeth Warren, also responded to an oral history in their claims to Cherokee blood.  I do not automatically associate this with Identity Theft - at all.  Anyone who is actually familiar with Native American Tribal histories understands this respected oral tradition - as well as the tribal politics due the fairly recent financial gains by tribal investments and assets.    As the survivors fled south - some following the "Trail of Tears" they became one with the Cherokee tribes who eventually settled in Oklahoma - and again co-mingled.  In scapegoating Elizabeth Warren - you seem to do so from limited understanding of these histories and their respective operative and systemic racisms.

Thanks to all for a stimulating conversation - once again!

Best,

Chris</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.3</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>Melinda Rackham</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Jun 19 18:49:56 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Hi all,
 great monthly topics.. and DNA talk compels me to respond..
my take on DNA  is rather different as an Adopted person without knowledge of my racial/cultural heritage

I did as a kid dream I was misplaced child of European royalty, but alas my birth mum was just a young unmarried working class woman from the poorer suburbs shamed and bullied by society and religion into letting nuns take her child. she had another daughter she lost to adoption two years later. I have never met my 1/2 sister.

so I am using DNA to locate my relatives - and I agree ist full of clich&#233;s and stereotyping , especially when one runs ones results through different companies (ancestry, 23andMe, my heritage etc) . their ancestral algorithms are based on estimates and probabilities, not certainties,  and I come out racially differently in each result.

My Scandanavian is overtaken by western European, I get to be more english and less Irish/Scottish in others, my precious bit of Persian decreases, while my Italian gains.  As well there are no DNA testing companies that have reliable reference SNP data from Indigenous Australians -so bad luck if you are looking.

For me it is flawed on so many levels , but serious as its the only linkage I have to my paternal heritage, and to my adopted 1/2 sister. It also answers a few questions for me, like why having grown up in outback Australia I feel so at home safe and comfortable in European forests - why I feel very familiar with Denmark and Danish. 

Those that have the luxury of connection to heritage, I don't think could really understand what its like to not see anyone u look like, and that mirroring is a vital component of development, and have no threads to  cultures, society, or land.  Its a little like being a refugee from birth .. grateful for food and shelter but stricken with grief and loss - cant go back uncertain about going fwd, a placeless person.

DNA promises a lot, but it doesn't deliver - almost like gambling- get a lead follow it, then people don't respond, etc.. .MyHeritage has a pro bono initiative DNA Quest which is supposed to  help adoptees and their birth families reunite through DNA testing- sending out 15,000  DNA kits for free.  But u still need the dedication to do the work to find and follow links and build thier network and info.  My favourite line in their blurb:
" We hope to make this project a shining light for corporate philanthropy and an example to be followed by other commercial companies in their own lines of expertise, to help make our world a better place."

And in all of this heart-felt searching, most companies ask if they can retain our DNA records for medical research .. building a Biodata Empire, and most people, thinking they are helping their fellows, say yes.

happy testing 

Kerri Anne Burgess
as I was on my birth certificate before I was legally transformed into Melinda Rackham</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.4</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>Christiane Robbins</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Jun 20 02:09:50 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Good Morning All -

Well&#8230;.this thread is taking an unexpected twist.  Luxury may be in the mind of the beholder here relative to taking racial and cultural heritage.  

Melinda, I, too, was adopted - from Catholic Charities - a larger story here and there.  But the searching for answers - the promise that is inherent in offerings - the services -  of these corporate entities - are predicated (as are many commodities) upon our own fantastical projections.  Seems like a child&#8217;s common fantasy was coming from Royalty &#8230; in my case, the Kennedys :). Until I was in my twenties, I was told I was of a different ethnicity - and no one was the wiser as my physical appearance can lean in several regions depending on one&#8217;s perspective.  So was I placeless, perhaps, but somehow I did feel anchored - a feeling for which I cannot account.  Perhaps it was that I was raised in the same region that my families had been for centuries, as opposed to being totally displaced geographically as well.  The Lenape( the original people)  had been in the Americas for a millennia or more.

Nonetheless, I had found my birth mother through an Underground Railroad of sorts - a &#8220;mole" working in the Federal Gov with whom I had been put in touch with by one of my students who had been working on a documentary on adoption.  This underground detective did this the hard way - looking through archival paper documents - this was the 90&#8217;s and the govt. was not yet fully digitized. My matriarchal line held the Lenape line along with the Coe lineage ( British.) among a few more.  

The oral tradition had not been handed down to me over a lifetime but through a few visits in my adulthood that with were abruptly halted with her untimely death.  It was she that told me of the Lenape.  Ironically, the Coe family refutes any Lenape lineage as offered thru their familial DNA analysis - which the family archivist is steadfastly tracking online and which is how I traced myself back to the Puritans.  BTW, I found the Coes on FB -  When my mother who told me of the Lenape and also made me promise ( honest to God ) to track down the church (land)  in Manhattan that had been &#8220;stolen&#8221; from her family - talk about a fantasy - not to mention a financial incentive :). The Lenape is now represented by a 6% in the proverbial pie chart of my DNA analysis.  I had previously understood that it was more prominent but then again I have only taken one DNA test.  Nonetheless, the matriarchal oral tradition is operative &#8230; although not verifiable by our evidentiary analytical mechanisms &#8230;. yet.  This is a chasm.

Actually, I took a DNA analysis to find out about my father - of whom no one would speak.  This also gave rise to many fantasies - not the least of which was the Sopranos - Italian, New Jersey - you may know what I am getting at.  But as they say there has been no cheese down that hole and so my new fantasy is that I may have been an Immaculate Conception :). The DNA analysis has not been helpful in sorting this one out -

Need to run but once again, many thanks for such a unexpected and enriching conversation.

Chris</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.5</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>lizvlx</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Jun 20 04:04:58 AEST 2018</date>
<content>&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; hello again&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; four things&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; I read this text and it is to be read: https://eand.co/why-were-one-step-away-from-the-abyss-4ef01d70937b &lt;https://eand.co/why-were-one-step-away-from-the-abyss-4ef01d70937b&gt; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; DNA - I am not adopted, the only great grandparent that is unknown in my family is the Roman Catholic priest that was my grandfather&#8217;s father :D .. But I have no known greek ancestry, neither northern African. I suspect that there might be a cluster of Sicilian DNA in upper Austria - but that is a work in progress theory, I still have a great aunt that is alive and I need to make her get tested to find out more. But thats more on a personal note.&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; DNA - the Datenschutzaspekt (I rather use German when it comes to data protection as there is no powerful terminology in English) - the problem when signing up for a DNA analysis is a) trusting the company that they won&#8217;t fuck around with your data (and if you live in the USA you will be a fool to trust em) and b) you are making a decision not about your own DNA but for the whole of your close family. This is an impossible decision - me mistress of the impossible of course had no problem tackling this hurdle. Seriously, I would have never taken the test if I were living in the USA, too dangerous. I decided to do it as I do believe that future will be one where everybody&#8217;s DNA will be screened known bartered with etc. There is no way to stop this (the only good thing to get out of these tests is have a non-mutt person is the exemption of the rule and all this race bullshit just does not compute). &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;Heartless psychopaths. What a lovely topic. For this topic, UBERMORGEN has been researching for the last year. We are calling it Binary Primitivism. We focused on analysing: pornography (also over time, trends, normalisation of criminal sexual abuse, hypnoporn) incels (thats the notorious Involuntary Celibates; we had done a piece on Elliot Rodger aka Santa Barbara Killer a little time ago and he is not the GOD of the movement, a movement that is terrorising online and RL communities) Alt.right (mostly their social media tactics of - again - immersiveness Online Gaming Environments (well u gotta play with em boys). Got some links hereto: https://player.vimeo.com/video/137939689 &lt;https://player.vimeo.com/video/137939689&gt; - video &#8220;Nice Vanilla Latte&#8221;, feat. Elliot Rodger, UBERMORGEN 2015 https://twitter.com/ElliotRodgerGod &lt;https://twitter.com/ElliotRodgerGod&gt; - his twitter account that is still live and now used by a friend of his DO NOT REPORT THIS ACCOUNT COZ THIS A GREAT RESSOURCE http://vaporwave.breitbart.pro/ &lt;http://vaporwave.breitbart.pro/&gt; this is unreleased work in progress - one example of imagery etc we produce and then insert into the networks of the heartless psychopaths.&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;&#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;  &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017; &#128017;
BYEBYE/LIZ</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.6</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>Vanouse, Paul</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Jun 20 05:00:55 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Good afternoon everyone,

I also thought this was an unexpected direction in this thread.  Of course, the threadlike underground mycelium of many mushrooms is/are known to grow in ways that seem non-formulaic, unstructured and spontaneous. And this is the very property that gives rise to Delueze and Guattari&#8217;s rich modeling of the rhizomatic underground network of flows, deterritorializations, lines of flight&#8230; indeed probably the very rich materialist models and metaphors that led many of us to the interest in mycelium (it/them)sel(f/vs) in the first place.  So in this sense, I suppose a flow into any unexpected direction shouldn&#8217;t take us too much by surprise;-)

My practice has generally undermined any strongly genetically determinist basis of identity, such as the notion that we are defined by our DNA, or represented by our DNA, or easily individuated by DNA technologies. Furthermore, I&#8217;ve criticized the slippage between genes, race and geographical place&#8212;in particular the idea of any fixity to these relations.

However, I engage this critique of identity of course from a fascination with identity. My mother is a Jamaican of African descent, from a country village near Brownstown, and much of her lineage isn&#8217;t documented.  My father is white and was adopted with two non-genetically related siblings into a French-Canadian/American family in Minnesota.  Probably no mystery why I&#8217;ve been critical of simplistic categories of race and identity.

What I find particularly interesting about this thread in a mycelium discussion tending toward DNA and genetics is that genetics are always portrayed with an arboreal model, i.e. &#8220;the family tree&#8221;, &#8220;the family tree of man&#8221;, etc.  Deleuze and Guattari found the teleology and patterning of branching, as well as the forever hierarchic relationship between branch and trunk as something to be resisted.  The branching model fits an ontology of hierarchy, whereas the rhizome model fits a philosophy of becoming.

Where might the thread go from here?

