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
"World War III will be a guerilla information war, with no division between military and civilian participation." -- motto of Tactical Media Crew, borrowed from Marshall McLuhan
Read01. These are precarious times. These are eventful times. Let us note some of the symptoms of this instability. There is September 11,and the prospect of a new form of American empire that uses September11 as its pretext. There is the global stock market slide, triggered by the collapse of American tech stocks, which altered the lives of chip-makers in Korea and Coltan miners in the Congo. These are instances of what I call weird global media events. They are events because they are singular. They are media events because they happen in a vectoral space of communication. They are global media events because they call a world into being. They are weird global media events because they defy explanation. They subsume every explanation as mere ripples and eddies in their wake.
Read(C) Mark Dery 1996; all rights reserved; reproduction in any medium without author's written permission forbidden.
On Mute and the Cultural Politics of the Net
There is a last enterprise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or rather, above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience. (Bergson, 1991: 184).
ReadMany are the social, political or economic problems in Brazil.
Socially, there's an extremely unequal distribution of wealth. Such a
big social unequality is reflected, for example, in the extreme
differences between the center and the periphery in the big cities,
regional unequalities, criminality, racism. Besides that, we live in an
unnoficial police state that acts in defense of the elites, murdering
and arresting poorer citzens, because of the color of their skin or
social condition.
10 solutions/facts plus one.
A citizen response to the recent attacks on freedoms in the name of an
incoherent concept that carries the name "intellectual property".
"Contemporary civilization differs in one particularly distinctive feature from those which preceded it: speed. The change has come about within a generation," noted the historian Marc Bloch, writing in the nineteen-thirties. This situation brings in its wake a second feature: the accident. The progressive spread of catastrophic events do not just affect current reality, but produce anxiety and anguish for coming generations.
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.
"Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the "indignados" protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest. Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a "cyberspace" detached from physical reality. Instead, social media is used as part of a project of re-appropriation of public space, which involves the assembling of different groups around "occupied" places such as Cairo's Tahrir Square or New York's Zuccotti Park."
Activist Media Tomorrow*
* BH: When I wrote this text five years ago, it really was not clear whether
the swarming tactics of the counter-globalization movement would get a
"second chance." But they have, and now the subtitle could be "activist
media today."
What happened at the turn of the millennium, when a myriad of recording
devices were hooked up to the Internet and the World Wide Web became an
electronic prism refracting all the colors of a single anti-capitalist
struggle? What kind of movement takes to the barricades with samba bands
and videocams, tracing an embodied map through a maze of virtual
hyperlinks and actual city streets? The organizational aesthetics of the
networked movements was called "tactical media," a concept that mixed
the quick-and-dirty appropriation of consumer electronics with the
subtle counter-cultural anthropology of Michel de Certeau. The idea was
to evoke a new kind of popular subjectivity, constitutionally "under the
radar," impossible to identify, constantly shifting with the inventions
of digital storytelling and the ruses of open-source practice. Too bad
so much of this subversive process was frozen into a single seductive
phrase.
Thesis 0
"What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good idea!"
(after Mahatma Gandhi's famous quip on "Western Civilization")
WikiLeaks is one of the defining stories of the internet, which means
by now, one of the defining stories of the present, period. At least
four large-scale trends which permeate our societies as a whole are
fused here into an explosive mixture whose fall-out is far from clear.
Reflections on Public Space, Light and Conflict
There is an unshakable belief in the idea that what defines the mass
media is that they produce or constitute, in all their different ways,
a public. So while there is agreement on the fact that not every public
sphere is a communication medium, many people tend to think that every
communication medium constitutes a public sphere - the most recent and
prominent candidate being, of course, the Internet. But is this claim
as to the public quality of all media, hegemonic as it may be today,
really tenable?
Keywords: robots / contestation / public space / expression management
When looking at technology, we barely see machinery, let alone the people who made it. We seem to take technology and its development for a given, neglecting the process of its creation. We live off the fruits of the tree, without examining its roots.
ReadWe understand the end of something all too easily in the negative sense as a mere stopping, as the lack of constitution, perhaps even as decline and impotence, the end suggests the completion and the place in which the whole of history is gathered in its most extreme possibility.[1]
ReadArthur Kroker, Canadian media theorist and is the author of 'ThePossessed Individual', 'Spasm' and 'Hacking the Future'. Over the pastyears he, together with Marilouise Kroker, were often in Europe andmade appearances at Virtual Futures, V-2, Eldorado/Antwerpen, etc.Recently, they have also been discovered in German-speaking countries.Both are noted for their somewhat compact jargon, which made theirmessage appear to drown somewhat in overcomplex code. But "DataTrash"`(1994) changed all that. The long treck through the squashydiscourses had not been in vain. Firmly rooted in European philosophy,yet not submerged, Arthur Kroker has found his topic: the virtual class.
What we've learnt from the Net and how we can extrapolate it to all spaces of struggle.
(Some thoughts geared towards action, compiled for the Radical Community Manager courses that we organise at X.net)