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---------- Forwarded message ----------Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:35:14From: Michael Gurstein <gurstein-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Reply-To: ciresearchers-W4fJYJ0jtx0Y6M8xKmy2xnioTA7GrhP5< at >public.gmane.org, Michael Gurstein <gurstein-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>To: ciresearchers-W4fJYJ0jtx0Y6M8xKmy2xnioTA7GrhP5< at >public.gmane.orgSubject: [ciresearchers] FW: [TriumphOfContent] Chinese internet addicts stage mutiny at boot camp??-----Original Message-----From: TriumphOfContent-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw< at >public.gmane.org[mailto:TriumphOfContent-hHKSG33TihhbjbujkaE4pw< at >public.gmane.org] On Behalf Of Anjana BasuSent: Wednesday, June 09, 2010 12:11 AMTo: Triumph ContentSubject: [TriumphOfContent] Chinese internet addicts stage mutiny at bootcamp??http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article7145877.eceFrom??Times OnlineJune 8, 2010 Chinese internet addicts stage mutiny at boot campJane Macartney, BeijingFourteen young detainees overcame their guard and fled a boot camp regime ofphysical training and psychological treatment designed to cure theiraddiction ? to the internet.The group, aged 15 to 22, staged their mass breakout by grabbing a dutysupervisor when he was in bed and immobilising him in his quilt.He shouted for help and they apologised before tying him up. They then madetheir way in groups of three to the home town of the leader of the group.The addicts made their break from the Huai?an Internet Addiction TreatmentCentre in eastern Jiangsu province last Wednesday, complaining that theycould no longer endure its ?monotonous work and intensive training?.It is the latest incident to highlight the sometimes brutal techniquesemployed at camps across China to wean young people off the internet. A15-year-old boy was beaten to death last year days after he was admitted toa camp. Last month a court sentenced two instructors to up to ten years injail for the incident.The China Youth Association for Network Development estimates that about 24million Chinese adolescents are addicted to the internet, many to gamingsites.For the recent escapees freedom proved short lived. A taxi driver alertedpolice after the young men were unable to pay the fare. There was littlesympathy from their exasperated parents either, who had paid 18,000 yuan(?1,830) for their children to receive six months? treatment at the camp.Most insisted that their children should go back to the camp at once andsince the breakout all but one have been returned.One mother wept at the police station when she described how her son oncespent 28 consecutive hours playing online games. A camp official justifiedthe methods used to cure the addiction, saying: ?We have to use militarystyle methods such as total immersion and physical training on these youngpeople. We need to teach them some discipline and help them to establish aregular lifestyle.?The camp requires its ?inmates? to be up at 5am and in bed at 9.30pm. Duringthe day they must undergo two hours of physical drills, as well as coursesin calligraphy, traditional Chinese philosophy and receive counselling.Yang Guihua, the mother of the youth who orchestrated the escape, said thather son must return and defended the treatment. She said: ?I don?t thinkthere is any problem with the training methods at the centre. They are formy child?s own good.?? China underscored its commitment to keeping a tight grip on the internetyesterday, vowing in a new White Paper to block anything deemed subversiveor a threat to national unity.It said that it wanted to boost internet usage to 45 per cent of thepopulation in the next five years but gave no indication that it would easethe Great Firewall, which blocks websites such as Facebook, YouTube andTwitter.http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article7145877.ece____________________________________________________________________________Chin music and high voltage T20 action on MSN Sports Sign up now.__._,_.___Reply to sender | Reply to group | Reply via web post | Start a New TopicMessages in this topic (1)Recent Activity:Visit Your GroupYahoo! Groups Switch to: Text-Only, Daily Digest * Unsubscribe * Terms ofUse.[nc3=3]__,_._,___!DSPAM:2676,4c0f3e94177551017968812!

Dear Nettime,I am sending you a review of the first Arctic Perspective Cahier on architecture, written by Sean Ruthen and published on August 31, 2010 by re:place magazine.The exhibition Arctic Perspective is on view at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund, Germany, until October 10, 2010.Check out www.arcticperspective.org and www.hmkv.de for more information.All the best,Inke Arns-----------------------------------http://regardingplace.com/?p=9660Arctic Perspective Cahier No.1: Architecturere:place magazine, August 31, 2010“The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a non-profit, international group of individuals and organizations whose goal is to promote the creation of open authoring, communication, and dissemination infrastructures for the circumpolar region… it is a transnational art, science, and culture work group consisting of partner organizations from five different countries – Germany, Slovenia, UK, Iceland, and Canada. Arctic Perspective uses media art and the research of artists to investigate the complicated, global, cultural, and ecological interrelations in the Arctic, and to develop concepts for constructing tactical communications systems and a mobile, eco-friendly research station, which will support interdisciplinary and intercultural collaborations.”- from the API mission statementEdited by Andreas Müller – Published by Hatje Cantz Press (2010)Review by Sean Ruthen, re:place magazineThere is and always has been an unexplainable attraction to the north, like some shared human lodestone. Whether for its great expanses of pristine and breathtaking sparseness, or the cultural richness of the different indigenous nations that live there, there is something about it which has long fascinated us. Like the unexplored depths of the planet’s oceans, the North represents one of the few remaining places where Nature still reigns supreme, where at best we can try to adapt our warm-blooded bodies to the microclimates of the temporary shelters we erect there. On two previous occasions, re:place has reviewed architecture books on the Arctic – Extreme Architecture and Modern North - but none have demonstrated the breadth of enterprise that is at the heart of the Arctic Perspective Initiative (API).Begun in 2006 when three of the group’s founding members sat down with the elders of Igloolik, Nunavut, the API has since become a sanctioned research body by the European Commission. This ongoing project will end in 2013, from which will be presented the outcome of Arctic Perspective – Third Culture, with the goal of providing the template for a two-way communication between the existing indigenous nations of the north and the developed nations to the south. At its core is the intent to not make the mistakes that have been made in the past, and to create an awareness and respect of the Arctic that just may save it and the people living there from complete catastrophe due to changes to their ecosystem.The first of four volumes, or cahiers, to be released, “Arctic Perspective: Architecture” focuses solely on the enterprise of habitation in the Arctic, and includes a design competition to the same end, as well as four critical essays related to architecture and the North, giving the volume its theoretical breadth. Three planned future volumes/cahiers will look at the politics of the Arctic, its relationship to technology, and of course its natural landscape.As it happens, the timing for the book’s release couldn’t be more apt, as just recently the media (and even our own federal government) have demonstrated an increasing interest in it, certainly while Canadian F-15’s are being called to our northern borders to disembark Russian planes which have curiously appeared on the horizon. Whether a gold rush or the relentless pursuit of oil, the developed nations of our world have often had their wrists slapped for trying to exploit its resources, and so does API arrive as a new steward for the Arctic, hoping to use new and old media alike to communicate the critical mass that we could shortly find ourselves faced with in the North, if governments and their corporate cronies are allowed to have their way.Most importantly though, and not unlike other humanitarian organizations such as Greenpeace and the UN, the API has as its mandate a bottom-up methodology, in that they are not interested in seeing the North solely on their own terms, but through the eyes of the indigenous nations that already call it home. This is an important focus of this first volume, and sure to be a recurring theme running in the volumes to come.Presented in a sparse and no-nonsense format, the pages of text allow the sixteen colour pages in the center of the book to pop out, themselves a collage of images culled from the competition entries. While the essays in the volume, including one on ‘Arctic Architect’ Ralph Erskine and another on Buckminster Fuller, provide effective counterpoint for the book, it is the design competition itself which is its raison d’etre.Conducted in 2009, the competition as put on by API called simply “Mobile Media-centric Habitation and Work Unit,” asked entrants to design a habitation with life support and work station for use in the Arctic, with the adjunct of it having to be mobile. The design brief as well required that the solution be a sustainable one, providing renewable energy and waste recycling along with its communication systems. Pending available funding, there was also built into the competition the possibility that the winning prototype could be built and tested in the North. With cash prizes for first, second, and third place, the book presents in some detail these three schemes, while a handful of others are presented in brief summary, accompanied by selected images from their presentations.As would be expected, the 103 entries from thirty countries ranged from the serious to the whimsical, with the three winners demonstrating a critical understanding of the terrain as realized through the indigenous traditions of building (and surviving) there. While one of the winning entrants appropriated forms of architecture and responses typical to the terrain, the two others went one step further and realized a habitation that could be collapsed to the footprint of a dogsled. A more whimsical, Archigram inspired entry made the media centre out of a VW camper van.Each of the essays featured, as introduced in the editor’s foreword, are excellent companions to the design competition visuals and text. The first by Marilyn Walker provides the anthropological perspective, complete with photographs of typical indigenous dwellings such as yurts or iglus. She points out that the Igloolik dialect, along with many others have 100 words for snow, of which many relate specifically to snow as a construction material.Two essays on Buckminster Fuller and Ralph Erskine, by Carsten Kohn and Jeremie Michael McGowan respectively, provide the book with both the architectural primer for the mobile house, as well as the first true modern architect of the North. The essays are then themselves bookended between the competition, and two documented accounts of travels through the Arctic, the first a rather empirical account of a voyage through the Northwest Passage, the other a more recent journey taken by members of the API to visit an ancestral ground along with several Inuit families in Nunavut.Arctic Perspective is without question a timely publication from Hatje Cantz, with future volumes bound to be as invaluable resource as this. And as sure as the magnetism of the North, like its Aurora Borealis, continues to draw our gaze to its horizon, the API looks there also as a chance to set things right between Nature and our old-fashioned ways, for better and for worse.***For more information on the Arctic Perspective Initiative, go to www.arcticperspective.org.For more information on the Arctic Perspective book series, go to www.hatjecantz.de.**Sean Ruthen is an architect working, living, and writing in Vancouver.------------------Dr. Inke ArnsArtistic DirectorHartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV)Guentherstr. 65 (office)44143 Dortmund, GermanyT + 49 - 231 - 823 106M + 49 - 176 - 430 627 93inke.arns-S+dZmHGU1xU< at >public.gmane.orgwww.hmkv.dehmkv-dortmund.blogspot.comARCTIC PERSPECTIVEHMKV at the PHOENIX Halle DortmundJune 19 - Oct 10, 2010TRUSTHMKV at the Dortmunder U (3rd floor)July 31 - Sept 5, 2010ISEA2010 RUHR exhibitionMuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, DortmundDortmunder Kunstverein and RWE Gallery DortmundAug 19 - Sept 5, 2010INTER-COOL 3.0HMKV at the Dortmunder U (3rd floor)Sept 17 - Nov 28, 2010

