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Google Buzz: Economic Surveillance – Buzz Off! The Problem of Online Surveillance and the Need for an Alternative InternetI wrote this text for a longer paper about online surveillance that will be included in the collected volume “The Internet & Surveillance” that I am editing together with Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval as part of the EU COST Action “Living in Surveillance Societies”. The book will be published in 2011.In February 2010, Google introduced a new social networking service called Buzz. Buzz is directly connected to GMail, Google’s webmail-platform. Google’s introduction of Buzz is an attempt to gain importance in the social networking sites-market that has been dominated by Facebook and Twitter. In February 2010, Facebook was ranked number 2 and Twitter number 12 in the list of the most accessed web platforms, whereas Google’s own social networking platform Orkut, which is only very popular in Brazil, was at number 52. Popular social networking platforms attract millions of users, who upload and share personal information that provides data about their consumption preferences. Therefore commercial social networking sites are keen on storing, analyzing, and selling individual and aggregated data about user preferences and user behaviour to advertising clients in order to accumulate capital. Google is itself a main player in the business of online advertising. One can therefore assume that Google considers Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms that attract many users, as competitors, and that as a result of this competitive situation Google has introduced Buzz. In 2009, GMail had approximately 150 million users, which explains that Google integrated Buzz into GMail in order to start from a solid foundation of potential users.Buzz supports the following communicative functions: the creation of postings that are shared with contacts, the sharing of images and videos, commenting and evaluating others’ Buzz posts, the forwarding of Twitter messages to a Buzz account, linking and integrating images uploaded to Flickr or Picasa, videos uploaded to YouTube, and posts generated on Blogger; the usage of Buzz via mobile phones. Buzz messages can either be presented publicly or only to selected groups of followers. Each user’s Buzz profile has a list of followers. Users can select which Buzz accounts they want to follow. Buzz mobile phone messages include geo-tags that display the current location of users. Buzz posts of users who are geographically located nearby a user and information about nearby sites, shops, restaurants, etc can be displayed on mobile phones. Buzz also recommends postings by others users.In December 2009, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt commented about online privacy: “If you have something that you do not want anyone to know, maybe you should not be doing it in the first place”. This statement is an indication that Google or at least its most important managers and shareholders do not value privacy very highly. Schmidt’s statement implies that he thinks that in the online world, all uploaded information and personal data should be available publicly and should be usable by corporations for economic ends.When first installing Buzz, the application automatically generated a list of followers for each user based on the most frequent GMail mail contacts. The standard setting was that this list of followers was automatically visible in public. This design move resulted in heavy criticism of Google in the days following the launch of Buzz. Users and civil rights advocates argued that Buzz threatens the privacy of users and makes contacts that users might want to keep private available in public. Google reacted to public criticism and changed some of the standard settings of Buzz on February 13, 2010. Some changes were made to the auto-follow option, so that now a dialogue is displayed that shows which users Buzz suggests as followers. But still all suggested followers are automatically activated, which does not make this solution an opt-in version of the follow feature. Google also said that Buzz would no longer automatically connect publicly available Picasa and Google Reader items to the application. Also an options menu was announced that allows users to hide their contact list from their public Google profiles. The problem here is again that this was planned as an opt-out solution, and not as an opt-in option. From a privacy-enhancing perspective, opt-in solutions are preferable to opt-out solutions because they give users more control over what applications are allowed to do with their data. However, it is clear that opt-out solutions are rather unpopular design options for many Internet corporations because they tend to reduce the number of potential users that are subject to advertising-oriented data surveillance.At the Google Buzz launch event on February 9, 2010, the presenters were keen on stressing the advantages that Buzz poses for users. Bradley Horwitz, Google vice president of product marketing, spoke of Buzz as “a Google approach to sharing” and a tool that will “help you manage your attention better”. There was no talk about potential disadvantages. When in the question and answer section of the event, the first question that came about was about privacy issues, Buzz product manager Todd Jackson answered: “There is a lot of controls in there for users. […] There are ways to control the settings you are revealing to other people”. Four days later, following a public discussion about the surveillance and privacy threats of Buzz, Google sounded much less optimistic. On the Google GMail blog, Todd Jackson wrote: “We’ve heard your feedback loud and clear, and since we launched Google Buzz four days ago, we’ve been working around the clock to address the concerns you’ve raised”.Google’s economic strategy is to gather data about users that utilize different Google applications in different everyday situations. The more everyday situations can be supported by Google applications, the more time users will spend online with Google, so that more user data will be available to Google, which allows the company to better analyze usage and consumer behaviour. As a result, more and more precise user data and aggregated data can be sold to advertising clients that provide the users with personalized advertising that targets them in all of these everyday situations with information about potential consumption choices. The introduction of ever more applications does primarily serve economic ends that are realized by large-scale user surveillance. As more and more people access the Internet from their mobile phones, the number of times and the time spans users are online as well as the number of access points and situations in which users are online increase. Therefore supplying applications that are attractive for users in all of these circumstances (such as waiting for the bus or the underground, travelling on the train or the airplane, going to a restaurant, concert, or movie, visiting friends, attending a business meeting, etc), promises that users spend more time online with applications supplied by specific companies such as Google, which allows these companies to present more advertisements that are more individually targeted to users, which in turn promises more profit for the companies. We can therefore say that there is a strong economic incentive for Google’s and other companies’ introduction of new Internet- and mobile Internet-applications.Google Buzz is part of Google’s empire of economic surveillance. It gathers information about user behaviour and user interests in order to store, assess, and sell this data to advertising clients. These surveillance practices are legally guaranteed by the Buzz privacy policy, which says for example: “When you use Google Buzz, we may record information about your use of the product, such as the posts that you like or comment on and the other users who you communicate with. This is to provide you with a better experience on Buzz and other Google services and to improve the quality of Google services. […] If you use Google Buzz on a mobile device and choose to view “nearby” posts, your location will be collected by Google” (Google Buzz Privacy Policy, February 14, 2010).Google uses DoubleClick – a commercial advertising server owned by Google since 2007 that collects and networks data about usage behaviour on various websites, sells this data, and helps providing targeted advertising – for networking the data it holds about its users with data about these users’ browsing and usage behaviour on other web platforms. There is only an opt-out option from this form of networked economic surveillance. Opt-out options are always rather unlikely to be used because in many cases they are hidden inside of long privacy and usage terms and are therefore only really accessible to knowledgeable users. Many Internet corporations avoid opt-in advertising solutions because such mechanisms drastically reduce the potential number of users participating in advertising. The Google privacy policy says in this context: “Google uses the DoubleClick advertising cookie on AdSense partner sites and certain Google services to help advertisers and publishers serve and manage ads across the web. You can view, edit, and manage your ads preferences associated with this cookie by accessing the Ads Preferences Manager. In addition, you may choose to opt out of the DoubleClick cookie at any time by using DoubleClick’s opt-out cookie” (Gogle Privacy Policy, February 14, 2010).Google’s online product advertising for Buzz says: “The first thing we all do when we find something interesting is share it. More and more of this kind of sharing takes place online. Google Buzz is a new way to share updates, photos, videos, and more. […] When you are out in the real world, you usually want to say something about where you are. Buzz makes this easy”. Sharing information with friends and to a certain extent with the public is surely an important feature of everyday communication that allows humans to stay in touch and to make new contacts. But Google only presents potential advantages of Buzz and does not say a single word about potential disadvantages. Do people really want to share vast amounts of private data and location data not only with their friends, but also with Google? Can Google be considered as a friend of all humans, or doesn’t it rather accumulate power that can also cause great harm to humans? Do people really always want to tell others where they currently are? Are people really interested in sharing their location data not only with selected friends, but also with Google? It is a natural corporate behaviour that Google only presents potential advantages of its applications in its marketing videos, ads, and events. But by doing so, it creates a one-dimensional picture of online reality that conveys the impression that we live in a world without power structures, in which all humans always benefit from corporate practices. But the great financial crisis has made clear to many citizens that corporations cannot always be trusted and are prone to act in ways that do not benefit all, but only a small group of investors.Buzz is not the only example of Google-enhanced surveillance. Google has developed Goggles, which is an image-recognition software that identifies objects that people take pictures of by mapping these objects with Google’s image database and provides information about these objects. If this application were linked to image data about humans, it would allow people to identify and obtain information about humans, who they see on the street by taking a picture of them and linking this image to Google in real time. This would on the one hand allow humans to intrude the privacy of others in public spaces by identifying their personality and it would allow Google to gather, assess, provide, and potentially sell real time data about the physical location of millions of people.Why is data surveillance for economic surveillance by Google applications such as Buzz problematic? One could argue that Google provides a free service to users and that in return it should be allowed to access, store, analyze, and use personal data and Internet usage behaviour. But the problem is that the power relations between Google and its users are not symmetric. In December 2008, Google controlled 57% of the online advertising market. A Google monopoly in online advertising poses several threats (for a general account of the threats of information monopolies see Fuchs 2008, 164-171):* Ideological power threat: Online advertising presents certain realities as important to users and leaves out those realities that are non-corporate in character or that are produced by actors that do not have enough capital in order to purchase online advertisements. An online advertising monopoly therefore advances one-dimensional views of reality.* Political power threat: In modern society, money is a form of influence on political power. The concentration of online advertising therefore gives Google huge political power.* Control of labour standards and prices: An online advertising monopoly holds the power to set industry-wide labour standards and prices. This can pose disadvantages for workers and consumers.* Economic centralization threat: An economic monopoly controls large market shares and thereby deprives other actors of economic opportunities.* Surveillance threat: Targeted online advertising is based on the collection of vast amounts of personal user data and usage behaviour that is stored, analyzed, and passed on to advertising customers. Modern societies are stratified, which means that certain groups and individuals compete with others for the control of resources, consider others as their opponents, benefit from certain circumstances at the expense of others, etc. Therefore information about personal preferences and individual behaviour can cause harm to individuals if it gets into the hand of their opponents or others who might have an interest in harming them. Large-scale data gathering and surveillance in a society that is based on the principle of competition poses certain threats to the well-being of all citizens. Therefore special privacy protection mechanisms are needed. All large collections of data pose the threat of being accessed by individuals who want to harm others. If such collections are owned privately, then access to data might be sold because there is an economic interest in accumulating money. Humans who live in modern societies have an inherent interest in controlling which personal data about them is stored and is available to whom because they are facing systemic threats of being harmed by others. Large collections of personal information pose under the given modern circumstances the threat that humans can be harmed because their foes, opponents, or rivals in private or professional life can potentially gain access to such data. Since 9/11, there has been an extension and intensification of state surveillance that is based on the argument that security from terrorism is more important than privacy. But state surveillance is prone to failure, and the access of state institutions to large online collections about citizens (as for example enabled by the USA PATRIOT Act) not only poses the possibility for detecting terrorists, but also the threat that a large number of citizens is considered as potential criminals or terrorists without having committed any crimes and the threat that the state obtains a huge amount of information about the private lives of citizens that the latter consider worth protecting (as for example: political views, voting decisions, sexual preferences and relationships, friendship statuses).Overall, the introduction of Google Buzz shows that there is an antagonism of privacy protection and economic surveillance interests on the contemporary Internet that is dominated by commercial interests. It might be time for thinking more about strengthening alternative Internet platforms and the potentials for constructing an alternative Internet.Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and society: social theory in the information age. New York: Routledge.Source: http://fuchs.uti.at/313/

