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GreetingsOn this question it might be worth it for those interested to take a look at The Passions and the Interests by Albert O. Hirschman at Princeton Univ Press. He illustrates the historical roots of what we can call the 'avaricious' side of capitalism; an issue that has been debated for many, many years and which ties into current conflicts."in matters of state let us not be guided by disorderly appetites... nor by violent passions, which agitate us in various ways as soon as they possess us...the Duke of Rordan (two or three centuries ago?)allan

Alistair Oldham an old film maker friend of mine has just just uploadedthe "Invisible Airs" documentary. This is Alistair’s particular take ondatabases and the events that surrounded our work in Bristol. Asdatabase's become active mediator's in their own right, actorsconstructing, organising and modifying social relations and I'm often ina position of addressing new public’s, outside of specialist knowledgeand trying to explain the complex machinery that's behind the livedlogics of databases. Alistair’s film will be a key tool with which wewill try to generate discussion. http://yoha.co.uk/ia_documentary Invisible Airs – Documentary by Alistair Oldham "The computerizeddatabase is fundamentally changing society. From communication, togovernment, transport, shopping, friendship, health, education,narrative and even the way we watch film, the database is radicallytransforming our lives. And yet we are only barely aware of itsexistence, we don't really know what a database is : like electricity,it's pervasive and all around us , but we cannot actually see it.Digital media artists YOHA set about making the database visible.Working with Bristol City Council in England, they use local governmentexpenditure to explore the relationship between the database, power andexpenditure. Turning the pounds sterling of expenditure into the poundsper square inch of pneumatic pressure, they make a suite of engineeredmechanical contraptions: an expenditure filled potato cannon, an OlderPeople Pneumatic Floor Polisher, an Expenditure Riding Machine and aOpen Data Book Stabber. But as they tour these contraptions aroundBristol, they become embroiled in the more fleshy realities of the city,in the form of the Royal Wedding, local anti-Tesco riots and thecensorship of a local outdoor cinema. Invisible Airs is very much astory of our time, of our obsessions with data, ordering and sorting andits uneasy relationship to the visceral bodies bound in cities." Alistair Oldham <Alistair.Oldham< at >uwe.ac.uk> http://vimeo.com/36567631 http://vimeo.com/acaciafilms # 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

http://www.sautiyawakulima.net/research/2012/02/the-e-i-ization-of-everything/??Eugenio Tisselli.The ???e-i-ization??? of everything (including cows)Posted on 29/02/2012Excerpt:e-agriculture, e-learning, e-banking (sometimes also m-banking) on one hand??? and on the other, iPhones, iPads, iCows. We are living in times where adding the e- or i prefix to anything turns it into something new and exciting. In the first case, e- stands for electronic, implying that the service in question has grown out of its analog phase, and entered a digital one. The i prefix may seem a bit less obvious, but it???s really what it seems: i as in I, myself. I searched the Internet for the meaning of the i in iPhones, and this is what I found:As announced for the very first iMac that came out in 98???, the ???i??? stood for ???Internet, Individual, Instruct, Inform, and Inspire.And also:The original imac, released in 1998, was marketed around the concept that it was the easiest computer to connect to the internet. in ???98, the internet was still something that most people didn???t use regularly, and so the idea of a computer that was ???internet ready??? was hip and new. The i stood for internet, but it also stood for ???I??? as in ???me???. The imac was designed to make the personal computer feel more personal, and make the user feel like the computer was working for them, not against them.So, if there was ever any doubt about how the cult of the individual goes hand in hand with digital gadgets, especially those designed and marketed by Apple, let it be forever vanquished. And while urban citizens throughout the world will hardly find this problematic, we might begin to find some dissonance when the i-products are applied to the improvement of rural livelihoods, as in e-agriculture. Countless studies show that small-scale, subsistence and rural farmers rely on their communities as key elements to their practices: the social sphere is inseparable from what they do in the field. Just to provide an example: in his book, Zapotec Science, Roberto J Gonz??lez studies the traditional idea of "mantenimiento" among the Mixe people in Oaxaca, southern Mexico: literally translated as maintenance, it is a broad concept that deals with farming, the preparation and consumption of food, and the family???s sustenance. It implies a particular vision of time: to farm the land, but without exploiting it, so that it can feed us today and tomorrow as well. But, quite significantly, Zapotec people also understand the relationships within their communities as something to be maintained through a practice of reciprocity in which farming and food has a central role to play, and thus apply the same concept to their social sphere.There is also an appization of everything, leading many to think that everything can be resolved, or at least improved, using a mobile application. This can be seen as a reductio ad "appsurdum" of the "e-i paradigm", and in fact reveals the worryingly reductionist worldview held by techno-determinists.??Read the rest here:http://www.sautiyawakulima.net/research/2012/02/the-e-i-ization-of-everything/????

