A popular inquest into the almost innumerable crimes of the chemical corporation and agribusiness giant, Monsanto. In Carbondale on Jan 28, 2012. Check it out at the blog of the Compass group/Midwest Radical Cultural Corridor, here.

Also check out the film by Marie-Monique Robin, The World According to Monsanto.

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EDRi welcomes the European Commission's proposal for a new data protection Regulation. Europe needs comprehensive reforms in order to ensure the protection of it's citizen's personal data and privacy, while enhancing legal certainty and competitiveness in a single digital market. Since the first draft was leaked in December, there has been a significant lobbying effort by certain foreign governments and industry. As a result, while some of the provisions seem to have been watered down and/or downgraded, the proposal still highlights the importance of key principles such as "privacy by design" and data minimisation.

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"“We sell over 100,000 of these masks a year, and it’s by far the best-selling mask that we sell,” said Howard Beige, executive vice president of Rubie’s Costume, a New York costume company that produces the mask. “In comparison, we usually only sell 5,000 or so of our other masks.” The Vendetta mask, which sells for about $6 at many retailers, is made in Mexico or China, Mr. Beige said."

–Masked Anonymous Protesters Aid Time Warner’s Profits - NYTimes.com

"

A new Twitter policy which goes into effect today allows the social network "to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country," so that Twitter can further expand globally and "enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression."

The Twitter blog post announcing this news was titled "Tweets still must flow." And yes they must, but apparently in some countries, only if they're censored?

–Twitter caves to global censorship, will block content on country-specific basis as required - Boing Boing

"

Either way, the treaty was signed today by European nations, including Belgium, the UK, Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Bulgaria, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden.

The signing took place at a ceremony at Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The treaty has already been signed by Australia, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore and the US

–EU countries – including Ireland and Poland – sign ACTA treaty - New Media - New Media | siliconrepublic.com - Ireland's Technology News Service

"Critics, mistrust and suspicion is one thing, but panic, mumbling and spreading disinformation is another thing. Looking at some finds on the biggest Polish social news platforms, looking at the comments of some readers, I get the impression that the lion's share of the protesters have no idea what ACTA is about. They've made up fantastic stories and are passing them on. The mass is getting crazy “Impale PM”, “Let's burn the Minister on the stake!”, “They will all lock us down in prisons!”. And then also Anonymous, who just make the whole protest look ridiculous in the eyes of mature older voters."

–Poland: Government Will Sign ACTA Despite Massive Protest - Global Voices Advocacy

"Now, it’s obvious where Google is going with this: It wants to be more like Facebook and Apple, both of which have a completely-unified, walled-garden approach — and both of which are enjoying huge leaps in revenue and profits, while Google falls short of quarterly expectations. Nothing happens on an Apple device without Cupertino’s knowledge, and as a result Apple can perfectly tailor its devices for its users (and ratchet up record-breaking quarterly earnings in the process). Facebook — because everything is centralized under the facebook.com domain — enjoys unprecedented access to the surfing habits, likes, shares, and messages of its users. On the other side of the fence, with a slew of discordant, disconnected properties, Google seems to be flailing. SPYW and the March 1 privacy changes are simply the next step in Google’s (rather messy) attempt to weave everything together, before it loses any more ground."

–Google is FUBAR | ExtremeTech

Always ;)

[Reposted from grzegoorz1 via do-panic]

“Outlawing dissent: Rahm Emanuel’s new regime”

by Bernard Harcourt

Occupy Chicago, Oct 15, 2011 – before the bust

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The reduction of American democracy to a façade punctured everywhere by states of exception is made painfully clear by the legislation just passed in the Windy City. The chill here is not just the snow.

It’s almost as if Rahm Emanuel was lifting a page from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine – as if he was reading her account of Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys” as a cookbook recipe, rather than as the ominous episode that it was. In record time, Emanuel successfully exploited the fact that Chicago will host the upcoming G8 and Nato summit meetings to increase his police powers and extend police surveillance, to outsource city services and privatize financial gains, and to make permanent new limitations on political dissent. It all happened – very rapidly and without time for dissent – with the passage of rushed security and anti-protest measures adopted by the city council on 18 January 2012.

Sadly, we are all too familiar with the recipe by now: first, hype up and blow out of proportion a crisis (and if there isn’t a real crisis, as in Chicago, then create one), call in the heavy artillery and rapidly seize the opportunity to expand executive power, to redistribute wealth for private gain and to suppress political dissent. As Friedman wrote in Capitalism and Freedom in 1982 – and as Klein so eloquently describes in her book:

“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function … until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

Today, it’s more than mere ideas that are lying around; for several decades now, and especially since 9/11, there are blueprints scattered all around us.

Step 1: hype a crisis or create one if there isn’t a real one available. Easily done:with images from London, Toronto, Genoa, and Seattle of the most violent anti-G8 protesters streaming on Fox News and repeated references to anarchists and rioters, the pump is primed. Rather than discuss the peaceful Occupy Chicago protests over the past three months, city officials and the media focus on what Fraternal Order of Police President Michael Shields calls “people who travel around the world as professional anarchists and rioters” and a “bunch of wild, anti-globalist anarchists“. The looming crisis headlines Rahm Emanuel’s draft legislation, now passed: “Whereas, Both the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“Nato”) and the Group of Eight (“G8″) summits will be held in the spring of 2012 in the City of Chicago” and “whereas, the Nato and G8 Summits continue to evolve in terms of the size and scope, thereby creating unanticipated or extraordinary support and security needs …” The crisis calls for immediate action.

Step 2: rapidly deploy excessive force. Again, easily done: Emanuel just gave himself the power to marshal and deputize – I kid you not, look at page 3 – the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the United States Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), and the entire United States Department of Justice (DOJ); as well as state police (the Illinois department of state police and the Illinois attorney general), county law enforcement (State’s Attorney of Cook County), and any “other law enforcement agencies determined by the superintendent of police to be necessary for the fulfillment of law enforcement functions”.

As one commentator suggests, the final catch-all allows Emanuel to hire “anyone he wants, be they rent-a-cops, Blackwater goons on domestic duty, or whatever. For a city that has great problems keeping its directly sworn officers in check, this looser authority is an even greater license for abuse.” Thanks to the coming G8 meeting, the Chicago police department has just gotten a lot bigger! According to Fox News, “there will be hundreds, perhaps thousands of federal agents here.”

Not just that, but Emanuel has also given himself the power to install additional surveillance, including video, audio and telecommunications equipment. And not just for the period of the G8 and Nato summits, but permanently. These new provisions of the substitute ordinance apply “permanently”: there is no sunset provision on either the police expansion or the surveillance. On this second, the new ordinance reads:

“The superintendent is also authorized to enter into agreements with public or private entities concerning placement, installation, maintenance or use of video, audio, telecommunications or other similar equipment. The location of any camera or antenna permanently installed pursuant to any such agreement shall be determined pursuant to joint review and approval with the executive director of emergency management and communications.” [my emphasis]

Thanks to the mobilization of the Occupy movement (including their funeral for the Bill of Rights) and other groups like the ACLU, some of Emanuel’s other draconian provisions were scaled back. Emanuel dropped his proposals to increase seven-fold the minimum fine for resisting arrest (including for passive resistance) from $25 to $200, to double the maximum fine for resisting arrest from $500 to $1,000, and to double the maximum fine for violations of the parade ordinance from $1,000 to $2,000. But the rest of his proposals – including the three-fold increase in the minimum fine for a violation of the parade ordinance – passed the City Council Thursday.

Step 3: privatize the profits and socialize the costs. In Chicago, that translates into Emanuel outsourcing city services to private enterprises, but making sure the public will indemnify those private companies from future law suits. This is a two-part dance with which we have become all too familiar.

First, city services are outsourced, often to circumvent labor and other regulations, and the income side of the public expenditures are shifted over to private enterprise and employees. Under the ordinance (see page 4):

“The mayor or his designees are authorized to negotiate and execute agreements with public and private entities for good, work or services regarding planning, security, logistics, and other aspects of hosting the Nato and G8 summits in the city in the Spring of 2012 … and to provide such assurances, execute such other documents and take such other actions, on behalf of the city, as may be necessary or desirable to host these summits.”

Second, the agreements can be entered “on such terms and conditions as the mayor or such designees deem appropriate” and these terms include, importantly, “indemnification by the city”. In other words, any lawsuits will fall on the city taxpayers. The public will be left holding the bag if there is, for instance, police abuse or other mismanagement by private employers.

Step 4: use the crisis to expand executive power permanently and repress political dissent. Most of the ordinance revisions, it turns out, do not sunset with the departure of the G8 or Nato delegates. To be sure, there’s a sunset provision for those contracts that specifically involve “hosting the Nato and G8 summits.” That provision expires on 31 July 2012; but not the expanded police powers, nor the increased video surveillance, nor the other changes to the protest permit requirements.

The new rules affecting permits for protests and marches include details that impose onerous demands on dissent. As noted earlier, the minimum fine for a violation of the parade ordinance will increase from $50 to $200. On the parade permit applications, the protest organizers now must provide a general description of any sound amplification equipment that is on wheels or too large for one person to carry and/or any signs or banners that are too large for one person to carry. These may sound like small details, but they are precisely the kinds of nitpicking regulations that empower and expand police discretion to arrest and fine, and that make it harder to express political opinions.