Cheers,

Paul</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.7</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>annet dekker</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Jun 20 06:58:07 AEST 2018</date>
<content>hi all,
thanks shu lea for inviting me to this inspiring discussion and sorry 
for the delay... i was/am trying to find the words to respond and still 
find it hard to insert them - i feel i have little to add to debates and 
discussion about dna, genetics, or mycelium for that matter, while i 
find them extremely urgent and fascinating, i'm still struggling with 
the challenges of 'human' networks.

so, for a short intro, in the last decade i've been increasingly busy 
with finding ways to preserve net art / net cultures, most of which can 
now be read in articles and a book 
&lt;http://library.memoryoftheworld.org/b/qMW7Yz83DPILOYpcDO_vYmC7utjP7iiWw0MCXXaXVFaOz8q3&gt;(s). 
one of the key possibilities i believe is in forming networks of [human 
and machinic] hardware and software, largely inspired by shu lea's 
notion of the cycle i'm interested in how networks form, break, disrupt 
or mutate. i'm trying to see how we can put these method into action in 
different fields and for other needs.

reading the essay linked by liz, after a discussion about the power of 
'songlines' and how the left find it hard to respond to the alt.right, 
i'm increasingly aware of the urgency to find and come up with 
alternative modes of organisation(s). this month's discussion comes in 
and out touching on these dilemmas in one way or another of course. i 
very much enjoyed the story of the kombucha, and how mycelium networks 
can help to think beyond the human=machine rethoric. and the project of 
a 'feral MBA' is a fantastic way to counter the current business and 
politics.

as mentioned i'm not too familiar with ins and outs of mycelium 
networks/infrastructures, so forgive my ignorance, but i would love to 
hear from others more about how these types of infrastructures could be 
'cycled' into other projects and made productive in other grounds. in 
other words, perhaps pragmatic, how to take into account the human 
scale(s), how to connect and, moreover, how to make sustainable these 
(post-net) networks?

annet
aaaan.net</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.8</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>Aviva Rahmani</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Jun 20 11:58:52 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Just a quick comment on trees and hierarchies, vertical space doesn&#8217;t necessarily imply hierarchy. A tree&#8217;s canopy, for example is at least as important to its survival as its roots and all the interconnected mycellae of its underground networks. I would suggest a more realistic conceptualization of these spatial relationships would be to consider permaculture- in which each spatial layer is equally important and all are interconnected. Further more, it might be considered that any trees&#8217; role is grounded in watershed dynamics, the atmosphere, soil, food webs, etc. Even a sentinel tree is only an artifact of these much larger relationships. Re: rehearsals for a network and other systems, it might be interesting to consider about the sentinel tree, that what is obvious may not be what&#8217;s important to pay attention to. The corollary in present politics is that the strong man may not be the real danger. It is the followers of the strong man and why they follow.

Aviva Rahmani, PhD</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.9</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>John Jordan</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Jun 20 19:24:39 AEST 2018</date>
<content> &#8220;The new picture of reality that the arts and sciences promise is one of a deeply sentient and meaningful universe. It is poetic &#8211; productive of new life forms and ever-new embodied experiences. It is expressive of all the subjective experiences that individuals make. It is a universe where human subjects are no longer separated from other organisms but rather form a meshwork of existential relationships &#8211; a quite real &#8216;web of life&#8217;. &#8220;Andreas Weber ,

Enlivenment: Towards a fundamental shift in the concepts of nature, &lt;https://www.boell.de/en/2013/02/01/enlivenment-towards-fundamental-shift-concepts-nature-culture-and-politics&gt; culture and politics, 2013 Heinrich Bo&#776;ll Foundation. 

The key is that we begin to think like a forest which means become sensitive to its sensitivity, to the sense of  every being in it, from the mycelial hyphe that spread through the ground building soil and feeding the forest, to the ants that farm and  harvest mushrooms, the woodpecker that profits from the fungi that rot wood to build her nest. The forest is a a wave of life, ever moving, ever adapting, ever weaving spaces that enable forms of life to flower, ever changing and diversifying. But the key lesson it gives us 21st century humans is inhabiting,  how do we  really inhabit worlds, which means giving up the hyper mobility of the cultural class and learning to become the territory rather than floating over it with our virtual networks and airplanes. 

We must see the forest and its life as our teachers, sometimes teaching us things that are totally counterintuitive to our cultural frames, such as the fact that the spores of Arbuscural Mycorrhizae (non mushroom forming mycelium that connects 95 % of the plant roots on the planet) have more than one nuclei, in fact many of them have between 800 and 35, 000 DIFFERENT nuclei and not all the same DNA but the Genetic material of other fungi AND other species !! These warehouses of genetic information defy the biological species concept !!!! 

Like lovers carve their names on trees, the earliest books were engraved on beech bark, hence the origins of the word &#8220;book&#8221; - &#8220;boc&#8221; meaning &#8220;beech tree&#8221;.
Under the canopy of an ancient Athenian olive grove, home to Plato&#8217;s academy, Phaedrus asked Socrates why he never ventured beyond the city walls into the countryside. &#8220;I'm a lover of learning&#8221; Socrates answered &#8220;trees and open country won't teach me anything, whereas men in the town will.&#8221; The grove was later chopped down to make siege machines.
The soundtrack of western &#8220;civilisation&#8221; is the noise of the book of &#8216;nature' being slammed shut and the rumble of war machines approaching. We are told that Nature is mute, it has nothing to teach us, except that it is a battlefield of all against all. But as the war against our climate and ecosystems tips the physiology of the planet into chaos, the myth that Nature is just &#8216;red in tooth and claw&#8217;, is unravelling.
The more we study the living world the more we come to realise that the tendency is actually to associate, build relationships, and cooperate. From trees that work with fungi to share sugars and information between themselves to bees pollinating flowers, nature abounds with reciprocity. The fittest are in fact those that relate the best. Perhaps it&#8217;s no surprise that a culture that rewards greed and domination would rather we forget the true lessons of the natural world. Perhaps its no surprise that capitalism wants us to be mobile and rootless, because then we cannot fall in love with a place and if your not in love with a place then you can never defend it from being destroyed and turned into another machine of profit and growth for the gods of the economy.
Susan simards work on the relationships between trees in forests is gorgeous&#8230;.she calls it the WOOD WIDE WEB. 
https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_simard_how_trees_talk_to_each_other

PETER MACOY&#8217;s BOOK - RADICAL MYCOLOGY is a gem of art, activism and science merging together in  practice and philosophy - 
https://chthaeus.com/collections/books-1/products/radical-mycology-a-treatise-on-seeing-working-with-fungi
THE RADICAL MYCOLOGY WEB SITE HAS SOME GREAT WEBINARS and resources for those of us who want to become fungi and forests...

https://radicalmycology.com/

here is to the mysteries of mycelium, the bridges between life and death...
yours JJ
AKA my new drag performance MISS CELIUM</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.10</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>Frederic Neyrat</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Jun 20 20:24:22 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Dear John Jordan,

Your post leads me to two questions (some questions I have these days
vis-&#224;-vis the ecological perspective in general):

1/ One of our goals should be, I think, to go beyond the opposition
between "becom[ing]
the territory" vs "floating over it with our virtual networks and
airplanes" because the risk of this opposition is to produce the
fetishization of the territory - but what's about migrants, nomads, those
who'd prefer not coming back to the land? What's about the vital aspect of
existential deterritorializations? Let's think about Debord's
psycho-geography, using ecology in order to sustain an existential
"d&#233;rive"...

2/ Is it necessary to personify Earth, forests, etc.? Fighting against the
denial of the non-human is one thing, but symmetrizing humans and
non-humans is something else (the "lesson" of nature, forests "teaching"
us, etc.). Actually, it seems very difficult to leave the non-human being
other than us!

My best,

Frederic Neyrat</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.11</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 3]</subject>
<from>Shu Lea Cheang</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu Jun 21 17:18:47 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Dear empyrians, mushrooms, trees, dolly and pollies, fishy creatures and 
cultures of mutating selves....

Let me again, pick up a few threads here...

Paul Vanouse on 19/06/18
"What I find particularly interesting about this thread in a mycelium 
discussion tending toward DNA and genetics is that genetics are always 
portrayed with an arboreal model, i.e. &#8220;the family tree&#8221;, &#8220;the family 
tree of man&#8221;, etc.  Deleuze and Guattari found the teleology and 
patterning of branching, as well as the forever hierarchic relationship 
between branch and trunk as something to be resisted.  The branching 
model fits an ontology of hierarchy, whereas the rhizome model fits a 
philosophy of becoming."

Indeed, somehow the DNA investigation got some public confessions on 
ancestry, roots tracing.
Aviva is right to defend the trees grounding in watershed dynamics, not 
necessary hierarchical.

In the case of MNS, no funding (as yet), thus, not much (top down) 
management to speak of ...
thus the networks inevitably "form, break, disrupt or mutate" (annet 
dekker 19/06/18)

recap Annet-
"how networks form, break, disrupt or mutate...... how these types of 
infrastructures could be 'cycled' into other projects and made 
productive in other grounds. in other words, perhaps pragmatic, how to 
take into account the human scale(s), how to connect and, moreover, how 
to make sustainable these (post-net) networks?"

Let's talk about human scale(s), any takers??

and thanks to JJ's radical mycology link
https://radicalmycology.com/

Do the becoming imply territorial take over?
Frederic Neyrat's two questions lead us to  a counter-narrative that 
does not allow us so easily certify our assumptions to be 'OTHERS"
(aya, human, non-human, chthulucene, do we have kinship in the making??)

I think i am gonna need to stand still for a bit till someone takes me 
out of the ruins................

over
sl</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.12</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-]  rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Shu Lea Cheang</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat Jun 23 18:25:11 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Dear all

thanks to Fran llich's latest posting (as promised) which coming at the 
tail end of week3 serves well to lead us into week 4. I believe there 
would  be some follow up for Fran's tremendous endeavours, Fran, please 
stay with us for this week 4.

This week we focus on proposals for speculative, tangible networks -  
the unrealized, to be realized, the anticipated, to be anticipated, the 
trashed and the in progress, deep sleep conjuration, deep water dive in, 
deep root expounding.... we open up this week to welcome all your 
proposal contributions.

I am honored to welcome the following three heavy-weight thinkers, 
writers, hackers, weavers+++  whose work i admired much to join us this 
week.

Francesca da Rimini (Adelaide, Australia) is an artist, writer, 
filmmaker and researcher.She was awarded an Australia Council New Media 
Fellowship in 1999, and her work has been widely published and 
exhibited. She is a founding member of the cyberfeminist art collective 
VNS Matrix, intercontinental group identity_runners (with Diane Ludin 
and Agnese Trocchi, and In Her Interior (with Virginia Barratt). Recent 
collaborations include performance/installation /lips becoming beaks, 
hexing the alien/ and /The Darkening/. She periodically adds to her 
labyrinth at LambdaMOO to continue hexing capitalism from within the beast.

