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Dear colleagues,We have a new MA programme in Digital Media & Society at Uppsala University. Please help us to spread information about it by informing your students about the existence of this programme or forwarding them this message.Thank you for your help.With kind regards,Christian Fuchs***New MA Programme in Digital Media & Society at Uppsala UniversityUppsala University has introduced a new master programme in Digital Media & Society as part of the Social Science Master. It is a 2-year-programme that will start at the end of August 2012 with its first year of students. The programme's teaching language is English.The application period for students starts now and lasts until January 16, 2012.The goal of this programme is that students acquire skills to critically study the role of digital media in society. Students study the economic, political, cultural, social and practical impacts of digital media. This programme focuses on teaching theoretical, empirical, ethical, critical and practical skills for studying digital media in the information society.European Union students do not pay fees for studying in Sweden.Uppsala University is among the 100 best universities in the world (Times Higher Education University Ranking 2011: #87). Every year 45,000 undergraduate and graduate students enroll for classes. Uppsala University offers some 30 international master programmes and 300 single-subject courses taught in English. It is the oldest university in the Nordic countries - founded in 1477.ProgrammeThe programme consists of one semester of advanced core courses (30 credits) that focus on theoretical knowledge, empirical skills and ethical reasoning required for understanding and analyzing digital media & society. 30 credits (= 4 courses, one semester study time) is made up of basic social science skills courses that are taught together with the other specialties in the Social Science Master. Another 30 credits are elective courses that the students choose from various courses taught at Uppsala University. Also an internship at a company or a research internship at a university department are options for the elective courses. The master’s thesis (30 credits) is the final stage in the programme.The four core courses are:* Introduction to Information Society Studies (semester 1)* Internet, Social Media and Society (semester 1)* Cyberculture and Politics (semester 2)* Organizations and Communication in Global Society (semester 2)The four skills courses are:* Quantitative Methods* Qualitative Methods* Science Theory and Methodology* Social Science Methods and Research DesignFurther information for students:Flyer (PDF) http://fuchs.uti.at/wp-content/uploads/DM&S_flyer.pdfProgramme site: http://www.uu.se/en/education/courses_and_programmes/selma/program/?pKod=SSV2M&lasar=12/13Facebook-Group http://www.facebook.com/pages/Master-in-Digital-Media-Society/156723914419506ApplicationApplication site:www.antagning.se/intl/search?period=HT_2012&freeText=UU-P2052All applicants need to verify English language profiency. This is normally attested by an internationally recognised test such as TOEFL or IELTS.EligibilityBachelor’s degree equivalent to a Swedish degree of at least 180 ECTS credits (i.e. three years of full-time studies), including at least 90 ECTS credits of studies in social sciences or a comparable field that qualifies for studies on the specilisation in Digital Media & Society.Selection and Application LetterSelection will be based on previous academic studies and degrees with emphasis on grades in relevant fields and degree project (if any), a summary in English (1–2 pages) of a previous degree project (if any), and a statement of intent (3–5 pages).Students should accompany their application with a statement of intent, in which they engage with each of the following questions:* Please describe the undergraduate (bachelor) studies that you completed.* What were your favourite topics, main interests, favourite courses in your undergraduate (bachelor) studies and why?* Why are you interested in studying in the master’s programme focusing on Digital Media & Society?* What do you expect to learn studying Digital Media & Society?* What qualifies you for studying in the field of Digital Media & Society?* What are your future plans and goals after you have finished your studies and how can a social science master’s degree focusing on Digital Media & Society support you in achieving your goals?* Why do you want to study in Sweden and at Uppsala University’s Department of Informatics and Media?ContactDepartment of Informatics and MediaUppsala Universityhttp://www.im.uu.seDirector of Studies Göran Svenssongoran.svensson< at >im.uu.seTel +46-18-4711514--Prof. Christian FuchsChair in Media and Communication StudiesDepartment of Informatics and MediaUppsala UniversityKyrkogårdsgatan 10Box 513751 20 UppsalaSwedenchristian.fuchs< at >im.uu.seTel +46 (0) 18 471 1019http://fuchs.uti.athttp://www.im.uu.seNetPolitics Blog: http://fuchs.uti.at/blogEditor of tripleC: http://www.triple-c.seBook "Foundations of Critical Media and Information Studies" (Routledge 2011)Book "Internet and Society" (Paperback, Routledge 2010)Co-Editor of "Internet and Surveillance" (Routledge 2011)# 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

No doubt lengthy paeans will be forthcoming from the Kittler scholars. They will be, of course, well deserved for a thinker whose work traversed so many spheres. For us in the media, Kittler's work has been an indispensable source of rigor and insight. Back in 1987, I read the first chapter of Gramophone, Film, Typewriter in the journal October. After that, his name surfaced in many sources and I read everything I could find with voracious interest. He was regularly in the media festivals and his intense presence was a stark challenge to the kind of idiosyncratic history that was/is still so prevalent in the media sphere.Uncompromising and prodigious, Kittler's works evinced an analytical force that came with unsparing lucidity. Few contrived accounts could match his astute autopsies. Kittler embraced history from both ends and wrung from it meanings that analytical amateurs could never fathom. At home with Pink Floyd and Pynchon, Volta and Virilio, Edison and Euclid, Helmholz and Heidegger, Shannon and the pre-Socratics, Foucault and Frege, Turing and Thucydides, Wagner and Weiner, etc,. Kittler dissected history with exacting precision. Under the veneers of comfortable historiography, Kittler discerned systems and unscrambled ciphers that identified not mere archaeological tidbits but the anatomy and circulatory systems for the mobilization of discourses increasingly inscribed by technologies whose effect would radically alter our 'so-called' (one of his favorite phrases) communication horizon. He knew so well the link between militarism and media, power and information, philosophy and poetry, reading and really reading. His wit was often obscure, his arguments targeted with intimidating precision, his ideas formidable and elucidated with the kind of certainty that remain a challenge to anyone representing themselves as media historians or theorists. No one in our field can avoid the continuing reverberations of his ideas, the on-going influence of the many scholars who have followed, studied with, or have seriously studied his work.Years ago at the Ars Electronica conference InfoWar, Paul Virilio participated remotely by videoconference. Just after, I spoke with Kittler who said in his reluctant English "he always brings water to my eyes." Well, we were outside the Brucknerhaus smoking at the time so maybe it was just a little smoke in the eyes. Nah. It wasn't then for him and it isn't now for all of us.

Who are the virtual murderers of Gaddafi?October 27, 2011 by Tjebbe van TijenThe full version with links and two pictures can be found at:http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/who-are-the-virtual-murderers-of-gaddafi/Grotesque and hypocrite the new Libyan Government statement on the persecution of the alleged killers of Gaddafi. Stating that these could not have been regular opposition groups and that the new government knows the rules of war… and taking prisoners.“With regards to Qaddafi, we do not wait for anybody to tell us,” NTC vice chairman Abdel Hafiz Ghoga. “We had already launched an investigation. We have issued a code of ethics in handling of prisoners of war. I am sure that was an individual act and not an act of revolutionaries or the national army,” the top interim official said. “Whoever is responsible for that (Qaddafi’s killing) will be judged and given a fair trial.”What a lie, as both NATO and the insurgents – that became the army of the new Libyan government – have thrown tons of munition on any spot they thought Gaddafi would be at a certain moment. A fair trial of Gaddafi has never been on the agenda of neither NATO nor the insurgents that became the new government. Only the International Criminal Court in The Hague lent itself to suggest that such a trial was a viable option, never protesting in public against the attempted killing of their indicted trial candidates, Gaddafi and his close circle.[picture of a huge blast over the skyline of Tripoli: Photograph publiched in The Independent 2011/07/24 with this caption: "Nato planes bomb a Gaddafi compound in Tripoli last month. Air strikes by allied forces have become increasingly ineffective"]They were out to kill all those months, but failed in spite of all the high tech devices put to the task. Now a few hot heads – which are necessarily part of any insurrection – who finished Gaddafi’s life by hand, will be made into culprits to wash the virtual bloody hands of NATO and the new government.[Picture of a young man with a golden pistol in his hand, holding it up with pride, hoisted on the shoulders of triumphant supporters: Photograph published on the web site of the Daily Mail 2011/10/21 with the following caption: "Celebration: Rebel fighters carry a young man holding what they claim to be the gold-plated gun of Colonel Gaddafi which was taken from him."]It is sad that such lies are published in the international press without any direct rebuttal. Gaddafi should have been put on trial. His murder will hamper any attempt to cleanse Libya of decades of dictatorship.It is most disturbing to notice that – apparently – distant killing by regular armies using state of the art guided missiles airplanes with remote sensing, and the like, is not conceived as murder and somehow a civil way of getting rid of an adversary, whereas traditional lynching on the spot or firing a gun at a victim at close range is perceived as a barbaric act that can be classified as a crime of war or murder.

Mike Davis' excitement is warranted but his argument strays wide of the mark and is finally contradictory. Which Occupy the World Movement is he referring to? And, whose "anger remains on Gandhian low heat." If movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Rome etc... are part of this OWM they have never quite seemed to be on 'low heat' - far from it. While there may be a certain form of universality that crosses borders, electronically and otherwise, and fuels outrage there are quite different, and important characteristics that distinguish one movement from another. To conflate them seems to mimic the rhetoric and reductionism of MSM.Further, as Davis states, to:"(i.e. reclaim the Commons). The veteran Bronx activist-historianMark Naison has proposed a bold plan for converting the derelictand abandoned spaces of New York into survival resources (gardens,campsites, playgrounds) for the unsheltered and unemployed."Yes, this is precisely the kind of micro strategy that repositions people's lives at the most fundamental level (Naison's strategy is in fact working in various cities throughout the world).but then Davis goes on to say that, "The great issue is not raising taxes on the rich or achieving a better regulation of banks.It?s economic democracy: the right of ordinary people to makemacro-decisions about social investment, interest rates, capitalflows, job creation, and global warming. If the debate isn?t abouteconomic power, it?s irrelevant."If you don't understand 'economic power' pack your bags because this movement is not for you - what simplistic rubbish; we're used to one dimensional slogans and platitudes coming from 'ruling elites' - along with their self-perpetuating solutions to major social problems (which are not just financial) - so, when a progressive/leftist starts reducing things to 'great issues' there is a serious problem of analysis and vision.

