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Incident at YYZ Toronto International AirportWe were in Toronto for the HASTAC Conference at York University.We left Sunday late afternoon. At the airport we checked our bag.We then took the bag through customs. We went through severalstages. We had the bag tagged. We showed our boarding-passes andpassports everywhere. We filled out the customs declarations. Wewaited in lines. We went through a long line. Azure had herboarding-pass stamped. The Canadian official forgot to stamp mine.We went through another line. We turned things in. I was stoppedtwo stops later and told to return to the Canadian official. Theline to reach him took a half hour the first time. I walked twostops back. I reached a U.S. official who had allowed us throughthe first time. I said do I have to go through the whole lineagain. I was annoyed. He told me I was being rude. He startedyelling. He told me one of the three Canadian soldiers presentwould escort me back [it was to booth 20]. He was furious. He saidif the soldiers have time. He said be polite to them. He saiddon't interrupt them. He said be nice to them. He was glaring atme. And for a moment I felt I was in a foreign country, the UnitedStates of America. He was bullying. His sarcasm was stupid. Hisinsults were flat. His eyes impaled. Other people watched. He kepthis eyes focused 'in that male gaze way' on me. He wanted me tochallenge him. He wanted to arrest me for something. He wanted tohumiliate me. I said nothing. The soldier was fine, the Canadianofficial joked with me, the U.S. guy let me through. I didn't lookat him. People afterwards asked us what happened. I didn't know.All I knew is that here was an ugly bullying American who liked auniform and didn't like me. Who wanted to arrest me; more, I wassure he was going to hit me. I kept thinking: here's the policeand here's the police leakage across the border. You check INTOthe United States while still in Canada. Canada, throw them out.I thought: this guy owns guns. I thought: this guy wants _action._I thought of his pleasure: humiliation. I wanted to strike out athim. I was powerless _there._ _There_ was _here._I came back to the States and played cura and did this piece:http://lounge.espdisk.com/archives/1115 (best)http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/stations.mp3I wanted to play as many styles as possible in as short a time aspossible. But it's long. I want to wrap the strings around hiseyes. I want to slam him to the ground. He turns me ugly. He turnsme enemy combatant. He turns me _collateral damage._I don't play guns with cura. Of the music: cura _cures._

Courtesy of our department of text filtering (aka 'bullshit engineeringnettime' -Pit Schutlz).Enjoy, p+4D!original to: http://mondediplo.com/blogs/shouldn-t-pitcairn-really-be-french(the (l)one comment is worth reading too)Shouldn't Pitcairn really be French?by Robert H WadeThe British overseas territory of Pitcairn Island, midway betweenAuckland, New Zealand, and Panama, could almost be a testing ground forHobbes versus Rousseau.Its climate, soils and water supply make it a bountiful place forsubsistence living, but what of its history?In 1790 nine mutineers from the British Navy's HMS Bounty, accompanied by18 Tahitians, arrived to settle on the uninhabited island. They burnt theBounty, because the island has no place to hide it from the British navalofficers sent out to bring the mutineers to justice. In this Garden ofEden the settlers descended into alcoholism, murder and disease; when theywere finally discovered 18 years later, in 1808, only one of the mutineershad survived, along with some of the original Tahitian women and numerousoffspring.In 2004 the community attracted unwanted international attention when aBritish court laid charges against seven men on the island and another sixabroad for sexual offences. After extensive trials, six were convicted ofchild abuse, including the island's mayor, and sent to prison. The prisonhad to be specially constructed -- and the men who would serve time theretook part in the building work. In late 2006 they started their sentences;by 2010 all had been released.Now another case has come up, involving the current mayor. By mistake, hesent an official email to the British governor's office containing a linkto a pornographic website. The police - or rather, the island's singlepoliceman - raided his house and took away his computer, on which a largenumber of pornographic photographs and related items were found. He hasretained a New Zealand lawyer to defend himself against the charges; andthe lawyer is acting with great zeal -- paid for by unlimited British legalaid. The two of them have turned the case into a challenge to the validityof the entire governmental and legal structure -- a convenient diversionfrom the facts of the case.This structure certainly does merit revisiting. The island is tiny: 4.6square kilometres with a population of just 51 Pitcairners. For this tinyentity, the British government bears the cost of a resident establishmentof five New Zealanders seconded to the island: a schoolteacher (for thesix children), a policeman, a doctor, a social worker and the governor'srepresentative. The British government also bears the cost of a three-manCourt of Appeal.The only way to reach the island is to fly to Papeete (Tahiti), wait twodays there before flying to Mangareva (flights are irregular), and fromthere catch a cargo boat on one of its four-times-a-year visits toPitcairn, a trip that takes 30 hours if the weather's good, 40 when it'sbad.The island has no geostrategic or economic importance -- no oil in prospect

Courtesy of our department of text filtering (aka 'bullshit engineeringnettime' -Pit Schutlz).Enjoy, p+4D!original to: http://mondediplo.com/blogs/shouldn-t-pitcairn-really-be-french(the (l)one comment is worth reading too)Shouldn't Pitcairn really be French?by Robert H WadeThe British overseas territory of Pitcairn Island, midway betweenAuckland, New Zealand, and Panama, could almost be a testing ground forHobbes versus Rousseau.Its climate, soils and water supply make it a bountiful place forsubsistence living, but what of its history?In 1790 nine mutineers from the British Navy's HMS Bounty, accompanied by18 Tahitians, arrived to settle on the uninhabited island. They burnt theBounty, because the island has no place to hide it from the British navalofficers sent out to bring the mutineers to justice. In this Garden ofEden the settlers descended into alcoholism, murder and disease; when theywere finally discovered 18 years later, in 1808, only one of the mutineershad survived, along with some of the original Tahitian women and numerousoffspring.In 2004 the community attracted unwanted international attention when aBritish court laid charges against seven men on the island and another sixabroad for sexual offences. After extensive trials, six were convicted ofchild abuse, including the island's mayor, and sent to prison. The prisonhad to be specially constructed -- and the men who would serve time theretook part in the building work. In late 2006 they started their sentences;by 2010 all had been released.Now another case has come up, involving the current mayor. By mistake, hesent an official email to the British governor's office containing a linkto a pornographic website. The police - or rather, the island's singlepoliceman - raided his house and took away his computer, on which a largenumber of pornographic photographs and related items were found. He hasretained a New Zealand lawyer to defend himself against the charges; andthe lawyer is acting with great zeal -- paid for by unlimited British legalaid. The two of them have turned the case into a challenge to the validityof the entire governmental and legal structure -- a convenient diversionfrom the facts of the case.This structure certainly does merit revisiting. The island is tiny: 4.6square kilometres with a population of just 51 Pitcairners. For this tinyentity, the British government bears the cost of a resident establishmentof five New Zealanders seconded to the island: a schoolteacher (for thesix children), a policeman, a doctor, a social worker and the governor'srepresentative. The British government also bears the cost of a three-manCourt of Appeal.The only way to reach the island is to fly to Papeete (Tahiti), wait twodays there before flying to Mangareva (flights are irregular), and fromthere catch a cargo boat on one of its four-times-a-year visits toPitcairn, a trip that takes 30 hours if the weather's good, 40 when it'sbad.The island has no geostrategic or economic importance -- no oil in prospect

