---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------Subject: [Nettime-nl] Fwd: Occupy Goes Home (fwd)From: "Nictoglobe" <a.andreas-EFM1J/VEdQ2fJiTClGZNEw< at >public.gmane.org>Date: Thu, December 15, 2011 11:03To: nettime-nl-/wkuC4qhQFNAfugRpC6u6w< at >public.gmane.org--------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent from my eXtended BodYBegin forwarded message:______________________________________________________* Verspreid via nettime-nl. Commercieel gebruik niet* toegestaan zonder toestemming. <nettime-nl> is een* open en ongemodereerde mailinglist over net-kritiek.* Meer info, archief & anderstalige edities:* http://www.nettime.org/.* Contact: Menno Grootveld (rabotnik-qWit8jRvyhVmR6Xm/wNWPw< at >public.gmane.org).
Hi all,Some Nettimers may be interested in this new book by me and Sherman Young,published today. Introduction and TOC available at the 'download samplechapter' link here: http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=344515."Media are what we do. With this deceptively simple yet particularlypowerful assertion, Meikle and Young successfully benchmark contemporarymedia" -- Mark Deuze."Meikle and Young's 'Media Convergence' is intelligent, sensible, preciseand timely" -- David Gauntlett.This book is about how networked digital media are being used to bringtogether people and ideas, images and texts, industries and technologies innew ways - media convergence. The book explores the development of theInternet, the rise of social media, the global expansion and consolidationof the major media corporations, and the new opportunities for audiences tocreate, remix, collaborate upon and share their own media. The book focuseson how everyday media - such as Facebook, iTunes, Google and the BBC iPlayer- can be understood in new ways for the twenty-first century through ideasof convergence. Best regards, gmDr Graham Meikle----------------------Senior Lecturer, Communications, Media & Culture,School of Arts and Humanities,University of Stirling, FK9 4LA, Scotland.T: +44 (0) 1786 466222F: +44 (0) 1786 466855E: <graham.meikle-Je82LJ4g1Le1Qrn1Bg8BZw< at >public.gmane.org>W: <http://www.fmj.stir.ac.uk/staff/graham-meikle/graham-meikle.php>
Check this out, then you don't have to listen to me any more ;-)(bwo Michele Schuler, with thanks)http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rGkmgnprrIUReally a must see (hear)!("Don't Happy, Be Worry!" sang Rambo Amadeus 20 yrs ago ...)Cheers, p+3D!
Google has banned Petra Cortright's video "VVebcam" because of her search terms. Her important art piece expresses the ridiculousness of search terms and in the infinite wisdom of Google, is banned for its use of such terms!<<<Dear petracortright:Thank you for submitting your video appeal to YouTube.After further review of the content, we've determined that your video does violate our Community Guidelines and have upheld our original decision. We appreciate your understanding.Sincerely,— The YouTube Team>>>VVebcam, a Rhizome Artbase selection, has been written about, discussed and published throughout the world. Furthermore, Google has removed an art work that is taught regularly in art schools. Petra Cortright has a solid reputation as an artist therefore I think that "deceptive" is an inappropriate term to describe work by one of the brightest minds in the contemporary art community.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPaCCBE-K1ghttp://petracortright.com/vvebcam.htmlhttp://archive.rhizome.org/artbase/53474/vvebcam.htmlAndres Manniste
Ubiquitous Pompei: the future of the city, created by high school studentsDear friends and colleagues,we are very happy to inform you about this event:http://www.artisopensource.net/2011/12/11/ubiquitous-pompei-the-future-of-the-city-created-by-high-school-students/The (digital) future of the city of Pompei, created by high school students.This event is the result of a project during which high school studentswere introduced to a set of technologies and methodologies through whichthey could create ubiquitous content using Augmented Reality and QRCodes.http://artisopensource.net/pompeiARStudents were invited to imagine the digital future of their city,designing end-to-end concepts in which the whole city became a space forpublication.4 wonderful projects emerged:- a tool for participatory administration of the city, in which citizensuse augmented reality to publish their ideas onto the city, classifyingthem as "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" and, thus, expressing their visions onhow to change their city- a peculiar tourist guide, in which the city is narrated directly bycitizens of all ages, who produced videos in which they tell the stories ofthis beautiful land in a way in which you will never find in classicaltourist guides, and published directly onto city spaces using augmentedreality, allowing you to experience the story and life of the city in anovel, emotional way- an augmented reality map to allow people to discover the places andevents of christianity in Pompei: the city is well known for its paganroman history. But how many people know about its engaging history inchristianity?- an incredible ubiquitous book dedicated to the ancient "social networks"found in Pompei's ruins: romans engaged in ubiquitous chatter, too! Ancientversions of Twitter and Facebook can still be found on the walls all aroundthe ruins of roman Pompei, where people inscribed graffiti messages abouttheir daily life and full of useful information; An augmented realityapplication allows you to read these graffiti by framing them in yoursmartphone and, thus, translating them from latin into your own language;discover the lives of ancient Pompeians and engage an experiment inatemporality, as using the application you are able to comment the ancientgraffiti and open up a dialogue across all timewe are particularly happy to being able to present this project to you all:in the current state of crisis hitting Italy, being able to actually give agood news such as this one is like a breath of fresh air and a energeticdrive for our hopes and visions.The city administration has been incredibly collaborative, the schools,teachers and students embraced this possibility with enthusiasm and desireto learn and express their ideas, and MediaDuemila Journal (the organizersof the "McLuhan meets Pompei" series of events for the celebrations ofMcLuhan's Centennial) have been wonderful enablers of the whole process.So, if you are around Pompei in these days consider dropping by: theaugmented city is full of icons, representing the will of young students toreinvent their reality.all the best,Salvatore
ACL Access Control ListADM Advanced Development ModelADP Automated Data ProcessingADPE Automated Data Processing EquipmentAE Application EntityAFSSI Air Force Systems Security InstructionAFSSM Air Force Systems Security MemorandumAIG Address Indicator GroupAIRK Area Interswitch Rekeying KeyAIS Automated Information SystemAISS Automated Information System SecurityAJ Anti-JammingAK Automatic Remote RekeyingAKDC Automatic Key Distribution CenterAKD/RCU Automatic Key Distribution/Rekeying Control UnitAKM Automated Key Management CenterALC Accounting Legend CodeAMS 1. Auto-Manual System2. Autonomous Message SwitchANDVT Advanced Narrowband Digital Voice TerminalANSI American National Standards InstituteAOSS Automated Office Support SystemAPC Adaptive Predictive CodingAPL Assessed Products ListAPU Auxiliary Power UnitARES Automated Risk Evaluation SystemARPANET Advanced Research Projects Agency NetworkASCII American Standard Code for Information InterchangeASPJ Advanced Self-Protection JammerASU Approval for Service UseATAM Automated Threat Assessment MethodologyAUTODIN Automatic Digital NetworkAUTOSEVOCOM Automatic Secure Voice Communications (Network)AUTOVON Automatic Voice NetworkAV Auxiliary VectorAVP Authorized Vendor ProgramBCSSO Base Computer System Security OfficerBPS Bits Per SecondC3 Command, Control, and CommunicationsC3I Command, Control, Communications, and IntelligenceC4 Command, Control, Communications, and ComputerCA 1. Controlling Authority2. Crypto-Analysis3. COMSEC Account4. Command AuthorityCCB Configuration Control BoardCCEP Commercial COMSEC Endorsement ProgramCCI Controlled Cryptographic ItemCCO 1. Circuit Control Officer2. Configuration Control OfficerCDR Critical Design ReviewCDRL Contract Data Requirements ListCDS Cryptographic Device ServicesCEOI Communications-Electronics Operating InstructionCEPR Compromising Emanation Performance RequirementCERT Computer Emergency Response TeamCFD Common Fill DeviceCI Configuration ItemCIAC Computer Incident Assessment CapabilityCIK Crypto-Ignition KeyCIP Crypto-Ignition PlugCIRK Common Interswitch Rekeying KeyCK Compartment KeyCKG Cooperative Key GenerationCKL Compromised Key ListCLMD COMSEC Local Management DeviceCM Configuration ManagementCMCS COMSEC Material Control SystemCMP Configuration Management PlanCMS C4 Systems Security Management SystemCNCS Cryptonet Control StationCNK Cryptonet KeyCNLZ COMSEC No-Lone ZoneCOMPUSEC Computer SecurityCOMSEC Communications SecurityCOOP Continuity Of Operations PlanCOR Central Office of RecordCOTS Commercial Off-The-ShelfCPC Computer Program ComponentCPCI Computer Program Configuration ItemCPS COMSEC Parent SwitchCPU Central Processing UnitCRC Cyclic Redundancy CheckCRIB Card Reader Insert BoardCRO COMSEC Responsible OfficerCRLCMP Computer Resources Life Cycle Management PlanCRP COMSEC Resources Program (Budget)CRWG Computer Resources Working GroupCrypt/Crypto Cryptographic-RelatedCSA Cognizant Security AuthorityCSC Computer Software ComponentCSCI Computer Software Configuration ItemCSE Communications Security ElementCSETWG Computer Security Education and Training Working GroupCSM Computer System ManagerCSO C4 Systems OfficerCSPP Communications-Computer Systems Program PlanCSRD Communications-Computer Systems Requirements DocumentCSS 1. COMSEC Subordinate Switch2. Constant Surveillance Service (courier)3. Continuous Signature Service (courier)CSSO 1. Computer System Security Officer2. Contractor Special Security OfficerCSSP Computer Security Support ProgramCSTVRP Computer Security Technical Vulnerability Reporting ProgramCSWG Computer Security Working GroupCTAK Cipher Text Auto-KeyCTTA Certified TEMPEST Technical AuthorityCUP COMSEC Utility ProgramCVA Clandestine Vulnerability AnalysisCVRP C4 System Security Vulnerability Reporting ProgramDAA Designated Approving AuthorityDAC Discretionary Access ControlDAMA Demand Assigned Multiple AccessDBMS Data Base Management SystemDCP Decision Coordinating PaperDCS 1. Defense Communications System2. Defense Courier ServiceDCSP Design Controlled Spare PartDDN Defense Data NetworkDDS Dual Driver Service (courier)DES Data Encryption StandardDIB Directory Information BaseDID Data Item DescriptionDLED Dedicated Loop Encryption DeviceDMA Direct Memory AccessDoD TCSEC Department of Defense Trusted Computer System Evaluation CriteriaDPL Degausser Products List (a section in the Information Systems Security Productsand Services Catalogue)DSN Defense Switched NetworkDSVT Digital Subscriber Voice TerminalDTD Data Transfer DeviceDT&E Developmental Test and EvaluationDTLS Descriptive Top-Level SpecificationDTS Diplomatic Telecommunications ServiceDUA Directory User AgentD&V Demonstration and ValidationEAM Emergency Action MessageECCM Electronic Counter-CountermeasuresECM Electronic CountermeasuresECPL Endorsed Cryptographic Products List (a section in the Information Systems Security Productsand Services Catalogue)EDAC Error Detection and CorrectionEDESPL Endorsed Data Encryption Standard Products ListEDM Engineering Development ModelEEPROM Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only MemoryEFD Electronic Fill DeviceEFTO Encrypt for Transmission OnlyEGADS Electronic Generation, Accounting, and Distribution SystemEKMS Electronic Key Management SystemELINT Electronic IntelligenceELSEC Electronic SecurityE-Mail Electronic MailE Model Engineering Development ModelEMSEC Emissions SecurityEPL Evaluated Products List (a section in the Information Systems Security Productsand Services Catalogue)EPROM Erasable Programmable Read Only MemoryERTZ Equipment Radiation TEMPEST ZoneETL Endorsed Tools ListETPL Endorsed TEMPEST Products ListEUCI Endorsed for Unclassified Cryptographic InformationEV Enforcement VectorFCA 1. Functional Configuration Audit2. Formal Cryptographic AccessFDIU Fill Device Interface UnitFDM Formal Development MethodologyFIPS Federal Information Processing StandardFIPS PUB Federal Information Processing Standard PublicationFOCI Foreign Owned, Controlled, or InfluencedFOT&E Follow-On Operational Test and EvaluationFOUO For Official Use OnlyFQR Formal Qualification ReviewFQT Formal Qualification TestingFSD Full Scale DevelopmentFSRS Functional Security Requirements SpecificationFSTS Federal Secure Telephone ServiceFTAM File Transfer Access ManagementFTLS Formal Top-Level SpecificationFTS Federal Telecommunications SystemGPS Global Positioning SystemGTS Global Telecommunications ServiceGWEN Ground Wave Emergency NetworkHDM Hierarchical Development MethodologyHOL High Order LanguageHSM Human Safety Mandatory ModificationHUS Hardened Unique StorageHUSK Hardened Unique Storage KeyIBAC Identity Based Access ControlICU Interface Control UnitIDS Intrusion Detection SystemIEMATS Improved Emergency Message Automated Transmission SystemIFF Identification, Friend or FoeIFFN Identification, Friend, Foe, or NeutralIIRK Interarea Interswitch Rekeying KeyILS Integrated Logistics SupportI/O Input/OutputIOT&E Initial Operational Test and EvaluationIP Internet ProtocolIPM Interpersonal MessagingIPSO Internet Protocol Security OptionIRK Interswitch Rekeying KeyIS Information SystemISDN Integrated Services Digital NetworkISO International Standards OrganizationISS Information Systems SecurityISSO Information Systems Security OfficerITAR International Traffic in Arms RegulationIV&V Independent Verification and ValidationJMSNS Justification for Major System New StartJTIDS Joint Tactical Information Distribution SystemKAK Key-Auto-KeyKEK Key Encryption KeyKG Key GeneratorKMASE Key Management Application Service ElementKMC Key Management CenterKMID Key Management Identification NumberKMODC Key Material Ordering and Distribution CenterKMP Key Management ProtocolKMPDU Key Management Protocol Data UnitKMS Key Management SystemKMSA Key Management System AgentKMUA Key Management User AgentKP Key ProcessorKPK Key Production KeyKSOS Kernelized Secure Operating SystemKVG Key Variable GeneratorLAN Local Area NetworkLEAD Low-Cost Encryption/Authentication DeviceLKG Loop Key GeneratorLMD Local Management DeviceLME Layer Management EntryLMI Layer Management InterfaceLOCK Logical Co-Processing KernelLPC Linear Predictive CodingLPD Low Probability of DetectionLPI Low Probability of InterceptLRIP Limited Rate Initial PreproductionLSI Large Scale IntegrationMAC 1. Mandatory Access Control2. Message Authentication CodeMAN Mandatory ModificationMATSYM Material SymbolMCCB Modification/Configuration Control BoardMCCR Mission Critical Computer ResourcesMCSSM MAJCOM Computer