THE TIME FOR ACTION IS NOW (Occupy Cuny)http://vimeo.com/31285186(by Iva Radivojevic & Martyna Starosta)"Occupy Wall Street" sparks "Occupy City University, New York"During the last weeks, we learned how quickly small protest gatherings can turn into new social movements. This is a document about the struggle of students and adjunct faculty at Cuny. This local struggle is part of an international student movement against neoliberal dictatorship.This is only the beginning. The time for action is now.Please spread it to mobilize more students, adjunct faculty, and allies for this important movement.Show it to your classmates, students, professors.Love & struggle,Martyna---Martyna StarostaFilm DetectiveRed ChannelsSucide or Solidarity?Facebook: Valerie Solanas Reloaded

Re: <<Kittler never had a chair for media studies, but for literature and later aesthetics.>>From the Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin website:"Kittler hatte den Lehrstuhl f?r ?sthetik und Geschichte der Medien an der Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin inne"

Dear Nettimers,(sorry for any cross-posting)The Share Festival is dedicating Saturday, 5th November to tactical media, to explore the fusion of art, media, politics and cultural activism and look at new forms of social protest and their media dimension.The day is an encounter open to all people who wish to voice their own contribution in a climate of free, open debate, as well as a chance to demonstrate that culture does not close, but opens doors to people, to the community, to the population, creating an opportunity for participation and discussion. A community response through its presence, to ask what sort of sustainability is possible? How do we live? What is the real world like for people? To ask, whose side are you on? Are you a cop or a robber?It will also be an occasion to retrace the history of media activism. First emerging in artist and activist circles in the 1990s, tactical media has since become a fully-fledged movement that targets anyone who tries to produce communication tools to support a political mission. It is a form of media activism that realizes that the distinction between street protests and media broadcasting—between the reality of the streets and its representation by the media—is not longer sustainable.A day for analysing how new forms of protest are being influenced by multimedia images and messages distributed by the Internet, mobile phones, social media, Internet video platforms and, naturally, traditional media such as the press, radio and television—from the "Twitter revolution" of the "Arab Spring" to the protests of Europe's "indignados", across the saga of Wikileaks.Saturday, 5th November3.00 pm - Regional Museum of Natural ScienceOpen Meeting - Art, Activism, New MediaFeaturing:Dmytri Kleiner, one of the founders of Telekommunisten, a collective involved in artistic projects that explore the way that communication technologies come with social relations embedded within them.Annette Wolfsberger, born in Austria, she worked in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom for the ten years for various different art festivals, before moving to Amsterdam to become production manager for Sonic Acts . She will speak about the difficult cultural situation in the Netherlands and the "Dutch Culture Under Attack" campaign.Giovanni Ziccardi, who will present a national preview of the Observatory on Human Rights and Electronic Resistance in the Digital Era, a project by the University of Milan.Franca Formenti, who will present Wikifood, a social network that focuses on certain protagonists of our contemporary society: the tongue and the mouth. An invitation to reflect upon the concept of privacy through culinary and ludic means.Closing the day at 9.00 pm will be a Hacking Resistance Party— to celebrate and commemorate, on Guy Fawkes Day no less, all the hackers throughout the four corners of earth, out there fighting censorship, state firewalls, global surveillance, big brother, restrictions on artistic freedom, repression and violence.Submit your proposal here info< at >toshare.itGreetings,Simonawww.toshare.it

Dear NettimersPlease see below for a talk that was given at "A Symposium on Zombies"at Winchester University, UK, last Friday, October 28th. The talk maybe of interest in connection with recent Nettime threads concerningthe current crisis and protest movements.All the bestGary FarnellFor a Symposium on Zombies Gary FarnellThe zombie is the official monster of our Great Recession. So saysTime magazine. "[Zombies] seem to be telling us something about thezeitgeist" " we might expect Time magazine to know a thing or twoabout the Zeitgeist.1 But in this short article by Lev Grossman,"Zombies Are the New Vampires", relatively little is said about whatindeed zombies are telling us about the Zeitgeist. At the same time,however, for socio-historical transformations to be registered inthe language of monstrosity is nothing new. At the time of the GreatDepression, for example, Antonio Gramsci in his prison cell wrote"The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying andthe new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbidsymptoms appear."2 "Now is the time of monsters", Gramsci says, notingthe configuration of the Zeitgeist and thus outlining how terrorsprings from torpor (a situation of dead-lock, if ever there was one)in the early 1930s. Gramsci"s remark concerning monsters, terror andtorpor acquires a new currency in the current crisis of the GreatRecession. A new teratology " more plainly, a new monsterology " isemergent, witness, for example, the publication of the late ChrisHarman"s Zombie Capitalism in 2009, Evan Calder Williams"s Combinedand Uneven Apocalypse in 2011 and David McNally"s Monsters of theMarket also in 2011. As well as this, there has been since late2009 a concerted theoretical effort to conceive of the present as a"conjuncture" in the pages of the journal Soundings.3 This initiativemarks the return of a Gramsci-inspired conjunctural analysis of theearly neo-liberal era formulated by writers in Marxism Today in the1970s and 1980s. The point about the conjunctural analysis as such isthat it enjoins consideration of the coming together of structuralcontradictions " as economically, politically and ideologicallyinflected " into a social crisis situation (a ruptural fusion, asLouis Althusser would denote it). Moreover, it prioritizes the issueof "representing the crisis" the better to find an exit from it. Inlight of this, this paper argues for the value of the zombie mythas an interpretative motif in relation to the Hegelian "Night ofthe World" that is the present crisis of our Great Recession. Thezombie should indeed be seen as the official monster of the moment.There has been a striking proliferation of images of monsters and ofthe apocalypse in the financial press starting with the sub-primecrisis of 2006 that mutated into the credit-crunch crisis of 2007that mutated into the financial crisis of 2008 that mutated into theglobal economic crisis we know of today. Thus, "What created thismonster"? asked the New York Times in March 2008.4 In April 2009 theFinancial Times warned that "Curse of the zombies rises in Europeamid an eerie calm".5 We have been warned that we face "Acropalypsenow" by the Sunday Times in September 2011.6 But it can be arguedthat it is specifically the figure of the zombie, at once spectacularand toxic, that traverses (intersects, negates) this problem of therepresentation of the present crisis. For from its origins in theculture of Haitian Vodou " and from a time when the Haitian Revolutionof 1791-1804 lay, as Susan Buck-Morss has said, "at the crossroadsof multiple discourses as a defining moment in world history"7 " theimage of the zombie has signified the end of civilization itself:it is the eschaton-made-flesh. It represents (in Hegelian terms)an image of the truth of the current conjunctural crisis of globalcapitalism. (Or put differently, "What if truth were monstrous"? asthe Heideggerian philosopher John Sallis once asked.8) Thereforewe should seize on the zombie"s image in all its sublime ugliness,itself a variation of Slavoj ??i??ek"s "sublime object of ideology".This obscene-deformative figure of the zombie speaks to power. Recallhow Occupy Wall Street protestors dressed as zombies, allowing WallStreet employees to "see us reflecting the metaphor of their actions".(Likewise, as Arthur Schopenhauer once joked, where else did thehorrors of Dante"s Inferno come from if not the horrors of the presentreal world itself?) Hence it"s time to love the living dead, a raceof monsters for the age of deterritorialized, new ethnicities crossedwith the politics of speed. (No wonder Gilles Deleuze and F??lixGuattari should have suggested quite so boldly in the first part ofCapitalism and Schizophrenia " Anti-Oedipus " that "The only modernmyth is the myth of zombies".9)Sublime ugliness The zombie"s sublime ugliness, as pressed intorelief by the force of conjunctural analysis of the neo-liberal erafrom the 1970s to the present, looks like this. It is now clear thatthe origins of the present financial and economic crisis lie in theresolution of the social-democratic "Keynesian" crisis that marked theend of the historic post-war settlement in the seventies. In otherwords, the neo-liberal solution to that earlier crisis has now becomethe problem of the present crisis. For if credit, deployed withinan expanding deregulatory regime (a gloriously immaterial space offlows), was once the principal instrument of a great transformation,redressing the various ills of "stagflation", a disgruntled workingclass and big government, it has subsequently folded back on itselfand crumbled to dust in the neo-liberals" own hands. A credit boom,bringing into play the circulation of vast amounts of virtual money,has at length become the generator not of general prosperity but ofacute inequality (crystallized, above all, in terms of the sub-primemortgages scandal). Then confirmation that the crisis situation of thelate 1970s/early 1980s was in fact being repeated (but in reverse!)in the late 2000s/early 2010s came in August 2011. Whereas forms ofindustrial unrest and street violence precipitated a credit boom(centring on London"s "big bang" of deregulation in the City in1986) as capital"s means of expanding its way out of a crisis, so, asthe bubble of a hyperinflated economy has finally burst in 2008, thecredit boom has in fact been causal vis-??-vis the recent rioting inEnglish cities. The fires, the scenes of violence in the first halfof August have been frightening indeed. But at the same time, liketrue "possessive individualist" subjects of neo-liberal ideology theurban rioters and looters have acted, curiously, like shoppers whowant to go shopping without paying for anything with real money. Thisexplains why the violence of the bad old days of the eighties hasreturned, but no longer in the form of that of politically consciouscollectives rather than that of post-credit boom consumers or pureneo-liberal shoppers. The general situation of the implosion of notjust the financial sector but also the market system more generallyis, ironically, precisely what credit qua fetish object was meant toforestall. Prescient indeed is Karl Marx"s comment in the third volumeof Capital (Marx"s Crisis Book) that "At first glance . . . the entirecrisis presents itself as simply a credit and monetary crisis."10This analysis of the neo-liberal conjuncture presses into relief thezombie"s sublime ugliness (the beautiful excrementalism, the shittysublime of the zombie) as portrayed in press coverage of the Augustriots of 2011: see, in particular, the well-known Sun front page ofAugust 10th that led with the headline "Shop a Moron"."Shop a Moron" This Sun front page belongs in the category ofthe "public image". Using pictures taken by closed-circuittelevision cameras, it presents a spread of photographs of rioters andlooters, laid out under the headline "Shop a Moron", accompaniedby the encouragement to readers to "name and shame" thosephotographed by contacting the police " the page as constructedis a virtual identification parade.11 Public images in this senseare as they have been described by Stuart Hall and his co-authors inPolicing the Crisis, now a canonical reference regarding conjuncturalanalysis, dating from 1978. Here a "public image" as articulatedin media discourse is "a cluster of impressions, themes andquasi-explanations, gathered or fused together".12 It is added:"These are sometimes the outcome of the [news] features processitself; where hard, difficult, social, cultural or economic analysisbreaks down or is cut short".13 A "public image", then, isa form of ideological mechanism used as a means to foreclose andhence "resolve" difficult issues articulated in media discourse,through a process of rhetorical closure. The "Shop a Moron" frontpage constitutes a public image in the above sense. The pictures asarranged allow the Sun to display its customary wit via the pun on"shop" and "shopping". This forms the basis of another of thepaper"s "public-interest" campaigns, promoting the cause of lawand order, here against the stupid, idiotic, jouissant behaviour ofthe "morons". At the same time, usage of the word moron in thecontext of this front page is the means of cutting-short of analysisand hence of achieving rhetorical closure regarding issues " thestory behind the news " arising from the rioting. The other mainnews story of the day (and indeed of that week) was of "turmoil inthe markets", as fears spread about a return to the stormy climate(or the forms of moronic behaviour!) of the credit boom. Yet it wasnot seen as necessary to draw any connections between the two (orfollow the "chain of equivalences" in the style of Laclau andMouffe"s discourse analysis). Even so, what appears the pressure inthe Sun to portray the rioters and looters as zombie-like figures maybe the most important thing of all about the "Shop a Moron" case.For the fact that the "moronic" rioters and looters representedin the Sun are made to look like zombies who have shuffled out ofGeorge A. Romero"s (later Zack Snyder"s) Dawn of the Dead, a filmclassic of consumerist alienation, is striking indeed. This "will tozombify" is what gives the game away.Conclusion: the zombie as objet petit a In short, there is at thelevel of representation a general reach for the zombie in the aspectof its sublime ugliness to show, as it were, the human face of thepresent crisis " the face of the moronic bankers on Wall Street aswell as that of the moronic looters on Main Street. Gillian Tett"sarticle in the Financial Times in 2009, "Curse of the zombiesrises in Europe amid an eerie calm", warns of the threat of whathappened to Japanese banks in the late 1990s that tipped over intocrisis, a sort of "undead state", Tett says, "in thesense of being too weak to flourish, but too complex and costly fortheir lenders to shut down".14 (The general "zombiness" ofall this, incidentally, is summed up nicely in the title of ColinCrouch"s recent book The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism.) But ifthe Japanese experience of extended economic depression (the "lostdecade") is, as Gillian Tett feared, now becoming a reality in theWest, it is notable beyond that how "universal" now is the zombieimage-repertoire in a universe that incorporates both the broadsheetFinancial Times and the tabloid Sun " in this sense, both the highend and the low end of representation of the current crisis. We mayconclude, then, that the zombie figures in all this as an embodimentof the Lacanian objet petit a, itself a forerunner of the ??i??ekiansublime object of ideology. Jacques Lacan has identified the objet a" the always-already other, reflexive, surplus object around whichthe drives circulate " as the object of psychoanalysis and, in theprocess, has paved the way for the retheorization of the Marxistconcept of ideology pursued by ??i??ek. The zombie qua Lacanian objetpetit a is what we are presented with as an obscure object of desirewe seek in the other ("in you more than you") in the at oncecompulsive and repetitive turn to the zombie image-repertoire thatstructures our stories about the current conjuncture and its monsters.The living dead, we may say, act out the death drive (the spectral"eternal life" of the undead) of the current global capitalistcrisis. They are thus a valuable form of political resource in theOccupy Wall Street sense of finding a means of reflecting the metaphorof capitalist power. Analogous with this is Elaine Scarry"s argumentformulated in her extraordinary work The Body in Pain that physicalpain represents the destruction of language through the reversion itcauses to the cries and groans " in Ingmar Bergman, the cries andwhispers " of a pre-Oedipal, pre-verbal state. The point is thatthat pain (in extremis that of the living dead) is relieved in themoment when it takes an object, thereby "project[ing] the facts ofsentience into speech . . . at the birth of language itself".15This clarifies how it is in the present moment that representing thepresent crisis is to find an exit from it " and the object-as-pivotin this respect is nothing other than the zombie qua objet petita. And so, in the end, if you have a T-shirt that says "We "Zombies", then wear it with pride.Notes1 Lev Grossman, "Zombies Are the New Vampires", Time, 9 April 2009. 2 Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Lawrence and Wishart 1971, p276. 3 See John Clarke, "What Crisis Is This"? and Michael Rustin, "Reflections on the Present", Soundings 43, Winter 2009, pp7-17, 18-34. 4 Nelson D. Schwartz and Julie Creswell, "What created this monster"? New York Times, 23 March 2008. 5 Gillian Tett, "Curse of the zombies rises in Europe amid an eerie calm", Financial Times, 3 April 2009. 6 Simon Tilford, "Acropalypse now for the euro", Sunday Times, 18 September 2011. 7 Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, University of Pittsburgh Press 2009, p13. 8 John Sallis, "Deformatives: Essentially Other Than Truth", in John Sallis, ed., Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, Indiana University Press 1993, p29. 9 Gilles Deleuze and F??lix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, Continuum 1984, p335. 10 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3, introd. Ernest Mandel, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin Books 1981, p621. 11 See the electronic (expanded) version of this page at www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/ 3742163/SHOP-A-MORON.html. 12 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order, Macmillan Education, 1978, p118. 13 Loc. cit. 14 Tett, "Curse of the zombies" 15 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford University Press 1985, p6.University of Winchester, a private charitable company limited by guarantee in England and Wales number 5969256.Registered Office: Sparkford Road, Winchester, Hampshire SO22 4NR

