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
CAPABLE OF cutting through time and space, the Internet offers a means of communication not previously dreamed of. It has created important new possibilities as it shrinks distances and provides an astounding volume and variety of information to those who have computer access. One result of these is the acceleration of the development of solidarity networks among peoples, regions, and countries. In Indonesia, it has even managed to help topple a strongman who, until his unscheduled resignation in May 1998, had been Asia's longest reigning postwar ruler. To Indonesia's powers that be, controlling the Internet has become close to being an obsession.
ReadThe formal political system today faces a new geography of power.
Globalization and the new technologies have contributed to the
shrinking of state authority and the explosion of a whole series of new
actors engaged in governance activities.
The current phase of the world economy is characterized by significant
discontinuities with the preceding periods and radically new
arrangements. This becomes particularly evident in the impact of
globalization on the geography of economic activity and on the
organization of political power. There is an incipient unbundling of
the exclusive authority over its territory we have long associated with
the nation-state.
Utopian ideas - like "Spaceship Earth" - are round, multidimensional, interrelated: their archetypal map is the Milky Way, the infinite constellations. But rational thinking is instrumental, linear, it distorts: and that's exactly the problem with the Mercator map, the most common world projection. Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, created a "Dymaxion map" to undo those distortions. First the earth becomes a geometric figure, an isocahedron: its 20 triangles are then disjointed and laid flat, so the land masses radiate from a nexus in the north, without splitting continents or enlarging the polar regions.
Pirate signals from the margins
ReadWhen thinking about dead bodies on the beach, these days most people think of refugees whose boats sank during the dangerous sea crossing to the European Union. The number of refugees drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015 is the highest ever, reaching 2,500. The killing of these men and women can effectively be seen as a direct – and deliberate – act of EU policy, making the border between Northern Africa and Europe the deadliest in the world.
The photographic series "Stranded" shows men lying motionless on an empty beach. But unlike refugees these men wear business suits, the standardized clothing of politicians and managers. Their bodies are partly in the water, partly on the beach; they appear to be stranded.
"Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is
an idea [?] and ideas are bulletproof."
- From the film V for Vendetta
Mexico / U.S Border Disturbance Art Project
ReadGermany 1998: 2 years before the New Millenium a new form of
Political Party came into existence: CHANCE 2000 - The Party of the
Last Chance. In the midst of an election that was one of the most
important in postfascist Germany an artist jumped into the political
arena to "make politics more aesthetic and aesthetics more political".
The film- and theatremaker and talk show host Christoph Schlingensief
started the Campagne: "VOTE YOURSELF!" In Berlin he started the project
with an "Election Circus". Together with a famous circus-family from
former East Germany and with his crew of actors and his family of
handicapped performers he founded "CHANCE 2000 - Party of the Last
Chance" in a circus tent in Berlin/ Prenzlauer Berg. The message for
the Republic was: "Vote Yourself, we know how to do it!" Every citizen
was asked to become an independent candidate for the new Bundestag.
Manuals were sent out how to become a direct candidate. And many
different people realized their chance to "prove that they exist" by
bringing their name on the ballot sheet: "Chance Meier", "Chance
Mueller", "Chance Schmidt". If you managed to collect 200 signatures of
support in your political region you were part of the game and you
could vote yourself. Why not voting somebody you know by heart, you
trust and love?
This article focuses on grassroots digital activism in the Arab world and the risks of what seems to be an inevitable collusion with U.S foreign policy and interests. It sums up the most important elements of the conversation I have been having for the last two years with many actors involved in defending online free speech and the use of technology for social and political change. While the main focus is Arab digital activism, I have made sure to include similar concerns raised by activists and online free speech advocates from other parts of the world, such as China, Thailand, and Iran.
ReadTranslating the abstraction—and banalities—of the Anthropocene into readable cartography has resulted in many past attempts that often ended up reproducing those same qualities. But, as Brian Holmes asserts in this essay, we seem to have found ourselves in a moment where collaboration, engagement, and new forms of knowledge exchange are breaking that deadlock. Tracing his own involvement with artistic practices that both engage with and attempt to represent a “political ecology,” Holmes explains how the evolving, collaborative cartographic practice that brought the "Mississippi. An Anthropocene River map" into being simultaneously reveals and interrogates the power structures of Anthropocence society.
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.
Access / Bandwidth / Code / Data / Ensemble / Fractal / Gift / Heterogeneous / Iteration / Journal / Kernel / Liminal / Meme / Nodes / Orbit / Portability / Quotidian / Rescension / Site / Tools / Ubiquity / Vector / Web / Xenophilly / Yarn / Zone
To: nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Rise and Decline of the Syndicate
Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 15:52:49 +0100
The Syndicate mailing list imploded and went down in August 2001, destroying the life-line of the Syndicate network. The network had been in a shaky situation for a while, due - we believe - to the destabilisation of the problematic balance between personal contacts of list members, lurking and filtering-and-not-reading-let-alone-posting subscribers, and a growing number of self-promoters who used the list as a personal performance space and disregarded the social rules of the online community.
At the end of the third 'Next 5 Minutes' conference on tactical media (March 1999) in Amsterdam, an interesting discussion emerged around the question of how the minor media practices elaborated and highlighted in this vibrant event would ever reach a wider audience for lack of being covered by any mainstream outlet. At one point, some people from the back of the room (unfortunately I don't know anymore who exactly, I believe an Italian group), shouted: 'We don't want to be mediated - we mediate ourselves!'
ReadThe two very different types of digital formations examined here make legible the variable ways in which the socio-technical interaction between digital technology and social logics produce distinctive outcomes. These differences point to the possibility that networked forms of power are not inherently distributive, as is often theorized when the focus is exclusively on technical properties.
ReadKeywords: robots / contestation / public space / expression management
I.
We start with the current strategy debates of the so-called 'anti-globalisation movement', the biggest emerging political force for decades. In Part II we will look into strategies of critical new media culture in the post-speculative phase after dotcommania. Four phases of the global movement are becoming visible, all of which have distinct political, artistic and aesthetic qualities.
gruesse von ELEKTRO
From: Pit Schultz
Status: RO
Techno: Psycho-Social Tumult
Arthur 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.