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Last month was a long and busy month that started in Canada and endedin South Africa.Along the way, SecuShare's {1} Daniel Reusche and I agitated fordecentralized social platfors at Berlin's Campus Party {2}, Ipresented the first Octo demo {3} at the latest reSource transmedialculture {4} event with Jeff Mann, Jonas Frankki and Baruch Gottlieb,also, Baruch, Jonas and I built the Miscommuniction Station {4} as anonline project of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival.Finally, Baruch and I traveled to the A MAZE / INTERACT festival {5}to present and represent iMine {6} and R15N {7}.Now I'm back in Berlin and looking forward to tonight's Stammtisch.And it's September.Tuesday, Septemeber 6944, 1993 to be exact {8}.6944 days, or 19 years and 9 days after the Eternal September began.A MAZE was fantastic, and the Braamfontein district of Johannesburgwhere the festival took place was an incredible place, not onlyto enjoy a great party in a really unbelievable community, butalso to reflect on where we are now, nearly twenty years since thecommercialization of the internet began to deliver a year-round flowof "newbies" to the Internet 1.0 that nobody yet called "the web".The Jargon File defines "The September that never ends" as "All timesince September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet usedto be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lackingany sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves.This coincided with people starting college, getting their firstinternet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn whatwas acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could beassimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL usersbecame able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers'capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall theperiod before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality ofdiscussions on newsgroups. Syn. eternal September."Once the internet was available to the general public, outside of theresearch/education/ngo world that had inhabited before September,the large numbers of users arriving on the untamed shores of earlycyberspace "nearly overwhelmed the old-timers' capacity to acculturatethem."Even in Africa, you'd have to go pretty far out of your way to find acommunity where it's not September yet. Internet access is certainlynot as ubiquitous, reliable or fast as it is it "the West," but theAfrican people do use the Internet, and are part of its culture.The Jargon File mentions "Netiquette," a quaint term from the innocenttimes of net.culture, yet Netiquette was not simply a way of fittingin like table manners at an exclusive dinner party. The culturalcontext of that Internet that made acculturation necessary was it'srelative openness and lack of stratification.Netiquette was required, because the network had relatively littleconstraints built into it, the constraints needed to be culturalfor the system to work. There was much more to this culture thanteaching new users how to not abuse resources or make a "generalnuisance of themselves." Nettiquette was not so much about onlinemanners, it was rather about how to share. Starting from the sharednetwork resources, sharing was the core of the culture, which not onlyembraced free software and promoted free communications, but generallyresented barriers to free exchange, including barriers required toprotect property rights and any business models based on controllinginformation flow.As dramatic as the influx of new users was to the "old-timers"net.culture, the influx of capital investment and it's conflictingproperty interests quickly emerged as an existential threat the basisof the culture. Net.culture required a shared internet, where thenetwork itself and most of the information on it was held in common.Capital required control, constraints and defined property in orderto earn returns on investment. Lines in the sand where drawn, theprimitive communism of the pre-September Internet was over. TheEternal September began, and along with it, the stratification of theinternet began.Rather than embracing the free, open, platforms where net.culture wasborn, like Usenet, EMail, IRC, etc, Capital embraced the Web. Notas the interlinked, hypermedia, world-wide-distributed publishingplatform it was intended to be, but as a client-server privatecommunications platform where users' interactions where mediated bythe platforms' operators. The flowering of "Web 2.0" was Capital'sre-engineering of the web into an internet accessible version ofthe online services they where building all along, such as the veryplatforms whose mass user bases where the influx that started theEternal September. CompuServ and AOL most notable among them.The Eternal September started when these Online Services allowed theirusers to access Internet services such as Usenet and EMail, Web 2.0instead replaced Usenet and EMail with social platforms embedded inprivate, centralized web-based services that look and work very muchlike the old Online Services.Scratch-off the Facebook logo, and you'll find the AOL logounderneath.The internet is no longer a open free-for-all where old-timersacculturate new-comers into a community of co-operation and sharing.It is a stratified place where privileged users have preferentialaccess, including broadband at-home, servers online, users who cancontrol there own "domain," can run their own mail and web servicesand access the internet as a whole, including the old platforms suchas Usenet and IRC. New users, who may have broadband at home, but haveno services and need to use online services like facebook or gmail tocommunicate at all, subject to the terms of use of those companies.Users who have no broadband at home, and rely on internet cafes andlibraries. And at the lowest tier, Users who can only access themobile internet, on locked-down iPhones and other smart phones, whereapps stores control the available apps users can us, and the appstightly control the users that use them. And of course, each bit ofdata is paid for from the users' precious mobile airtime.As the African people finally cross the digital divide, theonce-vibrant cyberspace they arrive in has already been colonized,enclosed and captured by the profit motive. The culture of sharing andco-operation destroyed by the terms of service of online platforms,by copyright lobies pushing for greater and greater restrictions andby governments that create legislation to protect the interests ofproperty and "security" against the interests of sharing.The culture of co-operation and sharing has been replaced by a cultureof surveillance and control.We once believed that perhaps getting the Africans onto our Internetwould help them in their struggles, now perhaps we can hope theircapacity for struggle will allow us to find ways to make the Interneta transformational force again. Yet, like the urban centers of citieslike Johannesburg, once access is finally won, the centers have beenabandoned. The common squares and open markets have already beendeserted in favour of protected suburbs and gated communities. Accessis allowed not to extend freedom and welcome, but to facilitateexploitation.If the modern Internet can't be the liberating force early net.culturebelieved it could be, maybe we can hope that as the African peoplecome online, their experience in working within environmentswhere inequality, repressions and privilege rule will bring atransformational consciousness to us. They might be our last hope.If you're in Berlin this evening, join us at Cafe Buchhandling {9},while we reminisce and reflect on the unforgettable experience we hadin Johannesburg at AMAZE / INTERACT. I'll be there around 9pm.{1} http://secushare.org{2} http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW_imx0z3LY{3} http://telekommunisten.net/octo/{4} http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/miscommunication-station{5} http://www.amaze-festival.de{6} http://i-mine.org{7} http://r15n.net{8} http://www.eternal-september.org/?language=en{9} http://bit.ly/buchhandlung

Re: <nettime> Eternal September Newmedia-YDxpq3io04c< at >public.gmane.org Dmytri Kleiner <dk-Dx6v7Xh9zxSJDmoZTJKuotHuzzzSOjJt< at >public.gmane.org> "Erich M." <me-U6X/jSX+xgqYes8W4uJ3TQ< at >public.gmane.org>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -From: Newmedia-YDxpq3io04c< at >public.gmane.orgDate: Tue, 4 Sep 2012 11:41:52 -0400 (EDT)Subject: Re: <nettime> Eternal SeptemberDmytri: You might want to discuss that with some striking platinum miners. You want free & open, then try 4CHAN . . . The "Net" has always been about *surveillance* (with ARPANET beinginitially funded by a social psychologist who was interested in reading theemails of the scientists who first signed up) and about DESIRE (with AOL'searly success driven by "Hot Chat" and followed by becoming the uber-cachefor the online porn industry.) PANOPTICON and DESIRE are natural partners. As were English *ideologists* Jeremy Bentham and Bernard de Mandeville. Capitalism depends on this partnership. Have you dealt with this crucial relationship in your writings and travels? Mark StahlmanBrooklyn NY In a message dated 9/4/2012 11:12:15 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time, dk-Dx6v7Xh9zxSJDmoZTJKuotHuzzzSOjJt< at >public.gmane.org writes:Last month was a long and busy month that started in Canada and endedin South Africa. <...>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Date: Tue, 04 Sep 2012 22:07:18 +0200From: Dmytri Kleiner <dk-Dx6v7Xh9zxSJDmoZTJKuotHuzzzSOjJt< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Re: <nettime> Eternal SeptemberOn 04.09.2012 17:41, Newmedia-YDxpq3io04c< at >public.gmane.org wrote:Indeed.4CHAN is a centrally controlled platform. Only free and open so long as it's operators permit it, and easily monitorable.ARAPNET was founded before internet email existed and long after several host based email systems where already widely in use where plenty of scientist emails could already be read. I don't think email was a planned service of the ARPANET, but something that a user (a contractor) made that caught on because it was useful. Not being host based, it would have been difficult for said social psychologist to read internet email not sent to his MTA, so it's more likely a snooping sociologists would rather there never was an APRANET and the scientists where stuck using host based systems like CTSS.Capitalism depends on controlling circulation of things for which demand exists or can be made to exist.Not sure if you remember, but we met at a party in your apartment in the late nineties. It was fun. Thanks for inviting me. Maybe we'll meet again one day.

RATTLING THE REPUBLICANShttp://www.alansondheim.org/rattling.mp3I want to rattle the Republicans; I want to SHAMANIZE themI want to rattle their evil I want to SEND THEM TO HELLAll I can do is PLAY my MUSIC and play my SHAMANIC TRANCEI did do TRANCE along with the DEMOCRATIC CONVENTIONI did to RATTLE to RATTLE the REPUBLICANS AND SEND THEMTHEY ARE INCURABLE THEY SUCK THE MONEY FROM THIS COUNTRYI want to rattle them I WANT TO SHAKE THEIR BONESI WANT THEIR SKIN TO FALL FROM THEIR BONESI PLAY SHAMAN TO THEM I PLAY SHAMAN AGAINST THEMI PLAY SHAMAN AGAINST THEMI SCREAM SARANGI AGAINST THEMI WANT THEIR BONES TO FALL FROM THEIR BONESI WANT THEIR POISON TO DESTROY THEMI WANT MY MUSIC TO DESTROY THEMI GIVE MY MUSIC TO THEIR DESTRUCTIONI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCEI did do TRANCE

Re: <nettime> subjective math . brian carroll <nulltangent-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh-bAttSoROYyI< at >public.gmane.org>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -From: brian carroll <nulltangent-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Re: <nettime> subjective math .Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 13:20:59 -0500 Hello St=E9phane I visited your project page and while I could not get the javascript example to function the basic idea is there and it is quite interesting to consider in terms of voting. At first my impression was of tiered access to concepts, how a young student may interact with a shared model of events in a simpler framework than others who may mediate more of its related and foundational structure, as an idea. Such that a child may reference 'house' and it may involve a certain framework, whereas an adult could reference house in terms of its management or an architect in terms of its construction, though these are not necessarily clear-cut views and could overlap. Thus an accurate modeling of 'house' could provide different layers of contextual access for perspective so if a child referenced its maintenance it could also be validated via the tiered model for use in reasoning, not denied as irrelevant in terms of its perspective. When I saw your javascript example it shifted this view of proportionality into the context of governance, voting, the state, and representational 'democracy'. The vote symbolic of its legitimacy, as if about error-correction and guiding the state via some kind of active foresight. If the world were ungrounded this mechanism could be turned-inside out, voting legitimating a fixed idea about how the deterministic state will function into the future, voting a ritual signing-off on its predetermined course. In the sense that what guides the actions of the state may not be informed by the vote, that it is an illusion. In terms of governing the state, the individual voter is to me similar to a person who stands behind one of those scenic or iconic paintings with a hole in it, for a person to poke through and smile for the camera, shooting them as if the person is a part of its scene, say American Gothic or a Wild West shootout, and then getting the photograph as a souvenir. It is a capturing of 'I was here - though not really' moment. Voting in Democracy, at least the U.S. today, is like this, though with the American Stars & Stripes as its scenery, perhaps iconic government buildings and then the temporary symbolic citizen, a smiling voter, if not holding a painted copy of the U.S. Constitution or flag along with a ballot stub in the photograph. In this way a citizen could function as a stand-in, cast in the role of 'active citizen' within political scenery. Yet in the reality - outside this painted image of the state - perhaps it is different than the given signage. What's represented versus what's actually going on. And representation can be controlled through both language and imagery, yet also through logic.* Your demonstration shows this situation quite specifically. It has been so long since I voted I forget how it works in terms of 'neutral' or abstaining from casting a vote, though it is assumed these remain "unaccounted" and are not tallied in relation to the outcome else perhaps other options would exist in the politics of today. If voting were modeled as you have it, into 3-values of [ yes / neither / no ] as the available options, then there would be a way of tallying 'dissent' from voting itself, versus a decision having to go into a yes or no category by default. This happens with voting systems yet it is a question of whether or not they are tallied, and so tallying the proportion of such dissents to that of a binary [ yes | no ] could at some point begin to challenge the legitimacy of the yes/no vote count, if the proportion of 'neutral' or neither was the greatest proportion. And so it is a question of what would the threshold be for determining legitimacy of the vote, especially if it is reliant upon a majority framework... If there are 100 people who vote, and 99 choose to vote 'neither' or 'neutral', and only 1 person votes on the issue [yes], does that legitimate the decision for the other 99 people, such that it represents 'yes' for all of them? This instead seems like an inversion of representation, proportionally, because 99% would be the majority, not the 'yes' viewpoint. Which by a binary determinism is the only valid response if it is not evaluated in the 3-value logic the situation exists within. Thus voting itself is 2-value if not accounting for the dissent of the vote itself. In this way it cannot be invalidated by voting, it becomes a faithful activity that accurate representation occurs within a binary viewpoint, ignoring the 99%. How few voters would it take to call into question the legitimacy of the vote. Any number of a population could be taken and used to represent 100% of the population, even if only say 10 million were to vote for 300 million people, it likely would still be a 49% to 51% race, given mass media and the horserace, as it relates with winning odds. (Feasibly 1% could win the vote yet not 'represent' the goals of existing populations, only those tallied within the binary viewpoint, forcing such an approximation. Thus the biased, warped, distorted viewpoint could be normalized via mass media yet be quite unreal.) The mechanism self-reinforcing, not self-questioning, it cannot allow self-awareness or self reflection for it cannot mediate the truth, control the outcome of the reasoning process if allowing for such representation (in this case, meaning truth outside biased functioning) so the 'image' must be maintained as a limit, boundary or threshold and this is why 2-value logic is required, to invalidate everything outside its controlled domain. It occurs and can occur because there is no actual accounting for truth within society, beyond language. A citizen who references their Constitutional Rights in a real contest of power is more likely to end up in a psychiatric ward filled to the brim with mind-boggling chemicals, if not wrongly incarcerated if not murdered, than find 'representation' within the legal system at any level that would take on the state in its operating falsity. If you can prove via logic the state in its functioning is unconstitutional, it is simply ignored and disregarded. This is to say, the Constitution itself is being ignored. The status quo is government beyond its own laws while at the same time denying these for its citizens. Ungrounded language (and lawyers) allows this. In voting, those who _are represented by this system are encouraged by the status quo, signing-off on this. It's an inversion of principles, truth and falsity switched due to the logic, its biasing and lack of accountability. The image is everything, based on ungrounded beliefs or beliefs opposite what the words supposedly are saying. *(logic is also at the foundation of language/imagery.) Brian Carroll- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Cc: "nettime-l-fO7mttO5ZDI< at >public.gmane.org" <nettime-l-fO7mttO5ZDI< at >public.gmane.org>From: Michael H Goldhaber <mgoldh-bAttSoROYyI< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: Re: <nettime> subjective math.Date: Fri, 7 Sep 2012 01:22:27 -0700To: brian carroll <nulltangent-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Mime-Version: 1.0Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bitContent-Type: text/plain; charset=us-asciiStatus: ROX-Status: FContent-Length: 34148Lines: 711Brian, How does your approach relate to or differ from Lotfi Zadeh's "fuzzy logic?"Best,MichaelOn Sep 5, 2012, at 5:46 PM, brian carroll <nulltangent-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> wrote: <...> <...>- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