http://mondediplo.com/2010/09/15avatarPrint the legend, and put it on YoutubeAvatar activismPop culture has now become the basis for a participatory approach to worldactivism – Harry Potter fans for gay rights in the US, defiantPalestinians protesting about Israeli occupation with their traditionalkeffiyahs over skins painted blue after Avatar’s Na’vi peopleby Henry JenkinsFive Palestinian, Israeli and international activists painted themselvesblue to resemble the Na’vi from James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar (1) inFebruary, and marched through the occupied village of Bil’in. The Israelimilitary used tear gas and sound bombs on the azure-skinned protestors,who wore traditional keffiyahs with their Na’vi tails and pointy ears. Thecamcorder footage of the incident was juxtaposed with borrowed shots fromthe film and circulated on YouTube. We hear the movie characters proclaim:“We will show the Sky People that they can not take whatever they want!This, this is our land!”The event is a reminder of how people around the world are mobilisingicons and myths from popular culture as resources for political speech,which we can call Avatar activism. Even relatively apolitical critics forlocal newspapers recognised that Avatar spoke to contemporary politicalconcerns. Conservative US publications, such as National Review and TheWeekly Standard, denounced Avatar as anti-American, anti-military andanti-capitalist. A Vatican film critic argued that it promoted “natureworship” while some environmentalists embraced Avatar as “the most epicpiece of environmental advocacy ever captured on celluloid”. Many on theleft ridiculed the film’s contradictory critique of colonialism andembrace of white liberal guilt fantasies, calling it “Dances with Smurfs”(from the simplistic pro-Native American 1990 movie success, Dances WithWolves). One of the most nuanced critiques came from Daniel Heath Justice,an activist from the Cherokee nation, who felt that Avatar was directingattention to the rights of indigenous people even as Cameronover-simplified the evils of colonialism, creating embodiments of themilitary-industrial complex which are easy to hate and hard to understand.Such critiques encourage a healthy scepticism towards the production ofpopular mythologies and are better than critics who see popular culture astrivial and meaningless, offering only distractions from our real worldproblems. The meaning of a popular film like Avatar lies at theintersection between what the author wants to say and how the audiencedeploys his creation for their own communicative purposes.The Bil’in protesters recognised potential parallels between the Na’vistruggles to defend their Eden against the Sky People and their ownattempts to regain lands they feel were unjustly taken from them. (TheYouTube video makes clear the contrast between the lush jungles of Pandoraand the arid, dusty landscape of the Occupied Territories.) The film’slarger-than-life imagery, recognised worldwide thanks to Hollywood,offered them an empowered image of their own struggles. The sight of ablue-skinned alien writhing in the dust and choking on tear gas shockedmany into paying attention to messages we often ignore.By appropriating Avatar, activists have made some of the most familiarcriticisms of the film beside the point. Conservative critics worried thatAvatar might foster anti-Americanism, but as the image of the Na’vi hasbeen taken up by protest groups in many parts of the world, the myth hasbeen rewritten to focus on local embodiments of the military-industrialcomplex: in Bil’in, the focus was on the Israeli army; in China, onindigenous people against the Beijing government; in Brazil, the AmazonianIndians against logging companies.Without painting themselves blue, people like the Indian writer ArundhatiRoy and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek have used discussions aboutAvatar to call attention to the plight of the Dongria Kondh peoples ofIndia, who have just won a battle with their government over access totraditional territories rich in bauxite. It turns out that America isn’tthe only evil empire left on Planet Earth. Leftists worry that the focuson white human protagonists gives an easy point of identification. Butprotestors just want to be in the blue skins of the Na’vi.The Avatar activists are tapping into a very old language of popularprotest. The cultural historian Natalie Zemon Davis reminds us in herclassic essay “Women on Top” (2) that protesters in early modern Europeoften masked their identity through dressing as peoples real (the Moors)or imagined (the Amazons) seen as a threat to the civilised order. Thegood citizens of Boston continued this tradition in the New World whenthey dressed as Native Americans to dump tea in the harbour. AndAfrican-Americans in New Orleans formed their own Mardi Gras Indiantribes, taking imagery from Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, to signifytheir own struggles for respect and dignity (a cultural practice beingreconsidered in HBO’s television series, Treme, by David Simon, about thepost-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans).Participatory cultureThe media theorist Stephen Duncombe (3) argues that the American left hasadopted a rationalist language which can seem cold and exclusionary,speaking to the head not the heart. But by rejecting the wonkishvocabulary of most policy discourse, it could draw emotional power fromits engagement with stories that already matter to a mass public.Duncombe cites an activist group that called itself Billionaires for Bush,whose members posed as mega-tycoons straight out of a Monopoly game, tocall attention to the corporate interests shaping Republican positions. Hemight have been writing about protestors painting themselves blue orTwitter users turning their icons green in solidarity with the Iranianopposition party.With a team of researchers at the University of Southern California’sAnnenberg School for Communications and Journalism, we have been mappingmany recent examples of groups repurposing pop culture towards socialjustice. Our focus is on what we call participatory culture: in contrastto mass media’s spectator culture, digital media has allowed many moreconsumers to take media in their own hands, hijacking culture for theirown purposes. Shared narratives provide the foundation for strong socialnetworks, generating spaces where ideas get discussed, knowledge getsproduced, and culture gets created. In this process, fans are acquiringskills and building a grassroots infrastructure for sharing theirperspectives on the world. Much as young people growing up in a huntingsociety may play with bows and arrows, young people coming of age in aninformation society play with information.The Harry Potter Alliance’s Andrew Slack calls this process “culturalacupuncture”, suggesting that his organisation has identified a vitalpressure point in the popular imagination and sought to link it to largersocial concerns. The alliance has mobilised more than 100,000 young peopleworldwide to participate in campaigns against genocide in Africa; insupport of workers’ rights and gay marriage; to raise money for disasterrelief in Haiti; to call attention to media concentration and many othercauses. J K Rowling’s creation Harry Potter, Slack argues, realised thatthe government and the media were lying to the public in order to maskevil, organised his classmates to form Dumbledore’s Army and went out tochange the world. Slack asks his followers what evils Dumbledore’s Armywould be battling in our world. In Maine, the alliance organised acompetition between fans affiliated with the houses of the fictionalHogwarts school, to see who could get the most voters to the polls in areferendum on equal marriage rights. All this may mobilise young peoplewho have traditionally felt excluded or marginalised from the politicalprocess.Such efforts may sound cynical (in that they give up on the power ofreason to convert the masses) or naïve (in that they believe in mythsrather than realities). In fact, there is always a moment whenparticipants push aside comforting fantasy to deal with the complexitiesof what’s really happening.This new style of activism doesn’t require us to paint ourselves blue; itdoes ask that we think in creative ways about the iconography that comesto us through every available media channel. Consider the ways that Dorathe Explorer, the Latina girl at the centre of a popular American publictelevision series, has been deployed by both the right and the left todramatise the likely consequences of Arizona’s new immigration reform law;or how the US Tea Party has embraced a mash-up of Obama and the Joker fromThe Dark Knight Returns (one of the Batman films) as a recurring image inits battle against healthcare reform.Such analogies don’t capture the complexities of these policy debates,just as we can’t reduce the distinctions between American politicalparties to the differences between elephants and donkeys (icons from anearlier decade’s political cartoonists). Such tactics work only if we readthese images as metaphors, standing in for something bigger than they canfully express. Avatar can’t do justice to the old struggle over theOccupied Territories and the YouTube video is no substitute for informeddiscourse about what’s at stake there. Yet their spectacular andparticipatory performance does provide the emotional energy needed to keepon fighting. And that may direct attention to other resources......Henry Jenkins is Provost’s Professor of Communication, Journalism, andCinematic Arts at the University of Southern California and author ofFans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, New YorkUniversity Press, 2006(1) See Colin Murphy, “Avatar, not as liberal as it looks”, Le Mondediplomatique, English edition, April 2010.(2) Natalie Zemon Davis, “Women on Top: Symbolic sexual inversion andpolitical disorder in early modern Europe”, in Barbara Babcock, TheReversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society, CornellUniversity Press, Ithaca, 1978.(3) Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Ageof Fantasy, The New Press, New York, 2006.

Vacancy: parttime curator at V2_ V2_ was founded in 1981 and is located in the center of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. V2_ runs a presentation space, a media lab, a publishing house and is actively developing an archive related to our almost 30 years of activities. V2_ is an interdisciplinary center for art, technology and media that pays special attention to research and experimentation. Thus, it has many collaborative ties with organisations in various sectors (a.o. the arts, universities, and the social and cultural sector). This research concentrates on the relationship between art and life, technology, media and society. Beside being a place for experts and researchers, we develop public events to make our research, which is practice and theory, accessible for a larger audience. Over the past 30 years, a growing dome stic and international audience has had the opportunity to get acquainted with prominent artists, thinkers and projects in the field of art, media and technology through exhibitions, present ations, symposiums and performances and the Dutch Electronic Art Festival - DEAF. V2_ currently employs a permanent staff of 22 people from different backgrounds and nationalities. Partime curatorThe position is focused on the development of V2_'s presentations, exhibitions, conferences and other activities. We are looking for a curator that has a profound interest and knowledge in combining practice and theory. The successful applicant will have all necessary knowledge and experience in the field of interdisciplinary and contemporary art in the context of its technological culture, and to maintain an international network of contacts in this area. Experience in organising interdisciplinary exhibitions, workshops and conferences is a must. In light of the international character of the position, the curator must speak different languages (English at a minimum) and preferably also Dutch. Because the position concerns interdisciplinary activities, the successful applicant should be well-informed in multiple fields. General knowledge in media theory is important. We require:contemporary art, technology, science and society, who is able to articulate and translate concepts into public presentations as well as into research activities. conferences and hands-on presentations. The curator will work in a small team that is responsible for researching and developing the public events at V2_ and play an important role in developing a public discours in the context of our activities. We offer a part-time position (app. 3 days a week), beginning on November 1st 2010 (starting date can be discussed). Deadline for the application October 15, 2010 Send your application to:V2_ Institute for Unstable mediaAtt: Alex AdriaansensEmail: alex-IsuZpU9mC/8< at >public.gmane.orgFor more information about our activities: www.V2.nl

The RidingsHegelung tuned with lowered melody string, Azure Carter:The riding pieces.http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/riding1.mp3http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/riding2.mp3These are fairly complex; the hegelung's range is extended and the numberof independent notes is pretty much doubled. The result is somethingthat's closer to taksim than dulcimer accompaniment. Apparently there'sprecedent for this sort of tuning in Mindanao as well.These kinds of works seem to embody structures that might otherwise beapproach philosophically - issues of phrasing, body, language, recursiv-ity, 'father-mother' structures, immersive phenomenology, relevancetheory, communality - they're all present. I'm not always sure how tobring these back into descriptive/academic language, traditionalphilosophical discourse. Everything is presenced, and sound reveals another not otherwise accounted-for.

A good complement to our (Geert Lovink & me) 10 theses on Wikileaks.cheers, p+3D!Original to: http://chrchristensen.wordpress.com/(August 10, 2010)Also appeared (in French) in Le Monde Diplomatique, September issue.Wikileaks: Three Digital MythsBy Christian Christensen (Uppsala University)Published in Le Monde Diplomatique, August 9, 2010The release of the Afghan War Diaries on Wikileaks, with stories publishedin The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel by agreement withWikileaks, has made news around the world. Le Monde Diplomatique, inconjunction with Owni and Slate.fr, have also made the documents availableonline via a dedicated website. The security implications of the leakedmaterial will be discussed for years to come. Meanwhile the release ofover 90,000 documents has generated debate on the rising power of digitaljournalism and social media. Many of the discussions are rooted in what Icall internet or digital myths — myths which are rooted in romantic,deterministic notions of technology.Myth 1: The power of social mediaMedia experts and commentators are commonly asked what the Wikileaks casetells us about the power of social media in contemporary society,particularly in the coverage of war. There is nothing wrong with thisquestion, but it does illustrate a troubling tendency to place all formsof social media (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Wikileaks) under thesame huge umbrella. The myth is that social media are homogenous by virtueof their technologies. But Wikileaks is nothing like Twitter or YouTube.What separates it from other forms of social media is the review processthat submitted material must go through in order to be posted to the site.This might seem like a detail, but it strikes at the heart of“techo-utopian” notions of an “open commons” where anyone and everyone canpost (almost) anything for all to read, hear and see.The real power of Wikileaks is not so much the technology (it helps, butthere are millions of websites out there) but the trust readers have inthe authenticity of what they are reading; they believe that those workingat Wikileaks stand behind the veracity of the material. There areliterally hundreds of videos on YouTube from Iraq and Afghanistan showingcoalition forces engaged in questionable, and in some cases obviouslyillegal, acts of aggression. Yet none of these clips have had anythinglike the impact of the single video posted to Wikileaks showing scores ofcivilians (and two Reuters journalists) gunned down by high-poweredaircraft artillery in a Baghdad suburb. Why? Because while completeopenness might be attractive in theory, information is only as valuable asits reliability, and Wikileaks has an organisational review structure inplace that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and most blogs (for obvious reasons)do not. All social media are not created equal, and so their power is farfrom equal.Myth 2: The nation-state is dyingIf the Wikileaks case has taught us anything, it is that the nation-stateis most certainly not in decay. A great deal of discourse surrounding theinternet, and social media in particular, revolves around the premise thatwe now live in a borderless digital society.The notion of the nation-state in decline has had a great deal of currencywithin certain spheres of academia for a number of years, but the eventsof the past few weeks should give us pause. Those in charge of Wikileaksclearly understand the vital role of the nation-state, particularly whenit comes to law. Despite New York University media scholar Jay Rosen’sclaim that it is “the world’s first stateless news organisation,”Wikileaks is very much territorially bound.Wikileaks is semi-officially based in Sweden and has all the protectionoffered to whistleblowers and guarantees regarding anonymity of sourcesunder Swedish law. As the New Yorker reported in June 2010, Wikileaks ishosted on a Swedish ISP called PRQ. Material submitted to Wikileaks firstgoes through PRQ, and then to servers located in Belgium. Why Belgium, youmay ask? Because Belgium has the second strongest laws for the protectionof sources. And Wikileaks founder Julian Assange chose Iceland as thelocation for decrypting the aerial video footage of the killings inBaghdad. Iceland recently passed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative,devised to make the country a global haven for whistleblowers,investigative journalism and freedom of speech.Beyond Wikileaks, we have other reminders of the importance of states andlaws in the fluid digital world: the recent decisions by the United ArabEmirates and Saudi Arabia to instigate bans on the messenger function onBlackBerry handsets, or the seemingly never-ending legal ban on YouTubeTurkey. While it’s true that the Wikileaks structure is set up to bypassthe laws of certain countries (enabled by digital technology), it alsomakes use of other countries’ laws. Wikileaks isn’t lawless – it’s justmoving the entire game to places where the rules are different.Myth 3: Journalism is dead (or almost)Reports of the death of journalism have been greatly exaggerated (toborrow from Mark Twain). The Wikileaks case speaks to the power oftechnology to make us re-think what we mean by “journalism” in the early21st century. But it also consolidates the place of mainstream journalismwithin contemporary culture. Wikileaks decided to release the Afghandocuments to The Guardian, the New York Times and Der Spiegel weeks beforethey were released online — mainstream media outlets, not “alternative”(presumably sympathetic) publications such as The Nation, Z Magazine orIndyMedia. The reason is surely that these three news outlets are topinternational news agenda-setters. Few outlets (leaving aside broadcasterssuch as the BBC or CNN) have so much clout as the New York Times and theGuardian – and being published in English helps exposure. The Wikileakspeople were savvy enough to realise that any release of the documentsonline without prior contact with select news outlets would lead to achaotic rush of unfocused articles the world over.As it was, attention turned straight to the three newspapers in question,in which a large number of the documents had already been analysed andsummarised. And the role of Wikileaks was not lost in an informationmaelstrom. In the death of journalism thesis (as in that of the death ofthe nation-state), change is mistaken for elimination. The release of theAfghan Diaries shows that mainstream journalism still holds a good deal ofpower, but the nature of that power has shifted (compared to 20 or 30years ago). An example is Executive Editor Bill Keller’s recounting of thecontact between New York Times editorial staff and the White Housefollowing the release of the documents:“The administration, while strongly condemning WikiLeaks for making thesedocuments public, did not suggest that The Times should not write aboutthem. On the contrary, in our discussions prior to the publication of ourarticles, White House officials, while challenging some of the conclusionswe drew from the material, thanked us for handling the documents withcare, and asked us to urge WikiLeaks to withhold information that couldcost lives. We did pass along that message.”This is an astonishing admission by the executive editor of the US’s mostrespected newspaper. For two reasons. The description of the encounterwith the White House shows pride in the White House’s praise, at odds withtraditional notions of the press as the watchdogs over those in power.Second, the New York Times’s role as intermediary between the USgovernment and Wikileaks illustrates an interesting new power dynamicwithin news and information in the US.At the heart of the death of journalism myth (and that of the role ofsocial media) is the presumption of a causal relationship between accessto information and democratic change. The idea that mere access to rawinformation de facto leads to change (radical or otherwise) is as romanticas the notion that mere access to technology can do the same. Information,just as technology, is only useful if the knowledge and skills required toactivate such information are present. Wikileaks chose its threenewspapers not because they necessarily represented ideological kindredspirits for Julian Assange and his colleagues, but because they wereprofessionally, organisationally and economically prepared for the job ofdecoding and distributing the material provided.In a digital world that is constantly being redefined as non-hierarchical,borderless and fluid, Wikileaks has reminded us that structure,boundaries, laws and reputation still matter.