Denis Roio aka Jaromil (Amsterdam, NL) is a purpose driven software 
artisan and well known ethical hacker.CTO and co-founder of the Dyne.org 
think &amp;do tank, a non-profit foundation with more than 15 years of 
expertise in social and technical innovation. Leading digital culture 
institution popular among digital natives and millenials. Jaromil shares 
understandable insights and visions on Internet of Things, Blockchain 
Technologies, Cyber Security, Data Ownership and Software Freedom. 
Expert speaker about Open Source, Lean and Agile methodologies

McKenzie Wark from New Castle, Australia, currentl living and working in 
New York City. known for his writings on media theory 
&lt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_studies&gt;, critical theory 
&lt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory&gt;, new media 
&lt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_media&gt;, and the Situationist 
International 
&lt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International&gt;. His best 
known works are /A Hacker Manifesto 
&lt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Hacker_Manifesto&gt;/ and /Gamer Theory 
&lt;https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Gamer_Theory&amp;action=edit&amp;redlink=1&gt;/. 
He is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School 
&lt;https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_School&gt; in New York City. To cite 
a few of his books -

&#183;/The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of 
the Situationist International/ (Verso, 2011)

&#183;/Telesthesia: Communication, Culture and Class/ (Polity, 2012)

&#183;/Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation/ (with 
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker) (University of Chicago Press, 
2013)

&#183;/The Spectacle of Disintegration/ (Verso, 2013)

&#183;/Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene/ (Verso, 2015)

&#183;/General Intellects: Twenty-One Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century/ 
(Verso, 2017)


On a sunny day in June.. let the words begin....


over

sl</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.13</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>warkk</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun Jun 24 01:01:40 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Thanks Shu Lea,
    i was at a thesis defense just yesterday and i was thinking about this.
The defender's name is Pehr Englen, and i expect he'll write about this
soon. The topic was the Situationist International considered as a network,
and as an argument between different forms of network. Which got me
thinking about Jacqueline de Jonge's journal, The Situationist Times, which
one can read as a publication for artists and (partly) by artists that was
a resource-book for thinking and acting in networks. It was multi-lingual,
but had more of a visual than a written language. There were issues devoted
to specific topologies, such as rings or spirals. I think this side of the
Situationist International that ended up in The Situationist Times was very
interested in what distributed networks of autonomous groupings would be
like as a form of artistic communication. One has to wrest it out of the
hands of art history, which is more interested in either individual artists
or movements that have names and leaders. This was an avant-garde that had
neither of those qualities.

This connected for me to a project i have never quite managed to get done,
which would be a more personal account of the listserv culture of the
nineties. I was on nettime more than empyre but i see them as part of a
network of networks that includes undercurrents, spectre, rhizome and
several others. How do you write about something in the form of linear
prose that didn't have that form at all? It is hard enough with just two
correspondents. When i was editing my correspondence with Kathy Acker this
drove me crazy. In actuality there were always several threads going and we
answered each other on those threads. But in book form all that has to
collapse into one sequence. I printed the whole thing out and moved the
documents around on the floor. The order ended up being a compromise.
Imagine doing that for dozens of threads among hundreds of parties.... Not
that i would want to actually transform those listserv debates literally
into print form, but even just notionally to transform the dynamics of
those networks into one prose narrative seems to defeat the form of the
thing itself.

So that might be a place to start thinking about speculative *and* tangible
networks, or ones that are both at once.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.14</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Shu Lea Cheang</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun Jun 24 03:05:20 AEST 2018</date>
<content>hi, warkk

I think we should bring in Rachel Baker to help us digging into the 
Situationists!! and we can start listing some keywords: distributed, 
autonomous.... (with all empyrians' help!)

so, indeed about the threads...just as we witnessed here last 3 weeks, 
the multiple threads, the threads that got picked up or sunk into 
oblivion......

and about listserve culture...you should really work on the book. I am 
very interested in it.

i have this web work, composting the net (2013).

real time accessing listserve, retrieve the postings randomly, scramble 
the words, make compost out of it for the fresh sprouts to grow..

http://compostingthenet.net

use menu pull down to take a listserve, when one start composting 
process, press mouse to stop the tumbling and read.

the composted ones - nettime, spectre, empyre, idc, aha, (skor is out, 
and it seems rohpost also not available any more)

Annet Decker once commissioned me to compost SKOR of NL, which gave me 
the archive access . unfortunately SKOR got shut down and the site is no 
longer available. this was casualty of NL's last media art budget cut...

over

sl</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.15</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>warkk</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun Jun 24 04:50:46 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Shu Lea,
   thanks tor the link to http://compostingthenet.net which i was just
playing with for a bit. I had once tried to get a more prosaic set of tools
developed for working with nettime.org as a collaboration with Warren Sack.
(We picked that one as its archive is public and has been for years).
Nobody would fund it so that didn't happen. I don't know how much one would
need tools for doing digital humanities style work on listserv culture, or
if one just needs to think about it and do it the old human humanities way.

Its remarkable how the networks of the nineties get left out of various
histories, from art history to media history. I was at a rather good event
on cybernetics organized by millennial artists, librarians, coders. Of the
three hundred people there, nobody knew what nettime was, or any of the
other similar networks i polled the audience about. They had only heard of
rhizome because its now a program at New Museum. I see a lot of people
re-inventing the wheel. I had to sit through a panel discussion recently at
which one panelist declared that "there is no critical writing about tech."

So the question then becomes one of the temporal aspect of networks, how
they might pass themselves along through time without losing too much of
their form. One can see what's going to happen if one reads the books on
the Situationist International, which is all things to all people, but is
never a network in the literature, let alone a series of conflicts and
mediations about what a network is or could be. I tried to remedy that a
bit in The Beach Beneath the Street, but there's a lot to be done to create
a network approach to the history of networks.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.16</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Shu Lea Cheang</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun Jun 24 06:03:26 AEST 2018</date>
<content>great start for getting into week4... bringing up the listserve network 
and the 90s...

networking in the 90s, me finger fucking Francesca across the deep waters.

take over, dollyoko, reanimated....

over

sl</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.17</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Alan Sondheim</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sun Jun 24 06:12:15 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Other than the usual suspects, there are thousands of email lists that 
aren't discussed at all - for example, the Spoons Lists which were early, 
mid-90s; think of Walkers in Darkness for example. Not to mention the huge 
numbers of newsgroups with their own cultures - the Doctress Neutopia 
stuff, alt.fan.dirty-whores, the hacking groups, etc. The cultures and 
networking among these groups were incredible. There are also the MOOs, 
etc. - we all know Lambdamoo, but there were so many others, and the furry 
etc. All these things were interrelated as for example the then ephemeral 
irc channels, and what constituted a network ranged from CuSeeMe 
coagulations through Powwow - even through bangpaths and the Accessgrid. 
Too many examples I think center on the usual suspects, where what was 
going on, as far as I knew (and participated in/with) was much more 
porous, more community-oriented and ideolectical, etc. At the 1996 
Cybermind conference in Perth, we literally jumped from newsgroups to 
email lists to CuSeeMe to chats as well as live; everything mixed and 
interpenetrated.

- Alan</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.19</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>dollyoko at thing.net</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Jun 25 16:16:15 AEST 2018</date>
<content>dear shu lea and empyreans

yes, finger fucking across platforms and waters,
deep code luscious moon brown stem
the shadow of a venetian blind on summer body in borrowed loft
wiping sweat, not swiping left
(write left alt write)
Floodnet!

i'm immersing eyes into this generous mycelial conversation today
feeling the tendrils of one hundred minds

'powerful poetic gestures'
'alternate sentiences'
'the incomputable'
'nature is not a system'
'break all separations'
'imps fuelling the real'
'vernacular approach to infrastructure'
't-shroom as family heritage and long-living family member'
'i have a vast genetic network in me'
'we begin to think like a forest'

how to extend the intentional families we (of a certain age) created in
the 90s
[while perhaps reading Bruce Stirling's Dead Media list, or skiving off to
PMCMoo or RiverMOO when LambdaMOO was down]
before other 'we(s)' were born

Jonathan Marshall's book 'Living on Cybermind' might be one answer to
Ken's Q about how to capture the non-linear threaded lives

i've been returning to build at LambdaMoo since around 2013, prompted by
projects such as Networked Art Forms and Tactical Magick Faerie Circuits -
instigated by the wonderful Nancy Mauro-Flude, and (equally wonderful)
Furtherfield's Beyond the Interface... I'm not sure what the mycelial
potential of such old platforms might be, I suspect there's something
though...... for example, a nascent project I'm doing with Virginia
Barratt and Alice Farmer takes as it starting point:

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

"A multi-platform artwork comprising a LambdaMOO environment (multi-user
domain object-oriented), performing avatars, improvised performance,
experimental hypertext fiction, cryptokitties on the (ethereum)
blockchain, and a hand-bound XenZine. The subject is the construction of
intentional family beyond blood and kind.

We revisit LambdaMOO as a site for gender non-conforming subjectivities to
explore the production of xenofam and xenobodies, outside of social
re-production, and bring those practices to bear upon the &#8220;real&#8221;. Only a
few years after the emergence of the WWW, social networking habits were
harnessed and stratified into machines for the production of social
capital and new affective forms of extractivism within the paradigm of
info-capitalism. Yet the outlier LambdaMOO is still maintained by a small
phreak family as a working experiment, an enclave among other secessionist
servers (caves, sinkholes, hackpads, labyrinthine clouds) carving out
space to platform lives of creative resistance, blasphemy and joy.

The performing avatars, the unholy trinity of Witchmum, Mum 2.0 and
Precocious Meme Savant, have cooked, co-habited and coded as becoming-kin
to instantiate xenofam, building affective bonds through which datablood
flows. This queered approach to extensible and open family platforms
generates intentional spaces for the reconfiguration of blood ties beyond
blood types, and another mode of hexing Capital."

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

I want to write more, but I need to buy bread as I can't wait the 12 hours
for the wild yeasts to do their thing.
I will try to attract some xenofeminist and other spores this way
while thinking about how Ken's 'we no longer have roots, we have aerials'
might take a mycelial turn


Warmly, to all
doll fingers + witch thoughts, perhaps a spell cast from and to this
conversation, tomorrow</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.20</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>warkk</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Mon Jun 25 22:13:28 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Alan is quite right to stress how extensive the options were for online
encounters in the 90s, beyond the handful i named. The larger point might
still be that knowledge of any of that world is fairly thin these days.
There are a few period accounts. dollyoko mentions Marshall's Living on
Cybermind. Julian Dibbell wrote a book about LambdaMoo. There's a new book
by Claire Evans called Broad Band that has good brief accounnts of Echo and
The Word and is focused on innovations in computation by women.