Systems Security ManagerMCTL Military Critical Technologies ListMDC 1. Manipulation Detection Code2. Message Distribution CenterMEECN Minimum Essential Emergency Communications NetworkMEP Management Engineering PlanMER Minimum Essential RequirementsMHS Message Handling SystemMI Message IndicatorMIB Management Information BaseMIJI Meaconing, Intrusion, Jamming, and InterferenceMIL-STD Military StandardMINTERM Miniature TerminalMIPR Military Interdepartmental Purchase RequestMLS Multilevel SecurityMOA Memorandum of AgreementMOE Measure of EffectivenessMOP Measure of PerformanceMOU Memorandum of UnderstandingMRK Manual Remote RekeyingMRT Miniature Receiver TerminalMSE Mobile Subscriber EquipmentMTT Methodologies, Tools, and TechniquesNACAM National COMSEC Advisory MemorandumNACSEM National COMSEC Emanations MemorandumNACSI National COMSEC InstructionNACSIM National COMSEC Information MemorandumNAK Negative AcknowledgeNATO North Atlantic Treaty OrganizationNCCD National Command and Control DocumentNCS 1. National Communications System2. National Cryptologic School3. Net Control StationNCSC National Computer Security CenterNETS Nationwide Emergency Telecommunications ServiceNISAC 1. National Information Security Assessment Center2. National Industrial Security Advisory CommitteeNIST National Institute for Standards and TechnologyNKSR Non-Kernel Security-Related (software)NSA National Security AgencyNSAD Network Security Architecture and DesignNSD National Security DirectiveNSDD National Security Decision DirectiveNSEP National Security Emergency PreparednessNSM Network Security ManagerNSO Network Security OfficerNSP Network Security PlanNSTAC National Security Telecommunications Advisory CommitteeNSTISSAM National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems SecurityAdvisory/Information MemorandumNSTISSC National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems Security CommitteeNSTISSD National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems Security DirectiveNSTISSI National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems Security InstructionNSTISSP National Security Telecommunications and Information Systems Security PolicyNTCB Network Trusted Computing BaseNTIA National Telecommunications and Information AdministrationNTISSAM National Telecommunications and Information Systems Security Advisory/Information MemorandumNTISSC National Telecommunications and Information Systems Security CommitteeNTISSD National Telecommunications and Information Systems Security DirectiveNTISSI National Telecommunications and Information Systems Security InstructionNTISSP National Telecommunications and Information Systems Security PolicyO&M Operations and MaintenanceOADR Originating Agency's Determination RequiredOMB CIR Office of Management and Budget CircularOPCODE Operations CodeOPSEC Operations SecurityOPT Optional ModificationORD Operational Requirements DocumentOT&E Operational Test and EvaluationOTAD Over-the-Air Key DistributionOTAR Over-the-Air RekeyingOTAT Over-the-Air Key TransferOTP One-Time PadOTT One-Time TapePA Privacy ActPAA Peer Access ApprovalPAE Peer Access EnforcementPAL Permissive Action LinkPC Personal ComputerPCA Physical Configuration AuditPCS Physical Control SpacePCZ 1. Protected Communications Zone2. Physical Control ZoneP&D Production and DeploymentPDL Program Design LanguagePDR Preliminary Design ReviewPDS 1. Practice Dangerous to Security2. Protected Distribution SystemPDU Protocol Data UnitPERC Product Evaluation Resource CenterPES Positive Enable SystemPKA Public Key AlgorithmPKC Public Key CryptographyPKSD Programmable Key Storage DevicePL Public LawPLSDU Physical Layer Service Data UnitP Model Preproduction ModelPM 1. Program Manager2. Preventative MaintenancePMD Program Management DirectivePMO Program Management OfficePMP Program Management PlanPNEK Post-Nuclear Event KeyPOM Program Objective MemorandumPPL Preferred Products List (a section in the Information Systems Security Productsand Services Catalogue)PRBAC Partition Rule Base Access ControlPROM Programmable Read-Only MemoryPROPIN Proprietary InformationPSDU Physical Layer Service Data UnitPSL Protected Services ListPTT Push-to-TalkPWA Printed Wiring AssemblyPWDS Protected Wireline Distribution SystemQOT&E Qualification Operational Test and EvaluationQT&E Qualification Test and EvaluationRAC Repair ActionRACE Rapid Automatic Cryptographic EquipmentRAM Random Access MemoryRCCI Regional Computer Crime InvestigatorR&D Research and DevelopmentRFP Request For ProposalROM Read-Only MemoryRQT Reliability Qualification TestsSAISS Subcommittee on Automated Information Systems Security (of the NTISSC)SAMS Semi-Automatic Message SwitchSAO Special Access OfficeSAP 1. System Acquisition Plan2. Special Access ProgramSARK SAVILLE Advanced Remote KeyingSCI Sensitive Compartmented InformationSCIF Sensitive Compartmented Information FacilitySCOMP Secure Communications ProcessorSCP System Concept PaperSDNRIU Secure Digital Net Radio Interface UnitSDNS Secure Data Network SystemSDR System Design ReviewSFA Security Fault AnalysisSI Special IntelligenceSIGSEC Signals SecuritySISS Subcommittee on Information Systems Security (of the NSTISSC)SMM Special Mission Mandatory ModificationSMO Special Mission Optional ModificationSMU Secure Mobile UnitSON Statement of Operational NeedSOW Statement of WorkSPK Single Point Key(ing)SPO System Program OfficeSPS Scratch Pad StoreSRR System Requirements ReviewSSO Special Security OfficerSSR Software Specification ReviewST&E Security Test and EvaluationSTAR System Threat Assessment ReportSTD StandardSTS Subcommittee on Telecommunications Security (of the NTISSC)STU Secure Telephone UnitTA Traffic AnalysisTACTED Tactical Trunk Encryption DeviceTACTERM Tactical TerminalTAG TEMPEST Advisory GroupTAISS Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems SecurityTASO Terminal Area Security OfficerTCB Trusted Computing BaseTCD Time Compliance DataTCSEC (DoD) Trusted Computer System Evaluation CriteriaTD Transfer DeviceTDBI Trusted Data Base Interpretation (of the TCSEC)T&E Test and EvaluationTED Trunk Encryption DeviceTEI Trusted Evaluated Interpretation (of the TCSEC)TEK Traffic Encryption KeyTEMP Test and Evaluation Master PlanTEMPEST Compromising EmanationsTEP TEMPEST Endorsement ProgramTFM Trusted Facility ManualTFS Traffic Flow SecurityTLS Top-Level SpecificationTNI Trusted Network Interpretation (of the TCSEC)TNIEG Trusted Network Interpretation Environment GuidelineTPC Two-Person ControlTPI Two-Person IntegrityTPWG Test Planning Working GroupTRANSEC Transmission SecurityTRB Technical Review BoardTRI-TAC Tri-Service Tactical Communications SystemTRR Test Readiness ReviewTSCM Technical Surveillance CountermeasureTSEC Telecommunications SecurityTSK Transmission Security KeyUA User AgentUIRK Unique Interswitch Rekeying KeyUIS User Interface SystemUK Unique KeyUPP User Partnership ProgramUSDE Undesired Signal Data EmanationsUSER ID User IdentificationVDT Video Display TerminalV Model Advanced Development ModelVST VINSON Subscriber TerminalVTT VINSON Trunk TerminalWAN Wide Area NetworkWWMCCS Worldwide Military Command and Control SystemXDM/X Model Experimental Development Model/Exploratory Development Model
Dear NettimersFollowing Gary Farnell's paper sent to this mailing list at the end oflast October, please see below for a talk that was given at "ASymposium on Zombies" at Winchester University, UK, October 28th. LikeFarnell's piece, my talk maybe of interest in connection with recent Nettime threads concerningthe current crisis and the kind of neoliberal(-ised) subject that hasemerged in the last ten years.All the bestYari LanciZOMBIE 2.0 SUBJECTIVITY: A NEW DROMOLOGICAL PARADIGM.At the end of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead, the remake of the secondfilm in Romero’s Living Dead series, the spectator is faced withfootage from a videotape. Paradoxically placed at the end of themovie, and more precisely integrated with the end credits, the footageappears to work as the happy ending of the storyline. It follows thejourney of the main characters, escaping the overrun mainland byyacht. The remaining survivors eventually reach an island.It takes only few seconds for the alleged happy ending to betransformed into a repetition of the same eschatological setting, withwhich Snyder had opened his movie. In fact, the island has alreadybeen infested by zombies. The contagion was faster than their journeyto the island. The zombies are too fast to flee from. The survivorsare not going to survive. The character filming the disembark isforced to drop the digital camera on the dock, and from that momentonwards the camera shows the scenes of the desperate attempt of thegroup to resist the running hoard of undead.Kim Paffenroth argued that Savini’s remake of Romero’s Night of theLiving Dead is “too identical to the original to need furthercomment.” Conversely, one of the things that distinguishes Snyder’sremake is an important change regarding the physical capacities of thezombies. In the last ten years we have witnessed in zombie moviessomething we have never seen before. Zombies have started to run.Their usual slow shuffling has turned, in Snyder and other’sinterpretations of the zombie narrative, into a frenetic run towardsthe living. In a recent book on popular culture after 9/11, AnnaFroula lucidly describes this new category of zombie when she affirmsthat since Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002, the living dead haveshifted from being “lurching ghouls to adrenaline-filled berserkers.”It is this notion of physiological metamorphosis of the undead, inrelation to their increased speed of movement, which constitutes thebasis of my presentation today. It is speed, not class or ethnicity,which is the trait that might provide an alternative understanding ofthe political relevance of the zombie. As already exemplified byGeorge Romero himself, the ‘godfather’ of the zombie subgenre, therehas always been an overt allegory on both class and race in any zombietexts, be it film, book, or TV series. The perspective I am trying toadopt is one under the umbrella of speed. In relation to some examplesfrom zombie movies and TV shows in the last ten years, what ispossible to learn when we investigate the change in speed of zombies?Isn’t this increased speed, with which the living dead is beingrepresented, nothing other than a symptom of a generalised anxietyabout the kind of speed the homo œconomicus must adopt in order tosurvive the neoliberal market?My presentation today can be summarised in three main points. Firstly,I will provide a methodological framework with which to consider thezombie narrative as one of the tools to better understand what isgoing on in our society. Secondly, I want to draw a genealogy of theundead in relation to the increased speed of their movements andanalyse this metamorphosis in order to understand how the formation ofsubjects has changed in the last twenty years. Thirdly, I will try toread this new subjectivation not just as a passive product ofcontemporary capitalist society (in its neoliberal version), butrather as a potential for a zombified subject who might disrupt theestablished order. This new subject is what I call the Zombie 2.0.*I should provide some methodological justification regarding theimportance of the zombie in critical theory and, accordingly, inrelation to the ways in which this monstrous figure can function as adiagnostic tool of contemporary Western society.Romero once stated, and I quote: “The zombie films are what I perceiveas my platform, a pulpit. They have given me an opportunity to atleast, not necessarily express opinions or criticise, but observewhat’s going on in society.” Romero is quite explicit in consideringthe zombie films he makes as being fictional metaphors to representhis perception of contemporary society. Over the years, critics haveread Romero’s movies as an allegory of the tumultuous social climateof the 1960s America – and I’m referring here especially to Night ofthe Living Dead in 1968. Also, the two sequels – Dawn of the Dead andDay of the Dead – have been read by critics from a diverse variety ofcritical perspectives, such as critiques of capitalism, racism, andAmerican conflict abroad.The zombie becomes a privileged tool of analysis of contemporarysociety, because it represents the kind of political and economicsubject produced by political and economic tendencies, in determinateperiods of our history. The zombie is always a result, never a cause.More precisely, as a metaphor for our contemporary times, the zombieis the result of a process of subjectivation. When I say“subjectivation” I am referring to the kind of formation of subjectsthat philosophers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze wereoutlining in their works during the 1970s.For Romero the zombie is a product of a certain kind of economicframework that was taking shape after the 1960s. For example, in hisDawn of the Dead in 1978, zombies gather outside and inside theshopping mall. They endlessly wander around the different shops as aresult of memory patterns of their previous state as living humans. InDawn of the Dead, the hoard of the walking dead naturally getsattracted by one of the most powerful symbols of the Americanconsumerist culture. In that case, Romero was trying to warn hisspectators about the state of hypnosis caused by the intense regime ofmass-production and consumption of commodities, started bycorporations. The typical sluggishness of Romero’s undead reproducedthe uniformity and massification of the majority of the Westernpopulation, half-hypnotised by TV and by consumer culture. This is whyRomero’s critique was, and still is, admittedly political.