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<<US trade commission to probe Apple for HTC patent infringementSarah Miley at 10:25 AM ETPhoto source or description [JURIST] The US International Trade Commission (ITC) [official website]on Friday voted to launch an investigation [press release] intoallegations made by HTC Corp accusing Apple [corporate websites] ofpatent infringement on certain portable electronic devices. HTC filed acomplaint with the ITC in May [JURIST report] claiming that Apple hadinfringed on five of HTC's patents, and is seeking an exclusion orderand a cease and desist order, which would ban Apple's importation ofiPhones, iPads and iPods. The complaint alleges violations of § 337 ofthe Tariff Act of 1930 [text], which regulates the importation and saleof certain portable electronic devices that infringe patents in the US.The ITC's Chief Administrative Law Judge will assign the case to one ofthe commission's six administrative law judges, who will schedule andhold an evidentiary hearing. The judges will make an initialdetermination of whether Apple violated § 337, and that determinationwill be subject to review by the commission as a whole. The commissionstated that a target date for completion will be determined within 45days of the investigation's commencement.In March, Apple filed a lawsuit [JURIST report] against HTC in the USDistrict Court for the District of Delaware [official website] allegingthat several of HTC's products infringe 10 patents owned by Apple. Applealso filed a complaint [text, PDF] against HTC with the ITC claiminginfringement of 10 other Apple patents, seeking to bar the importationof infringing devices. Apple has recently been involved in numerouslegal actions over alleged patent infringement. In October, Finnishtelecommunications company Nokia [corporate website] filed suit [JURISTreport] against Apple alleging that Apple infringed 10 of its patentssince the first iPhone was released in 2007. The patents cover wirelessdata transmission, speech coding, and security/encryption.http://jurist.org/paperchase/2010/06/us-trade-commission-to-probe-apple-for-htc-patent-infringement.phpH.

DUTCH GOVERNMENT TROIKA 1 + 1 = 3 – the non-mathematical logic of democracyJune 15, 2010 by Tjebbe van Tijen[ tableau image with 3 horses]This is the coalition government most seriously studied in the coming days: two big winners trying to persuade one big loser to combine forces. Compared to the elections of 2006 VVD grew from 22 to 31 seats, PVV from 9 to 24 and CDA lost 20 seats and now has 21 representatives in parliament. Historically speaking the actual argument – supported by almost all parties – that governmental participation of the PVV party should be taken most serious as they have seen the biggest growth in votes, shows how party politics is based on short memory. The oscillating favours of Dutch voters in the last two decades resulted in the national elections of the year 2003 in sudden growth of votes for the Socialist Party (SP). They grew from 9 to 25 seats which is one seat more of sudden growth than the now triumphant PVV party of Geert Wilders. In 2003 the bright red horse of the SP was maneuvered out of government within days. Nobody taking their victory serious. Where the PVV has grown in 2010 elections with 15 seats to a total of 24, the SP had grown in 2003 with 16 seats to a total of 25 (of which they have lost now 10 seats). These are the vicissitudes of the parliamentary system in which the act of counting and the value of numbers is most peculiar and has its own non-mathematical logic. As ‘a majority’ in our actual democratic system = 1/2 the numbers total number of seats +1, the ‘ars combinatoria’ of selecting party horses that will pull the ‘wagon of state’ will at one moment in history not value an electoral success, while at another moment prize a defeat.Most parties in the scattered landscape of Dutch party politics enter the election process with blind faith and false hope that they will gain enough votes to form a government with one or two friends. Most of the party leaders refuse to tell the voters on forehand who their friends are or will be. The most heard argument has been that is “you voters who decide.” After the elections democracy ends up with a decision process of wheeling and dealing directed by a hereditary monarch and a lackey appointed by her for this occasion. “De kiezer heeft gesproken” (the voter has spoken) is the expression of the day, while on the basis of marginal differences in actual votes, unpredictable government coalitions are wrought which have measures and policies in stall that will go against that what the majority of the voters have tried to express at the one brief moment in time that they could mark their ballot-paper. After one month of staged political debates on television and party leaders feigning ‘direct democracy’ on twitter, it is back to ‘back-room policies’.version with image and explanatory link on Dutch party system can be found athttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2010/06/15/dutch-government-troika-1-1-3-the-non-mathematical-logic-of-democracy/Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/

Hey Everybody,We just landed in BASEL for the notorious art show frenzy in this small provincial town of switzerl.land - and before we jump into the business madness, we wanted to let you know about our latest bits and pieces we have come up with during the last few weeks as well as those little items that are just ahead of us...BTW! >> if you are in Basel, pls sms/text, email or call us for a meet&greet,,Enjoy the summer! -- lizvlx && hansItem01 - UBERMORGEN at SCOPE BASEL, June 15 - 19Project shown: DEEPHORIZON - LED lid lightboxes & videoWhere to find: Fabio Paris Art GalleryProject URLs: http://ubermorgen.com/DEEPHORIZON && http://vimeo.com/ 12264646Item02: video moments with UBERMORGEN - relax lean back enjoyWOPPOW -- http://vimeo.com/12264646UGI Universal Health -- http://vimeo.com/10409634 (00:38:00 - A PAINFULL MUST SEE)Superenhanced Interrogation (NEW!) -- http://www.vimeo.com/12485728Item03: EYEBEAM NEW YORK - "Re:Group – Beyond Models of Consensus", June 10 - Aug 7Project shown: [V]ote-AuctionExhibition URL and artist list: http://eyebeam.org/events/regroup- beyond-models-of-consensusItem04 - HMKV DORTMUND "Agents & Provocateurs", May 14 - July 18Project shown: [V]ote-AuctionExhibition URL and artist list: http://bit.ly/bwdhQAItem05 - WEISSES HAUS VIENNA - Solo Exhibition, June 9 - July 17Project shown (NEW!!!): Asylabwehramt (AAbA) / Asylum Defence AgencyProject URLs: http://asylabwehramt.at/OEFFENTLICHKEIT/07062010e.pdfOffice Exhibition Video -- http://www.vimeo.com/12346600Image: Billie-Ada Bernhard, 2010, "Untitled", Photobooth, digital jpg 640x480Courtesy Helmut Lang Gallery, Sandwich/U.K.http://www.ubermorgen.com/UNEWS/BILLIE_ADA_UNTITLED_2010.jpgrambazamba------------------------------------- ;) ------------hans-J9x4cQJ3dcw6GGFevw1D/A< at >public.gmane.org && liz-J9x4cQJ3dcw6GGFevw1D/A< at >public.gmane.orgSkype Hans_Bernhard && lizvlxMobile +436509300061 && +436509300060http://ubermorgen.com