Of course one could ask whether the linear prose form of the book is the
best or even a necessary way of documenting such things. I think of the
book as an instance of what dollyoko calls "successionist servers." Its
hard to keep them out of Amazon, one of the biggest vectoral class
enterprises of our time, but they will at least 'run' independently of that
proprietary environment.

A book is a concentrated swarm whereas online communication tend to default
to dispersed ones....

dollyoko has some great language for an ongoing project: secessionist
servers, intentional family, open family platforms, vernacular approaches
to infrastructure. (To just pick a few that i think go together with the
themes Shu Lea suggested).

Maybe its a good thing that 90s cyberculture experiments ended up largely
invisible and excluded from history, as now it might be time to be rather
discreet about the possibilities uncovered then. Maybe it was a good thing
for mycelium that it was largely invisible for so long, as nobody figured
out how to monetize it.

mw</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.21</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>patrick lichty</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Jun 26 03:10:31 AEST 2018</date>
<content>As someone who would call himself postcybernetic rather than  postinternet,
I agree with Dollyoko nd Ken.  The spaces for intereaction were highly
heterogenous and diverse, and Honestly, I find the postinternet discourse
relatively bland by comparison, as a lot of what it talks about is reference
to postcybernetic/cyberdelic.  MOOs, MUDs, Even back to nets of online
communities (Thing, Compuserve, Delphi, Fidonet, Usenet) was amazing. In
many ways it seems like the corporate stacks combined with academic FOMO has
created a tremendous amount of conservatism compared to the crash theory
days of the Krokers.

In many ways, I think our era of risk aversion and its pruning of the
rhizome is indicative of the relationship between culture and capital.  As
art fairs and consolidating gallery culture, as well as the struggle (in my
mind) to figure ourselves out more as Postmodernism fractured into the
Speculative Turn, the notion of the rhizome has turned into reality bubble
foam that generally swirls under megacorporate umbrellas.

This is why I love things like Dina Karadzic's FUBAR bunch, and Shu Lea's
work the other year at the Leonore residency, but I also wonder why the
notion of the mycorhizome is so strong these days as opposed to the
strawberry patch (Deleuze), is it a subliminal signifier of fruit and decay
and rebirth?

Also very interested in t-shroom discussion.

Love from the desert
(also apologies for the typos - my current computer has a very flaky
keyboard)</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.22</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>warkk</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Jun 26 04:06:19 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Thanks for the links, Alice. I started reading but Nick Land came up so i
stopped reading immediately. I never took him to be state-of-the-art
theory. Others might find the space interesting but its just not for me.
Reaons given here: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3284-on-nick-land

Patrick is i think pointing us both back to the nineties but also forward,
and i think that's a good note to hit before anyone starts getting into a
nostalgic vein. I think its more about bracketing-off what networks came to
be in the two consolidations of the power of what i call the vectoralist
class. The first was around 2000, with the rise of corporate forms built on
nothing but IP. The second came a decade later, with the commdification not
just of information but also of the social network itself.

Patrick also asks why the mushroom as a figure. I don't really understand
how this part works, but it is the bit i find intriguing: that mushrooms
have 36,000 genders, or something like that. Maybe Shu Lea's introduction
of the mycelium into discussion will encourage me to get a layhumans' grasp
on how that works. It seems just at first sight to be be an interesting
thought-image of how protocols might work otherwise.

mw</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.23</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Shu Lea Cheang</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Jun 26 04:37:42 AEST 2018</date>
<content>ok

on how mycelium/mushroom as a figure ... the mycelium cult would wants 
to dive in and argue forever , but quickly, we quote-

My mecelium network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of 
a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out&#8230; all my 
mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyper light communication across 
space and time. - Terence McKenna, The Mushnoon speaks

I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. 
Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with information-sharing 
membranes. &#8230;..The mycelium stays in constant molecular communication 
with its environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses 
to complex challenges. - Paul Stamets, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms 
Can Help Save the World

We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological 
ruination&#8230;.. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think 
about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom 
picking. Not that this will save us&#8212; but it might open our imaginations. 
- Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The mushroom at the end of the world : on the 
possibility of life in capitalist ruins

This answers back to [week 1] how we got started... interesting we flash 
back to the 90s here..

bring up all nodes and bolts... loosen and to be fastened...

damn, and dollyoko are finger tight!!

over

sl</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.24</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Alice Famer</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Jun 26 14:21:32 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Understandable Ken. But to put patchwork down 2 just Nick Land throws away
a whole bunch of rich theoretical writing other places................</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.25</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Shu Lea Cheang</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Jun 26 15:13:13 AEST 2018</date>
<content>many thanks for Virginia's garden tips..

and to Jaromil, so bitcoins failed, and the blockchain is taking over 
the art market?

Speaking of art-

a few projects that started Mycelium Network Society

RADIO MYCELIUM by Martin Howse

https://fo.am/radio_mycelium/  (a workshop at FOAM in 2011, will also be 
at STWST48x4/ARS this september)

Azucena Sanchez' Narco Cultivos that tracks Mexico's drug trafficing 
network with behavior patterns of physarum polycephalum.

http://azusnz.com/narco-cultivos/

The T-shroom project by Kartina Neiburga and Art bureau OPEN (Ilze Black)
http://open.x-i.net/tsene/index2.html

The gorgeous Spore Print Film Series by Anna Schime of Buffalo
http://www.a--a.org/project/spore-print-film-series
https://vimeo.com/85092290

Taro's Myco-Logick
https://stwst48x2.stwst.at/myco-logick

and Sa&#353;a Spa&#269;al's (from Ljubljana, supported by Kapelica gallery) series 
of mycophonic works
https://mycophone.wordpress.com/mycophone_unison/

After all, MNS wants to connect local network nodes who would cultivate 
artists who work with fungal stuff....

over
sl</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.26</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Simon</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Jun 27 17:56:53 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Dear &lt;&lt;empyreans&gt;&gt;,

On 26/06/18 06:37, Shu Lea Cheang wrote/quoted:
&gt; I believe that mycelium is the neurological network of nature. 
&gt; Interlacing mosaics of mycelium infuse habitats with 
&gt; information-sharing membranes

Mycorrhyizal networks became entangled in the underground theatre work 
of Minus Theatre. But for reasons that rather go against those adduced 
in and around CMNs here, in their emphasis on the gains to be had, got 
from, harvested off the literal and metaphorical fungolalia and 
fungalia. The gain, for example, of communication: what if--we 
speculated in the spectacles we made--communication were not the point, 
but an exploitation-abstraction layer covering over--a too-human 
groundcover--the /work/ of decomposition? What if communication is /in 
/and an /excess/ of this work? And what then if the scatter, crackle and 
static of languages were the condition of their significations? The 
breaking-down, the waste itself, the soil, ground? Such work--of 
decomposition--would not be valued according to elements and minerals 
/liberated/ but would be valued in and through itself, as forming the 
maternal matrices in indeterminacy, inaction, asignifying, across 
inorganic and organic strata. Decomposition lays waste: elements are 
understood to be liberated and the value is in this breaking down, 
giving off phosphorescing halos in an excess of incandescent energy 
illumining the dark, not a light dispelling it.

best,
Simon</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.27</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Shu Lea Cheang</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu Jun 28 18:04:28 AEST 2018</date>
<content>dear All

threads entangled deeper into Mycorrhyizal networks that Simon 
meticulously argued.

As a moderator for the first time of such 'old fashioned' mailing list, 
(and let's leave it text based forever),  I am feeling an indescribable 
tension, anxiety as I check in on admin page to 'pass' the sporadically 
incoming postings...

the roots have no bound composting (thus renewed) underground... and how 
do we follow? cross-path?

Let me try -

We have checked ourselves into the 90s of its online communities which 
parallel to artistic intervention on the Net at the time, but existed as 
a society on its own, multiple mini-societies, mainly local (unlike the 
known international ones we refer to, spectre, nettime, to name a few), 
some archived, some legendary... bring it up to date,  the current 
'warred' zone of local social media,  sign in to wechat in China and 
whatsup in the States, has to echo these 'scenes' of the 90s.

I do not want to lose Alice Famer's references on patchwork/weaving as 
we got 'sidetracked' and 'righttracked' to mycelium..

thanks to dollyoko's taking us back to real (small) spaces of "deep 
social experimentation and collaborative creativity", somehow i connect 
these days with occupied squated space, move in and takeover... Jaromil 
can possibly echo these days with Amsterdam stakeout of a time? not to 
fall into any nostagia or romantic about it... collectives get 
dissolved, creativity fights over credits, and ultimately who's doing 
the dishes? taking out the garbage?

Much thanks to  Jaromil's summing of past 3 weeks... there are so many 
quotes of the contributors, each can lead us to 'rabbit holes' as 
dollyoko dares us to venture in???

again-

I am standing still in this junction with walkers in all directions, 
that particular center of the universe in Shibuya's transit exit.........

the swarm of thoughts from outer universe hitting at you... spores 
falling like spring snow, invasive as they are.

help me through this last few days of June..........

many thanks

sl</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.28</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Alice Famer</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Thu Jun 28 23:43:20 AEST 2018</date>
<content>"It was women&#8217;s fingers that enfolded the data-corpse into the fabric of
the world. Sadie Plant tells us that these fingers are like a spider&#8217;s
spinnerets, extruding digital silk, weaving the history of networked
technology, which at its core is a cunning practice of emasculation:
&#8216;cyberspace is out of man&#8217;s control, [it] destroys his identity...at the
peak of his triumph, the culmination of his machinic erections, man
confronts the system he built for his own protection and finds it female
and dangerous.&#8217; For Plant, man sentenced himself to annihilation when he
let the feminine hydra of digital technology out of its black box. Now, it
is everywhere, slyly completing its task. Cyberfeminism is an occult form
of warfare. It understands about &#8216;cyber - space&#8217; what Cixin Liu&#8217;s &#8216;dark
forest&#8217; theory understands about the cosmos: all existence is determined by
hostility and so the highest form of intelligence lies in occluding one&#8217;s
coordinates. The hypothesis explains why the universe, statistically full
of life, is dead silent. It is not because, as is commonly thought, life
has not found a way to communicate, but because it understands that silence
is the most advanced form of intelligence. Our physical and virtual spaces,
which are increasingly inseparable, are alike a dark forest, where every
step must be taken with care, as revealing one&#8217;s existence portends
annihilation. The most desirable skill, the most coveted trick, and the
most longed for disposition can only be this&#8212;a fluency in the trading of
secrets. The skills we need to strategically deploy concealment,
de-concealment and re-concealment."

this is from Bogna Konior's  "Ancestral Cyberspace: On the Technics of
Secrecy" (
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/584d3a10be6594f67565c0a0/t/5b34c37a0e2e7239ad7bc9ee/1530184579239/AncestralCyberspace.pdf
)

thinking about how the warfare of cyberfem (i think this itself is leading
2 discussions on Gender Accelerationism (G/ACC) and LesbiaNRx) functions
within networks specifically.
Hacking, ddos attacks, patchwork + weavinggg</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.29</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Jaromil</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri Jun 29 02:52:31 AEST 2018</date>
<content>dear Shu Lea,



On Thu, 28 Jun 2018, Shu Lea Cheang wrote:

&gt;    Much thanks to  Jaromil's summing of past 3 weeks...

