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Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and FactoryEdited by Trebor ScholzDigital Labor asks whether life on the internet is mostly work, orplay. We tweet, we tag photos, we link, we review books, we comment onblogs, we remix media, and we upload video to create much of thecontent that makes up the web. And large corporations profit on ouronline activity by tracking our interests, affiliations, andhabits—and then collecting and selling the data. What is the nature ofthis interactive ‘labor’ and the new forms of digital sociality thatit brings into being?The international, interdisciplinary contributors to Digital Laborsuggest that there is no longer a clear divide between ‘the personal’and ‘work,’ as every aspect of life drives the digital economy: sexualdesire, boredom, friendship—and all become fodder for speculativeprofit. They argue that we are living in a total labor society and theway in which we are commoditized, racialized, and engendered isprofoundly and disturbingly normalized by the dominant discourse ofdigital culture.Digital Labor poses a series of questions about our digital present:How is the global crisis of capitalism linked to the hidden labor ofthe digital economy?How do we address that most online interaction, whether work or play,for profit or not, is taking place on corporate platforms?How can we acknowledge moments of exploitation while not eradicatingoptimism, inspiration, and the many instances of individual financialand political empowerment?In response to these questions, this collection offers new definitionsof digital labor that address and challenge the complex, hybridrealities of the digital economy.Introduction: Trebor Scholz Why Does Digital Labor Matter Now?I. The Shifting Sites of Labor Markets1. Andrew Ross On the Digital Labor Question2. Tiziana Terranova Free Labor3. Sean Cubitt The Political Economy of Cosmopolis4. McKenzie Wark Considerations on A Hacker ManifestoII. Interrogating Modes of Digital Labor5. Ayhan Aytes Return of The Crowds: Mechanical Turk and NeoliberalStates of Exception6. Abigail De Kosnik Fandom as Free Labor7. Patricia Clough The Digital, Labor and Measure Beyond Biopolitics8. Jodi Dean Whatever BloggingIII. The Violence of Participation9. Mark Andrejevic Estranged Free Labor10. Jonathan Beller Digitality and The Media of Dispossession11. Lisa Nakamura Don’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game: TheRacialization of Labor in World of WarcraftIV. Organizing Networks in an Age of Vulnerable Publics12. Michel Bauwens Thesis on Digital Labor in an Emerging P2P Economy13. Christian Fuchs Class and Exploitation on the Internet14. Ned Rossitter and Soenke Zehle Acts of Translation: OrganizingNetworks as Algorithmic Technologies of the CommonBibliography=On Amazon.com:http://tinyurl.com/c8up2k4http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415896955/Ayhan Ayteş, Ph.D.Communication and Cognitive ScienceUniversity of California San Diego# distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission# <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,# collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets# more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l# archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime< at >kein.org

Hello dear group of people,here's what I have to share:I am working on a theory about the so-called Technology Cycle. It is aboutwhere the ideas come from, who takes them over, how they are dumped onsociety and how the society fights back.I will sit in a gallery for 3 weeks and study. In the end there will be atalk about how far I managed to get.The gallery itself is organised as a room for thinking, with panelsincluding the famous Disney - von Braun collaboration, as well as theObama/Assange -Putin/PussyRiot deal in Dubai.But:The Ministry of Culture is apparently cashless or something so they didn'tquite come through with payment for my show.I decided to do the show nevertheless, only in an empty gallery, and sincethe intervention of the state was so incisive I felt the need to sign theminister as co-author.The show opens on Wednesday in gallery Aksioma in Ljubljana.Here's the press release:http://www.aksioma.org/past.future.now/index_eng.htmlI figure, since this is about the type of theory us nettimers like and alsoabout confrontation with a regime you lot might approve.If not, please simply disregard this as promotion.Salutes for nowwould be great to meetciaoVuk, your friend

Permanent Address: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/10/08/comrades-join-the-peer-progressive-movement/Comrades, Join the “Peer Progressive” Movement!By John Horgan | October 8, 2012Fed up with Obomney? Sick of both Democrats and Republicans? Do you see the parties’ similarities—their cowardly hawkishness and craven obeisance to deep-pocketed donors–as more significant than their differences? Looking for a fresh new approach to governance and social problem-solving? Then you might consider becoming a “peer progressive.”Peer progressives believe that “peer networks,” consisting of many people of roughly equal status freely swapping ideas and information, can accomplish things that top-down, centralized, hierarchical organizations can’t. Peer progressives “believe in social progress, and we believe the most powerful tool to advance the cause of progress is the peer network.”That quote comes from the new book by science writer Steven Johnson: Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age (Riverhead Books), which I just reviewed for The Wall Street Journal. Future Perfect is a manifesto both for optimism—which has become my favorite ism—and for the peer progressive movement. Peer progressives resist left wing faith in Big Government and right wing faith in Big Business. They believe in the wisdom of crowds, especially crowds exchanging diverse viewpoints.Johnson cites research suggesting that a large, diverse group often comes up with better solutions to problems than a smaller, homogeneous group with a higher average IQ, a phenomenon summarized as “diversity trumps ability.” Johnson elaborates: “When groups are exposed to a more diverse range of perspectives, when their values are forced to confront different viewpoints, they are more likely to approach the world in a more nuanced way, and avoid falling prey to crude extremism.”Diversity, Johnson elaborates, “does not just expand the common ground of consensus. It also increases the larger group’s ability to solve problems.” Peer progressives favor diversity not just for traditional liberal reasons, to counter sexism, racism and other prejudices, but because “we are smarter as a society—more innovative and flexible in our thinking—when diverse perspectives collaborate.”Peer networks predate the Internet; Johnson sees them at work in the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and other periods of extraordinary creativity. But the Internet and other digital technologies–which reduce the costs, time and effort of communication–have turned out to be astonishingly effective enablers of peer networks. Hence we get Internet-catalyzed marvels ranging from Wikipedia and Kick Starter to the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements.Johnson is especially hopeful that peer networks can revitalize—even revolutionize—politics. He suggests how peer networks might thwart attempts by the rich and powerful to hijack U.S. democracy. We might move closer to “direct democracy,” in which we vote for laws and policies rather than for politicians who are supposed to represent our interests but too often don’t.Political peer networks are springing up all over the world. Take for example the Israeli-Palestinian Confederation, which calls for incorporating Israel and Palestine into a Swiss-style confederation. The Confederation plans to hold an online election in December to form a virtual parliament. Saleem Ali, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont, notes in National Geographic that the Confederation represents an attempt to “move beyond the stagnation of one-state/two-state fixes.”The underlying principles of peer networks have been explored by other writers. Johnson’s evangelical anti-authoritarianism reminds me a bit of the journalist Kevin Kelly, whose 1994 book Out of Control insisted that because nature organizes itself without any centralized control, we should too. But whereas Kelly came off as a bit of a crank, Johnson has a knack for sounding reasonable.Couple of caveats: One, Johnson neglects to address the potential of peer networks for solving two of our biggest problems: militarism and climate change. In my Wall Street Journal review, I urged Johnson and other peer progressives to start thinking of ways to tackle the problems of warfare and excessive fossil-fuel consumption.Caveat two comes from my friend and colleague–my peer!–Andy Russell, a historian of technology at Stevens Institute of Technology. Andy objects to Johnson’s claim that the Internet is itself the product of a peer network. Johnson calls Arpanet, the Pentagon-funded network that gave rise to the Internet, a “radically decentralized system” and a “network of peers, not a hierarchy.”Wrong, says Andy, who has done lots of research on the development of standards for the Internet. “The evidence is pretty clear that the Arpanet and Internet were designed and built through a hierarchical process,” Andy writes. “In fact its hierarchy (and well-heeled sponsor, the Department of Defense) was the single factor most responsible for the Internet’s success: it kept at bay the factions unleashed by democracy in international standards committees.”Steven Johnson no doubt welcomes this sort of criticism. This is exactly how peer networks are supposed to work. Johnson presents his vision of the future, Andy and I respond with our quibbles, others respond to us, we bicker, resolve our differences, agree to disagree, reach compromises, come up with new ideas and march bravely toward a more prosperous, peaceful future.About the Author: Every week, John Horgan takes a puckish, provocative look at breaking science. A former staff writer at Scientific American, he is the author of four books, including The End of Science (Addison Wesley, 1996) and The End of War (McSweeney's Books, January 2012). Follow on Twitter < at >Horganism.© 2012 Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Capitalism: How the left lost the argument.BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK | NOVEMBER 2012http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/capitalismOne might think that a crisis brought on by rapacious, unregulated capitalism would have changed a few minds about the fundamental nature of the global economy.One would be wrong. True, there is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment in the world today, particularly as a crisis brought on by the system's worst excesses continues to ravage the global economy. If anything, we are witnessing an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: Books, newspaper investigations, and TV reports abound, telling us of companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, corrupted bankers who continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are bailed out by taxpayer money, and sweatshops where children work overtime.Yet no matter how grievous the abuse or how indicative of a larger, more systemic failure, there's a limit to how far these critiques go. The goal is invariably to democratize capitalism in the name of fighting excesses and to extend democratic control of the economy through the pressure of more media scrutiny, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, and honest police investigations. What is never questioned is the bourgeois state of law upon which modern capitalism depends. This remains the sacred cow that even the most radical critics from the likes of Occupy Wall Street and the World Social Forum dare not touch.It's no wonder, then, that the optimistic leftist expectations that the ongoing crisis would be a sobering moment -- the awakening from a dream

Mark Poster, 1941-2012Mark Poster, Emeritus Professor of History and Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine, passed away in the hospital earlier this morning. Mark Poster was a vital member of the School of Humanities, and for decades one of its most widely read and cited researchers. He made crucial contributions to two different departments, History and Film & Media Studies, and played a central role in UCI's emergence as a leading center for work in Critical Theory.In the first part of his career, when his focus was on modern European intellectual history, his path-breaking publications included the influential book *Existential Marxism in Postwar France* (Princeton University Press 1975), a study of the intellectual world around Jean- Paul Sartre. When the theory boom hit the U.S., thanks in part to this book, he became a widely sought-after authority on French critical thought, especially the writing of Michel Foucault, whose work he helped introduce to American audiences. He played a crucial role in setting the History Department on its current course, as one of the first departments--if not the first department--in the discipline with a required graduate sequence in theory. In that sequence Mark taught a Foucault seminar that became legendary.His investments in French intellectual history also positioned Mark Poster for crucial contributions to the Critical Theory Institute at UC Irvine, which he helped start as an informal reading group; by 1987 it was established as a campus research institute. The distinction of Irvine, reflected in the CTI, the graduate emphasis, the Critical Theory Archive, and departmental strengths, still defines the special character of the School, and contributes to its international reputation for scholarly innovation. Hosting internationally known scholars, the Critical Theory Institute with its public seminars and Wellek lecture series soon became one of the global hotspots in the humanities.In the second part of his career, Mark became a seminal theorist of media and technology. He was the founding chair of the Department of Film & Media Studies at UC Irvine. Together with Franco Tonelli and Eric Rentschler, he had helped shepherd the Film Emphasis of the early 1980s to Program status by the end of that decade, and then to departmentalization by 2002. In the process he was pivotal in hiring and mentoring faculty who now serve the School's second largest major.Mark Poster was a major figure in the rapid development of media studies and theory in the USA and internationally. While as an intellectual historian he could draw on Frankfurt School thought as well as on cybernetics, he was particularly interested in the potential of poststructuralism for media studies. From his translations of Baudrillard to his dissemination of Foucault, Poster played a highly influential role in the study of media culture, including television, databases, computing, and the Internet; he continued to offer crucial commentary on the relevance to technology and media of cultural theory, and his numerous articles and books have been translated into a number of different languages. Reflective of the breadth of his interests and expertise, Poster held courtesy appointments in the Department of Information and Computer Science and in the Department of Comparative Literature. First hired at UCI in 1968, Poster had recently retired after 40 years of service tothe School and the Campus.We will let you know as plans for a memorial event in the School develop. In the meantime, we extend our condolences to his family and to all those close to him.Jim Steintrager, Interim Dean, School of HumanitiesPeter Krapp, Chair, Department of Film & Media StudiesJeff Wasserstrom, Chair, Department of History