*If Romero’s zombies are the counterpart of a general image thedirector himself had of American culture – in political and economicalterms – how should we understand the new increased speed of the livingdead in the last ten years? When did zombies start to run and howshould we understand this change?The first manifestation of the fast zombie can be traced back to DannyBoyle’s 28 Days Later in 2002. Although not technically zombies – forthey were the result of a synthetic biological contagion known as the“rage virus” – the running infected living dead in this movie starteda trend regarding the new enhanced speed of zombies. In fact, this newfast type of zombie can also be found in Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead,the English TV series Dead Set in 2008, the Resident Evil trilogy, LeHorde in 2009 and Rammbock: Berlin Undead in 2010. In these movies,the walking dead become the running dead. It sounds like an oxymoron,for if we follow Max Brook’s tutorial for surviving the living dead –The Zombie Survival Guide published in 2003 – and I quote: “Zombiesappear to be incapable of running. The fastest have been observed tomove at a rate of barely one step per 1.5 seconds.” However, the newbreed of zombies run fast. Extremely fast. Their level ofdangerousness has increased in the same way as their speed. It mightbe argued that zombies have undergone a dromological paradigm shift.The new zombies can be characterised by a dromological acceleration oftheir movements.But what is dromology? Dromology is a concept developed by the Frenchphilosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio at the end of the1970s. The word comes from the Greek dròmos, translated in English as“race” or “race course”. Virilio often described his concept ofdromology as a discourse on speed and, more precisely, dromology isthe science, the discipline, the logic of speed. The first systematicuse of the concept can be found in his Speed and Politics, originallypublished in 1977. In this work, Virilio argues that the history ofhumanity can be understood only insofar as we focus on thetechnological progress made possible through the militarisation ofsociety. One of the most important concepts of Virilio’s book is thatthe militarisation of society should be analysed through the study ofthe speed of the weapon employed. The passage from the feudal system –and its fortified cities – to the capitalist system – and thedevelopment of ballistic weapons like projectiles – is symptomatic ofthe way speed becomes an important category worthy of investigation.Accordingly, Virilio affirms that is speed – not class or wealth –which is the primary motor behind civilization.If the slow speed of Romero’s zombies mirrored the process ofsubjectivation under consumer culture after the 1960s, the increasedspeed of the new zombie is the metaphor for a new dromologicalsubjectivation. The new generation of zombies are functioning as anallegory and a metaphor for a new kind of economic subject. These newsubjects are not anymore zombified – in other words, subjectivised –as passive subjects of the market, but rather they are created torespond to the new needs of neoliberal capitalism. This is what I callthe Zombie 2.0.Michel Foucault outlined the formation of the neoliberal economicdiscourse in his lectures at the College de France in 1978, The Birthof Biopolitics. In these lectures, Foucault expands his research onthe genealogy of power he started in the first part of the 1970s. Thestudy of the mechanisms of security, in seventeenth and eighteenthcentury Europe, opened paths of research about the birth of theeconomic discipline of liberalism. The lectures in The Birth ofBiopolitics expose the way in which neoliberal economics changed theway the economic subject was not only perceived but also constructed.According to Foucault, the first American neoliberalists argued thatclassical economy did not analyse correctly the field of labour.Classical economists studied labour only as a part of the big machineof capital – that is, the conception of labour as an entity betweencapital and the process of production. On the contrary, as Foucaultshows, neoliberal economists study the internal rationalities of theworkers when they are on the market. In doing this, the position ofthe worker is conceived in a completely different manner. Neoliberaleconomics formulates its discourse from the point of view of theworker. For the first time in economic analyses, the worker is nolonger assumed to be an object – an object of demand and an object ofoffer in the form of labour force – but he becomes an active economicsubject. According to Foucault, the homo œconomicus assumes the formof an enterprise, or more precisely, an entrepreneur of himself.Neoliberalism incites each individual to take the form of “humancapital.”In Foucault’s reading of neoliberal economists, the concept of humancapital is constituted by innate and acquired elements. The acquiredelements of human capital are factors that become economicallyrelevant with neoliberalism, such as education, professional skills,and mobility. The new active subject of the neoliberal market can beeffective only insofar as he performs a series of investments inacquired human capital. In other words, contemporary neoliberalframework forces the worker to create, as soon as possible, anadequate level of employability. According to the Italian philosopherMaurizio Lazzarato, the aim of neoliberal economics is to create avast array of self-entrepreneurs who keep the level of competitionhigh. This in turn generates an atmosphere of what he calls “equalinequality.” Also, Lazzarato shows how one of the strategies ofneoliberal economics has been to construct a new economic subject suchas the “new poor” – that is, the proletarianised middle class that isoften placed in the general category of “precarious workers.” In thesecategories, Lazzarato continues, fear runs along the whole continuum.These subjects are being created in order to render the mechanisms ofcompetition and precariousness even harsher. As we can see, neoliberalcapitalism has its own devices (or dispositifs) for social control.If we follow Foucault and Lazzarato’s analyses of neoliberaleconomics, it becomes evident that, as it happened with the zombiemovies at the beginning of the third millennium, the worker hasundergone a dromological paradigm shift as well. The worker must nowactively invest in his human capital, for the neoliberal market can besustained only by the circulation created by the investments andmobility of the workers. Today, the worker as an entrepreneur ofhimself is required to be fast and adaptable to the constantlychanging requests of the neoliberal market.Through his concept of dromology, Virilio argued that the categoriesof space and time have become relative to the new absolute of speed.With modern technologies, speed becomes the only constant to thedetriment of physical space. In relation to any kind of movement, morethan the spatial coordinates of departure and arrival, what isimportant is the speed of the trajectory. According to Virilio, in thenew framework of modernity, Newtonian time and space have beenrelativised by the absolutization of the speed. The route has theupper hand over the object. In the same way, neoliberalism creates andprivileges the trajectories of workers, their mobility. This mobilitydoesn’t have to be intended only as spatial mobility – for examplewhen different flows of workers migrate towards stronger economies –but also as the level of employability in relation to the acquiredhuman capital.To recapitulate, the new fast zombie that can be seen in differentmovies after Boyle’s 28 Days Later, is the reproduction in popularculture of a kind of subjectivity that emerged with the development ofcontemporary neoliberal capitalism. The Zombie 2.0, be it the fastzombie in movies or the precarious entrepreneur of himself describedby Foucault and Lazzarato, has speed as his main trait.The movies featuring fast zombies registered a paradigm shift in theformation of subjectivities. As it was in the case of Romero’s movies,these kinds of zombie narratives function in our society as apolitical unconscious. The literary theorist Fredric Jameson arguedthat different branches of culture, like literature or cinema, act asthe expression of a political unconscious faced with the challenges ofthe metamorphoses of capitalism. The change in speed required indifferent economic subjects under neoliberalism, is one of thesemetamorphoses.*Zombie 2.0 narratives, like Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead and the TVseries Dead Set, depict a situation of zombie epidemics from which itis impossible to escape alive. The entire world will end up zombified.If we get back to the comparison between the process of zombificationand formation of subjectivities, one could argue that the sense ofeschatological inevitability in these movies, seems to suggest thatthe contemporary economical and political subjectivation is somethingto be acknowledged as inevitable. Neoliberalism shapes oursubjectivities according to its aims. This sense of inevitability isone of the tropes which might clarify why the zombie – and the actualsubjects zombies allegorically represent – has often been thought ofas a product of an overarching economical base, both with Romero’sslow zombies, and the fast Zombie 2.0. But if that is the case, whatis the critique established by the Zombie 2.0?I think that the critique of the Zombie 2.0 consists in what Viriliocalled the political economy of speed. Far from demonizing theincreased speed of our modernity, Virilio has rather tried tounderstand the inner logic of speed. It is in this sense that weshould try to understand not only how the neoliberal subjectivationworks. We should also try to learn how the political economy of speedof neoliberalism works, to the detriment of the labour force on themarket. Under neoliberalism, labour force – both in the forms ofmaterial and immaterial labour – undergoes the Zombie 2.0 dromologicalmetamorphosis.What has happened in the last thirty years is that the politicaleconomy of speed has been absorbed and employed by the schizophrenicpower of financial late capitalism. What is at stake now is a newconception of the zombie not anymore as a passive product of a certaintype of subjectivation, but as a new potential for disruption of theeconomic framework that created it. It is not surprising that theopening scenes in 28 Days Later and Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead showvideo footage of urban rioting. The student protests last year inEngland, the Spanish and Italian indignado movement, Greek uprising inthe last three years, London riots in August 2011, the “Occupy”movement all around the world, they all display how the constantgeneralised crisis of contemporary capitalism is being challenged bythe hoard of Zombies 2.0.If zombies and subjectivities are produced as fast and reactive, thatmeans that we have to use this new increased speed to turn the passivesubjectivation into one that is active and against neoliberalpolicies. After all, as Sun Tsu affirmed 2500 years ago, “speed is theessence of war.”Yari Lanci
[This September, the media department of the Universiteit vanAmsterdam invited me to give the graduation speech for its Mastersstudents of New Media. I had been asked to address the future of newmedia studies in my lecture, which was a difficult task since I hadnever studied or taught new media studies. I hope that I'm not boringNettime by posting the manuscript here. -Florian]# The Medium is Not the Message ### On the future of new media studies ##Dear graduates,Let me make a wild guess: Perhaps it has become more difficult for you tosay what media are - and what media studies are - than a few years agowhen you began to study them. A paradox of "media" is that, in our time,they seem to be everywhere at first glance yet nowhere when it comes tocritical study. Every person on the street would agree that our everydaylife is permeated by electronic media, the Internet, mobile phones,electronic gadgets. Everyone is aware of their economic impact. Eventhe link between these communication technologies to cultural and socialmovements is not esoteric anymore, in the year after WikiLeaks and twodays after the Pirate Party won nine percent at the state elections inBerlin. If we look at university media studies, however, we see that onlyfew departments exist and that of those few, most are journalism or filmstudies departments at their core. You could even philosophically debunkand dismiss the notion of "media" itself, with its legacy of 19th centuryphysics and outmoded concept of the ether. What exactly is a medium,as something supposedly in between a sender and a receiver, if sendersand receivers are nowadays routinely included in the concept of "media"?If you have faced these issues in your studies, you experienced firsthand that the notion of media is not set in stone, but under a constantsemantic shift. The implication of this is quite positive: Since "media"are always something in the making, and even something contested, youcan (and inevitably have to be) their makers, and help giving them themeaning you find important. The best thing that can be said of mediastudies is that they carry less idealist baggage than the historicallymore established humanities. In their best manifestations, media studieshave blurred or even removed the boundaries between theory and practice.This is even true for the so-called media theory. Benjamin, McLuhan,Enzensberger, Baudrillard, Haraway, Kittler, Manovich, Hayles - if wedrop some text book names of more or less canonical media theoreticians,we see that their works are bastards: speculative, controversial, fringeand of rather dubious reputation within the larger humanities, evenwithin media studies themselves. None of them even had media studydegrees like you have. As far as I know, most of your professors heredon't have them either. (Neither do I have any such degree, by theway.)Media studies are full of such paradoxes. Perhaps the most famousone is the sentence that institutionalized media studies, McLuhan's"the medium is the message". If you look at it closely, then thisstatement is a performative contradiction much like the liar's paradox:It uses the medium of language (or of print, here we already get into theintricacies of properly identifying a medium) to formulate a message thattranscends that medium. Or, in other words: if the medium is the message,then the sentence that "the medium is the message" is an exception tothat statement.McLuhan's historical pretext for this Zen-like and often misunderstoodstatement were the modern arts of the 20th century. In abstract painting,painting no longer depicts something else, but is pure painting, so themedium is the message. The same is true for sound poetry and for a textthat was McLuhan's major inspiration, James Joyce's novel "FinnegansWake" whose language is above all about language. But this ultimatelymeans that in McLuhan's media theory, the underlying message were notmass media but the modern arts.I see an upside and downside to this theory. The problematic side is howl'art pour l'art got transformed into a paradigm of communication media:we watch TV in order to watch TV (not news, sports, drama). The "globalvillage" that McLuhan proclaimed had, in my reading, nothing to do withtoday's Internet and community media activism, it was even the opposite- the kind of community created by people around the globe sittingin front of TV and watching the Apollo moon landing. It was a deeplyconservative vision of new media. Just at this time, we witness how,in the Netherlands and elsewhere, the sector of new media arts is beingscrapped and redefined as "creative industries". The same is happening inhigher education. Those who deplore this should however not forget thatthis is just what McLuhan did in the 1960s: He was the theoretician andpaid counseling guru of the creative industries of his time. He taughtits executives how to learn from the modern arts. His "global village"was not a critical but a commercial vision for tv networks. A lot ofmedia theory has been either pro-establishment or uncritical, but oftenin very idiosyncratic ways: If we think how Baudrillard and Enzensbergerturned against their earlier Marxism or how Kittler and Sloterdijk justrecently courted the German yellow press publisher Hubert Burda.The subtext underneath these strange alliances is that media studiesare