Well I fell compelled since so many interesting views were shared
already that the most appealing option at the moment is to wander
through them like performing a Mycelic Brain Ritual.

I'm looking for places where
	the Thoughts Rhyme and Hide Behind the Mirror;
		 trying to stick my head out on
the other side of the Rabbit Hole,
		where Everything is Upside Down.

What I see is not exactly the failure of Bitcoin; but these political
visions of freedom and autonomy, validated by most of our joyful
rebellions, are close to that of Mycelia. What I also see is a growing
industry that is understanding and extracting its value: financialised
capitalism, or algorithmic finance and computationalist ideologies.

Just like network routing algorithms were inspired by ant scenting
patterns, we are witnessing a moment in history in which the
mainstream industry with all its techno-poetic powers have embraced
the patterns of Mycelia.
Sadly? through us.
And its not there to save us
 and the world.

I've never seen so many connected yet parallel world scaling visions
   		in corporate roadshow as now,
				it is almost literally
	the Moon Landing
				of financial industry
in the middle of a Desert we are leaving behind



ciao






p.s. shoutout to the fellow fermenters out there
	 ohhh so many SCOBIs in our kitchen hanging in and out of us
	 http://bubbleclub.net</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.30</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Shu Lea Cheang</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri Jun 29 18:18:01 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Let's talk about these fingers ....

The grand dame of cyberfem VB has deep rooted her fingers in the dirt.. 
if ever a network to be re-constructed, it has to go underground, it has 
to be communicated in silence (as the most advanced form of 
intelligence), again, we find ourselves in deep forest, dark forest, in 
"deep doll space zero"(gashgirl aka dollyoko).

Then, Jaromil alarmed us, " Just like network routing algorithms were 
inspired by ant scenting patterns, we are witnessing a moment in history 
in which the mainstream industry with all its techno-poetic powers have 
embraced the patterns of Mycelia."

oh oh! need to join bubbleclub, "start your living culture at home"....


I am off , who can babysit my compost worms?


over

sl</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.31</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Simon</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat Jun 30 16:22:39 AEST 2018</date>
<content>On 29/06/18 20:18, Shu Lea Cheang wrote:
&gt; Then, Jaromil alarmed us, " Just like network routing algorithms were 
&gt; inspired by ant scenting patterns, we are witnessing a moment in 
&gt; history in which the mainstream industry with all its techno-poetic 
&gt; powers have embraced the patterns of Mycelia."

neither is there need at this moment in history to sound or heed alarm 
nor is there to bear witness silently mute or vocally poetic: the 
embrace of the mainstream industry with its technopoetic arms, its long 
arms, itsautomatic arms, its electronic arms, itsarms,its petrochemical 
arms, its military arms, isof patterns, or is making patterns, 
network-like patterns, barabbasian patterns, informational patterns, but 
productive patterns, profitable patterns, semiocapitalist patterns, and 
market-economic-neuroliberal patterns, algorithmically-invested 
patterns, desirous of some natural-religious explanation and causation: 
its patterns are all PR &amp; marketing depts. And the market is for 
economists, to see which ones write the best, futuristic, progressive, 
smartest, computer-AI-assisted EF [Economic Fiction] techno-poetry. The 
warning is Foucault's: where resistance has gone power will follow. 
Where the resistance has been the power has followed.

best,

Simon</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.32</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>dollyoko at thing.net</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat Jun 30 20:49:31 AEST 2018</date>
<content>How do we create forms of life that no longer reproduce the machines of
capital?
How do we desert the system that has no outside?
How do we refuse to become the fools in the palace?

***************************
*  Welcome to LambdaMOO!  *
***************************
Running Version 1.8.3+47 of LambdaMOO
The lag is low; there are 42 connected.
*** Connected ***

Deep Sea Abyss
A vast dark expanse. Strange bioluminescence. Volcanic vents and oceanic
harmonics. Silence (the most advanced form of intelligence). Go east to
the autonomous zone of la zad of Notre-dame-des-Landes. Take rebel raft
regatta to Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy. Go down on the altar of
abjection.

radio mycelium, mushrooms harvested from the reactor in Chernobyl, rolling
Jubilees and G-slime (performing a Mycelic Brain Ritual) are here.

You yawn, rub your eyes, and officially wake up.
Last connected Tue Jun 26 20:06:41 2018 ACDT from 118.211.40.5
You hear a distant kachunk as your time card is punched in on the time clock.

The procedural poets of the natural world, mushrooms are magical because
they are about chance (the conditions have to be just right for one to pop
up, for you to perceive it, for you two to meet&#8230;)

&gt; look radio mycelium
You see fungal transceivers sprouting mycelial antennas forming an
imaginary underground network.

https://twitter.com/hashtag/LesbiaNRx?src=hash&amp;lang=en

&gt; look me
WitchMum - a bundle of twigs bound with babies&#8217; tears fomented in the
Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination. She is holding a tiny brass key
stolen from Gilles de Rais.

&gt; @go War on Terror Universities
You can&#8217;t go that way.

again-
I am standing still in this junction with walkers in all directions,
that particular center of the universe in Shibuya's transit exit.........
the swarm of thoughts from outer universe hitting at you... spores
falling like spring snow, invasive as they are.
Help me through this last few days of June..........

&gt; @join slimegirl

&lt;slime cave&gt;
As you slip through the 'mud patch' you realise this isn't mud per se; but
a familiar feeling of wet stickiness. You fall onto a bed of Nyx Slime.

/a gesture that potentially &#8220;dissolved&#8221; the U.S. border with its poetry/

Slime Girl (1.0) slides in and hands your Slime Cave membership card and
complimentary Slime Pig (Whatever you do Slime Pigs MUST NOT LEAVE THE
CAVE). To the east there is a Cavern, which its faint whistling sounds
like the songs of Slime(mer)maids. To the West, a door, that longs to be
opened; but how. Up, is to The Junkyard, where Alabaster plays, and
'down?' you say, well, you might just have to take the plunge.
slimegirl (fluent in the trading of secrets) is here.

We need an opposite to the algorithm.
We need to sleep for regeneration our brain.

&gt; look slimegirl

slimegirl
Slime molds are in their own right a strange creature. Not quite plant,
not quite animal, not quite fungi, but something else. They live a
double-life, in most cases as nothing more than single-celled organisms,
but in dire situations where food is scarce, they form a collective. A
single-minded blob of slime that can hunt with stunning speed. There are
no known incidents of slime molds proving to be dangerous to humans, but
Dallas was harboring more than a few dark secrets in 1973.
It is sleeping.

Decomposition lays waste: elements are understood to be liberated and the
value is in this breaking down, giving off phosphorescing halos in an
excess of incandescent energy illumining the dark, not a light dispelling
it.

&gt; @go The Junkyard

electron dense materials that reflect ultraviolet light, and can travel
through space

The Junkyard
you stumble upon a junkyard shanty dwelling, littered as far as the eye
can see with apparent rubbish. upreaped old school objects from before the
time of facebook are scattered around, in various states of frankensteined
dis/repair. monster mashups, with perhaps unclear purpose, rattle and
shake emitting rusty greetings and demands:
'how do you feel?' 'what's up pal?' 'tell me what you're thinking'
there are decaying lolcats and tired old memes lying in a heap to one
side, exhaling fetid breath and unconvincing chuckles. you see a stained
Viennese Mattress leaning up against an old ATM machine, which has vomited
worthless piles of old currency, slowly turning into micronised plastic.

you hear a sound on the breeze above the clatter. a wailing, perhaps?
where the sound originates is unclear, the breeze being capricious in the
junkyard.
You see Subliminal Shift, shimmering shifting patch of light, dirt, and
hollybot (reading The Situationist Times) here.

Alabaster.Shimmer (asleep), Samantha and Sadie Plant are here.

Samantha (learning Ken Wark) says, &#8220;How do you write about something in
the form of linear prose that didn't have that form at all?&#8221;
Sadie Plant says, &#8220;Man confronts the system he built for his own
protection and finds it female and dangerous.&#8221;
Bogna Konior says, &#8220;Cyberfeminism is an occult form of warfare.&#8221;
hollybot says, &#8220;I have a vicious countenance.&#8221;

the mycelium stays in constant molecular communication with its
environment, devising diverse enzymatic and chemical responses to complex
challenges
communicative relationships between mycelium are proof of alternate sentience
I am feeling an indescribable tension, anxiety as I check in on admin page
hacking, ddos attacks, patchwork + weavinggg

&gt; @go Forest

Forest
An old growth forest, damp and still, apart from the odd scurrying
creature. An old wallaby track lies to the west, barely visible underneath
the bracken. To the east is a narrow path curving along the creek,
slippery with iridescent moss. To the far south, some ruins, of what you
cannot tell. And to the north, scattered detritus, leading not to Baba
Yaga but to an equally unworldly realm. You sense you might not be alone
here. A disconcerting presence pervades this place. You see LOLcat
familiar and Ectogenetic Pod here.

slimegirl teleports in.

You ask, "What do u see when u look at me?"

slimegirl says, &#8220;routing algorithms were inspired by ant scenting patterns.&#8221;
You say, &#8220;The roots have no bound composting (thus renewed) underground...
and so how do we follow? cross-path?&#8221;

It is evening.
The sun is setting.

