Search results for 'democracy'

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Blackout-proof the protests 

"Dear friends,

Across the Middle East -- in Bahrain, Libya, Yemen, and more countries every day -- autocratic regimes are trying to crush unprecedented peaceful protests with brutality and blackouts. These countries are poised on the brink between liberation and enormous bloodshed -- and the protesters' ability to reach the eyes of the world could determine the outcomes.

Avaaz is working urgently to "blackout-proof" the protests -- with secure satellite modems and phones, tiny video cameras, and portable radio transmitters, plus expert support teams on the ground -- to enable activists to broadcast live video feeds even during internet and phone blackouts and ensure the oxygen of international attention fuels their courageous movements for change."

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What is Mental Environmentalism? 

A brief history of "The Journal of the Mental Environment."

The core idea behind Adbusters, the essential critique that motivates our struggle against consumer society, is mental environmentalism. And for seventeen years, since the seventh issue of Adbusters was published in 1993, the subtitle of the magazine has been "The Journal of the Mental Environment". But, what exactly is mental environmentalism?

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World Charter of Free Media 

Tunis March 2015
We, communicators and activists committed to multiple emancipatory communication practices across different regions of the world, freely assembled in March 2015 in Tunis, on the occasion of the 4th World Forum on Free Media, organized in the framework of the World Social Forum 2015, adopt this World Charter of Free Media, as the result of our collective reflection initiated in 2013, and as an expression of our resistance, and our commitment to just and emancipatory communication, and our engagement with world developments and humanity.

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Dawn of the Organised Networks 

At first glance the concept of "organised networks" appears oxymoronic. In technical terms, all networks are organised. There are founders, administrators, moderators and active members who all take up roles. Think also back to the early work on cybernetics and the "second order" cybernetics of Bateson and others. Networks consist of mobile relations whose arrangement at any particular time is shaped by the "constitutive outside" of feedback or noise.[1] The order of networks is made up of a continuum of relations governed by interests, passions, affects and pragmatic necessities of different actors. The network of relations is never static, but this is not to be mistaken for some kind of perpetual fluidity. Ephemerality is not a condition to celebrate for those wishing to function as political agents.

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The Invention of the Savage: Colonial Exhibitions and the Staging of the Arab Spring 

Watching a popular uprising in real time was indeed a dramatic experience. As viewers tuned in (or streamed in) to the violence, courage, and uncertainty of events in North Africa this year, many of them had the impression of witnessing the "actual" events, free from the framing tactics and analytical bias often found on the six o'clock news. A host of new media celebrities became household names as they reported live from Tahrir, and news outlets such as Al-Jazeera saw an unprecedented rise in viewership. Spectators were made to believe that a return to the event "itself" was once again possible after decades of being locked into what Jean Baudrillard called the hyper-real. The revolution in-and-of-itself seemed to unfold before our eyes, creating a fetish for real-time revolt.

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Transcending Post-Communism? 


?In Central and (South-) Eastern Europe the cultural landscape has entered the Post-Soros Era, while still awaiting the arrival of the widely expected EU patronage for the arts and the civil sector ?? (from the original description of the ?Enduring Post Communism? panel)

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    The dark side of Camping 

    Camping can be so nice. Crawling out of dewy plastic in the early morning, with a pinch of sleep still in your eyes, braving the unbearably hot sun, yet invigorated and ready to take on the day with as much indifference as possible to the ongoing struggle with nature. Surely everybody knows that the secret of success is to fight the laws of petty bourgeois civilisation with minimal equipment and therefore gain a flexibility that is capable of suspending the otherwise ruling power relations for a clearly defined amount of time.

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    Dictionary of War - Trondheim Edition 

    Due to the impact of the cloud of volcanic ashes that lead to the cancellation of flights across Europe the 10th edition of the Dictionary of War will not take place on April 17th, 2010 in Trondheim (Norway). It will be postponed to a later date in the course of the exhibition "Manufacturing Today".

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    Dictionary of War - Idea 

    DICTIONARY OF WAR is a collaborative platform for creating 100 concepts on the issue of war, to be invented, arranged and presented by scientists, artists, theorists and activists at four public, two-day events in Frankfurt, Munich, Graz and Berlin. The aim is to create key concepts that either play a significant role in current discussions of war, have so far been neglected, or have yet to be created.

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    Political Ecology Begins When We Say "Black Lives Matter" 

    "They say it's a joke they say it's a game." The slogan was launched on the Chicago streets by the group We Charge Genocide, in the middle of a demo demanding reparations for victims of police torture. The folks on the street chanted those words, we hurled them out of our mouths in staccato bursts, while looking round at the passers-by who pretended not to notice. What the chant means is either enigmatic, or it's painfully obvious. There is a kind of disdain that minimizes a death or a beating or a torture or a life sentence for black people in the name of lawfulness, efficiency, morality and humanist ideals. That kind of disdain has made democracy impossible in the US - and other places too.

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    Electronic Civil Disobedience, Simulation, and the Public Sphere 

    What counts in the long run is the "use" one makes of a theory....We must start from existing practices in order to retrace the fundamental flaws.
    --Felix Guattari, "Why Marx and Freud No Longer Disturb Anyone"

    In 1994, when Critical Art Ensemble first introduced the idea and a possible model of electronic civil disobedience (ECD) as another option for digital resistance, the collective had no way of knowing what elements would be the most practical, nor did it know what elements would require additional explanation. After nearly five years of field testing of ECD by various groups and individuals, its information gaps have become a little more obvious and can finally be addressed.

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    Governmentality of Information 

    The American military network ARPAnet was conceived as a way to maintain uninterrupted communications in the event of nuclear war. Ancestor of the Internet and foundation of the Global Information Infrastructure, ARPAnet springs from exactly the same source as the "push­button war" that lay behind it: the change of scale provoked by the early 20th century discoveries in physics, within an industrial society capable of organizing the productivity - including the scientific productivity - of thousands of agents. Here, no doubt, is the real birthplace of the information society: a society massively penetrated by the sciences and technologies of information and telecommunications, using them to carry out the design of the planet or at least, that of its components (with design replacing politics). A society whose governmentality entails the knowledge of the real, that is to say, the transformation of reality into information. A society whose governmentality unfolds between its smallest common denominators (atomic, electronic, magnetic, genetic, chemical) and its largest common denominators (climate, planet, solar system), by way of laws, formulas and norms that determine its productivity, means, and possible destinies.

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    Prisoners of Dissent — Locked Up for Exposing Crimes 

    Berlin · May 12 2017:

    Conference series by Disruption Network Lab e.V.

    Whistleblowers and truth-tellers persecuted for blowing the whistle, critical thinkers and activists meet to discuss countermeasures to detention and repression.

    The 11th event of the Disruption Network Lab to celebrate the upcoming freedom of Chelsea Manning and launch the new book by John Kiriakou (CIA anti-torture whistleblower). Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli.

    With: John Kiriakou (CIA anti-torture whistleblower, USA); Annie Machon (former MI5 intelligence officer, UK/BE);
    Annegret Falter (Chair Whistleblower Netzwerk e.V., DE); Magnus Ag (Senior Programm Officer, Freemuse, DK/DE); Silvanos Mudzvova (Artist Protection Fund Fellow in residency at The University of Manchester, ZWE/UK).

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