www.edu-factory.org*Stop the Cuts - Defend Sussex: Occupation Statement 1*We have occupied the top floor of Bramber House, University of Sussex,Brighton. There are 106 of us.[...]***At the University of Wroclaw Poland still goes on struggle of PhD students*The Union of Polish Syndicalists (Zwiazek Syndykalistow Polski - ZSP) memberof International Workers Association decided to support this struggle andedit an informing bulletin about it in a context of theglobal campaign forfree and emancipating education, which will be infree distribution at theUniversity of Wroclaw and other schools in Poland.[...]***Utrecht: students occupy university administration building???*This morning at 7:05 a group of students occupied the main building oftheUniversity of Utrecht. The students are protesting against theuniversity'sboard decision to stop publishing the paper version of theUniversityNewspaper. The action is the first of a series of nationalinitiatives tostop budget cuts in education.[...]*Anti-Privatization and Demands???*On Thursday of last week, over 100 students, workers, local alternative highschool students, teachers, and staff came out in the first action called bythe UW Student/Worker Coalition.[...]--subscribe to the mailing list: edufactory-subscribe-FiNr9IKjHtuYWMdeRD7+nA< at >public.gmane.orgcontact us: info-rRqMck75DIy7Jn3c8fOrWw< at >public.gmane.org

|||| Back Buffer: New Arena Paintings: Julian Oliver 15 February ? 30 April 2010Gallery Talk 4pm - Julian Oliver talks about his work and the development ofthe open source painting package ioquake3Opening reception 12 February 6pm Abstract Expressionist painters have long explored strategies for decouplinggestural habit and tendency in their work by means of automatic orchance-based operations. This exhibition by Berlin based artist JulianOliver represents a new strategy along this vein, deploying a computer gameas canvas, paint and brush. The exhibition represents a major iteration of Oliver's game-based paintingsystem, ioq3aPaint, a project that began in 2003 in Melbourne, Australia aspart of a long career exploring artistic applications for computer gametechnology. ioq3aPaint is itself a modification of the source code ofioquake3, a free-software first person shooter engine used by thousands ofgamers and game developers worldwide.Hannah Maclure Centre, University of Abertay DundeeTop Floor Student Centre, Bell Street, Dundee, DD1 1HPhttp://hannahmaclurecentre.abertay.ac.uk

