Subject: Re: all that is solid melts into airwaves - msg#00046

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a stock market in life

Hi everybody, I've recently created a system called "a stock market in life". I belive that it can contribute to the discussions on immaterial labor, collective creativity, social software, and techno-cultural production. http://market.openio.org "a stock market in life" is a market that uses the value generated by the immaterial labor of visitors at different urban spaces in Oklahoma City, Boston, Munich, and Istanbul. These spaces will be connected with each other via a streaming video server for the duration of the Upgrade! A Day in Life event. For each location, sensors mounted in the entrance register how many people are in the room at any one time and send this information to the Stock Market central server. The number of visitors define the fair value for each place. Each location has 100 shares and the shares gain or lose value depending on the speculations in the market and the number of people in the local rooms. You can contribute to the value either by just visiting the physical locations or by trading in the online stock market. The market is open now, you can sell and buy shares using the money you will have when you register. Thank you, burak

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self-associated digest [x2: hardie, hopkins]

Re: <nettime> "in association with nettime.org" "martin hardie" <martin.hardie-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> John Hopkins <jhopkins-sH3bNdiDpjNH4x6Dk/4f9A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 15:55:31 +0100 From: "martin hardie" <martin.hardie-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: <nettime> "in association with nettime.org" netime by poll??? a nettime poll tax? On 11/29/06, Florian Cramer <fc-nettime-2S8i3W4CjuIxrlqPcB8adw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Am Mittwoch, 29. November 2006 um 06:09:10 Uhr (+0100) schrieb Geert > Lovink: > > > > A one-day conference in association with nettime.org <www.nettime.org> > > > which explores the geographical and social structures of workers in > > > the Creative Industries and particularly the New Media sector > > How can a conference be made "in association with nettime.org" without > any poll on the list? All the more when it perpetuates that terribly > stupid meme of the "Creative Industries"? Or is this event a fraud and > refers to nettime without any authorization? > > It it time for some tactical media use of ubermorgen.com's "Injunction > Generator" against the organizers of that event? <...> -- #+34 666519359 # #http://openflows.org/~auskadi/ # #http://auskadi.civiblog.org # #http://auskadi.tk # #IRC: aussieman on #gentlegeeks at freenode.net # The lover wants the loved one with all its predicates, its being such as it is. The lover desires the as only insofar as it is such -this is the lover's particular fetishism. Giorgio Agamben The Coming Community - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Wed, 29 Nov 2006 12:18:12 -0700 From: John Hopkins <jhopkins-sH3bNdiDpjNH4x6Dk/4f9A@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: <nettime> "in association with nettime.org" > CYBERSALON @ THE DANA CENTRE > DIGITAL WORK & CREATIVE MAPPING > The Science Museum's Dana Centre, 165 Queen's Gate, South Kensington, > London SW7 5HE <www.danacentre.org.uk> > Date: March 07 - to be announced > Cost: Cost and booking details to be announced > Nearest tubes: South Kensington/Gloucester Road On the front page of the Dana Center "The Dana Center is sexing up science for the masses" sheesh! And I find no mention of this project in the calendar for March 2007. > > > A one-day conference in association with nettime.org <www.nettime.org> >> > which explores the geographical and social structures of workers in >> > the Creative Industries and particularly the New Media sector at one level -- as an individual who doesn't often identify myself as a 'nettimer', more simply a participant in the nettime network -- who cares? although it would be interesting to know WHO exactly from nettime is facilitating this 'association.' on the other hand it could be interpreted as a cheap tactic of career promotion of an individual climber. what about insisting that there be a public synchronous forum available to nettime 'associatess' to actually input into the conference space... >How can a conference be made "in association with nettime.org" without >any poll on the list? All the more when it perpetuates that terribly >stupid meme of the "Creative Industries"? Or is this event a fraud and >refers to nettime without any authorization? good questions. I believe we are entitled to answers! Cheers John - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

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all that is solid melts into airwaves

