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marc garrett | 1 Jul 12:43
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Two new reviews on Furtherfield by Rob Myers.

Two new reviews on Furtherfield by Rob Myers.

http://www.furtherfield.org

Abstract Hacktivism: the making of a hacker culture.
A book collecting two essays by Otto von Busch and Karl Palmas 
transforms the concept of "hacktivism" with well-argued historical 
analysis and a number of informative case studies.

"Hacktivism" is a cool-sounding portmanteau word combining "hacking" and 
"activism". Activism means political organisation and activity directed 
toward particular issues. Hacking can mean either "creative mastery and 
reworking" or "breaking and entering" of various systems, usually 
computer systems. The latter is more properly called "cracking". 
Hacktivism tend to mean cracking rather than creative hacking. This 
means that hacktivism usually identifies at most a negativist posture of 
technological resistance to socioeconomic ills.
Permlink - http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=307

Big Buck Bunny. The Blender Foundation.
Big Buck Bunny is the second short 3D computer animated cartoon from the 
Blender Foundation. The Blender Foundation produces these films to 
stimulate development of and promote use of their popular eponymous free 
software 3D modelling and rendering package.

The Foundation's first film, codenamed Orange, was "Elephants Dream". 
This was in the European experimental stop-frame animation tradition, a 
dark Gilliamesque fantasy with two men trying to escape a threatening 
clockwork labyrinth that may or may not really exist. The character and 
scenery designs were excellent, and the film as a whole was very
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Florian Cramer | 1 Jul 11:58

Eric Kluitenberg, Turning the machines inside out

[This essay was commissioned for the graduation catalogue of the Media
Design M.A. of the Piet Zwart Institute, Willem de Kooning Academy
Rotterdam, and will appear in the graduation catalogue designed by
Open Source Publishing, Brussels. For more information on the graduation
show "YOU ARE PWNED" at WORM Rotterdam, 4-6 July, see
<http://www.wormweb.nl/agenda.php?id=1385>.  -Florian]

Turning the machine inside out

Creating Worlds as Interface

It is always a good thing for artists who work with technology and
technological media to study the inner life of the machines. Break open
the box and look what is inside. This helps to foreclose an overly naive
relationship to the medium. Obviously, it also seems a good thing for
artists to simply know their material, understand their medium. This is
hardly any different today for media-artists than it was, for instance,
for Fresco painters in the grand hall of Sienna's Palazzo Publico in the
thirteenth century. Still there might be more at stake in the case of
digital machines, something that moves beyond the usual questions about
the artist's material.

That something might be the creation of Worlds as Interface. This
speculative idea was suggested in the proposal for a new physics by
the physicist Otto E. Rössler. An approach he named Endophysics. The
main problem for Rössler was the apparently insolvable question of how
to define an explicit model of the world in its entirety, in which the
implicit role of the observer was accounted for, given that the observer
is always inextricably implicated in what can be observed of the world
in the first place. It would require an explicit model that includes
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Jonathan Lukens | 2 Jul 22:21
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The Temporary AlQaeda Zone

In brief:
Amir Taheri article from the NYPost re:
  "Governance in the Wilderness" (Edarat al-Wahsh) a new book of  
jihadi tactics by Sheik Abu-Bakar Naji.
AL QAEDA'S PLAN B By AMIR TAHERI
http://www.nypost.com/seven/07012008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/al_qaedas_plan_b_117936.htm

via John Robb's Global Guerrilla's blog: http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/

Notable:
< Islamists in the "wilderness" must create parallel societies  
alongside existing ones, Naji says - but not set up formal  
governments, which would be subject to economic pressure or military  
attack.
These parallel societies could resemble "liberated zones" set up by  
Marxist guerrillas in parts of Latin America in the last century. But  
they could also exist within cities, under the very noses of the  
authorities - operating as secret societies with their own rules,  
values and enforcement. >

Kind of a tactical "No shit, Sherlock." Here's where it gets weirder:

<But they could also take shape in Western countries with large Muslim  
minorities: The jihadis are to begin by giving areas where Muslims  
live a distinctly Islamic appearance, by imposing special styles of  
dress for women and beards for men. Then they start imposing the  
shariah. In the final phase, they create a parallel system of taxation  
and law enforcement, effectively taking the areas out of government  
control.>
(Continue reading)

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Brian Holmes | 3 Jul 11:35
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Some reflections on global mapping


dr. woooo wrote this to me:

    re: Sovereign Wealth Funds and the current global restructure, I’m 
struggling to keep up with it all, things move so quick now it seems, it 
is nearly impossible to develop a ‘map’

Indeed, is there any point to it?