Note, this flows from a discussion that initially took place on a listservesponsored by ISOC on Internet Policy. I'm also putting all of this below upon my blog http://gurstein.wordpress.com where those with an interest mightwish to carry forward this discussion and where relevant links can be found. The extended discussion is probably only for those with an interest inInternet Governance issues and particularly as they apply to the regulatoryregimes (and policy stances) of Less Developed Countries and I would pointthose with such an interest to research papers prepared by Michael Kende ofthe consulting firm AnalysysMason on behalf of Amazon, AT&T, Cisco Systems,Comcast, Google, Intel, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, National Cable &Telecommunications Association (NCTA), News Corporation, Oracle, Telef?nica,Time Warner Cable, Verisign, and Verizon. specifically:https://fileshare.tools.isoc.org/wentworth/public/ISOC%20WCIT%20statements%20<https://fileshare.tools.isoc.org/wentworth/public/ISOC%20WCIT%20statements%20&%20resources/Analysys_Mason_RDRK0_driving_broadband_Africa_Dec2011%20copy.pdf>&%20resources/Analysys_Mason_RDRK0_driving_broadband_Africa_Dec2011%20copy.pdf and http://www.analysysmason.com/About-Us/News/Press-releases1/Internet-global-growth-PR-Sept2012/?bp=http%3a%2f%2fwww.analysysmason.com%2fSearch%2f%23query%3dglobal%2binternet%2bgrowth%26access%3dAll+content I should say that both of these reports are very interesting and contain awealth of good information, however, the problem that I have with them andparticularly the second report is that it so clearly starts off with itspolicy conclusion and builds a case to support this. This is not an area ofparticular expertise for me but my gut is that the conclusions as to theappropriate policy regime for Less Developed Countries (the apparent targetfor the second policy report from Michael Kende) would look quite differentif it was done from/by folks from LDC's rather than sponsored as Kende'sreport was by Google, Cisco, Amazon, Microsoft and so on and so on. I'm not exactly sure what the LDC sponsored report would say but my guesswould be that they would focus rather more on looking at how costs andbenefits are and should be distributed as between some of the wealthiestcompanies from some of the wealthiest countries and LDC's looking toincrease Internet access overall in environments of very low incomes, verydifficult physical environments, extremely weak regulatory and taxationregimes, and vast areas and populations who might under some circumstancesderive benefit from Internet access but who would under almost anyconceivable current situation find paying for this almost impossible. My hunch is that they wouldn't start out with indicating as the number onerecommendation of the report -- the basic point of the overall report fromwhat I can see -- the overwhelming importance ofPromoting network infrastructure: (by a) Focus on increasing investmentsthroughout the network, from mobile broadband access through national andcross-border connectivity and IXPs, by removing roadblocks to lower the costof investment, including allocating spectrum for mobile broadband orlimiting licensing requirements and fees, in order to promote competitiveentry and growth. Internet biggies are running a bit scared (the term "moral panic" comes tomind) as to what "madness" might come out of the WCIT meeting that the ITUis hosting in December in Dubai. And they are pulling out all the stops intrying to derail any real discussion on how the costs and benefits might beallocated of improving/extending Internet access in and into LDC's andwithin LDC's to the other 99% or so in those countries who currently have nopossible means of access. This is of course because the ITU as thetraditional venue for global telecom "governance" includes among its 195 orso Member States a very goodly proportion, probably a majority, who arecurrently experiencing net costs (including many regimes who see these costsin terms of lost political control) from Internet access and paticularly ifattempts at extending access to rural and maginalized populations are takeninto consideration, rather than net benefits and not surprisingly they arelooking at ways of righting that balance. And so instead of actually sitting down and trying to figure out a globalregime for Internet (and possibly other) governance, that might in somesense lead to an equitable distribution of costs and benefits the biggiesare launching verbal, research and whatever types of broadsides infiniteamounts of money, easy access to expertise and the current ascendance ofneo-libertarian (anti-State, anti-tax) ideology can muster. I myself am of two minds on this issue. I well recognize the value/benefitsthat could flow from Internet access even to the poorest of the poor and theoverwhelming benefits that Internet access provides to those for example incivil society who can take advantage of its more or less unlimited free flowof communications and information (including through undermining variousrepressive political regimes). On the other hand, the unlimited unregulatedpolicy environment advocated by reports like that of Kende and others ofthat ideological ilk would I think, lead almost directly to a furtherenrichment of the already stupendously wealthy and overall a signifcanttransfer of wealth and benefit from those with the least to those with themost. The challenge I think is to recognize both of the above as equallylikely/possible outcomes. This implies the need to design and implement aglobal regime which ensures the possibility of universal access to thebenefits of the Internet while ensuring that the provision of theseopportunities does not further enmiserate those currently least able toobtain these benefits at least in part by destroying the means by which suchpossible access to benefits could through public intervention, regulationand yes, even taxation ensure that such a possibility of benefits can betranslated into actuality. Mike _____

http://domainincite.com/10754-company-files-for-injunction-against-189-new-gtldsCompany files for injunction against 189 new gTLDs Kevin Murphy, October 12, 2012, 21:48:52 (UTC), in Registries Alternate root player Name.Space has sued ICANN for trademark infringement and anti-competitive behavior, saying "insiders" have conspired to keep it out of the new gTLD program. If successful, the suit would prevent dozens of new gTLD applicants from having their applications approved. The lawsuit, filed in California this week, follows a warning the company fired at ICANN this March. While only ICANN is named as a defendant, the suit alleges that the new gTLD program was crafted by and is dominated by "ICANN insiders" and "industry titans". It wants an injunction preventing ICANN delegating any of the 189 gTLD strings that it claims it has rights to. It also fingers several current and former ICANN directors, including current and former chairs Steve Crocker and Peter Dengate Thrush, over their alleged conflicts of interest. Name.Space has been operating 482 diverse TLDs -- such as .news, .sucks, and .mail -- in a lightly used alternate root system since 1996. Most people can't access these zones and are unaware that they exist. The company applied to have 118 of these strings added to the root in ICANN's "proof of concept" gTLD expansion in 2000, when the application fee was $50,000, but was unsuccessful. Now, the company claims the new gTLD program is "an attack on name.space's business model and a mean by which to create and maintain market power in the TLD markets". The complaint (pdf) states: Rather than adopting a procedure to account for the pending 2000 Application and facilitate the expansion of TLD providers in the DNS, ICANN has adopted a procedure so complex and expensive that it once again effectively prohibited newcomers from competing. It instead has permitted participation solely by ICANN insiders and industry titans. If it had applied for all 118 again in this year's round, it would have cost almost $22 million (though it would have qualified for an $83,000 discount on a single bid). Name.Space is asking for damages and an injunction preventing ICANN from approving 189 gTLDs that match those it currently operates in its alternate root. The full list of affected applications is attached to the complaint. (c) 2010-2012 TLD Research Ltd

Don't Give Me the Numbers - an interview with Ben Grosser about FacebookDemetricator.Matthew FullerBen Grosser is an artist, composer, and programmer based inUrbana-Champaign, Illinois. His work is highly attuned to the role ofcomputation in changing and producing aesthetics, knowledge and socialformations and much of it is available to view online athttp://bengrosser.com/.Recently, Ben made a new piece of software available. FacebookDemetricator (http://bengrosser.com/projects/facebook-demetricator/) is atool for adapting the social network's interface so that the numerical datait foregrounds is removed. No longer is the focus on how many friends onehas or how many comments they've gotten, but on who those friends are andwhat they've written. The following interview took place by email inSeptember 2012.-------------------------------------------------------------------------MF: Facebook uses numbers as a key part of the information provided on itsinterface. Things, or what are there rendered as things, such as likes,friends, comments waiting, events, are all numbered as are the relation ofseveral other kinds of things to time. Facebook Demetricator suggests thatFacebook users might step away from enumeration as a way of understandingthe service. What role, for you, does the number play in Facebook, andwhat does the Demetricator propose?BG: As a regular user of Facebook I continually find myself being enticedby these numbers. How many friends do I have? How much do people like mystatus? I focus on these quantifications, watching for the counts ofresponses rather than the responses themselves, or waiting for numbers offriend requests to appear rather than looking for meaningful connections.In other words, these numbers lead me to evaluate my participation withinthe system from a metricated viewpoint.What's going on here is that these quantifications of social connectionplay right into my (capitalism-inspired) innate desire for more. Thisisn't surprising as we're living in a time when our collective obsessionwith metrics plays out as an insatiable desire to make every number gohigher. How much money did I earn? How many choices do I have? Perhapsthe most destructive example of this is the recent financial crisis, when aconstant desire for more led the global economy into financial ruin.Bringing this back to Facebook, I find myself asking questions about how itaffects user behavior. Would we add as many friends if we weren'tconstantly presented with a running total and told that adding another is"+1"? Would we write as many status messages if Facebook didn't reduce itsresponses (and their authors) to an aggregate value? In other words, thesite's relentless focus on quantity leads me to continually measure thevalue of my social connections within metric terms.In response, Facebook Demetricator invites the site's users to try thesystem without these things, to see how their experience is changed bytheir absence, to enable a network society that isn't dependent onquantification. Who are my friends? How do they think? What have theysaid?Along the way Demetricator explores how the designs of software prescribecertain behaviors, and questions the motivations behind those designs.What purpose does this enumeration serve for a system (and a corporation)that depends on its user's continued free labor to produce the informationthat fills its databases? Where does it lead when quantity, not quality isforemost?MF: Can you tell us now what Facebook Demetricator essentially does andhow?BG: Most simply, Facebook Demetricator changes how Facebook looks to itsusers by hiding all the metrics within the interface. For example, if thetext under someone's photo says 'You and 4 other people like this'Demetricator will change it to 'You and other people like this'. Under anad, '23,413 people like this' becomes 'people like this'. '8 mutualfriends' becomes 'mutual friends'. The user can still click on a link andcount up their mutual friends if they care about reducing them to a singlecount, but under the influence of Demetricator that foregroundedquantification is no longer visible. These removals happen everywhere: onthe news feed, the profile, the events page, within pop-ups, etc. Userscan toggle the demetrication, turning it on or off when desired. Itsdefault state is on (numbers hidden).To make this possible, Demetricator is software that runs within the webbrowser, constantly watching Facebook when it's loaded and removing themetrics wherever they occur. This is true not only of those counts thatshow up on the user's first visit, but also of anything that getsdynamically inserted into the interface over time. The demetrication isnot a brute-force removal of all numbers within the site, but is instead atargeted operation that focuses on only those places where Facebook haschosen to reveal a count from their database. Thus, numbers a user writesinto their status, their times for an event, etc. are not removed.The software is written in Javascript and makes extensive use of the jQuerylibrary to efficiently search the site's HTML for each metric's occurence.Sometimes these metrics are tagged and hidden, other times their containingHTML is cloned and modified for more complicated operations.MF: Is there any kind of difference that you see as significant betweenwhat is and what is not enumerated in Facebook?BG: I suspect that Facebook enumerates everything. If it resides withintheir databases then the counts are easily obtained. However not all ofthese counts are shown to the user. So the question then becomes whichmetrics does Facebook reveal to its users and which does it keep to itself?What is the difference between them? Further, what drives those decisions?I would suggest that the primary question asked by Facebook's designerswhen deciding which metrics to reveal is whether a particular count willincrease or decrease user participation. Am I more likely to click on a'trending article' if I only see its title or if that title is accompaniedby a message indicating that 131,394 other people read it before me? Ifthe latter then the metric is revealed.So what isn't shown? Well, I'm not told how many things I like per hour,or how many ads I click per day, or how effective the 'People You May Know'box is in getting me to add more friends to my network. These types ofanalytics are certainly a significant element within the system, guidingpersonalization algorithms, informing ad selection choices, etc. But wouldshowing these types of metrics to the user make them more or less likely toparticipate? If the answer is less then the metric is hidden.Despite my argument above, I would also speculate that some of thesedecisions are not as well considered as we might expect. That therelational database structure underlying Facebook simply lends itself tometrication. In other words, the counts are already there, so why not addthem to the interface? This has an added benefit of giving that data adegree of authority, just as a parenthetical reference within a text cando. Adding a metric to a line in Facebook implies that the data goesdeeper, that there's more to know than what you see.MF: Facebook Demetricator seems to offer almost the opposite service tothose of agencies such as EdgeRank Checker that aim to enable Facebookusers to measure and plan their activities on the site via analysis ofavailable data in terms of timing, content kind, pacing and so on. Whereasthere is no doubt some strategic self-delusion in any such analyticalapproach, what do you think about the more overtly manipulative approachesto the engineering of presence on Facebook?BG: I think the approaches you're referring to play right into the systemas it was designed.Whenever you create an algorithm that manages the presentation ofinformation within a large networked system (such as Facebook's EdgeRankformula), you'll always have users who try to engineer a methodology thatpreferences their own content. We've seen this with Google for years,where it's a constant back-and-forth battle between them and the black hatSEO crowd.However, while I haven't researched this, I suspect that systems likeEdgeRank Checker are silently cheered on by Facebook. EdgeRank analytics,especially with its preference for new over old, encourages a constantstream of updates from everyone hoping to appear in the news feed. Thisplays right into Facebook's news feed design, which analogizes anever-ending conversation. The algorithm thus produces the desiredbehavior in its users.There's also the ways that Facebook facilitates networked presence (e.g.real-time ticker updates), the ways it mimics said presence (such as thedelayed and staggered presentation of 'new' feed items after you've loggedin), and the engineered presence of Facebook itself (how it watches youractions, adapts to your interests, etc.). Each of these relies heavily onmetrics. You're made aware of other's actions primarily through a metricincrease, whether it's a comment count on a status, or an increase inlikes. As a whole these counts are ever shifting, visibly undulatingthroughout the interface, presenting a subtle but tangible reminder of theconstant change within.MF: Within this line of enquiry, there are other sets of metricsoperating within Facebook, such as those filters looking for spam accounts- those with 'many' friends but not much profile for instance, or who sendthe same message out several times within a day. Despite these filters,spam accounts are operative. What kinds of signals to identify these asopposed to ?real? contacts should you look for when using the FBDemtricator?BG: I love this question. You're asking how can we know if someone onFacebook is real or spam without the metrics to guide us. For example, ifwe can't see our mutual friend count when viewing someone else's profile,how can we be sure we're really friends?I'd suggest the first line of defense here is to ask yourself if you knowthe person. Have you ever run into them? Does their name even ring abell? If you can't remember them well enough to answer those questions,then they might not be your 'friend'!If you're still not sure, you could message the person, asking them fordetails on where you've met (online or off) and following up asappropriate. Or you could look at the substance of their activity withinthe site to see if it looks to be that of a real person or the actions of aspam account.But what does it say when metrics become our guide to evaluating thelikelihood of someone being part of our circle, rather than relying on ourrecollections of that person outside the system? When did we start needingquanitifications to help us choose whether to friend someone or not? Howmany friends have we added to our network simply because the numberssuggested it?MF: Facebook is notoriously aggressive in attacking artists who work withits kind of 'public' space. How do you see your project, as somethingthat works in-browser, possibly working around this problem?BG: I've specifically built the software with this history of Facebook inmind. By running in a layer on top of the site, all manipulations happenafter Facebook has delivered their data to the user. In this way, becauseDemetricator manipulates the presentation of Facebook's dataafter-the-fact, it is harder for them to thwart it programmatically.That said, they can break it. Their best option would be to startrestructuring their code, changing CSS class names, HTML tags, etc. Inanticipation of this I have released the Demetricator as open source, withthe hopes that others will help adapt the code to both Facebook's regularchanges as well as any restructurings specifically aimed at breaking theproject.MF: It's often been noted that when users first join Facebook there iscommonly this initial splurge period of rapidly adding contacts, andcontacts of contacts, a behaviour that subsequently settles at a relativelylow pace. There may be more or less discrimination used in this phase andthere is often the expression of surprise at how many people users know inso many different ways are there, ready to be friended in the same set ofuniform manners. How do you think the FB Demetricator, if it was used fromthe outset would effect this exploratory or surprising kind of initial useperiod?BG: I think the Demetricator would significantly lessen the initialsplurge you describe.To explain, let me start by talking about what happens when we enter a newphysical space full of other people. We look around, see who we know,engage with someone familiar, perhaps striking up a conversation. The roommay contain people we don't know well or even people we don't care for, sothis engagement tends to target those we do know and/or get along witheasily. Along the way we may meet new people, and if we're lucky we mightcreate the potential for a new friend.So what's different about the virtual space of Facebook? One is that thepotential pool of people we might know is much larger than any physicalgathering because of its ageographical and asynchronous nature. These twoconditions create the possibility for wide engagement and a quicklyexpanding virtual network that can't be matched in physical space. This isone reason for the initial surge you describe---there's so many optionsthat one can't help but be amazed by them.But there are also two specific interface design decisions that make thisplay out much faster and wider than it would otherwise.First is the architecture of the news feed. Without any friends in one'snetwork, the news feed is inactive. Dead. Boring. When you add one newfriend, the feed comes to life---but only at a trickle. Add another andits output doubles. From there, the more friends you add the more activethe feed becomes. In other words, this feed, which is the primaryspectacle of Facebook, is only usable and/or useful with a significantfriend network driving it.Second is the relentless presence of revealed metrics. Imagine what thephysical gathering I describe above would be like if every participant worea badge proclaiming how many friends they had in that room? Would anyonebe content to keep that number at zero? At one, two, or three? Or wouldthey be driven to walk around the space, meeting new people and identifyingold acquaintances all so they can increase their public friend count?In other words, this publically viewable friend metric plays right intowhat I described earlier as our capitalism-inspired desire for more. Whenyou're constantly being told how many friends you have, you're encouragedto add another, to make that number go higher, to exceed in metric terms.More is better, less is inferior.By removing this metric, Demetricator will blunt the initial surge offriend acquisition. The absence of metricated social valuation will allowother indicators of friendship to emerge, such as closeness andlikeability. Because of the architecture of the news feed, it won't slowit down entirely, but it should change the character of what is now often afrenzied activity.MF: Certain data on Facebook attracts a visible timestamp. How do you seethe differentiation between what the user sees as timestamped and what not,and what effect do you envisage the use of the Demetricator having on thekinds of data that is currently marked in this way?BG: These timestamps, in and of themselves, wouldn't qualify as metrics atall if it weren't for their hyperspecific and time-relative nature. But byrelentlessly reminding us of how old something is they create a false senseof urgency. I really don't need to know that my friend's meme post wentlive 23 seconds ago rather than 49 seconds ago, or that my colleague ateher banana 23 minutes ago rather than 30 minutes ago. But these constantenumerations of age present the news feed as a running conversation thatyou can't miss---that if you leave for even a second that somethingimportant might pass you by.Given that Facebook's value is directly tied into how much we allparticipate, this urgency helps fuel our continuous engagement with thesystem in the forms of posting, reading, liking, etc. It also plays asupporting role in the engineered presence we discussed earlier, as even ifnothing you see gets new likes while you're watching, its age is alwayschanging, reminding us that things are going on, that someone is keepingtrack of things.At the same time, many items in the interface lack one of thesetimestamps. I suspect the choice of where to place one lies with itsexpected affect on user engagement. If I saw that a trending article isold would I read it? If I knew an ad had been showing for weeks would Iclick it? Would I feel better if I knew my friend request had been ignoredfor months? These types of items are likely more effective when their ageremains incognito, informing Facebook's internal analytics without showingthemselves to us.The Demetricator acts on the visible timestamps by taking them out of theequation. It converts them into one of two options: 'recently', or 'awhile ago'. I expect that doing so will nullify the urgency that constantaging creates, and that it will propose a calmer reading of the news feedless dependent on unbroken attention. If everything within a day is'recent' (which, frankly, it is), then the user is less likely to worrythat they'll miss something. Interaction thus becomes less focused on thepresent value of the content and more focused on the content itself.----

