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More than 15 years after the beginnings of net art, the Internet has become the most ubiquitous participative global media of the 21st century; a huge territory between normalisation, commerce, hope and utopia. Is the Internet a disenchanted space for artists and creative people or is there a future for online arts and critical creative actions? If so, what are their possible forms and directions?This is what WJ-Spots Brussels proposes to investigate by gathering an international panel of some of the most influential net artists, theorists, online activists and digital cultures thinkers who will share their views on the past and future of artistic creation on the InternetAn immersive performance of live websurfing and speechesThe format of this event will be far away from a usual conference: during the speeches, webjays Isabelle Arvers and Anne Laforêt using the WJ-Spots platform of Anne Roquigny will be surfing live through a list of representative websites selected by the speaker. A multi-screen system is used to display those pages around the audience.The proceedings of the WJ-Spots Brussels event will be published in early 2012 as a special edition of the MCD magazine, and as video documents made available on the Digitalarti and iMAL websites.With: Raphaël Bastide & Yannick Antoine (FR/BE, artists), Michel Bauwens (BE, p2p2foundation), Josephine Bosma (NL, journalist and critic), Heath Bunting (UK, artist), Paolo Cirio (IT, artist), Florian Cramer (NL, Professor at Piet Zwart Institute), Régine Debatty (BE, we-make-money-not-art, journalist and critic), Constant Dullaart (NL, artist), Jodi (BE/NL, artists), Olia Lialina (RE/DE, artist), Alessandro Ludovico (IT, neural.it), Nicolas Malevé (BE, Constantvzw), Miltos Manetas (GR, artist), Julian Oliver (NZ/DE, artist), Domenico Quaranta (IT, contemporary art critic and curator), Rafael Rozendaal (NL, artist), Sakrowski (DE, curatingYouTube), Gordan Savicic (AT, artist).Practical infoSaturday 3 December 2012, 15:00 - 23:00iMAL, BrusselsFree entrance!Bar open. Food and drinks available.Thanks to register online if you wish to attend this event!More info: www.imal.org

Barcamp: How the Internet Changes our RealityMonday, November 28th 2011 / 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM / Umweltforum BerlinWhat’s the hashtag for this revolution? From #solidarity to #occupy, we’re seeing the power of Internet-enabled political action all around us. Individuals can organize quickly, they can unify around ideas, they can find and spread information (and misinformation) with lightning speed. It’s obvious that virtual platforms can have real-world impact, from the Maghreb to Main Street / Benghazi to Boston / Syria to Wall Street (pick whatever you like best). The use of Internet-based tools as catalysts for political activism is well-established, and its momentum is growing.How can we use these new forces in our global society to productively address the chronic problems of humanity? What are the limitations of these tools and movements? How can these new tools be used by decision-makers and others to cope with our future challenges? Where do the Internet and “real world” communities intersect, sharing real concern about the same issues? And how does this look in countries outside of Europe?Join us on the 28th of November for an all-day Barcamp in Berlin to debate these questions. As part of the registration, you’re invited to propose your own session to the audience. Argue for your own ideas about what’s right and what’s practical. Help us find ways to direct this outstanding energy and creativity to solve problems beyond the present-day.For more information and registration see: http://futurechallenges.org/barcamp-berlin/Feel free to forward this mail.# 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

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----Hash: SHA1Blog entry titled "Is Copyright Working?"<http://goo.gl/qzwsQ>Full text of Neelie Kroes's speech:<http://goo.gl/fFb4D>Neelie KroesVice-President of the European Commission responsible for the DigitalAgendaWho feeds the artist?Forum d'Avignon19 November 2011Avignon, FranceReference: SPEECH/11/777The creative sector is a unique source for growth, both economic andsocial. And it's something we do well in Europe. The current winner ofthe Oscar for Best Picture; the bestselling album in the US this year; 7out of the last 10 winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature: what dothey have in common? They all come from the EU.This is essential to our image abroad, and essential to our economicfuture. And if we want it to stay this way, we must be able to supportthose who create art. We must be concerned about the fate of Europe'sstruggling artists and creators. Art feeds the soul. But who feeds theartist?Often, this debate focuses on copyright, especially enforcing copyright.But this isn't the whole story.For a moment, let's take a step back from the tools, and remember whatwe are trying to achieve. Legally, we want a well-understood andenforceable framework. Morally, we want dignity, recognition and astimulating environment for creators. Economically, we want financialreward so that artists can benefit from their hard work and beincentivised to create more.I am an unconditional supporter of these objectives.But let's ask ourselves, is the current copyright system the right andonly tool to achieve our objectives? Not really, I'm afraid. We need tokeep on fighting against piracy, but legal enforceability is becomingincreasingly difficult; the millions of dollars invested trying toenforce copyright have not stemmed piracy. Meanwhile citizensincreasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it. Sadly,many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a toolto recognise and reward.Speaking of economic reward: if that is the aim of our current copyrightsystem, we're failing here too.1000 euros a month is not much to live off. Often less than the minimumwage. But most artists, and not only the young ones at the early stagesof their career, have to do so. Half the fine artists in the UK, halfthe "professional" authors in Germany, and, I am told, an incredible97.5% of one of the biggest collecting society's members in Europe,receive less than that paltry payment of 1000 euros a month for theircopyright works. Of course, the best-paid in this sector earn a lot, andwell done to them. But at the bottom of the pyramid are a whole mass ofpeople who need independent means or a second job just to survive.This is a devastatingly hard way to earn a living. The crisis will onlymake this worse, as public and private spending on arts, so often seenas discretionary, feels the squeeze. This must be a worry to one of themost valuable and unique sectors in Europe: it is certainly a worry to me.We need to go back to basics and put the artist at the centre, not onlyof copyright law, but of our whole policy on culture and growth. Intimes of change, we need creativity, out-of-the-box thinking: creativeart to overcome this difficult period and creative business models tomonetise the art. And for this we need flexibility in the system, notthe straitjacket of a single model. The platforms, channels and businessmodels by which content is produced, distributed and used can be asvaried and innovative as the content itself.ICT can help here. In all sorts of sectors, ICT can help artists connectwith their audience, directly and cheaply. And it can help audiencesfind and enjoy material that suits their specific needs, interests andtastes.And ICT can help in other ways too, supporting a system of recognitionand reward. A Global Repertoire database to find out what belongs towhom . Tracking technologies, to permit a totally transparent processfor artists and intermediaries to find out who is looking at whatartwork when and to distribute revenues accordingly. Digitisation, tomake artworks available for instant transmission to distant fans.Look at Cloud computing: it presents a totally new way of purchasing,delivering and consuming cultural works - music, books, films - whichwill certainly raise new questions about how licensing should functionin an optimal way.It's not just about technology: smart legislation can help, too. We needto find the right rules, the right model to feed art, and feed artists.We need the legal framework to be flexible. This is my recipe, mycommandment, my bumper-sticker to nurture creation. The digital worldchanges quickly, and if allowed to do so can permit creativity in allstages of the chain. So we shouldn't prescribe a particular model, butset a framework allowing many new models to flourish.In particular, we should make it as easy as possible to license, notobstruct that process while making sure that the system efficientlysecures the interests of artists themselves. This is what we are doingat the Commission with our future legislative proposal on collectiverights management.But as I said, it's not only about copyright legislation. Take tax, forexample. Isn't it just common-sense to think that eBooks should benefitfrom the same reduced VAT rates as physical books? The legal regime –the EU's own, I admit – makes it illegal to do that. Not justdiscouraged, but illegal. Personally, I find this very difficult toexplain. Thankfully, my colleague Algirdas Semeta is preparing a newstrategy on VAT. This subject will certainly be debated.Another example is the audiovisual industry. I know how important"windowing" is for the industry under current business models and Idon't want to take decisions for the business, it's not my job. As newways of watching films develop in the market, binding legislationdictating the sequence and period of release windows seems inflexible –and may make it harder, not easier, to provide and purchase contentlegally.A system of rewarding art, in all its dimensions, must be flexible andadaptable enough to cope with these new environments. Or else we willkill innovation and damage artists' interests.These are just a few examples of rigid legislation from the pre-digitalera. There are many new ideas out there – ideas, for example, likeextended collective licensing as practised in Scandinavia, or otherideas that seek to both legitimise and monetise certain uses of works.Are these ideas the right ones to achieve our goals? I don't know. Buttoo often we can't even try them out because of some old set of rulesmade for a different age – whether it is the Berne Convention, thelegislation exceptions and limitations on the VAT Directive or someother current law. So new ideas which could benefit artists are killedbefore they can show their merit, dead on arrival. This needs to change.I can't set out for you now what the model should be and indeed it's notthe kind of model that should be developed from the centre. Rather weneed to create a framework in which a model – or indeed several models –can develop organically, flexibly, in ways that support artists.I see how some European stakeholders see with horror the arrival ofNetflix, or the expansion of iTunes. We need to react, not to beparalysed by fear. Let's take chances. As Zygmunt Bauman put it, "thefunction of culture is not to satisfy existing needs, but to create newones".So that's my answer: it's not all about copyright. It is certainlyimportant, but we need to stop obsessing about that. The life of anartist is tough: the crisis has made it tougher. Let's get back tobasics, and deliver a system of recognition and reward that puts artistsand creators at its heart.Let's not wait for a financial crisis in the creative sector to happento finally adopt the right tools to tackle it.Thank you.- -- Pranesh PrakashProgramme ManagerCentre for Internet and SocietyW: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/iEYEARECAAYFAk7LoJUACgkQ7JoSBR1cXweAtgCgqL4biQU8sZBA8mmbbnDHVGx3TBQAn3l3DhMCKEBDfZEzTfnJMfeD/IVt=aVYs-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