From: contact-ohdWfduTxIleoWH0uzbU5w< at >public.gmane.orgIn August, right in the middle of the summer holidays, EXGAE received a certified fax from the lawyers of the Spanish royalties collection society, Sociedad General de Autores y Editores (SGAE), demanding that EXGAE disappear from the face of the earth within the next seven days. If it fails to comply, it went on, SGAE will proceed, without any further notice, to sue EXGAE for damages, unfair competition and infringement of the “SGAE” brand.The SGAE law firm, Lehmann and Caballeiro, allege unfair competition in regards to the name EXGAE and the nature of the activities it carries out, under the provisions of the Patents Law.Civil society has already denounced the fact that culture industry multinationals like the SGAE use copyright, patents and economic coercion for censorship, to silence dissidence and to restrict freedom of expression.Citizens have made it clear that lawsuits and threats will not stop the just development of the digital era.We’re sorry, but it will no longer wash. The SGAE lawyers will have to find some other business.And what´s more we doubt that SGAE´s associates would want their interests to be defended in this way.EXGAE won’t disappear within seven days. EXGAE is here to stay.Together, we are bringing down a monopoly and building a future that is accessible, sustainable, and beneficial for everybody.No! to the use of copyright for censorship purposes.EXGAE is a non-profit platform. It emerged from the desire of a group of associations and individuals to share – among themselves and with anybody who many need them – the tools to defend themselves from the abuses of the part of the cultural industries that tries by any means possible to hinder the transition to the digital era, which is natural and unavoidable. Through practice, EXGAE promotes the normalisation of new modes of creating, understanding and producing. EXGAE dialogues and works with everybody, and firmly believes that the old cultural models must coexist with the new ones, without the first trying to hamper the progress of the second. And it does so for the benefit of artists, citizens and cultural entrepreneurs.EXGAE works on six fronts:• Offering legal advice through specialised lawyers;• Reporting irregularities in the management of royalties collection societies and cultural industries, when they go against the interests of artists, and when they are detrimental to users and entrepreneurs;• Analysing the social and political situation and designing proposals for legislative intervention;• Organising cultural events aimed at “normalizing” the new form of cultural production, such as the oXcars;• Amplifying the power of national and international networks, promoting and harmonizing the capacities of each node;• Creating viral campaigns.In recent years, EXGAE has been one of the most active groups in the struggle for civil rights in the digital environment, at the Spanish, European and international level.It has participated in the organization of important milestones for freedoms on the Internet:• The fight against the Spanish Law of Sustainable Economy (LES) and the founding of RED SOSTENIBLE ;• The creation of tools for legislative reforms such as the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge ;• The organization of major mobilisations in 2010, such as the (D’) Evolution Summit, which reached more than 150,000 followers during the European Summit of Ministers of Culture• Internet will Not be another TV jointly with international consumer defence organisations.It provides information free of charge to over 1400 people each year and its web site http://exgae.net/ is visited by around 10,000 people per month.* If you want to help us, use and spread the information and reference material on our web. Follow us and participate on Facebook and Twitter. Let’s multiply, share, and not let them intimidate us.We will keep you informed.http://twitter.com/EXGAEhttp://twitter.com/EXGAEcahttp://www.facebook.com/EXGAE.net“(…) Times have changed. The Internet allows the horizontal exchange of information and culture among everybody. We all consume and produce culture at the same time. This is why the means of cultural production must adapt to this new democracy, and not the other way around (…).” EXGAE Manifesto “Greed Breaks the Sack,” July 2008If you don’t know what EXGAE is link here:http://exgae.net/que-es-exgae/what-is-exgaeRelated Files (spanish):The SGAE certified fax:http://omploader.org/vNWhvYw/sgae-vs-exgae.pdfOur responses:http://exgae.net/respuestas-de-exgae-al-burofax-de-los-abogados-de-la-sgae

