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Frederick Noronha [फ़रेदरिक नोरोनया] | 3 Mar 20:18

http://tinyurl.com/d4kv4q

What's Wikileaks, if you haven't heard of it yet?

Wikipedia explains it thus: "Wikileaks is a website that publishes
anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate,
or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and
untraceability of its contributors. Within one year of its December
2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million
documents.[1] Wikileaks runs on modified MediaWiki software."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks

Listen to Jacob Applebaum, giving a very brief introduction to this
amazing project ...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWxq9O1GYf0&feature=channel_page

Some of its "notable" leaks are as follows:

   Bank Julius Baer lawsuit
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Bank_Julius_Baer_lawsuit

   Guantánamo Bay procedures
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Guant.C3.A1namo_Bay_procedures

   Scientology
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Scientology

   Hack of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#Hack_of_Sarah_Palin.27s_Yahoo_account

   BNP membership list
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks#BNP_membership_list
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stef_arello | 5 Mar 00:27

Amsterdam-Surfing the Crisis and Anomalous Waves with Edufactory and Uniriot

Surfing the Crisis
Anomalous Waves from Universities in Europe and around the world

Thursday 5 March - 8,30 PM - De Peper / OT301 Amsterdam

In autumn 2008 students from Italy started to protest against the
approval of a Berlusconi's government's decree that was intended to make
a radical transformation of the educational system in Italy. The
decree's aims were to cut the public education budget, university
personnel and allowed universities to turn themselves in private
foundations to seek funds in the private market. In few words the goal
was to disqualify the public university sistem and with the excuse of
economical crisis move public funds to save banks and private institutions.

The political reactions of students, precarious workers and reaserchers
flowed into a movement - the biggest in 30 years - was soon referred to
as the 'Anomalous Wave'. The common shout was: " We won't pay for your
crisis" .

The Wave soon reached other countries: Greece, Spain, France and UK, as
the commodification of knowledge is a neoliberal design promoted by the
tecnochratical institutions of the EU through the so-called 'Bologna
Process'.

In preparation of the international demonstration against the
inter-ministerial conference about the Bologna process in Leuven,
Belgium, 28-29 April 2009 we will discuss the ideas and strategies of
the Anomalous Wave with

Claudia Bernardi, Gigi Ruggero, Paolo Do, Andrea Ghelfi, Camillo
(Continue reading)

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Brian Holmes | 5 Mar 13:55
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Cybernetics and the Internet

Hello Nettime -

Since the summer of 2006 we've had quite a few debates (a 
recurrent fever?) under this cryptic heading: Cybernetics 
and the Internet. The implication that a distant, partially 
militarized and long-obsolete research program might have 
anything to do with the ways we use our computers to freely 
communicate no doubt smacked to many of a dark and useless 
conspiracy theory, and perhaps even of an attack on Our 
Beloved Internet (OBI). I understand the reticence, but I 
saw it all a bit differently.

Contemporaneous with the vast expansion of free-market 
capitalism after 1989, the commercial Internet became the 
symbol, the tool and the most common lived experience of 
American-led globalization. By 2006 we had been through the 
boom, the bust, the blast, and a radical shift from the 
sunny Californian neoliberal rhetoric of infinite openness 
and a world without borders (or maybe even without salaried 
labor) to the thick-crude Texas neocon rhetoric of "freedom" 
aka security panic and neo-imperialism. While I watched a 
hulking Cold War military-industrial apparatus lurch back 
onto the stage along with some of the very goons who had 
brought it to its peak in 1950-70, I could not help being 
struck by the coexistence of two seemingly opposite 
paradigms: a command-and-control logic that had everything 
to do with the centralized military state, and a 
freewheeling "open systems" approach that had everything to 
do with the liberal theory of the market. If they coexisted, 
could they have any common root in the historical processes
(Continue reading)

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Pranesh Prakash | 5 Mar 12:28
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Ars | Report: Democracy 2.0 not quite the upgrade we first thought

This past election saw a lot of talk about "Democracy 2.0" and how the
Web has fundamentally changed the political landscape. A survey from
Pew suggests that the Web's impact on politics isn't completely
benign, as it has increased the political participation gap between
rich and poor, even after controlling for Internet access and age.