In/compatible, paradoxical, antithetical, the Janusian nature of Revolution, #tmresource"All is flux, nothing stays still." claimed Heraclitus. Heraclitus believed that you could not step into the same river twice, that the way up is the way down, that nothing simply is, that everything is becoming. "All things come into being by conflict of opposites, and the sum of things flows like a stream."In a continuous state of becoming, nothing has a true nature, but always two conflicting natures, on one hand having the nature of what it was, or where it was, on the other håand having the nature of what it will be, or where it will be.In Roman mythology, Janus the god of beginnings is two faced. Christian mythology gives us the two-faced demon Bifrons, listed in the Lesser Key of Solomon as a gateway guardian responsible for the transportion of corpses, and Jesus himself, the binato manifestation of god, having two natures, mortal and devine, who is the path to the kingdom of god. To be becomming is to have two-faces, two natures, to be both here and there.Like Janus, Bifrons and Jesus, all things are binato, as Heraclitus believed always becoming, and thereby always in strife, always in unending struggle to bring opposing natures into harmony. That is the nature of living in flux.During Transmediale's reSource research conference last week, I gave a short introduction to a concept that I've been developing: A revolutionary structure must have antithetical intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics. An agent of change must have internal characteristics that prefigure what is becoming, but none-the-less, must have extrinsic characteristics that allow it to function where it is.Tatiana Bazzichelli, who also participated in the reSource conference, noted that many of the artists, activists and hackers she researched for her thesis employed paradoxical elements in their practice. Often assuming, at least by way of parody, the forms they wish to oppose. Venture Communism, CopyFarLeft and Thimbl, projects and concepts from Telekommunisten where included among the examples. The Paradox is clear, all of these are bizarro world simulacrum of their objects of critique, attempt to invert or subvert the forms they oppose by creating their negation, thus being paradoxical, but also antithetical, assuming the outwardly form as they encounter it, but negating that outwardly form with an inwardly form that it it's opposite.To borrow the theme of this year's Transmediale, "in/compatible."The slash between "in" and "compatible" indicates the bifurcation of the intrinsic and the extrinsic, both compatible and not compatible, providing an outwardly in/terface that is compatible, but only as a part of a transformative flow towards an inwardly nature that is ultimately incompatible. The road to up new harmony, the negation of the negation, synthesis, and thereby also the road down, to the new antithesis, the new in/compatibility, the endless flux.It must seem paradoxical to strive against the existing being by adopting it's outwardly nature, but disruption requires it. Unprotected by an adaptive exterior, the new nature can not survive, and therefore can never become. Naive attempts to build simple alternative ways of being, acting, or relating, in conflict with what is, while insisting on external and internal harmony deny becoming, and are drowned in the stream, entering into conflict to soon without sufficient development for the negation to become negated.I'm not sure if Kristoffer Gansing and the Transmediale team see the term "in/compatible" as I do, indeed I suspect they hope the term will inspire different understandings.During the discussion that followed the panel, Kristoffer asked how this idea of antithetical intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics related to a networked environment, wich led us into a discussion of microcosm and macrocosm. In the words of The Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, "That which is Below corresponds to that which is Above, and that which is Above, corresponds to that which is Below," both the microcosm and the macrocosm is in flux, is becoming, and the streams of motion are many, interlinking and overlapping flows.Cornelia Sollfrank asked if paradoxical forms could lead to peaceful co-existence instead of revolution, if rather than overcome the existing being, having antithetical intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics would simply allow the new nature to exist within the old, to just be along with it. This is a good point, binato structures could just as easily be compositional and not oppositional, so not all binato structures need be oppositional, however all oppositional structures must be binato, as they require two natures to transform.We also launched the Beta Registration for Telekommunisten's latest Miscommunication Technology, R15N, at the reSource workshop, please register for the miscommunication platform of choice for Transmediale's reSource for Transmedial Culture. http://r15n.net, the system is currently in Beta, but operational, critical miscommunication will occur on this network.As for Stammtisch, I'll be at Cafe Buchhandlung at 9pm as usual. http://bit.ly/buchhandlung

Hey friends.The situation in Cairo and Alexandria is getting worse every hour.People are getting injured and killed on the streets. Hospitals areshort on supplies. A big demonstration is taking place today in Tahrirand, if violence continues, it might turn into a massacre.Please use your contacts and social networks to spread the news in theinternational press, specially from the US. We need to put pressure onthe military and demand them to stop the violence immediately.Follow #Egypt for live updates and disseminate this campaign on Avaaz:https://secure.avaaz.org/en/stand_with_egypt_round_2/?aSNVsabWe cannot let Egypt down now. It is urgent.Maria.

Hello nettimers,maybe you can help me. The website of "Unlike Us" says "You can watchUnlike Us Limassol On-line" [1], but I can't find any stream or furtherinformation online and I don't understand greek.Does anyone have more information if there is going to be a stream orvideo online afterwards?Thank you very much,Tim[1] http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/1-cyprus/

[LUM 2011 ? 2012] *ESC* atelier - Rome*Common Property**Appropriation and expropriation in the global crisis*This year the Free Metropolitan University (LUM) of Rome proposes aresearch seminar whose title is deliberately provocative: how is itpossible to transform the private into common? Is it possible to make apositive use of the concept of property by movements that claim a radicaltransformation of the present? How can we break the enclosures ofknowledge, imagination and production? In this framework, which kind oftheoretical instruments are useful to define what the common is?The methodology adopted is inductive: we will start from the experiencesand struggles of schools, universities, theatres and public spaces tore-think few hypotheses for the present. These struggles are close to theproperty issue at the philosophical, sociological, economical and juridicallevel.Focusing on the concept of property and the techniques of appropriation andexpropriation, we will trace its genealogy: from the enclosures of theseventeenth century and the English revolution to the present. In thecontext of the global economic crisis, how to qualify the property? Whatare the current techniques that, time ago, Marx called ?primitiveaccumulation?? We will analyse the social resistances within the presentregime of property to clarify the differences between *property* and *use*,*new enclosure* and *free access*.According to Harrington ?power follows property?: we are aware that eachkind of property corresponds to a specific power, and that the affirmationof the common property and the common use of material and immaterial thingsinvolves a constituent power (what Spinoza called ?the power of multitude?).In this research we will focus on the bodies liberated from theappropriation of the bio-medical power and from the sexual normative,analysing the sabotage of individual and national debt that governments ofausterity want us to pay.The ?Italian Third Republic ?of the President Napolitano, the technocratsand the ECB are imposing new political practices and analysis. In thiscontext, it is decisive for the movements to place actions in a constituentterrain, focusing on the fundamental aspects of the challenge. It is not acoincidence that the privatization is at the core of reforms imposedthrough continuous shocks by financial markets and the ECB. RegardingItaly, after the winning referendum about the water as a common good on12th of June, the immediate answer was a downgrading by rating agency andthe imperative for further privatization of services (health, education,retirements) imposed by the ECB.Thinking about a new Republic of movements, it is strategic to focus on newpolitical practices as well as a new statue of property beyond theclassical dichotomy public/private, in the midst of the singularityproduced by cooperation: the common property.Program:[All events will start at 5 pm with live TV streaming]*** *1. *Juridical definition* ?Ugo Mattei (25 November)*2. Power* ? Augusto Illuminati (2 December)*3. Bios and copyright* ? Elena Gagliasso and Michele Surdi (3 February)*4. Welfare* ? Alessandro Pandolfi (17 February)*5. Genealogy of the Republic* ? Beppe Caccia (2 March)*6. Uses and Access* ? Marco Bascetta (16 March)*7. Ethos* ? Paolo Virno (30 March)*8. Finance* ? Christian Marazzi (13 April)*9. Debt* ? Maurizio Lazzarato (27 April)*10. Transindividual Right* ? Federica Giardini (11 May)*11. Constitutional Transitions** *? Francesco Brancaccio (18 May)*12. Common* ? Michael Hardt (25 May)**** After socialism* ? Alexei Penzin (date TBD)** Body* ? Beatriz Preciado (date TBD)** The events of 3rd of February and 17th of February will be held at theOccupied Palace of Cinema ? Hall Vittorio Arrigoni (Square Sanniti in SanLorenzo).Info: www.lumproject.org ; www.escatelier.netIn collaboration with *Study Centre for the Alternative (*www.alternativacomune.eu)