[digested < at > nettime --mod (tb)]Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> gala production of the theater of death and the lie of buddhism Radical Disconnectivity Archive Index Text Wryting and Bones requiem of zero, love and slaughter We become a new frontier (for Tom Zummer, who always asks us) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:07:05 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: gala production of the theater of death and the lie of buddhism gala production of the theater of deathand the lie of buddhismbodies grind against bodies, nothing is produced.what could come of slaughter and yidam.what could possibly come of this. no one wants it to comeof this.no one wants it to come to this, it's flesh that's ground,there's nothing more, tendrils of fat, skeins of muscle,legarms flailing.it's nothing, not even an image.the image floats, there's only existence, whatever is:no matter whether illusion or obdurate, inert: it's alwayspresent. eyes grind against eyes, such that image turns ash.ears grind against ears, crackling: no sound.buddhism's a lie, existence is always relative, already pathto relative path, to relative thing after thing.existence never promised anything more: what more than thingafter thing after thing. it goes there and always goes there.believe what you want, ontology's meaningless outside of realms:it's not non-existence, but ontology sliding into the imaginary.what then? this sliding, for humans, appears uncanny, as if worldstremble; they don't, they don't do anything. get rid of existence:you're gone. and gone from existence, ground from it.existence grinds against existence, we're concerned about this.but that confuses the thing with is: grinds nothing,against nothing, no loss but what we've made of it: thing andsound or sight of grinding.these images show that, non-mandalas, no premise of a virtualbeyond the real, or beneath it, no promise of escape, error,elsewhere, elsewhere. remember it's never as close as an eyeor ear, never within hearing or seeing. senseless, sensed,it's what there is, the lie of buddhism is, that it isn't.http://www.alansondheim.org/her0.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/her1.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/her2.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/her3.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/her4.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/her5.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/her6.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/her7.jpghttp://www.alansondheim.org/her8.jpg- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 1 Jan 2010 07:37:02 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Radical Disconnectivity Radical DisconnectivityI imagine a _radical disconnectivity_ characterizing the fundamental tenorof the cosmos; if one grants event horizons their proper epistemologicalstatus, this is where one ends up, literally. (Bell's theorem, EPR, hastheir limits.)In which case, A and B have _no_ relation whatsoever, no communicative (orother) potential whatsoever. A simple symmetric operation, within which achain might exist - for example, if A< at >B symbolizes this, then one mightpossibly have A< at >B but A-< at >C & C-< at >B: but this is mythology. Preciselybecause this is mythology, the disconnection is _radical_ and irreducible.We have become increasingly deluded by models based on Indra's Net, orinternets: skein- or membrane-models where every node conceivably reflectsevery other, and where every node is conceivably accessible from everyother. Further, this models implies an organicity, an influence-machine orholism, a unification of effect, if not affect - something of comfort.As thought experiment, one can imagine a radical disassociation withoneself, such that one is relegated to regions far beyond the panoptical,or optical for that _matter._ Here one is safe with one's regrets anderrors; here, catatonia is the natural order of things. I say that thecatatonic is the _natural_ order of things; I say that stillness andisolation are the basic elements of life - not Gaia and integration, butsomething unnamed characterized by _differentiation._This is the natural state of humankind, the natural state of organism,which masquerades as network, not defect. Left to its own devices, human-ity continues with the radical disconnection of its home planet, a taking-apart beginning with children and watches, ending with slaughter andcorroded memory. (This if the world is 'all that is the case,' its latchis broken, and what was within has been always already desecrated andstolen.)(I will leave you with this, as if I were to leave myself.)I will leave you with this, as if I were to leave myself.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010 02:45:36 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Archive Index Text Archive Index Texthere's a list of all the digital work I have done online from 1994-pres-ent, in tree form, assembled for archiving. it also includes files from mycollaborations (with Foofwa d'Imobilite, Azure Carter, others), andvarious other files, texts, etc. it's longer than I thought it would be.http://www.alansondheim.org/archex.txthttp://www.alansondheim.org/archelim.txt (gross eliminate of duplicatenames)2000-3000 videos (different)28000 images (around, different)900 sound/music (different)1400 texts, programs, digital obj files etc. (different)it's weirdly interesting. it doesn't include iso files, Second Life full.avi video files, personal stuff. it runs about 830 gigabytes, would belarger w/ the additions.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 31 Jan 2010 13:20:39 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Wryting and Wryting andWryting is clotted inscription, that is, writing inextricably merged withflesh, body, organism; culture is the systemics and poetics of wryting.On one hand, writing is digital, discrete, disconnected; on the other, itis analogic flux, debris, corroded, syntactics pervaded by aura of scent,gesture, tonalities, and so forth. Writing is always wryting, alwaysentangled with the fuzzy modalities of its production, virtual andmaterial.Wryting spews through sexual fantasy, obsessive thinking, compulsionbehavior; it is never the purity of signal and channel. Even with digitalcode, interpretation blurs and moves through striations and membranes inan irreducible hermeneutics.The kernel of wryting is encoding, hermeneutics, protocols, and protocolmembranes or suites; legible code is illegible, illegible code is legible.There is no coding without temporal coding, no wryting without immersion,no wryting in time, no time for wryting.All wryting entangles with poetics, poesis, autopoesis, impulse and drive;all wryting accounts-for, is accountable, is unaccountable. Death anduntoward pain are wryting's dissolution; healing coagulates wryting insimilar formations. Death is the cessation of wryting formations, and thepromulgating of skeins of new wryting formations, among cultures andorganisms.Culture is all the way down, from one life-form to another; culture isalways inscription, always wryting. Wryting wrytes and is wrytten; what iswrytten and what has been wrytten, wrytes.It is impossible to isolate the discrete on the quantum level; thinkinstead of the granularity and corrosion of the symbolic. Interpretationis meaning; wryting is never meaningless; the presence of a sign isalready a deconstruction of presence.(A boy sees a mark in a field; a boy sees a mark on his body; a girl seesa mark in a field a girl sees a mark on her body. A girl has a history; aboy has a history. A boy reads a history of a girl; a girl reads a historyof a boy. A girl reads a book; a girl scents; a boy reads a book; a boyscents. An organism sees a mark in a field; an organism sees a mark on itsbody. An organism has a history; reads; scents.)All protocols are protocol suites. (All readings and wrytings and hearingsand scentings are protocol suites. The organism hears the boy and thegirl; the boy and the girl hear the girl and the boy.) All protocol suitespromise the premise of fit; the premise of fixture; the premise of corral;the premise of potential well; the potential of fetish; the maternalpremise and the paternal premise; the premise of home; the premise ofmeaning; the premise of comprehension; the premise of hermeneutics; thepremise of spirit.All codes are entangled in all bodies; all bodies are entangled in allcultures; in all codes; in all protocol suites. The poetics of the worldis what one might think of a day; of a night; what one might think. Thepoesis of the world inhabits death; death inhabits the poesis of theworld; poetics is a casting; poetics is a casting-off; is unnecessary;think the poesis of the virtual vacuum; think the poesis of the blackhole; of information; of the corruption and corrosion of information; ofthe body and the death of the body; of the recuperation of the body bybodies. (Of the recuperation and decoding of the sexual body: sexuality isalways a decoding.)The protocol sentence is a half-truth; is an institution; what is declaredhas disappeared; what is declared is declared unentangled; is declareddiscrete. Poetics recuperates poesis for an organism of interest; for aninterested organism. What is declared is lost; is already lost; is alwaysalready lost. Loss inhabits the symbol; inhabits wryting; wryting inhabitsdeath; death inhabits writing. A inhabits B; B inhabits A; A portends B; Bportends A; A interprets B; B interprets A; A entangles B; B entangles A;{A}{B} entangles { }. Wryting and culture inhabit rites of purification;purification makes a hedge around the symbol; around the symbolic; thehedge makes the symbolic possible; the hedge is the potential well ofmeaning. How may one wryte wryting? One may not; wryting wrytes elsewhere;wryting wrytes otherwise; wryting never just wrytes. Wryting is thewrything of the hermeneutic; wryting is imminent and immanent; wryting isa long way off; how may one wryte otherwise? (Desire wrytes otherwise,does it knot?)A story is that which has no story to tell; a story which is all the storythere is; a wryting.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Mon, 1 Feb 2010 09:08:40 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Bones BonesIn honor of the American (US) television show, Bones, with itsirresolution of psychotic relationships among the main characters."Not to mention a fine SL video, if I do say so myself."*http://www.alansondheim.org/Bones.mp4*Is such a statement performative; is the subjunctive always performative?(In the sense of evanescent fading. The performative doesn't lie in thefineness of the video, but in the potential for speech proffered and thenwithdrawn - or perhaps not withdrawn. The statement itself presences suchspeech; it's already stated, give status as possibility. But because it is_me_ saying it, then in fact I do say so, but not as declarative, only assubjunctive, as if it might be sight / might have been said. The outcomeis never clear (nor is the quality of the video), making such a statementuncanny, ontologically wavering, neither made nor unmade. Perhaps the "ifI do say so myself" underlies _every_ utterance, undercuts and withdraws,as if the perceived and heard world were fantasm. And that is the truth,since it is death that may cut, cauterize, deny the _second_ saying, as if"for I do say so myself" - but that is not the case - the case is _if,_presupposing, without cause or reason, that the utterance might be spoken,might still be spoken, that the speaker is still alive.http://www.alansondheim.org/Bones.mp4- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 03:53:07 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: requiem of zero, love and slaughter requiem of zero, love and slaughterhttp://www.alansondheim.org/requiemzero.mp3http://www.alansondheim.org/requiemzerozero.mp3for Sarajevo, Rwanda, Haiti, for Katrina, Baghdad, so manywelcome to my world- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 02:12:12 -0500 (EST)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: We become a new frontier (for Tom Zummer, who always asks us) We become a new frontier (for Tom Zummer, who always asks us)http://www.alansondheim.org/stinkbug.jpgWe'd been entertaining a brown marmorated stinkbug (Halyomorpha halys) fora while now - at least a couple of months. A small beautiful true bug, ithad arrived near the window sill (as had others); we carefully took itinto our garden and our hearts. That was the last we saw or heard of ituntil this evening, when it suddenly appeared, circling near the ceiling,and landing on our 1908 Chinese painting of flowers and birds. I looked itup on the Net, of course - only to find out that these insects seek thewarmth of apartments during the winter, and leave their scent everywhere.Other stinkbugs are attracted by the odor, which can become overpoweringand long-lasting. Sooner or later, we'd have a colony. We realized eitherthe bug or us had to leave; Azure gently took it to the same window it hadentered, and let it fly away.Now I've put up an image of the bug, a memorial of sorts. Here is whatWikipedia has to say about it: "simply jostling the bug, cornering it,scaring or injuring it, or attempting to remove it from one's house can'set it off'"; "it can make a whole room uninhabitable until aired out,and some people are even allergic to the smell."By the way, this insect hadn't been seen in the United States before 2001;we're proud to be early adopters, part of a new frontier, friendly hostsfor yet another invasive species.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