Guardian 15/16 June 2010.original at: http://bit.ly/cZRFPuCan Rupert Murdoch remain king of content?News Corp's bid for full control of BSkyB is just part of its push tomanage how its output is consumedContent is king, as we so often hear. The problem is, the internet is arepublic; which means that the most exalted content has to muck in witheverything else that's out there.The biggest technology companies don't sully themselves with creatingcontent: Google generates none (except Street View); nor does Microsoft,or Facebook, or Twitter. Even Yahoo, which has bought a company calledAssociated Content, is better known for the content on its photo sharingsite Flickr. There's no room for kings among that democratic mess.So how does Rupert Murdoch, a man who is fiercely certain of the value ofcontent, restore it to what he sees as its rightful place as amoney-earner in its own right? In effect, by making sure that it stays offthe wider internet. BSkyB is a perfect example of controlling the endpointof consumption: you need to have Sky's satellite dishes and Sky's receiverand Sky's encrypted card – tied to a subscription – to view it. Similarly,the Wall Street Journal, the newspaper that he coveted, lies behind apaywall on the web, and most recently in an iPad app (with, again,subscriptions). Fox is a cable channel, not an internet site. And it'sinteresting too that BSkyB and the Wall Street Journal rely on contentthat is fantastically time-sensitive: sports and finance. People will payfor access to those in a way they won't for the latest episode of House ora reality show.It's instructive to compare Murdoch's success with that content with thebiggest failed merger ever, of AOL and Time Warner. Those two couldn'twork, because they were the internet equivalent of oil and water: one isan internet distribution company, and the other a content company. With nocontrol of the endpoint, the losses were staggering. AOL has now been cutadrift, but not before Time Warner bled content and money all over theweb.Murdoch has experimented with the republican world of the internet, withMySpace, which News Corporation bought for $580m in 2005. Even that didn'twork, because it couldn't keep people locked into the site, and whensomething more attractive came along, people left in droves: Facebookovertook it in 2007. When last seen, MySpace's visitor numbers were stillplummeting, and nobody knows how to turn it around.So having tried the republican model for content, and found it not to hisliking, Murdoch is retreating once again to a kingdom. The paywalls beingput up around the Times and Sunday Times are indicative of that thinking.So if Murdoch has failed on the wider internet, does that mean it'simpossible to make content work online? No; but you either need not to beworried about the direct cost, or confident that your strategy isdefinitely going to pay off in the medium and long terms. For the firstexample look at the BBC, where its multiple outlets – TV, radio, the web –are increasingly well-integrated: its TV and radio journalism feeds intoweb pages, while TV programmes are available again on the iPlayer, andradio is spread around the world over the net. The purpose there is clear– to push the BBC brand, which is an end in itself that trumps simpleprofit-and-loss calculations, though even there it has had to cut backrecently.Then there are the newspapers, where the Guardian and the New York Timesare competing to push their content out across the web via an API – theside door to the database of stories and other content. Like the BBC'sstrategy, it's predicated on having no control of the endpoint, andinstead having control of the feed of content, which means either chargingfor it or including adverts – the same model as the print newspaper, infact.It may be that Murdoch will be able to largely ignore the internet andkeep the kingdom of content of his properties for as long as he likes,providing he can retain the two must-haves of live sports and financialinformation. For others, the former king may instead have to live like theSwedish royal family, cycling around with everyone else, and distinguishedonly in name and history.But Rupert Murdoch never did much like bicycles.Charles Arthur is The Guardian's technology editorhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/charlesarthur

oil lineover two thousand feet of vertical pipe in the gulf as imaged by CanyonOffshore and interpreted for virtual worlds (containing any potentialphysical damage) from Q4000 as interpreted from diagrams of containmentefforts -http://www.alansondheim.org/lynn.movrelayed at 10x real-time velocity, with the exception of the final light-source segment in real-time; static shots are the result of temporarytransmission failures. in the original two minor and one medium leak maybe seen, as well as numerous fish and plankton -metaphorically the debris of life (oil, gas, plastics) destroys life; weare a species inhabited by our own hauntings -

Apropos of some of the recent discussions about DRM, I wanted to sendinformation about a just-launched project entitled the Journal ofJournal Performance Studies (JJPS), a series ofthree interrelated works that engage with academic publishing,consisting of a Firefox extension, an online radio station, and ajournal. The project itself can be found athttp://turbulence.org/Works/JJPS/ .JJPS started as a result of my own disgust over the absurd prices foracademic journals. Thinking about modes of distribution of digitalcontent, and the fights over "piracy" started by the various mediaindustries, I considered what would possibly be the logical conclusionof the crackdowns on the passing of files in their "native" formats. Ifthe sharing of MP3 files, movies, and now PDFs continues to becriminalized, what other possibilities for distribution might exist?Given the textual nature of much scholarly publishing--and since authorsoften present their paper aloud at conferences--what would be thepotential of an online radio station that consisted of nothing butrecitations of academic articles?This question lead to a myriad of directions, as the project itselfshows. Because of my recent work with MAICgregator, a separate Firefoxextension looking at the military-academic-industrial complex, I wasinterested inhow a Firefox extension could contribute to our understandings of onepotential future of scholarly publishing where the Google worldviewdominates all. Thus the JJPS Firefox extension(http://turbulence.org/Works/JJPS/extension ), software that not onlyprovides information about the absurd journal costs as mentioned above,but also presents a myriad of "factors" and advertisement replacementsthat shows how bibliometrics and worry about Google's influence mightchange how journals present and market themselves.The JJPS Radio station (http://turbulence.org/Works/JJPS/radio ) isfully-automated, producing new programs 24/7 related to the study ofjournal performance. Not only does it have recitations of texts, italso uses these texts as its source material to create a varied set ofsonic programs. Certain shows have certain hidden features that youmight find by perusing the texts on the radio website. JJPS Radio isalso meant to foreground a different type of "digital humanities".While that term is used in so many contexts as to hardly describeanything of note, there seems to be a growing tendency to view it asreferring to simply the transplantation of large-scale data analysismethods from engineering to large-scale "humanities" datasets. (See,for example, the Digging into Data Challenge:http://www.diggingintodata.org/ ) JJPS Radio pushes back against this,and shows how the techniques of data mining and natural languageprocessing can be used in alternative ways.Finally, the Journal (http://turbulence.org/Works/JJPS/journal )initially presents statements about the project, as well as performancesof other forms of distribution. However, I do hope for the Journal tobecome an ongoing, fully-fledged publication that explores not only thepolitical issues surrounding journal and book publishing and their"performance", but also how we can use networked platforms to push thelimits of contemporary intellectual representation. Those interested inthis should contact me directly.Thanks to turbulence.org for the commission that allowed this project tocome to fruition.Best,nick

German/Deutsche Version: http://www.asylabwehramt.at/OEFFENTLICHKEIT/07062010d.pdfSUBPOENAGZ 2P/834752390 PGHVienna, June 7 2010((SEAL))((RUNDZEICHEN)) http://asylabwehramt.at/Bilder/Asylabwehramt_Seal_800x800.pngAsylum Defence Agency / Asylabwehramt (AAbA)http://www.asylabwehramt.atA-1010 Vienna · Wollzeile 1 / Stk.4International Relations: Tel.: +43 1/23 679-94 · E-Mail: INTREL< at >asylabwehramt.atPresse Deutsch: www.asylabwehramt.at/OEFFENTLICHKEIT/07062010d.pdfPress English: www.asylabwehramt.at/OEFFENTLICHKEIT/07062010e.pdfOffice Edutainment Video: http://vimeo.com/12346600The Asylum Defence Agency (Asylabwehramt, AAbA) is superordinated to the Defence Office (Abwehramt, AbwA) as well as the Federal Asylum Office and subordinated to the Federal Ministry of National Defence and Sports.This semi-anonymous and semi-autonomic Agency is responsible for anonymization of asylum proceedings, stopping human trafficking, immigration diversion, and for defending against surplus refugees and asylum seekers. The Agency also takes action in the fields of imigration pre-selection (economic refugees, naturalization), secret deportation, migration analysis for national protection as well as in prevention of re-traumatization and the expansion of bureaucratic barriers.The Agency disposes of its own intervention force and employs a private security agency which operates both nationally and internationally. The Defense Agency serves the country's and people's self-protection. Subsequently, the Agency takes part in resolving as well as preventing and/or with/without violence the invasion and the undermining of unwanted immigration subjects and the terror occurred through them and through groups in Austria as well as in their countries of origin (IMMINTEL). The Asylum Defense Agency possesses bureaucratic instruments (administrative – adjudicative) as well as instruction competence in the executive ministries (deployment force, immigration authorities, military, private security services) as well as an expanded expertise covering affairs such as torture, denial of assistance and homicides.Furthermore there are externally located, secured and anonymous centres for people leaving a country deliberately (service point for expatriation/repatriation - PATSEC, outsourced to the leading oil and building construction corporations OMV and Strabag). This service ensures a safe travel back home (http://bit.ly/bmxGyo). Our competent employees offer assistance to all refugees in opening up new perspectives for the refugee's future options in the respective destination country.The Asylum Defence Agency is also the authority charged with the enforcement of adminstrative acts in all asylum proceedings (first instance verdicts of the Federal Asylum Office). Core to its activities in this field are trustworthy anonymous experts and their respective reports, which are vital in scrutinising any affidavits and reports given by individual refugees and witnesses.The Office of the Asylum Defence Agency in Vienna consists of a lobby, an adminsitrative office and a head office with an adjacent screening room equipped for video-conferencing with the Agency's international satellite offices, as well as audiovisual documentations and entertainment.Sincerely yours,(digitally signed)OARat Dr. Andreas Bichelbauer(EOD End of Document) nnnnUBERMORGEN.COMAsylabwehramt (AAbA), 2010Office Installationhttp://www.asylabwehramt.atExhibition June 9 - July 17 2010Kunstverein das weisse hauswww.dasweissehaus.atReturnServiceHotline +43 800 20 30 40((SUBPOENA)) http://www.asylabwehramt.at/Bilder/Subpoena.png((LADUNG)) http://www.asylabwehramt.at/Bilder/Ladung.pnghttp://www.asylabwehramt.at/Bilder/Subpoena.pnghttp://www.asylabwehramt.at/Seiten/Seal.htmlhttp://www.asylabwehramt.at/Material/Hotline_Englisch.PDFhttp://www.asylabwehramt.at/Seiten/Externalactivities.htmlSponsors:BM.I Federal Ministry of the Interior, BMDI.DE Federal Ministry of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany, FRONTEX EU agency for the operational cooperation on external borders, Raiffeisen Meine Bank., IBM International Business Machines, OMV Mehr bewegen., STRABAG Building Visions – Building Values – Building Europe, Ghetto Company, Unitedagainstracism.org, Eurogendfor, Statewatch, IOM - International Organisation for Migration, Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa

http://en.slow-media.net/manifestoThe Slow Media ManifestoThe first decade of the 21st century, the so-called ‘naughties’, has brought profound changes to the technological foundations of the media landscape. The key buzzwords are networks, the Internet and social media. In the second decade, people will not search for new technologies allowing for even easier, faster and low-priced content production. Rather, appropriate reactions to this media revolution are to be developed and integrated politically, culturally and socially. The concept “Slow”, as in “Slow Food” and not as in “Slow Down”, is a key for this. Like “Slow Food”, Slow Media are not about fast consumption but about choosing the ingredients mindfully and preparing them in a concentrated manner. Slow Media are welcoming and hospitable. They like to share.1. Slow Media are a contribution to sustainability. Sustainability relates to the raw materials, processes and working conditions, which are the basis for media production. Exploitation and low-wage sectors as well as the unconditional commercialization of user data will not result in sustainable media. At the same time, the term refers to the sustainable consumption of Slow Media.2. Slow media promote Monotasking. Slow Media cannot be consumed casually, but provoke the full concentration of their users. As with the production of a good meal, which demands the full attention of all senses by the cook and his guests, Slow Media can only be consumed with pleasure in focused alertness.3. Slow Media aim at perfection. Slow Media do not necessarily represent new developments on the market. More important is the continuous improvement of reliable user interfaces that are robust, accessible and perfectly tailored to the media usage habits of the people.4. Slow Media make quality palpable. Slow Media measure themselves in production, appearance and content against high standards of quality and stand out from their fast-paced and short-lived counterparts – by some premium interface or by an aesthetically inspiring design.5. Slow Media advance Prosumers, i.e. people who actively define what and how they want to consume and produce. In Slow Media, the active Prosumer, inspired by his media usage to develop new ideas and take action, replaces the passive consumer. This may be shown by marginals in a book or animated discussion about a record with friends. Slow Media inspire, continuously affect the users’ thoughts and actions and are still perceptible years later.6. Slow Media are discursive and dialogic. They long for a counterpart with whom they may come in contact. The choice of the target media is secondary. In Slow Media, listening is as important as speaking. Hence ‘Slow’ means to be mindful and approachable and to be able to regard and to question one’s own position from a different angle.7. Slow Media are Social Media. Vibrant communities or tribes constitute around Slow Media. This, for instance, may be a living author exchanging thoughts with his readers or a community interpreting a late musician’s work. Thus Slow Media propagate diversity and respect cultural and distinctive local features.8. Slow Media respect their users. Slow Media approach their users in a self-conscious and amicable way and have a good idea about the complexity or irony their users can handle. Slow Media neither look down on their users nor approach them in a submissive way.9. Slow Media are distributed via recommendations not advertising: the success of Slow Media is not based on an overwhelming advertising pressure on all channels but on recommendation from friends, colleagues or family. A book given as a present five times to best friends is a good example.10. Slow Media are timeless: Slow Media are long-lived and appear fresh even after years or decades. They do not lose their quality over time but at best get some patina that can even enhance their value.11. Slow Media are auratic: Slow Media emanate a special aura. They generate a feeling that the particular medium belongs to just that moment of the user’s life. Despite the fact that they are produced industrially or are partially based on industrial means of production, they are suggestive of being unique and point beyond themselves.12. Slow Media are progressive not reactionary: Slow Media rely on their technological achievements and the network society’s way of life. It is because of the acceleration of multiple areas of life, that islands of deliberate slowness are made possible and essential for survival. Slow Media are not a contradiction to the speed and simultaneousness of Twitter, Blogs or Social Networks but are an attitude and a way of making use of them.13. Slow Media focus on quality both in production and in reception of media content: Craftsmanship in cultural studies such as source criticism, classification and evaluation of sources of information are gaining importance with the increasing availability of information.14. Slow Media ask for confidence and take their time to be credible. Behind Slow Media are real people. And you can feel that.Stockdorf and Bonn, Jan 2, 2010Benedikt KöhlerSabria DavidJörg BlumtrittConfer also:• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elissa-altman/move-over-slow-food-intro_b_367517.html• http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/11/17/pm-slow-media/• http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/announcing-my-first-pick-_b_310544.html• http://blog.oup.com/2008/11/slow_blog/• http://www.shep.ca/?p=132&http://blog.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/?p=5122 (in German)

_________________________________________________________microwurk 10: [[inte(di{late}u)rnal]] 12:37pm 23/06/2010_________________________________________________________microwurk 10: [inte(diu)rnal.leaps.b(f)ound+ sal(prist)ine.g(r)agged ..(p{ink})_et_als+ strict(l)ures.t(f)ainted.by.the.grey.mouse.grind .... my.time: my time: it _c(wh)or(e)por(ous+h)ate_ _experience____he(u)rtz___.] [end]_____________________________[begin: again: (in)al(l)ways]..........................[ break>unpacking ]:_____________________________b:_______[1stly: a "microwurk" is a (or equals, or "=") microCosmcondensation: discrete -x-pressions s(l)ip(=tongued)ped.thru.the.mi(A)nimal.u'll find these wurks everywhere nowadays if u care 2 look (+.siphon-C).txt.is.the.new.v(L)i(quid)Zion.]br:______["internal|diurnal": soggy_affect maintaining. in theface(tted_reality) of it,binding.ur.expression.in.tight.9-2-5.officialese.bit(e)s =knee_p(emotional.r)ain_jerkiness.]bre:_____["saline gagged|pristine ragged": medical allegories never goastray thru these w(et)alls scrawled with time.juggling.icons + lined with_SocioEconoCapitalness.straight.jackets.]brea:____["ink et als|pink petals" and "strict lures": "ink and others",indeed. "et al" binds in particular orangesque+canonBOOMic ways: candy-lacedBLOOMs frizzle + frazzle in their monotone shrinkwrapped b(won't)lasts.]break:___["faint|tainted by the grey mouse grind": 3.blind.mice obvious. ifu need this + subsequents unpacked: don't bother.]-