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONSSociety of the Query ReaderThe INC Reader Series, edited by Geert Lovink, give an overview of the present day research, critique, and artistic practices in a thematic research field at once broad and limited. The set up is multidisciplinary, with academic (humanities, social sciences, software studies etc.), artistic, and activist contributors. Following the success of the previous INC readers we would like to put together an anthology with key texts considering online search and search engines. In parallel with the second Society of the Query conference which will take place in Amsterdam on November 7-8 2013, the Institute of Network Cultures is devoted to produce a reader that brings together actual theory about the foundation and history of search, the economics of search engines, search and education, alternatives, and much more.This publication is edited by Ren?? K??nig and Miriam Rasch, and produced by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam, to be launched early 2014. It will be open access and available in print and various digital formats (see below for information on the INC reader series).POSSIBLE TOPICSTheory and Foundations of Search // Googlization: Mapping Google???s Dominance // Search Engines and Education // Searching Elsewhere: Non-Western Perspectives // Personalization: Testing the Filter Bubble // Regulation in a Globalizing World // Localization as the New Paradigm // Software Matters: Sociotechnical and Algorithmic Cultures // Showcasing Alternative Search EnginesWE INVITE: Internet, visual culture and media scholars, researchers, artists, curators, producers, lawyers, engineers, open-source and open-content advocates, activists, conference participants, and others to submit materials and proposals.FORMATS???: We welcome interviews, dialogues, essays and articles, images (b/w), email exchanges, manifestos, with a maximum of 8,000 words, but preferably shorter at around 5,000 words. For scope and style, take a look at the previous INC Readers and the style guide (pdf).WANT TO JOIN? Send in your proposal (500 words max.) before June 15th, 2013. You may expect a response before July 15th, 2013.DEADLINE FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: September 15th, 2013.EMAIL TO: Miriam Rasch (publications Institute of Network Cultures) at miriam[at]networkcultures[dot]org MORE INFORMATIONSociety of the Query: http://networkcultures.org/queryINC readers: http://networkcultures.org/publications ABOUT THE READER SERIESThe INC reader series are derived from conference contributions and produced by the Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam. They are available (for free) in print and pdf; check http://networkcultures.org/publications.INC Reader #8: Geert Lovink and Miriam Rasch (eds), Unlike Us Reader: Social Media Monopolies and Their Alternatives, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2013.INC Reader #7: Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.INC Reader #6: Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles (eds), Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.INC Reader #5: Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer (eds.), Urban Screens Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009.INC Reader #4: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (eds.), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.???INC Reader #3: Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (eds.), MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007.INC Reader #2: Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen and Matteo Pasquinelli (eds.), C???Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007.???INC Reader #1: Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (eds.), Incommunicado Reader, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2005.??? CONTACTMiriam RaschRen?? K??nigPublications Institute of Network CulturesITAS, Karlsruhe Institute of Technologymiriam[at]networkcultures[dot]orgkontakt[at]renekoenig[dot]eut: +31 (0)20 595 1865t: +49 (0)721 608 22209---Miriam Rasch, MAInstitute of Network CulturesAmsterdam University of Applied Sciences | HvAroom 04A07Rhijnspoorplein 1NL-1091 GC Amsterdamt: +31 20 5951865miriam-xAlTj2NUtBEeri3KQaAn9UB+6BGkLq7r< at >public.gmane.orgwww.networkcultures.org< at >INCAmsterdam

Folks: Digital Politics: What happens to "democracy" in a world where we all live in TWO *civilizations* (as presented by Eric Schmidt in his "The New Digital Age")?Democracy is *very* loaded term -- in part because it is the primary "negative" being directed at China -- and its Cold War *origins* (i.e. this was also what was throw up against the Soviet Union) are CERTAIN to come under very close scrutiny as a "meme" with some nasty origins. Someone recently sent me this very interesting link -- http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-makingIt is fairly detailed account of the historic "control" elements involved with the Rockefeller funding of the Radio Research Project and its mass-media "manipulation" of the population after WW II. This is a subject that I first started to research nearly 40 years ago, when I too was a young "leftie" trying to understand the machinations of the "ruling-class." <g>Okay -- as far as it goes. But there is so MUCH more . . . !!The most important new "discipline" coming out of WW II was Social Psychology -- blending sociology and psychology and based on the techniques that were developed during the war which are generally known as "psychological warfare" (including everything from studies on "morale" to the fire-bombing of Dresden and nuking of Japan.)The *heart* of Social Psychology -- which, incidentally, my "godfather" Norbert Wiener announced in the introduction to his 1948 book "Cybernetics" he would NOT cooperative with (by naming Kurt Lewin, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson as people who had asked for his help to apply cybernetics to "social problems," which he refused to give) -- was the *sharp* distinction between the AUTHORITARIAN and the DEMOCRATIC personality.Yes, these are the terms that they used (first against the Germans and then against the Russians and Chinese) . . . !!So, if we want to figure out what most people mean by "democracy," then posts/essays like the one above -- plus all the back-and-forth that comes with "blog" comments -- will provide us with some approaches if not some answers. The result is NOT going to be pretty. What does "democratic choice" (as opposed to "evil" one-party rule) actually mean? What do we really think about China?Gregory Bateson (who is a folk-hero to many in today's "media studies") describes what was being planned as "rigging the maze" so that "anthropomorphic rats" could get the "illusion of free-will." Btw, he meant this a POSITIVE, since people were being "guided" (through the design of the "maze") to make "healthy" and "democratic" choices.What happens when people take CHOICE seriously and refuse to "vote" for the options that are pre-built into the maze? Could it be something like Italy's 5 Star Movement . . . ??Digital Economics: What happens when -- as a result of living in TWO *civilizations* (where the "virtual" one is constantly pointing out via person-to-person feedback how STUPIDLY we have been behaving in the "physical" one) -- people stop simply choosing between different brands of toothpaste?However, what those, like the essayist above (and myself in my early days of studying all this), miss is that CONTROL-THROUGH-CHOICE is not a permanent condition!It relies on "subliminal" influence and requires constant reinforcement.That is what *television* (and the culture that revolves around mass-media) does for-and-to us -- constantly reminding us that we are "inadequate" and that we *must* choose products to "improve" our lives. Over-and-over . . . It turns out that the basis of *both* the "democratic personality" and the "consumer economy" are the same -- Social Psychology (aka "psychological warfare") delivered day-in-and-day-out through MASS-MEDIA.So, it is no surprise that the PROGRAMMA of the Italian 5 Star Movement is mostly about basic *economic* issues -- starting with a "citizens wage" and continuing through to Internet access-for-all.And, it should also be no surprise that some prominent members of the MoVementi (where the "V" refers to both the "V-day" that began the movement, roughly translating into f*ck-you-day, as well as the movie "V for Vendetta") were recently kicked out for appearing on . . . TELEVISION!! It turns out that one of the primary points of the 5SM is that they will *not* use mass-media to talk to their audience -- partly because they know they can't "compete" with Berlusconi (who owns the biggest media company) but also because they know that mass-media strives to make everything into a "false" choice (i.e. where there are no choices offered to get out of the "maze" of the typical party-choices).What happens to "economic choice" when NOT buying anything is an equally valid option? Not just because you have less money but because you don't to play that "game" anymore? Could it be an economic slowdown caused by a reduction in consumption? Might that be going on right now?Clearly, Eric Schmidt doesn't understand all this. He still thinks that it's "evil" that China isn't "democratic" (without knowing where that "meme" came from or likely knowing much about China.) He probably doesn't understand that living in a "virtual" civilization has significant implications for the "physical" economy. Both politics and economics have *already* been fundamentally changed by DIGITAL technology but, so far, very few have even tried to grasp the implications of this new reality.Mark StahlmanBrooklyn NY