By Jon Stokes | Last updated March 4, 2009 7:10 PM CT

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/03/survey-democracy-20-not-quite-the-upgrade-we-first-thought.ars

--

-- 
Pranesh Prakash
Programme Manager
Centre for Internet and Society

W: http://cis-india.org | T: +91 80 40926283
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Frederick Noronha [फ़रेदरिक नोरोनया] | 5 Mar 10:51

Voting computers... and all the fuss

How 15 people triggered off a major campaign

Patrice Riemens, an Amsterdam-based people networker and FLOSS-opher
(theorist about the world of Free/Libre and Open Source Software, a
tongue-in-cheek designation) explains how the campaign against "voting
computers" was successful, thanks to the determination of a small group. He
comments: "The German Constitutional (ie Apex) Court has just ruled that
the use of voting computers in the state elections three-and-half years ago
was illegal. It did not cancel these elections, but this judgment consigns
voting computers in Germany, and by extention probably in the rest of the
EU, to the dustbin of history." What does this issues involve? An amazing,
brief explanation...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PfCSuJ-1AU&feature=channel_page

Electronic voting, on Wikipedia: Electronic voting (also known as e-voting)
is a term encompassing several different types of voting, embracing both
electronic means of casting a vote and electronic means of counting votes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting

2004 United States election voting controversies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_election_voting_controversies

The E-voting Controversy: What are the Risks?

http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~lopresti/Talks/2006/EVotingPanel.pdf<http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/%7Elopresti/Talks/2006/EVotingPanel.pdf>

India has electronic voting; why can't the U.S.? - By Eric Weiner
(Continue reading)

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t byfield | 5 Mar 18:32
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Re: Cybernetics and the Internet

brian.holmes@... (Thu 03/05/09 at 01:55 PM +0100):

> Since the summer of 2006 we've had quite a few debates (a 
> recurrent fever?) under this cryptic heading: Cybernetics 
> and the Internet. The implication that a distant, partially 
> militarized and long-obsolete research program might have 
> anything to do with the ways we use our computers to freely 
> communicate no doubt smacked to many of a dark and useless 
> conspiracy theory, and perhaps even of an attack on Our 
> Beloved Internet (OBI). I understand the reticence, but I 
> saw it all a bit differently.

Oh please. Could you be a little more blatant about your straw men?
You yourself admit your ideas were based on first readings, whereas
others (at least a few of who've been thinking about this for years) 
couldn't see or [cue the ominous music] couldn't *face* the truth?

Maybe you're genuinely talking about several threads, but for me the 
one that jumps out is this:

  http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0810/threads.html#00036

The problem was, as you recount it here, the phrase (still notably vague) 
"might have anything to do with." Of course these things have something 
to do with each other. The question is *what* -- and, by extension, *how*. 
The lion's share of what you said is, as usual, tremendous; but I thought 
then and, in light of the vague wording noted above, still wonder -- about 
the 'dramatic' aspect of the historical narrative you offer. It relied too
heavily on WW2 as a decisive historical rupture and on a moralizing sort
of genealogy to make the more or less Kantian point that freedom ain't so
(Continue reading)

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Florian Cramer | 5 Mar 19:44
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Re: Cybernetics and the Internet


On Thursday, March 05 2009, 12:32 (-0500), t byfield wrote:

> One difficulty of writing a history of cybernetics is that the problems
> it explicitly poses about 'autonomy' undermine the twin ideas of author 
> and history. If you accept the major premises of cybernetics (even in the 
> bracketed form that historical craft requires), the notion of a stable 
> subject who acts deliberately falls apart; 

...but it's one thing whether the stable subject is taken apart on the
grounds of a critique of 18th/19th ideologies of genius and subjectivism 
by analyzing, for example, structures of human consciousness and
language (as in Freud's psychoanalysis and structuralism). It's a
completely different thing when the stable subject is negated from a
late-Cartesian perspective of behaviorist mechanism (as in classical
cybernetics).  The latter denounces human - and thus also political and
critical - agency, and that's a crucial difference.

Again, the frequent mix-up and contamination of these two discourses in
the "new media" field is unfortunate, and sometimes disturbing.

