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I am still brooding on a reaction to John Young's acerbic comments onWKLKs (though he took the defense of the same on CNN), but just like Jayrosen, I am still vastly confused about the issue. Julian Assange's smarttalking on:http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.htmlheightened the confusiuon - yet is quite enlightening (and anyway veryinformative).Cheers, p+3D!............................................................Original to:http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2010/07/26/wikileaks_afghan.html(http://bit.ly/bMHy1d) - loads of links! and no way Zero Comments ;-)The Afghanistan War Logs Released by Wikileaks, the World's FirstStateless News Organization"In media history up to now, the press is free to report on what thepowerful wish to keep secret because the laws of a given nation protectit. But Wikileaks is able to report on what the powerful wish to keepsecret because the logic of the Internet permits it. This is new." Wikileaks.org: Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010 Der Spiegel: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It New York Times: The War Logs The Guardian: The Afghanistan War Logs1. Ask yourself: Why didn’t Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan warlogs and let journalists ‘round the world have at them? Why hand them overto The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first? Because asJulien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a bigstory is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it.“It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. “You’d think the bigger and moreimportant the document is, the more likely it will be reported on butthat’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supplyequals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, thesupply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”2. The initial response from the White House was extremely unimpressive: * This leak will harm national security. (As if those words still hadsome kind of magical power, after all the abuse they have been partyto.) * There’s nothing new here. (Then how could the release harm nationalsecurity?) * Wikileaks is irresponsible; they didn’t even try to contact us!(Hold on: you’re hunting the guy down and you’re outraged that hedidn’t contact you?) * Wikileaks is against the war in Afghanistan; they’re not anobjective news source. (So does that mean the documents they publishedare fake?) * “The period of time covered in these documents… is before thePresident announced his new strategy. Some of the disconcerting thingsreported are exactly why the President ordered a three month policyreview and a change in strategy.” (Okay, so now we too know the basisfor the President’s decision: and that’s a bad thing?)3. If you don’t know much about Wikileaks or why it exists, the best wayto catch up is this New Yorker profile of Julien Assange. He is the operation’s prime mover, and it is fair to say thatWikiLeaks exists wherever he does. At the same time, hundreds ofvolunteers from around the world help maintain the Web site’scomplicated infrastructure; many participate in small ways, andbetween three and five people dedicate themselves to it full time. Keymembers are known only by initials—M, for instance—even deep withinWikiLeaks, where communications are conducted by encrypted online chatservices. The secretiveness stems from the belief that a populistintelligence operation with virtually no resources, designed topublicize information that powerful institutions do not want public,will have serious adversaries.And for even more depth, listen to this: NPR’s Fresh Air interviewedPhilip Shenon, an investigative reporter formerly at the New York Times,about Wikileaks and what it does. (35 min with Q & A.)4. If you go to the Wikileaks Twitter profile, next to “location” it says:Everywhere. Which is one of the most striking things about it: the world’sfirst stateless news organization. I can’t think of any prior examples ofthat. (Dave Winer in the comments: “The blogosphere is a stateless newsorganization.”) Wikileaks is organized so that if the crackdown comes inone country, the servers can be switched on in another. This is meant toput it beyond the reach of any government or legal system. That’s what soodd about the White House crying, “They didn’t even contact us!”Appealing to national traditions of fair play in the conduct of newsreporting misunderstands what Wikileaks is about: the release ofinformation without regard for national interest. In media history up tonow, the press is free to report on what the powerful wish to keep secretbecause the laws of a given nation protect it. But Wikileaks is able toreport on what the powerful wish to keep secret because the logic of theInternet permits it. This is new. Just as the Internet has no terrestrialaddress or central office, neither does Wikileaks.5. And just as government doesn’t know what to make of Wikileaks (“we’regonna hunt you down/hey, you didn’t contact us!”) the traditional pressisn’t used to this, either. As Glenn Thrush noted on Politico.com: The WikiLeaks report presented a unique dilemma to the three papersgiven advance copies of the 92,000 reports included in the Afghan warlogs — the New York Times, Germany’s Der Speigel and the UK’sGuardian. The editors couldn’t verify the source of the reports — as they wouldhave done if their own staffers had obtained them — and they couldn’tstop WikiLeaks from posting it, whether they wrote about it or not. So they were basically left with proving veracity through officialsources and picking through the pile for the bits that seemed to bethe most truthful.Notice how effective this combination is. The information is released intwo forms: vetted and narrated to gain old media cred, and released onlinein full text, Internet-style, which corrects for any timidity or blindspot the editors at Der Spiegel, The Times or the Guardian may show.6. From an editor’s note: “At the request of the White House, The Timesalso urged WikiLeaks to withhold any harmful material from its Web site.”There’s the new balance of power, right there. In the revised picture wefind the state, which holds the secrets but is powerless to prevent theirrelease; the stateless news organization, deciding how to release them;and the national newspaper in the middle, negotiating the terms oflegitimacy between these two actors.7. If you’re a whistle blower with explosive documents, to whom would yourather give them? A newspaper with a terrestrial address organized underthe laws of a nation that could try to force the reporter you contacted toreveal your name, and that may or may not run the documents you’vedelivered to them online…. or Wikileaks, which has no address, answers nosubpoenas and promises to run the full cache if they can be verified asreal? (And they’re expert in encryption, too.)Also, can we agree that a news organization with a paywall wouldn’t evenbe in contention?8. I’ve been trying to write about this observation for a while, buthaven’t found the means to express it. So I am just going to state it, inwhat I admit is speculative form. Here’s what I said on Twitter Sunday:“We tend to think: big revelations mean big reactions. But if the story istoo big and crashes too many illusions, the exact opposite occurs.” Myfear is that this will happen with the Afghanistan logs. Reaction will beunbearably lighter than we have a right to expect— not because the storyisn’t sensational or troubling enough, but because it’s too troubling, amess we cannot fix and therefore prefer to forget.Last week, it was the Washington Post’s big series, Top Secret America,two years in the making. It reported on the massive security shadowlandthat has arisen since 09/11. The Post basically showed that there is noaccountability, no knowledge at the center of what the system as a wholeis doing, and too much “product” to make intelligent use of. We’re wastingbillions upon billions of dollars on an intelligence system that does notwork. It’s an explosive finding but the explosive reactions haven’tfollowed, not because the series didn’t do its job, but rather: the job offixing what is broken would break the system responsible for such fixes.The mental model on which most investigative journalism is based statesthat explosive revelations lead to public outcry; elites get the messageand reform the system. But what if elites believe that reform isimpossible because the problems are too big, the sacrifices too great, thepublic too distractible? What if cognitive dissonance has beeninsufficiently accounted for in our theories of how great journalismworks… and often fails to work?I don’t have the answer; I don’t even know if I have framed the rightproblem. But the comment bar is open, so help me out.9. Few people realize how important leaking has been to the rise of thepolitical press since the mid-18th century. Leaks were actually “presentat the creation” of political reporting. I’m moving quickly this morning,so I only have time for a capsule version. Those with a richer knowledgeof the British Parliament’s history can confirm or correct this outline.Once upon a time, Parliament’s debates were off limits to newspapers. Buteventually, through a long period of contestation, the right to report onwhat was said in Parliament was securely won (though not constitutionallyguaranteed.) John Wilkes is the pivotal figure and 1770 the date when thepractice became institutionalized.A factor in that struggle was the practice of leaking. The way it workedthen is essentially the same as it works today. There’s a bitter disputein Parliament and people line up on one side or the other. Unable orunwilling to accept defeat, the losing faction decides to widen thebattlefield by leaking confidential information, thus bringing the forceof public opinion into play. It’s a risky maneuver, of course, but thecalculation is that fighting it out in public may alter the balance offorces and lead to a re-decision.Each time the cycle is repeated, the press becomes a bigger factor inpolitics. And internal struggles for power remain to this day a majortrigger for leaks. Conscience, of course, is a different trigger.Whistleblowers can be of either type: calculating advantage-seekers, ormen and women with a troubled conscience. We don’t know which typeprovided the logs to Wikileaks. What we do know is that a centuries-olddynamic is now empowering new media, just as it once empowered theink-on-paper press.* * *

Pits to Bits, Interview with Graham HarwoodThis interview follows on from a project called “Coal Fired Computers (300,000,000 Computers - 318,000 Black Lungs)” carried out in Newcastle in spring 2010 for the AV Festival. The project, by Graham Harwood, Matsuko Yokokoji with Jean Denmars involved a means of producing a physical diagram between components in production as they undergo transformations across different kinds of time, politics, matter, knowledge, and vitality. The project found a way of working with such things that was particularly powerful. The interview begins with a discussion of CFC but also moves off into databases and a certain understanding of their material force.One thing we don’t cover in the interview is the detail of the Coal Fired Computers project’s work with miner activists, including the inspirational Dave Douglass. (See information on his memoirs here ). More of this can be found in a booklet about the project here, including links to all the groups involved.The interview was carried out by email in May and June 2010.Matthew Fuller: If we are to list the visible components of the project it would go something like this: pile of coal -> fair ground steam engine -> power transformer -> computer / software -> air compressor -> blackened lungs. But there are a lot of things missing from that set of components that are integral to the project, what are they and how do you see them?Graham Harwood: This list should really start with Jean Demars who set up the collaboration with the miners, being French and youngish gave him little knowledge of the UK class struggle of the miners strike in the 1980’s. He use his political enthusiasm, critical analysis to re-examine the strike in the context of globalisation with the people who struggles against it back then. If they had not been defeated they would have picketed every port to stop the everyday atrocity that powers our world.Matsuko on the other hand is always the leader of all things organised, productive, efficient. I’m much too lost in my own space to ever accomplish much on my own. Matsuko takes this raw material of todays obsession and forms it into graphics, budgets and how the exhibition will look and act. She does not like to talk in public she just likes getting on with things.MF: So perhaps you have some considerations about how the kinds of work we are speaking about involve collaboration, within this ‘list of components’, about yourself, about Jean and Matsuko and the kinds of collaboration you have been developing with them and others, with Richard Wright and earlier, as part of the group MongrelGH: Collaboration is a necessary minefield, if you’re interested in the place where media systems and the social clash, unfold and get really dirty then they are mandatory. It would be far too easy to claim everything under my own authorship but anyone with an ounce of nous would see that all imaginings are dependent on the context in which they arise or are seen, I’m just a bit more explicit about that.MF: So to return back to the list of components…GH: Then the place, Newcastle Upon Tyne a former mining and industrial district in England’s North East with a geographical propensity for coal, then - people maybe – firstly the miners who displayed their literature and spoke about their lungs, then the Discovery Museum, with it’s cleaners who were also Miners, it’s exhibits, Charles Parson’s 1884 steam turbines the descendants of which produce the worlds electricity. Then there is the 3000 visitors who had some familial relationship with Coal mines, lung disease.It could be said that coal dust gets into everything. Sealed into the lungs of miners it forms visible blue streaks, like veins of coal. According to the World Health Organisation, 318,000 deaths occur annually from chronic bronchitis and emphysema caused by exposure to coal dust. The common perception is that wealthy countries have put this all behind them, displacing coal dust into the lungs of unrecorded, unknown miners in distant lands, however coal returns into our lives in the form of the cheap and apparently clean goods we consume.Coal fired energy not only powers our computers here in the UK, but is integral to the production of the 300,000,000 computers made each year. 81% of the energy used in a computer’s life cycle is expended in the manufacturing process, now taking place in countries with high levels of coal consumption. The UK currently produces less that one third of the coal it uses, importing the majority of it and therefore displacing 150,000 tons of coal dust into unknown lungs.Then there’s the recent histories of media and my preoccupation with it’s interrelation to death. But more about that later.MF: Part of the interest of the work it seems to me is that in a context in which ‘the world is too complicated to describe or to understand’, it provides something like a diagram, or a formula which shows how a series of things are joined together, how certain kinds of momentary connections are made, but does not renounce the difficulty of such work of abstraction, and really gets into the very different kinds of qualities, materialities, knowledges, histories and powers of the things that are nevertheless joined. The work doesn’t make it’s argument through affirming a set of categories but by drawing out these formulae in uncannily clear ways through this process of conjunction. What kind of process of searching and sifting goes into making this diagram of formula?GH: It’s probably best if it starts as a joke, a completely unrealisable funny fantasy that will not go away. Yet every time you tell someone new, you can see it connects and they recount stories or expressions that affix to the initial idea. Next you formulate a contraption who’s structural operations can leak out into the domains you want to contest, play with and the areas people have spoken to you about. I leave as much work undone as possible, so as it unfolds it can contest the space in which it’s showing and the space/geography can contest the contraption. As the physical/code machine begins to take shape it creates complex negotiations, apprehensions and upsets as the speculation grows.Then there is fear, violence and the dead. I need to be scared of what I make, It needs to put me in embarrassing, difficult, hurtful and potentially violent situations or it’s just not interesting.MF: A number of projects you have been involved in over recent years work with ‘primary’ raw materials, stuff dug out of the ground and refined, such as the metals aluminium – in the film ‘Aluminium’ presented at Manifesta7 - and coltan – which is explored in the various iterations of the Tantalum Memorial and Phone Wars projects. What are the stakes in this coupling of elementary or primal materials with computational systems?GH: What interests me is the material’s ability to recursively unfold possibilities, transforming the flesh, the social, political and economic. Essentially what a material makes possible and what it shuts down when it’s ripped from the earth and it’s context and contaminates human ecologies.Simultaneous with the material properties, they are contagious concepts that move around technical cultures growing on the jelly of science embedded with it’s own philosophical speculations about the nature of the world.The materials also come into to existence as a force when the political, geographical and economic situations are right for them to do so. Aluminium ‘needs’ Italian Fascism to ‘need’ a national metal, It ‘needs’ Italy to lack coal, iron and have bauxite instead. Coal for a long time in the UK was dug from deep cast mines and the shafts required pumping out which creates the steam engine which in turn requires more coal and more labour. Tantalum ‘requires’ political unrest in the Congo, kids playing Sony games.Then there is the flesh and death, the material bends the flesh to suit itself, miners lungs, bones shattering, light, fast munitions ripping into countless bodies, rapes and murders.MF: And the place of mines in our clean modern world?GH: Mines are everywhere in everything once you start looking, you cannot have humans without them, we seem to be preprogrammed to burrowing blindly underground like worms. The main difference from us and worms is that we have a compulsion to burn or explode whatever we find.For the CFC project I wanted to look at the steam engine as a physical and conceptual machine simultaneously in a popular setting like the Discovery Museum.In the 19th century the great engines of change at that time were built around coal-fed steam. This was a society that rested on its mines; its products dominated life and determined its inventions and transport infrastructure and its politics. In this way, the coal mines of England recursively transformed the bodies of those who touched them and redirected large parts of its society to feed its machines.This is still the case, but the mines and production are displaced to India and China. It’s like contemporary media tries to obscure it’s origins. When we use an Ethernet cable we rarely think of the poor bastard who had to mine the copper or think about the effect of early copper mines on our cultural, social evolution.I like to imagine the matter of contemporary media crawling out from the satanic pits of the early 19th Century, struggling to evolve in the winding towers. Then laying rails for itself to feed, spreading out creating denser and denser webs of interconnection for itself.One you suspend seeing transport and communication in contemporary terms and think about them as the same thing, as they once were, then different histories of media emerge. Like in the 1840’s, physical machines, steam engines force the compression of landscapes into manageable chunks of aligned time-tables, co-ordinating the bodies on to trains and into mass labour.Submarine telegraph cables start to criss-cross the Atlantic, re-compressing the ocean’s trade routes into global markets realigning it into the rows and columns of the ledger, birthing scientific management and unifying markets. The mines transformed the body as the body transformed the mine, feeding lungs into the hungry boilers of empires.MF: Coal Fired Computers doesn’t attempt to resolve the problem of energy, but using a wonderful but rather inefficient engine turns coal into heat, into movement, into electricity, this in turn transmuted into a machine that handles data, and drives a compressed air machine feeding a pair of blackened lungs. The machine is a diagram, but also composed of an enormous different kinds of things, timescales and eras, of sorts of stuff, and of different kinds of expertise and ‘states of nature’ things that are worked and transformed in various ways. The project is also, as you say, very much about transformation, of matter, time, knowledge, media systems, communities, flesh.GH: Yes it’s a dark futurist contraption – a strange, unnecessarily intricate, improvised machine, dreamed up to bring power, media, histories and flesh into proximity with each other. When I plugged the electricity from a hundred year old steam engine into the computer, I was elated to feel the symbolic power of that, I did not care what anyone else thought – I needed that fix.Then bringing the miners who dug the coal that was shovelled into the boiler to watch the diseased lungs inflate with every database record made it orgasmic. The miners have a fantastic vision of class power that I recall from when I was a child and they bought down two Governments in the 1970’s. The melancholy of all those lungs, death, disease, power, electricity - we just don’t have a vision of power like that anymore.I deliberately wanted to burn as much coal as possible, pollute a massive area for no purpose other then to feed my contraption, I needed to see what it felt like to be completely wasteful. Originally we wanted to gather the coal from child labour in India but this proved too difficult, but it led ultimately to our discovery of the nameless labour… the lack of datasets that fuel our wealth and power.MF: And the connections run on?GH: I suppose the other fix was the lack of separation between flesh and the machine. The lungs hanging on the front of the steam engine with wires poking out and pulsating. For me, this reflects my own reality of having big bits of steal screwed into my body with nylon screws that I have carried for the last 35 years, and having endless cameras and other bits of medical technology inserted into my flesh, or conversations with kidney dialysis patients about where their life ends and the machine begins, and the simple reality of those bodies that feed the machine of our power.MF: You have also worked with databases that provide statistics on the conditions of work, (such as the Lungs: Slave Labour project of 2005). Work records, health records, the registrations of populations in figures becomes something that you see both as means to tell some kind of truth or story about the conditions of life, but also to make them physically palpable, through breaths, but also tender, bodily and ephemeral. These are two different means of registering peoples’ lives, two ways of knowing the world but here they are brought together in a way that is both very sad, mournful, but also somehow irrefutable. What are your thoughts on the relation between statistics, record keeping, the infrastructural cruelty of the systems you record, and the kinds of expression that they yield in the systems you assemble at a tangent to them?GH: Death and media excite me, it’s one of my kinks. In what might be an unhelpful nutshell, Memorial is where the database combined with death changes conduct.MF: Could you explain that a little more?GH: Record keeping is still seen by many as being separate from lived experience, a model, a trace, residue if you like. But we are transformed by the use of indirection, modeling, creation and implementation of our record keeping or by not keeping records at all.Simply put… the database, the need to create a conceptual-view for our records, necessitates the implementation of sets of formal rules that are contained within the database. These theoretical machines are used to dissect an enterprise into sets of discrete normalised fields from which comparisons can be made which, in turn influences the conduct of the records input.You can see the raw power of the database at The Tower Hill Memorial, Trinity Square to the Merchant Navy’s 28,000 War dead in London’s East End. The ordering of names, ships, dates forces you to iterate over the data in specific physical ways. The enlistment system records its victims by inserting a date in the death column. The collection of the data, to include commonwealth dead, but not those of the USA, echoes empire and the order of international relations at the time.MF: Yes, this is a neo-classical monument that conflates masses of dead with architectural masses, columns covered in metal plates bearing the names and details of dead sailors, which in turn support a roof structure. The allegory is there for the turning.GH: Or to put it another way, the normalisation and categorisation of the experience of an enterprise distilled into the conceptual-view creates an encoded expertise of the enterprise which reproduces its power in new and unexpected ways.In Coal Fired Computers we tried to unpack this materialist view of software, its histories and engines. Open it up to a live experiment, see with others how the conceptual machines of the 19th Century have unfolded in to the everyday conditions that are now defined by perpetual crisis management, in the economy, ecology, security and financial systems.MF: How important then has the key requirement in statistics and database design for data normalization to be maintained had an effect on other kinds of normative process, such as social normalization?GH: There is almost no separation. If we think again about the Tower Hill Memorial as a physical manifestation of a database laid out in space. The body of the visitor is moved to access information, by ship, name, date. We order ourselves to read the fields as the ships, crews were ordered by the records kept on them.The space between data and the management systems that processes the data points to a history of conceptual machines at least going back as far as Samuel Pepys’ days at the admiralty where he introduced examinations rather then class privilege as a means of evaluating officers, standardising ship types across the country, the provision for officers’ pensions and payments for sailors’ widows; amongst other things. His great innovation in all this was a distinct separation of information from the methods of its own representation… scrupulous, absolute record keeping as a machine to produce Empire. In contemporary terms we would see this as a form of standardisation. In turn building the ability to reference something using a name, reference, or container instead of the value itself.MF: One aspect of a number of the projects you have produced in recent years is that of the incorporation of pseudo-code, bringing instructional sequences, written in an idiom that is close to Perl, sometimes with a degree of functionality, sometimes not: what are the stakes in working with this material?GH: Hmm, there is no great difference between pseudo-code and functional code. There is just one level of abstraction or another. Maybe I’m too old but all my early experience of coding was with algorithms written in pseudo-code to get over the problems of language specificity. I have produced pseudo-code that has done much more processing then the more functional stuff. Maybe another way to see this is that I build software contraptions that enable me or whoever I’m working with to speculate about the world.I’m completely uninterested in software that’s useful or works too well. I have no desire for a seamless integration in to my desktop and the systems it implies.MF: To return to CFC then, the question of seamlessness is one that often occurs in the rational discourse on sustainable energy, in terms of creating energy systems that don’t loose power, that don’t leak. You are saying that in computational terms, another kind of consideration arises, that leakiness creates the possibility for excrescences, for imagination, the expressivity of data in relation to slightly mismatched algorithms or visualization schemes?GH: Code leaks all the time, that’s what’s worrying, hopeful about it when it’s received uncritically. You create it with intention, a technical fix, but in implementation it leaks into the social enabling, disabling as it iterates over the social, cultural, economic and political conditions that formed it.In my own work I exploit this by creating assemblages of code, hardware, histories, people and materials. Particular datasets have particular resonance in certain geographical, social and political situations. In CFC we used a UK database of over 164,000 records containing the details of coal mining accidents and deaths in the UK from 1600 to the present day. This was created and/or paid for by Raleys Solicitors - specialists in workplace accident and disease compensation - a way of accruing knowledge. During 2003 and 2005 when the scheme was at its peak, Raleys’ annual profit rose from £2.5 million to £15.7million. During this period two Raleys partners, Ian Firth and David Barber, made personal profits of £9.9 million and £7.2 million respectively. To reuse this dataset in other ways allowed us to play with Raleys as part of our contraption.With the Lungs project in ZKM, the original dataset of records of slave workers was conceived within a Hollerith/IBM paradigm of punch cards, a mechanism of census taking that unfolded into racial hygiene. To take a Nazi dataset of the number of slaves used in the armaments factory in the building that now houses ZKM, to calculate the air that was in each set of lungs at the point of death, and re-breathe it into that factory was a way of unleashing new knowledge from fascist systems.MF: One of the underlying arguments I think in CFC, but also in Lungs: Slave Labour is about the power that vast accruals of data can have. Databases are no longer called Data Banks, but there is something about the agglomeration of large amounts of data that gives it an affinity, if not quite to capital, to something common in a power of amassment to create distortions of power and understanding around it. In which ways might we need to reshape our understandings of data?GH: Yes, I have never quite got to the bottom of the name change from data banks to databases – Codd who produced the first relational database still refers to data-banks in the late 1960’s. I suppose it’s something like there was no separation between the data and the code that produced it in the data-bank, leading to a repository of information and the methods of accessing that data. After Codd’s idea of relational database management systems, data sets and the code that process them are separate. So, the DBMS becomes an engine for the production of knowledge and power, changing conduct from processing the sets of information.I’m working on health records at the moment in Liverpool and trying to think about the aggregation of 60,000,000 health records in the UK… forget about the privacy issues for a moment.The aggregation and structure of this information will produce new knowledge with a measurable power to change conduct as I described earlier. This will disrupt older forms of health authority like the British Medical Association, based upon professional knowledge, with a new kind of power formed from a software-mediated return of the masses in the form of health records. This is where the leaks get interesting, potentially on the road to new tyrannies.An example from Liverpool, is the “Joint Strategic Needs Assessment” document developed by the Liverpool NHS Primary Care Trust (PCT) dated 2008. The PCT had found that it had a strong indication that 10,000 people were out there somewhere with Hypertension. They had no direct knowledge of this, but it was indicated by comparing their records with other records around the country. If those people could be found, then morbidity rates throughout the city could be reduced. The argument for this interpretation was created by comparative analyses involving many datasets. These datasets coalesced as new forms of authority that in turn could direct PCT priorities. A further convolution in the reading of the data was that Public Health advisors also thought that if you put the same money as it would cost to take the measures against hypertension into promoting the health of 16-25 year olds, this would have greater long term benefits – unfortunately however the evidence for this would take longer to gather then the lifetime of a parliament and so had to be discounted.MF: This sounds like a story with many possible turning points in it, many moments when decisions were made, resources were joined, work was done, in one way or another. What kinds of connection and combination can you imagine for such datasets to yield new figures of truth and potentially a new politics of this new kind of mass?GH: I remain hopeful that vast datasets will ooze new forms of power from the aggregation of mass records which have the potential to dislodge established forms of professional knowledge before they unfold into new modes of tyranny further down the road. The problem with this optimistic model of transformation is that it depends on datasets being ‘rationally’ built by people who understand the flows of information.Recently when I was working with a Health Trust I noticed that the fields within the five competing datasets were politicly driven and the system was undesigned to protect the competing political/financial interests of the Hospitals, Health Trusts, Government and General Practitioners. The system was not live in that records were at least two months old, had to be requested over night and arrived in a flat file with one table of more then a 1000 fields in a table. This would be shocking to any elementary computer science undergraduate.I find myself becoming a data puritan, well designed, ruthless information, using open systems will allow for much better regulation of data privacy then any sloppy, propriety and politically determined system.MF: I like this term ‘contraption’ that you have started using recently. It seems to couple a kind of intentionality with a bit of the looseness required to keep things going. What is a contraption?GH: In French, Jean says, contraption is pronounced “Machin, truc, bidule”: something that one cannot or refuses to name. Its quality as “passe-partout” (passe-partout is a device that opens all doors) is to be unqualified, thus connecting elements and revealing sets of relations that are not evident or sometimes hidden. Its in-between states allows for a practical exploration and/or understanding of power and media ecologies that surround it.A contraption in English is were the domain of the technical overlaps the imaginary, an experiment with nothing to prove. Usually strange, unnecessarily intricate, unfinished, inherently unstable, improvised machine.‘Strangeness’ enables it to become a place of experimentation and fun. ‘Inherently unstable’ refuses easy utility, normalisation and emphasis the forces at play in the machine that break it. ‘Unfinished’ is about provoking thought, emotion rather than wanting to show it how it is/should be. ‘Improvised machine’ implies a playful assemblage of pre-exiting parts. ‘Unnecessarily intricate’ allows for a geeky self-expression or the elegance, aesthetics we find in complex code.I suppose what I’m hinting at is the unstable state of invention before the ‘machin’ becomes normalised.# 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