FINAZISM and ART IACCCA brings together some 40 curators of corporate art collections in order to reflect on the specificities of individual collections. IACCCA is a platform for the curators to share best practice and insights on challenges and opportunities facing corporate collectors (e.g. staff buy-in and employee engagement and education, legitimacy in times of crisis, positioning within corporate social responsibility?).Initiatives include privileged exposure to other collections and collectors' expertise, reciprocal visits of collections' storage facilities, networking amongst a peer group, and strengthening communications power. There are also highly valuable technical sessions to share specialist expertise (e.g. on conservation and restoration issues, relations with stakeholders?).IACCCA members, March 2013Corporate collections represented by their serving director or curator: Austria: Erste Group/ERSTE Foundation, EVN AG; Belgium: Belfius Banque, Belgacom, ING Belgium, Lhoist Group, National Bank of Belgium; Brazil: Ita? Unibanco Bank; Canada: Banque nationale du Canada; France: Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, HSBC France, Neuflize Vie, Norac, Soci?t? G?n?rale; Germany: Deutsche Bank AG, DZ Bank, European Patent Office; Japan: Shiseido; Luxembourg: European Investment Bank; Morocco: Attijariwafa Bank; Netherlands: AMC, De Nederlandsche Bank, ING Bank, Rabobank Nederland, Rabo Real Estate Group; Norway: Statoil; Portugal: Banco Espirito Santo; South Africa: Standard Bank; Spain: Berg? & Cia, Fundaci?n Banco Santander, Fundaci? "La Caixa," Fundaci?n Mapfre; Switzerland: Banque Pictet, BSI SA, Nationale Suisse; Turkey: Borusan Holding; UK: Fidelity Worl dwide Investment.