.http://forums.airbase.ru/2012/06/t86082--azerbajdzhan-vs-karabakh-armeniya-na-zadnem-plane.html#p2915213Caspian ShitstormWars never happen, when forces, alliances and intentions are knownin advance. In those cases, the weaker party simply yields to thedemands of the stronger. Every war is preceded by misunderstanding.That is, the different sides live in different perceived realities.The expectations on both sides are typically completely out of whack.I will going to try to shed some light on these expectations and ifyou think that they are ridiculous, that's precisely what makes themdangerous. Also, I should state up front that because of that, theseevents are quite unlikely and the probability of a large-scale war isfairly low in normal terms, but uncomfortably high in terms of thepotential damage it can cause.First statement that you can verify by talking to any Armenian you canfind: the overwhelming majority of Armenians is crazy. Not just thegovernment, not just the political class, not just the intelligentsia,not just the population of the country, but near-everybody for whomtheir Armenian heritage is part of identity, both inside and outsideof Armenia, including the entire vast Armenian diaspora around theworld. Of course, there is a large absolute number of perfectly saneArmenians, but they are a tiny minority with zero political clout. Therest is perfectly capable of enormous sacrifices for their nation,which they perceive to be existentially threatened. They are, onaverage, much crazier than Israelis even.Azerbaijanis are only slightly less crazy. While they do not feelexistentially threatened, the refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh andAgdam county as well as the humiliated military establishment thirstsrevenge. Politicians of all stripes have vowed to retake Karabakh inthe very near future.Both Armenia and Azerbaijan spent around 3%-4% of GDP on Military,with a steep hike in the past two years in both countries.Azerbaijan's GDP is approx. 6 times that of Armenia, meaning thattheir military budget is bigger than the entire government budget ofArmenia.So, on paper, Azerbaijan would be ready to launch a military offensivein Nagorno-Karabakh any day, if Armenian armed forces were the onlyobstacle to overcome. However, there is potentially a bigger obstacle:Russia. Obviously, Armenia's government want to secure Russianprotecion, while Azerbaijan's government wants the Russian military tostay out of the conflict. So far, both have tried to curry favors withthe Kremlin, but things are changing.Why would Russia intervene on the side of Armenia? Because they wantto keep Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian-occupied, for the same reasonswhy Transdnistria, Crimean naval bases, South Ossetia and Abkhaziaexist: to keep these countries (Azerbaijan, Moldova, the Ukraine andGeorgia, respectively) out of NATO. Here's how it works: because ofArticle 5, NATO never grants membership to countries with territorialdisputes and non-NATO foreign armed forces on their soil; Russianmilitary thinking measures Russia's security by the distance potentialadversaries need to cover on their way to Moscow, as exchangingterritory for time has been a time-honored (and mostly successful)strategy for beating back invaders. For numerous reasons (in whichboth parties share the blame) Russian military establishment considersNATO potential adversaries. Since the eastward expansion of NATOfirst into former Warsaw-pact countries and then into former Sovietrepublics, only very hard guarantees (preferably: Russian militarybases) are considered reliable (and acceptable). These disputedterritories and military bases are Russia's effective veto on therespective states' NATO membership. In case of Azerbaijan, Armenianforces substitute for Russians.In case of Azerbaijan, keeping it out of NATO is especially importantfor the Russian government, as its NATO membership could veryrealistically (in their nightmare scenarios) change the strategicbalance around the Caspian Sea and even threaten Russia withdisintegration. Here's why. Right now, the Caspian Sea is the onlysea with no U. S. naval presence. By contrast, Russia maintains byfar the strongest naval force on that lake (and it is legally a lake,more on this later) and is essentially the arbiter of all disputesregarding seabed (oil & gas) and surface (fisheries, caviar) amonglittoral states. When separatists in Russia (in Chechnia or Dagestan)used the territory of neighboring countries (Georgia and Azerbaijan)for logistics and training, Russia's government did not hesitateto apply pressure with the threat of military force and in case ofGeorgia (in 2003) even acted on it carrying out a number of bombingraids in Pankisi Gorge against Chechen separatists, violating Georgianairspace and bombing undisputed Georgian territory, after deeming theefforts of Georgia's government (still headed by Eduard Shevarnadzeat that time) insufficient. Azerbaijan has so far usually ??ompliedwith Russian demands. When Georgia's new government (headed by MikheilSaakashvili) declared its intention to join NATO and then moved toreconquer South Ossetia and Abkhazia (in 2008), the Kremlin respondedwith a full-scale invasion, the near-total destruction of Georgia'smilitary infrastructure and the recognition of the two separatiststates, maintaining a powerful military presence in both. Now, suchmeasures won't work against NATO members. All parties know that.Why are Russia's rulers so nervous about foreign support of separatismin the Northern Caucassus? Losing access to large parts of the mineraland caviar wealth of the Caspian Sea is just one reason. If Dagestan(which already has a simmering separatist civil war going on) andKalmykia (a national republic with a 3/4 ethnic Kalmyk population)secede, it would become entirely feasible to close the small gap overthe Volga delta between Kalmykia and Kazakhstan called Astrakhancounty which right now on paper has a 2/3 Russian majority, but whichmay change very quickly. If Russia ceases to be a littoral state tothe Caspian Sea, it loses its veto in re-classifying it from a laketo a sea. Once it is a sea, maritime law requires that access tointernational waters is granted to all without interference. Thisis why Turkey cannot stop any ships, including military ones, totravel between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. In practice thatwould mean that American naval vessels could sail up and down theVolga waterway (which thus becomes an international one much likethe Bosphorus) between St. Petersburg and Astrakhan and Russia'sgovernment cannot legally do anything about it. In Yaroslavl, theywould be a mere 230km from Moscow and they are allowed to carry cruisemissiles with nuclear warheads. As you can now understand, Russia'srulers would go to pretty extreme lengths to resist every single stepdown that road. Sounds crazy? See the first paragraph.So how could Azerbaijan's rulers realistically hope to keep Russianeutral in an armed conflict with Armenia? For instance, by givingthem a military base in Azerbaijan's territory. Namely, they rent themthe Gabala Radar Station (a Soviet-era advanced beyond-horizon earlywarning station controlling the airspace over the entire Middle East).So, they could convincingly claim that they have a proper Russianmilitary base and there's no need to keep those Armenian occupiers.The lease runs out on December 24, 2012. A few years ago, it wasconsidered a given that it will be prologued after a little bit ofhaggling over the price and other minor horse-trading.But things have suddenly changed last year. The rulers of Israel andthe U. S. started preparations for an attack on Iran. For a numberof reasons (more on this later), the Kremlin is against it and thuswants to make an attack on Iran as costly as possible. Ways to dothat without getting involved in the conflict include providing Iranwith effective air defense weapons and early warning in case of anattack. The latter even has the benefit of plausible deniability.The radar station in Gabala is perfectly suited for the purpose. Ina surprise move, Azerbaijan's government raised the annual rent from$7.5M USD to $300M USD and offered to lease it for only seven years.This position has not changed for months and is still the officialposition of the government of Azerbaijan in the ongoing negotiations.Time is running out and Russia's military seems to be resigned to thefact that they will have to vacate Gabala before the end of the year;already half of the personnel has been removed, families have beenresettled to Russia, etc. Whether or not the new radar station inArmavir is a suitable replacement is anybody's guess. This developmentpoints to the possibility that Azerbaijan got very strong securityguarantees from the United States government, because it pushes theKremlin unambiguously to the Armenian side in the Nagorno-Karabakhconflict. Given the value of Azerbaijan's support in the event of anattack on Iran, this does not strike me as entirely impossible. It isalso worth noting that verbal guarantees and even strong military tiesare obviously insufficient: the U. S. military stood idle as Russia'smilitary invaded Georgia, even though they had direct access throughthe Black Sea; ferrying back Georgian troops from Iraq to Tbilisi wasall the help Georgia got from Uncle Sam. Azerbaijan is not accessibleby U. S. Navy, all material aid must arrive through Turkey or Georgia.Armenia does not share a border with Russia and has no seaportseither. Supplies from Russia (both for Russian troops stationedin Gyumri, Armenia and for Armenian recipients) must pass throughthird countries. Initially, it was done through Georgia, but since2003 it has become increasingly difficult and by now effectivelyimpossible. Azerbaijan and Turkey are out of question, which leavesthe only possibility: Iran. Stuff gets shipped from Russian ports onthe Caspian to Iranian ports; from there it is forwarded by land toArmenia. Thus, Armenia critically depends on Iran and its governmentis pretty desperate in keeping that relationship warm, even if itmeans breaching the embargo on pretty much anything and fouling uprelationships with the U. S. and their allies. Here's the latestepisode:Fars News Agency :: Iranian, Armenian FMs Discuss Bilateral Ties in Tehran http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=9106061134pshttp://www.economist.com/blogs/easternapproaches/2012/09/hungary-armenia-and-axe-murderer

brian carroll <nulltangent-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> formatting error =?UTF-8?Q?St=C3=A9phane_Mourey?= <stephane.mourey-zbJ9d5tIj/Z8iYGHDyxJ6Jm7MGRryh++< at >public.gmane.org> Re: <nettime> subjective math .- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -From: brian carroll <nulltangent-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>Subject: formatting errorDate: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 10:23:18 -0500 Moderators, The text emailed for consideration for list publication had a formatting error due to checking for wrapping, then copying and pasting back into email where a tab stop was removed by software and not noticed before sending to you, effecting comprehension. If possible, if the tab stop could be reintroduced into the following diagrammatic line: 3=3partial-3|partial-EE=E Such that it reads: 3=3partial-3|partial-EE=E I am not sure what it renders like there though another copy will be sent with the correction in case it is eventually published on the list. Thanks and apologies, Brian Carroll- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -From: =?UTF-8?Q?St=C3=A9phane_Mourey?= <stephane.mourey-zbJ9d5tIj/Z8iYGHDyxJ6Jm7MGRryh++< at >public.gmane.org>Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 09:48:13 +0200Subject: Re: <nettime> subjective math .Sorry, about http://brokenclock.free.fr/scripts/pev/pev-0.0.1.php : it doesnot work with Chrome...2012/9/11 St??phane Mourey <stephane.mourey-zbJ9d5tIj/Z8iYGHDyxJ6Jm7MGRryh++< at >public.gmane.org> <...>

