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Anna | 1 Jan 21:02

Happy new 1984


... is a slogan I heard a lot during the last days at Chaos
Communication Congress (24c3). In fact there was a strong
demonstration as a part of the congress with 500-1000 people
(depending on the sources) against data retention and surveillance:
the German data retention law was introduced last year and came
into effect today. Very nice action in the middle of after-x-mas
shopping at Berlin Alexanderplatz. There's some videos and pictures.
(Conference recordings and more links below)

During the demonstration as well as during the conference itself I
was surprised, and glad, to find that the links between hacking,
surveillance, technology and the war on terror seemed almost
self-evident. Article 129a, the German law to prosecute terrorism,
was mentioned in the demonstration when everybody chanted "We are
all 129a" (it rhymes better German) as well as several talks and
e.g. during the famous 'Hacker Jeopardy' game show. This year a new
category was introduced: 'Brave new world'; and at least one question
referred directly to terrorism.

My lecture on living with surveillance and blogging about it was
starting point for a number of discussions. Isn't it a contradiction
to suffer from police surveillance, to not want to have your privacy
violated on the one hand and then to go out and seek the most of
publicity through blogging and talking at an event like the 24c3?

Interesting point and in fact this did made me think about whether
I actually wanted to blog for at least a month before I started. I
am very fond of my privacy. I still advise people to encrypt and
to anonymise as much as possible, and luckily the Federal Court of
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David Golumbia | 2 Jan 15:49
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Re: Critique of the "Semantic Web"


Having written about these issues for quite a while, including in my
paper "Becoming-Encoded" at the 2006 MLA "Code" panel, I apologize for
having failed to check the list for a few weeks at the end of this
semester and missing this important discussion. I could not agree
more with Florian's perspective (indeed I think it is similar to the
perspective I offered in my paper and elsewhere), and that one can and
should go even further.

1) Where and how did the idea develop that something like the
"semantic web" COULD work? I argue that it stems exactly from
a powerful rationalist philosophy that walks hand-in-hand with
computers, and that it exists today for exactly the same reason Strong
AI once existed (and in some quarters still exists). This is most
apparent in the *goals* listed by Semantic Web advocates: they are
almost always examples of removing human decision-making from the
circuit of social decisions.

2) Along with the philosophical problems in building even relatively
general ontologies (as opposed to highly local ones, which certainly
do work, though often to the effect of *limiting* rather than
*increasing* the typical functions of the underlying data, there is a
profound question of language. In what language should tags--whether
on the surface or in the code--be written? So far they are largely
English, probably even moreso than most code is. Assuming that we can
cluster tags in different languages presumes the kind of universal
translation that will never happen (again, a subject on which I and
many others have written extensively). I would argue that there
is a profound desire on the part of many advocates--even if it is
unconscious--to keep the web "English-only," & that this ties to the
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pavlos hatzopoulos | 4 Jan 14:35
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The social web and its social contracts


The social web and its social contracts: Some notes on social antagonism in
netarchical capitalism
by Michel Bauwens

http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=3D261

When we talk about the social web, we have to be careful about which aspect
it is that we are talking about:

   - Are we talking about its technological affordances: the new levels
   of participation that it allows
   - Are we talking about the social web as a process of direct creation
   of value by produser communities?
   - Are we talking about the associated business models?

*1.*

The social web facilitates an unprecedented level of social sharing, but it
does so mostly through the vehicle of proprietary platforms. The issue
therefore is to clearly distinguish the invisible architecture, i.e. the
'protocol' of the facilitating technology, which needs to be separated from
the ownership issue as such. This protocol needs to be sufficiently open to
allow for the process of sharing to occur, but at the same time, it has to
be 'sufficiently closed' to create scarcities that can be exploited by the
platform owners, and this is a clear line of tension between the user
community and the corporate hierarchy. For platform owners, openness will
always be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is beneficial to open u=
p
and create a stronger and wider commons, from which more value will be
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h w | 4 Jan 04:58
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Re: Google distorts reality


> 
>    1. Re: Google distorts reality (chad scov1lle)

wrote:

>The path to utopia is paved with blood.