<view-source:http://scenerules.irc.gs/t.html?id=2012_SDTVx264r.nfo>-- -- The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012 -LTTTT--++TT++- L[ INTRO ]- -- -- x264 has become the most advanced video codec over the past few years. -- Compared to XviD, it is able to provide higher quality and compression at -- greater SD resolutions. It also allows better control and transparency over -- encoding settings. With CRF in the mix, we can also ensure that a diverse -- array of material will get the most appropriate bitrate for them and not -- arbitrary and fixed sizes. This standard aims to bring quality control back -- to SD releases. There are many standalone players/streamers such as TviX, -- Popcorn Hour, WDTV HD Media Player, Boxee, Xtreamer, PS3, XBOX 360, iPad, & -- HDTVs that can playback H264 and AAC encapsulated in MP4. -- -- The SD x264 TV section was formed to separate releases from the ruleless -- world of TV-XviD. This document will cover the rules and guidelines for -- only SD resolution x264 television rips. -- -LTTTT--++TT++- L[ RELEASE RULES ]- -- -- Compliance with this document is optional as of its pre date, and -- mandatory as of 2012-02-22 16:00 UTC. -- -- Video: -- - Sources requiring resize are to be cropped and resized using sharp -- resizers such as Lanczos/Lanczos4, Spline36, or Blackman. Bicubic is -- banned. -- - HD video taken from the decoded HD output of a set-top box (e.g. -- component, DVI, HDMI) may be used as a source; source must be tagged -- in dirname as AHDTV. Decoded output of PDTV or DSR sources is banned. -- Releases taken from a natively recorded transport stream shall be tagged-- as HDTV, PDTV, or DSR. Dupes are as follows: HDTV > AHDTV > PDTV > DSR. -- AHDTV captures must be done at the native format of the channel, e.g. -- 720p or 1080i. -- - Sources that sideconvert 1080i to 720p (such as BellTV) are allowed but -- must be tagged as PDTV or DSR. -- - If there is a question as to the validity of a source, the release -- may be nuked source.sample.requested_<reason.for.nuke> (e.g. -- source.sample.requested_suspicion.of.analog.source) within 24 hours of -- pre. The group has 24 hours from the nuke to pre a RARed SOURCE.SAMPLE -- that is at least 10 seconds in length in order to document that the -- source is valid. Failure to provide source proof or providing bad -- source proof shall result in the release remaining nuked, and it may -- then be propered. -- - Improper IVTC methods that result in jerky playback, such as Force -- Film, are banned -- - Interlaced video sources must be deinterlaced with a smart deinterlacer -- such as Yadif. FieldDeinterlace is banned. -- - Group watermarks of any kind on the video are banned -- - Intros, outros, betweenos, or any other form of defacement of the -- episode are banned -- - "Native" refers to the standard in which the video was produced (e.g. -- NTSC or PAL). NTSC produced video is native to NTSC, PAL produced video -- is native to PAL. PAL produced video that is broadcast in NTSC is -- converted. NTSC produced video that is broadcast in PAL is converted. -- - Converted video that has significant artifacting (e.g. blended frames) -- and cannot be reversed to native must use CONVERT tag -- - Converted video that does not have significant artifacts does not need -- convert tags and may not be nuked for the conversion -- - Native releases are allowed after those tagged CONVERT. Use NATIVE tag. -- -- Audio: -- - Allowed audio formats are VBR AAC LC (Low Complexity). -- - Average bitrate on AAC audio must be 96 - 160 kbps. -- - AAC audio must be normalized and downconverted to stereo. -- - Nero and Apple encoders are recommended. FFmpeg is banned. -- - Dupes based on audio format are forbidden and must be tagged INTERNAL -- - Multiple language audio tracks are allowed and must be listed in NFO -- - Dupes are not allowed based on multiple audio tracks -- - Severe audio drops resulting in one full missing word or otherwise the -- inability to understand material dialogue is considered to be a -- technical flaw and may be propered -- - Audio that is 120ms or more out of sync or drifts more than 120ms -- between any two points (e.g. needing -80 at one and +40 at another) is -- considered to be technically flawed and may be propered -- -- Framerate: -- - IVTC or deinterlacing must be applied as needed -- - 50/60fps video may be released at 50/60fps or 25/30fps. Releasing true -- 25/30fps video at 50/60 is considered a technical flaw. -- - In rare cases, 25/50Hz sources should be IVTC'd to 24 or 30 fps. -- - In rare cases, 30/60Hz sources should be IVTC'd to 25fps. -- Failure to apply IVTC when needed is a technical flaw. -- -- Codec/Container: -- - Video codec must be x264 (8-bit depth). -- - Container must be MP4. -- - You will have 30 days from latest x264 rev date to update in order to -- maintain all bug fixes and improvements in the x264 codec -- - Stripping or falsifying encode information in the file header is banned -- - Custom muxing tools are permitted; however, output must be compatible -- with standard demuxers. -- - Custom Matrices are allowed -- - Encoded colorspace must be 4:2:0. -- - Deblocking must be used; values are at the discretion of the group. -- (default is enabled, 0:0 settings) -- - No setting can go below what is specified by --preset slow. -- - Keyframe interval (--keyint) must be at least 200 and at most 300. It -- is recommended to be 10*framerate (film=240, PAL=250, NTSC=300). -- - Minkeyint must be 30 or less -- - Colormatrix must be set to source specification. If not specified by -- source, bt709 must be used for sources with resolution greater than or -- equal to 1280x720 (e.g. HDTV and some PDTV) and sources with lower -- resolutions must use bt601 (e.g. DSR and some PDTV). -- - Constant Rate Factor (--crf) must be as follows: -- -TT -- - Compressibility - CRF - General Examples - -- ++++ -- - High - 19-20 - Scripted, Talk Shows, Poker, Animation - -- - Medium - 21-22 - Documentary, Reality, Variety - -- - Low - 23-24 - Sports, Awards, Live Events, Competitive- - -- - - - Reality - -- L++- -- - x264 parameters shall not vary within a release -- - Zones (--zones) are forbidden. -- - Any deviation in CRF from given examples must be specifically justified -- in the NFO. Use discretion when deviating CRF by matching the -- compressibility of the show to a corresponding CRF value. CRF values -- below 19 and above 24 are never permitted. -- - As a general suggestion, average video bitrate in excess of 1500kb/s -- is a sign that a higher CRF value should be chosen, when possible -- - Allowed parameters for --tune (optional) are film/grain/animation -- - Level 3.1 must be respected. -- - Suggested command line: -- x264.exe --crf ## --preset slow --level 3.1 --colormatrix bt709 -o -- out.h264 in.avs -- -- Resolution: -- - WS HDTV and WS PDTV sources with greater than 720px horizontal res must -- be cropped as needed and resized to 720px width and mod2 height to -- maintain proper AR. -- - WS PDTV sources with horizontal source res of 720-704px must be cropped -- as needed and only height must be resized to the proper anamorphic AR -- using mod2. Upscaling/downscaling is forbidden. -- - All other sources, including FS HDTV, must be cropped as needed and -- resized to 640px width and mod2 height to maintain proper AR. -- - When cropping, remove everything that is not actual picture, including -- black or other colored borders, duplicate lines, and full-time tickers. -- Removing or retaining fading edges is at capper's discretion and shall -- not be considered undercropped or overcropped. -- - In the case of varying crops, crop to the most common frame size (e.g. -- pitch/primary view in sports). -- - Actual picture area may be over- or under-cropped by 1px maximum per -- side. More than 1px on any side is considered a technical flaw. -- - Encoded Video resolution must be within 2% of the original aspect ratio -- To calculate AR error (%): (Original AR - Release AR)/Original AR * 100 -- OAR = (SourceWidth-CropLeft-CropRight)/(SourceHeight-CropTop-CropBottom)-- Release AR = EncodedWidth / EncodedHeight -- -- Subs: -- - Optional, but encouraged -- - Text based format is preferred (e.g. SubRip, SubStation Alpha, etc). -- - Subtitles must be in "Subs" directory. -- - Burned subtitles will only be allowed when the source exhibits such -- subtitles in the picture itself -- - Subtitles cannot be used as a basis for a dupe -- - Group marks in subtitles are banned -- -- Packaging: -- - Releases must be packed in RAR file format. -- - Rars may be in 15, 20, or multiples of 50 MB. 15 and 20 MB sizes must -- contain 1-101 files. Multiples of 50 MB must contain 10-101 files. -- 1MB = 1,000,000 bytes. -- - Multi-episode releases with no clear delineation such as credits must -- not be split -- - RAR compression must not be used -- - Recovery and MD5 record are optional -- - Encryption or password protection is forbidden -- - Must have SFV and NFO -- - RAR, SFV, and sample files must have unique, lowercase filenames with -- the group tag. -- - Missing SFV or RAR(s) on all sites is considered a technical flaw. -- Corrupt RARs (errors on extraction) are considered technical flaws. -- SFVFix and RARFix are not permitted. Uploading a missing SFV or RAR to -- all presites after pre is not permitted. Release REPACK. -- -- Credits/Previously On: -- - Previously on footage is optional, but suggested to be included -- - Full end credits must be included if they contain show content or -- outtakes/bloopers. End credits are optional and suggested if they are -- clean, and purely optional in other cases. -- -- Samples: -- - REQUIRED! -- - 50-70 seconds in length and in a separate folder marked as Sample -- - Must be taken from the episode, not encoded separately -- - Stream samples are recommended for any questionable issue with the -- source, e.g. no IVTC possible -- -- Propers: -- - Propers are only permitted in the case of a technical flaw in the -- original release (e.g. Bad IVTC, Interlacing, missing footage, bad crop,-- commercials, bad x264 settings used, bad source, etc.) -- - Scrolling or other alert messages added by a station (e.g. weather, -- Amber alerts) must be at least 30 seconds in length in order to -- nuke/proper -- - Drops with missing footage but no missing dialog must be at least 2 -- seconds long in any one instance to be considered a technical flaw -- - Proper reason must be clearly stated in nfo, including timecodes and -- extent of the flaw when appropriate -- - Sample of propered release is encouraged -- - Qualitative propers are not allowed -- - Flaws (such as drops) present in any optional content are not a flaw -- and shall not be nuked or propered. -- - Propers based upon the rules set forth here are allowed only on -- releases that come after this document goes into effect -- -- Internals: -- - Internals are allowed to be pred for any reason, including releases -- with technical flaws or those done with alternate codecs, containers, -- or settings for experimental purposes -- - Any severe technical flaws or deviations must be mentioned in the NFO -- - With the exception of the following rule, internal releases may only be -- nuked for severe technical flaws or deviations that are not mentioned -- in the NFO -- - Using DIRFIX.iNTERNAL to avoid a dupe nuke is banned, and such -- dirfixes shall be nuked fix.for.nuke -- -- Directory Naming: -- - Show.Name.SXXEXX.Episode.Title.HDTV.x264-GROUP -- - Show.Name.YYYY.MM.DD.Guest.Name.HDTV.x264-GROUP for daily or other -- dated shows -- - Episode title and guest name are optional -- - Show.Name.PartXX.HDTV.x264-GROUP for miniseries -- - ALL others are FORBIDDEN. (e.g 0x00 000 EXX.EP.TITLE PART.VI) -- Sport: -- - League.YYYY.MM.DD.Event.EXTRA.TAGS.HDTV.x264-GROUP -- - Competition.YYYY-MM.Event.EXTRA.TAGS.HDTV.x264-GROUP -- Using just the year is only permitted if the event is once per year -- (e.g. a WWE PPV). In the case of leagues which have seasons that span -- multiple years, it is permissible to tag the release with just the years-- of the season. Inclusion of MM and DD is mandatory for all constantly -- running shows (e.g. WWE). -- If there is no league, the sport needs to be used instead -- The following are some examples of correct directory names: -- - EPL.2010.01.01.Manchester.United.vs.Arsenal.HDTV.x264-GROUP -- - TNA.Impact.2010.03.02.HDTV.x264-GROUP -- - WWE.WrestleMania.2010.PPV.HDTV.x264-GROUP -- - Tennis.US.Open.2011.Final.Player1.vs.Player2.HDTV.x264-GROUP -- - Different shows that have the same title in different countries (e.g. -- The Marriage Ref) must have the ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 country code in the -- directory name, except for UK shows (e.g. The.Marriage.Ref.UK not -- The.Marriage.Ref.GB). ISO country code is not needed for the original -- show (e.g. The.Marriage.Ref.US is forbidden). -- - Different shows with the same name in the same country produced in -- different years must have the year of the first season in the directory -- name, e.g. Human.Target.2010 and Doctor.Who.2005. Year is not needed -- for the first show with a particular name. -- - Channel name (e.g. National.Geographic, History.Channel) shall not be -- tagged on any normal series starting after this ruleset's effective -- date. Miniseries and single-episode docus may optionally be tagged with -- the channel name. -- - The use of audio format tags such as AAC, and AAC.x.x is FORBIDDEN -- - READ.NFO tag is allowed; however, discretion is recommended -- - PROPER.READ.NFO is NOT allowed. The NFO is REQUIRED to have a reason; -- therefore, the tag is redundant. -- - All repacks must include detailed reason as to why it's being repacked -- in the nfo -- - Other permitted tags are: PROPER, REPACK, RERIP, REAL, UNCUT, DUBBED, -- SUBBED, iNTERNAL, OAR, PPV, CONVERT, NATiVE -- - Acceptable characters in naming a directory include (NO spaces or -- double dots - single dots ONLY): -- -- ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ -- abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz -- 0123456789._- -- -- Nukes: -- Releases must be nuked for any of the following reasons: -- - Any valid proper listed in the propers section -- - Missing nfo, or missing Sample -- - Invalid directory naming format -- - Mislabeled directory that could prevent finding the release in a -- dupecheck, including incorrect season/episode/date or incorrect title -- - Dupe -- - Releases may not be propered for bad tagging or missing nfo/sample -- -- Fixes: -- - The following fixes are allowed: NFOFix, SampleFix, DirFix, SyncFix, -- ProofFix -- - DirFix requires NFO and NFO must state which release is being fixed -- - The original release shall be unnuked when a valid fix is released -- - A proper may not be released for an issue that was fixed, unless the -- fix does not completely correct the issue -- -LTTTT--++++- The SD x264 TV Releasing Standards 2012 (2012-02-22) -- -LTTTT--++TT++- L[ GROUPS ]- -- -- TVx2642012 rules created by the following groups: -- -- ASAP BAJSKORV C4TV D2V DiVERGE FTP KYR -- LMAO LOL MOMENTUM SYS TLA YesTV -- -LTT- LT\ Thanks to the x264 developers for their assistance in /T- LT\ determining assistance in determining the best /T- L\ mix of encode settings. /-