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

LambdaMOO germinating spores 0.1. With deep doll thanks to gleaned/stolen 
words/ideas/projects via empyre ('rehearsal of a network' discussion
curated by Shu Lea Cheang, June 2018) from all participants in general,
and from in particular: John Jordan, Alice Farmer, slimegirl, Franz Xaver,
Anna Scime, Shu Lea Cheang, Martin Howse, Isabelle Fremeaux, Nitasha
Dhillon, Amin Husain, Paul Stamets, Virginia Barratt, Alabaster.Shimmer,
Simon Taylor, Ricardo Dominguez, Sadie Plant, Ken Wark, Bogna Konior.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>22.33</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] rehearsal of a network - [week 4]</subject>
<from>Murat Nemet-Nejat</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat Jun 30 22:29:15 AEST 2018</date>
<content>Hi Dolly, a very interesting text.

Ciao,
Murat</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.0</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Anna Munster</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Oct 13 20:08:24 EST 2009</date>
<content>Kazys, I'd like to move now to some more engagement with your actual chapter contribution: 'The Immediated Now: Network Culture and the Poetics of Reality' (http://varnelis.networkedbook.org/the-immediated-now-network-culture-and-the-poetics-of-reality/)

In this chapter you marks a distinction between earlier network art (Bunting, Shuglin, odi.org et al) and the 'web 1.0' period  during which there was a  preoccupation with the medium of t e net itself among many artists (using the properties of html code  etc) and today's networked culture in which everything is networked or rather the network is dispersed diffusely throughout all aspects of culture. Your position (sorry to simplify!) is that the reality of a networked world becomes a preoccupation itself, in fact a kind of   preoccupation with the 'reality' of media. In turn, this leads to a set of cultural/artistic tactical manoeuvres:

"On the contrary, the fascination with the real in &#8220;reality&#8221; media, be it reality TV, amateur-generated content, or professional &#8220;art&#8221; is constructed around specific tactics: self-exposure, information visualization, the documentarian turn, remix, and participation."

However, I 'd also point to the 'big' statement by net artists of the '90s encapsulated by jodi's comment: 'Net artists live on the net'.( that's a paraphrase btw). So, I'd contend that in fact this preoccupation with the 'real' of networking actually begins with these earlier artists and that it might be something of a false (although currently fashionable) position to institute too much of a break  at least in terms of aesthetics  between earlier and contemporary network cultures.

Just wondering what your response to this might be...

best
Anna</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.1</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Simon Biggs</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Tue Oct 13 21:34:00 EST 2009</date>
<content>Hayles concept of Oborn digital&#185; is useful in contextualising what Jodi
might have meant when they spoke of &#179;net.artists living on the net&#178;. Prior
to a certain point in time artists working with computers and associated
communications technologies came to this practice from other media,
employing frameworks and criteria imported from other contexts. At some
point this changed and a generation of artists emerged who had always worked
with digital and networked media. This didn&#185;t happen in a simple linear
manner. Nor did developments occur at the same time, or in the same way, for
the various aspects of what are now, but what were not previously, related
media (computers and telecommuniciations only got substantially together in
the 1980&#185;s).

There were a small number of artists working in the 1970&#185;s who started out
in their practice using digital systems, even a few in the 1960&#185;s. There
were, similarly, a small number of artists who emerged in the 80&#185;s who were
using networks from the start. Bunting is an example of this &#173; although his
early network practices did not engage the internet but telephone networks.
Paul Sermon is another (very different) example. However, the emergence of a
generation of network savvy artists, with a culture attached, didn&#185;t begin
until well into the 1990&#185;s. The associated buzz, involving the engagement of
theorists and cultural commentators, intensified after that time. In this
sense I&#185;d assess Varnelis&#185;s observation that these technologies &#179;cultural
implications (were) confined to niche realms for enthusiasts&#178; more or less
correct &#173; although I&#185;d move the dates back a little to the early 90&#185;s or
even the late 1980&#185;s and identify 1993 as they key year in terms of impact,
when the first web browser (Mosaic) became publicly available.

There were a series of events and developments, in the late 1980&#185;s, when the
key players in what was to emerge in the 1990&#185;s, with net.art and related
practices, started to meet, communicate directly with one another and inform
each other&#185;s work. It is no accident that many of these people were Eastern
or Central European or were based in what had been cold-war border cities,
like Berlin and Ljubljana. A few of these artists did replay historical
tropes. Shulgin&#185;s playful refigurings of Suprematism is an example, although
as much concerned with developing a commentary on his personal sense of
national heritage at a time of social turbulence, post 1989, than formal
art-historical deconstruction. It can be argued that the emergence of new
medialities and formal frameworks are often associated with artists
revisiting the past. Picasso&#185;s confluence of Cubism and African art is
perhaps an example. Again, it would be dangerous to consider this as simply
or even primarily formal aesthetic experiment. Picasso, like Shulgin, lived
in a social and political context and he drew inspiration from the
excitement and conflict he experienced living within it.

Contemporary network culture is a very recent phenomenon. Perhaps we forget
how fast things have changed and what seemed odd or futuristic to many until
only a few years ago is now commonplace. There is a turbulence associated
with that rate of change.

Varnelis&#185;s piece attempts to connect artists practice with digital networks
with examples of practice from a more mainstream art world (you can&#185;t get
more mainstream in the UK than the work of a Turner Prize winner). To some
degree this approach is illuminating, allowing some novel connections to be
made. Zittel and Auerbach&#185;s work sits interestingly alongside  Halley&#185;s or
Estes&#185;s. It is also clear that mainstream arts practice of the early
post-modern period (1960-1980) was an influence on many artists who were
associated with the 1990&#185;s emergence of art practices situated within a
networked cultural context.

However, it is important to remember that many of those artists chose to
work with digital and communications systems in large part because they were
disillusioned with the mainstream artworld. Here I am not talking about art
practices but the artworld itself. These artists sought out of a parallel
system that would allow practitioners to work, communicate and facilitate
new audiences without the mediation of the institutional framework the
artworld was/is composed of. This activity is traceable to earlier examples,
some of which explicitly join up, with practitioners associated with artist
run initiatives like The Kitchen and Film-makers Coop in New York or London
Video Arts and Film-makers Coop in the UK (amongst many other actitivies
around the World during the 1960&#185;s and 70&#185;s) being part of the development
of the prototype digital and networked culture of the 1980&#185;s which Shulgin,
Bunting and many others are associated with. This is arguably a stronger
lineage of historical precedent than that which connects Peter Halley to
Josh On and in this sense Varnelis&#185;s piece risks being revisionist. But it
can be hard to establish new historical connections without taking such a
risk.

However, as was pointed out in the first paragraph above, nothing is linear
or simple. Whilst many of the artists associated with net.art and similar
activities did seek alternate models to the dominant artworld market model
others sought to play with it and turn the system to their own advantage.
Vuk Cosic is an example here, his provocations and interventions functioning
as both critique of the dominance of market thinking in the creative arts
and an attempt to grab some of the associated limelight. He played this
double edged sword with some skill. It is perhaps too early to evaluate
whether Shulgin&#185;s more recent work with easy to consume electronic multiples
is as clever and destabilising as Cosic&#185;s practices (he made sense of what
he was doing by Oretiring&#185; young) or whether he risks repeating the failures
of Kasemir Malevich, the Suprematist Shulgin parodied in his Oform art&#185;
works, who, after a blazing period of creativity retreated into
politically-correct folk-art.

To me this sort of art-historical connection evidences a Oborn digital&#185; art
criticism which Varnelis&#185;s essay perhaps fails to do.

Best

Simon</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.2</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Kazys Varnelis</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri Oct 16 01:44:22 EST 2009</date>
<content>Hi Simon,

Thanks for the comments. I wanted to make a couple of points of  
clarification, since it seems like you misunderstood what I was after.

First, when I write about early work in new media experiencing  
"marginalization by established art institutions," such  
marginalization works both ways.

Many of the early practitioners felt marginalized or excluded by a  
hierarchical and incestuous world of art in the academy and the market  
from day one. So yes, as you write, many of the artists sought  
alternate places to operate from as an alternative to the artworld,  
not just in pursuit of new media. But looking at the early history of  
networked art wasn't my goal, so I condensed.

A sociological history examining this phenomenon would be interesting  
for someone to take on, especially if it was compared to the condition  
in architecture. During the 1990s, due to its early embrace by leaders  
in the academy, digital architecture became precisely what many new  
media artists would have fled from, a playland for the &#233;lite. In my  
case, the result was that I stayed away from writing about  
architecture and digital media for a good decade out of dismay at what  
had happened to it. Critical or progressive practices in that field  
have only developed in the last decade, often drawing on the work  
being done in the art world more than on architecture.

Now, apart from my argument about immediated reality, my fundamental  
point in this essay is that we need to think hard about what writing  
about "networked" art or "new media" art means today and how useful  
such distinctions are anymore. Genealogies that look inward, are no  
longer adequate to explain contemporary work. Hayles's "Born Digital"  
needs to be revised for the present day. The current generation hardly  
knows a world that wasn't digital and work that is intentionally  
limited to digital media is often as backwards looking as work that is  
limited to traditional media. Take Hayles's writing about hypertext  
fiction. Ok, hypertext fiction is great, it's revolutionary. But how  
many works of hypertext fiction have you read lately? I'd venture that  
few of us have read any in the last decade. But how many works of  
fiction in the last decade have been written on networked computers?  
Is the latter simply inconsequential? Or is the latter evidence of a  
deeper form of being "born digital," that no longer thinks of the  
digital as somehow different or autonomous?

This is what I'm calling for when I suggest that we need to look at  
network culture in the broadest sense, as a cultural moment, not as a  
product of technology, but rather as the product of a host of social,  
economic, and cultural changes. Of course you can't get much more  
establishment in the UK than winning Turner Prize and that Leckey  
presented a video lecture on his work on the Tate site informed  
simultaneously by music videos and YouTube webcam videos is precisely  
why we need to expand the way we look at this material, rather than  
producing more internalized genealogies, which is what I you seem to  
be calling for.

Best,

Kazys</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.2-p.199</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Paul Woodrow</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Wed Oct 14 02:15:22 EST 2009</date>
<content>Julie
here is a chapter from Anna Munster's new book
its all about ...embodied perception !!!!

http://varnelis.networkedbook.org/the-immediated-now-network-culture-and-the-poetics-of-reality/

its on that site that I sent under Anna Munster

Paul</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.3</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Anna Munster</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri Oct 16 12:14:47 EST 2009</date>
<content>Hi Kazys,
I see that you have shifted a little in your 'categories' from your chapter (where you move from high-low to cool not cool via Liu), to the idea of internal vs external genealogies of networked art and culture. I think this is potentially a very rich shift. But I also wonder if we aren't actually fragmenting into more and more 'internal' networked scenes both culturally and artistically. So, for example, the aesthetics and textuality of YouTube is very different from Twitter and the cultural scenes there quite diverse. hence we have potential internal network genealogies everywhere. The Web 2.0 moniker may turn out ot be quite useless...however, a key unifier across these and other contemporary online environments is their performativity/celebrity. Would this be a distinguishing factor between web 1.0 and web 2.0 and beyond for you?

best
Anna</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.4</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Kazys Varnelis</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Fri Oct 16 13:21:09 EST 2009</date>
<content>Hi Anna,

I don't think I've shifted in this, sorry if it wasn't clear.

