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Prisonhouse of AgeSomething has to be said about age and ageism, which is so pervasive inour culture, that we're held down, tied up, unable to move. I'm told Ilook good for my age; that I play like a much younger person. In aperformance I hear that a dancer, who died at 68, was in the middle of theend of her life. A friend says that his uncle dying at the age of 72, isquite old. Grandfathers and grandmothers on tv always look to retirementand playing with the kids. Television ads are increasingly aimed towardsdrugging us, those over 60 say, because of a variety of ailments we don'thave. We're frightened of falling and not getting up. We're no longermid-career artists, but a dying generation. We're waiting for the end.Friends say that now we're waiting for us to die off, that every daybrings news of new deaths and again this isn't true. The rhetoric ishurtful and isn't meant to be hurtful. The rhetoric is made out of bitsand pieces of the 'natural' progression from birth to death. We're theAARP generation. We're the baby boomers are are demanding to suck socialwelfare dry. We don't do anything. We're not worth listening to. We'rehippies and repeat the 60s. We just love listening to 60s music whichformed us. We're part of the social welfare state. Some of us who foughtin Vietnam are an embarrassment. Some of us who didn't are anembarrassment. On tv we're told that 'all we have is our stories.'If this happened to anyone at any age, the result would be unbearable.We're not taken seriously. We're all waiting for us to pass away. We haveto prove ourselves repeatedly. We're the result of hidden prejudice. We'reon the way to dementia. We're on the way to Alzheimer's. We're told ourshort-term memory isn't what it used to be. In the most well-meaning areasof popular culture, we're forgetful. Our bones are weak and ready tofracture. We have to exercise more. Our family has to be everything. We'renot eligible for grants and for jobs. We're eligible to die and the soonerwe do that, the less the embarrassment. In fact embarrassment is the keyto everything; we embarrass others. If we're sexual it's a joke. If weremarry it's a joke. If we refuse our assigned place in the family it's ajoke.I first ran into ageism at the age of 30, applying for a job as editor ofan art mag in Los Angeles. I've always been sensitive to it because I'vealways been told I look and act 'younger than my age.' Now the violence ofage, an assigned number, a number we can't do anything about - almost butnot quite like the color of our skin - is foregrounded. I get turned downfor jobs because of it, illegal but of course there are always ways aroundit.My own feeling? If I can't do something now, just as if I couldn't dosomething at 20, then so be it; I don't belong where doing that thing isimpossible. But otherwise, leave me alone, judge me on what I make, what Isay, and leave goddamn age out of it. Don't call me a generation and don'ttell me my best days are behind me. Don't tell me I'm in my golden years.This may all seem minor, idiotic, to you. You have no idea, at least inthe US, how pervasive this is. There are pockets of resistance - Eyebeamfor example, where I was resident until a week or two ago, is a healthyexception. But almost everywhere, the codes are in place, they'resuffocating. I'm offered seats on the subway - because of age, not becauseI need them. People condescent, smile at me, since apparently I'm nolonger sexual, have no desires, know my place. I'm told I'm a child again,that the elderly are child-like. I'm told I'm living on borrowed time. I'mtold there's not much time left. I'm told I should be grateful. I'm told Ihave a loving family. I'm told my grandchildren are my future. I'm told mychildren are my future. I'm told I have no future.I'm told about generations, that I'm of this or that generation, that it'snow the turn of a new generation. I'm told what our generation thinks andI can't recognize that. I'm told repeatedly that we were born before thedigital age, that we think differently. The fact this isn't true, none ofthis is true, with people I know and I'm sure millions of people in thiscountry, is irrelevant. I'm lectured _to._ I'm talked _to._ I'm taken outof the realm of instrumental thinking, consigned to a real which is atotal mirage, told to act my age and behave myself. People don't tell meto retire, but they assume I'm headed that way. My theoretical work isassumed dated, somewhere back probably with existentialism or Bateson. Mymind is supposedly elderly. Am I repeating myself? Did I forget somethinghere? Should I send a birthday gift? Should I ask a grandson or daughterto drive for me, since I'm constantly running off the road? Should I startpreparing for the end? Should I become a consumer of culture, preferablyold tv shows and books, instead of a producer? It's remarkable how well Ilook for my age! It's remarkable I haven't had any major medical problemsyet, but wait, they're just around the corner. Do I have enough money todo nothing? Should I do nothing? Should I worry about my IRA?I don't expect this to change, not even with radicalism on the rise amongpeople I know. But I do want to say this - that when you see someone, atany age, turning towards senility or depression, you might ask yourselfwhat happened to that person, how is that person perceived - by his or herfamily or friends, by others in the community, by granting organizationsor hiring committees. You might look at studies of enforced helplessness,you might think for a moment how age, like race, manifests itself today -age more violently than ever, since we're assumed to be non-productive,eating away at the very foundations of civil digital society, ofwhatever's left of the commons, of the fabric of the sentient city.What I'm talking about is being called a 'geezer' or 'old geezer' or 'oldman' with all the nastiness that implies. This isn't true of everyone, ofcourse, but it's miserable enough, that it's true across the board. In theculture industry, such as it is, you either become blue-chip and/or elder-statesman or woman, or you sink into oblivion. If I go into a gallery, I'mimmediately sized up in a certain way that parallels the not-so-subtlehatreds against race in the 1930s. I recognize the violence of thatparallel itself, but there's no other way to describe it. Lyotard calledthis kind of situation the differend, and there's been writing on and offabout the stigma that's applicable. We carry a sign on our foreheads, asign not of our own making or choosing, but one imposed on us culturally.Whatever we do or accomplish is under or within the sign. Whatever we sayis already signed, assigned.I'm sick of this, and this rant, so to speak, is nothing more than anexpression of that sickness. And I'm well aware that nothing will be doneabout it, although things _can_ be done about it. I'm tired of ageistremarks being 'let slip' accompanied by apologies. We have no slogans like"we're here and we're queer." We're speechless. We're kept speechless.We're irrelevant, just as this protest is irrelevant.In the _foreground_ there are all the inadvertent and well-meaningcomments, advertising, stereotypes in the media. In the _background_ thereare concrete decisions being made against us, but 'benevolently' for us.In the background, Foucauldian power violates the commons. In the back-ground, the Occupiers don't see age as a problem. In the background,they're waiting for our deaths, forgetfulnesses, incapacities, hostels -they're waiting for our silencing. The _they_ is the Heideggarian They,the They of doxa, the They of the obdurate, idiotic inert. The they isalways well-meaning; the They knows what's best for us.On and on: This would kill _anyone,_ this misreading, misrecognition,deprivation, fun-house mirror. Some people can ignore it altogether, mostof us can't. We live within a social order of _continuous violation._ Andthere's no way out.- Alan

Seen these?http://truthonthemarket.com/2012/03/12/google-isnt-leveraging-its-dominance-its-fighting-to-avoid-obsolescence/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitterhttp://www.themediabriefing.com/article/2011-01-09/decline-and-fall-of-the-google-empirehttp://blogs.msdn.com/b/jw_on_tech/archive/2012/03/13/why-i-left-google.aspx"The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus."It just doesn't stop.Then my eye fell on a big add in the Pravda (WSJ for the clueless) by an organization called Fair Search.http://www.fairsearch.org/Extensive website.Their add in the WSJ of March 9 2012 is the most mainstream version of our critique of free and open yet. It says: "Think Google's free?" It is a business critique that I have heard more often (anti-competitive, destroying my business etc.) combined with the privacy and monetizing riddle.http://www.fairsearch.org/goodtoknow/http://searchengineland.com/fairsearch-org-introduces-anti-google-good-to-know-ad-campaign-109304I also noted that Google started to buy adds in our local Amsterdam newspaper Het Parool to promote their AdSense etc. products.Which reminded me of the recent (second) rejection by EU to fund our small alternatives to Google initiative, led by Felix and Konrad in Vienna. It seems very hard to fund any alternative research in this direction. We at the Institute of Network Cultures contributed as well with the Society of the Query event, in Vienna there's Deep Search, there are efforts in Bangalore, Rene Ridgeway and so on.I keep on collecting material, researchers and initiatives in this direction. Search seems to be so crucial, yet so abstract and invisible somehow, in comparison to the funky social media such as Facebook where people spend a lot of time. Search is almost subconscious. You go to the engine, type, klick and you're already somewhere else. And now this crisis at Google (a long one in the making, of course). What would Google do? Decline. This only makes our distributed efforts to look into the political economy of it all, and into the alternatives, more urgent.Such a pitty we cannot get our act together (yet). If you have the golden funding tip, contact one of us!Yours, Geert

Apologies in advance for any cross-postings!SOUND::GENDER::FEMINISM::ACTIVISMCALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS -*deadline for applications has been extended to 23.3.2012.*Post-graduate Research EventLondon College of Communication, University of the Arts LondonMay 17th 2012We invite submissions for 10 minute contributions relating to aspects of research inthe context of sound, in its various creative and theoretical forms, and gender.This is an open call and we welcome responses from all relevant disciplines and willaccept a variety of formats from short academic presentations to more experimentalcontributions.We are looking to share research with a view to establishing a network ofresearchers and practitioners working in these areas. The final format of the eventwill be generated around the contributions received.Please send expressions of interest, including the theme, topic and format of yourpresentation, of around 100 words and a short biography of no more than 100 words by*March 23rd* 2012tosoundartsevent-bK+0QtxxyAkdnm+yROfE0A< at >public.gmane.org <https://sm.webmail.pair.com/src/compose.php?send_to=tosoundartsevent%40crisap.org>supported by CRiSAPhttp://www.crisap.org/This event follows on from?Her Noise Archive Symposium3-5 May 2012Tate ModernA three day event investigating feminist discourses in sound, launching with aperformance and talk by Pauline Oliveros. The symposium, which brings togethercontributions by leading artists, performers, theoreticians and writers aims toprovide a platform to further develop these emergent feminist discourses in soundand music, with an emphasis on tactics that challenge and / or infiltrate canonicalreadings. The event marks the donation of the Her Noise Archive to University of theArts London Archives and Special Collections housed at London College ofCommunication, and is realised as a collaboration between CRiSAP (Creative Researchin Sound Arts Practice), Electra and Tate.