My idea over the last 5 years has been that the incessant transforms
of global capital are in our nervous systems, like it or not, and
that it could be more interesting to see them on the outside,
right there big as life, like a skyscraper or a cement factory or
a stock exchange. It could be useful and meaningful to map out the
restructuring in ways both theoretical and aesthetic, rather than just
taking each new jolt through the headlines, the fashions, the clashes
in the street, the new management “tools,” the labor movements, the
glimpsed oppression at the borders. Since I was flexible (after
all) and could ride the cultural air-ticket to a wide variety of
destinations, I decided to Just Do It. By going to Edge Europe, to
Argentina, to China, to the Midwest and the Middle East, I hoped to
meet people who would open up their nervous systems, so that we could
not only compare jolts, but better, explore other lengths and depths
of time, share different kinds of aspirations, dreams and satirical
ironies, replacing headlines with lifelines. I wanted to ask: How has
your existence changed since this whirligig of electrocapital came
around? And I wanted to feel out what might have come before, not
paradise, but historical experience on the intimate level, the kind
that shapes a body and the tone of a voice, or the way families and
lovers relate, the way people protest or laugh it off or complain or
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Nettime's avid reader | 3 Jul 17:56

Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom


oh, the joys of centralization :)

Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom
By Ryan Singel EmailJuly 02, 2008 | 7:16:54 PM
Categories: Copyrights and Patents  
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/07/judge-orders-yo.html

Google will have to turn over every record of every video watched by 
YouTube users, including users' names and IP addresses, to Viacom, which 
is suing Google for allowing clips of its copyright videos to appear on 
YouTube, a judge ruled Wednesday.

Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular 
than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's 
liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement.

Viacom filed suit against Google in March 2007, seeking more than $1 
billion in damages for allowing users to upload clips of Viacom's 
copyright material. Google argues that the law provides a safe harbor for 
online services so long as they comply with copyright takedown requests.

Although Google argued that turning over the data would invade its users' 
privacy, the judge's ruling [1] described that argument as "speculative" 
and ordered Google to turn over the logs on a set of four tera-byte hard 
drives.

The judge also turned Google's own defense of its data retention 
policies -- that IP addresses of computers aren't personally revealing in 
and of themselves, against it to justify the log dump.
(Continue reading)

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Ed Phillips | 3 Jul 18:55
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Re: The Temporary AlQaeda Zone

That is grimly funny.

What immediately jumps out of this and that poor grim guy John Robb's book
is the absence of any appreciation for the "political" and dare I say
cultural aspects of conflict, of mobilization, and even of the organization
of states and white markets, and the organization of black markets as well.

These bufoons in their literalism and their inability to understand or
imagine anything beyond charts that outline "security" in terms of targets
and jihadis, completely miss the fact that all markets, white or black are
organized. Robb and his ilke homologues of the fundamentalists. But that
kind of literalism is endemic to global capitalism and that may be the only
sense in which the world is flattening.

What John Robb misses here is that the criminal networks are a form of
globalization, with local forms, local interests and local effects.  The
war in Iraq is "political." Iran knows that even if the DOD makes every
attempt to avoid that conclusion.

Robb's book looks like a fundraiser and a consulting gig. He'll make a
living helping people forget the naked political power of Empire, helping
them avoid the fact of "politics."

On Wed, Jul 02, 2008 at 04:21:00PM -0400, Jonathan Lukens wrote:

> In brief: Amir Taheri article from the NYPost re:
>   "Governance in the Wilderness" (Edarat al-Wahsh) a new book of  
> jihadi tactics by Sheik Abu-Bakar Naji.  AL QAEDA'S PLAN B By AMIR TAHERI
> http://www.nypost.com/seven/07012008/postopinion/opedcolumnists/al_qaedas_plan_b_117936.htm
>
(Continue reading)

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Morlock Elloi | 3 Jul 18:49
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Re: Judge Orders YouTube to Give All User Histories to Viacom

The unasked question was: why is youtube/google keeping all the viewing logs? 