(Hi, where does this collective tiredness come from? Can someone explain this? Is it the winter? Depressed politics? Cold turkey post- Xmas feelings? Agreed, the weather is bad. Obama sucks. And the iPad is yet another disappointment. The 'I told you so attitude' doesn't bring much, I guess. Is it the great influence of Jaron Lanier on the American psyche? You tell me. Ciao, Geert)"Digital Nation": What has the Internet done to us?We're Googling ourselves stupid. Even tech guru Douglas Rushkoff has regrets. PBS investigates our Information AgeBy Heather Havrileskyhttp://www.salon.com/entertainment/tv/i_like_to_watch/2010/01/30/frontline_digital_nation/index.htmlAfter 15 years of bloviating, looks like we've finally entered theinformation age. Back in 1996, when I worked at Suck.com in theoffices of HotWired, the online offshoot of Wired magazine, ourbrightly hued warehouse was abuzz with overcaffeinated worker beeshigh on the limitless possibilities of the Internets. Every 20-something in San Francisco went from being unemployed (post-recession)to dreaming big. Why, we could write stuff about Burning Man and rockclimbing, and people would pay us for it! We could learn HTML or(gasp) become middle managers!The "big idea" guys, high on more than the Internets, called bigmeetings so they could rhapsodize on creating virtual communitiesand breaking down traditional Western phallocentric patriarchies andenabling subcultures to reach out and robustly interface with like-minded hives.My bosses at Suck.com, meanwhile, accurately predicted that the Webwould soon become something between a gigantic mall catering to thelowest common denominator and an infinite tabloid echo chamber. Theirmantra: Sell out early and often. Why? Because those of us musingabout murderous robot showdowns (or scratching out angry cartoonsunder a pseudonym, for that matter) would all go back to grabbingankle for The Man sooner than we thought.What they didn't know, and never could've predicted, was that the Webwould also transform itself into an enormous, never-ending high schoolreunion (See also: hell).Revolutionary in a coal mineEven though I've opted out of the big-idea, Future-of-the-Webbloviating business over the years (mostly because it's more my styleto wallow in obscurity, wearing outdated shoes), I think it's finallysafe to proclaim, together, that the information age has officiallyarrived. After all, my 13-year-old stepson texts more often than hespeaks, my 3-year-old daughter wants her own bright pink iPad soshe can see what Cinderella is doing right now, I waste most of myday reading Tweets from a Laura Ingalls Wilder impersonator and arecent dinner guest spent half the night answering lingering trivialconversational unknowns by looking them up on his iPhone.Let's see, so the digital revolution led us all to this: a gigantic,commercial, high school reunion/mall filthy with insipid tabloidtrivia, populated by perpetually distracted, texting, tweeting demi-humans. Yes, the information age truly is every bit as glorious andspecial as everyone predicted it would be!Apparently our futuristic "Blade Runner"-esque digital dystopia isso bewildering that even Internet "big idea" man Douglas Rushkoffis currently reconsidering his unconditional love for new media inFrontline's "Digital Nation" (premieres 9 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 2,on PBS, check local listings), an in-depth investigation into thepossibilities and side effects of our digital immersion."I want the luxury of being able to push the pause button, you know,"Rushkoff, one of the producers of this 90-minute report, muses to theother producer, Rachel Dretzin, as the cameras roll. Rushkoff sayshe wants to "really ask whether we're tinkering with some part ofourselves that's a little bit deeper than we might realize at first.You know, how are we changing what it means to be a human being byusing all this stuff?"Keep in mind, this is a guy who, despite his Dilbert-meets-Derridaperspective, spent the better half of the '90s gushing about the powerand the glory of the Internets in intelligently written books andon crappy "all about the Internets" shows like "The Site" (Christ,remember that one?). If Rushkoff is rethinking his ardor for thedigital realm, you know we're in trouble.Even if you're too distracted by your iPhone to care whether continualdistractions will take a toll on our souls, "Digital Nation" shouldbeat a little sense into you. You know the routine: A kid saysproudly, "I never read books. I'll be honest. I can't remember thelast time I read a book"; an English professor tells the camera,solemnly, "I can't assign a novel that's more than 200 pages"; welearn of a Kaiser Family Foundation study indicating that 8- to 18-year-old kids spend 53 hours a week using media.And don't believe the hype about a whole new generation of effectivemultitaskers, either. "Most multitaskers think that they're brilliantat multitasking," says Stanford professor Clifford Nass. But "itturns out that multitaskers are terrible at nearly every aspect ofmultitasking." (In an article on the Stanford News Web site, hiscolleague Eyal Ophir comments, "We kept looking for what they'rebetter at, and we didn't find it.")Even Sherry Turkle, director of MIT's Initiative on Technology andSelf, confesses that a plugged-in state doesn't necessarily make herlife more satisfying or more productive. "I've been busy all day,and I haven't thought about anything hard," Turkle says. "I mean,the point of it is to be our most creative selves, not to distractourselves to death.""I've always prided myself on offering soothing answers to people'sanxieties about this stuff," Rushkoff continues later. "I felt likeI was in on a secret, that these old fuddy-duddies were panickingunnecessarily, underestimating our kids' ability to adapt to the newreality unfolding before us."But Rushkoff's mind has changed, and now he feels like a fuddy-duddyhimself. But, as he accurately points out, stepping away from itall isn't always possible. "Combating distraction, it's not as easyas just turning off your e-mail program. You turn off your e-mailprogram, it's not your e-mail program that complains, it's yourfriends, it's your boss, it's your bills. You know, 'Where's thatreport?' 'Why haven't you answered your e-mail?' 'Are you mad at me?'You can't do this in isolation. If you're going to deal with theproblem of distraction it's something that we're all going to have todeal with together."But how, Doug? How? Instead of suggesting some answers, we're off toSouth Korea to watch teenagers in a dark underground PC Bangs (gamingcenters) playing video games for hours on end, then we're off to anArmy Experience Center, an eerie new style of recruitment center thatlures young men with violent video games and then discusses enlistingwith the ones who are legally eligible. Next, we watch a guy in frontof a computer screen operating an unmanned drone, then view footage ofsimilar drones dropping bombs on targets a world away.And just when you're pretty sure that technological advances aretransforming our globe into a seething cauldron of violence, hatredand pointless musings about Snooki from "Jersey Shore," here's alighter segment on "Second Life" to distract us back into a stateof complacency. Apparently IBM uses "Second Life" to hold virtualmeetings between people who live thousands of miles from each other.Each person at the meeting is embodied by a different avatar, and theparticipants end up feeling like they've met in person, even thoughthey're actually in upstate New York, Vermont and San Paolo, Brazil.(Note to boss: Can we hold our Salon meetings this way, and can myavatar be an enormous roach that occasionally hits other people overthe head with a crowbar?)"It may be decades until we know what living in a state of constantdistraction will do to us," offers Rushkoff, although right now I'ma little more concerned about what the people getting bombed tosmithereens by those drones are going to do to us, once they have themeans.But don't worry, everyone! "For all of the moments of isolationthe digital may promote, there's also a chance for engagement,"Rushkoff says. "So I guess that means you can still count me amongthe faithful!" With that chirpy conclusion, Rushkoff shuts off hiscomputer and heads outside to his garden. Suddenly I can't helppicturing Louis Rossetto and the big idea guys (plus that guy who sold"big.com" for a few million dollars) all padding out to their lushbackyard gardens, paid for by those years as Web visionaries, and Ithink: I should've sold out earlier, and more often.Not that I had anything to sell in the first place. But who's going tohelp the rest of us turn this stuff off? Doug? Before you leave, um,where's the exit to the mall? How do we filter out the tabloids andthe instant messages from long-lost high school acquaintances? Doug?Dooouuuug! Come back here! Help us!C amera disappears into screaming mouth, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers"-style. Fade to black.