 The ARPANET Dialogues Vol. IV ARPANET TestApril 1976with Jim Henson, Ayn Rand, SidneyNolan & Yoko OnoPublished on 4 March 2012. Presented as a contribution toRoundtable Issue 1, a journal for the 9th Gwangju Biennale. Featuring guest contributor NatalyaPinchuk, an artist based in Pittsburgh, USA.Background:17 April 1976 – The transcript presented here records aconversation between four figures from the broad spectrum of culture: puppeteerJim Henson; Russian-American writer, philosopher and playwright Ayn Rand;painter Sidney Nolan; and artist and musician Yoko Ono. A few months after thefall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War,The Agency’s tests with the ARPANET convened these four individuals, each witha distinct sense of, as well as the potential means for, a competingworld-view. These individuals, who cross different hemispheres, were to helpwith considerations towards the viability of broadly implementing Article 21 ofthe Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Go to this link to read:http://www.arpanetdialogues.net/vol-iv/4/About the ARPANET Dialogues Project:In the period between 1975 and 1979, the Agency convened arare series of conversations between an eccentric cast of charactersrepresenting a wide range of perspectives within the contemporary social,political and cultural milieu. The ARPANET Dialogues is a serialdocument which archives these conversations. Even more unusual perhaps was thespecific circumstances of the conversation: taking advantage of recentdevelopments in telecommunications technology, the conversation was conductedvia an instant messaging application networked by computers plugged intoARPANET, the United States Department of Defense’s experimental computernetwork. All participants in the conversation were given special access toterminals connected to ARPANET, many of them located in US militaryinstallations or DOD-sponsored research institutions around the world. Excerptsfrom each session will be published as they become available.The ARPANET Dialogues is an ongoing research project byBassam El Baroni, Jeremy Beaudry and Nav Haq.

original to:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203370604577261102293143834.html?mod=googlenews_wsjYoung & Poor French Grade Candidates (sic)By WILLIAM HOROBINPARIS—Having already suffered the loss of France's triple-A credit rating,French President Nicolas Sarkozy and his opponents in this spring'spresidential elections now have a new ratings organization to reckon with:Young & Poor.Founded in a central Parisian café last week, Young & Poor has set itselfthe task of rating candidates in the presidential election campaign ontheir youth policies and their credibility in the fight to bring downyouth unemployment.Launched as data showed youth unemployment in France jumped sharply in thefinal months of 2011 to 22.4% from 21.6% in the third quarter, Young &Poor taps into a heightened sensibility to rating companies here afterStandard & Poor's—the inspiration for its name—stripped France of itstriple-A rating in January."Rating agencies are at the heart of the news," said Young & Poor, whichisn't actually a ratings organization. "Creating an agency is a means ofusing contemporary political and economic codes and of being easilyunderstood."France's economy is in the doldrums and, as in other European countries,young people are the primary victims of rising unemployment, leading tofears of a lost generation alienated from the workplace. The fragility ofthe economy—the government expects only 0.5% growth this year—will makejob creation difficult.The situation has propelled youth unemployment to the heart of theelection campaign. Socialist front-runner François Hollande has promisedif elected to create 150,000 jobs to ease young people into the world ofwork and create contracts that link old and young workers. Meanwhile, Mr.Sarkozy, who polls show losing in a run-off with Mr. Hollande, is yet todetail his election program. But the president has recently implementedemergency measures to protect jobs, including the abolition of levies forsmall companies hiring young people.So far, Young & Poor is unimpressed and it shows in the rankings of thepresidential candidates."I'm sorry to tell you, there are no triple-As," said Ophélie Latil, asupervisor at Young & Poor, which was created and is funded by activistgroup Génération Précaire. (http://generation-precaire.org/)Mr. Hollande scored a C rating, while Mr. Sarkozy got a D, one notch abovejunk.Génération Précaire was founded in 2005 during the civil unrest in Frenchsuburbs and traditionally campaigns against the misuse of intern workcontracts. The movement grew in stature in early 2006 as it met with thenPrime Minister Dominique de Villepin during the protests and strikesagainst the creation of a special employment contract for those gettingtheir first jobs. The protests led to the government abandoning the newcontract, which would have given young workers less security. Mr. DeVillepin, who is also a candidate in the presidential elections, is ratedD.Génération Précaire, whose activists are known for wearing white masks,lobbies through traditional channels as well as with nonconventionalmethods like choreographed surprise demonstrations, so-called flashmobs.It has also met with other French ministers, including Valérie Pécresse,now budget minister and government spokeswoman, when she headed the highereducation ministry. The movement has formed a European network calledGénération P, and worked with similar movements including Germany's FairWork, Internocracy in the U.K., Repubblica degli Stagisti in Italy."Our objective isn't to criticize rating agencies," said Sylvestre Coulon,a supervisor at Young & Poor and co-founder of Génération Précaire.Young & Poor has drawn up an ethics code to avoid any conflicts ofinterest. Its organization is layered with volunteers fulfilling differenttasks: observers who must not be involved in the organization of anelection campaign, as well as analysts and supervisors. There is also acommittee of experts from business, academia and trade unions.The ratings methodology is complex, with 10 themes to be analyzed and asystem of weighting scores to get the final rating. And like real ratingscompanies, Young & Poor warns the subjects of its ratings in advance ofdecisions."Some actually said they weren't ready and shouldn't be rated. And atfirst some refused to meet us," said Ms. Latil.Ratings go from triple-A to E, the equivalent of a junk bond. The highestrating so far is a C, but candidates have time to make up the ground.Young & Poor will change ratings three times between now and the secondround of elections May 6. It will also review the outlook on ratings oncea week. The ratings updates will be published on the newly created websitefor Young & Poor.Write to William Horobin at William.Horobin-twM2Yer8+e9Wk0Htik3J/w< at >public.gmane.org

Thimbl, Unlike Us & A Pair of Inconvenient ParadoxesThe Institute for Network Cultures will be holding the 2nd UnlikeUs conference (1), "Understanding Social Media Monopolies andTheir Alternatives." I'll be there, representing Telekommunisten'sThimbl(2), which will be present among many other projects.Thimbl is quite different from the other projects. Conceived as anartwork, a "performative economic fiction," Thimbl is a symbolic workthat artistically explores the obstacles faced by projects that seekto create an alternative to social media monopolies.Well-meaning technologists or social media enthusiasts initiate mostprojects, and as a result, they start in a rather irrelevant place:technology. They start coding and architecting better solutions, tothe best of their ability, yet the primary problem they face is nottechnological.In Andrew Feenberg's McLuhan lecture at Transmediale 2012 (3), "10Paradoxes of Technology," Feenberg describes what he calls the "TheParadox of the Frame," and argues that "Efficiency does not explainsuccess; success explains efficiency."Feenberg argues that certain technologies become efficient asa result of further development and investment. However, thesetechnologies were chosen for development or investment in the firstplace for social reasons, generally the choice is motivated bypolitical and economic reasons. The eventually successful technologywas often originally chosen over more intrinsically efficientalternatives.This paradox is perhaps nowhere more apparent than it is in socialmedia. The Internet has always been about sharing, and decentralizedsharing technologies such as usenet, IRC and finger have been andcontinue to be available. Yet, these technologies have not been chosenfor further development and investment once capital became the drivingforce, centralized platforms like Facebook have.Facebook was chosen because the choosers are venture capitalists whoneed to have a means of capturing profit in order to have a return ontheir investment. Thus, the more intrinsically efficient decentralizedtechnologies were not chosen, since they fail to provide the verything that capital requires; control and scarcity. As a result ofbeing chosen by venture capitalists, Facebook could obtain the neededfinancing required to become efficient enough, despite the massivedisadvantages poised by its centralized architecture.Facebook's business model of capturing and monetizing user dataand interaction was appealing to investors, and thus Facebook wassuccessful at attracting investment and financing development.So, if Facebook was chosen because it allows investors to controlusers and monetize their use of the platform, than newer, even betterdesigned open and decentralized alternatives, like the many that willbe presented at Unlike Us, will likewise not be chosen, as they areno more appealing to venture capitalist investors than the classicdecentralized internet platforms were.Thimbl addresses this by creating a decentralized microbloggingplatform based on the old finger protocol, a platform for postingstatus updates that was developed in the 1970s. The explicit point ofthis is that the challenge faced by those working towards alternativesto social media monopolies are not technological, the technology isthe easy part, the challenge is political.The challenge is to overcome the hegemonic economic power of thosethat finance these monopolies.This is not a challenge that can be programmed around, it is achallenge that requires a social solution. So long as the developmentof our technological platforms are directed by the profit motive,the platforms will need to engineer in the control and scarcity thatcapitalism requires.In there March 2011 Monthly Review article (4), John Bellamy Fosterand Robert W. McChesney, apply another paradox, The "LauderdaleParadox" named for James Maitland, 8th Earl of Lauderdale. Fosterand McChesney phrase the implications of Maitland's paradox as"Scarcity ... is a necessary requirement for something to have valuein exchange, and to augment private riches". Their conclusion isthat the communications platforms must be removed from the domain ofcapital, and be made available as a public good.'An innovation is commercially developed, and a market created, onlyby finding a way to “wall” off a sector of public wealth andeffectively privatize and monopolize it, leading to huge returns.Information, which is a public good—by nature available to all and,if consumed by one person, still available to others—is, in thisway, turned into a scarce private commodity through the exercise ofsheer market power.' -- John Bellamy Foster & Robert W. McChesneyThis is the real problem faced by those who seek to createalternatives to social media monopolies. Any genuine alternative wouldneed to first identify, not a new way of developing and architectinga technical solution, but a new way of financing the development at asufficient scale to rival the capital funded platforms.'Communication is more than an ordinary market. Indeed, it is properlynot a market at all. It is more like air or water—a form of publicwealth, a commons.' -- John Bellamy Foster &amp; Robert W. McChesneyMaking something into a public good is a social choice, something thatsociety must undertake, it is not a technical innovation that softwaredevelopers can develop on their own.As I wrote following Social Media Week back in October (5):'Just like science fiction becomes reality when science transcendsthe limitations that existed when the fiction was imagined, foreconomic fiction like Thimbl to become reality, economics will need totranscend the limitations that we currently face'I'll be at Cafe Buchhandlung (6) around 9pm as usual, please come! Andif will be in Amsterdam , see you at Unlike Us. For those in Berlin,be sure to checkout CiTiZEN KiNO “Electric Sheep Revisited” (7),Wednesday, March 7th at TheaterKapelle(1) http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/unlikeus/2-amsterdam/program/(2) http://thimbl.net/manifesto(3) http://www.transmediale.de/node/20769(4) http://monthlyreview.org/2011/03/01/the-internets-unholy-marriage-to-capitalism(5) http://wp.me/p24fqL-Z(6) http://bit.ly/buchhandlung(7) http://xlterrestrials.org/plog/?p=8342"Thimbl, Unlike Us & A Pair of Inconvenient Paradoxes" can be found online at: http://www.dmytri.info/thimbl-unlike-us-a-pair-of-inconvenient-paradoxes/