(posted to nettime on behalf of Suzanne Treister. /geert)Essay by Lars Bang Larsen(Published in HEXEN 2.0, Black Dog Publishing, London 2012, in the context of the Hexen 2.0 exhibit in the Science Museum, London from March 7 -May 1 2012, see also http://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/HEXEN_2_LBLessay.html)The Secret Life of Control: Suzanne Treister's Radical Enlightenmenthttp://www.suzannetreister.net/HEXEN2/HEXEN_2_LBLessay.htmlYou see, to me it seems as though the artists, the scientists, the philosophers were grinding lenses. It's all a grand preparation for something that never comes off. Someday the lens is going to be perfect and then we're all going to see clearly, see what a staggering, wonderful, beautiful world it is...Henry Miller, quoted from Gilles Deleuze: Spinoza. Practical Philosophy (1970)These signs are real. They are also symptoms of a process... to apprehend it you will follow the signs. All talk of cause and effect is secular history, and secular history is a diversionary tactic... If you want the truth-I know I presume-you must look into the technology of these matters. Even into the hearts of certain molecules... you must ask two questions. First, what is the real nature of synthesis? And then: what is the real nature of control?Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow (1973)Unsurprisingly, considering that she trafficks in unwritten genealogies, the title of Suzanne Treister's HEXEN 2.0 hides contraband. Diverting the project's signification from references to witchcraft, the Greek word Hexis means coherence or cohesion; not just understood as a structural unity, but the source of all qualities in a body. Thus Hexis is defined by producing tensional motion in a body or across several bodies. On one ancient account, "there is a tensional motion in bodies which moves simultaneously inwards and outwards."[i] It is easy to picture Treister's work and its straddling of disciplines, discourses and cultural hierarchies as a dynamic mover that produces continual and contrary motions in or across bodies: physical bodies, concept-bodies, the body politic.Through the lens of the Macy Conferences that took place in the US for more than a decade during and after WWII, HEXEN 2.0 is an investigation of the scientific underpinnings of what Michel Foucault called bio-political governance; the government that rules with information, and through life. For Foucault, bio-political governance dates back to the 18th century, when society's control over individuals became internalised and conducted in and with the body through refined medical, cultural educational and administrative technologies. He sees it proliferating with contemporary neo- liberalism that tweaks and fine-tunes institutional and commercial parameters for citizenship through the "mystical calculus of the infinitesimal and infinite [that in bio-politics supervises] the smallest fragment of life."[ii] Offering an anatomy of contemporary control society, the anti-disciplinary hexis of Treister's project is the story of the living human body that is modeled by deeply mutational institutions and practices. The recent history of the apparatuses that allow and reproduce such administrative mutations is one in which forms of knowledge and sovereignty are at stake vis-a-vis technological fantasy, military power and scientific research.Held in New York between 1946-1953 the Macy Conferences were meetings between Cyberneticians and social scientists whose aim-as fundamental as it was immodest-it was to outline a science of the workings of the human mind. It is rare that one can identify an event when scientists decided to collectively set the controls for the heart of sun. Even if they didn't get there, perhaps, in terms of establishing a functionalistic model for the human mind, they at least made sure to produce much epistemological turbulence. Perhaps these types of meetings can only happen during a war or as its afterquake; "suppose we considered the war itself as a laboratory?", as one character in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow muses.[iii] Indeed, it is difficult to imagine the Macy Conferences taking place without the WWII as the categorical imperative for confronting the human mind as a ticking bomb that may go off again at any minute with another Hitlerism, another conflagration as its result. This will also account for similar research initiatives in the post-war period, such as the Frankfurt School's The Authoritarian Personality study (which is in the middle of Treister's Anarcho-Primitivism Diagram), as well as socio-psychological conceptualizations of conformism such as Herbert Marcuse's 'One-Dimensional Man', William H. Whyte's 'Organization Man' and Wilhelm Reich's 'Little Man'.At the Macy Conferences, cyberneticists and social scientists such as Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Heinrich Klüver, Molly Harrower, and Arturo Rosenblueth, among other distinguished scholars, arrived at a knowledge model that encompassed certain engineering devices as well as aspects of human behaviour. A synthesis was heralded with cybernetics as a new paradigm for interdisciplinary research across the sciences in which one can talk about systems and feedback processes, including biology, psychology and information theory, and many more: "Essentially the idea was to identify in a behaviorist spirit some of those aspects of what organisms do that can be analyzed in terms of what certain analogous machines do."[iv] Needless to say, computers as we know them today, were yet to be built- but its contours may have been divined by the Macy participants, as the apparatus that could catch human and machinic behaviour in its crosshairs.According to Gilles Deleuze disciplinary society began to break down after WWII. This was when "new forces moved slowly into place, then made rapid advances." It is a good guess that some of the forces to which he alluded were set in movement, probably inadvertently, by the Macy Conferences. Control, then-the new governmental instrument-is neither discipline's organisation of sites of confinement, nor is it the abstract machine of modernism's grid, but a modulation, "a self- transmuting molding continually changing from moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another." Such a meta- stability is a kind of plasma whose organic vitality ominously merges with functions of monitoring.In a motific overlap with the manipulated photo HEXEN 2.0/Cybernetic Séance in which Macy Conference participants are seen as participants at a spiritualist séance, Thomas Pynchon also organises various holy circles in Gravity's Rainbow. As already indicated by the quote at the beginning of this text, these are characterized by a strange and lucid objectivity invested in an analysis of control by severing rationality from morally and politically instituted judgments of normal knowledge. Thus at the first sitting in the novel is described a circle of etherically inclined sitters who, much like the scientists in Cybernetic Séance- "is not at all distracted or hindered. None of your white hands or luminous trumpets here."[v] Also the medium (or the entity speaking through him) comes through loud and clear, with an incisive proclamation: "It's control. All these things arise from one difficulty: control. For the first time it was inside, do you see. The control is put inside. No more need to suffer passively under 'outside forces'..."[vi] This is Deleuze's control society, as it were: control springs alive and is inserted into the body by means of bio-political technologies, in order to work there as self-monitoring and self- management.Against such vital and invasive control mechanisms one needs good hexis. In HEXEN 2.0, Treister works through the format of the tarot card, thereby tapping into the dynamic potential of occult knowledge forms to connect seemingly disparate historical dots in a kind of alchemical hypertext. Unlike the sometimes kinky embrace of the dark side of cognition through the esoteric formats employed by contemporary artists, Treister's approach is much less gestural, and does not refuse rationality. Thus what her work may have in common with Niki de Saint-Phalle's Giardino dei Tarocchi in Tuscany (1998)-a kind of post-Mannerist sculpture park whose monumental elements are based on the symbols of the tarot cards-is not the creativist spirit, but a feminist subtext whose rejection of nature yields an overwhelming mosaic of elements. Other contemporary artistic practitioners of the tarots include the cineast and dramaturg Alejandro Jodorowsky, an elderly Chilean gentleman one can meet on Wednesday afternoons at Café le Temeraire in Paris for a private session of psichomagia. While Jodorowsky sticks to the original function of the tarots as a self-technology appropriated ready-made for art, Treister-as we will see-takes a quite different approach to the magic deck.The ineradicable instinct of the paranoiac is to locate or re-possess power. His aggressive idiosyncracy hides a particular hermeneutic stinginess: once located-power is usually seen to be elsewhere-the interpretation of power is fatal and diagrammatic. The aesthetic potential of paranoia has been seen as its potential for scrambling transparency. Thus Salvador Dali proposed his paranoiac method to create 'systematised confusion' with Surrealist machines of desire. Neither conception of paranoia, however, gels with HEXEN 2.0. Treister's project is fuelled not by power and desire, but by knowledge and pleasure. It is not distortional, but cartographic. It is a syllabus, a flowchart of connections and developments, a unique critical overview of modern intellectual and scientific history. The historical facts that Treister handles are of a nature that she couldn't have kept to herself, and so she dutifully follows the topological displacements and transformations of knowledge across many disciplines; knowledge's 'tripping' through unofficially connected networks is affirmed by way of the tarot deck as an encyclopedic format.Encyclopedic formats, understood as a comprehensive and simultaneous organization of available knowledge, are recurring elements in Treister's work, where facts proliferate rhizomatically. NATO (2004-8), for instance, consists of over 200 works illustrating the NATO codification system which numerically classifies and groups everything that exists in the world for potential military procurement; and [MTB] Military Training Base (2009) a wall sized drawing for a military base of the future which incorporates into its design ancient archaeological sites, Vatican City, an art school, global corporate complexes and sections of the Israeli West-Bank Barrier. Correspondence: From Afghanistan to Zimbabwe (2007-8), are 324 pencil reproductions of letterheads from Government and Presidential Offices, Ministries of Defence, NGOs and arms manufacturers across the world, both past and current, and as they hang on the wall they look like so many ominous card blanches for authorising military action through the world-or conversely, like the artist's riffing on Rauschenberg's Erased De Kooning (1953), a way of undoing through invocation.Employing the tarot deck is thus not a quick-fix attempt at re- enchanting the world, but-apart from a homeopathic indication of occult aspects in the history leading up to control society-a structuring device that mirrors and performs procedures of mass intelligence gathering in the service of a new epistemology. One can perhaps compare it to a Turing Machine: a virtual system capable of simulating the behavior of any other machine or apparatus of knowledge, including itself.In tarot lore The Ace of Pentacles, for instance, represents new beginnings, wealth and inspiration in material or financial matters, such as the energy to undertake a new business venture. In Treister's deck, it conflates The Four Technologies: nano-, bio- and info- technology as well as cognitive science. The drawing pulls quotes from a 2002 report commissioned by the US National Science Foundation whose title could have rolled off the tongue of Norbert Wiener: 'Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance'. Browsing in the report itself, one will find detailed discussions on the beneficial effects of converging technologies in such different areas as "expanding human cognition", "improving human health", and (of course) "national security". One of its conclusions is, "Beyond the 20-year time span, or outside the current boundaries of high technology, convergence can have significant impacts in such areas as: work efficiency, the human body and mind throughout the life cycle, communication and education, mental health, aeronautics and space flight, food and farming, sustainable and intelligent environments, self-presentation and fashion, and transformation of civilization."[vii] Strangely, the overcoming of death isn't on the program yet, but just wait till the next report. Everything that rises must converge.In Treister's deck, the original symbolic import of the tarots is used as ciphers that vie for their meaning with the new content that Treister has invested them with. This is in accordance with how tarot card readers read the person in front of them as carefully as the card that is called up: in this way the tarot deck allows you to reach for an object of knowledge through a system that is explicitly and opaquely coded, and therefore allows the operator of the deck to negotiate and undo the codes in the process. Thus if we take the Three of Swords (a card that urges to take a strong look at that which is at the centre of our world), it refers in Treister's version to CIA's infamous MKULTRA program, in which volunteers as well as unwitting civilians were guinea pigs for government mind control experiments with psychedelica. The program was run by one Dr. Sidney Gottlieb who, in exchange for immunity from criminal prosecution, undertook to investigate "whether and how it was it was possible to modify an individual's behaviour by covert means."[viii] While the CIA eventually closed MKULTRA for want of usable results, the most manifest outcome of the program was in fact to unwittingly having helped to make LSD a hippie drug by turning on countercultural luminaries such as Ken Kesey (the subject of another tarot, the Knave of Chalices, and the drawing HEXEN 2.0/Diagrams/From MKULTRA via the Counterculture to Technogaianism). Other of Treister's tarot cards trace an underdog history of modern technology through grassroots movements (anarcho-syndicalists), and unruly individuals such as Timothy Leary and Stafford Beer who, in spite of their anti- authoritarian and 'spiritual' engagement with cybernetics rather translate into the 21st century as ambiguous avantgarde entrepreneurs. This is indeed a field that cannot be navigated in terms of truth and morality: it is a knotty, queasy, contemporary ontology.Since the genealogies that Treister deals with have so far remained largely untold, it is only appropriate that she should employ an epistemologically virgin format. If historians haven't got these connections and events on their radar so far, then one shouldn't hesitate to use a new radar, a new device, a new unit that may capture and recognise historical reality. To use a format for heuristic knowledge organisation that is ostensibly obscurantist is, from a commonsensical point of view, counterintuitive. In science, however, the counterintuitive may represent a logical next step in a systematic investigation that has so far proven fruitless. Norbert Wiener, for one, was not averse to taking such an approach to cybernetics. Confronting the ethical implications of cybernetics on concepts of life, free will and evolution in his book, God & Golem, Inc. A Comment on Certain Points where Cybernetics Impinges on Religion (1964), he strays from the common positivistic vocabulary in order to describe, or invoke, the full range of ethical considerations of modern science: "There is a sin, which consists of using the magic of modern automatization to further personal profit or let loose the apocalyptic terrors of nuclear warfare. If this sin is to have a name, let that name be Simony or Sorcery."[ix] Many other 20th century scientists had occult leanings. One was the poet and scientist Konstantin Ciolkovskij, whose research in rocket fuel kicked off the Soviet space program, a feat he considered secondary to his 'cosmic philosophy' in which he pondered correspondences between the will and creativity of the human brain and the eternal youth of the universe. [x] Playing out science on the terrain of the occult is not simply a binary inversion.Divorced from its personal application, Treister employs the tarot card for readings of a collective destiny that matches up possible futures of reactivated knowledge and trace their effects back to our present. In other words, she separates technology from existing society, and creates reasonable doubt about existing technology as the receptor and effector organs we are given to navigate the technological city. The technologies, and the understanding of them, that were outlined at the Macy Conferences, are the materiality of affect of contemporary life. In order to comprehend the relations of production that have created the nervous system of contemporary man and woman-sensibilities, perceived dependency needs, habitual ways of seeing, accustomed velocities of life and so on-these technologies, and their institutional/commercial/governmental application that have valorised them symbolically and dedicated them to praxis, must be taken apart, synchronically and diachronically. Certain technologies didn't have to go in the direction they went, but can be backtracked. The way freedom can be reestablished as a critical concern doesn't go through dropping out or other kinds of system abandonment, then, but through positive feedback: reason and the human subject must re-enter the system in order to be 'reprogrammed'.I would argue that through her artistic research, Treister rejoins intellectual history and a critique of contemporary control society with the tenets of a radical enlightenment. As a crucial event for the making of modern concepts of subjectivity, citizenship and governance, central to which is discussions about reason and its place in society and thinking, the enlightenment was hardly unambiguous. With a phrase that resonates critically in cybernetic behaviourism, Adorno and Horkheimer write how the Enlightenment reifies human beings, treating them as Zentren von Verhaltensweisen ("centres of behaviour patterns"). [xi] Also HEXEN 2.0 enters into a dialectic of the enlightenment and deliberates its incessant self-destruction, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it; a destruction that is undertaken in order to show how reason in the post-war era had failed historically, yet how it must nonetheless be pursued in order to guarantee social freedoms.At the same time as philosophy was considered the only agent potent enough to precipitate a rapid, all-encompassing revolution, the optimism of Enlightenment philosophers was often legitimised by Utilitarian views.[xii] The practical task of helping humanity to become humanity, through the eradication of illness, poverty, ignorance, etc., and social history could be transformed through political, industrial and agricultural revolutions. Moreover, utilitarianism rejects the ranking of (moral) value according to a priori criteria in favour of the equal validity of each subject's search for happiness and pleasure. What makes Treister a faithful pupil of the enlightenment is the simple usefulness of the tarots in relation to her reading of material history. She turns enlightenment principles of utilitarianism and equal validity into epistemological principles by assuming that 1) if it is applicable, it is legitimate, and 2) don't moralise, don't pathologise. In order to make technology- whether computer, diagram, concept, drug or weapon-work in the interest of freedom, we must approach it without prejudice, and without a rationalist concept of rationality.The historian Jonathan Israel distinguishes what he calls a radical enlightenment, thereby establishing a dialectic between moderate and revolutionary Enlightenment movements. To Israel, the revolutionary tendency represents a process of improving human existence by making society secular, tolerant, equal and democratic, and by extending reason to transform basic principles of education, legislation, international relations and colonial affairs. On crucial points regarding human rights, democracy and the role of the church, the radical tendency opposes moderate enlighteners such as Rousseau and Kant-the reformers who famously set their mark on modern civil society.Israel talks about the instability of Enlightenment:The Enlightenment's idea of progress, then, was invariably conceived as being "philosophical," a revolution of the mind. But it was undoubtedly economic, technological, political, medical, and administrative as well, in addition to being legal, moral, educational and aesthetic. Enlightenment "progress" was thus very wide-ranging and multi-faceted. Moreover, it was also inherently unstable (...) For it is apparent that Enlightenment progress could take specifically Christian, Deist, or atheistic forms; it could be conceived as endorsing or opposing the existing order of society, as being reversible or irreversible, God-ordained or purely natural.[xiii]To Israel, enlightenment progress is all in the mind, as it were, as he argues that it was primarily an intellectual revolution before it manifested itself as an actual one in 1789.Israel places particular emphasis on Spinoza as a founding figure of the radical enlightenment because the latter creates a sharper opposition between philosophy and theology, than do other philosophers, seeing organised religion as political deception.[xiv] In Spinoza's one-substance doctrine, body and soul, matter and mind are "one single substance viewed under different aspects" that essentially have to do with processes of corporeal organisation-again, the hexis that animates bodies, and our understanding of them, by allowing for a unifying perspective on their articulations.[xv] Thus Spinoza's materialist metaphysics concludes that everything that exists is matter and that God and the universe are the same. With this, Israel writes, Spinoza extends a Radical Enlightenment "metaphysically, politically, and as regards man's highest good."[xvi] One-substance enlightenment excludes all miracles and invokes "reason as the sole guide in human life, jettisoning tradition."[xvii]A fundamental radical enlightenment impulse in Treister can be detected in the attempt to bring life back into reason through the encyclopedic consideration of everything existing; a reason that has not been formalised and instrumentalised and whose goals therefore hasn't become illusory. Maybe this reason appears to us as strangely bent, as it is conditioned by the experimental moment's momentary unity of pleasure, idea and representation. This may be because it is a meeting with another enlightenment than the one we got, of capital and control. Instead, from the point of view of a radical enlightenment, we are offered a total glimpse of a world in which tensional motions allow for different bodies to enter freely into composition with one another.Lars Bang Larsen 2011Notes:[i] C.N. Cantor and M.J.S. Hodge: "Introduction: Major themes in the development of ether theories from the ancients to 1900," in: Cantor and Hodge: Conceptions of Ether. Studies in the History of Ether Theories 1740-1900. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1981, 6.[ii] Michel Foucault: Discipline and Punish. Vintage Books, New York 1979 (1975), 140.[iii] Thomas Pynchon: Gravity's Rainbow. Vintage Books, London 2000 (1973), 49.[iv] Steve J. Heims: The Cybernetics Group. MIT Press, Massachusetts 1991, 15.[v] Op.cit., 29.[vi] Op.cit., 30.[vii] http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/ NBIC_report.pdf, xii[viii] Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain: Acid Dreams. The Complete Social History of LSD: the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond. Grove Press, New York, 1985, xxiii.[ix] 52[x] Cf. Groys, Hagemeister and von der Heiden (eds.): Die Neue Menschheit: Biopolitische Utopien in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 2005.[xi] Adorno and Horkheimer, 93.[xii] Israel: A Revolution of the Mind. Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (2010), 53.[xiii] Op.cit., 8.[xiv] Op.cit., 2.[xv] Op.cit.[xvi] Op.cit., 2. Deleuze discusses univocity in Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition in relation to his canon of univocal philosophers Ð Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. Alliez puts it this way, "Opening up thought to constituent power, Spinoza is our contemporary by virtue of his refusal of any dialectical dimension that would aim at the (utopian or historical) reconciliation of the real." (Alliez, op.cit., 23)[xvii] Op.cit., 19.