Dear nettimers,Between 17 – 23 January 2010 transmediale, together with FLOSS Manuals, hosted an experimental Book Sprint focussing on the festival theme FUTURITY NOW!. The Book Sprint, an intensive and innovative methodology for the rapid development of books saw five people locked in a room in Berlin's IMA Design Village for five days to produce a book with the sole guiding meme being the title – Collaborative Futures. They had to create the concept, write the book, and output it to print in 5 days.Collaborative Futures was facilitated by Adam Hyde and written by Mike Linksvayer, Alan Toner, Marta Peirano, Michael Mandiberg and Mushon Zer-Aviv with a number of guests who contributed chapters and passages. The process opened up a new and networked discussion focusing on a new vocabulary of the forms, media and goals of collaborative digital practice. As the transmediale.10 publication the Book Sprint was based on an idea by Adam Hyde and Stephen Kovats to enact the festival notion of futurity in the form of a flash publication.Aleksandar Erkalovic in part developed and tested the alpha version of the 'booki' collaborative platform live and on-site with which 'Collaborative Futures' was created.The contents of the book are now available online, and a special limited edition of 200 copies featuring a great cover designed by Laleh Torabi will be available for sale during transmediale.10, opening next Tuesday Feb 02, at the House of World Cultures in Berlin.For an e-pub and pdf version:http://www.transmediale.de/en/collaborative-futureswith some great pics and more info on the process at FLOSS Manuals:http://en.flossmanuals.net/abouttransmediale.10FUTURITY NOW!02 - 07 February 2010House of World Cultures Berlinhttp://www.transmediale.detwitter #tm10Collaborative Futures festival edition price 15,-- eurogreetings,and looking forward to seeing you in Berlin next week,Stephenartistic director--------------------------------------------------------FUTURITY NOW!transmediale.10 | 2 - 7 feb 2010festival for art and digital culture berlintickets and passes online at:http://www.transmediale.de/en/tickets--------------------------------------------------------klosterstr. 68 - 10179 berlin - germanyfon +49 30 24749 761 fax +49 30 24749 763http://www.transmediale.dehttp://twitter.com/transmedialefacebook: transmedialekulturprojekte berlin gmbhaufsichtsratsvorsitzender volker hellergeschäftsführer moritz van dülmenamtsgericht berlin charlottenburg, HRB 41312 B--------------------------------------------------------

A funny pass in Edward Chancellor's review of John Lanchester's "Whoops!on the financial crisis and its causes. The art-cult-net (in)crowd willprobably appreciate... ;-)"Mr. Lanchester compares the shift in finance over recent decades to therise of modernism in the arts. It constituted a "break with common sense,a turn towards self-referentiality and abstraction, and notions thatcouldn't be displayed in workaday English." Finance had become as rottenas modern literary criticism. The bookish Mr. Lanchester senses a "weirdfamiliarity about the current crisis: value, in the realm of financecapital, parallels the elusive nature of meaning in deconstructionism."full review article at: http://bit.ly/6Y32ouCheerio, p+3D!

US National Public Radio reports that the UCLA police have "updatedtheir missing persons bulletin for Agre with the following news:'Philip Agre was located by LA County Sheriff's Department on January16, 2010 and is in good health and is self sufficient.'"http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2010/01/missing_internet_pioneer_phil.htmlhttp://www.ucpd.ucla.edu/2009/09-2490.pdfSee: http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0911/msg00031.htmlCheers,T

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----Hash: SHA256re all,some time ago, 2 years almost, we've had a IoT presentation in Waagand in my presentation i mentioned "philanthropic bubbles" among thebad practices, which spawned questions and criticism in the audience(at least from the reactions i've directly collected).http://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/2008/10/28/internet-of-things-book-presentation-at-the-waag/the "philanthropic bubble" definition is mostly referring to myexperience of the birth and growth of Ubuntu's egemony in the freesoftware world, which i've also defined here previously as a "big fisheating all the aquarium": Mark Shuttleworth and his "God-given"capitals have done nothing else than forking Debian and take all thepublic credits and donations for having done a "Linux for humanbeings" (please note also the omission of GNU in there).so now the situation becomes clear for more people, what waspredictable with a little bit of information on the background ofCanonical ltd. (and even a linguistic etymology of its name) is nowperceived by more and more people: Canonical has created a cathedral,a centralised regime that saturated the market, a monopolistjuggernaut for such a novel liberal market (deja vu?) and ultimately acorporate entity that is not even intentioned to respect the integrityof the liberal ideals it predates:https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2010-January/029976.htmland a direct link, just in case it gets censored... http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2010/01/14/ubuntu-debian.htmlin addition to Bradley M. Kuhn arguments let me point out also thatthe new "software center" installation interface offered byUbuntu/Canonical imposes a very dangerous interpretation of "free" as"gratis" to the wide public installing software: in the italianversion that is even translated as "gratis" and not "libero" so farthat our software included in the distribution is perceived by usersas "gratis and amateur level" in comparison to "professional" softwarethat you pay for. surprised that after all this talking about it"free" is translated as "gratis" by Ubuntu? go see the discussion onthe italian ubuntu forum on this regards, it unfolds in a veryinteresting way as a bully translator negates all possibilities tochange the state of things referring to undocumented discussions "hehad with other translators" on this issue:http://forum.ubuntu-it.org/index.php/topic,331942.20.html still stuckat gratis, and will stay, without a democratic process for such animportant decision. this new software shopping application will giveno hints about the concept of liberty that has moved so manydevelopers to put together the many GNU/Linux/BSD systems that canhardly survive today, it will just put besides software that "you haveto pay" with software that "you don't have to pay". see:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCentersome people might argue this unfaithful mutation is a viable tradeoffto make "Linux usable" (and the GNU out of the picture), but isincerely believe the rise of Ubuntu resolves in a huge desaster forus free software developers: it is a deterrent for the sustainabilityof many grass-root development communities (Ubuntu never redistributedthe wealth and visibility it has predated..) while the fact that aGNU/Linux desktop is made solid is still a simple task for a group ofartisans or a small *local* company, as proven by the many effortslisted on http://distrowatch.com for instance.so now ex-Debian developers and FSF enthusiast on the Canonical board!have fun with your philanthropist multinational, hope it feels betterthan it does on this side of the World. still i hope in a near futureit will be interesting to follow the fall of such a "humanistmonopoly"; if it will ever happen, it will be the victory of communityideals and diversity over monopoly regimes. After all, this"internal" conflict in free software becomes more and moreunavoidable: Ubuntu won't ever find it convenient to follow theoriginal ideals they are predating since they are looking for dominionand not supporting an ecosystem.arguably Red-Hat (and Fedora) have played a more honest role inestablishing a multinational business company than Ubuntu inestablishing a monopoly "deus ex machina". however, once again theintegrity of the Free Software Foundation, comes at hand and theirefforts in supporting the development of various free softwaredistributions is as valuable as our need for alternatives likeGnewsense GNU/Linux http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.htmlhttp://www.gnewsense.org/personally i've stopped feeling frustrated about all this since awhile now, having decided to observe and document this dynamic as itunfolds, I'm wondering what you think about it? arguably you don'teven need to be using GNU/Linux to realise how well this story relatesto many other contexts.ciao- -- jaromil, dyne.org developer, http://jaromil.dyne.orgGPG: B2D9 9376 BFB2 60B7 601F 5B62 F6D3 FBD9 C2B6 8E39-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)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6HOu-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

[ Vocational training: "Spook Studies" - a parallel to "Sustainability Studies". Two lines that must converge soon, like strawberries and cream. - ao] --David Price has a major scoop in our latest subscriber-only newsletter. He describes how, across the past five years, without a word of public debate, let alone concern the CIA, has successfully implanted spy schools on 22 university campuses across the country, many of them labeled “Intelligence Community Centers of Academic Excellence” – ICCAE, pronounced “Icky”. It began in 2004,” Price reports, when “a $250,000 grant was awarded to Trinity Washington University by the Intelligence Community for the establishment of a pilot ‘Intelligence Community Center of Academic Excellence’ program. Trinity was in many ways an ideal campus for a pilot program. For a vulnerable, tuition-driven struggling financial institution in the D.C. area the promise of desperately needed funds and a regionally assured potential student base, linked with or seeking connections to the DC intelligence world, made the program financially attractive.”Price’s timing is impeccable. Last Monday, the day we were preparing to send his story to press, came news that a group of Fox News’ freelance buggers - the same who set up ACORN – had been arrested, trying for phone sabotage in Senator Mary Landrieu’s New Orleans office. Three of the team were caught inside Landrieu’s office. A fourth was arrested as he sat in a car a few blocks away with what the police described as “a listening device that could pick up transmissions." Another anonymous official told MSNBC that the man in the car was Stan Dai. Dai is a veteran of Trinity Washington University’s spook school,. funded by the “Intelligence Community”. In 2008, Dai served as associate director of ICCAE at Trinity Washington. How many wannabe Howard Hunts and G. Gordon Liddys are being turned out by the spook schools? As Price writes, “Even amid the extreme militarization prevailing in America today, the public silence surrounding this quiet installation and spread of programs like ICCAE is extraordinary. In the last four years ICCAE has gone further in bringing government intelligence organizations openly to multiple American university campuses than any previous intelligence initiative since World War Two. Yet the program spreads with little public notice, media coverage, or coordinated multi-campus resistance.” Did any tenured faculty member at the 22 campuses now hosting spook-schools publicly raise the alarm? Twenty years ago there would have been furious demonstrations. Not now. Faculty, most notably at the University of Washington, did write anguished, even angry memos. Price quotes them. But as he writes, “it’s far from clear that these private critiques had any measurable effect, precisely because they remained private... "Tenured professors on ICCAE campuses, or on campuses contemplating ICCAE programs, need to use their tenure and speak out, on the record, in public... the split between the public and private reactions to ICCAE has helped usher the CIA silently back onto American university campuses. The intelligence community thrives on silence.” Alexander Cockburnhttp://counterpunch.org/cockburn01292010.html