the humanities discipline with the broadest impact outside its ownculture. While the position of an English professor studying Shakespeareis comparatively safe and uncontroversial (even given the precarious stateof the humanities), it is not of immediate interest to any politicalor economical party (even if it is political such as the Shakespearephilology of Stephen Greenblatt). Media studies, on the other hand, has amore widely recognized social urgency. Policy makers and industry leadersexpect media studies and media arts to deliver innovative visions. (Thisis the reason why my own job has now been changed from teaching new mediato art students to research and development for the creative industriesin the Rotterdam region.) Prominent media theorists have often beento seduced into lucrative second jobs as media industry consultants andwater down their critical distance - a problem even more rampant in thecontemporary visual arts where often the same people work as curators,critics and consultants for private collectors.For me, the performativity of media theory became visible after thedotcom crash in the early 2000s. Not only did Internet companies crash inAmerica and pretty much everywhere in Western Europe. In my home country,there was also the "stupid German money" bubble, investment money thatfinanced Hollywood B movies like "Driven" (with Sylvester Stallone) andA movies like "Gangs of New York" (by Martin Scorsese). This was onlypossible thanks to German government tax cut programs for investmentinto new media. Contrary to the Anglo-American notion of new media,the German term encompasses all electricity-driven media and thus alsoradio, tv and film. This difference in terminology was powerful enoughto offset a few billions on the world financial markets. In the lightof the financial system crisis, we can only wonder what other seeminglyabstract theories created, and destroyed, market value.The upside of this is that media studies is not on a safe ground, butrisky - not just in a metaphorical, wannabe sense. Aside from thissystemic aspect, there is also an individualist dimension. McLuhaninstitutionalized media studies as a discipline driven by passions,underground passions that never matched nominal research subject. InMcLuhan's case, avant-garde arts, for others: politics, sexuality, money,too, to name a few. In all these cases, the medium is not actually themessage. What's more, media have been and continue to be designed andtweaked to these political, sexual, economic ends. If I had the time tohave a seminar with you, and not just a traditional lecture, my questionto each of you would be: What is _your_ passion? How do you channel itinto your media practice and theory? What drives you into a field wheremost of you will not have clearly predefined jobs (such as a literaturegraduate becoming a publisher's editor) but where you will have to defineyour own profession?I am not advocating an ideology or fetish of the "new" in "new media".I am currently working in a project with third year Bachelor studentswho were born in 1990 and for whom the term "new media" makes no senseanymore. More than that, it's obvious that the real "new media" (in thesense of contemporary, edgy, passion-driven means of communication)these days are not digital, but analog: zines, artists' books, Super8 films and analog photography, cassette tapes (and vinyl records to alesser degree). They are not merely embraced in a nostalgic retro trend,but as truly self-made media whose production and social sharing escapesthe control of Google, Apple and Facebook - and in this sense, they arethe new 'new media'.If this describes the practice, what does it mean for new media studies asa critical discipline? With the exception of publications like JunkJetor BLIK (from Utrecht): What are the zines, what is the Super 8 ofnew media studies, metaphorically speaking? I consider this importantbecause those media that were new ten or twenty years ago have become soconventional that they invite corresponding conventionality in criticismand scholarship.As two paradigmatic examples, I would like to choose Apple and Wikileaks,the most successful computer and digital lifestyle company versus theInternet project that made the biggest headlines last year. On thesurface, they couldn't be more different: Here the most valuable companyof the world that operates top-down and sells products, here a grassroots,non-commercial activist project. But both of them are quite similar intheir reviving of classical notions of media. Apple's business modelhas always been to merge media and product design: software and hardwarethat become one organic whole. The iPhone and iPad have perfected this asempty slates where each touchscreen app running full screen pretends to beits own medium: a camera, a map, etc. Since those media - including iTunesmusic and films - have been made tangible single products again, you cansell them as products, like in the 20th century. That also means thatall classical categories of media criticism can safely remain in place.Apple's business model and media concept is easy to understand whileGoogle's business model of media as free networked services financedthrough a hidden underlying layer of commercial services is muchmore difficult to penetrate. Google and Facebook, however, seem to bethe only companies left who can run this "new economy" business modelsuccessfully, a model that can, as it seems, be profitably run only bymono- or duopolies. This doesn't invalid Yann Moulier Boutang'sdiagnosis of "cognitive capitalism" (which he presented at the Societiesof the Query conference here in Amsterdam), but relativizes it. I dareto predict that the programs of "knowledge economies" or "creativeeconomies" will end up having a similar fate. Instead of a pure serviceeconomy with neo-colonially outsourced fabrication, there will hopefullybe a return to an economy that will locally reintegrate intellectuallabor and physical production.To come back to my second example: WikiLeaks is more like Apple in thesense that it operates within a classical media paradigm, the realm ofwhistleblowing and mass media political journalism. For those who haveseen media studies as merely a synonym of journalism studies, WikiLeaks(next to online journalism) is the godsend Internet phenomenon thatfits that paradigm, and requires almost no methodological updates ofmass media studies scholarship.I have been in discussions with Geert Lovink that new media studiesseem to be disappearing as a discipline of its own, and swallowed bythe social sciences and cultural studies. Or perhaps they are turningagain into somewhat boring journalism and communication studies. You,the graduates of this department, can change this state of affairs. Oryou make the same choice made by most people working in the media fieldtoday: go into a different field of work and research to creativelyapply your expertise and mindset there, like the Pirate Party is currentlytrying to do in politics.So when the UvA asked me for a guest lecture on "The Future of New MediaStudies", I was not sure whether I was the right person to defend it. Ontop of not having a degree in media studies, I have never had a job inthis discipline, but taught in a comparative literature department, thenin an art school and now in a polytechnic. If the value of media theoryand media studies has been, historically, to foster experimental thinkingand experimental humanities, from Walter Benjamin to Wendy Chun, thenthe disciplinary label is of rather secondary importance. When I studiedexperimental humanities in the late 1980s, it was called ComparativeLiterature, when I went to the USA as an exchange student in the early90s, it had become Cultural Studies, and by the early 2000s, it was newmedia studies. My concern at this point is that the new name will beCreative Industries.Since part of my work is for the arts, it has been my experience that"new media" is best used as an umbrella to fit practices that misfitestablished disciplines. Everyone pretends to love interdisciplinarity,but once you actually try to get a job or some project funding, youwill see that this far from the reality. From 2007 to 2009, I wasone of four jury members for net art subsidies in Vienna, a city thatstill generously supports this area of artistic production and culturalactivism. Again and again, we ended up subsidizing projects that were notstrictly Internet art or activism, but for example film installationsor sound art festivals, never mind the fact that separate city fundsfor film and music did exist. But the music fund would not supportanything that was not a concert, and the film fund would not supportanything that wasn't a theatrical screening. If you laugh and dismissthis as conservative Austrian politics, then you should know that it'salmost the same in this innovation-loving country. For the same reason,an experimental music institute like STEIM in Amsterdam and an anarchistmusic/film/performance/hacklab venue like WORM in Rotterdam were putinto the "e-culture" sector of Dutch arts funding, and will thereforebe forced to be "Creative Industries" in the future.Let me stay with moving images for a little while. In former times,when film was synonymous with new media, experimental film and video weresynonymous with media art. We not only see it in the strong film heritageof media studies, up to Lev Manovich's "Language of New Media" in itsreliance on Dziga Vertov. In the arts, an institute like Montevideo/NiMKis still a video art archive at its heart. What I have been witnessing inmy own work, for example in conferences that we organized in Rotterdam,is how film culture has become conservative in the literal sense of beingmostly concerned with its self-preservation. While experimental filmsin the 1960s such as Wilhelm and Birgit Hein's "Rohfilm" exposed themateriality of the celluloid in order to destroy the dream factory ofthe mass medium, contemporary experimental film exposes the very samemateriality - sprockets, grain, dust, edge lettering - as a nostalgiccelebration of an analog medium that is about to disappear. (Just followthe respective discussions on analog versus digital on the "Frameworks"mailing list.) Micro cinema networks like Kino Climates see themselvesas preservers of film and cinema culture. In its worst manifestations,contemporary artists books have become a graphic design genre, taughtat schools like Werkplaats Typografie, celebrating the materiality ofthe paper book.This brings us back to McLuhan and the medium as the message: It isa sure sign of a dead medium when a medium is fetishized for its ownsake. Therefore, 20th century abstract painting was not a good modelfor media theory. When books are about "book culture", then they aredead. When films are about "film culture" and film theaters about"film theater culture", they are dead, when vinyl records are about"vinyl culture", then they're just zombies, zombie films are dead sincethey got co-opted into "b movie culture", etc. Zines died in the 1990swhen they became swallowed into the encyclopedic "zine culture" booksby Factsheet Five and Re/search, and did not became alive again untilthey reinvented themselves as informal, ephemeral media.Or, to express it in positive terms: A medium is alive as long as it canbe quick and dirty. Wilhelm and Birgit Hein's "Rohfilm" was such a dirtyfilm. Therefore, it was only logical for the two filmmakers to proceedinto the realms of sexuality and pornography in their later work. (Imet Wilhelm Hein this weekend, so I am still under the impression.) Solet's once more radicalize the hypothesis: A medium is alive as longas it is being used for pornographic ends. This gives us pretty clearindications about the respective booms and busts of print, VHS video andDVDs, for example. Cinema is rather dead since there are no more porncinemas. Musea, it conversely follows, are not dead media because thereis still a thriving sex museum in the near neighborhood of this institute.I am mentioning these trivia because I would like to encourage you to walkoff the beaten paths (to quote the name of Wilhelm Hein's and AnnetteFrick's current zine, "Jenseits der Trampelpfade") and beware of falsetrust in expertise. One example: It took me personally a long time tosee that the foundations of what I had studied as structuralist literarytheory were entirely speculative, and often based on false scientism. Soit seems to me as if the title of this lecture, "The Future of New MediaStudies", is blatantly irrelevant to you because it is not interestingwhat media studies will be, but what _you_ will do and whether it willbe interesting. Whether this practice will still be called "new mediastudies" is of secondary importance. Often enough, disciplinary specialismhas just been a token of the emperor's new clothes. For example, I amalmost sure that hardly any new media studies professor actually knowsthe technically correct definition of "analog" and "digital". If youneed a proof, just take the popular term "Digital Humanities". It wouldnot exist, except as an embarrassment, if the scholars gathering aroundit knew more than just the colloquial notion of "digital".When I was a teenager in the West-Berlin of the 1980s, the most vitalsubcultural current were the self-acclaimed "genius dilettantes" whichincluded the bands Die Tödliche Doris and Einstürzende Neubauten. Isympathize with the dilettantes but less so with the romanticist legacyof the "genius". For experimental humanities, and whatever future of newmedia studies under whatever name, I would like to modify this term intoanother paradox, the "dilettante expert". Expertise is the classicalfoundation of all geekdom, whether it is encyclopedic knowledge ofShakespeare, of the Star Trek universe or the registers of an 8-bitcontroller. Dilettantism is the unavoidable condition of drawing thebigger picture. It can end up badly like with the pseudo-mathematics andpseudoscience in the books of Lacan, Kristeva, Baudrillard and Deleuzedebunked by Sokal and Bricmont, especially to the extent that some oftheir discourse - Lacan's in particular - lacked doubt and humbleness.Sokal and Bricmont published "Intellectual Imposters" in 1997.Retrospectively, it seems to have marked an end of speculative culturalstudies and media theory, except for shrinking niches in the contemporaryarts and in political activism. And deservedly so, I would say, becauseyou could see the grand media theorists shutting up very quickly whenthe new media technologies became a reality and you could no longer getaway with theorizing about "virtual reality" while not being able tooperate your own laptop. (For a certain period from roughly 1997 to2007, this was the running gag of new media studies conferences.) Youare among the first generations of people with postgraduate degrees inmedia studies who actually, pardon my French, know their shit. You areexperts enough to permit yourself some dilettantism again and dare tobecome universalists. If this is your ambition, then my only messagewould be: Don't take the medium for the message, and don't take mediastudies for the message either.