Immanent Singularities: A Minor Compositions Interview with Bruno Gullihttp://www.minorcompositions.info/gulli.htmlAs a philosopher and academic worker, Bruno Gulli is nothing if not untimely. In an era when the labor of thought, the work that creates new concepts, finds itself squeezed by an ever-increasing array of restrictions (from journal and publisher limitations to lack of time from overwork and precarious employment), Gulli bucks these trends in a spectacular fashion. Rather than composing 8000 word chunks of pabulum, simply recycling tired clichés or niceties, Gulli has embarked on composing a three-volume inquiry into the relation between ethics, labor, and ontology. Such an approach might not have seemed all that remarkable fifty years ago, but today to carry out such a fundamental rethinking of our categories of political thought and discourse is paradoxically no longer appreciated, and therefore all the more necessary. Gulli’s first book, The Labor of Fire (2005, Temple University Press) led Michael Hardt to comment that the work of Gulli, along with others carrying out similar work, will renew the Marxist tradition. This renewal, he claims, will not be of a scientific, structuralist, or humanist Marxism, but rather a philosophical approach to Marx centered on the concept of labor its power of social transformation. High words of praise indeed. This interview was conducted shortly after the publication of his most recent book Earthly Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor (2010, Temple University Press).Minor Compositions: First off I wanted to ask you about what you describe as the “dignity of individuation.” In particular how does this indicate a shift in theorizing the relation between ethics and politics? Could this perhaps be connected to the Zapatistas’ notion of the dignity of revolt or Simon Critchley’s elaboration (2007) of an anarchic meta-politics based upon the infinite demand of the ethical?Bruno Gulli: “Dignity of individuation” provides a metaphysical (or ontological) grounding for both politics and ethics. Conversely, it says that metaphysical (or ontological) definitions cannot escape a political and (especially) ethical dimension. It is then a synthetic and poetic concept, à la Vico, where some of the most basic problems of the philosophical tradition are reflected and, at the same time, expanded. The concept has two parts: “individuation” refers to, and is drawn from, the principle of individuation (principium individuationis), which, in particular, I understand in terms of John Duns Scotus’ concept of haecceity (or thisness), that is, what makes something the something that it is (but it has a history that goes beyond Duns Scotus). The problem with the concept of the principle of individuation, as Paolo Virno (2009) has also recently pointed out, has to do with the term “principle” – not with “individuation.” The latter indicates a process, and thus individuation is really individuating; the former, I might say from the point of view of my book, is a sign (anticipation or residue) of sovereignty. Conjugating “individuation” with “dignity,” once the word “principle” is eliminated, was for me an act of piracy – an act of piracy within philosophy. Differently from individuation, which can be and is applied to anything, which names the ordinary and regular, dignity is usually reserved for something which, to some degree, is extraordinary, which has distinguished itself for some reason. Even when we speak of human dignity (vis-à-vis other forms of life), we use this type of logic. Thus, the dignity of X indicates a lack, or a lesser degree, of dignity in Y. To say that dignity lies in individuation is to counter this type of logic, and following Leibniz, whose work I use a lot in the first chapter of my book, it is also to affirm that nothing is extraordinary, nothing other than regular, other than orderly – though of an order we may not like, not understand.All this does not imply a move away from politics onto the terrain of ethics alone, as if ethics were the pre-political or non-political. Instead, it is a way of trying to rethink the categories of the political. This rethinking cannot distinguish between the political and the ethical – a distinction that I totally reject. I don’t know if I would call this meta-politics, following Simon Critchley. Indeed, I am not interested in giving it a name – I don’t think I would be able to do so. What I think is that calling attention to something like the dignity of individuation, that is, to the idea that worth is not determined by any relation of externality, but is intrinsic to the coming of whatever, to the fact of life, is already a way of rethinking the political outside of the logic of inclusion and exclusion, which, it seems to me, constitutes the most important problem in political thinking throughout history, as well as (and particularly) today. History then. You ask about a possible connection between the dignity of individuation and the Zapatistas’ notion of the dignity of revolt. Of course, there is one. History is for the Zapatistas “la palabra politica” – a history of conquest and subjugation, of sovereign crime and devastation. But it is also the history of revolt. The word “dignity,” the way I use it, comes directly from the Zapatista tradition, as well as from the tradition of philosophy, particularly from Kant. Dignity is then a political and ethical concept. Dignity of individuation reaches into the depths of history, shatters the ontological ground, and presents itself as a new singularity – by abandoning the false splendor of that history to its own destiny of decadence, and by creating a new essential difference.MC: Following on from that, one concept that is key for in this book in the notion of singularity, which you come at drawing primarily from a medieval tradition of figures such as St. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Can you elaborate on your usage of singularity. What does it bring to your consideration? And how might be older notion of singularity mesh with that which has been developed more recently in the work of Guattari, as a process of re-singularization, and in Bifo’s recent work?BG: In the Grundrisse (1993), Marx says that the concrete is “the concentration of many determinations.” This can be accepted as a (very good) definition of singularity. Singularity is the concrete. Yet, as we also learn from Marx, the concrete is the point of departure in reality, not in thought. Thus, we arrive at the concrete through a process of abstraction – starting from the abstract. In its immediacy, the concrete yields a “chaotic conception.” Indeed, as a moment of synthesis, singularity is this con-fusion. And although Marx adds that the concrete is “unity of the diverse,” what really counts here is not the word “unity” but, precisely, “the diverse.” Singularity is difference.In Earthly Plenitudes, I identify singularity with the dignity of individuation. In this sense, what I can say, to begin with, is that it is a metaphysical and political/ethical concept. What interests me in this is the relation of singularity to commonality on the one hand, but also to plurality and universality. As far as I know, in Duns Scotus we find the first most rigorous formulation of singularity as haecceity, or thisness. This is perhaps a sufficient reason for going back to him in this respect. What I find particularly interesting in his work is the necessary interplay of the singular and the common. In Labor of Fire, I use Scotus’ concept in a section called “The thisness of production,” in which I deal with Marx’s concept of “essential difference” – a mode of production as an essential difference. Communism would then be a new essential difference, a way in which the common is re-singularized. Thus, I don’t think there is any conflict with the notion of singularity worked out by Guattari or by Franco Berardi (whose recent, beautiful book, The Soul at Work (2009), I’ve just finished reading). Obviously, the idea of communism as singularity, the idea of re-singularization, may be drawn from Marx’s work (or from other venues) without having to go back to the medieval tradition. But for me a proper understanding of the concept of singularity requires precisely that. In any case, I think that the work of Duns Scotus is, perhaps strangely, very much part of our contemporary tradition (notably, in and through the work of Deleuze) so that when we deal with concepts such as that of singularity a relation to Scotus is, however implicitly, (always-)already present.Given the approach I take in Earthly Plenitudes, in particular my examination of Leibniz’s thought in chapter one, the reference to Scotus acquires even more importance. Indeed, in his Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz explicitly refers to Duns Scotus’ haecceity when he works out his own notion of singularity as the notion of individual substance. In Leibniz, the singular is also the universal insofar as any individual substance expresses the whole universe in a different way. Here the concept of singularity, even more than in Scotus, is linked to that of contingency. The question is not only about the what and the how of a thing. Indeed, the main question is why this event happened and not another, which was, in principle (ex hypothesis), equally possible. What comes to be a one, “the concentration of many determinations,” is the end of the process of singularization.It is then evident that singularity is not simply a one; it is not individuality. Jean-Luc Nancy brilliantly shows the relation of singularity to plurality, and it is because of this that I rely so much on his work in my own book (at least in the chapter on singularity or the dignity of individuation). Singularity is plurality, and, in this sense, it is pre-individuality; it makes the individual, but it is not the same as the individual. This way of thinking is not altogether new. It can be found in Leibniz; it can be found in Marx – in different forms.MC: In this book you’re reconsidering and largely rejecting the notion of sovereignty, including Bataille’s attempt to formulate a radical notion of sovereignty. Your critique of Bataille is based around what you describe as his confusion of to be useful / to serve, and thus sovereignty cannot be equated with subjectivity. This strikes me as quite similar a move to that made by someone like Hakim Bey, who famously finds it quite difficult to decide in his politics between a position of anarchism and monarchism. This might seem quite bizarre at first until this Bataille-ian conception of sovereignty is acknowledged. When Bey says that we are sovereigns of our skins before the advent of the political (2003), this follows directly from this radicalized conception of sovereignty. I largely agree with your critique of Bataille’s distinction, particularly as it cannot seem to help but to develop in very problematic individualistic directions. But then you also that in the equation of sovereignty and subjectivity, sovereignty becomes ordinary and common, and thus “finds its truth in the concept of communism.” How do you make this move, going beyond Bataille’s formulation, but seemingly maintaining some elements from it?BG: This is actually Bataille’s move, but I don’t agree with it. Better: I think that at this point the concept of sovereignty is no longer necessary. Yet, Bataille chooses to retain it. In reality, it makes no sense to say that everybody is sovereign. This is the same problem we have with Kant’s concept of the kingdom of ends, in which precisely everybody is a legislator and sovereign. But we can apply to this the same type of criticism Maritain applies to the concept of people’s sovereignty: the people separated from, and dominating, the people; the people above the people. The sovereignty I have over myself, even over my skin (to use your reference to Bey), implies the same kind of contradiction: I would be over myself. But the truth is that both this “I” and this “self” are in question. If the singularities we come to be have, as Nancy says, “a plurality of origins” (2000), if our subjectivity and individuality is “an intersection of singularities,” what we have before the political, before the law, is the fact that there are “skins” – soon to be institutionalized. Sovereignty is the name for this process of institutionalization, for all institutionalization processes. Singularization is something different. I don’t want to say that it is the opposite of institutionalization. Rather, in the manner of Spinoza, I prefer to say that it is different from it. Indeed, when we consider singularization from the point of view of what we have become (i.e., institutionalized being, “docile bodies,” rights-bearing individuals, whose rights are more often denied than not, legal, political subjects, etc.), we must say that re-singularization, can only have the movement of a return. This return is not a going back to a previous, perhaps only hypothetical state before politics and the law; it is rather a return into the anarchy of the plural and common.MC: You argue for disposing of sovereignty within a radical ontology of labor, for producing a philosophy and ontology is not relegated to a marginalized position. This would be, to use your words, a labor that “forms and shapes the thing, is neither servile nor sovereign,” rather it is “the common, ordinary labor that founds new, immanent plenitudes.” Can you describe how you understand how this might be done, working from within the intersections of culture, labor, and politics? Or perhaps projects you know that show promising beginnings of such a process.BG: The labor that is neither servile nor sovereign follows from my analysis and critique, in Labor of Fire, of the category of productive labor. There I use the neither/nor logic to show that the categories of productivity and unproductivity are ‘invented’ by the system of capital. In Earthly Plenitudes, the critique of sovereignty joins that of productivity to show that categories of domination (e.g., servility, sovereignty) are also similarly constructed. The common and ordinary labor is not the labor that, typically, no one wants to do, the labor of the “vulgar craftsmen and hired laborers” in Aritostle’s Politics, of the illegal immigrants in Arizona, or the Africans in Rosarno. It is not, in other words, a labor that is common and ordinary as opposed to one which has status and dignity. Instead, the common and ordinary quality of this labor comes from the dismantling of all dichotomies of domination: productivity/unproductivity, servility/sovereignty, etc. It comes from the idea, to go back to Leibniz, that everything is ordinary, and that everything is common. This can be done in various ways. I give some examples when I address, in chapters four and five of the book, the questions of contingent labor and of the work of care. In relation to the first question, I can say that either no labor should be contingent or all labor should. If contingency simply named the fact that we worked when we wanted, or when the need arose (and then went back to other activities), it wouldn’t be a problem. I think you say the same in your excellent book, Imaginal Machines (2009), when you say that contingency started as a subjective re-appropriation of time, to be then co-opted by the system of capital. Thus, the problem today is that we are forced to work contingently. Contingency becomes a form of slavery, similar to (credit cards) debt. As Joe Berry says in his book, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower (2005), contingent workers experience “a permanent lack of permanence” – that is the paradox, whereby contingency turns into necessity. Yet, a labor that is neither servile nor sovereign is one that experiences the genuine, let’s say, philosophical, dimension of contingency, that is, the modality that names that which can be and not be, that is, again, freedom. Because, certainly, there is work to be done, work that has a social character (as Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio (1994) said years ago in The Jobless Future) – yet most of the work we do (we are forced to do) is either useless or harmful, or both. Thus, the work that “founds new, immanent plenitudes” is the work posited by real, organic needs and desires, not by those dictated by capital and its logic of oppression, alienation, and exploitation. The same is with the work of care, arising from facts of life, yet channeled into political and economic categories that make it, first of all, unproductive and, second, highly exploitable and exploited. But the work of care, just like the work of an artist (to paraphrase Kittay), also constitutes immanent plenitudes by bringing back into a life the chaotic and healthy plurality of possibilities which institutional isolation would quickly eliminate.MC: On the question of caring labor, you reject the notion that caring labor and activities of social reproduction are directly productive of value for capital. This is within a context of finding within the forms of caring labor the merging of non-alienated relations and production, or what you call as a mode of care. There seems to great value, no pun intended, in pursuing such an approach. But I wouldn’t want to toss aside the legacy of Marxist feminism, for instance in the history of movements such as Wages for Housework and figures such as Silvia Federici, which based their politics precisely on an argument of the value producing nature of social reproduction, housework and caring labor. Is it possible to hold together a position that caring labor might indeed be productive of value for capital, at least within some circumstances, but also contains the potential for creating post- capitalist relations and interactions?MC: Yes, absolutely. What I tried to say in the book is that caring labor and activities of social reproduction are, traditionally, not recognized as productive by the logic of capital. This is part of capital’s dubious distinction between productive and unproductive forms of labor and activities. What I say is that the distinction as a whole must be rejected, and that means rejecting the logic of capital. Obviously, within that logic, and as a temporary form of struggle, the notion that these forms of labor and activities should be recognized as productive, hence compensated accordingly by means of the wage, is also correct. And I agree with the notion that the struggle for the wage is a political struggle. But I wouldn’t want to say that the solution to the problem of the productive/unproductive dichotomy is to make all unproductive labor productive; also because productive labor itself (as productive of capital) must be thoroughly eliminated. Let me be very clear about this again: in themselves forms of labor are neither-productive-nor-unproductive (this is the, perhaps somewhat cumbersome, yet very important and fruitful, category I develop in Labor of Fire – one that is not truly grasped in general). Forms of labor become productive or unproductive only in relation to the position they occupy within the process of value formation, from a strictly capitalist point of view. Thus, I absolutely agree with the Marxist feminist contention that indeed these forms of labor and activities are essential to the making of value; it is evident that the reproduction of labor-power would be impossible without them. And they are more than simply productive (in the narrow, technical sense of political economy; that is, directly producing and increasing capital); they are highly useful and actually absolutely necessary to society, for without these forms of labor and these activities everyday life would not be possible, communities could not exist. There is a very serious and radical challenge to the system of capital made by movements such as Wages for Housework (and I often refer to the classic The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community by Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa (1972) in the last chapter of my book). Of course, housework is work not recognized as such, and this lack of recognition only ensures stronger and more specific forms of social domination and oppression. But it is not recognized as work on the basis, precisely, of the dubious, yet almost unanimously accepted, distinction between productive and unproductive forms of labor. And while the wage is an important recognition of the fact that housework is also work, it constitutes, at the same time, the most basic and common instrument of social domination and oppression. Thus, my answer to your question is, emphatically, yes, caring labor is productive of value for capital, yet more importantly it contains the potential for creating post-capitalist relations and interactions. Under capital, caring labor is doubly exploited, or super-exploited, because while it is essentially productive, it is not recognized as such – it is instead called unproductive. In virtue of this situation, caring labor has the ability to show the inconsistency and falseness of the productive/unproductive dichotomy and accomplish what I call the return of labor to itself, its mode of neutrality as to the categories of the productive and unproductive alike, a whole new notion of “productive” if you will, which to avoid confusion I’d rather call “creative” – the mode of care.In the chapter on caring labor I also deal with the question of disability and, following Eva Feder Kittay (1999), of dependency as an inescapable fact of the human condition. In disability and dependency, it is easier to find instances of human activity more readily reducible and reduced to the category of the unproductive, and it is actually more difficult to argue (unless we take a heterodox standpoint) that these activities have inherent worth and should be respected and compensated accordingly because they are productive. Indeed, from the point of view of the logic of capital, with its requirements of efficiency, speed, avoidance of unproductive times, etc., they are unproductive. This shows the partial, only relative, importance of the logic of the wage, and the political struggle based on it. Indeed, the wage always operates within a logic of inclusion and exclusion. The fact that more forms of labor may be deemed productive and thus included within the system of the wage does not eliminate the essentially unjust and violent distinction between the productive and the unproductive. But how about, precisely, these unproductive forms? Where is their worth? If there is any. I think it’s the same problem we find with the category of the citizen, a category whereby that of the non-citizen is immediately called forth. The solution cannot be to include more people within the category of citizenship, but still leave many outside. Rather, the solution is to make the category all-inclusive and thus explode it. The same with productivity. If I am someone with a severe mental impairment and what I do is engage in activities that are evidently meaningful to me, but meaningless to most or all other people, shouldn’t I get a wage (if the issue is that of the wage), or more generally, shouldn’t my activities be considered productive? Evidently not, from the point of view of capital, of value as an economic category. Yet, if productivity becomes all-inclusive and the category itself is exploded (and again, to avoid confusion, I would call it creativity), then my performance is as important (as useful to society, the diversity of the social, and as worthy) as that of the engineer, the high-tech worker, the politician, etc. In any case, whether a person is productive or not, whether s/he works or does not work, s/he ought to have access to the means for the good life (that means can be money, if we stay within the logic of money, or any other thing). But, and in this I agree with an important point Berardi makes toward the end of his book, the dogma of the wage must be abandoned.MC: Lastly, I wanted to ask you a question or two about contingent academic labor, a subject which you discuss in the last chapter of the book, and also takes up a good bit of your working time personally. (As a side note, I’m still amazed that you’ve found the time to work on a trilogy of books given the constraints of working as a contingent member of faculty). Contingent academic labor is clearly marked by increased pressures, and contradictions, as it moves even deeper within the heart of academic capitalism. But perhaps there are also radical potentials within these contradictions, for re-grounding the very ontology and radicality of labor you describe. Or perhaps exhibited within the ongoing wave of student and campus radicalism that has been occurring in recent years. Perhaps it is, as described by the title of a recent conference in Minneapolis, “Beneath the University, the Commons” (http://beneaththeu.org). What potentials do you see for growing out of this politics of the edu-factory?BG: Yes, I agree that there are radical potentials within the contradictions of contingent academic labor, or of contingent labor in general. In fact, I use contingent labor in the academy as an illustration of a more general situation. Contingent labor is part of the labor of bare life. I’ve recently read Christian Marazzi’s important book, The Violence of Financial Capitalism (2010), so, together with the notion of bare life, I’d also like to make a reference to the notion of biocapitalism. Contingency is one of the modalities in which the violent logic of capital is applied to life in its totality. In Earthly Plenitudes I say, perhaps in a poetic way, that contingent workers are attached to nothing but their own shadow, or to their shadow as to nothing. But I think that this is actually very true, that is, it can be taken quite literally. What’s interesting is that the word contingency, as applied to labor in the post-Fordist and now biocapitalist economy, fully retains its original philosophical meaning: being able to be and not be, to do and not do, to work and not work. Contingency is freedom. However, this freedom is even more ironic and tragic than the double freedom of workers described by Marx in Capital. This is a freedom that from contingency goes all the way to the “valorization of the ‘free labor’ of users,” of which Tiziana Terranova (quoted in Marazzi) speaks. Or rather, the latter is contingency in its purest state.Of course, in real life things often stand otherwise. To quote Joe Berry again, this contingency is a “permanent lack of permanence,” and thus it turns into a necessity. In my book, I distinguish (even playfully, I must confess) between necessary and non-necessary (or contingent) contingency. It is evident to everybody that, with due exceptions, what we find in our societies is the former, and not the latter. And this is true in the academy, as is in all other work environments. This being attached to nothing of contingent workers, but being truly attached to it, became tragically clear, for instance, in the violent events that took place in Rosarno (Calabria), sadly a fifteen-minute drive from my hometown, this past January. There, African immigrants, who were super-exploited during the orange-picking season by the local mafia and lived in conditions of utter poverty and deprivation, became the victims of systematic and vicious attacks initiated by the employers themselves. When they reacted, the violence became widespread, and they were “evacuated,” that is, deported, elsewhere by the Italian State. They were forced to leave without being able to collect their meager wages and few belongings. They found themselves in other Italian towns and cities, really attached to nothing but their own shadow. Contingency is this type of freedom, which resembles, paradoxically, a fact of nature (where freedom is negated), that is, the fact of bare life.Compared to Rosarno and other too many similar places in Italy and in the world, the situation in the academy isn’t so bad. But this is (should be) no consolation. Here, too, one finds super-exploitation, a different type of violence, and humiliation. I want to call attention, in the brief space of this interview, to a practice that is rarely talked about, even in the literature on academic contingent labor, but that I think is very important. I mean the so-called peer observation of contingents. It is in reality an inspection and a technique of control, which psychologically threatens and destabilizes the contingent workers, reminds them of their contingency (like the monk who periodically reminds his peers of the caducity and precariousness of life [brother, remember that you must die!] – but in the peer observation of contingents there is really no parity, and the observer is, or represents, the boss). This is a serious matter. In the CUNY [City University of New York] system, for instance, people are observed, not two or three times, but ten times, ten semesters in a row. If they work in different departments, they are observed in each. If they go from one college within the system to another, the process starts again. You have people who have years of teaching experience, who are published and respected, and yet are observed by any just- hired fulltime member, and so on and so forth. The system justifies this by saying that it is in the best interest of the contingent worker: the observation gives you grounds for a grievance in the eventuality of non-reappointment. But this isn’t true. First of all, because a college can justify non-reappointment in many ways; second, because an observation can go wrong for many reasons – and what are they going to do then? Let’s say a contingent worker has had six excellent observations, and the seventh, and the eighth aren’t good. What can the consequences be? Moreover, and this is a matter that logic and the philosophy of science teach us, an observation includes the observed and the observer: it is certainly not a situation of neutrality and objectivity. The truth is that this is a political question, of political control and discipline. Let me say that I am not speaking from a personal point of view. I have been observed at least twenty times within the CUNY system, and I have always had excellent reports, so I’m done with this. But I think that it is an offensive practice, an insult to the whole category of contingents within CUNY and similar university systems – and that is an insult to the super-exploited and damned majority of workers. I recently saw posts in the Edu-factory listserv about the inadequacy of academic peer review in journals. The situation is not that different, and the arguments that can be made against such practices are similar. It is important to recognize that in addition to economic super- exploitation, academic contingent workers also face a series of offensive practices that undermine their psychological and existential well-being, as well as their general health and their life: no good life.Yes, beneath the university, the commons. Just like they are beneath capitalist appropriation and accumulation in general. What I think is that a radical dismantling of the corporate university, as well as of the other institutions of capitalist society, is absolutely necessary. People want to learn and have a good life. The life of study, for Aristotle the highest type of life, is not a life of training – not training toward docility and productivity. It is rather the life in which there is an understanding of the order of things, and the possibility to modify this order for the sake of the good life, that is, of happiness. Probably, instead of the university, we need spaces of learning and care. Instead of institutional sadness (determined by stress, overworking, competition, and debt), we need spaces and moments of happiness. I think this is what the Edu-factory project also aims at, though I think that less emphasis should be put on research universities, and more on general, humanistic study. I teach in a community college where student radicalism is not too strong, also because most students work, have families, etc., and they come to school with the (perhaps to an extent illusory) idea that this can improve their lives and work situations. In other places, the student and faculty movement will certainly have a very positive impact on the way the university is run. Yet, even in the community college, most people have a genuine passion for studying and learning, and besides their focus on grades and the degree, they are exposed (certainly in some classes) to the possibility of thinking differently, of going beyond the institutional boundaries, reaching into life and thus, as I understand, the commons. Perhaps, this may contribute to social change as well, that is, to an understanding of the common character of knowledge.That knowledge is common means that the university as we know it today has no legitimate claim to its administration. The non-university will be a place that has a free and open access policy. Paying so much money to study (as to get in deep debt for life), taking stupid standardized tests just to be able to finally study what you want, having to bother people for useless letters of recommendation (as if your word, your person, your life had no worth whatsoever, carried no weight) – all these are practices that run counter to the idea of the commonality of knowledge and must be eliminated. The commons may appear if the university is dismantled. And the process is underway, though there will be (as there has already been, and there is right now) a lot of institutional repression and violence. The transnationalization of the production of social knowledge, linking the common projects and struggles happening in different places of the world, is in itself a way of reshaping the university, or a path into the future of the non-university. Just recently, the strikes and occupations from California to Italy, from Middlesex to Puerto Rico are a clear indication of this. And so is Edu-factory’s important emphasis on the question of debt. But this is something that goes well beyond the university as such, so that the movement (of the commonality and singularity of knowledge) is one that tends toward the reshaping of society as a whole.ReferencesAronowitz, Stanley and William DiFazio (1994)The Jobless Future. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Berry, Joe (2005) Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education. New York: Monthly Review Press.Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ (2009) Soul at Work: From Alienation to Autonomy. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).Bey, Hakim (2003) TAZ. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.Critchley, Simon (2007) Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. London. Verso.Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and Selma James (1972) The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press.Gulli, Bruno (2005) Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Gulli, Bruno (2010) Earthly Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Kittay, Eva Feder (1999) Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge.Marazzi, Christian (2010) The Violence of Financial Capitalism. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).Marx, Karl (1993) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy. London: Penguin.Nancy, Jean-Luc (2000) Being Singular Plural. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Shukaitis, Stevphen (2009) Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self- Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life. Brooklyn: AutonomediaVirno, Paolo (2009) “Angels and the General Intellect: Individuation in Duns Scotus and Gilbert Simondon,” parrhesia number 7: 58-67.--Stevphen ShukaitisAutonomedia Editorial Collectivehttp://www.autonomedia.orghttp://www.minorcompositions.info "Autonomy is not a fixed, essential state. Like gender, autonomy is created through its performance, by doing/becoming; it is a political practice. To become autonomous is to refuse authoritarian and compulsory cultures of separation and hierarchy through embodied practices of welcoming difference... Becoming autonomous is a political position for it thwarts the exclusions of proprietary knowledge and jealous hoarding of resources, and replaces the social and economic hierarchies on which these depend with a politics of skill exchange, welcome, and collaboration. Freely sharing these with others creates a common wealth of knowledge and power that subverts the domination and hegemony of the master’s rule." - subRosa Collective