U.S. enables Chinese hacking of GoogleBy Bruce Schneier, Special to CNN http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/01/23/schneier.google.hacking/index.html Editor's note: Bruce Schneier is a security technologist and author of"Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World."Read more of his writing at www.schneier.com.(CNN) -- Google made headlines when it went public with the fact thatChinese hackers had penetrated some of its services, such as Gmail, ina politically motivated attempt at intelligence gathering. The newshere isn't that Chinese hackers engage in these activities or thattheir attempts are technically sophisticated -- we knew that already

here's the dark ide of texting:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8482666.stmwould like to see where else and when texting has been used to provokepolitical violence. might we see more "hostile" uses of social media? textwars, maybe?-robert

In contrast to the early thousands of hits per day coming from GoogleCN when the ban was first lifted, now the hits have dwindled to 2 or 3per day on our one site.Google.cn lists 61 files for "Tiananmen Square massacre" compared toGoogle.com's 325,000.Not sure if this means Google.cn is listing only the targeted filessince the ban was lifted or if there is some other type filtering isbeing done.:xAny news on what Google is actually doing about its threat to stopcensoring Google.cn? Has Google conclusively determined that that theattacks came from China.Not much since the initial spin which got an amazing amount ofcredulity. Follow-up questions about proof of the origin of theattacks remain unanswered, rather answered with equivocation.But lots of offical use of the alleged attacks to gear up forcyberwarfare hootenany. Cybersecurity mavens are ecstatic -- this isnot to accuse these scoundrels of orchestrating the attacks, Chinawill do that, but a few experienced skeptics say best not to believeanything about cybersecurity that is classified.Even the USG is propounding that skepticism, says the NY Times today,but defense mavens assure there are adequate protections, in themanner of Janet Napolitano.Smells fishy.Was Google bamboozled by DoD or one of its classified contractorsor "false flaggers" My, false flaggers, haven't heard that hoary exculpationsince the murder operations in Latin and Central America.

<http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c18091ee-09ee-11df-8b23-00144feabdc0.html>Hackers target friends of Google workersBy Joseph Menn in San FranciscoPublished: January 25 2010 23:47 | Last updated: January 25 2010 23:47Personal friends of employees at Google, Adobe and other companies weretargeted by hackers in a string of recently disclosed cyberattacks,raising privacy concerns and pointing to a highly sophisticatedoperation, security experts said.Cybersecurity experts analysing the attacks said the hackers spied onindividuals and used other sophisticated techniques, making themextremely difficult to stop. The disclosures come amid renewed alarmover cybersecurity after Google said it had been the target of a seriesof cyberattacks from China.The most significant discovery is that the attackers had selectedemployees at the companies with access to proprietary data, then learntwho their friends were. The hackers compromised the social networkaccounts of those friends, hoping to enhance the probability that theirfinal targets would click on the links they sent."We're seeing a lot more up-front reconnaissance, understanding who theplayers are at the company and how to reach them," said George Kurtz,chief technology officer at security firm McAfee."Someone went to the trouble to backtrack: 'Let me look at theirfriends, who I can target as a secondary person'."McAfee discovered that a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft's InternetExplorer had been used in the attacks. Mr Kurtz said the attackers alsoused one of the most popular instant messaging programmes to inducevictims to click on a link that installed spy software.Another element of the attack code used a formula only published onChinese language websites, said Joe Stewart, a researcher for securityfirm SecureWorks. Mr Stewart also found that some of the code had beenassembled in 2006, suggesting that the campaign had been not only wellorganised but enduring.The evidence pointed to a government-sponsored effort that only largespy agencies or perhaps some of the most advanced big companies couldhave withstood, experts said. China on Monday described accusations itwas behind cyberattacks as "groundless".Sam Curry, vice-president of security firm RSA, said: "This is a loudmessage for the commercial world, which is: wake up, this isn't allhappiness and goodness and new business."Doing business on the internet is as risky as sending ships through thePanama Canal."(c) The Financial Times Limited 2010

