Felix Stalder explores the swarm politics of the 'endlessly fascinating Anonymous story' in an essay written for Le Monde Diplomatique, where it appeared in a slightly edited version and under a different title.
This version of the text was originally distributed via the international nettime mailing list.
Anyone involved with "tactical media" (TM) before its famed christening in 1996 at the Next Five Minutes had to know that naming this cultural/political tendency was going to have some very negative repercussions. The naming was the first step in doing what TM feared the most°Xclaiming cultural territory doomed to house haunting archives. Once given an official title, so many nasty processes could begin - most significantly, the construction of historical narratives. So many narratives already exist explaining this ephemeral, immediate, specific, and deterritorialized process of cultural production that seemed so urgent to so many radical subjects in the early 90s.
PRESS RELEASE
Chobi Mela VI to Open a Portal to a Restive World of Dreams
"All that we value, that we strive to uphold, all that gives us strength, has been made of dreams"
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?
Occupy Sandy gained the attention denied to Occupy Our Homes because it replaced militant Occupy! with "do-it-yourself" Occupy. Feel-good mutual aid displaced attention from the underlying contradiction between public housing and private utilities onto the quick fix of digital media. Occupy Our Homes, on the other hand, confronts the system with its failures ? predatory lending, homelessness, and empty bank-owned houses. The problems it addresses can't be solved by rolling up our sleeves and getting involved; they require political solutions.
ReadOn January 20, 2018, marking the one year anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, Deep Dish TV and Paper Tiger released We Interrupt this Program, a video/web series about the global eco-economic-political crises and rise in far-right politics.
EuroMayDay is a transnational demonstration of precarious and migrant people held the First of May in more than a dozen European cities.
ReadViva La Piracy! An intellectual freedoms documentary based around the interpersonal triumphs, and defeats of the three main characters against the largest industry in the known universe. The media industry.
ReadPrecarisation is the norm, temp work, low salaries, unemployment. Barbed wire, uniforms and camps that protect fortress-europe, excluding and persecuting thousands of women, men and children. Police and armies are in the streets, with their cameras and helicopters. Control is everywhere, terrorist laws are used to legitimize repression. The media keeps the lid on the pot that is starting to boil over. At the same time it is doing its best to convince us to keep up consumption. The serpent is eating its own tail. Our brothers and sisters in the south are paying the bill; and we pay too. Animals becoming extinct show the way to the future generations. And at the same time, the banks are throwing our billions out the window...
We networkers and flextimers of Northern and Southern Europe, autonomously gathered at Middlesex University and determined to go beyond the sclerotizing European Social Forum, solemnly join minds and bodies in the present declaration of conflict against Europe's governments and corporate bureaucracies.
As new technologies make it possible to move more information faster than ever before, we are dazzled by the millions of gigabytes that move across the world in nanoseconds. We are infatuated by bandwidth, digital television by gadgets and gizmos. Yet we hardly ask questions about the quality of the information: what is it that we are communicating? Is it relevant? Will it make the world a better place? And does all this information add up to knowledge?
ReadThe existing use of media so far has been determined by the local, decentralized nature of the campaign. Local groups are adapting, editing and redesigning existing material like research results, lines of argumentation and logos, photos and slogans. The educational material, used by trade unions, schools and churches is very specific and "customized", and therefore cannot be used in campaigns which target the general public.
ReadAmong the many troubling and bizarre features of contemporary politics, the following apparent paradox can be found: Informationalisation has brought along enormous increases in the traceability of the doings and dealings of the powerful. But the disruptive power of the exposure of these activities to the public, today seems especially low. After information technology, the going about of those in power and their abuses, are increasingly documented, and the resulting records are increasingly susceptible to leakage to the public. Email is an obvious example. In the run-up to the last Iraq war, a message by an official of the National Security Agency (NSA), which requested ? aggressive surveillance ? of UN Security Council Members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, made its way to the newspapers.
Declaration of Occupation
As we gather together in solidarity to express a feeling of mass
injustice, we must not lose sight of what brought us together. We write
so that all people who feel wronged by the corporate forces of the world
can know that we are your allies.
The NYC General Assembly is composed of dozens of groups working
together to organize and set the vision for the #occupywallstreet
movement.
They wanted the Germs; they got 'em. - Darby Crash
The use of the symbolic abstraction of fear as an exchangeable sign has
always been a helpful means to justify and manifest the most perverse
needs of authority invested in the expansion of militarized orders and
the erasure of individual autonomy. But in the United States after the
9/11 attacks, fear reigns supreme as a fundamental unit of exchange
across the entire political, economic, and military spectrum.
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".
ReadDICTIONARY 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.