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/12/jaron_lanier_the_internet_destroyed_the_middle_class/__You talk early in ?Who Owns the Future?? about Kodak ? aboutthousand of jobs being destroyed, and Instagram picking up the slack? but with almost no jobs produced. So give us a sense of how thathappens and what the result is. It seems like the seed of your book ina way.Right. Well, I think what?s been happening is a shift from the formalto the informal economy for most people. So that?s to say if you useInstagram to show pictures to your friends and relatives, or whateverservice it is, there are a couple of things that are still the same asthey were in the times of Kodak. One is that the number of people whoare contributing to the system to make it viable is probably the same.Instagram wouldn?t work if there weren?t many millions of people usingit. And furthermore, many people kind of have to use social networksfor them to be functional besides being valuable. People have to,there?s a constant tending that?s done on a volunteer basis so thatpeople can find each other and whatnot.So there?s still a lot of human effort, but the difference is thatwhereas before when people made contributions to the system that theyused, they received formal benefits, which means not only salary butpensions and certain kinds of social safety nets. Now, instead, theyreceive benefits on an informal basis. And what an informal economyis like is the economy in a developing country slum. It?s reputation,it?s barter, it?s that kind of stuff.__So instead of somebody paying money to get their photo developed,and somebody getting a part of a job, a little fragment of a job, atleast, and retirement and all the other things that we?re accustomedto, it works informally now, and intangibly.Yeah, and I remember there was this fascination with the idea ofthe informal economy about 10 years ago. Stewart Brand was talkingabout how brilliant it is that people get by in slums on an informaleconomy. He?s a friend so I don?t want to rag on him too much. But hewas talking about how wonderful it is to live in an informal economyand how beautiful trust is and all that.And you know, that?s all kind of true when you?re young and if you?renot sick, but if you look at the infant mortality rate and the lifeexpectancy and the education of the people who live in those slums,you really see what the benefit of the formal economy is if you?re aperson in the West, in the developed world. And then meanwhile thisloss, or this shift in the line from what?s formal to what?s informal,doesn?t mean that we?re abandoning what?s formal. I mean, if it wasuniform, and we were all entering a socialist utopia or something,that would be one thing, but the formal benefits are accruing at thisfantastic rate, at this global record rate to the people who own thebiggest computer that?s connecting all the people.__So Kodak has 140,000 really good middle-class employees,and Instagram has 13 employees, period. You have this intenseconcentration of the formal benefits, and that winner-take-all feelingis not just for the people who are on the computers but also from thepeople who are using them. So there?s this tiny token number of peoplewho will get by from using YouTube or Kickstarter, and everybody elselives on hope. There?s not a middle-class hump. It?s an all-or-nothingsociety.__Right, and also I think part of what you?re saying too is that it?sstill in most ways a formal economy in that the person who lost hisjob at Kodak still has to pay rent with old-fashioned money he or sheis no longer earning. He can?t pay his rent with cultural capitalthat?s replaced it.Yeah, well, people will say you can find a place to crash. People whotour right now will find a couch to crash on. But, you know, this isthe difference ? I?m not saying that there aren?t ever benefits, likeyeah, sometimes you can find a couch. But as I put it in the book,you have to sing for your supper for every meal. The informal way ofgetting by doesn?t tide you over when you?re sick and it doesn?t letyou raise kids and it doesn?t let you grow old. It?s not biologicallyreal.Actually, can we stick with photography for a second? If we go backto the 19th century, photography was kind of born as a labor-savingdevice, although we don?t think of it that way. One of my favoritestories, which might be apocryphal ? I can?t tell you for sure thatthis is so, although photographers traded this story for many years.But the way the piece of folklore goes is that during the CivilWar era, and a little after, the very earliest photographers wouldgo around with a collection of photographs of people who matched acertain archetype. So they would find the photograph that most closelymatched your loved one and you?d buy that because at least there wouldbe representation a little like the person, even if it was the wrongperson. And that sounds just incredibly weird to us.And then, you know, along a similar vein at that time earlyaudio recordings, which today would sound horrible to us, wereindistinguishable between real music to people who did double blindtests and whatnot. So the thing is, why not just paint the realperson, because painting was really a lot of work. It takes a longtime to paint a portrait. And you have to carry around all the paintsand all that, and you could just create a stack of photos and sellthem. So in the beginning photography was kind of a labor savingdevice. And whenever you have a technological advance that?s lesshassle than the previous thing, there?s still a choice to make. Andthe choice is, do you still get paid for doing the thing that?seasier?People often say, well, in Rochester, N.Y. ? which is a town that kindof lived on the photography business ? they had a buggy whip factorythat closed down with the advent of the automobile. The thing is,it?s a lot easier to deal with a car than to deal with horses. I lovehorses, but you know, you have to feed them, and they poop a lot, andyou have to deal with their hooves. It?s a whole thing. And so youcould make the argument that a transition to cars should create aworld where drivers don?t get paid, because, after all, it?s fun todrive. And it is. And they?re magical.__And so there could really easily be, somebody could easily haveasserted that photography is so much easier than painting and drivingcars is so much easier than horses that the people who do those things? or support it ?shouldn?t be paid. Working in a nice environment ? ifyou go to Sweden and you visit the Saab factory, it?s really nice. Whyshould you even be paid to do anything?We kind of made a bargain, a social contract, in the 20th centurythat even if jobs were pleasant people could still get paid for them.Because otherwise we would have had a massive unemployment. And soto my mind, the right question to ask is, why are we abandoning thatbargain that worked so well?__Right. Well, until about the year 2000 or so, some jobs had beendestroyed by new technology. This goes back to the industrialrevolution and earlier. But more jobs were created than thosedestroyed. So what changed?Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobswere created was because there was a social contract in which a morepleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could bepaid for. That?s the only reason it worked. If we decided that drivingwas such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no oneshould be paid for it, then there wouldn?t be all of those peoplebeing paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that itwas OK to have jobs that weren?t terrible.__So it wasn?t inherent in the technology. In other words, there?snothing inherently different about digital technology or the Internetthan there is with factory technology or the assembly line or theseother technological shifts that have developed?Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of a job is entirely social construct.The United States was built on slave labor. Those people didn?thave jobs, they were just slaves. The idea of a job is that you canparticipate in a formal economy even if you?re not a baron. That therecan be, that everybody can participate in the formal economy and thebenefit of having everybody participate in the formal economy, thereare annoyances with the formal economy because capitalism is reallyannoying sometimes.But the benefits are really huge, which is you get a middle-classdistribution of wealth and clout so the mass of people can outspendthe top, and if you don?t have that you can?t really have democracy.Democracy is destabilized if there isn?t a broad distribution ofwealth.And then the other thing is that if you like market capitalism, ifyou?re an Ayn Rand person, you have to admit that markets can onlyfunction if there are customers and customers can only come if there?sa middle hump. So you have to have a broad distribution of wealth. Sothere?s no reason technically for any technology to ever create a job.In other words, we could have had motor vehicles, and we could havehad film cameras, we could have had all these technologies without anyformal jobs. We just had a social contract in which we decided thatwe?d allow formal jobs in factories and in drivers and in users ofcameras and creators of cameras and film.It was all a social construct to begin with, so what changed, to getto your question, is that at the turn of the [21st] century it wasreally Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, ifwe give away all the information services, but we make money fromadvertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism.But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract wherepeople still participate in the formal economy. And it?s a kind ofcapitalism that?s totally self-defeating because it?s so narrow. It?sa winner-take-all capitalism that?s not sustaining.__Well, a lot of your book is about the survival of the middle classin the digital age, the importance of a broad middle class as we moveforward. You argue that the middle class, unlike the rich and thepoor, is not a natural class but was built and sustained through somekind of intervention. Has that changed in the last decade or two asthe digital world has grown?Well, there?s a lot of ways. I mean, one of the issues is that ina market society, a middle class has always required some littleartificial help to keep going. There?s always academic tenure, or ataxi medallion, or a cosmetology license, or a pension. There?s oftensome kind of license or some kind of ratcheting scheme that allowspeople to keep their middle-class status.In a raw kind of capitalism there tend to be unstable events thatwipe away the middle and tend to separate people into rich and poor.So these mechanisms are undone by a particular kind of style that iscalled the digital open network.Music is a great example where value is copied. And so once you haveit, again it?s this winner-take-all thing where the people who reallywin are the people who run the biggest computers. And a few tokens, anincredibly tiny number of token people who will get very successfulYouTube videos, and everybody else lives on hope or lives with theirparents or something.One of the things that really annoys me is the acceptance of liesthat?s so common in the current orthodoxy. I guess all orthodoxiesare built on lies. But there?s this idea that there must be tensof thousands of people who are making a great living as freelancemusicians because you can market yourself on social media. Andwhenever I look for these people ? I mean when I wrote ?Gadget? Ilooked around and found a handful ? and at this point three yearslater, I went around to everybody I could to get actual lists ofpeople who are doing this and to verify them, and there are more now.But like in the hip-hop world I counted them all and I could findabout 50. And I really talked to everybody I could. The reason Imention hip-hop is because that?s where it happens the most right now.So when we?re talking about the whole of the business ? and these arenot 50 people who are doing great. Or here?s another example. Do youknow who Jenna Marbles is? She?s a super-successful YouTube star.She?s the queen of self-help videos for young women. She?s kind ofa cross between Snooki and Martha Stewart or something. And she?scool. I mean, she kind of helps girls with how to do makeup, and she?sirreverent. She?s had a billion views.The interesting thing about it is that people advertise, ?Oh, whatan incredible life. She?s this incredibly lucky person who?s workedreally hard.? And that?s all true. She?s in her 20s, and it?s greatthat she?s found this success, but what this success is that she makesmaybe $250,000 a year, and she rents a house that?s worth $1.1 millionin L.A.. And this is all breathlessly reported as this great success.And that?s good for a 20-year-old, but she?s at the very top of, Imean, the people at the very top of the game now and doing as wellas what used to be considered good for a middle-class life. And Idon?t want to dismiss that. That?s great for a 20-year-old, althoughin truth, in my world of engineers that wouldn?t be much. But forsomeone who?s out there, a star with a billion views, that?s a crazylow expectation. She?s not even in the 1 percent. For the tiny tokennumber of people who make it to the top of YouTube, they?re not evenmaking it into the 1 percent.The issue is if we?re going to have a middle class anymore, and ifthat?s our expectation, we won?t. And then we won?t have democracy.__You mentioned a minute ago that there?s about 50 in hip-hop. Whatkind of estimate did you come up with for music in general?I think in the total of music in America, there are a low number ofhundreds. It?s really small. I wish all of those people my deepestblessings, and I celebrate the success they find, but it?s just not away you can build a society.The other problem is they would have to self-fund. This is gettingback to the informal economy where you?re living in the slum orsomething, so you?re desperate to get out so you impress the boss manwith your music skills or your basketball skills. And the idea ofdoing that for the whole of society is not progress. It should be thereverse. What we should be doing is bringing all the people who arein that into the formal economy. That?s what?s called development.But this is the opposite of that. It?s taking all the people from thedeveloped world and putting them into a cycle of the developing worldof the informal economy.__You say early in the book, ?As much as it pains me to say so, wecan survive only if we destroy the middle classes of musicians,journalists, photographers.? I guess what you seem to be saying hereis the creative class is sort of the canary in the digital coal mine.Yes. That?s precisely my point. So when people say, ?Why are musiciansso special? Everybody has to struggle.? And the thing is, I do thinkwe are looking at a [sustainable] model.We don?t realize that our society and our democracy ultimately rest onthe stability of middle-class jobs. When I talk to libertarians andsocialists, they have this weird belief that everybody?s this abstractrobot that won?t ever get sick or have kids or get old. It?s likeeverybody?s this eternal freelancer who can afford downtime and canself-fund until they find their magic moment or something.The way society actually works is there?s some mechanism of basicstability so that the majority of people can outspend the elite so wecan have a democracy. That?s the thing we?re destroying, and that?sreally the thing I?m hoping to preserve. So we can look at musiciansand artists and journalists as the canaries in the coal mine, andis this the precedent that we want to follow for our doctors andlawyers and nurses and everybody else? Because technology will get toeverybody eventually.__It wasn?t too long ago that it was unskilled people on assemblylines who answered phones or bank tellers and it?s just crept up inthe decades since. You?ve mentioned a few times this sort of digitalutopianism that still emanates from Silicon Valley. Where does thatkind of thinking come from and why does it exist despite all theevidence to the contrary?Well, it?s an orthodoxy now. I have 14-year-old kids who come to mytalks who say, ?But isn?t open source software the best thing in life?Isn?t it the future?? It?s a perfect thought system. It reminds meof communists I knew when growing up or Ayn Rand libertarians. It?sone of these things where you have a simplistic model that suggeststhis perfect society so you just believe in it totally. These perfectsocieties don?t work. We?ve already seen hyper-communism come totears. And hyper-capitalism come to tears. And I just don?t want tohave to see that for cyber-hacker culture. We should have learned thatthese perfect simple systems are illusions.__Speaking of politics, your concerns are often those of the politicalleft. You?re concerned with equality and a shrinking middle class. Andyet you don?t seem to consider yourself a progressive or a man of theleft ? why not?I am culturally a man on the left. I get a lot of people on the left.I live in Berkeley and everything. I want to live in a world whereoutcomes for people are not predetermined in advance with outcomes.The problem I have with socialist utopias is there?s some kind ofcommittees trying to soften outcomes for people. I think that imposesmodels of outcomes for other people?s lives. So in a spiritual sensethere?s some bit of libertarian in me. But the critical thing for meis moderation. And if you let that go too far you do end up with awinner-take-all society that ultimately crushes everybody even worse.So it has to be moderated.I think seeking perfection in human affairs is a perfect way todestroy them. It just doesn?t work. So my own take on it is, actuallyanother way I?ve been thinking about it lately is a balance ofmagisteria. ?Magisteria? was the term that Stephen Jay Gould describedscience and religion. And I?ve been thinking that way about money andpolitics, or computers and politics, or computers and ethics. All ofthese things are magisterial, where the people who become involved inthem tend to wish they could be the only ones.Libertarians tend to think the economy can totally close its ownloops, that you can get rid of government. And I ridicule that inthe book. There are other people who believe that if you could geteverybody to talk over social networks, if we could just cooperate,we wouldn?t need money anymore. And I recommend they try living in agroup house and then they?ll see it?s not true.My cyber-friends think if you can just come up with a perfect scheme,that some perfect digital scheme will solve all the problems. Mybelief is that if we deal with all of these things, they can balanceout each other to prevent the worst dysfunctions of each one fromhappening. And at minimum if we can just have enough distributionof clout in society so it isn?t run by a tiny minority, then at thevery least it gives us some room to breathe. And that?s the minimumrequirement. Maybe not the ideal.So what we have to demand of digital technology is that it not tryto be a perfect system that takes over everything. That it balancesthe excess of the other magisteria. And that is doesn?t concentratepower too much, and if we can just get to that point, then we?llreally be fine. I?m actually modest. People have been accusing me ofbeing super-ambitious lately, but I feel like in a way I?m the mostmodest person in the conversation. I?m just trying to avoid totaldysfunction.__Let?s stick with politics for one more. Is there something dissonantabout the fact that the greatest fortunes in human history have beencreated with a system developed largely by taxpayers dollars? Militaryresearch and labs at public universities. And many of the people whomthe Internet has enriched have become libertarians who earnestly tellyou that they are ?socially liberal and fiscally conservative,? andresist progressive taxation because of it.Yeah, no kidding. I was there. I gotta say, every little step of thisthing was really funded by either the military or public researchagencies. If you look at something like Facebook, Facebook is addingthe tiniest little rind of value over the basic structure that?s thereanyway. In fact, it?s even worse than that. The original designsfor networking, going back to Ted Nelson, kept track of everythingeverybody was pointing at so that you would know who was pointing atyour website. In a way Facebook is just recovering information thatwas deliberately lost because of the fetish for being anonymous.That?s also true of Google.__Near the end of the book you talk about the changes in the bookbusiness. It doesn?t sound pretty. What?s going on there and what haveyou learned as someone who has now written several books?I don?t hate anything about e-books or e-book readers or tablets.There?s a lot of discussion about that, and I think it?s misplaced.The problem I have is whether we believe in the book itself.To me a book is not just a particular file. It?s connected withpersonhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent akind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. Andwhat I?m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, theyoften think of them as really differently as just data points thatyou can mush together. They?re divorcing books from their role inpersonhood.I?m quite concerned that in the future someone might not know whatauthor they?re reading. You see that with music. You would think inthe information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you?relistening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearingit so you know what you?re listening to, but in truth it?s hard to getto those services.I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interestedin, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these ? sothey knew what stream they were getting, but they didn?t know whatmusic it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn?t knowwhat that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determineswhat music you?re listening to, but it was a noisy place and thatdidn?t work. So what?s supposed to be an open information systemserves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closedinformation system. It actually loses the information.So in practice you don?t know who the musician is. And I think that?swhat could happen with writers. And this is what we celebrate inWikipedia is pretending that there?s some absolute truth that canbe spoken that people can approximate and that the speaker doesn?tmatter. And if we start to see that with books in general ? and I sayif ? if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Googlelibrary project, they do have the tendency to want to move thingstogether. You see the thing decontextualized.I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I knowit just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my musicmean? I make very novel sounds, but I don?t see any value in mesharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I writeif people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushedtogether and they don?t know the overall position or the history ofthe writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day booksbecome mush is the day I stop writing.__Let?s close with music then. You?re a longtime musician andcomposer. You?re a collector of obscure and archaic instruments. Howdoes your interest in music and especially pre-modern acoustic musicshape your thinking and your life as well?Well, the original way I got into it is very personal. It?s just thatmy mother died when I was young, and she was a musician. My connectionto her. I got involved in more and more unusual music because I didn?twant that connection to become something that was too static. It hadto be constantly changing or it would become a clich?. So that?s how Igot into it.But as far as the connection to computers, the thing to me is thatI?ve always been intrigued with music interface. Musical interfacesare such profoundly better user interfaces than anything we?ve donewith a digital computer. They have better acuity. They create moreopportunities for virtuosity. They work with the human body moreprofoundly, the nervous system. I mean good musical instruments. AndI?ve just been intrigued by them. It made me realize that just becausesomething is the latest, newest thing that seems like the cleverestthing we can do at the moment doesn?t make it better.So to realize how much better musical instruments were to use as humaninterfaces, it helped me to be skeptical about the whole digitalenterprise. Which I think helped me be a better computer scientist,actually.__Did your life as a musician show you some of the things that youended up excavating in ?Gadget? and the new book?Sure. If you go way back I was one of the people who started the wholemusic-should-be-free thing. You can find the fire-breathing essayswhere I was trying to articulate the thing that?s now the orthodoxy.Oh, we should free ourselves from the labels and the middleman andthis will be better.I believed it at the time because it sounds better, it really does. Iknow a lot of these musicians, and I could see that it wasn?t actuallyworking. I think fundamentally you have to be an empiricist. I justsaw that in the real lives I know ? both older and younger peoplecoming up ? I just saw that it was not as good as what it had oncebeen. So that there must be something wrong with our theory, as goodas it sounded. It was really that simple.