> From: Nettime's avid reader <nettime@...>
> oh, the joys of centralization :)
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jd in .hu | 3 Jul 23:46
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Re: The Temporary AlQaeda Zone (Jonathan Lukens)

Quote:
Notable:
< Islamists in the "wilderness" must create parallel societies
alongside existing ones, Naji says - but not set up formal
governments, which would be subject to economic pressure or military
attack.
/Quote

*You mean like this?....

*

> To defend itself against a lawsuit by the widows of three American soldiers
> who died on one of its planes in Afghanistan, a sister company of the
> private military firm *Blackwater has asked a federal court to decide the
> case using the Islamic law known as Shari'a.*
> The lawsuit "is governed by the law of Afghanistan," Presidential Airways
> argued in a Florida federal court. "Afghan law is largely religion-based and
> evidences a strong concern for ensuring moral responsibility, and deterring
> violations of obligations within its borders."
>
> If the judge agrees, it would essentially end the lawsuit over a botched
> flight supporting the U.S. military. Shari'a law does not hold a company
> responsible for the actions of employees performed within the course of
> their work.
>
from:
http://www.newsobserver.com/front/story/1112843.html
--

-- 
. .. ... .. .
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Ed Phillips | 3 Jul 21:12
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Re: Some reflections on global mapping

These are some important (to me) questions you are asking here and you
are asking them in the right way.

Elsewhere on brianholmes.wordpress.com you mention that both dialogue
with other interested actors and less than paranoid attempts to
understand how "governmentality" is operating or understanding itself
on its own terms is also a positive and even hopeful activity.

I wholeheartedly agree and I highly recommend that people read Brian's
blog. I don't know that I always comprehend Brian's articulate
mappings or that I even give myself the time and energy to fully work
through his thinking, but the little understanding I have managed to
wrangle is "something."

I can say that Brian is honestly doing the work of attempting to
understand and live, and doing it well. An important part of it is how
an "aesthetic" framing allows for reading across discourses.

At a meta-critical level, I don't really see enough effort in such
figures as Naomi Klein for example. Doug Henwood's review of her
latest attempts to understand geoeconomics are spot on see the
leftbusinessoberver.com. She is just not doing the work. 

She quite simply falls into the trap of personality as well as the
fact that she does not do even the most rudimentary economic homework.

A disavowal of the personality level of politics, and even dare I say
it of the state as personality seems to me to clear the ground for
understanding geo political economy quite a bit.
(Continue reading)

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Keith Hart | 4 Jul 09:52

Re: Some reflections on global mapping


Ed,

I too continue to learn a lot from Brian. His effort to engage with
and understand our world takes him on one of the great journeys.
If I say that it is a romantic quest, this is meant to enhance its
value. After all, when structures break down, it no longer works to
seek to adapt to "the system". All each of us can do is to improve
what is between our ears in the hope of being able to respond to
circumstances more effectively, perhaps even to participate in new
patterns of association. Romantics tell stories because narrative
better captures the movement of life than other forms of thinking. Why
replace the fluidity of story-telling with a map? A map is a static
object, one thing out there, a visualisation of an encompassing idea
like neoliberalism or global capitalism. But of course Brian also
tells wonderful stories.

Edward Said once suggested that life gives us so many cultural
fragments and our task is to make a story out of them. I would say
that we internalize society wherever we have lived and writing (not
only, but mainly) gives us a chance to make a partial object of that
experience that we can reflect on and share with others. For me this
is a religious activity in Durkheim's sense, an endless traffic
between inside and outside, the known and the unknown, conscious
and unconscious, in search of meaningful connection. Brian's travel
programme gives him a great chance to excavate an expanded vision of
society, if he ever gets time to reflect on it. That's my problem too.

"Politics is masked".
(Continue reading)

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Gmane