from http://bit.ly/sXMjKa | presented athttp://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/1-cyprus/The global occupy protest movement is proliferating by “contagion,epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes”.[1] Furthermore, itmaterialises and disperses in multiple ephemeral processes oftransformation that construct a common for the multitude ofprotestors. The common produced by the global occupy movement is not amutually shared opposition to the capitalist crisis, nor a collectiveidentity (of the “indignados” or of the 99%), nor a consensualpolitical project (for real, authentic democracy). The common does noteven embody an identical strategy of occupying public space, butrather to a series of becomings that question establishedcategorizations and taxonomies that normalize the production ofsubjectivities and the organisation of life.More so, the common is not produced in a genealogical, linear fashion,evolving from past forms of mobilisation and protest but rather itemerges directly out of the exceptional material circumstances ofcrisis contagion and catastrophe that spread like an epidemic indifferent territorialisations.In order to perform this argument, we will attempt to trace forms ofbecoming cockroach in the context of the global occupy movement.*< at >Syntagma square*We start with a snapshot of life at Syntagma square in Athens on June29, 2011. This was the day of protests against the wave of austeriymeasures passed by the Greek government in parliament.“Since yesterday, June 28, we live like cockroaches in Syntagmasquare. We are sprayed continuously with chemicals by the Greek policeregardless of what we do or what we say, but we persist. We leaveSyntagma square for a while to catch our breath and keep on comingback. We rest a bit and return to the square. Even before thechemicals began exploding yesterday morning, we were just sitting onthe pavement and the riot police stormed and arrested a person seatingnearby. When we protested against the arrest, the riot policeresponded by arresting another passerby who was just exiting a coffeeshop with a coffee in his hand. To be just standing close to Syntagmasquare seems dangerous and certainly suspicious. The arrests are beingenacted to disperse the crowds, but we keep on moving closer to thesquare instead of leaving.As we are becoming cockroaches we begin, without really realizing it,to adopt tactics of stasis, of perseverance and endurance, that werepreviously unknown to us. Chemicals keep on flying, sound bombs keepon exploding all around us making terrible noise and the crowdsrespond by not leaving, by remaining at Syntagma square. Becomingcockroaches and growing more and more resistant to the chemicals, ourbodies begin to mutate. In gas masks, painting maalox on our faces,wearing sun glasses and ski masks, we persist. The figures in gasmasks and maalox recognize each other even when they meet further awayfrom Syntagma square.Even now that the austerity law was approved in the Greek parliament,the crowds are not leaving, they are reinforced. “Let’s have anassembly now,” said someone in the midst of a cloud of chemicals. Likewe did when we “staged the music concert yesterday”, he explains.Yesterday, we were cleaning and washing the square with water forhours to disperse the smell of the chemicals and then from a defunctPA system the Tiger Lillies played live on Syntagma square. Chemicalsand sound bombs started to explode again all around Syntagma, buteverybody remained on the square and kept on dancing.The classic urban tactics of demonstration (marching in a linearfashion, protesting in front of the Parliament, dispersing after theend of the demonstration) or confrontation (like throwing marbles,stones, and molotov cocktails against the police and destroyingsymbolic targets like banks, multinational commercial chains etc. )seem and are secondary in face of our tactics. Cockroaches do notattack, they do not make much noise, nor do they destroy something.But, we cockroaches are far more persistent and productive than otheranimals that are slowly disappearing.”This narrative is not about a denunciation of police violence andoppression, neither is it a call for global solidarity with humanstreated like animals by the police. Wearing gas masks to resist teargas and other chemicals or adopting tactics of perseverance andendurance does not mean that we humans are forced to mimic an inferiorspecifies, or that we are reduced to acting like insects. In a similarfashion in Tahrir square, after 6 successive days of murderoussuffocation by tears gas and other chemicals and of shootings ofprotesters with rubber bullets and live ammunition by the Egyptiansecurity forces (from 19 to 24 of November 2011), Twitter user< at >El_Deeb writes: “#Tahrir has turned into a lifestyle, a way ofliving, a utopian city”. The refusal of the protesters in Tahrir to,once again, leave the square, their perseverance in the face of whatwas previously thought of as “unlivable conditions” produces thecommon.Becoming cockroach is a process through which occupation is producedas common and where new possibilities are emerging for the propagationand expansion of the occupy movement beyond the confines of an urbansquare as public space.[2]The global occupy movement rests on tactics of stasis, on a primaryrefusal to move, instead of march. From Tahrir, to Piazza del Sol, toSyntagma, to Zucchotti park, immobility embodies the desire of theprotesters to dissociate their occupied public spaces from existingnetworks of power.These tactics of stasis are not directly disruptive. They do notintend to block traffic or to close down the roads: to disrupt, inother words, the main networks of urban mobility. They are, instead,devised as a cause for themselves. Stasis operates through contagionand absorption: it constitutes the desire to absorb the entireeveryday urban life into the occupy mode itself.This is how stasis relates to existing organisation of urbanspace-time. In a way, the occupy protesters adopt a politics ofasymmetry in relation to power. Their tactics are not intended to headon destroy the way that power organises the space-time of urban life,nor to attack it in some of its weakest chains (although this is alsodone by certain groups that are part of these protests). Occupiedpublic spaces are intended to devour within their bordering all theexisting activities and subjectivities which operate in thenon-occupied city space.The call to “occupy everything” does not, then, directly aim at thedestruction of existing structures of domination, but at theproduction of an occupied zone within which multiple and oftencontradictory desires may co-exist. The following comment from the“Take the Square” blog is indicative of such a cohabitation and of theextent to which a multitude of occupying desires can co-exist on thesame plane:“i wanna occupy nigeria…..heart of africa……am so serious..i needhelp…i started a student coalition on climate change already…so u seewhr am coming from”.[3]In fact, for the global occupy movement the question of where one iscoming from or where one is heading to is or should be entirelyirrelevant to the actual act of occupation. What is more significant,here, is the fact that occupation sets the space where multiplebecomings take place.This space of multiple becomings is also digital. The entanglement ofsocial media activism with the global occupy movement creates theconditions for a becoming machinic cockroach.*Machinic cockroaches*An experiment was performed in 2007 by a group of scientists in theFree University of Brussels. Scientists, there, created a set of tinymachinic cockroaches with the purpose of socialising with realcockroaches and of ultimately affecting their behaviour.[4] Themachinic cockroaches were basically tiny robots, of about the samesize with real cockroaches and programmed to exude the same smell sothat they would fool the real ones into believing that they were real,too.The experiment tried to test the predominant hypothesis thatcockroaches find shelter on the basis of two criteria: a) how dark itis…choosing the darkest place available and b) how many othercockroaches are to be found in that spot. The researchers programmedthe machinic cockroaches to prefer a less-dark hiding place than theones available.During the experiment all the cockroaches scurried around randomly fora while, but the robots eventually settled under the lighter, lessshadowy spot — and the real cockroaches followed. The machiniccockroaches had tricked the real ones into following them — even toplaces where a sensible roach would never venture. In a similarfashion, the entanglement of the global occupy protest with mainstreamsocial media is also a becoming machinic cockroach.Take the story of the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page, forinstance. In a recent interview, the administrators of this Facebookpage, which played a prominent role in the initial mobilisations inEgypt remembers how “in early November 2010, the page disappearedthrough an organized attack from the state security electronicdepartment…”. They flooded Facebook with complaints that the KhaledSaid page violated Facebook’s terms and conditions”, theadministrators of the page remember. And then they recount how“activists in Egypt instantly campaigned Facebook through mass e-mailsand threats to boycott Facebook” and how they “immediately made callsto the Facebook headquarters in California” demanding that the page beput back online. The page was up again in a space of a few hours.[5]Or take the story of Amira Yahyaoui, a cyber activist from Tunisialiving in exile in France. The desire to prevent her blog from beingblocked in Tunisia (the internet was heavily censhorship was heavythere from the beginning) prompted her to basically change the url ofher blog on an almost daily basis. From “delle3a” it became “delle3b”and then “delle4a”, and so on, with Amira giving a tip in code theprevious night of what the new url would be.[6]In these cases, social media activism becomes a machinic cockroach,not only in the sense that activism adopts a tactics of perseveranceand mutation with the primary purpose of remaining visible online,refusing to vanish under the power of censorship and control. More so,it adopts a tactic of contagion and absorption. It attempts to enactthe “contamination” of social media platforms with data flows andactivity that will ensure the peopling of social media. The globalfascination with making “#tahrir” or “#ows”, or “#tunisie” and so onfeature on the Twitter world trends list or preventing a particular FBpage or group or profile from being taken down by Facebook or fromgetting trolled by organised user groups can be seen as an attempt toabsorb digital flows at the borderline that an occupied zone is.In effect, like a machinic cockroach can disturb the dark habits of aband of coackroaches, these practices disturb the personalised,a-political, banal social interactions that normalize Facebook andTwitter usages. This is not to say, that the dominant social mediaplatforms do not try to resist machinic cockroaches or that they donot attempt to appropriate them.The argument, instead, is that there is a radically new social mediaactivism that is emerging via the global occupy movement. Radicallydifferent from previous practices of clicktivism, of enhancing andfacilitating mobilisations, of collective articulating politicaldemands, this new activism operates by attempting to transform socialmedia platforms into occupy zones. Through a becoming machiniccockroach, Facebook and Twiter users and data flows subvert theoriginal usage of these mediums, destroy their common sensefunctioning and re-claim them as a plane where occupation ispropagated, where the contagion of occupy zones proliferates.The reaction by social media monopolies to redefine and normalizethese practices is ever present, but machinic cockroaches tend toreappropriate social media as planes of renewed struggle and of acontinuous re-negotiation of their potential usages.*Conclusion? “From the Arab spring, to the European summer, to theAmerican winter to…”*Overall, the occupy protest movement is not linear, synchronic, norevolutionary. Its failure to produce a new permanent structure forreal democracy or for organising future mobilisations or a new“species” of revolutionary subjects is also its strength. The occupyprotest movement is, strictly speaking, not a movement at all, but ablock of strange and unfamiliar becomings emerging in differentlocales.Becoming cockroach embodies an ephemeral symbiosis of different lifeforms (natural and machinic) that are normally incompatible and evenhostile. It is an ephemeral borderline phenomenon triggered by thepolitical and socioeconomic crisis and by state and police violence inspecific locales. Becoming cockroach is, however, just one block ofbecomings that takes hold of different life forms. It is of crucialimportance to resist the evolutionary analysis of these becomings thatinevitably lead us to questions about the origins and the direction ofprotests: “where did they come from?”…“what is born out of them?”.Occupy movements spread like contagion from one urban context to thenext, from one social medium to another. They are always to be foundin the “middle of a line” that does not necessarily lead to a newpower configuration, a new species or a new medium, but rather to anew set of becomings.[1] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalismand Schizophrenia, (London: Athlone Press), p. 241.[2] Ibid., p. 239.[3] See http://howtocamp.takethesquare.net/2011/11/07/occupyresearch/.[4] See http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1684427,00.html?imw=Y.[5] See http://www.bostonreview.net/BR36.6/khaled_said_facebook_egypt_revolution.php.[6] Personal interview with Amira Yahyaoui.

Network ArchaeologyConference at Miami University, Oxford OHApril 19-21, 2012Call for Papers (submissions due November 29, 2011)This conference will bring together scholars and practitioners to explore the resonances between digital networks and ?older? (perhaps still emergent) systems of circulation; from roads to cables, from letter-writing networks to digital ink. Drawing on recent research in media archaeology, we see network archaeology as a method for re-orienting the temporality and spatiality of network studies. Network archaeology might pay attention to the history of distribution technologies, location and control of geographical resources, the emergence of circulatory models, proximity and morphology, network politics and power, and the transmission properties of media. What can we learn about contemporary cultural production and circulation from the examination of network histories? How can we conceptua lize the polychronic developments of networks, including their growth, adaptation, and resistances? How might the concept of network archaeology help to re-envision and forge new paths of in terdisciplinary research, collaboration, and scholarship?The conference will trace continuities and disjunctures between a variety of networks, including telecommunication networks, distribution systems for both digital and non-digital texts, transportation routes, media storage (libraries, databases, e-archiving), electrical grids, radio and television broadcast networks, the internet, and surveillance networks. We seek to address not only the technological, institutional, and geopolitical histories of networks, but also their cultural and experiential dimensions, extending to encompass the histories of network poetics and practice. The proceeds of the conference will form the basis for a substantial publication on Network Archaeology.This conference is organized by the Miami University Humanities Center and is the final event in a year-long series entitled ?Networked Environments: Interrogating the Democratization of Media.? It is a companion to our Fall 2011 symposium, ?Networks and Power,? on November 17-18th featuring panels, interventions, and keynote presentations by Wendy Chun (Brown University) and Lisa Parks (UC Santa Barbara), that interrogate the interrelationships between networked environments, both old and new, and varied forms of power. The ?Networked Environments? series, involving an interdisciplinary group of ten humanities scholars, seeks to show how the network dynamics so crucial to contemporary political developments have deep and perhaps unexpected roots in the histories of earlier forms of inform ation production and circulation.We welcome presentations of academic research and artistic projects on contemporary and historical network studies. Please send abstracts of 250 words and a short bio to cris cheek (cheekc-i3Ccqu8OfiY3uPMLIKxrzw< at >public.gmane.org) and Nicole Starosielski (nicole.starosielski-i3Ccqu8OfiY3uPMLIKxrzw< at >public.gmane.org) by November 29, 2011.Keynote speakers include:Lisa Gitelman, Associate Professor of Media and English at New York University, and author of Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (2000), New Media, 1740-1915 (2004), and Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (2008).Richard R. John, Professor of Journalism at Columbia University, and author of Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (1995) and Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (2010). Alan Liu, Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information (2004) and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database (2008).Jussi Parikka, Reader in Media & Design at Winchester School of Art (University of Southampton), and author of Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses (2007), Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology (2010), and Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, Implications (2011).Adrian Johns, Chair of Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at University of Chicago, and auhor of The Nature of the book: print and knowledge in the making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009)