http://spacecollective.org/renatalemosmorais/7980/bruce-sterling-answers-my-questions-about-atemporality-and-social-networksdear bruce [sterling],The reason for this interview is that during Early Atemporality - theposthistorical or ahistorical period you suggest we are living in -'we are struggling with what it means and how it?s different frompost-modernism'. Since you are one of the main proponents of thisconcept, your help in clarifying what it means is greatly appreciated.I suspect that previous versions of your ideas about atemporalitymight have been lurking in many of your works as a novelist, a topexample being The Difference Engine. This novel hints on atemporalfeatures of cultural evolution. William Gibson has said that 'oneof the impulses that led to The Difference Engine was a sense BruceSterling and I had of the Industrial Revolution having been a fardeeper and more intense shift than we ordinarily, culturally, give itcredit for having been'.renata - Was atemporality already present at the time of theIndustrial Revolution as a cultural phenomenon? If so, how does itdiffer from the atemporality which is based on contemporary networkculture?bruces - *I wouldn't say that the Industrial Revolution had"atemporality." The Industrial Revolution was extremely keen onsynchronization, on accurate railroad schedules, on time-zones fortelegraphy. A conceptual disruption in timekeeping such as Einstein'srelativity was decades ahead of them.*There were certainly episodes in the Industrial Revolution whenpeople were agitated about time and space - for instance, anxietyabout the disorienting speed of rail travel. However, they hadfirm ideas about historical development, especially compared tous. A network of the kinds we have today doesn't behave with thecomprehensive mechanical timing of a railroad. We have to face newatemporal anxieties, such as the spasms and crashes of microsecondstock-trading, where it's literally impossible to determine whatelectronic event had strict temporal priority.renata - Your ideas on atemporality have ignited interestingcommentaries, such as Kazys Varnelis's:If any observation about history defines our time, it's sciencefiction novelist Bruce Sterling's conclusion that network cultureproduces a form of historical consciousness marked by atemporality. Bythis, Sterling means that having obtained near-total instant access toinformation, our desire and ability to situate ourselves within anykind of broader historical structure have dissipated. The temporalcompression caused by globalization and networking technologies,together with an accelerating capitalism, has intensified theahistorical qualities of modernism and postmodernism, producing theatemporality of network culture - Kazys VarnelisIs your understanding of atemporality conditioned to the 'temporalcompression caused by globalization and networking technologies', asVarnellis suggested?bruces - *The time compression is certainly part of the issue, butthere are also time extensions in network culture. For instance,what is the difference between "the year 1955" and "the year 1955as revealed to me by a Google Search"? Analog remnants of 1955 tendto be marred by entropy, but digitized clips of 1955 will load withsame briskness and efficiency of digital clips from 1965, 1975, 1985and so forth. In this situation, our relationship to history feelsextended rather than compressed, because data from the past feels justas accessible as data generated yesterday. If you are re-using thismaterial to create contemporary cultural artifacts, you don't justget "compression," you also get a skeuomorphism, a temporal creole ?a Brazilian anthropophagy when all the decades are in one softwarestew-pot.renata - Is atemporality simply "a form of historical consciousness"produced by network culture?bruces - *I wouldn't call that process "simple." Also, the networkculture we have now is temporary. With that said, it would be veryhard to be or feel atemporal with only analog technology.*The network is required, although the network is not "consciousness,"it's a variegated set of devices and services embedded in culture andtransforming culture.*By talking about "atemporality," I'm arguing that the ways thatcultures form historical consciousness are bound up in the ways thatcultures access information ? the ways we reason and argue abouthistory and futurity. When one uses grand terms such as "history" and"consciousness," that suggests that people can touch absolute timelessrealities outside the ways that human beings test and discuss historyand consciousness. We might indeed have numinous, wordless encouterswith reality, but we can't make them part of our culture unless weconvey them to one another, and those methods of conveyance have beenscrambled radically. We are still naive about some of those effects.*So, what's reality? I'm inclined to say that "history" would existif Homo sapiens had never existed, and that there are potential formsof "consciousness" that aren't human. But, whatever those real thingsmay be, we human beings never fully conquered metaphysics with ink onpaper. Now we're losing ink on paper. So, why do we still pretend thatour expressions about these things are stable, or timeless? They'reno more stable than the artifacts by which we learn about them andpromulgate them.*Ancient Egyptians had a "historical consciousness," but there werecenturies when their hieroglyph writings were in full view, and noone had the least idea what they were saying. So Egyptian historicalconsciousness is not permanent, it's a very historically-contingentthing; sometimes it's there, and far more often it isn't.renata - Atemporality as 'a problem in the philosophy of history?,according to your definition, is a subjective experience dependenton technologically-mediated grounds of perception - or - is it anobjective, all-encompassing dimension which has real existenceoutside perception? In any case, how do you see time in relation totechnology; more specifically time in relation to social technologies?bruces - *I love that question. "Is reality really atemporal?" Beinga science fiction writer, I always like to collect suggestions thatspace-time is not as we expect.*I wouldn't be so arrogant as to say that we human beings graspthe "objective, all-encompassing dimension that has real existenceoutside perception." Just for one instance: if matter and energyas we experience it is just four percent of a universe that isninety-six percent Dark Matter and Dark Energy (as modern cosmologysuggests), does it really behoove us to swan around making a lot ofabsolutist declarations about our subjective experiences? Maybe aproper metaphysical modesty is in order here.*With that said, I think that the Second Law of Thermodynamics is asfirm a "law" as mankind is going to encounter. The passage of time isnot a suggestion; time really passes, the days of your mortal lifetimedo not return once they pass. If the passage of time was somehowarbitrary, then one would expect to see measurable effects on everydayphysics, such as eggs unscrambling themselves, flowing water runninguphill, and so forth. I frankly don't expect to ever witness even oneof those. Atemporality is about our human, cultural apprehensions andexpectations of time; it doesn't refute the laws of cause and effect.renata - Is the atemporal the realm of extreme multi-temporality orrethe alm of extreme connection via social media?bruces - *They're by no means "extreme" compared to what's coming. Wejust valorie them because they are part of our own unique experiencenowadays. One tires of this corny new-media rhetoric when thingsare always named "extreme, mega, hyper, ultra." Of course they areextreme, but not for long.renata - You also say that network culture 'really changes thenarrative, and the organized presentations of history in a way thathistory cannot recover from [...] it means the end of post-modernism'.How is it different from, or how does it relate to, Jean-Fran?oisLyotard's The Postmodern Condition?bruces - *Well, try to imagine a world where "atemporality" comesfirst, and then Lyotard writes "The Postmodern Condition." Culturewouldn't work that way, it's not possible.renata - You have written extensively on the New Aesthetics. Arethere any atemporal attributes embedded into this movement? Is NA theaesthetics of atemporality?bruces - *Having seen many examples of the New Aesthetics, I feelconfident now that there is a worldview waiting *beyond* atemporality.I said that atemporality was a temporary cultural point of view thatwould last about a decade. I still don't quite know what comes next,but I feel confident that my judgement there is about right. In theyear 2022, "atemporality" will look-and-feel visibly old-fashioned."Network society" will also be transformed. Not that it is refuted, or"wrong" ? it's just that people will feel, "yes, life was indeed likethat for a while, but then something else important happened, and nowthings look and feel quite different in some specific, identifiableway."renata - Is design an atemporal practice? Is there a specific kind ofdesign practice which is conducive to atemporality?bruces - *Yes, I'd say that the Modernist search for timeless designsolutions is sojourn opposed to temporality. So is the culturalconservatism of Arts and Crafts design. Atemporal design is markedby contemporary practices like mash-ups, collective intelligence,peer-to-peer production, re-usable software components, "favela chic"? I could go on, and I suppose that I will have to.brucesp.s. dear bruces, please do go on. best, renata