What would the world be like if Roy Ascott's "La Plissure du Texte" (1983)sold at auction for $34.2 million instead of Gerhard RIchter's ?AbstraktesBild?? In what sort of world (and artworld) would that be possible?I asked this question a couple days ago on Facebook and it has generatedsome interesting responses, which I'd like to share in order to get morefeedback on this little mind experiment from Nettime readers. Here are afew responses, anonymized but in order, so far:1. And that money would be distributed, like the artwork.2. It would be a world in which people would be much more aware of theimportance of play, just imagine 'playtime' at work, crawling around,turning over your desk, pretending it is a spaceship in which yourcolleagues begin a journey! A moment to delve into the inner narratives ofthe symbolic. It would be a world in which creativity was valued more thanit is feared.3. Good call. I really like this "what the world would be if" starting froman art auction, you are suggesting a way out the decadence in the art worldand the impotence of art production. Thanks for this uplifting imaginationexercise.4. Well, the Richter they can carry home. What would they be carrying homewith 'La Plissure ..."?5. I'm not sure it would mean a darn thing. Art sales in the tens ofmillions are so far out on the thin tail of the bell curve that they sayvery little about the mean. I do wish folks would stop picking on Richterthough. He's a great artist, and it's not his fault the wealthy havedecided to use his work as the coin of the realm.ES: For "La Plissure..." to have an exchange value of $30+ million woulddemand a complete retooling of not only the commercial artworld but a majoroverhaul of cultural values. I'm not picking on Richter, merely using himas an example of the commercial artworld's infatuation with retrogradeforms of practice that are out of touch with aesthetic developments (to saynothing of techno-cultural developments) since the 1960s. Over four decadesago Kosuth wrote that "Being an artist now means to question the nature ofart. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot bequestioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture)he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. That's because the wordart is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind ofart. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) thenature of art." By this logic, Richter might be a great painter, but he isnot a great artist. On the other hand, "La Plissure du Texte" is a farsuperior work of art than any painting since 1969, when Kosuth called thebluff and the jig was over.5.2 So a quote over four decades old is authoritative for art today? Ithink we've gotten beyond end-of-art thinking where the only legitimate artis art about art. Kosuth's way treats art like a star collapsing in onitself and becoming a black hole. All gravity and no light.6. So a quote over four decades old is authoritative for art today? I thinkwe've gotten beyond end-of-art thinking where the only legitimate art isart about art. Kosuth's way treats art like a star collapsing in on itselfand becoming a black hole. All gravity and no light.3.2 I believe time will tell. The sword is double edged, investments in artaren't good just because they move market value *today*. Actually, theymight be epic fails as well - and that's what is happening all over - as wespeak - to several big capitals. So that is pretty consequent with thetimes we are living isn't it? 'nuff said, lemme order that copy of PdT nowto get it signed by Roy ... oh gosh I'm so materialistically OT tonight.Must be the visit to the Van Gogh last sunday.ES: In terms of use value, defined as the cultural capital accrued by acollector today within the contemporary commercial art world, Richter has agreat deal to offer, hence the high price tag, i.e. its exchange value.However, an artwork potentially has value outside of classical economictheory: what it contributes to a continuously unfurling history of art(that is perpetually retold from ever changing future perspectives). Let'scall that its posterity value. The history of western art from contrappostoto conceptual art celebrates innovation and embraces work that challengesthe status quo. In this regard, Kosuth's perspective is as insightful todayas it was 40 years ago. I suspect that a Richter painting has littleposterity value, whereas I suspect that Ascott's "Plissure" has potentiallygreat posterity value. In other words, at some point in the future, Ascottwill be generally recognized as having made a more valuable contribution tothe history of art than Richter. The disparity between use value andposterity value, and between posterity value and exchange value, is atissue. Over time, as posterity value is more firmly established andrenegotiated from various present perspectives, it becomes closely alignedwith exchange value. The previous entry is insightful here, because I think$33 million for a Richter is destined to be an epic fail when thecorrection between posterity value and exchange value takes place - notbecause the art market is overvalued but because it has valued the wrongthings.Ed Shankenwww.artexetra.com