This Thursday, Andrew Boyd{1} will be in town for the Berlin launch of Beautiful Trouble{2}, something of an "An encyclopedia for creative activism" as described by Sandra Cuff, of the Vancouver Media Co-op. As a contributor, I will join Andrew for the launch. Please come and join us.My contributions to the book where on the subject of organizing around debt as a political focus. Beyond the two essays in the book, I have written quite a bit about this already{3}. The event on Thursday is a book launch, not a lecture, so I'll talk for 15 minutes or so, since tactics are an important focus in the book, and Andrew will certainly cover some of them, I want to try to go a little more theoretical and attempt an macroeconomics of debt in 15 minutes. We'll see how it goes.Here's a bit of primer.If a modern monetary economy is to have either growth or savings it requires a deficit somewhere.This is not an opinion, or an ideologically biased point of view. It is an arithmetic fact based on the what money means in actually existing modern economies.The key identities here are the "Sectoral Balances." The "sectors" are private, public, and international. And the three balances in question are net private savings, the total amount the private sector, including households, can save, along with the public balance, that is the amount the Government taxes minus what it spends, and the "current account balance," which the balance between imports and exports.If you sum these three balances the total is always zero. That is because there is only a limited amount of money in the economy at any time, and therefore any surplus in one balance must inevitably show up as a deficit in another.If economy needs more money, either because it is growing, or because people or corporations want or need to save more, either the budget deficit needs to increase or the trade imports need to go down relative to exports. If neither of these things happen, then neither economic growth, nor increased saving is possible. This is why if wealth is to grow, either a government deficit or trade surplus is required. Of course, the world as a whole can not have a trade surplus. A trade surplus in any nation, must be offset by a trade deficit in another. Thus, within a modern monetary economy, the only means for an wealth to grow in a balanced trade environment is for the Government to run a budgetary deficit.In other words, if the private sector is carrying too much debt, this means the public sector is likely taxing too much or spending too little. Government needs to increase it's deficit.Government spending, and also government borrowing is essential for the functioning of our economy. Back in the year 2000, when the economy was on over-drive and the US Federal Reserve bank was ratcheting interest rates in an attempt to cool down an economy it felt was in overdrive, Scott F. Grannis, Chief Economist of a US asset management firm, delivered a remarkable paper at the Cato Institute 18th Annual Monetary Conference, a right-wing affair co-sponsored by the Economist. Grannis, like other fund managers was terrified. What terrified him was that the combination of a government budgetary surplus and the fed's tight monetary policy would result in a scarcity of government treasuries. It's worth quoting him.Grannis argues "The world needs Treasuries, and would be worse off without them. They are a public good just like our justice system, our national defense, and our network of interstate highways. [...] We would be foolish to pay down the national debt." Although Grannis interest are ultimately self-serving, the preservation of a risk-free investment, his point holds true. Bill Mitchell reports a similar situation taking place on Australia, during a period of budgetary surplus the government wanted to "pay down it's debt," and the financial industry went ballistic, for fear of a scarcity of risk-free Treasuries to hold in their portfolios.Money, like Treasuries, is simply a form of Public debt. The fact is that Public debt, no matter if it's in the form of accounts, currency or treasuries, is the basis of the modern monetary economy. We'd all be broke without it. Money enters the economy as government spending, and exits the economy as tax payments. If the government has a balanced budget, no extra money remains in circulation, and there can be no increase in private savings. If the Government has a budgetary surplus, this means that private wealth is decreased.For this reason, as Grannis says, "Debt is a Public Good," in the same way the infrastructure such as roads create the capacity for transport, government debt creates the capacity for commerce. Fiscal policy should never be interpreted from the budgetary balance alone, but must always keep the Sectoral Balances in mind. The government must spend enough to ensure that scarcity of its's debt does not strangle the economy, which almost always means it must spend more than it taxes, if it fails to do so, then the result would either be economic stagnation or global trade imbalances. As we can see from the words of Scott F. Grannis, the bankers know this.While public debt is a public good, private debt is a burden, often a crippling one. A sensible fiscal policy would be to use government spending to reduce private debt, especially household debt.Understanding the way the Sectoral Balances function is key to understanding what is going on in the economy today. For instance, austerity measures reduce the government deficit, which in turn reduces private sector savings, or rather, increases private sector debt. Imbalances of political power within the private sector, for example between corporations and household, mean that the burden of this debt mostly born by households. The only way to reduce such household debt is either increase corporate debt or increase public debt, or decrease trade deficits. This not only explains why household debt is exploding, but also explains the Euro crisis. Germany has a large trade surplus, thus other countries, like Greece have a trade deficit. If the Euro is to be stable, Greece can only decrease its trade deficit if Germany increases its budgetary deficit. Somethings got to give.Organizing around debt means uniting against insane policies that promote the interests of rich corporations and rich countries against common households and poorer countries. Much of the debt born my households and the debt born by peripheral nations is a result of bad government and bad economic policy.To quote The Debtors' Song{4}: If us debtors get together, all together, every one we can heal, and house and teach each other and do the work that must be done. Them creditors, they don't help us none, they just get in the way, their profits are what drags us down, we must refuse to pay.Look forward to discussing this with some of you tonight at Stammtisch{5} and this Thursday at the Beautiful Trouble Booklaunch!{1} http://andrewboyd.com/{2} http://beautifultrouble.org/event/beautiful-trouble-book-launch-berlin/{3} http://www.dmytri.info/collected-texts-related-to-the-debtors-party-initiative-updated/{4} http://www.dmytri.info/debtors-song/{5} http://bit.ly/buchhandlungFind this text online for comments and sharing: http://www.dmytri.info/debt-as-a-public-good/

<http://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201207&id=31944>WHATEVER HAPPENED TO DIGITAL ART? Cast your mind back to thelate 1990s, when we got our first e-mail accounts. Wasn'tthere a pervasive sense that visual art was going to getdigital, too, harnessing the new technologies that were justbeginning to transform our lives? But somehow the venturenever really gained traction -- which is not to say thatdigital media have failed to infiltrate contemporary art.Most art today deploys new technology at one if not moststages of its production, dissemination, and consumption.Multichannel video installations, Photoshopped images,digital prints, cut-and-pasted files (nowhere betterexemplified than in Christian Marclay's The Clock, 2010):These are ubiquitous forms, their omnipresence facilitatedby the accessibility and affordability of digital camerasand editing software. There are plenty of examples of artthat makes use of Second Life (Cao Fei), computer-gamegraphics (Miltos Manetas), YouTube clips (Cory Arcangel),iPhone apps (Amy Sillman), etc.[1]So why do I have a sense that the appearance and content ofcontemporary art have been curiously unresponsive to thetotal upheaval in our labor and leisure inaugurated by thedigital revolution? While many artists use digitaltechnology, how many really confront the question of what itmeans to think, see, and filter affect through the digital?How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how weexperience, and are altered by, the digitization of ourexistence? I find it strange that I can count on one handthe works of art that do seem to undertake this task: theflirtations between Frances Stark and various Italiancyberlovers in her video My Best Thing, 2011; ThomasHirschhorn's video of a finger idly scrolling throughgruesome images of blown-apart bodies on a touch screen,occasionally pausing to enlarge, zoom in, move on (TouchingReality, 2012); the frenetic, garbled scripts of RyanTrecartin's videos (such as K-Corea INC.K [Section A],2009). Each suggests the endlessly disposable, rapidlymutable ephemera of the virtual age and its impact on ourconsumption of relationships, images, and communication;each articulates something of the troubling oscillationbetween intimacy and distance that characterizes our newtechnological regime, and proposes an incommensurabilitybetween our doggedly physiological lives and the screens towhich we are glued.But these exceptions just point up the rule. There is, ofcourse, an entire sphere of "new media" art, but this is aspecialized field of its own: It rarely overlaps with themainstream art world (commercial galleries, the TurnerPrize, national pavilions at Venice). While this split isitself undoubtedly symptomatic, the mainstream art world andits response to the digital are the focus of this essay. Andwhen you look at contemporary art since 1989, the year TimBerners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, it is striking thatso little of it seems to address the way in which the formsand languages of new media have altered our relationship toperception, history, language, and social relations.In fact, the most prevalent trends in contemporary art sincethe '90s seem united in their apparent eschewal of thedigital and the virtual. Performance art, social practice,assemblage-based sculpture, painting on canvas, the"archival impulse," analog film, and the fascination withmodernist design and architecture: At first glance, none ofthese formats appear to have anything to do with digitalmedia, and when they are discussed, it is typically inrelation to previous artistic practices across the twentiethcentury.[2] But when we examine these dominant forms ofcontemporary art more closely, their operational logic andsystems of spectatorship prove intimately connected to thetechnological revolution we are undergoing. I am notclaiming that these artistic strategies are consciousreactions to (or implicit denunciations of) an informationsociety; rather, I am suggesting that the digital is, on adeep level, the shaping condition -- even the structuringparadox -- that determines artistic decisions to work withcertain formats and media. Its subterranean presence iscomparable to the rise of television as the backdrop to artof the 1960s. One word that might be used to describe thisdynamic -- a preoccupation that is present but denied,perpetually active but apparently buried -- is disavowal: Iknow, but all the same . . .THE FASCINATION WITH ANALOG MEDIA is an obvious startingpoint for an examination of contemporary art's repressedrelationship to the digital. Manon de Boer, MatthewBuckingham, Tacita Dean, Rodney Graham, Rosalind Nashashibi,and Fiona Tan are just a few names from a long roll call ofartists attracted to the materiality of predigital film andphotography. Today, no exhibition is complete without someform of bulky, obsolete technology -- the gently clunkingcarousel of a slide projector or the whirring of an 8-mm or16-mm film reel. The sudden attraction of "old media" forcontemporary artists in the late 1990s coincided with therise of "new media," particularly the introduction of theDVD in 1997. Overnight, VHS became obsolete, rendering itsown aesthetic and projection equipment open to nostalgicreuse, but the older technology of celluloid was and remainsthe favorite. Today, film's soft warmth feels intimatecompared with the cold, hard digital image, with its excessof visual information (each still contains far more detailthan the human eye could ever need).[3] Meanwhile, numerousapps and software programs effortlessly impersonate theanalog without the chore of developing and processing;movies imbued with the elegiac mood of Super 8 can now betaken on your cell phone. So why continue to work with"real" analog equipment? Artists like Dean, the preeminentspokesperson for old media, stake their attachment tocelluloid as a fidelity to history, to craft, to thephysicality of the editing process; the passing of real filmis a loss to be mourned. The sumptuous texture of indexicalmedia is unquestionably seductive, but its desirability alsoarises from the impression that it is scarce, rare,precious. A digital film can be copied quickly and cheaply,ad infinitum; not so a 16-mm film.[4] Rosalind E. Krauss hasinvoked Walter Benjamin to elucidate the use of analog mediain the work of William Kentridge and James Coleman, drawingon Benjamin's belief that the utopian potential of a mediummay be unleashed at the very moment of its obsolescence. Buttoday this assertion needs to be subject to scrutiny. Therecourse to Benjamin's argument, so closely tied to thehistorical avant-gardes, sounds almost nostalgic whenapplied to these younger artists, especially when analogfilm seems fashionable, rather than cutting against thegrain. (It also seems striking that this discussion didn'thappen decades ago, when video began to supplant celluloid.)The continued prevalence of analog film reels and projectedslides in the mainstream art world seems to say less aboutrevolutionary aesthetics than it does about commercialviability.Another contemporary mode steeped in the analog is socialpractice. It is worth recalling that Nicolas Bourriaud'searliest texts on relational aesthetics set artists' desirefor face-to-face relations against the disembodiment of theInternet; the physical and the social were pitched againstthe virtual and the representational. In the past decade,socially engaged art has tended to favor intersubjectiveexchange and homespun activities (cooking, gardening,conversation), with the aim of reinforcing a social bondfragmented by spectacle. Yet social relations today are notmediated by monodirectional media imagery (the mainstay ofGuy Debord's theory) but through the interactive screen, andthe solutions offered by "useful art" and real-worldcollaborations dovetail seamlessly with the protocols of Web2.0, introduced in 2002: Both deploy a language ofplatforms, collaborations, activated spectatorship, and"prosumers" who coproduce content (rather than passivelyconsuming information devised for them).[5] As we have seenso many times in the past decade, most recently at theSeventh Berlin Biennale -- where the curator, artist ArturZmijewski, invited Occupy activists into the KW Institutefor Contemporary Art for the duration of the show -- theresults of such coproductions are difficult to containwithin the traditional format of the exhibition. In 2001,Lev Manovich presciently observed that in foregroundingtwo-way communication as a fundamental cultural activity (asopposed to the one-way flow of a film or book), the Internetasks us to reconsider the very paradigm of an aestheticobject: Can communication between users become the subjectof an aesthetic?[6] The centrality of this question tosocial practice is obvious: Does work premised on adialogic, prosumer model, seeking real-world impact, need toassume representation or an object form in order to berecognized as art?Manovich's question also haunts more traditional sculpturalpractices. The recent prevalence of assemblage and"unmonumentality" in object making has been productivelydescribed by Hal Foster as "precarious" sculpture (in thework of Isa Genzken and others), even though the tendency ismanifested more frequently as retro-craftiness, as seen inthe fiddly collages and tapestries of the recent WhitneyBiennial. Both iterations suggest some of the pressures thatcurrent regimes of technology and communication have placedon the object, which becomes increasingly fragile andprovisional, as if to assert subjectivity (and tactility)against the sealed, impregnable surface of the screen.Moreover, if Genzken's work exemplifies an older model ofbricolage, in which found elements are treated as rawmaterials whose histories are incidental, then the moreprevalent strategy since the 1990s has been to maintain thecultural integrity of the reused artifact -- to invoke andsustain its history, connotations, and moods. Books,performances, films, and modernist design objects areincorporated into new works of art and repurposed: Think ofCarol Bove's or Rashid Johnson's shelves of carefullyarranged knickknacks, or Paulina Olowska's copies ofpaintings by Polish artist Zofia Stryjenska (1891-1976).This trend is manifest in other disciplines, too: Poetry,theater, and dance have all enacted their own forms ofrepurposing in sync with visual art, from Elevator RepairService's eight-hour play Gatz (which uses F. ScottFitzgerald's The Great Gatsby), to Rob Fitterman's poems(repurposing anonymous tweets and Yelp reviews), to RichardMove's reperformances of the modernist choreographer MarthaGraham.These forms of repurposing differ from appropriation art ofthe 1980s, when artists seized imagery from art history(Sherrie Levine) or advertising (Richard Prince) with a viewto questioning authorship and originality while drawingattention, yet again, to the plight of the image in the ageof mechanical reproduction. In the digital era, a differentset of concerns prevails. The act of repurposing aligns withprocedures of reformatting and transcoding -- the perpetualmodulation of preexisting files. Faced with the infiniteresources of the Internet, selection has emerged as a keyoperation: We build new files from existing components,rather than creating from scratch. Artists whose workrevolves around choosing objects for display (Bove, Johnson)or who reuse previous art (Olowska with Stryjenska, SimonStarling with Henry Moore, Ryan Gander with Mondrian) areforegrounding the importance of selection strategies, evenwhen the outcome is decisively analog. Questions oforiginality and authorship are no longer the point; instead,the emphasis is on a meaningful recontextualization ofexisting artifacts.Any consideration of this drive to gather, reconfigure,juxtapose, and display leads quickly to Foster's influentialtheory of the archival impulse. For Foster, the term denotesart that undertakes "an idiosyncratic probing intoparticular figures, objects, and events in modern art,philosophy, and history."[7] Artists' archives arefragmentary and material, writes Foster, and call out for"human interpretation" rather than "machinic reprocessing";here, he clearly draws a line between subjective andtechnological.[8] Artists both have recourse to archives andproduce them, displaying a paranoid will to connect whatcannot be connected.[9] Foster's examples are Dean, SamDurant, and Hirschhorn, but we might equally consider KaderAttia, Zoe Leonard, or Akram Zaatari. Often refutingestablished taxonomies as a systematic organizing principlefor their work, these artists embrace subjective rationalesor arbitrary systems. Presented as carefully displayedcollections, their installations belie the extent to whicheveryone with a personal computer today has become a defacto archivist, storing and filing thousands of documents,images, and music files. (I often feel as if I don't listento music so much as perform upkeep on my iTunes collection