-F

--

-- 
blog:     http://en.pleintekst.nl
homepage: http://cramer.pleintekst.nl:70
          gopher://cramer.pleintekst.nl
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t byfield | 5 Mar 20:42
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Re: Cybernetics and the Internet


fc-nettime@... (Thu 03/05/09 at 07:44 PM +0100):

> > One difficulty of writing a history of cybernetics is that the problems
> > it explicitly poses about 'autonomy' undermine the twin ideas of author 
> > and history. If you accept the major premises of cybernetics (even in the 
> > bracketed form that historical craft requires), the notion of a stable 
> > subject who acts deliberately falls apart; 
> 
> ...but it's one thing whether the stable subject is taken apart on the
> grounds of a critique of 18th/19th ideologies of genius and subjectivism 
> by analyzing, for example, structures of human consciousness and
> language (as in Freud's psychoanalysis and structuralism). It's a
> completely different thing when the stable subject is negated from a
> late-Cartesian perspective of behaviorist mechanism (as in classical
> cybernetics).  The latter denounces human - and thus also political and
> critical - agency, and that's a crucial difference.

It never occurred to me that I'd need to distinguish between these things 
because I never confused them. Having said that, that crucial difference 
was an explicit and ongoing debate in the Macy Conferences -- in sessions 
where, for example, Roman Jacobson and Erik Erikson were present. There's
some very interesting work to be done, I suppose, in looking at, say, the
evolution of the idea of the 'stability' of the subject, which encompasses
both Freudian models and ~cybernetic models involving homeostasis. Indeed,
this evolution -- as it's manifest in individual psychology, small groups
(families, social clusters, therapeutic settings, education, etc), and 
long-term cultural change -- were crucial issues for Bateson and Mead. So,
while there are crucial differences, there are also ~genealogical relations;
but we won't get at them, or in particular understand how actual people
(Continue reading)

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Brian Holmes | 5 Mar 20:52
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Re: Cybernetics and the Internet


Florian Cramer wrote:

> One could even go farther back in history and say that the link between
> chaos and complexity theories, communication networks and counterculture
> created in Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel "The Crying of Lot 49" already
> mapped out the whole field and discourse.

Yeah, I love that book. You're right, it does more or less map out
the counter-cultural desire for cybernetics. The more rigorous
second-order phase begins more-or-less around that time, with Maturana
and Varela, then with Von Foerster, who were all into serious
mathematical formalism. It grows directly out of the inclusive
tendencies of systems thinking, which in the end cannot help but
include the observer. In my opinion it is what leads to the break-up
of the whole cybernetic "paradigm" - because this self-reflexivity was
too fuzzy for the physicists. However, the break-up led to various
reformulations in the 80s-90s, both in the hard sciences and in the
behavioral sciences, and it is those that I think have really affected
the society we live in today. Jean-Pierre Dupuy's book retraces part
of this history (as I am sure you know).

> The problem, however, is that second-order cybernetic notions of
> "chaos", "complexity" and "self-organization" have been, and continue to
> be, thoroughly misunderstood in countercultures just because they appear
> to be identical to their homonymous political and cultural notions. In
> reality, they are quite if not radically different: The scientific
> notion of chaos is stochastic-deterministic, the political-cultural
> notion of chaos is ontological and anti-deterministic.  The
> scientific/cybernetic notion of "self-organization" and emergence is
(Continue reading)

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Florian Cramer | 5 Mar 19:08
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Re: Cybernetics and the Internet


On Thursday, March 05 2009, 13:55 (+0100), Brian Holmes wrote:

> This command-and-control paradigm, in its turn, was 
> destabilized by Maturana, Varela and Von Foerster's 
> self-reflexive introduction of the observer's consciousness 
> into the system, leading to "second-order cybernetics" and 
> ultimately to the chaos and complexity theories that came to 
> dominate our understanding of both networks and the economy 
> during the 1980s and 90s. 

One could even go farther back in history and say that the link between
chaos and complexity theories, communication networks and counterculture
created in Thomas Pynchon's 1966 novel "The Crying of Lot 49" already
mapped out the whole field and discourse.

The problem, however, is that second-order cybernetic notions of
"chaos", "complexity" and "self-organization" have been, and continue to
be, thoroughly misunderstood in countercultures just because they appear
to be identical to their homonymous political and cultural notions. In
reality, they are quite if not radically different: The scientific
notion of chaos is stochastic-deterministic, the political-cultural
notion of chaos is ontological and anti-deterministic.  The
scientific/cybernetic notion of "self-organization" and emergence is
about [nonsubjective, swarm-like] organic phenomena whereas the
political notion is completely about social construction and personal
intention.  In a systems theoretical context, a software cellar
automaton or a fractal is "complex", in a social, political and
aesthetic sense, they're blatantly under-complex.
(Continue reading)

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Gmane