*****************Exhibition openingHousework, Gender and Subjectivity: Cultures of Domesticity**Monday, October 29th, 2012 through November*(See Reynolds Gallery website for map, dates, details)*Opening reception*, 6:30pm in the Gallery, (on going after the panelfrom 8 - 9pm)*Curators and artists panel,* 7 - 8pm, Art History Lecture Hall adjacent tothe gallery*Where: *The Reynolds GalleryUniversity of the Pacific,Stockton, California<http://www.pacific.edu/Academics/Schools-and-Colleges/College-of-the-Pacific/Academics/Departments-and-Programs/Visual-Arts/About/Reynolds-Gallery.html>***About the Exhibition:Housework, Gender and Subjectivity: Cultures of Domesticity* is anexhibition inspired by the work of feminist media artists working withissues of spectatorship, self, and identity. The exhibit, curated byindependent scholar/artist/curator, *Molly Hankwitz,* focuses upondomestic space as site for the investigation of multiple aspects ofgendered subjectivity, from the experience of real women and theirperformance as spectacularized subjects to notions of women's placeand our response to patriarchal, psychological and social oppression.Across cultures, the role of the wife, the daughter, and duties ofdomestic labor within the household from cleaning to cooking tochildcare and sex are frequently expected from women. In dominantwestern media, especially commercial advertising working to maintain astatus quo, the stereotype of the perfect "housewife", her duties andcommitment to products remains a powerful ideology despite progress infeminism to speak alternatives. This stereotype has been the object ofsignificant comment and critique for women artists in the history ofart.*Housework, Gender and Subjectivity: Cultures of Domesticity *bringstogether a group of contemporary feminist artists who dig into thegendered emotional, experiential and psychosocial domestic realmsattached to 'house' and idealized versions of womanhood. The artistsexamine domestic labor and women's place within it. Guest curatorand published feminist, Molly Hankwitz brings together borders andboundaries of domestic space where stereotypes and the spectacle ofdomestic labor can be revisited as an art historical idea.*Installation, video and new media on view* * Maria Ezcurra's*art is both humorous and sharply critical of domestic work, theuniversalization of housewife imagery vis a vis global media,andthe oppression of Latin American women. *Perfect Housewife'sWardrobe*(2008)is a series of large photographs in which the artistenacts scenes from the patriarchal home. In *Liminal Beings** *(2011)partly embodied household technologies are petite collage works madefrom magazine and mailer images collected by the artist.*Annetta Kapon's* art looks at womens'labor in the form of anon-traditional installation,* Cornucopia* (2010) made from baguettes,womens' clothing, and a plastic laundry basket which literally spillsforth from the corner of the gallery in an act of nurture and giving.The work suggests a delicately controlled, even silent, at home andalone, notion of women's labor which speaks to the private realm ofthe household.*Heidi Kumao's* Cinematic Machines, *Holding Pattern *(1999) and *Kept*(1993) are glimpses of cinema and memory. Comprised of zoetropes,projectors, screens, a child's chair, and small coffee table, thesepieces explore repetition and scale, use cinematic conventions andordinary furniture to express the psychoanalytic dimensions of gender.*Annie Abrahams' *new media work,* Domestic Dancing* (2007), designedfor the computer screen in html and with sound files, contrastsartistic pleasure with conventional domestic work to suggesttransformation in historic time for women artists.*A selection of videos* which use household objects, food, householdmaterials, domestic sounds and elements of cinema to explore genderand domestic space will loop.*Featuring:**Perry Bard *- videos*The Kitchen Tapes*, 2011, 3:55, color*Secure Dining*, 2011, 4:42, color*Evelin Stermitz* - video*Hitchcock Dishing*, 2008,1:17, color*Yin Ju Chen*- video*Recycle System 1*, 2002, 2 min, color*Annetta Kapon* - video*Photography Lesson*, 1990, 7:00, color*Curator's and artists' panel, 7 - 8pm* in the Art History Lecture Halladjacent to the gallery. Exhibition curator Molly Hankwitz leads a paneldiscussion on work in the exhibit with housework and domestic space astopic in art, domestic materials and domesticating ideas in women's artpractices. Panel presented with artists Annetta Kapon and Heidi Kumao inperson!*Participating artists' websites and additional links:**Annie Abrahams*http://www.bram.org/*Perry Bard*http://www.perrybard.net/*Yin-Ju Chen*http://www.yinjuchen.com/*Maria Ezcurra*http://www.mariaezcurra.com/*Annetta Kapon*http://www.annettakapon.com/*Heidi Kumao*http://heidikumao.net/*Evelin Stermitz*http://evelinstermitz.nethttp://artfem.tv*Molly Hankwitz* and *Annetta Kapon* liveThe Womens' Magazine <http://pcrcollective.org/?page_id=154>Mutiny Radio <http://pcrcollective.org>,Friday, October 19th, 1:30pm*Images: *Cornucopia detail, KaponHolding Pattern, KumaoDomestic Mythologies, EzcurraStill from Photography Lesson, KaponFor 300 dpi images for print, or full image credit details, pleasecontact:mollyhankwitz-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org<https://fulvetta.riseup.net/sm/src/compose.php?send_to=mollyhankwitz%40gmail.com>*Many thanks to Reynolds Gallery, Reynolds Galleryboard, Gender Studies, Film Studies, and Art History Departments of theUniversity of the Pacific for their support.*

Alexis C. MadrigalDark Social: We Have the Whole History of the Web WrongThe Atlantic, 12 Oct 2012http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/dark-social-we-have-the-whole-history-of-the-web-wrong/263523/Here's a pocket history of the web, according to many people. In the early days, the web was just pages of information linked to each other. Then along came web crawlers that helped you find what you wanted among all that information. Some time around 2003 or maybe 2004, the social web really kicked into gear, and thereafter the web's users began to connect with each other more and more often. Hence Web 2.0, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I'm not strawmanning here. This is the dominant history of the web as seen, for example, in this Wikipedia entry on the 'Social Web.' But it's never felt quite right to me. For one, I spent most of the 90s as a teenager in rural Washington and my web was highly, highly social. We had instant messenger and chat rooms and ICQ and USENET forums and email. My whole Internet life involved sharing links with local and Internet friends. How was I supposed to believe that somehow Friendster and Facebook created a social web out of what was previously a lonely journey in cyberspace when I knew that this has not been my experience? True, my web social life used tools that ran parallel to, not on, the web, but it existed nonetheless. To be honest, this was a very difficult thing to measure. One dirty secret of web analytics is that the information we get is limited. If you want to see how someone came to your site, it's usually pretty easy. When you follow a link from Facebook to The Atlantic, a little piece of metadata hitches a ride that tells our servers, "Yo, I'm here from Facebook.com." We can then aggregate those numbers and say, "Whoa, a million people came here from Facebook last month," or whatever. There are circumstances, however, when there is no referrer data. You show up at our doorstep and we have no idea how you got here. The main situations in which this happens are email programs, instant messages, some mobile applications*, and whenever someone is moving from a secure site ("https://mail.google.com/blahblahblah") to a non-secure site (http://www.theatlantic.com). This means that this vast trove of social traffic is essentially invisible to most analytics programs. I call it DARK SOCIAL. It shows up variously in programs as "direct" or "typed/bookmarked" traffic, which implies to many site owners that you actually have a bookmark or typed in www.theatlantic.com into your browser. But that's not actually what's happening a lot of the time. Most of the time, someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you. Nonetheless, the idea that "social networks" and "social media" sites created a social web is pervasive. Everyone behaves as if the traffic your stories receive from the social networks (Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, StumbleUpon) is the same as all of your social traffic. I began to wonder if I was wrong. Or at least that what I had experienced was a niche phenomenon and most people's web time was not filled with Gchatted and emailed links. I began to think that perhaps Facebook and Twitter has dramatically expanded the volume of -- at the very least -- linksharing that takes place. Everyone else had data to back them up. I had my experience as a teenage nerd in the 1990s. I was not about to shake social media marketing firms with my tales of ICQ friends and the analogy of dark social to dark energy. ("You can't see it, dude, but it's what keeps the universe expanding. No dark social, no Internet universe, man! Just a big crunch.")And then one day, we had a meeting with the real-time web analytics firm, Chartbeat. Like many media nerds, I love Chartbeat. It lets you know exactly what's happening with your stories, most especially where your readers are coming from. Recently, they made an accounting change that they showed to us. They took visitors who showed up without referrer data and split them into two categories. The first was people who were going to a homepage (theatlantic.com) or a subject landing page (theatlantic.com/politics). The second were people going to any other page, that is to say, all of our articles. These people, they figured, were following some sort of link because no one actually types "http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/atlast-the-gargantuan-telescope-designed-to-find-li fe-on-other-planets/263409/." They started counting these people as what they call direct social. The second I saw this measure, my heart actually leapt (yes, I am that much of a data nerd). This was it! They'd found a way to quantify dark social, even if they'd given it a lamer name! On the first day I saw it, this is how big of an impact dark social was having on The Atlantic. Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They're about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that's delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It's more than 2.5x Facebook's impact on the site. Day after day, this continues to be true, though the individual numbers vary a lot, say, during a Reddit spike or if one of our stories gets sent out on a very big email list or what have you. Day after day, though, dark social is nearly always our top referral source. Perhaps, though, it was only The Atlantic for whatever reason. We do really well in the social world, so maybe we were outliers. So, I went back to Chartbeat and asked them to run aggregate numbers across their media sites. Get this. Dark social is even more important across this broader set of sites. Almost 69 percent of social referrals were dark! Facebook came in second at 20 percent. Twitter was down at 6 percent. All in all, direct/dark social was 17.5 percent of total referrals; only search at 21.5 percent drove more visitors to this basket of sites. (FWIW, at The Atlantic, social referrers far outstrip search. I'd guess the same is true at all the more magaziney sites.)There are a couple of really interesting ramifications of this data. First, on the operational side, if you think optimizing your Facebook page and Tweets is "optimizing for social," you're only halfway (or maybe 30 percent) correct. The only real way to optimize for social spread is in the nature of the content itself. There's no way to game email or people's instant messages. There's no power users you can contact. There's no algorithms to understand. This is pure social, uncut.Second, the social sites that arrived in the 2000s did not create the social web, but they did structure it. This is really, really significant. In large part, they made sharing on the Internet an act of publishing (!), with all the attendant changes that come with that switch. Publishing social interactions makes them more visible, searchable, and adds a lot of metadata to your simple link or photo post. There are some great things about this, but social networks also give a novel, permanent identity to your online persona. Your taste can be monetized, by you or (much more likely) the service itself. Third, I think there are some philosophical changes that we should consider in light of this new data. While it's true that sharing came to the web's technical infrastructure in the 2000s, the behaviors that we're now all familiar with on the large social networks was present long before they existed, and persists despite Facebook's eight years on the web. The history of the web, as we generally conceive it, needs to consider technologies that were outside the technical envelope of "webness." People layered communication technologies easily and built functioning social networks with most of the capabilities of the web 2.0 sites in semi-private and without the structure of the current sites. If what I'm saying is true, then the tradeoffs we make on social networks is not the one that we're told we're making. We're not giving our personal data in exchange for the ability to share links with friends. Massive numbers of people -- a larger set than exists on any social network -- already do that outside the social networks. Rather, we're exchanging our personal data in exchange for the ability to publish and archive a record of our sharing. That may be a transaction you want to make, but it might not be the one you've been told you made. * Chartbeat datawiz Josh Schwartz said it was unlikely that the mobile referral data was throwing off our numbers here. "Only about four percent of total traffic is on mobile at all, so, at least as a percentage of total referrals, app referrals must be a tiny percentage," Schwartz wrote to me in an email. "To put some more context there, only 0.3 percent of total traffic has the Facebook mobile site as a referrer and less than 0.1 percent has the Facebook mobile app."------------------Dr. Inke ArnsArtistic DirectorHartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) at the Dortmunder ULeonie-Reygers-Terrasse, 44137 Dortmund Office: Hoher Wall 15, 44137 Dortmund, GermanyT + 49 - 231 - 496642-0 (direct line -11)F + 49 - 231 - 496642-29M + 49 - 176 - 430 627 93inke.arns-S+dZmHGU1xU< at >public.gmane.orgwww.hmkv.dewww.inkearns.deCurrently on view:SOUNDS LIKE SILENCEJohn Cage / 4'33'' / Silence today1912 / 1952 / 2012HMKV at the Dortmunder U, Aug 25, 2012 - Jan 6, 2013

World<http://torrentfreak.com/worlds-first-flying-file-sharing-drones-in-action-120320/> 's First Flying File-Sharing Drones in Actionhttp://torrentfreak.com/worlds-first-flying-file-sharing-drones-in-action-120320/A few days ago The Pirate Bay announced that in future parts of its sitecould be hosted on GPS controlled drones. To many this may have sounded likea joke, but in fact these pirate drones already exist. Project "ElectronicCountermeasures" has built a swarm of five fully operational drones whichprove that an "aerial Napster" or an "airborne Pirate Bay" is not asfuturistic as it sounds. picture of a drone <http://torrentfreak.com/images/sharing-drone1.jpg> Inan ever-continuing effort to thwart censorship, The Pirate Bay plans to turnflying drones into mobile hosting locations<http://torrentfreak.com/the-pirate-bays-attacks-censorship-with-server-drones-120318/> ."Everyone knows WHAT TPB is. Now they're going to have to think about WHERETPB is," The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak last Sunday, announcing theirdrone project.Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow <http://www.tomorrowsthoughtstoday.com/>'s Thoughts Today, was amazed to read the announcement, not so much becauseof the technology, because his group has already built a swarm offile-sharing drones. "I thought hold on, we are already doing that," Young told TorrentFreak. Their starting point for project "Electronic Countermeasures" was to createsomething akin to an 'aerial Napster' or 'airborne Pirate Bay', but itbecame much more than that."Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm, we have rebuilt andprogrammed the drones to broadcast their own local Wi-Fi network as a formof aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their piratenetwork, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere,"says the group describing their creation. File-Sharing Drone in Action (photo by Claus Langer<http://www.clauslanger.de/> ) picture of a sharing drone<http://torrentfreak.com/images/sharing-drone.jpg> In short the system allows the public to share data with the help of flyingdrones. Much like the Pirate Box<http://torrentfreak.com/piratebox-takes-file-sharing-off-the-radar-and-offline-for-next-to-nothing-120311/> , but one that flies autonomously over thecity."The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as thedrones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The swarmbecomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-bycan interact with," the creators explain. One major difference compared to more traditional file-sharing hubs is thatit requires a hefty investment. Each of the drones costs 1500 euros tobuild. Not a big surprise, considering the hardware that's needed to keepthese pirate hubs in the air."Each one is powered by 2x 2200mAh LiPo batteries. The lift is provided by4x Roxxy Brushless Motors that run off a GPS flight control board. Also ondeck are altitude sensors and gyros that keep the flight stable. They alltalk to a master control system through XBee wireless modules," Young toldTorrentFreak."These all sit on a 10mm x 10mm aluminum frame and are wrapped in a vacuumformed aerodynamic cowling. The network is broadcast using various differenthardware setups ranging from Linux gumstick modules, wireless routers andUSB sticks for file storage."For Young and his crew this is just the beginning. With proper financialsupport they hope to build more drones and increase the range they cancover. "We are planning on scaling up the system by increasing broadcast range andbuilding more drones for the flock. We are also building in other systemslike autonomous battery change bases. We are looking for funding and backersto assist us in scaling up the system," he told us.Those who see the drones in action (video below) will notice that they'renot just practical. The creative and artistic background of the group shinesthrough, with the choreography performed by the drones perhaps even morestunning than the sharing component."When the audience interacts with the drones they glow with vibrant colors,they break formation, they are called over and their flight pattern becomesmore dramatic and expressive," the group explains. Besides the artistic value, the drones can also have other use cases thanbeing a "pirate hub." For example, they can serve as peer-to-peercommunications support for protesters and activists in regions whereInternet access is censored.Either way, whether it's Hollywood or a dictator, there will always begroups that have a reason to shoot the machines down. But let's be honest,who would dare to destroy such a beautiful piece of art?

http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/263141-international-monitors-at-polling-places-draw-criticism-from-voter-fraud-groupElection Monitors Coming to U.S.The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), a UnitedNations partner on democratization and human rights projects, will deploy 44observers around the U. S. on Election Day looking for voter suppressionactivities by conservative groups. "Through our contacts at state and countylevel in certain states, we managed to secure invitations at local level andwe have taken up the offer to observe. Where this is not possible, we willrespect the state regulation on this matter and will not observe inprecincts on Election Day," said Giovanna Maiola, OCSE spokesperson.