It’s another glaring example of what I have called The Illusion of Free Markets and the paradox of “neoliberal penality”: the purported liberalization of the economy (here, the privatization of city services) goes hand-in-hand with massive policing. Scott Horton captured the idea well in Harper’s, under the rubric “The Despotism of Natural Law”. Notice the neoliberal paradox: the fact that the city claims to be incompetent or unable to performs its ordinary functions implies that we need to both outsource city services and augment city police powers.

It was accomplished so quickly and seamlessly – passed practically overnight – that few seem to have noticed or had time to think through the long-term implications. There’s not a mention in the New York Times and only a small story in the Chicago Tribune. The crisis and fear of outside agitators, professional anarchists and rioters – splashed on the TV screens direct from London, Toronto, Genoa, Rome, or Seattle – is enough to create a permanent state of exception.

To make matters worse, this cookbook implementation of mini shock treatment follows on the heels of a severe crackdown on the Occupy Chicago movement that resulted in the arrest of over 300 Occupy protesters in Grant Park in October 2011. The prosecutions are still ongoing today and the effect on political dissent has been chilling.

In those 300 arrests, Rahm Emanuel and his police chief rigidly enforced a park curfew without finding reasonable ways to accommodate the political speech interests of the protesters, and beyond any semblance of a legitimate governmental interest. The massive arrests raise a clear first amendment problem – one that has been raised by the Occupy protesters and will be heard en masse at the Daley Center on 15 February. (Ironically, Emanuel and his police will effectively “Occupy the Daley Center”.)

The first amendment argument is compelling, especially when you consider the disparate treatment that political expression receives in Chicago. Recall, for instance, how different things were in Grant Park on election night 2008. Huge tents were pitched, commercial sound systems pounded rhythms and political discourse, enormous TVs streamed political imagery. More than 150,000 people blocked the streets and “occupied” Grant Park – congregating, celebrating, debating and discussing politics. That evening, President-elect Barack Obama would address the crowds late into the night and the assembled masses swarmed the park to the early morning hours. It was a memorable moment, perhaps a high point in political expression in Chicago.

Well, that was then. The low point would come three years later, almost to the day. On the evening of 15 October 2011, thousands of Occupy protesters marched to Grant Park and assembled at the entrance to the park to engage, once again, in political expression. But this time, the assembled group found itself surrounded by an intimidating police force, as police wagons began lining up around the political assembly. The police presence grew continually as the clock approached midnight.

Within hours, at the direction, ironically, of President Obama’s former chief-of-staff (was Rahm Emanuel at Grant Park after hours, a few years earlier?), the Chicago Police Department began to arrest the protesters for staying in Grant Park beyond the 11pm curfew in violation of a mere park ordinance.

Emanuel could have ordered his police officers to issue written citations and move the protesters to the sidewalk. In fact, that’s precisely what the police would do a few weeks later at a more obstreperous protest by senior citizens at Occupy Chicago. On that occasion, 43 senior citizens who stopped traffic by standing or sitting in the middle of a downtown street were escorted by police officers off the street without being handcuffed, and were merely issued citations to appear in the department of administrative hearings. (Those arrests, however, took place under the watchful eye of Democratic Senator Dick Durbin and Democratic Representatives Danny Davis, Jan Schakowsky and Mike Quigley.)

But not on 15 October or the following Saturday night. Instead of issuing citations, the Chicago police arrested over 300 protesters, placed them in handcuffs, treating the municipal park infractions as quasi-criminal charges, booked them, fingerprinted them and detained them overnight in police holding cells, some for as many as 17 hours. They are now aggressively prosecuting these cases in criminal court.

That’s precisely the type of practice that chills political expression. The inconsistent treatment of political dissent in Grant Park or at the Chicago board of trade reflects the colossal amount of discretion that mayors and police chiefs have over political discourse today. Police discretion is wide, political expression is fragile.

Rahm Emanuel’s message on the G8 and Nato meetings has been loud and clear – and chilling: the DEA, FBI, ATF, DOJ, state police and many other law enforcement agencies will be out in force; it will be harder to comply with the protest laws; and any deviations or errors will be costlier and punished. What’s really troubling is that the G8 and Nato will come and go, but these reforms are with us in Chicago to stay. Chicago’s mayor seems to be following in the footsteps of other municipal officials (recall Rudy Giuliani’s idea of staying on as mayor for an extra three months), who, with a touch of Potus-envy and perhaps a small Napoleonic complex, begin to act like minor tyrants.

It’ll be interesting to follow the first amendment litigation brought by the Occupy protesters. Their cases have been joined – there are about 100 of them in the challenge now – and their free speech claims will be heard by the chief judge at the Daley Center on 15 February 2012.

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Source: The Guardian, Jan. 19, 2012

• EDRi supports protests against US blacklist legislation
• What's Wrong with ACTA Week
• The US pressure on Spain to censor the Internet has paid off
• Belarus strongly censors the Internet
• Commission confirms illegality of Data Retention Directive
• Romanian Senate rejects the new data retention law
• Finnish ISP started blocking The Pirate Bay
• Dutch Internet providers forced to block The Pirate Bay
• US continue pushing on EU Commission against Data Protection proposals
• Researchers say smart meter technology is privacy intrusive
• ENDitorial: Copyright vs Public Domain-copyright as a barrier to culture?
• Recommended Action
• Recommended Reading
• Agenda

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Introduction The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) is a plurilateral international agreement which wants to set a “gold standard” for the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The Agreement will have major implications for freedom of expression, access to culture and privacy. It will also harm international trade and stifle innovation.

Decision-time in the European Parliament

In February, the European Parliament will be formally given the dossier. It then plans to discuss the dossier with the International Trade Committee as the body in charge, with input from the Industry, Legal Affairs, Civil Liberties and Development Committees.

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Release Notes: The codebase has been substantially rewritten since the 1.4.x branch. Various bugfixes were made.

Book Launch & Poetry Reading

Howard Slater's 'Anomie/Bonhomie & Other Writings' 

Tuesday, 24 January 2012, 7-9pm.

Møllegades Boghandel, Møllegade 8A, 2200 Kbh. N, Denmark

About the Book

In this collection of writings, Howard Slater improvises around what Walter Benjamin could have meant by the phrase 'affective classes'. This 'messianic shard' and its possible implications leads Slater to develop a therapeutic micro-politics by way of a mourning for the Workers' Movement and a grappling with the 'becomings of capital'. The essay 'Anomie/Bonhomie' is the keystone of this book which also features tributary texts and poems drawn from the past ten years. These supplementary texts approach such themes as exodus, species-being, surrealist precedents, poetic language and the possibilities for collective 'affective' practices to combat capitalism's colonisation of the psyche.

Howard Slater is a volunteer play therapist, sometime writer and ex-housing worker who lives in East London. Whilst he has been writing since the early 1980s he has mainly been published in small press magazines, independent publishing initiatives and web sites. 

Buy a copy of the book 

The sweetest and most generous person in the world.

Webradio Program on Friday Jan. 20th  from 4 p.m. till late

Live Webradio: M2M stream: http://radio.dyne.org:8000/

Patapoe in MP3 http://icecast.freeteam.nl/patapoe.m3u

Patapoe in OGG http://icecast.freeteam.nl/patapoe.ogg.m3u

Young Somali refugees who are forced to survive in the streets in Holland have taken the lead in organizing demonstrations and camps to demand their basic human rights. The Dutch right wing governments drive to harrass undocumented mighrants out of the country leads to thousands of humans from Somalia, Iran, Afghanistan, Guinee and other countries having to live on the street. There is no shelter for them in official centers and the charity shelters that existed before are at best full or had to close for lack of money. Or the first time in Dutch history a powerful and proud group of illegalized refugees has taken action in its own hands, demanding a chance to live.
On Friday 20th of January Dutch activists join hands with the Somali activists for a “Public Conspiratorial Meeting” on how to make a change in Dutch migration politics. Together we can walk tall!

No more human beings on the street without a chance to live here or in their homeland.

Join the show, come to Amsterdam on January 20th from 4 p.m. till after midnight.

Beat the Borders

Walk like a Somali!

Venue: OT301, Overtoom 301

Program and Info

Live stream with M2M Radio  and on Radio Patapoe at  FM in Amsterdam

Listen to Nuredin, Halad, Sarah and friends in Vught talking with Jo M2M:

part 1 Welcome!

part 2 Jump like a Somali!

part 3 Somali Anthem

Excerpt of “Liberation from the Affluent Society”
by Herbert Marcuse (1967)

‘

We all know the fatal prejudice, practically from the beginning, in the Labour Movement against the intelligentsia as a catalyst of historical change. It is time to ask whether this prejudice against the intellectuals, and the inferiority complex of the intellectuals resulting from it, was not an essential factor in the development of the capitalist as well as the socialist societies: in the development and weakening of the opposition. The intellectuals usually went out to organize the others, to organize in the communities. They certainly did not use the potentiality they had to organize themselves, to organize among themselves not only on a regional, not only on a national, but on an international level. That is, in my view, today one of the most urgent tasks.