Blogpost:http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/are-mobiles-a-capitalist-plot-to-keep-the-poor-poor/(the comments are interesting as well...Are Mobiles a Capitalist Plot to Keep the Poor Poor?by Michael Gurstein I was moved to ask the question in the title after spending the good part ofa week going in and out of a conference in Johannesburg on ICT4RD (RuralDevelopment) where much of the discussion and most of the presentationsseemed to be assuming some form of smart phone and some rather significant(and expensive in the African context) mobile device and connectivity.This could also be placed in the context that (as someone mentioned at theconference) in one study in rural Africa it was being found that the costsof mobile communications were absorbing up to 54% of the total net income ofcertain farmers and perhaps more tellingly, the major applications formobiles in Sub-Saharan Africa seem to be premised on the likelihood thatthose for whom the application was being designed would not have enoughmoney to actually pay for the connectivity costs of whateverinformation/services was being touted.I should also mention here that my somewhat jaded question was in part theresult of again hearing those energetically espousing the virtues of mobile(over for example, fixed Internet access through ahem... Telecentres) bypointing to the exact same applications that I was pointed to some 3 or 4years ago when mobiles were still in their infancy i.e. providing up-to-datemarket information to farmers and providing (mostly) safe sex reminders toteenagers.Both these applications are of course, worthy in themselves and significantif the (as yet to my knowledge, not undertaken impact/evaluationassessments) prove positive however, one would have hoped after all the hypeand expenditures (and more or less total diversion of ICT for Developmentresources in that direction) there might be other additional significantapplications that could be pointed to.So I took my hesitations and provocative blogpost title to lunch with somecolleagues here in Maputo (where I am at the moment) with very long and deepexperience with development and ICTs in rural Southern Africa. Thediscussion went back and forth but then a colleague drew a distinctionbetween mobile communications and mobile applications (apps). What theypointed out to me in example after example was the profound significancethat having low cost access to communications was having on the well beingof people (and in this instance particularly women). And of course, in therural African context this necessarily means mobiles because of the totallack of alternative infrastructure .that someone could be easily summoned in the event of an emergency(including the police), to being able to determine if supplies to supporthome crafts were available in the shop several kilometres away withouthaving to spend the day walking to the town only to find that what wasrequired was out of stock--the effect of (finally) having thetelecommunications access that most of the rest of us have taken for grantedfor all of our lives was truly beneficial and even transformative of life inrural Africa.My colleagues went on to talk about the "shiny apps" which is where I hadstarted the conversation. They more or less dismissed these as beingirrelevant, at least in the case of Mozambique which is where theirexperience was, given the relatively high cost of mobiles that could handlethe apps we were talking about and similarly the very high communicationscosts which would be required in most cases to take advantage of theseservices.So, we answered my question--No! mobiles aren't completely a capitalist plot to keep the poor poor atleast for simple low cost person to person communications, but the jury isstill out on answering the question for all the shiny M4D (Mobile forDevelopment) apps that seem to be so attractive these days to developmentfunders and the development-erati.Michael Gurstein, Ph.D.Executive Director: Centre for Community Informatics Research, Developmentand Training (CCIRDT)Vancouver, BC CANADAtel/fax: +1-604-602-0624email: gurstein-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.orgweb: http://communityinformatics.netblog: http://gurstein.wordpress.comtwitter: #michaelgurstein

Hey nettimers,I'm working on a mapping art project for a community centre here in Vancouver, with my art group Something Collective ( http://somethingcollective.ca ). Part of my mission in this project is to re-localize teenagers - i.e. bring them into a geographical relationship to their neighbours.The part I'm planning on leading is the documentation / dissemination portion. That is, as people participate I want to get them to share the experiences and imagery with their social networks, but I can't bring myself to advocate facebook, twitter, google+ etc. All my non-profit, artist and activist circles use facebook to promote things, and I don't believe it's ultimately healthy.Why? Well, facebook's algorithms don't necessarily have the community's best interest at heart, let's put it that way. I'd love to see facebook get left behind like friendster or myspace at the earliest opportunity, in favour of some open-source alternative or, even better, meat-space encounters. People on this list will have a plethora of their own qualms about corporate social media.Despite that, though, I think reaching out through social networks will help get more people involved.So I'm thinking of kicking in a Diaspora* element, possibly using D*'s ability to integrate with facebook as a sort of weaning / luring process.Anyone have any thoughts or experiences with that? Is anyone here using Diaspora?My I.D., which I've just set up, is flickharrison-tejU/H4PPUssA/PxXw9srA< at >public.gmane.org-Flick--* WHERE'S MY ARTICLE, WORLD?http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Flick_Harrison* FLICK's WEBSITE & BLOG: http://www.flickharrison.com