*BACK TO THE FUTURE/Remembrance, Insight, Imagining anew: The Turin Art Scene from the Eighties to Today/An open conference on culture and the arts.*By *Francesco Bernardelli* and *Olga Gambari**Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art*Piazza Mafalda di Savoia10098 Rivoli - Torino16th - 18th March 2012open daily 10 AM to 6 PM*Simona Lodi*, artistic director of Piemonte Share, will be participating by video link on Saturday *17th March at 4 PM* in "Art in Digital Culture and in the New Media Era. The Spread of New Organizational and Democratic Models."Three days designed as an open space for delving into the past, present and future, by *Francesco Bernardelli and Olga Gambari*, to be held on *16th-18th March 2012 at the Castello di Rivoli*.Turin certainly has a long heritage as a city at the crossroads for new and exciting things. With the benefit of hindsight at a reasonable distance in time, the present can help us understand the past movements and events that built the contemporary artistic and cultural wealth of the local territory, so as to build a new, proactive approach to the future. Taking such an approach to the local creative scene is quite clearly a collective demand, a priority felt not only by professionals and people in the sector but by the public at large, who over the years has come to support and cherish the issues and venues of contemporary culture in Turin. Hence the goal is to recover and restore the identity of a city that produces and makes full use of its artistic, ethical and economic assets. For *three days at the Castello di Rivoli, from 16th to 18th March 2012*, an *open conference for all comers* to focus on different perspectives on the state of art in Turin since the 1980s, and understand where the future lies.*/BACK TO THE FUTURE/* is a democratic discussion about and for the city. Open not only to professionals in the sector, it creates a space for encounter and exchange on the trends, issues, needs and models of the different art worlds and micro-systems that together have built the pluralist cultural scene of Turin, a store of energy and possibilities for the future.The conference is organized over three days, featuring presentations and critical insights on the past, both near and far, debates, round table discussions and narrations by leading figures from the contemporary cultural scene-bringing together art, cinema, literature, theatre and music.Info:*Press Office Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary ArtSilvano Bertalot - Manuela Vasco*T +39.011.9565209 - 211, F +39.011.9565231C +39.3387865367press-psSsSb65f7Q86sWU88xwTmD2FQJk+8+b< at >public.gmane.orgwww.castellodirivoli.org <http://clienti.mflab.it/tools/track/8e3d9d0af4f071b3a07163e53ffeeaoh/7745d596240ce9111349a8dbb5hh15id> ; www.castellodirivoli.tv <http://clienti.mflab.it/tools/track/3355d5a14ea2f8f49c33f8e690z1pnsf/7745d596240ce9111349a8dbb5hh15id>www.toshare.it<http://clienti.mflab.it/tools/track/a49bde146cb1f084e3c6b6e146ui4xz1/7745d596240ce9111349a8dbb5hh15id>

Folks, a historical vignette:I've been doing some research on Canadian artist David Rokeby where I found reference to one "European Software Festival" which was, at the time, initiated by the US-based business software company Borland (a then competitor of Microsoft - check the interesting Wikipedia entry). Here's a contemporary report:Klaus Brunnstein, University of Hamburg (March 1, 1991: 5 p.m. GMT)On February 19-20, 1991, Borland collected, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary, a rare collection of gurus, experts, engineers, artists in Munich (Title: European Software Festival). On the program: - Niklaus Wirth on his Oberon language concept (lecture, workshop) - Bjarne Stoustrup (AT&T) with 2 lectures on C++/Object Oriented Programming - Marvin Minsky: Lecture on Personal Software and Programs Who Know You (but he really gave a survey of AI history) plus Lecture on Artificial Animals - Philippe Kahn: Back to the Future - Joseph Weizenbaum against overestimation in research - Izumi Aizu: Hypernetwork SocietySome more could not come (Alan Kay should not use plane), others really did not come (Cyberspace guru Jaron Lanier was only virtually present in a video).One of the most stimulating (and generally uncomparable) events was a concert of Tod Machover (composer, director MIT Media Lab) who demonstrated his "conductor-aiding handglove" in a new composition, after having demonstrated his concept of "hyperinstruments" with a piece from his opera "Valis".Also some native German speakers: - Computer Art professor Herbert W. Franke on Experimental Esthetics - Thomas von Randow on Cryptosystems ("If Mary Stewart had applied cryptology...") - my own contribution was on Risky Paradigms in Informatics' Box of Pandora (starting from J.v.Neumann's assumption, that his EDVAC be equivalent to the human brain, with peripheral devices analog to "organs", I analysed risks in misconceptions, errors in realisations, misunderstanding on the users side, and malicious misuse, with examples well known to Risk Forum readers).<snip ... more "About Risks in Believing AI Gurus (M.Minsky)">from: The Risks Digest. Forum on Risks to the Public in Computers and Related Systems. ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy, Peter G. Neumann, moderator. Volume 11: Issue 19, Friday 1 March 1991archived at: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/11.19.htmlP.S.: I assume that there must have been other artists involved, besides David Rokeby (with the installation "(Perception is) The Master of Space") and Werner Kiera (multimedia performance?).Rokeby: http://homepage.mac.com/davidrokeby/mos.htmlKiera: http://museum.arch.rwth-aachen.de/Reiff2/Museum2/kiera.htmlhttp://www.datenverarbeiter.com/werner-kiera.html

this might interest some of us on the listhttp://www.artisopensource.net/2012/03/20/maps-of-babel-at-human-cities-symposium/we presented Maps of Babel in Buruxelles at the Human Cities conference,bringing up scenarios through which the digital forms of expression ofpeople in cities using social network can be harvested and used to createnew practices for urban planning, community design, city governance,tending to p2p models in which citizens and administrations take activepart in the same process. And, in the meantime, raising ethical issues onthe transformation of public space and privacy.Salvatore---Salvatore Iaconesiprof. of Interaction Design and of Digital Design atLa Sapienza University of RomeISIA Design FlorenceRome University of Fine ArtsIstituto Europeo di Design[Art is Open Source]http://www.artisopensource.net[FakePress Publishing]http://www.fakepress.it