HiThere is a limited opportunity to apply for dotART domain name by April 12.Is there any inking of support ? Or do people think that no artistwould like to have a .art domain?dotArt(s), in plural though, has been proposed once in 1997 beforeICANN was set up the process for adding TLDs(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAHC#Proposed_TLDs).The entity applying for it should have at least 185,000 USD for theapplication feeand some money raised for operating the registry for 3-5 years.There might be many applicants and I would hate to see .art go into the wronghands (the ones with deepest pockets that would win it in the auction phase).Is anyone here interested in making a pledge for the cause?A little bit about myself:http://icannwiki.com/index.php/Desiree_MiloshevicTxDes--

HelloIn regards to will capitalism survive question I am posting thisinterview will Alain Badiou where he shifts the discourse in aworthwhile direction.cheersAllanVan HoudtFrom Kant to Husserl, and now to your work, the move to transcendentalphilosophy has, for the most part, taken place in times of ?crisis.?For Kant it was the potential failure of classical accounts ofrationality at the skeptical hands of David Hume, for Husserl it wasthe collapse of the spirit of philosophy under the joint pressure ofmodern science (the critiques of psychologism) and the onset of Nazism(the Crisis), and for you the problem is what you call ?the crisis ofnegation.? How do you define ?negation? and why it is in crisis today?BadiouMy answer is a simple one, in fact. The very nature of the crisistoday is not, in my opinion, the crisis of capitalism, but thefailure of socialism. And maybe I am the philosopher of the timewhere something like the ?Great Hypothesis? coming from thenineteenth-century?and maybe much more, for the French Revolution?isin crisis. So it is the crisis of the idea of revolution. But behindthe idea of revolution is the crisis of the idea of another world,of the possibility of, really, another organization of society,and so on. Not the crisis of the pure possibility, but the crisisof the historical possibility of something like that is caught inthe facts themselves. And it is a crisis of negation because it isa crisis of a conception of negation which was a creative one. Theidea of negation is by itself a negation of newness, and that if wehave the means to really negate the established order?in the momentof that sort of negation?there is the birth of the new order. Andso the affirmative part or the constructive part of the process isincluded in negation. Finally, we can speak also of the ?crisis ofdialectics? in the Hegelian sense. In Hegel we know that the creativepart of the negation was negation of negation, so the negation ofnegation was not a return to before, but was on the contrary, thedegradation of the content, the positive content of negation. Andthere are so many things of the failure of this vision that soproves that very often negation is under a negation. And that isthe crisis of negation. On all sides today we know that the pureviews of negation are practically very often militant to negation,and to the future of negation?s negations. Exactly, that the futureof revolution, victorious revolution, has been finally a terroriststate. The complete discussion of all that is naturally much morecomplex, necessitates dates, and all that, but philosophicallythere is something like that. So therefore we must pronounce thatthere is a crisis of negation, and from this problem, there are twopossible consequences: first to abandon purely and simply the idea ofrevolution, transformation of the world, and so on, and to say thatthe capitalist world, with moderate democracy, and so on, is the bestworld after all ? not so good but not so bad, and finally we have withthat answer, the first vision. And so it is a vision where in somesense the relationship between philosophy and history is separation.Because it is my conviction that if the history of humankind has asits final figure the figure of our world, it is proof that historyis of no philosophical interest, that there is only left a pragmaticposition, and so the best is business. In that case, the best is notphilosophy but business! So that is why if, precisely when I speakof the ?crisis of negation,? I name ?negation? the revolutionaryconception of negativity which was dominant from the French Revolutionuntil sometime at the end of the last century; it was the 80s I think.The 80s, something like that, the time of your birth, maybe? TheCrisis of Negation: An Interview with Alain Badiouhttp://www.berfrois.com/2012/03/the-80s-i-think/

Hi all,Modern Poland Foundation has launched the Future of Copyright Contest,in which we want to collect best international works on this topic.The prize is set by people supporting the project, by means ofIndieGoGo (a crowdfunding platform).We would like to invite You to share and promote this initiative, inorder to gain maximum exposure to potential supporters andcontestants!The main website of the contest ishttp://www.indiegogo.com/future-of-copyrightFor more information about Modern Poland Foundation please visithttp://nowoczesnapolska.org.pl/about-us/All the best,Jarosław Lipszyc# 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

Seminar on Political Organization Essex March 12thEssex Centre for Work, Organization and Society SeminarLessons of 2011: Three Theses on Political OrganizationRodrigo Nunes, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande Do SulMarch 12th, 4PM-6PM < at > University of Essex Room 5N.7.23With the Arab Spring, the Spanish indignados, Occupy and so much more, 2011 is likely to go down in history as a very special year – perhaps even the beginning of something. But what would that something be? This presentation attempts to draw some conclusions about the present state and future of politics and organization by examining the practices of the movements that erupted in the last year. Thinking beyond their usual representation by the media, trying to avoid either describing them as something entirely new and unheard of or as manifestations of an ultimately non-political culture, what can be the lessons of 2011?Bio: Rodrigo Nunes is a post-doctoral fellow at (Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande Do Sul, Brazil, with a PNPD/CAPES grant. He has a PhD in philosophy from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and is a member of the editorial collective of Turbulence (www.turbulence.org.uk). His writing, on philosophy, art and politics, has appeared in such publications as Radical Philosophy, Deleuze Studies, Transform, Mute, ephemera, The Guardian, Z and others.

Hello,I have been working to get a copy of Forgetting by Friedrich Kittler. Itapparently appeared in *Discourse: Berkeley Journal for Theoretical Studiesin Media and Culture.*No. 3, 1981, p. 88-121. The library at my institutionis having trouble tracking this down.If anyone might have a .pdf of this, a copy would be greatly appreciated.Kind regards,Nomr