(Intro: Radical budget cuts in the cultural sector of the Netherlands have caused disquiet and debates about high culture even in Germany. However, do we really need what the German punk poet Rainald Goetz once sneeringly called “Kulturverteidigung” (“defence of culture”)? Or should we rather develop a whole new concept of culture? A new term that is guided by questions of production and cooperation, rather than antiquated needs of representation? Such questions are asked by independent theatre maker Alexander Karschnia in his article on protests in the cultural arena in Italy and Holland. His performance group andcompany&Co. has resided in the Netherlands for many years. Together with Dutch and Belgian collaborators they are going to present a new piece on the topic early 2012 entitled The (Coming) Insurrection According to Friedrich Schiller).CULTURAL COUNTERREVOLUTION GAINING GROUNDBy Alexander Karschnia“Through car-free streets I walk to the Odéon. A young man in the centre aisle of the theatre is leading the discussion. An amazing experience, still: Someone is speaking from one of the golden boxes, handsome and serious faces, finally no longer bored, turn into that direction, arguments are streaming back and forth in the world’s longest dialogue, which has now been going on for days around the clock. (...) Never again, not even when this will be past, will this theatre be a ‘normal’ theatre for me, because this scene is unforgettable.”Paris, May, 1968, described by Cees Nooteboom for a Dutch newspaper. For several weeks, revolting students had occupied the Théâtre de l’Odéon and used it as a gathering place. Rome, June, 2011, a similar scene: Rome’s most ancient extant house, the Teatro Valle, was occupied by Lavoratrici e Lavoratori dello Spettacolo (male and female workers of the theatre: actors, directors, designers, stage callers, light board operators, sound engineers) demanding to preserve the famous theatre house. Founded in 1727 as a concert stage, it saw the first performance of Pirandello’s Six Persons are Looking for an Author 90 years ago. The play’s experimental dramaturgy laid the founding stone for a new era of Italian theatre. For 60 years, the theatre had been controlled by the national authority Ente Teatrale Italiano (ETI), which had ultimately opted for privatisation, prior to its own dissolution. In June, it was taken over by its staff: “All of them together keep a theatre going which has not had any official managing director since the beginning of June,” Spiegel online wrote. Protests were voiced by more than 8000 citizens and international theatre makers, including Thomas Ostermeier from Germany. In the course of summer, nearly the entire cultural establishment of Italy joined the protest: it is ironical that precisely on the 150th anniversary of Italy’s national unification, a theatre that would be eminently suitable for a ‘national theatre’ is for sale. Occupants and their supporters demand a publicly funded house with transparent operating structures, dedicated to developing contemporary dramaturgies and to teaching and training, which is capable of realizing international co-productions, like the Royal Court Theatre in London, the Theatre de la Colline in Paris or Berlin’s Schaubühne. An ‘ecological principle’ is wanted, “between small and big productions, training and guest performances; fairness of wages, including fixed minimum and maximum wages; an affordable and progressive policy with regard to admission fees; independent supervisory bodies, transparency and legality through online publication of balances; drafting an ethical codex as a model for all theatre houses and groups in Italy.” And – hopefully – beyond!Italian civil society had already rejected nuclear power as well as the privatisation of water and the legal special treatment of politicians this year; now Roman theatre workers declared culture a ‘common wealth’, and “free access to culture, knowledge, freedom in distributing ideas and the strengthening of critical thinking an essential component of civil rights.” In principle, we may agree with this, yet we need to ask whether the theatres they mention as examples really achieve this. The Art Workers’ Document by another group of Italian curators, artists, and activists goes further. Attempting to analyse their situation within the framework of general transformations of the welfare state, which after all was also a ‘cultural state’, they warn against the widening gap between the public sphere and the sphere of cultural production. Their demand to reform this state goes far beyond the demand for state-funding and de- privatisation: it is this cooperative and collective dimension of their work which must be respected and actively protected, instead of mechanically reciting the neoliberal harangue of self-responsibility, creativity, flexibility, and mobility. This is precisely what is happening at Teatro Valle every night, when its doors open for meetings, discussions, and performances, partly by prominent artists such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Nanni Moretti, and many more, who declare their solidarity. Occupants were delighted during the summer: “Already, we are over Berlusconi...”This is what occupants of the Odéon were thinking back then, too: after many nights of fighting on the barricades, overwhelming mass protests by students and workers and a wild general strike, which had brought the country to a halt for almost a month, nobody would have imagined that the ‘General’ (de Gaulle) who had fled the country would score this high in the elections a few weeks later. But the points of departure in France, 1968 and Rome, 2011 are very different: while l’Odéon was chosen as a meeting place during a whole series of occupations of universities and businesses, the occupation of the theatre house in Rome is a singular event. An event, however, that could be the prelude to a new social cultural movement – in all of Europe and beyond. For the field of culture is as fiercely contested as never before. We are indebted to the Italian Antonio Gramsci for his concept of ‘cultural hegemony’, which implies – in short – that the (non-material) superstructure has its own dynamics, which acts upon the (material) ‘basis’ (relations of production). While the activists of 1968ff. followed this realization with Mao’s slogan of a ‘cultural revolution’ and Situationist phrases on their lips, today, however, we are facing a ‘cultural counterrevolution’ – where the basis immediately affects the superstructure: anywhere in Europe, whether in England, Hungary, Italy, Slovenia or the Netherlands, cultural expenses are slashed. The Netherlands are an extreme example: a right-liberal minority government, which can only remain in power with the support of extreme right-wingers, decided budget cuts by 20% of 200 million Euros (from 900 to 700 millions). The performing arts are hit especially hard: here, the cuts amount to more than 50%, in dance, music and fine arts over 40%. While big, representative houses and groups are protected, funding of the middle sector is dropped completely: free production houses and alternative festivals no longer figure in the governments’ calculations. Usually, such scenarios are familiar only from economy or hostile takeovers. Or from wars. Irony of history: not until German occupation was state-funded theatre introduced to the Netherlands.The government’s culture struggle is not directed against the model of German theatre, but against the model which emerged from the protests against the former – by two tomatoes being thrown: Actie Tomaat was the name of a student campaign against a performance by the Nederlandse Comedie in 1969. More tomatoes followed, as well as a stink bomb and three months of heated discussions after – and sometimes during – performances. Successfully: the minister of culture back then reacted with reforms, and immediately changed the funding system. From then on, not only big, existing institutions were supported, but also groups and theatre collectives such as “werkteater” which closely collaborated with young dramatists such as Judith Herzberg. During the following four decades, a completely distinct cultural landscape evolved, with independent ensembles, free production houses, new university courses, and an institutional infrastructure that had given rise to the “miracle of Dutch theatre” (Hans-Thies Lehmann). Thanks to this campaign, Dutch theatre came to be the model for all “iconoclasts” of the stage/theatre ? - a structural reform Germany is still waiting for! As every independent theatre maker knows: the municipal theatre of a small provincial town has a larger budget than the so-called ‘independent scene’ in Germany. Only during the past few years, cautious steps were taken towards a convergence of the ‘independent scene’ and the system of municipal and state theatres.In Germany, the revolt of ‘68 led, above all, to the establishment of a so-called ‘director’s theatre’ (‘Regietheater’), where directors in their productions emancipated themselves from the idea of a ‘faithfulness to the original’ as well as from the author’s ghost. The Netherlands, in contrast, saw the emergence of a series of collectives creating their own repertoire. Thanks to state-funding and public recognition of their work, these groups were able to operate for extended periods of time, some of them for more than thirty years.In Germany, such independent groups usually disappeared after a few years only. They were either dissolved or absorbed into the existing system. The latter remained an exception, for the municipal and state theatres are part of a closed system caught between nationally recognized educational establishments, hierarchically organized institutions with a large number of unwritten laws, and an extensive bureaucratic administrative body. The Dutch theatrical landscape is now heading towards just such a closed system. Thus, already in 2009 – exactly forty years after the first tomatoes being thrown – BIS (basic infrastructure) was created, connecting eight theatre houses with eight training institutions. If it were for the government’s plans, this infrastructure would be the only thing to remain of Dutch theatre. Those 21 independent production houses which saw the rise of an extremely heterogeneous, innovative and, above all, a productive theatre and dance scene, should no longer have a place in this cultural landscape, which is merely concerned with issues of representation. (In comparison: all of Germany has only one-third of Holland’s number of comparable independent houses, one-third of which are in the neighbouring county of North Rhine-Westphalia).This is an irony of history, too: while the German system of municipal theatres is struggling for reforms inspired by the Dutch model, the Dutch system is being restructured according to the German model. At the same time, the big shining lights of German municipal theatre are Dutch and Belgian, respectively: Johan Simons (director of the Munich Kammerspiele since this year) and Luk Perceval (director of Thalia Theatre, since last year) – both of whom owe their artistic careers to this very model. Many prominent artists of the German state and municipal theatres have pointed out this fact in an urgent letter to the Dutch minister of cultural affairs.Worlds turned upside down! However, haven’t relations between the Low Lands and Germany always been – let’s say: complementary? Or how come one country succeeds in revolution, while the other only produces classical drama about it? I am talking about the Eighty Years’ War, which in the rest of Europe is known only as the Thirty Years’ War (since it lasted only thirty years everywhere else apart from the Netherlands, because the Dutch had taken up arms against the Spanish superpower fifty years earlier). And about Schillers Don Carlos and Goethes Egmont. While Germany was completely devastated and depressed after thirty years of war, the Dutch were finally independent and autonomous after eighty years of war, as the first country in Europe! Later the Dutch rejected Greater Germany’s generous offer to revert those 400 years of error which had caused both countries to grow apart from each other, when they decided not to gratefully integrate into the “Thousand-Year Reich” as blonde blood brothers. They merely examined and took over the fully finalised funding plans for theatres, which Germans had left on the desks of their office of culture and propaganda – and were firmly resolved to ward off any exertion of influence on the part of the state: season tickets, permanent positions for actors, social insurance etc. The social protection of artists in the Netherlands was on a level that performing artists in Germany (like ourselves) can only dream of (Berlin is currently trying to reinforce minimum wages).And yet: in the Netherlands, we nowadays frequently hear that an entrenchment of theatre, i.e. a cultural mandate, had never existed in the consciousness of the people here as it did in Germany. On the contrary: people prove to be quite receptive to the new populism. Obviously, art and culture are considered “leftist hobbies”, not only by the extreme right-winger Geert Wilders. According to Johan Simons, artists are met with “downright hatred”: “there is an atmosphere where you better don’t mention that you’re an artist or have read more than 100 books.” The slashes in culture have not diminished but rather increased support for the government. And thus, even the Raad voor Cultuur (Dutch Council of Culture, the government’s independent advisory body) had to acknowledge that it was not about necessary limitations - Noodgedwongen Keuzen – but about something entirely different. All constructive suggestions proposed to the government of how to arrive at savings in the least harmful way were wiped off the table (a singular event). Instead, a Cultuuromslag (cultural turn) was pronounced: ‘Cultural Counterrevolution.’ This clear-cutting of culture is part of wider campaign. The government has discovered artists as a new social group to back up populist politics: “subsidy- eater” (analogous to the “petrol-eating” car) is one of the kinder terms which are presently heard on the part of the government. The horrified liberal public helplessly speaks of a ‘new vandalism’ - a new “iconoclasm”. On the part of the government.The tragedy that is currently unfolding in the Netherlands should be a lesson to the rest of Europe: in the motherland of liberalism, its Janus face appears, i.e. the ugliness of the second face now becomes all the more visible. The process is reminiscent of the changes in migration politics. Within a short period of time, the previously most tolerant immigration country became the most repressive. All of a sudden, the so-called ‘Holland-Test’ consisting of a list of perfidious questions which each immigrant has to pass, became a model for all authoritarian right-wing parties in the EU. By and by, all liberal achievements are collected: artists are only good for gentrification (such as the dissolution of the red-light district in Amsterdam), foreigners are no longer permitted to buy soft drugs in coffee shops (only if they present a European passport are they allowed to buy hash), while residents can buy them only in prescribed amounts. Once more we can see: the slim state is the string state – and neo-liberalism is the real-existing anti-socialism. Many artists are waking up only now that their own lives are affected. Why have we have refused for such a long time to show solidarity with other social groups who do not have job security either, the authors of the Art Workers’ Document are wondering? After all, we could perhaps be the ones to develop a new model that would help to overcome the antagonism of freelance vs. permanent position in favour of a completely new structure that is simultaneously creative and cooperative. Theatres have always been excellent gathering places: OCCUPY A THEATRE IN EVERY CITY, Italian cultural workers are calling out to us. On November 11, this call was followed by Greek practitioners (Mavili collective) who occupied the deserted EMBROS theatre in Athens. To be continued…P.S. In 1977, Noteboom wrote: “Sometimes, when I walk past the Sorbonne or Théâtre de l'Odéon, I can hardly imagine that May 1968 happened right here in front of my eyes, - the masses of people, the tension, the banners, the sense of humour, the hopes and disillusionment.” Finally, once again, the theatre had become what he had not considered possible anymore: a ‘normal’ theatre. What Nooteboom felt was – nostalgia, “not about barricades or police attacks, not about interminable explanations and political chicaneries, not about all the excitement, the news that happened right in front of one’s eyes, or fulfilled prophecies of doom, but about that inexplicable tingle in the air, the almost tangible expectation, everyone’s complete, touching openness towards everyone else, the mixture of hope, naiveté, strategy and honesty, all of that which has become invisible now that the world looks like the world.” What we do need are neither monologues of power, nor dialogues between power and those who claim to represent us, but a dialogue – amongst each other: Brecht called it “the Big Discussion”, which was the precondition for the ‘Big Production’. Cultural workers of the world – unite! Let fantasy rule! (written on the walls of the Sorbonne).

dear nettimers, a workshop in london that may be of interest. danYou are invited to a workshop at Goldsmiths with < at >samthetechie,co-founder of anti-kettling app Sukey.Sukey is a web app that is designed to keep people safe, mobile andinformed during demonstrations. It emerged the night before thestudent protest in November 2010 and is now being developed as an opensource tool for any demonstration.In this workshop with we'll get under the hood to explore what coding& design decisions were made and why, and we'll discuss the future forSukey in an world of #occupy movements.More broadly, what are the different ways that software can bedeveloped for social and political movements and what are thedifferent kinds of knowledge, organisation and information that needto be brought together in order to make such systems work well? Whatare the problems introduced by 'informationalising' protest and directaction and how do software and politics change when they are broughttogether in such ways.Free event; all welcome!VENUE: Room 326, New Academic Building, Goldsmiths, University ofLondon, New Cross, London, SE14 6NWApp: http://sukey.org/Code: http://snarl.github.com/Signup: http://sukeyatgoldsmiths.eventbrite.com/