Can we say that the intelligentsia is the agent of historical change? Can we say that the intelligentsia today is a revolutionary class? The answer I would give is: No, we cannot say that. But we can say, and I think we must say, that the intelligentsia has a decisive preparatory function, not more; and I suggest that this is plenty. By itself it is not and cannot be a revolutionary class, but it can become the catalyst, and it has a preparatory function – certainly not for the first time, that is in fact the way all revolution starts – but more, perhaps, today than ever before. Because – and for this too we have a very material and very concrete basis – it is from this group that the holders of decisive positions in the productive process will be recruited, in the future even more than hitherto. I refer to what we may call the increasingly scientific character of the material process of production, by virtue of which the role of the intelligentsia changes. It is the group from which the decisive holders of decisive positions will be recruited: scientists, researchers, technicians, engineers, even psychologists – because psychology will continue to be a socially necessary instrument, either of servitude or of liberation.

This class, this intelligentsia has been called the new working class. I believe this term is at best premature. Its members are – and this we should not forget – today the pet beneficiaries of the established system. But they are also at the very source of the glaring contradictions between the liberating capacity of science and its repressive and enslaving use. To activate the repressed and manipulated contradiction, to make it operate as a catalyst of change, that is one of the main tasks of the opposition today. It remains and must remain a political task.

Education is our job, but education in a new sense. Being theory as well as practice, political practice, education today is more than discussion, more than teaching and learning and writing. Unless and until it goes beyond the classroom, until and unless it goes beyond the college, the school, the university, it will remain powerless. Education today must involve the mind and the body, reason and imagination, the intellectual and the instinctual needs, because our entire existence has become the subject/object of politics, of social engineering. I emphasize, it is not a question of making the schools and universities, of making the educational system political. The educational system is political already. I need only remind you of the incredible degree to which (I am speaking of the United States) universities are involved in huge research grants (the nature of which you know in many cases) by the government and the various quasi-governmental agencies.

The educational system is political, so it is not we who want to politicize the educational system. What we want is a counter-policy against the established policy. And in this sense we must meet this society on its own ground of total mobilization. We must confront indoctrination in servitude with indoctrination in freedom. We must each of us generate in ourselves, and try to generate in others, the instinctual need for a life without fear, without brutality, and without stupidity. And we must see that we can generate the instinctual and intellectual revulsion against the values of an affluence which spreads aggressiveness and suppression throughout the world.

Genuino Clandestino from Nicola Angrisano on Vimeo.

Doc., HD,2011,colore,70′ - Un film di Nicola Angrisano, InsuTv

SINOSSI:
“Movimenti di Resistenza Contadina” -
Decine di coltivatori, allevatori, pastori e artigiani si uniscono nell’attacco alle logiche economiche e alle regole di mercato cucite sull’agroindustria, per difendere la libera lavorazione dei prodotti, l’agricoltura contadina, l’immenso patrimonio di saperi e sapori della terra.
Da questa rete nasce la campagna “Genuino Clandestino”, con donne e uomini da ogni parte d’Italia che si autorgnizzano in nuove forme di resistenza contadina.
Mentre la burocrazia bandisce dal mercato migliaia di piccoli produttori, il consumatore continua a subire, spesso inconsapevolmente, modelli di produzione del tutto inadeguati a garantire genuinità ed affidabilità dei cibi.
Attraverso il lavoro, le situazioni e le voci dei contadini “clandestini”, insu^tv racconta questa campagna, semplice nel suo messaggio, ma determinata nelle sue forme, insieme alle implicazioni in materia di democrazia del cibo, sviluppo economico, salvaguardia dell’ambiente e accesso alla terra.

Per acquisire il dvd, per organizzare presentazioni ed eventi correlati al film e alla rete contadina:
genuino@insutv.it

A User’s Guide to Closing the Casino

Tahrir by night

This text concludes the Three Crises series with an exploration of the collapsing Western middle classes, our entanglement in finance capital, our relations to the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, our inexorable proletarianization and revolutionary potentials. Happy New Year, gentle reader. De te fabula narratur.

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I want to begin, not with a curse but with a very beautiful convergence, one that is widely held to be real, but shrouded in mystery for millions of people. I’m talking about the “movement of the squares” unfolding on both sides of the North/South divide. And here’s the question: What is the hidden link between the middle-class and precarious movements against the dictates of finance capital – Occupy Wall Street and the European Indignados – and the far more perilous struggles to end dictatorships in North Africa and the Middle East? What relationship could possibly be sustained between the regions that concentrate global wealth and those from which labor, resources and interest payments are relentlessly extracted?

Immanuel Wallerstein claims that the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa pit two historical groups against each other. One he calls the “1968 current,” which consists of non-violent, directly democratic grassroots movements that challenge all forms of exclusion and abuses of power, in the name of an equality that includes respect for fundamental differences. The other group consists of people who oppose such movements and seek in whatever way to capture, contain and neutralize them – and in North Africa and the Middle East, that chiefly means holders of oil wealth and US-backed dictators. For Wallerstein, today’s uprisings are a continuation, after decades of latency, of “the world-revolution of 1968,” which lasted by his account from 1966 to 1970.1

If this is true, then the people out in the streets today at least share a history. Because the world-revolution of 1968 also took place in Europe and in the United States, where it revolved crucially around solidarity and direct cooperation between Northern middle-class students and intellectuals and oppressed people in the South – which in the US meant not only Vietnam and Latin America, but also the South of our own country. Whites went to Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi to work with the civil rights movement. Oppressed minority groups, especially the Black Panthers, read Frantz Fanon and other anti-colonial thinkers, and came to designate themselves as Third World peoples. The New Left sought to express its support for the Vietnamese revolutionaries by “bringing the war back home.” A vast, unruly and often failed experiment in cross-class, cross-border collaboration defined the “1968 current.” But is this historical memory enough to explain the convergence of direct-democratic practices in the movement of the squares?

I don’t think it is. To uncover the more complex grounds on which we meet, it’s necessary to look back to the reactionary surge that followed 1968, ultimately giving rise to neoliberalism. It began in the US with the election of Richard Nixon. He ran on a law-and-order platform, and his administration crushed domestic dissidents with covert operations, legislated “spatial deconcentration” programs for inner-city gentrification, invented SWAT teams for attacks on the ghettos, launched the prison-industrial complex and offered support to the military regime of Pinochet in Chile, opening the door to the coordinated repression of the Latin American left by Operation Condor in the later 1970s. Nixon also presided over the settlement of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and the OPEC embargo. That led on the one hand to the US stabilization of Egypt (with military aid formalized in 1979 as part of the Camp David accords), and on the other, to the new petroleum prices and the introduction of a capital circuit linking Western banks, engineering firms and armament makers to the most oppressive oil-exporting regimes. The whole process cemented the position of authoritarian leaders in the Arab world and provided the cash for a major round of predatory lending to developing countries across the planet. The dictators that have recently fallen in North Africa and the Middle East date from this period. Thus both domestically and internationally, the 1970s saw the installation of a police and military order that sought, and still seeks, to capture and contain the “1968 current.”

As police rapidly militarize in the North, the experience of repression becomes another thing that today’s movements share – unequally, as usual. Yet again that’s not the whole story, and a further moment of history must be considered. In the US and throughout the developed countries, student protest and the emergence of a counter-culture appeared to herald the rise of a “new class” capable of grasping the levers of power in increasingly bureaucratic systems. This “new class” consisted of administrators, scientists, engineers, educators, social workers, opinion-makers and artists.2 It was nurtured in the liberal universities of the welfare state, at a time when the functions of government had dramatically expanded, leaving the old patricians behind. Decision-making by committee had replaced the leadership of “great men,” and the private ownership of corporations was increasingly considered a legal fiction.3 To neoconservative eyes, the student revolt threatened to radicalize what was already a mainstream trend toward collective control of the American political economy. The societal struggle of the 1970s, at a time of deep economic crisis, revolved around furthering or blocking this possible takeover of power.

More recent sociological thinking observes that after the period of widespread alienation accompanying each major crisis, a reformed and transformed capitalist system has to succeed in reintegrating its qualified managerial and technical personnel along with the producers of artistic and intellectual culture.4 The new order has to recover the confidence of those who will be charged with administering and reproducing its logic. How was this achieved from the 1980s to today, with respect to the professional-managerial classes of North America and Europe, and indeed, to similar strata in the developing world? The answer to this question will reveal both the glaring divide and the hidden links between the Northern and Southern movements.

Here’s my idea: the integration of the professional-managerial classes to the neoliberal phase of capitalism has been accomplished by a complex, but unified and deeply pervasive mechanism, which may be called the financial apparatus. Or you can just call it the casino. Its operations can be felt across the spectrum of society, not only in business but in art, education, public administration, technology, the media, urbanism, diplomacy, and most acutely of all, in social psychology. The necessary converse of systematic military repression is an adrenaline-charged roll of the electric dice. When we occupy Wall Street in the global financial capital of New York City, or any other financial district in any other city, what we do is to oppose the integrative strategy of those who seek to capture, contain and neutralize the effects of world revolution. In this way we stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters in the North Africa and the Middle East (and in Latin America and other regions) by taking actions which are in no way identical, but instead run parallel to theirs. Could one cross the line, to direct cooperation? Let’s hold on to that question.