reSource for transmedial cultureStatement of interest & call for collaborationsThe reSource is an initiative of transmediale - festival for art and digital culture, Berlin in collaboration with CTM/DISK GbR and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, on the search for further partners during 2012.## reSource - A new initiative of the transmediale festivalThe reSource for transmedial culture is a new framework for transmediale festival related projects that happen throughout the year in the city of Berlin. It is an initiative that extends into ongoing activities with decisive touchdowns at each festival. Within the aegis of facilitating collaboration and the sharing of resources and knowledge between the transmediale festival in Berlin and the local and translocal scene engaged with art and digital culture, the objective of the reSource for transmedial culture is to act as a link between the cultural production of art festivals and collaborative networks in the field of art and technology, hacktivism and politics.This statement of interest is directed mainly to local and international artists, cultural producers, hackers, activists, and gender-situated communities active in the city of Berlin and in the broader field of net culture regionally and internationally, to co-develop experiences which invite exploration, experimentation and reflection. By generating a set of questions and issues which are addressed to local and translocal communities within (and beyond) digital cultural production, the main idea is to develop mutual exchanges of methodologies and knowledge, as well as project-space experiences, investigating new ways of forming a cultural public and producing a meta reflection on strategies of collaborative actions.The launch of the reSource will take place at transmediale 2012 through different project disseminations such as workshops, talks and performances. It will in itself be an important feature of the 25th anniversary of the transmediale, looking into the future while acknowledging the importance of the festival as an accessible and dynamic forum for the translocal art scene as well as for interdisciplinary cultural producers and researchers.The reSource launch at transmediale is anticipated by a beta-reSource event on November 16-18, 2011 at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) organised in partnership with the Digital Aesthetics Research Center (DARC) of Aarhus University and the Vilém Flusser Archive. After transmediale 2012, the reSource will extend its activity in collaboration with two main partners: CTM/DISK, proposing a series of open events held in the spring 2012, and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, organising a public event in August 2012, which will show the results of the first phase of collaboration and sharing within the context of the reSource for transmedial culture.This statement of interest is thought as a call for collaborations to involve a number of additional projects and partners towards the creation of a distributed platform during 2012 and further, envisioning the festival form as a peer-production context of knowledge and research.## reSource - A year-round distributed projectIf a source is the beginning, or origin of something, reSource is used in this context as a starting point from which a distributed sharing process, and a common executable (artistic) program, is produced. The aim of the reSource for transmedial culture is to be distributed in a form that extends into an ongoing, year-round activity with touchdowns at each festival. This form includes both its executable files, and its source code. Source codes are useful to modify a program or understand how it works. Taking this notion more broadly, in the framework of the reSource for transmedial culture, the objective becomes to develop a networking distributed platform and an (executable) meta reflection on the meaning and the practices of networked art, hacking and collaborative art production within the context of an international art festival.Starting from the assumption that the increasing commercialisation of the contexts of sharing and networking is currently transforming the meaning of art and participation, what should be the answer of artists, activists and hackers working on a critical dimension of networking? And if hacker and artistic practices are developing in the context of a deep transformation of the meaning of participation, often reflecting a precarious cultural and economical configuration, what is the responsibility and the role of cultural institutions engaging with art and digital technologies, towards a critical articulation of culture production?In Berlin, hacker, activist and artistic practices are very much realised outside the realm of artistic institutions. Some of those practices are contributing to transform the economy and the cultural asset of the city, but they are also becoming easy targets to be exploited by the market. However, this is not only a local phenomenon: At this present time, while financial markets are deeply influencing the development of cultural production and, more generally, our daily life flexibility, direct participation and common engagement are becoming pervasive business logics. The progressive involvement of users in the production process generates new possibilities of interaction among peers, but also of hierarchical control.Analysing the topology and the effects of artistic and hacktivist practices in decentralised social networks implies a reflection on power structures, business methodologies as well as on the relationship between art and economy. The social media and social networking phenomenon brings about contradictions and ambiguities. The subject of social networking is constantly transforming, and requires both a theoretical and empirical involvement of researchers and artists, theoreticians and practitioners before it can be fully understood. It becomes necessary to rethink concepts such as innovation and disruption, co-optation and opposition, as a mutual feedback loop, and a two-way disruption.## reSource - A shared knowledge laboratoryThe reSource for transmedial culture aims to work towards the creation of a shared knowledge laboratory within transmediale, and a project for local and trans-local distributed networks by organising events, workshops and talks involving artists, hackers, activists, researchers and cultural producers active in the city of Berlin and abroad. The aim of the reSource is to involve communities that not only engage directly with network technologies, but that are also critically reflecting on decentralised and distributed strategies of networking and anti-hegemonic practices, from hackers and activists to feminist, queer, transgender and porn communities.Within this framework, the reSource statement of interest poses the following objectives:- To rethink the concepts of (social) networking, collaborative practices, innovation and participation, through the creation of a platform of distributed networks involving grassroots communities of hackers, artists, performers, activists, curators and cultural producers;- To apply the concept of disruptive innovation to the art field so as to open up a critical perspective on the “network economy”, working in collaboration with local and translocal communities in Berlin and abroad, trying to understand how the market works after de-assembling its strategies and mechanisms of production;- To generate disruptive modalities of art production after the emergence of social media, reflecting on distributive decentralised and socially engaged contexts of participation and innovation;- To analyse the concept of transmedial culture, investigating creative approaches across digital and analogue media, reflecting on the intersections between cultural production, networking and disruptive art practices;- To reflect on the strategies of networked art and hacktivism, by developing an empirical methodology based on mutual exchanges between the members of the (post-) media art scene, cultural producers and researchers in the field of the humanities.The analyses of these subjects necessarily imply sharing methodologies whereby artists, hackers, activists and researchers join together to form practice-oriented contexts of reflection and give feedback to both theory and practice through an interdisciplinary, distributed and polyphonic approach. Artistic and hacker practices are thought therefore both as a resource for producing cultural innovation, but also as a strategic challenge to generate media criticism – and a meta reflection on artistic production in the framework of digital culture and network economy.This statement of interest must be imagined as an initial input and a starting point for further collaboration on the analysis and the production of disruptive hacker and artistic practices in the framework of (social) networking, but also as an input to generate a collective investigation into the practice of networking as an art strategy – and an applied research method.Contacts:Tatiana Bazzichelli: tbazz-m5l5pcv1r2d7rYuN+7wG8g< at >public.gmane.orgreSource concept and programme developerDaniela Silvestrin: ds-m5l5pcv1r2d7rYuN+7wG8g< at >public.gmane.orgreSource programme assistantMore info: http://www.transmediale.de/beyond/tm-resource