A blogpost on Open Data that may be of interest http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2010/09/02/open-data-empowering-the-empowered-or-effective-data-use-for-everyone/ "Efforts to extend access to "data" will perhaps inevitably create a "datadivide" parallel to the oft-discussed "digital divide" between those whohave access to data which could have significance in their daily lives andthose who don't. Associated with this will, one can assume, be many of thesame background conditions which have been identified as likely reasons forthe digital divide-that is differences in income, education, literacy and soon. However, just as with the "digital divide", these divisions don'tsimply stop or be resolved with the provision of digital (or data) "access".What is necessary as well, is that those for whom access is being providedare in a position to actually make use of the now available access (to theInternet or to data) in ways that are meaningful and beneficial for them."And a follow-up http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/open-data-2-effective-data-use/"In the following I will itemize what I think are the various elements thatare required to be in place on the end user side for effective use of opendata to take place. Some of these are more essential than others but to mymind some component of each needs to be in place or large numbers of thosewho might otherwise make use of Open Data to improve their lives andparticularly the poor and marginalized will be excluded from making"effective use" of open data."MikeMichael Gurstein, Ph.D.Director: Centre for Community Informatics Research, Development andTraining (CCIRDT)Vancouver, CANADAhttp://www.communityinformatics.netNow blogging at http://gurstein.wordpress.com/

http://www.depers.nl/binnenland/508034/Geert-Wilders-explained.htmlDictionary 9/11: Geert Wilders explained by Peter WierengaYankees, Geert Wilders is coming your way! He will take a break from the formation of a new Dutch government and speak out against the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ in New York, this Saturday. In order to avoid an international scandal, De Pers presents a special Wilders Dictionary. What does Geert actually mean, whenever he gets a bit foul-mouthed?Al Gore-parrot (‘Al Gore-papegaai’):respectable climate scientistGeert Wilders is a bit of a climate sceptic and no friend of the Democrats. This does NOT mean he is in favour of destroying the earth, it means he doesn’t believe in driving slowly (the new coalition will raise the maximum speed to 80 miles per hour).Barbarian (‘barbaar’):the wise prophet Mohammed, peace be upon himOne of the many nicknames Wilders has in stock for the prophet of Allah. It does NOT mean that he does not respect Mohammed, it means that he holds different opinions on a wide range of subjects (see also: Mass Murderer & Paedophile).Fitna (‘Fitna’):melancholic road movieIn 2008 Wilders released an internet movie about the threat the Islam poses to the West. The Dutch government tried hard to prevent Fitna (Arabic for: tribulation) out of fear for retaliation. There was a happy ending: no riots in The Netherlands.Headscarf tax ( ‘kopvoddentaks’):economic stimulus bill for The NetherlandsThough some people would explain this as a measure to wipe out all headscarves in the Dutch streets, Wilders forgot to calculate the expected benefits of this new tax and apparently wasn’t very serious about it himself.Hank and Ingrid (‘Henk en Ingrid’):the average people who love their Muslim neighboursWilders likes to call his fictitious fans Henk and Ingrid, two common Dutch names. One and half million men and women voted for his Freedom Party at the last elections, some 15 percent of the electorate. They are worried about immigration and security, but most of them do not support extreme measures like an official ban of the Quran.Islamofascism (‘islamofascisme’):the majority of moderate MuslimsWilders believes Islam is a totalitarian ideology, instead of a religion. However, that does NOT stop him from signing a deal with CDA and VVD, political parties that do regard Islam as a religion.Left Church (‘Linkse Kerk’):Wilders’ dear friends from Dutch televisionWilders dislikes Dutch left leaning media, especially Hilversum-based public television – the Left Church - almost as much as he dislikes the Islam. He will never appear on their shows, EXCEPT when elections are near.Street terrorist (‘straatterrorist’):angry young manForeign teenagers harassing their neighbourhood are entitled to the same label ‘terrorist’ as members of Al Qaeda, Wilders insists. This does NOT mean he wants to deport street terrorists to Guantánamo Bay, he merely wants the police to shoot them in the knee.Tearing the Quran (‘de Koran verscheuren’):new reading technique for holy booksUnlike reverend Terry Jones, Wilders has never made plans to burn Qurans. Instead, he advised Muslims in this very newspaper to tear out all violent passages. A book the size of a Donald Duck magazine would remain.Total freak (‘mafketel’):head of friendly state, for example president ObamaThough Wilders called Turkish prime minister Erdogan a total freak, he does NOT hate all Turks. For his 47th birthday last Monday, he enjoyed the famous Turkish baklava, given to him by television show PowNews (see also: Left Church.)Tsunami of islamisation (‘tsunami van islamisering’):the multicultural melting pot of The NetherlandsWilders likes to compare the process of immigration with a natural disaster and wants to close the border for Muslims.But he withdrew an earlier statement that millions of Muslims who do not want to integrate should be deported out of Europe. Who is inside, stays inside. Cosy, or as we say: gezellig!

A Blackberry addict discovers grassroots enterprise in Indiahttp://shekharkapur.com/blog/2010/07/a-blackberry-addict-discovers-grassroots-enterprise-in-india/A greater ‘hole in the wall’ you cannot imagine.  A small fading signon the top saying “Cellphoon reapars” barely visible through thestreet vendors crowding the Juhu Market in Mumbai. On my way to buy anew Blackberry, my innate sense of adventure (foolishness) made mestop my car and investigate. A shop not more than 6 feet by 6 feet.Grimy and uncleaned.‘Can you fix a blackberry ?”‘ Of course , show me”” How old are you”‘Sixteen’Bullshit. He was no more than 10. Not handing my precious blackberryto a 10 year old in unwashed and torn T shirt and pyjama’s ! At leastif I buy a new one, they would extract the data for me. Something Ihave been meaning to do for a year now.‘What’s wrong with it ?”‘Well, the roller track ball does not respond. It’s kind of stuck andI cannot operate it”He grabs it from my hand and looks at it“You should wash your hands. Many customers have same problem. Rollerball get greasy and dirty, then no working’Look who was telling me to wash my hands. He probably has not bathedfor 10 days, I leaned out to snatch my useless blackberry back.” you come back in one hour and I fix it’I am not leaving all my precious data in this unwashed kid’s hands foran hour. No way.“who will fix it ?”‘Big brother’‘ How big is ‘big brother?’‘big …. umm ..thirty’Then suddenly big brother walks in. 30 ??? He is no more than 19.‘What problem ?’ He says grabbing the phone from my greasy hand intohis greasier hand. Obviously not trained in etiquette by an upmarketretail store manager.‘Normal blackberry problem. I replace with original part now. You mustwash your hand before you use this’What is this about me washing my hands suddenly ??  19 year old bigbrother rummages through a dubious drawer full of junk and fishes outa spare roller ball packed in cheap cellophane wrapper.  Original part? I doubt it.But by now I am in the lap of the real India and there is no escape ashe fishes out a couple of screwdrivers and sets about opening myBlackberry.“How long will this take ?”” Six minutes ”This I have to see. After spending the whole morning trying to find aBlackberry service centre and getting vague answers about sending thephone in for an assessment that might take a week, I settle down nextto his grubby cramped work space. At least I am going to be able towatch all my stored data vanish into virtual space. People crowdaround to see what’s happening. I am not breathing easy anyway. I tellmyself this is an adventure and literally have to stop myself grabbingmy precious blackberry back and making a quick escape.But in exactly six minutes this kid handed my blackberry back. He hadchanged the part and cleaned and serviced the the whole phone.  Takenit apart, and put it together. As I turned the phone on there was ahorrific 2 minutes where the phone would not come on. I looked at himwith such hostility that he stepped back.‘you have more than thousand phone numbers ?”‘yes’.‘backed up ?’‘no’‘Must back up. I do it for you. Never open phone before backing up’‘You tell me that now ?’But then the phone came on and my data was still there. Everyonewatching laughed and clapped. This was becoming a show. A six minuteshow.I asked him how much.‘ 500 rupees’ He ventured uncertainly . People around watched in gleeexpecting a negotiation. Thats $ 10 dollars as against the Rs 30,000($ 600)  I was a about to spend on a new blackberry or a couple ofweeks without my phone. I looked suitably shocked at his ‘high price ‘but calmly paid him. Much to the disapointment of the expectant crowd.‘do you have an Iphone ? Even the new ‘4′ one ?‘no, why”‘I break the code for you and load any ‘app’ or film you want. I giveyou 10 film on your memory stick on this one, and change every weekfor small fee’I went home having discovered the true entreprenuership that lies atwhat we call the ‘bottom of the pyramid’. Some may call it piracy,which of course it is, but what can you say about a two uneducated anduntrained brothers aged 10 and 19 that set up a ‘hole in the wall’shop and can fix any technology that the greatest technologists in theworld can throw at them.I smiled at the future of our country. If only we could learn toharness this potential.‘Please wash your hands before use’ were his last words to me. Now Iam feeling seriously unclean.Frederick Noronha+91-9822122436+91-832-2409490# 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

Plan CClue 1: The ZoneIn the Summer 2010 a group of six artists who barely knew each other embarked on a journey to Chernobyl, to develop a secretive Plan C. The story is not clear at all, and it will probably never be.They came from different parts of Europe and the US, and they had an appointment. Nobody knew about their final destination, nobody knew about Plan C. They told friends vague stories about "entering The Zone" and "throwing metal nuts". They had one thing in common: an obsession for Tarkovsky's 1979 movie Stalker.What happened after is still a secret.Follow http://www.PlanC.cc It will be as close as you’'ll ever get to the truth behind Plan C.

BEHIND THE NEWS with Doug Henwood"Best Music on an Economics & Politics Radio Show"Village Voice Best of NYC 2005many opening commentaries at:<http://doughenwood.wordpress.com/>--------------------------------------------------Just posted to my radio archive (and apologies for the delay)<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html>:September 9, 2010 Liz McNichol of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the fiscal crisis of the states • Yanis Varoufakis of the University of Athens fact-checks Michael Lewis Vanity Fair article on GreeceSeptember 4, 2010 (KPFA version) Jesse Eisinger talks about how banks flipped CDOs to each other, made billions, stuck us with the bill (article here) • Michael Yates talks about the miserable mood out there in the Real Americathey join:---------August 26, 2010 (back after long fundraising break) Paul Street, author of The Empire’s New Clothes, on the sorrows of Brand Obama • Christian Parenti, author of this article, on how the gov can kickstart the adoption of green technologies by the way it buysJuly 29, 2010 Michael Lind on infrastructure, who’s behind the parties, and the USA’s evolution into an oligarchy • Astra Taylor on digital serfdomJuly 22, 2010 Yves Smith, keeper of the Naked Capitalism blog and author of Econned, on the contribution of the dismal science to the financial crisis, and how Wall Street is worse than ever (rerun of March interview) • Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen, on the Dodd-Frank financial reform billJuly 15, 2010 Corey Robin on Ayn Rand • Alyssa Katz, author of Our Lot (just out in paperback!), on the state of the housing marketJuly 8, 2010 Sean Keenan, proprietor of the indie label Blanco Music and author of this great rant, on how music is faring in the Internet era • Ruy Teixeira, author of this paper, on how demographics favor the Dems (for what that’s worth) • Bill Hartung on military spending todayJuly 1, 2010 Cynthia Enloe, splendid analyst of gender and the militarization, on the McChrystal affair • Richard Seymour, author of The Meaning of David Cameron, on the new British governmentJune 24, 2010 Matthew Lasar on Pacifica governance • Max Fraser, author of this Nation article, on Andy Stern & SEIU • Keith Gessen and Hedge Fund Man, collaborators on Diary of a Very Bad Year, talk about the wacky bubble daysJune 17, 2010 Gary Rivlin, author of Broke USA, on how sleazy businesses make bundles by lending to the poor • Sarah Ellison, author of War At the Wall Street Journal, on Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Dow JonesMay 29, 2010 (KPFA only) Norman Finkelstein, author of This Time We Went Too Far, talks about Israel’s invasion of Gaza in late 2009, and about changing U.S. public opinion towards that country---Doug HenwoodProducer, Behind the NewsThursdays, 5-6 PM, WBAI, New York 99.5 FMSaturdays, 10-11 AM, KPFA, Berkeley 94.1 FM"best music on a show about economics & politics" - Village Voicepodcast: <http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/radio-feed.php>iTunes: <http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73801817>or <http://tinyurl.com/3bsaqb>Facebook group: <http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53240558375>."blog": <http://doughenwood.wordpress.com/>