Source: obviously FT, but U can't access anyway. bwo Virginie Mamadouh.Cleaned up for picture captions, which look nice (not seem 'm, was a c+p fwd)March 2, 2012 9:50 pmSchool for quantsBy Sam KnightInside UCL's Financial Computing Centre, the planet's brightestquantitative analysts are now calculating our futureStudents look at equations from a PhD thesis that uses Bayesian analysisto examine the relation between bond trades and economic data releases.Got that?On a recent winter's afternoon, nine computer science students weresitting around a conference table in the engineering faculty at UniversityCollege London. The room was strip-lit, unadorned, and windowless. On thewall, a formerly white whiteboard was a dirty cloud, tormented by theweight of technical scribblings and rubbings-out upon it. A poster in thecorner described the importance of having a heterogenous experimentalnetwork, orSix of the students were undergraduates. The other three were PhDresearchers from UCL's elite Financial Computing Centre. The only personkeeping notes was one of them: a bearded, 30-year-old Polish researchercalled Michal Galas. Galas was leading the meeting, a weekly update on thebuilding of a vast new collection of social data, culled from theinternet.Under the direction of the PhD students, the undergraduates were writingcomputer programs to haul millions of pages of publicly available digitalchatter - from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and news stories - into areal-time archive which could be analysed for signs of the public mood,particularly in regard to financial markets. Word of the project, known asSocialSTREAM, had reached the City months ago. The Financial ComputingCentre was getting calls most days from companies wanting to know when itwould be finished.The Bank of England had been in touch.During the meeting, Galas asked each undergraduate about a particularcorner of the database. Most of the time, the language was computer:impenetrable exchanges about batching, pseudo-storage and the risks ofpropagating on tiers. "Should that work in a distributed field as well?"an undergraduate asked. "If you have different connectors running ondifferent machines, you might start duplicating..." Galas considered this."Personally," he replied, "I would run the connectors outside the cloudmachine."Every now and again, though, the discussion became comprehensible. Thestudents discussed annoyances - so much data about animals! - andpossibilities. One of the PhD students, Ilya Zheludev, talked about"Wikipedia deltas" - records of deleted sections from the onlineencyclopaedia. Immediately, the students hit on the idea of tracking theWikipedia entries of large companies and seeing what was deleted, andwhen.The mood of the meeting was casual and exacting at the same time. Galas,who is from Gdansk and once had ambitions to be a hacker, is something ofa giant at the Financial Computing Centre. One of the first students toenrol in 2009, he has a gift for writing extremely large computerprograms. In order to carry out his own research, Galas has built anelectronic trading platform that he estimates would satisfy the needs of asmall bank. As a result, what he says goes. Galas closed the meeting bygiving the undergraduates a hard time about the overall messiness of theirprogramming. "I like beauty!" he declared, staring around the room.The Financial Computing Centre at UCL, a collaboration with the LondonSchool of Economics, the London Business School and 20 leading financialinstitutions, claims to be the only institute of its kind in Europe. Eachyear since its establishment in late 2008, between 600 and 800 studentshave applied for its 12 fully funded PhD places, which each cost thetaxpayer £30,000 per year. Dozens more applicants come from the financialindustry, where employers are willing to subsidise up to five years ofresearch at the tantalising intersection of computers, data and money.As of this winter, the centre had about 60 PhD students, of whom 80 percent were men. Virtually all hailed from such forbiddingly numeratesubjects as electrical engineering, computational statistics, puremathematics and artificial intelligence. These realms of knowledge containconcepts such as data mining, non-linear dynamics and chaos theory thatmake many of us nervous just to see written down. Philip Treleaven, thecentre's director, is delighted by this. "Bright buggers," he calls hisstudents. "They want to do great things."In one sense, the centre is the logical culmination of a relationshipbetween the financial industry and the natural sciences that has beendeepening for the past 40 years. The first postgraduate scientists beganto crop up on trading floors in the early 1970s, when rising interestrates transformed the previously staid calculations of bond trading into afield of complex mathematics. The most successful financial equation ofall time - the Black-Scholes model of options pricing - was published in1973 (the authors were awarded a Nobel prize in 1997).By the mid-1980s, the figure of the "quantitative analyst" or "quant" or"rocket scientist" (most contemporary quants disdain this nickname,pointing out that rocket science is not all that complicated any more) wasa rare but not unheard-of species in most investment houses. Twenty yearslater, the twin explosions of cheap credit and cheap computing power madequants into the banking equivalent of super-charged particles. Givenfreedom to roam, the best were able - it seemed - to summon ever morerefined, risk-free and sophisticated financial products from the edges ofthe known universe.Of course it all looks rather different now. Derivatives so fancy you needa degree in calculus to understand them are hardly flavour of the monththese days. Proprietary trading desks in banks, the traditional home ofquants, have been decimated by losses and attempts at regulation since thestart of the financial crisis. There is nothing like the number of jobsthere used to be.Moreover, among some older quants at least, there is a feeling that theera of genuine discovery is over. Pioneering thinking in the 1970s and1980s has long been programmed into the most idiot-proof trading software.You can download an Excel spreadsheet of the Black-Scholes model in a fewseconds. I went to see Piotr Karasinski, a former head of quantitativeanalysis at HSBC, who has a model named after him: the Black-Karasinskimodel for short-term interest rates, which he developed with Fischer Black(of Black-Scholes). "I think that the field is shrinking," saidKarasinski, in his quiet office at the European Bank of Reconstruction andDevelopment. "Very few people do original work."You don't hear that kind of talk at the Financial Computing Centre. Andthat is mainly down to its founder, Professor Treleaven. Treleaven was themanager of a holiday camp before he went to study computer science atBrunel University in 1964. One of his father's friends had heard thatcomputers might be the next big thing. "I took a punt on that," Treleavensays, and for the past 47 years - 30 of them at UCL - he has enjoyedthrowing his machines at pretty much any problem he hears about.Treleaven began working with the financial industry in the late 1980s. Hisfirst project - an attempt to use artificial intelligence to forecastmarkets - was a failure. But he hit pay dirt with his second: an automatedfraud-detection system for the London Stock Exchange. Over the years, theoccasional phone calls to his office from financial firms became regular,and by the early 2000s, Treleaven and his department was caught up in thewave of innovation sweeping the industry. Until recently, by far the mostpopular topic for both his students and his City contacts was theapparently limitless world of algorithmic trading.In its starkest form, algorithmic trading is the replacement of humandecision-making in financial transactions with computer programs. Analgorithm - a series of instructions (when to start trading, when to stop,how much risk to take) - issues its own orders to buy and sell. In theory,algorithms can do anything, but in practice they work along a spectrumfrom simply executing trades to coming up with their own ideas to makemoney. At their most advanced, and Frankensteinian, algorithmic tradingstrategies independently scour the world's financial markets, looking fordiscrepancies, statistical correlations and arbitrage opportunities,trading most of the time against each other. High Frequency Trading - massautomated dealings of this type - now accounts for about 75 per cent ofall US equity transactions.To some, algorithmic trading is a harbinger of a world out of our control.Robert Harris's recent novel, The Fear Index, was inspired in part by the"flash crash" of May 6 2010, in which the New York Stock Exchange plungedcrazily and then recovered after algorithms responded to an unexpectedlylarge order in the electronic futures market. To others, algorithmictrading shows just how far the automation of financial markets has yet torun. "People say about algorithmic trading, 'They're just a bunch ofcowboys, you know.'" Treleaven shook his head. "No," he said. "It isindustrialisation. It is like putting robots in car factories."Treleaven's excitement stems, at least in part, from the fact thatfinancial disasters are just as interesting to academics as successstories. When I asked him whether the ongoing agony in the economy hadthrown up research opportunities, he said: "Oh yes, absolutely... themother of invention is all something, you know? Look at what happened inthe war, you have loads of scientific breakthroughs." But the professor'sreal animus is that he believes that what has been taking place in thefinancial industry - a heady meeting of computing power and the finestyoung scientific brains - is about to break into the rest of the socialsciences. That is because what Treleaven's students do, what quants do, isfind patterns in oceans of electronic data. In a hedge fund, that mightmean finding relationships between price movements and then trading onthem. In public health, it might mean tracking millions of pharmacytransactions and spotting the next outbreak of flu."They think of themselves as doing computational finance," Treleaven saidof his students, "but let's jump forward: people who are interested inpolitics in the next 10 years will be doing computational politics." Thecalculating power and analytical techniques used in finance could alsomodel the impact of public policies, or seek insights in sport andeducation. This year, for the first time, Treleaven has a psychologygraduate among his students and he enjoys telling undergraduates fromother faculties - economics, music even - that they should learn how toprogram computers if they want to stand a chance in the world that iscoming.Most of Treleaven's students have the most obvious destination in mind,however: the trading floor. One afternoon I met Mahnoosh Mirghaemi, a29-year-old Iranian who was awarded the centre's first PhD last October.Mirghaemi brought her thesis with her: "Bayesian Learning in FinancialMarkets". Bayesian learning is very voguish among quants at the moment. Ituses a probability theory first devised by Thomas Bayes, an 18th-centuryEnglish clergyman, to create financial models that learn and adapt to newinformation.Mirghaemi spent two years using Bayesian techniques to study how Europeanbond markets responded to 3,077 separate releases of economic data between2007 and 2008. She studied 1.6 million bond trades and figured out whichpieces of news moved the markets more, and which ones analysts and traderswere more likely to forecast poorly. "It made my eyesight like a double,"she said. But Mirghaemi's research should now, in theory, allow traders,and trading algorithms, to position themselves better on an hour-by-hourbasis. "It definitely makes money," she said.Mirghaemi was hired by BNP Paribas last summer. A few months later, herboss - a trader for 37 years - mentioned that he could never work out thesimultaneous price and position of a trade. On the spot, Mirghaemi wrotedown a cosine formula from physics useful for measuring electromagneticwaves. "He was just looking at it," she said. Mirghaemi emphasised herrespect for her seniors at the bank but she said that she felt different."I think I come from the new generation," she said, "looking at thefinance, the economic, the engineering, the computing altogether."There was a touch, almost, of sympathy in the way that Mirghaemi describedcolleagues coming to terms with the changing nature of the markets. "Theirminds are like, 'We know as economists this is what is happening, orshould be happening," she said. "But the real world says 'No.' Thecomputer systems and all these quant people are changing the market muchmore rapidly than they actually want to." And not necessarily for thebetter. When asked whether she thought all these quants made for morestable financial markets, Mirghaemi looked at me and said: "It is very,very risky and it brings a lot of volatility to the markets and it is outof control."Students at the Financial Computing Centre are comfortable making suchstatements, because they believe they are equipped to handle theirimplications. When I asked Mirghaemi how this unstable future made herfeel, she said: "It puts me in a very good situation.". . .A willingness to embrace uncertainty, a certain ruthlessness in acquiring,testing and rejecting new ideas is also what employers are looking for."That's what it's like in this area," said Rafael Molinero, who runs aquant-led hedge fund, Molinero Capital Management, where three studentsfrom the centre are currently on work placements. "You always have toreinvent yourself to stay on top of the curve. That is a big driver forus. That is what we want to see in them." And the best way to keep yourhead is to listen to your algorithms, rather than your heart. As Molineroput it: "The main idea when you become a quant is that a computer is lessprone to pitfalls than a human."If Molinero is right, then Michal Galas became a quant a long time ago.For his PhD, Galas is building what he calls an "adaptable algorithmtrading portfolio" - a production line of automated trading strategies,from which computers will select the most appropriate one, depending onwhat is happening in a particular market. Algorithms upon algorithms uponalgorithms. Galas imagines it as a hedge fund without employees. "There isno human intervention necessary," he said.I told Galas that this degree of trust in machines unnerved me. I told himthat, as I understood it, the sheer complexity of some financial productsand an over-reliance on mathematical models had been a major contributorto the financial crisis. To illustrate this, I drew two diverging lines inmy notebook and told him that I thought this gap - the difference betweenwhat we know and what we think we know - had proved itself dangerous.Galas looked at the widening gap as if he recognised it. "That is anopportunity to use computers," he said. "So yeah, good for me."Of course, not every student at the centre speaks like this. Stathi Panayispent an unhappy year at an investment bank in 2008 and has vowed never togo back. He returned to Cyprus and worked as an English teacher beforestarting his PhD in financial computing last year. Panayi is now trying todevise better ways to measure liquidity in financial markets, and comingup with ideas for how regulators might intervene earlier to prevent eventssuch as the credit crunch of 2007. One of his advisers works at the Bankof England.Even so, Panayi was sanguine about the eagerness - the right - of hisfellow students to come up with ever more abstract ways to beat ourbattered markets. The methods of quants might be difficult to fathom buthumanity, and capitalism, has not progressed by putting limits oninvention. "Is the answer going down a level of sophistication, makingthings easier for the layman to understand?" Panayi asked me. "Is there alimit? Who is to say what is the limit of sophistication in the market?"He considered this. "I don't think the answer is banning everything youdon't understand."Even better: give them one of your problems to solve. Technology andanalytical thinking, after all, is neutral: what matters is the aim inwhich it is deployed. That is why SocialSTREAM - the database the studentswere trying to figure out on that winter's afternoon - could turn out tobe so useful.I got a preview of what the database might be capable of, shortly beforeit went live last month. The idea behind SocialSTREAM, and otherexperiments like it, is to collect reams of live text being published tothe internet, and to run it through dictionaries designed to test languagefor signs of mood. For an individual tweet - "Good morning!" - this mightbe meaningless. But taken across millions of postings, from the personalto political, a rough indicator of popular sentiment does emerge.Ilya Zheludev, one of the students from the meeting, showed me his studyof 500,000 internal Enron emails, which were released following thecollapse of the energy company in 2001. Zheludev's sentiment analysisshowed a spike in emotion among employees - both positive and negative, amassive, contradictory shiver - in April 1999, a few months before thecompany's stock began to take off on its exponential (and fraudulent)trajectory.Picking up on such bubbles of emotion as they emerge (around a company,for instance, or a government even in such murky waters as Twitter, orFacebook, or the website of the Financial Times, has an obvious allure toindividual investors trying to stay ahead of the market. At least oneLondon-based hedge fund, Derwent Capital, now trades purely on socialdata, mined in this way.But there are clear civic and academic possibilities as well. Takepolitical polling: while I watched, Zheludev set up SocialSTREAM to trawlthe entire current output of Twitter for mentions of "Obama" and toanalyse each mention for an approval rating of +1 to -1. Then he put thefindings on a graph. A jagged line appeared, and from 4.22pm to 4.27pm, onJanuary 16 2012, Zheludev and I were looking at one crude, real-timemeasure of the political fortunes of President Obama. "There you have it,"said Zheludev. We stared at the zigzag on the screen, wondering what itmight possibly mean.Deciphering such patterns is what excites collaborators with the FinancialComputing Centre who are more interested in stabilising the markets thanbeating them. Zheludev's supervisor is David Tuckett, a psychoanalyst atUCL who studies the interplay of emotion and the unconscious in tradingdecisions. He told me that the database could, if used properly, allow usto see our exaggerated hopes and paranoias for what they are, before theygrow to overwhelm us. "If you think about it like the sea," said Tuckett,of the torrents of digital information that we produce each day, "can weidentify narratives when they are not yet at the surface? Can we learnabout how they come and go?"As Tuckett spoke, I began to believe in the idea of quants enabling us todigest the world in more rational ways, to become, in a sense, betterversions of ourselves. "We are not interested in a world that iscompletely without excitement or volatility," said Tuckett, "But we areinterested in getting a handle on things before they get out of hand." Theparadox is that in order to become safer, in order to become betterinformed, we will have to continue to place ever more faith in brains andmachines that we only begin to understand. It is always easy to start. Theproblem is knowing when to stop.To comment, please emailmagazineletters-lnepeYUt+bE< at >public.gmane.org<mailto:magazineletters-lnepeYUt+bE< at >public.gmane.org>