[The sidebar texts on Al Jazeera have become the single best source for written analysis of global events, to my knowledge anyway--please inform if there is any place of similar quality. This article is the most far-ranging I've yet read on the current terminal crisis of neoliberalism. It makes an important distinction between structural crisis - which changes the political-economic rules of the game, as in the 1890s, 1930s and 1970s - and systemic crisis which would actually change the game itself. The author is among the sociologists who developed the theory of the Transnational Capitalist Class -- oh yeah, and as I've just learned by hunting around on the net, he was also the subject of a huge academic scandal because he compared Israel's attacks on Gaza to the Nazis' attacks on the Warsaw ghetto. Expect far worse divisiveness while an unjust and unsustainable political economy collapses. -- BH]***GLOBAL REBELLION: THE COMING CHAOS?William L. Robinsonhttp://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111130121556567265.htmlAs the crisis of global capitalism spirals out of control, the powers that be in the global system appear to be adrift and unable to proposal viable solutions. From the slaughter of dozens of young protesters by the army in Egypt to the brutal repression of the Occupy movement in the United States, and the water cannons brandished by the militarised police in Chile against students and workers, states and ruling classes are unable are to hold back the tide of worldwide popular rebellion and must resort to ever more generalised repression.Simply put, the immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.To understand what is happening in this second decade of the new century we need to see the big picture in historic and structural context. Global elites had hoped and expected that the "Great Depression" that began with the mortgage crisis and the collapse of the global financial system in 2008 would be a cyclical downturn that could be resolved through state-sponsored bailouts and stimulus packages. But it has become clear that this is a structural crisis. Cyclical crises are on-going episodes in the capitalist system, occurring and about once a decade and usually last 18 months to two years. There were world recessions in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and the early 21st century.Structural crises are deeper; their resolution requires a fundamental restructuring of the system. Earlier world structural crises of the 1890s, the 1930s and the 1970s were resolved through a reorganisation of the system that produced new models of capitalism. "Resolved" does not mean that the problems faced by a majority of humanity under capitalism were resolved but that the reorganisation of the capitalist system in each case overcame the constraints to a resumption of capital accumulation on a world scale. The crisis of the 1890s was resolved in the cores of world capitalism through the export of capital and a new round of imperialist expansion. The Great Depression of the 1930s was resolved through the turn to variants of social democracy in both the North and the South - welfare, populist, or developmentalist capitalism that involved redistribution, the creation of public sectors, and state regulation of the market.Globalisation and the current structural crisisTo understand the current conjuncture we need to go back to the 1970s. The globalisation stage of world capitalism we are now in itself evolved out the response of distinct agents to these previous episodes of crisis, in particular, to the 1970s crisis of social democracy, or more technically stated, of Fordism-Keynesianism, or of redistributive capitalism. In the wake of that crisis capital went global as a strategy of the emergent Transnational Capitalist Class and its political representatives to reconstitute its class power by breaking free of nation-state constraints to accumulation. These constraints - the so-called "class compromise" - had been imposed on capital through decades of mass struggles around the world by nationally-contained popular and working classes. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, globally-oriented elites captured state power in most countries around the world and utilised that power to push capitalist globalisation through the neo-liberal model.Globalisation and neo-liberal policies opened up vast new opportunities for transnational accumulation in the 1980s and 1990s. The revolution in computer and information technology and other technological advances helped emergent transnational capital to achieve major gains in productivity and to restructure, "flexibilise," and shed labour worldwide. This, in turn, undercut wages and the social wage and facilitated a transfer of income to capital and to high consumption sectors around the world that provided new market segments fuelling growth. In sum, globalisation made possible a major extensive and intensive expansion of the system and unleashed a frenzied new round of accumulation worldwide that offset the 1970s crisis of declining profits and investment opportunities.However, the neo-liberal model has also resulted in an unprecedented worldwide social polarisation. Fierce social and class struggles worldwide were able in the 20th century to impose a measure of social control over capital. Popular classes, to varying degrees, were able to force the system to link what we call social reproduction to capital accumulation. What has taken place through globalisation is the severing of the logic of accumulation from that of social reproduction, resulting in an unprecedented growth of social inequality and intensified crises of survival for billions of people around the world.The pauperising effects unleashed by globalisation have generated social conflicts and political crises that the system is now finding it more and more difficult to contain. The slogan "we are the 99 per cent" grows out of the reality that global inequalities and pauperisation have intensified enormously since capitalist globalisation took off in the 1980s. Broad swaths of humanity have experienced absolute downward mobility in recent decades. Even the IMF was forced to admit in a 2000 report that "in recent decades, nearly one-fifth of the world’s population has regressed. This is arguably one of the greatest economic failures of the 20th century".Global social polarisation intensifies the chronic problem of over-accumulation. This refers to the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, so that the global market is unable to absorb world output and the system stagnates. Transnational capitalists find it more and more difficult to unload their bloated and expanding mass of surplus - they can’t find outlets to invest their money in order to generate new profits; hence the system enters into recession or worse. In recent years, the Transnational Capitalist Class has turned to militarised accumulation, to wild financial speculation, and to the raiding of sacking of public finance to sustain profit-making in the face of over-accumulation.While transnational capital’s offensive against the global working and popular classes dates back to the crisis of the 1970s and has grown in intensity ever since, the Great Recession of 2008 was in several respects a major turning point. In particular, as the crisis spread it generated the conditions for new rounds of brutal austerity worldwide, greater flexibilisation of labour, steeply rising under and unemployment, and so on. Transnational finance capital and its political agents utilised the global crisis to impose brutal austerity and attempting to dismantle what is left of welfare systems and social states in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, to squeeze more value out of labour, directly through more intensified exploitation and indirectly through state finances. Social and political conflict has escalated around the world in the wake of 2008.Nonetheless, the system has been unable to recover; it is sinking deeper into chaos. Global elites cannot manage the explosive contradictions. Is the neo-liberal model of capitalism entering a terminal stage? It is crucial to understand that neo-liberalism is but one model of global capitalism; to say that neo-liberalism may be in terminal crisis is not to say that global capitalism is in terminal crisis. Is it possible that the system will respond to crisis and mass rebellion through a new restructuring that leads to some different model of world capitalism - perhaps a global Keynesianism involving transnational redistribution and transnational regulation of finance capital? Will rebellious forces from below be co-opted into some new reformed capitalist order?Or are we headed towards a systemic crisis? A systemic crisis is one in which the solution involves the end of the system itself, either through its supersession and the creation of an entirely new system, or more ominously the collapse of the system. Whether or not a structural crisis becomes systemic depends on how distinct social and class forces respond - to the political projects they put forward and as well as to factors of contingency that cannot be predicted in advance, and to objective conditions. It is impossible at this time to predict the outcome of the crisis. However, a few things are clear in the current world conjuncture.The current momentFirst, this crisis shares a number of aspects with earlier structural crises of the 1930s and the 1970s, but there are also several features unique to the present:The system is fast reaching the ecological limits of its reproduction. We face the real spectre of resource depletion and environmental catastrophes that threaten a system collapse. - The magnitude of the means of violence and social control is unprecedented. Computerised wars, drones, bunker-buster bombs, star wars, and so forth, have changed the face of warfare. Warfare has become normalised and sanitised for those not directly at the receiving end of armed aggression. Also unprecedented is the concentration of control over the mass media, the production of symbols, images and messages in the hands of transnational capital. We have arrived at the society of panoptical surveillance and Orwellian thought control. - We are reaching the limits to the extensive expansion of capitalism, in the sense that there are no longer any new territories of significance that can be integrated into world capitalism. De-ruralisation is now well-advanced, and the commodification of the countryside and of pre- and non-capitalist spaces has intensified, that is, converted in hot-house fashion into spaces of capital, so that intensive expansion is reaching depths never before seen. Like riding a bicycle, the capitalist system needs to continuously expand or else it collapses. Where can the system now expand? - There is the rise of a vast surplus population inhabiting a planet of slums, alienated from the productive economy, thrown into the margins, and subject to sophisticated systems of social control and to crises of survival - to a mortal cycle of dispossession-exploitation-exclusion. This raises in new ways the dangers of a 21st-century fascism and new episodes of genocide to contain the mass of surplus humanity and their real or potential rebellion. - There is a disjuncture between a globalising economy and a nation-state based system of political authority. Transnational state apparatuses are incipient and have not been able to play the role of what social scientists refer to as a "hegemon", or a leading nation-state that has enough power and authority to organise and stabilise the system. Nation-states cannot control the howling gales of a runaway global economy; states face expanding crises of political legitimacy.Second, global elites are unable to come up with solutions. They appear to be politically bankrupt and impotent to steer the course of events unfolding before them. They have exhibited bickering and division at the G-8, G-20 and other forums, seemingly paralysed, and certainly unwilling to challenge the power and prerogative of transnational finance capital, the hegemonic fraction of capital on a world scale, and the most rapacious and destabilising fraction. While national and transnational state apparatuses fail to intervene to impose regulations on global finance capital, they have intervened to impose the costs of the crisis on labour. The budgetary and fiscal crises that supposedly justify spending cuts and austerity are contrived. They are a consequence of the unwillingness or inability of states to challenge capital and their disposition to transfer the burden of the crisis to working and popular classes.Third, there will be no quick outcome of the mounting global chaos. We are in for a period of major conflicts and great upheavals. As I mentioned above, one danger is a neo-fascist response to contain the crisis. We are facing a war of capital against all. Three sectors of transnational capital in particular stand out as the most aggressive and prone to seek neo-fascist political arrangements to force forward accumulation as this crisis continues: speculative financial capital, the military-industrial-security complex, and the extractive and energy sector. Capital accumulation in the military-industrial-security complex depends on endless conflicts and war, including the so-called wars on terrorism and on drugs, as well as on the militarisation of social control. Transnational finance capital depends on taking control of state finances and imposing debt and austerity on the masses, which in turn can only be achieved through escalating repression. And extractive industries depend on new rounds of violent dispossession and environmental degradation around the world.Fourth, popular forces worldwide have moved quicker than anyone could imagine from the defensive to the offensive. The initiative clearly passed this year, 2011, from the transnational elite to popular forces from below. The juggernaut of capitalist globalisation in the 1980s and 1990s had reverted the correlation of social and class forces worldwide in favour of transnational capital. Although resistance continued around the world, popular forces from below found themselves disoriented and fragmented in those decades, pushed on to the defensive in the heyday of neo-liberalism. Then the events of September 11, 2001, allowed the transnational elite, under the leadership of the US state, to sustain its offensive by militarising world politics and extending systems of repressive social control in the name of "combating terrorism".Now all this has changed. The global revolt underway has shifted the whole political landscape and the terms of the discourse. Global elites are confused, reactive, and sinking into the quagmire of their own making. It is noteworthy that those struggling around the world have been shown a strong sense of solidarity and are in communications across whole continents. Just as the Egyptian uprising inspired the US Occupy movement, the latter has been an inspiration for a new round of mass struggle in Egypt. What remains is to extend transnational coordination and move towards transnationally-coordinated programmes. On the other hand, the "empire of global capital" is definitely not a "paper tiger". As global elites regroup and assess the new conjuncture and the threat of mass global revolution, they will - and have already begun to - organise coordinated mass repression, new wars and interventions, and mechanisms and projects of co-optation in their efforts to restore hegemony.In my view, the only viable solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity along the lines of a 21st-century democratic socialism in which humanity is no longer at war with itself and with nature.****William I. Robinson is a Professor of Sociology, Global Studies, and Latin American Studies, University of California at Santa Barbara. His latest book is Latin America and Global Capitalism.