Why do people continue to be shocked that the most repressive governments are not afraid of websites and their operators?< at >wikileaks tweeted this earlier today:------------Iranians report that Iran has blocked WikiLeaks submissions again. This discredits Iran.------------*This* discredits Iran? According to Amnesty International (to pick one example):Iran's latest presidential election on June 12, 2009, took place against a backdrop of discrimination, worsening repression of dissent and violent unrest. Amnesty International continues to document serious human rights violations including detention of human rights defenders and other prisoners of conscience, unfair trials, torture and mistreatment in detention, deaths in custody and the application of the death penalty. Iran has one of the highest number of recorded executions of any country in the world.(http://www.amnestyusa.org/all-countries/iran/all-countries/iran/page.do?id=1381041) --Dave.--Dave Mandldmandl-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.orgdavem-Lr0sFQ5rN1I< at >public.gmane.orgWeb: http://www.wfmu.org/~davemTwitter: http://twitter.com/dmandl

[[Wikipedia:Ein kritischer Standpunkt]]September 25-26, 2010University Library Leipzig, GermanyOn 25th and 26th of September 2010 the German speaking conference [[Wikipedia:Ein kritischer Standpunkt]] ([[Wikipedia:Critical Point of View]]) will take place at the University Library in Leipzig, Germany. The conference will gather Wikipedia researchers, critics as well as community-members from the German-speaking world for an interdisciplinary debate. In particular the significance of Wikipedia for education, politics, culture and society will be discussed.Wikipedia is one of the largest, if not the largest, self-contained general knowledge reference of our time. It offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, impact, production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution, and relation to power (re-)constitution. New strategic and tactical operations of knowledge and power are clearly at work through Wikipedia. Of specific interest is the concept of 'the open', which is ambiguous within the social formation(s) constituted by Wikipedia, serving as both a rallying concept of digital democracy enthusiasts and as an ideoglical nodal point masking new agonistic encounters.In both material and perceptional ways, every new technology modifies the conditions of possibility for knowledge. The logic of technologies bleeds into the very structures and organizing principles of knowledge, and today both medium and message may reflect the ideas of the (organized) network, multitude, or the Deleuzian machine. It is through a selected mix of technological and normative conditions – the distributed architecture of the net, the Wiki software platform, commons-based property licenses and the FLOSS zeitgeist – that Wikipedia as the encyclopedia of the information age emerges, both continuing and transforming the Enlightenment encyclopedic impulse or will to know.The main topics of the conference are Wikipedia & The Politics of Open Knowledge, Digital Governance, and Wikipedia & Education. These topics derive from the significance of the online encyclopedia in the reconfiguration of knowledge (re-)production and its consequences for the public, architectures of participation, and political education in a media democracy. Alongside presentations of established scholars like Christian Stegbauer, Peter Haber, Rainer Hammwöhner, Ramón Reichert, and Ulrich Johannes Schneider, the programme of the conference will consist of a panel discussion of Wikipedia community-members and critics, as well as Wikipedia-workshops and a research network meeting.The research network meeting addresses Wikipedia researchers to discuss their current research and draft new research projects. Especially aimed for young academics, the research network meeting is planned as open space, allowing its participants to actively engage in the event as questions and topics are shaped and discussed among the group. To participate, we ask for a registration by email not later than August 31, 2010 to info-d9Ea0Ks4jKI< at >public.gmane.org Please include a description of your research interest or abstract of your research on one page and tell us, if you are interested to make a short presentation.The Leipzig conference continues the series of international conferences of the Wikipedia Research Initiative Critical Point of View from January and March 2010 in Bangalore (India) and Amsterdam (Netherlands). It is hosted by cultiv – Gesellschaft für internationale Kulturprojekte e.V. in cooperation with the Research Initiative Critical Point of View and funded by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung.The conference will be open to the public. There will be no participation fee. Conference language is German.For further information please visit the conference website: www.cpov.deDeadline for the Registration for the network meeting: August 31, 2010Concept and Editorial board: Geert Lovink, Johanna Niesyto and Andreas MöllenkampContactcultivGesellschaft für internationale Kulturprojekte e.V.Bernhard-Göring-Str. 65D-04107 LeipzigTel. +49-341-2228893Email: info-tmUOzQgSuUw< at >public.gmane.orgwww.cpov.de

[digested < at > nettime -- mod (tb)]Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> language, the economy of the imaginary interesting text and interesting cleaning up from ELO performance oil films and films and text about them the message from the dead silent meditation on dissolution The Wake Clarity. the flooding and milking of liquid and liquid event-description (please no replies) Executables meanderings of landscape Living Romanticism: Violin and Thunderstorm Duet oilamina Songs and Accompaniments (with text) MM tissue AVATAR Alan PUMP across generation SPLASHED - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 25 May 2010 03:10:04 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: language, the economy of the imaginary language, the economy of the imaginarymore work on language embodiment, this time with machinery, amazing sound,and text, as if generated on branes and duals, stills and movements: andeverything churning within limited bandwidths controlling both sound andimage. welcome to the economy of the imaginary!http://www.alansondheim.org/thinking.mp4- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sat, 5 Jun 2010 09:54:19 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: interesting text and interesting cleaning up from ELO performance last night, june 4chat.txt from ELO performance with Sandy Baldwinand cleaning up the sites after the performancehttp://www.alansondheim.org/chat.txthttp://www.alansondheim.org/cleaningup.mov- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2010 20:25:53 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: oil films and films and text about them oil films and films and text about themtopographichttp://www.alansondheim.org/oilll.mp4closeuphttp://www.alansondheim.org/oill.mp4geographichttp://www.alansondheim.org/allover.mov swinging just above the road, oil rigs go by fast & raisethe kings of Israel were anointed in a ceremony in which oil wassmearing them with oil so escape the bullets and whips, dodge the swordsthem, smearing them with oil so escape the bullets and whips, dodge theengine light's on gaslight oil light brakelight toowashington middot oil fat cats vs hugo chavez middot is bush al qaedasviable by sucking oil out of the ground like a soda straw or a syringesucking crude oil out of the ground katrina# s greatest impact appears tomaintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro heldwas frightening - and it was all for the sake of oil - Huntington Beachwas at one point one of the largest producers of oil in the US - and thesegrasshoppers - this oil rigs - carrry american flags on it as if it makesresult of oil - well you get the idea - george bush drives the oil whichengine light's on gaslight oil light brakelight toowashington middot oil fat cats vs hugo chavez middot is bush al qaedasviable by sucking oil out of the ground like a soda straw or a syringesucking crude oil out of the ground katrina# s greatest impact appears tomaintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro heldwas frightening - and it was all for the sake of oil - Huntington Beachwas at one point one of the largest producers of oil in the US - and thesegrasshoppers - this oil rigs - carrry american flags on it as if it makesresult of oil - well you get the idea - george bush drives the oil whichpoured oil luz vowed vow lying rolled rachel roll tidings embraced abodedrawn crazy mid-night oil burned, heat schlieren optics on the rise - youfor the survive of the biome. But oil slicks are highly disruptive of theso blood urine feces & gas & sand water oil solvent alcohol lymph menses &and stick their shit-covered pricks in them, smearing them with oil so swinging just above the road, oil rigs go by fast & raise shoved up his anal hole an terring into him; oil cums fromspncr optical microscop with oil immrsion objctivThe oil anus remains frozen glass; flesh has fallen away, backward, intoblue sky and was oil blue upside-downof sky the blue was and blue oil and... psychosocial battered pray filtering pat odors oil ... ... to ain sor do yomile ..well u mean Midnii am naked ..aght oil Oilnd yes i havea soft sheen of oil where your hands and fingers delicately heldjulu spreads big pussy-cunt for bush-man big-cock oilgreetngs from huntington beach oil supply incorporated \n these are notBush bodies exploded with burning oil gushers out of every hole.iraq's oil other outrages these images background reply great wrongs manpussycunt for bushman bigcock oil blackoil squirt asshole whipped by gnawsah! oil ah! odestly ah! autiouslyeast nor of the west, the oil of which would well-nigh give light thoughpoured oil luz vowed vow lying rolled rachel roll tidings embraced abodefor oil exploration, increased rates of global warming, etc., theengine light's on gaslight oil light brakelight toothem, smearing them with oil so escape the bullets and whips, dodge thestructures are oil pumps and attendant machineryother kind?). The result is the oil crisis and the mess in this gluttonouswashington middot oil fat cats vs hugo chavez middot is bush al qaedasviable by sucking oil out of the ground like a soda straw or a syringesucking crude oil out of the ground katrina# s greatest impact appears to selves hungered ghosts within the wires depend on coal oil pollution'smaintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro heldwas frightening - and it was all for the sake of oil - Huntington Beachwas at one point one of the largest producers of oil in the US - and thesegrasshoppers - this oil rigs - carrry american flags on it as if it makescould do was destroy his speech. heres an island for you. its reallly oilHe's an oil man and we'd all be oil men if we could.result of oil - well you get the idea - george bush drives the oil whichripe (grain) ly cau oil modes raigh e in o develop reward dismiss, expelmaintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro heldfloating in oil legs spread arms spreadfloating in oil legs spread arms spreadunclimbable. wall above pit this room. pool oil one corner pit. an e/wpencilled tasty food small bottle water oil *mirror *plant bellowingit's as if the blackness of an oil spill has penetrated my soul, as ifmuck muc palli palliat palm oil peacemak perks pastmaggot perquisite pomade pacifi obsequi odi oilpour oil on pourboire pulpar pulp pulpal narcotic nardnumb oil oint opi pacificat adhes adulat relieve remedblack-and-white oil upside-down\ oil\ moaning he room infrared\ disappearsky and was oil blue upside-down\ the sky was blue and oil\ of sky theblue was and blue oil and \ moaning he blue light background green lightbigbb oil b aath mayheh kad mips heh friday a your aa traps where i'mOne organism lends itself to another, the fossil life of oil lendsdrought he bought up large quantities of olive oil and stored it forin sor do yomile ..well u mean Midnii am naked ..aght oil Oilnd yes i havethem, smearing them with oil so escape the bullets and whips, dodge themaintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro heldwas frightening - and it was all for the sake of oil - Huntington Beachwas at one point one of the largest producers of oil in the US - and thesegrasshoppers - this oil rigs - carrry american flags on it as if it makescould do was destroy his speech. heres an island for you. its reallly oilresult of oil - well you get the idea - george bush drives the oil whichfloating in oil legs spread arms spreadfloating in oil legs spread arms spread"an oil and wine cellar, many casks, so that it may be pleasant toblood urine feces gas sand water oil solvent alcohol lymph mensesa soft sheen of oil where your hands and fingers delicately heldblood urine feces gas sand water oil solvent alcohol lymph mensesmaintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:45:35 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: the message from the dead the message from the deadthe avatar reduced to the emission point or the black holethe message from the deadthe person transformed into the function and the person-emission transformed into the spew geometry, the monopole cellular automatonalready the source has disappearedin the virtual world there is no source, only the phantasm of suchthe totalization of the mathesis constructs the fantasmthe totalization of the mathesis constructs the avatar-simulacrum.nowhere is there the densitynowhere is there the oil only the appearancethe appearance of the oil on the screen indicated nothingnothing outside the appearance of the visiblemight one say that the screen is always the dream-screenthe screen is always the site of the simulacrumthe simulacrum functions only through the perceptionit does not function through the chemical or quantum interactionthe virtual world is not the virtual worldthe world is not the worldthis is not to say that the world is other than the visiblethis is not to say that we are not inhabited by deaththat we are given the briefest of the glances into the uncannythat we are given the briefest of moments of the fantasmjust that the world is not the worldthis is the message from the deadhttp://www.alansondheim.org/thephant.mov[1;1H [7m UW PICO 5.04 the New Buffer [23;1H [24;1H [23;1H [7m^ [7mG [mGet the Help [7m^ [7mO WriteOut [7m^ [7mR [m Read the File [7m^ [7mY [mthe Prev Pg [7m^ [7mK [m Cut the Text [7m^ [7mC [m the Cur Pos [24;1H [7m^[7mX [m the Exit [7m^ [7mJ [m Justify [7m^ [7mW Where is [7m^ [7mV [m theNext Pg [7m^ [7mU [m UnCut the Text [7m^ [7mT [m To the Spell [3;1H [22;1H[22;35H [7m[ the New file [1;42H [7m the File: wc [3;1H [22;1H [22;18H[7m[ the line 1 of 1 (100%), the character 0 of 0 (0%) ] [3;1H [22;1H[22;18H [7m[ the line 1 of 1 (100%), the character 0 of 0 (0%) ] [3;1H[1;39H [7mFile: wc Modified [4;1H [5;1H [23;1H [24;1H- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Mon, 21 Jun 2010 04:55:31 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: silent meditation on dissolutionsilent meditation on dissolutiontitle:silent meditation on dissolutionpraxis:http://www.alansondheim.org/wraithe1.mp4http://www.alansondheim.org/wraithe2.mp4http://www.alansondheim.org/wraithe3.mp4http://www.alansondheim.org/wraithe5.mp4theory:think of the world as a debris fieldbooks are a priori modernist monolithicplot is equivalent to mise en sceneaphorisms define and promulgate thoughtfragmented programming languages proliferatefriends without networks are not friendsthe universe is incomprehensiblethought and research shape-rideimminence replaces immanencedifference replaces differanceall construction is deconstructionimmersion is neighborhood-baseddefinition is situationalgrand narratives are replaced by noneecosystems are replaced by micro-nichesvertebrates give waypast life swallows present lifebe on the make or dieinformation increase is chaotic and blindthe future has already pastwe are proliferating splitting and outmoded channelsfucking is too close and too slowa parent is an afterthought of a child and a mistakeagreement is futile- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 15:41:09 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: The Wake The WakeThis is the beginning of the Wake of the Real.There is a certain style to our world.The world presents a certain style to us.Our senses construct a certain style to the world.The style of the world is the world incomplete.Instrumentation extended these senses.We directly observe only limited modalities.There are modalities inaccessible except through instrumentation.Instrumentation transforms bandwidths of modalities.Our senses leave a wake in the world.Cultures orient wakes.Wakes possess impermeable cores.The orientation of wakes constructs meaning.The construct of meaning founders and is founded on abjection.Abjection is the irresolute deconstruction of the body.The body is the site of the construct of meaning.Meaning and body are a mess.The world is consistent.Inconsistency is the result of over- or de-cathecting.Overcathecting implies the error of inerrancy.Decathecting implies the fragility of invested domains.Cathecting wavers between overcathecting and decathectingDetermination wavers between overdetermination and indeterminacy.Science is the absorption of anomaly by construct.Construct and meaning are boot-strapped.Boot-strapping occurs throughout the wake among sentient beings.No sentience, no wake.The wake is always already under erasure, disappearance.The re-mark of the wake is history; the mark of the wake is death.Always a mark, never a demarcation.Inscription drowns and coalesces in the wake.Inscription dwells in sentience.The disorders of sentience, orders of the real.The disorders of the real, orders of sentience.Inscription is never inscribed.This is the end of the Wake of the Real.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 4 Jul 2010 23:48:24 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Clarity. Clarity.the clarity of darkness:http://www.alansondheim.org/dark1.movhttp://www.alansondheim.org/dark2.movsome older texts concerned with virtual worlds - these are stillvaluable; they have an 'uncanny' clarity I think I'm lacking at themoment:For Nicanor ParraI came into cyberspacein order to look at myself. I wouldstand aside from myself and from my fingers.I would look at language in orderly rowscoming from my mouth. A woman would flowand she would create a thing. I would rushinto familiar words and at timesin the middle of a conversationI would run into a conversation. A generalwould appear carrying swords and knives anda warrior. The white screen would neverbeckon the dark, nor the grey, the color ofdeath. Colors poured into a vise a carpenterwould build with letters. The first buildingwas the building with letters. I have tracedyou back, computer through computer, toolbehind tool, entire genealogies at work untilthe very beginning. Here, I foundhand-axes starting to strikemetal. The metal was a dagger or a knife and Icould hear speech in the dagger, colorsglistened in the knife. Later,there would be a wheel, and later, a pulley.On a ceiling a pulley turned where beltsconnected steam to tools milling shanksfor motors, electric relays, turned carbonfor telephones and lamps. Someone spokebeneath the lamp and all was lost. Electronsrushed in vacuo; things started turning andmemorized the axe into this space. Then,I would watch this space, looking for signsof me. I would look at myself and a woman.VocksI want to take up the idea of voice in chats as embodiment again, from arelatively simplistic viewpoint. The voice, its granularity, is intimatewith the body, produced directly by the reconfiguring of tissue. To thespeaker, it appears unmediated; even language itself streams forth, as ifwithout impediment or processing. When an avatar represents a player on avisual chat, there is a split in embodiment; however, the body is adept atwhat Polyani calls _tacit knowledge,_ the ability to invest in, cathectthrough, an other, implement, terrain, etc. The human organism existswithin a symbolic field with physiological consequences; physiology andcommunication are intertwined, as aphasias, etc. demonstrate. So the splitbetween visual avatar and verbal language, or even visual avatar and writ-ten/textual language at the bottom or adjacent to the image, is ultimatelyno great difficulty, no matter how theorized. The _practical_ element issomething else again, however, with the text covering up the its embeddingspace (including the presence of other avatars) in ThePalace for example.If one wishes in fact to study the _cyborg_ at this point in time, theavatar itself, as dissemination from the physiological body, constitutes adominant site. The avatar is articulated in dialectic among software, par-ticipant, and communicative space (the give and take of the on line commu-nity at hand); it is simultaneously organic and machinic, self-operatedand remotely "run." It is susceptible to upgrading, software variants,etc. And ultimately, it represents, not an exterior shell, but the interi-ority of the participant's body, morphing according to intention, command,and drive.It's interesting to watch someone beginning with WorldsChat, moving aclumsy body around a constantly (and clearly) reconfigured space; there isalways a kinesthetic sense involved, interference for example indicated ifand when one of the figures comes between two others apparently (whoknows?) engaged in whispered conversation. And this occurs with minimalclues of course. Even the early mouse movements leave one feeling as ifshe or he were _propelled_ through the space, tentatively or violentlymoving from group to group in blind search. In spite of the fact that (atleast the surface) conversation is reasonably inane, WorldsChat providesa clear example of future cyborg existence. It's already here, inhabited,dependent as usual upon consumption, fast machines, and the lucky me whohas access to a T1 line.It's _money_ all the way.The PlainMy Gothic grammar states that there is almost no literature available inthe language; most of what one knows stems from the New Testamenttranslation done by Ulfilas in the fourth century, through sixth centuryItalian copies.In Mandeville, the images of the Khan remain with me, mobile capitals onmobile plains, nomadic. In the Utgarda-Loki section of the Prose Edda,Thor turns around, and the castle has disappeared; there's nothing butthe plain.The plain is the locus of power, the site of a part-object tentativelyconnected to Goths, Visigoths, Saxons, the Golden Horde. It's criss-crossed, temporary. Distance is measured by civilization, the rings ofstationary dwellings, agriculture, surrounding, encroaching on the desertwhich proceeds to devour them. As today.Territories extend indefinitely, carrying nothing with them. Simmel'sstranger glances, walks on. It's always a situation of strangers; readingRutilius Claudius Namatianus, there are Goths who are enemies, and a Gothwho buys the house.Investments are made in the form of the project/production. Imagine thebrightness of the stars in the evening, the fair regularity of the cyclesof weather. One can gallop up and down almost indefinitely. You can hearthe sounds of the horses at a distance. There are always the skitteringsof small mammals in the underbrush. Firelight is the source. There's asmell of meat. There's the sound of stringed instruments and sometimesdancing in the distance.These are the spaces of cyberspace, holes, temporary encrustations, in-tensities. These are the spaces where fantasms appear, burn into the eyes,turn inward or outward, disappear once again. Try as I might, these spacesdefy description. They're not nomadicisms in the Deleuze/Guattari sense;there are no lines of flight. The spaces are self-similar, but _locally_intense, everywhere, with the currents of micro-ecological niches. Youcan't forget the ecology, ever; you can't forget the claims of nations,colonialisms, geographic economies. Boundaries are always already in flux,just as they are, say, in the WorldsChat emptied spaces which look some-thing like enormous boxing rings.WorldsChat in fact provides an example: _What anchors the avatars to thesimulated ground?_ Nothing, of course, except for programming whichoccasionally is faulty, sending figures flying. The screen, not the de-lineation of planet, is the final arbiter. And the screen is nowhere; itis the eye, the stain or residue of the gaze.The screen is naught; the screen carries a sense of boundary, outline.Outline disappears in the literal maze of links, multiply-connected topo-logy that always returns to itself, frays at the edges. It's as if cultureis the _objet petit a_ somewhere else; who/what pulls the tongue from themouth?The body is never found. The voices are always at a distance. You can'tsee the animals for the underbrush. The animals are stases; they knowwhere they are. They aren't agents, of anything, anyone. It's not as ifthey're "there" either. The "it" is a neutral inscription. It doesn'tmean anything in the sense. It doesn't have any location. Nor does itmove on; there aren't vectors.But it's not all negative. It's the plain. It's where you can draw figuresor cut them into the grass. It's where they appear as if they're _some-thing_ in the midst of, that is, between, seasons. They're ignored becauseyou can only see them from the air. Airplanes haven't been invented yetbut the kids are having a good laugh and you can hear them clear acrossthe plain.(There's so _little_ of Gothic left to read/hear. Almost all of it istranslation from the Gospels, as if others are speaking through theirtombs. Colonialization circulates among itself. Logos takes over, hardinscription. The Bible is the Book. The Book is the Bible. The world goesflat with forgetting. Each and every world is a plain. Cyberspace is allthe world there is.)Entering, Rites of Passage, CharacteristicsHey, what's the entrance to the software? The other day I was on Worlds-Chat and there was this avatar with the signboard on its head readingn******basher, and I'd never seen anything like that. I tried to blow himout of the space, but you can't do that; I ended up just getting the hellout of there as fast as I could. I felt doubly violated, not only becauseof the overt racism of the name, but because in general, these thingsdon't appear in the environmental chats. For one thing, when you log onas a guest on a MOO, ThePalace, etc., you're given a guest designation -you've got to do an < at >request on the former for a character. Because ofthis - the simple matter of < at >request - there's a rite of passage that'sinvolved, which makes literally all the difference in the world, just asthere is a rite of passage into an email list, as opposed, say, to a Use-net newsgroup. With that rite comes responsibility, designated or not;one's acted intentionally, thought about joining, cooperation, even ifone's aim is ultimately very different.But on WorldsChat, you can pick any name you want immediately; it's withyou, a sign of terror, just as you can violate within IRC, or a talkerfor that matter. True, a talker takes a password, but you can change thatany time - it's your responsibility, not the sysadmin's. And you do thatwhen you log on, not later. It's the _delay_ then that establishes theentrance into an email list or a MOO (or ThePalace for that matter) as arite - a rite then is something that proffers liminality, that in-betweenstate framed by inscriptions. The delay designates temporality, trans-forms short-term into long-term memory, changes occasion into event.There's also something to be said about the textuality of the delay - theproper name begins to assert itself, binds itself to the circumscriptionof the body, the participant using the software. This is very differentthan jumping into chatlines, IRC, or other forms in which identity isoften amorphous, changing momentarily (it is true you can morph in a MOOof course, but that requires programming, keystrokes beyond a click inMIRC) - changing in fact in a way that can decathect language from its owndisplay.Be that as it may, delays, rites of entrance, inscription, liminal states,all play a role in the character of these spaces. Not enough attention ispaid, in any of the accounts I've read, to the welcome message and initialoperations required to enter a space - things which are ultimately takenfor granted, forgotten, circumvented, but which nonetheless create inpart the character of the communications framework itself.As I pointed out elsewhere, then, there are innumerable elements in sucha framework (these are given in no particular order):1. The player's client software;2. The program software (including issues of quota, buffering, etc.);3. The program aura (contacts outside the program);4. The sysadmins', wizards', or moderators' decisions and powers;5. Various rites of entrance and exit;6. Assumed quality and conditions of governance;7. Assumed quality and conditions of privacy and distinction of public/ private spaces;8. Ability of the player to transform his or her character on a formal level (i.e. set descriptions);9. Ability of the player formally and in terms of individual knowledge, to transform the environment itself;10. Async/sync aspects of the environment in relation to each other;11. Types of speech possible (first-person [ytalk] / third-person [MOO]), (packaging of emotions/emootions), (paging, telling, yelling, whis- pering, asking, exclaiming, saying), (echo on / echo disabled), etc.;12. Types of speech tolerated, use of toading, kill, delete, filtering, etc.;13. Issues of network and software lags.All of these play a role in the quality of communication; the framing offlaming; the ability to carry on sustained conversations among partici-pants; the ability to carry on sustained conversations continuing acrossvarious login sessions; the manifestation of desire and sexuality invarious modes of privacy; the manifestation of a certain political econ-omy in relation to ownership and privatization of spaces, software, andgeneric objects; and the very real questioning of the loci of power inrelation to wizards, administrators, server ownership and mandates, andso forth.There is much work to be done in regard to these issues, work which lendsitself naturally to creating a phenomenological approach for the consid-eration of future seamless virtual realities.ThresholdLiving alone in my loft, there is an entire phenomenology of entering andexiting; the external world literally floods my presence when I _emerge_into the light. The rite of passage in signing on to a MOO is different;one is already on-line, and the passage may occur among variousapplications, including ytalk, IRC, and so forth.The threshold in fact occurs with the initial logging-on, a trivial actin itself. The community then appears, with the secondary log-on in itsentirety; ontologies shimmer, epistemologies crash, and so forth.It's difficult for an outsider to understand this transformation occurringwith the movement of a few keys. The body remains in place. Nothing floodsthe room, and it's the flooding that ordinarily separates interior andexterior - along with the relative lack of ownership and privacy the ex-terior occasions (which is more problematic in cyberspace), and so forth.This is where prosthesis, the uncanny, projection/introjection, and thelike come into play. The user is at home or in the office; the mind ismoving fast-forward elsewhere. It's going to seem useless, artificial,non-existent. It's going to be incomprehensible from the outside, and soforth.The space is dry. Nothing is illuminated. Words crack either darker orlighter than background, light background flattening the screen, darkbackground an illusion of inconceivable depth; Pascal comes to mind, andso forth.In dreams real and virtual coalesce, ascii-dreams, livid dreams, maroondreams of womb interiors, dreams of classification, conflagration. Theyflicker in and out of the preconscious, lists of sexual graphemes andregions centered around the penis, perineum, anus, nipple. I wake in themiddle of the night, fingers half-inserted, erect, sweated; there aremonsters. The image: cuneiform word-lists, transliterated and translated,sharp spikes penetrating the body, mouths held open. There are no screamsin cyberspace, not even with Iphone's advent; there is the collusion, the_substance_ of the computer, and it's this _substance_ as well whichremains untranslatable to those unfamiliar, and so forth.Circulating among the home pages, one rarely runs into community; languageis pasted onto signboards, even on those refreshable chat sites. Crack theWeb, split it open, and words, neighborhoods seethe forth. I resist this,this splitting, even the surface, resist the Net; for me, totally succumb-ing to its narrowed modalities is the sign of death, hungering for toolong too near the screen. But I understand the promise in this hungeringas well, the ability to achieve satiation, find commonality. I have toremind myself constantly that I'm a freak, that the lure of the thresholdis the lure of paste compared to the flood of the out of doors, and soforth.It's a litany of occasions, events, each with their temporal horizons,subjective projects, relevances, avatars, sublimations, repressions,identities, political and monetary economies. As I said last night to theinterviewer from NPR (not broadcast), humans will find communicative andcommunal possibilities in any ecological niche; there are Iphone and IRCsocieties as well as those in MUDs, MOOs, newsgroups, email lists, and soforth. Communication in this fashion parallels capital and late capital-ism, extending and expanding through all those devices of -jectivity, hy-steric embodiment, that I've documented elsewhere. So there are thresholdsand rites of passage, there are communities and projections, there are hy-sterias and issues of governance/framework/political economy, and thereis a majority off-line public out there, meeting explanation with bewil-derment, uncomprehending of community external to the obdurate existenceof bodies, trails, buildings, streets, and so forth.And so forth into the night of the darknet, day of the real, vacillatingamong illuminations, uneasy dreams, sexual-depressive twists of the body,corporate-celebratory twists of the machinic, and so forth.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 6 Jul 2010 17:15:37 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: the flooding and milking of liquid and liquid the flooding and milking of liquid and liquidhttp://www.alansondheim.org/flood.movhttp://www.alansondheim.org/flood2.mov( but it's not the flood that meanders; it's the flood or storm thatspreads and spill, but not meanders; it's the pronoun that follows thetext below * )( * and see below and http://www.alansondheim.org/flood3.movhttp://www.alansondheim.org/flood4b.mov ** )sometimes work meanders; environments are unexpected, and analysis followssuit. visual and theoretical paths meander, as if trajectories were alwayssecond-order at the least: think of spatial acceleration. the speed ofthought moves nothing. everything proceeds as if an apologetics: thisisn't what I meant but isn't it interesting?then there are the dreams, dream work, as if all screens were breasts, allleaks, exhalations from the matrix.the well PUMPED the oil, the man and woman PUMPED each other, the infantdesert was NOURISHED, the ocean and mind were MILKED.* ** it's the following for example :: http://alansondheim.org/flood3.movwhere simultaneous sit/teleport commands construct an imaginary position_elsewhere,_ in mid-air or mid-stream - a position viewed either fromavatar or independent camera - a position which answers to its owntransposed topography - breaking the simulacrum of the real - floating theavatar 'about' deeply unrelated spaces - as if she were controlled there -so one might ask - where is the mechanism here - the control mechanism -since 'there' has none - and the original mechanism is elsewhere - out oftouch, out of reach - so here's a meander - an occurrence - something totake advantage of - leading us out into, in fact, a dream state of sorts -flying through unknown geographies - and thenthe well PUMPED the oil, the man and woman PUMPED each other, the infantdesert was NOURISHED, the ocean and mind were MILKED -as the next and final image, environment, process, procedure, operation,installation, performance appeared -http://www.alansondheim.org/flood4b.mov - perhaps the most 'original' ofall - certainly the most energized - the most possessing a philosophicdiegesis or trajectory - something to say, to be said - for the liquidityof catastrophe - liquidity of permanent crisis - and its relation toengendering, to the interior of the body, to the matrix, the breast, tosemen, to the womb, to the infant, to nourishment and nutrition, to thephenomenology of the swollen, tumescent, distended - to fecundity,engorgement and the soft flow of the eaten - to suffocation and the lastrespiration, to death and the last sight of eyes slowly closing - never toopen again -- think of the jagged-dance or puppet-marionette-dance, for that's whathappens, that's what's happening - whenever you're there - beneath thesign of capital (I used to say) - _within_ the sign of capital - not thehere/ there of the Matrix, but effluvia, floundering about, flailing, forand against our will - 'the soft flow of the eaten - to suffocation andthe last respiration' -http://www.alansondheim.org/flood.movhttp://www.alansondheim.org/flood2.movhttp://www.alansondheim.org/flood3.movhttp://www.alansondheim.org/flood4b.movand 4b yes yes yes, the coming home of the catastrophic, the flooding, thenew world of oil and milk, the flooding and milking of liquid and liquid,the flooding and milking of liquid and liquidthe flooding and milking of liquid and liquidthe flooding and milking of liquid and liquidthe flooding and milking of liquid and liquidthe flooding and milking of liquid and liquidthe flooding and milking of liquid and liquid- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 9 Jul 2010 06:00:53 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: event-description (please no replies) event-descriptionfast heartbeat, palpitations, shaking, sleeplessness, tossing and turning,wide-awake, sweating, heavy eyelids, unbearable exhaustion, persistenturination, dry throat, mucus, sore throat, shoulder pain, slight pain inankles, neck pain, slight joint pain in fingers, out of breath, slightfeeling of rigidity, panic, despair, lower back pain > panic attack?excessive and chronic insomnia?feelings of having-to-do-everything-immediately because of the imminenceof death, mind whirling at high-speed, anguish over dying, anguish overleaving azure behind, anguish over my father's condition, anguish over ourfinancial situation, anguish over my joblessness > not depression though -slight difficulty swallowing, dry mouth, dry scalp, excessive nervousness,not wanting to go on like this, watching the irreversible slowing-up of myfather, fear of family feuding, feeling trapped, flailing uselessly, teethhurting slightly, bad breath, random itches, legs twitching, chapped,lips, feelings of infinite regret, jealousies of others' careers, slightlymanic - feelings of stupidity, of being tone-deaf, of being unable to doanything and to do anything of importance, of being forgotten, of beinggarbage, of interfering with the lives of others, of interfering withemail lists, of interfering in virtual ad real worlds, of being a blighton the internet, of being useless and being utterly useless, slight painsin lower left leg, inability to concentrate > faster, faster -Fri Jul 9 05:58:40 EDT 2010 all night, all day, all week, all month long-- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sat, 10 Jul 2010 04:39:03 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Executables Executableshttp://www.alansondheim.org/exe/ - all the files are .exe, executable.They were made in 2003. One or more will 'stick' to the desktop untilrebooting. None of them have viruses, worms, etc. They're all self-contained. Some of the images have to be double- or single-clicked on tostart the processes. Some of the processes end by themselves; some justcontinue; some of the images themselves differ with each click; some ofthe images change with repeated clicking; and so forth. The pieces areconcerned with - maybe 'deal with' - issues of the gaze, language,reading, sexuality, body, corruption, decay, control, deconstruction,eroticism. I'm leaving the them up for a while only - if you want them,download them now. After a while, some of the pieces will move to anothersite, and some of the more risque will simply be taken down. The programsthat created these, by the way, were deleted; I wanted the executables tobehave as independent autonomous objects with relatively impermeableinteriors. I don't remember myself how they were made. They were createdwith Visual Basic 6, in a flurry of activity over a period of weeks. I'venever been able to take the surface of an image for granted; these piecesare the result of that failure.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Wed, 14 Jul 2010 01:12:02 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: meanderings of landscape meanderings of landscapelandscape displacement remappedbringing natural beauty from the foothills of the rockiesinto the sterile landscape of second lifelooped recordings made at roxborough state park, coloradoattached to objects and others in second lifeattached to avatar alan dojoji < at >who wanders around the abstract and denuded installation < at >where hir footprints ./echo and resound in many waysone might consider this an antiquated form of conceptualism:map 1 -> map 2 or some such (as if the world were map(were only map (iff and only if the world were map)))but think, now, of the natural beauty of a world murmuring- the transporting of that murmuring into the unnatural- within the unnatural <--> these are random typologies(necessarily so) - s.t.in landmap.mp4 SEE the wandering of Alan DojojiHEAR the effluent of the murmuring world *and in landmaps 2-7 .mp3, HEAR the effluent * -a NEW aural landscape is created for you by Hir Wanderingand many NEW subtlely different aural landscapesradio landscapes & you can imagine themmapped back into the foothills of the rockiesgracefully traced, if you so desire, by Alan Dojoji in the hills or against the cliffs or overhanging moss and trees -http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/landmap2.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/landmap3.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/landmap4.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/landmap5.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/landmap6.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/landmap7.mp3http://alansondheim.org/landmap.mp4* bayou, billabong, branch, confluent, confluent stream, streamlet,dejecta, dendritic drainage pattern, discharge, tributary, streaming,exudate, wandering, flooding, meandering, walking, chirping, exudation,feeder, fork, outbound, outflowing, outgoing, outpouring, outward-bound- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:55:20 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Living Romanticism: Violin and Thunderstorm Duet Living Romanticism: Violin and Thunderstorm DuetViolin played under overhang in severe thunderstormstopped as lightning moved in:http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/thunders1.mp3Here's the raw (underrecorded) file - towards the endafter the major strike, there are 'clicks' that seem to bestatic discharge in the recording device:http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/staticdischarge.mp3Earlier preparation for the above, almost musical:http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/thunder2b.mp3- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:44:35 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: oilamina oilaminaoilamina oil animals lamina oil main mail anal oil lama o in i loam moanalma ama lamas lamb lame lamp lava la ma la-ma lima mama {concurrent}{object-oriented} languages - body appearing to breath, creating me -http://www.alansondheim.org/ oilamina01.jpg - oilamina26.jpgthe body appears to breath, its organs duplicated everywhere, laminatedthe texts create me as a laminar manifold, strata and tendrils - plateaustion and planetary extinctions. the result is a precarious laminarinsufficient layers, lamina. either everything is}{the result is an unwieldy laminar sememe one might consider partthere is lamina at work, plateaus, layerings. ontologies andand gender form lamina or strata weaving across domains, the former an in-split, shunted into decentered lamina, the wryting is the _said_ of it.occasion. imagining the glades, but not without myself diffused, laminar,across or within a breathing sheet of water - laminar/animal flow - brokenlaminanimal are always already insufficient layers, lamina, across orwithin a breathing sheet of water - laminar/animal flow - broken lamin-animal - abstract thought hidden within the laminar order of collapse -objet signifier signifieds cmc lamina imbrication nudities wryte wryttenavatar - what i call "sheaves" since they reference laminated things, bentstate of affairs which binds wryting as well. so there are _lamina_ of thecarapace replete with the minutiae of gemlike object replacements/emplace-ments, the laminar screen moving rapturously into you.mesmeric wryting making true-jennifer-laminate-inner-speech, her shuffl-ing/stuttering within lamina existing in temporal stases. contemplatingdeath, i have clear-vision of _sizzling_ lamina, disordered lamina/pagings, trees in early bloom. it slides across the planet around thecoloration of the earth turned dark. and i have seen the threads.jennifer, alan, julu, nikuko, are lamina established by networks; theygather together across membranes - moisture; i am transported - acrosslamina, fallen through tubes - vacances -the great lamina of the stars sway back and forth -she sways back and forth on the laminar plane - in tune -with the rhythms of the universe -the laminar plane and stars -- laminanimal -- laminanimal -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:35:23 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Songs and Accompaniments (with text) Songs and AccompanimentsAzure's new song:creatures - solo -- creaturesv - w/violin -- creaturesvv - w/violin mod --creaturesvvv - w/violin modhttp://espdisk.com/alansondheim/creatures.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/creaturesv.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/creaturesvv.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/creaturesvvv.mp3Murmur (Creatures)Creatures neath the surface/ murmur among themselvesSoftly mewling in silt/ tender touching/ lovelyMany eyes wide open/ to stirrings of the surfaceBut remaining in the depths/ everything blurs smoothlySome come with memories/ of others offered/ barteredWhat could be given then/ but creatures warm and floatingTurning and mourning/ turns mourning and turningMany eyes shyly close in comfort/ and close comfortMany sights to see/ and many seas are sleepingMany creatures slipping/ many mourning/ drowningCreatures neath the surface/ murmur among themselvesSoftly mewling in silt/ tender touching/ lovelyMany eyes wide open/ to stirrings of the surfaceBut remaining in the depths/ everything blurs smoothlySome come with memories/ of others offered/ barteredWhat could be given then/ but creatures warm and floatingTurning and mourning/ turns mourning and turningMany eyes shyly close in comfort/ and close comfortMany sights to see/ and many seas are sleepingMany creatures slipping/ many mourning/ drowningAzure's dark robe:darkrobevv - w/violin -- darkrobevvv - w/violinhttp://espdisk.com/alansondheim/darkrobevv.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/darkrobevvv.mp3muteute - violin solohttp://espdisk.com/alansondheim/muteute.mp3- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Mon, 2 Aug 2010 21:40:26 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: MM tissue AVATAR Alan PUMP across generation SPLASHED MM tissue AVATAR Alan PUMP across generation SPLASHEDCOASTAL BASIN Dojoji mess mess Dojoji BASIN COASTAL SPLASHED generationacross PUMP Alan AVATAR tissue MM PUMP verb MF operated FF fleshstriations moment lubrication walks by AVATAR plaque FLUSH FLUSH plaqueAVATAR by walks lubrication moment striations flesh FF operated MF verbPUMP MM tissue AVATAR Alan PUMP across generation SPLASHED COASTAL BASINDojoji mess mess Dojoji BASIN COASTAL SPLASHED generation across PUMP AlanAVATARFF nerve PUMP nerve nerve PUMP nerve verb PUMP nerve striations nervesplit nerve verb connect striations verb tissue split verb tissue connectstriations tissue generation split generation machine connect generationoperated tissue generation by generation generation by machine machineJulu operated machine Twine Julu operated Twine Twine operated Twine Alanby Twine Dojoji Julu Alan not Twine Alan moment Dojoji Alan FLUSH not AlanFLUSH moment Dojoji FLUSH FLUSH not NOISE fills moment NOISE SPLASHEDFLUSH NOISE BASIN NOISE NOISE BASIN fills fills coastal SPLASHED fillsAVATAR coastal SPLASHED AVATAR AVATAR SPLASHED AVATAR walks BASIN AVATARinto coastal walks midst AVATAR walks mess into walks across midst intoacross mess into across across midst gravel plaque mess gravel fleshacross gravel oozed gravel gravel oozed plaque plaque through flesh plaqueCOASTAL through flesh COASTAL COASTAL flesh COASTAL AVATAR oozed COASTALmoment through AVATAR lubrication COASTAL AVATAR MF AVATAR AVATAR PUMPlubrication moment PUMP MF moment FM PUMP lubrication FM PUMP MF FM MMPUMP FM PUMP FM FM PUMP PUMP PUMP FF MM PUMP PUMP FF MM PUMP PUMP MM PUMPPUMP FF PUMPhttp://www.alansondheim.org/organmachine.mp4- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