Here's a letter for Intellectuals, Academics, and Artists Call To SupportOWS Anniversary Actions at http://standwithoccupy.org/Please sign, circulate, and participate.

Folks: This is a post I made on the "_Points: The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society_ (http://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/) " blog --Hello: Vice "regulation" is, of course, an *economic* topic which is at the heart of capitalism -- as it has been at least since early 18th century and the publishing (at first anonymously) of Bernard de Mandeville's "Fable of the Bees: Private Vice and Publick Benefit." The consumption of vice is, after all, the basis of the FREE MARKET. Here, you could refer to the defense of the British Opium Wars in front of Parliament by Riccardo as *required* by the free market -- using Adam Smith as his "authority." The vigorous defense of the "Fable" by free-marketeer F. von Hayek and the publishing of the two-volume "ur-text" of the "Fable" by Liberty Books firmly makes that connection -- as does, perhaps, the copious funding support for drug legalization by free-marketeer George Soros. Capitalism really makes no sense without vice and, indeed, those who have been responsible for expanding its range have consistently argued for more vice. Vice makes the market work. And, arguably, those attempts to curtail the expansion of vice, like the "prohibition" of alcohol occurred at just those moments when new technologies were expanding the market further -- as radio/newspapers/movies were opening the era of mass-media advertising in the early 20th century. My question is a simple one. If the world (or even parts of it) have become or, as many wish, will become *post-capitalist* and, therefore, *post-market* economies, does that mean that the expansion of VICE=MARKET will move in the other direction? Mark StahlmanBrooklyn NY This was in response to a post on "Regulating Vice," by Jim Leitzel, who teaches a course with that title at University of Chicago and recently gave a TEDxChicago talk on the topic. _http://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/teaching-points-jim-leitzel-comments-on-regulation-of-vice/#comment-3228_ (http://pointsadhsblog.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/teaching-points-jim-leitzel-comments-on-regulation-of-vice/#comment-3228) _http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Px4nYbJoQ_ (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_Px4nYbJoQ) More broadly, the whole topic of *freedom*, including freedom of speech, assembly and the whole range of freedoms associated with "democracy," need to be discussed in relationship to capitalist market expansion. And, does our understanding of "human rights" make any sense outside of the need to expand these capitalist markets? If one is "opposed" to capitalism and the market economy, then were do you stand on vice? Mark Stahlman

CATALAN INDEPENDENCE MOVEMENT is a state of denial of what producedthe economic crisis. Eager nationalist who will ride on the socialdiscontent to just impose yet another exploitative class... as ifCatalan banks and eager speculators and so on were not involved... it will bring turmoil and has - historical speaking - a lot ofreactionary effects that could lead to an Iberian Civil War, asugly as the Yugoslavian one. When Catalonia breaks off, you mayimagine what the Basques will do and what violence they have instock. Sheer mass-stupidty in my opinion. There is plenty of regionalautonomy in the Spanish federal like monarchy. They better get rid ofthe institution of the Franco imposed king and make finally a real(confederate) Spanish Republic. Belated 21st century nationalism hasnothing good in stock for any future. Let 'nationality' be first ofall and last of all 'a cultural identity' ...Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/

original to:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443571904577631750172652114.html?Step Into the Office-Less CompanyHow One Tech Firm Manages 123 At-Home Employees Scattered Across 26Countries and 94 CitiesBy RACHEL EMMA SILVERMANThe Web-services company Automattic Inc. has 123 employees working in 26countries, 94 cities and 28 U.S. states. Its offices? Workers' homes.At Automattic, which hosts the servers for the blogging platformWordPress.com, work gets done wherever employees choose, and virtualmeetings are conducted on Skype or over Internet chat.The company has a San Francisco office for occasional use, but projectmanagement, brainstorming and water-cooler chatter take place on internalblogs. If necessary, team members fly around the world to meet each otherface to face. And if people have sensitive questions, they pick up thephone.Having a remote workforce lets companies tap into a wider talent pool notlimited by geography. Firms can also save money on real estate, thoughsizeable travel budgets may partly offset that.Nobody knows for sure how many completely office-less companies there areor how fast their ranks are growing, but management researchers say suchfirms are still rare. Today, just 2.5% of the U.S. workforce considershome its primary place of work. But that number, which is based oncensus-data analysis, grew 66% from 2005 to 2010, according to theTelework Research Network, a consulting and research firm. Andincreasingly, employees at companies with physical offices are choosing towork remotely or forming virtual teams with colleagues world-wide, thanksto rapid advances in video, social-networking, cloud storage and mobiletechnology.Many far-flung companies also have nonhierarchical management structures,providing teams and workers the authority to make decisions and completetasks with light supervision.But working from home isn't for everyone. "Some people hunger for thepersonal contact," says Michael Boyer O'Leary, an assistant managementprofessor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. Dr.O'Leary says that face-to-face contact is most critical for new employeesor when people without a track record together launch a new project.Other staffers have difficulty creating boundaries between work and homelife, even missing the mental and physical transition of a commute, saysJay Mulki, an associate professor at Northeastern University's College ofBusiness Administration who studies virtual workers..........................................................................Automattic: How they make it work Assignments with deadlines are posted on internal blogs. Meetings with team members take place on blogs, Skype or Internet chat. Internal 'water cooler' blogs enable workers to engage in virtualchitchat. There is a 'grand meetup' once a year for all employees to gather faceto face.Source: the company..........................................................................He says that one remote worker he studied got into his car every morning,drove around the block and then returned home to clock in.Lori McLeese, who heads Automattic human resources, says that its hiringand orientation processes are key to creating a cohesive culture. Thecompany requires top applicants to work on a trial project for a few weeksto see if they are a good fit. New hires, regardless of position, mustwork in customer service for three weeks to create a unifying employeeexperience and have direct customer contact.The company lives by a philosophy of "overcommunication," says Ms.McLeese, to help proactively quell any misunderstandings and provideworkers with direction. Employees mainly transmit messages via internalblogs, dubbed P2s, which also act as a virtual water cooler. Whenmisunderstandings occur with text-based chats, participants are encouragedto pick up the phone.But because staffers are in so many time zones, work is often doneasynchronously. Team members work their own hours—the company has a lot ofnight owls and early risers—to meet project deadlines. If someone missesthe mark, the team leader or another staffer will reach out to theemployee to figure out what went wrong.The company also organizes regular face-to-face get-togethers of teams,allowing workers to fly to meet each other in convenient locations, and anannual, week-long "grand meetup" for all employees. Ms. McLeese says thatafter long stretches without seeing each other face to face, the meetupscan be emotional. "People are giving each other hugs at the airport," shesays.Mat Atkinson, the chief executive of the design-review software companyProofHQ, says that managing "distributed" teams requires 25% more effortthan a face-to-face team would because managers must pay closer attentionto whether workers are motivated and fully understand tasks and businessprocesses. "There isn't the opportunity to just pop into someone'soffice," says Mr. Atkinson, who is based in London and has 32 staffersbased in 17 cities around the world.But Mr. Atkinson says that employees are more productive because they haveno commutes and fewer interruptions. And he says that being virtual costsabout 50% less than having fixed real-estate costs.Kalypso LP, an innovation consulting firm, has 150 employees around thecountry and in Europe but no corporate offices, says founding-partner BillPoston, who works from his home in Boerne, Texas, when he is not at clientsites.When the firm was founded eight years ago, Mr. Poston says the decision togo office-less was financial. But now, being virtual is a matter ofchoice, though he points out that the company isn't a good fit for people"who are uncomfortable with ambiguity."Mr. Poston also says that employees are far from isolated. Workerscommunicate constantly via instant messaging and email. And teams ofconsultants see each other almost daily when meeting with clients. Thecompany also flies employees to an annual meeting in September, and ittransports workers and their families to "family fun" weekends every June.In addition, employees can fly to meet each other whenever necessary.Not everyone believes in virtual companies. Last year the founders ofZaarly Inc. debated whether to operate virtually or open an office for thefledgling online marketplace for local services.The firm opted for the latter, says Shane Mac, director of product forZaarly, which now has 43 employees, most of whom work in the company's SanFrancisco-based office.Although the firm has some remote employees, Mr. Mac says that makingdecisions is faster when someone is sitting next to you, and it's easierto keep employees in the loop and brainstorm together over a whiteboard."You can't create true serendipity over IM," he says.Write to Rachel Emma Silverman at rachel.silverman-Oo4YIDBCiv0< at >public.gmane.org

Strike Debt is launching the Debt Resistors Operations Manual tonight (atJudson Church in Manhattan) to commemorate the OWS Anniversary. Free copiesare available athttp://www.scribd.com/doc/105887484/Occupy-Wall-Street-Strike-Debt-The-Debt-Resistors-Operations-Manualar/

< http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/sep/09/jake-davis-anonymous-charged-bail >My life after Anonymous: 'I feel more fulfilled without the internet'One of the key figures of the '50 days of Lulz' is now onconditional bail -- and barred from going online. Here, hedescribes how he feels serene, and rechargedJake DavisThe ObserverSaturday 8 September 2012The last time I was allowed to access the internet wasseveral moments before the police came through my door inthe Shetland Isles, over a year ago. During the past 12months I have pleaded guilty to computer misuse under thebanners of "Internet Feds", "Anonymous" and "LulzSec". Oneof my co-defendants and I have also been indicted with thesame charge in the United States, where we may possibly beextradited, and if found guilty I could face several decadesin an American prison. Now I am on conditional bail and haveto wear an electronic tag around my ankle. I'm forbiddenfrom accessing the internet.I'm often asked: what is life like without the net? It seemsstrange that humans have evolved and adapted for thousandsof years without this simple connectivity, and now we inmodern society struggle to comprehend existence without it.In a word, life is serene. I now find myself readingnewspapers as though they weren't ancient scrolls; enteringreal shops with real money in order to buy real products,and not wishing to Photoshop a cosmic being of unspeakablehorror into every possible social situation. Nothing needsto be captioned or made into an elaborate joke to impress acitizenry whose every emotion is represented by a sequenceof keystrokes.Things are calmer, slower and at times, I'll admit, moredull. I do very much miss the instant companionship ofonline life, the innocent chatroom palaver, and the easewith which circles with similar interests can be found. Ofcourse, there are no search terms in real life -- oneactually has to search. However, there is something oddlyendearing about being disconnected from the digital horde.It is not so much the sudden simplicity of daily life -- asyou can imagine, trivial tasks have been made much moredifficult -- but the feeling of being able to close my eyeswithout being bombarded with flashing shapes or constantbuzzing sounds, which had occurred frequently since my earlyteens and could only be attributed to perpetual computermarathons. Sleep is now tranquil and uninterrupted and booksseem far more interesting. The paranoia has certainlyvanished. I can only describe this sensation as thelong-awaited renewal of a previously diminished attentionspan.For it is our attention spans that have suffered the most.Our lives are compressed into short, advertisement-likebursts or "tweets". The constant stream of drivel fills pageafter page, eating away at our creativity. If hashtags wererice grains, do you know how many starving families we couldfeed? Neither do I -- I can't Google it.A miracle cure or some kind of therapeutic brilliance arenot something I could give, but I can confidently say that apermanent lack of internet has made me a more fulfilledindividual. And as one of many kids glued to their screensevery day, I would never before have imagined myself eventhinking those words. Before, the idea of no internet wasinconceivable, but now -- not to sound as though it's somekind of childish and predictable revelation spawned as aresult of going cold turkey -- I look back on thetranscripts of my online chats (produced as legal evidencein my case, in great numbers) and wonder what all the fusswas about.It's not my place to speculate on whether or not the hackercommunity should stop taking itself so seriously, but Icertainly became entangled within it and had forgotten howeasy it was simply to close a laptop lid.I hope, then, that others in a similar situation may decideto take a short break from the web (perhaps just for a week)and see if similar effects are found. It can't hurt to try.