FYI: The date for ?Occupations,? the 11th Annual Graduate Conference in Communication and Culture at York University and Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario has been changed from March 23-25, 2012 to April 27-29, 2012. Please see information on the revised deadline for submissions in the CFP below.Also of note, Edu-Factory?s ?Our University! A Conference on Struggles Within and Beyond the Neoliberal University? will be held in Toronto the same weekend. We will be working in collaboration with the Edu- Factory organizers on some events over this weekend; stay posted for details. For more information on the Edu-Factory conference, see http://www.edu-factory.org/wp/the-university-is-ours/+ + +INTERSECTIONS / CROSS SECTIONS 2012: OCCUPATIONS11th Annual Graduate Conference in Communication and Culture at York University and Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, CanadaApril 27-29, 2012 (new date!)http://thecomcult.wordpress.comAbstracts due: February 1, 2012 (revised deadline)Email submissions and questions to: intersections.occupations-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.orgOccupy but better yet, self manage?. The former option is basically passive?the latter is active and yields tasks and opportunities to contribute.? To occupy buildings, especially institutions like universities or media, isn?t just a matter of call it, or tweet it, and they will come. It is a matter of go get them, inform them, inspire them, enlist them, empower them, and they will come.? Michael Albert, ?Occupy to Self Manage? (http://interactivist.autonomedia.org/node/33609 )The unfolding events at Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere present possibilities for new politics, and new forms of learning from, living with and engaging each other. Occupations are attempts to build the social compositions that are the precondition for action. They are the working through of a problem that politics-as-usual works to suppress? the massive exploitation that is capitalism and the emergence of politics adequate to address it. At this stage, occupations are the connection of people, ideas and machines?the cumulation of assemblages that might build something. What happens next depends on what is being built now. We invite graduate students from all related disciplines to submit proposals for academic, artistic and activist presentations and workshops that explore and otherwise critically engage occupations.Please send a 250-word abstract to occupations.intersections-Re5JQEeQqe9fmgfxC/sS/w< at >public.gmane.org Proposals should list paper/panel title, name, institutional affiliation and contact details.Workshop facilitators: Please provide a timeline indicating the duration and one or two general learning objectives of your session, along with space and technical requirements.Artists: If sending creative works by email, please limit attachment size to 5 MB or less, or direct us to a URL. Include viewing instructions, comments and titles if applicable. If submitting creative works by post, please mail the proposal, a copy of the work and viewing instructions to the following address:Intersections / Cross Sections 2012 Conferencec/o Graduate Program in Communication and Culture3013 TEL Building, York University4700 Keele StreetToronto, ON M3J 1P3Occupations is presented by and for graduate student scholars, artists and activists through the organizing efforts of the Communication and Culture Graduate Students Association (GSA).For more information about the Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities: http://comcult.yorku.ca & http://www.ryerson.ca/graduate/programs/comcult/
Please DO +RT! Take the #OccupyResearch survey:http://bit.ly/owsurvey-net Research by/4 the movement FTW! More info:http://bit.ly/owsurvey-info
Dear participants ofOxcars and FCForum, dear members of the FCForum platform, dear all,with some delay, we send you here all the material produced and edited during the conference.Once again we thank you for your participation in this event and in general in this fight we all share.Oxcars: photos, video, press:http://oxcars11.whois--x.net/en/media/Oxcars: video:http://vimeo.com/33047393FCForum: videos, photos, press:http://www.2011.fcforum.net/en/media-2/FCForum conclusions / recommendations / case studies:http://www.2011.fcforum.net/en/outcomes11/This material is added to the /Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge/ produced by the FCForum in 2009 that is being used as a tool to reform copyrightlaws throughout Europe and the /Manual for//sustainable creativity/ , published in 2010:http://fcforum.netIf you like the material, we welcome you to give diffusion and to use it as a tool for change.A big hug,X.nethttp://whois--X.net< at >fcforum_net
I am awakening from my lurker-slumber (enhanced by the fact that I just underwent eye-surgery for retina detachment - went all very well, thank you) to post these three pieces from the LRoB. Myself have given up academia some time ago - in fact I was kicked out under the motive that I was not "representing any form of measurable scientific added value whatsoever" - funily enough exactly the same words used in the Middlesex philosophy department collective sack five years later (I have always been ahead of my time, the most impardonable political mistake acoording to Francois Mitterand...), and I actually fail to understand why people stay there - that includes you, guys and gals - since todays universities have by an large become what my friend Rolf Pixley aptly calls 'KFZs' - Knowledge Free Zones (as befits an epoch of fact-free politics). Okay, I know a few oases, individuals and sometimes whole collectives, but generally speaking, to quote Rop Gonggrijp in a defiierent setting, "we have lost the war". And the reason why is most eloquently put forward by Michael Wood in the third piece ('Why pay for Sanskrit?): we cannot talk to the decision makers any more, since their language is impervious to our arguments and if we adopt their language we cannot phrase these anymore and automatically adopt their viewpoint (I wonder if that is what English analytical philosophy understands as 'performative'). I always say "you just could talk Japanese to them (assuming they are not - and even then ...;-)Cheers for now, and; HAPPY ENDING, HAPPY LANDING!patrizio & Diiiinooos!....................................bwo Virginie Mamadouh/ Ewald EngelenNice pieces in the London Review of Books on the glaring discrepancy between the self-image of contemporary universities as projected by the board of directors through glossy brochures and other carriers of corporate humbug and the lived reality of staff and sudents...Very uplifting ;)Universities under Attack (1)Rachel MalikFor a long time I believed that being an academic wasn't just the best career for me - which it clearly was, I loved it - but one of the best it was possible to have, especially within a university system committed to expansion. Yet recently I took voluntary redundancy after teaching in the humanities at Middlesex University for 18 years, and for the foreseeable future I have no desire to work in any university in this country - or, I imagine, elsewhere.The attack on universities takes many forms. My focus here is on attacks from within: attacks on staff, academic and administrative, and attacks on knowledge that come from inside universities themselves. 'Universities' is not a simple plural. The 'academy' is a messy conjunction of increasingly conflicting elements and interests and these cut across the familiar oppositions between old and new, rich and poor, deserving and undeserving. Thus Middlesex is not just or most importantly a struggling post-1992 institution. Its management worked out a long time ago that survival and success did not lie with domestic students. The university has two overseas campuses - in Dubai and Mauritius - and is actively searching for a site and partners for a third, probably in India. Like many others, it has attempted to commodify as many of its assets as possible: courses and programmes in the form of franchises; research; and various types of higher educational and pedagogical expertise.It wasn't always like this. When I arrived in 1993 and for a good number of years after that, it was a wonderful place to work. Demand in the humanities was buoyant, and this was crucial to the opportunities we had to build teaching programmes from scratch and rebuild others, and to do our own research, encouraged both by the intellectual culture in which we worked, and by something else that has become increasingly rare: sabbatical leave.Today the most reliable communiqué from the institution is the corporate newsletter. By 'reliable' I mean that it arrives regularly and contains no bad news. It is the familiar story of visions delivered, research impacting, champions championing. This corporate version of the institution is completely at variance with the lived reality of the staff and most of the students. These representations, like much else, exist for the benefit and reassurance of foreign partners, actual and potential. Meanwhile, on another part of the website, the voluntary redundancy scheme is now permanently open, punctuated by frequent compulsory redundancy operations. Both are designed to erode morale and force staff to accept increasingly degraded conditions of 'service'.Discrepancies of this kind are a part of everyone's working life, but at Middlesex they were particularly jarring. In nearly all respects ours is an institution with no past. I do not mean by this that it does not have 500 years, or 150 or 50 years of history and tradition to look back on. I am talking instead about the managerial embrace of a particularly degraded form of the modern. The management speciality is 'radical' reorganisations: of teaching programmes, organisational structures and research priorities, all of which must be achieved at absurdly accelerated rates. Such revolutions are always justified as a necessary response to external conditions and to a future whose only certain quality is its uncertainty. Emergency is our everyday: it is always wartime.When yet another one of these restructurings is declared, what we do - teaching, thinking, writing, marking, planning - is never taken into consideration. It counts neither as activity nor as value. Anyone who expresses reservations about the direction chosen for the future is, by definition, inflexible and disloyal. This is a particularly cynical version of modernity. No one wants to be on the wrong side of the future, and that future is achievable only through a complete cancellation of the past.This revolutionary tempo sits uncomfortably with the rhythms of teaching and research. Last year Middlesex closed down its philosophy department, which has since moved to Kingston. It was an excellent department. It also had all the contemporary indicators of 'research excellence'. When I asked my dean about the decision, it was obvious that excellence hadn't been enough to save the department, so I asked him why the extensive funding the unit had earned from its RAE scores and various other funding sources had been no protection against immediate closure. He was (for once) perfectly clear: 'But that's over, that's finished,' he said, meaning that what was already earned simply did not count.Within this 'logic', it is virtually impossible for an individual or group to accumulate intellectual value or capital, much less trade on it. This may sound - and it obviously is - cack-handed and incompetent, but something of the same logic is at work in the short-termism that is currently remaking the academic workforce.Many university departments simply could not function without the energy, talent and goodwill of part-time lecturers, but the pattern of a skeleton permanent teaching staff supported by part-timers and those on teaching-only contracts has become a model for staffing in many institutions, and not just because it is cheaper. Those small numbers of permanent staff are increasingly going to be employed to develop, write and monitor courses that they will not teach and that exist primarily as units for sale or rent to a variety of markets, national and global. Little, if any, thought has been given to the impact of this on teaching and learning by the universities adopting this model. This commodifying of a course or a degree programme or a set of quality procedures is bad news. For one thing, the majority of academics and students are becoming ever more remote from the places where knowledge is produced. It is now seen as naive to insist on the natural connections between teaching and research.Further, the global market, rightly or wrongly, is seen as a very conservative place: the role of self-censorship, the weeding out of anything that might prove controversial, is a necessary consequence of the edu-business model. The result is courses that become ever more anodyne as they compete to imagine the inoffensive. In various departments at Middlesex, course content is already indirectly determined by partner institutions, national and international: it can't be taught here, unless it is taught there.There has been a good deal of discussion about the direct pressures put on academics to produce work that sits comfortably within the research assessment criteria. However, I would suggest that as the financial situation worsens, institutions will need to apply less pressure on researchers to go where the money is. Academics will make their own adjustments, will internalise the priorities of the funding councils, and adopt them as their own. Soon they will become adept at second or even third-guessing them. Such pragmatism probably doesn't make for very good research. But that pragmatism is likely to be strengthened as the nature of research itself is redefined.In various forms of higher educational discourse, research is already starting to float free of 'content', that tricky, highly specialised, fancy knowledge that presents such a challenge to institutions such as Middlesex. Education is becoming a training in learning. Students learn a good deal about how to 'do' team-work and assess their peers, but rather less about the Victorian Novel or the Role of Literature in the Contemporary. Similarly, research has come to mean one of two things: the quantifiable thing that needs to score well in the Research Excellence Framework, or a set of transferable practices or methods.These practices, increasingly generic and cross-disciplinary, are being taught to postgraduates, and increasingly to undergraduates, particularly those in what are now called 'research-rich institutions' looking for ways to justify their fees. Just as the good manager takes pride in being able to manage anything, so the good researcher will take pride in being able to research anything. Not knowing much about a subject area will present no difficulty, rather it might be considered an advantage, for the researcher will be untroubled by disciplinary loyalty - just like the manager who comes in from outside.This may seem hyperbolic, but there are already strong precedents for this sort of approach in both management and teaching. And perhaps it isn't so very far away from happening in academia. I recently chanced upon a website that provides students in humanities and social sciences at a UK university with information about the various types of research training available to them. Some of these were valuable - training about writing for publication, conferences, the profession and so on (we would be fools to reject professionalisation) but I was brought up short by a workshop on 'the literature search':This second interactive workshop will provide an opportunity to find out how to identify the most important and influential literature from the literature search. Participants will use measures to identify journals with high impact factors, articles with large citation counts, and influential authors. Strategies for reading will also be discussed, as well as understanding how much to read, when to stop, and options for taking effective notes from reading materials.This doesn't call for elaborate interpretation. However, I find the unthinking correlation between 'influential literature' on the one hand and 'high impact factors', 'large citation counts' and so forth, rather worrying. Even before the first REF has run, its metrics have been adopted as the primary indicators of value and esteem. This research programme is offered, I might add, by a Russell Group university. Of greatest concern, perhaps, is that the training offered here is totally divorced from any particular body of material. Faced with such a free-floating model of what knowledge is, perhaps we should all think a little more carefully about the future of that proprietary 'my' in 'my research'.Universities under Attack (2)Keith ThomasWe are all deeply anxious about the future of British universities. Our list of concerns is a long one. It includes the discontinuance of free university education; the withdrawal of direct public funding for the teaching of the humanities and the social sciences; the subjection of universities to an intrusive regime of government regulation and inquisitorial audit; the crude attempt to measure and increase scholarly ‘output’; the requirement that all academic research have an ‘impact’ on the economy; the transformation of self-governing communities of scholars into mega-businesses, staffed by a highly-paid executive class, who oversee the professors, or middle managers, who in turn rule over an ill-paid and often temporary or part-time proletariat of junior lecturers and research assistants, coping with an ever worsening staff-student ratio; the notion that universities, rather than collaborating in their common task, should compete with one another, and with private providers, to sell their services in a market, where students are seen, not as partners in a joint enterprise of learning and understanding, but as ‘consumers’, seeking the cheapest deals that will enable them to emerge with the highest earning prospects; the indiscriminate application of the label ‘university’ to institutions whose primary task is to provide vocational training and whose staff do not carry out research; and the rejection of the idea that higher education might have a non-monetary value, or that science, scholarship and intellectual inquiry are important for reasons unconnected with economic growth.What a contrast with the medieval idea that knowledge was a gift of God, which was not to be sold for money, but should be freely imparted. Or with the 19th-century German concept of the university devoted to the higher learning; or with the tradition in this country that some graduates, rather than rushing off to Canary Wharf, might wish to put what they had learned to the service of society by teaching in secondary schools or working for charities or arts organisations or nature conservation or foreign aid agencies or innumerable other good but distinctly unremunerative causes.Our litany of discontents makes me realise how fortunate I was to have entered academic life in the mid-1950s, and thus to have experienced several decades of what now looks like a golden age of academic freedom, ‘when wits were fresh and clear,/ And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames;/ Before this strange disease of modern life,/ With its sick hurry, its divided aims.’ It was a time when students were publicly funded and when the Treasury grant to universities was distributed by the University Grants Committee, largely made up of academics and working at arm’s length from the government; they understood what universities needed and they ruled with a light touch, distributing block grants and requiring only that the money be spent on buildings, teaching and research. It was a time when the ‘new’ universities of the 1960s were devising novel syllabuses, constructed with an eye to the intellectual excitement they generated. Of course, there were fewer universities in those days, and only a minority of young people had access to them. It is a matter for rejoicing that higher education in some form or other is nowadays potentially available to nearly half of the relevant age group. But because there are so many universities, real and so-called, there are fewer resources to go around and the use of those resources is more intensively policed. As a result, the environment in which today’s students and academics work has sharply deteriorated. When I think of the freedom I enjoyed as a young Oxford don, with no one telling me how to teach or what I should research or how I should adapt my activities to maximise the faculty’s performance in the RAE, and when I contrast it with the oppressive micro-management which has grown up in response to government requirements, I am not surprised that so many of today’s most able students have ceased to opt for an academic career in the way they once would have done.Confronted by philistinism on the scale of the Browne Report and the government’s White Paper, what are we to do? Where can we turn? Not to the present government, for it is committed to the notion of the university system as a market, driven by economic considerations. And not to the Labour Party, which, when in government, introduced tuition fees in 1998, trebled them in 2004 and declared in a document of 2009 that universities should make a ‘bigger contribution to economic recovery and future growth’, and in opposition has been almost totally silent on the whole matter. Not to Hefce, in its new role as ‘lead regulator’, for its chief executive has, unsurprisingly, welcomed the White Paper with enthusiasm. Not to the research councils, whose role as government agencies has become increasingly blatant. Not to the law courts, for it is surely unlikely that they will grant the recent application by some students to have the fee increase deemed a breach of human rights. Not even to the academic profession as a whole, for only in a few universities do all their members have the right to express their dissent publicly, as in the recent vote of no confidence by the Oxford Congregation, and in many institutions they dare not even complain to their head of department, for fear of subsequent persecution. Not to the vice-chancellors, for, with some honourable exceptions, they have been remarkably supine in the face of increasingly maladroit government policies, and are understandably more concerned to see what their own institutions can gain from the new arrangements than to challenge them directly.Let me, nevertheless, suggest a few alternative ways forward. First, on tuition fees. The new provisions for student fees have been hastily arrived at and chaotically presented, with much backtracking and many changes of mind, and little visible financial saving at the end of it, for the state still has to put the money up front and will certainly fail to recoup it all in thirty years’ time. But in an age of mass higher education, and without either a reduction in other forms of public expenditure or a willingness to raise the level of direct taxation, fees are undoubtedly here to stay. The government’s great failure has been its inability to present its scheme for what it is: a graduate tax, payable only by those earning above a certain level and only for a fixed period of time. Instead, potential students have the mistaken impression that they will be crushed by a lifelong burden of intolerable debt. The other day I heard a mother on the radio lamenting that, if her son went to university, he might never get a job and would therefore be unable to repay his colossal debts. Universities should do all they can to help poor students by fee waivers, scholarships and maintenance grants, but above all they should try to dispel the fog of misunderstanding which the government’s ineptitude has created.Second, we must press for changes to the Research Excellence Framework (REF), formerly the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). In my experience, this operation, though initially a stimulus, has in the longer run had appalling effects. It has generated a vast amount of premature publication and an even larger amount of unnecessary publication by those who have nothing new to say at that particular moment, but are forced to lay eggs, however addled. In the social sciences, it has discouraged the writing of books, as opposed to specialist articles, and by making peer review the ultimate arbiter it has very probably enshrined orthodoxies and acted as a curb on intellectual risk-taking and innovation. Everywhere, it has led to an unwelcome shift in academic priorities, for younger faculty have been encouraged to do all they can to secure outside research grants which will allow them to escape from teaching, which they now regard as a vastly inferior activity; and it has induced vice-chancellors to emulate football clubs by buying in outside ‘stars’ on special terms and conditions.The RAE has also been absurdly rigid in its requirements. A few years ago, a colleague in another university published a huge book, based on a vast amount of archival research, meticulously documented, beautifully written and offering a new and formidably argued reinterpretation of a major historical event. I remarked to a friend in that university that this great work would certainly help their prospects in the RAE. ‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘We can’t enter him. He needs four items and that book is all he’s got.’ At a recent meeting of the editorial board of a multi-volume historical project, the question arose of what should be done if some of the chapters submitted proved to be unsatisfactory. The obvious answer was to delay publication until they had been properly revised. But it was at once pointed out that this would be very hard on the other contributors, who were relying on their work appearing in time to be included in the REF. So if the worst happens, we shall face an intolerable choice: should we meet the REF deadline at all costs? Or is our primary obligation to ensure the quality of the completed work? There must be hundreds of scholars who are currently confronting the same dilemma.I contrast this with my own experience in the old, supposedly unregenerate days. The college where I became a tutor in 1957 had only 19 academic fellows. Of these, two did no research at all and their teaching was languid in the extreme. That was the price the rest of us paid for our freedom and in my view it was a price worth paying. For the other fellows were exceptionally active, impelled, not by external bribes and threats, but by their own intellectual ambition and love of their subject. In due course three became fellows of the Royal Society and seven of the British Academy. They worked at their own pace and some of them would have fared badly in the RAE, for they conformed to no deadlines and released their work only when it was ready. I became a tutor at the age of 24, but I did not publish a book until I was 38. These days, I would have been compelled to drop my larger project and concentrate on an unambitious monograph, or else face ostracism and even expulsion.I should like to see the abolition of the REF altogether, but since no one has been able to think of a better method of selectively allocating research funds to universities, it is probably here to stay. Yet we should at least press for a longer interval between each round of assessment, say, ten years rather than six, a much greater emphasis on the quality of publications rather than their quantity, and the relegation of ‘impact’ to an optional extra rather than an essential requirement. Since the REF is a scheme which is workable only if academics co-operate with it, the universities could easily achieve some reform here, but only if they maintain a united front. Unfortunately, those institutions which are currently most successful in the competition have no incentive to change the system, its undesirable intellectual consequences notwithstanding. We should also enlist the support of the House of Lords, which has on past occasions successfully come to the aid of the universities, most notably in 1988, when it amended the Education Reform Bill, so as to ensure the freedom of academics to express controversial or unpopular opinions without placing themselves in danger of losing their jobs or privileges.My final suggestion, and much the most important, is that universities should collectively and publicly refute the repugnant philosophy underlying the Browne Report and the White Paper by reaffirming what they stand for and what they believe is their correct relationship to students on the one hand and to the government on the other. The original purpose of universities in the Middle Ages was to train students for service in Church and State, but the undergraduate curriculum was in the liberal arts (which, of course, included science and mathematics), and only after graduating did students take up vocational courses in law, medicine and theology. Today, universities aim to enable students to develop their capacities to the full; in the process, they acquire the intellectual flexibility necessary to meet the demands of a rapidly changing economy. But a university should not provide vocational training, in the narrow sense of uncritical indoctrination in the rules and techniques of a particular trade. Institutions which do that are an indispensable part of the higher education system. But if their courses are vocational and their staff do not engage in research, it does not help to call them ‘universities’: that way they end up being regarded as inferior versions of the real thing. We need a diverse system of higher education, but only some of its components should be universities and much confusion is created by the indiscriminate application of that name.Advanced study and research are essential attributes of a university and some of that research will have vital social and industrial applications. But that is not its primary purpose, which is to enhance our knowledge and understanding, whether of the physical world or of human nature and all forms of human activity in the present and the past. For centuries, universities have existed to transmit and reinterpret the cultural and intellectual inheritance, and to provide a space where speculative thought can be freely pursued without regard to its financial value. In a free and democratic society it is essential that that space is preserved.That will not happen unless the fate of our universities becomes a prominent political issue. We need constituents to badger their MPs and voters to make their views felt in the polls. This will prove a demanding task, but I think that the British public might prove a more receptive audience for our message than is sometimes assumed. Moving, as I do these days, among retired people of a certain age, I am struck by how many of them, though not university-educated, are strongly committed to the values of higher education. They sustain the cultural institutions of the country, whether museums and galleries, or concerts of classical music or the National Trust. They read books and, unlike some students, they seem to enjoy going to lectures. We should mobilise their support, and that of others like them. What we need to do now is to clarify our aims and then to form a pressure group – perhaps the Council for the Protection, not of Rural England, but of British Universities. We should secure the help of an enlightened benefactor, hire a public relations agency and take our case to the country.(3)Must we pay for Sanskrit?Michael WoodA couple of markers may help. We are all situated somewhere, even if we see ourselves as cosmopolitans emancipated from mere biography. I was a beneficiary of the old idealistic British system, a grammar-school boy who went to Cambridge in the 1950s when not too many people were so lucky. If we can’t afford such a system any longer because we wish to make a good education available to many more people – if that is our real reason and our real intention – then we have to think of proper new ways of funding it.But we can also remember the values of such a system, whatever the costs. My parents had to be persuaded to let me stay at school after I was 16, but they were fairly easily persuaded, and the whole larger culture helped to persuade them. Higher education was a good thing because it was free, and it was free because it was a good thing. It was what we now call ‘cultural capital’ – and far more closely connected to culture than to capital. That sense of education as a ‘public good’ is itself of inestimable value and makes everything else possible: music college as well as agricultural college, free inquiry, disinterested curiosity, engineering school, degrees in dead languages. We can gloss this value in detail, and we should; but we can’t and shouldn’t turn it into value for money, or confuse value with extensive use.But what if we are not given a chance to provide this gloss, or turn out not to be up to providing it? Second flashback, to the bad old days this time. I returned to England at the time of the Malvinas War, sometimes known as the Falklands War, and taught at Exeter University until 1995.When asked about this period, I usually say I found the battles on behalf of the university (the department, the school, the discipline, our younger colleagues’ jobs) very hard work but exhilarating: there was something to fight about. But it was no fun losing all of the battles, and I am still trying to work out what it means that we should so thoroughly have lost all of them. What can we do about it?Let me put the matter as starkly as I can. If we can’t speak the language of our enemies, not only will they not listen to us – they might not listen to us anyway – but they can’t. We need to be saying things they could hear if they would listen. ‘They’, by the way, includes all kinds of people within universities as well as outside them. But what if we can’t speak that language without losing the battle? What if the very language wins the battle by definition? What if we can’t speak of cost-effectiveness because we don’t understand either cost or effect in the way our enemies do? How do we make astrophysics sound useful without turning it into science fiction? Just what sort of transferable skills do we pick up from Greek metrics? I think of a line from Mallarmé: what’s the good of trafficking in what should not be sold, especially when it doesn’t sell? A thought triggered by David Willetts’s amiable description of the publications a distinguished scholar might bring to the RAE as ‘a good back catalogue’. Austin and Wittgenstein had plenty of thoughts, and a huge influence on philosophy, but at the time of their death almost no catalogue, back or front.This is not a narrow question of terminology – although I’m not sure questions of terminology are ever all that narrow. During the Thatcher years, as during the Reagan years in America, a strong assumption arose that the quarrel was not between right and left or between different opinions and positions, but between those who knew what reality was and those who didn’t. If you didn’t know what reality was – that is, if you disagreed with those who were sure they knew and had the power to implement their views – it didn’t matter whether you were right or wrong, since you were irrelevant anyway. And reality was ... whatever you could get a largish number of conservatives (small c) to take seriously. This move was particularly devastating in America, where liberals shared with conservatives a consensus against extremes, and on the whole still do. Left-wing liberals were a special problem, because they genuinely believed they had gone as far left as anyone could reasonably go. The current array of protests in both Britain and America is an encouraging sign in this respect: dissent may be rational again, rather than someone else’s insanity.So when what is real, in relation to university education, is student demand and jobs in the future – a pair of premises about as fictional as you can get – what are we to say in favour of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake? Especially if the very notion of doing anything for its own sake has more or less vanished from the national landscape? What can we say that is not vague, without falling into the market trap?Here are two modes of an answer, which we may need to deploy both together and separately, as strategic need arises. First, the quest for knowledge needs no justification except the energy and enthusiasm, the passion it inspires, and a society that doesn’t encourage such quests for their own sake has already started to impoverish itself in ways it may not be able to see. Nietzsche once defined human beings as animals who had invented knowledge – well, literally they had invented knowing, erkennen, ‘getting to know things’, and recognising them. If we can’t care about knowledge enough to let others look for it even if we don’t want to, we shall be the less human for it, or human beings of a lesser kind. And here even this first answer based on the virtue of disinterested inquiry begins to slide towards the practical, since a society that does not value knowledge in this way will soon be outpaced in all kinds of areas by societies that do.Second mode of answer. If we live in a secular society, and do not have a special insight into God’s plans for us, we don’t know what knowledge will be useful to us in the future. And more important, we can’t know what knowledge we may find at the end of an apparently pointless or even crazed inquiry. Many of our most useful inventions began in the realms of purest theory. This is not to be mindlessly optimistic. The motto from Marie Curie hanging up outside the British Library is quite wrong. ‘Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.’ We may well fear many things, and we should, and some things we shall fear because we understand them. But this is not a reason for not wanting to understand them. We can deal well or badly with the knowledge when we have it; but we can hardly want to shelter in our ignorance, it isn’t any safer there.If you want it you’ll pay for it and if you won’t pay for it you can’t have it is a perfectly reasonable principle if you’re running a small shop, but it won’t even work for a business, once it reaches any size – you’ll lose out to the competition, which isn’t watching the pennies so closely. Where is the invention, the new technology, all the wrong roads in research that allowed a few right roads to be found? In the part of New Jersey where I live the object of much local nostalgia is not any university or establishment of learning, public or private, but the old Bell Laboratories, fondly remembered as a place where people pursued research for its own sake, with only a secondary thought of profit for the company. I have never entirely believed that these laboratories were this legendary place, but I’m not sure my wary scepticism should survive my just acquired knowledge that the place has been the home of seven Nobel Prizes. In any event, such a set-up is clearly possible, or was possible. And can cease to be possible, as is shown by the record of the current owner of the labs, the French company Alcatel-Lucent.And this possibility leads me to the distinction between business and business-speak, and more broadly between the working corporate world and the world of business and management schools. We are being asked to imagine our universities not as real businesses, but as dream businesses of the kind thought up by people who work only with models and yesterday’s quality assessments. Of course, the distinction is not absolute. There are businessmen who really believe in the free market – until it stops believing in them. Thatcher believed in the market until the Americans stopped buying British aeroplanes. Then she believed in the special relationship. Business and management schools no doubt do teach practices that are (sometimes) actually practised. But my experience of working with the Leverhulme Trust, for example, suggests strongly that many leading executives, like the rest of us, are interested in quality for money, which is quite different from value for money, and even interested in qualities that don’t immediately have to do with money at all. Their question would be, about a Sanskrit scholar, say, ‘How good is she?’ not: ‘Who cares about Sanskrit and why should we pay for it?’ This is in contrast to Thatcher’s response to an undergraduate at Oxford who told her she was reading history. Thatcher is supposed to have said: ‘What a luxury.’ Those who think the supposedly unpractical sides of higher education are a luxury for which the state has no responsibility are right in a quite wretched way. They won’t have to pay for them. But their children will, and so will ours – and not with money.Keith Thomas and Michael Wood spoke at ‘Universities under Attack’, a conference sponsored by the ‘London Review’, the ‘New York Review’ and Fritt Ord held on 26 November at King’s College London.# 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
Certain considerations of ?notable disjunctures? (Kluitenberg) in thepublic occupations globally:Following some of Raunig?s thoughts on Delueze & Guattari?s thoughts onmachines?noting that the audience is the machine.Can we have an Arab spring without an audience? Can we have an Occupymovement without an audience?In a world driven by spectacle (under the guise of the politicalmystification labeled democracy),In a world where human relations are based on the dynamics of capital (thisis nothing new, I know, but we all have to chatter a bit before we canchat),Based on the dynamics of capital, meaning that all relations must flowthrough a capital object in order to be a relationship?a world in whichthere is no relation between two (or more) people without a capital objectmaterializing between bodies (note that this is part of what Kluitenberg isgetting at and why he turns toward Hybrid spaces), capital objects mediate.But where do these objects come from? Microsoft? Verizon? GoDaddy?No. Too simple.Mediating objects come from the audience. The audience is the machine thatproduces our capital objects and that make it possible for us to haverelationships (Jodi Dean is worth a read here.)Somehow we have been lured into the notion that we need, can?t livewithout, an audience, can?t have democracy without an audience. Democracyhas relinquished plurality and instead grabbed on to mediating capitalobjects, such as ?the vote?. The vote now sits between you and me. Andmaybe even in Occupy?s GA?s, where it?s called consensus.)The audience machine?how does it make you you? And how do we dissolve it?-nb
Somewhere in the very early nineties I happened to be in Budapest just afew days after a big public ceremony in commemoration of Imra Nagy, theshort time Hungarian prime minister executed after the supressed uprisingof 1956. I went to the cemetary where he had been (re-)burried, and allthe wreaths were still on the tumb. One of them carried ribbons in theblue, red and white colors of Tchecoslovaquia and was inscribed "VaclavHavel President CSSR". Then I thought "Yes, the times, they have changed".Vaclav Havel was very much part of that change, which we have all in us.It is emblematic for Vaclav Havel that he requested on his grave bementionned only his name, date of birth, date of death, nothing else.