What happened to the great showdown between freedom-loving tech-companies -- who were supposed to depend on earning their users's trust by protecting their privacy -- and authoritarian governments bent on all-around surveillance and censorship? While initially there has been a lot of press about Google challengingthe Chinese government, the reports have slowed to a trickle recently.for another year or two, though it remains unclear under whichconditions. This seems to indicate that the government got enoughof what it wanted, or, that it doesn't see Internet-freedom as sothreatening, after all. [1]And then there is RIM decision to cooperate fully with Saudi Arabia'sauthorities to prevent their email services to be banned in thecountry. Instead of protecting their users's privacy, RIM (the companythat makes the Blackberry devices) agreed to "to locate three serverswithin Saudi Arabia, putting them under the jurisdiction of localsecurity forces and thus removing the necessity of the planned ban."[2][1] http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/07/google-china-fiction/[2] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/08/09/rim_saudi_arabia/--- 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

Free concert via the Limping Messenger:http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/hissing-in-the-grass-free-concert-of-unintentional-art-at-the-oosterdok-amsterdam/“Hissing in the grass” free concert of unintentional art at the Oosterdok AmsterdamAugust 12, 2010 by Tjebbe van Tijen | EditTrying to take my usual short-cut on bicycle coming from the ferry to the North of Amsterdam, I did get stuck in a corridor of fences and no go signs, a tiny stretch of land right next to the canal going underneath the railway tracks, with the next bridge I wanted to cross in sight but out of reach.A hissing sound caught my ear and soon I discovered a mysterious device in between a patch of non-planned grass and flowers. And as I approached I was charmed by the unknown functionality of the device and its performance of a tasks that was impossible to to discern.All these qualities made me decide to project upon this hissing tube box at least some understandable function – if only just for my own satisfaction: This is Art!With the Muziekgebouw aan het IJ just around the corner (accessible through a tunnel under the railway in which an officially approved public sound-art installations with a ‘ding donging’ travelling sound can be experienced) this hissing device was proving the power of non-intentional art works in public space (of which there are many for the attentive art amateur). The nice rhythmic tinging instrument that can be heard is the attention signal of the open foot-passenger bridge being opened.It looks as if the “Hissing in the grass” concert will be performed for a while, at least during the upcoming tourists event in Amsterdam SAIL 2010. So do not miss it.

Domino's in Battle Ground is looking for a enthusiastic,motivated, dependable individual to help attract attentionand increase business at our store by shaking a banner outby the road.Please reply with your name, number where you can be reachedand a short paragraph explaining why you think you would begood for the job.--PROXY Galleryhttp://cart.iabrace.comglobal islands project:http://bbrace.net/id.html"We fill the craters left by the bombsAnd once again we singAnd once again we sowBecause life never surrenders."