art-leaks.org*On the urgency of launching the ArtLeaks Gazette*Artleaks was founded in 2011 <http://art-leaks.org/about/>as aninternational platform for cultural workers where instances of abuse,corruption and exploitation are exposed and submitted for publicinquiry. After over a year of activity, we, members of the collectiveArtLeaks felt an urgent need to establish a regular on-line publication asa tool for empowerment in the face of the systemic abuse of culturalworkers??? basic labor rights, repression or even blatant censorship andgrowing corporatization of culture that we encounter today.Namely: radical (political) projects are co-opted under the umbrella ofcorporate promotion and gentrification; artistic research is performed onresearch hand-outs, creating only an illusion of depth while in fact addingto the reserve army of creative capital; the secondary market thrives asauction houses speculate on blue chip artists for enormous amounts oflaundered money, following finance capitalism from boom to bust, meanwhile,most artists can???t even make a living and depend on miserly fees,restrictive residencies, and research handouts to survive; galleries anddealers more and more heavily copyright cultural values; approximately 5%of authors, producers and dealers control 80% of all cultural resources(and indeed, in reality, the situation may be even worse than these numberssuggest) ; certain cultural managers and institutions do not shy away fromusing repressive maneuvers against those who bring into question theirmission, politics or dubious engagements with corporate or statebenefactors; and last but not least, restrictive national(ist) laws andgovernments suppress cultural workers through very drastic politics, not tomention the national state functions as a factor of neoliberal expressionin the field of culture.Do you recognize yourself in the scenarios above? Do you accept them asimmutable conditions of your labor? We strongly believe that this direstate of affairs can be changed. We do not have to carry on complying topolitics that cultivate harsh principles of pseudo-natural selection (orsocial Darwinism) ??? instead we should fight against them and imaginedifferent scenarios based on collective values, fairness and dignity. Westrongly believe that issues of exploitation, repression or co-optationcannot be divorced from their specific politico-economic contexts andhistorical conditions, and need to be raised in connection with a newconcept of culture as an invaluable reservoir of the common, as well as newforms of class consciousness in the artistic field in particular, and thecultural field more generally.Recently, this spectrum of urgencies and the necessity to address them hasalso become the focus of fundamental discussions and reflection on the partof communities involved in cultural production and certain leftist socialand political activists. Among these, we share the concerns of pioneeringgroups such as the Radical Education Collective <http://radical.temp.si/> (Ljubljana), Precarious Workers???Brigade<http://precariousworkersbrigade.tumblr.com/> (PWB)(London), W.A.G.E. <http://www.wageforwork.com/> (NYC), Arts&Labor<http://artsandlabor.org/> (NYC), the May Congress of Creative Workers <http://may-congress.ru/> (Moscow)and others (see the Related Causes <http://art-leaks.org/links/>section onour website). The condition of cultural workers has also recently beentheorized within the framework of bio-politics, in which cognitive labor isimplicitly described as a new hegemonic type of production in the contextof the global industrialization of creative work.The question then emerges, what is creative work today? To structure thisundifferentiated categorizations, we will begin by addressing in ourjournal all those ???occupied??? with art who are striving towards emancipatoryknowledge in the process of their activity. As the contemporary art worldmore and more envelops different areas of knowledge as well as theproduction of events, we considered it a priority to focus on thisparticular field. However, we remain open to discussing urgencies relatedto other forms of creative activity beyond the art world.Through our journal, we want to stresses the urgent need to seriouslytransform these workers??? relationship with institutions, networks andeconomies involved in the production, reproduction and consumption of artand culture. We will pursue these goals through developing a new approachto the tradition of institutional critique and fostering new forms ofartistic production, that may challenge dominant discourses of criticalityand social engagement which tame creative forces. We also feel the urgencyto link cultural workers??? struggles with similar ones from other fields ofhuman activity ??? at the same time, we strongly believe that any suchsustainable alliances could hardly be built unless we begin with thestruggles in our own factories.*Announced Theme for the first issue*: *Breaking the Silence ??? TowardsJustice, Solidarity and Mobilization*The main theme of the first issue of our journal is establishing a politicsof truth by breaking the silence on the art world. What do we actually meanby this? We suggest that breaking the silence on the art world is similarto breaking the silence of family violence and other forms of domesticabuse. Similarly as when coming out with stories of endemic exploitationform inside the household, talking about violence and exploitation in theart world commonly brings shame, ambivalence and fear. But while each caseof abuse may be different, we believe these are not singular instances butpart of a larger system of repression, abuse and arrogance that have beennormalized through the practices of certain cultural managers andinstitutions. Our task is to find voices, narratives, hybrid forms thatraise consciousness about the profound effects of these forms ofmaltreatment: to break through the normalizing rhetoric that relegatecultural workers??? labor to an activity performed out of instinct, for thesurvival of culture at large, like sex or child rearing which, too arezones of intense exploitation today.Implicit in this gesture is a radical form of protest ??? one that does notsimply join the concert of affirmative institutional critique whichconfirms the system by criticizing it. Rather, breaking the silence impliesbringing into question the ways in which the current art system constructspositions for its speakers, and looking for strategies in which tocounteract naturalized exploitation and repression today.At the same time, we recognize that the moment of exposure does not fullyaddress self-organization or, what comes after breaking the silence? Wesuggest that it is therefore important to link this to solidarity,mobilization and an appeal for justice, as political tools. As it is theunderstanding of the dynamic interaction between the mobilization ofresources, political opportunities in contexts and emancipatory culturalframes that we can use to analyze and construct strategies for culturalworkers movements. With summoning the urgency of *potentia agendi* (or thepower to act) collectively we also call for the necessity to forgecoalitions within the art world and beyond it ??? alliances that have theconcrete ability of exerting a certain political pressure towards achievingthe promise of a more just and emancipatory cultural field.***Structure of publication*The journal would be divided into six major sections.*A. Critique of cultural dominance apparatuses*Here we will address methodological issues in analyzing the condition ofcultural production and the system that allows for the facile exploitationof the cultural labor-force. Ideally, though not necessarily, thesetheoretical elaborations would be related to concrete case studies ofconflicts, exploitation, dissent across various regions of the world,drawing comparisons and providing local context for understanding them.*B. Forms of organization and history of struggles*Cultural workers have been demanding just working conditions, strugglingover agency and subjectivity in myriad ways and through various ideas aboutwhat this entails. In this section we will analyze historical case-studiesof self-organization of cultural workers. Our goal is not to produce asynthetic model out of all of these struggles, rather to examine howproblems have been articulated at various levels of (political)organization, with attention to the genealogy of the issues and theinteraction between hegemonic discourses (of the institution, corporation,the state) and those employed by cultural workers in their respectivecommunities.*C. The struggle of narrations*In this section we will invite our contributors to develop and practiceartistic forms of narration which cannot be fully articulated throughdirect ???leaking???. It should be focused on finding new languages fornarration of systemic dysfunctions. We expect these elaborations can takedifferent form of artistic contributions, including comics, poems, films,plays, short stories, librettos etc.*D. Glossary of terms*What do we mean by the concept of ???cultural workers???? What does???gentrification??? or ???systemic abuse??? mean in certain contexts? Whose ???artworld???? This section addresses the necessity of developing a terminology tomake theoretical articulations more clear and accessible to our readers.Members of ArtLeaks as well as our contributors to our gazette will beinvited to define key terms used in the material presented in thepublication. These definitions should be no more that 3-4 sentences longand they should be formulated as a result of a dialogue between all thecontributors.*E. Education and its discontents*The conflicts and struggles in the field of creative education are at thecore of determining what kind of subjectivities will shape the culture(s)of future generations. It is very important to carefully analyze what iscurrently at the stake in these specific fields of educational processesand how they are linked with what is happening outside academies anduniversities. In this section we will discuss possible emancipatoryapproaches to education that are possible today, which resist pressingcommercial demands for flexible and ???creative??? subjectivities. Can weimagine an alternative system of values based of a different meaning ofprogress?*F. Best practices and useful resources*In this section we would like to invite people to play out their fantasiesof new, just forms of organization of creative life. Developing thetradition of different visionaries of the past we hope that this sectionwill trigger many speculations which might help us collect modest proposalsfor the future and thus counter the shabby reality of the present. Thissection is also dedicated to the practices which demonstrate alternativeethical guidelines, and stimulate the creation of a common cultural sphere.This would allow cultural workers to unleash their full potential increating values based on principles of emancipatory politics, criticalreflections and affirmative inspiration of a different world where thesevalues should form the basis of a dignified life.*On Practicalities*Our open call addresses all those who feel the urgency to discuss theaforementioned-issues. We look forward to collecting contributions untilthe *31st of December 2012*. Contributions should be delivered in Englishor as an exemption in any language after negotiations with the editorialcouncil. The editorial council of Artleaks takes responsibility ofcommunicating with all authors during the editorial process.*Please contact us with any questions, comments and submit materials to:artsleaks-Re5JQEeQqe9fmgfxC/sS/w< at >public.gmane.org When submitting material, please also note the sectionunder which you would like to see it published. *The online gazette will be published in English under the Creative Commonsattribution noncommercial-share alike and its materials will be offered fortranslation in any languages to any interested parties.We will publish all contributions delivered to us in a separate section.However, our editorial council takes full responsibility in composing anissue of the journal in the way we feel it should be done.*Editorial council for the first issue will consist of: Corina L. Apostol, **Vladan Jeremi??, **Vlad Morariu,** David Riff *and *Dmitry Vilensky.*

In case u didn't now already: the market, and especially the financialsystem can regulate itself perfectly, if it could only be left alone!(Take that, Dmytri! ;-)............original to:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444273704577637792879194380.htmlSpeech of the YearA regulator, of all people, shows how complex regulations contributed tothe financial crisisWhile Americans were listening to the bloviators in Tampa andCharlotte, the speech of the year was delivered at the FederalReserve's annual policy conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming on August31. And not by Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. The orator of note was aregulator from the Bank of England, and his subject was "The dog andthe frisbee."In a presentation that deserves more attention, BoE Director ofFinancial Stability Andrew Haldane and colleague Vasileios Madourospoint the way toward the real financial reform that Washington hasnever enacted. The authors marshal compelling evidence that asregulation has become more complex, it has also become less effective.They point out that much of the reason large banks are so difficultfor regulators to comprehend is because regulators themselves havecreated complicated metrics that can't provide accurate measurementsof a bank's health.The paper's title refers to the fact that border collies can oftencatch frisbees better than people, because the dogs by necessity haveto keep it simple. But the impulse of regulators, if asked to catcha frisbee, would be to encourage the construction of long equationsrelated to wind speed and frisbee rotation that they likely wouldn'teven understand.Readers will recall how ineffective the Basel II international bankingstandards were at ensuring the health of investment banks likeBear Stearns. The inspector general of the Securities and ExchangeCommission, which adopted the Basel standards in 2004, would reportin 2008 that Bear remained compliant with these rules even as it wasabout to be rescued.Messrs. Haldane and Madouros looked broadly at the pre-crisisfinancial industry, and specifically at a sample of 100 large globalbanks at the end of 2006. What they found was that a firm's leverageratio—the amount of equity capital it held relative to its assets—wasa fairly good predictor of which banks ended up sailing into the rocksin 2008. Banks with more capital tended to be sturdier.But the definition of what constitutes capital was also critical, andhere simpler is also better. Basel's "Tier 1" regulatory capital ratiowas thought to be more precise because it assigned "risk weights"to each category of assets and required banks to perform millionsof complex calculations. Yet it was hardly of any use in predictingdisasters at too-big-to-fail banks.We've argued that Basel II relied far too much on the judgments ofgovernment-anointed credit-rating agencies, plus a catastrophicbias in favor of mortgages as "safe." Instead of learning from thatmistake, the gnomes have written into the new Basel III rules adangerous bias in favor of sovereign debt. The growing complexity ofthe rules leaves more room for banks to pursue regulatory arbitrage,identifying assets that can be classified as safe, at least forcompliance purposes.Messrs. Haldane and Madouros also describe the larger problem:a belief among regulators that models can capture all necessaryinformation and then accurately predict future risk. This beliefis new, and not helpful. As the authors note, "Many of thedominant figures in 20th century economics—from Keynes to Hayek,from Simon to Friedman—placed imperfections in information andknowledge centre-stage. Uncertainty was for them the normal state ofdecision-making affairs."A deadly flaw in financial regulation is the assumption that a fewyears or even a few decades of market data can allow models toaccurately predict worst-case scenarios. The authors suggest thathundreds or even a thousand years of data might be needed before wecould trust the Basel machinery.Despite its failures, that machinery becomes larger and larger.As Messrs. Haldane and Madouros note, "Einstein wrote that: 'Theproblems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the levelof thinking that created them.' Yet the regulatory response to thecrisis has largely been based on the level of thinking that createdit. The Tower of Basel, like its near-namesake the Tower of Babel,continues to rise."Exploding the myth that regulatory agencies are underfunded, theynote that in both the U.K. and U.S. the number of regulators has fordecades risen faster than the number of people employed in finance.Complexity grows still faster. The authors report that in the 12months after the passage of Dodd-Frank, rule-making that represents amere 10% of the expected total will impose more than 2.2 million hoursof annual compliance work on private business. Recent history suggeststhat if anything this will make another crisis more likely.Here's a better idea: Raise genuine capital standards at banks andslash regulatory budgets in Washington. Abandon the Basel rules on"risk-weighting" and other fantasies of regulatory omniscience. Infinancial regulation, as in so many other areas of life, simpler isbetter..........(courtesy of the 'audi et alteram partem' deptt - we just like bordercollies and don't really understand how they landed in this mess....)