50 years of electronic artA naked bicyclist takes 30 minutes to travel 10 metres. A ?suicide machine?roasts a person like a steak: rare, medium or well done. Driven by thewind, creatures made of PVC piping roam a beach. A million Flickr photoslight up, and a little further down computer code dances across the wall.An electric ceiling discharges above your head, crackling so loudly that itgives you goose flesh. And then there is the smallest piece of furniture inthe world: invisible, a nano chair.HighlightsThe annual art, music and technology festival STRP is entering its fifthedition. STRP is named after the Philips site that borders downtownEindhoven: Strijp-S. With its Design Academy, Technical University, thePhilips group and dozens of IT companies, Eindhoven is the perfect city toexperience what happens when art and technology enter into a pact. Tocelebrate the fifth anniversary, the highlights of technological art fromthe past 50 years will be on display. The location, the Klokgebouw, is not a white box with a stricthands-off policy; instead, it is an impressive industrial hall. Philips?NatLab was once housed here. The NatLab was a physics laboratory where thebest and the brightest were free to experiment as they please, and an amplebudget to fund it all. In addition to acoustic experiments, this was thebirthplace of many inventions including the radio tube, short wavetransmitter, videodisc and compact disc. Roaming through this imposing factory building, a visitor encountersan extremely diverse array of art: some of the works date back more than 20years, while others are more recent. The artists are connected by thedesire to experiment: to see what is possible with technology ? and the joyis positively palpable.PioneersThe renowned video presentation Po?me Electronique has been referred to asthe first ?multimedia work of art.? For the 1958 World?s Fair, Philipsapproached the architect Le Corbusier. His assignment was to show whattechnological advancement had to offer humankind. The result was agesamtkunstwerk, a sound poem in which architecture, sound and sight merge.Imagine a specially designed room filled with electronic music by Var?se(very modern at the time) issuing from 400 speakers, accompanied by giantslide projections of everything from birth, death, destruction and themiracles of technology. It was said that the music seemed to ?drip down thewalls.? Var?se spent over six months crafting the composition with engineersfrom Philips' NatLab, where artist Dick Raaijmakers worked between 1954 and1960. Using the pseudonym Kid Baltan, an anagram for ?Dik Natlab,? he wasinvolved in electronic music, too. But Raaijmakers cannot be pigeonholed.He experimented to his heart?s content with installations, performances,?instructive pieces? for string ensembles and ?graphic methods? for tractorand bicycle. In Raaijmakers' Method Bicycle we see a documentation of a?re-enactment?: a nude bicyclist covers a distance of 10 metres veryslowly, and dismounts. The endeavour takes a total of 30 minutes tocomplete. As the bicycle is pulled by a motorised winch and steel cable,the cyclist is lifted up off the saddle in slow motion, his leg moves backand he dismounts the bicycle at extremely low speed. The silence created bythe concentration of the nude performer causes the viewer to acutely hearhis heartbeat and breathing. You see his muscles quivering. The simple actof ?dismounting a bicycle? becomes breathtakingly thrilling. Another pioneer presented by STRP is Gerrit van Bakel. He, too,experimented with slowness: he built machines that advance by merecentimetres over the course of millions of years. Agonisingly slow.Punk and social criticismThe machine art of the Eighties was an extension of the squatters? movementand punk, the ?DIY? culture. Fire artist Erik Hobijn is one of itsexponents. He built a massive installation that he named Delusions ofSelf-Immolation, a suicide machine. Covered with flame retardant gel, thesubject stands on a revolving platform between a flamethrower and a waterhose. The flame comes from behind. The user is exposed to the flamethrowerfor approximately ? second and automatically rotated towards theextinguisher, which immediately puts out the flames. The actual time duringwhich subjects are actually on fire is extremely brief ? approximately 0.4- 0.8 seconds -- to prevent them from actually burning. Hobijn and his workare illustrative of the way in which technology was used with apost-apocalyptic aesthetic during the punk and squatter era.The work contained an unmistakable element of social criticism withoutbeing pedantic. It was rebellious, energetic. The same could also be saidabout Jodi.org: Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, Internet and gamepioneers. In the Nineties, they made art that manipulated the computer?soperating system and the user?s fear of computer viruses. JODI usescomputer iconography the way that a painter uses paint: you click and errormessages, pop-up windows and arrows tumble across the screen. The effect isa confusing graphic spectacle. At the time, it sowed panic among manypeople, who mistakenly believed that this ?weird sort of art? had ?broken?their computer. Technological art acquires added value when you look at it in terms oftime and context. The interactive installation The Legible City by JeffreyShaw was shown for the first time in 1989. Astride a stationery bike, youcycle your way through huge coloured letters that form words, streets andsentences: a city. The landscape of letters is based on the map of NewYork. You cycle through excerpts from stories and condensed urban historiesprojected on the wall in front of you. The installation Spatial Sounds by Marnix de Nijs and Edwin van derHeide takes your breath away in an entirely different manner. The work hasa savage beauty to it. The violent installation dates back to 2000, alittle over a decade after Shaw?s more subdued work. The audience isstartled by a speaker, which spins through the air with brute force like awashing machine gone haywire. As soon as someone approaches, the box emitsloud, pulsating sounds.Today?s generation of technical artists is represented, too, of course.There has been a perceptible shift from machine and installation art (vianet.art) to robotics, mobile telephones, augmented reality, ?intelligent?fashion, and nano and game technology. Augmented Reality was made popular by the smartphone. A screen (or pairof glasses) is used to add another layer over reality. Originallyunsolicited, artist Sander Veenhof?s telephone application for the Museumof Modern Art (MoMA) in New York allows you to see art that is notofficially part of the collection hanging on the museum?s walls: these arethree-dimensional virtual objects. For STRP, he came up with something new:a real live rabbit named Tibb, who lives in a cage with a webcam aimed atit. The cage has blue screen walls, which are similar to those in atelevision news studio. Using their smartphone screen or iPad, festivalvisitors can take the live rabbit with them and let the virtual version hoparound freely at home in real time. Tibb AR -Rabbitt reads the samebackward as forward, which is reminiscent of the Kid Baltan - Dik Natlabanagram.Some AR artists call themselves ?cyber activists? who ?squat? officialspaces (art museum or otherwise). After all, using GPS coordinates you canleave virtual objects everywhere, whether it is a sculpture inside thePalace on Dam Square in Amsterdam, or flowers on a grave. Another new generation artist and designer, Daan Roosegaarde, made aname for himself with playful interactive installations such as Dune. Asvisitors walk down a long corridor of artificial beach grass, the soundsmade by visitors (for example by coughing, singing, or shouting) cause thetips of the blades to light up. They react to sounds and produce a wave oflight. It is as if you are walking through sand reeds, traversing a dunelandscape that shifts with your movements. During the past few years, Roosegaarde has been focusing on fashion,too. The exhibition includes a woman wearing a dress that Roosegaardecreated in cooperation with a pair of fashion designers. When you approachthe model in her high tech outfit, the material covering her body slowlybecomes transparent: Intimacy 2.0.Mature art formThe exhibition presents an overview of the developments in the Netherlands.Technology has made significant advances during the past 50 years but theartists? inspiration has remained more or less the same. Some usetechnology to express social criticism; others play around with thepossibilities. The combined result is a journey filled with associations: afascinating timeline of 50 years? worth of art and technology. Bringing somany works together allows you to see parallels, and the historic contextadds relevance to the installations.STRP makes it clear that the combination of technology and art is reachingthe stage of maturity: there is a canon of experimental artists worthy ofrespect. Where technology was only sparsely available in the past, nowthere is an arsenal of opportunities and an international community that isstronger than ever thanks to network technology.Ine Poppe, 2011

The recent post by Geert and Bifo was, as far as I am concerned, so apodictic and used such strange words ('Finazism'? - gimme a break...) that it did not really invite discussion outside its own terms of reference. Fortunately, Geert has rephrased in somewhat more accessible language its main argument, viz that hackers should help dismantle the fortress of finance. I transquote from an article in the University of Amsterdam magazine, where he was asked about purpose and effect of the local Occupy WS, together with two other luminaries:"Borowing from the issue of nuclear armaments, I advocate the dismantling of financial software itself. Hackers could help in this. We need not to convince bankers to do it. We must stop the damage they do to our pensions ourselves." (...)The idea, however, that hackers, 'the army of software', could, would, or would be prepared and willing to mount an assault on the walls of Jericho of the global financial fortress is, to use that quirky Dutch phrase, "sniffed at by the rats". The electronic financial networks have kicked into existence much earlier than the public ones, and have been developped separately from what has become known as the Internet, of which it is, in its mission critical functions, as well separated and shielded as military networks are, if not better. If they were hackable at a grand scale, it would have happened already (and spare me the argument that it has, already, repeatedly been, but kept under wraps - a Big One, we would have known). The financial networks are more likely to collapse under their own weight, or trigger operational clusterf&^%$£!, which they indeed regularly do.I think two much more interesting (but less romantic and actionist) line of attack would be to prevent the financial sector from luring and capturing the best brains in computer science, a.o.t. by way of exorbitant remunerations. An another would be to firmly put a cap on the sphere of accountancy, which in the last thirty years, has managed to invade both minds and processes, not only in finance, but in society at large, so that the Cult of Mamon has for all practical purposes been replaced by the Cult of the Number, whose beginning and end, as we all know, is Zero.Wishing you a happy cruise towards monetary meltdown,Cheers, patrizio & Diiiinooos!