Never Art/work!Stevphen Shukaitis & Erika Biddle From issue 7 of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest: http://joaap.org/7/7.htmlEveryone is an artist. This would seem a simple enough place to begin; with a statement connecting directly to Joseph Beuys, and more generally to the historic avant-garde’s aesthetic politics aiming to break down barriers between artistic production and everyday life. It invokes an artistic politics that runs through Dada to the Situationists, and meanders and dérives through various rivulets in the history of radical politics and social movement organizing. But let’s pause for a second. While seemingly simple, there is much more to this one statement than presents itself. It is a statement that contains within it two notions of time and the potentials of artistic and cultural production, albeit notions that are often conflated, mixed, or confused. By teasing out these two notions and creatively recombining them, perhaps there might be something to be gained in rethinking the antagonistic and movement-building potential of cultural production: to reconsider its compositional potential.The first notion alludes to a kind of potentiality present but unrealized through artistic work; the creativity that everyone could exercise if they realized and developed potentials that have been held back and stunted by capital and unrealistic conceptions of artistic production through mystified notions of creative genius. Let’s call this the ‘not-yet’ potential of everyone becoming an artist through the horizontal sublation of art into daily life. The second understanding of the phrase forms around the argument that everyone already is an artist and embodies creative action and production within their life and being. Duchamp’s notion of the readymade gestures towards this as he proclaims art as the recombination of previously existing forms. The painter creates by recombining the pre- given readymades of paints and canvas; the baker creates by recombining the readymade elements of flour, yeast, etc. In other words, it is not that everyone will become an artist, but that everyone already is immersed in myriad forms of creative production, or artistic production, given a more general notion of art.These two notions, how they collide and overlap, move towards an important focal point: if there has been an end of the avant-garde it is not its death but rather a monstrous multiplication and expansion of artistic production in zombified forms. The avant-garde has not died, the creativity contained within the future oriented potential of the becoming-artistic has lapsed precisely because it has perversely been realized in existing forms of diffuse cultural production. “Everyone is an artist” as a utopian possibility is realized just as “everyone is a worker.” This condition has reached a new degree of concentration and intensity within the basins of cultural production; the post-Fordist participation-based economy where the multitudes are sent to work in the metropolitan factory, recombining ideas and images through social networks and technologically mediated forms of communication. We don’t often think of all these activities as either work or art. Consequently it becomes difficult to think through the politics of labor around them, whether as artistic labor or just labor itself.The notion of the Art Strike, its reconsideration and socialization within the post-Fordist economy, becomes more interesting and productive (or perhaps anti-productive) precisely as labor changes articulation in relation to the current composition of artistic and cultural work. The Art Strike starts with Gustav Metzger and the Art Worker Coalition and their call to withdraw their labor for a minimum of three years from 1977–1980. Metzger’s formulation of the Art Strike is directed against the problems of the gallery system. Metzger’s conception was picked up by Stewart Home and various others within the Neoist milieu who called upon artists to cease artistic work entirely for the years 1990–1993. In this version, the strike moves beyond a focus on the gallery system to a more general consideration of artistic production and a questioning of the role of the artist. In the most recent and presently emerging iteration, Redas Dirzys and a Temporary Art Strike Committee have been calling for an Art Strike currently as a response to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, becoming a European Capital of Culture for 2009. The designation of a city as a capital of culture is part of a process of metropolitan branding and a strategy of capitalist valorization through the circulation of cultural and artistic heritage. (In Vilnius this has played out through figures like Jonas Mekas, George Maciunas, the legacy of Fluxus, and the Uzupis arts district.) In Vilnius we see the broadening of the Art Strike from a focus on the gallery system to artistic production more generally, and finally to the ways in which artistic and cultural production are infused throughout daily life and embedded within the production of the metropolis.The Art Strike emerges as a nodal point for finding ways to work critically between the two compositional modes contained within the statement ‘everyone is an artist.’ An autonomist politics focuses on class composition, or the relation between the technical arrangement of economic production and the political composition activated by forms of social insurgency and resistance. Capital evolves by turning emerging political compositions into technical compositions of surplus value production. Similarly, the aesthetic politics of the avant-garde find the political compositions they animate turned into new forms of value production and circulation. The Art Strike becomes a tactic for working between the utopian not-yet promise of unleashed creativity and the always-already but compromised forms of artistic labor we’re enmeshed in. In the space between forms of creative recombination currently in motion, and the potential of what could be if they were not continually rendered into forms more palatable to capitalist production, something new emerges. To re-propose an Art Strike at this juncture, when artistic labor is both everywhere and nowhere, is to force that issue. It becomes not a concern of solely the one who identifies (or is identified) as the artist, but a method to withdraw the labor of imagination and recombination involved in what we’re already doing to hint towards the potential of what we could be doing.Bob Black, in his critique of the Art Strike, argues that far from going on a strike by withdrawing forms of artistic labor, the Art Strike formed as the ultimate realization of art, where even the act of not making art becomes part of an artistic process. While Black might have meant to point out a hypocrisy or contradiction, if we recall the overlapping compositional modes of everyone being an artist, this no longer appears as an antinomy but rather a shifting back and forth between different compositional modes. While Stewart Home has argued repeatedly that the importance of the Art Strike lies not in its feasibility but rather in the ability to expand the terrain of class struggle, Black objects to this on the grounds that most artistic workers operate as independent contractors and therefore strikes do not make sense for them. While this is indeed a concern, it is also very much the condition encountered by forms of labor in a precarious post-Fordist economy. The Art Strike moves from being a proposal for social action by artists to a form of social action potentially of use to all who find their creativity and imagination exploited within existing productive networks.But ask the skeptics: how we can enact this form of strike? And, as comrades and allies inquire, how can this subsumption of creativity and imagination and creativity by capital be undone? That is precisely the problem, for as artistic and cultural production become more ubiquitous and spread throughout the social field, they are rendered all the more apparently imperceptible. The avant-garde focus on shaping relationality (for instance in Beuys’ notion of social sculpture), or in creative recombination and detournément, exists all around us flowing through the net economy. Relational aesthetics recapitulates avant-garde ideas and practices into a capital-friendly, service economy aesthetics. This does not mean that they are useless or that they should be discarded. Rather, by teasing out the compositional modes contained within them they can be considered and reworked. How can we struggle around or organize diffuse forms of cultural and artistic labor? This is precisely the kind of question explored by groups such as the Carrotworkers’ Collective, a group from London who are formulating ways to organize around labor involved in unpaid forms of cultural production, such as all the unpaid internships sustaining the workings of artistic and cultural institutions.In 1953, Guy Debord painted on the wall of the Rue de Seine the slogan “Ne travaillez jamais,” or “Never Work.” The history of the avant- garde is filled with calls to “never artwork,” but the dissolution of the artistic object and insurgent energies of labor refusal have become rendered into the workings of semiocapitalism and the metropolitan factory. To renew and rebuild a politics and form of social movement adequate to the current composition does not start from romanticizing the potentiality of becoming creative through artistic production or working from the creative production that already is, but rather by working in the nexus between the two. In other words, to start from how the refusal of work is re-infused into work, and by understanding that imposition and rendering, and struggling within, against and through it.ReferencesArt Strike Biennial: http://www.alytusbiennial.comCarrotworkers’ Collective: http://carrotworkers.wordpress.comHome, Stewart (1991) The Neoist Manifestos/The Art Strike Papers. Stirling: AK Press.

dear nettimersa small conference with a lot of action for those who will be in Barcelona next week...in the last few years a lot of things changed in the /tactical/ side of tactical media and it's maybe time to ask a few questions again: how do DIY grassroots practices deal, clash, mutate or just ignore mainstream cultures? how are new collective narratives built? why is taking risks so important to build them?(for those who won't attend, the videos will be on line soon after)bani- - -* The Influencers *Art, communication guerrilla, radical entertainmentPresentations, screenings, workshops, actionsA project by Bani Brusadin, Eva & Franco Mattes a.k.a. 0100101110101101.ORGFebruary 4 - 6, 2010Center of Contemporary Culture - Barcelona, Spainhttp://TheInfluencers.orgWith the participation of:Mike Bonanno of The Yes Men, ZEVS, James Acord, the author of Donkeypedia and Donkijote.org, the NYC chapter of the Black Label Bike Club, Joan Leandre a.k.a. Retroyou, Steve Kurtz and Steve Barnes of the Critical Art EnsembleThe Influencers is a three day think-tank that tackles the potential of non conventional communication in contemporary society. We are interested in exploring the hybrid zones wherein autonomous experiments and mainstream culture blend and collapse into one another. Projects that stem out of a deeply rooted do-it-yourself attitude, even when they develop into complex, large scale projects.http://theinfluencers.org/en/festival/2010/program

There's an interesting battle brewing in the Canadian media between a Facebook user group and the Conservative government.P.M. Stephen Harper has prorogued Parliament, which means he has cancelled the Parliament in mid-session and instituted a 3-month break. He says, variously, that this is to allow Canada to "concentrate" on the Olympics in Vancouver, to "re-calibrate" the government, and to focus on the economic stimulus versus the recession.Both progressives and conservatives have suggested he actually prorogued to stop an inquiry into war crimes, namely the knowing hand- over of Afghan prisoners-of-war into the hands of Afghani government torture. This topic was getting much front-page coverage and the inquiry was getting closer and closer to unwelcome information. The PM's attempt to discredit a career diplomat was met with an unprecedented letter from 23 former ambassadors criticizing Harper's tactics.Anyway, the prorogation (Harper's second in a row) caused a bit of an outcry, including the creation of a facebook group that has 200,000 members a month later. Conservative poll numbers are down 15 per cent (evening their popularity with the Liberals) over the same period.(I have to reference, here, John McCain's call to suspend electioneering to deal with the recession, which was an utter failure as a tactic. Obama famously chided him for being unable to deal with more than one thing at a time.)The Conservative Party line is that facebook groups are meaningless in terms of real voting.However, this analysis suggests the opposite is true:" Why did more than 200,000 people join ?Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament,? and why should anybody care?"by the Rideau Institutehttp://www.scribd.com/doc/25550017/Rideau-Institute-Facebook-and-ProrogationAnyone have any thoughts on this? There are anti-prorogue rallies planned for Saturday, which may or may not settle the issue; voters who stay home from the rally might still vote against the Conservatives.I'd suggest that while Facebook is a fairly passive way to take part in politics, it's slightly less passive than simple voting, because it involves a public online commitment, with all the dangers of a permanent record. That also means the action can have a ripple effect among communities of friends (or, I should say, Facebook Friends [tm]). So if any party wishes to form a government, they had better pay attention to that kind of activity.-Flick Harrison* FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com* FACEBOOK http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=860700553* MYSPACE: http://myspace.com/flickharrison