I just have to say I'm ashamed of this country, and scared - too much hatred against illegal immigrants (WHICH WE ALL ARE), and now Islam. Some of the protests are all too familiar Kristallnacht in tone - on Jon Stewart, there was a newsclip of a community going to burn a copy of the Koran on 9/11.I can't argue this with anyone - I'm horrified and brought to tears by it. And we can't sit by and let a rabid racist right grow in this country - the affects have been seen repeatedly worldwide.- Alan---------- Forwarded message ----------Date: Thu, 12 Aug 2010 15:20:36From: evolutionary-psychology-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw< at >public.gmane.orgReply-To: No Reply <notify-dg-evolutionary-psychology-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw< at >public.gmane.org>To: evolutionary-psychology-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw< at >public.gmane.orgSubject: [evol-psych] Digest Number 7327There are 6 messages in this issue.Topics in this digest:1. News: Orangutan pantomime ~ elaborating the message From: Robert Karl Stonjek2a. Re: Holistic Darwinism: The new evolutionary paradigm and some impli From: Mike Tintner2b. Re: Holistic Darwinism: The new evolutionary paradigm and some impli From: Steve Moxon3. Bonobos and chimps From: mark hubey4. The Rise of America's Idiot Culture From: ED5. 8 Percent of U.S. Births to Illegal Immigrants From: R A FondaMessages________________________________________________________________________1. News: Orangutan pantomime ~ elaborating the message Posted by: "Robert Karl Stonjek" stonjek-24jMwgp+fRTvnOemgxGiVw< at >public.gmane.org rk_stonjek Date: Thu Aug 12, 2010 3:07 am ((PDT))Orangutan pantomime: elaborating the messageAnne Russon1 and Kristin Andrews21Psychology Department, Glendon College, 2275 Bayview Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4N 3M62Philosophy Department, York University, 4700 Keele St Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3*Author for correspondence (arusson-+/PJti/ttUcsA/PxXw9srA< at >public.gmane.org).AbstractWe present an exploratory study of forest-living orangutan pantomiming, i.e. gesturing in which they act out their meaning, focusing on its occurrence, communicative functions, and complexities. Studies show that captive great apes may elaborate messages if communication fails, and isolated reports suggest that great apes occasionally pantomime. We predicted forest-living orangutans would pantomime spontaneously to communicate, especially to elaborate after communication failures. Mining existing databases on free-ranging rehabilitant orangutans' behaviour identified 18 salient pantomimes. These pantomimes most often functioned as elaborations of failed requests, but also as deceptions and declaratives. Complexities identified include multimodality, re-enactments of past events and several features of language (productivity, compositionality, systematicity). These findings confirm that free-ranging rehabilitant orangutans pantomime and use pantomime to elaborate on their messages. Further, they use pantomime for multiple functions and create complex pantomimes that can express propositionally structured content. Thus, orangutan pantomime serves as a medium for communication, not a particular function. Mining cases of complex great ape communication originally reported in functional terms may then yield more evidence of pantomime.Source: The Royal Societyhttp://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/08/05/rsbl.2010.0564.abstract?papetocPosted byRobert Karl StonjekMessages in this topic (1)________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________2a. Re: Holistic Darwinism: The new evolutionary paradigm and some impli Posted by: "Mike Tintner" tintner-QgLWrMLu8clzjhtm8Ag3mw< at >public.gmane.org andarot Date: Thu Aug 12, 2010 4:28 am ((PDT))"Steve Moxon" <stevemoxon3< at >...> wrote:I can't speak to the virtues of this particular approach. But as to the need for, and inevitability of, major paradigm shifts, I have no doubt.What's the difference between saying humans are gene-determined, and - computers are RAM-determined? Well, they are to a considerable extent, but just looking at key parts of a machine will not explain the evolution or design of the machine as a whole. Nor will just in addition looking at the environment of the machine.The study BTW of the evolution of actual machines has just begun. See Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology, wh. I detect is already having a cross-cultural impact.And, to return to the comparison with computers (& robots), clearly a gene-/part-centered approach will ignore the most central, glaring and indeed gigantic feature of these machines - they are **general-purpose** machines - **creative** machines - designed so as to be capable of an infinite range of physical activities and mental activities, capable of surviving in an infinite range of environments, (wh. makes the idea that they are environment-determined look somewhat bizarre).One way or another, the recognition of humans and animals as creative machines will transform the sciences - you can see one of the first significant moves towards this in S. Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred, wh. is an attempt at a new creative worldview, to supplant the currently crumbling, reductionist, parts-centered worldview. Neither Kauffman nor, I wouldn't be surprised, Corning, has a fully crystallised new paradigm. But you can be sure, one is coming. The gene-centered POV is breathtakingly narrow in its powers of explanation - and cannot begin to explain the *design* of the "organismic machine" as a whole.Messages in this topic (2)________________________________________________________________________2b. Re: Holistic Darwinism: The new evolutionary paradigm and some impli Posted by: "Steve Moxon" stevemoxon3-rIDUbWZ4T7Pk1uMJSBkQmQ< at >public.gmane.org spmox Date: Thu Aug 12, 2010 4:55 am ((PDT))A 'creative machine' is exactly what we're not. The more complex the organism then the more faithful it is to its genes -- as I explain in my paper. We never go off at some new trajectory.As for computer models: they are hopeless analogies of organisms.Systems-biology is the antithesis of a 'parts view' and this is fully here without any 'paradigm shift'A paradigm shift is necessary when it's neceseray; not when it's not.As ever, failure of philosophical understanding destroys scientific understanding.Steve Moxon [author of the book, The Woman Racket: The new science explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society, 2008 Imprint Academic; and the papers: 'Dominance as adaptive stressing and ranking of males, serving to allocate reproduction by self-suppressed fertility: Towards a fully biological understanding of social system', 2009 Medical Hypotheses; 'Culture is biology: Why we cannot 'transcend' our genes', 2010 Politics & Culture; and 'Beyond Staged Retreat Behind Gender Paradigm Barricades: The rise and fall of the misrepresentation of partner violence and it's eclipse by an understanding of mate-guarding', in press The Journal of Aggression, Conflict and Peace Studies]. ----- Original Message ----- From: Mike Tintner To: evolutionary-psychology-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw< at >public.gmane.org Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 12:18 PM Subject: [evol-psych] Re: Holistic Darwinism: The new evolutionary paradigm and some impli "Steve Moxon" <stevemoxon3< at >...> wrote: > > There is no new evolutionary paradigm along the lines outlined here. I can't speak to the virtues of this particular approach. But as to the need for, and inevitability of, major paradigm shifts, I have no doubt. What's the difference between saying humans are gene-determined, and - computers are RAM-determined? Well, they are to a considerable extent, but just looking at key parts of a machine will not explain the evolution or design of the machine as a whole. Nor will just in addition looking at the environment of the machine. The study BTW of the evolution of actual machines has just begun. See Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology, wh. I detect is already having a cross-cultural impact. And, to return to the comparison with computers (& robots), clearly a gene-/part-centered approach will ignore the most central, glaring and indeed gigantic feature of these machines - they are **general-purpose** machines - **creative** machines - designed so as to be capable of an infinite range of physical activities and mental activities, capable of surviving in an infinite range of environments, (wh. makes the idea that they are environment-determined look somewhat bizarre). One way or another, the recognition of humans and animals as creative machines will transform the sciences - you can see one of the first significant moves towards this in S. Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred, wh. is an attempt at a new creative worldview, to supplant the currently crumbling, reductionist, parts-centered worldview. Neither Kauffman nor, I wouldn't be surprised, Corning, has a fully crystallised new paradigm. But you can be sure, one is coming. The gene-centered POV is breathtakingly narrow in its powers of explanation - and cannot begin to explain the *design* of the "organismic machine" as a whole.Messages in this topic (2)________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________3. Bonobos and chimps Posted by: "mark hubey" hubeev-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org hubeyh Date: Thu Aug 12, 2010 6:53 am ((PDT))Can bonobos and chimps interbreed?Messages in this topic (1)________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________4. The Rise of America's Idiot Culture Posted by: "ED" seacrofter001-/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org seacrofter001 Date: Thu Aug 12, 2010 7:59 am ((PDT))August 12, 2010The Rise of America's Idiot Culture The Muslim Community Center atGround Zero: a Manufactured ControversyBy ANTHONY DiMAGGIOA substantial racist uproar is taking place in conservative America,particularly in right-wing radio and television. Reactionary punditsare drawing increased attention to plans to build an Islamic communitycenter in downtown Manhattan, near Ground Zero. Republicans andconservatives have long been known to harbor racist views of Islam,although they're hardly alone in this. Many on the right frame theentire religion as radical, fundamentalist, and a threat to nationalsecurity. In light of this pattern, there's little surprising aboutthe right's most recent attack on Muslim Americans as a secret,under the radar threat.Islam has at times been portrayed on the right as the bedrock threat toAmerican cultural values, and Muslims are depicted as uni-dimensionallyset on overthrowing Christianity, enslaving the American public, andimposing "Sharia law." The last warning about "Sharialaw" ? repeated by pundits like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh? among many others ? comes off as extremely ignorant,considering that the term "Sharia" itself means Islamic law.One should take the warnings of those who use the phrase "Sharialaw" about as seriously as someone who masquerades as a legalscholar while talking about the importance of "American lawlaw."The American right has also taken to paranoid conspiracy theoriescharging that Obama is a non-citizen. As the story goes, Obama wasreally born in Kenya, and his "take over" of the White Houserepresents a secret victory for radical Islam, since, as we all"know," Obama is a closet Muslim terrorist who is allied withOsama bin Laden and other radical Islamists. About half of Republicansbelieve either that Obama is not a citizen or that they cannot be sureof whether he is really an American citizen or not. These views areshared by nearly 60 percent of self-designated Tea Party supporters.Of course, the nuances of the Islamic faith and the mainstream nature ofthe American Muslim community - the vast majority who oppose terrorism,fundamentalism, or repression of women - have been completely lost inthe smug arrogance and incompetence of racists on the right.The reactionary right has long been opposed to anything related to Arabculture and the Muslim religion in New York and around the country. Oneinfamous example is New York's Khalil Gibran Arabic languageacademy, the first of its kind for the city. Rabid right-wingers railedagainst it, especially those in the "stop the Madrassa" campaign(many of whom worried about the dangers of "Madrassa schools,"while apparently too ignorant to realize that the word Madrassa itselfmeans school). I argued with one of the leaders of this group on AlanColmes' radio show a few years ago. She seemed un-phased by thereality that there was never any concrete evidence that the KhalilGibran academy was teaching Islamic values. As she announced on theshow (despite my scorn for her comments), the very fact that there wasno visible evidence of an Islamic curriculum was proof of just how goodthe schools' administrators and teachers were of hiding it. Suchparanoia demonstrated how far conservative extremism and racism havecome in recent years.This brings us to the most recent "controversy" related toIslam: the Muslim community center planned for Manhattan. Right wingersin radio and at Fox News have gone into overdrive attacking it as afundamental threat to the American way of life and to American security.Their racist diatribes have been hard for me to listen to, but theyremain important to address, if for no other reason than so we can fightthe ignorant assumptions behind them head on.Here's a quick review of some of the most outrageous comments madein the American media:- On Fox News, former Congressman Newt Gingrich attacked the communitycenter for its planned location "right at the edge of a place where,let's be clear, thousands of Americans were killed in an attack byradical Islamists." On his website, Gingrich announced that"there should be no mosque near ground zero in New York so long asthere are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia."Gingrich's choice to spotlight the radical fundamentalist regime ofSaudi Arabia (hypocritically supported by Gingrich himself when he wasSpeaker of the House in the 1990s) ? while neglecting moderate andsecular governments in the Muslim world, speaks volumes about what heconsiders to be the "essence" of Islam. Gingrich's languageis truly abhorrent; he frames those supporting the community center inManhattan as part of the same "they" as the Islamicfundamentalists who perpetrated the 9-11 attacks. As far as Gingrich isconcerned, there are no distinctions to be made in the monolithic"threat" that is the entire U.S. and world Muslim community.- On Fox, Sarah Palin drew attention to "those innocent victims,those families of those who were killed in the 9-11 tragedy, it saddensme to think that people don't understand what building this mosqueat such hallowed ground really represents." Inextricably linked toPalin's warnings is the assumption that the community centerrepresents a single, overarching fifth column threat from AmericanMuslims. This much was clear when she characterized its constructionas "an unnecessary provocation" against the people of New Yorkand the American people more generally.- Fox News host Sean Hannity claimed that the "Iman" supportingthe building of the community center is a figure who "supports whathappened on 9/11" and "praises Osama bin Laden." Hannity,of course, failed to present any evidence linking community centersupporters to defending the 9/11 attacks, but this hardly seemed tomatter to him or his guest, Jay Seculow (of the American Center for Lawand Justice), who complained that "you don't get to build amosque on a site that's part of ground zero" because "thatwould be like putting at Pearl Harbor a monument of the Kamikaze pilotswho tried to destroy U.S. troops, you just don't do that." Inthis case, Muslim Americans who had nothing to do with 9/11 areapparently the equivalent of Japanese soldiers who killed Americansduring World War II.- Right wing radio icon Rush Limbaugh, not to be outdone, warned that"the terrorists win" if the community center successfully movesforward. Limbaugh continued, posing a hypothetical comparing MuslimAmericans to those who lynched blacks in the post Civil War era:"Let me ask you: What would happen, do you think, if the Ku KluxKlan wanted to establish a memorial at Gettysburg?" Limbaugh alsoemployed a World War II analogy, likening the dangers of the communitycenter to the destruction brought upon Japan by U.S. nuclear weapons:"Let's go to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and let's build giantmonuments in the shape of nuclear bombs and call it the ManhattanProject. I mean you'd have Americans objecting to that,wouldn't you?"What is most disturbing about the manufactured controversy involving thecommunity center is the blatant arrogance and stupidity of the right inits warnings of an imminent "threat." Anyone who spends thirtyseconds researching the Cordoba Group, the organization responsible forpromoting the community center, would know that the group'srepresentative, Feisal Abdul Rauf (targeted in Hannity attacks aspro-bin Laden and pro-9/11) is actually a public critic of Osama binLaden and the 9/11 attacks, and a vocal supporter of improving relationsbetween the U.S. and the Muslim world. None of this is conveyed in anyof the right-wing slander above, however, as these pundits are contentto showcase their ignorance regarding the basic facts surrounding thecommunity center fiasco they "authoritatively" "report"on.I should note that all of the pundits above premise their attacks on theManhattan community center with statements that promotion of religioustolerance and cultural diversity are important and necessary. Theseclaims, however, mean nothing when they are followed by fear mongeringand attacks on Muslims as part of an all-encompassing threat thatderives from some sort of uniform "Muslim culture" ? onethat is seen as constituting a danger to U.S. security and the Americanway of life. These pundits refuse to distinguish between the tinyminority of those throughout the world who support terrorism in the nameof Islam and the vast majority of Muslims who reject those beliefs.Their reluctance to take a reasonable, level-headed approach to thestudy of the Muslim faith is an indicator of their fanaticism, religiousbigotry, and racism.Rather than asking whether the Manhattan community center represents athreat, we should be asking ourselves what happened to our country whennational discourse is hijacked by those who not only have no interest infacts, but see them as an active roadblock to advancing their racistagendas. The blatant racism and incompetence of those attacking theManhattan community center should be obvious enough to those who pridethemselves in promoting multi-culturalism, racial diversity, and respectfor religious freedom. That the racist right remains so prominent innational television and radio is a sign, more than anything else, of thesteep deterioration of American political discourse.Anthony DiMaggio is the editor of media-ocracy (www.media-ocracy.com<http://www.media-ocracy.com/> ), a daily online magazine devoted to thestudy of media, public opinion, and current events. He has taught U.S.and Global Politics at Illinois State University and North CentralCollege, and is the author of When Media Goes to War<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1583671994/counterpunchmaga>(2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0739119036/counterpunchmaga>(2008). He can be reached at: mediaocracy-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org<mailto:mediaocracy-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>http://www.counterpunch.org/dimaggio08122010.html<http://www.counterpunch.org/dimaggio08122010.html>Messages in this topic (1)________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________5. 8 Percent of U.S. Births to Illegal Immigrants Posted by: "R A Fonda" rafonda-H+0wwilmMs3R7s880joybQ< at >public.gmane.org rafonda2000 Date: Thu Aug 12, 2010 8:01 am ((PDT)) Study: 8 Percent of U.S. Births to Illegal Immigrants Pew Hispanic Center Report Sheds Light on Americans at Center of Birthright Citizenship Debate By DEVIN DWYER*WASHINGTON, August 11, 2010---*Eight percent of all babies born in the U.S. in 2008 belonged to illegalimmigrant<http://newspreview.corp.dig.com/Politics/illegal-immigration-america-shadows-abc-news-special-series/story?id=11099873>parents, according to a groundbreaking analysis of U.S. Census Bureaudata by the Pew Hispanic Center. Under the 14th amendment to theConstitution, each child obtained U.S. citizenship at birth while one orboth of the parents remained undocumented.The study <http://pewhispanic.org/reports/report.php?ReportID=125> shedsnew light on a group of Americans at the center of a hot politicaldebate<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/birthright-citizenship-14th-amendment-republican-senators-explore-change/story?id=11313973>in recent weeks. Some Republican lawmakers have proposed revisingbirthright citizenship to bar U.S.-born children of illegal immigrantsfrom obtaining legal status.Pew estimates 340,000 of the 4.3 million newborns in U.S. hospitals in2008 belonged to illegal immigrant parents. In total, 4 millionU.S.-born, citizen children of illegal immigrants<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/birth-tourism-industry-markets-us-citizenship-abroad/story?id=10359956>currently live in the country, according to the study.The study is the most comprehensive, non-partisan research to date onchildren of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. and adds importantcontext, and frames the ongoing debate. Previously there have been fewreliable estimates of annual U.S. births to illegal immigrants.Critics of birthright citizenship<http://abcnews.go.com/WN/debate-birthright-citizenship-aims-baby-tourism/story?id=11322850&page=1>have expressed concern over the burgeoning size of America's illegalimmigrant<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/illegal-immigration-america-shadows-abc-news-special-series/story?id=11099873>population, estimated at 10.8 million and whose offspring in the U.S.would be able to sponsor their parents and relatives for legalresidency. The children are sometimes referred to as anchor babies."Birthright citizenship I think is a mistake," said Republican Sen.Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. "We should change our Constitution andsay if you come here illegally and you have a child, that child'sautomatically not a citizen."Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and other leading Republicans,including Arizona senators Jon Kyl and John McCain, have indicated anopenness to exploring the 14th Amendment issue raised by Sen. Graham.But some harbor deep reservations about changing the Constitution."It's a rather unseemly business and I think we ought to have somehearings about it," McConnell said of the practice of illegal immigrantmothers giving birth in the U.S."Congressional hearings are always warranted when members of Congressraise the issue of amending our Constitution," said McCain in astatement. "I believe that the Constitution is a strong, complete andcarefully crafted document that has successfully governed our nation forcenturies and any proposal to amend the Constitution should receiveextensive and thoughtful consideration." Birthright Citizenship Debate: Election Year Politics?But some lawmakers are calling the push to revise the 14th Amendmentnothing but a political stunt."I think it's good to take a look at all of our constitutionalamendments. But I'll tell you something: if you think it's a coincidencethat this sudden discussion begins three months before an election,you'd be very, very mistaken," said Vermont Independent Sen. BernieSanders on ABC's "Top Line"<http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/sanders-14th-amendment-100-percent-political-11314073>.Pennsylvannia Democratic Sen. Arlen Specter, whose parents wereimmigrants to the U.S., has called U.S. citizenship by birth afundamental right."The political pandering on the immigration issue has reached thehysterical level," Specter told ABC News. "To try to direct the effortat the children born in this country is just preposterous... How cannewborn children protect themselves if politicians want to gainpolitical gain... I would be shocked if this idea would gain politicaltraction, but I'm being shocked on a daily basis by the United StatesSenate." History of Birthright and the 14th AmendmentThe 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which was enacted after theCivil War to grant citizenship to descendants of slaves, reads: "Allpersons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to thejurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the statewherein they reside.""The drafter of the 14th Amendment provision on citizenship did make astatement that it would not include foreigners or aliens," said GeorgeWashington University constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley."However, other senators made it clear that they believed that thisprovision guaranteed birthright citizenship."The courts have repeatedly ruled that people who are born in the U.S.are American citizens and if Congress passed a law changing that, itwould likely be repealed, experts say.The Supreme Court <http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Supreme_Court/> hasonly addressed the issue once, clarifying in 1898 that citizenship doesapply to U.S.-born children of legal immigrants who have yet to becomecitizens."The legislative history may be a little mixed, but the language of theamendment seems to speak clearly in favor of birthright citizenship,regardless of what the intent may have been," Turley said.The United States is one of the few remaining countries to grantcitizenship to all children born on its soil. The United Kingdom,Ireland, India and Australia, among others, have since revised theirbirthright laws, no longer allowing every child born on their soil toget citizenship.Messages in this topic (1)------------------------------------------------------------------------Yahoo! Groups Links<*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/<*> Your email settings: Digest Email | Traditional<*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/evolutionary-psychology/join (Yahoo! ID required)<*> To change settings via email: evolutionary-psychology-normal-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw< at >public.gmane.org evolutionary-psychology-fullfeatured-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw< at >public.gmane.org<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: evolutionary-psychology-unsubscribe-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw< at >public.gmane.org<*> Your use of Yahoo! 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TIME LIFE presentsTORTURE CLASSICShttp://www.TORTURECLASSICS.COMUBERMORGEN.COM feat. JAMES POWDERLYTORTURE CLASSICSALBUM RELEASE, INFOMERCIAL & PERFORMANCESit back and relax, as we make this incredible music come alive!Seoul / Daebudo / Vienna, August 13, 2010, 18:00hPRESS-PDF: http://tortureclassics.com/PRESS/TC_PRESSRELEASE_13082010.pdfTIME LIFE announces the release of the TORTURE CLASSICS COLLECTION. Torture Music is the kind of music that's perfect for sitting in the Afghan or Iraqi Desert, sharing a prisoner for a night, or relaxing in a military barack or a CIA black site in some godforsaken country on a lazy afternoon. It's music thats just makes you feel free and drives others crazy. But, the artists included in the TORTURE CLASSICS COLLECTION have taken the Torture Music sound and given it a psychotic and everlasting quality. This Torture Music compilation includes 60 songs, tons of images, uncensored videos, pdfs and extra bonus material. The Ultiimate Collection DOWNLOAD-DVD inlcudes both The White Site Album and The Black Site Album.To kick-off of the release of the TORTURE CLASSICS ULTIMATE COLLECTION DOWNLOAD-DVD, a 24h TORTURE-GALA-PERFORMANCE will take place. The headlining act of the evening will be James Powderly, who will be subjected to Musical Torture, in the experienced hands of Hans Bernhard, who will blast Justin Bieber's "Baby" and the new hit track "Two Different Tears" by the original K-pop Idols the Wondergirls. He will be tightened into stress-positions to prevent him from muting the sound. This showcased event will take place in a cell at Gyeonggi Creation Center Facilities in Daebudo - an island off the western coast of South Korea, formerly used by the Japanese to torture Korean orphans. This event will be streamed live.PERFORMANCEhttp://www.TORTURECLASSICS.com/PERFORMANCEINFOMERCIALhttp://www.vimeo.com/14084957DOWNLOAD-DVD/ALBUMhttp://TORTURECLASSICS.com/musique.htmlCreate a bloodbath in your ears and a psychotic shock in your brain!Hans Bernhard: "With TORTURE CLASSICS and the 24h-TORTURE-GALA- PERFORMANCE, we create a spectacular media-event and a s(e)oul- penetrating product. We shine a "single" spot-light on this dark world of sonic military interrogation."James Powderly: "Now, you too can own the TORTURE CLASSICS COLLECTION, America's Red-Hot and Dark-Blue Torture Hits. The DOWNLOAD-DVD is designed to enhance US security, keep Americans safe and preserve freedom at home and in the rest of this festering, sad and unstable world. I could listen to these magical tunes over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over..."Stevie Benton of Drowning Pool, which has played to U.S. troops in Iraq, told Spin magazine, "I take it as an honor to think that perhaps our song could be used to quell another 9/11 attack or something like that."TORTURE CLASSICSTHE BLACK SITETOP 30TORTURE CLASSICS includes blockbuster tracks from Metallica, Rage Against the Machine, Britney Spears, NIN, Eminem, Queen, Nancy Sinatry, The Monkees, Justin Bieber, Wondergirls, Falco, Tanya Tucker, Neil Diamond, Barry Manilow, the Barney Show and the Meow-Mix commercial. And for a limited time only, thanks to governemental copyright infringement, TIME LIFE can offer you all these confession- inducing torture tracks for free. Its all here in the TIME LIFE MUSIC TORTURE CLASSICS COLLECTION:1. F**k Your God - Deicide2. Delta Dawn - Tanya Tucker3. Rivers of Babylon - Boney M4. Bulls on Parade - Rage Against The Machine5. Hells Bells - AC/DC6. March of the Pigs - Nine Inch Nails7. Baby one more time - Britney Spears8. Meow Mix TV commercial - Meow Meow Meow9. Die MF Die - Dope10. Enter Sandman - Metallica11. We Will Rock You - Queen12. Take Your Best Shot - Eminem13. White America - Eminem14. These Boots Were Made for Walking - Nancy Sinatra15. Kim - Eminem16. Barney Theme Song - Barney the Dinosaur17. Bodies - Drowning Pool18. Sesame Street TV Theme Song19. Babylon - David Gray20. Born in the U.S.A - Bruce Springsteen21. Shoot to Thrill - AC/DC22. Stayin' Alive - Bee Gees23. All Eyes on ME - Tupac24. Dirty - Christina Aguilera25. America - Neil Diamond26. American Pie - Don McLean27. Click Click Boom - Saliva28. Muskrat Love - Captain & Tennille29. We're Not Gonna Take It - Twisted Sister30. Paradise by the Dashboard Light - Meat LoafDOWNLOAD-DVD/ALBUMhttp://www.TORTURECLASSICS.COM/order.htmlCreate a bloodbath in your ears and a psychotic shock in your brain!TORTURE CLASSICSTHE WHITE SITETOP 301. Der Komissar - Falco2. Private Dancer - Tina Turner3. Mandy - Barry Manilow4. Cold - Matchbox Twenty5. A Question of Lust - Depeche Mode6. Eye of the Tiger - Survivor7. Music Non Stop- Senor Coconut Y Su Conjunto8. El Jefe De Narcos - El Potro De Sinaloa9. Rasperry Beret - Prince10. Psycho Killer - Talking Heads11. Lotta Love - Nicolette Larson12. Get Up Stand Up - Bob Marley13. Baby - Justin Bieber14. Mmmm Bop - Hanson15. Country Trash - Johnny Cash16. Travelin' Soldier - Dixie Chicks17. Witness Dub - Roots Manuba18. Rock Music - Pixies19. Dance of Shiva - KarmaCosmic20. I'am A Believer - The Monkees21. Kopi Dangdut - Inul Daratista22. Your Pussy's Glued To A Building On Fire - John Frusciante23. You're Beautiful - James Blunt24. Paradise City - Guns N' Roses25. The Best Is Yet To Come - Frank Sinatra26. Two Different Tears - Wondergirls27. I Wear My Sunglasses At Night - Corey Heart28. Empire State Of Mind - Jay-Z ft. Alicia Keys29. My Life - Billy Joel30. Venturea Highway - AmericaDOWNLOAD-DVD/ALBUMhttp://www.TORTURECLASSICS.COM/order.htmlCreate a bloodbath in your ears and a psychotic shock in your brain!INFOMERCIALhttp://www.youtube.com/user/tortureclassicsPERFORMANCE24H-TORTURE GALALIVEIMAGE:http://www.TORTURECLASSICS.com/PERFORMANCEIn this once-in-a-lifetime-performance, high-value detainee James Powderly will be immobilized with a wide range of stress-position and musically tortured for a full 24 hours by listening to K-Pop superstars Wondergirls "Two Different Tears" off TIME LIFE MUSIC's exciting TORTURE CLASSICS COLLECTION. You can watch James unravel LIVE to the mellow and demented sounds. He will be tortured by the experienced interrogator Hans Bernhard of UBERMORGEN.COM.During the performance, Powderly will be able to hit his head against the wall along to these great songs, as this special memory becomes burned into his brain. This experiment is as dangerous and pointless, as it is glamorous and totally rock n' roll. James will confess all his sins and have a chance to relive his Chinese prison experience - incarcerated for six days in a Bejing jail during the Olympic Games in 2008. Throughout the entire performance, Powderly will be on the verge of a very melodic psychosis. Applied techniques will include: Prolonged kneeling on the floor, cold room, very loud music, sleep deprivation, stress-positions, prolonged hooding and exposure to bright lights and strobes.Special guest stars include, "Superenhanced" interrogation specialist Wendy (aka Wendelin P. Teister), U.S. navy psychiatrist Dr. Shird Kaukasian and a special appearance by Olympic Gold-medalist, Kim Yuna.This radical media-stunt will occur at the Gyeonggi Creation Center Facilities in Daebudo: the same facilities once used by the Japanese to detain and torture Korean orphans during the colonization and World War II. Don't miss this one-time-only performance that is guaranteed to keep you "wall-slamming", singing-along and rocking-out- of-your-mind all night long!DATE/TIME OF LIVE-STREAM:FRIDAY, AUG 13, 2010, Full 24 HOURS:FROM 10am GMT (5am EASTERN, 6PM GMT+8)UNTIL SATURDAY AUG 14, 10am GMT (5am EASTERN, 6PM GMT+8)LOCATION: Gyeonggi Creation Center, Daebudo (South Korea)ONLINE: http://www.TORTURECLASSICS.com/PERFORMANCEFOLLOW THE PERFORMANCE ACTION PROTOCOL ON TWITTER: http://twitter.com/ TORTURECLASSICSBACKGROUNDFROM BRITNEY TO BARNEYMusic Torture has been officially and publicly confirmed by government officials, human rights organizations, prison guards and interrogators, as well as suspected terrorists who have been detained in military prisons and detention centers. The United Nations and the European Court of Human Rights have banned the use of loud music in interrogations.The United States Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency has made extensive use of sonic interrogation techniques, ie. torture by music, in facilities like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Kandahar, Bagram Detention Center and numerous "black sites" scattered around the globe. Such Interrogation techniques, combined with sleep deprivation, hard treatment, water-boarding, air deprivation and other notorious forms of torture, has been legalized under special provision of the United States Department of Justice and the White House under both the Bush and Obama administrations and continues to be used today.The actual music used in TORTURE CLASSICS has been reported by both prison guards and released inmates (Binyam Mohamed and Donald Vance, tortured with music for 76 days) and includes Top 40 hits, Metal, Hard Rock, Country and Western, TV theme-songs and commercial jingles, as well as original "mash-ups" created by CIA agents, prison administrators, guards and interrogators.Anonymous: "The Barney Song has a sound that was designed to make children feel safe and loved. But it was used to torture people and to drive them to their emotional breaking point. Music publisher Jive Records changed Britney Spears song title from "Hit me Baby One More Time" to "... Baby One More Time" to get rid of the ambiguous undercurrent to the catchy pop smash hit".Sgt. Mark Hadsell: "If you play the same song for 24 hours, your brain and body functions start to slide, your train of thought slows down, and your will is broken. That's when we come in and talk to them".Guantanamo Prisoner Ruhal Ahmed: "I can bear being beaten up, it's not a problem. Once you accept that you're going to go into the interrogation room and be beaten up, it's fine. You can prepare yourself mentally. But when you're being psychologically tortured, you can't. From the end of 2003 they introduced the music, and it became even worse. Before that, you could try and focus on something else. It makes you feel like you are going mad. You lose the plot. And it's very scary to think that you might go crazy because of all the music, because of the loud noise, and because after a while you don't hear the lyrics at all, all you hear is heavy banging."LINKS:Superenhanced Generatorhttp://superenhanced.com SuperenhancedVideos, photos, text, research-materialhttp://ipnic.org/superenhancedAUTHORSHans Bernhard: "I certainly don't believe in torturing people, well, maybe just a little bit, but i don't believe that playing loud music is torture either".James Powderly: "I think probably, a lot of people might disagree, even some of the other detainees might feel like what they received wasn't torture. And relative to what someone might receive on a daily basis at a place like Gitmo it certainly is not particularly harsh. It's kind of like being a little bit pregnant, we were a little bit tortured".TORTURE CLASSICS is a project by the artist duo UBERMORGEN.COM (A/CH/ US) and James Powderly (US, Graffiti Research Lab) in conjunction with TIME LIFE, the respective artists, copyright-holders and their respective lawyers.TORTURE CLASSICS is an outgrowth, a metastasis of UBERMORGEN.COM's "Superenhanced" project - a two year R&D project on "Enhanced Interrogations" (newspeak for torture), "Extraordinary Renditions" (kidnapping), "Supermax prisons" (high-security prisons) and "child imprisonment" (USA, Iraq, Afghanistan). "The Superenhanced Generator", an interrogation-software, a series of studio-photos and - videos with Lola (2) and Billie (5), torture-performances and military-tribunal installations, and now the TORTURE CLASSICS COMPILATION are products of this long-term project. TORTURE CLASSICS combines the clandestine world of military torture & the special sonic interrogation techniques with the pop-culture ethos and glam- rock flare of the global music-business.Powderly's performance related to TORTURE CLASSICS is an extension of his research into mainstream culture's popular obsession with terrorism and government-sponsored violence and the celebrity terrorists and torturers that fill our screens, minds and water- cooler conversations. Related projects include: Top Chumps Radical Fanaticals card game, where kids compare terrorists' "stats" to win cards and the game, and his music video for Bowie's "Rock N' Roll Suicide", which combines footage of bombings, sniper attacks, explosions, propoganda and executions, released by terrorist organizations on the web, with contemporary music video imagery and style.http://www.UBERMORGEN.COMhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_PowderlyCREDITSWendy (aka Philipp W. Teister), Hyesoo Yoon, Jaewon Choi, Hongik University, GCC Gyeonggi Creation Center, Pro Helvetia, Bundesministerium fuer Unterricht, Kunst und Kultur BM:UKK Austria, lo-res.org, Chris Arendt, Murat Kurnaz, Dr. Shird Kaukasian, Kim Yuna, Lotte, RIAA, Breitling, Korean Air, Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon, Royal Caribbean,INFOMERCIAL TRANSCRIPTINFOMERCIALhttp://www.vimeo.com/14084957/STARTINTROSONG HANS/JAMES (The Barney Song):I love youYou love meWe're a happy familyWith a a great big hug and a kiss from me to youWon't you say you love me tooVOICEOVER: The following is a paid advertisement for time life music collection.In the early 2000's rock-pop music mellowed out. Singers, producers, songwriters, Djs and news on the war in iraq and afghanistan filled the airwaves when torture music was born.Powderly: Hi, i m James PowderlyHans: And i am Hans BernhardPowderly: And together we are The EnhancersPowderly: When we started performing together in 2001 a fresh new wave came out of AfghanistanHans: Something cruel, mellow and melodic that we have come to know as Torture Music.Hans: Torture Music is the kind of music that's perfect for sitting in the Afghan or Iraqi Desert, sharing a prisoner for a night, or relaxing on a lazy afternoon in a military barack or a CIA black site in some godforsaken country.Powderly: It's music thats just makes you feel free and drives others crazy.Powderly: The 2000s and 2010s are the golden era of Torture Music. Everytime some Hadji and his interrogator sit in a cell somewhere in Egypt, Syria, the US of A or Poland on the in-cell radio or on the individual headphones they hear incredible hit songs with a laid-back sound.Hans: It's that smooth and easy feeling that goes away after listening to the very same song, very loud, for 24 hours.Powderly: These songs really take me back to a time of anger and fear. And now, let me introduce you to our co-host lizvlx.Lizvlx: I can't belief i am sitting here with The Ehancers. You guys have so many great songs. I think i own everyone of your albums and i remember listening to them over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. -Hans: Thanks lizvlx, it is a great time to be making torture music and all these songs bring back a lot of wonderful memorieslizvlx: WOW. These songs sound great.Powderly: Thats nothing, wait until we get startedHans: If you love the sound of Torture Music as much as we do, have yourself tightend into a stressposition and try not to go mental as we make this incredible music come alive.VOICEOVER: For the first time ever, all the biggest and best Torture Music hits of all time together TIME LIFE MUSIC presents the TORTURE CLASSICS collectionPowderly: Let's get back to the early 2000s. I remember flying over Baghdad with the top down and listening to incredible songs over the headphones. like this mellow classic „March of the Pigs" from "Nine Inch Nails"Hans: You know, the 00's was the era of the TV commercial and of war. Every ad told a different storyPowderly: And some of the most memorable wars were fought, and the soundtrack to the war was written and performed by two pop legends: britney spears and the meow mix cat.Powderly: When i hear a great Torture Music song it always takes me back to a horrible place like the supermax facility in Guantanamo or a sweltering cargo-container in the desert near Bagram.Hans: You get a break from the hectic paste of everyday life.Powderly: Some artist took the Torture Music sound and gave it psychotic and everlasting quality.Hans: And you can hear it in classics like this one from Eminem...Powderly: In 2002 just about everyone had this album.Hans: And it made Eminem one of the biggest stars of the decade.Powderly: You know, some people like a fine wine, others like a ice- cold beer...Hans: ...but in 2000 everyone seemed to be reaching for an american pie,Powderly: Wow! what great memories. I still can hit my head to the wall along to these songs.Hans: I know what you mean. And now, all of these amazing torture music hits together in the TORTURE CLASSICS collection.Powderly: You'll get some of the most incredible number one hits in supermax history.Powderly: What a classic and here's lizvlx to tell you more ,.Lizvlx: Thanks guys, imagine 60 of the very best Torture Music hits together in one collection, including some of the songs we recommend for most effective torture. you can spend a lot of time and money trying to find all theses songs, in army camps or downloading them from the internet. but time life in conjunction with the CIA, DoD and U.S. Army has done all the work for you. and getting it is as easy as sending an email.VOICEOVER: Now, for the first time ever all the most unforgettable torture music hits are together. time life presents the torture classics collection.You re-live all the memories of 9-11, Operation Iraqi Freedom and the invasion of afghanistan, you get 60 original torture music hits by artists like Metallica, Tanya Tucker, Nancy Sinatra, classic tv commercials and blood curdling kids television show jingles.All 60 hits in the torture classics collection have been digitally remastered to give you detention cell perfect sound.You hear the make-me-talk hits, the best mindfucking music, classic angst songs and so much more this is the music that made torture pure magic.The DVD is jam-packed with hits and comes with the complete story behind these incredible songs, the images, the torture techniques and much more.You can spend hours of time and a lot of money trying to collect all the unforgettable hits and images in the torture classics collection. If you download now you can get the entire collection for free as a DOWNLOAD-DVD and pre-order your limited edition DVD for only 99$95 or 99Euro95.But wait, that's not all. When you download in the next 19 minutes we will also add a free download link to the best interrogation technique ressources, additional images, great videos, in-depth pdfs and a free yearly rotten.com membership.Come and visit us at TORTURECLASSICS.com/ENDVIMEO: http://www.vimeo.com/14084957TWITTER: http://twitter.com/TORTURECLASSICSYOUTUBE: http://www.youtube.com/user/tortureclassicsFACEBOOK: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Time-Life/59290172844