All That is Solid Melts into Airwaves Theory and Event Vol. 9 No. 2 2006 Deborah Halbert http://muse.jhu.edu.libproxy.newschool.edu/journ als/tae/v009/9.2halbert.html#top McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. pp.196. $21.95 (hc). ISBN 0674015436. 1 Wark begins his reformat of The Communist Manifesto by suggesting that "a double spooks the world, the double of abstraction (1)." Unlike the specter of communism, which powerful forces aligned against to destroy, the double of abstraction is both feared and revered by those in charge (1). It is the hacker, a class that isn't a class so much as an abstraction (6), at the heart of the conflict. However, the class conflict involving the hacker will not be the product of collective action as understood in the past. Instead, mass politics will become a "politics of multiplicity" where "all the productive classes can express their virtuality." (43) If this sounds a bit, well, abstract, that is because A Hacker Manifesto reads like a Baudrillardian simulation of Marx. Wark's manifesto, a manifesto of abstraction, virtuality, and third nature, melts into the (virtual) air. 1 The Hacker Manifesto is a trip ? intellectually and conceptually. The book is organized by paragraph, not by page number and is fractal in its organization ? non-linear often spiraling back to points made earlier where meaning can be derived not only from the text as a whole, but from each paragraph and each sentence. This is a much-needed book that recognizes the importance of intellectual property to contemporary capitalism and situates it within the ongoing tension created by the productive class of the information age (the hacker class) and the controlling class (the vectoral class). 1 A Hacker Manifesto enlighteningly describes class struggle in the information age more than it states principles; the primary focus is to make manifest the dimensions of class struggle in the globalized information age. Wark takes the concept of the hacker far beyond computer programming and applies it (writ large) to any individual working in the economy of information and creating under the rubric of modern capitalism. The hacker class is the new productive class (36). 1 It is difficult to know what course of action would work for a 'class' that coalesces under the banner of "workers of the world untied (6)," or what a manifesto would say to this 'class.' Wark doesn't seem concerned with providing answers. "Even this manifesto, which invokes a collective name, does so without claiming or seeking authorization, and offers for agreement only the gift of its own possibility (213)." Wark's gift is to hack the present and open the possibilities for a future where domination and exploitation can be resisted, not, necessarily, to show us the way to that future. 1 While the book is a trip, this review only offers a dull guide ? I can tell the story of the book, outline its argument and provide an assessment; however, I cannot capture the essence and poetry of the writing. The book does not set out to make a linear point but instead introduces you to a new world ? a world whirling with the concepts necessary to find meaning in the flows that make up the current global political economy. While Marxists may criticize Wark for postmodernizing Marx and postmodernists may criticize him for recovering categories such as class, and while it is not entirely clear that walking the line between the two always works, reading this book is a trip worth taking, even if you don't like the destination. 1 Here is at least part of the story told by Wark: History is a series of class struggles with each struggle focusing on an increasingly abstract form of property. The most recent permutation of the struggle over property is between the hacker and the vectoral class who seeks to control flows and vectors of information (100?110). With each further abstraction of property ? from land to information ? ownership needs to rely even more deeply upon the law to enforce what is clearly a 'legal fiction (108).' When the vectoral class controls the economy, culture itself is colonized and sold back to the workers as a commodity (110). Intellectual property becomes the key to a vectoral economy and hackers play a crucial role in the construction of intellectual property and in the resistance to the rapidly growing control of the vecotoral class (197). 1 To the hacker, "information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains (126)." Through previous stages of ownership, information remained socialized as a commons because past controlling classes focused upon monopolizing land and industry. As information becomes a commodity, what was once a commons is forcibly privatized (117). As information becomes intellectual property, the vectoral class creates the chains that further enslave humanity (132). 1 The hacker as a producer of information plays a dual role in contemporary capitalism. First, the vectoral class is dependent upon the hacker to create intellectual property for commodification. However, the process of producing ever more abstract property creates the seeds for the undoing of the vectoral class. "[T]he uncanny capacity of the hacker class to mint new properties for commodification, threatens to hack into existence new forms of production beyond commodification, beyond class rule (163)." However, while Wark suggests the conditions for true freedom are on the horizon (footnote, 165), the hacker class must gain class consciousness. To do so, there must be some sort of alignment with the farming and working classes which, while not ascendant, continue to exist throughout the underdeveloped and overdeveloped world (173). It is the hacker, unlike the farmer or the worker, that designs the tools of production used to enslave us and the hacker that can also design tools "more amenable to autonomy and cooperation than monopoly and competition (120)." While Wark provides no concrete examples in the text (and only some in the footnotes), it is clear that the free software movement is an example of the hacker class hacking the concept of intellectual property. 