'There is a strange paradox in Marx's approach to revolution. Generally speaking, when Marx speaks of material creativity, he speaks of 'production', and here he insists, as I've mentioned, that the defining feature of humanity is that we first imagine things, and then try to bring them into being. When he speaks of social creativity it is almost always in terms of revolution, but here, he insists that imagining something and then trying to bring it into being is precisely what we should never do. That would be utopianism, and for utopianism, he had only withering contempt.' -- David Graeber, The Revolution In ReverseIn this example David Graeber is suggesting that it is Utopian to imagine a better world in the future, before achieving it.In 'A Discussion on "Listen, Marxist!"' Bookchin writes of Marx: ''No less serious is the rejection of Utopian thought'the imaginative forays of Charles Fourier and William Morris. What Martin Buber called the "utopian element in socialism" is rejected for a "hardheaded" and "objective" treatment of "reality." 'Bookchin is suggesting, citing Buber, that to be Utopian is to be overly imaginative and lacking hard-headedness and "objectivity."Now clearly, lacking objectivity could be drawback, but could Marx really have objected to imagination and for-sight? I don't claim to match the scholarship of Graeber or Bookchin, so I wont hazard to prove what Marx really believed about Utopian thinking, but for me, both the above defences, which are unfortunately common ones, are completely missing the point.The issue is not so much objectivity, vision, nor imagination, it is the belief that society can be changed without conflict, that oppressed classes can end their oppression without overcoming the ruling classes, often just by merely suggesting another system is possible. I have complete confidence that Graeber and Bookchin also reject such socialism, simply using other words.Perhaps the most of famous of Marx and Engels' rejection of Utopianism comes from this passage of the Communist Manifesto:"The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see it in the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?. Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel." -- Marx & Engels, The Communist ManifestoIt seems plain that what is being rejected here is not a vision for the future, nor imagination. Although 'their own surroundings' is mentioned as a cause, there is hardly a strong argument being made on the basis of a lack of objectivity. The criticism of the rejection of Utopian thought presented by Graeber and Bookchin seems to miss the mark.Utopians are those activists who deny class struggle, who reject all political and revolutionary action, who, appeal to the oppressors themselves, instead of placing their hope in the revolutionary potential of the oppressed masses; "they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see it in the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?"That is Utopian thinking.Class society does not exist simply because nobody has been clever enough to think-up a better system. Class society evolved over time, under force, to serve the interests of the most powerful. Who, as a predatory class require a productive class to exist and serve them. The control and oppression of the productive classes is not an accident, it is the purpose of the system.The representatives of the predatory class will not abandon their privilege, they will fight to the death to keep it, and even bring down the whole society, if they can, to prevent losing their privilege.Rulers would rather see everything they have lost, their own children slaughtered, and the greatest works of their society destroyed and undone, sooner than fall into the lower classes and accept their servants as their equals.What makes certain thinking Utopian is denying conflict, imagining the economic and social structure of society can be overturned without conflict, thinking that we can go from a society of class stratification to a society without classes without conflict among the contesting classes. Such thinking is rightfully to be rejected.Thinking is Utopian when it has no political program, no revolutionary theory, when it doesn't address how the balance of power will be changed so that a new society is possible, when this issue of power is in fact the primary issue we must address to achieve a society where "In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."A social theory is not Utopian because the future society it envisions is unrealistic, but rather because it fails to answer, or often even consider, the issue of how we could possible get there and achieve such a society, how we can overcome the resistance of those who would lose privilege and power in such a society. This lack makes such work not so much political thought, but better filed under Speculative Fiction.

"We are the 99%" is of course the very effective slogan coined by#OccupyWallStreet and embraced all over the planet, starting withOakland, where today a momentous general strike will be staged, whoserepercussions are national, if not global.It is of course convenient rhetoric portraying a movement as the vastmajority mobilized against the monstrous privileges of a tiny elite,which like the aristocracy at the Versailles court must be deprived ofits unmerited privileges by the righteous and rebellious masses.Unfortunately, the neoliberal regime is unlike the Ancien Régime, andit has held economic, political, and intellectual hegemony for nearlythree decades (from Thatcher and Reagan to the outbreak of the GreatRecession) precisely because it has long commanded the consent of themiddle classes. Like the German social democratic thinker andpolitician Peter Glotz used to say in the 1980s, neoliberal society isa two-thirds society, that is, a society where the poorest third(single mothers, minorities, immigrants etc) is effectivelydisenfranchised, because it is excluded from the labor market and fromany hope of affluence and consumerism (in the legal economy, at least)which constitute the tenets of neoliberal citizenship. The bottomthird is in effect an underclass to be feared and to be policed, apoverty trap it is hard to escape from. As neoliberalism progressed,precarization and casualization of job relations of course grew andslowly but surely the middle third was affected by stagnatingsalaries, wages, and incomes, especially for the younger generations,swelling the ranks of the precariat as free-lancers and interns in theservice industry. People relied on credit cards or used housing assetsas collateral to maintain standards of living.Starting with the summer of 2007 and reaching point of high drama inseptember 2008, the financial bubble exploded once for all as realestate values plummeted and the myth of market deregulation wasexposed in all its nefariousness. The onset of the Great Recession andits aftermath of pauperization and mass unemployment has inverted thetwo-thirds society of yore. Now there's only one third left to enjoythe benefits of neoliberalism: the upper class is still joined by asizable upper middle class in enjoying the luxuries of cosmopolitanliving and leisurely pursuits. They might be time-starved, but they'recertainly not cash-starved like the rest of us. SUVs still sellhandsomely and exotic tourism has never been so much in demand, forinstance.It's the middle class, especially the children of the middle class,the lower middle class (petty bourgeoisie, if you will), and theworking class who are feeling the pinch of the global recession inEurope and America. The underclass sees its suffering brought a notchhigher, due to austerity cuts in social spending, but it's been inhell for two decades already. It's the middle third that wasn't readyfor this theft of democracy by bankers and investment funds and ishoping to mobilize all of society fallen victim to the demise ofneoliberalism against the unwarranted privileges of the elites: theseguys have failed badly but they want to retain the lever of economicand political power. This just can't be, otherwise it'd mean we haveshifted from democracy to oligarchy, something not even neoliberalismcould countenance (free markets in free democracies, was its ethos).Hence the occupy/indignado rebellion at St Paul's and Wall Street. Ifthings go well, we'll be the voice of the 66% that alter the relationsof political, economic and ideological power in the west. The bigquestion is if the working class and the petty bourgeoisie will go theway of #ows/#occupylsx, or if they will fall prey to the siren songsof nativist conservatism and xenophobic populism.