Dear nettime!These days mark the 5th anniversary of what has been later coined bythe mainstream media as a "storm on Fortress Europe". In deed, severalhundred migrants had crossed the outer border of the European Unionaround the spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in a self-authorizedand self-organized fashion.I take the opportunity to post a text that attempts something like acloser reading of these events and, in particular, the images that havebeen circulated by the spanish border police and news agencies acrossthe globe.The text is based on the notes of a series of lectures and presentationsover the past few years. It was published recently in "UncorporateIdentity" edited by Metahaven (Lars Müller Publishers). A differentversion will appear in german language in: "Die Kunst derMigration" edited by Marie-Hélène Gutberlet and Sissy Helff (transcriptVerlag).On Friday, September 17th 2010, John Palmesino (architect and urbanist,co-founder of "Multiplicity" and "Territorial Agency") and me will entera discussion whether the events in September 2005 might well have markedthe beginning of a subtle redesign of the European outer borders.Against the backdrop of current events like the deportations of Romain France, the question would be, how in the presence – as well as inthe absence – of a scandal, new forms of participation, neutralizationand caretaking become the constitutive elements of a border regime thatoperates beyond the patterns of inclusion and exclusion.The event is the start of BETWEEN, a new series of events at the Designdepartment of Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht. BETWEEN #1 takes placeon Friday, 17th September at 16:00 hrs at the JVE. The session will befollowed on Saturday by a presentation of the new research projects anda new call for applications in the JVE Design department. http://www.janvaneyck.nlAll the very best,florian---The scandal: notes on the autonomy of the image by Florian SchneiderIt is the night of the 29th September 2005. 215 men and women have madea momentous decision. Over several weeks or months they have been ekingout an existence reduced to bare survival; camping in a low forest orshrubland, hiding in flimsy tents, with no access to money, food or evenwater.Although they came so close to the final destination of a journey fullof privations, what opens up now is a reverse perspective: the longerthey are standing still the further they get away from the finish.Europe, or at least the official territory of what is considered the"European Union" is only a few meters away.They have been discussing the problem in many nightly meetings. Shouldthey take the risk and leave one night altogether or wait for a anotheropportunity? Should they continue to try to cross the border in smallgroups of at most a dozen people -- in such a low number that it doesnot cause a stir?The people living in the forest are well organized in small groups of 15to 20 members. Most of them gather according to their countries oforigin, but there are others who join a group of a different country.The members of a group elect a leader and these leaders again meet incounsels in order to make further decisions.The decision to cross the border in the night of the 29th of Septemberis almost unanimously, though apparently without the consent of theelder leaders who are sometimes called "the fathers of the forest". Theymust have feared the scandal such a decision would cause; they wereaware, at least, that such an exodus and its aftermath woulddramatically change the situation in the forest.The images that were taken by the CCTV cameras of the "Guardia Civil",the Spanish border police, show dozens of people climbing with self-madeladders over the three-meter-high fence that runs along 50 kilometers ofthe Spanish enclave of Ceuta, a military outpost in the north ofMorrocco.One can only guess how painful it must be for a human body to crawlthrough the barbed wire; and then one sees them jumping the three metersdown, onto the road that runs between the fences.Almost everybody was hurt. Broken arms, legs and sprained ankles,injuries to the head. Seven people lost their lifes. Either they do notsurvive the fall into Europe or they were shot, some to death, by theborder patrol's rubber bullets.The footage spread by Reuters over the next few days is a sacrilege interms of sincere journalism. It features a nine-second sequence based onthe images of the surveillance cameras, but animated in fast motion.Broadcast all around the globe, looping every hour, a dribblingvoiceover gabbles about a "storming of fortress Europe".The sequence turns out to be an unintentional piece of art; and itsconceptual radicalism, its determination far outstrips numerouspolitically engaged works presented at various biennales and exhibitedin shows that deal more or less superficially with the issues of bordersand migration.Instead, the border appears here in its almost perfect postmoderndesign: performed through a scandal, in a widely publicized incidentinvolving allegations of wrongdoing, disgrace, and moral outrage.But what is so scandalous in these images? At first sight, the scandalrelates to the collectively organized attempt to overcome the border,the self-authorized and self-organized transgression of the fence.It is a scandal in the truest sense of the word, which derives from theLatin "scandere", to climb. But there is yet another, no lesscompelling, etymological perspective: the border as "skandalon", whichis the ancient greek word for a stumbling block.In this respect, the events of the 29th of September serve as anexquisite example of what activists and theorists of the "nobordernetwork" have, since the early 1990s, called the "autonomy ofmigration".This slogan aims to understand migration as a much more complex processas if it could be reduced to misery and calamity. The patterns ofvictimization are as omnipresent as the ubiquitous control system. Bothneoliberals and many of their adversaries understand migration as alogical result of the movements of capital, as its unsavory aftereffector appendix.The "autonomy of migration" claims that activist strategies as well asresearch to be done in this field should refrain from indulging ineternally returning tropes of charity and compassion. Instead, it aimsto recognize and realize the complex multitude of social and politicalprocesses needed to practically cross a border, which are, theoreticallyor politically, constitutive of the production of contemporary migrantsubjectivities.Migration is not the action of an isolated, asocial, expelledindividual. Its social and subjective dimensions appear, rather, in itsautonomy and independence of the political measures that try to controlit. To escape one's country of origin, to cross borders, and to seeksomething more somewhere else, is an eminently political act.But what happened that night had an even wider impact. The tremendouspotential of exposing the redundancy of the collection of high-techgadgets so central to the staging of technological supremacy in theborder regime around Ceuta, as well as in many other critical areasaround the European Union.Every few hundred meters there is a watchpost equipped with spotlights,noise and movement sensors, and videocameras that provide CCTV footagevia underground cables to a central control booth.The decision of the Guardia Civil to release that footage wasdeliberate. Normally the public is not supposed to access it.Yet the scandal is not the release of the images; rather, it lies infast-forwarding them. The low frame rate of the recordings of thesurveillance camera is speeded up through an additional time lapse.Normally this video effect is applied in order to pronounce processesthat would appear rather subtle to the human eye.The purpose is all too clear: of the 215 persons who crossed the fencethat night, only a few dozen were captured in the published footage. Themanipulation of the images transforms the distinct number of individualsinto a swarming mass, a "storming of fortress europe" as the voiceoverput it.Such undercranking epitomizes the hypocrisy of contemporary discoursesabout "Fortress Europe." Agency is denied to those who are seizingopportunities.Worse, the animation transforms them into animals or even insects. Theirstaccato, choppy movements reveal an imaginary plague that isbeleaguring Europe, overrunning its outposts and fortifications.This may lead to a third notion of the scandal. According to thedictionary a scandal is usually a product of a mixture of both, real andimaginary incidents. The scandal suppresses the distinction between thereal and the imaginary. It operates through unuttered laws whichregulate that what is permitted to some and not permitted to others.The real movements of the bordercrossers who appear in news footage arechopped off and broken into smallest possible pieces, jerky, saccadicmovements. In order to reconstruct an impression of coherence, they haveto merge inseparably with the most banal, enduring imaginations andcommon knowledge about illegal immigration.The scandal transforms the event to solicit a moral outrage whose purpose is nothing but the reaffirmation of the border -- a border thatmay otherwise be invisible, disputed or disbelieved.The scandal affirms that the border is still there, still true. Itsconceptual homogenization of real and imaginary reassures us, allows usto enjoy and to cooperate with the regime that relies on the frail andineffectual facts on the ground. We can even worry about its perversionsand moderately criticize its violent character.Outside of the frame of the CCTV footage, what we don't see -- and forthat very reason can more easily, collectively imagine -- "modern"homogeneity on one side, and the "primitive" inarticulacy on the other,the uninterrupted continuity of colonialism and postcolonialism.Each of these three notions of the scandal are instantiated by the frameof the image as well as within the frame. The frame is the allegedlynecessary homogenization of real and imaginary elements, it is theborder that limits what is and is not visible, and thereby establisheswhat can and cannot be said.And yet there is another, a more disturbing presence, beyond the fieldof the image -- indeed, beyond the frame of the scandal with itssubsequent homogenization of space and time.It testifies to an elsewhere: not something literally to the left or theright of the frame but, rather, the spaces where the bordercrossers arecoming from and where they are going. Neither exists in the immediacy ofthe footage of the events; both must be negated, ignored, in the mis enscene of "Fortress Europe".Moussa K., for example: He fled from the civil war in Sierra Leone in2003 looking for another life somewhere in Europe. Passing throughGuinea-Conakry, Mauritania, and the Western Sahara, he tried to enterSpanish territory in Las Palmas; but he was caught by Moroccan policeand deported to Oujda on the Moroccan-Algerian border. With somecomrades he decided to try again in Ceuta.After 25 days of walking across 900 kilometers of Moroccan desert theyfinally reached Castillago, a small Moroccan town near the border atCeuta, in June 2005. "We lived like animals -- it was like in a warzone," he recalls of the three months he spent in the forest near theborder.On the 28th of September he decided to take part in the collectiveattempt to climb across the barbed wire fence and make his way intoCeuta. The slogan of the collective effort was: "No retreat, nosurrender".He built his own laddar from small tree trunks and branches from theforest and succeeded -- unlike his friend, who died from police gunfirein the same crossing. A few weeks later his injuries are almost healed.He hopes to obtain a residency in Spain and then to study miningsomewhere in Europe.But what is really at stake is not the relative out-of-field, such asgeographical destinations, privations and longings, but the absolutenullification of any remaining subjectivity. Every one knows, if she orhe knows nothing else, that the essential function of the border regimeis to render innocuous any past experience of the bordercrosser letalone future desires. As soon as the border is crossed, engineers turninto cleaners, academics into sex workers, professors into casual farmlaborers or domestic workers -- ready-made for over-exploitation on theinformal labor markets of late capitalism.Rather than lamenting unfairness and considering himself as a victim,Moussa K. seems to understand the bordercrossing as an extreme processof desubjectivation -- in large part by living in ways that were almostunliveable. Pushed beyond the conditions and limits of what is oftendescribed as "human", his experiences become a sort of negative freedom,as Foucault might say.It radically changes the modalities of being, it opens up the potentialfor transformation and change in relation to oneselve and the world. Itdoes not exist neither in the images nor in the imaginaries of theborder and its regime of scandalization, it rather insists or subsistssomewhere else, in an absolute out-of-the-field or "hors-champ".In his cinema books Gilles Deleuze associated this absolute out-of-fieldwith the Bergsonian concept of "durée" or duration. Instead of measuringsequenced movements in homogenous space, he suggested a heterogenous,non-representative notion of time that is irreversible, unretrievableand undivisible -- a sometimes faster, sometimes slower flow of becomingor pure mobility.In fact, it is quite stunning what happens as soon as one renders thenine seconds sequence of the animated bordercrossers of the 29th ofSeptember back to what they themselves might have been experienced asreal time. The specters which are supposed to run down fortress Europeseem to stand still, as soon as they regained a certain, sort ofrealistic duration. Every single image is stretched and prolonged to analmost unbearable extent.Since CCTV cameras usually run with a lower frame rate, which in thatspecific case was compensated by the undercranking of the video materialinto fast motion, any attempt to slow it down again, needs to resultnecessarily in an at the first sight aimless reduplication of everysingle original frame.But there is one exception: The only moving part of the image is thecounter of the time code running smoothly from frame to frame, replacingone image with its double, metering a faked sameness and presentingevery 25th part of a second as if it were enjoyable as pure time whileall the content of the image is waiting for the next moment of release.And yet, a strange kind of apparition takes place, when the movement ofthe bordercrosses is halted for a moment that feels like infinite. Thedeadlock of overmediated content causes a collapse of time. It hasemerged as the result of a two-folded manipulation of the footage: firsta fast-forwarding for the sake of the scandal, then by reversing thistime-lapse through slow-motion: a possible, ethically necessary butapparently quite arbitrary restoration of the time in which that whathappened could have happened -- just for the case that it would matterat all.Rather than canceling each others out or negating itself, it comes as asurprise. The recurrence of an imagined "real time" generated by thefaked slow-mo as an unlapsing of time produces new blocs ofinvisibility, potential hide-outs between the never-changing images,uncontrolled zones between the frames which reproduce ever the same.Paradoxically, the standstill of the image seems to open up to a newplane. Maybe as an allegory for autonomy of migration, at least it isanticipating a freedom of movement that is certainly not in place yet,nevertheless it achieves something quite impossible: The pre-emptivecharacter of surveillance appears to no avail.