Global Gamble

Marxists like David Harvey interpret the financial turn that began in the early 1970s as a class strategy to restore the prerogatives of ownership, giving rise in our time to the power of the worldwide 1%.5 Others such as Michael Hudson or the late Peter Gowan concentrate on the strategies of the American state: structural support for neoliberal finance is Washington’s “global gamble” to maintain control over the international monetary system.6 Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy integrate both approaches, but they also introduce a crucial class concept. In their view, Keynesian Fordism represented a compromise between the middle and working classes, while under neoliberalism (or Neoliberal Informationalism) the middle classes have been sucked back into the service of capital.7 The question we will have to ask is, how did the cultural formations of the welfare state metamorphose into those of corporate globalism? What were the ethical and aesthetic pathways of this political power shift? The “global gamble” is not only a capitalist or governmental strategy but above all a societal passion, one that has acted to disable any emancipatory moves within the professional, cultural and educational spheres until very recently.

To understand the results, let’s look into one of those agitated scenes that currently holds the middle classes so deeply in thrall. I’m thinking of the UBS facility in Stamford, Connecticut, some thirty-five miles north of Manhattan.8 It’s the world’s largest trading floor: 103,000 square feet of desks, computers, keyboards and monitors, with designer seating for some 1,400 traders exchanging up to $1.5 trillion a day beneath a single overarching roof. Zurich-based UBS specializes in foreign exchange and wealth management, but like other transnational megabanks it deals in everything: stocks, commodities, bonds, money markets, derivatives, asset-backed securities and all the arcana of structured finance. Staring endlessly into personalized arrays of three to eight screens, the traders watch Bloomberg news feeds, spread sheets, continually updated price displays and database graphics showing candlestick charts and moving averages as well as their own market positions and trading histories. They buy and sell through single-key voice-broker telephones, networked dealing systems and automated trading programs, and they communicate with each other through glances, gestures, brief comments, the occasional shout and an intensive use of MindAlign chat and video-conference software. Group leaders, software designers, middle managers, computer techs and other support personnel share the same open floor plan, to maximize interactivity. The bank is wired into a securitized global network of fiber optic cable provided by Hibernia Atlantic, with a special low-latency link to the UK under construction today, so that high-frequency traders can take advantage of transoceanic speeds down to 60 milliseconds.9 Of course, by the time the new cable kicks in the bank may have already collapsed or been restructured, since UBS took major hits on subprime mortgage derivatives and has since been plagued by leadership issues and rogue trading, as well as persistent difficulties in recruiting qualified personnel for this location too far from Wall Street and Park Avenue. Stability, in any case, has never been promised by today’s financial institutions. Instead they claim to manage risks.

UBS trading floor, Stamford CT

The official functions of banks like UBS are to raise capital for long-term productive investments, to provide liquidity for the month-to-month and day-to-day borrowing on which all business and public-sector activity now depends, to offer investors appropriate rewards for risks incurred, and to hedge against every kind of natural and artificial disaster that might affect the invested sums – including those disasters generated by the dealers themselves. The unofficial function of the banks is to make obscene profits by whatever means necessary, to distribute as much of them as possible to insiders by way of bonuses and stock options, and to shunt losses off to naive individuals or government guarantors. Recent events, from the gigantic bailouts distributed by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, to the direct takeover of the Greek and Italian governments by technocrats from planet money, have dramatized the extent to which public policy is now set and destroyed according to financial imperatives. Finance is effectively a global government, represented on the media stage by the G-20 summit of finance ministers, but obeying no laws except its own. Yet the question why its rule has been tolerated for so long, and still is tolerated by the middle classes, cannot be answered by simply reiterating a litany of abuses. Instead we should consider the activity of the trader – the lowest level of “golden boy,” who can strike it rich, but also fail abysmally – and see how it epitomizes the conditions under which all professions are now exercised.

On the one hand, he faces streams of primary data that are considered entirely objective. They are prices, market facts generated by anonymous buyers and sellers whose collective judgment is supposed to provide real information about goods and services. Trading acts to smooth out minor differences in price through the process of arbitrage, buying slightly lower in one place, selling slightly higher in another. In this way it is supposed to correct innacuracies and perfect the system. The idea that market prices assure a perfect equilibrium between supply and demand, leaving only a residual fluctuation that is ultimately random, is known as the efficient market hypothesis.10 It underwrites an enduring faith in the neutrality of financial speculation.

At the same time, the trader is lionized as an exception, a maverick, a genius. He is possessed of unique knowledge, lightning speed, unparalleled aggressivity and an uncanny “feel” for changing trends. Through his manipulation of information that is theoretically available to everyone, the trader constantly creates value for the bank and its clients. He does so in the strictest separation from the fate of any real goods or services, since he can make money on numbers going either up or down. He keeps his own book of profit and loss, and even though he is dealing with other people’s money he must make singular and original choices, since he is rewarded for acting only on those particular risks where he can make a profit. The trader is defined by what economic theory deems impossible: the ability to “beat the house.” Hypercompetition and virtuoso skill make him the middle-class hero of Neoliberal Informationalism.

Never mind that the entire environment is relentlessly fabricated and controlled; that the price information is shaped into patterns by the abstruse calculations of particle physicists whose math no one else could possibly understand; that this math in its turn is translated into automated programs unleashed more or less blindly into the labyrinths of computer networks; that the traders themselves are incessantly coached, cajoled and managed by their team leaders guiding everything with a hidden hand; and that the very layout of the floor, the curve of the architecture, and perhaps some day, the dreams of the people inhabiting it are subjected to a calculus of interactivity that subsumes every behavior to an optimal outcome whose shadow in reality is continuously monitored for negative deviations from the norm.11 Because that’s the way it is, and it’s no secret to anyone involved. For generations of business geeks raised on video games and Terminator films, financial trading remains the closest thing to professional paradise yet imagined. The ethics and the aesthetics of the neoliberal period have been shaped by this central institution, to which the university, the cultural-intellectual sphere, the government itself and even the industrial world are now simply adjuncts.

Apparatchik

How does a narrow class strategy, concentrated into specific technical functions, spill over into an entire era and lend its coloration to a whole diffuse period of human coexistence? In a 1977 interview, Michel Foucault gave a definition of one of his key concepts: the apparatus (or dispositif). His discussion, though highly abstract, reads like a cartographer’s key to our financialized society. The apparatus is the “system of relations” that knits together a set of seemingly unrelated elements: “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions.” It is a “formation which has as its major function at a given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need.” Yet beyond this urgency, the apparatus is constructed to sustain both “a process of functional overdetermination” and “a perpetual process of strategic elaboration.” Finally, Foucault notes that “in trying to identify an apparatus, I look for the elements which participate in a rationality, a given form of co-ordination [une concertation donnée].”12 The aim is to grasp the operations of a ruling idea within an interlocking series of social forms.

The most well-known example of a Foucaultian apparatus is the observational system of the Panopticon: a circular prison outfitted with a central tower concealing the invisible but all-seeing gaze of the warden.13 Its intended effect was to diminish the need for disciplinary force, by gradually installing an inner censor at the heart of each prisoner’s self-consciousness. Beyond this immediate need, the apparatus responded to a larger strategy, which was that of producing docile and trainable bodies for the factories and armies of industrial society. But it also exemplified a situation where distanced observation actually produced a norm. This functional excess, or overdetermination, made the social relation of the prison into a generative matrix for both scientific disciplines and standardized individuals. The Panopticon fit centrally into the coordinating rationality of industrial modernism.

By 1977, however, Foucault had realized that the panoptic schema was already obsolete, along with the Keynesian-Fordist society that it served to critique. In his course at the Collège de France on the prehistories of neoliberalism he turned instead to “apparatuses of security.” His first example was an 18th-century redevelopment plan for the city of Nantes, which involved cutting out new streets to serve four overlapping functions: the aeration of unhygienic neighborhoods; the facilitation of trade inside the city; direct connection to long-distance transportation networks; and the surveillance of traffic in an urban environment that is no longer walled or subject to curfew. Instead of developing closed, precisely defined spaces for exclusive uses, the plan creates a series of multifunctional corridors that can expand in various directions, according to future patterns of growth that can only be foreseen as probabilities. Other examples of security apparatuses include the mitigation of famine by economic regulations that discourage the hoarding of grain, or most interestingly, the treatment of smallpox by means of the disease itself, that is, vaccination. In each case, the nature of an existing phenomenon and its effects on a population are carefully analyzed before any measures are taken.

Security apparatuses come into play as enabling frameworks. Their primary effect is not to impose anything on anyone, but instead to select the most favorable elements from the spontaneous behaviors of a given population, then shape an environment to optimize them still further, until their very predominance excludes unwanted traits. The idea is “to reduce the most unfavorable, deviant normalities in relation to the normal, general curve.”14 Intervention takes place not on the individual players, but on “the rules of the game”;15 while outright repression is reserved for “dangerous” elements that could perturb the system. Over the last three decades, exactly such a schema has defined the preferred relations between the holders of concentrated capital and their servants, the professional-managerial classes.