Nettimers, for your consideration....All best,Dan*http://prop-press.typepad.com/blog/2011/11/from-wisconsin-on-ows-and-post-democracy.htmlDuring the Great National Debt Ceiling (non-)Debate of 2011, when PresidentObama stood his ground after giving it away first, like many of my fellowAmericans I called and emailed the offices of my US senator and mycongressional representative. I urged my senator, the ultra-regressive RonJohnson, to vote for the debt ceiling-increase plan, and I advised mycongressperson, liberal Tammy Baldwin to vote against the House version ofthe bill. In the end, Ron Johnson blew off my opinion and voted against it.Tammy Baldwin honored it and voted against it. I sent an email to SenatorJohnson expressing my disappointment, and an email to Ms. Baldwin applaudingher for listening to her constituents. Did you get that? On my score card Johnson voted against it and did thewrong thing. Baldwin voted against it and did the right thing. Huh? The thinking was this: voting against the bill would be handing theregressives a victory in their effort to sabotage the US economy; thisinvented crisis was their method of blackmailing the American public intoaccepting draconian cuts to social spending. From this position, theconclusion was that Senator Johnson needed to hear from constituents opposedto his extreme regressive tendencies. So, call his office and lodge a tallyin the Vote Yes column. For her part, Tammy Baldwin always needs encouragement to uphold theprogressive standard she proudly advertises but frequently fails to deliver.As noted, President Obama gave away the ranch even before getting theRepublicans to the table. No self-respecting defender of social prioritiescould possibly vote for such an insult. So, call her office and tell her tostand up to the assault by voting No. In the end the bill passed, with the No votes cast by a bunch of Tea Partygreenhorns who had gleefully put Speaker Boehner¹s panties in a twist, and acadre of progressives who couldn¹t stomach the bill¹s passage withoutlodging a principled refusal to take part in the charade. Nevermind that theGreat (non-)Debate has already been forgotten, more or less, in just theseveral months between then and now. The absurdity of the actual vote‹whatthose votes represented, and how complex positions mixed with ideologicalposturing cannot be reduced to a yes or no vote‹not only remains, but isreplayed every single time an ideologically written bill comes to the floorof the legislative chambers. Which is to say, now, all the time. Governing by lowest common denominator may work in periods of equilibrium,but dysfunction and the exacerbation of crises are all but guaranteed when asociety deals with urgent challenges using the blunt tool of majority rulein an oligarchical representative democracy. Tactical voting andmanipulative campaigning (was I secretly trying to get Senator Johnson tovote No?) against ever more preordained outcomes only makes the base levellimitations more obvious. Though I tell the story above as a personalexperience, it is a mass phenomenon, experienced by millions every day. Theabsurdity of the participatory experience can no longer mask the essentialdisenfranchisement that supports the cheap veneer of a functioningdemocracy. Though perhaps most acute in the US, with the unrestrictedamounts of money now warping the electoral process beyond repair, the limitsof democracy are felt in all variations of the parliamentary system, and inall presidential systems, the world over. Judged by the standards ofeffectively tackling the problems faced by societies, representativedemocracies as functioning systems are the exception, not the rule. *As the existing system proves itself incapable of addressing the needs ofordinary people, an out of whack economy, and ecologies on the brink‹and,most fundamentally, the crisis of political participation itself‹othersystems, embryonic and half-blind, emerge, wherever they can. The mostevident emergence of a non-parliamentary system from recent times is theprocess at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement, that is, the directdemocracy of the General Assembly. Owing much to the long history of groupprocess identified with movements of social justice and egalitarianism,going back directly to the councils of Seattle, the cultures of consensus inthe social experiments of the 60s and 70s, the workers assemblies ofrevolutionary Catalonia, the voteless decision making of the Quakers andnineteenth-century utopian societies, the GA presents the seed of the longterm project, the one that builds different social relations through anextraparliamentary, non-representative system. It is the resolute refusal to avail itself of the existing democraticsystem‹not just the political parties, but the system of representation as awhole‹that marks Occupy Wall Street as a movement for a different world, asmuch or more than any of its critiques of finance capital, corruption, andcorporate power. The General Assembly takes the direct vote and/or consensusprocess to a new level of proliferation by virtue of its visibility andperformed display. For the six weeks of the Occupy movement at pretty muchevery Occupy site the GA has been held in the open, anyone can listen, andanyone can participate. The process has thus far resisted corruption and theconcentration of power, and yet still allowed groups of people numbering inthe hundreds and even single thousands to make concrete decisions. What isbeing created through the practice of daily assemblies (at some sites twicedaily) are new political cultures and working models of direct democracy. Badiou specifies the resonant radicalism of the Paris Commune precisely inits Committee¹s rejection of, as he says, a parliamentary destiny. Based onhis interpretation of March 18, 1871, it seems reasonable to wonder whetherthe Occupy movement might qualify as, in his word, an ³event.² It isdifficult to say, for two possible reasons. First, the historicalreverberations that conclusively mark a political moment (a ³site,² as hesays‹and OWS is already that, certainly) as an event only come later; it istoo early for such reverberations even if the original moment over. Theother, better reason may be that OWS is not over, and an event is neverknown as an event for its duration. Within that duration, time is different;seasons change, but the present holds still for as long as the insurgencyauthors life freshly, thereby disrupting the reproduction of daily life. Unlike the territorial particularity of the Paris Commune, the Occupymovement has proliferated across geographic space and distance. With thearrests in Chicago, the bulldozing in Richmond, and above all (thus far) thebrutality of Oakland, the mediated affective center of the movement pinballsaround the nation, with each turn extending the movement. The longer theOccupy movement stays viable as an unpredictable process, the longer andbroader the site gets stretched, facilitating its evolution toward an event.On the level of long term possiblity being considered here, the mostdangerous of the counterforces is neither police repression nor erodingpublic sympathy, nor even the shrinking of public spaces suitable foroccupation. Rather, it is the reassertion of normal processes of governance,ie a turn away from the GA and toward a formalized representative system,especially as some elements of the Occupy movment eventually move toward aninstitutionalized, sustainable form. *When Brian Holmes speaks of post-Fordism, he is careful to describe thatcondition as the new media, hyper commodified, globalized environment ofcomplex subjectivities living in societies that at many key institutionaland structural levels remain Fordist in origins, design, and essentialoperation. When Xudong Zhang writes about the cultural politics ofpostsocialist China, he is describes the contradictions of an unshackledmarket economy and exploding middle class, learning to consume the materialand the symbolic, overlaying a society whose socialist foundations are farfrom disappeared across an uneven geography. In other words, the ³post-²phase of a society is about emergence, layering, and coexistence. The latersystem, paradigms, lifeways, and economies never wholly or cleanly supersedethe earlier frame‹especially when that earlier frame was itself a wholesaledisplacement of the pre-modern, as it was the case with both AmericanFordist industry and Chinese revolutionary socialism. Similarly, OWS hints at the coming of the post-democratic. This is the longterm potential of the movement. One can see it in Madison, where the GAstake place practically within shouting distance of the capitol building. TheGA is a study in the amateur, what with its balky sound system, ramshackleinfo tables and grungy participants. Every additional day is a kind ofexistential victory. Meanwhile, the edifice of officaldom that is theCapitol silently screams permanence. For the rest of our lives and probablyfar beyond, these two systems of governance, decision making, and powerdistribution will coexist, with the post-democratic system growing,developing, and gaining traction wherever it can, and the democratic systemcontinuing to monopolize official power but rotting from within. For activists, the challenge is how to fight and function in both arenas atonce. The nascent world must be nurtured, we must acculturate ourselves tothe post-democratic social relations by participating, giving of ourselvesto the emerging embryonic systems. At the same time at the very least wemust defend against the brute attacks coming out of the existing democracy,wielded by the regressives with the stamp of state legitimacy. That meansfighting battles on the terms of that system: using the legislative processand the elections. In Wisconsin, this contradictory position will be coming to a head in thenext few months. The recall campaign targeting Governor Walker will bestarting on November 15. The recall campaign will almost certainly achieveits goal of staging a new election, but the outcome of that election is farfrom a guaranteed victory. Republicans will do everything they can to winit, precisely because they understand that when they win, they will thenhave the final mark of legitimacy that they will need. The extremist agendawe have seen up until now will be nothing‹nothing‹compared to what will comeshould Walker win (or, more accurately, buy and steal) the recall election.Therefore, we must defend against this possibility by working for a Walkerdefeat in the election, but at the same time articulate our basic rejectionof the election as anything but a sham exercise that confers zero legitimacyon whomever should win. There is no simple way to deliver this dual message,other than through our actions‹to work in the electoral sphere (doorknocking, fundraising, get out the youth and minority vote) and also tobuild up our local post-democratic initiatives (co-ops, GAs, experimentalforms). In Wisconsin, in Oakland, at OWS, and all the as yet unknown future sites,it is up to us to make this latest ³post-² phase a reality. As with otherpost- phases, it is really not a choice, but simply where the decaying butextant structures leave us. We have the rest of our lives to do it, but thereasons for diving in are all right now.

Dear All,You may find a video titled "P2P and Utopia" athttp://vimeo.com/31495896which deals with the P2P movement in a moreabstract, but hopefully artistic, way and it is based on a 2008 videopoem in Greek under the same title. I hope that it maybe of interestto some of you :-)Best,Vasilis

----- Forwarded message from John Hopkins <jhopkins-LRlVL1xtBs0sV2N9l4h3zg< at >public.gmane.org> -----From: John Hopkins <jhopkins-LRlVL1xtBs0sV2N9l4h3zg< at >public.gmane.org>Reply-To: jhopkins-LRlVL1xtBs0sV2N9l4h3zg< at >public.gmane.orgSubject: Re: <nettime> The False Defences of Utopian Thought.Organization: neoscenesDate: Thu, 03 Nov 2011 08:49:35 -0600CC: nettime-l-fO7mttO5ZDI< at >public.gmane.orgOn 11/3/11 01:15, Morlock Elloi wrote:the future belongs to those who are aware when it is happening, now and then...jh----- End forwarded message ---------- Forwarded message from Rob Myers <rob-MHOfhu0kjIxg9hUCZPvPmw< at >public.gmane.org> -----From: Rob Myers <rob-MHOfhu0kjIxg9hUCZPvPmw< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Re: <nettime> The False Defences of Utopian Thought.Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:20:40 +0000To: nettime-l-E4ExXAXZP6aEi8DpZVb4nw< at >public.gmane.orgOn 03/11/11 07:15, Morlock Elloi wrote:In what way is revolutionarianism different from hipsterism?- Rob.----- End forwarded message ----

bwo INURA list/PMDate: Thu, 3 Nov 2011 16:53:58 -0400Sorry, I think there's moe to it than just what the numbers can show..In the debate about the meaning, potential, and future direction of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the issue of just who the 99% and the 1% are, and what difference it makes, is a thorny one. The occupiers themselves, as a rough estimate, comprise less than .1% of the population. What is the line of division the occupy movement is trying to get across? How can it be done?The answer connects with the questions of demands vs. goals, the slogans the movement uses. Some sound-bite size slogans can be imagined to suggest how a real debate might be provoked and the message of the occupations spread convincingly among the large number of their actual or potential supporters.It’s newly on my blog, pmarcuse.wordpress.com, as:FOR OCCUPY WALL STREET, WHAT DOES 1% AND 99% MEAN?Occupy Wall Street’s Common Message to its Diverse Potential SupportersPeter# 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://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