Critique, Democracy, and Philosophy in 21st Century Information SocietyTowards Critical Theories of Social MediaThe Fourth ICTs and Society-ConferenceUppsala University, May 2nd-4th, 2012.The collected abstracts of the plenary talks are now available:http://www.icts-and-society.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/abstracts.pdfOpening PlenaryVincent Mosco (Queen’s University, Canada): Marx is Back, but Will Knowledge Workers of the World Unite? On the Critical Study of Labour, Media, and Communication TodayGraham Murdock (Loughborough University, UK): The Digital Lives of Commodities: Consumption, Ideology and Exploitation TodayFeaturing plenary talks by Andrew Feenberg, Catherine McKercher, Charles Ess, Christian Christensen, Christian Fuchs, Gunilla Bradley, Mark Andrejevic, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Peter Dahlgren, Tobias Olsson, Trebor Scholz, Ursula Huws, Wolfgang Hofkirchner.Abstract submission: open until February, 2012 29 (deadline)ATTENTION: We recommend EARLY submission of abstracts way before the deadline because the presentation slots are limited and abstracts will be reviewed continuously starting in early January 2012. Once all presentation slots are filled, the submission process will be closed.Submission information:http://www.icts-and-society.net/events/uppsala2012/http://www.icts-and-society.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/CallforAbstracts.pdf # 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
Tactical commanders continually stress dispersion, mobility,and flexibility in the employment of tactical units. However,dispersion, mobility, and flexibility can be realized only if signal communication systems are designed to support these operational concepts and provide the commander with the necessary capability for control. The signal communication system must be able to absorb damage from nuclear attack without complete disruption of signal communications. It must be flexible and capable of quick reaction to changes in operational plans and task organization. It must be able to support all command requirements, as well as certain sole-user circuit requirements of higher headquarters. It must provide, as an integral feature, communication security to the maximum extent possible, consistent with operational considerations.Nov-21-1961
tripleC: Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information SocietyEdited by Christian FuchstripleC is a peer-review open access journal that focuses on information society studies and studies of media, digital media, information and communication in society with a special interest in critical studies in these thematic areas. It is indexed in Scopus, Communication and Mass Media Complete, Sociological Abstracts.The 2012 volume will feature besides regular contributions the three special issues “Marx is Back – The Importance of Marxist Theory and Research for Critical Communication Studies Today” (edited by Christian Fuchs and Vincent Mosco), "Political Economy and Critical Theory of the Internet < at > Nordmedia 2011" (edited by Christian Fuchs and Göran Bolin), “The Difference that Makes a Difference 2011” (edited by David Chapman and Magnus Ramage”).http://www.triple-c.atTable of Contents Vol. 9 (2011)Vol 9, No 2 (2011)Articles:* Privacy as Invisibility: Pervasive Surveillance and the Privatization of Peer-to-Peer SystemsFrancesca Musiani, 126-140* Selling You and Your Clicks: Examining the Audience Commodification of GoogleHyunjin Kang, Matthew P. McAllister, 141-153* Can Online Forums Be Designed to Empower Local Communities?Kerill Dunne, 154-174* Consumer Protection in CyberspaceOscar H. Gandy, Jr., 175-189* Neoliberalism in the Information Age, or Vice Versa? Global Citizenship, Technology, and Hegemonic IdeologyRobert Neubauer, 195-230* Communicative Informatics: An Active and Creative Audience Framework of Social MediaLinda M. Gallant, Gloria M. Boone, 231-246* Can Environmental Governance Benefit From an ICT-Social Capital Nexus in Civil Society?Subas P. Dhakal, 551-565* Critical Surveillance Studies in the Information SocietyThomas Allmer, 566-592* Avatar: A Marxist Saga on the Far Distant PlanetYong Tang, 657-557* From Seven Years to 360 Degrees: Primitive Accumulation, the Social Common, and the Contractual Lockdown of Recording Artists at the Threshold of DigitalizationMatt Stahl, 668-688* Social Networking and Transnational CapitalismDavid Kreps, 689-701Reflections:* Two New Critical Internet Studies-Books: Marcus Breen’s “Uprising” and Eran Fisher’s “Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age”Christian Fuchs, 190-194* Critical Media and Communication Studies Today. A ConversationChristian Fuchs, Dwayne Winseck, 247-271Special Issue: ICTs and Society - A New Transdiscipline?Edited by Joseph E. Brenner and Celina Raffl, 593-656 (introduction + 5 contributions)Special Issue: Towards a New Science of InformationEdited by Wolfgang Hofkirchner, 272-550 (introduction + 31 contributions)Vol 9, No 1 (2011)Articles* Doing Research, Doing Politics: ICT Research as a Form of ActivismJuliet Webster, 1-10* Embracing Technology and the Challenges of ComplexityAlice Robbin, 11-27* Social Media for Digital and Social Inclusion: Challenges for Information Society 2.0 Research & PoliciesPieter Verdegem, 28-38* From Financialization to Low and Non-Profit: Emerging Media Models for FreedomNuria Almiron-Roig, 39-61* Deconstructing Bentham’s Panopticon: The New Metaphors of Surveillance in the Web 2.0 EnvironmentManuela Farinosi, 62-76* Information – is it Subjective or Objective?Andrzej Stanislaw Zaliwski, 77-92* The Need for an Informational Systems Approach to SecurityJosé María Díaz Nafría, 93-122Reflections* Book Review: Signs of Science - Linguistics meets BiologyRobert Prinz, 123-125# 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
The luxury of New Year big bangs as funDecember 31, 2011 by Tjebbe van Tijen A fully illustrated and documented version can be found at:http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2011/12/30/the-luxury-of-new-year-big-bangs-as-fun/[tableau with Chinese firecracker roll tapestry on the street]The Netherlands is part of what can be called ?the European war-exempted-zone?. Firework is a popular craze here from 10 in the morning December 31 to 2 at night January 1, to drive out the old year. 60 to 70 million Euro value of explosives goes up in the air, 200 to 300 eye operation as a result, 20 to 30 blind, hardly any dead. Many youngsters do test their ammunition before hand, especially near my house next top a night outgoing district. Most of the Dutch have no direct war or terrorism connotation when they here a big bang nearby in these last days of the year, though the Party for the Animals and Green Left have called for a total ban on private/personal firework use.[archive photograph: Firework sales for New Years Eve in the Netherlands in 1959 as I remember it as a boy counting all the pocket money I have saved and scanning the window of the only shop or so in town for my acquisitions. My parents knew the sound of real big bangs and my mother told me how she stand on the balcony of her house in The Hague and patting my back to make me not afraid of the bangs and billowing smoke at the horizon: the big mistake of a RAF bombardment hitting a civilian quarter (Bezuiden Hout) of The Hague right opposite the home of my grand mother. I was just a baby so can not remember it. I did play in the ruins - left for a decade or so - as a kid when staying with my grand mother... she did not appreciate much my rejoicing of "the ban bangs"...]Enjoying explosives is a real LUXURY as can be learned from the United Nations bulletin ?ExplosiveWeapons.info? published by the United Nations Disarmament Research Institute in Geneva. The ?End of Year Explosive Violence Review? is summing it up: ?Sadly, in over 70 countries, explosive weapons have caused severe harm to individuals and communities and furthered suffering by damaging vital infrastructure. But recognition is growing that the use of explosive weapons in places where civilians live, work or gather constitutes a serious humanitarian problem that needs to be addressed.?[screen shot of explosive weapons web site of United Nations]See http://explosiveweapons.info/2011/12/29/end-of-year-explosive-violence-review/Not only in the Netherlands, there are initiatives to come to a ban on firework as a citizen?s demand, in all parts of the world similar initiatives have been taken, Philippines, New Zealand, Great Britain, South Africa, Italy, the United States, which can be read about in detail on the web site of stop-fireworks.org, Some initiatives propose alternative forms of New Year celebration like in the USA to bang drums instead of firing explosives?[Photograph: Fireworks in the Binnen Bantammerstraat part of the then still tiny Chinese Quarter of Amsterdam in the winter of 1971-72, a photograph by Koen Wessing (1942-2011).]When living in Amsterdam in the early seventies next to the small Chinese quarter, still growing at that time around the Binnen Bantammerstraat, there was always a big display of Chinese fireworks by the restaurant holders in that street on Western calendar New Years Eve. The Chinese had these long rolls of big firecrackers, one after another, we called them ?pakora?s', sometimes hung from the top of the house fronts or all along the street, twelve and more meter long. There was also the swaying around of firework on ropes within a dense circle in a crowd of people, the first ranks shrieking back each time a mass of glowing and sputtering ?saltpeter? passed their faces. The next morning the whole Chinese area looked like covered with a deep soft red carpet, with eager youngsters rummaging around to fire the ones that failed to explode during midnight. We had a squatted neighbourhood action centre straight next to this scene and always did throw new year midnight parties there . The photographer of this picture Koen Wessing was one of the supporters of our action group and it was only today I discovered this photograph by him, while doing a little research for this article.The first part of this year I lived and worked for half a year in Hong Kong and on the first day of Chinese New year I was waiting for a massive popular display of fire work in my neighbourhood close to the popular district of Shek Kip Mei in Kowloon. To my surprise nothing happened at all, the only fireworks visible were the ones on the television set. The city panorama below my apartment ? situated on a rock with a wide view ? remained completely empty. It was only later I learned that all firework in the then Crown Colony of Hong Kong of the Brits had been forbidden in 1967, a year that almost saw a Cultural Revolution Rising in Hong Kong by local Maoists. Gunpowder of firework had been used in that turbulent year to make street bombs that would be exploded to raise the level of unrest in the city. That firework ban has remained in force ever since, with only some exceptions for the inhabitants of Hong Kong?s New territories villages during their special traditional spring and summer festivals.[Archive press photograph: A labour dispute at a factory making artificial plastic flowers in San Po Kong, Kowloon was the event triggering the 1967 Hong Kong rising; production output levels being raised for the same wage; breakdown hours of machines as non paid work time and so on...The picture taken May 11 1967 shows police forces firing tear gas grenades and wooden bullets at demonstrators assembling in front of the high rise factory building. Objects had been dropped on some police men before from the rooftops. A young boy later was beaten up and died.]When studying more of the history of the conflict in 1967 (?Hong Kong?s watershed: the 1967 riots? by Gary Ka-wai Cheung; 2009) I learned that some of those street bombs had warning signs on them (like ?compatriots do not come close?) when planted, but the message was written in Chinese characters only. Most of these bombs were primitive home-made contraptions on the basis of gunpowder taken from firework stock (others used gunpowder used by fishermen). Firework bombs were most often thrown directly at colonial targets, mostly police stations and of the ones planted in the street many were fake bomb, just to ?fire? social unrest. During almost a year 8352 suspected bombs had been planted of which only 1420 proved to be ?genuine?, 1167 targeted the colonial police force, 253 were detonated in an uncontrolled way. The bombs hailed by the underground Maoist Communist Party of Hong Kong as a form of ?People?s Warfare? could not fail to also hit ?the people? themselves and when in August 1967 a street bomb killed an eight year girl and a two year old boy, the public reaction backfired at the anti-colonial insurgents. An existing relative sympathy under broad layers of the population for the cause of these left wing revolutionaries fighting the colonial power, was progressively lost. The disruption of the daily life in the colony by the firework bombs -which were in a military sense minor weapons ? had been significant. Hindering traffic and most of all having a psychological impact. At a certain moment during that year the British governor even worked secretly on a new emergency evacuation plan, for the non Chinese population, just in case. In the end it proved that the local underground Communist Party had for a great deal acted on their own and failed to gener ated the needed support from party authorities in Bejing. Mainland China was ? at that time ? too much in a political turmoil with lots of fractional infighting, to allow itself to take the small Colony of Hong Kong by force. Neo-colonial Hong Kong, ?the goose with the golden eggs? was of more importance to the Mainland China than a banking, manufacturing and trading centre, which would certainly collapse after a forceful take-over.Till this very day, the firework bombs remain a legacy associated with the Communist Party of Hong Kong, that, though not formally part of the restraint political landscape of Hong Kong (see ?Underground front: the Chinese Communist Party in Hong Kong? by Christine Loh; 2010), is the central force of power in what is now The ?Special Administrative Region of China Hong Kong? (SAR Hong Kong). The highest governmental functions in SAR Hong Kong are reserved for (secret) Communist Party members only. As the history of this central core of Hong Kong power remains covered in secretive haze, debatable events in its history remain a subject which is mostly avoided. Who ? for instance - visits the Hong Kong Historical Museum will find just one or two photographs of the 1967 struggle with a super ficial caption. In popular memory though, the firework bombs and the effects of some indiscriminate targeting of the primitive firework bombs from 1967, lingers on.