The path to utopia leads [nowhere.erehwon]

Utopia assumes a better future. This is a new idea, and perhaps one of
the first "modern" ideas. Utopia invented collapse: as a vision of a
great future implies missing the mark, it also permits dystopia. Buck
Rogers > Blade Runner.

The opposite position is utopia in the past - Eden, Atlantis, "the
Golden Age". In that case, calamity is the order of the day, and one
cannot assume a better tomorrow.

Columbus 1492. Utopia 1514.

Discovery of another world of resources: unlimited prospects of growth
and plunder: it is possible to think of utopia.

Petroleum Discovery Peak 1962. Production flattens 2005. Oil $100
barrel 2007.

A vision of fewer resources, a future of limits and depopulation, a
return to calamity as the order of the day. Utopia is shelved as
wishful thinking, an idle phantasy.
(Continue reading)

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Jamie King | 4 Jan 20:11

STEAL THIS FILM II


Dear Nettime,

We recently released STEAL THIS FILM II over at  
<www.stealthisfilm.com>, and you can also watch it on Google Video,  
Stage6, Joox, YouTube etc. if you like. It includes -- however briefly  
-- an interview with a Nettime moderator ;)

There is  a brief report on our experiences of distributing STEAL THIS  
FILM on my (here-again/gone-again) blog:

  http://jamie.com/2008/01/03/the-future-doesnt-care-about-your-bank-balance-but-the-11000-do/

And a somewhat more constrained one on Alan Toner's, Knowfuture:

http://knowfuture.wordpress.com/2007/12/31/steal-this-film-2-round-up/

Steal it, watch it and let us know what you think!

Happy New Year,

Jamie
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Felix Stalder | 4 Jan 23:56
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review: Steal this Film, II


Steal this Film, II

The other night, I watched "Steal this Film, II" [1]. The first thing
I noticed is how extremely efficient bittorent can be. I downloaded
the HD version, 1.71 GB, in less than three hours over my plain
vanilla cable line and leaving the connection open for the rest of the
night, I distributed the equivalent of 2.5 copies to others.

This experience reinforces the main point of the film: file-sharing --
a technologically super-charged, deep cultural practice -- is beyond
the point where it can be stopped. The old media industry has lost
control over the distribution of content, radically reducing the power
of the current gate keepers to determine who can access the archives,
who can produce new works, and who can reach an audience with those
works.

The film's premise is that file-sharing is transforming the basic
mechanism of how culture and information is distributed with
consequences as profound as the transformation brought about by the
printing press. Now, for anyone who remembers the late 1990s, this
introduces a certain deja-vu, since this argument was pretty much what
fueled the dot.com boom back then. But here, it is delivered with a
twist. It's not the happy venture-capital infused entrepreneurs who
turn the wheels of change, but the pirates who expand the scope of the
possible for the masses, and the teenagers who have already claimed
this new space as their natural cultural environment. This is not a
top-down revolution.

So far the first layer of the argument. The second argues that this
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Matze Schmidt | 2 Jan 12:34
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Re: Happy new 1984


hi,

i am sorry, i only read about the case of surveillance, about the facts
here but not about drives 'behind' or 'under' this.

imho i recommend to read the book of reinhard kuehnl. _formen
buergerlicher herrschaft_ (in german) in which the author tries to prove
how the early democratic (?) state germany, the weimar republic was
converted in a fashist way at the very point at which the german capital
was in deep crisis.

but my core-question is: with all due respect to what happened to you
personally, why do you and the protesters in germany refer to the
bundeverfassungsgericht (federal court of justice) and the basic
constitutional law? is it the believe in a real existing democratic
political system of a group (30.000 complained against the retention,
see also http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de) or is it the specific
model of an action against which one may call state-illusion -- a
strange movement against a phantasm made by those who act against it? in
other words a don quijotesque situation for civil rights and privacy
activists. to understand it right, don quijote was fighting against what
he created, after his lecture of a world which already was done.

matze schmidt

> Article 129a, the German law to prosecute terrorism,
> was mentioned in the demonstration when everybody chanted "We are
> all 129a" (it rhymes better German) as well as several talks and
> e.g. during the famous 'Hacker Jeopardy' game show. This year a new
(Continue reading)

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watanabe shinya | 5 Jan 01:37
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The Breakaway from the Century of War - Article 9 as the Overcoming of European Modernism

Dear Nettimers,

Hi, I am making an art exhibition about Japanese Peace Constitution Article 9
which was written by the U.S. Occupied Military. The issue of Article 9 is a
issue of modernism, I believe, and I wrote the text prior to my art exhibition
"Into the Atomic Sunshine - Post War Art under Japanese Peace Constitution
Article 9" which opens on Jan 12th, 2008 at the Puffin Room in SOHO.