original to:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203804204577014051108901214.html#After Karl Rove, we now have another right-winger rehearsing the arguments- but they're neatly lined up, so its worthwhile taking stock of them. Asit is worthwhile to ponder why the right, esp in the Northern parts of theNorth, is so much more succesfull at broad-based organising than the left.Strictly speaking as a Swiss banker, the numbers are definitely in theirfavor. I already wondered as a young students how a massive (andmainstream) left-wing demo (eg organised by the main trade unions) wouldmobilize in the lower ten thousands, but any gathering of the orthodox(young) protestants easily, and repeatedly breached the lakh mark...(one lakh = 100.000). And btw, the scenes described at NYC Occupy -subject of a very sarcastic editorial in the same paper a few days ago -also have been witnessed at the Amsterdam Occupy, and probably a fewmore... In the South, they definitely do it beter.Cheers for now, p+3D!Occupying vs. Tea PartyingFreedom and the foundations of moral behavior.By MATT KIBBEMy first instinct was to sympathize with Occupy Wall Street (OWS). At thetime of the initial protests, I was in Italy giving a lecture on the teaparty ethos to graduate students participating in the Istituto BrunoLeoni's annual Mises Seminar. I was getting reports of OWS signs that Ihad often see at Tea Party protests, such as "End the Fed" and "Stop CronyCapitalism." But something didn't jibe. I wasn't sure why.The answer came from economist and Nobel Laureate Vernon Smith, whodelivered the keynote address at the Mises Seminar. His lecture on AdamSmith's Theory of Moral Sentiments focused on the question "how do socialnorms emerge spontaneously?" Both Smiths, Adam and Vernon, argue thatindividual freedoms and property rights are the foundations of moralbehavior. Individuals, with full ownership of their life, liberty andproperty, judge themselves and care about the positive judgments ofothers. This accountability allows for cooperation, connects a communityand enables human prosperity."The most sacred laws of justice, therefore, those whose violation seemsto call loudest for vengeance and punishment, are the laws which guard thelife and person of our neighbor," wrote Adam Smith back in 1759, addingthat "the next are those which guard his property and possessions."America's tea partiers put it another way: "Don't hurt other people anddon't take their stuff."deficit spending and other government intrusions into our lives, such asthe mandate contained in the recent U.S. health-care reform that dictatesto every American what health insurance he must buy and which treatmentshe may or may not access. Tea partiers oppose government forcing theresponsible to subsidize the irresponsibility of others, because thesepolicies hurt other people and take their stuff.When tea partiers petition their government for a redress of suchgrievances, as more than one million did on Sept. 12, 2009, they don't getinto fights, they don't get arrested, they say "excuse me" and "thankyou," they wait in hopelessly long lines for porta-johns, they pick uptheir trash and leave public spaces and private property exactly as theyfound them. No one told myself or other tea partiers to do these things;we just believe that you shouldn't hurt other people and you shouldn'ttake their stuff.{ picture caption: An Occupy Wall Street associate in Rome addresses hisgrievances. -> you see a shirtless - but masked - dude throwing a molotov,with a burning something in the background... -PR}In contrast OWS, whose ranks represent a small fraction of total tea partyprotestors, has struggled to maintain civility or to even identify aunifying sense of purpose in their uprising. At Zuccotti Park in lowerManhattan, there is stealing, property damage and arrests often provokedby protestors wanting conflict with the police. Real people—not members ofthe so-called 1%—are being hurt as their small businesses are impacted andtheir property destroyed.Things have gone far worse in Europe. In Rome, just one week later and 468kilometers south of the Mises Seminar, a protest aligning itself with theOWS movement quickly devolved into a full-on riot, with the demonstratorssmashing shop windows and torching cars. "Clad in black with their facescovered," the Associated Press reported, "protesters threw rocks, bottlesand incendiary devices at banks and Rome police in riot gear. Someprotesters had clubs, others had hammers. They destroyed bank ATMs, settrash bins on fire and assaulted at least two news crews from Sky Italia."Why so much violence? Many protesters in the U.S. have legitimate anger atthe crony capitalism and high unemployment that have defined the firstthree years of the Obama Administration. Likewise, many young people inthe euro zone can't find jobs and face a perfect storm no-growtheconomies, crushing sovereign debt fueled by ingrained welfare states andpublic unions acting as barriers to entering the job market. But for teapartiers, who rose up against many of the same circumstances, tacticalnon-violence simply reflects the values that first brought us together.When you look for defining values in Occupy Wall Street, you discover onlya disparate set of competing demands. Many are against capitalism per seand wealth-creation in general. They want to redistribute the pie, notgrow it. But whose claims are legitimate, and how might you reallocate thewealth of some to the benefit of those more entitled? This most difficultquestion is playing out in real life in Zuccotti Park, where a GeneralAssembly allocates scarce resources among factions of protesters. Onedemand by a group of drummers for $8,000 for new musical instruments wasdemonstrative. "We have worked for you! Appreciate us!" one drummershouted angrily to the General Assembly, as reported in the HuffingtonPost. When the bid failed, obscenities flew and the Huffington Postreports that "a physical fight nearly erupted."I can't help but think of the fate of the Twentieth Century Motor Companyin Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged," where the edict "to each according totheir contribution" was replaced with "to each according to their need."The disastrous results left an entire community—the 99%—jobless, angry anddestitute.Despite all of this, in America Occupy Wall Street has been celebrated bymany in the media and the Democratic party as a legitimate counter to thetea party. All of the accusations that were wrongfully hurled at the teaparty—from bigotry to violent tendencies—now seem to be occurringregularly at OWS protests. Yet they are ignored in deference to thesupposed morally superiority of this new movement. Van Jones, formerly anenvironmental advisor to President Barack Obama, says we should ignore OWSdefects because "they've got moral clarity." Even Mr. Obama has said that"the protesters are giving voice to a more broad-based frustration abouthow our financial system works."Who knows, maybe cognitive dissonance is a good political strategy for theleft. Can the king of crony capitalism win reelection having codified "toobig to fail" into law? Can Congressional Democrats, having spent the pasttwo years attaching Republicans to so-called "tea party extremism," nowembrace without consequence the radical demands, blatant anti-Semitism,violence and property damage of OWS?Progressives' burning desire to create a tea party of the left may beclouding their judgment. Even Mr. Jones has grudgingly conceded that teapartiers have out-crowd-sourced, out-organized, and out-performed the mostsophisticated community organizers on the left. "Here's the irony," hesaid back in July. "They talk rugged individualist, but they actcollectively." He and his colleagues don't seem to understand thatcommunities can't exist without respect for individual freedom. They can'timagine how it is that millions of people located in disparate places withunique knowledge of their communities and circumstances can voluntarilycooperate and coordinate, creating something far greater and more valuablethan any one individual could have done alone.In the world of the contemporary Western left, someone needs to be incharge—a benevolent bureaucrat who knows better than you do. They can'thelp but build hierarchical structures—a General Assembly perhaps—becausethey don't understand how freedom works.Mr. Kibbe is president of FreedomWorks, a fellow at the Austrian EconomicsCenter in Vienna and co-author of "Give Us Liberty: A Tea Party Manifesto"(HarperCollins, 2010)