Here are some of the issues identified (in response to a journalism question) by luddites200.org.uk in preparation for the London Teach-in this Sat Mar24th 10.30am-5.00pm < at >the London Feminist Library see https://network23.org/invite for details schedule at https://network23.org/invite/schedule reserve a seat at http://t.co/o4ecIBlOThis teach-in is butted up against the Royal Society's technofix conference next week http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net<http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/>________________________________________From: Ned Ludd [luddites200-/E1597aS9LT10XsdtD+oqA< at >public.gmane.org]Sent: 21 March 2012 18:20Subject: Rio+20Regarding researching/writing articles/journalism on Rio+20 [ http://www.uncsd2012.org<http://www.uncsd2012.org/> ] here are some issues you might want to cover:Firstly from all the submissions from which the so-called "zero draft" is written there is now a 24ish page document "The Future we Want" at http://www.uncsd2012.org/rio20/futurewewant.htmlMost of what civil society wants has been left out of this document. The U.S. negotiators have apparently made an early statement that they want the final document down to 5 pages. So it is clear from the outset that the strategy of the big powers is to reduce the UN process to a series of non-binding "political statements" of intention. The most disturbing thing in the document is the role accorded to private enterprise to be an integral part of the solutions to ecological crisis. Basicly this is writing in corporate interests to the eco-crisis round table of knights and more or less shifting the ecological problem into an opportunity for capitalism to jump start a new round of capitalist accumulation through transfer of the commons (air, water, forests, land, etc. as well as the gene tic commons of biodiversity, an inheritance that all life on earth shares) to private interests.So one approach to writing an article might be to contrast the traditional leftist internationalist hope that the UN process would bring about enlightened international relations to what is actually happening in the Rio+20 process. Many people have invested their hopes that the United Nations would somehow curb the violent anarchy of selfish national interest in competition, of exploitation of poor by rich, would somehow be a path towards enlightenment values of equality and cooperation. So for example the idea of technology assessment at the UN level was part of the original 1992 Rio Earth Summit discussions: a future promise. Whatever the original rhetoric, the already marginal technology assessment mission that the UN had (Centre for Science and Technology for Development, United Nat ions Secretariat, New York) and a UN commission on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), a monitoring division within the U.N. (for history see https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:0Gn7g FXlidUJ:www.unhistory.org/briefing/17TNCs.pdf+transnational+corporations+monitor+United+Nations&hl=en&gl=uk&pid=bl&srcid=ADGEESisfolZIkhUb0nbxz7yQJBtlPAhkgwg0KmBAz18MfcLnjOkXdbruyZ4FoGUgKDuY5wcQJQ1Ulv_rrPrDrZ5XD3hQ1caBPuZRTNsnH2jtooN1a1s1HtsQPtEWiRVikrKt7vzsAh1&sig=AHIEtbRpWM_nrzlSjHacO1E6dVIch-TkRQ ), were both done away with during the 90s. This may seem like old news but I think it is key to understanding the hope that has been placed in the United Nations as a vehicle towards progress to recount what the leftists internationalist vision has been and why many people originally expected some of these things to happen now at Rio+20. So it might also be good to look at what has come out of the original Rio negotiations- for example opinion varies on whether this was important because it was a first step and the rhetoric about what would be negotiated in the future was very hopeful, or others might say that none of what came out of the original rio was in any significant wa y a binding agreement to the governments concerned (for example how does agenda 21 stack up as a tool to fight multinational corporations?) so therefore rio wasn't significant or hope inspiring. It's not necessary for an informative article to take a position but it might be helpful to provide people with enough information to know that there is a grassroots debate: abandon the UN processes because they are corrupt and distracting to real action by social movements or work to reform the U.N. processes so that they might have more teeth and the possibility of civil society/social movements intervention. This is a decision for social movements to make but a writer can certainly stoke the fires of debate by providing people with information. [ UN & climate http://www.corporatewatch.org/?l id=3843 technofixes- http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=3126 ]Obviously the finacialisation of natural entities (forests, coral reefs, etc.) is part of the banker's carbon market imagination so defining commons and how finacialisation is an attack on what we all own together in common (with the other species on the planet) is useful to think about. For an english audience the history of the enclosure movements, (levellers, diggers, etc) might make an interesting inclusion. Even technology use by corporations is also a way to enable new types of enclosure: for example- Governments were given sovereignty over the genetic diversity within their own territory during the 1992 treaty. This was described as Amazonian amnesia because it forgot the colonial history of the European and american powers removing species that had been cataloged and placed in z oos. Northern powers stole it all and then had the 1992 treaty approve this theft. Is Rio+20 a chance for the superpowers of biopiracy to go back for the rest of that genetic diversity? Co nsider that biological material is supposed to be very important to the economy and science during the 21st century - predictors say the genetic revolution will make the information technology revolution (by comparison) look like not much of a change! Whether this is true or not only the future can say but the increasing importance of genetic information makes the legitimising of biopiracy sort of like saying its ok that the Spanish Empire could sail to the New World with a fleet of ships, plunder South and Central America and bring back hull-loads full of coffers of gold to their European home country to be paraded around the Royal Court as a new sign of wealth. The finacialisation of nature obviously relates to the Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradat ion (REDD+) which has been opposed by civil society during the previous climate treaty negotiations.So the key theme emphasized in the London teach-in (rightly or wrongly) is the so-called "Green" Economy which we are describing as "greed" economy. In the North, the Rio+20 is going to be a public relations battle to greenwash corporate seizure of commons. As a global movement our approach in the northern wealthy countries is only slightly different to our approach in the global South. Via Campesina is a good example of how our global movements are approaching "green" economy in the South. Whereas they seem to be saying "Say no to the Green Economy" many in the Northern environmental movements here may be unwilling to cede the word "green" to the corporations and prefer to keep alive the idea of an environmentally compatible economy (jobs & environment)- a green economy by contrasting it to the proposals by corporate polluters which we describe as a "greed" economy or a "greenwashed greed" economy. There is not much different in the content of the demands but the two wa ys to approach the same message has a nuance that is significant in our UK national and local politics. The word green belongs to civil society. When the so-called green economy hits, the public will discover it to be an expensive disaster that causes new economic bubbles. If we let the polluters call their marketisation of nature a 'green' economy, we will only play into the significant (Northern) public cynicism and backlash against climate related mitigation costs which are sometimes seen as a sort of austerity or more green taxes, etc. If 'green' means coporate greed, then environmentalism and being concerned about the climate will also be associated with corruption. For Via Campesina, they primarily speak to their constituency (peasant farmers) who do not have difficulties under standing what is going on. However the mass media audiences of Britain will need to be approached slightly different because here it will be a PR war. Corporate polluters will associate th emselves with the word "green" [victory #1 if they can do it] and then when the later expensive failure of the 'green' economy becomes apparent to the public backlash and cynicism against all green issues will be directed against genuinely green environmental justice demands [victory #2 which follows from victory #1]. Lefty readers might be primed for this subtle PR war of words. * So to summarize, it seems to us like the strategic intention of polluter nations and their corporate interests is to use Rio+20 as a moment to shelve international negotiations into a very short non-binding document of political intentions. This will emphasize corporate involvement in finding the solutions. There will also be lots of nice things (entirely non-binding) written in the document. The nice things will be left aside and polluter nations will use the Rio document to justify and begin a new round of corporate involvement in 'solution' providing. If Rio+20 validates corporate involvement, then these these private enterprise solutions can be begun without the U.N. process meddling in the way of polluter nations and their corporate clients. The corporate solutions will be u sed to jump start a new round of derivatives trading in the stockmarkets of nature, none of which will actually help the biocrisis. Any "reparations" money will be given to poor nations in the form of contracts for Northern 'climate-solutions' providing corporations. A sub-prime carbon bond market will eventually trip us into a new financial crisis but in the mean time the (same old) ecological crisis will still be here. The sheer insanity of it will be apparent to some people; they will be quietly taken aside and told that GeoEngineering is the actual solution to the planetary crisis. The Rio+20 political document will be used to legitimise corporate involement in resource grabs generally, including carbon trading scams, but also direct resource grabs. The most notable resource grab is water privatisation. This will be described positively as a solution to biocrises through better management and capital investment.Regarding geoengineering it should be thought of as already functioning today (without yet being used) functioning today in debates in the same way that Nuclear Weapons function (without yet being used) function every day in foreign policy debates as a debt collectors threat. Nuclear weapons are an implicit threat (without being used) so the debt economy continues. Geoengineering (without being implemented) is an implict 'solution' to biocrisis, so the capitalist growth economy can continue. Geoengineering is a false solution that allows profiteering economy to continue without addressing its insanity. Without the "idea" of geoengineering the global carbon trading markets and capitalism itself would begin to seem to more and more people like an emperor with no clothes. Geoengineering is an idea with no substance- it is the emperor's magic (i.e. invisible) clothes. For the role of science in the Rio+20 look at the recomendatiosn that came out last week [See http://www.di gitalhen.co.uk/news/science-environment-17381730 and also see http://www.earthsystemgovernance.org/news/2012-03-15-navigating-anthropocene-improving-earth-system-governance ]. These scientists, the Earth System Governance project did a project mandated by those who organized the Planet Under Pressure conference (IGBP & the Royal Society). Their recommendations include GEOENGINEERING, and SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY the so-called "extreme genetic engineering"). They also make suggestions to strengthen and centralize part of UN environmental governance. This is a call to centralize we presume. They suggest better role for CSOs. We think their politics very niave. The better role for CSOs will quietly be sidelined (We hear this sort of thing all the time but the UN is run by national sovereignt y and CSOs will never be willingly given any more power than they already have) but more centralized governance might be taken up depending on who uses it how. Re extreme genetics (a.k.a. s ynthetic biology) [ http://www.etcgroup.org/en/node/5232 & http://www.corporatewatch.org/?lid=3619 ] and geoengineering [ http://www.etcgroup.org/en/node/5217 ] see publications at http://www.etcgroup.org . Synthetic biology means reengineering the metabolic pathway of one-celled micro-organisms so that they eat waste biomass, (cornstocks for example) and excrete something useful to the industrial economy, paint thinner for example or better yet petroleum. This is the corporate biotech wet dream: designer bugs that eat cornstocks and shit out petroleum. For a list of corporate baddies see particularly the new corporate partnership deals: http://www.etcgroup.org/en/node/5296 [Wouldn't it be interesting to correlate which of these companies will be at the London olympics as Sponsors? Dow Chemical for example is wrapping the Olympic stadium with their banner. Already there are calls from Indians to bring this banner down because of their 1984 Bhopal disaster where Dow poi soned to death a whole town in India http://www.global-sisterhood-network.org/content/view/2654/59 How exciting it would be to link these demonstrated past safety failure disasters with Dow's new involment in "Green Economy" and synthetic biology! See piii "The New Corporate Galaxy" in ETCgroup report Who Will Control the New Green Economy? for Dow's links to BP, General Mills, Unilever, Chevron, the U.S. military, & now also Solazyme ]. Re Geoengineering the types of geoengineering that are most frequently advocated are putting nanoparticles up into the sky to block out light (a sort of venetian blind system), blowing up artificial volcanoes to put sulphites into the stratosphere and block out the sunlight, and ocean engineering to change the chemistry of the oceans. Nanoparticles (in cluding volcano sulphite nanoparticles) are carcinogenic. They will eventually drift down from the stratosphere and presumably cause massive health damage to peoples. Geoengineering of the ocean is also insanely dangerous- especially with engineered microbes (synthetic biotechnology- artificial bugs). Geoengineering isn't just dangerous if it misfires. Firstly it is already functioning as a last resort scenario in many people's minds so they can accept not immediately doing anything about climate overheating. Secondly it is likely to fail and very possibly fail badly, such that it makes things worse and has huge human health and ecological consequences. Thirdly even it works or sort-of half works (ie. protects Northern rich countries even while poor countries fry) it will only allow a continuation of a greedy capitalist economy where the rich get richer and the rest of us are left to eat moldy bread or face violent expropriation. The ENMOD treaty of the 1970s (from US attempts to use weather as a weapon during the Vietnam war) is relevant to legality of geoengienering debates as well as 2008 treaty negotiations (CBD, yes?) outlawing ocean interference for the purpose of geoengineering and perhaps all forms of geoengineering. Despite its insanity and illegality geoengineering continues to be part of the conversation because so many capitalists need an excuse of last resort so that they can keep on capitalizing without having to confront the unsustainability of permanenat growth. The Climate Justice slogan "You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet" will be familiar to many people (it was one of three key messages by social movements during the COP15 in copenhagen). Geoengineering is an attempt to fix the planet for being "finite" rather than fix the economy for being out of touch with reality. Regarding science (instead of getting into a difficult pro/anti science arguement) it may be useful to contrast science -vs-"royal scie nce" to say that royal scientists are a group of elites manipulating the scientific process to protect their wealthy friends. For this arguement see https://network23.org/anarchistscience/v s-royal-science This description of the Royal Society shows how they have been stealing science for 350 years now, making sure it didn't fall into the hands of regular people or women.Technology trumps trade! This means that international technology treaties will eventually be more important for the balance of global power than any particular round of trade talks. Until now much of anti- and alter-globalisation activity has focused on trade related issues, stopping the GATS, or the WTO doha round, etc. However because so many of the economic possibilities for capitalism to continue rely upon technofix solutions to the biocrisis and also to their accumulation crisis (which to them is more important) we are now (or will soon be) entering a period where technology transfer issues are more important for maintiaining elite power than new trade agreements. [In Luddites200 we're still debating whether/if/when this is true but it is certainly something to consider whenever t hey start negotiating technology transfer clauses.] Any type of technology transfer treaty pushed at the global level by the polluter powers will include careful intellectual property prote ction and mandatory purchase of their new technofix solutions. The future of capitalism is entirely techno-zombie capitalism returned from the dead like a michael jackson biotech-cyborg-zombie thriller video. The internationalist left who see in the U.N. hope for the future imagine something like an International Commission for the Evaluation of New Technologies (ICENT). This was written into the 1992 Earth Summit text. A lot of strategically minded people would value such a thing. At least it would be a speed bump slowing down the polluter powers mangle of communities and the earth. The Rio+20 zero draft has nothing like this in it. The polluter powers want to avoid any type of thing that puts ethhical strings on their technical power to manipulate future possibilities in whatever technological way they want. Their version of a technology transfer agreement will not include accountability but it will focus on intellectual property and lock international aid and clima te mitigation money to the new technologies for which they own the profit rights. Money promised to the global South would go from one Wall Street bank to another down the street (the intellectual property holders account) without the global South seeing a penny except on paper.There is one suggestion in the rio documentation that there will be an environmental ombudsperson- don't know much about this. Again a hierarchical U.N. position is only as good as who is assigned to the post and nation states make the decisions. Nonetheless, many people are excited that this might benefit us. At very least the person in the position can not ignore completely obvious criminal activity. But it is something to bring up in an article on rio+20 because it seems to have captured the imagination of lots of lefties. It might be worth investigating how this plays into/or possibly co-opts a rights of mother earth approach (such as advocated by the 2010 Bolivian summit)?There are a lot of Rio+20 issues not covered in the London teach-in. Rightly or wrongly, the London teach-in emphasizes issues around green vs greed economy and technology issues (particularly since it butts up against the http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net<http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/> conference on technofixes). But many other things are being talked about at other teach-ins and public talks. Many people are very hopeful about various sets of legal parameters to give rights to mother earth- as coming from the Cochambamba conference in the summer after COP15. I can't imagine that won't come up during the open discussions in the London teach-in. There are also a variety of corporate law/human rights issues particularly as relate to resource extraction (Prior Informed Co nsent (PIC) as per recently negotiated Nagoya Protocol, and various other laws affecting corporate responsibility to communities in relation toresource extraction/local states and or the abs ence of any effective local governance structures) that may be impacted by Rio+20. SOAS had a seminar series but they seemed to not know precisely how Rio would impact, only that it could do so. See http://www.soas.ac.uk/ledc/events/seminarseries/?showprevious=1 for list of topics and contact ledc-9ByJeooTiUe1Qrn1Bg8BZw< at >public.gmane.org<mailto:ledc-9ByJeooTiUe1Qrn1Bg8BZw< at >public.gmane.org> with questions. she's grad student convening seminar series and may be able to answer questions or point you in direction of someone who could. Also the speakers at the Occupy LSX discussion of Rio+20 had a very optimistic perspective on the potential of possible legal tools to come out of Rio+20. The WWF and Oxfam speakers talked about planetary boundaries and how economics and inequality can be reconsidered from within a planetary boundaries perspective. Rights of mother earth were being pursued (sometimes at local level) in some of the legal cases discussed. See http://www.facebook.com/events/328744843842479 and click on "see more" to see who the panelists were. At Luddites200 we haven't focused on possible new legal protection tools. Recourse to legal action to protect the environment or human rights is limited not just because the existing legal and regulatory system prioritizes economic interests but also because the tremendous amount of legal expertise and costs needed to even participate in legal challenges often prevent people from being able to enter into legal dispute. This is doubly true in highly technical disputes where expensive scientific expertise must be presented. As example, nanotechnology is one of the high cancer risk technologies that would be used as part of a geoengineering strategy advocated by the scientists bringing their advice to the Rio+20 process. The difficulties for civil society trying t o use the law to fight high technology risks are documented in http://ejlt.org//article/view/93 (which is a case where many of us in the luddites200.org.uk originally came together) see espe cially the final section "Challenges for effective civil society protection".These are some of the issues relevant to the Rio+20Here's a few other important links with issues we haven't covered in this commentary:http://climate-connections.org/2012/02/16/reclaiming-our-future-rio-20-and-beyond-la-via-campesina-call-to-action/http://www.tni.org/report/green-economy-wolf-sheeps-clothinghttp://www.thecornerhouse.org.uk/sites/thecornerhouse.org.uk/files/Energy%20Security%20For%20Whom%20For%20What.pdfhttp://www.etcgroup.org/en/rioLastly, if dealing with the UN makes readers feel powerless here are some grassroots actions happening this spring which are "bottom-up" technology assessment alternatives to waiting around for the U.N. to decide whether it is going to save or not save or collective asses. Actions, demonstrations, and direct action at the local level can be thought of as replacement&critique of the failing global U.N. processes or, equally, they can be thought of as leverage in forcing democratizion & improvement into the U.N. system thus making it possible to hold polluter nations accountable at global level. Either way local grassroots action is something which people can do immediately and which have real effect regardless of whatever opinion they hold about the United Nations: * May 27th http://www.taketheflourback.org/ * March 10th http://www.cnduk.org/about/item/1355 * April 21st http://stopnuclearpoweruk.net/content/sizewell-camp-2012 -and these are just three actions which luddites200 network has been involved in supporting, obviously there are many other relevant actions going on in the U.K. that can help if you've got the UN process blues. It might be part of a fledgling Rio+20 strategy to actively name our dissatisfaction with the polluter-nations dominated UN process as part of our publicity/press strategy for local actions. But local environmental justice actions would continue to be locally concieved and have local objectives, much as the campaigns named above are. A mass action in Britain against GM wheat trials is also a hit against the Rio+20 biotech agenda. But people in Britain are taking action because we don't want biotech here. Debates about international technology assessment are a bolted on ext ra meaning of local actions. They could give local campaigns some international depth and an extra media moment. This would also allow our end of the UN negotiations to point to examples of the public rejecting a greenwashed greed economy dressed up as 'green' and sold with Royal Science pretending (as usual) to be real science.On behalf of luddites200,Solidarity & Autonomy,Nedrick Luddwww.luddites200.org.uk<http://www.luddites200.org.uk>

TorrentFreakWorld’s First Flying File-Sharing Drones in ActionMarch 20, 2012https://torrentfreak.com/worlds-first-flying-file-sharing-drones-in-action-120320/A few days ago The Pirate Bay announced that in future parts of its site could be hosted on GPS controlled drones. To many this may have sounded like a joke, but in fact these pirate drones already exist. Project “Electronic Countermeasures” has built a swarm of five fully operational drones which prove that an “aerial Napster” or an “airborne Pirate Bay” is not as futuristic as it sounds.In an ever-continuing effort to thwart censorship, The Pirate Bayplans to turn flying drones into mobile hosting locations.“Everyone knows WHAT TPB is. Now they’re going to have to think about WHERE TPB is,” The Pirate Bay team told TorrentFreak last Sunday, announcing their drone project.Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, was amazed to read the announcement, not so much because of the technology, because his group has already built a swarm of file-sharing drones.“I thought hold on, we are already doing that,” Young told TorrentFreak.Their starting point for project “Electronic Countermeasures” was to create something akin to an ‘aerial Napster’ or ‘airborne Pirate Bay’, but it became much more than that.“Part nomadic infrastructure and part robotic swarm, we have rebuilt and programmed the drones to broadcast their own local Wi-Fi network as a form of aerial Napster. They swarm into formation, broadcasting their pirate network, and then disperse, escaping detection, only to reform elsewhere,” says the group describing their creation.File-Sharing Drone in Action (photo by Claus Langer)picture of a sharing droneIn short the system allows the public to share data with the help of flying drones. Much like the Pirate Box, but one that flies autonomously over the city.“The public can upload files, photos and share data with one another as the drones float above the significant public spaces of the city. The swarm becomes a pirate broadcast network, a mobile infrastructure that passers-by can interact with,” the creators explain.One major difference compared to more traditional file-sharing hubs is that it requires a hefty investment. Each of the drones costs 1500 euros to build. Not a big surprise, considering the hardware that’s needed to keep these pirate hubs in the air.“Each one is powered by 2x 2200mAh LiPo batteries. The lift is provided by 4x Roxxy Brushless Motors that run off a GPS flight control board. Also on deck are altitude sensors and gyros that keep the flight stable. They all talk to a master control system through XBee wireless modules,” Young told TorrentFreak.“These all sit on a 10mm x 10mm aluminum frame and are wrapped in a vacuum formed aerodynamic cowling. The network is broadcast using various different hardware setups ranging from Linux gumstick modules, wireless routers and USB sticks for file storage.”For Young and his crew this is just the beginning. With proper financial support they hope to build more drones and increase the range they can cover.“We are planning on scaling up the system by increasing broadcast range and building more drones for the flock. We are also building in other systems like autonomous battery change bases. We are looking for funding and backers to assist us in scaling up the system,” he told us.Those who see the drones in action (video below) will notice that they’re not just practical. The creative and artistic background of the group shines through, with the choreography performed by the drones perhaps even more stunning than the sharing component.“When the audience interacts with the drones they glow with vibrant colors, they break formation, they are called over and their flight pattern becomes more dramatic and expressive,” the group explains.Besides the artistic value, the drones can also have other use cases than being a “pirate hub.” For example, they can serve as peer-to-peer communications support for protesters and activists in regions where Internet access is censored.Either way, whether it’s Hollywood or a dictator, there will always be groups that have a reason to shoot the machines down. But let’s be honest, who would dare to destroy such a beautiful piece of art?Worlds First File-Sharing Drone-> http://vimeo.com/36267881