Dear Manager,(If you are not the person who is in charge of this, please forward this toyour CEO,Thanks)This email is from China domain name registration center, which mainly dealwith the domain name registration in China and Asia. We received anapplication from Tianhong Ltd on May 10, 2013. They want to register "amsterdamtime " as their internet keyword and China/Asia/Hongkong(CN/ASIA/HK) domain names. But after checking it, we find this nameconflicts with your company. In order to deal with this matter better, sowe send you email and confirm whether this company is your distributor orbusiness partner in China or not?Best Regards, JimGeneral Manager Shanghai Office (Head Office) 3002, Nanhai Building, No. 854 Nandan Road, Xuhui District, Shanghai 200070, China Tel: +86 216191 8696 Mobile: +86 1870199 4951 Fax: +86 216191 8697 Web: www.ygregistry.cn

Dear nettime,Here is a tiny step towards gathering the collective of humans and non-humans..."The eyes of the milpa"Families from Santa Mar?a Tlahuitoltepec, Oaxaca (Mexico) use mobile phones to create an online community memory about everything that grows in their fields.?http://ojosdelamilpa.netLos ojos de la milpa (The eyes of the milpa*) is a community memory that captures, through images and voice recordings, a moment of transition in these complex times. It all takes place somewhere in the mountains of the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, Mexico, in a community where the elders tell stories to the youth about how maize was planted many years ago: without fertilizers or sophisticated technology. The young ones listen as they witness how maize can no longer grow without chemical fertilizers, nor survive without synthetic pesticides. This is a place where the precious pace of the passing seasons coexists with a growing pressure to produce more, to extract from the earth not only nourishment, but also more and more profit.?But there are newcomers in the milpa: in the community of Santa Mar?a Tlahuitoltepec Mixe, Oaxaca, peach trees have recently made their appearance. This is thanks to the MIAF system (Milpa Intercropped with Fruit Trees), an agroforestry management proposal developed by researchers from the Postgraduate College of Agronomy at Chapingo, Mexico. In addition to traditional crops such as maize, beans and squash, the MIAF system introduces fruit trees in the milpa to satisfy a number of needs. By forming a live barrier, they help to protect the soil from erosion caused by runoffs, a major problem in Tlahuitoltepec, where arable land is mostly found on hillsides. The trees contribute to carbon sequestration, an important strategy in the context of climate change. Finally, they also strengthen the livelihoods of farmers and their families who eat or sell the fruits, in this case peaches. However, new knowledge, skills and technologies come together with these benefits, involving a tough learning process, an increase in the amount of required labor, and the danger of a greater dependency on external inputs.?In this scenario, Los ojos de la milpa seeks to reveal the tense interweaving of the old and the new. Throughout a crop-growing cycle, families from the Juquila and Santa Ana ranches use smartphones to capture images and record sounds of whatever happens in their milpas, and to post them on this website. By doing this, they share their knowledge, their concerns, their ways of doing and their ways of thinking. They make themselves present by presenting their stories to us, by showing us how they live and work in a community which resists as it transforms. Through their own words and points of view, they leave a testimony of a crucial moment in which the urgency of finding a balance between nature and technology, between culture and productivity, can be felt.* milpa: a crop-growing system formed mainly by maize, beans, chili and squash.Best wishes, and may you have a good harvest.Eugenio.