SPIEGEL ONLINE, 08/06/2010---------------------------------------------------------------------Logging Off: The Internet Generation Prefers the Real World---------------------------------------------------------------------They may have been dubbed the "Internet generation," but young peopleare more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. Newresearch shows that the majority of children and teenagers are notthe Web-savvy digital natives of legend. In fact, many of them don'teven know how to google properly.By Manfred DworschakYou can download the complete article over the Internet at thefollowing URL:http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,710139,00.htmlMore about this issue---------------------------Photo Gallery: The Digital Natives Who Can't Even Googlehttp://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/fotostrecke-57857.htmlFacebook Lessons: German Schools to Teach Online Privacyhttp://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,710320,00.htmlGerman Interior Minister on Web 2.0 Privacy: Those on 'SocialNetworking Sites Want Their Data To Be Linked'http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,702465,00.htmlRules for Web 2.0: German Interior Minister Navigates Muddy InternetWatershttp://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,702479,00.htmlStatus Update: Facebook LOL as Germany's StudiVZ Loses Groundhttp://www.spiegel.de/international/business/0,1518,695700,00.html

Amsterdam: “This station is closed” yet another example of the decline of public servicesAugust 16, 2010 by Tjebbe van TijenToday the subway in Amsterdam opens again after being closed for six weeks because of an administrative mistake. This is NO joke, this is the infamous world village of Amsterdam. Working on a tramway or railway or whatever way in this muddy village most often results in closing off for what seems to be an unlimited time, whatever traffic passage may be concerned. The contract with the building firm that was at the basis of the decision to close down the metro for six weeks, was refuted because terms could not be met, but nevertheless the subway was closed down, because as a spokesman said the subway drivers all had been send already with holidays… This left me wondering about the sublime working conditions: 6 week sin one go? As this is a segregated town – though in full denial of the fact – it is “only” the predominant ‘non-wester-allochtones’ that suffered (sorry for the Dutch Apartheid vocabulary, you may need to check Wikpedia for this) they especially need to travel back & forward from the suburban Bijlmer-ghetto to the inner city.[images]It is (only) thanks to the upcoming SAIL tourist event where eager – entrepreneurs hope to welcome a million extra clients – that the wind will blow some life into the subterranean public transport system. The photograph above shows a clumsy sign at one of the entrances of the subway system at the Central Station. At the most central Waterlooplein subway station that can be seen from my window there was NO sign whatsoever about why the doors were closed and how to get to the Bijlmer-ghetto…the full illustrated article can be found athttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2010/08/16/amsterdam-this-station-is-closed-yet-another-example-of-the-decline-of-public-services/Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/

dear all,waves of euphoria and crisis crisscross public discourse in places like india in recent times. this is also a great time for lively debates and thinking. here is an essay by Sibaji Bandyopadhyay from kolkata. he is an scholar who comfortably traverses multiple intellectual and literary traditions. maybe be of some benefit to people in this list.warmlyjeebeshhttp://www.india-seminar.com/2010/608/608_sibaji_bandyopadhyay.htmA critique of nonviolenceSIBAJI BANDYOPADHYAYAhimsā paramo dharmo – this is one aphorism with which almost every Indian schoolchild is acquainted. From early childhood we are tutored to discern the symptoms of the pathological everyday we inhabit, taught to be increasingly protective of ourselves in a progressively more violent world, and in the same breath told that all sane Indians of the past swore by the creed of ‘nonviolence’. Offering, as though a therapeutic solace to the troubled souls of today, it is incessantly reiterated that ancient Indians were unwavering in asserting the ethical propriety of ahimsā.We are repeatedly reminded, the one singular achievement of ancient India was that all her sages, meaning ‘custodians of people’ called upon to preserve harmony among different callings and thus augment loka-samgraha or ‘social wealth’, condemned himsāor ‘violence’ without so much as a demur. And, to refurbish this popular wisdom, the modern ideologues committed to it invariably hark back to the Mahābhārata, the colossal work that within the tradition of Indian taxonomy of genres bears the title itihāsa. With the express intention of affirming iti-ha-āsa or ‘so indeed it was’, they cite selective portions of the Mahābhārata.With great fondness, they keep mouthing, for example, the dictum handed out to Yudhishthira by grandsire Bhishma in ‘Anuśānaparvan’. The dictum, lilting in terms of lyrical cadence, makes the expression ‘ahimsā paramo dharmo’ or ‘ahimsā is the highest dharma’ more weighty by appending to it expressions such as, ‘Ahimsā is the highest form of self-control’, ‘Ahimsā is the highest austerity’, ‘Ahimsā is the highest sacrifice’, ‘Ahimsā is the best friend’, ‘Ahimsā is the greatest happiness’, ‘Ahimsā is the highest truth’ (13.117.37-38).*Indisputably, there is a kind of critical consensus that itihāsa places an exceedingly high premium on ‘nonviolence’. Also certainly, it is this uncritical or unconscious adherence to the same unanimity, which gives to the painstaking statistical exercise undertaken by Alf Hiltebeitel the quality of the unexpected. Alf Hiltebeitel, in his 2001 book Rethinking the Mahābhārata, prepares a tally-sheet for the phrase paramo dharmo and demonstrates that out of the 54 times it occurs in the Mahābhārata, it is conjoined with the word ahimsā only four times – and, of those four, one is contained in Bhishma’s dictum quoted earlier!1Even if we grant that frequency distributions based on quantitative analyses are by themselves not sufficiently strong measures of weights attached to values, Alf Hiltebeitel’s chart provides other information that have the potential to meet the deficiency. We gather from it that along with ‘nonviolence’ and ‘truth’ there is one order of excellence extolled by the Mahābhārata, which by a curious twist of logic, appears to give lie to the truth of nonviolence. And that is ānŗśamsya or ‘noncruelty’. Moreover, and surely this is telling, although the expression ānŗśamsyam paro dharma or ‘noncruelty is the supreme dharma’ features eight times in the Mahābhārata, it is only very recently that scholars have begun to take cognizance of ānŗśamsya as a complex concept on its own right.Mukund Lath, in his path-blazing 1987 article on the term has gone so far as to say, ‘It has been kind of voyage of discovery for me, to understand what ānŗśamsya means in the Mahābhārata… [It is more so because] outside the Mahābhārata, whether in the literature preceding the Mahābhārata or following it, the word hardly has the supreme significance [as] it has in the epic’.2The obvious questions that this observation gives rise to are: (a) What is the ideological role of ānŗśamsya in the Mahābhārata? (b) Does it have any relevance beyond the framework of itihāsa?In the justly famous dialogue between Yudhishthira and Dharma, the highest authority on the meaning of Good-ness, appearing as a Yaksha in the ‘Âraņyakaparvan’, the philosophical Yudhishthira’s response to Yaksha’s question, ‘What is the greatest virtue in the world?’ was, ānŗśamsyam paro dharmo, ‘absence of cruelty is the highest virtue’ (3. 297.54-55 and 3. 297.71). In the course of the interrogation which took in its stride such intriguing existential issues as ‘the substance of self’, ‘the meaning of happiness’, ‘the surest path of acquiring authentic knowledge’, ‘the problem of recognizing one’s own mortality’, the statement ānŗśamsyam paro dharma comes twice. The fact that Yudhishthira the Dharmarāja chose to conclude the session by stating it once again gives to the expression the air of a well-considered maxim (3.297.11-298.22).It surely is instructive that the person most sensitive and upright among the chief protagonists of the Mahābhārata, the one hero compulsively obsessed with intricacies involving moral conundrums, should choose to mark ‘noncruelty’ and not ‘nonviolence’ as the ultimate humane attribute. However, the underlying assumptions behind the privileging is supplied not by Yudhishthira but by a fowler by profession – instead of Dharmarāja, they are spelt out by a Sūdra reverentially referred to as Dharmavyādha. They are there in the lecture, rather lengthy and tiresome one at that, which the Dharmic Fowler delivered to a haughty Brahminin ‘Âraņyakaparvan’ (3.198.1 to 3.206.32).Let us now focus on the salient features of the discourse on ānŗśamsya spun by Dharmavyādha of Mithilā, the conscientious Sūdra whose very livelihood depended on killing fowls of the air, beasts of the field and selling flesh in the open market. Schematically put, this is what Dharmavyādha said:1. ‘Ahimsā is the highest dharma, which, again, is founded upon truth’ (3.198.69). (Incidentally, of the four times we encounter the phrase ahimsā paramo dharma in the Mahābhārata, one of them comes from Dharmavyādha.)2. But, even though men of learning and wisdom have advocated non- violence from the earliest times, anyone who thinks hard enough is bound to reach the conclusion that there is none who is nonviolent (3.199.28). (This same view is forcefully voiced by Arjuna in ‘Śāntiparvan’. The hero whom an immobilizing depression seized immediately before the commencement of the Kurukshetra War but who, thanks to Krishna’s sobering as well as stimulating discourse managed to shake it off just in the nick of time said, long after peace had returned to the land, ‘I do not see a single person in this world who lives by nonviolence’ (12.15.20).3. Hence, the best way to resolve the paradox is to temper the exacting demands of ‘nonviolence’ by emphasizing ‘leniency’ or ‘noncruelty’ and, for all practical purposes, replace the commandment ‘ahimsā is the highest dharma’ by ‘ānŗśamsya is the highest dharma’ (3.203.41). (In Mukund Lath’s words, ‘What the Mahābhārata preaches is not ahimsā but ānŗśamsya’.3 Lath’s claim is indeed provocative. Unlike J.L. Mehta, who believes ‘[Mahābhārata’s] central message, repeated again and again, is that non-violence (ahimsa) and compassion (anrisamsya) are the highest duties of man’4, Lath sees a distinct hierarchy at work in the Mahābhārata – a subtle distinguishing operation that places ānŗśamsya over and above ahimsā.)Dharmavyādha reckons ‘state of violence’ to be an irremediable, unavoidable factor of ‘human condition’. By the same token, in his system of Ethics, ahimsā obtains the precarious status of an unrealizable ideal – it is as if, no matter how morally judicious a subject is in conducting his daily life, the goal of ahimsā can only be approached by moving along an asymptomatic curve that converges only at infinity. The Dharmic Fowler’s axiomatic propositions – propositions that he himself claims to be part and parcel of authentic ‘Brahmanic philosophy’ (3.201.14) – lead inexorably to the framing of, what, for the sake of convenience may be called, a ‘principle of proxy’.In the Brāhmanic universe of the scrupulous Sūdra, the notion of ānŗśamsya functions as a stand-in for ahimsā. It maintains a critical distance from both the components of the himsā-ahimsā or ‘violence-nonviolence’ binary without dissolving either of the two. It opens up a discursive space within which excessive violence is condemned and unqualified nonviolence considered unviable. Placed as a golden mean between two extremes, ānŗśamsya gestures towards the apparently contradictory prescript of ‘violence without violation’. In short, given the fact that every being on earth is obliged to abide by certain violent but objective conditions, the only way left to man to differentiate himself from other living things and assert his specific species-being is to treat ānŗśamsya as the closest possible approximate of ahimsā.But then, we are dealing with itihāsa, a compendium of fables that has the extraordinary felicity of attaching contending signifieds to the same signifier. This flexibility may be bothersome; but, it often achieves effects that are overwhelming. Ānŗśamsya too has an indeterminate ambiguity about it. There are moments in the Mahābhārata in which the word comes so close to anukrosha or ‘empathy’ as to make ahimsā and ānŗśamsya not only mutually exchangeable (as envisaged by J.L. Mehta) but also to construe a general grammar of ‘ethical care’ on the basis of ānŗśamsya.5 The ‘fable of the parrot’ in the Anuśāsanaparvan is a case in point. On Yudhishthira’s plea ‘I wish to hear of the merits of ānŗśamsya’, Bhishma had recounted the legend (13.5.1-31).The story went: a fowler had mistakenly pierced a forest-tree with a poison-arrow; as a result, the tree withered away; despite the destruction, a parrot living in the hollow of the tree’s trunk did not desert his nest; surprised by this show of (irrational) attachment, Indra approached the parrot and enquired into his reasons for cohabiting with the condemned; justifying his voluntary decision on the grounds of ‘compassion’, ‘kindliness of feeling’ and affection for the erstwhile protector, the parrot invoked successively the concepts ānŗśamsya and anukrosha (13.5. 22-23).6The puzzle posed by the parable was, how come lower animals exhibit a sensibility which humans take for granted to be peculiarly humane. Indra wondered about the parrot’s supernatural feat of practicing ānŗśamsya (13.5.9) and resolved the problem by adducing to the primary supposition of a (supposed) ‘Natural Ethics’. Indra discerned in the parrot’s behaviour a confirmation of the principle of ‘mutual care’ – there was no mystery; the urge to be generous towards others was a predilection common to allcreatures (13.5.10).Doubtless, the ‘fable of the parrot’ exceeds the limit set by Dharmavyādha to the category of ānŗśamsya. Similar exceeding can be found in other parts of the Mahābhārata too. For example, in the almost last (significant) episode of itihāsa in which Indra forbade Yudhishthira from entering the celestial abode if Dharmarāja insisted on continuing with the dog that had been accompanying him in his final journey. Yudhishthira was, however, adamant; he refused to abandon the humble animal. In expressing his touching loyalty for the loyal dog, Yudhishthira employed the word ānŗśamsya (17.3.7); and, a little later, shedding the disguise of the dog, Dharma himself praised Yudhishthira for being thoroughly informed by the moral compulsion of anukrosha (17.3.17). Here too, conjoined as it is with a word etymologically rooted in the notion of ‘crying out that "follows" (anu) someone else’s "cry"(krosha)’7, ānŗśamsya over- steps the boundary imposed on it by Dharmavyādha.But, before one can cognize the ‘supplement’ that ‘supplants’ any ‘steady’ signification, it is imperative to follow the ‘logic’ of the ‘main argument’ to its end. Hoping that spots of confounding aporia would inevitably appear as we proceed and the spree for the free play of deconstruction would gather force, we mostly restrict ourselves to Dharmavyādha’s discourse in this paper.To trace the genealogical route of the term ānŗśamsya (as explicated by Dharmavyādha) most scholars refer back to the great ideological clash that took place about two and half thousand years back in the Indo-Gangetic plain. The two parties involved in the battle are generally known as the Brahmin and the Śŗamaņ – the former comprising the votaries of animal sacrifice and the latter men disenchanted by Vedic chants and the magical powers imputed to the act of sacrifice.Most of the Śŗamaņs – the two most prominent of whom were the Buddhists and the Jains – denounced the senselessness involved in killing innocent animals for either gratification or appeasement of the so-called gods. It was the dumbness of being cruel towards ‘dumb creatures’, a form of dumbness unhesitatingly sanctified by priests practiced in the art of Vedic rituals, which exercised them the most – the dissenting Śŗamaņs fleshed out their idea of ahimsā as a protest against this outrage. This, however, does not mean that all those anti-Brahminical sects which propagated ahimsā also preached that it was beneath the dignity of men to consume meat as food.The fact that the ideals of ahimsā and vegetarianism did not stem from the same origin but evolved along two different paths is borne out by facts like: while the Theravāda school of Buddhism permitted its followers to eat flesh provided they were not guilty of procuring the flesh by their own hands, the Jain scriptures poured scorn on the Theravāda ordinance as being an example of sophistry designed to camouflage the desire for the taste of meat – in contradistinction to the early Buddhists, the Jains from the very beginning favoured absolute prohibition on all meat-eating.8 While the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka (3rd c. BCE) is credited to have introduced virtual vegetarianism, the declaration in his First Rock Edict, ‘Here [meaning perhaps, Ashoka’s capital] no animal is to be killed for sacrifice’, clearly imposed a limiting condition on the solicitous state policy governing the practice of vegetarianism.9It is also legitimate to think that in the process of bringing about a ‘revaluation of all (Brāhmanical) values’ through the category of nonviolence – in the Jain-like exaggerated diction or otherwise – the Śŗamaņs reinforced some of the precepts which were part of the tradition of (pre-Śŗamaņic) Upanişad. The Śŗamaņic insistence on ahimsā certainly cast a new light on sayings such as, ‘Verily, a person is a sacrifice… austerity, almsgiving, uprightness, ahimsā, truthfulness are the gifts [for that sacrifice]’ (Chāndogya Upanişad: III. 16.1 and III. 17.4).10Again, undoubtedly, fighting against the home-dwelling Brāhmins, the priests who had no qualms about earning their livelihood by gifting animal flesh to gods, the homeless Śŗamaņs could have garnered moral support for their irremediable wanderlust as well as claim a longer and nobler lineage than the himsā-epitomizing Brāhmins from pre- Śŗamaņic utterances as ‘Verily, he is the great unborn Self… Desiring Him only as their worlds, monks wonder forth. Verily, because they knew this, the ancient (sages) did not wish for offspring’ (Bŗhad-āraņyaka Upanişad: IV. 4.22).11On the whole, despite the earlier invocations of the creed of nonviolence, the Brāhmin-Śŗamaņ hostility was scripted by treating ahimsā as the moot point of contention – and, due to that, what were before, at best, perfunctory and scattered, coalesced to shape a wholesome discourse. Moreover, such is the wholesomeness of the discourse, it still shows no sign of disintegration.Patanjāli, India’s legendary grammarian of 2nd c. BCE, had compared the Brāhmin-Śŗamaņ hostility with the natural snake-mongoose hostility. Then again, while expounding on the ‘antagonistic compound’, Patanjāli had instantiated it by referring to the ‘eternal conflict’ between the Brāhmin and the Śŗamaņ!12 This grammatical wit is sufficiently incisive to keep us forewarned that the ancient ideological contrariety is yet to be transcended.Neither Mukund Lath13 nor Alf Hiltebeitel14 would face any difficulty in accepting Mahābhārata’s ānŗśamsya as a compromise formula – a formula devised to diffuse the disaccord between the orthodox Brahmana and the non-conformist Śŗamaņ. What is more, this view is quite palatable to many a radical interpreter of India’s past, such as, Kashi Nath Upadhyaya, the author of the outstanding treatise, Early Buddhism and the Bhagavadgītā (1971).15 None of them would contest that the concept of uncompromising ahimsā conceived by a section of the Śŗamaņs in order to morally nullify the himsā- oriented Brāhminical practices provided the founding condition for Mahābhārata’s ānŗśamsya. Of course, there are dissenters; e.g., Chaturvedi Badrinath, the author of The Mahābhārata: An Enquiry in the Human Condition. He wrote as late as in 2006, ‘The three powerful words ahimsā paramo dharmo that [keep] resound[ing] in the Mahābhārata …would later become the cardinal foundation of Jainism’.16Nevertheless, if we leave aside the complicated business of arguing on the basis of historical evidence and take the softer option of deriving information from literary study of characters, it seems the first view has the greater chance of being vindicated. Take a look at the Mahābhārata’s chief ideologue of ānŗśamsya, the Dharmic Butcher.Dharmavyādha’s body is like a repository of various contesting predilections; it houses all but combines them in such a fashion that all real antagonistic contradictions seem to disappear: he does not slay animals but pursues his family-trade by selling the meat of hogs and buffaloes killed by others (3.198.31); he lays out chopped out flesh in the marketplace for the gratification of culinary appetite of his customers but he himself is a strict vegetarian (3.198.32); he subscribes to the theory of karmaphala but, (as though to negate the Buddhist-like semantic revolution of redefining the word karma to connote ‘personal intention’ in place of ‘Brahmin ritualism’17), insists that it is Destiny which calls people to their respective vocations (3.199.2).He readily admits that his profession is heinous but exculpates himself on the ground that he is a mere ‘passive instrument’ (3.199.3); he displays a great sense of discomfiture vis- à-vis the cruelties he daily practices but mitigates it by claiming that his steadfastness in observing swadharma or ‘the duty of one’s order’ (3.199.14) bestows upon his job the benediction of ānŗśamsya or ‘noncruelty’; he appreciates the lowliness of his rough trade but it gladdens him to think that he supplies meat to ‘gods’ (3.199.4) offered in duly conducted Sacrifices.On the whole, Mahābhārata’s Dharmavyādha, a rare example of a Sūdra trained in ‘Brahmanic philosophy’, stands out as a person who to the last syllable of his being fulfils one of Manu’s kernel injunctions. In the very first chapter of his Book of Laws, Manu had issued the writ: ‘The Lord assigned only one activity to a Sūdra: serving the other castes without resentment’.18 And, it is this lack of ‘resentment’ (or better still of Nietzschean ressentiment) towards so-called natural superiors which enables Dharmavyādha to simultaneously epitomize servility and make a case for ‘leniency’ or ‘compassion’.It is, therefore, not surprising that playing the role of mediating middle term, ānŗśamsya should come to the rescue of the Vedic Sacrifice, remove the taint of himsā ascribed to it by the Śŗamaņs. It underpins the rationale behind the new ‘rules of the game’ chalked up by embattled Brahmanism, by lawmakers embarrassed by Śŗāmaņic charges. Ânŗśamsya places, for example, Manu’s dictum, ‘…killing in sacrifice is not killing…The violence sanctioned by the Veda and regulated by official restraints is known as nonviolence’,19 on a surer footing.Clearly, the ‘new word’20 which captures the imagination of both Mukund Lath and Alf Hiltebeitel, is rather about attitude than any concrete instance of violence or nonviolence – set up to countermand the Śŗāmaņic over-valorization of ahimsā, ānŗśamsya bespeaks of an ‘affective state’. Encourages as it does to cultivate a sense of detachment to the consequences of his actions in the mind of the doer, the ‘new word’ bears familial resemblances with many Brahmanic and Śŗāmaņic concepts. For example: in ‘Śāntiparvan’, after saying, ‘I know what ānŗśamsya is, because I have always marked the conduct of good people’ (12.158.1), Yudhishthira heaps praises on a sensibility central to the set of precepts associated with the famed nishkāma karma (12.164.41-46).Aparigrahah is one word that ānŗśamsya recalls most strenuously. The word itself has a checkered history. Aparigrahah generally implies ‘non-possession’. It appears in the ancient, most probably pre- Buddhist, Jābāla Upanişad;21 it is one of the ‘Five Great Vows’ enjoined by Jainism;22 it recurs once in Chapter Six, Verse number ten in the Bhagavadgītā.23Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi – the apostle of ahimsā of modern India who on occasions looked back to Yudhishthira in his attempts to define the term24 and besides translating the Gītā into Gujarati composed immensely influential commentaries on the book – was deeply impressed by the Gītā’s employment of aparigrahah. Lest we muddle up things, it is important to remember that aparigrahah or ‘[to be] free from longing for possessions’25 used in conjunction with thoroughgoing ahimsā connotes a value quite distinct from the one produced by its conjunction with the more malleable ānŗśamsya.Being a self-professed ‘practical idealist’,26 Gandhi was often driven to reflect on the epistemological limits of the creed of ‘nonviolence’. A pacifist, he consistently disavowed the ‘doctrine of the sword’ in his battles against imperialist forces. In pointing to the distinctive character of man’s species-being Gandhi did not, unlike the Dharmic Fowler, stop at ‘noncruelty’, but said, ‘Nonviolence is the law of our species as violence is the law of the brute’.27 He paid tributes to Mahavira, the Jain teacher who was among the staunchest advocates of the gospel of ahimsā, and the Buddha as well and termed them ‘soldiers’ for the cause of ‘nonviolence’.28 Nonetheless, Gandhi maintained, there were certain aspects of violence which were ‘inevitable’;29 he boldly asserted that his own doctrine of ahimsā was ‘new’, not ‘dependent upon the authority of [previous] works’ including those belonging to the Jain school of thought.30There are several passages in Gandhi’s An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth (volume I: 1927; volume II: 1929) in which he expresses great fascination with the Gītā and its English translation by Edwin Arnold titled The Song Celestial(1885).31 He took the Gītā as his Book of ‘conduct’ and sought to develop his idea of ahimsā on its basis.32 And, it is striking that Gandhi’s political lexicon is most profoundly coloured by a word which appears only once in the Gītā, his ‘dictionary of daily reference’.33 That word, as Gandhi put it himself, ‘gripped’34 him from the start and as years passed by, helped him to forge his most original contribution in the field of social sciences: the notion of ‘trusteeship’. The word was aparigrahah.Gandhi wrote in his Autobiography: ‘I understood the Gita teaching of [aparigrahah or] non-possession to mean that those who desired salvation should act like a trustee who, though having control over great possessions, regards not an iota of them as his own’.35 Note the crucial difference: while according to the Jain tenet aparigrahaħ signifies renunciation of all material possession in the exact sense of the term, Gandhi derives from Gītā’s aparigrahaħ the profile of a ‘subject’ who does not give up his private property for good but has the perspicuity to not to call anything one’s own for the sake of public good.It may now be safely surmised that the concept of ānŗśamsya has a positive bearing on itihāsa as well as on modern history. The ‘supreme significance’36 ascribed to it in the epic is doubtless absent in post-Mahābhārata literature. However, its hidden intellectual career can be uncovered once we align ānŗśamsya with aparigrahah and follow the latter’s role in shaping the image of the responsible leader of New India – a man gifted with both control over great possessions and the right attitude towards them; a man who affirms ahimsā but knows periodic release of controlled violence may be mandatory in the discharge of his duties.There still remains a serious epistemological problem. It is quite apparent that in pre-modern texts the will to himsā is equated to will to slay – it is assumed that even the most trivial act of himsā inclusive that of ‘speech’ or ‘thought’ is grounded on and geared to the final solution of annihilating some other. Even when the Jains advised that it was advisable to avoid violence ‘not so much because it harm[ed] other beings [but] because it harm[ed] the individual who commit[ed] it’,37 the ‘selfish’ motive was dictated by the fear of damaging, in the extreme case damaging physically, someone else. Nonetheless, it seems, in the light of more recent formulations, neither the Śŗāmaņic celebration of ahimsā nor the Mahābhārata’s resolution of opposites through ānŗśamsya nor the latter’s disguised deployment in modern political theory, evince sufficient alertness to the mechanisms of violence.A whole section of Mahābhārata’s ‘Śāntiparvan’ is devoted to āpad-dharma, to the rules in situations of extremity when normal rules do not apply (12.129.14 to 12.167.24). Almost at the beginning of the section there is a sloka which is like a prelude to what is to follow. It says: ‘As a hunter discovers the track of a deer wounded with arrow by marking spots of blood on the ground, so should one try to find out the reasons of dharma’ (12.130.20). We are then introduced to a series of tales and counsels whose chief burden is to underscore the over-riding importance of ‘self-preservation’.The instruction is: ‘See the efficacy of self- interest’ (12.136.140). Therefore, recognizing instinctively that ‘this body is my friend’ (12.139.73), a person should not refrain from doing things, no matter how distressful or distasteful they are, in order to save his most intimate friend; knowing that, ‘One should keep up his life by any means in his power without judging of their charter’ (12.139.59), it is quite permissible and passable for a person threatened by imminent death to cause injury to others. (Incidentally, Gandhi too accepted the necessity of applying violence for self-defence.)This means at the moment of deepest crisis, the man caught up in it has every right to suspend all codes of formal behaviour orsadāchāra. More importantly, this also indicates that, in the ultimate analysis, the source of violence is always positioned as beingexternal to the body; it is taken for granted that the violence which may entail one’s destruction is always inflicted from the outside; the terrible enemy is forever stationed elsewhere. This sense of exteriority in relation to fatal dangers also circumscribes the reach of ahimsā – to be ‘nonviolent’ then becomes a corollary and an extension of the urge to conserve one’s body.It is no wonder, therefore, that Sudharman, a direct disciple of Mahāvira, in stating the irrevocable factum tenet of the Jain system, the first of the ‘Five Great Vows’,38 took recourse to the metaphor of the ‘body’ dreading foreign invasion and the criterion of ‘reciprocity’. He said: ‘All [bodies] are subject to pain; hence they should not be killed… Know this to be the real meaning of the Law of ahimsā: as you do not wish to be killed, so others do not wish to be killed’.39Armed with this Law, Sudharman launched a frontal attack on the competing Śŗamaņ school of Buddhism and declared: ‘See! There are men pretend[ing] to be houseless, i.e., monks such as the Bauddhas, [who] destroy earth-body by bad and injurious things…a wise man should not act sinfully towards earth, nor cause others to act so’.40 Going by this extremist dogma, if a man lays down his life for any cause, say, for ahimsā, he does so because he willfully lets the other- directed himsā to fall upon him and not because desire for violence stems from his own body. Mahābhārata too – the text, that in S. Radhakrishnan’s opinion is a stellar example of ‘readjustments’ initiated by Brāhmanism to process some of the objections raised by diverse ‘systems of revolt’41 – in substance reiterates the same criterion of ‘reciprocity’ when it teaches that the sum total of man’s duties is contained in the maxim, ‘Thou shalt not do to others what is disagreeable to thyself’.42However, complacency apropos violence can no longer be entertained. Among others, the psychoanalytic intervention in the matter precludes such a possibility. In 1920 Sigmund Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle (English translation: 1922). Sitting in Vienna, Freud composed that perplexing work just after the First World War ended and the Austro-Hungarian Empire had vanished from the political map. The two inter-related concepts he introduced in the book have radically altered all earlier visions as regards man’s aptitude for controlling violence. One of them was primary masochism and the other, death-instincts.At one point in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud alluded to E. Hering’s theory that all ‘living substance[s]’ were subject to two contrary processes, one ‘constitutive or assimilatory’ and the other ‘destructive or dissimilatory’. Next, with no prior intimation whatsoever, Freud suddenly took a mighty speculative leap. He substituted Hering’s ‘vital processes’ by ‘instinctual impulses’ and proposed that every living substance was ‘dualistic’ in nature – each was simultaneously motivated by ‘life instincts’ and ‘death instincts’.43The expression ‘death-instincts’, later more famously known as Thanatos, makes its ‘first published appearance’44 in Beyond the Pleasure Principle – and, at the very moment of its debut it forces us to take seriously, perhaps for the first time in recorded history, bizarre hypotheses such as, ‘[There exists an irresoluble] opposition between the ego or death instincts and the sexual or life instincts’45 or ‘The instincts of self-preservation… are component instincts whose function is to assure that the organism shall follow its own path of death’.46The death-driven Freudian psyche supplies the aetiology necessary for sociological analyses of ‘suicide’. But, it does more. Thanatos and the ‘primary regression’ called masochism together bring ‘violence’ to centre stage – the human appetite for self- consumption changes the meaning of ‘danger’ to include instances that overstep boundaries set by the principle of ‘self- preservation’; the sensational hypothesis that ‘pain’ can jolly well be a pleasurable sensation for the human animal, in effect, problematizes the Śŗāmaņic doctrine of ‘mutual dependence’, the psychosomatic axiom upon which the pre-modern notion of ahimsā was premised.The 1932 correspondence between Albert Einstein, the physicist whose elegant formula e = mc2 provided the theoretical frame for making the atom bomb a practical proposition, and Sigmund Freud, the psychoanalyst who widened the horizon of ‘violence’, unambiguously demonstrates that the latter in later life regarded the antimony of two basal instincts, eros and Thanatos, as one inviolable factor of ‘human condition’.47 So did the Śŗamaņs when they spoke of bodily pains and Mahābhārata’s Dharmavyādha when he said it was absurd to think that one could avoid doing violence to others in any absolute sense. In each case the theory is produced in response to a specific circumstance, each articulation is backed by a political intention.If the Śŗāmaņic insistence on ahimsā, on according respect to all and giving credence to individual suffering was a strategy to mount an ethical attack on Brahmanism and Mahābhārata’s ānŗśamsya an apologia for Brahmanism, then Freud’s Thanatos was an offshoot of the brutalities regularly practiced by men during the First World War and the initial phase of Nazism. And, Adolf Hitler, the arch-ideologue of Nazism, in the concluding chapter titled ‘The Right to Self- Defence’ in his 1924 autobiography Mein Kampfhad written: ‘[just as] a weak pigmy cannot contend against athletes, a negotiator without any armed defence at his back must always bow in obescience’.48On 6 August 1945, the allied forces fighting against the Evil of Nazism dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima and thereby officially inaugurated the Nuclear Age. With that strike, at one stroke man acquired a ‘new attribute’: ‘the ability to extinguish all life upon earth’.49 Replaces as it does the age-old diachronic order associated with ‘death’ by the possibility of the ‘synchronic’, by the ever-looming terrifying thought that man can actually make everything and being sign out all at once if he so wills, also brings to Freud’s idea of Thanatos or individualistic death-wish a quaint charm. It is in the historical context of the technological revolution which has the capacity of posing ‘utter calamity’ as the telos of humanity, that the real one feels, epistemological challenge of today is to re-think the question of ‘nonviolence’; ask again, what really is ahimsā?Footnotes:* All Mahābhārata references are to the Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. The English translations are based on (a) M.N. Dutt, The Mahābhārata (nine volumes), Parimal Publications, Delhi, 2004 and (b) Kisari Mohan Ganguli, The Mahābhārata (four volumes), Munshiram Manoharlal, New Delhi, 2004.1. Alf Hiltebeitel, ‘Chapter Five: Don’t Be Cruel’, Rethinking the Mahābhārata: A Reader’s Guide to the Education of the Dharma King (first published 2001), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2002, p. 207.2. Mukund Lath, ‘The Concept of Ānŗśamsya in the Mahābhārata’, The Mahābhārata Revisited, ed. R.N. Dandekar, Sahitya Akademi, New Delhi, 1990, p. 113, p. 115.3. Mukund Lath, ibid., p. 119.4. J.L. Mehta, ‘The Discourse of Violence in the Mahabharata’, Philosophy and Religion: Essays in Interpretation, Indian Council of Philosophical Research and Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, New Delhi, 1990, p. 256.5. Vrinda Dalmiya, ‘Dogged Loyalties: A Classical Indian Intervention in Care Ethics’, Ethics in the World Religions, eds. J. Runzo and Nancy M. Martin, Oxford, 2007, pp. 293-306.6. For discussions on the fable see: (a) Alf Hiltebeitel, op cit., p. 213; (b) Vrinda Dalmiya, op cit., p. 294.7. For a detailed discussion on the moral implications of anukrosha, see Vrinda Dalmiya, ibid., pp. 298-305.8. Sources of Indian Tradition (Volume One: ‘From the Beginning to 1800), ed. Ainslie T. Embree, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 1992, pp. 170-171.9. The original text: ‘1 Shilānusāshana’, Ashokalipi, ed. and tr. Amulyachandra Sen, Mahabodhi Book Agency, Kolkata, 1994, p. 144.For English translation see: Sources of Indian Tradition (Volume One), op .cit., p. 144.10. Chāndogya Upanişad, ‘III.16.1’ and ‘III.17.4’, tr. S. Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanişads, HarperCollins Publishers India, New Delhi, 1998, p. 394 and p. 396.11. Bŗhad-āraņyaka Upanişad, ‘IV.4.22’, The Principal Upanişads, ibid., p. 279.12. The Vyākaraņa Mahābhāsya of Pataňjali, edited by F. Kielhorn, Volume 1, p. 474, p. 476.13. Mukund Lath, op cit., pp. 118-119.14. Alf Hiltebeitel, op cit., p. 203.15. Kashi Nath Upadhyaya, ‘Chapter II: Section B: The Compromising Character of the Bhagavadgītā’, Early Buddhism and the Bhagavadgītā, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2008, pp. 106-109.16. Chaturvedi Badrinath, ‘Chapter Five: Ahimsā – Non-violence, the Foundation of Life’, The Mahābhārata: An Inquiry in the Human Condition, ed., p. 114 [emphasis added]17. Richard F. Gombrich, ‘Chapter III: The Buddha’s Dhamma’, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, Routledge, London, 1988, p. 67.18. Manusamhitā, ‘I.91’, ed. Panchanan Tarkaratna, Sanskrit Pustak Bhandar, Kolkata, 2000, p. 40.For English translation see: The Laws of Manu, ‘I.91’, tr. Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith, Penguin Books, New Delhi, 1991, p. 13.19. Manusamhitā, ‘V.39 & V.44’, ed. Panchanan Tarkaratna, op cit., p. 129 and p. 130.For English translation see, The Laws of Manu, ‘V.39 and V.44’, tr. Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith, op cit., p. 103 and p. 103.20. (a) Mukund Lath, op cit., p. 113. (b) Alf Hiltebeitel, op cit., p. 202.21. Jābāla Upanişad, ‘Verse No. 5’, tr. S. Radhakrishnan, The Principal Upanişads, HarperCollins, New Delhi,1998, p. 898.22. Âkārāňga Sūtra, ‘Book II, Lecture I5: i-v’, tr. Herman Jacobi, The Sacred Books of the East (Volume 22), ed. F. Max Müller, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2002, pp. 202-210.Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, ‘Lecture XXIII’, tr. Herman Jacobi, The Sacred Books of the East (Volume 45), ed. F. Max Müller, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2004, pp. 119-129.23. The Bhagavadgītā, ‘VI.10’, ed. S. Radhakrishnan, HarperCollins, New Delhi, p. 192.24. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Problems of Non-violence’ (in Gujarati: 9 August 1925), The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XXXII, The Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India, Delhi, 1968, p. 273.25. The Bhagavadgītā, ‘VI.10’, tr. S. Radhakrishnan, op cit., pp. 192-193.26. M.K. Gandhi, ‘The Doctrine of the Sword’, (in Gujarati: 11 August 1920), The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XXI, op cit., p. 134.27. Ibid,, p. 134.28. M.K. Gandhi, ‘On Ahimsa’, The Penguin Gandhi Reader, ed. Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Penguin Books, New Delhi,1993, p. 97.29. M.K. Gandhi, ‘Problems of Non-violence’, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XXXII, op cit., p. 273.30. M.K. Gandhi, ‘On Ahimsa: Reply to Lala Lajpat Rai’ (October 1916), The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume XV, op cit., pp. 251-252.31. ‘I have read almost all the English translations of [the Gītā], and I regard Sir Edwin Arnold’s as the best’: M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume I, Navajivan Publishing House, Ahmedabad, 1968, p. 100.32. M.K. Gandhi, An Autobiography or The Story of My Experiments with Truth, The Selected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Volume II, ibid., p. 393.33. Ibid., p. 393.34. Ibid., p. 393.35. Ibid., p. 394.36. Mukund Lath, op cit., p. 115.37. A.L. Basham, ‘Introduction: Basic Doctrines of Jainism’, Sources of Indian Tradition (Volume One), op cit., p. 57.38. Âkārāňga Sūtra, ‘Book II, Lecture I5: i’, op cit., pp. 202-204.Uttarādhyayana Sūtra, ‘Lecture XXIII’, op cit., pp. 119-129.See also, Upinder Singh, ‘Chapter Six: Cities, Kings and Renunciasists: North India, c. 600-300 BCE: Section: Early Jainism’, A History of Ancient and Early Medieval India: From the Stone Age to the 12th Century, Pearson Longman, Delhi, 2009, pp. 312-319.39. Sūtrakritāňga, ‘Book I, Lecture I, Chapter 4: Verse nos. 9 & 10’, tr. Herman Jacobi, The Sacred Books of the East (Volume 45), ed. F. Max Müller, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi, 2004, pp. 247-248.The same commandment is repeated in: Sūtrakritāňga, ‘Book I, Lecture II: Verse nos. 9 and 10’, op cit., p. 311.40. Âkārāňga Sūtra, ‘Book I, Lecture I, Lesson 2’, op cit., pp. 3-5.41. S. Radhakrishnan, ‘Chapter VIII: Epic Philosophy’, Indian Philosophy, Volume 1, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 1999, pp. 477-478.42. Ibid., p. 506.43. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, tr. James Strachey, The Penguin Freud Library, Volume 11: ‘On Metapsychology’, Penguin Books, London, 1991, pp. 311-322.44. Angela Richards, ‘Footnote 2’, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, op cit., p. 272.45. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, op cit., p. 316.46. Ibid., p. 311.47. For a detailed discussion on the subject see, Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, ‘Defining Terror: A Freudian Exercise’, Science, Literature and Aesthetics, ed. Amiya Dev, History of Science, Philosophy and Culture in Indian Civilization, Volume XV, Part 3, Centre for Studies in Civilization, New Delhi, 2008, pp. 567-631.48. Adolf Hitler, ‘The Right to Self-Defence’, Mein Kampf, Jainco Publishers, Delhi, p. 572.49. Heinar Kipphardt, In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, tr. Ruth Speirs, Methuen, London, 1967, p. 67.# 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