Had Foucault lived through the speculative boom of the late 1980s, he would have recognized transnational finance as the crucial security apparatus of the neoliberal era. Computerized trading applies a logic of risk optimization to circulating capital flows, and it does so within precisely defined technological, informational and legal environments. Let’s consider how those environments emerged, after the collapse of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange-rate treaty in 1971. The urgent need to which currency futures, options and other derivatives responded was that of managing transnational business operations under conditions of unprecedented volatility, where values fluctuated hour by hour and prices were subject to multiple forms of risk. Sophisticated mathematical models combined with networked price-information systems not only helped to mitigate those risks by complex hedging strategies, but also served to generate liquidity for a wave of mergers and acquisitions, at a time when corporations were scaling up to the global level. Yet the financial turn also fit into a larger strategy for the reintegration of the professional-managerial classes, whose younger elements had been alienated by the standardization and regimentation of Fordism.

The strategy hinged on the recognition of individual difference as constitutive of human capital, whose promised “returns” would be offered in compensation for the suppression of public facilities and entitlements. The fiscal crisis of the welfare state could be resolved if the expenses of social reproduction – health, education, transportation, housing, unemployment, retirement – were assigned to individuals as investments in their human capital, for which credit could be furnished by private banks, at interest. Ideology, patriotism and family values no longer had much sway over the members of the “new class,” but the tantalizing prospect of accessing some speculative capital, combined with the monthly oligations of student loan payments and homeowner or consumer debt, furnished more precise means of behavioral control. As the university retooled to serve the knowledge economy, the most popular artists and intellectuals became culture stars and a few scientists began drawing profits from intellectual property. Meanwhile, at the elite end of the spectrum, ownership prerogatives were restored when shareholder value became the governing principle of enterprise. Instead of focusing on production, corporations would now pursue a single goal: generating cash, and therefore social power, for their owners.

These are tremendous changes with respect to Keynesian Fordism. But one could go further and show how the cybernetic calculus of finance operates as a coordinating rationality for just-in-time production, distribution and sales. When the G-20 finance ministers strive to forestall a transnational credit crunch, it is this just-in-time system that they are serving. The rhythms of finance have come to govern the entire circulation system of the world economy.16 However, if we want to understand how the social relations of the trading floor have spilled over to reshape contemporary culture – through a “functional overdetermination” of the financial apparatus – then we will have to turn back to the micro level, and look more closely at what actually happens inside the casino.

An obscenely powerful hedge fund dude

Starfuckers

The sharpest observations emerge from fieldwork by Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Bruegger among a team of UBS currency traders in Zurich. What they claim to have discovered there is a “post-social relationship”: an intellectual, perceptual and visceral interaction with the “market on screen,” experienced by the traders as “a complex ‘other’ with which they are strongly, even obsessively, engaged.”17 According to these sociologists, the market that coalesces into presence on the screens is indistinguishable from a “life form,” constantly fluctuating, elusively shifting and changing. Its complexity arises from a double aspect, for it is both a flow that one enters and alters, and a quasi-conscious other that one encounters with a shock of recognition. As Bruegger and Knorr Cetina write: “the transfer of the market onto the screen has meant that traders are now able to simultaneously position themselves inside the market in the sense of becoming players in its overlapping networks, and to relate to the market on screen as an exteriorized other, a sort of master being that observes all transactions and includes their contextual conditions and motivations.” The interaction with the market is tumultuous and passionate, oscillating between the desire and fear of volatility, the narcissistic elation of profit and the violent shock of loss. Failure is expressed in graphic metaphors where sexualized aggression turns inward from the market to the trader: “I got shafted, I got bent over, I got blown up, I got raped, I got stuffed/the guy stuffed me, I got fucked, I got hammered, I got killed.” All of that, remember, is happening at work, via an apparently cool and technocratic gaze on three or six or eight computer monitors.

Borrowing a page from psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s text on the “mirror stage” of human development, the two authors compare this relationship with the market on screen to the infant’s relationship with its own reflection, experienced as the tantalizing image of a bounded whole that appears to be the self, yet remains irreconcilable with the bodily experience of uncoordinated movements, partial objects and chaotic drives. The fluctuating nature of the market, the incompleteness of the information it offers at any particular time, thus becomes the motor of a dynamic relationship. The key thesis that undergirds all of Knorr Cetina’s work on flux-objects is this: “we maintain that traders’ engagement with markets is based on a match between the self as a sequence of wantings and an unfolding object that provides for these wantings through the lacks it displays.” The interconnection of organic and electronic rhythms – the push-pull of greed and market signals – is the basis of postsocial relations. Yet beyond this rhythmical relation of wanting and lack, of unfolding object and inchoate desire, there is always a tantalizing image of the whole: the star trader just one row over, the Hollywood star out on a yacht in the bay, the millionaire exec just returning from China – or the market itself when it suddenly coheres, complete and ravishing, as an opportunity within reach.

For architectural critic Norman Klein, the “scripted spaces” of Las Vegas casinos are the epitome of urban design in financialized culture. Klein homes in on slot machines, which “turned risk into a consumer thrill.” They now include screens displaying special effects from the movies, feature realistic showgirls giving players the come-on, and integrate narrative devices from quiz shows and other popular TV series. Yet their major function is statistical control. As Klein observes: “They became the most integrated software network in entertainment, practically a metonym for the globalized electronic economy. They stand in for cybernetic controls across many markets at once. Today computerized tracking services perform like a bot for the house: tracking players, slots, tables, revenue services, doing the taxes, providing ‘up to the minute WIN reporting,’ player photos, electronic signature identification, messages for players in their hotel rooms.”18 At the heart of the slots, where the wheels of fortune spin, is a subtle equation whereby the player at once “senses an internal design” (the math that governs the payback) but also feels “the illusion of luck” (the possibility of a chance event). Profit for the house is ensured through strictly calculated probabilities.

The electronic trading floors that provide a model for contemporary casinos are also theaters of passion subject to integral statistical control. Yet unlike casinos, they are incapable of achieving cybernetic closure. The calculus of probabilities is too vast to master, despite the mathematical efforts of quants writing unique equations for personalized over-the-counter derivatives. Storms, earthquakes, meltdowns and other events continually intervene, at historically unpredictable rates due to the ecological consequences of an over- heated global economy. Populations wear down, unable to repay the loans that injected more capital in the system to increase the illusion of luck. Then governments take over with quantitative easing programs that expand the money supply for a further round of the global gamble. As I write, the passionate involvement between traders and the internalized “other” of the market has turned violent: major banks, hedge funds and ratings agencies collude to threaten the economic stability of the entire European continent, provoking conditions of volatility that offer fresh occasions for high-frequency trading and more obscene profits. The ice-cold cerebral activity of finance takes on the aura of a strangely frenetic sacrificial rite. It’s as though the theater of greed and desire had suddenly become a gladiatorial arena. The rest of us – the people in the street – sense that we could be the “other,” that is, the victims.

Profane Communication

Separation, for Giorgio Agamben, is the essence of the sacred. It removes objects, places, activities and people from the world of common usage, transferring them through rite and myth to the sphere of the divine. “Not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation preserves within itself a genuinely religious core.”19 This sacred divide is carried over into the value-form of the commodity, whose abstraction reaches a height in the semiotic universe of the financial markets. But Agamben does not call for any return to genuine religion. The urgency of his thinking is clear in his concept of secularization:

Secularization is a form of repression. It leaves intact the forces it deals with by simply moving them from one place to another. Thus the political secularization of theological concepts (the transcendence of God as a paradigm of sovereign power) does nothing but displace the heavenly monarchy into an earthly monarchy, leaving its power intact.

All of contemporary capitalism effects a repressive secularization, transforming the absolute divide between priestly and secular status into class hierarchies where economics fully replaces aura. For this reason the grand strategy of Enlightenment, demystification, can no longer apply to the basic operations of power in our societies, which contain no obscure core of mystery, but only obsessional procedures for the imposition of rationalized myths and rites. In place of secularization, Agamben proposes the act of profanation: “Both are political operations: the first guarantees the exercise of power by carrying it back to a sacred model; the second deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized.”

Chris Cobb for Fake Fox News

In societies dominated by the mediatization of two destructive rites – financial crisis and war – the act of profanation becomes necessary to the very existence of democratic politics. By converging on sites of global decision-making, such as international summits, a previous wave of protesters was able to displace social attention at the very locus where it is concentrated and synchronized with the commands of power. Agamben refers to a kind of defunctionalizing play, which “frees and distracts humanity from the sphere of the sacred, without simply abolishing it.” Those were the tactics of the “carnivals against capital” at the century’s turn. But at a moment when political control is being ceded to financial traders operating 24/7 through abstractive global networks, the outbreak of embodied dissent on Wall Street and in other financial centers has greater force than the protest carnivals – all the more so because the occupations continue day and night, incarnating another life rather than a disruptive moment. The spillover into the media is tremendous. Once the place of power is altered, its name acquires a different valence, it becomes an invitation to further questioning and defiance, rather than a reminder of disempowerment and cynical manipulation. At issue is a cultural resistance to the depressive effects of scripted society. To describe the nature of profane play, Agamben quotes the linguist Émile Benveniste:

The power of the sacred act, he writes, lies in the conjunction of the myth that tells the story and the rite that reproduces and stages it. Play breaks up this unity: as ludus, or physical play, it drops the myth and preserves the rite; as iocus, or wordplay, it effaces the rite and allows the myth to survive. “If the sacred can be defined through the consubstantial unity of myth and rite, we can say that one has play when only half the sacred operation is completed, translating only the myth into words or only the rite into actions.”