{picture of a painted silk flag from the 10th century in China showing gunpowder used as a weapon on the end of a sort of spear gun.]Saltpeter (potassium nitrate) is a substance that forms through the decomposition of organic materials, a whitish salt like material since long known for its quality of burning fiercely even in non favourite circumstances for fire. We know that Taoist alchemists in China were experimenting with it already in the 8th century in their quest for life prolonging elixirs. While trying out all kind of combinations of substances and materials, they discovered the explosive properties of mixing saltpeter with sulphur and charcoal. The mix we call now in English ?gunpowder? (?buskruit? in Dutch). Aside from try-outs to swallow small quantities as a medicine, the aesthetic and ceremonial qualities of the substance were discovered and all kind of ways to fire it for spectacular display were devel oped. Spring, Autumn and New Year festivals with their staged dances of mythical animals like dragons and lions, were amplified with display of fireworks. Bamboo tubes were used at first, wh ich lead also to experiments to use the explosive mix for war purposes. First devices were spears with at the end bamboo tubes filled with gunpowder that were directed at an enemy during a battle. Soon more elaborate war use was found by finding out the propulsive qualities of certain mixes that could drive out one or more arrows from wooden containers. Closing up such bamboo containers would give yet another effect of bursting wood fibre and so also what we call now a grenade, has been invented over one thousand years ago.Healing, celebration and warfare all used the same substance: gunpowder. Moments of celebration punctuated by explosions, but also new powerful bangs of explosions on the battlefield, which before was less loud with just clanging of lances, swords, shields and the shouts of warriors. Up to this very day the awe of a big bang may be just a carrier of celebration, but once someone has witnessed an explosion as a part of an act of terrorism or war, the aesthetic appreciation of a firework spectacle may be lost ? for her or him ? forever.Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/PS De kleine lettertjes: van staatswege wordt mij gevraagd ieder van u uit te leggen dat dit een in de loop der tijd gegroeide lijst van email adressen is van mensen die ik ken of van wie ik weet dat zij - bij wijle - mijn commentaar op prijs stellen en dat in het geval dat dit niet, of niet meer het geval is, een enkel retourbericht waarin daarvan melding gemaakt wordt voldoende is om van mijn bescheiden lijstje afgevoerd te worden, waarbij het omgekeerde natuurlijk - van staatswege - ook toegestaan is, vrienden van u op deze lijst attent te maken en hen te suggereren om mij een verzoek voor opname op deze lijst per email te sturen.
<http://www.portlandoccupier.org/2011/12/15/occupy-portland-outsmarts-police-creating-blueprint-for-other-occupations/>Occupy Portland Outsmarts Police, Creating Blueprint for Other Occupations December 15, 2011 Photo by Paul by Lester Macgurdy The Portland Occupation stumbled upon a tactical innovation regarding occupying public spaces. This evolution in tactics was spontaneous, and went unreported in the media. On December 3rd, we took a park and were driven out of it by riot police; that much made the news. What the media didn't report is that we re-took the park later that same evening, and the police realized that it would be senseless to attempt to clear it again, so they packed up their military weaponry and left. Occupy Portland has developed a tactic to keep a park when the police decide to enforce an eviction. The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old- the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance. Heavy infantry is a group of soldiers marching in a column or a phalanx that are armed with weaponry for hand to hand, close quarters combat. Heavy infantry function as a unit, not individual soldiers. Their operational strength is dependent upon maintaining the integrity of that unit. Riot police are heavy infantry. They will always form a line and advance as a unit. Light infantry are armed with ranged weapons for assault from a distance. Light infantry operate as individuals that are free to roam at a distance and fire upon the opposition with ranged weapons. Cops firing tear gas, rubber bullets, water cannons, bean bag rounds, etc. are light infantry. They remain to the rear of the phalanx of riot cops (heavy infantry) and depend upon the riot cops maintaining a secure front and flanks to provide them a secure area of operations. Protesters function fluidly as either light or heavy infantry. Their mass, because it is lacking in organization, functions as a phalanx, having no flanks or rear. Lack of organization gives that mass the option of moving in whichever direction it feels like, at any given time. If protesters all move to the right, the entire group and supporting officers has to shift to that flank. While the protesters can retreat quickly, the police can only advance as fast as their light infantry, supporting staff can follow and maintain a secure rear (if the mass of protesters were to run to the next block over and quickly loop around to the rear of the riot cops, the organization of the cops would be reduced to chaos). If that police cannot assemble with a front to oppose protesters, they are useless. The integrity of that tactic is compromised, and unable to maintain internal organization, the cops revert to individuals engaging in acts of brutality, which eventually winds up on the evening news and they lose the battle regardless of whether they clear the park or not. Because of the lack of organization in a crowd of protesters, light infantry cops firing tear gas, etc. has little effect because it just serves to disorganize a group that relies upon disorganization in the first place. All it really does is disorganize the riot cops, who then resort to brutality. The lack of weaponry on the part of the protesters grants them the luxury of opposing riot cops at close quarters, or remaining at long range in a refusal to engage the heavy infantry riot police at all. They have the advantage of the retreat, they can quickly move away, or in any direction, and the heavy infantry riot cops lack the swiftness to respond. So far, all the occupations have, in a grave tactical error, agreed to engage the riot cops when they march in to clear parks. This has been a show of bravado that has the tactical benefits of providing media coverage of the brutal methods of police and the benefit of draining the resources of the oppressor by forcing them to incur the expense of arresting and prosecuting people for trivial offenses. Photo by Lauriel Now, to move on to the actual application of these tactical principles (that evolved by accident rather than conscious thought), we can take the example of Shemanski park on the 3rd. We occupied the park and set up a few tents and facilities to serve food and coffee. The police soon declared an emergency closure of the park and came out in force, with full riot gear and all the weaponry. The line of riot cops soon forced us out of the park, so someone decided that we ought to march to City Hall. It was about 9 pm on a Saturday night, so City Hall was closed, but we marched there anyway, 800 of us blocking traffic the whole way. Once there, the riot cops once again lined up to disperse the crowd. However, since City Hall was closed and there was no point in staying there anyway, someone had the idea to march down to the area of town where all the clubs were, so we took off marching again. The riot cops were trailing behind us, as was the truck with the giant speakers on the top repeatedly announcing "This street is open to traffic, individuals blocking traffic will be subject to arrest." Announcing this repeatedly was useless. One principle of non-violent resistance is this: one person has to walk on the sidewalk, 500 people can walk wherever they please. The riots cops had no place to form a line, so they were crippled. Since we had no clear destination, the police were unable to get ahead of us and set up roadblocks. They were helpless to do anything but trail along as an escort to the march. The only other response they could have had was for the riot cops to charge into the marching crowd and attempt to disperse it by brutality, which would have been mayhem that could have only resulted in a PR loss by the police department as the images of beatings and brutality hit the airwaves the next day. The march, having no clear destination, marched wherever it willed through the downtown area, blocking traffic and light rail at will and growing larger as onlookers joined in. One of the participants of the march had a three-wheeled bike with a loud amplifier hooked up to batteries with which to hook up an iPod and blast party music the whole time. This kept the atmosphere enthusiastic and energized and served to motivate onlookers to join. The ability of music to raise morale can't be understated. Slayer, Metallica, etc. wouldn't be good music for this because it would induce aggression. Rhythmic music that's usually danced to or played in clubs works best. If a DJ would play it as the ball drops on New Year 's Eve, then it's perfect. After marching for 3-4 hours, we eventually found ourselves a block away from the park that we'd been forced out of, so we took it again. The riot police lined up and prepared to take the park again, but the attempt was called off and the police just left. They realized that they would have to go through the standard military procedure of clearing the park inch by inch, only to have us go back out into the streets and march again while they, one more time, trailed along helplessly- their entourage functioning as a part of the march, creating an even larger disruption to traffic (the marchers covered a city block, the trailing police took up another city block, effectively doubling the size of the obstruction to traffic). In summary: when the cops come to clear the park, don't resist. As they are preparing for their military maneuver and use of force that the Occupiers cannot reasonably be expected to resist, the occupiers should be packing up their tents and baggage and loading them into wagons, bicycles, backpacks, etc. Force the cops to clear the park inch by inch, but try to avoid arrest in so doing. Once they have cleared the park, rouse the crowd through loud amplification announcing that you intend to march (any destination will do). Get the music blaring and then march aimlessly, blocking traffic the whole way, for hours. The crowd will be energized and willing to march for a long time, being spurred on by energetic music and chants. The police will eventually trim down their entourage because they realize that they are helpless. Eventually, work your way back to the park. Or, if the police have fenced off the park, head to another park. If the police force you out, march again and they will be forced to follow. Eventually, they will inevitably come to the conclusion that they would rather have you in a park than disrupting traffic. The police have no response to this tactic, other than resorting to brutality. And if they do that, we win whether they clear the park or not. Copyright © 2012 Portland Occupier. All Rights Reserved.
Dear Spacebank Customer,How are you? We hope you are celebrating yet another year of NAFTA and the anniversary of the rising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army.I am writing, as you might be interested in buying titles of the Virtual Real Estate Mortgage Backed Securities, a loan which was used to build Casa Dandelion, the safehouse in 2L of the cooperative media conglomerate Diego de la Vega. The cost per title is 1 Digital Material Sunflower. So take the opportunity to start the year with your left foot by supporting the construction of the Partido Cyberpunk, aan international conspiracy that researches technologies that are creative, disruptive, emancipatory and hybrid, and which might function to build communities, spaces, networks of utopic life that can lead towards another possible world. But which in game reality will be a campaign of Cyberpunk 2020, even if it will have material results in the nano-macro-economy of the DMS. Who says games can't be real? Even if they are really virtual, nothing stops them from being material: its the network economy, stupid!From now on, Diego de la Vega will be an avatar in cyberspace, a cooperative media conglomerate like those in cyberpunk novels, and an entity where many social relations intersect: an economic function in itself, which will now be temporarily connecting the economies of the Digital Material Sunflower with the Linden Dollar. This in part because we have observed that such digital currency is relatively stable and basically convertible, but also to experiment with a next phase towards the construction of a net.island. That is, if in the cities there is an emergence at impressive speeds, of zones and experiences which can only be accesed thru augmented reality and internet, and every day that passes by, clothes are becoming integrated to technology, so we believe it might be an important exer cise to research a virtual world like Second Life, but only as a complementary activity. We outsource our thirdlife to be able to create network connections that make an impact in material r eality, so we could only try Second Life to see if it makes sense to think of the existence of a virtual reality net.island. And in the worst case scenario, if we find virtuality can work for us, but not 2L, we can always move to Opensimulatorwith the plus of new found experience of 2L. If the knight novels of Amadis de Gaula helped 'materialize' a ficticious (but very real) state like California (and also helped to inspire Cervantes to write his famous 400 year old novel), where Diego de la Vega fought colonizers within fiction, and today the economy of Hollywood is nurtured with the labor of migrant human workers without political rights which make possible material and virtual realities. We would have to find out if SL can help us materialize an island, a little utopia that within fict ion can get us closer to our goals. And if everything works out, next june in Ecuador, Diego de la Vega will become a legal body, linking the Digital Material Sunflower with the Sucre Digita l, which is the digital currency of theALBA countries: Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador and Venezuela. Maybe from our little corner of the Internet we can, in fact, collaborate, change the material reality by generating creative flows from experimental economics and finances, hacktivism, and narrative media. Happy new year! Fran Ilich.