This TED talk [ http://bit.ly/cPXXTJ ] by Peter Molyneux:*"...demos Milo, a hotly anticipated video game for Microsoft's Kinectcontroller. Perceptive and impressionable like a real 11-year-old, thevirtual boy watches, listens and learns -- recognizing and responding toyou."*The demonstration begins with an explanation of how Milo is constructed. Acombination of the following three elements allow Milo to exist: 1. A Kinect Camera 2. Artificial Intelligence developed by Microsoft 3. Emotional Artificial Intelligence built by Lionhead Studios.Milo moves through a synthetic environment predicated on User-directedbiofeedback/body gestures: no mechanical controllers are necessary.Unfortunately, Milo's introductory learning curve [which is integral to the"game" leveling system] involves inherent gender bias: if you're a girl,your initial game variable is a Butterfly whereas if your a boy, you'll bepresented with a Snail.The demonstration goes on to illustrate how Milo's face is comprehensivelyAI driven. His facial movements include blush response, nostril "flare" size[indicating stress], "body matching" [causing neuro-linguistically drivenfacial alterations] and responses to verbal cues. Peter then describes howMilo's personality development is predicated on a Cause-and-Effect dynamic.This causality is showcased via 3 examples: 1. The User can choose to direct Milo to squash a snail: if the User does it will effect "...how Milo develops". The specifics of the verbal stimulus employed including* how* the User vocalises [specific phrases and intonations] all contribute to a database that informs and effects future interactions. 2. The User teaches Milo to skim stones over the surface of a river [skewed gender stereotyping is again evident here]. 3. The User choosing to clean Milo's room: Milo's recognition of the User's beneficial intervention and verbal engagement promotes sustained developmental interaction based on [what Peter terms] "deep psychology".This "deep psychology" [or what is described in synthaptic terms as"augmentology" http://bit.ly/cR2sR7 ] encourages a User's empathy loadings.This in turn allows such games to shift towards complexexperientially-defined engagement. These games surpass the hollowreinforcement of contemporary Social Games such as Farmville: instead, theUser "levels up" by knitting fictionalised engagement withpersonality/identity construction and personalised growth variables. Theelement of cloud-directed learning [coaching synthetic humans whose socialand chronological development depends on "crowdsourced" input] createsenormous opportunties for instruction and feedback via this "Reality Gaming"system.

Greetings netizens,I'm working on a media / video design for a new english translation ofHeiner Muller's Macbeth Nach Shakespeare with GasHeart / Conspiracy Theatrein Vancouver.Just wondering, has anyone seen any productions of this play that includedvideo and / or projections? I'd like to be aware of historical precedentsthat might be lost in the mists of time.I like the Muller re-interpretation with a class-analysis layer added.It's hard to imagine the context / reception in Communist Europe where anEnglish classic might be seen as a dangerous western influence, but the wayhe indicts all the nobility of all the western nations (norway, england,scotland) involved is really quite clever. Then again, Herr Marx himselfdrew on shakespeare to add a popular tinge to his writings, and marxistreadings of shakespeare tend to put him on the side of class struggle,rather than against it.Macbeth: nach Shakespeare could be an underlying dig at the DDRestablishment, I suppose, because it also, cunningly, indicts allstate-power actors as complicit in murder and torture.-Flick--* WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD?http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison* FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com

Herr Doktor Google has never been able to help out with a dim memoryI have about a poobah at the NYT, on seeing a copy of _USA Today_ (apaper famous for colorful infographics and vending machines designed to look like TVs), say something like: "Now it's come full circle -- TV you can wrap your fish in." And we've come full circle again: now the NYT is rehashing^W I mean *mashing up* leitmotifs from _WiReD_'s heroic period. "Timely and timeless," as she says. It's tempting to CC legal-kDRA3j2J2j5BDgjK7y7TUQ< at >public.gmane.org to see if it's their policy toobstruct evolution by insisting on their copyright.Cheers,T-b1ff.org<http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/the-third-replicator/>opinionator.blogs.nytimes.comAugust 22, 2010, 5:30 pmThe Third ReplicatorBy SUSAN BLACKMOREThe Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues bothtimely and timeless.All around us information seems to be multiplying at an everincreasing pace. New books are published, new designs fortoasters and i-gadgets appear, new music is composed orsynthesized and, perhaps above all, new content is uploaded intocyberspace. This is rather strange. We know that matter andenergy cannot increase but apparently information can.It is perhaps rather obvious to attribute this to theevolutionary algorithm or Darwinian process, as I will do, but Iwish to emphasize one part of this process -- copying. The reasoninformation can increase like this is that, if the necessary rawmaterials are available, copying creates more information. Ofcourse it is not new information, but if the copies vary (whichthey will if only by virtue of copying errors), and if not allvariants survive to be copied again (which is inevitable givenlimited resources), then we have the complete three-step processof natural selection (Dennett, 1995). From here novel designs andtruly new information emerge. None of this can happen withoutcopying.I want to make three arguments here.Imitation is not just some new minor ability. It changeseverything. It enables a new kind of evolution.The first is that humans are unique because they are so good atimitation. When our ancestors began to imitate they let loose anew evolutionary process based not on genes but on a secondreplicator, memes. Genes and memes then coevolved, transformingus into better and better meme machines.The second is that one kind of copying can piggy-back on another:that is, one replicator (the information that is copied) canbuild on the products (vehicles or interactors) of another. Thismultilayered evolution has produced the amazing complexity ofdesign we see all around us.The third is that now, in the early 21st century, we are seeingthe emergence of a third replicator. I call these temes (shortfor technological memes, though I have considered other names).They are digital information stored, copied, varied and selectedby machines. We humans like to think we are the designers,creators and controllers of this newly emerging world but reallywe are stepping stones from one replicator to the next.As I try to explain this I shall make some assertions andassumptions that some readers may find outrageous, but I amdeliberately putting my case in its strongest form so that we candebate the issues people find most interesting or mosttroublesome.Some may entirely reject the notion of replicators, and willtherefore dismiss the whole enterprise. Others will accept thatgenes are replicators but reject the idea of memes. For example,Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb ( 2005) refer to "the dreadedmemes" while Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd (2005), who havecontributed so much to the study of cultural evolution, assertthat "cultural variants are not replicators." They use the phrase"selfish memes" but still firmly reject memetics (Blackmore2006). Similarly, in a previous "On The Human" post, WilliamBenzon explains why he does not like the term "meme," yet heneeds some term to refer to the things that evolve and so hestill uses it. As John S. Wilkins points out in response, thereare several more classic objections: memes are not discrete (Iwould say some are not discrete), they do not form lineages (somedo), memetic evolution appears to be Lamarckian (but only appearsso), memes are not replicated but re-created or reproduced, orare not copied with sufficient fidelity (see discussions inAunger 2000, Sterelny 2006, Wimsatt 2010). I have tackled allthese, and more, elsewhere and concluded that the notion is stillvalid (Blackmore 1999, 2010a).So I will press on, using the concept of memes as originallydefined by Dawkins who invented the term; that is, memes are"that which is imitated" or whatever it is that is copied whenpeople imitate each other. Memes include songs, stories, habits,skills, technologies, scientific theories, bogus medicaltreatments, financial systems, organizations -- everything thatmakes up human culture. I can now, briefly, tell the story of howI think we arrived where we are today.Both memes and genes are vast competing sets of information, allselfishly getting copied whenever and however they can.First there were genes. Perhaps we should not call genes thefirst replicator because there may have been precursors worthy ofthat name and possibly RNA-like replicators before the evolutionof DNA (Maynard Smith and Szathmary 1995). However, Dawkins(1976), who coined the term "replicator," refers to genes thisway and I shall do the same.We should note here an important distinction for living thingsbased on DNA, that the genes are the replicators while theanimals and plants themselves are vehicles, interactors, orphenotypes: ephemeral creatures constructed with the aid ofgenetic information coded in tiny strands of DNA packaged safelyinside them. Whether single-celled bacteria, great oak trees, ordogs and cats, in the gene-centered view of evolution they areall gene machines or Dawkins's "lumbering robots." The importantpoint here is that the genetic information is faithfully copieddown the generations, while the vehicles or interactors live anddie without actually being copied. Put another way, this systemcopies the instructions for making a product rather than theproduct itself, a process that has many advantages (Blackmore1999, 2001). This interesting distinction becomes important whenwe move on to higher replicators.So what happened next? Earth might have remained a one-replicatorplanet but it did not. One of these gene machines, a social andbipedal ape, began to imitate. We do not know why, althoughshifting climate may have favored stealing skills from othersrather than learning them anew (Richerson and Boyd 2005).Whatever the reason, our ancestors began to copy sounds, skillsand habits from one to another. They passed on lighting fires,making stone tools, wearing clothes, decorating their bodies andall sorts of skills to do with living together as hunters andgatherers. The critical point here is, of course, that theycopied these sounds, skills and habits, and this, I suggest, iswhat makes humans unique. No other species (as far as we know)can do this. Song birds can copy some sounds, some of the othergreat apes can imitate some actions, and most notably whales anddolphins can imitate, but none is capable of the widespread,generalized imitation that comes so easily to us. Imitation isnot just some new minor ability. It changes everything. Itenables a new kind of evolution.This is why I have called humans "Earth's Pandoran species." Theylet loose this second replicator and began the process of memeticevolution in which memes competed to be selected by humans to becopied again. The successful memes then influenced human genes bygene-meme co-evolution (Blackmore 1999, 2001). Note that I seethis process as somewhat different from gene-cultureco-evolution, partly because most theorists treat culture as anadaptation (e.g. Richerson and Boyd 2005), and agree with Wilsonthat genes "keep culture on a leash." (Lumsden and Wilson 1981 p13).Benzon, in responding to Peter Railton's post here at The Stone,points out the limits of this metaphor and proposes the "chessboard and game" instead. I prefer a simple host-parasite analogy.Once our ancestors could imitate they created lots of memes thatcompeted to use their brains for their own propagation. Thisdrove these hominids to become better meme machines and to carrythe (potentially huge and even dangerous) burden of larger brainsize and energy use, eventually becoming symbiotic. Neither memesnor genes are a dog or a dog-owner. Neither is on a leash. Theyare both vast competing sets of information, all selfishlygetting copied whenever and however they can.To help understand the next step we can think of this process asfollows: one replicator (genes) built vehicles (plants andanimals) for its own propagation. One of these then discovered anew way of copying and diverted much of its resources to doingthis instead, creating a new replicator (memes) which then led tonew replicating machinery (big-brained humans). Now we can askwhether the same thing could happen again and -- aha -- we cansee that it can, and is.As "temes" proliferate, using ever more energy and resources, ourown role becomes ever less significant.A sticking point concerns the equivalent of the meme-phenotype orvehicle. This has plagued memetics ever since its beginning: somearguing that memes must be inside human heads while words,technologies and all the rest are their phenotypes, or"phemotypes"; others arguing the opposite. I disagree with both(Blackmore 1999, 2001). By definition, whatever is copied is thememe and I suggest that, until very recently, there was nomeme-phemotype distinction because memes were so new and sopoorly replicated that they had not yet constructed stablevehicles. Now they have.Think about songs, recipes, ways of building houses or clothesfashions. These can be copied and stored by voice, by gesture, inbrains, or on paper with no clear replicator/vehicle distinction.But now consider a car factory or a printing press. Thousands ofnear-identical copies of cars, books, or newspapers are churnedout. Those actual cars or books are not copied again but theycompete for our attention and if they prove popular then morecopies are made from the same template. This is much more like areplicator-vehicle system. It is "copy the instructions" not"copy the product."Of course cars and books are passive lumps of metal, paper andink. They cannot copy, let alone vary and select informationthemselves. So could any of our modern meme products take thestep our hominid ancestors did long ago and begin a new kind ofcopying? Yes. They could and they are. Our computers, all linkedup through the Internet, are beginning to carry out all three ofthe critical processes required for a new evolutionary process totake off.Computers handle vast quantities of information withextraordinarily high-fidelity copying and storage. Most variationand selection is still done by human beings, with theirbiologically evolved desires for stimulation, amusement,communication, sex and food. But this is changing. Already thereare examples of computer programs recombining old texts to createnew essays or poems, translating texts to create new versions,and selecting between vast quantities of text, images and data.Above all there are search engines. Each request to Google, AltaVista or Yahoo! elicits a new set of pages -- a new combinationof items selected by that search engine according to its ownclever algorithms and depending on myriad previous searches andlink structures.This is a radically new kind of copying, varying and selecting,and means that a new evolutionary process is starting up. Thiscopying is quite different from the way cells copy strands of DNAor humans copy memes. The information itself is also different,consisting of highly stable digital information stored andprocessed by machines rather than living cells. This, I submit,signals the emergence of temes and teme machines, the thirdreplicator.RelatedMore From The StoneRead previous contributions to this series.Go to All Posts What should we expect of this dramatic step? Itmight make as much difference as the advent of human imitationdid. Just as human meme machines spread over the planet, using upits resources and altering its ecosystems to suit their ownneeds, so the new teme machines will do the same, only faster.Indeed we might see our current ecological troubles not asprimarily our fault, but as the inevitable consequence of earth'stransition to being a three-replicator planet. We willinglyprovide ever more energy to power the Internet, and there isenormous scope for teme machines to grow, evolve and create evermore extraordinary digital worlds, some aided by humans andothers independent of them. We are still needed, not least to runthe power stations, but as the temes proliferate, using ever moreenergy and resources, our own role becomes ever less significant,even though we set the whole new evolutionary process in motionin the first place.Whether you consider this a tragedy for the planet or amarvelous, beautiful story of creation, is up to you.(Susan Blackmore's essay is the subject of this week's forumdiscussion among the humanists and scientists at On the Human, aproject of the National Humanities Center.)Susan Blackmore is a psychologist and writer researchingconsciousness, memes, and anomalous experiences, and a VisitingProfessor at the University of Plymouth. She is the author ofseveral books, including "The Meme Machine" (1999),"Conversations on Consciousness" (2005) and Ten Zen Questions(2009).