abscent(0)"WorldsChat in fact provides an example: _What anchors the avatars to thesimulated ground?_ Nothing, of course, except for programming(3) whichoccasionally is faulty(1), sending figures flying(2). The screen(4), notthe delineation of a virtual world(6), is the final arbiter(5). And thescreen is nowhere(7); it is the eye(8), the stain(10) or residue(11) ofthe gaze.(9)(12)" (from Past text, unknown date)(0) as in scent - stain or residue of odor.(1) faulty from the programmer's perspective of desired and achieved ends.(2) flying - against the presumed tenets of the space.(3) programming anchors nothing to nothing but creates the appearance ofsuch.(4) the monitor or other visual interface.(5) final arbiter - the inert or obdurate screen, the screen in the senseof presence and appetition.(6) boundaries of the virtual world as perceived.(7) this is the crux, from the remnant of the text - that the screen, isnowhere; it is in the vicinity of the perceiver/user; it's neither herenor there, just as the body is presenced, even in absence, for thesubject - it's nowhere at all - its location is irrelevant - similar topain in this regard - think of the screen as internalized - as-if - itmight as well be -(8) not the eye - what the eye sees - but the eye in the sense that onedoes not see one's own eye - parts of it (pressing the eyelids, lookingout of a corner), but not the eye itself - mirrors give the reflection up- nothing more -(9) stain or residue - but the result of _gazing_ - not the ontology ofthe eye but its productive epistemology.(10) eye and gaze leave an _internal_ stain always already in need ofreconstruction - re-producing the originary scene - primal scene - whosestain of course - then, within the memory, one's own, one has it - but themetaphor tends to break down - not a stain at all - for the most part whatis seen remains unnoticed, filtered out - integrated in the absence ofanomaly.(11) stain or residue - one defining the other; the stain is somethingleft behind - residue implying a sloughed coherent form - a form denuded -or residue unrelated to stain - perhaps an inscription or molecularfingerprint.(12) is the screen then the gaze, the eye, the stain, the residue - orare these parallel moments of absence - (not) having the author before me- i'd argue the latter - perhaps not parallel - a collocation of absences- as in leder's the absent body - the screen absent in this way -(13) the screen or footnote then - of course - nowhere at all -

In 2005 I wrote a one page essay for theFall issue of the Community Media Review (pg. 37)calling for a Slow Tech Movement./.7(!44(!4 THE JOURNAL OF THE ALLIANCE FOR COMMUNITY MEDIA ? Winter 2005www.communitymediareview.org/.7(!44(!4 THE JOURNAL OF THE ALLIANCE FOR COMMUNITY MEDIA ? Winter 2005www.communitymediareview.org------------------------------------------------------------Richard LowenbergP. O. Box 8001, Santa Fe, NM 87504505-989-9110 off.; 505-603-5200 cell------------------------------------------------------------1st-Mile Institute www.1st-mile.com------------------------------------------------------------

turkey banned a pool of google IPs, including googledocs... this is apart of a more complicated story about the youtube censor in turkey.http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=turkey-censors-google-for-ataturk-2010-06-04but this particular case that affects googledocs along with many other google services should make us rethink the freedom in the so called "cloud". i would love to give the link to the youtube video of eben moglen's speech at the internet society meeting on "freedom in the cloud" but i cannot access this "web 2.0" content right now because of the same youtube censor case in turkey. however richard stallman's text about what he calls "software as a service", the so called cloud computing, is here http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html but there is more to the problem with SaaS-the cloud computing- thanstallman and moglen's concerns about software freedom. besides thefreedoms highlighted by fsf about the software, you don't even "have"anything to talk about freedom anymore, if you live in turkey and usedto use googledocs. it is simply not accessible. this proves that youdon't have control over anything in the cloud, if the structure of thecloud "is just not right". if it is not "free, anonymous, distributedand p2p"... "your" documents "stored" and "edited" on google serversare subject to censor and many other threats. you may trust googlefor many reasons (which possibly need to be questioned also) aboutthe safety and access of your data. but how about other services andinfrastructures that you need to use to reach google etc... thiscase about googledocs is a crises for you if your "business" relieson gooledocs, just because you trust google because of its scale...http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Docs/thread?tid=7a2864f7a4fedf97&hl=en.another internet is possible!_ as i have written here on this listbefore... also another cloud.... but all the replies and commentson my post titled ".another internet is possible_" was stuck on thelittle part about "facebook" in that text. this also reveals anotherproblem about facebook. when we start talking about fb, we forget/skipthe rest of the internet... internet is not the fb and fb is not theinternet. we cannot reduce the critic and politics of internet tofacebook. i just realized that what i wanted to write in this e-mailabout the cloud problem referencing the turkey googledocs case, wasall about my concerns in my previous e-mail titled .another internetis possible!_, which has been sacrificed to fb discussions... soinstead of continuing this e-mail with the googledocs case in turkeywhich would repeat the same approach based on the concepts of freedom,anonimity and p2p, my apologies for pasting a part of my previous texthere again (skipping fb part)....another internet is possible!_ "not only possible but also necessary".....free distributed p2p architectures are important for internetapplications, where we can also be anonymous ,if we want to. if wewant to be free... "freenet"s model (http://freenetproject.org/) is agreat opportunity for the possible (but also necessary) future of theinternet. the "freesites" on freenet are not hosted on servers thatare subject to control but on peer's computers in a distributed andencyrpted way. all the activities on freenet are also anonymous. eachpeer shares a part of their disc space for freenet but they cannotreach it directly since the information is encrypted and only a smallpart of that information is stored on their own single computer. ithink this must be the way another internet is possible.cloud computing, what richard stallmancalls SaaS (software as a service-http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html), gives the control of the software to the private companies.online storage applications (like that of dropbox) also give thecontrol of your information to the companies giving that service.in the beginning of the 2000s, i used to advocate that storing thepersonal information on remote servers would totally dematerializethe information which is metarialized on the harddisk of a particularcomputer. so we need "that computer to reach the information. but ifit was on "the internet", not "on the harddisk", then what we wouldneed was "any" computer not "that" computer. when a computer isconnected to the internet through a (lan) cable, it also materializesthe access to information by rendering us dependent on the location of"the" cable and "the" computer. when the internet connection is freepublic wireless connection and when the personal informationcan bereached form any computer, then a hardware,"the" hardware,which alsoraised the problem of digital divide, would be alterable. a publichardware or a "100 dollar laptop" (of negraponte), even a "zero dollarlaptop" (of which furtherfieled.org is doing workshops inspired bythe manifesto of of James Wallbank,) will be enough to access andinterpret information, if the the software demanding high computingpower also runs on the "cloud". essentially not the software in thecloud as described as SaaS by richard stallman but software in whati dare say "peer cloud". software running on an architecture likethat of freenet. not on private servers like that of google's (asin googleDocs). AFAIK it is not technically possible yet but if weencourage the work on distributed p2p architectures, it may be oneday.web 2.0 was a great opportunity to democratize the way information iscreated and shared. bu it is not a great opportunity to access it.youtube is banned in turkey for very long. blogger was also banned fora time. web is subject to censorship and control. p2p is the way to bewithout intermediation of any parties. the problem with p2p was thatit is widely being used for sharing files not for running systems. but"freesites" of freenet shows that running system-like applications onp2p can be possible. wouldn't it be great if it was "p2p 2.0" insteadof "web 2.0".so the idea of the "cloud" is not evil if it is not dependent ofprivate servers and "services". it even has the potential of fullydematerializing the information rendering the access to it independentof any particular "hard"ware. i totally agree with what felix haswritten about "the return of DRM". the way to escape from controland property on internet lies on free anonymous distributed p2parchitectures like that of the freenet.another internet is possible! it is not late find the way to the"beach". it is not totally covered with the "pavement" yet like thatof the world. another internet is possbile, first of all to influencethe possibility of another world. http://another.httpdot.net/http://mail.kein.org/pipermail/nettime-l/2010-May/002158.html.-_-.http://httpdot.net/.-_-./

Taiwan's Miaoli County government destroy with power shovels andforcefully confiscate farms without landowners' permission. (partpictures are available inhttp://www.taiwangoodlife.org/story/20100702/2191)Some farms stop shovels with their flesh and blood body. The scenewas similar with Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989. The maindifference between these conflicts is China is a centralized state andTaiwan is democratic country. China employed military army to controlmedia but Miaoli County government paid much money to avoid TV andnewspaper reporting this protest.Until now, mainstream media still try to cover this news with fakestory. No member of council or Parliament mention this violence inpublic. Our only weapon is Internet to let more and more people knowwhat really happened in Taiwan.