Street Ghosts project.By Paolo Cirio.http://streetghosts.netIn this project, I exposed the specters of Google’s eternal realm ofprivate, misappropriated data: the bodies of people captured byGoogle’s Street View cameras, whose ghostly, virtual presence I markedin Street Art fashion at the precise spot in the real world where theywere photographed.Street Ghosts hit some of the most important international Street Art“halls of fame” with low-resolution, human scale posters of peopletaken from Google Street View. These images do not offer details, butthe blurred colors and lines on the posters give a gauzy, spectralaspect to the human figures, unveiling their presence like a digitalshadow haunting the real world.This ready-made artwork simply takes the information amassed by Googleas material to be used for art, despite its copyrighted status andprivate source. As the publicly accessible pictures are of individualstaken without their permission, I reversed the act: I took thepictures of individuals without Google’s permission and posted them onpublic walls. In doing so, I highlight the viability of this sort ofmedium as an artistic material ready to comment and shake our society.The collections of data that Google and similar corporations havebecome the material of everyday life, yet their source is the personalinformation of private individuals. By remixing and reusing thismaterial, I artistically explore the boundaries of ownership andexposure of this publicly displayed, privately-held information aboutour personal lives.In this case, the artwork becomes a performance, re-contextualizingnot only data, but also a conflict. It’s a performance on thebattlefield, playing out a war between public and private interestsfor winning control on our intimacy and habits, which can changepermanently depending on the victor. Who has more strength in thiswar? The artist, the firm, the legislators, the public concern or thetechnology? This reconfiguration of informational power provokesengagement between those social agents, who are recruited throughsimple visual exposure.Ghostly human bodies appear as casualties of the info-war in the city,a transitory record of collateral damage from the battle betweencorporations, governments, civilians and algorithms. Some of thisbattle has played out in the courts: for instance, the Swiss andGerman governments have placed legal restrictions [1] on Google,claiming that capturing people on the street in this way violatestheir privacy. Google rejoins with the accuracy of its facial blurringalgorithm, though it doesn’t always work [2]. But even if it does,this is hypocrisy: the rest of their bodies, their hair or clothes aremore than enough to identify them, especially for someone reallyinterested in their private lives.On the street, the public encounters the random victims of this war asunclear, impermanent colors and shapes, inclined to fade away butalways there, like ghosts haunting the streets and sometimesreappearing from the ethereal hells of digital archives.The obscure figures fixed to the walls are the murky intersection oftwo overlain worlds: the real world of things and people, from whichthese images were originally captured, and the virtual afterlife ofdata and copyrights, from which the images were retaken. The virtualworld, as a transposition of the real world into an enclosure owned bymultinational corporations, is no less real for its seemingwithdrawal; it has material effects. Media is the interface thatbridges the two worlds, and maintains a constant mutual influencebetween them. By going back to the spot where information has beenextracted from the physical world and de-virtualizing it, criticalpoints emerge.Google didn’t ask permission to appropriate images of all the world’stowns and cities [3], nor did it pay anything to do so. It sells adsagainst this public and private content, and then resells theinformation collected to the same advertisers, making billions thataren’t even taxed [4]. It’s a sort of exploitation by a giant socialparasite that resells us what was collectively created by people’sactivity and money.The public display of this biopolitical surplus from Google’svalue-harvesting campaigns – the people aren’t supposed to appear inthe pictures, but they do – appropriates their aesthetic and politicalvalue, as opposed to the commercial. Google appropriates the sociallabor we perform by constituting the public; simply by investing thecity with social meaning, we unintentionally provide value for Googleto capture. This Street Art intervenes by confronting the public withthe aesthetic qualities of the data they didn’t even know they werealienating, and forces them to reckon with the possibility of theirown image appearing as ghostly slaves trapped in a digital worldforever.Paolo Cirio.http://paolocirio.netNYC, Septemebr 15th 2012.Notes:[1] The Register: Google calls halt on German Street View[2] NYTs: Swiss Court Orders Modifications to Google Street View[3] NYT: Coming Soon, Google Street View of a Canadian Village You’llNever Drive To.[4] Daily Mail: How Google avoided paying £218m in tax: Internetgiant's cash-saving deal on £2.6bn UK earningsABC News: Google and Other U.S. Companies Dodge Billions in Taxes,Bloomberg Reports

[perhaps the demands aren't the worst thing to voice....]Jubilant Quebec students declare victory as Premier Marois cancels tuition fee increase, repeals Bill 78Jubilant students declare a win in tuition-hike conflictBy Karen Seidman,Gazette Universities Reporter September 21, 2012http://tinyurl.com/bwy44ls"Victory!" was the immediate tweet from Martine Desjardins, president of the Feration etudiante universitaire du Quebec, which had been fighting any kind of tuition increase since the hike first appeared in the budget of March 2011. Premier Marois kept her promise and cancelled the increase on Thursday.Victory was sweet for Quebec students on Thursday as Premier Pauline Marois wasted no time in announcing the tuition hike was cancelled and the most controversial sections of Bill 78, adopted by the Liberals in the spring as an emergency measure to rein in boycotting students, are being repealed."It's a total victory!" said Martine Desjardins, president of the Federation etudiante universitaire du Quebec, which is the largest student association with about 125,000 students. "It's a new era of collaboration instead of confrontation."The icing on the cake for the 170,000 students who spent last winter and spring marching in the streets opposing a tuition hike of $254 a year for seven years? They get to keep, for this year, the $39-million boost to financial aid introduced by the Liberals to offset the tuition increase."Sept. 20 will be etched in the annals of history in Quebec," tweeted the Federation etudiante collegiale du Quebec."Bravo to the striking students," Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, who was spokesperson for the Coalition large de l'association pour une solidarite syndicale etudiante (CLASSE) for much of the student conflict, said in a tweet.Whichever side of the debate you were on, there was no denying the significance of the moment. Marois, who was criticized by the Liberals for wearing a symbolic red square in solidarity with students for much of the conflict, made a promise to cancel the tuition increase ? and she moved quickly to fulfill that commitment.Students, who organized countless marches and clanged pots and never wavered from their goal of keeping education accessible with a tuition freeze, seemed at last to have triumphed definitively.But there is a glimmer of hope for universities in what must be a chaotic fall, dealing with makeup classes for thousands of students and budgets that may suddenly be invalidated. Marois did promise compensation for 2012-13 and said university financing will be maintained, said Daniel Zizian, director-general of the Conf?rence des recteurs et des principaux des universit?s du Qu?bec.Of course, details aren?t known so it still remains to be seen whether Quebec's universities will get all of the roughly $40 million they were anticipating from the tuition increase this year."There isn't panic, but it's a big preoccupation," Zizian said, although he seemed reassured by Marois's commitment to maintain funding. "It's a difficult situation for us."Under the Liberals? original plan of a $1,778 increase over five years, universities were supposed to have about $440 million in new funding in the fifth year, $216 million from the tuition increase, according to Zizian. Universities complain they are underfunded by about $620 million a year compared to other universities in Canada.Now it is up to the Parti Qu?b?cois?s new minister of higher education, research, science and technology, Pierre Duchesne, to organize a summit on higher education that Marois promised. Students say he has several immediate challenges, including how students will get reimbursed for the tuition hike that went into effect this fall.Eliane Laberge, president of the FECQ, said he also has to get tough with universities."He's going to have to be stricter with rectors, they were spoiled by the Liberals," she said.Also, the united front between the FEUQ, FECQ and CLASSE that was in effect during the tuition dispute may be over, as CLASSE continues to advocate for free education, which the other associations don?t support. In fact, CLASSE will be alone in organizing a demonstration on Sept. 22 in support of free education."We are waiting to meet the minister and see how the PQ positions itself," said Camille Robert, a spokesperson for CLASSE.Still, many organizations involved in higher education were pledging their support to collaborate with Duchesne. Guy Breton, rector of the Universite de Montreal, said he welcomed the importance accorded to higher education and research with the appointment of a new minister exclusively for that portfolio.There was a similar sentiment from Alan Shepard, president of Concordia University, and Olivier Marcil, vice-principal of communications and external relations at McGill University.But Marcil also had another message for the new minister:"The fact remains that something must be done to address the underfunding issue and if it is not through tuition increases, then we must look at alternative solutions," he said. "McGill and other Quebec universities will not be able to sustain the quality of education offered if that situation is not addressed."