*www.alternativacomune.eu <goog_820466060>**The Third Republic of Movements*Considerations on the alternative and the constituent conflict in ItalyFrancesco Brancaccio, Alberto De Nicola, Francesco RaparelliFollowing the events of October 15th the main challenge the Movement facesis to avoid being pressed in the grip of simplification and strictdichotomy, and at the same time to preserve its open and varied nature. Webelieve this risk has been outlined better than elsewhere in the editorialby Piero Ostellino published by Corriere della Sera. Ostellino uses theriots that took place during the demonstration to worn that there is nopossibility of transforming the present beyond the choice between civil waror respectful reform of representative democracy and of the capitalistmarket rules*Tertium non datur*. Even radical conflict, when it comes onto the scene,is bound to follow one of these two paths sooner or later, leaving behindany ambition to modify social relations.Moving from this premise we believe that it is of crucial importance today,more that in the past, to explore in depth the concept of the politicalcategory going under the name of "alternative", since this is what shouldoccupy the position excluded from the game in Ostellino’s view. Thisimperative is easily understood: the historic phase we are experiencing ismarked by the structural crisis of Neo-liberal capitalism, involving thefoundations of the social and economic system as well as the institutionalsystem, established in these past thirty years. This crisis is accompaniedby a widespread awareness that it is not possible for anyone to turn backanymore. Discussion about the alternative is compulsory if we wish toseriously acknowledge the radical nature of this historic moment. Thisimperative is also, and this must be clear, very ambiguous: in fact thepolitical category of the alternative summarizes a variety of meanings anddifferent options, all potentially diverging.* **1. The statue of revolt*An assumption we find useful to start from point is found in FaustoBertinotti’s articles in Manifesto: the political and institutionaldimension is currently locked into an enclosure with no way out. Withinthis enclosure, the direct expression of the financial governance (evidentin the letters to the Italian government from the ECB), no trulyalternative government practice is possible. Least of all is it possiblethe resort, way past the deadline, to political options attempting therehabilitation of representative democracy, which has been in crisis for along time and is currently forced to face the terminal phase of itsdecline. Only a "revolt", if it were capable of breaking the scene ofcompatibility, would produce a rethinking of politics itself.This view, which we mostly share, does however require a fewspecifications. The first one being, at the origin, that the conditionimposed by the financial governance by holding hostage the governments isnot in the least reducible to a "field invasion" in the political sphere.It is if anything the expression and the counterpart of theinterpenetration of financial economy and real finance that has redefinedthe forms of capital accumulation. The pervasive influence of finance (bothon an economic scale as well as on a political one) is the result of acrisis (much previous to the current one) regarding the inability on theone hand to exploit productive forces undergoing radical change, and on theother to govern populations that have proved, over time, the inadequacy ofthe forms of organization and regulation of power. What is hastily calledthe "dominance of finance" is in fact a new form of *withdrawal* (of wealthand of decision power) operating on unprecedented forms of existence, allthe more authoritarian as the old social organizational schemes revealtheir inability to organize and command lives. This means that the crisis,both economic and political, is not at all the expression of an exceptionalstate, but is in fact the short-circuit within the new order, solidifiedlong ago.This first specification is closely linked to another one, downstream as tosay, regarding the statue of revolt. If it’s true that the crisis is deeprooted and involves the transformation of the forms of capital accumulationand government, the role attribute to the "revolt" cannot be limited merelyto a function of de-structuring, be it the de-structuring of the politicaland economical enclosure. We do not intend to attribute such thoughts tothe former President of the Chamber of Deputies, but we are howeverinterested in exposing one of the possible interpretations of his thought.This wrong interpretation could be schematically summarized as follows:only revolt, by breaking the compatibility that is tying down the functionsof government, can reactivate sovereignty and with it the legitimacy ofpolitical and social representation. We consider this interpretationdisputable and inadequate as it cannot account for the nature of the newsocial movements.In the same way, we consider the insurrectionist rhetoric spreading on theweb in these days to be inadequate. In fact, this type of logic moves froman oversimplified reading of the current situation, according to which theincrease of intensity of the crisis extends the sphere of the social rage,which in turn tends to be expressed in a symmetric "hand to hand fight"with the state: the variety of forms of conflict are reduced to this singleimage of civil war. The generic and undifferentiated idea of revolt as an"outburst" strangely becomes, in both cases, the key passage behind theblind interruption of sovereign order and its "rehabilitation" at the sametime. Both these readings, although deriving from opposite points of view,seem to share the same "myth of the State" that Foucault alreadyconveniently dissolved by focusing the attention on the reality ofgovernment. In other words, even though this may appear as a paradox, whatreunites these readings so different from each other is the idea thatrevolts are to be interpreted as the expression of an essentially *revokingpower*.A line of reasoning about the political category of the alternative shouldinstead begin from the opposite assumption, from the acknowledgement of the*constituent* nature of social turmoil. This constituent nature,*institutionaland regulatory*, is clearly visible in movement experiences ranging fromSpain to Iceland (the later a case in which the democratic claim torefuse-renegotiate the *default *develops into a constituent rule), to thefights of workers in the entertainment rewriting the statue of an occupiedtheatre, and of university students launching a process of auto-reform ofthe university, to the extraordinary experience of the Italian referendumlast June. These and other experiences yet describe a precise need forchange that aims at braking the same two phase old politics that attributesan essentially negative and defensive function to conflict and assigns themandate to translate demands coming from below to representative politics.Setting the political discourse on the level of the alternative has noother meaning than to question the exhaustion of this "double timing",enabling us to convey the creation of experiences of revolt and effectivebalance of power within a trajectory of transformation.* **2. The movement and the Italian transition*Now, we need to set these premises in the context of the so called "Italiananomaly". In fact in Italy we face a complex but nevertheless excitingchallenge: we are witnessing negotiations and attempts to form politicalalliances with the aim to reconstruct the political scene and secure thepassage to the Third Republic, eliminating precisely the *constituent force*that* *springs from movements. Aside from the shape it will take, thispicture will be built on the same premises (technical government, coalitiongovernment, Nuovo Ulivo, assuming there are differences between them):commitment to pay the debt, the balanced budget constitutional amendment, amodel of social pact that follows the guidelines set by the agreementbetween Confindustria and the unions signed on June 28, implementation ofthe austerity measures and privatization of public goods, as dictated bythe main financial institutions. If this picture is not pre-emptivelyquestioned, any participation by the movements, even when positive, isdestined to fail bitterly.Nevertheless, we mustn’t abandon this level, however difficult it may be:we must strive to understand how the social movements can fit in thetransition. In our opinion there are two fronts that must be open to debate.The first front regards the current transformation of the Welfare State. Itis not enough to note that the austerity policies are contributing to itsdismantlement. It is much more interesting to begin with the idea thatwelfare today is in a totally different relationship with the productionsystem than it was historically at the time of its creation. Someeconomists (among them Boyer, Marazzi and Vercellone) have applied the term"anthropogenetic model" to an emerging economic system based more and moreon services centred around *production by man for man, *such as healthcare,education, culture, security and so on. If we accept this hypotheticalmodel, which is confirmed by the centrality these sectors have indetermining growth, it is immediately clear that the current transformationof welfare does not regard sectors "close to" the productive processes, butdefines these sectors as absolutely central. The modification andprivatization of welfare is in other terms the grounds for revitalizingcapital accumulation. The attention with which the financial markets aredealing with this is no coincidence. Transformation of the welfare systemis a result of an accelerated break-up of the so-called wage-based societyon the one hand (unpaid work, private debt, the precarious nature ofemployment are a clear example of this, and have been so for some time),and on the other of the interruption of public funding which is determiningthe crisis of the public sector (hospitals, universities and schools,cultural sites). Movements seem to have understood this tendency very well,so much that their action is focusing not only on the claim for guaranteedincome not linked to employment wages, but is also focusing, at a deeperlevel, on the democratic repossession of those public institutions. We havepreviously listed a few examples: all that needs to be said about thesestruggles is that while defending what has been brought to its knees byausterity policies, they are re-writing the managerial practices in theplaces they occupy, re-defining the nature of the subjects taking part inthe production of public services, increasing and socializing access tothem, and promoting a new form of *common property*, an alternative toprivatisation as much as to the old state management. Starting from theselocal experiences that we believe will continue to prosper, we can start toimagine a *Federation* of new social institutions.We think it is crucially important to revive thought and debate on a newpost-State federalism, not to be interpreted as a model or form ofgovernment, but on the contrary as a *horizontal* and open process,resulting from pacts capable of involving a plurality of powers, subjectsand institutions with a constituent potential *ab origine. *A form offederalism, to say it in the words of Luciano Ferrari Bravo, conceived as a*concentration of non centralized power*, cutting across transversally andrecombining territorial and social dimensions. Within the Italian context,this topic is an urgent and relevant one in any serious discussion aboutthe alternative, unless federalism is to be considered achieved with thereform of the Title V of the Constitution, or even worse, with the currentdebate on fiscal federalism. The sphere of localauthority, strangled in the grip of government funding cuts, is a goodcandidate for a first significant passage.* **3. A Constitution for the next twenty years*Secondly, we must realistically acknowledge that the next step towards theThird Republic is already marked by an actual *constitutional transition*.The introduction of the balanced budget "golden rule" in the Constitution,along with the reform of the articles regulating free enterprise, describea regressive process that affects its substance. The Italian economicconstitution will be profoundly changed by this process. Why not enter theprocess of transition overturning its course?We are addressing this issue in spite of our awareness concerning thecrisis of the democratic constitutions, be they mere interfaces mediatingbetween State and society, or, more materially, the result of a compromisebetween political, economic and social subjects (the Welfare State). Thiscrisis, like every crisis, has most certainly not produced a void. Newinstitutonalism currents of thought within the field of legal science haveobserved for some time now that the crisis has been accompanied by theemergence of new constitutional devices, fragmenting and surpassing thestate-nation perimeter, and blurring the line that used to separate publicfrom private law. On these premises, a level of discourse that does notdirectly involve the European and international dimension is clearlyunsatisfactory.Ultimately, we are aware that in Italy the debate around transition hasmostly been misleading: the *leitmotif* of the so-called institutionalreforms that has characterized the political debate in our country for thepast twenty years, has been used to deny any possible re-opening of a trueconstituent process at the roots. We are stuck half way: the First Republicseems to have never really ended, and the Second to have never taken shape,if not in a distorted and deviated way. In substance the term transitionhas been used to block the possibility of real transformation.This is why we believe that the legitimate and sharable effort to defendthe 1948 Constitution is, in this picture, a very weak prospect. Ifmovements today present an institutional and regulatory nature activeoutside of the known track of representation, it is also true that conflictmust create a political process with the aim to acknowledge and elaborate,and not to recover, the decline of political party forms, working in thedirection of an *institutional restructuring*. It is necessary to startwith the idea that the material constitution has by now radically changed,with the appearance of new social subjects insisting on a common levelwhich is already political. In the same way, a new Constitution, whichwould preserve the most advanced aspects in the previous one, couldrepresent the highest meeting point for the re-composition of the multipledemands brought forth by present and future struggles. We intend a newConstitution as lever for the beginning of a political process, not as itsfinal result, and not merely as a formal and procedural matter (maintainingthe openness of the political and legal dimension tracing the distinctionbetween constituent power and constitution itself.)The hegemonic nature of the manifesto contained in the expression *CommonGoods*, ratified by the referendum victory, should be the infrastructure ofthis new *Constituent.* During the French Revolution, article 28 in the1793 Constitution, which was never applied, read: "A people has the rightto review, reform and change its Constitution. A generation can not subjectfuture generations to its laws". A few years before, in the United States,Thomas Jefferson, in opposing the proposal for re-election of the Union’sPresident, expressed the hope that the Constitution be completelyrevised ‘*everytwenty years’. *In renewing this ‘constituent tension’, we believe thatdebate on the alternative must be faced, as this is the demand being voicedby the Indignant protests worldwide.[Traduzione a cura di Sarah Gainsforth]

The Creative Commons is to Free Culture what Shareware is to FreeSoftwareBack in the early days of computers proprietary software developershad a problem. Often working from home or small-offices, far removedfrom their potential customers, there was no easy way to sell softwareto their customers. One common way was to use classified adds incomputer magazines, but unless a software title was very well known,it was difficult to convince customers to pay for it before they hadthe opportunity to try it and verify that it does what they need itto.Yet, the very emerging of computers had the solution embedded into thevery technology, users where already distributing software on theirown, by way of exchanging floppy disks, uploading software to BulletinBoard Systems or Online Services, or even printing out source code sothat others could rekey it on their own computer.However, this practice was directly contradictory to the waycommercial software was sold: paid for in advance and sold in a box ina store or by mail order. To prevent such unauthorized distribution,commercial software was often distributed on copy-protected media thatused various cryptographic and obscurity techniques to prevent it'susers from distributing on it's own. This was "All Rights Reserved"software, the published insisted on you buying it from them or theircontracted resellers, and not, under any circumstances, share it withothers.In the same way that commercial art, movies, music and books, forinstance is "All Rights Reserved," publishers want you to buy itdirectly from their or their agents, and never share it with others,and likewise, the rights being reserved are the publisher's rights.Yet, the very technology that made a recorded music industry possible,mechanical reproduction, also made it possible for its users to shareit. Starting from home-taping to today's online social platforms, fansof certain artists actively share with each others. And just like thecommercial software authors, the music industry has availed itself ofa wide variety of tactics to prevent this, from legal and politicalintimidation, to all sorts of cockamamie "Digital Rights Management"techniques.Yet, this "All Rights Reserved" business practice was well andgood for well-funded publishers who where able to afford effectiveadvertising and build out large-scale distribution networks, yet forboth smaller artist and smaller commercial software vendors, such asystem worked agains them, and they turned to ways of using users'sharing with other as means to find their audience and customers.In the software world this manifested as "Shareware" and in culturalproduction this manifested as the "Creative Commons."Both these movements developed as systems of "Some Rights Reserved,"granting users the ability to share with each other, but restrictingthem according to the will of the publisher, common restrictions inboth cases included non-derivate clauses, and non-commercial clauses,effectively preventing consumers from becoming producers, meaning thatthe publishers where eager to use consumer sharing as a means to buildthe value of their property, but wanted to make sure that their statusas producer was maintained, that all creative and commercial use oftheir work was restricted only to them, that their consumers wouldremain consumers, instrumental only as casual distributors.Reading both the Shareware and the Creative Commons licenses,there was no confusion over whose rights where being reserved, thepublishers claimed all rights and denied all responsibilities. Theconsumers' rights where not mentioned, except in efforts to limits anythey might have.Meanwhile, at the radical fringes of cultural production, and inthe quickly expanding belly of information technology, a morerevolutionary way of thinking existed. Artists and Software usersfelt constrained by the restrictions on their ability to be creativeand productive with the culture and software they had, from thepoet Comte de Lautreamont's call for a poetry written by all, toRichard Stallman's call for a computer operating system writtenby all, free culture and free software where concerned with therights of the consumer, not the producer. Or even more to point,concerned with abolishing the distinction between producer andconsumer, understanding culture and technology to be a mutuallyconstructed wealth, the value of which becomes more rich the morepeople contribute to it.The use of the word "Share" in Shareware and the use of the word"Commons" in Creative Commons share a misleading disingenuousness,they seem to imply common cause with the consumers, but no less than"All Rights Reserved," "Some Rights Reserved" is designed to enclosethe consumer, to make sure they can not become the producer. "SomeRights Reserved" allows consumers to contribute to the value of theproducers' product as promoter and distributor, but not to share inthe value, which, far from being "common," remains the sole propertyof the producer.Free Culture and Free Software attempt to prefigure communities thattruly share in common.