The struggle for the defense of the Internet and free culture grows stronger year after year, inseparable from the struggle to consolidate the paradigm change that goes hand in hand with the digital era.2012 has seen civil society win great victories over the barbarians:Social pressure has led to the rejection of the fearsome ACTA, SOPA, and PIPA laws; the UN has recognised freedom of expression on the Internet as a basic right; the EU has declared that filtering links is illegal; the Swiss government has legalised filesharing; the German Constitutional Court has prioritised the right to freedom of expression and information over the interests of cultural lobbies; the Hargreaves Report recommends a fair reform of copyright in the UK; Pablo Soto has been absolved; a European ruling declared that bars, gyms, hairdressers and similar businesses do not have to pay royalties to collection societies; anti-downloading legislation is failing; IP addresses are not accepted as evidence to persecute users in the US?Nevertheless, we must not let our guard down. New dangers are always lying in wait for sharing and for the Internet as we know it. As Cory Doctorow, rightly says, ?the copyright wars are just the beta version of a long coming war on computation.? Copyright lobbies and those in power are always imagining ways to gain ever-tighter control over the way we use computers. Attacks posing as defense of copyright were only the beginning. Further battlefields will be deployed in an attempt to seize civil society?s potential to bring about the cultural and economic ? as well as political and social ? renewal that the Net is making possible.Even so, something has changed. The victories achieved are proof that civil society is prepared to defend itself.Placing restrictions on users and creators is synonymous with blocking the invention of new kinds of economies and sustainability. In the face of this, we continue to come up with new sustainable models adapted to the new conditions for creativity, given that the restructuring of the cultural industries neutralises one of the excuses that are used to try to castrate the Net.In the meantime, we are preparing to confront the new threats that are taking shape.The aggressive new laws that have invented the idea of ?cybercrime? blatantly manipulate legality in order to gain political control of the Net.For all of these reasons, civil society is determined to put an end to the repressive approach and the mutilation of the Net, replacing it with a Positive Digital Agenda that favours a democratic renewal that is in line with the times. An overhaul of the legislation that regulates the use of the Internet and the dissemination of information, culture and knowledge in the digital era.By protecting the Net, we protect a tool for democratic change, a new era.Increasingly transformative uses of the Net are emerging.Direct forms of control are spreading to better informed and more connected citizens, allowing them to monitor governments and corporations. Transparency, access to public data and freedom of information, which governments have always tried to hinder, are the prerequisites for any democracy worthy of the name, and are now gaining ground thanks to the efforts of self-organised citizens on the Net. As the spectrum of information that citizens can obtain from governments and companies grows, so does our knowledge and level of control.In 2011, the Net allowed for the emergence of massive movements that seek to totally transform the political and social framework. In 2012, it is enabling them to adapt to the new tactical needs of the current context.With all of this in mind, the 2012 FCForum will explore the following subjects, and extract conclusions and useful tools for action from each of them:Working Areas 20121. SUSTAINABLE MODELS FOR CREATIVITYAuthors? rights are being used as an excuse to curtail Internet freedoms. Even though it has been proven that cultural industries and their business models do not in fact defend the interests of authors, but rather those of multinationals and middlemen, while authors can actually defend their own interests on the Internet; in spite of ample evidence that it will not only be inevitable but also beneficial to restructure the industry based on the new models of creation and dissemination of culture that the Internet makes possible; in spite of all of this, some artists still believe in the propaganda of cultural industry lobbies, and are being used by them to keep their outdated and obsolete businesses afloat.This would only be an internal problem for the culture industry, except that it ends up affecting the whole of society because these lobbies are pushing legislation that mutilates the Internet.This is why it is so important to have an RPCUDAY: Rehabilitation Plan for Creators who haven?t Understood the Digital Age Yet (a project included in the European Community?s Culture Programme).Every year, after publishing its influential report on Sustainable Models for Creativity in 2010, the FCForum sets some time aside to help fast track the restructuring of the cultural sector. Not just for the good of the sector, but also to neutralise the excuses for attacking the Internet and the free flow of culture and knowledge.This year, we will systematise the models that have emerged from the restructuring of the journalism sector, teaching (specifically music teaching), digital fabrication based on 3D copies and intermediary platforms for online music creation and distribution.But above all, we will propose two models that are fully structured in practical and legal terms: to revolutionise for-profit sharing mechanisms on one hand, and crowdfunding on the other.? Crowdfunding: a model for empowerment in the current context or poverty management?Crowdfunding, a financing system that dates back thousands of years, has experienced a remarkable boom on and thanks to the Internet. Even so, we think that it hasn?t really evolved beyond a marketing and pre- sales tool yet, because it has not been able to become a communal shareholding system within the capitalist economic system. We have also seen how institutions sometimes use it to shirk their responsibility to support culture.For these reasons, we studied the most highly developed platforms and came up with a legally viable proposal to promote a system of mixed public, private and group shareholding, one that favours sustainable culture in today?s context, in which everybody can participate and which is at the service of all.The proposal also includes the use of patronage laws and some existing European directives, given that it is not possible to imagine a viable creative sector that isn?t integrated into the European and global context.? The cost of sharingAlthough it is wasteful and anachronistic, Spain?s ?Sinde? anti-piracy law is too cumbersome and inefficient to be pernicious per se; what makes it dangerous is that it works at the level of the social imaginary to criminalize sharing itself, attacking the distribution systems of digital culture such as torrents and P2P networks. The discourses against ?downloads? and against sharing fail to make distinctions between platforms that are simply used as tools for sharing among peers and those that are genuinely new models of distribution for the creative sector ? highly efficient, innovative and reliable, very beneficial for creation. A sane society should promote both kinds, and support them for the good of the sector. Or could it be that governments are intent on protecting multinationals rather than authors? As it happens, society is defending authors, while governments serve the interests of powerful cultural sector lobbies.We, civil society and innovative entrepreneurs, believe that it is necessary to promote and defend sharing, and this includes profit sharing.This is why, now that some filesharing platforms are turning a profit, they are suggesting a change of the game rules, in which middlemen disappear and profits are shared with the creators of the content shared.Megaupload was working on the launch of Megabox: a music store that planned to offer 90% of profits to creators who shared their music on the site. The response came swiftly. The US Government called on no less than the FBI to close down Megaupload and requested the extradition of Kim DotCom. But the battle is not over and Kim DotCom has announced that the Megabox project is going ahead and will be released soon.Other projects are following similar paths. After fending off an accusation in which its founders faced a 6-year jail term, the platform Taringa! is lauching Taringa! M?sica,a platform that shares profits with the authors.The FCForum is contributing to this experience, by launching the Spanish section of the project and discovering how much it really costs to share cultural content in the digital age.A few facts:Monthly expenses for a website with 10 million users are high, easily exceeding $20,000 per month, which means it could come to around $250,000 per yearHost + Server = $10,000 per monthStaff = $10,000 per monthWebsite operation and developmentGraphic designTechnical supportAdministrationAdvertising sales and serviceAnd always a surplus for legal services and advice.If industries accepted fair competition, this would not be necessary.2. POSITIVE AGENDA FOR COPYRIGHT REFORM IN EUROPEAudiences are part of the creative process; their property cannot be taken from them.In 2012 the the European Parliament rejected ACTA after two years of civil society lobbying; two official reports confirmed the failure of the European intellectual property directive IPRED 2011/29; the Spanish government (the fox guarding the chicken coop) published a shameful report against Net Neutrality which it had commissioned from those interested in destroying it (this was precisely the opposite of the Netherlands, which already has legislation in place to protect Net Neutrality); royalties collection societies continue their failure to respect their members and users, while they are sued for fraudulent practices around the world (USA, Belgium, Colombia, Spain, Brasil?), meanwhile, the EU only asks for ?a little more transparency? in its proposed directive for these entities.Civil society, which is much more advanced than legislators in these (and other) subjects, is determined to put a stop to this corporate, repressive approach and to the mutilation of the Net through laws that regulate copyright and royalties, entrepreneurs and users of culture and knowledge. Instead, we want to replace it with a Positive Digital Agenda. A Positive Agenda that protects non-profit sharing among individuals once the work in question has been released, and also protects the interests of all the agents involved when financial profits are generated.In addition, we defend citizens? right to participate in the debate and drafting of legislation that affects them.With this in mind, we will launch a prototype for collective online drafting of legislation on copyright and the Internet, along the lines of an experience tried in Brazil with the Marco Civil do Internet.Similarly, at the FCForum we will present a collaborative system for the reform of the misnamed ?Intellectual Property? Law in Spain and the European Union, based on documents created by civil society at the 2009 and 2010 FCForums, the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge and the How-To for Sustainable Creativity, and on a proposal by Quadrature du Net that draws on the recommendations of Communia.3. ?CYBERCRIMES? AS AN EXCUSE: THE CRIMINALISATION OF THE INTERNET IN AN ATTEMPT TO CONTROL ITThe current tendency for legislators to fail to apply the same justice in the earthly realm and the virtual context is sometimes disguised under the name of ?cybercrime?. For example, it requires complex juggling and many headaches for politicians to ban street demonstrations in the physical world, but a few lines hidden away in legislative reforms is all they need to ban demonstrations in virtual space, such as DDoS, he same goes for spying on mail, forcing service providers to monitor their customers, censorship, ignoring the presumption of innocence, etc.People who are up in arms about repression and censorship on the Net in countries such as China should realise that there are lobbies and legislators who are proposing the same thing here. They should also be aware that the control mechanisms used by repressive regimes are usually paid for by Western multinationals who develop them to control their own employees and then, in order to make the most of their investment, they sell them to States that are repressive to a lesser or greater extent. Once again, control is also big business.At the FCForum we will study legislative approaches to these issues and ways of defending ourselves from them.4. TRUE DEMOCRACY FOR THE DIGITAL ERARecent emergencies such as the Arab Spring, #15M, the Occupy movement and Mexico?s yosoy132 have shown that there is an urgent need to update our democracies, and radically changed the relationship between citizens and governments. Organised civil society no longer wants to be a spectator of ?democracy.? Our current institutions, born under the industrial paradigm, behave like zombies, emptied of any representatitvity or legitimacy and out of touch with the social needs of the people. But even so, democracy is being re-built by citizens behaving as a smart mob.At the FCForum we will study the potential of this path, of building a democracy that explores new kinds of participation and engagement technologies, and that includes freedom of information and transparency as built-in, inalienable values.? Information: Free choice doesn?t exist without free access to information. For this reason, access to public data and freedom of information are the key indicators of democracy in the 21st century. A good example to follow is Iceland?s IMMI or Icelandic Modern Media Initiative.At the FCForum, we will analyse the strategies employed in new professional and citizen journalism, how the two complement each other, and the attacks they face, as well as looking at ways to defend and support them.? Transparency: Governments do not engage in transparency. As citizens, we do not know what information the government?s decisions are based on; we don?t know how they spend our taxes; we don?t know who decides our future or for what reasons. Spanish citizens are the least informed of all: Spain is one of the few European States that do not have any transparency legislation. Under pressure, the current government is planning to pass a simulacrUM. Pure whitewash. Even the OSCE has said that the majority of changes in the Spanish government?s proposal are ?cosmetic? and fail to meet international standards such as:- Recognise the right of access to information as a fundamental right (article 20).- Expand the scope of application of the future law to the legislative and judicial powers.- Improve the definition of information which currently includes some exceptions not subject to public interest tests.- Ensure that all exceptions are subject to both harm and public interest tests.- Ensure that the body charged with overseeing compliance with the right of access to information is fully independent.This is why there is an urgent need to organise ourselves to achieve a genuine transparency law.? Networked democracy: In the context of the Net, people are inventing new tools for collective decision-making and creation of legislation, predominantly under citizen control.At the FCForum, we will explore the potential of these mechanisms in order to equip ourselves with tools for the battles that are taking place. We will also share projects such as Democracia 4.0, and the Government of Rio Grande do Sul?s Digital Office- a next generation democracy mechanism that is becoming a prototype for distributed, open control of the State by its citizens. Meanwhile, with its new forms of digital participation and its innovative constitutional process celand is showing us other interesting approaches to the bottom-up drafting of a constitution, by citizens, for all.Working methodThe FCForum is open to anybody who is interested in participating. It is free, and registration is not required. Everybody can participate, taking into account the different levels of knowledge and skills.The FCForum working method consists of discussing different hypotheses so that we can all end up working together on a unifying strategy. There are no long speeches, only presentations of the different hypotheses as a point of departure for the discussions.Discussions will focus on the sticking points between the different proposed models, in an attempt to identify possible mechanisms that can bring them together and make them compatible. We believe it is possible to create an inclusive mechanism within the autonomy of each agent, which can boost all the alternatives by means of strengthening each one, through the others.The results will be defined online in the weeks following the FCForum, in the form of ?recommendations? that can be used to:? Provide arguments for political ?reformers?: they are a tool with which to lobby political parties, institutions and government agencies, with the aim of influencing the legislative changes that are currently being considered and introduced.? Provide tools for citizens as active agents facing a change of paradigm, so that they can take advantage of its potential to the full.? Create a network of affinity and global collaboration based on a common interest in the defense of the Internet and free/libre culture.The FCForum is open to anybody who is interested in participating. It is free, and registration is not required.More on http://2012.fcforum.net/en/#oXcars12 - Thursday, 25/10 - 8,30PM:http://oxcars12.whois--x.net/en/streaming:http://oxcars12.whois--x.net/en/media#fcforum12 - Friday 26 + Saturday 27 - 10,30AM to 9PM:http://2012.fcforum.net/en/streaming:http://2012.fcforum.net/en/media/