Dear ListServ Administrator:Please post the below message to Nettime. Also, please let me know if you'd like to review the book for your listserv. Thanks!Best wishes,Heather Skinner, PublicistUniversity of Minnesota Press111 3rd Ave S, Ste. 290Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520presspr-OJFnDUYgAso< at >public.gmane.orgv * 612-627-1932f * 612-627-1980http://www.upress.umn.edu_______________________________________________________________________Leading figures in the digital humanities explore the field?s rapid revolutionDEBATES IN THE DIGITAL HUMANITIESEdited by Matthew K. GoldUniversity of Minnesota Press | 532 pages | 2012ISBN 978-0-8166-7795-5 | paperback | $34.95ISBN 978-0-8166-7794-8 | cloth | $105.00Debates in the Digital Humanities brings together leading figures in the field to explore its theories, methods, and practices and to clarify its multiple possibilities and tensions. Together, the essays? which will be published later as an ongoing, open-access website? suggest that the digital humanities is uniquely positioned to contribute to the revival of the humanities and academic life.PRAISE FOR DEBATES IN THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES:"Is there such a thing as ?digital? humanities? From statistical crunches of texts to new forms of online collaboration and peer review, it?s clear something is happening. This book is an excellent primer on the arguments over just how much is changing?and how much more ought to?in the way scholars study the humanities." ?Clive Thompson, columnist for Wired and contributing writer for the New York Times MagazineABOUT THE AUTHOR:Matthew K. Gold is assistant professor of English at New York City College of Technology. He is a faculty member in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Doctoral Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he also serves as Advisor to the Provost for Master?s Programs and Digital Initiatives.For more information, including the table of contents, visit the book's webpage:http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/debates-in-the-digital-humanitiesPlease email me if you have any questions.--Heather Skinner, PublicistUniversity of Minnesota Press111 3rd Ave S, Ste. 290Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520skinn077-OJFnDUYgAso< at >public.gmane.orgv * 612-627-1932f * 612-627-1980________________Alexandra SobiechMarketing AssistantUniversity of Minnesota Press111 Third Ave. S., Suite 290Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520www.upress.umn.edu612.627.1933

For the 7. Berlin Biennale, the curator Artur ??mijewski has created apolitical space where to explore the effects of art in society and theconnections with the current social and political situations. In thisscenario, several actors, institutions and political collectives that sharethis approach have been invited to engage in ???solidarity actions??? inaccordance with the theme of the BB7.In this frame, the Istituto Svizzero di Roma and the Free MetropolitanUniversity of Rome are organizing a solidarity action to debate on the newforms of interaction between art, knowledge and politics, with the aim ofgiving visibility to a network of organizations acting in variouscountries, in solidarity with each other and with the Biennale.On March 23 Igor Stokfiszewski (literary critic, editor and playwright,member of the 7. Berlin Biennale team) and Salvatore Lacagnina (Head ofArts Programming at the ISR), will discuss the forms of responsibility andpossible intervention of art in the social and political realities, throughthe work of Artur ??mijewski.On March 24, The Free Metropolitan University of Rome (LUM) and thepolitical collective Krytyka Polityczna will meet at the Istituto Svizzeroof Rome to discuss about a new political constellation for themovements. Starting from the documents ???Do the right Thing??? by LUM and???Globalize the left??? by Krytyka Polityczna, we will discuss about themultiplicity forms of uprising across Europe exploring their constituentcapacity, in particular focusing on the co-extensive and recursiverelationship between tumults and institutions. While social movementquestions life and form of expression, art and knowledge, institutionsrefer to a ???positive model of action??? that organizes reality developingmultiplicity, linking uprising to federal and transnational dispositiveable to spread power instead of concentrating it.full program here:http://www.solidarityaction.istitutosvizzero.it/?p=250&lang=en -----LUM (Libera Universita` Metropolitana) is a Free Metropolitan Universitybased in the self-managed and autonomous atelier ESC, indipendent from theacademy, that since 2005 organizes open seminars which last one year.Students, researchers, precarious workers, PhD students and professors holdfree and public discussions leading to the organization of an annualseminar. Every year it is focused on different issues, such as transformation of metropolis and its gentrification; human nature andpolitical theory; figures of the material body in the present; tumults anduprisings; common property in the global crisis. The series of seminars isoften followed by the publication of seminar papers such as LessicoMarxiano (ManifestoLibri, 2008) and Le passioni della crisi(ManifestoLibri, 2010) both available on our website under Creative CommonLicense. www.lumprojects.org - www.escatelier.netKrytyka Polityczna (The Political Critique) is a Polish left-wingintellectual journal founded by S??awomir Sierakowski in 2002. It isrepresented by a group of left-wing Polish intellectuals: Yael Bartana(Arts Editor), Magdalena B????dowska, Kinga Dunin, Maciej Gdula, DorotaG??a??ewska, Maciej Kropiwnicki, Julian Kulty??a (Vice Editor-in-chief),S??awomir Sierakowski (Editor-in-chief), Micha?? Sutowski (Managing Editor),Agata Szcz????niak (Vice Editor-in-chief), Artur ??mijewski (Arts Editor)amongst others. It deals with social sciences, culture and politics andwith how these disciplines produce a visible impact on social reality. Thejournal is media partner of the BB7. www.krytykapolityczna.plIgor Stokfiszewski (1979) is a literary critic, editor and playwright. Hecollaborates regularly with Krytyka Polityczna and is member of the 7.Berlin Biennale team. He studied Polish philology at the University of Lodzand at Jagiellonian University. He was editor of the literary magazine Ha!art from 2001 until 2006 and is author of the volume Political Turn (2009).He has worked as a playwright since 2005 and more recently has contributedto Mass, the reconstruction of the rite of a Roman Catholic mass, directedby Artur ??mijewski that was performed on two consecutive evenings at theTeatr Dramatyczny in Warsaw in October 2011. He is co-editor of the BerlinBiennale blog: www.berlinbiennale.de/blog/Artur ??mijewski (Warsaw, 1966) started working as an artist in the 90s,when he studied in the sculpture class of Professor Grzegorz Kowalski atthe Warsaw Art Accademy with Katarzyna Kozyra and Pawel Althamer. His workbecame known for An Eye for an Eye (1998-2000): here ??mijewski worked witha group of physically disabled people. In 2005 he represented Poland at the51st Venice Biennale with the film Repetition (2005). In 2007 he publisheda series of interviews with artists entitled ???Dr????ce cia??a??? (TremblingBodies). He collaborates regularly with the Foksal Gallery Foundation andis Art Director of the left-wing social-political journal KrytykaPolityczna. This collaboration with KP has given him the opportunity totheorize on his artistic position through articles such as ???StosowaneSztuki Spo??eczne??? (The Applied Social Arts). Published for the first timein the journal in 2007, ???The Applied Social Arts??? provoked a growing debateabout the question of the necessity of contemporary art to have asubstantial impact on society. Artur ??mijewski lives and works in Berlinand Warsaw.more info:http://www.solidarityaction.istitutosvizzero.it/http://lumproject.org/

http://domainincite.com/company-claims-ownership-of-482-new-gtlds/Company claims ownership of 482 new gTLDs Kevin Murphy, March 22, 2012, 15:51:26 (UTC), Domain Registries A small New York company has warned new gTLD applicants that it owns 482 top-level domain strings and that ICANN has "no authority" to award them to anybody else. Name.Space claims it has ownership rights to potentially valuable gTLDs including several likely to be applied for by others, such as .shop, .nyc, .sex, .hotel and .green. It's been operating hundreds of "gTLDs" in a lightly-used alternate DNS root system since 1996. Now the company has filed for trademark protection for several of these strings and has said that it will apply for several through the ICANN new gTLD program. But Name.Space, which says it has just "tens of thousands" of domain registrations in its alternate root, is also claiming that it already owns all 482 strings in the ICANN root too. "What we did is put them on notice that they cannot give any of these 482 names to anyone else," CEO Alex Mashinsky told DomainIncite. "These names predate ICANN. They don't have authority under US law to issue these gTLDs to third parties." "We're putting out there the 482 names to make sure other people don't risk their money applying for things ICANN cannot legally give them," he added. [DEL: I could not find a comprehensive list of all 482 strings, but Name.Space publishes a subset here. :DEL] Read the company's full list here (pdf). <https://namespace.us/CompleteTLDList.pdf> It's a slightly ridiculous position. Anyone can set up an alternative DNS root, fill it with dictionary words and start selling names - the question is whether anyone actually uses it. However, putting that aside, Name.Space may have a legitimate quarrel with ICANN anyway. It applied for a whopping 118 gTLDs in ICANN's initial "test-bed" round in 2000, which produced the likes of .biz, .info, .name and .museum. While ICANN did not select any of Name.Space's proposed names for delegation, it did not "reject" its application outright either. This is going to cause problems. Name.Space is not the only unsuccessful 2000 applicant that remains pissed off 12 years later that ICANN has not closed the book on its application. Image Online Design, an alternate root provider and 2000 applicant, has a claim to .web that is likely to emerge as an issue for other applicants after the May 2 reveal date. These unsuccessful candidates are unhappy that they've been repeatedly told that their old applications were not rejected, and with the privileges ICANN has given them in the current Applicant Guidebook. ICANN will give any unsuccessful bidder from the 2000 round an $86,000 discount on its application fees, provided they apply for the same string they applied for the first time. However, like any other applicant this time around, they also have to sign away their rights to sue. And the $86,000 discount is only redeemable against one gTLD application, not 118. "We applied for 118 and we would like to get the whole 118," said Mashinsky. ICANN is not going to give Name.Space what it wants, of course, so it's not clear how this is going to play out. The company could file Legal Rights Objections against applications for strings it thinks it owns, or it could take matters further. While the company is not yet making legal threats, any applicants for gTLDs on Name.Space's list should be aware that they do have an additional risk factor to take into account. "We hope we can resolve all of this amicably," said Mashinsky. "We're not trying to throw a monkey wrench into the process."

<http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2011/11/new-york-times-financial-advice-be-an-unpaid-intern-through-your-20s-then-work-till-youre-100.html> New York Times Financial Advice: Be an Unpaid Intern Through Your 20s (Then Work till You're 100) posted by Frank Pasquale Jason Mazzone has already addressed the main shortcomings of the latest N.Y. Times article by David Segal on law schools. I'd like to situate it as part of a neo-liberal ideology developing at the Times and other scriveners for the powerful. If you pair the basic message of Segal's piece ("law students and professors aren't doing enough to raise corporate profits") with that of Ed Glaeser's anti-retirement musings in the same pages ("work into your 90s"), the ideology starts to emerge. Labor economist Mark Price pithily suggested it: Law schools couldn't possibly teach the wide range of firm specific skills that law firms need . . . . And yet you have a writer [pushing] propaganda that the big law firms are tired of paying for on the job training. On the other hand it is at least comforting to know that law firms are not that different from firms in Manufacturing or Health Care[;] that is[,] they would prefer that somebody else pay for the skills that make them profitable. This is a classic problem of uneven bargaining power familiar since the 1920s.* Why are wages falling while productivity is rising? Because firms realize they can fire current workers, shift their duties (unpaid) to frightened current employees, and reap the profits of having one person do the work of many. It's another form of "shadow work" that contributes to the time bind so many Americans find themselves in. When 65% of economic gains go to the top 1% of the population, it's not too hard to discern this dynamic. Of course, a firm can only pile so many unbillable hours onto existing employees. So what's the next step? Start calling beginning work an "unpaid internship." Complain that "kids these days" don't know a thing; they're "zero marginal product" workers; they don't deserve to be paid till they're truly experienced. (At the end of a long line of traineeships, some may find themselves discarded as "too old" or "overqualified" for what is now defined as an "entry-level" position.) This is a wonderful strategy for cutting the budgets of corporate legal departments. But it only spells doom for attorneys caught up in the corporate games once reserved for blue collar labor. The Political Roots of Rising Un- and Underemployment in the Legal Industry Mazzone has complained that Segal doesn't know enough about legal education. He's also too narrowly focused on it. There is no question that, in many sectors, there are fewer positions for attorneys. Many journalists have attributed the decline to the creeping influence of "skill-biased technological change" and outsourcing: e-discovery can be done by computer or by the asymmetrically open Indian legal market. These trends do undermine some firm business models. But James K. Galbraith has already demonstrated the weaknesses of the "skill-biased technological change story" in many contexts. Moreover, the biggest driver of legal unemployment is political: the wholesale dismantling of tort, contract, and administrative remedies for corporate wrongdoing. As I observed back in 2008, it would be shocking if an ideological movement to shut the courthouse doors to the injured failed to threaten lawyers' livelihood. To build on that: maybe there are less jobs for finance lawyers because the Justice Department has systematically failed to prosecute egregious white-collar crime. A "tort reform" movement has made the price of violating the law a mere cost of doing business for thousands of companies. When banks can get away with robo-signing and foreclosure fraud, why should they hire attorneys to ensure that their paperwork is actually valid? Even an ostensible regulator, the OCC, isn't bothering to launch a serious investigation in areas where deeply troubling practices have already been documented. Corporate promotion of tort reform, deregulation, and arbitration has saved businesses many costs, including legal fees. But it has also increased the fragility of our food and drug supply chains, accelerated a financial crisis that has already cost the US trillions in lost output, and reduced opportunities for attorneys to fight to assure that business is conducted in a fair and societally beneficial way. To ignore the political roots of the decline of both law and the rule of law in the US (and its obvious impact on attorney employment) is to fail to even begin a serious analysis of young lawyers' problems. Segal acts as if corporate defense is the heart and soul of legal work. He never considers how legal education works to prompt legal challenges to corporate wrongdoing. No one will have a job defending corporations if there aren't well-trained attorneys applying old law to new corporate wrongdoing. That takes creative thought, a chance to learn the policy behind law, and engagement with current industry trends. It's not something to be drilled into people by projecting bar prep rote back into law school. Law as a Cost Throughout Segal's article, another pair of assumptions creeps in. Law is presented as a cost, a series of niggling and none-too-important hoops to jump through to get down to the real business of mergers and deals. Law professors' research is dismissed as pure self-indulgence, as we are once again treated to Justice Roberts' witty dig at articles devoted to Kantian Bulgarian evidence law. Segal never stops to ask: Why might a Justice like Roberts want to discredit the legal academy? Maybe it's because, while colleagues of mine were trying to nip the housing crisis in the bud, a phalanx of deregulators on the Supreme Court came up with a politicized preemption decision that let the good times roll for America's most predatory banks? Maybe it's because law professors actually have the time to document how radically Roberts and his allies have diverged from precedent? Perhaps it's because Roberts, after long years in corporate practice, sees law profs' efforts to reinterpret old statutes and doctrines in light of new harms (a far larger part of legal scholarship than the high theory he laments) as one more nuisance for the clients who made him a rich and powerful man? But we need not even engage with these politically sensitive questions. Rather, we might wonder: why does philosophy stand in for Segal as archetypical legal scholarship? When I first heard Justice Roberts lament the tragic dearth of practical articles, I marveled: has he ever taken a look at Sharona Hoffman's or Nicolas Terry's cutting edge work on digital medical records? This emerging field raises critical questions about the balance between privacy and innovation. We cannot permit our digital health infrastructure to be constructed solely according to the corporate interests of whatever vendors and providers happen to be most powerful at the time. We desperately need more work like Hoffman's and Terry's to guide us through the thicket of administrative and technical issues raised by electronic medical records. I can think of figures as eminent and important-to-practitioners as Terry and Hoffman in five areas of health law and four areas of intellectual property law off the top of my head. (Ever heard of Pam Samuelson, Mr. Segal?) Yet Segal is apparently ready to write off the entirety of legal scholarship because someone, somewhere had the temerity to write about Kant. I can understand why a writer at the New York Times might want to lash out at maladaptive institutions. Segal is daily subjected to his paper's opinion pages, which peddle one irrelevant or stereotypical piece after another from their tenured moderates. (You learn more from Dean Baker's critiques of them than from the articles themselves.) Thursday Styles reports on the 0.1%'s lifestyle intently, breathlessly tracking the price of Birkin bags as if it's news the rest of us can use. The Gray Lady is becoming less the paper of record than a chronicler of the conventional wisdom and consumption of the wealthy. What Next? Law students, like many others today, face a grim job market almost without precedent. But I think proposals like Segal's--making students start corporate-type work earlier and earlier--will only exacerbate the problem by providing an ever-larger pool of free labor for firms. We need a bigger picture view of an economy where professional and rentier incomes in general must deflate to match the diminished buying power of strapped lower and middle classes. Debt is the critical financial issue of our age. Mortgage debt, student debt, credit card debt, medical debt, sovereign debt---all are causing social upheaval. Debt often seems like a standalone menace, a black hole sucking money (and thus time and opportunity) from the indebted. But behind every mortgage statement is a servicer, distributing those funds to buyers of income streams. Debt is the shadow side of wealth, as Margaret Atwood memorably portrayed it. You don't have to immerse yourself in the accounting equivalences of Modern Monetary Theory to figure this out. Congress addressed two major sources of debt recently. The credit card provisions in the 2009 CARD Act and Dodd-Frank offered some weak disclosure provisions. Look at your statements, and you'll see exactly how many years it will take you to pay off the balance if you stick to minimum payments. Basic consumer protections are in place, but there is not much substantive relief for debtors. However, the ACA addressed medical bills much more comprehensively. I think its provisions can be a model for balancing obligations of the individual and society in other essential areas, like housing and education. In brief: for unemployed individuals (or those who are not offered affordable insurance by their employer), health insurance exchanges will offer various health plans. Thus the notorious "individual mandate:" these persons will need to get insurance or pay a fine. But the government will offer help, in two ways. First, to help pay for the premium, advanceable tax credits will ensure that no one pays too much of their income for insurance. How much is too much? A family of four with earnings under $40,000 should not be paying more than around 6.3% of income for premiums; for those making around $85,000, the rate rises to 9.5%. (Here is a calculator with rough estimates of how much individuals and families need to pay at certain levels of income.) This is essentially an income-based payment scheme, for people making up to 4 times the federal poverty level. Moreover, "those with incomes below 250 percent of the poverty line will also receive cost-sharing assistance" on the other side of medical bills: the copays, coinsurances, and deductibles not covered by an insurance policy. The formula is complex, but the bottom line is that the federal government assists in paying these costs based on income, as well. Income-based repayment schemes are a part of education financing now, though many have complained that they are not sensitive enough to other costs of living. Making income-based repayment more fair, and considering other legal changes in this area, are very important political issues. Housing policy should also be more open to income-based payment of mortgages, offering options ranging from "rights to rent" to direct principal modifications. The key point here is that the owners of the income streams from student debts, mortgages, and other sources are playing a dangerous game if they think rights to payments are as sacrosanct, as, say, the AIG bonuses. They may think that they can continue to squeeze the indebted to pay 60 or 70% of their income each month for housing, insurance, and loan debts (and for the dubious right to claim as an asset something that will eventually be worth far less than what was paid for it if current debt deflation continues). But the larger economic implications are disastrous. Consider Steve Keen's diagnosis, as related by George Monbiot. Keen believes that both the Great Depression and the current crisis "were triggered by a collapse in debt-financed demand:" Aggregate demand in an economy like ours is composed of GDP plus the change in the level of debt. It is the sudden and extreme change in debt levels that makes demand so volatile and triggers recessions. The higher the level of private debt, relative to GDP, the more unstable the system becomes. . . . In the 1920s, private debt rose by 50%. Between 1999 and 2009, it rose by 140%. The debt-to-GDP ratio in the US is still much higher than it was when the Great Depression began. We are in the midst of a great readjustment. For decades we've been told that our economic model, as persons, was to act like corporations do, accumulating assets and rights to payment. In fact, this "ownership society" was a mirage, providing great wealth to a few at the very top and precarity to the rest. There is no way to guarantee a secure future all on one's own. Social structure, norms, and bargaining power matter. Neither law students nor law schools can preserve their own future simply by better learning how to serve the corporate interests that would like to eliminate all profit-menacing regulation and tort claims. Economic security is an inevitably political question, which requires a coordinated political response--not one more effort to legitimize corporate wage-slashing with a simple story about "unskilled" workers. Before the Times treats us to another "what's wrong with law schools" story, it might want to investigate the forces of deregulation and volatile financialization that kneecapped not only the legal job market, but employment prospects generally. No one needs another piece legitimizing the "young people don't deserve to be paid" meme of the radical right, in the guise of snide snark about out-of-touch law professors. *I've addressed these imbalances many times in posts on Law & Inequality. See, for instance, Power & Productivity After the Great Recession; Inequality and the Great Recession).Concurring Opinions is a general-interest legal blog operated by ConcurringOpinions LLC, a Pennsylvania Limited Liability Corporation.