[From Lewis Mumford, "The Condition of Man," 1944, Volume III, "Renewal of Life," Chapter IX, "The Progress of Prometheus," pp. 304-5] As a humanizing influence the new interests and the new processes of production were extremely fruitful and they were to have a healthful effect upon the development of the personality. But this is more than one can say without qualification of the goods themselves or of the goals of the utilitarians set before the community. This distinction is important. The philosophers of industrialism, from Bacon to Bentham, from Smith to Marx, insisted that the improvement of man's condition was the highest requirement of morality. But in what did that improvement consist? The answer seemed so obvious to them that they did not bother to justify it: the expansion and fulfillment of the material wants of man, and the spread of these benefits, from the few who had once pre-empted them to the many who had so long lived on the scraps Dives had thrown into the gutter. The great dogma of this religion is the dogma of increasing wants. To multiply the powers of production one must likewise multiply the capacities of consumption. What, then is man's true life? The utilitarian has a ready answer: it consisted in having more wants that could be supplied by the machine, and inventing more ways in which these wants could be varied and expanded. Whereas the traditional religions had sought to curb appetite, this new religion openly stimulated it: forgetting its hungry Olivers, who could with pathetic justice ask for more, it licensed its Bounderbys to unlimited consumption and surfeit. In the name of economy, a thousand wasteful devices would be invented; and in the name of efficiency, new forms of mechanical time-wasting would be devised: both processes gained speed throughout the nineteenth century and have come close to the limit of extravagant futility in our own time. But labor-saving devices could only achieve their end -- that of freeing mankind for higher functions -- if the standard of living remained stable. The dogma of increasing wants nullified every real economy and set the community in a collective squirrel cage. Thus the universal use of the telephone has caused the abandonment of the far more economic written memorandum or postcard for brief intercommunication; the invention of the radio has caused the time-consuming human voice to displace the swift human eye even in the consumption of daily news: the cheapened cost of printing has added to the amount of needless wordage and unusable stimuli that assail modern man in newspaper, magazine, pamphlet, prospectus, folder, advertisement. On the basis of its quantitative success, this untrammeled productivity and activity should result in boundless satisfaction: but its massive actual result is confusion, frustration, impotence. The mechanical expansion of human appetites, the appetite for goods, the appetite for power, the appetite for sensation, has no relation whatever to the ordering of the means of existence for the satisfaction of human needs. The latter process requires a humane scale of values and a priority schedule for their fulfillment which puts first things first. No such scale existed in the utilitarian ideology. Without critical inquiry it assumed that the new was better then the old, that the mechanical was better than the vital, that the active was better than the passive, the the financially profitable was a sufficient indication of the humanly valuable. All those unqualified assumptions were demonstrably false. [What Mumford calls the "mechanical" is, of course, what McLuhan referred to as the "Gutenberg Galaxy." What he points to as the lack of "critical inquiry" is what McLuhan meant by a deficit of pattern recognition, resulting from the "visual" sensory bias of the print-based media environment. What McLuhan hoped would occur under electric-media conditions would be a re-examination of these deficiencies, as the sensorium rebalanced. Indeed he *joined* the Distributist League (circa 1934), which was an attempt to return to the economics *before* the ideology of "utilitarianism" had taken over. Person-to-person economics. However, what McLuhan hoped for couldn't happen in the ANALOG environment of radio and television -- which harnessed "behaviorism" (i.e. discarnate man-is-just-monkeyism) to stoke the "demand" for pornographic levels of consumption, which was the subject of "Mechanical Bride." Today's DIGITAL environment, where we all *lean-forward* and *interact* -- which completely redefines wants/needs and consumption/production and encourages us to RE-CARNATE -- presents the first opportunity for Distributism (i.e. the broad social distribution of the productive means to sustain ourselves and our families) to finally come into play. This is why Occupy Wall Street began as a rallying call from ADBUSTERS, as an anti-consumption declaration. This development is neither "Left" nor "Right," which are terms from the seating pattern of the 18th century French National Assembly and make no sense at all in today's media environment. Now we are all *digital* environmentalists!] Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY

On Thursday, December 1st, 2011 WikiLeaks began publishing The Spy Files, thousands of pages and other materials exposing the global mass surveillance industryhttp://wikileaks.org/The-Spyfiles.htmlMass interception of entire populations is not only a reality, it is asecret new industry spanning 25 countriesIt sounds like something out of Hollywood, but as of today, massinterception systems, built by Western intelligence contractors,including for ’political opponents’ are a reality. Today WikiLeaks beganreleasing a database of hundreds of documents from as many as 160intelligence contractors in the mass surveillance industry. Working withBugged Planet and Privacy International, as well as media organizationsform six countries – ARD in Germany, The Bureau of InvestigativeJournalism in the UK, The Hindu in India, L’Espresso in Italy, OWNI inFrance and the Washington Post in the U.S. Wikileaks is shining a lighton this secret industry that has boomed since September 11, 2001 and isworth billions of dollars per year. WikiLeaks has released 287 documentstoday, but the Spy Files project is ongoing and further information willbe released this week and into next year.International surveillance companies are based in the moretechnologically sophisticated countries, and they sell their technologyon to every country of the world. This industry is, in practice,unregulated. Intelligence agencies, military forces and policeauthorities are able to silently, and on mass, and secretly interceptcalls and take over computers without the help or knowledge of thetelecommunication providers. Users’ physical location can be tracked ifthey are carrying a mobile phone, even if it is only on stand by.But the WikiLeaks Spy Files are more than just about ’good Westerncountries’ exporting to ’bad developing world countries’. Westerncompanies are also selling a vast range of mass surveillance equipmentto Western intelligence agencies. In traditional spy stories,intelligence agencies like MI5 bug the phone of one or two people ofinterest. In the last ten years systems for indiscriminate, masssurveillance have become the norm. Intelligence companies such asVASTech secretly sell equipment to permanently record the phone calls ofentire nations. Others record the location of every mobile phone in acity, down to 50 meters. Systems to infect every Facebook user, orsmart-phone owner of an entire population group are on the intelligencemarket.<....>