Both High-low/internal vs. Cool/Uncool/transdisciplinarity are  
reflections of the same transition to network culture.

Best,

Kazys</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.5</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Anna Munster</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat Oct 17 11:24:12 EST 2009</date>
<content>Ok - got it!
Kazys wrote:

&lt;Both High-low/internal vs. Cool/Uncool/transdisciplinarity are reflections of the same transition to network culture.&gt;

however, I would still ant to maintain that relative to the period in which they ere working, '90s net artists were not necessarily elite. I don't think small or niche = elite. The question of access and mass has taken on a renewed medial push in the age of 'hits' and their registering. This links up to Anne's points about the ways in which search engines produce forms of identity. Likewise algorithms.

One thing we might be forgetting about that early net art was its internationalism - alot of it came out of eastern europe and the balkans especialy and was very much connected with early net radio and its relations to Dutch net culture. A number of people, Stallabrass included, have remarked on the net art movement as one of the truly international art movements of the late 20th century. For me, this alone takes that work out of some 'art ghetto' and makes it concerned with a lot more than avant-gardism...

best
Anna
</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.6</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Will Pappenheimer</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat Oct 17 13:13:51 EST 2009</date>
<content>Some lurker thoughts-

It is interesting to see a reference to 'art ghetto', since may of us  
practitioners are so keenly aware of a "technology art ghetto" (or  
should I say being ghettoized by the mainstream art world?). Art  
history, art as a category, is a contested space which, as Duchamp  
demonstrated, is designated, not only by artists but by institutions  
in power. I can remember when one of my favorite critics, Rosalind  
Krauss, attacked digital multimedia as not having a recursive history,  
a strangely conservative attack, which is now nolonger true for an  
aging net art. Another attack came from Nicolas Bourriaud, who  
outlined I think a very important theoretical model for net art in  
relational aesthetics. Painting makes no excuses for self-reference  
since it is, along with other media, firmly in the elite.

Will Pappenheimer</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.7</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Timothy Murray</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat Oct 17 14:58:48 EST 2009</date>
<content>&gt;Thanks, Anna, for stressing the internationalism of 'early' net art, 
&gt;particularly its Eastern European and Balkan flavor.  Your post made 
&gt;me think fondly of a project I did in Slovenia with Teo Spiller in 
&gt;99-2000 for INFOS 2000, for which we ran an international net.art 
&gt;competition.   I believe that I've posted before on this, but the 
&gt;conceit was that artists had to agree to permit their work to be 
&gt;copied and disseminated off-line on CD-Roms that were distributed 
&gt;for free both to Slovenian technology fair, INFOS 2000, and to 
&gt;international alternative media centers (with the aim of reaching 
&gt;audiences lacking home high speed connections).   This ended up 
&gt;being a very interesting experiment that generated  widespread 
&gt;international participation.  There's still our account of this on 
&gt;http://art.teleportacia.org/kunstkammer/webart.html.


&gt;  "Internationalism" was also the driving force of CTHEORY 
&gt;MULTIMEDIA.  I don't think anyone working in these venues were 
&gt;particularly worried about establishing an art ghetto.  Rather there 
&gt;was extreme enthusiasm about working outside of the conventional 
&gt;gallery-museum network with the hope of reaching an alternative 
&gt;audience.  Of course things have become more conventionalized over 
&gt;time, but generally the artists working on these exhibitional 
&gt;efforts tended to be committed to the kind of collaboration that 
&gt;typifies -empyre-.

&gt;  Interestingly, this is the same spirit that has grown the Rose 
&gt;Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, with the majority of the general 
&gt;'collection' having come voluntarily from international artists 
&gt;committed to the communal notion of a new media archive.   I like to 
&gt;think that the spirit lives on.


Best,

Tim</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>24.8</nbr>
<subject>[-empyre-] 'real' networked art</subject>
<from>Ian Clothier</from>
<to>&lt;empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au&gt;</to>
<date>Sat Oct 17 15:34:28 EST 2009</date>
<content>Probably I have missed one or two heartbeats in this discussion, but it would be good to return to the contention that time might be of greater relevance to net art, and digital media context in general.

An abbreviated wish list for context, which will be presented more fully at re:live would be:

1. Context that is current.

2. Context that is media independent. 
Much context to date is dependent on the media that is under discussion however there must be a context on practice that is not limited by media. Everyone knows that net.art is not a category like 'sculpture' but we currently persist in media associated context. 

3. Context that is not necessarily anchored in a sense of place. 
This is necessary because media practice is occurring within, beyond and in-between the art/museum institution and the broader spacetime of social communication media and it&#8217;s adjuncts. Social communication media are driving creative possibilities rather than vice versa. 

4. Context that is relevant multi-culturally. Really important in global context, many are all a little tired of Western only context.

5. Context that is shared. Rather than singular contextual identity (Foucault, Baudrillard, Hayles, Manovich) context is provided by several simultaneously (us).

Curt Cloninger posted to the new media curating list a possible framework based on time, which are sufficient to actualise a hybrid post modern, inter-cultural and contemporary context:

"Some scales of speed simultaneously at play in The Art Formerly Known as Time-Based:

1. The time it takes the actual media art object to play out (as Jon Thompson noted -- a decaying sculpture, a perpetually updated data cloud). 
 categorically problematic is aleatoric software (like Brian Eno's "77 Million Paintings") which perpetually runs with enough generative variability to keep from ever "looking" like the same thing twice (although arguably it is performing the same perpetual function at an algorithmic level).

2. The Cartesian clock time that the discrete viewer/user actually spends viewing/interacting with the work in the space (three seconds, 30 minutes, or whatever).

3. The more subjective Bergsonian time (analog, non-digital, qualitative not quantitative) that the discrete viewer spends affectively experiencing the work (could involve personal prior memories, could involve the work coming to mind later after leaving the space). This is related to the Cartesian clock time, but by no means solely determined by it.

4. The time that the entire show or project runs.

5. Archival time -- how the work is archived, collected, subsequently displayed, gradually folded into an art historical canon.

6. The evolutionary time of art criticism and art historical scholarship (and its overlap with philosophy, science, culture theory, etc.)

7. The evolutionary time of an art practice throughout an artist's life.

8. Curatorial research time.

9. Institutional evolutionary time -- the time it takes art institutions to come to terms with and incorporate new media forms (or new conceptual approaches to old media forms).

Best

Ian M Clothier</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>25.0</nbr>
<subject>&lt;nettime&gt; The State of Networking (with Florian Schneider)</subject>
<from>geert lovink</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Sun, 29 Feb 2004 09:52:38 +0100</date>
<content>Notes on the State of Networking

By Geert Lovink and Florian Schneider

February 2004

(Written for the free theory paper Make World #4, printed in 10,000 copies
and distributed at the Neuro-Networking in Europe-festival in Munich. URL:
www.makeworlds.org).


No longer the society, the political party or even the movement, networks
are the emerging form of organization of our time. By marching through the
institutions the idea of networking has lost its mysterious and subversive
character. Sandpapered by legions of consultants, supervisors, and
sociologists, as a buzzword networking superseded the latest fashions of
sustainability, outsourcing, and lean organization.

The hype of networks reveals a conceptual crisis of collaboration and
cooperation. Yet, the confusing aspect of networking is the fact that
large formations of power apparently defy networks. Business and other
large institutions are still in the process of opening up. The
introduction of computer networks within organizations over the past
decade has changed work flows but hasn't reached the level of decision
making. In this period of transition and consolidation we get confusing
answers to the question whether 'new media' are part of mainstream pop
culture. Whereas it is easy to see that networks have become the dominant
mode of power, this is still not the case for 'power' in the narrow sense.
This is why the call for openness, transparency and democracy, on both
micro and macro-levels, still potentially contains progressive elements
and should be seen as a counterpart to popular conspiracy theories.

A radical critique of the information society implies analyzing the
passages from the state of territory and the state of population to the
state of a networked globality or: Info-Empire. It is not adequate to
analyse this with Debord's Society of the Spectacle. The networking
paradigm escapes the centrality of the icon to visual culture and its
critics and instead focuses on more abstract, invisible, subtle processes
and feedback loops. There is nothing spectacular about networking. And
this is exactly why most of the leading theorists are not aware of the
current power transformations. They still sit in front of the television
and watch the news or a rental VHS-perhaps they have even bought a DVD
player by now.

The networking paradigm marks the threshold of postmodernity and
characterizes the global governance scenarios of Info-Empire. This
threshold was crossed when digital communications appeared in the
political scene and created a notion of the global that is essentially
different from the predominant values of 'solidarity' in internationalism
or 'multiplicity' in trans-national corporations. Without referring to
inferior sentiments or noble feeling, a nuclear strike force or massive
drug abuse it was suddenly possible, to think global in absolutely
un-pathetic ways.

Rather than a simple application to improve life or increase efficiency
life becomes intrinsically networking and networking comes alive as
unconditional attribute of social existence.

The ultimate goal of networking has been, and still is, to free the user
from the bonds of locality and identity. Power responds to the pressure of
increasing mobility and communications of the multitudes with attempts to
regulate them in the framework of traditional regimes that cannot be
abandoned, but need to be reconfigured from scratch and recompiled against
the networking paradigm: borders and property, labour and recreation,
education and entertainment industries undergo radical transformations.
Although the promise of liberation still lures, and works at times,
shifting geographies and social layers, an identity backflip has occurred.
Its pretty hard these days to be a dog on the Internet. There never was
something like privacy on the Net, but after 9.11 things definitely
reached a new level. And once again, theory runs behind the facts or it is
satisfied with great gestures that occupy the moral high ground but reveal
nothing but powerlessness.

When within the nation state techniques of localization and
identification, communication surveillance and motion control have been
temporarily suspended it was the direct result of the social struggles of
a mass of individuals against the corruption of state sovereignty. Within
the 'state of networking' these techniques and technologies tend to become
redundant. Furthermore Info-Empire is constituted by including and
simultaneously excluding the tracks of localized and identifiable life.