What could this mean in a secularized context, where myth has been replaced by media, and rite by the instrumentality of mathematical models and computer programs? Consider first of all the most striking emblem of the recent occupations, which is the signage. Oscillating between an endless list of grievances, an angry J’accuse! and a warm invitation to satirical disbelief, these handwritten signs fascinate participants and bystanders, floating above the crowd like headlines from everyday existence. The signs are not yet demands: they are discursive and affective information for the movement itself, clarifying the collective perception of social problems that have been censored from the major media. No less powerful in this regard, despite its purely web-based appearance, are the letters of people abandoned by the system, the sorrows of the 99% that have never made it into any statistic.20 Wordplay is everywhere at the occupations, substituting direct address and shared invention for the laborious and repressive fabrications of the corporate media. The will to interrupt one-way speech is so strong that even where amplification is available and legal, the occupiers have used the “people’s mic” so as to make sure that a speaker’s every word can be tested (and tasted) in one’s own body before being received as truth. All of this is done in the absence of functional expertise, and of any “demands” whatsoever: the connection between ideological myth and instrumental rite is interrupted. The displacement and release of both direct and mediated speech opens up new faculties of critical intelligence, not only among the protesters on the spot, but across the world.

Through the irruption of a social movement, political-economic analysis is returned to common use among the people who are typically on the receiving end. That’s fundamental, it’s the biggest gain so far. Yet to be effective in breaking the dependence of intellectuals and cultural producers on elite patronage and models of human capital, this expressive intelligence will have to be pushed further into both professional life and everyday practice. There is an irreverence that equalizes, that cuts through privileges and lies, it’s the essence of profanity. Like this: a guy at Liberty Square holds a Fox News camera made of cardboard, with a hand-drawn, one-dimensional mic that he thrusts insistently in the face of anyone claiming to be important. The gesture dissolves the repetition-compulsions of the media into pure play: the ethical departure point of profane communication.

A different use of speech is possible when the occupations shatter the narcissistic mirror, mingling bodies, upsetting class and race divides. This is possible because a major crisis of capitalism brings all kinds of people out into the street. The question is how to go on talking with those you formerly ignored. They could include scientists and technicians who shape behavior through machines, or managers who organize productive collaborations. Normally these people provide services to our rulers. Could they break the connection between instrumental technology and mediated myth?

Engineering, a central concern of communism, was more or less abandoned by the ‘68 current – to disastrous effect, because a movement without têchné can’t convince anyone of its capacity to materially reorganize society. But younger activists have been able to find a new way in, mainly by way of networks. When global computer exchange links are hacked away from the official capitalist ideologies that bind them to the financial apparatus, what results is the open proliferation of a powerful tool. The Global Revolution streaming video network is one example. Among the founders is Vlad Teichberg, who emigrated from Russia to the US when he was ten years old. In an interview with Democracy Now he speaks about the roots of OWS in the Arab Spring and the Spanish Indignado movement. Those who wonder about the struggles of technologists inside the financial apparatus definitely have something to learn from this guy:

I was a derivatives trader. I was basically working for large banks, betting their money on derivatives products. And my job was understanding how those products work… For me… the whole globalization philosophy that was being pushed in the early/mid-nineties, [the idea] that it would be the ultimate equalizer for the world, turned out to be faulty, because of the effect of multinationals. Toward the late nineties I think a lot of people came to the same conclusion: globalization was doing more harm than good… And that’s pretty much when I started shifting out of being a supporter of this Ayn Rand approach to looking at the world.21

A programmer like Teichberg is no longer glued to any established combination of discourse and practice. Refusing hierarchical separations, he’s able to divert certain aspects of the financial apparatus toward other ends, to create a planetary network for common use. The failure of neoliberal globalization, which became obvious to him ten years ago, is now a palpable fact for everyone. The potential for a political use of skills that were formerly subordinated to the 1% is suddenly enormous. The contradictions of the “new class,” absorbed for decades by opportunities in the financialized economy, are returning to the fore. But the only way to keep them alive – and to save them from being captured, channeled and neutralized – is to use them, not just out on the street, but in whatever field you occupy every day. Profanity is only a departure point. The beginning is near, as an OWS slogan has it.

Closing It Down

I started this text in mid-November, with technocrats taking over European states and robocops evicting occupations across the US. While British workers pushed for a general strike and Chilean students radicalized their revolt, images of epic street fights poured in from Tahrir Square. Just as Wallerstein had claimed, the “1968 current” was back. It turned out that the same factory – Combined Systems Inc of Jamestown, Pennsylvania – was supplying tear-gas to the American and Egyptian police. On Al Jazeera I found a text by William Robinson: “The immense structural inequalities of the global political economy can no longer be contained through consensual mechanisms of social control. The ruling classes have lost legitimacy; we are witnessing a breakdown of ruling-class hegemony on a world scale.”22

At last it has become obvious that this is a major crisis of capitalism. As in the 1930s and 1970s, it will only be resolved by changing basic parameters of the system. The point is to take part, to generate an agency that can make changes for the better.

It’s impressive to learn that as far back as 2007, a financial think-tank working for the British military had already understood that under the pressure of crisis, “the middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx.” Here’s what they said:

The globalization of labor markets and reducing levels of national welfare provision and employment could reduce peoples’ attachment to particular states. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat to social order and stability, as the burden of acquired debt and the failure of pension provision begins to bite. Faced by these twin challenges, the world’s middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.

Now such futures are beginning to be realized – and immediately repressed by the capital-state. The question is, what happens next? Can today’s intellectuals and cultural producers of the North, acting in parallel with oppressed peoples in the South, spark a movement on the scale of the world-revolution of 1968? Can we use the solidarity brought by economic crisis to create an alternate hegemony? Can we intervene in a new way, to provoke not a violent reaction, but instead a positive structural change in the repressive course of what is currently being called “necropolitics”?24

The middle-class revolts of the North will never be comparable to those of people facing hunger and dictatorship. But the secret link of our criss-crossing histories is that ultimately we share the same opponents. Behind the desiring-machine of the financial markets, the authority of the generals lies in wait. It was obvious throughout the last decade, when the dot-com bust was followed by global security panic and two brutal wars; but the course of everyday life went on unperturbed, in a period of massive complicity between the middle classes and our rapacious elites. The point is to tear away from the imperatives of the 1%, which have reshaped public institutions and penetrated the cultural-intellectual sphere very deeply. This requires playing a different game, no longer a gamble. Without tangible proof of a change of loyalties – achieved essentially by means of projects constructed outside the professional economy – there is no way to gain the trust of others. Without the capacity to reach into established fields and workplaces – achieved essentially by a courageous defense of philosophical principles against the current rules – there is no way to gain the capacities of social transformation.

Similar dilemmas have already confronted the growing professional-managerial classes of the South. One finds an important insight in the chronicles of Mark LeVine, a young University of California prof who has been on the scene in Egypt. Recounting a midnight visit to Tahrir, he discusses the desire of the movement’s informal “leaders” to create a space directly on the square for the poetry, music, cinema and other cultural forms that have sustained the revolt since its beginnings:

In other words, the leaders of Tahrir want to institutionalize the incredible creativity of the revolution, from musical performances and film to artwork, poetry and story-telling. These activities have sustained protesters during the darkest days of violence and have helped to attract hundreds of thousands of “ordinary Egyptians” to the Meidan during each of the occupations since January. This would constitute a permanent counterpoint to the state media and other mechanisms that the government and elite have at their disposal, through which they try to convince Egyptians that the Tahriris are little more than “thugs” who don’t have their interests at heart.25

In the corrupt and declining countries of the North, artists and intellectuals need to rediscover this desire for a culture outside the financialized state – a profane culture that is powerful, sophisticated and deep, but open to common use. Only in this way can we strengthen the affects of resistance and build the capacity to create alternatives. And there is no time left for ambivalence. A structural crisis can only be resolved by major transformations, for better or for worse. Social movements inevitably intervene, but often with unwanted consequences, as became obvious in the Nixon years. The challenge today, in societies dominated by the aging and fearful rich, is to hold off police violence while pushing defiantly for economic and ecological transformation. At some point over the next few years it will likely require decisive action, like those days when the people of the former East went out into the streets and didn’t leave. But we won’t get there by just hoping – because if financial chaos really hits, the generals have a plan.

Class strategies are formed by the aggregation of small decisions. Ask yourself, ask those around you, what it will take for us to close the casino.

* * *

Occupy Chicago

NOTES

1 Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Contradictions of the Arab Spring,” on Al Jazeera English (Nov. 14, 2011), http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111111101711539134.html.

2 Three books on the new class appeared in a single year: Pat Walker, ed., Between Labor and Capital (Boston: South End Press, 1979); A.W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (New York: Seabury, 1979); and B. Bruce-Briggs, ed., The New Class? (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1979). The first reprints a crucial essay by Barbara and John Ehrenreich on “The Professional-Managerial Class” and the third gives neocon viewpoints.

3 For the issues of ownership and control, see A. A. Berle and G.C. Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World Inc., 1968/1st ed. 1932); James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (New York: John Day, 1941); and J.K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967).

4 See Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (London: Verso, 2005/1st French edition 1999), as well as my text “The Flexible Personality” (2002), http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en.

5 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford U.P., 2005).

6 Michael Hudson, Super Imperialism (London: Pluto Press, 2003/1st ed. 1972); Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble (London: Verso, 1999).