HI all,Please find included below a new interview with Franco "Bifo" Berardi thatcovers a broad swathe of topics, including issues of education, debt,crisis, and mediation in the contemporary historical conjuncture.It is published in the most recent issue of Berkeley Planning Journal andcan also be linked to here: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z74819gElisePeer Reviewed Title:Reactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times: A Dialogue withFranco 'Bifo' BerardiJournal Issue:Berkeley Planning Journal, 25(1)Author:Hugill, David, York UniversityThorburn, Elise, University of Western OntarioPublication Date:2012Publication Info:Berkeley Planning Journal, Department of City and Regional Planning, UCBerkeleyPermalink:http://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z74819gAuthor Bio:David Hugill is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at YorkUniversity.Elise Thorburn is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Media Studies at theUniversity of Western Ontario.Keywords:Crisis, precariousness, Italian Autonomism, capitalism, revolution, Occupymovement, Arab Spring, neoliberal, education, Universities, debtLocal Identifier:ucb_crp_bpj_11813Abstract:The Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has spent a lifetimeparticipating in revolutionary movements and thinking through theircomplexities. He is best known in the English-speaking world for hisassociation with the Italian autonomist movement Operaismo (“workerism”)and its prominent attempts to transform communist politics by resituatingthe “needs, desires, and organizational autonomies” of workers at thefoundation of political praxis (Genosko and Thoburn 2011: 3). This textassembles excerpts from three interviews we conducted with Berardi over thecourse of the insurrectionary year 2011. Each of our conversationscoincided with notable developments in last year’s mobilizations and ourinterviewee’s enthusiasm about those events is evident at certain points inthe transcript. Yet while Berardi is generally optimistic about the revoltsand the “reactivation of the social body” that they seem to imply, hereminds us that protest alone will not be enough to win the genuine kindsof autonomy that he suggests are necessary. He argues that dogmas ofgrowth, competition and rent have so colonized every sphere of “humanknowledge” that they have begun to threaten the very survival of what hecalls “social civilization.” The hegemonic grip of this “epistemologicaldictatorship” has altered our capacity to feel empathy towards one another,severing fundamental bonds of inter-personal connection. Yet in spite ofthis dark diagnosis, Berardi is not a doomsayer and he always leaves openthe possibility of transformation and escape. He counsels that our bestshot at deliverance lies in the development of new strategies ofwithdrawal, refusal, sabotage, and the negotiation of new “lines of flight”from the late-capitalist forms of domination. 210 Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 25, 2012Reactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times: A Dialogue withFranco ‘Bifo’ BerardiBy David Hugill and Elise Thorburn AbstractThe Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has spent a lifetimeparticipating in revolutionary movements and thinking through theircomplexities. He is best known in the English-speaking world for hisassociation with the Italian autonomist movement Operaismo (“workerism”)and its prominent attempts to transform communist politics by resituatingthe “needs, desires, and organizational autonomies” of workers at thefoundation of political praxis (Genosko and Thoburn 2011: 3). This textassembles excerpts from three interviews we conducted with Berardi over thecourse of the insurrectionary year 2011. Each of our conversationscoincided with notable developments in last year’s mobilizations and ourinterviewee’s enthusiasm about those events is evident at certain points inthe transcript. Yet while Berardi is generally optimistic about the revoltsand the “reactivation of the social body” that they seem to imply, hereminds us that protest alone will not be enough to win the genuine kindsof autonomy that he suggests are necessary. He argues that dogmas ofgrowth, competition and rent have so colonized every sphere of “humanknowledge” that they have begun to threaten the very survival of what hecalls “social civilization.” The hegemonic grip of this “epistemologicaldictatorship” has altered our capacity to feel empathy towards one another,severing fundamental bonds of inter-personal connection. Yet in spite ofthis dark diagnosis, Berardi is not a doomsayer and he always leaves openthe possibility of transformation and escape. He counsels that our bestshot at deliverance lies in the development of new strategies ofwithdrawal, refusal, sabotage, and the negotiation of new “lines of flight”from the late-capitalist forms of domination.Keywords: crisis; precariousness; Italian autonomism; capitalism;revolution; the occupy movement; the “Arab Spring”; neoliberal education;universities; debtIntroductionThe Italian theorist Franco “Bifo” Berardi has spent a lifetimeparticipating in revolutionary movements and thinking through theircomplexities. HeReactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times 211is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for his associationwith the Italian Operaista (“workerist”) movement – known colloquially as“Autonomism” or “Autonomist Marxism” - and its prominent attempts totransform communist politics by re-centering the “needs, desires, andorganizational autonomies” of workers as the foundation of political praxis(Genosko and Thoburn 2011). The Autonomist tradition is primarily concernedwith the autonomy of human subjects: it is a Marxism that insists on theprimacy of laborers as active agents. Thus where Western Marxisms havetended to focus on the dominant logic of capital itself, Autonomists havesought to affirm the power of workers first, understanding transformationsin the capitalist mode of production primarily as responses to classstruggle (Dyer-Witheford 2004); the political history of capital, in otherwords, can be read as a “history of successive attempts of the capitalistclass to emancipate itself from the working class” (Tronti 1979 quoted inTrott 2007). This inversion of the dialectical relationship between laborand capital (sometimes called the “Copernican Turn”) is thus oftenconsidered the hallmark of Autonomist theory (Moulier 1989).What follows are excerpts of three interviews that we conducted with Bifoover the course of the insurrectionary year 2011. Each of our conversationscoincided with notable developments in last year’s mobilizations and ourinterviewee’s enthusiasm about those events is evident at certain points inthe transcript. Our first encounter was at an Edufactory meeting in Parisat which a range of groups had come together to build a common frontagainst the neoliberalization of universities in Europe and around theworld. The conference was held just weeks after the ouster of TunisianPresident Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and the proceedings were routinelyinterrupted by live updates from the ongoing revolution in Egypt. Indeed,news of the emergent ‘Arab Spring’ coupled with the energy of attendeesfrom ongoing student mobilizations in Britain, Italy, Chile and elsewhere,animated the conference with a palpable sense that a new cycle of strugglewas once again upon us. Our follow-up conversations with Bifo - both heldremotely - were animated by a similar backdrop of upheaval as thatrevolutionary spring bled into an equally oppositional summer and then gaveto an occupied fall. Yet while our interviewee remains generally optimisticabout the events of 2011 and the “reactivation of the social body” thatthey seem to imply, he is also quick to remind us that protest alone willnot be enough to win the genuine kinds of autonomy that he suggests arevitally necessary. As we shall see, Bifo’s primary concern is with the waysin which particular dogmas of growth, competition and rent have colonizedthe spheres of “human knowledge.” He argues that the persistence of these“mental cages” threatens the very survival of “social civilization” andremains critical about the capacity of protest to interrupt theirpervasiveness. There are tactical implications to these observations andBifo - both in the text below and elsewhere - asks tough questions about212 Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 25, 2012whether marches and occupations are effective strategies for targetingcontemporary arrangements of domination. Unlike the geographer EricSwyngedouw (2011), who insists that the seizure of urban space continues tobe at the heart of “emancipatory geo-political trajectories,” Bifo pointsto the limits of too enthusiastic an embrace of space-based urban struggle.His point is not to deny the importance of marches and occupations but tosuggest that a more formidable foe resides in the deterritorialized orbit ofsoftware and algorithms, financial flows and behavioral automatisms. Indeed,he argues that the hegemonic grip of this “epistemological dictatorship”has altered our capacity to feel empathy towards one another, severingfundamental bonds of inter-personal connection. As he puts it elsewhere:We have lost the pleasure of being together. Thirty years of precariousnessand competition have destroyed social solidarity. Media virtualizationhas destroyedempathy among bodies, the pleasure of touching each other, and the pleasureof living in urban spaces. We have lost the pleasure of love, because toomuch time is devoted to work and virtual exchange (Berardi and Lovnik 2011).Yet Bifo is not a doomsayer, in spite of this dark diagnosis, and he alwaysleaves open the possibility of transformation and escape. He counsels thatour best shot at deliverance lies in the development of new strategiesof withdrawal,refusal, sabotage, and the negotiation of new “lines of flight” fromlate-capitalist forms of domination. There are good reasons to be optimisticas we reflect on the flourishing of this new “spring” of resistance but asMike Davis (2011: 5) warns us “spring is the shortest of seasons.” Bifo’sobservations are critical reminders that the hardest work will come as wetry to sustain, transform and hone the insurrectionary energies of 2011. Wehope this dialogue contributes to that process in some modest way.InterviewQ: We’d like to begin by asking about the emphasis that you and others haveplaced on the role of financial capitalism in undermining what you call“social civilization.” You’ve suggested, among other things, that it is adeterritorializing form of predation because its violence is primarilyconducted through a virtual circuitry. With this in mind, we’d like to aska tactical question: if the architecture of contemporary domination is lessand less linked to the control of physical spaces– if its more virtual andalgorithmic than material and locatable – then where can that domination bemeaningfully challenged?A: In my view, imagination is the central field of social transformation inthe age of semiocapital. Capitalist domination is sustained by thepersistenceReactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times 213of mental cages that are structured by the dogmas of growth, competitionand rent. The epistemological dictatorship of this model – its grip on thedifferent spheres of human knowledge – is the very ground of power. So thetask of transformation requires us to imagine and make sensible a differentconcatenation of social forms, knowledge, and technology. Of course,imagination will never be enough on its own. We need to build forms ofsocial solidarity that are capable of re-activating the social body afterthe long period of its isolation and subjugation to competitiveaggressiveness. Solidarity – in contrast to this aggressiveness – is basedon empathy, on the bodily perception of the presence of the other.This word, solidarity, is a crucial word in the language of our movementsbut it needs to be better understood. What does solidarity mean, exactly?In general, we use the word in an ethical or political sense but this doesnot allow us to grasp its inner meaning. Solidarity, in my view, has to dowith psychic and emotional relationships between living bodies. When we seethat solidarity has broken down in our daily lives, the form that it takesis usually not political. Rather, it is an experience of dis-conjunction, abreaking down of empathetic bonds between living beings. The virtualizationof communication, the precarization of work, and a range of othercontemporary phenomena, have disconnected our capacity to feel empathytowards each other. In my opinion, this is the main problem of our time.Building and sustaining solidarity has to be much more than a politicalproject. It is about reactivating the sentience of the social body muchmore than it is about political organization. Do you see what I mean?Ultimately, what we have is a problem of therapy, which, in my parlance,does not imply a process of re-connecting, or reducing language, behavior,or feelings to established norms. For me, therapy implies a process ofre-activating empathy between living organisms. This empathy is thefoundation of the solidarity we need today.Q: In your view, has the wave of revolts and occupations that have unfoldedover the past year or so, initiated this therapeutic process, this processof reactivating interpersonal empathy in the face of particular forms ofdomination?A: I am still trying to understand what happened in 2011 but I do think theuprisings can be seen as a challenge to the dis-empathetic pathologies thatare crossing the social skin and social soul and as the reactivation of thesocial body. They can be seen, in other words, as therapy for apsychopathology, as a process of healing.For too long the dictatorship of financial capitalism has compressed the socialbody and the cynicism of the ruling class has become increasingly repugnantto many. This is why we should not be surprised that the uprisings havesometimes taken the form of violent explosions and will continue to do so.Of course, violence is itself a pathological demonstration214 Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 25, 2012of impotence and there is little tactical justification for a violentanti- capitalistmovement today. Nevertheless, we will continue to witness massiveexplosions of precarious rage and violence, like the ones that wereunleashed in Tottenham, Peckham and elsewhere in the UK in August and inRome in October. Future uprisings will frequently give way to thepsychopathology of violence and this shouldn’t surprise us. Neither shouldwe condemn such acts as criminal. But in terms of the therapeutic meaningof the uprisings in general, I don’t think it is simply a matter ofpolitical negotiation, of struggle, denunciation and demonstration. Rather,the main problem that is addressed by the uprisings – from Egypt to theoccupation movement but also the violent riots in London and many othercities in Europe – is the reactivation of the link between human bodies,which is also a reactivation of a relationship to the city, to land, toterritory.Q: If imagination is the critical site of struggle, as you’ve suggested,then has it become less important for oppositional groups to fight battlesin actual physical space? Has holding city squares or disturbing theordered functioning of various financial districts became on obsolete ormerely symbolic tactical approach or can it still be productivelydisruptive?A: I don’t think that we will be able to win a fight against financialcapitalismby demonstrating in the street. Destroying banks isn’t useful if we areseeking emancipation from financial dictatorship. Financial power does notexist in the banks; it is embedded in software, in the techno- linguisticautomatisms that govern daily life and the psychic automatisms ofconsumerism, competition and fear. Nevertheless we are in the midst of aprocess – a movement – that will deploy itself over the course of the nextdecade, maybe longer, and we have to start from where we are and what weknow. What we have today is the memory of past forms that our movementshave taken, including occupations, strikes and demonstrations, bothpeaceful and violent. All of these are part of the legacy of 20th centurysocial movements. Recently, we have tried to resurrect some of these oldforms of struggle – these old forms of expression – but this hasn’t workedparticularly well. Established forms of peaceful demonstration have absolutelyno possibility of changing the politics of financial capitalism. They don’twork when democracy is dead - and it is totally dead, the Europeanexperience is demonstrating that clearly. But on the other hand, violentriots or bank bombings are also useless because they don’t challenge thesites of real power. Real power is in the cybersphere, in the algorithms offinancial control, in the quantitative analyses that undergird trading, andso on.We continue to use old forms of action but we will have to begin to imagine newforms that are capable of actually struggling against financialdictatorship. In my opinion, the first task – which we have begun to experienceover the last year – is the reactivation of the social body that IReactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times 215have already described. But as I have said, this will not be enough. Wewill also have to begin to learn to create new forms of autonomy fromfinancial control and so on. For instance, in Italy we have been talkingincreasingly of “insolvency.” Of course, insolvency means the inability topay a debt but we don’t think of it strictly in monetary terms. There isalso a symbolic debt that is always implied in power relationships. Imaginationmight mean the ability to create the possibility of insolvency – to createthe right to be insolvent, the right not to pay a debt – at a semiotic anda symbolic level. We need to imagine forms of social relationships thatescape monetary exchange or invent new forms of exchange, like time banks,new forms of currency, community currency and so on. Do you see what I amtrying to say? The process of imagination begins with the reactivation ofthe social body but next this body has to create new levels of socialinteraction. Escaping financial dictatorship, in other words, meansimagining new forms of social exchange. I don’t know what form emancipationwill take in the coming years. I can only propose this littlemethodological starting point from what we already know.Q: We want to build on this discussion about the “reactivation of thesocial body” by asking you a question about alliances and movementbuilding. It’s our view that the ways that we talk about questions of“class” have been profoundly diminished in North American populardiscourses. The geographer Neil Smith recently suggested that it has gottenso bad in the United States that there are now really only three classesthat are acknowledged in public debate: millionaires, homeless people andthe middle class (Hugill and Smith 2011: 88). In this context, we areextremely interested in your commitment to understanding “precariousness”as a central dimension of the contemporary. Do you see precariousness as acategory that can be meaningfully mobilized as a basis for coming togetherand identifying with each other? In other words, do you think the idea ofprecariousness itself is substantial enough to form the basis of a newclass politics?A: Precariousness is not a marginal feature of contemporary laborrelations. It is the general character of work in the age of globalization.We shouldn’t abandon class categories but they need to be redefined inevery sense. The working and capitalist classes have changed dramaticallysince the dawn of industrial capitalism. The deterritorialization ofproperty and work is the general trend that has lead to widespreadprecarization. The old bourgeoisie was a territorialized class, linked tothe physical property of factories, built environments and material assets.They were intimately connected to particular territories and territorialcommunities, which were the markets for what they produced. Today’spredatory financial class has no territorial affinity, no interest in thefuture of particular communities. The accumulation of capital is no longerbased on the physical properties or the growth of physical quantities ofgoods but on the abstraction of digital and financial signs. Labor has beensimilarly detached from territory and216 Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 25, 2012community. Workers no longer meet in the physical space of the factory andif they do it is usually provisional, temporary, precarious. This is why Ithink that precariousness has become the general condition of labor inaddition to the general condition of social existence and self-perception.At its core, precariousness means the fragmentation of the work force.People no longer meet in the same place and social time has becomefragmented, fractalized. The recent wave of movements are a way tore-connect some of these fragments that might otherwise have no way, notime, no space to meet. This, essentially, is what an occupation is. I usethe language of reactivating the social body but one could also call it anattempt to bring together that which has been broken apart by thegeneralization of precariousness. I see the Occupy movement, for example,as an attempt at recomposing the broken body of the precarious community.Q: Elsewhere, you’ve spoken about how the generalization of precariousnessand crisis has made space for new alliances to be formed, including betweenacademic or university workers, so-called “cognitive” laborers, and otherkinds of workers. Would you expand on this on little?A: I am interested in looking at this problem through questions ofsubjective consciousness, the ways in which crisis has been perceived bydifferent social subjectivities. Over the last decade our consciousness ofthe centrality of “cognitive labor” has been increasing. For example, injust the last two years in Italy the university has become one of thecentral foci of struggle. The situation is becoming so dramatic everywherethat new forms of alliance and connection between the social crisis and theproblem of the university are being made and this is new. For example, inItaly, in recent months, a new organization has been created called UnitedAgainst the Crisis – it is a meeting point for metalworkers and studentsand researchers. In some sense, it is reminiscent of the 1960s or 1970s butit is also absolutely new in other ways.Q: How successful have these experiments in alliance building been?A: Well, in January 2011 there was a general strike of the metalworkers allover Italy and it was very successful. In my region around 90% of workerswere striking in their factories. And what was interesting was that thesquares were full not only of metal workers but also of students. Justafter that, in Porto Marghera (an important city for working class memorybecause everybody associates it with autonomous workers movements of the1960s and 1970s) the FIOM (Federazione Impiegati Operai Metallurgici), themain union of metal workers, and the so-called disubbidientes, which is anational organization of students and precarious workers, decided to hold acommon meeting that roughly 2000 people attended. It was the first time in40 years that unionists and students met together to decide common actionsagainst the crisis. I want to stress the novelty of this. TheReactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times 217government and leading classes had been saying for so long that nothing washappening but now it has become completely evident that we have a massiveawakening of social cultures.Q: There aren’t many precedents for these kinds of alliances betweenstudents and university workers with other kinds of workers in contemporaryNorth American contexts. So, on this side of the ocean, we don’t have muchof a blueprint to begin building them today. Can you tell us how theseconnections were forged and sustained?A: In Italy there is a long legacy of students and workers “united in thestruggle.” In fact, this was one of the main slogans in the 1960s and1970s. And it wasn’t just rhetoric either. It was really something deep. Ofcourse, this was thirty or forty years ago and in the meantime many thingshave happened. But over the last five or six years, the precarization ofworkers has created a new common ground between workers and students.Students are precarious workers in most instances and factory workers knowthat precariousness for students is also a problem for them, a blackmail tobe used against them. Additionally, the public discourse and theconsciousness of generalized precariousness has been growing dramaticallyover the last few years and this has had a significant impact. I think thatthe problem of precariousness is felt differently in Italy and Europe thanit is in North America. Precariousness is something that is inherent tolabor relations in North America. Of course, I can’t give suggestions toNorth American activists but I think that working to understand the newcharacter, the new cruciality, that precariousness has taken on in thepresent time is of critical importance. Once upon a time, precariousnesswas a marginal space of labor in general but today it is fixed labor thathas become marginal. And so, we need to do things like change theperception of what a student is. Most students are precarious workers,first and foremost.Q: Can you elaborate? In what sense is a student a precarious worker?A: First of all because students are increasingly learning in smallparcels, small fragments, small fractals of knowledge, and they arebecoming more and more accustomed to think of their knowledge not asknowledge but as intellectual availability to exploitation. In NorthAmerican forms of education this is already well established, it is nothingnew. It is new in much of Europe and it has begun to provoke somereactions. But it is also a fact of a networked and globalized world. Whatdoes precariousness mean today? What is the relationship betweenprecariousness and globalization? It means that you can buy a fragment oflabor in Bangkok, a fragment in Buenos Aires, and a fragment in Milan andthat these three fragments become the same product from the point of viewof capital. Knowledge is headed the same way. You no longer need – from thepoint of view of capital – to know in the humanistic sense, the meaning,the finality, the intimate218 Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 25, 2012contradictions of knowledge, you just need to know how particular parcelsof knowledge can be made functional. There is something new and somethingold in this. Herbert Marcuse’s (1964) One Dimensional Man alreadyidentified this problem of the functionalization of knowledge but in histime it was only a kind of prediction about how capitalism would betransformed. Today, this functional consideration is the dominant form ofour relationship to knowledge. So, we should question people about what ishappening to our knowledge. Are we really learning things, knowing things?Or are we simply learning how to become part of the productive machine?Additionally, I think we need to ask people, especially young people, abouttheir suffering in the relationship with knowledge, with communication andso on. I think that the problem of psychic suffering is of centralimportance our time. Problems of depression, panic, massive suicide, arevery real. Do you know that suicide has become the main cause of deathamong people between 18-25 years old? Suicide is becoming a politicalweapon. I’m not only thinking of Columbine or of Mohamed Bouazizi, the manwho killed himself and started the Tunisian revolution. Suicide hassomething to do with knowledge. When your knowledge is becoming more andmore something that does not belong to you, this is a problem of personalidentity, of psychic identity.Q: Do you see a relationship between this psychic suffering and thevirtualization of communication that has been associated with new kinds oftechnology?A: This is a tricky and difficult question to answer because I see aprofound danger in reactionary technophobia. I am absolutely not atechnophobe but I do want to question the ambiguity of new technologies. Itis evident that new technological forms are in some sense tools ofempowerment for social movements – we see what has happened in Egypt andTunisia, for example. This is clear enough but it is only part of thequestion. The other part concerns the relationship between bodilyperception of society, affective perception of society, and work.Thirty-five years ago I read a book called The Show and Tell Machine, by anAmerican anthropologist called Rose Goldsen. I read this book in 1978 or1979 but I was so struck by one sentence that I can still repeat it, “weare breeding the first generation that will learn more words from a machinethan from mothers.” I remember that Freud said that the main place ofaffective creation – of the creation of personal affection – is languageand the relationship between language learning and bodily affection. Thedark side of new technology is this distance from the body of the mother,and by the “body of the mother” I mean the body in general, the ability toperceive oneself linguistically in relationship to the body. This is beinglost. You know, psychiatrists say that twenty years ago the word panicmeant nothing, but today panic is a new symptomology. Today, it effects 15%of the young people, especially women. And this is absolutely new. So whyis this happening? It is because panic is a problemReactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times 219of the relationship between the body and information, the acceleration ofinformation in conditions of competitiveness. This is pathogenic. There arenew forms of pathology that are emerging from the acceleration of thetechnological rhythm of information and the separation of the body from thesocial process. Our social processes are less and less bodily processes andmore and more informational processes. I like the Internet very much andparticularly the possibilities that it creates. I don’t want to renounce itbut I see that the new technologies have this dark side but I don’t have asolution. There are key problems here in terms of subjectivation, politicalunderstanding and so on, and we should work on this ambiguity, this doublebind. I think we need to be cautious about the triumphalism that associatesnew technologies with democratic possibilities etcetera. Yes there arethese possibilities but new technology does not mean only that.Q: Do you invest any hope in the capacity of new technologies -particularly virtual communication technologies – to accomplish thereactivation of the social that you mentioned at the outset of thisinterview?A: Of course I do. I am not a reactionary, nor am I a nostalgic person whowants to go back to a time of low-tech communication. The technologicalstruggle is part of a living body of society but the problem is that duringthe last twenty years new technologies have also cancelled or obscured thepossibility of a bodily relationship between social beings. In one sense,social networking and social media technologies have been useful in callingbodies to the street but this dynamic of virtual embodiment has to bereactivated from the point of view of the body, of eroticism, of socialrelationships. I don’t want to suggest that we should forget about newtechnology, but rather that we have to inscribe these technologies within anew bodily relationship to each other in physical space, not only invirtual space.David Hugill is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at YorkUniversity.Elise Thorburn is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Media Studies at theUniversity of Western Ontario.220 Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 25, 2012 ReferencesBerardi, Franco Bifo. 2011. After the Future (Oakland and Edinburgh: AKPress).Berardi, Franco Bifo and Geert Lovnik. 2011. “A Call to the Army of and tothe Army of Software,” published online by the Institute of NetworkCultures, Amsterdam. http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/geert/2011/10/12/franco-berardi-geert-lovink-a-call-to-the-army-of-love-and-to-the-army-of-software.Davis, Mike. 2011. “Spring Confronts Winter,” New Left Review 72 (Nov/Dec), pgs. 5-15.Dyer-Witheford, Nick. 2004. “Autonomist Marxism and the InformationSociety,” published online by Multitudes, http://multitudes.samizdat.net/spip.php?page=rubrique&id_rubrique=464.Genosko, Gary and Nicholas Thoburn. 2011. “The Transversal Communism ofFranco Berardi” in Franco Berardi After the Future (Oakland and Edinburgh:AK Press).Goldsen, Rose K. 1977. Show and Tell Machine: How American Television Worksand Works You Over (New York: Doubleday).Hugill, David and Neil Smith. 2011. “Revolutionary Ambition in the Age ofAusterity: An Interview with Neil Smith,” Upping the Anti: A Journal ofTheory and Action #13, pgs. 81-90.Marcuse, Hebert. 2002 (1964). One Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideologyof Advanced Industrial Society (London and New York: Routledge).Moulier, Yann. 1989. “Introduction,” in Antonio Negri The Politics ofSubversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: PolityPress).Swyngedouw, Eric. 2011. “Every Revolution Has Its Square,” published onlineby cities< at >manchester blog, http://citiesmcr.wordpress.com/2011/03/18/every-revolution-has-its-square.Trott, Ben. 2007. “Immaterial Labour and World Order: An Evaluation of aThesis,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organisation 7(1).