nettime people:powerful computers are getting?unbelievably?cheap and small: it's a fact we witness everyday. many of you may have heard about the raspberry pi: a $25 "credit-card sized computer" that plugs into a tv and a keyboard. it uses an arm processor and comes with a gnu/linux os.?http://www.raspberrypi.orgaccording to the manufacturers, the idea behind this ultra-cheap computer is to make it available for kids everywhere in the world. while i don't doubt their good intentions, i believe the time has come to ask questions about the material nature of our devices, no matter how big, small, cheap or expensive they are. as many of you also know, computers are getting cheaper and more powerful partly because of certain minerals, such as tantalum or tungsten, which make the miniaturization of circuits possible. but these two minerals, together with others, are considered to be "conflictive", because of many reasons. the best known case is coltan (a metallic ore from which tantalum is extracted) mined in eastern congo under brutal conditions, both for communities and the environment. if this issue sounds new to you, a good place to get more information is the web oage of the enough project:?http://www.enoughproject.org/conflict_areas/eastern_congo?... but conflicts are not limited neither to the eastern congo or coltan alone. gold, which is used in various electronic circuits because of its conductivity, malleability and resistance to corrosion. in tanzania, the world's third largest producer of gold, multiple violations to human rights and damages to the local environment have been documented because of careless mining:?http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/450/ERROR%20FREE%20NORTH%20MARA%20REPORT%20-%20FINAL.pdfthere is, without question, a link between our small, cheap computers and the brutal damage we are doing to poor, voiceless communities and the environment.so, i tried to do some basic research about the raspberry pi. it uses a broadcom bcm2835 soc (system-on-a-chip)... according to a company engagement report made by the "ethical bank" triodos in 2011 (http://www.triodos.com/downloads/research/company-engagement-report-2011.pdf), broadcom corp. was uneligible for partnership because of their negative performance regarding conflict minerals. broadcom doesn't seem to have much to say about that on their corporate responsibility page: http://www.broadcom.com/global_citizenship/social_responsibility/ ... this research was the fruit of an afternoon's googling, so i can't make any claims about it. so i figured i should ask the makers of the raspberry pi directly. on march 14, is asked the following question on their faq page:"how do you ensure that the suppliers you are working with (arm, broadcom and others) are ethically responsible? more concretely, how do you know they are not using conflict minerals to manufacture the components you buy from them? the raspberry pi is a great initiative, and it would be shame to learn that the technology involved is not 100% ethically responsible."http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs#comment-16298?i didn't get a reply, even if the people who manage the webpage are actively replying to most of the questions. i believe my question is respectful and valid, and that it deserves an answer.if you also believe that asking about the materials used to make our cheap devices is important, i invite you to turn the "q" into a "faq". ask the question, using your own words of course, on their faq page. insist until we all get a satisfactory reply. it's not about attacking the raspberry pi or any other company: it's about raising awareness about what's happening at the other end of technology. we can no longer afford to turn a blind eye to what's going on out there. it's not a time for being (only) enthusiastic: it's a time for asking questions.thank you for reading so far.best wishes,eugenio.

Original to:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577297454154404874.htmlExecSum: 95% of phone calls billed under the heavilly govt subsidizedservice for hearing impaired scheme were actually made by Nigerian '419'con-tricksters, 'possibly' with the knowledge of AT&T ...AT&T Tied to Nigerian ScamBy ANTON TROIANOVSKI and BRENT KENDALLOn April 6, 2010, an AT&T Inc. T -0.60% manager pondered a drop in volumein the company's government-subsidized service for hearing-impairedcallers.Reassuring a colleague in an email, the manager said she was "not ready tothrow up flags" because "it was Easter Monday yesterday, which iscelebrated in Nigeria."The exchange was part of a lawsuit unveiled Thursday by the Department ofJustice, which alleged that AT&T knew the service had become a haven forNigerian scam artists, while serving relatively few of America'shearing-impaired.A Justice Department lawsuit alleges AT&T improperly sought FCCreimbursement for hearing-impaired services it provided to scammers fromNigeria, Anton Troianovski reports on the News Hub.The telecom giant then billed the Federal Communications Commission $16million for such services since December 2009, as much as 95% of whichwere provided to international callers attempting to defraud U.S.merchants, the Justice Department said in the suit.The suit was brought under the federal False Claims Act and was based ontips from an employee in an AT&T call center.AT&T did not comment on the suit, but said it followed the FCC's rules forproviding the service and seeking reimbursement.The program at issue is a little-known text-based communications servicecalled IP Relay that allows the hearing-impaired to place telephone callsby typing messages over the Internet. Those messages are then read aloudto parties on the other end of the line by call-center employees atcompanies like AT&T, which are then reimbursed by the FCC.The government alleges that scammers operating out of Nigeria used theservice to defraud U.S. merchants by ordering goods with stolen creditcards and counterfeit checks. In essence, the government alleges, AT&T'soperators became mouthpieces for the scam artists.The complaint used an example of a scammer pretending to be a foreignbuyer, who placed a large order with a stolen credit card. Typing textread aloud by the operator, the scammer would then ask the merchant towire money for transporting the goods.Enlarge Image0126attearns0126attearnsMichael Nagle/Getty ImagesA Justice Department lawsuit alleges AT&T improperly sought FCCreimbursement for hearing-impaired services it provided to scammers fromNigeria.The advantage of using the IP Relay system is that it is anonymous, theJustice Department said in the complaint. The caller can't be visuallyidentified, and FCC rules say operators can't disclose the contents of theconversation."As the FCC is aware, it is always possible for an individual to misuse IPRelay services, just as someone can misuse the postal system or an emailaccount," AT&T spokesman Marty Richter said, "but FCC rules require thatwe complete all calls by customers who identify themselves as disabled."IP Relay services are paid out of fees collected from telecom customersand are included in the federal budget. Providers like AT&T bill thegovernment at a rate of about $1.30 a minute, the complaint says.David Rolka, a telecom consultant who last summer began administering IPRelay funds for the FCC, said he has grown concerned about fraud.Earlier this year, he started requiring providers of IP Relay service tosubmit detailed records about each call that they handle.This month Mr. Rolka said he has decided to withhold IP Relay paymentsfrom the fund to all of the service providers—AT&T, Sprint Nextel Corp.,and several smaller, specialized companies.The FCC solicited comment in recent weeks on potential misuse of the IPRelay service. In a filing, Sprint detailed steps it was taking to combatfraud, such as blocking users making an unusually high volume of calls andmaintaining a database of Internet addresses used to make internationalcalls.The Justice Department's complaint was filed in a lawsuit originallybrought by Constance Lyttle, a former worker in one of AT&T's IP Relaycall centers. Filed in a Pennsylvania federal court, it seeks tripledamages, restitution and civil penalties.AT&T began providing the service in 2003, and learned from its call centerworkers the same year that many of the callers were using the service todefraud U.S. merchants, the complaint says. An internal analysis by AT&Tin 2004 found some of the worst abusers generated over 10,000 minutes perday of usage, according to the complaint.The study found that on Jan. 14 and 15, 2004, 10 of the top 12 users ofthe service at AT&T were calling from outside the U.S., primarily fromLagos, Nigeria, according to the complaint.A single Internet address was the source of 100 hours of calls in thosetwo days, placing multiple calls at the same time, according to thecomplaint.The FCC, concerned about abuses of the system, began requiringtelecommunications providers in late 2008 to register users of the serviceand verify the customers' information.The Justice Department lawsuit alleges AT&T was concerned about losingcall volume and implemented procedures that it knew wouldn't weed outfraud.For example, the Justice Department says, AT&T in 2009 followed up on theFCC's new requirements by sending a postcard with a verification code toIP Relay users' purported addresses.AT&T managers recognized that the new system would drastically reduce thevolume of fraudulent calls, according to exchanges quoted in thecomplaint."We are expecting a serious decline in [Internet relay] traffic becausefraud will go to zero (at least temporarily) and we haven't registerednearly enough customers to pick up the slack," one manager of the relaytechnical team said, according to the complaint, which doesn't specify howthe manager's message was delivered.In response to the concerns, the Justice Department says, AT&T switched toa less demanding registration process that simply involved asking users toprovide their mailing address. If the address matched a real U.S. address,the users were registered, the complaint says.The number of registered users soared after the switch, the JusticeDepartment alleged.An email from an AT&T employee quoted in the complaint says 2010 was a"great year" for the IP Relay service, with the total of 10 millionminutes of service in the year "a whopping +42%" over 2009 volumes."AT&T has followed the FCC's rules for providing IP Relay services fordisabled customers and for seeking reimbursement for those services," Mr.Richter, the AT&T spokesman, said.Write to Anton Troianovski at anton.troianovski-Oo4YIDBCiv0< at >public.gmane.org and Brent Kendallat brent.kendall-twM2Yer8+e9Wk0Htik3J/w< at >public.gmane.orgA version of this article appeared Mar. 23, 2012, on page B1 in some U.S.editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: AT&T Tied toNigerian Scam.