7 G. Duménil and D. Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism (Harvard U.P., 2011), esp. chs. 1 and 5.

8 For a photo-essay about the site, see http://www.advancedtrading.com/photos/trading-floors/ubs.

9 http://www.hiberniagfn.com/network.php.

10 Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market (New York: Harper Collins, 2009).

11 On the math, see Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets (MIT Press, 2006).

12 Michel Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh” (1977), in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings (New York: Random House, 1980); translation slightly modified.

13 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1978/1st French ed. 1975).

14 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007/1st French ed. 2004), p. 90.

15 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008/1st French ed. 2004), p. 260; also see lectures 9 and 10 on the concept of human capital, discussed below.

16 See my article “Do Containers Dream of Electric People? The Social Form of Just-in-Time Production,” in Open 21, “Im/mobility” (2011), http://www.skor.nl/_files/Files/OPEN21EN_P30-44.pdf.

17 Karin Knorr Cetina and Urs Breugger, “Traders’ Engagement with Markets: A Postsocial Relationship,” in Theory, Culture & Society 19 (December 2002). All quotes in this and the following paragraph are from this article.

18 Norman Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects (New York Press, 2004), p. 340.

19 Giorgio Agamben, “In Praise of Profanation,” in Profanations (New York: Zone Books, 2007/1st Italian ed. 2005); further quotes are from the same essay. Agamben also develops the notion of profanation in What Is An Apparatus? (Stanford U.P., 2009/1st Italian ed. 2006). However he does not deal with the material and discursive complexity of any specific apparatus, nor with any particular acts of profanation.

20 http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com.

21 Interview with Vlad Teichberg, http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/18/the_revolution_will_be_live_streamed.

22 William I. Robinson, “Global rebellion: The coming chaos?”, on Al Jazeera English (Nov. 29, 2011), http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/11/20111130121556567265.html.

23 “The DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme, 2007-2036,” http://www.frequencyclear.tv/strat_trends.pdf.

24 Achille Mdembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15-1 (2003), http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/icuss/pdfs/Mbembe.pdf.

25 Mark LeVine, “Tahrir’s late night conversations,” on Al Jazeera English (Dec. 5, 2011), http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2011/12/201112511219971906.html.

As part of the Finnish Institute‘s new publications series, Hanna Harris edited a book about urban/community TV. It is largely based on experiences emerging from an exchange and mini seminar/workshop Harris organised with Tenantspin at FACT/Liverpool and m2hz in Helsinki. The book will be published in early 2012. Harris interviewed Adnan Hadzi for this edition:

Adnan is finalising a practice-based PhD entitled ‘FLOSSTV – Free, Libra, Open Source Software (FLOSS) within participatory ‘TV hacking’ Media and Arts Practices’ at Goldsmiths College, London. His research focuses on the influence of digitalisation and the new forms of media and arts production, as well as the author’s rights in relation to collective authorship. The practical outcome of his research is Deptford.TV, an online database drawing on and documenting the current process of urban change in Deptford, South East London. Adnan is also part of the artist group !Mediengruppe Bitnik. The group’s artistic practice focuses on media systems, mediatized realities and live media feeds which they manipulate and reproduce to give the viewer a novel and refined understanding of their mechanisms. Adnan and his collaborators ask:

How can broadcasting systems be reconfigured into participative media?
How can media systems be used to provide access to closed circuits?

Here we talk to Adnan about communities, power and experimenting with TV.

1. What do you understand by community media? How and by whom is it produced?

I like to refer to the Critical Art Ensemble’s notion of “electronic civil disobedience” (1996). Community is a discriminatory term, a label, used for minority communities; it is too loaded. This leaves out the power you can assert with media. I don’t see the power in community. There is a political dilemma with “community media”: it becomes about power vs. community media, about empowering vs. taking the power away. That’s why I prefer to use the term “participatory media”, although, recently, this term has become loaded too, espcially with the recent discussions around ‘social networks’. You can allow mainstream media to be there too.

2. You have been hacking contemporary TV cultures with Deptford.TV. What kind of media and TV is being created with Deptford.TV?

Deptford TV is research into media and communication. It is practice-based experimentation, not a community media project. It’s about getting lost into collectives. Deptford TV started in 2005 with the notion of urban change. The community media angle was strong in the beginning. We started with a group of MA documentary students at Goldsmiths and began documenting urban change. We did this by creating and developing database filmmaking. Soon, there was a shift to art practice and participatory media through methods such as video sniffing. Deptford.TV serves as an open and collaborative platform for artists and filmmakers to store, share and re-edit the documentation of the urban change of South East London. Deptford TV is hosted by Deckspace – which is like a hack space with subscription fees for members. Deckspace has an open wireless network, hosts servers and experiments with network activities. As it is very difficult to host these activities within the institutional context of universities, one often needs to step out in order to undertake this research. The open and collaborative aspect of the project is of particular importance as it manifests in two ways: a) audiences can become producers by submitting their own footage and b) audiences interact with each other through the database. Deptford TV makes use of licenses such as the Free Art License, the Creative Commons SA-BY license, and the GNU General Public license to allow and enhance this politics of sharing. Deptford.TV is accessible publically but you need to come to the workshops to be allowed into the database and to get to play around with the database and clips. Deptford TV is research into arts production that engages with those who are interested. It aims to develop methods to enable this. The process is similar to the development of free and open source software. It is about thinking around collectives and collaboration. Up until now the focus has been on postproduction methods. There is potential to focus on distribution: immediate file sharing and live TV. Recently we produced Ali Kebab Live on Air. We experimented by broadcasting live CCTV footage from a local kebab shop. The same material, shown in Linz at the 2011 Linux Wochen Linz, was also shown on monitors 200 metres away from the shop in a gallery.

3. Why is what you refer to as participatory media needed?

It’s about reclaiming TV. It’s about decentralising TV in order to offer the next generation of media a less centralised notion of politics. The Internet is becoming more centralised. If TV becomes less centralised, one could argue that, it will be more difficult for those parties interested in centralising the Internet to do so. First, there is the political aim. Reclaiming TV is about the redistribution of wealth. I’m a big fan of sharing wealth – for me, knowledge production signifies wealth. We should have a big redistribution system going on. The digital networks are good starting point for this. In the light of the digital divide, TV can mean access for all. Second, there is a cultural aim. I talk about post-mortem. We are locking culture away. Where is the benefit for society, for future generations? For us being able to philosophise about life and what is important? Marshall McLuhan predicted this, and it hardly materialised, but maybe the time for bottom up TV is now, the time for reclaiming your TV. Nevertheless when looking into McLuhan one should not forget Raymond Williams’ criticism of McLuhan’s techno-deterministic approach to media systems.

4. What are the future platforms and practices of participatory media?

Open wireless networks might have a future. Operating on ‘many to many’ principles, they are more powerful than having a community TV station. We should focus more on use and on small entities that can network each other. Currently however, the community aspect cannot go further because it is not allowed; we are still under a centrally controlled service system. Under the British Digital Economy Act, open networks can potentially become heavily censored. We are witnessing a similar moment everywhere in Europe.

5. What actions should be taken now?

For Deptford TV, it has become more and more a reflection about culture. The open wireless network needs to be defended. If we are banned from intellectual properties of the past, future generations will not have our culture. This is also why I am interested in database filmmaking. We need to move back to thinking about distribution. Using the model of Deptford TV, I could imagine to set up something like Stratford TV based on a wireless network around Stratford and Hackney in East London and have the tenants “ranting” about the Olympics. Wouldn’t that be cool!

“The 9th edition of the Piksel Festival took place on November 17th-20th 2011 in Bergen, Norway. The festival was subtitled this year as “re:public” for rethinking and redefining public space, both as a concrete physical space, and in a larger social and political context. As previously, through the nine-year history of the festival, Piksel is firmly grounded on free/libre and open source.” (Tuomo Tammenpää)

Deptford.TV was invited to PIKSEL11 to hold a FLOSSTV workshop. Our main tool for this workshop were video receivers that could intercept the data collected by small CCTV video cameras (often placed covertly in shops, offices and other public/private spaces). The workshop introduced participants to Surveillance and CCTV filmmaking where material and images from the Deptford.TV archive were edited to submissions from the Deptford.TV database. Footage taken from Deptford.TV was filmed during a previous TV hacking workshop where participants equipped with CCTV surveillance signal receivers were lead through the city by incoming surveillance camera signals.

From 27th to 30th October 2011 the third edition of the Free Culture Forum took place in Barcelona. Version 2.01 of the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge was released n line with the declaration of the UN Committe on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: General Comment Nº17 (2005), the introduction of the charter states:

We are in the midst of a revolution in the way that knowledge and culture are created, accessed and transformed. Citizens, artists and consumers are no longer powerless and isolated in the face of the content production and distribution industries: now individuals across many different spheres collaborate, participate and decide in a direct and democratic way.

Digital technology has bridged the gap, allowing ideas and knowledge to flow. It has done away with many of the geographic and technological barriers to sharing. It has provided new educational tools and stimulated new possibilities for social, economic and political organisation. This revolution is comparable to the far-reaching changes brought about by the invention of the printing press.