deBts8 Robots play the debt/GDP ratioMonday, 5th of July 2010, 8:00 am on Alexanderplatz, Berlin directly in front of the Kaufhof.8 Robots programmed by 38317 play the State Debts in decibel (dB). Each of them in different intensity, based on a 2009 IMF chart of the arrears of important developed leading countries in percent of the given GDP (Gross Domestic Product). | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | F G I E J G C U r e t u a r a S a r a r p e n A n m l o a a a c a y z n t d e n o a y n B e r i t a i n Development of Public Debt in percent of GDP France 82,6 Germany 84,5 Italy 120,1 Eurozone 86,3 Japan 227,0* Great Britain 81,7 Canada 79,3 USA 93,6 * 2 x 113,5 dB due to tech reasonsHear, feel, sense and track the rise and fall of your favourite nation, the pressure on the working class and the future of apossible post-capitalistic world right now!The machines produce a unpleasant sinusoidal tone each as loud as the position of the particular state. For example: Germany 84,5 % = 84,5 dBCheck it out! This is not "Krach der Roboter" and not "Roboter spielen Haendels Wassermusik". Don't mishear it if you can't hear it.dB's Little LexiconIMF, the International Monetary Fund. Its primary purpose is to ensure the stability of the international monetary system and economic growth = capitalism. The IMF is not the motor of capitalism, this the capital.GDP, the Gross Domestic Product. It represents the dollar value of all goods and services produced over a year in one country.post-capitalistic, [phrase]: means nothing without a plan.www.38317.tk(c) 2010 n0name

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[org From: "Bryant Eason" <Br__nt.__s_n< at >_____.com.cn>Looking for a job? My name is Juliette Barnes, I am a recruiting manager of NetTemps Inc, a recruiting agency for direct-hire, contract, and freelance professionals within various professions. Today I would like introduce some part-time and virtual office vacancies in the spheres of Advertising, Education, Engineering, Finance, Health care, Information technology, Media, Real estate and Transportation. If you are interested to learn more about the jobs offered, please get back to me, providing your name and contact number. We are eager to help you find a better job and improve your career! If you have questions, please do not hesitate to e-mail me on: e u r o p e < at > n e t t _ _ . c o m [please delete spaces in the email address before sending it to us] Yours sincerely, Juliette Barnes NetTemps Inc ---------------------------------------------------------------