Call for papers for an ephemera issue on:Workers, Despite ThemselvesIssue Editors: Stevphen Shukaitis and Abe WalkerDeadline for submissions: November 30th, 2012.Workers’ inquiry is an approach to and practice of knowledge production that seeks to understand the changing composition of labor and its potential for revolutionary social transformation. It is the practice of turning the tools of the social sciences into weapons of class struggle. Workers’ inquiry seeks to map the continuing imposition of the class relation, not as a disinterested investigation, but rather to deepen and intensify social and political antagonisms.The autonomist political theorist Mario Tronti argues that weapons for working class revolt have always been taken from the bosses’ arsenal (1966: 18). But, has not it often been suggested, to use feminist writer Audre Lorde’s phrasing (1984), that it is not possible to take apart the master’s house with the master’s tools? While not forgetting Lorde’s question, it is clear that Tronti said this with good reason, for he was writing from a context where this is precisely what was taking place. Italian autonomous politics greatly benefited from borrowing from sociology and industrial relations – and by using these tools proceeded to build massive cycles of struggle transforming the grounds of politics (Wright, 2003; Berardi, 2009).Of these adaptations the most important for autonomist politics and class composition analysis is workers’ inquiry. Workers’ inquiry developed in a context marked by rapid industrialization, mass migration, and the use industrial sociology to discipline the working class. Workers’ inquiry was formulated within autonomist movements as a sort of parallel sociology, one based on a radical re-reading of Marx (and Weber) against the politics of the communist party and the unions (Farris, 2011). While the practitioners of workers’ inquiry were often professionally-trained academics – especially sociologists – its proponents argued their research differs in important ways from ‘engaged’ social science, and all varieties of industrial sociology, even if it there are similarities. If bourgeois sociology sought to smooth over conflicts, and ‘critical’ sociology to expose these same conflicts, workers’ inquiry takes the contradictions of the labor process as a starting point and seeks to draw out these antagonisms into the formation of new radical subjectivities.This is not to say that workers’ inquiry is an unproblematic endeavor. We remain skeptical that the weapons of managerial control can be cleanly re-appropriated without reproducing the very social world they were designed to take apart. For as Steve Wright argues, “the uncritical use of such tools has frequently produced a register of subjective perceptions which do no more than mirror the surface of capitalist social relations” (2003: 24). As the legacy of analytical Marxism reveals, imitation is never far removed from flattery, and at its worst moments, workers’ inquiry risks becoming its object of critique. To be fair there are disagreements among the proponents of workers’ inquiry over the limitations of drawing from the social sciences. But to continue the metaphor, like any potentially dangerous ‘weapon’, sociological techniques must be carefully examined, and when necessary, disabled.Today we find ourselves at a moment when co-research, participatory action research, and other heterodox methods have been adopted by the academic mainstream, while managerial styles like TQM carry a faint echo of workers’ inquiry. In the contemporary firm workers are already engaged in self-monitoring, peer interviews, and the creation of quasi-autonomous ‘research’ units, all sanctioned by management (Boltankski and Chiapello, 2005). Workers’ inquiry is now part of the accepted social science repertoire: its techniques no longer seem dangerous, but familiar, at least at the methodological level. The bosses’ arsenal now includes weapons mimicking the style, if not the substance, of workers’ inquiry. And as George Steinmetz (2005) has suggested, while blatantly positivistic research styles have fallen out of favor, this obscures the ‘positivist unconscious’ that continues to interpellate even apparently anti-positivist methodologies.The pioneers of workers’ inquiry argued researchers must work through/against the ambivalent relations of (social) science; now, there may be no other option. Wherever there are movements organizing and addressing the horrors of capitalist exploitation and oppression, the specter of recuperation is never far behind. The point is not to deny these risks, but to the degree such dynamics confront all social movements achieving any measure of success. It is by working against and through them that recomposing radical politics becomes possible (Shukaitis, 2009). Today workers’ inquiry remains, as Raniero Panzieri claimed (2006 [1959]), a permanent reference point for autonomist politics, one that informs continuing inquiries into class composition. With this issue we seek to rethink workers’ inquiry as a practice and perspective, and through that to understand and catalyze emergent moments of political composition.ContributorsWe invite papers that update the practices of workers’ inquiry for the present moment of class de-/recomposition. Can we develop, taking up Matteo Pasquinelli’s suggestion (2008: 138), a form of workers’ inquiry applied to cognitive and biopolitical production? The very possibility of a *workers* inquiry begs reconsideration when official unemployment figures drift toward 50% among sectors of the industrial working class.This issue picks up themes that developed in previous issues of ephemera inquiring into affective and immaterial labor (2007), digital labor (2010), militant research (2005), and the politics of the multitude (2004). We encourage submissions that draw upon this previous work, particularly on the politics of social reproduction.Recently, workers’ inquiry has proven its versatility through new applications and reconfigurations. Groups like Colectivo Situaciones (2011) and have used the practice of workers’ inquiry to analyze popular uprisings. Scholars have drawn from class composition analysis to explore areas such as cognitive labor (Brophy, 2011; Peters & Bulut, 2011), citizenship and migration (Papadopoulos et al, 2008; Barchiesi, 2011), and finance (Marazzi, 2008; Mezzadra and Fumagalli, 2010). Militant research collectives such as Kolinko (2002), Team Colors (2010), and the Precarious Workers Brigade (2011) have employed workers’ inquiry to intervene composition of social movements and labor politics.We are particularly interested in research that expands and/or deconstructs the project of workers’ inquiry, or that transposes workers’ inquiry onto unconventional terrain such as archival research and cultural studies. Additionally, we encourage contributors to include a substantial reflection on method, possibly addressing some of the tensions outlined above and engaging with recent debates about method and measure.Deadline for submissions: November 30th, 2012.Please send your submissions to the editors. All contributions should follow ephemera guidelines – see http://www.ephemeraweb.org/journal/submit.htm. In addition to full papers, we also invite notes, reviews, and other kinds and media forms of contributions – please get in touch to discuss how you would like to contribute. We highly encourage authors to send us abstracts (of 500 words) outlining their plans. The ephemera conference in May 2013 will focus on a related theme, with contributors for this issue invited to present their work.Contacts:Stevphen Shukaitis: stevphen-F2PZruqdxTimYgehrs7/Lw< at >public.gmane.orgAbe Walker: awalker-pjauJHRnGTuVc3sceRu5cw< at >public.gmane.orghttp://www.ephemeraweb.org/We're also interested in putting together a panel on this theme for the Historical Materialism conference in London in November (information here: http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/annual9/call-for-papers), particularly with people who plan to submit a piece for this issue. If you are interested in this please contact Stevphen by April 20th.ReferencesBarchiesi, F. (2011) Precarious liberation: workers, the state, and contested social citizenship in postapartheid South Africa. Albany: SUNY Press.Berardi, F. (2009) Precarious rhapsody: semiocapitalism and the pathologies of the post-alpha generation. London: Minor Compositions.Boltanski, L. and E. Chiapello (2005) The new spirit of capitalism. London: Verso.Brophy, E. (2011) “Language put to work: cognitive capitalism, call center labor, and workers inquiry,” Journal of Communication Inquiry. Volume 35 Number 4: 410-416.Colectivo Situaciones (2011) 19&20: notes on a new social protagonism. Brooklyn / Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions.Farris, S. (2011) “Workerism’s inimical incursions: on Mario Tronti’s Weberianism,” Historical Materialism Volume 19 Number 3: 29-62.Kolinko (2002) Hotlines. Berlin: Kolinko. Available at www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/kolinko/lebuk/e_lebuk.htmLorde, A. (1984) “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” Sister outsider: essays and speeches. Berkeley: The Crossing Press: 110-114.Marazzi, C. (2008) Capital & language: from new economy to war economy. New York: Semiotexte.Mezzadra, S. and A. Fumagalli (Eds.) (2010) Crisis in the global economy: financial markets, social struggles, and new political scenarios. Los Angeles: Semiotexte.Panzieri, R. (2006 [1959]) “Socialist uses of workers’ inquiry.” Available at http://www.generation-online.org/t/tpanzieri.htm.Papadopoulos, D., N. Stephenson, and V. Tsianos (2008) Escape routes: control and subversion in the 21st century. London: Pluto Press.Pasquinelli, M. (2008) Animal spirits: a bestiary of the commons. Rotterdam: NAi Publishers.Peters, M. & E. Bulut, Eds. (2011) Cognitive capitalism, education and digital labor. New York: Peter Lang.Precarious Workers Brigade (2011) Surviving internships: a counter guide to free labor in the arts. London: Hato Press.Shukaitis, S. (2009) Imaginal machines: autonomy & self-organization in the revolutions of everyday life. Brooklyn: Autonomedia.Steinmetz, G. (2005) “The genealogy of a positivist haunting: comparing pre-war and post-war U.S. sociology” boundary 2 Volume 32 Number 2: 109-135Team Colors (Eds.) (2010) Uses of a whirlwind: movement, movements, and contemporary radical currents in the United States. Oakland: AK Press.Tronti, M. (1966) Operai e capitale. Torino: Einaud.Wright, S. (2003) Storming heaven: class composition and struggle in Italian autonomist marxism. London: Pluto Press.

original to:http://www.thepolisblog.org/2012/03/new-yorks-moma-rehouses-american-dream.htmlfor nice pics(bwo INURA list/ Roger Keil)MoMA Rehouses the American DreamOne would be hard-pressed to find a more jarring juxtaposition to the newexhibit "Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream" than the venue itself:New York's Museum of Modern Art. MoMA is pre-High Line Big Applecontemporary, with glass, steel and high-end patrons. It is located in avery high-end neighborhood, a far cry from cities like Rialto, Calif., andCicero, Ill. discussed in the exhibit. One is far more likely to bestanding next to a Carioca discussing her new downtown condo thansuburbanites wondering about foreclosure or falling property values. At$25 a ticket, an hour of museum entrance fees on a typically busy weekdaycould probably buy an entire block in many of the hard-hit suburbancommunities across the country.That said, it is high time that a high-profile American culturalinstitution took on the question of housing and the future of the AmericanDream, and the exhibit does an admirable job of asking some importantquestions. The project began at the Buell Center for the Study of AmericanArchitecture at Columbia University. In classic architectural style, itemerged first as a pamphlet and then as the "Buell Hypothesis," an ode tomanifestos and monographs past that combines Socratic dialogue with ascrapbook of American housing history and an urgent call to rethink theAmerican Dream.The goal of the exhibit is urban — this is not just about housing, itargues, but about cities. Its hypothesis is: "Change the dream and youchange the city." Doing so requires "a different kind of publicconversation" about housing, dreams and cities. In addition to featuringarty displays of this hypothesis as textual object, the exhibit featuresthe grand designs of interdisciplinary teams of architects andnon-architects that seek to test it. Five places were chosen: Rialto,Calif.; Cicero, Ill.; Keizer, Ore.; Temple Terrace, Fla.; and The Orangesin N.J. Teams did extensive research, and their renderings of a rebuiltand re-imagined suburbia appear in the exhibit.To their credit, what emerged were not simply architectural renderings.The Keizer team included planners, economists and one of my favorite urbanlaw theorists, Harvard's Jerry Frug. The "design" of this 21st centuryrendition of Ebeneezer Howard's dream includes ideas on taxation andownership structures. The other four models include ideas on energy,water, transportation, land use regulation and microeconomics. Some ofthem are spectacular, especially the neo-Garden City model from Oregon.Unfortunately, most of these ideas get lost in the pretty models andlarge-scale renderings, buried under architectural gloss and the dominanceof design. I have the utmost respect for the goals of the BuellHypothesis, and I would argue that most of us at Polis are attempting toengage in a new public conversation on urbanism. However, I question thedegree to which the exhibit pushes this conversation forward. Perhaps itis my own distrust of high architecture, or of architecture and architectsas the primary drivers of this conversation. Much is made in the Buelltext of the history of modernism and public housing, a history that mademany non-designers like myself inherently distrustful of a conversationabout changing cities that seems to foreground physical models.There is also little engagement with the fact that much of what madeHoward's Garden City idea great was his re-imagining of property ownershipand local political economy, not simply his ideas on design. In fact, thefate of American suburbs and the hardened fiction of the American Dreamstems in part from the ways developers and urbanists used Howard's designmodel but threw away his anarchist ideas about ownership.The failure of this exhibit to highlight a fact that it clearly knows, andinstead fall back on the enticing eye candy of design, is all the morefrustrating because of its location. New York City has long been home tosome of the most innovative ideas in collective property ownership, fromco-ops to mutual housing associations. Needless to say, the towerssurrounding the museum are reminders of a different kind of "ownership,"debt-fueled speculative capital markets whose global center is only a fewmiles to the south.If you want a more complete story of the American Dream, walk down oneflight of stairs and take a look at a piece MoMA commissioned from DiegoRivera in 1931, aptly titled Frozen Assets.