http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance/Last week I [Moxie Marlinspike] was contacted by an agent of Mobily, one of two telecoms operating in Saudi Arabia, about a surveillance project that they’re working on in that country. Having published two reasonably popular MITM tools, it’s not uncommon for me to get emails requesting that I help people with their interception projects. I typically don’t respond, but this one (an email titled “Solution for monitoring encrypted data on telecom”) caught my eye.I was interested to know more about what they were up to, so I wrote back and asked. After a week of correspondence, I learned that they are organizing a program to intercept mobile application data, with specific interest in monitoring: Mobile Twitter Viber Line WhatsAppI was told that the project is being managed by Yasser D. Alruhaily, Executive Manager of the Network & Information Security Department at Mobily. The project’s requirements come from “the regulator” (which I assume means the government of Saudi Arabia). The requirements are the ability to both monitor and block mobile data communication, and apparently they already have blocking setup. Here’s a sample snippet from one email: From: Yasser Alruhaily <…….. .. .< at >mobily.com.sa> Date: Thursday, May 2, 2013 1:04 PM Subject: Re: As discussed last day .further discussion we are working in defining a way to deal with all such requirements from regulator and it is not only for Whatsapp, it is for whatsapp, line, viber, twitter etc.. So, what we need your support in is the following: is there any technical way that allow for interception these traffic? Is there any company or vendor could help us on this regard? is there any telecom company they implement any solution or workaround?One of the design documents that they volunteered specifically called out compelling a CA in the jurisdiction of the UAE or Saudi Arabia to produce SSL certificates that they could use for interception. A considerable portion of the document was also dedicated to a discussion of purchasing SSL vulnerabilities or other exploits as possibilities.Their level of sophistication didn’t strike me as particularly impressive, and their existing design document was pretty confused in a number of places, but Mobily is a company with over 5 billion in revenue, so I’m sure that they’ll eventually figure something out.What’s depressing is that I could have easily helped them intercept basically all of the traffic they were interested in (except for Twitter – I helped write that TLS code, and I think we did it well). They later told me they’d already gotten a WhatsApp interception prototype working, and were surprised by how easy it was. The bar for most of these apps is pretty low.In The Name Of TerrorWhen they eventually asked me for a price quote, and I indicated that I wasn’t interested in the job for privacy reasons, they responded with this: I know that already and I have same thoughts like you freedom and respecting privacy, actually Saudi has a big terrorist problem and they are misusing these services for spreading terrorism and contacting and spreading their cause that’s why I took this and I seek your help. If you are not interested than maybe you are on indirectly helping those who curb the freedom with their brutal activities.So privacy is cool, but the Saudi government just wants to monitor people’s tweets because… terrorism. The terror of the re-tweet.But the real zinger is that, by not helping, I might also be a terrorist. Or an indirect terrorist, or something.While this email is obviously absurd, it’s the same general logic that we will be confronted with over and over again: choose your team. Which would you prefer? Bombs or exploits. Terrorism or security. Us or them. As transparent as this logic might be, sometimes it doesn’t take much when confirming to oneself that the profitable choice is also the right choice.If I absolutely have to frame my choices as an either-or, I’ll choose power vs. people.Culture Over TimeI know that, even though I never signed a confidentiality agreement, and even though I simply asked questions without signaling that I wanted to participate, it’s still somewhat rude of me to publish details of correspondence with someone else.I’m being rude by publishing this correspondence with Mobily, not only because it’s substantially more rude of them to be engaged in massive-scale eavesdropping of private communication, but because I think it’s part of a narrative that we need to consider. What Mobily is up to is what’s currently happening everywhere, and we can’t ignore that.Over the past year there has been an ongoing debate in the security community about exploit sales. For the most part, the conversation has focused on legality and whether exploit sales should be regulated.I think the more interesting question is about culture: what do we in the hacker community value and prioritize, and what is the type of behavior that we want to encourage?Let’s take stock. One could make the case that the cultural origins of exploit sales are longstanding. Since at least the 90’s, there has been an underlying narrative within the hacker community of not “blowing up” or “killing” bugs. A tension against that discipline began with the transition from a “hacker community” to a “security industry,” and the unease created by that tension peaked in the early 2000’s, manifested most clearly by the infamous AntiSec movement.Fundamentally, AntiSec tried to reposition the “White Hat” vs “Black Hat” debate by suggesting that there are no “White Hats,” only “Green Hats” – the color of money.As someone who also regretted what money had done to the hacker community, I was largely sympathetic with AntiSec. If I’m really honest with myself, though, my interest in the preservation of 0day was also because there was something fun about an insecure internet at the time, particularly since that insecurity predominantly tended to be leveraged by a class of people that I generally liked against a class of people that I generally disliked.In short, there was something about not publishing 0day that signaled affiliation with the “hacker community” rather than the “security industry.”The Situation TodayIn many ways, it’s possible that we’re still largely operating based on those original dynamics. Somewhere between then and now, however, there was an inflection point. It’s hard to say exactly when it happened, but these days, the insecurity of the internet is now more predominantly leveraged by people that I dislike against people that I like. More often than not, that’s by governments against people.Simultaneously, the tension between “0day” vs “publish” has largely transformed into “sell secretly” vs “publish.” In a sense, the AntiSec narrative has undergone a full inversion: this time, there are no “Black Hats” anymore, only “Green Hats” – the color of money.There are still outliers, such as Anonymous (to the extent that it’s possible to be sympathetic with an unguided missile), but what’s most significant about their contribution is that they’re not using 0day at all.Forgetting the question of legality, I hope that we can collectively look at this changing dynamic and perhaps re-evaluate what we culturally reward. I’d much rather think about the question of exploit sales in terms of who we welcome to our conferences, who we choose to associate with, and who we choose to exclude, than in terms of legal regulations. I think the contextual shift we’ve seen over the past few years requires that we think critically about what’s still cool and what’s not.Maybe this is an unpopular opinion and the bulk of the community is totally fine with how things have gone (after all, it is profitable). There are even explicitly patriotic hackers who suggest that their exploit sales are necessary for the good of the nation, seeing themselves as protagonists in a global struggle for the defense of freedom, but having nothing to do with these ugly situations in Saudi Arabia. Once exploits are sold to US defense contractors, however, it’s very possible they could end up delivered directly to the Saudis (eg, eg, eg), where it would take some even more substantial handwaving to think that they’ll serve in some liberatory way.For me at least, these changes have likely influenced what I choose to publish rather than hold, and have probably caused me to spend more time attempting to develop solutions for secure communication than the type of work I was doing before.It’s HappeningReally, it’s no shock that Saudi Arabia is working on this, but it is interesting to get fairly direct evidence that it’s happening. More to the point, if you’re in Saudi Arabia (or really anywhere), it might be prudent to think about avoiding insecure communication tools like WhatsApp and Viber (TextSecure and RedPhone could serve as appropriate secure replacements), because now we know for sure that they’re watching.For the rest of us, I hope we can talk about what we can do to stop those who are determined to make this a reality, as well as the ways that we’re already inadvertently a part of that reality’s making.