1 The tension between the vectoral class and the hacker class is global. As the vectoral class comes to dominate, the overdeveloped world's state structure is subsumed under the emerging global power (360) and comes to serve the interest of this global vectoral power. The vectoral class is not located only in the overdeveloped world, but has nodes throughout the underdeveloped world as well. Vectoralists in the underdeveloped world appropriate traditional cultures and feed then into the commodity cycle. At this point, "global vectoral interests learn to duplicate this appearance of authenticity (372)." While the overdeveloped world's vectoral class aggressively protects their intellectual property, they freely appropriate the intellectual property of the underdeveloped world to feed the engines of production necessary to keep the global economy running. 1 The dark side to globalization, at least for the overdeveloped economies, is that due to the pervasive "military entertainment complex" (118), "the productive classes have seen what the world has to offer, and they want it all. There is no stopping them . . . the good life of consumption and equivocal liberty that everyone now sees courtesy of telesthesia, the rest of the world is coming to get it, ready or not (240)." The coming revolution is a global revolution and according to Wark, the biggest hack of them all is breaching the envelope of the state (88). 1 So what is to be done? The struggle for freedom continues along all lines ? farmers against pastoralists, workers against industrialists, and (hopefully) hackers against vectoralists. There is reason to believe that resistance will be centered in the underdeveloped world where struggles by farmers and workers are more closely aligned with hackers (footnote 170). Commodifiying information is a form of enslavement and class rule imposing scarcity on knowledge must be abolished (137). Wark draws upon the revolts of 1989 as "the seed stock for future movements (243)." The politics of the future can take one of two forms: to retreat into the envelope, meaning the imagined past of the sovereign state, or to move forward into the unknown (246). It is clear Wark approves of moving forward into what he calls "third nature," or nature as information (153). The future is one for expressive politics, which seek to undermine the concept of property, in both its market and bureaucratic state forms (253, 256). For Wark, there is no violent overthrow ? there is simply "an alternative practice of everyday life (257)." 1 If only it were so easy. It is possible to envision a world where information is free and where the vectoralist class discovers a "scarcity of scarcity (312)." However, the ever-present power of property control could equally lead to a future where the vectoral class "struggles to find new 'business models' for information, but ends up settling for its only reliable means of extracting a surplus from its artificial scarcity, through the formation of monopolies over every branch of its production (312)." The movement towards ever wider monopolies in the music, movie, computer software and pharmaceutical industries suggest that a world where information is free remains far away. 1 One is left wondering: where are the bodies of people who are exploited, who work and die in a world of such abstraction? As we all float into increasingly abstract identities, virtual worlds, and multiple perspectives, do we become free? When information is free are we free as well? When the envelopes of past sovereign states are finally shed, when information scarcity is eliminated and surplus can be utilized to provide culture free to all have we become liberated? Wark does not forget the struggles of the farming and working classes and constructs his analysis in light of the struggles of the developing world, but his crypto-Marxist structure by default focuses more on information than on land and the productive forces of industrial capital. While one can hope that these classes can unite (or untie) to form a critique of property as a whole, it may be only information that is liberated in the end. 1 Wark identifies property as the key unit of analysis important to transforming the future. He claims there are two errors made by past Marxist analysis. First, placing theory in the hand of a worker's movement and "fetishizing the economic infrastructure of the social formation (387)." Second, placing theory in the hand of a leftist academic elite who "fetishized the superstructures of culture and ideology (387)." Wark correctly points to the importance of "new kinds of class struggle now emerging under the sign of the domination of information as property (387), something ignored by earlier interpretations of class struggle. Focus on property is key, and in the information age a focus on intellectual property and resistance to the formation of this newly abstract form of intellectual property is necessary. 