Aesthetics of Improvisation:Intermissions, Interruptions, and Digressions in PerformanceAt the Sunday talk/video/dance given by Foofwa at the 92nd St. Y, hetalked about the relationship between complex choreography and inter-ruptions in his piece based on Cage, THiRtEEn. We talked about this laterand I related the discussion to my own improvisation work, as well asperformances I'd done in Second Life, with other musicians, and so forth.I began to think of a taxonomy of interruptions, realizing that I washeading into muddy hermeneutics at the least, as well as splittingepistemologies and fractured phenomenologies. I revived the idea of the'fissure,' a break in the midst of A and A, which doesn't change theentity; the split remains, temporary or permanent, as a glitch, but not -as in negation, an ontological process.So we begin with a choreography (which may also be a musical score,theatrical text, etc.) which is absolute in the sense that the real isabsolute; it forms a foreground and background structure which theperformer follows to the best of hir abilities, without break, with asense of inhabiting the piece which is almost unconscious, and with arepertoire of technique that, hopefully, can be taken for granted - a formof tacit knowledge that allows the piece to flow smoothly, from beginningto end. Think of this absolute choreography as an impossibility, as theperformer adjusts hirself throughout the presentation: nothing is or canbe perfect, because no choreography operates as natural law, andinterpretation is part of the very atmosphere of any performance.We are talking about human performance here, not machine or programperformance, where choreographies may repeat themselves endlessly withouterror, or with the repetition of the same error growing either linearly orexponentially. Let us think, without error.There is always the question, or the state, of the freedom of theperformer, who has agreed, often under contract and capital, to performand rehearse a piece, for perhaps a set amount of time, with variousriders attached, for example drowning as an act of God.What can happen? Here we enter into the phenomenologies, the taxonomies,of behavior in relation to structure: the coupling is always a loose coup-ling.The performer may repeat or elide a section or sections of the choreo-graphy, This may be the result of forgetting the section or sections; itmay be a conscious decision; it may be the result of an other cue; it maybe the result of muscle strain or other sense of injury. It may also occuras a result of play. All of these situations imply different intentions,different intentionalities: forgetting can also connect to a suturing, forexample, so that the performer does not know s/he has elided something -s/he remains within the aegis of the dance, inhabiting the dance, in spiteof (perhaps) the consciousness, from outside, of something amiss - as ifthere were differing hermeneutics and strata of the same choreography:someone performing, someone reading, someone watching. A sense of injuryor strain tends to foreground the body; if the pain is minor, theperformer may attempt to circumscribe it, detour 'around' the section, asif the detour _were_ the section. If the pain is major, the performer mayslip into a phenomenology of the body, backgrounding the choreographywhich is then only an inscription under erasure (a differend; thechoreography is no longer speaking, no longer in control, no longer _in_inscription).The performer may make a conscious decision not to do the section orsections, or to repeat them, or transform them according to any number ofsemiotic operations. This may come out of an inhabitation of the dance,leading hir elsewhere/elsewise; it may come out of a sense of play, as ifthe dance were temporarily objectified, thrown for a loop, thrown out ofkilter; it may come out of a sense of play in which the dance is forgottenand the section becomes the horizon itself.The forgetting of the section may be a conscious forgetting, as the per-former does something else, or nothing at all: the performer might rest,might decide to rest; the performer's body might 'seem' to rest or decideto rest. The daily, the everyday, is foregrounded; the performer has anitch, wants to rest, needs to go to the bathroom; has a sense of thegiggles; remembers a recent argument or sex; starts laughing; is furiousat hirself; and so forth.For the audience, the conscious forgetting, the everyday, may well be partof the performance: did s/he forget hir lines or is this part of thechoreography, the score? Is this Brecht, Pirandello, their descendents? Isthis revolutionary theater, Occupy?It may simply be everyday, a relationship or communality among people -performers, choreographers, audience, within or beneath the problematicsign of capital. For the performer, there may _never_ be a return to thechoreography; for the audience, there is a mixed hermeneutics parallelingthat between the virtual and the real, always these entanglements, whichare on the increase, as reality is augmented and the virtual is mixed: asprogramming becomes absolutist on one hand, and the hack and play on theother.The performer may elide a section and jump to another section, rupturingthe time and continuity of the piece, suturing the same as a fissurereveals cracks in the midst of substance, the same and the glitch. Theglitch is already a recovery. Think of the recovery in relation tocommunality: the action of one performer affects the others, but not inthe sense of choreography - in the sense of choreography's absence,everyone covering up, everyone filling in the gaps - or not, for somethingis always there to be shown, even the performers asleep, giving up,deciding it wasn't worthwhile to continue in any case.What about this? - the decision that it's _not worthwhile to continue._Here is the audience and its/their expectations - their choreography,their role/s, and there are the performers carrying a sense of exhaustion,ennui, the uselessness of it all, bodies still present, perhaps millingabout. So there continues to be an occurrence, and everyone perhaps isstill present, so something is going on, there is a doing or doings.This is where it might be of interest, thinking through what's worthwhilein a deeper or more veered-off sense: is it worthwhile to continue if thechoreography physically hurts the performer? Becomes so complex that itseems ridiculous to follow? Takes up so much of hir time that hir otherlife or lives are backgrounded or eliminated for a period of time? Butthen there is capital, agreements have been made.Let the agreements perhaps stand _from the very beginning,_ so as Foofwaindicated, there is no danger of being fired, eliminated from theperformance, and so forth. The situation becomes one of trust: theperformer is hired, that's all there is to it, and what s/he does isalready acceptable, already in-process, presented, presentable. Of coursethere are limits, s/he might abscond... So the ceiling is set sufficientlyhigh that it disappears, just as soccer for example, as rule-laden as itis, becomes a dance of improvisation and strategy, a continuance, based onthe trust that players will do their best. (We know where that leads us,but that's another story, not here. So perhaps a bad example.)Think of this in terms of taksim, a string breaks, the oud cracks, theperformer is exhausted; in terms of free jazz, a conversation emerges withthe horns, is carried out in song, then words, then leaving the perfor-mance altogether. And in dance: as if we're in this together, as if a timeand a space were being built - rather, inhabited - a form of temporarydwelling called an event.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/03/2012319125340857774.htmlScope, not scaleWhat do medieval monks, Cuban socialists and Wikipedia have in common?Unsustainable economies of scale ought to be replaced by economies ofscope, argues authorChiang Mai, Thailand - The competitive dynamics of industrial capitalismare well-known, and they are all about scale.Producing more of a unit enables companies to drive the unit price downand thus outcompete the competition. Multinational corporations and globalbrands now have very complex value chains, in which various parts of aproduct are mass-produced in different parts of the world.Nevertheless, the system has obvious weaknesses. One weakness is that ittends towards monocultures, both agricultural and industrial. One exampleis the dependence of the Chinese coastal economy on exports.Because competition drives prices down, the dominant western playerschanged their strategy in the 1980s. They abandoned costly westernworkers, moved low-profit industrial production to low-wage countries, andexpanded the intellectual property (IP) regime using patents, copyrightsand trademarks. As Thijs Markus has written, if you want to sell $5 shoesfor $150 in the West, you'd better have one heck of a repressive IP regimein place. Hence the need for SOPA, PIPA, ACTA and other attempts tocriminalise the right to share.ACTA, the new SOPA?But there is, of course, a more fundamental problem: the whole system ofglobalising the advantages of scale fundamentally rests on cheap globaltransportation and, thus, the continuous availability of fossil fuels.Once the era of cheap oil ends, it is more than likely that the wholeregime will come tumbling down. Competing on the basis of scale, even ifit is still effective today, ultimately can only be played by those who donot care about the destruction of our planet. What game can the othersplay? Rising fossil fuel prices mean that innovation and competition haveto find another outlet. Actually, it's about inventing another gamealtogether.This type of economic transition has played out before.The fall of RomeIn the late fifth century, as the Roman Empire was coming to an end,Christian communities prefigured the values of a coming era ofrelocalisation based not on an economy of scale, but on an economy ofscope - in which the cost of production becomes lower through sharedinfrastructure costs.As the Roman Empire decayed and supplies of gold and slaves becamegradually more problematic, the smarter landowners started to free theirslaves, but bound them contractually to the land as "coloni", or serfs.Meanwhile, the increasingly taxed and bankrupted freeholders soughtprotection from the very same landowners. Thus, one side of the equationwas localisation, since the system could no longer bear the global scaleof the empire. But the new post-Roman system also invented a new system ofinnovation, based on the advantages of scope, not scale.Indeed, as the cities were emptying out, the Christians inventedmonasteries as a new type of agrarian knowledge centre. The ChristianChurch actually functioned as a global open design community. Monks andmanuscripts travelled, and with it the many innovations of theworker-monks. While Europe initially decayed as the remnants of the Romanempire crumbled, eventually, after the first European social revolution inthe 10th century, this new system created the seeds for the first medievalindustrial revolution.Between the 10th and 13th centuries, Europe started blossoming once again,based on a unified culture of knowledge. Its population doubled and itsbeautiful cities, many of which were run democratically by the guildcouncils, grew again. Peer-to-peer universities were founded in Bologna inthe 11th century. This first renaissance was based on economies of scope,a unified body of knowledge that European intellectuals and artisans couldbuild on. The guilds may have had their secrets, but they took them withthem wherever cathedrals were built.Cuban innovationsThe same experience happened in 1989, when isolated Cuba was no longerable to rely on the Soviet system's advantages of scale. The Cuban crisisof 1989 prefigured the current world situation: the country experiencedits very own peak oil situation when the Soviets abruptly stoppeddelivering oil at below world market prices.While the Cubans initially went back to using donkeys, its governmentlaunched several interesting initiatives. It allowed some entrepreneurshipby granting more autonomy to local agricultural co-operatives, andmobilised the population's grassroots knowledge. But perhaps mostimportantly, Cuba created several agricultural institutes with the goal ofspreading local innovations. Whatever the other faults of the country'stotalitarian system, this open design experiment succeeded beyond allexpectations. As documented by Bill McKibben and a number ofdocumentaries, Cuba now produces more nutritious and organic food, usingless fossil fuel - because sharing knowledge created economies of scope.Agricultural innovations could spread quickly across the country and beadopted by everyone.Indeed, economies of scale work well in periods of energy "ascent", whenthe supply of energy increases, but work less well in periods of energy"descent". In these circumstances, economies of scope are needed. Thesetypes of economies are exactly what peer production (which encompassesopen knowledge, free culture, free software, open and shared designs, openhardware and distributed manufacturing) is all about.Our current system is based on the belief of infinite growth and theendless availability of resources, despite the fact that we live on afinite planet. Let's call this "pseudo-abundance". The system also holdsthat innovations should be privatised and only available by permission orfor a hefty price, making sharing of knowledge and culture a crime, Let'scall this "enforced artificial scarcity".Peer production methodologies are based on the exact opposite tenets. Peerproduction communities believe that knowledge is a commons, for all toshare. Therefore, no innovation can be withheld from the human populationas a whole. In fact, withholding a life-saving or world-saving innovationis seen as distinctly unethical. Peer production designs for distribution,inclusion and small-scale fabrication. Planned obsolescence - which is afeature and not a bug, of the current system - is totally alien to peerproduction logics. In other words, sustainability is a feature of opendesign communities, not a bug.So what are the economies of scope of this new age? They come in twoflavours: the mutualising of knowledge and the mutualising of tangibleresources.The first principle is easy to understand. When an individual doesn't knowsomething, it's more likely that a community - whether local or virtual -does know. Hence, the mutualising of knowledge and "crowd-acceleratedinnovation" is now a well-known feature of the collaborative economy. Butthe advantage of scope is created when that knowledge is shared, and canbe used by others. With this social innovation, the cost of productionthat depends on knowledge can be dramatically reduced.Take the example of the Nutrient Dense Project. This global community ofagrarian workers and citizen scientists experiments with better nutrientsto obtain better quality food. They carry out joint research on nutrientsin various soils and climate zones, which can benefit not just theparticipating community, but, potentially, the whole of humankind.Strategies based on privatising intellectual property cannot obtain suchadvantages of scope - at least, not at that level. Or take the example ofthe urban homestead of the Dervaes family in Los Angeles, who managed toproduce 6,000 pounds of food annually on a tiny city plot. Because theyshare their productivity innovations, many other people have learned howto improve their own lots."What will the new system look like if economies of scope become the norm,replacing economies of scale as the primary driver of the economy andsocial system?"The second principle, of sharing physical resources, is exemplified by thetrend towards collaborative consumption. The general idea is the same. Imay lack a certain tool, skill or service, but it is likely that someoneelse in a community has it, and that other person could share, rent orbarter it. There's no need to all possess the same tool if we can accessit when we need it. Hence the proliferation of "peer-to-peermarketplaces".Let's take an illustrative example: car-sharing. Car-sharing projects canbe mutualised through the intermediary of a private company which owns thecars (like ZipCar), through peer-to-peer marketplaces that link car usersto one another (like RelayRides), or through public entities (likeAutolib, in Paris). But they all achieve economies of scope. According toa study cited by ZipCar, for every rented car, there are 15 fewer ownedcars on the road. Furthermore, car-sharing members change drove 31 percent less than when they owned a vehicle. So, in 2009 alone, car-sharingdiminished global carbon dioxide emissions by nearly half a milliontonnes.What will the new system look like if economies of scope become the norm,replacing economies of scale as the primary driver of the economy?Global open design communities could be accompanied by a global network ofmicro-factories producing locally, such as the ones that open-source carcompanies like Local Motors and Wikispeed are proposing.This would require organisations to organise our material activities inorder to minimise the "common costs" of the various networks and not justin terms of sharing knowledge. In other words, who will play the role thatthe Catholic Church and its roaming monks played in the Middle Ages? Thiswas not just an open design community, but an effective materialorganisation giving leadership to a whole continent-wide cultural sphere.Do we have a potential peer-to-peer version of this that can operateglobally? The answer will be for a future contribution.Michel Bauwens is a theorist, writer and a founder of the P2P(Peer-to-Peer) Foundation.

Dear all,on 31st of May in Milan, students, precarious, activists and unemployedwill take to the streets towards Piazza Affari, the financial symbol ofItaly to launch the mobilizations of #Blockupy Frankfurt.Here you find the english version of the call:http://www.unicommon.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3554:31th-march-2012-blockupy-milan&catid=132:book-bloc&Itemid=324thanks!claudia***The 31th March we will take to the streets claiming the right to not paythe debt!The refusal of paying the debt of the states is an essential condition tobuild up a future in which the always growing inequalities, between the 99%and the 1%, will not be constantly reproduced.The largest part of the sovereign debts are illegitimate since they havenot been taken out for the interests of the collectivity but in favor tothe private investment funds (first of all the military industry) and tothe financial global oligarchy. Public debts grew considerably in the lastyears to allow the bail out of theprivate banks, the same banks that now speculate on the sovereign debts toimpose policies aimed at boosting profits through dismantling of rights andwelfare state and privatization of the commons.We see as the financial governance leads the national policies imposing acompulsory administration of governments, either directly (as in Greece) orindirectly (as in Italy and Spain), through the diktat of ECB. So, we arewitnessing, in Italy and all over Europe, a frontal attack to the rights ofworkers, the compression of incomes, the growing of blackmail in workplaces(Marchionne Docet) and the worsening of life condition, all justified withthe commitment of paying the debt back. The rhetoric of the crisis becomethe excuse (or the opportunity, it depends on the point of view!) to imposesacrifices and to close spaces of freedom in the name of austerity andancient morality. This is also a way to give legitimacy to the worsestereotypes: welfare is confused with family, women are thrust back home tocare about domestic question, rights of gay, lesbians and trans arepostponed when the crisis will be over, arts and cultures are considered aluxury that we cannot afford. Any political debate is suppressed and hiddenbehind the voice of the technicians!As a mirror of the austerity, the legendary ?recovery? so strongly pursued,is today proposed through the idea of project financing, meaning the bigpublic works as TAV and TEM: the legalization of the waste of public fundsin favor of a corrupted system of power in agreement with mafias, thatdamages the local communities and their history; the break up of thecommons in the name of an imposed ?modernity?. But these strong interestsfind movements of resistance, that articulate in different ways the refusalof the debt-mechanism, under the names of NO TAV and NO TEM: powerfulstruggles that stimulate a large and differentiated participation. In frontof this legitimate resistance, the government of Monti showed itsauthoritarian face through a shameful repressive operation: acriminalization of the movement addressed to suppress any form of dissentand establishing once forever the ?unique doctrine? of neoliberalism.So, it is necessary to give a response which claims the right to dissent,the freedom of movement and the right to collectively refuse the payment ofdebt. Only through this process, actively practiced by the movements andstarting from the audit of the debt itself, we can wonder to build a realpower of opposition which breaks the perverse mechanisms acted by theglobal governance. This step becomes a necessary condition for a true exitfrom the crisis and the first moment of liberation from the dictatorship ofthe finance and form the blackmail it tries to impose.To refuse the debt means to declare the unavailability to renounce to ourrights and the claim for a real extension of them. It means to ask for abasic income released from the work, for the construction of a welfare ableto allow the imagination of a future for new generation. It means to givecentrality to the commons, rescuing them from the wild privatizationimposed by the Troika.It means that we are actually creditors. Creditors for a university as aplace of sharing knowledge, creditors for an income which allow us to befree from the blackmail of the salary, creditors of rights, creditors forthe future which has been undersold to banks and financial institutions.The 31th March we will take to the streets to fight the measures ofAusterity enacted by the ECB, to claim the right to default and the expressour aversion to the preventive detention of the activists NO TAV.The 31th March we will be marching with the banner ?Blockupy Milan: We WillNot Pay Your Debt? and the day before we will make action in our places tolaunch the demonstration.Towards the 1st May, towards the siege of the ECB from the 17th to the19th May in Frankfurt.Freedom for Nic - Freedom for All!