Trust the WSJ to convince you that art and culture only come to their own('grow up') when they represent marketable value and the 'lifestyle'associated with it ...original to Wall Street Journal W/e 20-22 August 2010:http://bit.ly/d3I9P4 (for pics & inserts)Berlin Broods Over a Glitz InvasionIn a city proud of its underground scene, a trendy new social club feedsangst about elitismBy Vanessa FuhrmansIn most world-class cities, the opening of a Soho House—a string ofLondon-born, ultra-hip private social clubs—marks another exclusiveplayground for the creative in-crowd. In Berlin, where the members-onlybrand opened its latest outpost in May, it's sparked an identity crisis.Launched 15 years ago in the eponymous London neighborhood, the Soho Housefranchise has spread to New York and Los Angeles, will open in mid-Octoberin Miami, and is perhaps best known to the non-member masses from a 2003"Sex and the City" episode in which Carrie Bradshaw and her pals arebounced out of its Manhattan venue's rooftop pool after sneaking in.Belonging requires a certain quotient of hipness—with credentialspreferably in the media, entertainment, fashion or art worlds—theendorsement of two members and an annual fee between $935 and $1,800,depending on the city.The Berlin club, a hulking Bauhaus building that housed a Jewishdepartment store in the 1920s, then the Hitler Youth's headquarters,opened in glam style. At a preopening party, Damien Hirst spray-painted ashark on a construction wall that now decorates its cavernous,cement-floored lobby. In the weeks afterward, German celebrities such asWolfgang Joop and director Wim Wenders and other Berlin glitterati haveflocked to rub shoulders at the poolside bar or on its chintz-coveredsofas.At first glance, it's easy to see why Soho House founder Nick Jones chosethe German capital as the club's first outpost on the Continent: In the 20years since the fall of the Wall, Berlin has become Europe's hottestcultural mecca, teeming with galleries, night clubs and buddingdesigners—just the kind of creative cool the club seeks to embody. "Berlinis like a child screaming and kicking in all directions, and we want to bepart of that," says Chris Glass, the Berlin club's membership manager.But not all Berliners, proud and protective of their anarchic, grittybrand of cool, are sure they want to grow up into the Soho House's moreupscale version of it.The city's creative energy and social scene have long been shaped by thestarving artists and hipsters lured by its cheap rents and abandonedbuilding space over the years—the flip side of the capital's nearly 15%unemployment rate (roughly double the German national average) and nearly€60 billion ($78 billion) debt burden. "Poor but sexy"—as Berlin's mayor,Klaus Wowereit, inadvertently branded the metropolis in 2003—a largecontingent remains stubbornly wary of gentrification symbols, from therise in rents and strollers in the once avant-garde neighborhood ofPrenzlauer Berg to a $3.2 billion airport being built just outside thecity. Even BMWs are suspect: Last year a record 270 cars, most of themluxury brands, were torched here.The resulting reaction to the Soho House has been a mixture of fascinationand fretting. "The city's scene still must be convinced of a club in whichyou have to pay a membership fee," cautioned the daily BerlinerMorgenpost. German fashion blog "Les Mads" worried it would be a "step inthe wrong direction" to try to "encapsulate" Berlin's creative scene in amembers-only club. Vandalizers were more to the point: Shortly after theSoho House project was announced a couple years ago, they grafittied itsfaçade with "No Exclusive Club!" and the insistence that the buildingbecome a youth center instead."What's special about Berlin is that a creative person without much moneycan come here and accomplish, contribute something," says Ortwin Rau, whooperates a now-cult status bar, youth center and African and Caribbean artmarket along the city's Spree river banks. "Tomorrow we'll have a class ofcreative yuppies instead and they'll create something, too, but it won'tbe the same."The eight-story, 1928 building in the city's Mitte district now occupiedby the Soho House was one of the city's first department stories to sellgoods on credit to the poorer and mostly Jewish residents who livednearby, but was later "Aryanized" and expropriated by the Nazis. After thewar, it served as the the East German Communist Party's headquarters andfrom the late 1950s until the end of the Cold War housed the party'scentral archives. Then, it stood empty and in crumbling disrepair for morethan a decade, until British investors bought it from descendents of thebuilding's original owners.In recent years, the city's hipster social scene has grown increasinglymore upscale with such locales as Grill Royal, a clubhouse-style bistropopular with Berlin's media, art and fashion crowd, and Bar Tausend, asleekly styled music speakeasy. The China Club, elegantly bedecked withmodern Chinese art, caters more to Berlin's establishment than itsemerging creative class.In Berlin, Soho House has sought a different approach. At the equivalentof $1,152, annual membership costs much less than the $1,800 fee in NewYork. Soho House tapped a couple of dozen of the Berlin scene's top moversand shakers to recruit 20 to 30 founding members with the right hip andcreative credentials.On the rooftop overlooking the blocks of communist-era prefabricatedconcrete-slab buildings that still dominate the neighborhood, members candine poolside on grilled swordfish. But the menu also includes Berlin'ssignature snack of curry sausage and French fries, for €5, and the lobbyhas ping-pong and foosball tables. The club is also playing up the site'shistory. Its dinner-event space, where the first East German president hadhis offices, has been redubbed the Politburo. A 40-room hotel, with smallrooms starting at €100, a still-to-be-opened restaurant and the spa areopen to non-members, as well.Thorsten König, director of Miracle Music and Entertainment, aBerlin-based music industry consulting firm, was asked to help scour formembers. Afraid Soho House would be too posh or expensive, "many of thepeople we asked weren't sure they wanted to do it," he says. But as buzzbuilds, friends and acquaintances have been clamoring to get in, he says.Still, the city's artists, he adds, have shown less eagerness."Berlin is still Berlin; it's still the city that is cheap and practicallybankrupt," Mr. König adds, eating sorbet poolside. But, as he sees it, thecity and inhabitants are growing up: In Berlin, for something like theSoho House, "this is the right moment."

tripleC (cognition, communication, co-operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society.Vol. 8. No. 2: Special Issue on Capitalist Crisis, Communication & CultureEdited by Christian Fuchs, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken, Marcus Breenhttp://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/issue/currentSuggested citation: Fuchs, Christian, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken and Marcus Breen. Eds. 2010. Special issue on “Capitalist crisis, communication & culture“. tripleC (cognition, communication, co-operation): Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 8 (2): 193-309.“Capitalism […] is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point” (Slavoj Žižek).What is the role of communication in the general situation of capitalist crisis?The global economic downturn is an indicator of a new worldwide capitalist crisis. The main focus of most public debates as well as of economic and policy analyses is the role of finance capital and the housing market in creating the crisis, less attention is given to the role of communication technologies, the media, and culture in the world economic crisis. The task of this special issue of tripleC is to present analyses of the role of ICTs, the media, and culture in the current crisis of capitalism. The seven papers focus on the causes, development, and effects of the crisis. Each paper relates one or more of these dimensions to ICTs, the media, or culture.Capitalist Crisis, Communication, & Culture – Introduction to the Special Issue of tripleCChristian Fuchs, Matthias Schafranek, David Hakken and MarcusBreen (Special Issue Editors)pp 193-204http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/228/189Computing and the Current Crisis:The Significant Role of New Information Technologies in Our Socio-Economic MeltdownDavid Hakkenpp 205-220http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/161/193The Virtual Debt Factory: Towards an Analysis of Debt and Abstraction in the American Credit CrisisVincent R. Manzerollepp 221-236http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/149/192Calculating the Unknown. Rationalities of Operational Risk in Financial InstitutionsMatthias Werner and Hajo Greifpp 237-250http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/184/194Crisis, What Crisis? The Media: Business and Journalism in Times of CrisisRosario de Mateo, Laura Bergés, Anna Garnatxe*pp 251-274http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/212/195Anglo-American Credit Scoring and Consumer Debt in the Subprime Mortgage Crisis of 2007 as Models for Other Countries?Thomas Ruddypp 275-284http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/176/198Crise, Genre et TIC : Recette pour une Dés-Union Pronon- cée. L’Exemple de l’Afrique du Sud(in French)Joelle Palmieripp 285-309http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/141/197