Bwo Michel Bauwens* Report: A Synthetic Overview of the Collaborative Economy. By MichelBauwens, Nicolas Mendoza and Franco Iacomella, et al. Orange Labs andP2P Foundation, 2012.URL = http://p2p.coop/files/reports/collaborative-economy-2012.pdfSummary via:http://p2pfoundation.net/Synthetic_Overview_of_the_Collaborative_Economy"Chapter One creates a frame of understanding with some generalcharacteristics of the whole field. In order to do this, it attemptsto create a general grammar to ease the understanding of the variedphenomena that will be discussed in the rest of the report. It triesto uncover the fundamental drives and explains the basicinterconnected concepts. It ends with a first approach to acategorization of the different expressions of the collaborativeeconomy.Chapter Two looks at user innovation dynamics, and describes how thecorporate world has answered their challenge. We examine the emergingfigures of the more active 'user' which replaces the traditionalfigure of the consumer, and sociological categories such as theprofessional amateur and the lead user. The chapter describes howcorporations have adapted by initializing open innovation and byintegrating practices for co-design and co-creation of value in theirown value chains. We also look at the more independent user-generatedmedia practices, which have been facilitated with the emergence ofsocial media.In Chapter Three we look at two of the new 'diagonal' or 'hybrid'approaches. These hybrids combine entrepreneurship with morehorizontal participation, and deepen of the mutualization of bothskills and materials. In the case of crowdsourcing, firms appeal tothe crowd for both creative/innovative input and for moreservice-oriented tasks; we try to make sense of this complex ecology.We also look at the emergence of collaborative consumption, in whichphysical resources and services are mutualized, in order to mobilizehitherto underutilized idle resources. Practices of mutualizationcharacteristic to collaborative consumption also to render existingservices more ecologically efficient, as for example in car sharing.We are witnessing here a more profound shift: from ownership toaccess: this is, access to a wide variety of services. We look at thenew possibilities for (dis)intermediation that it generates, but alsoat the peer to peer marketplaces that it enables.In Chapter Four we look at the more radical community-centricproduction methods, i.e. the emergence of commons-based peerproduction, where participating firms have to adapt more stringentlyto the rules and norms of the initiating communities. After definingpeer production, we look at the various ways in which community andcorporate dynamics interpenetrate to create a 17dynamic field ofhybrid economies. We also look at the cultural penetration of thesenew practices and the current shift of their reach from the moreimmaterial creation of knowledge and code, to actual physicalproduction through the sharing of designs, as is emerging in thefields of open hardware and distributed manufacturing.In Chapter Five, we look at the infrastructural underpinnings whichenable the new forms of distributed production. These range from thevery material development of personal fabrication and 3D printingmachines culminating in new possibilities for microfactories, but alsodistributed funding, new accounting and metric systems to measuredistributed development, and new hybrid legal forms. These new hybridlegal forms integrate for-profit and non-profit motives, with morepotential to generate contributing communities.Chapter Six is an overview of 'open' (i.e. based on sharedintellectual property) and community-based business and monetizationmodels. It answers the crucial question of financial sustainability inthe absence of strong IP-based rent income."