[This is my contribution to the current issue (#19) of 'open. Cahier on Art and the Public Domain.' which focuses on 'Beyond Privacy. New Notions of the Private and Public Domains.' In this text, I try to analyze why the notion of privacy seems to be loosing its capacity to function as a political category, despite all the privacy commissioners and NGOs fighting to protext privacy. Felix]http://www.skor.nl/artefact-4808-en.htmlOne way to characterize Western modernity, the period we are just leaving, is by its particular structure of control and autonomy. It emerged as the result of two historic developments – one leading to large, hierarchic bureaucracies as the dominant form of organization, the other to the (bourgeois, male) citizen as the main political subject. Privacy played a key role in maintaining a balance between the two. Today, this arrangement is unraveling. In the process, privacy loses (some of) its social functions. Post-privacy, then, points to a transformation in how people create autonomy and how control permeates their lives.Bureaucracies and Citizens, 1700-1950--------------------------------------The first of these developments was the expansion of large-scale institutions, first state bureaucracies, then, since the late nineteenth century, commercial corporations.1 Their attempts to organize social processes on a previously unimaginable scale – in terms of space, time and complexity – required vast amounts of information about the world, most importantly about the subjects in their domain. In 1686, the Marquis de Vauban proposed to Louis XIV a yearly census of the entire population, so that the king would be ‘able, in his own office, to review in an hour’s time the present and past condition of a great realm of which he is the head, and be able himself to know with certitude in what consists his grandeur, his wealth, and his strengths.’2 At the time, such an endeavour could not be conducted for practical reasons, but the vision spawned an entire range of new theoretical approaches to render the world available in such a way. In 1749, the German political scientist Gottfried Achenwall (1719-1772) brought them together under the term ‘statistics’, defined as the ‘science dealing with data about the condition of a state or community’. Yet, handling such data became ever more difficult as the drive to collect intensified. In the late nineteenth century, the US census, held once a decade, reached a critical juncture when the processing of the data amassed could not be finished before the next census was to be held. The historian James Beniger put this ‘control crisis’ at the beginning of the computer revolution and the information age enabled by it.3 Without the systematic gathering of standardized information and its processing into actionable knowledge, none of the functions of the modern state, or the modern economy, could have developed, beginning with centralized taxation, standing armies, social welfare provisions, or international trade and production of complex goods and services. Thus, modernity, and particularly high modernity, was characterized by an expansion of control by large bureaucracies based on massive amounts of information, conceptualizing people as standardized data-points to be manipulated for their own, or someone else’s, good. But as long as life was lived in a largely analogue environment, the comprehensive gathering of data remained such an extremely labour-intensive affair that only massive bureaucracies were capable of conducting it, and even highly developed states could do it only once every ten years. Under such conditions of limited information processing capacity (as we can see now), the drive to scale up these bureaucracies created strategies to radically reduce complexity, rendering them rigid and impersonal.Yet, during the same period of expanding centralized control, new spaces of autonomy were created. People, or, more precisely, educated townsmen, forged a new type of subjectivity. They began to think of themselves less as members of larger collectives (the guild, the church) and more as persons individually endowed with capacities, self-responsibility and, thus, a certain freedom from these collective entities. Central to this new sense of individuality was the secular notion of an inner life.4 It was characterized by the innate capacity to reflect and reason. This is, perhaps, the central notion of the enlightenment which celebrated the ability ‘to use one’s understanding without guidance from another’, to use Immanuel Kant’s famous definition (1784). While these capacities were located in the inner world of the individual, the enlightenment thought of them as universal. In principle, every man (though not necessarily women) should reach the same reasoned conclusion, if presented with the same evidence. Based on this universality of reason, the subject could justifiably contradict authority and tradition.The notion of privacy protected this inner world (and by extension, the home and the family life) from interference by authorities and thus protected the ability of the person to come to reasoned opinions about the world. In the liberal conception, this protected inner world provided the foundation of the ability of each man to form his own opinions to be exchanged in the public sphere in a rational deliberation of public affairs.5 This capacity for reasoning, in turn, provided the legitimacy for the inclusion of these reasoned men (and later women), elevated to the status of citizens, in governing the state. Indeed, this claim to power was increasingly regarded as the only legitimate one, superseding tradition as the main source of authority. Much of the concerns about the loss of privacy today stems from a commitment to this tradition of liberal democracy.6Starting in the late nineteenth century, however, the conception of the inner world changed radically. With the emergence of consumer capitalism, personal identity became a project and a problem with an urgency previously unknown. Inner life was no longer viewed as comprised of a relatively narrow set of coherent universals, but as an infinite expanse of conflicting drives and influences, forming a dynamic pattern unique to each person. Sigmund Freud, as the historian of psychoanalysis Eli Zaretsky argues, became the leading interpreter of the psychological tensions triggered by the consumer society.7 The inner world came now to be seen as the ground on which individual identity (rather than universal reason) was anchored. Privacy protected the complex, and potentially dangerous exploration conducted by the individual as he or she tried to come to terms with the pressures and desires at the core of individuality. If we follow Zaretsky’s approach of charting the transformation of subjectivities (and of psychoanalysis as the conceptual framework to articulate one type of it) alongside the transformations of capitalism, the type of subjectivity described by Freud started to lose its dominance in the 1960s.New social movements began to react to the pressures and opportunities created by yet another transformation, towards what was then called the post-industrial society and is now called, more accurately, the network society. Rather than focusing on introspection, the new social movements promoted a new type of subjectivity emphasizing expressiveness, communication and connection. At the same time, feminists began to develop a sustained critique of privacy, understanding family relations not as the counteracting force to capitalism, but rather as its continuation. Thus, privacy would not shield from domination, but transfer it from the field of economics to that of gender relations.8 However, despite the emergence of these freedom-oriented social movements, hierarchical bureaucracies remained the dominant form of social organization, and despite the feminist critique of privacy, it could still function as an important concept to shield people against the grip of these institutions. In Germany, for example, popular resistance against the national census (Volkszählung) arose in the mid 1980s, mainly on grounds of privacy protection against the preying eyes of the state.Networked Individualism and Personalized Institutions-----------------------------------------------------Fast forward 30 years. Many countries, including Germany, no longer conduct national censuses because the data has already been collected and can be aggregated flexibly from the various databases at the heart of government. An ever growing number of people is willing to actively publish vast amounts of information about themselves online for everyone to see and is happily using services that collect very fine-grained data about very personal affairs. While people still claim to be concerned about privacy when asked in surveys, their practices seem to indicate that such concerns have largely vanished in daily life. What happened? Here, I want to focus on two pieces of this puzzle. The first concerns the transformation of subjectivity on a mass scale. The second the changing relationships between individuals and institutions concerning the delivery of personalized, rather than standardized services.9First, subjectivity. The values of the social movements of the 1960s, severed from their political roots, have spread throughout society. They are now dominant. Flexibility, creativity and expressiveness are regarded today as generally desirable personal traits, necessary for social success, and, increasingly, seen as corresponding to the ‘true nature’ of human beings. As traditional institutions are losing their ability to organize people’s lives (think of the decline of life-long employment, for example), people are left to find their own orientation, for better or worse. While this has often been seen as primarily a negative process of atomization,10 we can now also see new forms of sociability emerge on a mass scale. These are based on the new infrastructures of communication and (relatively) cheap transportation to which vast amounts of people have gained access. But the sociability in this new environment is starkly different from earlier forms, based largely on physical co-presence. In order to create sociability in the space of flows people first have to make themselves visible, that is, they have to create their representation through expressive acts of communication. In order to connect within such a network, a person has to be, at the same time, suitably different, that is creative in some recognizable fashion, and abide by the social conventions that hold a particular network together. There are both negative and positive drivers to making oneself visible in such a way: there is the threat of being invisible, ignored and bypassed, on the one hand, and the promise of creating a social network really expressing one’s own individuality, on the other. This creates a particular type of subjectivity that sociologists have come to call networked individualism. ‘Individuals,’ Manuel Castells notes, ‘do not withdraw into the isolation of virtual reality. On the contrary, they expand their sociability by using the wealth of communication networks at their disposal, but they do so selectively, constructing their cultural worlds in terms of their preferences and projects, and modifying it according to their personal interests and values.’11 Since these networks of sociability are horizontal forms of organization, based on self-selected, voluntary associations, they require some degree of trust among the people involved. While trust deepens over the course of interaction, as it always does, there needs to be a minimum of trust in order to start interacting in the first place. What could be a chicken-and-egg problem is in practice solved by the availability of the track record of interests and projects that each person creates by publishing – as an individual and voluntarily – information about him/herself, what he or she is interest in, passionate about, and investing time in. In other words, being expressive – about anything – is the precondition of creating sociability over communication networks, which, in turn, come to define people and their ability to create or participate in projects that reflect their personality.12 This need to express one’s desires and passions in order to enter into a sociability that creates one’s identity slowly but surely erodes the distinction between the inner and outer world, so central to the modern subjectivity, forged in the Gutenberg Galaxy. Subjectivity is being based on interaction, rather than introspection. Privacy in the networked context entails less the possibility to retreat to the core of one’s personality, to the true self, but more the danger of disconnection from a world in which sociability is tenuous and needs to be actively maintained all of the time. Otherwise, the network simply reconfigures itself, depriving one of the ability to develop one’s personality and life.Second, large institutions. One of the progressive promises of the modern liberal state, and modern bureaucratic institutions in general, was to do away with privilege and treat everyone equally, based on the premise that no one is above (or below) the law and that all decisions are taken in accordance to the law (or, more generally, written procedure). Rigidity and impersonality have long been defined as core features of bureaucracies. Max Weber, at the beginning of the twentieth century when bureaucracies grew to an unprecedented scale, famously feared that their superior rationality would force society into an iron cage. Today, such impersonality is seen neither as a liberation from the injustices of privilege nor as rational, but as the dead hand of bureaucracy. Because, neoliberal ideology holds, we are not equal, but each unique. This creates both a push and a pull profoundly transforming the relationships between institutions and individuals. Even very large institutions are faced with demands to treat everyone individually. This is best visible in new institutions that have had to contend with these demands since their inception. The corporations that make up Web 2.0 are all about personalization, recommendations and individualized results. For that, they demand vast amounts of personal data, either directly provided by the user (by filling out registration forms, uploading personal contact lists and calendars, designating favourites and exchange partners) or indirectly collected (through log-analysis, processing of user histories, etcetera). Google, of course, is the most ambitious in this area, but in principle, it’s not different from other Internet companies.13 But this is not an isolated development in one sector, but symptomatic for the uneven transformation of the economy as a whole. On the level of manufacturing, this is expressed in the shift from the Fordist model of standardized mass production to a networked model of highly flexible production for precisely defined niches, all the way down to the size of one. On the level of services, this is expressed in the shift towards the delivery of personalized services. Virtually all consumer-oriented industries and services are today employing customer-relationship management (CRM) vastly increasing the amounts of personal data collected across the board, allowing the delivery of highly targeted products and services. Of course, there is also a very strong pull by the corporations themselves to learn as much as possible about their customers/users, in order to fine-tune each relationship to maximize profit. There seems to be an implicit deal, accepted by the vast majority of consumers/users: in exchange for personal data, one receives personal service, assuming that personalized is better than standardized. In order to succeed in such an environment, bureaucracies, even large-scale ones, strive to become less hierarchical, more flexible and highly personal, entering into intimate relationships with the people they deal with.Autonomy and Control--------------------The old balance between autonomy and control, represented by the figures of the citizen and the large bureaucracy, sustained by privacy, is in the process of disappearing. Autonomy is increasingly created within (semi)public networks, held together by mass self-communication and more or less frequent physical encounters.14 New projects to increase autonomy – that is the ability for people to lead their own lives according to their own plans – are being created on all scales and with the greatest variety of definitions of what autonomy actually looks like. What is characteristic to all of them is that the condition for autonomy is no longer understood as being rooted in the inner world, withdrawn from the social world, but in networked projects deeply engaged in the social world. Such projects range from the global justice campaigns, to the resurgence of local identities, from loosely coordinated political pressure campaigns to support groups that help people cope with personal traumas. They can be left-wing or right-wing, destructive or nurturing. Engagement in such projects is voluntary and they are held together by common protocols of communication and based on trust among their participants. Trust, in turn, is enabled by the horizontal availability of personal information about each other. In some ways, the dynamics of traditional offline communities – where everyone knows everyone – are being transported, transformed and scaled-up to new communities based on online communication. Of course, what ‘knowing a person’ means is rather different, and often distributed communities are too large to even superficially ‘know’ or count as a ‘friend’ everyone involved. Yet, if need be, everyone can be looked up and become suitably known very quickly, because everyone, voluntarily or involuntarily, leaves personal traces than can be accessed in real time or after the fact with great ease. While this, in itself, is not an entirely unproblematic condition – what about the freedom to have certain acts fade from memory?15 – it provides the basis for the rise of new voluntary associations. This can help to increase real autonomy of people, because it is focused on creating inter-personal worlds in which autonomy can be lived on a daily basis, even if its extends only to some fraction of one’s life.More problematic is the shift towards personalized institutions. With the rising complexity of the services delivered, personalization does have its benefits and the dead hand of bureaucratic formalism often can be, indeed, rather deadly. Yet, personalization also increases the power and control that such institutions can exercise, rather than the opposite. All the knowledge that goes into framing the character of the personalization resides at the end of the corporation that gets an ever increasing range of tools to fine-tune each relationship to optimize the pursuit of its own interests (usually profit maximization). As long as the actions of the user/customer are aligned with those of the corporation, they are supported and amplified through the granting of privileges, such as discounts, extra features and opportunities, faster delivery, and so on. However, as soon as the actions are no longer aligned (because they are hostile or not profitable), personalization turns into discrimination, based on whatever mechanisms are programmed into the underlying algorithms.16 For the user, confronted with subtle, entirely opaque and unaccountable decision-making mechanisms, it is nearly impossible to tell if one is being privileged or discriminated. There is no more standard against which this can be measured.Thus, the possibilities to create meaningful autonomy are being expanded through voluntary, horizontal associations that directly express their members’ interests and desires. At the same time and through the same infrastructure, the return of privileges and discrimination expands the ability of institutions to subtly or overtly shape other people’s lives according to their agendas. Thus, we can observe a structural transformation of the conditions for autonomy as well as the practices of control. Privacy no longer serves to mediate between them. What should replace it are two things. New strategies for connective opacity extending both horizontally – modulating what those outside a particular network can see of what is going on inside – and vertically – modulating what the providers of the infrastructure can see of the sociability they enable. In a way, this can be seen as privacy 2.0, but it takes as its unit not the individual, but an entire social network. But that is not enough. We also need mandatory transparency of the protocols, algorithms and procedures that personalize the behaviour of these newly flexible bureaucracies, so that the conditions of discrimination can be contested.1. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press, 1977).2. Quoted in: James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale: Yale University Press, 1998), 11.3. James R. Beniger, The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).4. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).5. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989 *).6. See, for example, Wolfgang Sofsky, Privacy: A Manifesto, translated by Steven Rendall (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), or, if you read German, Beate Rössler, Der Wert des Privaten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2002).7. Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Vintage, 2005).8. Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).9. I have addressed the role of the preventive security regimes elsewhere. Felix Stalder, ‘Bourgeois Anarchism and Authoritarian Democracies’, First Monday, vol. 13 (2008) no. 7 (July).10. The classic here is: Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster, 2000). A recent addition to this perspective: Jacqueline Olds and Richard S. Schwartz, The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Beacon Press, 2009).11. Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 121.12. Christophe Aguiton and Dominique Cardon, ‘The Strength of Weak Cooperation: An Attempt to Understand the Meaning of Web 2.0’, Communications & Strategies, no. 65 (2007).13. For an analysis of Google’s comprehensive data-gathering strategy, see Felix Stalder and Christine Mayer, ‘The Second Index: Search Engines, Personalization and Surveillance’, in: Konrad Becker and Felix Stalder (eds.), Deep Search: The Politics of Search beyond Google (Innsbruck/New Jersey: Studienverlag/Transaction Publishers, 2009), 98-116.14. For the relationship between communication and travel, see Jonas Larsen, John Urry and Kay Axhausen, Mobilities, Networks, Geographies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).15. Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).16. David Lyon (ed.), Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Automated Discrimination (London/New York: Routledge, 2003).-> http://felix.openflows.com/node/143--- http://felix.openflows.com ----------------------- books out now:*|Deep Search.The Politics of Search Beyond Google.Studienverlag 2009*|Mediale Kunst/Media Arts Zurich.13 Positions.Scheidegger&Spiess2008*|Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity, 2006 *|Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. Ed. Futura/Revolver, 2005 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