bwo CIS-India, original at:http://www.cis-india.org/news/wiki-worth-different-turfWiki's worth, on a different turfAn Indian duo–a programmer and a mathematician–have developed a tool toexpose anonymous writers and cleanse Wikipedia of rogue editorsBangalore-based Kiran Jonnalagadda, a Web programming guru, and HansVarghese Mathews, a mathematician, are the new entrants to the emergingfield of Wikipedia research. The duo is credited with building WikiAnalysis, a tool that helps researchers understand the growing phenomenonof astroturfing, the practice of faking grass-roots support on Wikipediaand other websites. Wikipedia is the first Google result for most searchesand this has made it a popular destination for those trying to manipulatepublic opinion on the Internet. Corporations, governments and even popartists have been caught astroturfing in the past.Jonnalagadda and Mathews are among 34 researchers from 17 countriesattending a two-day conference in Bangalore, WikiWars, which is concludingtoday. WikiWars is taking a fresh look at many different aspects of theworld’s biggest encyclopaedia, the sixth most popular website on theInternet.The first generation of astroturfing on Wikipedia has been, thus far,largely unsophisticated, with little attention paid to covering up digitalevidence. Remember the campaign Avril Lavigne’s fans launched last yearthat turned her music video Girlfriend into the most viewed clip onYouTube? Wal-Mart Stores Inc. contracted its public relations firm Edelmanto maintain a fake website called “Working Families for Wal-Mart”. Theypretended to be ordinary citizens who opposed the views of the firm’slabour union.It is well known that platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, with opaquemanagement procedures, are susceptible to astroturf campaigns. Supportersof open licensing and peer production have always held that Wikipedia andother community-managed platforms are protected thanks to theirtransparency in policies and practices. But as far as Wikipediaresearchers are concerned, the jury is still out.Microsoft tried to pay technology blogger Rick Jelliffe to work onWikipedia connected to OOXML (Office Open XML) during the ISO(International Organization for Standardization) approval process in anattempt to influence the global vote. OOXML was the new file format for MSOffice documents that urgently needed approval to check the growingpopularity of Open Office. A user called “Ril_editor”, active betweenSeptember 2007 and May 2008, who claimed to be working out of RelianceIndustries Ltd’s chief Mukesh Ambani’s offices, tried to expunge pagesconnected to negative publicity about Reliance. Scientologists wereblocked by Wikipedia’s arbitration committee when they were found tryingto systematically undermine Wikipedia’s NPOV (neutral point of view)policy. NPOV is Wikipedia’s particular spin on non-partisanship, providingequal space to all opinions. However, some Wikipedia researchers such asGeert Lovink, head of the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, andco-organizer of the WikiWars conference, believes that the dominance ofEnglish and textual citation requirements has meant that NPOV is nevertranslated into practice.An American team based out of the Santa Fe Institute, US, has developedWikiScanner, a public database of IP addresses that helps reveal theorganizations behind anonymous edits on Wikipedia. WikiScanner has beenused to expose the US Central Intelligence Agency’s manipulation of pages.WikiScanner doesn’t yet work for edits by authenticated users. TheWikiScanner team has also developed another tool called Potential SockPuppetry, which exposes those who use multiple user accounts from the sameIP address. However, both tools could be circumvented by purchasingmultiple data cards or getting people to work from public access pointssuch as coffee shops and cyber cafés.It is this gap the Indian duo’s tool tries to plug. The first version oftheir Wiki Analysis tool clusters users into potential lobbies based onthe pages they edit within a date range. The tool’s next version willcluster users into lobbies based on the words they consistently add anddelete across pages. Says Jonnalagadda, “Wikipedia is now close to adecade old and has many articles that have existed since its earliest daysand have been edited by thousands of individuals.” It is now the primaryencyclopaedic destination for Internet users, and that makes it a ripetarget for astroturfing. At no point in the history of human civilizationhave so many collaborated over so long to produce one canonical documenton any article of human knowledge.“Wikipedia users rarely bother to check how a page was edited, but thatinformation is all there, available to anyone who cares to look. We’rebuilding the tools to help make sense of it,” Jonnalagadda says. Once WikiAnalysis is ready, you will be able to check if, for example, the editorsof the climate change page on Wikipedia are more interested in ecology orenergy.Original article on Livemint

[Note: files are often posted well ahead of their announcement here or on the web archive page - so for the latest, subscribe to the podcast version.]BEHIND THE NEWS with Doug Henwood"Best Music on an Economics & Politics Radio Show"Village Voice Best of NYC 2005podcast:<http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/radio-feed.php>iTunes:<http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73801817 >or<http://tinyurl.com/3bsaqb>opening commentaries now at:<http://doughenwood.wordpress.com/>Facebook group:<http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53240558375>.--------------------------------------------------Just posted to my radio archive<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html>:January 14, 2010 Robert Fatton on the history and social structure of Haiti (excerpts from 2004 interviews—originals here and here) • Tom Geoghegan on the evil thing known as the Senate filibuster • Alyssa Katz, author of this piece (and the excellent book of Our Lot) on the state of the housing market and what good things we can do with all the see-through condos left over from the bubbleJanuary 9, 2010 (KPFA version) Michael Rose of the Bureau of National Affairs on the BNA’s survey of economists’ projections for 2010 • Cyrus Bina of the University of Minnesota–Morris on Iranthey join:---------December 31, 2009 David Himmelstein on the emerging Democratic health reform schemes • Dennis Brutus on South Africa (repeat of July 2008 interview in memory of the great poet and activist who died on December 26)December 24, 2009 Sam Gindin, former economic advisor to the Canadian Auto Workers union, on bringing the working class back into politics • Lucia Green-Weiskel of the Beijing-based NGO Innovation Center for Energy and Transportation on the Copenhagen climate conference and China’s role in climate politicsDecember 17, 2009 Gar Lipow on the Copenhagen climate conference and the technological path to a post-carbon future (download his book and other stuff here) • Kevin Alexander Gray on South Carolina, white supremacy, and Obama and black AmericaDecember 10, 2009 Greg Grandin, author of Fordlandia, on Honduras and other Latin American hotspots • Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Bright- Sided, on enforced good cheer in the USADecember 5, 2009 (KPFA version) Letitia James of the New York City Council and Dana Berliner of the Institute for Justice on the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn and the depredations of eminent domain across the U.S. • Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute on EPI's jobs programNovember 28, 2009 (KPFA only) DH on financial regulation • Bob Meister, professor of political science at the UC–Santa Cruz, on the crisis in the University of California systemNovember 19, 2009 Curt Ellis, co-producer of Big River (and King Corn), on the toxic evils of agribusiness • Joel Schalit, author of Israel vs. Utopia, on the Israeli politics and identity, and the country's relations with the U.S.---Doug HenwoodProducer, Behind the NewsThursdays, 5-6 PM, WBAI, New York 99.5 FMSaturdays, 10-11 AM, KPFA, Berkeley 94.1 FM"best music on a show about economics & politics" - Village VoiceLeft Business Observer242 Greene Ave - #1CBrooklyn, NY 11238-1398 USA+1-347-599-2211 voice+1-917-865-2813 cellemail: <mailto:dhenwood-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>web: <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html>podcast: <http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/radio-feed.php>iTunes: <http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73801817 >or <http://tinyurl.com/3bsaqb>"blog": <http://doughenwood.wordpress.com/>--------------------------------------------download my book Wall Street (for free!) at<http://www.wallstreetthebook.com>

Haiti earthquake: video uncut footage from the Vimeo channelOn the Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2010/01/16/haiti-earthquake- video-footage-from-the-viemo-channel/January 16, 2010 by Tjebbe van TijenDid choose these two examples of raw video footage from Haiti because there is no voice over, no music, no appeal… just an eye witness with a camera that registers. This kind of untouched documents are rare. Everybody is mimicking at the moment the disaster relief propaganda style appeals with heart breaking music, voice-overs, mixing often the same images, the same footage.How to help en who to help is still a big question for us outsiders, but one need not to be in a hurry…. there is always the long dreadful aftermath with its many needs and support structures that will be more clearly defined and adapted to individual financial help. I am in a process to try and find out which organizations have a long and positive record of activity in Haiti (the Dutch NGO database of CIDIN/ University of Nijmegen may be a source). More structural structures are needed for individual disaster support and the means to do so are there with the internet tools we have now. The disaster industry is needed of course, big scale operations first, however questionable the mechanism may be. There should be also a second line of help that allows for small initiatives, grass root support.Now just the two high resolution video examples the only ones in a set of 80 videos at the Vimeo web site that let us into the harsh reality without a filter.The Reformed Church in America’s General Synod President, James Seawood, and an RCA delegation were in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck. This is footage taken by Rev. Seawood in the moments just after …. by clicking the full screen icon at the right in the bottom bar of the video you can see the high resolution full screen version…[embedded video]The above video has been taken by James Seawood of The Reformed Church in America’s General Synod, he and a RCA delegation were in Port-au-Prince when the earthquake struck. The footage shows a 9 minute uninterrupted (non-montaged) video take while mr. Seawood and his company walk down from a somehow untouched area with buildings still standing into what looks from afar as a cloud of dust…. The crowd in the street shows a mixed behavior from very contained to horrified outbursts.This video is taken in the south of Haiti by a staff member of the Global Orphan Project…[embedded video]and has the following caption: “1/12/2010 Haiti was hit by a massive 7.3 magnitude earthquake, here is some footage from one of our field partners on the ground in the south of Haiti.”Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/