Internet research, now having reached its ethnographic phase, has great
difficulties in catching up conceptually, let alone provide us with
speculative visions that capture the permanent flux of global immaterial
labour.

The classical dichotomies of public/private, global/local, etc. become
useless and even obsolete. These binaries are replaced by flexible
attitudes of managing singularities and fluid differences: rather than
challenging power networking environments act as carriers for virtual
self-management and self-control, up to the point of crashing. Networked
environments are inherently unstable and its temporality is key, much like
events. Networks are dense social structures on the brink of collapse and
it is questionable if there are sustainable models that can 'freeze' them.

Maybe it is better to understand networking as a syncope of power, a
temporary loss of consciousness and posture, rather than a panacea against
corruption, commodification, resentment and the general dumbness of
traditional hierarchies. The result of networking often is a rampant will
to powerlessness that escapes the idea of collective progress under the
pretext of participation, fluidity, escapism and over-commitment.

Participants easily get lost in the overload of email messages, weblogs
and chat exchanges. The subjective feeling, having to swim against a tidal
wave of noise and random tension, can no longer be explained by a lack of
media literacy. Software and interface solutions can be helpful, but often
only temporarily assist users to get a handle of complex information
flows. This often results in the abandoning of collective communication,
somewhere half-way, leaving the online participants with the
unsatisfactory feeling that the online conversation got stuck, unable to
reach a conclusion. After an exciting first phase of introductions and
debates, networks are put to the test: either they transform into a body
that is capable to act, or they remain stable on a flatline of information
exchange, with the occasional reply of an individual who dares to
disagree.

At the same time we are facing a backlash towards romantic and outdated
forms of representation, hierarchies and command on many terrains. Due to
the 'conceptual wall' that online communities often find hard to cross,
classic 'informal' forms of representation fill up the gap. This is part
of a larger process of 'normalization' in which networks are integrated in
existing management styles and institutional rituals.

But the progress of networking technologies is not that linear or
unstoppable, as it appears in the techno-naivety of some NGO's. It is
often hard to admit that the realm of power (agenda setting,
decision-making) exists relatively autonomous of the techno-sphere as B2B
("breast to breast") meetings. Instead, we would all love to believe that
decentralized networks somehow dissolves power, over time. Meanwhile,
networking environments also create specific dispositives, that are
coordinating new forms of power and that consist of a variety of elements.
To research these new statements, norms, standardizations, practices and
institutions as an ensemble that organizes the transactions from power to
knowledge and knowledge to power goes far beyond the current talk about
the information society as well as the attempts to find and replace
information with knowledge or any attempt to locate and identify an object
of networking, let alone a purpose.

In retrospect, one can say that the radical critique of the information
society does not yet exist. That was the lesson of the World Summit of the
Information Society (WSIS), held in December 2003 in Geneva. There is the
NGO civil society story about human rights and unequal access, but that's
it. What's so weak about this approach is it's charity mentality: please
donate us some computers and share some of your bandwidth. What is lacking
is an informed autonomist perspective. Let's say, an 'Empire' for the
Internet generation. This programmatic work should have been written
during the raving nineties. Instead, we got stuck with remnants of the '68
generation, and the mess they made, characterized by this particular blend
of utopia, violence and sell-out. In the past decade collective work on
ideas has been replaced by informal networking, a move away from politics
towards culture and the arts, shifting the focus towards software,
designing interfaces. and just playing around. Instead of blaming the
'nettime' generation one could also stress that theory can only grow out
of reflected experiences. In that sense we might be too impatient. The
question should rather be: how can theory come into being in an age of
real-time events?

WSIS made evident that there are only few forces willing and able to
analyse and then criticize the 'information society' concept. The air in
Geneva was filled with the spirit of network naivety-no matter on what
side. Both the hegemonic and the alternative view of the information
society is characterized by a persistent transcendentalism, as if the
spread of ICT would increase development, as if access to the Internet
would improve living conditions, as if free software would override
capitalism, as if file sharing equals altruism, as if open publishing
would promote democracy.

Instead of endlessly deconstructing the 'New Economy meets NGOs' agendas,
we believe it the task of the next media activists to investigate the
limits of networking in order to be in a better position to overcome those
boundaries. This era is blinded by the light. As technologies are still an
expanding universe it is hard to see its limits, to recognize its damages,
without falling back into technophobia and cultural pessimism.

Quixotic projects and idealism pervaded the rhetoric of the vast majority
of those who have not ignored the summit. That was the disappointment of
the WSIS process but it did not really come as a surprise. But what could
it mean to put the information society under a radical critique? One has
to track down the material basis of information and communication in order
to turn the whole discourse downside up. For instance one could research
the impact of precarious and migrant labour in hardware and software
industries, within the service sector such as the call centres, with its
temporary workers. This means to tear down the exclusive notion of
information as something ephemeral, spiritual and immaterial, and reveal
the dirty side of the technology.

It would be a mistake to look at this other or, better to say, the real
information society with an attitude of charity and to commiserate these
poor things who have to work so damned hard that we can play with ever
cheaper computers. Often this perspective comes along with a romantic,
anti-technological attitude or full of ignorance and resentment against
informatization, de-regularisation and globalization. These processes that
are constituting the current situation are direct and indirect results of
struggles (against the working day, for a better living, at for least a
job etc.) that are disconnected and abstracted from a common, daily
experience.

A radical critique always implies practical consequences. There is no
other way out of the intellectual stagnation than to stage unlikely
encounters and unexpected alliances, between coders and solders, activists
and researchers, artists and unionists. We have to bring on irrelevant
moments and leave the programmed density of the event-time for what it is.

Shouldn't a radical critique of the information society in the first
instance confront the common notion of sovereignty and it's mediatisation
with something that reaches out beyond the increasing banality of
networking? What happens after the excitement of encounter has faded away?
Should the motor of creativity and subversion continue to be supplied with
an ever-changing focus on yet to-be discovered, soon to be exploited
cultural differences?

Does it make sense, as a possible way out, to demand a 'cultural
exception' for the digital commons? How can the making of a digital public
domain be pushed out of beta, beyond the usual 'revolution or reform'
choice? The digital commons obviously have left the sandbox and are
out-there, in the wide world. As a 'high potential' meme the digital
commons is growing at a pace way beyond the worthy Gutenberg project,
which, in the thirty years or more of its existence has only added 10,000
book titles to the public domain. But this is exactly why digital commons
is a potentially fragile concept. It involves risk taking, in terms of
civil disobedience. It asks of digital artisans to take a firm stand when
they negotiate with publishers and distributors. The creative multitudes
have to wake up out their numbed state and have the courage to refuse. No
more bad contracts. Don't sign away your rights. To publish under the
creative commons licence is the very least one can do. This shift not only
requires public awareness; it also needs 'best practices' stories of those
who stood up and actually tore up contracts. A critical mass of IP-
refuseniks will only come into being if such individual stories can find
the public forums and inspire people to say no. Otherwise it will remain
everyone's individual problem.</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>25.1</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The State of Networking (with Florian Schneider)</subject>
<from>Benjamin Geer</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Sun, 29 Feb 2004 11:50:15 +0000</date>
<content>geert lovink wrote:
&gt; After an exciting first phase of introductions and
&gt; debates, networks are put to the test: either they transform into a body
&gt; that is capable to act, or they remain stable on a flatline of information
&gt; exchange, with the occasional reply of an individual who dares to
&gt; disagree.

Maybe this is because those people are using the wrong tools for the 
job.  If you don't know what you want to do, you can't select the right 
tools.  Rather than set up a network as a tool for 'bringing people 
together' or some such vague idea, and then hope that the participants 
will then find some way to act, I think it would make more sense to 
first decide exactly which action you want to take -- what work you want 
to do -- and then decide which tools (software, networks, organisational 
processes) could help you do that work.  *Then* set up the tools and 
start using them.

Ben</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>25.2</nbr>
<subject>Re: &lt;nettime&gt; The State of Networking (with Florian Schneider)</subject>
<from>auskadi {AT} tvcabo.co.mz</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Sun, 29 Feb 2004 16:33:01 +0100</date>
<content>Benjamin Geer wrote:

&gt;geert lovink wrote:
&gt;  
&gt;
&gt;&gt;After an exciting first phase of introductions and
&gt;&gt;debates, networks are put to the test: either they transform into a body
&gt;&gt;that is capable to act, or they remain stable on a flatline of information
&gt;&gt;exchange, with the occasional reply of an individual who dares to
&gt;&gt;disagree.
&gt;&gt;    
&gt;&gt;
&gt;
&gt;Maybe this is because those people are using the wrong tools for the 
&gt;job.  ..............
&gt;
&gt;Ben
&gt;
&gt;  
&gt;
I am actually tending to wonder whether this is because people feel 
bound to the rules or mantras that the networks where originally founded 
in relation to. Like the Floss rules set out in Freedom 0 Freedom 1 etc 
etc. Decisions on network architectures seem to be bound by principles 
that don't allow space for politics. Everything gets sucked back into 
the rational consesnus and that individual who seeks to disagree appears 
as a loony who doesnt understand the freedoms inherent in the network 
structures. To borrow from the Negrian dictionary  the networks becomes 
"constituted" by the tenents of for example correct Floss philosophy, 
and cease to be "constituent".

I am thinking out loud here on nettime.

Martin</content>
</mail>
<mail>
<nbr>25.3</nbr>
<subject>FW: &lt;nettime&gt; The State of Networking (with Florian Schneider)</subject>
<from>Michael Gurstein</from>
<to>nettime-l@bbs.thing.net</to>
<date>Sun, 29 Feb 2004 11:55:38 -0500</date>
<content>Interesting piece Geert and Florian...

Right question/wrong answer...

The problem with "Internet Research/theory" is that the ICT theory (and
research) folks see ICTs as a tool rather than as a basis for a
fundamental transformation including in relations of production/power.
So they miss the forest for the trees...

You folks are making the opposite mistake with "networks", seeing
(asking questions about) networks as fundamentally transformative social
solvents, rather than seeing networks as (social) "tools" and then doing
some sort of analysis on what those (newly empowered) tools are being
used for or not being used for--missing the trees while contemplating
the forest...  How, for what and under what conditions are networks
being/could be used...

An increase in the scope and range and force of networking certainly is
one outcome of the introduction of ICT's but so is the increase in the
capacity for surveillance, destructive autarchy, and "armies of one...".

As the National Networks Association so aptly puts it, networks don't
(kill/empower/enrich... take your pick...), its what is done with them
by the people who use them... 

MG</content>
</mail>
</mails>
</chapter>