hello,well I've been trying to get at the core of this discussion which frankly I find bloated with excess verbiage and driven by a subtext that seems to fetishize Facebook as if this were one of the most pressing questions we are now facing. Really folks, one has to simply watch The Social Network and extrapolate from the personalities and economic milieu (Harvard Univ Facebook ground zero) at Facebook's inception into present social/political climate to see how value increases (and why); is the paradigm that different for Youtube, Yahoo, Google etc...?a.s.

Stimulating ‘PowerPoint’ presentation of Dominique Strauss Kahn at The Cambridge Union Societyto see the documented news tableau published on March 10, 2012 by Tjebbe van Tijen check out the latest Limping Messenger:http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2012/03/11/stimulating-powerpoint-presentation-of-dominique-strauss-kahn-at-the-cambridge-union-society/or short linkhttp://wp.me/pw0cu-1fe-------------------Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/

[Resent-From: Geert Lovink <geert-qWit8jRvyhVmR6Xm/wNWPw< at >public.gmane.org>]Hello Everyone,A quick update on my appearance at South By South West this coming Saturday (March 10) at 9.30 am in Ballroom G of the Austin Convention Center. This will be my very first public reading of the book and, if you are going to SXSW, I hope you'll come to hear me. I'll also be available after the reading for press interviews.And don't worry if you can't make it. My US publisher, St Martins Press, is running a sweepstakes which is not only giving away 100 copies of the e-book but is also featuring its first two chapters. So please read and then tell me what you think.Early responses to the book have been amazing. Nicholas Carr noted that I've "found the off switch for Silicon Valley's reality distortion field". Sir Martin Sorrell said that "Digital Vertigo may be one of the few books on the subject that, twenty years from now, will be seen to have got it right." Peter Bale, CNN International's GM of Digital, described it as "part-William Gibson and part-Christopher Hitchens", while Sherry Turkle called it a "bracing read... that clarifies and enlightens." For other early reviews, as well as an overview of the book, please go here.Digital Vertigo is released both in the US and UK on May 22 and I've already got a very busy schedule of speeches and media appearances planned for late May, June and July. So if you do want me to speak about the book over the summer, please let me know as soon as possible.I hope to see you bright and early on Saturday morning in Austin.v. best,Andrewdd.