Dear all,Over a week ago (2 Sept) a work by Bitnik Mediengruppe (UBS Lies, 2009) was taken down from its billboard site in North London under the threat of legal action. The billboard space was hired for a month in the context of an exhibition called 'Too Big Too Fail, Too Small Too Succeed' at [ space ] Gallery in Hackney, London, and themed around 'artist's responses to the financial crisis'. The following is an eyewitness accountI arrived late at the opening and found everybody spilling out into the street already, but then I realised they were all heading towards the billboard site next to the gallery. A small flatbed truck was parked by the billboard and there was some discussion going on with the driver of the truck who was wearing a hardhat and fluorescent vest.The backlight on the billboard was switched off but I could still clearly see a photograph of a nondescript street scene in which a silver-haired man in a long black coat stands in front of a USB bank branch, holding up a white piece of cardboard that has the word 'LIES' handwritten on it. I realised that this must be the work of the Mediengruppe Bitnik, which is a homage and an update to the photograph of Peter Weibel from 1971, in which he stands in front an Austrian police station holding up a sign that reads 'LÜGT' under the 'POLIZEI' sign so that the image forms the temporary statement 'POLIZEI LÜGT' (police lies), meant as a protest against what Peter Weibel considered the abuse of state power. I had heard that Mediengruppe Bitnik had re-enacted this photograph in 2009 but I'd never actually seen it.Pretty quickly it became clear to me that the man in the flatbed truck was here to take the photograph down, and that the artists and the curator were questioning him as to the reason - to which he had no reply: he had simply been instructed by the advertising company running the billboard to take the image down 'because there'd been a complaint'. The atmosphere was not relaxed, but I'd describe it more as baffled rather than tense. We're not used to seeing any kind of physical enforcement deployed against artwork anymore, and are not sure how to react.Eventually one member of the Bitniks stepped on to a crate and asked the crowd 'don't harass the worker' because he was 'only doing his job'. He explained that they assumed there might have been a complaint from USB bank, but that there's no hard information at this point - clearly the gallery had not been informed of anything yet. He also explained the provenance of the photograph, and rather mysteriously, that the man holding up the sign is an 'unknown financier'.The billboard worker then climbed into the billboard case and proceeded to take down the offending photograph, and then took a long time to put a grubby white tarpaulin sheet in its place. It looked like a genuine piece of performance art, watched by a group of artsy spectators who by now were joined by some of the local drinkers from the London Fields pub next door. All the buzz on the night was about how the image was now surely going to go viral, and surely the Bitniks and the gallery were going to get lots of attention from this, but in the following days I didn't hear or see anything. Out of curiosity, I asked around people I'd met on the night and someone who didn't want to be named said that indeed the gallery had received a threatening letter from UBS and could not be seen to publicise the case pending possible legal action (presumably a libel case, in which of course both the gallery, which is a non-commercial space, and the artists would be 'too small to succeed'). The image was taken down from the [ space ] gallery website, but the german version can still be found onhttp://www.likeyou.com/en/node/19582I think the whole incident throws up some interesting questions about the limits of freedom of (visual) speech, freedom of art, the difference between making a controversial gesture in public space vs doing the same inside the sanitised, screened-off space of the art gallery, etc.With its legal threats UBS is nicely illustrating what was the point of the work in the first place: in our time, it is corporate and financial entities that are 'too big to fail' that can use libel and copyright laws to repress freedom of speech, analogous to the way the police was used as a tool of state repression at the time of Peter Weibel's image from 1971.All the bestLennaartLennaart van Oldenborghlennaart< at >hofilms.co.uk# 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

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews_excl/ynews_excl_pl3653"Essentially what we're doing is crowd-sourcing," says Meckler, whosevocabulary betrays his background as a lawyer specializing in Internet law."I use the term open-source politics. This is an open-source movement."Every day, anyone and everyone is modifying the code. "The movement as awhole is smart."

Stuxnet malware is 'weapon' out to destroy ... Iran's Bushehr nuclear plant?The Christian Science MonitorBy Mark Clayton - Tue Sep 21, 3:08 pm ETCyber security experts say they have identified the world's first knowncyber super weapon designed specifically to destroy a real-world target - afactory, a refinery, or just maybe a nuclear power plant.The cyber worm, called Stuxnet, has been the object of intense study sinceits detection in June. As more has become known about it, alarm about itscapabilities and purpose have grown. Some top cyber security experts now sayStuxnet's arrival heralds something blindingly new: a cyber weapon createdto cross from the digital realm to the physical world - to destroysomething.At least one expert who has extensively studied the malicious software, ormalware, suggests Stuxnet may have already attacked its target - and that itmay have been Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, which much of the worldcondemns as a nuclear weapons threat.The appearance of Stuxnet created a ripple of amazement among computersecurity experts. Too large, too encrypted, too complex to be immediatelyunderstood, it employed amazing new tricks, like taking control of acomputer system without the user taking any action or clicking any buttonother than inserting an infected memory stick. Experts say it took a massiveexpenditure of time, money, and software engineering talent to identify andexploit such vulnerabilities in industrial control software systems.Unlike most malware, Stuxnet is not intended to help someone make money orsteal proprietary data. Industrial control systems experts now haveconcluded, after nearly four months spent reverse engineering Stuxnet, thatthe world faces a new breed of malware that could become a template forattackers wishing to launch digital strikes at physical targets worldwide.Internet link not required."Until a few days ago, people did not believe a directed attack like thiswas possible," Ralph Langner, a German cyber-security researcher, told theMonitor in an interview. He was slated to present his findings at aconference of industrial control system security experts Tuesday inRockville, Md. "What Stuxnet represents is a future in which people with thefunds will be able to buy an attack like this on the black market. This isnow a valid concern."A gradual dawning of Stuxnet's purposeIt is a realization that has emerged only gradually.Stuxnet surfaced in June and, by July, was identified as ahypersophisticated piece of malware probably created by a team working for anation state, say cyber security experts. Its name is derived from some ofthe filenames in the malware. It is the first malware known to target andinfiltrate industrial supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)software used to run chemical plants and factories as well as electric powerplants and transmission systems worldwide. That much the experts discoveredright away.But what was the motive of the people who created it? Was Stuxnet intendedto steal industrial secrets - pressure, temperature, valve, or othersettings -and communicate that proprietary data over the Internet to cyberthieves?By August, researchers had found something more disturbing: Stuxnet appearedto be able to take control of the automated factory control systems it hadinfected - and do whatever it was programmed to do with them. That wasmischievous and dangerous.But it gets worse. Since reverse engineering chunks of Stuxnet's massivecode, senior US cyber security experts confirm what Mr. Langner, the Germanresearcher, told the Monitor: Stuxnet is essentially a precision,military-grade cyber missile deployed early last year to seek out anddestroy one real-world target of high importance - a target still unknown."Stuxnet is a 100-percent-directed cyber attack aimed at destroying anindustrial process in the physical world," says Langner, who last weekbecame the first to publicly detail Stuxnet's destructive purpose and itsauthors' malicious intent. "This is not about espionage, as some have said.This is a 100 percent sabotage attack."A guided cyber missileOn his website, Langner lays out the Stuxnet code he has dissected. He showsstep by step how Stuxnet operates as a guided cyber missile. Three top USindustrial control system security experts, each of whom has alsoindependently reverse-engineered portions of Stuxnet, confirmed his findingsto the Monitor."His technical analysis is good," says a senior US researcher who hasanalyzed Stuxnet, who asked for anonymity because he is not allowed to speakto the press. "We're also tearing [Stuxnet] apart and are seeing some of thesame things."Other experts who have not themselves reverse-engineered Stuxnet but arefamiliar with the findings of those who have concur with Langner's analysis."What we're seeing with Stuxnet is the first view of something new thatdoesn't need outside guidance by a human - but can still take control ofyour infrastructure," says Michael Assante, former chief of industrialcontrol systems cyber security research at the US Department of Energy'sIdaho National Laboratory. "This is the first direct example of weaponizedsoftware, highly customized and designed to find a particular target.""I'd agree with the classification of this as a weapon," Jonathan Pollet,CEO of Red Tiger Security and an industrial control system security expert,says in an e-mail.One researcher's findingsLangner's research, outlined on his website Monday,reveals a key step in the Stuxnet attack that other researchers agreeillustrates its destructive purpose. That step, which Langner calls"fingerprinting," qualifies Stuxnet as a targeted weapon, he says.Langner zeroes in on Stuxnet's ability to "fingerprint" the computer systemit infiltrates to determine whether it is the precise machine theattack-ware is looking to destroy. If not, it leaves the industrial computeralone. It is this digital fingerprinting of the control systems that showsStuxnet to be not spyware, but rather attackware meant to destroy, Langnersays.Stuxnet's ability to autonomously and without human assistance discriminateamong industrial computer systems is telling. It means, says Langner, thatit is looking for one specific place and time to attack one specific factoryor power plant in the entire world."Stuxnet is the key for a very specific lock - in fact, there is only onelock in the world that it will open," Langner says in an interview. "Thewhole attack is not at all about stealing data but about manipulation of aspecific industrial process at a specific moment in time. This is notgeneric. It is about destroying that process."So far, Stuxnet has infected at least 45,000 industrial control systemsaround the world, without blowing them up - although some victims in NorthAmerica have experienced some serious computer problems, Eric Byres, aCanadian expert, told the Monitor. Most of the victim computers, however,are in Iran, Pakistan, India, and Indonesia. Some systems have been hit inGermany, Canada, and the US, too. Once a system is infected, Stuxnet simplysits and waits - checking every five seconds to see if its exact parametersare met on the system. When they are, Stuxnet is programmed to activate asequence that will cause the industrial process to self-destruct, Langnersays.Langner's analysis also shows, step by step, what happens after Stuxnetfinds its target. Once Stuxnet identifies the critical function running on aprogrammable logic controller, or PLC, made by Siemens, the giant industrialcontrols company, the malware takes control. One of the last codes Stuxnetsends is an enigmatic "DEADF007." Then the fireworks begin, although theprecise function being overridden is not known, Langner says. It may be thatthe maximum safety setting for RPMs on a turbine is overridden, or thatlubrication is shut off, or some other vital function shut down. Whatever itis, Stuxnet overrides it, Langner's analysis shows."After the original code [on the PLC] is no longer executed, we can expectthat something will blow up soon," Langner writes in his analysis."Something big."For those worried about a future cyber attack that takes control of criticalcomputerized infrastructure - in a nuclear power plant, for instance -Stuxnet is a big, loud warning shot across the bow, especially for theutility industry and government overseers of the US power grid."The implications of Stuxnet are very large, a lot larger than some thoughtat first," says Mr. Assante, who until recently was security chief for theNorth American Electric Reliability Corp. "Stuxnet is a directed attack.It's the type of threat we've been worried about for a long time. It meanswe have to move more quickly with our defenses - much more quickly."Has Stuxnet already hit its target?It might be too late for Stuxnet'starget, Langner says. He suggests it has already been hit - and destroyed orheavily damaged. But Stuxnet reveals no overt clues within its code to whatit is after.A geographical distribution of computers hit by Stuxnet, which Microsoftproduced in July, found Iran to be the apparent epicenter of the Stuxnetinfections. That suggests that any enemy of Iran with advanced cyber warcapability might be involved, Langner says. The US is acknowledged to havethat ability, and Israel is also reported to have a formidable offensivecyber-war-fighting capability.Could Stuxnet's target be Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant, a facilitymuch of the world condemns as a nuclear weapons threat?Langner is quick to note that his views on Stuxnet's target is speculationbased on suggestive threads he has seen in the media. Still, he suspectsthat the Bushehr plant may already have been wrecked by Stuxnet. Bushehr'sexpected startup in late August has been delayed, he notes, for unknownreasons. (One Iranian official blamed the delay on hot weather.)But if Stuxnet is so targeted, why did it spread to all those countries?Stuxnet might have been spread by the USB memory sticks used by a Russiancontractor while building the Bushehr nuclear plant, Langner offers. Thesame contractor has jobs in several countries where the attackware has beenuncovered."This will all eventually come out and Stuxnet's target will be known,"Langner says. "If Bushehr wasn't the target and it starts up in a fewmonths, well, I was wrong. But somewhere out there, Stuxnet has found itstarget. We can be fairly certain of that."http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20100921/ts_csm/327178;_ylt=AhWD.tUWftAi5mRB.MiRIwBI2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTI0cDd2cDRqBGFzc2V0A2NzbS8yMDEwMDkyMS8zMjcxNzgEcG9zAzgEc2VjA3luX21vc3RfcG9wdWxhcgRzbGsDc3R1eG5ldG1hbHdh

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/22/technology/22iht-godard.html?ref=global-home<<“Downloading is a citizen’s right,” Mr. Climent said. “Even if there isonly a small chance, there is a chance that a favorable judgment couldchange the laws across Europe.”Mr. Godard has yet to comment publicly on Mr. Climent’s case, but helaid out the rationale for his opposition to French copyright rules in arecent interview with the cultural magazine Les Inrockuptibles, in whichhe declared: “There is no such thing as intellectual property.”“Copyright really isn’t feasible,” Mr. Godard said. “An author has norights. I have no rights. I have only duties.”Mr. Godard could not be reached, but an associate, who insisted onanonymity because the director had not authorized him to speak,confirmed the donation. Mr. Godard, the associate said, wanted to make a“symbolic” gesture to draw attention to what he described as Mr.Climent’s plight.# 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

BEHIND THE NEWS with Doug Henwood"Best Music on an Economics & Politics Radio Show"Village Voice Best of NYC 2005many opening commentaries at:<http://doughenwood.wordpress.com/>--------------------------------------------------Just posted to my radio archive (and apologies for the delay)<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html>:September 23, 2010 Eric Garris, founder of Antiwar.com, on the antiwar movement, the libertarian perspective on it, and the effort to unite opponents across the spectrum • Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story, on life amidst anxious imperial declineSeptember 16, 2010 Stephen Mihm, co-author of Crisis Economics, on The Crisis in historical perspective • Two segments on Cuba: Julia Sweig in an excerpt from a Council of Foreign Relations conference call (full audio here) about her conversation with Fidel, and consultant Kirby Jones on the Cuban economy and U.S. companies doing business therethey join:---------September 9, 2010 Liz McNichol of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities on the fiscal crisis of the states • Yanis Varoufakis of the University of Athens fact-checks Michael Lewis Vanity Fair article on GreeceSeptember 4, 2010 (KPFA version) Jesse Eisinger talks about how banks flipped CDOs to each other, made billions, stuck us with the bill (article here) • Michael Yates talks about the miserable mood out there in the Real AmericaAugust 26, 2010 (back after long fundraising break) Paul Street, author of The Empire’s New Clothes, on the sorrows of Brand Obama • Christian Parenti, author of this article, on how the gov can kickstart the adoption of green technologies by the way it buysJuly 29, 2010 Michael Lind on infrastructure, who’s behind the parties, and the USA’s evolution into an oligarchy • Astra Taylor on digital serfdomJuly 22, 2010 Yves Smith, keeper of the Naked Capitalism blog and author of Econned, on the contribution of the dismal science to the financial crisis, and how Wall Street is worse than ever (rerun of March interview) • Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen, on the Dodd-Frank financial reform billJuly 15, 2010 Corey Robin on Ayn Rand • Alyssa Katz, author of Our Lot (just out in paperback!), on the state of the housing marketJuly 8, 2010 Sean Keenan, proprietor of the indie label Blanco Music and author of this great rant, on how music is faring in the Internet era • Ruy Teixeira, author of this paper, on how demographics favor the Dems (for what that’s worth) • Bill Hartung on military spending todayJuly 1, 2010 Cynthia Enloe, splendid analyst of gender and the militarization, on the McChrystal affair • Richard Seymour, author of The Meaning of David Cameron, on the new British governmentJune 24, 2010 Matthew Lasar on Pacifica governance • Max Fraser, author of this Nation article, on Andy Stern & SEIU • Keith Gessen and Hedge Fund Man, collaborators on Diary of a Very Bad Year, talk about the wacky bubble daysJune 17, 2010 Gary Rivlin, author of Broke USA, on how sleazy businesses make bundles by lending to the poor • Sarah Ellison, author of War At the Wall Street Journal, on Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of Dow JonesMay 29, 2010 (KPFA only) Norman Finkelstein, author of This Time We Went Too Far, talks about Israel’s invasion of Gaza in late 2009, and about changing U.S. public opinion towards that country---Doug HenwoodProducer, Behind the NewsThursdays, 5-6 PM, WBAI, New York 99.5 FMSaturdays, 10-11 AM, KPFA, Berkeley 94.1 FM"best music on a show about economics & politics" - Village Voicepodcast: <http://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/radio-feed.php>iTunes: <http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=73801817>or <http://tinyurl.com/3bsaqb>Facebook group: <http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=53240558375>."blog": <http://doughenwood.wordpress.com/>