I want to share the issue of modernism with everyone, so I decided to send this
text to you. Thank you!

Shinya Watanabe
--

The Breakaway from the Century of War¡¡-¡¡Article 9 as the Overcoming of European Modernism (Dec.8, 2007)
http://spikyart.org/atomicsunshine/article9textbyshinya.html

Text by Shinya Watanabe

Headline:
Curating an Art Exhibition about Japanese Peace Constitution Article 9
Alteration of the Constitution of the Empire of Japan to the Constitution of Japan after the Defeat
¡°The MacArthur Draft¡± Has Been Secretly Developed
What is the ¡°Atomic Sunshine¡± Conference?
Who proposed Article 9?
Function of Article 9 in the Postwar Period
About the Definition of European States that Caused World War II
World War II created Emmanuel Levinas¡¯ philosophy of the ¡°Other¡±
As a Problem of Modernism - The Historian¡¯s Quarrel in Germany and the Yasukuni Shrine Dispute in Japan
The Possibility of Article 9 in the 21st Century
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lotu5 | 5 Jan 03:27
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Sharing is Sexy.org is live

//We are sexy guerillas, running through the city at night with ski 
masks on and our dildos strapped to the barrels of our M16's like 
grenade launchers for orgasms. You've probably seen us at a sex party, 
or a queer film screening, but we were blending in, totally clandestine, 
hiding our g and p spot powers under our ordinary sexy as hell 
appearance. We are artists and activists who you've marched with, locked 
down next to, screamed beside, sipped wine at ridiculous art openings 
with and chuckled at the whole situation, or painted banners and fixed 
your bikes with, or sat across from on the bus. We like our anonymity 
and try to maintain it...//

Finally, after a year of collective love, sweat and juices, 
http://www.sharingissexy.org is available for your horny little eyes. We 
encountered a lot of difficulty along the way, institutional resistance 
from a university that was hosting the site, the challenges of getting 
our legal questions answered while operating on an anti-capitalist's 
(i.e. no) budget, our own hesitations and changing energy levels, but 
now its here.

I'm writing this announcement on my own, its not a collective statement, 
but it is still my hope that this project can help spread queer love and 
lust and help to overthrow heteronormativity, capitalism, war and 
monogamy. I hope that people will look at our little creation and get 
off, and that might help them imagine a world without gender (and 
national) borders, might help them get out of the army by cross dressing 
into the mess hall, might help bring an end to capitalism by adding 
eroticism to the world of copyright free imagery.

But are we doing enough? Do we even know who we are? Or what we want? 
That is the most important part o the project for me, is the process of
(Continue reading)

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zeljko | 5 Jan 11:55

Re: [spectre] Sharing is Sexy.org is live


On Jan 5, 2008 11:04 AM, Rob Myers <rob@...> wrote:
> lotu5 wrote:
>
> > On monday we'll have more writing for you about the project, but for
> > now, I'd love any feedback you might have on the project... See for
> > yourself at http://sharingissexy.org
>
> This cannot be described as "Open Source"

True. But not so relevant.
It is much more interesting what this can inscribe then be described.

> because commercial use is not
> allowed. This breaks the Open Source Definition, Debian Free Software
> Guidelines, Freedom Defined and the Free Software Definition. Using

wrong argument.
...you are mixing Free Software and Open Source (in 2008 ;-)...

> BY-SA rather than BY-NC-SA would solve this.

...with CC licencing schemes, which do overlap to a point but are separate.

> Other than that, the project is absolutely brilliant. This could be Free
> Culture's killer app. ;-)

hm...what is with this hype of all of these antagonistic metaphors...
Culture is acumulative it is bussiness that kill of alternatives...
but I agree this could be a great tractor app :-)
(Continue reading)

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Gmane