In spite of these transformations, the entertainment industry, most communications service providers, governments and international bodies still base the sources of their profits and power on controlling content, tools and distribution channels, and on managing scarcity. This leads to restrictions on citizens’ rights to education, access to information, culture, science and technology, freedom of expression, the inviolability of communications and privacy, and the freedom to share. In deciding copyright policy, the general interest shall take priority over the specific private interests.

Today’s institutions, industries, structures and conventions will not survive into the future unless they adapt to the changes that result from digital era. Some, however, will alter and refine their methods in response to the new realities. And we need to take account of this.

Political and Economic Implications of Free Culture

Free culture (“free” as in “freedom”, not as “for free”) opens up the possibility of new models for citizen engagement in the provision of public goods and services, based on a ‘commons’ approach. ‘Governance of the commons’ refers to negotiated rules and boundaries for managing the collective production and stewardship of, and access to, shared resources. Governance of the commons honours participation, inclusion, transparency, equal access, and long-term sustainability. We recognise the commons as a distinctive and desirable form of governance that is not necessarily linked to the state or other conventional political institutions, and demonstrates that civil society today is a potent force.

We recognize that this social economy is an important source of value, alongside the private market. The new commons, revitalised through digital technology (among other factors), enlarges the sphere of what constitutes “the economy”. Governments currently give considerable support to the private market economy; we urge them to extend to the commons the same comprehensive support that they give to the private market. A level playing field is all that the commons needs in order to prosper.

The current financial crisis has highlighted the severe limits of some of the existing models. On the other hand, the philosophy of Free Culture, a legacy of the Free/Libre Software movement, is empirical proof that a new kind of ethics and a new way of doing business are possible. It has already created a new, workable form of production based on crafts or trades, in which the author-producer does not lose control of the production process and can be free of the need for production and distribution intermediaries. This form of production is based on collaborative entrepreneurial initiatives, on exchange according to each person’s abilities and opportunities, on the democratisation of knowledge, education and the means of production and on a fair distribution of earnings according to the work carried out.

We declare our concern for the well-being of artists, researchers, authors and other creative producers. Projects and initiatives based on free culture principles use a variety of approaches to achieve sustainability. Some of these forms are well established, others are still experimental. The combination of these different options is increasingly viable for both independent creators and industry. There must be clear rules that promote public, sharable knowledge, protecting it from any form of exclusive appropriation by individuals or companies and thus preventing the possibility of restrictive monopolies or oligopolies emerging from this appropriation.

The digital era holds the historic promise of strengthening justice and being rewarding for everybody.

The charter can be found here.

This image was taken by William Uricchio during the ISEA conference. On Sunday the 18th of September 2011 we wanted to visit the main exhibition event of the ISEA conference at Taksim square. Due to a demonstration of Turkish Intellectuals for the ‘Freedom of Journalists’ a heavy police presence ironically completely contained the ‘un contain’ exhibition.

Photo by Sara Hana for the transcript of Slavoj Žižek’s speech at Occupy Wall Street.

Just before the NYC Occupy Wall Street movement started the Open Video Conference opened in lower Manhattan, on September 11th 2011. Adnan Hadzi joined the Open Video Editing Platform editing workshop. Lightworks received a lot of buzz regarding their announcement to release the code as open source, see statement from their website: “In response to feedback from our extensive User base, we have undertaken a huge amount of work to enhance the Codecs and cross-platform support for the Mac OSX and Linux versions of Lightworks. We have been working on these updates for several months and had originally hoped to release the new version on the 29th November. However, we are not yet fully satisfied with the stability of this version with its many new features and therefore we have made the difficult decision to delay its release to our customers. Obviously we are very keen to get the new version out, but we will only do this once we are confident that it meets the high standards demanded by our user community. Therefore, we are holding back on announcing a new date for the full release, but please be assured that we will do so as soon as possible and that we will keep all users fully informed”.

Notes from the Video Editing Platform workshop:

The Libre Video Lab opened in Brussels, hosted by Constant, a Brussels organisation for media art. Peter Westenberg blogged about the opening film screenings on the OS Video blog:

Open Source Video ?

On 22 september, we showed some films in our freshly opened Libre Video Lab, which is part of Constant Variable, Constant’s new lab building dedicated to F/LOSS art, on Rue Gallait 80 in Schaarbeek, Brussels.

We showed some video’s that were in their own way give meaning to the ‘open’ in ‘open source’ video. The shorts Interdit de filmer; Une Mer; Headwar and Pov Mec; by Sarah Pleak, aka Sarah Tohn are made using free softwares such as Kino and Cinelerra and open source codecs and are available under a free license (from: http://www.c3p0o.org/larsselavy/).

Other video’s addressed issues concerning public space, border crossing, notions of identity and freedom, common spaces and collective ownership.

Le Pied by Fred Chemama; and Frontière by Jerome Giller are both released under a Creative Commons license. They were suggested for the evening by 68septante, the super sympa Brussels based organisor of cultural events and publisher of dvd’s that wants to stimulate creative production and exchange between artists and a broad public.

By clapping your hands (up to 25 claps per seconds) you could slow forward the single shot film Barca High Speed by Peter Westenberg, which was projected behind the door of the main room. The film is a portrait of a walk through Barcelona shot as a series of photographs on B/W super 8.

Stéfan Piat showed documentation of his interactive installation Fort Saint-Nicolas and a GPS video collage, reconstucting a walk along the canal de Charleroi in Brussels, using gps data that was captured along the video.

After enjoying some beautiful clips of the work of Stadtmusik , and a quick look at an example from the wonderful slit scan blog, Michael Murtaugh showed some results from MotionCamera, videos made with “motion” & ffmpeg, commandline tools, including Cat Motion #2.

And finally Simon Yuill was present to show his film Given to the People a film telling the story of the Pollok Free State, a Free State initiated by the actions of local resident Colin Macleod, who began a tree top protest against the building of the M77 motorway through Pollok Park, one of Europe’s largest inner city public commons, in the early 1990s. Yuill joined the original VHS footage that was shot at the time with additional interviews that contextualise the actions in an atmospheric account of the events.

For all the video’s goes: yes they can be found on line, but usually some higher resolution exists with the makers. Send a mail if you would like to show something and you think we can help.

Pictures can be found in the Constant Gallery. & Further infos can be found on the wiki.

Photo by Rasda.

During the Chaos Computer Camp, August 2011, Deptford.TV joined the Dyne village & C-base village for some TV hacking. “The Chaos Communication Camp is an international, five-day open-air event for hackers and associated life-forms. It provides a relaxed atmosphere for free exchange of technical, social, and political ideas” (CCC 2011). Dyne also presented their latest release of the operating system Dyne:Bolic, DistroWatch blog post:

“Denis ‘Jaromil‘ Rojo has announced that a new public beta of dyne:bolic 3.0, a live, multimedia-oriented distribution, is now ready for testing. The biggest change in the new version is the fact that it is no longer built from scratch, but based on Ubuntu (version 9.10) instead. “The time has finally come to look together at what is going to be the dyne:III development cycle for the dyne:bolic operating system, so please, if you have some experience of GNU/Linux desktop systems and some hardware to try it on, take time to look around and comment on these ISO files up for download from some of our kind mirrors. This new major version features a core based on pure:dyne carrot & coriander, cleaned up to be 100% free (no proprietary software, binary blobs, but still there might be something to clean up. One of the technical spotlights under the hood is that we now run on the Linux kernel version 3.” Read the rest of the informal release announcement for more information and download links. Get the live DVD image from here: dynebolic-3.0-beta4.iso (1,661MB).”

During the Create Festival the Helvetic Centre organised an event entitled Protocol #1, where Adnan Hadzi presented Deptford.TV’s ‘souveillance’ series.

PROTOCOL aims to explore some shifts of the visual regime through a series of exhibitions and talks dedicated to photography. Each event will show the work of emerging talents from the United Kingdom and Switzerland. Following a recurrent procedure, the goal is to offer a laboratory that facilitates exchanges between different fields and audiences. For this PROTOCOL #1 session we chose to work around the notion of Participant Observation; the works of Yann Gross and Bronwen Parker-Rhodes trace the nexus between photographic aesthetics and ethnographic investigation.
yanngross.com
bronfilms.com

Talk series: “Sousveillance”
Guest speaker: Adnan Hadzi (Deptford.tv)
Saturday 16 July, 8pm

Adnan Hadzi’s talk will focus on the nature of CCTV images through the notion of sousveillance, that is to say the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity. By making visible CCTV images which normally remain hidden, sousveillance is a “surveillance from above” that provide documents to create subjectives narratives of the city. PROTOCOL #1 takes place within CREATE, a unique cultural festival that’s all about taking part.

Create Issue 01 & Issue 02

I made this as a Christmas/New Year present for my friends:

   Saw You Dreaming

Monster In Winter

Awesome Skyboat

Download the EP here.

Listen to the M2M Radio remix of the best action for free migration in 2011.
Click here please.

Right at the end of the inter-service consultation process in the European Commission (the almost final step before a legislative proposal is launched), the United States Department of Commerce launched a significant lobbying campaign against the leaked draft proposal for a Data Protection Regulation. The campaign included high-level phone calls from senior figures in the US Department of Commerce to top level staff in the European Commission covering topics such as US business, multilateral and bilateral treaty organizations, PNR, national security, law enforcement, trade and innovation. A somewhat less critical, but nonetheless alarming, "informal note" was also circulated (pdf).

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