1 I could not agree more that intellectual property should be resisted and if possible eliminated. Wark has crystallized in this short text an essential message for critical intellectual property scholars interested in understanding the class dimensions of intellectual property. While he primarily relies upon Boyle, Lessig and Stallman, it is clear that he is taking on not only contemporary Marxist analysis, but intellectual property scholars who have not gone far enough in their critique of the system. 1 To that end, it is necessary to point out an important performative contradiction that is deeply disturbing and to some degree undermines the entire thrust of the text. Wark offers a compelling critique of our current educational structure and the commodification of knowledge. Within this critique he quotes Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist, "the very moment philosophers proclaim ownership of their ideas, they are allying themselves to the powers they are criticizing (069)." To Wark this means, "to hack is to express knowledge in any of its forms. Hacker knowledge implies, in its practice, a politics of free information, free learning, the gift of the result in a peer-to-peer network (070)." So why does Wark publish through Harvard University Press and assign them the copyright? How is the information in this book free? The answer should be obvious ? it is not. As the property of Harvard University, only they can give permission to distribute the book. 1 Earlier versions of A Hacker Manifesto have appeared in other venues (Critical Secret, Feelergauge, Fibreculture Reader, Sarai Reader, and Subsol are listed on the copyright page), but a book of this power should not be copyrighted. A colleague reminded me that Marx faced the same dilemma ? his livelihood was made possible in a time of industrial production where the exploitation of the working class helped support his work. It is also important to admit that I fall into the same trap ? my recent book Resisting Intellectual Property is copyrighted and I have no legal control over its circulation (though resistance is still possible). However, there are options available to modern hackers (remember, hackers help produce the vectoral system) that may not have been open to scholars in the industrial world. 1 First, one can stop worrying about property and let work freely circulate in the public domain. However, public domain works are easily appropriated and commodified by the vectoral class because permission is not necessary. A second strategy might be to use the creative commons (www.creativecommons.org) ? a licensing scheme that allows authors to circulate their works and retain control without entering the centralizing system of intellectual property. However, creative commons doesn't destroy copyright, but simply changes who owns intellectual work. There is also a growing open access movement where on-line journals utilize the power of the Internet to provide access without barriers. Ultimately, resistance of the vectoral class begins when those of us who make intellectual property eschew ownership in favor of the free circulation of ideas. However, resisting intellectual property is the easy part. If we are to follow the argument of this book, undoing other types of property relations will be a much more difficult task. *** Debora Halbert is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Otterbein College. She is the author of two books on intellectual property law. The first, Intellectual Property in the Information Age: The Politics of Expanding Property Rights (Quorum, 1999) traces the expansion of copyright in the information age. Her second book, Resisting Intellectual Property (Routledge, 2005), maps the growing resistance to the expanding nature of copyright and patent law. She can be reached at dhalbert <at> otterbein.edu. Copyright © 2006, Deborah Halbert and The Johns Hopkins University Press ____________________________________ McKenzie Wark http://www.ludiccrew.org

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Racism and Sexism at Citizendium

A month or two ago I was invited to join in building a new repository of knowledge on the Internet, a spin-off from Wikipedia called Citizendium. The chief attraction of Citizendium (also called CZ) was that articles would be authored by laypersons and experts alike, but editorially approved by experts -- thus creating an environment of authority and reliability that Wikipedia, with its lack of quality control, could not match. I strongly support public intellectual work and I am all for making reliable information and analysis widely available to all who seek it. I joined CZ with high hopes, and with the goal of recruiting others to participate in a project I felt could be very useful and rewarding. My initial contributions impressed Larry Sanger enough that he invited me to join the Executive Board of Citizendium, and I accepted. I wrote to colleagues and friends about CZ and invited them to participate -- and especially appealed to African Americanist and feminist scholars, since that is my own area of expertise. I asked, in my announcements, what Wikipedia might