"Twenty years ago, class was not in the vocabulary of Swedish pundits and mavens. Class was something that belonged to the past. Today, however, it is back with a vengeance. Recently the Swedish Occupy movement "Allt åt alla" (Everything for Everyone) organized a bus "safari" through exclusive Stockholm suburbs to take a look at the millionaires' villas there and "fuel class hatred". Every leading newspaper has already had its own "class debate". Class is simply everywhere in Swedish society. "Anyone who wants to understand both the age in which we live and the future will have to talk about class," write editors Malena Rydell and Mikael Feldbaum in Arena. But not just any class. The cover of the new issue spells it out: "The middle class doesn't exist." The slogan is from poet and pundit Göran Greider's "54 theses for a new class awareness", a manifesto for a new Left packed with sound bites such as: "Treat the very word class as a teenager: it grows; it's unruly; it doesn't obey; it stuns you." Or: "Today's working class is mainly female." The thesis of the death of the middle class is simple and not peculiar to Sweden: every time you try to define the allegedly most important contemporary social formation, this "middle class" breaks into two, writes Greider; one part that serves the economic power and another that has more in common with blue collar workers and unemployed, with the sans papiers and the precariat."http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2013-05-08-eurozinerev-en.html

hi there,well, to tell the truth, after reading just the infamous (so it seems) Jaron Lanier interview it is not his shabby analysis that is shocking, i.e. "Of course jobs become obsolete. But the only reason that new jobs were created was because there was a social contract in which a more pleasant, less boring job was still considered a job that you could be paid for. That’s the only reason it worked. If we decided that driving was such an easy thing [compared to] dealing with horses that no one should be paid for it, then there wouldn’t be all of those people being paid to be Teamsters or to drive cabs. It was a decision that it was OK to have jobs that weren’t terrible." Duh! What ahistorical rubbish; seems that these kinds of prognostications a great for those swimming in the kiddie pool (the shallow level of political discourse in the MSM) where Marx is still a dirty word (something like polio before Jonas Salk). Hard to figure out what the future might look like when one's image of the past is so limited.allan

Dear nettime,we´re a group of developers, open source evangelists, activists,theorists and artists - mainly based in Vienna, Austria. Please considerthe following game as a contribution to an "immanent net critique".We´ve been working hard on that for the last 2 years.http://datadealer.com"Privacy? Screw that. Turn the tables! Become a data dealer and get allthe dirty details on your friends, neighbors and the rest of the world.Learn how to trick your users and make cash with their personal data!""Data Dealer" is a critical online/impact game about digital culture andcollecting, processing and selling personal data.[to play it Facebook is not required]In the digital age virtually everything we do is recorded, monitored ortracked in some way. Nearly every device we use today is connected tothe Internet. Due to the rapid evolution of ICT the collecting,processing and exploitation of personal data has become part of allareas of life. Emerging businesses in the fields of social media, mobileapplications and online marketing specialized in making commercial useof personal data.In "Data Dealer" players run all kinds of companies and online ventures- from dating sites, mobile apps to search engines and their own socialweb. On the way to becoming the world's most powerful data tycoon, theyobtain data from a variety of sources – whether legal or illegal - andruthlessly sell it to insurance companies or human resourcesdepartments. Their growing data empires have to be defended againsthackers, complaining citizens, critical media and pesky privacy activists.Data Dealer is based on extensive research. We´ve published a 15 pagessummary:http://datadealer.com/datadealer_backgrounds_research.pdfWe're curious to hear what you think about it.Cheers from ViennaWolfie

Begin forwarded message: > What We See, What We Hope: > Declaration of Solidarity with the Uprising in Greece > > We want first of all to say a collective yes! to the uprising in > Greece. We are artists, writers and teachers who are connected in > this moment by common friends and commitments. We are globally > dispersed and are mostly watching, and hoping, from afar. But some > of us are also there, in Athens, and have been on the streets, have > felt the rage and the tear gas, and have glimpsed the dancing > specter of the other world that is possible. We claim no special > right to speak or be heard. Still, we have a few things to say. > For this is also a global moment for speaking and sharing, for > hoping and thinking together... > > No one can doubt that the protest and occupation movement that has > spread across Greece since the police murder of Alexis > Grigoropoulos in Athens on 6 December is a social uprising whose > causes reach far deeper than the obscene event that triggered it. > The rage is ...

Original post, with images at: http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2008/dec/21/1a21virtual162313-online-world-immersion-probes-po/?uniontrib Read the blogging of Becoming Dragon, which concluded its current phase on December 17th, at http://secondloop.wordpress.com I'm happy to say that this story was on the front page of the San Diego Union-Tribune today, the largest San Diego newspaper. I would make a few corrections, one being that my name in world is Azdel Slade, another being that I didn't say "gender, identity and trends" but "gender, identity and transition". Also, another important correction is that the author says "stereoscopic goggles", but I did nt use the goggles in stereoscopic mode. We were unable to get our stereo code working in the hmd. Still, a good article nevertheless, I think. Also, most offensive is that he starts the story off saying I'm a man taking hormones to become a woman, so apparently he missed the main point of thinking about subjects in permanent transition, being something...

[orig From: "Monroe Swain" ] Stop fighting with your male friend and start taking the blue pill. Haste to click # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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@kein.org

Hmm, If one proposes to 'simply act', I'm not sure how a highly theoretical discourse of the Other will get anyone very far in acting upon pedagogy. But simple action isn't ever that simple, is it? There is action in questioning the possible centre of cognitive labour in the University, and in this thesis, leading to an action toward self-education. While, point being, the discussion of 'centres' of resistance to capital has very much to do with the production of subjectivity, I am not sure how a discourse of flows & Others aids in grappling with the thesis under debate: that the University is centre to global cognitive capital. (Or rather, I have guesses, but it's your post.) If we want 'no ideology', perhaps the first question is how the kind of theorizing you propose would be conducive to a noncorporate educational apparatus given that such theorizing thrives in the current climate of English Departments in highly corporatized universities. I don't necessarily like this kind of question, as I think it's po...

>> How are we to articulate the organizational practice of self-education >> when a physical outside does not exist? From where do we organize the why articulate it? why not simply act? (the 'physical outside' is a conceptual framework that should be discarded for a more wholistic and interconnected view which more accurately circumscribes the phenomena of life). >> threat? We need to find a new and public line of escape: a way to >> invent new weapons as Deleuze and Guattari (2004: 445) said, in a >> scenario that is no longer physical but becoming more and more time >> bound. We need to organize self-educational practices and workers >> self- management at a new level: at the level of the institution. > >Yes, we all want self-education. But usually one needs resources: places, >spaces, connections, archives, access. The internet can't solve the problem self-education takes an open body-system that is able to receive the flows that it is part of and moving through. It also takes this condition and the ensuin...

Clever but so 20th century. Obviously there should be two networked versions: - Encrypted P2P for cults, so that participants far away can get empathized while nobody knows, and - Centralized server-based system for organized religions, where priests initiate empathy for the masses, possibly after payment. > The Bureau of United Religions proudly presents: > The Empathy Box? # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # 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@kein.org