(but maybe they should have ;-)Apparently the campaign to save Middlesex University's philosophydepartment has been so succesful that one hears no more of it...Well there has been a momentous development in which one ex-poly(Kingston) is taking over the upper (post-graduate) tier of the written-ofdepartment. The fate of the lower (under-graduate) tier is now in the handof Middlesex Uni which has promised to let students finish their course.Reading the campaign website does not make one very confident about thathowever.So Middlesex philosophy has been saved - or sortof. But seen from outside,the whole episode looks like a caricature rather than the sole instance ofa future that, unfortunately, awaits quite a lot of department andresearch institutes whose quality and popularity only tend to prove todecision makers that they do not represent any 'measurable added value' totheir institution. PR lessons will undoubtedly be learned from Middlesexbosses' clumsy and callous approach, but this kind of policies is here tostay. Time may be to reconsider the university as a (the?) unique font ofresearch and knowledge...More news on: http://savemdxphil.com/Announcement (8 June): The CRMEP is moving to Kingston UniversityPosted on 8 June 2010 by aletheiaticverseTuesday 8 June 2010The campaign to save our philosophy programmes has just won a partial butsignificant victory: Kingston University in south-west London announcedtoday that it will re-establish our Centre for Research in Modern EuropeanPhilosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston, by employing the four senior staff inPhilosophy at Middlesex (Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, Peter Osborne andStella Sandford). Our MA and PhD programmes (full-time and part-time) willbe re-launched at Kingston this September, and all current post-graduatestudents will be invited to move along with the staff. Institutions inFrance and Germany have also made significant new proposals forcollaboration with the CRMEP, which may allow it to expand the Europeandimensions of its work considerably in the near future.This remarkable turn of events would never been possible without theextraordinary local and international campaign that began six weeks ago,to save our philosophy programmes.Like Middlesex, Kingston is a post-1992 university, with a commitment towidening participation in education. Unlike Middlesex, Kingston isexpanding rather than cutting back its provision in humanities subjects,and it is investing in research in these areas. In addition to taking onCRMEP staff, Kingston will be making a number of other high-levelappointments over the coming months, and is launching its own LondonGraduate School in conjunction with colleagues from several otherUniversities internationally. We believe that Kingston will provide anenthusiastic and supportive base for the activities of the CRMEP.Although we have not won all the demands made by our campaign, the move toKingston is a major achievement. We have found a way to keep all of ourpostgraduate programmes open, and to keep most of the CRMEP staff togetherin a single unit. We have preserved a place in London for the uniqueacademic community that has built up around the Centre and its distinctiveresearch interests, and this will continue to be a place where thecriteria for entry and participation remain as open as possible. Thecampaign has directly refuted the line that Middlesex managers haverepeated for many years now – a variation of the line that ‘there is noalternative’ but to follow the neoliberal way of the world, and to closedown small academic departments in favour of large vocational ones. Thecampaign hasn’t merely proved that ‘another way is possible’: it hashelped to indicate what needs to be done to make such a way a reality, andshown that there are universities in the UK and in Europe that are willingto embrace it.We hope that the campaign will continue, evolving to become one of severalcontributions from a range of institutions across London and the region toa broader and deeper struggle in support of philosophy, the humanities andpublic education more generally. Some of the protestors who made thebiggest impact in our campaign came from supportive universities such asSussex, KCL, SOAS, Westminster and Goldsmiths. This emerging network ofeducation activists isn’t going to disperse, and is likely to play animportant role in the struggles that will soon affect the entire sector.Although the closure of Philosophy at Middlesex is yet another indicationof the ongoing commercialisation of education in the UK, our campaign,along with other recent mobilisations at universities up and down thecountry, has helped change the balance of power across higher education.The campaign to save philosophy at Middlesex has already made a powerfulintervention in the fight for public education in general and forendangered humanities programmes in particular. The future lookschallenging but there is now much to build on, at Middlesex, at Kingstonand across the UK.Eric Alliez, Peter Hallward, Peter Osborne and Stella Sandford* * * * *The decision to leave Middlesex University was very difficult. Recently itbecame clear that some of the steps taken by Middlesex management to shutdown Philosophy would be irreversible in the short term. Management havealready written to all our current undergraduate applicants, informingthem that our BA programme is closed. No new PhD applicants have been ableto apply since early March. Belying some apparent suggestions oflast-minute compromise from his deputies, on Friday 28 May MiddlesexVice-Chancellor Michael Driscoll reiterated his determination to endPhilosophy recruitment and to phase out all Philosophy teaching.Management ignored a UCU motion calling for staff suspensions to be liftedby noon on Wednesday 2 June, and we know that effective UCU action tooppose the closure and suspensions will now take several months toprepare. The national political context is also significant. A first roundof severe cuts to the Higher Education budget will be announced on 22June, with more drastic measures to follow in the autumn. Given thefinancial pressures that will soon apply to every university in thecountry, if the door is shut at Middlesex then the time for a group movemay be now or never. If programmes are to be validated and new studentsadmitted in good time for the start of the new academic year in Septemberthen we need begin the transition immediately.We are acutely aware of the fact that such a move is only an incompletevictory for the campaign. Despite relentless local and internationalpressure the central demand of the campaign, to save philosophy atMiddlesex itself, has fallen on deaf ears. Vice-chancellor MichaelDriscoll and those managers who support his vision of a university purgedof critical thinking, research and humanities teaching have amplydemonstrated their contempt for the passionately argued priorities oftheir own students, and for the academic judgement of many highlyrespected scholars in and around our field, in the UK and the world over.Kingston University, meanwhile, doesn’t yet have an undergraduateprogramme in Philosophy, and in order to make this move possible it willhave to provide a substantial sum of transitional funding, through to theend of the current research funding cycle (i.e. for a minimum of threeyears). Given these constraints, Kingston is only able to take four of thesix members of staff in Philosophy at Middlesex. We very much regret thatwe haven’t managed to find a secure base for the CRMEP that includes allMiddlesex Philosophy programmes and staff. We hope that Middlesex will nowhonour its commitment to teach out its under-graduate programmes and thatit will retain our colleagues Christian Kerslake and Mark Kelly (if theyso choose) to teach them. In the longer term, we hope that Middlesex willoffer to retain Christian and Mark to teach philosophy courses forprogrammes in other areas. In addition to providing a place for currentMiddlesex undergraduates to pursue an eventual MA or PhD, we hope thatKingston will launch its own undergraduate provision in due course,enabling new appointments in Philosophy.We know that in leaving Middlesex we are leaving many courageous andembattled colleagues who have supported the campaign and whose ownprogrammes remain vulnerable. We know as well that several of the mosturgent issues of the campaign remain unresolved: students and staff arestill suspended, our undergraduate programme is slated for termination,the situation of our current undergraduate students is uncertain, thecriteria for further ‘sustainability’ decisions remain unclear, and thefuture of humanities provision is as precarious as ever. Middlesexmanagers have not changed their position and the union remains in disputeover the staff suspensions and the way in which closure decisions aretaken. The mobilisation of Middlesex staff in and beyond our UCU branch isproof of their readiness to fight not only for a radical transformation ofthese procedures but also for the general principles that have animatedthis campaign: the defence of universal access to education and theopportunity to pursue independent critical thinking; the defence ofteaching and research in terms that challenge the prevailing divisive andhierarchical criteria used to assess ‘performance’ and ‘excellence’; thedefence of academic freedom and the right to protest; the defence ofcollective action by students and staff alike.We will continue to do everything we can to support our colleagues and oursuspended students, and to resist any further intimidation of campaignactivists. Christian Kerslake, Peter Osborne, and Peter Hallward havesuspension hearings scheduled for this coming week, and we will fight notjust to overturn these suspensions but to discourage any future use ofsuch punitive and inappropriate sanctions in the face of peaceful protestand dissent.Today our campaign enters into a new phase. It has succeeded in showingthat there is indeed an alternative to the narrow corporate prioritieschampioned by Middlesex managers, and that in closing their Philosophyprogrammes and then persecuting their students and staff, Middlesexmanagement have violated their own procedures, damaged the reputation ofthe University and lost the confidence of many students and members ofacademic staff. These students and members of staff will no longertolerate management incompetence, bullying and unaccountability. Middlesexcan no longer be managed in the same old way. As it changes to become partof the broader struggle for public education, our campaign will continueto emphasise collective action and direct confrontation with the forcesthat are driving the neoliberal assault on our education system.One phase of this campaign is over; the struggle continues.