Reassessing Recomposition: 40 Years After the Publication of Anti-OedipusFranco ‘Bifo’ Berardi From Subjectivity Volume 5 Issue 1 (April 2012)Special Issue: Collective Becomings, Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis & Joanna Figielhttp://www.palgrave-journals.com/sub/journal/v5/n1/index.html1. Post-OedipalThe process of subjectivation is based on conditions that have dramatically changed in the forty years since the publication of Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Reading that book was a defining moment in my intellectual and political experience, in the first years of the 19070s, when students and workers were fighting and organizing spaces of autonomy and separation from capitalist exploitation. Forty years after the publication of that book the landscape has changed so deeply that very concept of desire has to be re-thought, as it is marking the field of subjectivation in a very different way.The proliferation of sources of enunciation in this age of the networks, the globalization of the economy and the media, was predicted and in a sense pre-conceptualized Deleuze and Guattari, but they could not know in advance the effects that global capitalism has produced on the unconscious and the dynamics of desire. As production, media and daily life have been subsumed into the sphere of semiocapital we need to reconsider the unconscious from this transformed position.My starting question is thus: what is capitalism and what is schizophrenia after the psychosocial landscape has been reshaped by the tendencies described by Deleuze and Guattari? Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus described, or better yet, mapped in advance the waste and proliferating land of rhizomatic capitalism that we see now deployed in the forms of neoliberal deregulation and financial semiocapitalism. They also mapped the formation of the schizo-psychosphere, in which today the psychosis is taking the central place of neurosis as prevailing clinic condition.Shortly after its publication Anti-Oedipus encountered and inspired a movement that was the expression of the first generation of precarious cognitive workers, a movement which, while continuing the legacy of May 1968, was opening a post-ideological wave, based on the concepts of desire and autonomy. In the streets of Bologna in the year 1977 students yelled ‘anti-oedipal’ slogans rather than celebrating Che Guevara and Mao Zedong. Those students found in that book the joy of unleashing desire as energy of social solidarity and creation.When we first read that book in the 1970s we understood it as a claim of liberating desire from the chains of industrial work, from sexual and social repression. This was a legitimate reading, but it was also too narrow, too simplistic. Now the chains of capitalism have become immaterial and semiotic, and psychic suffering does not come so much from repression but mainly from the hyper-expressive compulsion, from competition and acceleration of the infosphere.In the 1970s we did read that book as a critique of the Freudian reduction of the unconscious to the theatrical dimension, and a critique to the Lacan’s reduction of the unconscious to language. This was a legitimate way to read the book, and a good political starting point.“Quelque chose se produit: des effets de machine, et non des metaphores” – “Something is happening: machine effects, not metaphors.” We read in the first page of the book, and this was a good introduction to a critique of the logocentrism implied in Freudian and Lacanian cult of interpretation. But beyond that today we should understand what has changed in social imagination and in the collective psychosphere in the decades that come after the publication of this book, which has to be read today as a prefiguration of the new phenomenology of precarious work and the new pathologies of psychic suffering.We identified desire as a force, and rhizomes as revolutionary models, as we tried to fully develop the liberation of collective life from the repressive tangles of industrial capitalism, and simultaneously from the centric and authoritarian model of the disciplinary state. In my opinion that interpretation was politically legitimate, particularly in the context of unemployment, the precariousness of young people, and persisting political power of the working class, but it was narrow and reductive from a philosophical point of view. Forty years later, in my opinion, we have to abandon the emphasis on the liberating potential of desire and of schizoid expressivity, and replace the assumption of infinite energy of desire with a new consciousness of exhaustion, a consciousness of the limits of living organisms.Desiring expressivity and rhizomatic proliferation, the processes that the book conceptualized, have been strong factors of change, dismantling the repressive and neurotic form of capitalist domination in its industrial phase. But in the meanwhile, the features of a new model of economic power have emerged, and this new model is based on the topological structure of the rhizome, and is acting as a powerful attractor for the economic investment of desire.In the 1970s we emphasized the liberating force of desire, and movements deconstructed the neurotic cage of alienated labor and sexual repression. In the 1990s, as language was captured in the process of semiotic production and desire invested in the creative economy and in the financial abstraction, we have to face the ambiguity of desire, which is not a unilaterally progressive force, liberating and joyous. Strictly speaking desire is not even a force, but a field, and the field where the most important action of social communication occur. The basic processes of disaggregation and re-aggregation for power and social movements are happening in the field of desire. This is the fundamental discovery of that book. But this discovery has turned into a misunderstanding.We translated the words of Anti-Oedipus into the idea that desire is in itself a force of liberation, and thus we did not see the pathogenic effects of the acceleration and intensification of the info-stimuli, that are linked to the formation of the electronic infosphere and to precarization of work.2. Limit1972 was also the year of publication of a book titled Limits to the Growth produced by a group of scientists assembled by the Club of Rome. Asserting that physical resources of the planet are not boundless, the book contained an important conceptual intuition: economic growth cannot be infinite because basic physical resources are doomed to run out. The Arab-Israeli war of 1973 seemed to confirm this. It showed that the fundamental assumptions of capitalist ideology needed to be rethought and a new political culture developed based on the idea of un-growth.Similarly, the psychic energies of cognitive work are not boundless, as the organic, psychic and cultural limits of the social body are limits to the potency of the general intellect, and a limit to desire itself. The core of clinic and political attention needs to shift: from the field of the expanding potency of the general intellect and desire to the field of psycho-pathologies of the first generation of precarious cognitive work. The acceleration of the infosphere, the unceasing intensification of mental work, that semiocapital is constantly stimulating, has to be seen as factors of the fragilization of the psychic fabric of social composition. This was foreseen by Deleuze and Guattari in the last part of their lives. In their last book What is philosophy?, particularly the last chapter, dedicated to Chaos and the brain Deleuze and Guattari write:We require just a little order to protect us from chaos. Nothing is more distressing than a thought that escapes itself, than ideas that fly off, that disappear hardly formed, already eroded by forgetfulness or precipitated into others that we no longer master.What is philosophy? is a book on aging, as the authors state in the introduction. Aging, suffering, physical and psychic decay – the continent of exhaustion – that were hidden in the triumphal emphasis of our political reading of Anti-Oedipus, emerge here as a new perspective for imagining and conceptualizing the process of subjectivation in the sphere of semiocapitalism.The schizo-strategy outlined in the pages of Anti-Oedipus was a way to escape the Freudian phenomenology of neurosis. The psychotic explosion of the high-speed semiocapital is changing the landscape. Neoliberal deregulation and network proliferation have deterritorialized the process of subjectivation, and opened the door to the explosion of the repressive cage of industrial labor and of paternal power of interdiction. As the repressive borders of unconscious and labor explode, precariousness becomes the social form of indetermination and uncertainty in the psychogenesis.In his recent book, Man without Unconscious, Massimo Recalcati (an Italian psychoanalyst and philosopher who is trying to redraw the conceptual relation between Lacan and Deleuze and Guattari) lists the emerging diseases of our time: panic, food disorders, dependence on toxic substances, attention deficit disorders: pathologies that cannot be easily referred to the Freudian analysis, and demand a new context of interpretation, the context of post-Fordist, postindustrial deterritorialization, the context of labor precariousness. I call this context semiocapital because the general product is no more the physical good but the immaterial semiotic products: information, affection, and aesthetics. Countless users can consume these products without exhausting them, circulating in the market of attention, invading mental space, and producing effects in the cognitive, but also affective and psychic spheres.In the sphere of semiocapital the production of semiotic goods provokes an expansion and acceleration of the infosphere, directly affecting the psychosphere, i.e. the affective, sexual and imaginary dimensions. Consequently the relation between the production process and unconscious comes to be much more immediate and complex than in the industrial age, where production and consumption involved the collective psychic sphere only in an indirect way. Freud’s psychoanalysis was intended to bring the plague into the disciplinary space of conformist bourgeois society, opening the door to the vision of unconscious abysses. The bourgeois society, which tried to deny and remove the disturbing features of sexuality was obliged to look at itself in the mirror of sexual psychogenesis.Now we inhabit a totally different condition marked by the explosion of imagination, by the hyper-sexualization of media imagery, and the precarization of social connections. Psychosis is no longer confined to the separated sphere of institutionalized madness, but is exploding in the daily dimension as a factor of constant deterritorialization of the activity of imagination and desire.We cannot face this new situation with the conceptual tools of the Freudian analysis, but at the same time also the categories of schizoanalysis need to be rethought.Free from the neurogenic cage of the disciplinary society, the unconscious exploded and is proliferating in full daylight, naked and provocative in the dimensions of advertising, pornography and popular diffusion of psychopharmacology and cocaine, and the media hyper-stimulation of attention. Should we reclaim the restoration of the old moral order, of the slow family life, of the hierarchical territorialized system of the Protestant bourgeoisie in the old industrial cities? Obviously not, because this claim would be reactionary and ineffective. But we should not insist on the mere exhibition of the plague, on the mere emphasizing the infinite potencies of desire. Constantly mobilized by the economic machine, shifting from a simulation to the next under-promise of immediate pleasure, desire is turning to panic. The precarious generation is haunted by countless contradictory injunctions: enjoyment and acceleration, expression and competition, freedom and anxiety, creativity and exploitation. What is the way towards subjectivation in these new conditions?3. BodyIn order to imagine paths of social recomposition in the poet-oedipal condition that I have tried to sketch out in these pages we need to understand that the crucial problem, both at the political and at clinical levels, is the bodily dimension of the general intellect. This is why I speak of cognitarians, in order to define the cognitive workers in conditions of precariousness. Precarity is jeopardizing the sphere of affection and language, but we cannot cherish the idea of a comeback to the old times of the ‘standardized’ employment and social discipline. We should find a way to disentangle the potentialities of the new condition starting from an understanding of its alienation. This is why I use the word “cognitariat.” In this concept I want to underline the implication of the intellect and of the body, the denial of this implication, and the separation of mental activity from the social body.Since 2001, Christian Marazzi has been warning of the dismantling of the general intellect, a process that started after the dotcom crash of the spring 2000. As he predicted, during the first decade of the new century cognitive labor has been disempowered and subjected to the form of precarization. The social and affective body of the cognitive workers has been separated from their daily activities. The alienation of the first generation of people who have learned more words from a machine than from their mother is based on this separation, on the virtualization of social relations. In the last two or three years, in the aftermath of the financial crisis, riots and huge demonstrations have exploded in many European cities, and seem destined to spread and gather strength in the coming years. But it is difficult to imagine what the forms of the struggle will be, as financial capitalism is deterritorialized and virtual, and therefore it is impossible to zero in on a social target, to attack a delimited enemy, as the enemy is nowhere and everywhere. So what is the issue of the mobilization against financial capitalism, if financial capital is impossible to locate and to contest?At the same time, the possibility of a revolution seems to be out of reach, as social reality has become too complex, and replacing the ruling class seems useless, as a specific ruling class strictly speaking no longer exists. The financial class is not a territorialized class, as the industrial bourgeoisie used to be, it is rather a transversal function, recombining countless fragmentary actions of net-trading, exchanging stocks, producing simulations and so on. Economic power and political power are not the emanation of a rational decision, but a recombinant function, traversing the boundless sprawl of digital financial exchange. How can this ocean of fragments be subverted, how can a rational direction be imposed on this constellation of segments? It is not possible.So why are people taking to the streets, and fighting against the police, and destroying the shops and the banks? Old rituals coming from the proletarian revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth century? Perhaps, in a certain way, yes: old rituals have become ineffective as the city is no more a place of social life, but a simulacrum, and the enemy is no more identifiable and targetable. But we should see another face in this kind of mobilization, one that is not aimed towards aggression and destruction, but towards self-recognition and recomposition.The cognitarians of this generation are going to the streets to recompose their social and affective bodies. They are reactivating their bodily relations with the metropolitan territory. Riots are reshaping the perception of urban territory, and the perception of the complicity between bodies. From this point of view the students’ struggles that exploded in fall 2010 are not to be seen as a sudden outburst of rage, but as the beginning of a long-lasting process that will encompass the next decade, a cognitarian insurrection of sort. Insurrection means rising up, and also full deployment of the potencies of the actor. The actor who is coming out on the historical scene of our time is the general intellect in its process of subjectivation. The potencies of this actor are the potencies of the collective intelligence in the network, the potencies of knowledge, reduced to the narrow dogmatic utilization that capitalist economy is forcing on them.The full deployment of the general intellect falls beyond the sphere of capitalism. When the general intellect will be able to reconstitute its social and erotic body, the capitalist rule will become obsolete. This is the new consciousness that comes out from the explosion of the last months of 2010 from reclaiming the autonomy of knowledge. The process of social recomposition is essentially the process of reactivation of the body of the general intellect, whose social existence is constrained in the precarious fragmentary form.

Dear Nettimers: I am moderating this month in -empyre and I know many ofyou are subscribed also to both lists. Since we are often discussingtangent topics I wonder if I can encourage you to participate in thismonth's discussion.These two posts were written by two very dear friends to me, two Uruguayanwriters. I should love to see some of you contributing to this discussiontoo!Ana Dear all, I am Alicia Migdal, Uruguayan writer, film and literary critic.I work as academic dean of the Theater School Margarita Xirgu, managed bythe Montevideo?s municipality. I am a friend to Ana since many years andthank to what I call her tireless ?mental activism?, which act upon all usin a viral way J, I am here and allow myself a literary sidepath.Estimadostodos,Loneliness is always a urbane situation. For us being congenital urbane isnot thinkable as a subjective situation the loneliness of peopoe living innot urban places.I am remembering the short story ?Wakefield?, written by NathanielHawthorne. I associate it always with the short story ?Bartleby?, writtenby Herman Melville, quoted here by Ricardso Dominguez here the other day.And Kafka?s Gregor Samsa, the clerk becoming an insect looking at thelights of the city from his room. All of them represent urban situationsimpossible to think upon outside the polis.All of those has always being associated for me with ?The Man of theCrowd?, a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe quoted by Walter Benjaminconnecting him with Charles Baudelaire and his condition of ?flaneur?.In this literary triangle the common denominator is the city and it?sanonymity. The famous poem of Baudelaire ?A une passante? put in scene theshock of the ephemerous image: a man was struck at the fugitive image of awoman passing in front his eyes and losing herself in the crowd. She wasimpossible to find and all possible relation between the poet and thewoman, bound to be mysterious and furtive.Benjamin analyzed in detail in his essays on Baudelaie the new role of theurban grid represented by Paris as capital of the 19th century. Hededicated his book ?The Arcades Project? to Paris and it?s life. He studiedthe passages, galleries, the inside and the outside implicated by the newarchitectonic conceptions of social life.There is a short story by Julio Cort?zar, ?The Other Sky?, describing itaround the Gallery Vivienne in Paris. Galerie Vivienne de Par?s y andPasaje G?emes in Buenos Aires, where the times and the characters merge andthe count of Lautreamond and a serial killer live simultaneusly.By the way the serial killers go from city to city, at least the mostfamous, or make it?s own map in the urban wave where they live, as showedin the film ?Zodiac?.And in other analyze Fredric Jameson has investigated the disjunctionbetween the self and the constructed space starting on Hotel Bonaventure inhis essay on capitalism?s late postcultural logic.But I continue on other day. Dear all,I am Sabela de Tezanos. Is a pleasure to greet you and intervene in thisforum at the invitation of Ana Luisa, whom I thank again taking intoaccount my perspective, in which intersect, in unstable doses, my trainingin philosophy (licensed by the Faculty of Humanities and Sciences ofeducation, UdelaR), my work as a teacher (Department of Psychology,Montevideo) and cultural production (I am a member of the staff of the MAPI- Museum of pre-Columbian art and indigenous) in Montevideo and my writing.Every city has a skin. Its appearance is multiple and mobile, and it'smobility relates to the socio-cultural context in space and time.The factors affecting this skin are innumerable, and referred both to thearchitectural physiognomy and recent history; to the fast changes that this"skin" is exposed (technology, communication, globalization, etc.) andcurrently to trends imposed by social movements in the world.Montevideo is the capital of a small country, with a population ofapproximately 3,500,000 inhabitants. It's status of peripheric cit isintermittently reflected in successive urban images.As Montevideo born and resident, I have lived in different neighborhoods ofthe city. My perception, as their climates and peculiarities, have changedover time.I can recognize signs of response to these changes, the resistance andability of the community to deal with "progress", with political movements,to fashions.There are metaphors, reading between lines, manifestos orabsent-mindedness, giving rhythm to what, in the words of the Paraguayancritic and current Minister of culture of his country, Ticio Escobar,called "social skin". He refers to body painting and ornaments of differentindigenous Latin American tribes, they reflect hierarchies, status,membership, practices, beliefs, traditions.I must also quote the Mexican muralist Felipe Ehrenberg: visitingMontevideo (2009) on the occasion of the completion of a work on the wallsof the city, his lecture was titled "The skin of the cities."At the beginning of this exchange we can transfer the concepts of "the skinof the city" to the "social skin". We see the urban appereance, the wallsand their graphic tags, how the walls are, how much is recycled, thesimultaneous convivence of large gentrified buildings with squatted placesand forgotten areas. I am going to enlarge these concepts as to individualsneeding express belonging, of being identified and classified, to beinglooked at or to be invisible in a context where everyone is seen asuniform.I am in a next post to write about the tatoo as extended practice and goesthrough all social layers and challenge all those age groups and becames a"tag" of this time.