Or, how Danish arrogance and complacency towards the extreme rightsucceeded in making the world a more dangerous place to live:(http://counterpunch.org/larsen09242010.html orhttp://www.panhumanism.com/articles/2010-01.php)THE DANISH CARTOON AFFAIRBy RUNE ENGELBRETH LARSEN On September 30, 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published 12cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, some of which were extremelydemonizing in their outspoken anti-Muslim symbolism. Four months laterviolent protests erupted outside Danish embassies in some Muslimcountries, and the terror threat against Denmark increased dramatically.Yet what happened during those four months, and could the escalation ofthe crisis have been prevented? Was it simply about freedom of speechand a "clash of civilizations" or were other agendas in play? Moreover,why did it happen in Denmark of all places?The End of Diplomacy Among the most important and often overlooked elements in understandingwhy the Cartoon Crisis originated in Denmark and how it escalated intothe biggest international crisis in the history of Danish foreignpolitics since World War II, are. 1) The increasing acceptance ofdemonizing and antagonistic rhetoric directed against Muslims in Danishmainstream politics and the media since the mid-1990's. 2) The lack ofdiplomatic efforts by the Danish government to prevent the escalatingcrisis. 3) The stridently patronizing and arrogant approach of theDanish government and media towards ambassadors from Muslim countries aswell as the deliberate misrepresentation of their intentions displayedby the then Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen in October,November and December 2005. Without these elements, an escalation of the crisis would have beenhighly unlikely, and the violent protests and riots seen in some Muslimcountries four months after the publication of the cartoons would neverhave taken place. The whole affair would have most likely blown overbefore it became a global media phenomenon. Yet how did it all begin? The first crucial event after the publication of the cartoons was aletter to the then Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, October12 2005, by ambassadors from eleven Muslim countries requesting ameeting concerning (among other things) Jyllands-Posten's Muhammadcartoons. The ambassadors' letter contains four main points: 1) A criticism of the"very discriminatory tendency towards Muslims in Denmark" and "thedefamation of Islam as a religion." 2) A warning of the danger of thepossible escalation of the crisis. 3) An appeal to the Prime Minister to"censure those responsible" to the extent the law permits. 4) A requestfor a meeting with the Prime Minister. Primarily, the ambassadors criticised what they perceive as an "ongoingsmear campaign" against Islam. To illustrate their point, in addition tothe Muhammad cartoons they cited several other "recent instances" ofthis phenomenon, e.g., Racist articles published on the website ofDanish MP Louise Frevert, in which, among other derogations, Muslimswere compared to "Cancer"; Minister of Culture Brian Mikkelsen's speechat the annual meeting of the Conservative party, in which he called fora new cultural struggle against "medieval Muslim culture" in allegedMuslim parallel societies in Denmark; and a xenophobic local radiostation, which in the summer of 2005, called upon Danes to "kill asignificant part of the country's Muslim immigrants". Furthermore, the letter placed great emphasis on the very realpossibility of serious consequences and repercussions in the wake ofthese events: "We must emphasise the possibility of reactions in Muslimcountries and among Muslim communities throughout Europe." Nevertheless, the Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen refuses tomeet with the ambassadors and instead chooses to respond in a letterdated October 22, proclaiming that freedom of speech is "the veryfoundation of Danish society". Neither in his written response nor in public does the Prime Ministerrefer to the issues raised by the ambassadors, failing to comment evenonce on any of the specific examples of the "very discriminatorytendency" provided by the ambassadors. Large sections of the press as well as political commentators quicklyreduce the content of the ambassadors' letter to an example of their(Muslim countries) ignorance of Democratic society. They even portray itas a direct assault on freedom of speech itself, despite theambassadors' repeated assurances to the contrary. The Palestinian representative, Maie Sarraf emphasises that the purposeof the letter was never to control the press: "It's not as if we areasking Anders Fogh Rasmussen to exercise control over the Danish media,but even Western politicians have the option to make certainrecommendations to the media, and that is what we ask him todo." (October 22, 2005). Notwithstanding, Anders Fogh Rasmussen said of the ambassadors'criticism that "a Prime Minister cannot intervene and control thepress" (October 25, 2005), and that "the principles upon which Danishdemocracy is built are so self-evident, there can be no basis forconvening a meeting to discuss them" (October 25, 2005). Despite the fact, the ambassadors had never requested a meeting todiscuss the principles of Danish democracy, Anders Fogh Rasmussennevertheless claimed that the ambassadors' intentions in this matterwere in conflict with Danish democracy itself. Egypt's Ambassador, Mona Omar Attiah repeatedly points out that theyonly requested of the Prime Minister that he distance himself morallyfrom dehumanizing utterances: "It is a big misunderstanding when peoplethink we have asked the Prime Minister to put limits on freedom ofspeech. We wished for him to call for a responsible and respectful useof this freedom. We also wished for him to take a moral position bydeclaring that Danish society is striving for the integration, not thedemeaning, of Islam." (October 27, 2005). Fügen Ok, Turkey's ambassador to Denmark points out: "We're not stupid;we know the Prime Minister has no authority to intervene. Our intentionwas to encourage him to improve the situation in the country; whathappened is very serious and very provocative. This is not about closingnewspapers. It's about presenting your views on the issue and trying topromote dialogue." (October 28, 2005). Despite the ambassadors' direct rejection of the Prime Minister's wilfulmisrepresentation of their letter, he blatantly ignores them,intensifying his hostility in a way which can only be characterised asarrogant. In response to the ambassadors' criticism and allegations thatthe Muhammad cartoons represent an attack on Muslims and Islam ingeneral within a bigoted Denmark, he declares: "In my opinion, thisreveals an abysmal ignorance of the principles of true democracy, aswell as a complete failure to understand that in a free democracy thegovernment neither can, must nor should interfere with what the pressmay write." (October 30, 2005). The ambassadors' request that those responsible for the cartoons beprosecuted "to the extent permitted by Danish law" is fully compatiblewith Danish jurisprudence and custom (blasphemy is illegal in Denmark).Hardly an attack on freedom of the press! Otherwise stated, Anders Fogh Rasmussen chose to pontificate to elevenambassadors as if they were schoolchildren who simply did not understandthe definition of democracy, instead of discussing the issues raised bythem, and commenting on the fact that their single request was for himto take a moral position on the issue of the cartoons. Subsequently, Minister of the Church (and Religious affairs), BertelHaarder reduces the whole affair to a clamour for "censorship" (October30, 2005), and Foreign Affairs spokesman for the Prime Minister's partyVenstre - The Liberal Party of Denmark, Troels Lund Poulsen, can see noreason to "enter into dialogue with persons who want to short-circuitthe democratic process" (December 20, 2005). The Danish government it seems is not content with refusing to meet withthe Muslim ambassadors: they proceed to lecture them in patronisingtones and their request for a dialogue suddenly becomes an attempt to"short-circuit" Danish democracy. Portraying the ambassadors' appeal as an attack on freedom of speech issimply a wilful attempt at misrepresenting their intentions.Nevertheless, the Prime Minister continued his insistence upon thisfalse interpretation, disregarding the ambassadors' explanations andstatements to the contrary. All of this was completely absent from his reasoning. The media and mostDanish commentators also ignored it. Paradoxically, Anders Fogh Rasmussen encourages the offended Muslims torespond to the cartoons in the very manner he himself refused to respondto the ambassadors: "The Danish tradition is to call a meeting, where wecan sit and talk peacefully with each other. Sometimes we disagreestrongly even when the meeting's over, and sometimes we reach anunderstanding of each others' motives. That's the Danish model. That'swhat we call conversational democracy." (Jyllands-Posten, October 30,2005). Apparently, "conversational democracy" does not apply to Muslimambassadors! They were refused a meeting with the Prime Minister whoobviously did not intend to discuss the matter with them, peacefully orotherwise. Escalation It was brought to the Prime Minister's attention on several occasionshow easily he could end the conflict with no implications whatsoever forfreedom of speech, but each time he adamantly refused to consider it. The Prime Minister's rejection of the ambassadors' request for ameeting, his wilful misrepresentation of the contents of their letterand his denial of any anti-Muslim tendencies in Danish politics,significantly increased the rifts in Danish society between Muslims andnon-Muslims as well as between Denmark and Muslims worldwide. Simultaneously, the Danish government chose to overlook the fact thatthe ambassadors' letter warned about possible "reactions in Muslimcountries", and a few days later - still in October 2005 - the Egyptiangovernment warned the Danish ambassador in Cairo about "a possibleescalation of the problem". As early as October 29, the Egyptian ambassador Mona Omar Attiah, makesvery clear recommendations: "The Egyptian Embassy urgently appeals tothe Danish government to adopt a more serious approach to the problem inorder to avoid an escalation, and expects at the very least, a statementfrom the government confirming its disapproval of these types ofdrawings as well as any violation of Islam in general." An Egyptianofficial who described the sort of reaction his government was callingfor suggested the same: e.g. "an official statement condemning themocking of Islam and its Prophet". On November 18, the Egyptian Foreign Secretary Ahmed Aboul Gheit,emphasizes what several ambassadors have told the Danish press: thatnobody asked for the newspaper "to be closed or for it to be censored",they had simply hoped for some sort of official statement. He goes asfar as to detail all that was required of the Prime Minister to preventthe crisis from escalating: "Gentlemen, you must understand that myhands are tied. I cannot act against it, yet I would like to declarethat this is not my opinion". (Politiken, November 18 2005). The escalating crisis could probably have been contained if the Danishgovernment had distanced itself from the image of Islam depicted by thecartoons, without doing any damage to the freedom of the press in theprocess. End of story. Instead, the Prime Minister responded to the ambassadors' letter bymisrepresenting their intentions whenever he spoke to the press. Hedistorted and omitted critical phrases and warnings in their letter,simultaneously ignoring the ambassadors' own explanations of itscontents, even though they have repeatedly emphasised, startingimmediately after receiving his response to their letter, that they haveneither expressed any desire for control of the press nor for any kindof encroachment upon freedom of speech. The entire affair gave the Egyptian Foreign Affairs Minister thedistinct impression that "there are actually people within the Danishgovernment who like what they see" in the cartoons. Yet the Danish government continues to ignore the continuous requestsfor a clear indication of its moral position regarding the messagebehind the cartoons. Despite the constant flow of clarifications andrepetitions of this request from numerous foreign government officials,the Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs Per Stig Møller in November 2005still chooses to overhear everything: "The Constitution preventscensorship from ever being reintroduced. If Jyllands-Posten, claimingthe protection of the constitution has violated the blasphemy law, thenthat's the business of the courts." (November 8, 2005). Time and again, with equal condescension, the Danish governmentneglected to comment the many specific requests from ambassadors andother official agents from Muslim governments and the Islamic world ingeneral, who ask for no more than a statement of disapproval from thePrime Minister. Shortly after Christmas 2005, the Secretary General of the IslamicEducational, Scientific and Cultural Organization ISESCO, threatenedcalling for an economic and political boycott of Denmark among its 51member states. The Egyptian ambassador Mona Omar Attiah emphasised thatthe Secretary General's threat should be taken seriously: "He's not theonly one calling for a boycott. The public sentiment is such that it maylead to people not buying Danish products." (December 27, 2005). Even though Attiah still believed in the possibility of a diplomaticsolution, she warned that there were also "elements in the Middle Eastwho are not as interested in solving problems through dialogue as weare". Nonetheless, the Danish government chose to ignore the politicalreality for months, showing no understanding of the gravity of thesituation. On the contrary, Anders Fogh Rasmussen criticised 22 former Danishambassadors for "bad timing", when they in December 2005 in an openletter criticised his handling of the case, which they found hadprevented a diplomatic solution. Since mid-October, Anders Fogh Rasmussen has maintained this wilfulmisrepresentation of the situation despite repeated warnings of apossible escalation of the crisis, including the possibility of a tradeboycott, never once heeding the opinions or advice of the ambassadors. There is plenty of documentation after events began to spiral of controlin late January. Whatever one's opinion of Jyllands-Posten's initialpublication of the Muhammad cartoons, and how exaggerated the violentreactions may have been four months later, it was still the Danish PrimeMinister's wilful manipulation and distortion of events throughout thethree months of conflict that resulted in the greatest internationalcrisis in post-war Danish history. This so-called Muhammad Cartoon Controversy has succeeded inestablishing a rift between Denmark and many ordinary Muslims worldwide,as well as providing a host of anti-Muslim movements in the West withammunition in their proclaimed struggle for 'freedom of speech'. Astruggle which often seems to be nothing more than an excuse for the'right' to demonize Muslims! At the same time radical Islamists havebenefited from the cartoons by 'proving' that freedom of speech andother human rights serve to legalize blasphemous and Islamophobichatespeech, whereas various types of anti-Semitism on the other hand areoften considered serious offences. Unfortunately, these double standards are the rule rather than theexception, enforcing an ongoing conflict that stimulates anti-Muslimtendencies in the West, as well as anti-Semitic and anti-Westerntendencies in the Muslim world. In this way, the fundamental weakness ofDanish diplomacy, coupled with a constant flow of anti-Muslim rhetoricand provocations in Denmark have played a key part in deepening thereligious and ethnic rift that unfortunately dominates parts of theinternational political arena today.--Rune Engelbreth Larsen is an historian of ideas and columnist in theDanish newspaper Politiken. 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