(Written in response to the lack of debate during last weekend's Creative Time conference in NYC. I think art criticism is important source of inspiration and reference (or not) for net critique. The letter also refers to the ongoing, almost funny neglect by the 'art world' of 'new media'. /geert)An open letter to critics writing about political art- Stephen Duncombe & Steve LambertLast weekend Creative Time held their fourth annual summit on the currentstate of artistic activism. Over two days, scores of political artists fromaround the world gave short presentations and organized longer workshops.Hundreds of people participated.The critical response, so far, has been underwhelming: few criticsattended and those that did had little substantive to say. It would be easyto account for the overall silence and dismiss the surface commentary withsome snarky criticism of our own about a bullshit art world with theirhead up their ass who can't recognize that something important ishappening right in front of them. And while this may be self-righteouslysatisfying, it is not very helpful. We want to help.How this event was -- and wasn't -- covered is indicative of the state ofcriticism when it comes to political art. The problem is not necessarilylazy criticism, but the fact that we don't have a developed vocabularywith which to understand, and criteria with which to evaluate, politicalart and activist artists. In an effort to develop a language and criteriawith which artistic activism can be usefully criticized, we offer thefollowing seven questions for the critic to consider:1. Does it work? Art about politics is not necessarily political art. The function ofpolitical art is to challenge and change the world. This should be obvious,but there is plenty of "political art" which uses social injustice andpolitical struggle as mere subject matter: making these forces objects forcontemplation and, perversely, appreciation. The point of political art isnot to represent the world but to act within it.Thus, the first question to ask of political art is: Does it Work? Wedon't mean: does it work aesthetically? but does it work politically. Thisentails asking more questions. Questions like: What does the artist wantto achieve with their work? What change do they see happening throughtheir work? How will this change happen? Who is affected, what affect willthe work have on them, and what actions will these people take?We're not suggesting that there's one criterion of efficacy for politicalart, nor is there one goal that all political arts should move towards.What we are saying is that political artists, if they want to change theworld, need to think about what they want their work to do. And critics,if they want to seriously interrogate and evaluate this work, have to bothexamine those political aims and ask whether the artist has succeeded.It is hard to truly succeed as a political artist. Many times, an artistaims short and sets out to "intervene" and "raise awareness" about a socialproblem or political issue. This is the low hanging fruit of political art.Other work sets out to have a direct impact in a discernible way. Usingart to defeat a pending policy, or elect a politician. This is moreambitious on the part of the artist, and easier -- if not boring -- for thecritic of political art to judge. Much harder, much more ambitious, andtherefor much more difficult to evaluate, is art that intends to changethe very way we see, act and make sense of our world -- including what weunderstand to be politics itself. It is hard to measure the long termtotal victory of a shift in the culture.2. Who is the audience?The art critic is the audience for most art, and therefor it's quite validfor the critic to write from his or her own perspective. The audience forpolitical art is quite different. Political art, by it's very name, has the"polis" as its audience and this constitutes a much broader demographic -- one in which the art critic is confronted with readings of art radicallydifferent than their own. As diverse as we'd like to imagine the audiencefor most art to be it draws from a very narrow population, one in whichthe art critic is at home. But when the audience is a wider public, thetried and true perspective of the veteran art critic comes up short. Thecritic of political art needs to place themselves in the minds of verydifferent people. This takes humility. It may even require taking theradical step of talking to the audience, asking them what they see, whatthey think. These are basic techniques of journalism and ethnography thatan art critic may not be accustomed to.3. What is the relevant tradition?The tradition that serves conventional art criticism doesn't often workwhen it comes to political art. Drawing together art's historical andtheoretical connections, while impressive to the writer's eruditereadership, and possibly entertaining, is largely irrelevant. There areconnections to be drawn, to be certain, but the valid ones here are morelikely to be found in histories of social movements and textbooks in thefields of marketing, advertising, and public relations. Theories in humancognition and decision making, for example, are far more applicable,useful, and insightful into the work of the artistic activist thandiscussion of its relation to the newest aesthetic or Albers' colortheory. The training most critics have is not sufficient for fullyunderstanding this work. Indeed, knowledge of sociology, communityorganizing, or rhetoric lends crucial insight into what political artistsare doing, and whether they are doing it well. You are not alone in yourignorance. We readily admit that many artists are in dire need of thisknowledge as well.4. What medium and why?For art critics, medium is important. It situates the work within anhistorical canon, provides context and meaning, and a sense of continuity.For the artistic activist medium is important too, but as a means: theinstrument through which one reaches the audience to effect change.Therefor, discussions about means are dependent on politicalconsiderations, such as who is the audience, how they are most effectivelyreached, and so on.To privilege one medium over another in the absence of a discussion ofefficacy is to miss the point. A good political artist's practice ispromiscuous when it comes to medium. Critical Art Ensemble said it bestwith four words. The artistic activist works: "by any media necessary." Agood critic, therefor, judges the political artist on the mastery of themedium they choose for the task at hand.5. What kind of mastery is required?Fine artists are often rewarded for the degree of control and mastery overtheir medium. We valorize artists who can transform materials to fullyexpress their vision without compromise.Political art, however, is engaged in the world. The world is messy. Ithas a lot of moving parts. This material is impossible to fully control ormaster -- and shouldn't be (unless you have fascist ambitions). Whereascompromise for the traditional artist means diluting their vision,compromise for the political artist is the very essence of democraticengagement.The venue for the traditional artist is galleries and museums -- controlledspaces where the art itself does not need to speak very loudly because allattention is focused on it. Political art has a dauntingly large venue: thestreet, the marketplace, the mass media. This is an out-of-control spacewhere one competes with the cacophony rather than retreating into silenceand solitude. Political art, responding to this space, is often brash andloud. Subtlety is sometimes not its strong point. But we shouldn't fault acreative activist practice for what's inherently required of it. Indeed,it should be judged on how well it opens up a space, is read, andunderstood within this arena.Some art lovers may be turned off by this focus on the practical andtactical, but for creative activists these concerns are essential. We arenot, however, arguing that the informed art critic should simply bejudging political art on how effective it is in communicating a message.Aesthetics matter -- but they needn't be seen in opposition to efficacy. Ifone's goal is to affect change, form serves function. Art that succeedsaesthetically also has a better chance of succeeding politically.Beautiful art is art that people are drawn towards. The power of art liesin its ability to open up a space to ask questions rather than deliveranswers. We think this makes for good politics too.6. What am I missing?The "art world" is truly a world all its own, with separate culturalspaces, communities, and languages. The detachment of fine arts frompopular culture is the norm.Alternatively, for creative activists, popular culture is their briarpatch. Whereas in fine art, engaging in this terrain is read as pandering,ironic, "critical," and at all times, exceptional, for political artistsit is the rule. In order to reach everyday people one must speak in alanguage they understand. This can be interpreted as dumbing things down.It is not. In order to convey complex radical ideas in a vernacularlargely developed for and oriented toward consumer sales and crassmanipulation requires a great deal of intelligence and skill. And thebetter you do it, the more likely it is to be overlooked.Within the fine art world to stand out and be noticed is a clear sign ofsuccess. In the practice of artistic activism you are more successful themore your art weaves into the fabric of popular culture -- lost to the artworld. The entire effort is shrouded in camouflage.Critics are forgiven for passing over the best of this work in the past,but let's all begin to look more carefully, ok?7. What's my role as a critic?The relationship between artists and critics is often a fraught one.Critics can be lauded for how well they skillfully and cleverly demolishand denigrate artists' work. This aligns with the dominate competitivelogic of the commercial art world. This is the paradigm, in part, thatpolitical art is trying to change. Despite this cannibalistic tendency,we all know that makers and critics live in symbiosis. This is especiallytrue when the art operates in the broader society and the function of thework is not to be a unique and valuable object but to effect the world.In this realm, the art critic is part of the team, with everyone workingtowards the big win of a better world. Being a good team member for artistsmeans making powerful work. Being a good team member for the critic meansoffering insightful, relevant, and instructive criticism.Art critics raise questions. Questions are good. But questions for whatpurpose? If you're a political artist, and you're primarily showing peoplehow smart and clever you are, you're not producing good political work.The energy is misdirected. The same goes for critics. If you're writingprimarily as a demonstration of how smart and clever you are, you have lostthe soul of being a critic.The critic might want to ask themselves, why am I writing this? Am Iclarifying and illuminating the work? Am I instructing the artist and theaudience so that better work is produced. Or am I "problematizing" as ademonstration of my prowess as a thinker. ("Problematizing" is too oftenused as a cheap substitute for understanding, analyzing and aiding.)Being a critic, like being an artist, involves some degree ofselflessness. There is a larger purpose. The critic, through theirattention and analysis of the work, provides a helpful service.Of course we all know this, but it's easy to get off track.It's bigger than you and it's bigger than the art.Modern art is rooted in the belief that the artists' individual expressionis important. In turn, the individual critic's opinions about said artistsand art are important. Think Pollock and Greenberg.With political art a bigger game is being played. There are stillindividual artists and individual critics, but the stakes are not about thereputations of artists and critics. What's at stake is the transformationof the entire society. If this sounds grandiose, you may be in the wrongbusiness.We don't train people to be good political artists in our art schools.Most institutions are slow to adapt and are, at best, fighting the old mythof the lone genius artist expressing their vision in spite of society,rather than moving forward towards a world in which artists workcollectively in an embedded engagement with society.Call us optimists, but we assume anyone producing creative work to affectpower is doing it from a sincere and passionate place. If it's not working,it's not because they don't care enough or aren't committed. It's becausewe haven't developed a critical tradition that helps artistic activistsstrengthen their work. Political art needs help.This is why we need you.Because we're all in this together.--See also:http://artisticactivism.org/2012/10/an-open-letter-to-crtitcs-writing-about-political-art/an-open-letter-to-art-critics/The Center for Artistic Activism: artisticactivism.orgSteve Lambert: visitsteve.comStephen Duncombe: stephenduncombe.com

http://themonetaryfuture.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-old-radical-how-bitcoin-is-being.htmlFriday, October 26, 2012The Old Radical: How Bitcoin Is Being DestroyedPosted by Julia DixonDGC MagazineWednesday, October 24, 2012http://www.dgcmagazine.com/the-old-radical-how-bitcoin-is-being-destroyed/This piece was recently sent to me by 'an old radical.' The message is perhaps a bit harsh, but I have to admit, all I can do is grimace and nod in agreement to this thesis: "Bitcoin and state banking systems are born enemies: only one can survive. If you are imagining that they can peacefully coexist, you are fooling yourself."----I was a radical before most of you Bitcoin users were born. That doesn't make me any better than you (hopefully I did a few things to make you better than myself), but it does give me a better perspective; time just works that way.I've been watching the recent developments in the Bitcoin markets, and having seen this drama before (too many times), I thought I'd pass along a lesson. This will strike its target in some of you, but others of you are also likely to reject it, because it doesn't match what you want to be true.Here's the lesson: Trying to go 'legit' will destroy the Bitcoin market.For those of you who haven't turned away, I'll explain:There's nothing really wrong with Bitcoin itself. The developers are doing a nice job of addressing its problems and a heartening number of people have jumped up to create new tools and new services. No problem here.The problem is that too many people in the Bitcoin market are thinking the old way.Understand this: Bitcoin is a new thing - it is not compatible withthe old financial system.Bitcoin and state banking systems are born enemies: only one can survive. If you are imagining that they can peacefully coexist, you are fooling yourself.Bitcoin exposes the fraud that is state banking. If you think that politicians and bankers will calmly allow it to take over a significant percentage of world financial flows, you're in denial. States will come after Bitcoin, and hard. They have no choice. Their money can only exist if there are no competitors.Alan Greenspan may have done a lot of bad things, but he is not stupid. And before his adventures at the Fed, he wrote this:"(Under a fiat system), there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation' If there were, the government would have to make its holding illegal, as was done in the case of gold."What gold was then, Bitcoin is now -- times five.So, let me try this again: Going legit gives the state a handle to grab you with. 'Legit' means registered and regulated, doesn?t it? You have to tell them your name, where you live, and where you put your money, right' It means that they can control you whenever they want to.There are two big reasons why Bitcoin people are tempted to go 'legit':- They want to get mega-rich fast, like Mark Zuckerberg.- They have been trained to be obedient and can't unlearn it. They are compelled to believe that the government is basically good. It must just be one bad politician or one bad law.#2 is what destroyed e-gold, and it looks like #1 is what killed GLBSE. (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/GLBSE)Because of GLBSE, Bitcoin is now being regarded as a currency and states will start to regulate it as one. That means that they'll attack the public exchangers and force everyone possible to comply with their rules.So' it's time to man-up, or to crumble.(Interestingly, there is often a larger percentage of women that 'man-up' than men.)Will you have the guts to do the right thing when the pressure is on' If yes, I applaud and honor you. If not, here are a few cheap excuses to use (after all, who wants to admit conditioning or cowardice):- Without the rule of law, everything would fall apart.- Without regulation, criminals would destroy everything.- Yes, regulation is coercive, but along with it comes a certain amount of public benefit!- I got ripped off, and someone has to fix it!- If I can't sue someone, they can get away with ripping me off!- We can't get people to use Bitcoin unless it's authorized.- We need approval or we will forever remain a tiny market.A significant number of Bitcoin people will say these things (and others), but the real truth will be that they are scared, or are still hoping to get mega-rich, or just can't rip the 'government is our friend' meme out of their heads. But mostly it will be fear.We all feel fear of course, but some of us are determined enough to do the right thing, even when we're afraid.So, here's a final tip: If you run into someone who can feel the fear and still do the right thing, don't let go of them.Reprinted with permission.Posted by Jon Matonis at 9:55 AMLabels: bitcoin, cryptography, digital bearer instrument, enforcement, nonpolitical currencyAbout MeJon Matonis I am an e-Money researcher and crypto economist focused on expanding the circulation of nonpolitical digital currencies. My career has included senior influential posts at Sumitomo Bank, VISA, VeriSign, and Hushmail. "Free-market protagonists, such as Matonis, regard cybercash as better than traditional government-issued or -regulated money, because it is determined by market forces and thus nonpolitical in nature." --Robert Guttmann, Professor of Economics at Hofstra University, in Cybercash: The Coming Era of Electronic Money, 2003 "Matonis is quite correct that the new technology makes easier the use of multiple private currencies." --Mark Bernkopf, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in "Electronic Cash and Monetary Policy", 1996 "Matonis argues that what is about to happen in the world of money is nothing less than the birth of a new Knowledge Age industry: the development, issuance, and management of private currencies." --Seth Godin in Presenting Digital Cash, 1995