IRON BRAINS keep playing their war games over Israel and Gaza: everybody loses, except war-industry.March 12, 2012 by Tjebbe van TijenThe fully illustrated and documented version can be found at:http://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/2012/03/12/iron-brains-keep-playing-their-wargames-over-israel-and-gaza-everybody-loses-except-war-industry/[tableau showing launching of rockets by Islamic Jihad from the outskirts of Gaza City and Iron Shield system launching a rocket that captures these rockets mid air. In the background a photograph of a dog in the field and a thin white stripe in the sky of a Jihad rocket being destroyed]I have a hard time understanding the aerial combat over Israel and Gaza. What is the idea of the Palestinian brigades to fire their low tech rockets to penetrate the Iron Shield protected area of Israel?90% of such rockets – it is said – are now destroyed in mid air by the the Israeli defence system, whereas the people in Gaza have no defence whatsoever against incoming retaliation bombardments from the endless military arsenal of Israel. The picture with the dog in the foreground and the smoke trail of the Israeli anti-rocket system intercepting a Gaza-strip fired rocket, was taken on Saturday the 9th of April 2011 in the field near Ashkelon in Israel with the following command: “Nicole was out walking her dogs when she heard the distant siren and the booms. In the fields there is nowhere to hide, so she just watched the Iron Dome shooting the rocket out of the sky, leaving a puff and white smoke trail.” (3)I need two arms and two fingers to point at all those despicable missile launchers. The only ones gaining from this ‘iron brains game’ is the weapon industry that uses the territories of Israel and Gaza as a testing grounds for the most advanced military products as is summarised in these visuals from trade brochures…[visuals of trade brochures: "Israel's Innovative Homeland Security Solutions"]More than one hundred rockets fired from Gaza at Israeli territory, 6 Israelis’s wounded, retaliation attacks on Gaza 21 dead (March 12, 2012). There must be an immense hatred for all those ‘iron brains’ launching their explosive devices, from whatever side, for whatever ideological or security claim. But, who can earnestly express such a view, either in Israel or Gaza?[tableau showing buildings on fire and wounded children in Gaza as a result of Israeli retaliation attacks]---notes with all three tableau picture elements in full original format and with their original captions. Also link to YoiuTube movie showing The Iron Shield System operating from a field.------------Tjebbe van TijenImaginary Museum ProjectsDramatizing Historical Informationhttp://imaginarymuseum.orgweb-blog: The Limping Messengerhttp://limpingmessenger.wordpress.com/

It’s the Macroeconomy, Stupid. To understand neoliberal policy you need to look at the structure, not the level of wealth.I've been thinking a lot recently about macroeconomic identities. An accounting identity is an equality that must be true, no matter what the values of its variables are.Macroeconomics has many such identities. For instance, Y = P + W. Meaning total income (Y) is equal to profits (P) plus wages (W). As this is an accounting identity, this must always be true, and therefore any change in either profits or wages must either be compensated by an inverse change in the other, or be reflected in a change in total income [1].This identity tells you that when profits grow faster than income growth, that wages must be falling. When profits grow and wages fall, this generally means wealth is concentrating.What's import here is that this is true, wealth is concentrating, even when Y falls, so long as P falls less.Another key identity is Y = I + C. Total income is equal to the sum of investment (I) and consumption (C). This tells us, for instance, that any reduction in the combined sum of investments and consumption invariably means negative economic growth.This identity is currently making the heads of honest economists worldwide spin, they are often outraged and mystified by the apparent economic voodoo behind neoliberal austerity programs currently being inflicted on economies worldwide, which clearly and invariably will result in economic stagnation.Now why would the financial elite be pushing for policies that are certain to reduce total income? Doesn't this mean they would make less money? Isn't it their goal to make more money? No, not necessarily.The goal is not wealth, per se, the goal is power, and power depends not so much on the level of wealth, but rather on the structure of wealth, not the total sum of wealth available to capital, but rather the structure of wealth in society, the relative amount of income that returns to private owners compared to the amount that is retained by workers. Not the absolute level of profits, but the relative share of profits in the total income.The financial elite are not elite by nature of the level of wealth, but by the structure of wealth. The more wealth is concentrated, the more power it's owners have, even when the total level of wealth is lower. It doesn't matter whether the capitalist class makes a million, a billion, a trillion, or a duodecillion dollars, only what percentage of the sum of all the money that is made in the economy ends up as their own.Therefore it's not economic ignorance or policy voodoo that drives the current austerity policies, but rather the rational self interest of the financial elite: their desire to stay on top of the pyramid. To see this identity we need to break down our understanding of the macroeconomy, not based on total income, but based on the relative incomes as accrued by class, and break income flows down to distinguish those that reproduce private capital, and thus cause further concentration, from those that do no reproduce private capital, and thus lead to capital dissolution. We need to isolate the relative share of profit in the total income, not the absolute level of profit.To start with, P + W = C + I is a combination of the two identities above, since both equal Y, they must also therefore be equal to each other. So the sum of profits and wages is equal to the sum of consumption and investment.Renowned economist Mikhal Kalecki isolated profit from this identify by breaking down consumption into consumption by capital and consumption by workers, resulting in P + W = Cp + Cw + I. Reasoning that workers, as a class, spend all the income they make, Kalecki equated W and Cw, resulting in P = Cp + I. Meaning Profit is equal to the sum of capitalist consumption plus investment. This means that wages are essentially meaningless when it comes to profits when wages eventually return to capitalists by way of worker's consumption.Yet, the assumption the workers consume everything they earn as a class is based on wages being determined by an efficient labour market. Workers can, as a class, use their social power to work against the workings of the labour market.In one of his later papers, "Class Struggle and the Distribution of the National Income", Kalecki reasons that through non-market processes like collective bargaining, workers can negotiate wage increases that do not entirely flow back to Capital in the form of profits. Collective political action, can likewise push to enact laws and lobby for benefits that move aggregate wages above class subsistence levels, and thus enable workers to earn more than they spend, and therefore allow workers to invest, breaking the monopoly on investment enjoyed by capital.Kalecki wrote in 1960, "According to [my] first theory, the absolute level of profits is determined by capitalist consumption and investment. According to [my] second theory, the relative share of profits in national income is determine by degree of monopoly."The degree of monopoly is determined by class struggle, and the relative share of profits in the national income is the result.Roughly following Kalecki, lets expand both consumption and investment to add a class dimension, lets say P + W = Cw + Cp + Iw + Ip. Now, to isolate relative profits (R) from absolute profits, we could use R = C + Ip. In other words relative profits are equal to all consumption of capitalist goods plus investment derived from capitalist profit. The social capacity of workers to invest (Iw) reflects a part of the national income that is not being consumed, and, more importantly, not flowing through to capitalist profit.We can now introduce a new equation to express wealth concentration (X) as X = C + Ip - Iw. This wealth concentration equation quantifies Kalecki's concept of the "Degree of Monopoly." This equation is macro-economically consistent, since Y = X + Iw.If we understand that the neoliberal agenda is to maximize X, not Y, we clearly see that X can rise even if Y falls, so long as workers' capacity to invest, meaning the amount of their income workers can sustainably divert from consumption, falls more.Thus, the macroeconomy of class struggle boils down to this, any action that decreases X is revolutionary and any action that increases X is reactionary. Just as the concentration equation reveals the logic of neoliberal policy, this also serves to guide the objectives of all who oppose it. Understanding that the goal of neoliberalism is to make X as close to Y as possible, we know that the goal of building a fairer society requires us to increase worker's capacity to invest as much as possible, thus reducing X as far below Y as possible.The level of workers' capacity to invest is not the result of the market, but a social choice born of collective action, such as collective bargaining and political struggle, and only maintained by the further social choice of not simply spending it back into the market. Workers' ability to invest can only come from a collective will to fight for more wages and benefits, and then intentionally use the extra wages and benefits in ways that do not create capitalist profits.The further investigation on how to decrease X, what I have described elsewhere as as integrated strategy of counter-politics, venture communism and insurgent finance, will be explored in upcoming articles.I'll be at Cafe Buchhandlung this evening at around 9pm, please join us. http://bit.ly/buchhandlung[1] Total income refers to the sum of all incomes within the economy in question, in the case of a nation, the national income. If the economy in question is anything smaller than the entire global economy, then balance of payments between this and other economies affects these identities, but this will not be covered here.