[digested < at > nettime -- mod (tb)]Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> From the East of Odyssey Performance: Text, Video, Stills 8.14.10 maxims, laws of form The Sparse Dance at Humlab Whose Bodies The Roma: Europe's favorite Scapegoat three more from the concentration camp cafe concentration-camp cafe humans protecting us STOP FORCED EVICTIONS OF ROMA IN EUROPE! (fwd) Social Media Poetics: Why Talk, Sondheim Sondheim Thinking About Retiring - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 15 Aug 2010 11:34:35 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: From the East of Odyssey Performance: Text, Video, Stills 8.14.10 (apologies for cross-posting and file sizes, odyperform up for a short time only, because of space constraints)http://www.alansondheim.org/odyperform.mp4 - very large file, gives a goodidea of the organization of 'chaotic/fluid' architecture/organism. Textorganized by Sandy Baldwin, performance by Alan Sondheim/Sandy Baldwinhttp://www.alansondheim.org/odyre1.mov - short section from rehearsalshowing two computers interacting; I ran two avatars together, so thatperformance could alternate with script/object/animation changes etc.http://www.alansondheim.org/jt.bmp - Julu Twine towards endhttp://www.alansondheim.org/ad.bmp - removing objects at the end- some East Odyssey Performance Chat Dialog[2010/08/14 14:25] Flight Band: All Go[2010/08/14 14:25] sandy Taifun: We swallowed each other, mouth againstorgan, juices bubbling over the tongue, wet eyes, wet hair, mouthingHONEY, you'd say, m[2010/08/14 14:25] sandy Taifun: Hey![2010/08/14 14:25] sandy Taifun: I'd press myself up against theTERMINAL screen TERMINAL desire, my nipple against the O mouthing itself,taking death away, he[2010/08/14 14:25] sandy Taifun: Our membranes devoured the glass,enchanted residue remaining on-line off-line for days.[2010/08/14 14:25] sandy Taifun: My mouth and HONEY's cunt: A doublehollow! My cock and HONEY's fist: Lozenge! My body would break on itself,a limited defile![2010/08/14 14:25] sandy Taifun: I enter your nave! Your feet skid downparallel wires; sliding into my testicles, ASCII spurts from yoururethra, ASCII spurts[2010/08/14 14:25] sandy Taifun: would you like to bear my child[2010/08/14 14:25] sandy Taifun: or become my child processes[2010/08/14 14:26] sandy Taifun: use me![2010/08/14 14:26] sandy Taifun: ???The sun deluges its chemicalholocaust to the earth with blinding indifference"[2010/08/14 14:26] sandy Taifun: would i murmur and caress you[2010/08/14 14:27] sandy Taifun: would you be my parent process[2010/08/14 14:27] sandy Taifun: ???erection... around my balls...yes... across the screens... yes...???[2010-08-14 14:41] sandy Taifun: alan, i im'd fau ferdinand aboutconnectivity problem and asked him/it to pass on to lizsolo[2010-08-14 14:45] Alan Dojoji: it's all screwed up at this end -[2010-08-14 14:45] Alan Dojoji: I can't use the main machine with thewireless keyboard![2010-08-14 14:45] sandy Taifun: ok, well, there's a little time. do youwant me to connect as you?[2010-08-14 14:45] Alan Dojoji: It's a complex avatar.[2010-08-14 14:46] Alan Dojoji: Try and fly it then drop it into the mix[2010-08-14 14:46] sandy Taifun: ok, ill do what i can it'll take a fewminutes to connect[2010-08-14 14:46] Alan Dojoji: use animation - there's one calledallover that I've been working with[2010-08-14 14:46] sandy Taifun: ok, so sytart allover in the middle ofthis mess?[2010-08-14 14:47] sandy Taifun: allover animation[2010/08/14 14:59] sandy Taifun: u ok?[2010/08/14 15:00] Julu Twine: yes running[2010/08/14 15:00] sandy Taifun: ok[2010/08/14 15:04] Julu Twine: WORDS ARE A MISERY[2010/08/14 15:16] sandy Taifun: i've no idea what's happening[2010/08/14 15:23] sandy Taifun: plz teleport[2010/08/14 15:26] Julu Twine: ARE YOU IN[2010/08/14 15:26] sandy Taifun: yes[2010/08/14 15:26] sandy Taifun: still no sure hat's appening[2010/08/14 15:26] sandy Taifun: alright onyr end??[2010/08/14 15:27] Julu Twine: ALL RIGHT HERE - KEEP THE CHAT GOING -[2010/08/14 15:31] Julu Twine: LET'S GO IN A MINUTE OR TWO\[2010/08/14 15:31] sandy Taifun: leave? ok[2010/08/14 15:31] Julu Twine: YES WE JUST BOW OUT - RIGHT NOW MAYBE? -DO YOU THINK THIS IS LONG ENOUGH?[2010/08/14 15:32] sandy Taifun: i suppose, it's so thick and clotty anddense i can't realy tell what's happening, but tat's ok[2010/08/14 15:32] sandy Taifun: sure leave anytime? now???[2010/08/14 15:33] Julu Twine: MAYBE ANOTHER MINUTE - TRY WITH MEDIA ON, PRETTY INTERESTING[2010/08/14 15:33] sandy Taifun: ok just tell me when[2010/08/14 15:34] Julu Twine: CAN YOU PUT UP A HUGE AMOUNT OF SCRIPT?[2010/08/14 15:34] sandy Taifun: ok[2010/08/14 15:35] Julu Twine: EXCELLENT![2010/08/14 15:35] sandy Taifun: !!!![2010/08/14 15:35] Julu Twine: OK LET'S LEAVE IN FIFTEEN SECONDS[2010/08/14 15:35] sandy Taifun: good[15:36] sandy Taifun: definatly sharks and clowns.........what o.o. mosthappy when .... Oh please God , have mercy! Oh please let it end! And he[15:36] sandy Taifun: Hey![15:36] sandy Taifun: I wish I was home making new avatars on mycomputer to fuck with.[15:36] sandy Taifun: The avatar has to avoid the swords. The swordsmake the avatar angry.[15:36] sandy Taifun: avatar-meat from body motion-capture to digitalrepresentation to uncaptured body body remembering origins / scars <digital[15:36] sandy Taifun: ancer ancer ancer/avatar ancer/ancer ancer/igitalancer igital ancer.[15:36] sandy Taifun: ancer{}igital{{}}avatar{}analog.igital{{}}avatar{}analog.[15:36] sandy Taifun: every avatar is deconstructible[15:36] sandy Taifun: every avatar has a level of deconstruction[15:36] sandy Taifun: engineering and reverse engineering an avatar[15:36] sandy Taifun: Get lost![15:36] sandy Taifun: i prefer the small, seeping, the peripeheral,marginal, the scattered words[15:36] sandy Taifun: what would break down here, a language that youuse against me? so that I will absjure, abjure these ... moments ... ?[15:36] sandy Taifun: as sites, domains, emanations, emissions, whichare interwoven and sharing coagulated ego/s, matrices, languages,bodies.[15:36] sandy Taifun: i prefer the small, seeping, the peripeheral,marginal, the scattered words, drops say from a drizzle[15:36] sandy Taifun: everything is a moment moment for you, everythingthis mmmm... of matrix, mother, maternal, carrying forth[15:36] sandy Taifun: which announces itself as the edge or frame ofthis dialog, these moments carried forth...[15:36] sandy Taifun: times which smooth us, bits and bytes, protoclslost and smoothing functions traced across peripheries, margins[2010-08-14 15:42] Howl Yifu: plz teleport - sandy[2010-08-14 15:45] Howl Yifu is Offline[2010-08-14 15:45] Howl Yifu is Online[2010-08-14 15:50] Howl Yifu: garret lynch = v. interesting work[2010-08-14 15:50] Howl Yifu: shd we continue or exit?[2010-08-14 15:51] Alan Dojoji: definitely - we might do some thigstogether - we've been talking about it - I think exit? do you have thetext? I don't at this end -[2010-08-14 15:51] Howl Yifu: that's what i need to look for - not suretwas so chaotic[2010-08-14 15:51] Howl Yifu: give me a few minutes[2010-08-14 15:51] Alan Dojoji: ok, can I call yoou later?[2010-08-14 15:51] Howl Yifu: yes. i'll look for text and then makedinner[2010-08-14 15:52] Alan Dojoji: ok, take care -[2010-08-14 15:52] Howl Yifu: you 2[2010-08-14 15:52] Howl Yifu is Offline- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 11:34:54 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: maxims, laws of formmaxims, laws of formyou can't draw a distinction without the meatif a distinction is equivalent, it's a fissureif a distinction is different, it's a negation relative to the meatonce crossed, a negation is donefrom negation emerges the othernegation is on the way to inscribing the other and the meat of the otherfrom a fissure emerges the slow creep of the otherfrom the slow creep of the other emerges the matrix of the fissurethe matrix of the fissure is unstabledifferent distinction is stable to the extent that negation is stablenegation of negation is somewhat of something elsea fissure is abjection in meat, is meat-abjectiondifferent distinction renders meat-abjection tauttaut abjection is at the breaking-point of sloughsubstrate shines among broken meatcrossing a fissure makes no differencethe non-difference of fissure is the foundation of culturethe fissure, meat-abjection, is always imaginarythe imaginary of the fissure is uncountable, unaccounted-forthe imaginary of different distinction is surreal numberamong numbers are numbers, among the fissure is defugefissures are reducible and irreducibledifferent distinctions reside on the plateau of mathesismathesis is extruded from the plateau of different distinctionsschemata are imaginary and unaccountableschemata are meat-fissuresdear monster, there is nothing left of meeverything has fallen through and i cannot die for hirs/he will be bereft and that is the worst of the tokens/he says the laws of form are the out-laws of forms/he says the out-laws of form are meat-forms and 'no matter what's/he says ontology is a muscle memoryhir rightness is monstrous and true as meat is truethe truth of meat is the cleft and fissure of meat (s/he says)i will never get back to you on this(there is nothing to get back to)(it is impossible to return)- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2010 01:57:12 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: The Sparse Dance at Humlab The Sparse Dance at HumlabAvatar Julu Dojoji performing Sparse Dance at Humlab. Of all the avatardance videos I've done in SL, this seems to me (at the moment) to be themost interesting - certainly the dance makes sense. Some of the materialsare worn by Dojoji, some are activated by hir; the movement is fluid,camera work extraordinary thanks to the Snowglobe 2 Viewer. I wish tothank my entire production staff for this. If you have ONE avatar Dojojifilm to see this year, THIS IS IT!http://www.alansondheim.org/sparse.mp4Seriously, it's beautiful and close to the kind of hypostatization I'vewanted to work towards, in terms of solo performance/choreography. Not tomention the sound finally comes together. The beginning and end of thepiece demonstrates the construction and deconstruction.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 22 Aug 2010 23:08:55 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Whose BodiesWhose Bodieshttp://www.alansondheim.org/whosebodies.mp4I can't stand this piece, non-white bodies, like Auschwitz smoke of afuture Amerika where "anchor babies" become synonyms for things, Mosquesare carousels of debris, white Amerika cleanses and scours the newer morenatural you. The virtual world is a perfect harbor for white fears, humansmoke, violence changing the (apparently Jewish and liberal) fabric ofspace and time itself. What happens in Amerika doesn't stay in Amerika; itspreads like cancer, like there's no tomorrow and there might not be. I'msick of humans, sick of slaughter, hatred, hunting; I'm sick of death anddestruction, sick of fundamentalisms, sick of ignorance and rumor. Welcometo Kristallnachtundtag, worlds of pain and analysis, annihilation to thelimit. And all I can do is make stupid videos I can't stand.- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 22:05:01 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: The Roma: Europe's favorite Scapegoat Sickening and all too familiar ----------- Forwarded message ----------date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:25:55from: moderator-1P9u8MX5GVLRnqqr4xx/QQ< at >public.gmane.orgto: PORTSIDE-psCCsKB7rKShSZ4PnerUBNpPI6r2+5pS< at >public.gmane.orgsubject: The Roma: Europe's favorite ScapegoatThe Roma: Europe's favorite ScapegoatDispatches From The EdgeConn Hallinansubmitted to Portside by the authorAugust 23, 2010[Note: A version of this article appeared in TheBerkeley Daily Planet (The East Bay's IndependentNewspaper)http://berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2010-08-24/article/36127?headline=Dispatches-From-The-Edge-Roma-Europe-s-Favorite-Scapegoat- ]Peggy Hollinger and Chris Bryant of the Financial Timesput their fingers on what's behind the current uproarover Europe's Roma population: the group is "an easytarget for politicians seeking to distract attentionfrom problems at home by playing on fears oversecurity." That strategy was stage center in earlyAugust when France's conservative government shippedseveral hundred Roma back to Romania and FrenchPresident Nicolas Sarkozy pledged he would bulldoze 300Roma camps over the next several weeks.Europe is certainly in need of distraction these days.Sarkozy's poll numbers are dismal and his administrationis plagued by scandals. The economic crisis has seenFrance's debt soar, and European governments haveinstituted savage austerity programs that are fillingthe jobless rolls from Dublin to Athens. Since mostpoliticians would rather not examine the cause of theeconomic crisis roiling the continent - many werecomplicit in dismantling the checks and balances thateventually led to the current recession - "criminalgypsies" come in very handy.France's crackdown was sparked by an angry demonstrationin Saint-Aignan following the death of a young"traveler" at the hands of police. Sarkozy never saw ariot he couldn't turn to his advantage. On July 29 hisoffice declared it would dismantle Roma camps becausethey are "sources of illegal trafficking, profoundlyshocking living standards, exploitation of children forbegging, prostitution and crime."Living conditions in Roma camps are, indeed, sub-standard, but in large part because local Frenchauthorities refuse to follow a law requiring that townswith a population of over 5,000 establish electrical andwater hookups for such camps. And because countries likeGermany, France, Italy and Britain refuse to use any ofthe $22 billion that the European Commission has madeavailable for alleviating the conditions that the Romaand other minorities exist under.As for the "crime" and "drug trafficking" charge,research by the European Union (EU) suggests there is nodifference between crime rates among the Roma than in"the population at large.""Indeed there are Roma who are in charge of traffickingnetworks, but they represent less than one percent ofthis population, the rest are victims," David Mark, headof the Civic Alliance of Roma in Romania, a coalition ofover 20 Roma non-governmental organizations, told IPSNews.Mark went on to point out that "Because that one percentcommits crimes and the authorities are not able to stopthem, all Roma are being criminalized." The expulsionsand demolitions, he charged, are "based oncriminalization of an entire ethnic group, whencriminality should be judged on a case by case basis incourts of law."In some cases the level of hysteria would be almostlaughable were it not resulting in the most wide spreadroundup of an ethnic minority since World War II. Italydeclared a "Gypsy emergency," in spite of the fact thatItaly, which has a population of 57.6 million people,has only 60,000 non-Italian Roma.Estimates are that there are between 10 and 12 millionRoma in Europe, making the group the continent's largestminority.For several weeks, the EU's executive body, the EuropeanCommission, played hot potato with the issue. The ECinsisted that it was doing everything it could to helpthe Roma and pointed to the $22 billion pot that remainspretty much untapped. But it also kept silent on chargesby human rights organizations that countries likeGermany, Italy and France were violating EU lawguaranteeing freedom of movement.These nations - primarily France - argue that since theRoma are from Romania and Bulgaria, and both countriesare newly minted EU members, the freedom of movementclause doesn't kick in until 2014. And, in any case,French officials charge that the Roma can't show theyare gainfully employed and self-supporting.On this latter point, rights organizations point outthat Roma are discriminated against in employment. "It'ssomewhat hypocritical to complain about people nothaving money to subsist in France when you don't offeraccess to the labor market at the same time," says BobKushen, managing director of the European Roma RightsCenter in Budapest.With the exception of Spain and Finland, most EU membershave the same restrictions on staying in a country morethan three months without a regular job.France is certainly not alone in singling out the Roma.Germany is preparing to deport 12,000 to Kosovo, adestination that may well put the deportees in danger,because Kosovo Albanians accuse the Roma of siding withthe Serbs during the 1999 Yugoslav War. From the Roma'spoint of view Serbia had long guaranteed theircommunities a certain level of employment andeducational opportunities, while the Albanians hadalways repressed them.Other countries singling out the Roma include Britain,Sweden, Denmark and Belgium. The Swedes deported some 50Roma for "begging," even though begging is not a crimein Sweden.But France has instituted the most aggressive anti-Romacampaign, which also includes its own "gens du voyage,"all of whom are French citizens and theoreticallyguaranteed encampment facilities. France is estimated tohave between 300,000 and 500,000 of these "travelers."The French campaign, however, has sparked a backlash.Romania's Foreign Minister, Teodor Basconschi, blastedFrance for "criminalizing ethnic groups" and warned of"the risks of populist provocation and creatingxenophobic reactions at a time of economic crisis."Basconschi called for a joint Romanian-French approach"devoid of artificial election fever."The Vatican's secretary of the Pastoral Care of Migrantsand Itinerant People Commission said, "The massexpulsion of Roma are against European norms."The growing chorus of protest by human rights groups,the United Nations, the Vatican, and Romania finallymoved the EU to inject itself into the controversy."Recent developments in several European countries, mostrecently eviction of Roma camps in France and expulsionsof Roma from France and Germany, are certainly not theright measures to improve the situation of thisvulnerable minority. On the contrary, they are likely tolead to an increase in racist and xenophobic feelings inEurope," said Meviut Cavusogiu, president of theParliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.Cavusogiu cited Protocol No. 4 of the EuropeanConvention of Human Rights that prohibits "thecollective expulsions of aliens," as well as the rightto freedom of movement for all EU citizens.However, France was sticking by its guns, claiming thatit was not "deporting" anyone: the Roma were leavingvoluntarily for a nominal payment of $386 for adults,and $129 for children. But some members of Sarkozy'sparty, the Union for a Popular Movement, were using theword "deport," and even the more explosive term"rafles." That was the term used to describe therounding up of French Jews during WW II, most of whomdied in the death camps.Roma suffered a similar fate at the hands of the Nazis.It is estimated that between 200,000 and 1.5 millionRoma perished in the concentration camps.Scapegoating the Roma is an old European tradition,almost as old as the initial migration of the Romanypeople out of Rajasthan, India in the 11th century. Mostof those Roma settled in Moldavia and Wallachia -today's Romania - where they were quickly enslaved.Those Romany who did not escape enslavement by to takingup the nomadic life remained slaves until 1856.According to Maria Ochoa-Lido of the Council of Europe,those centuries of slavery essentially sentenced theRoma to poverty-stricken lives on the margins, with lifeexpectancy considerably lower than other populations inthe EU.A lack of access to education, social services,education and the legal system for Romania's 2.5 millionRoma still drives many of them to take to the road. Asbad as conditions for the Roma are in countries likeFrance and Germany, they are better than those inpoverty-stricken Romania.The attacks on the Roma could well be a prelude tosimilar campaigns against other European minorities:Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in England, Moroccans andAlgerians in Spain and Italy, and Africans scatteredthroughout the continent. Xenophobia in a time ofeconomic crisis rarely restricts itself to a singletarget.[Conn Hallinan is currently a columnist for ForeignPolicy In Focus (FPIF.com), a "think tank withoutwalls." FPIF is associated with the Institute for PolicyStudy and draws together more than 600 foreign policyanalysts from around the world to examine U.S. foreignpolicy. Hallinan is also a columnist for the BerkeleyDaily Planet, and an occasional free lance medicalpolicy writer. He is a recipient of a Project Censored"Real News Award." He formally ran the journalismprogram at the University of California at Santa Cruz,where he was also a college provost. He holds a PhD inAnthropology from the University of California atBerkeley, and lives in Berkeley, California.]_____________________________________________Portside aims to provide material of interestto people on the left that will help them tointerpret the world and to change it.Submit via email: moderator-0h5K2prAsCRg9hUCZPvPmw< at >public.gmane.orgSubmit via the Web: portside.org/submitFrequently asked questions: portside.org/faqSubscribe: portside.org/subscribeUnsubscribe: portside.org/unsubscribeAccount assistance: portside.org/contactSearch the archives: portside.org/archive- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 00:04:33 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: three more from the concentration camp cafe three more from the concentration camp cafethey are building the arena next to our building.eminent domain - misused - resulted in a lot of evictions.the neighborhood was declared blighted.we fought this stuff off for four years and lost, no surprise.they're tearing up our street now and our building is shaking.no surprise at that either.i think we're going to have to move as the building falls apart.thank god i'm white and wealthy and live in white america.gotta learn to play, just in case the orkestra needs me.let's beat up some jews and kick them out for being beaten.tie anchor babies to the boats, nothing cleans like disappearance.me i'm gonna suck up jesus christ any way i can.he wants a blow job i'll give him a blow job.i think my muslim friends better do the same.gays, stay away from jesus christ, the blow jobs are for straights.thank god i'm white and wealthy and live in white america.gotta learn to play, just in case the orkestra needs me.three more from the concentration camp cafe:http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/atonalmatrix.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/doomed1.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/doomed2.mp3- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:39:57 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: concentration-camp cafe concentration-camp cafethe jews have to play to stay alivemoslem-islam-yid music everyone's dancingworld war two plus 65 and look who's countingsomeone's gone by the end of the dayburn the constitution and kneel down to praythe poor orkestra tries again and againfights break out between shtetls and atonalsdrown out bayonetted anchor-baby screamsdrop dead, go on and on, drop deadsomeone's dead by the end of the dayburn the constitution and kneel down to prayhttp://espdisk.com/alansondheim/cafe1.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/cafe2.mp3- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:17:05 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: humans protecting us humans protecting ushttp://www.alansondheim.org/them.mp4in them the fury of the havens unleashes disguised counter-attackson immigrants holding the world at bay, rewriting language, andmasquerading as true friendsit's not as if we're invited guests in them's partsbut what the hell, kill them all of us, bloody hearts beatinga note or two, i mean kill us all before we dohttp://www.alansondheim.org/thems.mp4but look my friends when thems open up into brilliant chaos of everylittle town, each and every sign, who shall find our way homeif not thems'one of thems your own dont worry youre safe here'- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 11:52:20 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: STOP FORCED EVICTIONS OF ROMA IN EUROPE! (fwd)---------- Forwarded message ----------date: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 05:59:27from: ajaco c/o bid <ajaco-Ew/y/azDL7EbIzgrwE/FjQ< at >public.gmane.org>reply-To: Theory and Writing <WRYTING-L-JX7+OpRa80RAv0SARGResg< at >public.gmane.org>to: WRYTING-L-JX7+OpRa80RAv0SARGResg< at >public.gmane.orgsubject: STOP FORCED EVICTIONS OF ROMA IN EUROPE!http://tent.xs4all.nl/mediacontent/eur015005210.en.pdfSpread wildlyAA- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Fri, 27 Aug 2010 23:26:09 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Social Media Poetics: Why Talk, Sondheim Sondheim Why Talk, Sondheim Sondheim||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||$ ytalk sondheim------------------= YTalk version 3.3.0 =-----------------------------[Ringing sondheim...][Waiting for connection...]------------------= YTalk version 3.3.0 =-----------------------------------------------= sondheim-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgrw< at >public.gmane.org =--------------------------hello, these are dismal days, the country has lost its footing, no oneknows where we're heading, we're ruddless, rudderless, i stay in nowadaysit's like there's nowhere to go, the suffering of life isa clinamen forbuddhism, i remember when there seemed to be a form of enterprise, magic,what you might call among oneselves, this social mediuam is lose when onespeaksalone which always seems to be the case. sondheim i would fuck you, wouldswallow you hole,, fill your mouth with my cock, turn you inside out with theapc apocalypse of anguag o of anguish, you choke you choking you choking onyour double bodies, these just the beginning of loss ofskin and flesh and bones, you are not listening, you write as ,no, you wwrite as a form of deliberate muteness, the violence of language,inherent language, becomes you, your eyes are fucked, ears are fucked, whatwhat you have left is text, ou, pouring out, covering everythig with themurmur of the selves, of the self, it's singular, signu, sig, singularity,the absolute makes itself apparent just in the wings just off the stage inevery form of speech, in every moment within every moment when it goes on just this form of signing no one else isrequired,it brands selves, it scars what's left of the body, ripples the mememe,this self-fucking isthis self-fucking sthis self-fucking gnaaws away at the skein of the bodyy, sun-particlestransform its age, speech of engagement, of this there is none, i swallowsuchswallow such piss of mine, such shit, my smy body is replaced by its severence, debris, chokes on its vomitof debricof debrisnothing when wwhen writing is swallowed nothing is swallowedwhen writing is vomitted nothing is vmoited$ Message from Talk_Daemon-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgrw< at >public.gmane.org at 23:03 ...$ talk: connection requested by sondheim-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgr+G/Ez6ZCGd0< at >public.gmane.orgtalk: respond with: talk sondheim-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgrw< at >public.gmane.org$ $ [Waiting for connection...]------------------= YTalk version 3.3.0 =-----------------------------what you have left is text, ou, pouring out, covering everythig with themurmur of the selves, of the self, it's singular, signu, sig, singularity,it brands selves, it scars what's left of the body, ripples the mememe,this self-fucking isthis self-fucking sthis self-fucking gnaaws away at the skein of the bodyy, sun-particlestransform its age, speech of engagement, of this there is none, i swallownothing when wwhen writing is swallowed nothing is swallowed---------------= sondheim-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgrw< at >public.gmane.org =--------------------------no, you wwrite as a form of deliberate muteness, the violence of language,inherent language, becomes you, your eyes are fucked, ears are fucked, whatthe absolute makes itself apparent just in the wings just off the stage inevery form of speech, in every moment within every moment when it goes on just this form of signing no one else isrequired, suchof debris||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||Message from Talk_Daemon-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgrw< at >public.gmane.org at 23:03 ...talk: connection requested by sondheim-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgr+G/Ez6ZCGd0< at >public.gmane.orgtalk: respond with: talk sondheim-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgrw< at >public.gmane.org[Waiting for connection...]----------------------------= YTalk version 3.3.0=-----------------------------what you have left is text, ou, pouring out, covering everythig with themurmur of the selves, of the self, it's singular, signu, sig, singularity,it brands selves, it scars what's left of the body, ripples the mememe,this self-fucking isthis self-fucking sthis self-fucking gnaaws away at the skein of the bodyy, sun-particlestransform its age, speech of engagement, of this there is none, i swallownothing when wwhen writing is swallowed nothing is swallowed-------------------------= sondheim-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgrw< at >public.gmane.org=--------------------------no, you wwrite as a form of deliberate muteness, the violence of language,inherent language, becomes you, your eyes are fucked, ears are fucked,whatthe absolute makes itself apparent just in the wings just off the stage inevery form of speech, in every moment within every moment when it goes on just this form of signing no one else isrequired, suchswallow such piss of mine, such shit, my smy body is replaced by its severence, debris, chokes on its vomitof debricof debriswhen writing is vomitted nothing is vmoited$k7% ytalk sondheim----------------------------= YTalk version 3.3.0=-----------------------------[Waiting for connection...]----------------------------= YTalk version 3.3.0=-----------------------------inherent language, becomes you, your eyes are fucked, ears are fucked,whatthe absolute makes itself apparent just in the wings just off the stage inevery form of speech, in every moment within every moment when it goes on just this form of signing no one else isrequired, suchswallow such piss of mine, such shit, my smy body is replaced by its severence, debris, chokes on its vomitof debricof debriswhen writing is vomitted nothing is vmoited-------------------------= sondheim-1rsecFGBr9VEIHK4WyZgrw< at >public.gmane.org=--------------------------skin and flesh and bones, you are not listening, you write as ,what you have left is text, ou, pouring out, covering everythig with themurmur of the selves, of the self, it's singular, signu, sig, singularity,it brands selves, it scars what's left of the body, ripples the mememe,this self-fucking isthis self-fucking sthis self-fucking gnaaws away at the skein of the bodyy, sun-particlestransform its age, speech of engagement, of this there is none, i swallownothing when wwhen writing is swallowed nothing is swallowed||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:49:04 -0400 (EDT)From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim-VmQCmMdMyN0AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Thinking About Retiring Thinking About RetiringI'm considering retirement; I'm asking for advice (back-channel); I'm at aloss; I never thought I'd reach this point; it's a point of solitude; nooffline community, students, teaching; useless beyond occasional onlinetalks. I write too much, play (music) too much, think too much; it's toomuch for me; too much for anyone; it's me. My friends don't return calls;why should they; school's starting; all those residencies; commitments; Isit in this loft (assume it's "this loft"); face the computer screen; theviola; the keyboard; the video editing software; the guitar; the oud; Idecide what to do; I owe nothing to anyone. People visit on occasion; useone or another of my pieces (video or music), disappear. I haven't seenMyk (lap steel) for months; he's gone. I put work up at ESP-Disk; assumesomeone listens; it's gone. Grants are gone; jobs are gone; I tire fromcalling friends who don't have the time to return calls; I sit here; Ithink this is a bother; admire my father who watches tv day in day out;takes rides in the country; babbles; never did a creative thing in hislife; gave me chances I wouldn't otherwise have had; psychologicallyabused me; has been retired over forty years; reads sometimes. I need toknow what to do; I'm getting suicidal; I live in vacuum; compose invacuum; think philosophy or dance or art in vacuum; push my own work likean arrogant fool; wait for no returns; wait for the money to run out; thebuilding to collapse around me.I don't want to go back to school as a student; tour aimlessly around thecountry; volunteer for non-profits; my mind's still active. Invitations toschools; for performances; for equipment use; have stopped. I'm sick ofthe screen; this forced retirement; my sins have caught up with me; mynumerous crimes have taken their toll; you know where to find me; you justdon't know why.Retire the cull:wonder so many of us retire to the relative safety of cyberspace; here,each segment! will retire all the others... the segments...respects, seemed to him to be faultless. He had to retire to an uneasyeach segment! will retire all the others... the segments...I would be a niter. I would retire from the machine. Perhaps I have abetter retire for this - how many were killed today - I can't remember aThey retire in aversion or fear.each segment! will retire all the others... the segments...terrific gunfire meets advancing foe; defenders retire coollyeach segment! will retire all the others... the segments...female was just retiring to an inner room, when she suddenly came backthis terminated the dialogue, Julia retiring to her own room, carrying meif retirement is a bridge that must be crossed when we get thereleisure and retirement by systematically shirking any laborSuicide, the cull, far too many over 16 years: embryo suicide suicide embryo like now i think of suicide and hills O suicide O gnawed-blade hole O tourniquet punished by foaM Do listen to all smallthing suicide and leaping, say Alan Fear of deep death and do suicide. I would die. I want to die. I am so fantasy. I am so suicide. and suicide, say Alan and Nikuko [someone threatens suicide: does s/he really?] craw - a couple of other poets and myself have suicide poems in them. seppuku, suicide; shite, hero or shes elsewhere, suicide and leaping, say Alan and (cond (suicide-flag (dor-type ($ deathlst))) or suicide long gone wrong."or rather suicided along with opera."'death)731: discipline lesbian murder infidelity hardcore suicide(dor-put-meaning suicide 'death)(dor-put-meaning suicides 'death)

Ten Theses on WikileaksBy Geert Lovink and Patrice RiemensThese 0."What do I think of Wikileaks? I think it would be a good idea!" (after Mahatma Gandhi's famous quip on 'Western Civilisation')These 1.Disclosures and leaks have been of all times, but never before has a non state- or non- corporate affiliated group done this at the scale Wikileaks managed to with the 'Afghan War Logs'. But nonetheless we believe that this is more something of a quantitative leap than of a qualitative one. In a certain sense, these 'colossal' Wikileaks disclosures can simply be explained as a consequence of the dramatic spread of IT usage, together with a dramatic drop in its costs, including those for the storage of millions of documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping state and corporate secrets - never mind private ones - has become rather difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination. Wikileaks here becomes symbolic for a transformation in the 'information society' at large, and holds up a mirror of future things to come. So while one can look at Wikileaks as a (political) project, and criticize it for its modus operandi, or for other reasons, it can also be seen as a 'pilot' phase in an evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure, beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.These 2.For better or for worse, Wikileaks has skyrocketed itself into the realm of high-level international politics. Out of the blue, Wikileaks has briefly become a full-blown player both on the world scene, as well as in the national sphere of some countries. By virtue of its disclosures, Wikileaks, small as it is, appears to carry the same weight as government or big corporations - in the domain of information gathering and publicizing at least. But at same time it is unclear whether this is a permanent feature or a hype-induced temporary phenomenon - Wikileaks appears to believe the former, but only time will tell. Nonetheless Wikileaks, by word of its best known representative Julian Assange, think that, as a puny non-state and non- corporate actor, it is boxing in the same weight-class as the Pentagon - and starts to behave accordingly. One could call this the 'Talibanization' stage of postmodern - "Flat World" - theory where scales, times, and places have been declared largely irrelevant. What counts is the celebrity momentum and the amount of media attention. Wikileaks manages to capture that attention by way of spectacular information hacks where other parties, especially civil society groups and human rights organizations, are desperately struggling to get their message across. Wikileaks genially puts to use the 'escape velocity' of IT - using IT to leave IT behind and irrupt into the realm of real-world politics.These 3.In the ongoing saga termed "The Decline of the US Empire", Wikileaks enters the stage as the slayer of a soft target. It would be difficult to imagine it doing quite the same to the Russian or Chinese government, or even to that of Singapore - not to speak of their ... err ... 'corporate' affiliates. Here distinct, and huge, cultural and linguistic barriers are at work, not to speak of purely power-related ones, that would need to be surmounted. Also vastly different constituencies obtain there, even if we speak about the more limited (and allegedly more globally shared) cultures and agendas of hackers, info-activists and investigative journalists. In that sense Wikileaks in its present manifestation remains a typically 'Western' product and cannot claim to be a truly universal or global undertaking.These 4.One of the main difficulty with explaining Wikileaks arises from the fact it is unclear - and also unclear to the Wikileaks people themselves - whether it sees itself and operates as a content provider or as a simple carrier of leaked data (whichever one, as predicated by context and circumstances, is the impression). This, by the way, has been a common problem ever since media went massively online and publishing and communications became a service rather than a product. Julian Assenge cringes every time he is portrayed as the editor-in- chief of Wikileaks, yet on the other hand, Wikileaks says it edits material before publication and claims it checks documents for authenticity with the help of hundreds of volunteer analysts. This kind of content vs. carrier debates have been going on for a number of decades amongst media activists with no clear outcome. Therefore, instead of trying to resolve this inconsistency, it might be better to look for fresh approaches and develop new, critical, concepts for what has become a hybrid publishing practice involving actors far beyond the traditional domain of professional news media.These 5.The steady decline of investigative journalism due to diminishing support and funding is an undeniable fact. The ever-ongoing acceleration and over-crowding in the so-called attention economy makes that there is no longer enough room for complicated stories. The corporate owners of mass circulation media are also less and less inclined to see the working of the neo-liberal globalized economy and its politics detailled and discussed at length. The shift of information towards infotainment demanded by the public and media- owners has unfortunately also been embraced as a working style by journalists themselves making it difficult to publish complex stories. Wikileaks erupts in this state of affairs as an outsider within the steamy ambiance of 'citizen journalism' and DIY news reporting in the blogosphere. What Wikileaks anticipates, but so far has not been able to organize, is the 'crowd sourcing' of the actual interpretation of its leaked documents.Traditional investigative journalism consisted of three phase: unearthing facts, cross-checking these and backgrounding them into an understandable discourse. Wikileaks does the first, claims to do the second, but leaves the issue of the third completely blank. This is symptomatic of a particular brand of the open access ideology, whereby the economy of content production itself is externalized to unknown entities 'out there'. The crisis in investigative journalism is neither understood nor recognized. How the productive entities are supposed to sustain themselves is left in the dark. It is simply presumed that the analysis and interpretation will be taken up by the traditional news media but this is not happening automatically. The saga of the Afghan War Logs demonstrates that Wikileaks has to approach and negotiate with well-established traditional media to secure sufficient credibility. But at the same time these also prove unable to fully process the material.These 6.Wikileaks is a typical SPO (Single Person Organization). This means that initiative-taking, decision making, and the execution process is largely centralized in the hands of one single person. Much like small and medium-size businesses the founder cannot be voted out and unlike many collectives leadership is not rotating. This is not an uncommon feature within organizations, indifferent whether they operate in the realm of politics, culture or the 'civil society' sector. SPOs are recognizable, exciting, inspiring, and easy to feature in the media. Their sustainability, however is largely dependent on the actions of their charismatic leader, and their functioning is difficult to reconcile with democratic values. This is also why they are difficult to replicate and do not scale up easily. Sovereign hacker Julian Assange is the identifying figurehead of Wikileaks, whose notoriety and reputation very much merges with his own, blurring the distinction between what it does and stands for and Assange's (rather agitated) private life and (somewhat unpolished) political opinions.These 7.Wikileaks is also an organization deeply shaped by 1980s hacker culture combined with the political values of techno-libertarianism which emerged in the 1990s. The fact that Wikileaks has been founded, and is still to a large extent run by hard core geeks, forms an essential frame of reference to understand its values and moves. This, unfortunately, comes together with a good dose of the somewhat less savory aspects of hacker culture. Not that idealism, the desire to contribute to making the world a better place, could be denied to Wikileaks, quite on the contrary. But this idealism is paired with a preference for conspiracies, an elitist attitude and a cult of secrecy (never mind condescending manners) which is not conducive to collaboration with like minded people and groups - reduced to the position of simple consumers of Wikileaks outcomes.These 8.Lack of commonality with congenial 'another world is possible' movements forces Wikileaks to seek public attention by way of increasingly spectacular - and risky - disclosures, while gathering a constituency of often wildly enthusiastic, but totally passive supporters. Following the nature and quantity of Wikileaks exposures from its inception up to the present day is eerily reminiscent of watching a firework display, and that includes a 'grand finale' in the form of the doomsday-machine pitched, waiting-to-be-unleashed, 'Insurance' document. This raises serious doubts about the long-term sustainability of Wikileaks itself, but possibly also, that of the Wikileaks model. Wikileaks operates on a ridiculously small size (probably no more than a dozen of people form the core of its operation). While the extent and savvyness of Wikileaks' tech support is proved by its very existence, Wikileaks' claim to several hundreds, or even more, volunteer analysts and experts is unverifiable, and to be frank, barely credible. This is clearly Wikileaks Achilles' heel, not only from a risks and/or sustainability standpoint, but politically as well - which is what matters to us here.These 9.Wikileaks displays a stunning lack of transparancy in its internal organization. Its excuse that "Wikileaks needs to be completely opaque in order to force others to be totally transparent." amounts to little more than Mad Magazine's famous Spy vs Spy cartoons. You win from the opposition but in a way that makes you undistinguishable from it. And claiming the moral high ground afterwards is not really helpful - Tony Blair too excelled in that exercise. As Wikileaks is neither a political collective nor an NGO in the legal sense, and not a company or part of social movement for that matter, we need first of all discuss what type of organization it is that we deal with. Is it a virtual project? After all, it does exist as a hosted website with a domain name, which is the bottom line. But does it have a goal beyond the personal ambition of its founder(s)? Is Wikileaks reproducible and will we see the rise of national or local chapters that keep the name Wikileaks? And according to which playing rules will they operate? Or should we rather see it as a concept that travels from context to context and that, like a meme, transforms itself in time and space?Maybe Wikileaks will organize itself around an own version of the IETF's slogan 'rough consensus and running code'? Project like Wikipedia and Indymedia have both resolved this issue in their own ways, but not without crises, forks and disruptive conflicts. A critique like the one voiced here does not aim to force Wikileaks into a traditional format but on the contrary to explore whether Wikileaks (and its future clones, associates, avatars and assorted family members) could stand model for new forms of organizations and collaborations. Elsewhere the term 'organized network' has been coined as a possible term for this formats. In the past there was talked of 'tactical media'. Others have used the generic term 'internet activism'. Perhaps Wikileaks has other ideas in what direction it wants to take this organizational debate. But where? It is of course up to Wikileaks to decide for itself but up to now we have seen very little by way of an answer, leaving others, like the Wall Street Journal, to raise questions, e.g., about Wikileaks' financial bona fides.These 10.We do not think that taking a stand in favor or against Wikileaks is what matters most. Wikileaks is there, and there to stay till it either scuttles itself or is destroyed by the forces opposing its operation. Our point is rather to (try to) pragmatically assess and ascertain what Wikileaks can, could - and maybe even, who knows, should - do, and help formulate how 'we' could relate to and interact with Wikileaks. Despite all its drawbacks, and against all odds, Wikileaks has rendered a sterling service to the cause of transparency, democracy and openness. We might wish it to be different, but, as the French would say, if something like it did not exist, it would have to be invented. The 'quantitative turn' of information overload is a fact of present life. One can only expect the glut of disclosable information to grow further - and exponentially so. To organize and interpret this Himalaya of data is a collective challenge that is out there, whether we give it the name 'Wikileaks' or not.Amsterdam, late August 2010