From: Bruce Sterling <bruces {AT} well.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 22:59:27 -0600 (CST)
Sender: owner-nettime-l {AT} basis.Desk.nl
Key concepts: art movements, Internet, reputation economics, arts grants, Europe, Interfund
In a statement issued to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the so-called "John Doe" behind the biggest information leak in history cites the need for better whistleblower protection and has hinted at even more revelations to come.
Titled "The Revolution Will Be Digitized" the 1800-word statement gives justification for the leak, saying that "income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time" and says that government authorities need to do more to address it.
TooBigHasFailed.org consists of a group of activists who think Wall Street could be better.
In
many ways we mirror the efforts of community banks and credit unions in
wanting to end "too big to fail." That is, we support the basic idea of
banking as it should be, but we oppose what Wall Street has become
today - with all of its political favoritism, excessive size, and
reckless speculation.
What's more, we believe that activist efforts can be a force for good in the world.
The two very different types of digital formations examined here make legible the variable ways in which the socio-technical interaction between digital technology and social logics produce distinctive outcomes. These differences point to the possibility that networked forms of power are not inherently distributive, as is often theorized when the focus is exclusively on technical properties.
ReadNotes for Brain Holmes' text: The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique.
ReadThe Negative Dialectics of the Net
In his essay, "Presenting the Unpresentable: The Sublime", Jean-François Lyotard observes that capitalism, technoscience and the pictorial avant-garde of the twentieth century share an 'affinity to infinity'. All three point towards a sensibility that is constitutive for the experience of the modern world.
We call for a #globaldebout day of action on the 15th of May, 2016.
We call on peoples movements across the world to mobilise for justice and real democracy on the weekend of May 15th, 2016 for a #GLOBALDEBOUT. We invite you to come to Paris for an International Gathering of movements at Place de la Republic on May 7 and 8.
Today #46mars (April 15) is just two weeks after one million people mobilized in Paris and the movement Nuit Debout continues to grow. In numerous French and foreign cities, #Nuitdebout (Night on our Feet) is a light in the dark, it gives testimony to our hopes, dreams and common rebellions. Those who have taken the squares in the past and those who are taking them NOW: we know something is happening.
Nuit Debout is a French social movement that began on March 31, 2016, arising out of protests against proposed neoliberal labor reforms known as the "Loi Travail," or the "El Khomri Law".
The movement is centred at Paris's Place de la République, where protestors have held nightly assemblies following the March 31 protest. The movement has spread to dozens of other cities and towns in France and to neighbouring countries in Europe.
[From: Wikipedia.org ]
The four-day conference on the campus of the Universidade Estadual de
Campinas (Unicamp) brought together many key persons from the tactical
media movement of Brazil and some of their counterparts in the
Brasilian government.
The movement is converging from roots in
free radio, free software, hardware hacking, art and social movements.
It is currently focussed around a large-scale project master-minded by
Claudio Prado and supported by the Ministry of Culture: ?Pontos de
Cultura? (Culture Spots) which is aiming to empower up to 600 cultural
projects with free software-based multimedia production and publication
facilities.
Humanity has always invested heavily in any scheme that offers escape from the body. And why not? Material reality is such a mess. Some of the earliest "religious" artefacts, such as Neanderthal ochre burials, already suggest a belief in immortality. All modern (i.e. post-paleolithic) religions contain the "Gnostic trace" of distrust or even outright hostility to the body and the "created" world. Contemporary "primitive" tribes and even peasant-pagans have a concept of immortality and of going-outside-the-body (ec-stasy) without necessarily exhibiting any excessive body-hatred. The Gnostic Trace accumulates very gradually (like mercury poisoning) till eventually it turns pathological. Gnostic dualism exemplifies the extreme position of this disgust by shifting all value from body to "spirit". This idea characterizes what we call "civilization".
ReadNew Political-Economic Possibilities for the Twenty- First Century
The Next System Project is an ambitious multi-year initiative aimed at thinking boldly about what is required to deal with the systemic challenges the United States faces now and in coming decades. Responding to real hunger for a new way forward, and building on innovative thinking and practical experience with new economic institutions and approaches being developed in communities across the country and around the world, the goal is to put the central idea of system change, and that there can be a "next system," on the map.
WikiLeaks releases today the "Investment Chapter" from the secret negotiations of the TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) agreement. The document adds to the previous WikiLeaks publications of the chapters for Intellectual Property Rights (November 2013) and the Environment (January 2014).
Read"We have to be very attentive and united at a state level to fight
against what is a threat to democratic authority and sovereignty,"
-
French government spokesman Francois Baroin speaking out against
wikileaks releasing US diplomatic cables.
"Governments of the
Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from
Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of
the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no
sovereignty where we gather."
- A Declaration of the Independence of
Cyberspace, John Perry Barlow
Friday, October 05, 2001 12:20 PM
subject: Activism After September 11
Dear Friends,
This essay was published today in The Nation. It's
an attempt to discuss what the atrocities of September 11 might mean to
those of us who are publicly critical of corporate power and the
current global economic model. There are no easy answers to this
question so the essay is more of a meditation on symbolism and tone
than a political roadmap.
Take care,
Naomi
The formal political system today faces a new geography of power.
Globalization and the new technologies have contributed to the
shrinking of state authority and the explosion of a whole series of new
actors engaged in governance activities.
The current phase of the world economy is characterized by significant
discontinuities with the preceding periods and radically new
arrangements. This becomes particularly evident in the impact of
globalization on the geography of economic activity and on the
organization of political power. There is an incipient unbundling of
the exclusive authority over its territory we have long associated with
the nation-state.
Translating the abstraction—and banalities—of the Anthropocene into readable cartography has resulted in many past attempts that often ended up reproducing those same qualities. But, as Brian Holmes asserts in this essay, we seem to have found ourselves in a moment where collaboration, engagement, and new forms of knowledge exchange are breaking that deadlock. Tracing his own involvement with artistic practices that both engage with and attempt to represent a “political ecology,” Holmes explains how the evolving, collaborative cartographic practice that brought the "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River map" into being simultaneously reveals and interrogates the power structures of Anthropocence society.
ReadOuter Spaces Conference Series 2017
An analysis of ISIS and its media strategy, the meaning of cyber jihad, and why people enrol as foreign fighters.
The 12th conference of the Disruption Network Lab
Directed by Tatiana Bazzichelli. Studio 1, Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin.
The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realise the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of telepresence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the reinvigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favour of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hypermobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits - most prominently in the intense debate on global warming - citizens and organisations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced telepresence technologies.
Read