<http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2011/12/01/income-inequality-killed-the-music-business/>Income Inequality Killed The Music Business I'm a smart guy. I was educated at one of America's finest colleges. I'm a member of the California Bar. But even if I struck it rich as a writer, I could never garner the millions a banker or corporate CEO does. It's impossible. It's like asking a sandlot player to bat .400 in the big leagues. It's like paying a street ball player twenty million a year. Never gonna happen. Twenty million a year. There are bankers and CEOs who make this much each and every year. This is not U2, going on the road, raping and pillaging in stadiums for years. If U2 went out again, they'd have trouble selling tickets. Hell, they had trouble moving tickets for the last leg of their tour. They played it out, they mined the depths, they've got to let it lie fallow. Costs for the U2 360 tour were prohibitive. How much did each member of U2 end up with at the end? I'd say no way a hundred million, but let's just start there, let's go with that number. There are bankers and CEOs pulling down nearly a hundred million dollars a year. It took U2 years to achieve this goal, to make this amount. They're spent, but the bankers and CEOs are still rolling in dough. And the U2 360 tour was the biggest in history! So you're graduating from college, playing in a band all the time you were in school, and you ask yourself, should I give music a go or get an MBA, go to work for Goldman Sachs? Now it's no longer the seventies. Take a year or two off and you miss the bus. You've got to start now. There's only one band making mucho coin, but thousands of bankers and CEOs getting rich. Odds are better if you become a CEO. Or you could go into tech. Mark Zuckerberg is not the only young techie worth millions. There's that guy running Groupon and the guy running Zynga, and so many of the worker bees end up making millions too, that's what all the employees at Facebook are counting on. Do you think you can make millions as an A&R guy? 1. The Labels Used to be running a label paid well, but it was mostly about the music, the lifestyle. Then, with the advent of MTV and the CD, suddenly Tommy Mottola was far richer than the acts. And Tommy and his ilk started hanging with other rich people in the Hamptons, they felt entitled to their wealth. Such that when Napster blew a hole in the paradigm, everybody was sacrificed but the top guy. The people running the labels are still as well paid as they were before Napster, before the recession. They're keeping up with the joneses, they're in charge, everybody's expendable but them. As for those people still working at the label...they're thrilled to have a job. Glad to be slaves on the plantation. And everything is driven by the bottom line. Hell, Warner is privately held, Sony and Universal are parts of giant corporations. Theoretically, they could invest in the future, they could leave money on the table, but they won't. The execs want that money in their pockets. And they don't really care about the label anyway, they don't own it. As long as they get paid for their multi-year contracts, they're cool. Music is not the focus, money is. It's a change in our entire culture, why should the label heads be any different. They've fought their way to the top, the top are handsomely rewarded, usually with double digit million incomes. If the guy running some industrial firm makes this much money, shouldn't they, providing entertainment for the masses? 2. The Acts The best and the brightest don't go into music. It just doesn't pay. The only people pursuing music as a career are the lower classes, who are struggling to get on top. As a result, they'll do whatever it takes to make it, they'll whore themselves out when they get there, it's all about the bucks. Ergo the crazy endorsement and product deals. The acts feel they're entitled to the money. Look at all the other half as famous people, they're loaded, so the acts feel they should be loaded too. And the corporations are willing to lay cash on the acts, because the corporations have money to burn, their taxes have been lowered, check the statistics, they're sitting on huge cash reserves. The CEOs can use this cash to hang with stars. This is how the Gaddafi family got household name talent to play their shindigs. This is how that guy who made bad body armor got the biggest stars in the world to play his son's bar mitzvah. Used to be no CEO could afford it. But now, they can. And the acts see no reason not to take it. Hell, they don't want to fly commercial, they too want to vacation in St. Barth's. Music has become about the money. But the odds are low and so is the money, so you get the desperate, willing to do anything to make it, kind of like the athletes. Those NBA players are not model citizens, but they're essentially one-dimensional, it's comes down to their playing ability, their performance on the court. But we believe musicians are their music, that they're three-dimensional, that we can believe in them, but we can't. a. Artist Development Few of the classic acts did their best work on their first records. But labels allowed them to marinate and mature, to develop. Now the label says no, because the executive wants his money up front. There is no long term. And that's why there's no "Hotel California". Nobody peaks on their fifth album, there usually isn't even a fifth album. b. Writing Your Own Material This is what blew up the rock acts. This is what made us believe in them. Now, material is written by committee. If the label's gonna take a risk, it wants insurance. It doesn't want the act blowing half a million dollars on something that won't sell. So inherently, we've got less believable stuff. Sure, there will always be music, but the heyday of the music business was when the rock star was responsible for everything and was beholden to no one. Ain't that a laugh. 3. Concerts Sure, there was scalping decades back, but tickets were not the equivalent of a thousand bucks. Because no one had a thousand bucks to blow on a ticket. But the bankers and CEOs do. So the hoi polloi can't get a good ticket. And since the acts need to make as much money as they can, and recorded music revenue is down, the price for all tickets is heavily inflated. Therefore, people go less, they just can't afford it. And they take no risks on new acts, not at these prices. And what are the odds the new acts are good? They're just moneygrubbers like the rest of them. Conclusion Meanwhile, everybody fighting his way up the food chain is spreading disinformation, saying his hands are tied. And when finally nailed down, they utter some b.s. about just trying to feed their family. But with the money they've already made, they can feed their children's children's children. The incentive to be an artist, to make great, lasting music, has been blown away. Used to be, a working act could have a middle class lifestyle and maybe some future performing rights income and other royalties. Now, you're either starving or fighting to hold on to what you've got so the bankers will hire you for a private. It's desperation all the time. Back when we were all in it together, when the gap between rich and poor was smaller, it was reasonable to be a musical artist. One took a chance expressing himself. You could always give up and go to law school, find a place for yourself on the middle class spectrum. But now if you're not on your way to riches immediately, you're boxed out. Which is why parents push their kids to get into the Ivies, why teenagers are creating websites and apps. They want to get in on the ground floor. Used to be people picked up guitars. Now they flock to their computers. But what if a label exec couldn't make millions, whether it be as a result of taxes or the demands of employees and acts. What if CEOs and bankers made this same amount. Hell, what if forty acts could make the same amount of money as a CEO or banker, and there were another hundred who were solidly middle class, and being so meant you could live comfortably and pay the bills? Then you'd have the sixties and seventies all over again. Because this is the way it was. Conclusion 2 The cost of our diverging economic rewards system doesn't only affect lifestyle, it affects art. There's been no great protest music in this decade, despite there being so much to protest against, because the acts don't align themselves with the oppressed proletariat, but the rich bankers and CEOs. And if you take too big a stand, there goes your endorsement deal, there goes your invitation to the party. But if you could make enough money without the endorsements, because you just didn't need as much to survive, then the acts could play by their own rules. Conclusion 3 Blame time and again is being put on the public, on the poor. As if the people stealing the music could afford a grand a ticket. This is just the fat cats turning the argument around. Rather than investigate why the public is fed up, they just label the public thieves and say they're doing nothing different than the bankers and CEOs. Which is paying off Congress to make things go their way. That's what SOPA's all about. If people lose a few rights along the way, what difference does it make? We've got to make our money, we've got to get our check!

The occupation of key public spaces by Occupy Wall Street, as a meansof calling attention to more basic problems, raises questions of therole of public spaces that need to be urgently dealt with. The basicquestions about the organization of society, democracy, inequality,social justice, public priorities are deep-going and require long-termanswers. They should not be pre-empted by the immediate needs forspace, not should any space be fetishized. But spatial issues need tobe dealt with immediately and urgently.I have tried to deal with these immediate questions in a new piece. Iargue that cities should give priority to uses of public space thatincrease the ability of the people to participate actively and withinformation in democratic governance. Such a priority can includeconventional reasonable time, place, and manner regulations, and couldbe part of a comprehensive planned approach to the provision of publicspace. Similar decisions on priorities for the use of public spaceare constantly made in deciding on the placement of statues, memorialplaques, street parades, festivals, electioneering, etc. They need tobe considered here.Planners can have a significant role to play.See OCCUPY AND THE PROVISION OF PUBLIC SPACE: THE CITY'S RESPONSIBILITY, available at pmarcuse.wordpress.com.Comments more than welcome.**

Britain is an economic dictatorship Time for economic democracy We expect political democracy. Why not economic democracy too? Peter Tatchell Huffington Post - London - 29 November 2011 http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/peter-g-tatchell/strikes-30-november-time-for-democracy_b_1117266.html Up to two million trade union members went on strike on Wednesday, in protest against the government's attack on pensions and cuts in public services. Their grievances are real. But their solutions don't go far enough. Pressing the government for fairness isn't the answer. Staging a protest is second best. These are reactive, defensive responses to fundamental flaws and failings in the way our economy is organised and run. The perennial failing of most trade unions is that their horizons are so limited. They seek a better deal for their members within the economic status quo, when the real solution is to reform the system of economy that, by its very nature, leaves the vast majority of working people powerless, disenfranchised and marginalised. When it comes to the economy, the average person has no meaningful say in the decisions that affect their jobs, wages, pensions and working conditions. We expect political democracy. Why not economic democracy too? Behind the cosy democratic facade, Britain is a cut-throat economic dictatorship. A rich and powerful economic elite makes all the key economic decisions, excluding millions of employees and consumers. Our country's democratic political transformation - pushed forward by the Levellers, Chartists and Suffragettes - has never been matched by a corresponding economic democratisation. 'One person, one vote' has been won in the political sphere (albeit imperfectly) but not in the realm of economics. Britain's democratic revolution, begun four centuries ago, remains unfinished. It is time to put economic democracy on the political agenda; to bring the economy into democratic alignment with the political system. Extending the economic franchise is about democracy and justice. It can help create a greater plurality and diversity of economic power, and also lay the foundations for a more equitable and productive economic partnership between all those who contribute to wealth creation and to the provision of public services, from local councils to the NHS. Whatever people think of the current economic system, one thing is indisputable: it is characterised by an absence of democracy, participation, transparency and accountability. Employees and their representative bodies - the trade unions - are frozen out of economic influence and decision-making. Big business rules. The captains of industry, commerce and finance have almost total power. They run their enterprises on totalitarian lines. All decision-making is concentrated in the hands of a tiny, privileged cabal of major shareholders, directors and managers. They alone determine how the company operates. Employees - without whom no wealth would be created and no institution could function - are powerless and disenfranchised. They are little more than glorified serfs of the moneyed classes and their government. Not much has changed in two centuries of capitalism. There have been no major democratic reforms of the economy. Although millions of people bought shares in privatised public enterprises like BT, their individual holdings are minuscule and marginal. They have no real influence. Big corporate interests retain the decisive economic power. This power is as centralised and autocratic as ever. A few determine the fate of the many. The advent of nationalised public industries, utilities and services changed nothing. They have been run in much the same centralised, dictatorial manner as their privately-owned counterparts. There was never any economic democracy in the state-run railways or coal mines. The system of ownership changed but not the system of management. The bosses of public utilities and nationalised industries were almost as powerful as the captains of private enterprise. Their employees remained locked out of the decision-making process. It was state capitalism, not socialism. The Labour Party and the trade unions have made a huge mistake in over-emphasising public ownership, to the neglect of public control. The same applies today in the NHS and other public services. They are administered according to the classic capitalist model of top-down command and control. NHS big-wigs have almost as much power as private medical bosses. Doctors, nurses and ancillary staff are excluded from policy-making in both public and private medicine. Their years of accumulated hands-on, frontline service knowledge is disregarded when it comes to policy-making. This is a huge waste of human resources. Wherever we look, in all sectors of the economy, the democratic deficit is universal. Power is concentrated and wielded in ways that is contrary to the democratic, egalitarian spirit of modern, twenty-first century Britain. The time for economic democracy is now. * For more information about Peter Tatchell's human rights and social justice campaigns: www.petertatchell.net

Models for a Peer-to-Peer SocietyA seminar with Michel Bauwens, P2P FoundationMonday December 12th at 2pm in the Ivor Crewe Lecture Hall Seminar RoomCentre for Work, Organization and Society, University of Essex (http://www.essex.ac.uk/ebs/research/emc)Many observers argue that the change induced with the internet is on a par with at least the effects of the printing press, which was instrumental in creating a cascade of changes such as the renaissance, the reformation and the Enlightenment, culminating in the replacement of feudalism with capitalism. It is therefore reasonable to posit a phase transition this time as well, but what kind of transition and on which timescale? This is the question we want to address. Our first answer is that the emergence of a new hyper-productive mode of value creation, i.e. commons-based peer production as, a new ‘mode of production,’ and its co-emerging institutional framework, illuminate us about the incipient ‘patterns’ of the emergent new social order.The temporality of change is more complex as it involves the breakdown and end of a Kondratieff cycle (a seventy year cycle), then, on a deeper level, the exhaustion of the industrial model based on cheap fossil fuel (a 500 yr cycle), and on a even deeper level, the questioning of civilization itself, as a mode of exploiting nature (a 5,000 yr cycle). Given this deep change, what part of capitalism and the market can we expect to see surviving? What kind of ‘open business models’ and p2p-friendly market structures, may be expected to be part of the new mix? Though out, our talk will be based on extrapolating current and visible trends, not on ‘desires’ for a better society.Bio: Michel Bauwens is Peer-to-Peer theorist and an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation. He is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, based in Chiang Mai, Thailand.Foundation for P2P Alternatives: http://p2pfoundation.net/Respondent for the session will be Chris LandMichel will also be presenting at Tent City University, as part of Occupy London, on December 10th at 11:00am. More information about that can be found here: http://tentcityuniversity.occupylsx.org.