<http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/30/jimmy-savile-mark-thompson-new-york-times>Michael WolffThe Jimmy Savile scandal, Mark Thompson and the New York Times Savile is unknown in the US. The real issue is Arthur Sulzberger Jr's judgment in embracing the BBC's former director general Among the major institutions in the world most inclined to self-scrutiny and self-criticism are the BBC and the New York Times. This is not to say that they are transparent or self-aware, but, rather, achingly self-conscious, consumed by the scrutiny of others. The fact that the former head of the BBC, Mark Thompson, is shortly to become the CEO of the New York Times (the Times uses the modifier "incoming", just in case he never gets there), creates a sort of double whammy. Thompson was lucky enough to get out of town (that is, London) before the Jimmy Savile sex abuse scandal became an opportunity for the BBC to flagellate itself - in part, for not flagellating itself when it cancelled a documentary expose about Savile - and for its myriad enemies to join in. But Thompson was unlucky to have escaped to an organization that, while entirely remote from the Jimmy Savile story, now had to make it big news by emphasizing and exaggerating its own role in the scandal (that is, for hiring Thompson) - lest it incur even larger opprobrium for seeming to minimize its role. This is a column about context, so let's set it. Nobody in the US knows who Jimmy Savile is. Even when a Brit explains, nobody in America gets it. Part Captain Kangaroo, part Pee Wee Herman, part Dick Clark? But not really. What's more, nobody in America really understands what the BBC is, at least not in the sense that it pervades British life and has as much to do with national identity as it does with news and entertainment. And then, there is the nature of sex scandals themselves. They are, almost always, culturally specific: Jerry Sandusky and Penn State was a minor story in the UK (American football doesn't translate in Britain); likewise, Jimmy Savile would have been, save for Mark Thompson and the New York Times, a footnote here (the BBC doesn't translate in the US). Still, both nations have progressed to seeing sexual abuse as an absolute evil; any rationalization, or effort to specify context, seems to add to the evil. Before, gingerly, trying to address the social context, let me stay with the institutional context. Both the BBC and the New York Times are each in one of the most difficult periods of their histories. The logic of the BBC's massive public subsidy in an age of ever-expanding media choice, is under fire. The Times' bleak financial straits are existential as all newspapers dwindle, and, as well, a cause for harsh recriminations as to the various decisions that might have deepened the company's predicament and hastened its fate. One of the ways the BBC has responded to increased public scrutiny and political pressure (and, as well, ramped up criticism and attention from its media competitors), is to become ever more cautious, self-questioning, and self-protective. (Some people date this to Crowngate, when the BBC aired footage of the Queen storming out of a photo session seemingly in a great huff, when she was, in fact, entering in a good humor, resulting at the Beeb in groveling apologies and high-placed resignations.) Almost any remotely controversial subject before the BBC is now second-guessed. Nobody wants to put a foot wrong. Or, at least, nobody wearing a bureaucratic hat wants to put a foot wrong. This creates, of course, a tension with the non-bureaucrats or program-makers, eager to pursue compelling material and subjects. Hence, there exists a greater-than-usual cold war between the administrative side and the content side - a simmering war that has connected itself to the canceling of the Savile documentary, and to the weird, operatic, tabloid tale of Savile himself, reaching deep into British pop, class, and sexual culture. At the New York Times, as its future becomes more fraught, a greater and greater chasm has opened up between management and other parts of the institution (journalists, shareholders, family, greater media community). Its purpose and identity seem ever more under siege. A crisis mentality grows. If the Times dies or is diminished, the feeling among a certain circle seems to be that journalism will sink with it. Therefore, the people who might damage the Times damage journalism and, hence, civic welfare. Indeed, the Thompson controversy has largely been sparked by the Times' own public editor (an outside critic to whom the Times gives editorial space and a salary to air his or her disgruntlement). Margaret Sullivan turned Thompson's hiring from a management issue (what exactly is his job?), to a journalism question (what did Thompson know and when about the Savile scandal?), and to a broad challenge to the company's moral leadership. Thompson was hired by Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr, whose family controls the company. Sulzberger's appointment of a man without newspaper experience or experience in the American media market as CEO, has been, to all, confounding. (Or transparent: Sulzberger long ago became the true operational CEO, and surely does not want his de facto role to be challenged by someone with the actual job.) Clearly, one obvious outcome of linking Thompson to Savile is to embarrass Sulzberger - the man who seems most responsible for the Times' general extremis status. Unfortunately for Sulzberger, he has, throughout his tenure as publisher, been temperamentally incapable of getting the tone right when it comes to addressing or parsing the emotional issues that relate to the Times' future and identity and his own decision-making skills. He defends rather than explains. He's hysterical rather than judicious. He mixes up the personal with the institutional. Sulzberger has already defended his incoming CEO in the kneejerk way that he has approached problems before. One result of his reflexive defensiveness, is that he often seems to lash himself to sinking ships (see his stout defense, and ultimate abandonment, of Howell Raines and Judy Miller). Now, somehow, beyond all sense and logic, he's gotten himself on Jimmy Savile's boat. And it's worse than that. Because we don't know who Jimmy Savile is or why he ever came to exist, we've equated him with our own most notorious sex abuser, Jerry Sandusky. Late last week, I was having a gossipy lunch in New York with a retired media grandee and the subject quickly and eagerly turned to Thompson, Sulzberger, and Savile. "Of course," said the media grandee, "Thompson would have known. You always know." Alleging, I suppose, that Thompson was Penn State's Joe Paterno in this analogy, turning a blind eye as one of his employees used his position to sexually abuse minors. And that seemed a plausible assumption to me. Then, not a half hour later, I ran into Michael Jackson, the former CEO of the UK's Channel Four broadcasting company, who may know more about British television than anybody else living in America. Continuing the discussion, Jackson first corrected my pronunciation of Savile, and then, when I repeated the Penn State comparison, pointed out that Savile had long been retired by the time Thompson became the director general of the BBC. Sure, sure ... details. But what about the cancelled Newsnight show? Even if you can absolve Thompson of the overriding issue of who knew what, when, about the minors Savile is said to have abused, how could the BBC's director general not have known about the decision to kill the investigative report that would have exposed Savile? Thompson admits to knowing something - after he denied knowing anything. He went to a cocktail party and someone asked whether he was worried about the Newsnight Savile investigation. And what did he do? Here's the only decent and safe response (at least, at this point in hindsight): "That's a great story and we've got to have it. Pursue the truth wherever it goes." Any other response would seem to be saying: "Don't you dare mess with our Jimmy." The truth is probably something else: I'm not really listening to this. I hate all the complainers who work here. Sounds like someone else's problem. Who cares about Jimmy Savile? Jimmy Savile - gross! Over the weekend, another reporter - characterized, in most accounts, as a "freelance" reporter - claimed he had logged a call to Thompson's office and left a message inquiring about Savile and charges that he abused girls while at the BBC. This made front-page news not only in London, but also in the New York Times. The fact that a random phone call from a random reporter to an executive office, which would invariably deflect phone calls from random reporters, now seems to be part of the evidential chain is more proof that life inside the scandal hot-house has diverged from everyday life. Of course, the problem is compounded - the problem is always compounded - by the fact that just as the BBC was getting ready to expose Jimmy Savile, it was also getting ready to celebrate him with a special Christmas Day encomium. This certainly does seem, in its baldness, less conspiratorial and more like two hands unaware of each other: why would you go out of your way to praise such a potential liability? But celebrating him and damning him also seems consistent with the two sides of Jimmy Savile. It is not just that managers of the BBC may have turned a blind eye to and effectively colluded in protecting Jimmy Savile, but that everybody in the country knew about him. Or should have known. Just look at Jimmy Savile on You Tube. Your jaw is sure to drop. Indeed, Jimmy Savile and his reputation as a sexual masher of under-age girls turns out to have been, for at least a generation, a reliable pop culture riff - one guaranteeing a certain laugh. Everybody knew. And yet, somehow, for whatever weird, self-loathing, Dickensian, kinky British reasons, Jimmy Savile had become an eccentric, but apparently proud, British institution. Not to mention a face of the BBC. He was a cultural norm, rather than an aberration. It is a not insignificant context point that a parallel showbusiness world of outré behavior and coddled perviness has long existed. To the extent that this has been one of our fascinations with that world, someone has to live our fantasies. A quick email to a former BBC personality of my acquaintance gets me a robust list of celebrity pervs in Britain. I could compile one for US pervs. Now, perhaps, the page is turning and our tolerance has come to an end. Or perhaps Jimmy Savile was just more extreme, though that seems like a difficult line to draw. Perhaps I cannot fully interpret what the Brits really mean when they invoke Jimmy Savile, beyond guilt and darkness, and when they display a striking tolerance of weird uncles at holiday gatherings, and an ambivalence about the BBC. But I do know that when certain New Yorkers say "Jimmy Savile", they merely mean that the New York Times is a bumbling and directionless and vulnerable organization.© 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies

Dear all,I would like to share with you a text about "the creativity of the common",written by Nuovo Cinema Palazzo, a very interesting occupied cinema in Romethat is exploring forms of radical democracy, creating new commoning andconstituent processes, inside the metropolis and beyond the territorialcommunity.This text is a contribution to the discussion that will be held at theeuro-mediterranean meeting of Agora99 in Madrid during the workshop "Spacesfor metropolitan commoning": http://99agora.net/2012/10/a99metropolitanI hope you'll enjoy it!hugsclaudia****http://www.nuovocinemapalazzo.it/2012/10/30/la-creativita-del-comune/*The Creativity of the Common*The following considerations are food for thought derived from anddeveloped throughout a series of meetings and debates with the occupants ofthe Teatro Valle occupato and other subjects sharing the process ofcreation of the ?common?.*The constituent dimension of the common good*Let's begin with the centrality and historical urgency of the practice weare producing with the creation of the common good. We believe that whatthe traditional legal models are now compelled to face is, more than theregression of state sovereignty, the relation between constitutions andsocial autonomies, and the regulatory claim of the first over the latter.**To this regard, our effort is not employed in the direction of awholehearted defense of the Constitution, nor towards its absoluteabolishment. It is rather aimed at creating a dialectic relationship withthose institutions in which we find a potential ?gap? for creativeintervention, therefore penetrating the legal system, regaining the meansof affirmation of our struggle, of collective action, and of a newbattleground for ourselves and others.More and more movements and collective experiences are speaking out onconstitutional principles. Again, the aim is not their safeguard: movementsperceive themselves and place themselves within an autonomous, constituentand founding perspective, and, starting from a political scenario that isin progressive dissolution, movements are advancing towards the creation oflegal rights and forms of self-governance. Movements are creating breakingpoints from within, tracing new paths by practicing transformation.The practice of self-governance generates new settings for relations,functioning, management and regulation methods, eliminating the boundariesof specific subjectivities, connecting to a social elements whosecomposition cannot be inscribed within classic territorial borders, norwithin networks linked to production and labor models. The practicesnaturally prefigure the models. The translation and reproducibility ofthese models generate the prototypes of new institutions.*Action beyond reclaiming: creating autonomy, practicing self-governance*A concrete plan for autonomy develops from action, not frominstitutionalized nouns (education, cultural production, healthcare). Thecreation of art and culture, the production of a response to our needsunveil the collective ability to satisfy such needs, setting them within aperspective of possibility, in a horizontal scenario of cooperation, muchbeyond a purely demanding position.These are the means with which we escape domination of our lives and bodies.The direct practice of our needs, the undermining of the bio politicalpervasiveness enable us to generate constituent processes, to create newinstitutional models which constitute a forefront, for ourselves andothers, and give life to the places in which we carry out our struggles,that are both a meeting and a starting point.*Against speculation: illegal legitimacy*The practice of common good does not develop, however, outside of thestruggles and of their factual nature. In this perspective, the crucialrole played by the fight against speculation in the experience of the NuovoCinema Palazzo represents much more than just a narrative element. There-appropriation of the Cinema Palazzo by the occupants has inverted thebalance in a power play where the city is generally dominated by realestate speculation, by infringement of local building regulations, by aconsequent corrupt political and economic system. The affirmation of theprincipal of illegal legitimacy against legal illegitimacy, translates intoconfronting the current legal system, while a new one is already beingwritten in practice.The (constant) political use of law not only goes in the direction ofdetermining the legal means to strategically sustain our action, butextends to the re-creation of legislation not only as regards encoded law,but also including common law and the judicially held law.We are aware that legislation registers the modifications determined by thechange of balance in current power plays. The court ruling with which theRome civil court denied the reintegration of possession of the structure tothe Camene spa can be read in this perspective. The legal system does notdirectly coincide with the law.*The practice of rights: the right to culture*The need for a place destined to culture, many kinds of it, is not the aimand the object of our struggle, it is on the contrary the actual substanceof our action. The first step we took was to connect the fight against realestate speculation to the issue of the cultural dimension as central inlife. This passage was instantly and instinctively achieved without theneed for thought; it later became a political process gaining clarity alongthe way. The awareness of the urgency of a cultural revolution is whatdrives the creative action of the Cinema Palazzo, the rediscovery of itsoriginal vocation, in response to a widespread demand.The need for social relations and exchange, the subtraction of ourexistence to the relentless monetary domination of life: these are thepractices that have determined the means to break the idea of *homo?conomicus* whose choices are driven only by individualistic andutilitarian considerations, an idea dominating not only the economicsphere, but also the un-critical realm of politics held hostage byfinancial dictates, and a legislative system inspired by liberalanthropology.On the contrary, our resistance is deeply rooted in the human and creativedimension of our existence in which culture plays a leading role. We assertthe importance of culture as a basic and fundamental need: not reducible,inalienable, indefeasible.*Demolishing** private **property*Our experience produces practices of collective re-appropriation thatquestion private property.Our experience challenges the essentially absolutist view typical oflegislation concerning private property. By practicing collectivere-appropriation, our experience contradicts, disperses and reformulatesthis view, referring to a different meaning of possession, focusing on theway we relate to our territory and to our city.*Beyond the classic forms of production and labor, towards the right tocitizenship*The city is the main scenario in which contemporary conflict takes place.Fordism labor organization surpassed, the re-organization of the marketeconomy on a global scale designates the city as the place for capitalismto attempt its renewal and survival. Capitalism requires ongoingurbanization processes, in order to absorb the exceeding productscontinually being produced. Overproduction is absorbed by urbanization andvice versa. The right to citizenship, intended as the collective control ofthis strong link between urbanization, production and use of the capitalsurplus, represents a main goal in the political struggle. Social movementsare becoming more and more a constituent voice on the metropolitanpolitical scene, with the ability to alternate means of protest to creativeand imaginative forms of action, putting forth alternative models ofradical metropolitan democracy.*New subjects and ?commoning?*The new subjects revolving round the creation of the common good are givingrise to new experimental forms of citizenship reaching beyond the conceptof territorial community and *subjectively defined community* , redefiningthem through broad experiences of re-appropriation. Referring to therelational nature of goods, practices building the common good achieve theidea of citizenship as an adherence to a project, not merely limited toadministrative guidelines (*according to a property and census oriented view*) but thought of as the ability to cooperate towards obtaining a commonprocess.Citizenship becomes the subject whose shared aim is to create a collectivecity -?project? centered on its use value, opposed to a ?product?- city,based on trade value.*Beyond the territorial community*The experiences we are focusing on are based on relations of recognitionand broad cooperation and do not intend to reproduce a nostalgic view ofclosed communities nor, on the contrary, do they portray the post-modernideal of a city user crossing multiple spaces without ever belonging to acollective reality. These experiences bring forth the idea of community asa vast network functioning fluidly on different levels, entering intorelation with local realities as well as with each other on a national andEuropean scale.We are not interested in rights of common from a standpoint of immediate ordirect recognition, but as a troublesome element to disrupt the private lawand state structures. Rights of Common evoke an archaic and collectivestrength, and interest us concerning the development of a scene ofdiscourse that addresses a different way of possessing, and a new way ofbeing citizens.Our effort goes in the direction of translating, modeling and re-inventingthe rights of common. The rights of common are linked to the land, tomaterial needs, to a community depicted over time as closed anddefined. On the other hand, our experience is essentially linked to thecity, to immaterial needs that are central in our lives, and to an open andfree/accessible community.The practice of care and management of the common good is what willdetermine the belonging and the right of use/ownership use. This practiceis what determines our belonging to a community, defining us as holders ofa right of common intended with a double meaning: the right to access andthe duty to tend to, administrate and develop the common good in its socialand collective function.These rights and obligations are not necessarily based on territorialproximity or on the formal geographical belonging of the common good, buton the access, the use, on the relations and social ties that areconstantly being generated in relation to the use of the good.*Beyond the governing community: commons as a dispositif (device) of directand radical democracy*The self-governance of common goods also requires participation in thecollective manage mechanism which involves the community of reference andthereby creates participatory management aside from the ownership of thegoods. We think this community must be repeatedly redefined and potentiallyexpanded. The relationship between whoever occupies or whoever cares forthese goods and the other members of the populace is always open andosmatic.The idea of a restitution beyond the subjective ?we? achieved in the?common? is self-contained. For this reason the tension is in producingself-governance based on the spaces managed in an expanded way, targeted ondiverse generations and cultures, on rooting the community in a prospectivecitizenship looking to the future and on high. Spaces like the spacededicated to parenthood, managed together with parents arriving from theneighborhood and throughout the city; classrooms progressively opened tostudent management; projects which increasingly range in the direction ofco-planning with others and groups; housing which provide enterprises timeand possibilities for producing works which would otherwise not come aboutin a special mechanism, and not episodic, open to the ?common? of the citywith the idea of contaminating other subjects in the progressive practiceof expropriating physical and symbolic spaces.*Towards a federative and relational practice*The plurality of constituent practices and the subjects who generate andpractice them and force them on in an uninhibited and autonomous wayprovide the occasion for a federative and relational practice for thestruggle beyond fragmentation and also beyond the search for a singlesynthesis.The occupations which spread nationally in a direct and progressive fashiontook shape in all of Italy in 2011 and 2012 to thereby draw a map of the?common? raised beyond the single realities. In the dialectic andmultipolar relationship between various occupations, each experiencecontained factors of growth and specifics in elaborating and studying itsown identity and, in putting history into perspective with variousintensities and duration, fueled common repertoires of investigation andstruggle. Each contributed to the creation of a dynamic which was, in part,uncontrollable, deeply transformational, making rebellion without the seedsof failure imaginable. Not only did this generate new outposts for thestruggle but also produced the practice, the mentality and discourse on thecommon good. Independent institutions which were neither public nor privatebased on the concept of common use and affirming the fundamental the needfor creating networks of similar experiences from the time of theirfounding; specific experiences with their differences but which shared thesame constituent capacity and same universal vocation (universal not inabstract terms but very real; the partiality of an experience always looksto translatability).Being in a relationship, creating different nodes in the same mechanism netmay, however, not be sufficient if it fails to provide a core to theconstituent process going beyond the mere ?structural? side. In this sense,we believe that the new form of federalism beyond the state can come as theopening of a path to build relations among the different institutions ofthe common. A process which is open, agreed to, horizontal and capable ofinvolving a plurality of powers and institutions arising out of theexperience of the common good. Common goods are actually polycentric innature and this require a deeply democratic approach (the principle ofdecentralization, a subsidiary status, diffuse sovereignty and speciallegislation) as well as an economic approach (the ways of producing commongoods which lead to our dependence on money and the markets).

*Presentation of the international platform ArtLeaks*. *On the Urgency ofLaunching the ArtLeaks Gazette**Wednesday, 7 November 2012**19:00-22:00**Khalili Lecture Theatre, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies),University of London*This is part of the *9th Annual Historical Materialism Conference* ???WeighsLike a Nightmare???, London, November 7th-12th, 2012ArtLeaks is an international platform for cultural workers where instancesof abuse, corruption and exploitation are exposed and submitted for publicinquiry. ArtLeaks??? mission is to create a space where one could engagedirectly with actual conditions of cultural work internationally ???conditions that affect those working in cultural production as well asthose from traditionally creative fields. Furthermore, ArtLeaks isdeveloping in the direction of creating transversal alliances between localactivist and cultural workers groups, through which we may collectivelytackle repression and inequality.While building on previous models that emerged in the highly politicizedmilieus of the 1970s and 1980s, such as the institutional critique practiceof left-wing collectives, ArtLeaks seeks to expand the scope of thesehistorical precedents towards international geopolitical engagement. One ofthe outcomes of ArtLeaks working assemblies and workshops was theestablishment of alliances with international groups such as W.A.G.E.(NYC), Occupy Museums (NYC), Arts & Labor (NYC), Haben und Brauchen(Berlin), the Precarious Workers Brigade (London), Carrotworkers???Collective (London), Critical Practice (London), and The May Congress ofCreative Workers (Moscow). It is our strong belief that only aninternationally coordinated movement would be able to expose and denounceexploitation and censorship in contemporary culture, and collectivelyimagine new types of organizational articulations.For the 2012 Historical Materialism Conference, members of ArtLeaks willpresent the outcome of their previous working assemblies which took placethis year in Berlin, Moscow and Belgrade, and bring up for discussion theurgent need to establish the ArtLeaks Gazette (forthcoming 2013). Thisregular, online publication aims to be a tool for empowerment in the faceof the systemic abuse of cultural workers??? basic labor rights, repressionor even blatant censorship, and the growing corporatization of culture thatwe face today.After these brief introductions, we will break into four working groups,each focused on a different theme outlined in our Gazette. These will be:*1) 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. We will try to relate methodology withconcrete case studies of conflicts, exploitation, dissent across variousregions of the world, drawing comparisons and providing local context forunderstanding them.*2) The struggle of narrations*This working group will develop and practice artistic forms of narrationwhich cannot be fully articulated through direct ???leaking???. Our focus willbe finding new languages for narration of systemic dysfunctions. We expectthese elaborations to take different forms of artistic contributions, suchas comics, poems, drawings, short stories, librettos, etc.*3) 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 important therefore to analyze what iscurrently at the stake in these specific fields of educational processesand how they are linked with what is happening outside academies anduniversities. Here we will discuss possible emancipatory approaches toeducation that are possible today, which resist pressing commercial demandsfor flexible and ???creative??? subjectivities. Can we imagine an alternativesystem of values based of a different meaning of progress?*4) Best practices and useful resources*In this working group we invite people to play out their fantasies of new,just forms of organization of creative life. Developing the tradition ofdifferent visionaries of the past we hope will trigger many speculationswhich might help us collect modest proposals for the future and thuscounter the shabby reality of the present. This also includes practiceswhich demonstrate alternative ethical guidelines, and stimulate thecreation of a common cultural sphere.At the end of the working group session, we will present our findings toeach other and come together for some final conclusions and future commonaims.Facilitators of the event: *Corina L. Apostol, Vlad Morariu*The editorial board for the first issue of the Gazette will consist of *CorinaL. Apostol, Vladan Jeremi??, Vlad Morariu, David Riff and Dmitry Vilensky*.More about the ArtLeaks Gazette: http://art-leaks.org/artleaks-gazette/More about Historical Materialism :http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/about-us

This is the perfect storm for Italian politics. It's hard for us who are init to understand it, I imagine it must be impossible abroad to understandthe present entanglements of traditionally byzantine politica.itFirst of all, the eurocrat Monti succeeded Berlusconi a year ago, togeneral relief. Mr B. was basically ousted by a Palace coup orchestrated bythe President of the Republic (former commie rightwinger Napolitano) at therequest of Merkel and the EU. Monti is making people bleed (while leavingbanks and corporations unscathed) but at least he's honest and non-mafia. Abig change. But the honeymoon with him is now over as Italy has dropped ina gloomy recession deliberately engineered by Monti's budget "rigor"(that's how he calls austerity) in order to appease the notoriously crooked"financial markets" which where targeting Italian gov't bonds. A Greeksituation has been averted, and Italy is doing a bit better than Spain(there was no major real estate bubble and italy still has a manufacturingexport industry). The evil dwarf is politically dead, don't let the mediaenthusiasm for him (at least it's less grim than reporting on cuts andausterity) fool you. It's game over for him and the Second Republic heheralded in 1994, two years after Bribesville buried the socialists and thechristian democrats who had governed the 80s untroubled by the CommunistParty in opposition.In spite of the Nobel Prize, the number of people who want to "to tie theirhands" (Monti lingo) to the EU is fast decreasing. But anyway this is anemergency government, since general elections have already been called forApril. Or is it? Actually, bankers, industrialists, major media would liketo see a so-called Monti bis, after the spring elections (although he won'tbe a candidate). So the center is trying to outmaneuver the left and seizegovernment.In fact, the right wing is in complete disarray after huge corruptionscandals have toppled first Bossi and his family and blemished the NorthernLeague (emerged in the early 90s against Bribesville corruption) hopefullyfor ever. They proved being as prone to thievery as any other politician,in spite of what they kept preaching for two decades. Then two major blowsbrought Berlusconi's PdL down to its knees: major corruption cases wereuncovered in Lazio and Lombardy bringing down its two regional governments.The case of Lombardy is particularly interesting because it had beengoverned uninterruptedly for 17 years (!) by Formigoni, leading politicalexponent of the reactionary catholic movement CL and its economic wingCompagnia delle Opere, which occupied the Lombard health system andprivatized it, making millions in black funds in the process. The biggestprivate hospital in Milano was brought to bankruptcy by the elderly priestwhich founded it (it's where Berlusconi gets cured) conveniently diedbefore he was brought to justice. But what is emerging is more alarmingstill. That is the 'ndrangheta, the Calabrese mafia has secured access toall levels in the regional administration, from health to public housing,to the major works that are being done to host EXPO 2015. A brave woman,Lea Garofalo, was murdered and dissolved in acid in 2010 in Milano by her'ndranghetoso husband because she collaborated with the judges. Yes, you'veread well: Milano, not Palermo (in fact, I support the leftist candidateGiulio Cavalli, a guy that needs to live under police escort, in theupcoming regional primaries). So now antimafia is really a nationalproblem, nobody can deny it. So at the end of January there will be also beregional elections in Lombardy and Lazio.So basically berlusconi and the league will be buried in the nextelections, but who will be their gravediggers? The Sicilian elections haveproved that the truly ingenuous Grillo's stunts (swimming from Reggio toMessina to start his Sicily campaign) and the networked organization of the5Star Movement will be major contestants in the general elections. If theymanaged to become the first party in Sicily (where they had no foothold)they can do anything. The PD, the party that turned the historicalcompromise between catholics and communists into a political formation,would normally be expected to pick up the pieces and lead a winningcoalition to government (think the two Prodis). But thanks to the typicalsadochism of the Italian center-left, this is by no means assured. PDsecretary Bersani (although he still keeps an eye to the center) has made acoalition with Nichi Vendola, governor of Puglia and leader of Left EcologyFreedom (4-5% but on a downward trend). With the PD they should obtain therelative majority of votes and according to the current law, the absolutemajority of seats in Parliament. The problem is that on November 25 therewill be the primaries of the center-left and Bersani's victory is by nomeans assured. His rival, Renzi, 30 years its junior and mayor of Florence,is very TV-friendly and self-assured. He has vowed to send the old PDleaders to the junkyard and has already managed to put old hands likeVeltroni and D'Alema out of the game. He has ties with Vatican and highfinance, but there is no question that he incarnates the generation thathas always been excluded by Italian politics, the thirty- andforty-something. More than that, Italians are thirsty for change. Andparties are dead, this is the current mantra on Italian media and inpeople's conversations. They are because they are mostly about theapportioning of power positions rather than thinking out policies.So the scenario is highly unclear. If Bersani wins the primaries, therewill be something like Prodi III, if Renzi wins the PD could split, and thecentrists could seize power as Montezemolo and Marchionne (Ferrari andFiat) would like. And the left could then maybe try a reunification(unlikely, but still a possibility). I told you it was complicated. But ina couple months the situation will be clearer and you won't need anotherarticle of mine;)Let's Occupy European Parliament in 2013lxhttp://milanox.eu