events were still unfolding when i first sent the note below yesterday, sunday, 27 june 2010, 10:29 am, toronto time. apparently the note got lost in the shuffle and never posted to the list, so i'm resending at the request of a moderator. since its writing, we saw another day of heavy police crackdown.many residences were raided (the raids had started on thursday night), the alternative media centre and the convergence space (headquarter of the toronto mobilization network) were also raided and many organizers arrested. several small, peaceful actions and solidarity rallies - both what was planned ahead and spontaneous jail solidarity marches - were surrounded by massive numbers of police in riot gear who attacked with rubber bullets and tear gas without any provocation. the arrests were systematic and followed scripted profiles. the bus stations were surveilled and people arrested as they were leaving town. many of the key organizers - including poeple who organized daycare and medics - are now in detention (or in hiding). charges range from "breaching peace" to "conspiracy". the level of absurdity was so high that last night at a downtown corner several hunderd riot police surrounded a group of about 150 poeple, many of them on their way to dinner or shopping and caught there by accident, kept them in pouring rain for several hours, in full view of live tv cameras. at the time of this writing, the number of people arrested is estimated to be around 900. the conditions at the detention centre are deplorable. some poeple have been transferred to higher security jails.updated information here:http://g20.torontomobilize.org/http://2010.mediacoop.ca/=====quick report from toronto - where anti-g20/g8 protests have been going on all week. this is mostly about events of saturday, june 26, which was the largest protest organized by the labour movement. you may have seen some reports of the "violence" by protesters on your news channels. this is what actually happened:1- while the "violent protesters" were walking up Yonge street smashing windows with NO police in sight (in fact, many of us saw them leave their posts in coordinated fashion and let the "black bloc" do its work), the cops were cracking down on peaceful demonstrators even in the "designated protest area". the public transit - streetcars and even the subway - was shut down for several hours, making it impossible for people to get out of downtown. we were all on foot, exposed and the cops were everywhere - except where black bloc was - and stopping, searching and grabbing people without any apparent reason.2- quoting from a direct witness where "violent protests" were happening:"The extreme violence of the black blockers was, from what I witnessed, directed towards police property (cars and police station) and businesses with global operations. Social institutions such as the native family organization that lies between the police station and Frans restaurant was not touched. The black blockers urged bystanders to get out the way. Even though their violence was considerable and frightening as it was happening, it was not directed towards people."This cannot be said for the police. Indeed, I could say that every excessive show of strength, intimidation, and aggression by the police was directed towards people. Everyone who I witnessed being injured, was injured by the police. I saw a young man, a meter behind me, peppered sprayed in the eyes when he stumbled as the line of riot police pushed us from University Ave back east along College street. As he lay on the ground screaming with pain, two middle aged women leaned down to help him and they were peppered sprayed. At Elizabeth St. and College St. I saw four fully suited up police officers kneeling on top of a young man face first on pavement. He was screaming "I didn't insult you, get off me. I'll fully cooperate." They stripped off his shoes."3- there are several reports and footage posted of the police charging/assaulting/arresting journalists:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3nCoNvldkhttp://toronto.mediacoop.ca/story/guardian-journalist-assaulted-arrested/3865closer to the fence in the evening (Novotel hotel site) where they were shooting blank bullets at people who had staged a spontaneous sit-in, tweet reports were that they were grabbing and smashing cameras4- latest official number of arrested: 480. we don't know yet how many people were injured and where they are.5- "security" cost: 1.1 billion6- an account/analysis by judy rebickhttp://transformingpower.ca/en/blog/toronto-burning-or-itlatest info including tweets athttp://2010.mediacoop.ca/toronto star, city's newspaper, blogginghttp://thestar.blogs.com/g20/and last night's tweets from the mild-mannered, middle-of-the-road canadian journalist steve paikinhttp://twitter.com/spaikinas i write and all last night and this morning i've been seeing/hearing police helicopters circling overhead near my house which is close to the film studio which they turned into a detention centre.thus toronto is welcomed to the world stage!gita

hello all, i am very interested in your "slow" thematics, we try also to organise an event with slow motion and autonomy/autarchy thematics.welcome tohttp://www.estivenumerique.orgin few days...JN