have looked like if there were significant participation from black or women scholars from its inception. I assumed -- wrongly -- that Ethnic studies and Women's studies scholars would be welcome at CZ. I was gravely disappointed. We are not welcome, and our disciplines are not welcome. We may participate only if we are willing to subsume our work under the headings of other, "more traditional" disciplines. CZ as conceived of and enforced by Sanger is a strongly conservative endeavor, and adamantly opposed to progressive scholarship. I am withdrawing from Citizendium because of the racist and sexist policy put in place by Larry Sanger, who claims that the disciplines of Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies do not belong in the list of top level categories in Citizendium, or as individual categories at all. Sanger has unilaterally decided that all race and gender topics should be split up under traditional disciplinary headings, so that there will be, for example, a sub-group of "African American Literature," and "African American History," but no category -- at any level -- in African American studies, and he embraces the same tactic of fragmenting other Ethnic Studies and Gender Studies. The fact that his broad strokes of exclusion primarily effect women and minority scholars does not seem to matter to him. Here is what Sanger has to say about gender and race studies: "I take the view that most of these university departments are inherently cross-disciplinary and--here I know I am treading on thin ice and saying what few dare to say--highly politicized themselves. Well, I do not want to make CZ "politically correct," i.e., appealing especially to one (largely American/Western/Left) ideology. I really do want to make it neutral, and that means **not** creating special groups for ideologically-motivated groups." [posted November 16, 2006 10:29:59 AM MST to the Citizendium Editors listserv] The notion that traditional disciplines are race and gender "neutral" is at the heart of Sanger's rationalization for exclusion. The credibility of this argument has been (for anyone knowledgeable in the those areas) thoroughly destroyed over the last thirty or forty years, as accumulated quantitative and qualitative evidence has shown that despite many white male scholars' protestations to the contrary, power and authority have remained firmly gripped in their hands. The claim that clearly biased disciplines are "neutral" is a plain and simple power play, and an excuse to perpetuate the patterns of exclusion that have been in place for hundreds of years. The tactic of fragmenting ethnic and gender studies into small, minority sub- categories under the control of larger white and male dominated groups is also well understood, both by the white men who employ the tactic to their advantage and by the minorities and women who are disadvantaged by it. The idea that Gender and Ethnic Studies are "political" and enforce "political correctness," while somehow traditional disciplines are above politics and do not enforce an inequitable Status Quo would be laughable if it were not so pernicious and injurious to the people who are oppressed by sexism and racism -- women and minorities. Once again, this is a case of a white male scholar with no experience in either race or gender studies legislating, with broad strokes, how those disciplines will be represented in an academic endeavor he hopes will be of major importance. He does it with no regard for the current state of scholarship in those fields, or the expertise of their practitioners -- an irony in an academic endeavor that claims to rely on expertise for its authority. Expertise apparently only counts if it agrees with the naive opinions of the untutored white man in charge. Sanger claims that his version of neutrality is rooted in Enlightenment principles. But as anyone working race and gender studies knows very well, white men have traditionally only applied Enlightenment principles to each other. It is the work of women and minorities that has extended those principles and challenged those who espouse them to apply them more and more broadly... and it is women and minorities who have risked their livelihoods and even their lives as they have engaged in over 250 years of activist work dedicated to building communities and nations that are free not only in principle, but in fact. By refusing to acknowledge Ethnic Studies and Gender studies as essential top-level disciplinary categories, Sanger is attempting to roll back our progress towards freedom and equality, as conservatives everywhere have been trying to roll back all of our gains. Frankly, I am embarrassed to have had anything to do with CZ and I will be publicly critiquing Sanger's policy in various venues. I hope that all supporters of race and gender studies will join with me in boycotting CZ, and with protesting Sanger's decision. You can find more information on Citizendium at http:// www.citizendium.org. Most of my discussions with Sanger took place on the Editors listserv, but there are a few on the Citizendium Forum pages: http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,259.msg2165.html#msg2165 http://forum.citizendium.org/index.php/topic,251.msg2164.html#msg2164 Kali Tal http://www.kalital.com