monoskop :: Something smarter than us is going to emerge


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created:	01.02.2007 - 18:25:05
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 MEDIA ART   MEDIÁLNE UMENIE )   N O V É   M É D I Á    DIGITAL ART '  ')(#, kyberia.sk/monoskop +   o - pre - proti !  (- Bratislava - Praha - Brno - Banská Bystrica - Košice - Žilina - Nitra - Trnava - Trenčín - Prešov   (+  projekty +   výzvy    čo sa deje   )Re: teória $  & kolaboratívne filtrovanie textov    k n i h y (  #-$,# blogy a newslettre !  ! monoskop - wiki prehľad akcií, ľudí, priestorov, iniciatív  &   media art in Slovakia   ' festivaly 2006 "   festivaly 2007 $  "* *-#, databázy a online galérie: mediaartnet - runme     susedné fóra: 13m3 - burundi - copyfuck - error - gps - free.net - hi-tech/lo-tech - human databases - max/msp - kult informácií a dát - mobilny internet - multiplace - net cultures - proce55ing - produkcia hudby [sw/hw] - pure data - skosi - umelecke programovanie - visual art - vj-ing   Re:we dont serve content

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https://trust.support/watch

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https://www.eurozine.com/sad-by-design/

While classical melancholy was defined by isolation and introspection, today’s tristesse plays out amidst busy social media interactions. Geert Lovink on ‘technological sadness’ – the default mental state of the online billions.
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/S/bo40060953.html

Melancholy has always been with us. Nowadays, though, it’s a design problem—its highs and lows coded into the social media platforms on which we spend so much of our lives. We click, we scroll; we swipe, we like. And after it all, we wonder where the time went, and what, other than a flat and empty feeling, we got for it.
Sad by Design offers a critical analysis of our social media environment and what it’s doing to us. Geert Lovink analyzes the problems of toxic viral memes, online addiction, and the lure of fake news. He shows how attempts to design sites to solve these problems have, in their studied efforts to be apolitical, been unable to generate either a serious critique or legitimate alternatives. But there is an answer: Lovink calls for us to acknowledge the engineered intimacy of these sites—because boredom, he argues, is the first stage of overcoming “platform nihilism,” which can free us to organize to stop the data harvesting industries that run them.

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On the anniversary of the “Velvet Revolution,” an international meeting of artists, activists & theorists from diverse backgrounds will take in Prague to discuss & plan strategies & tactics for creative emancipation & insurgency under a global regime of algorithmic control & co-option. Subjects will range from Xenofeminism to Sinofuturism, Accelarationism, Alienism, the Anthropocene, Big Data & the “Technological Singularity.” The three-day colloquium will be accompanied by a group exhibition presented simultaneously with alt’ai (Qiao Lin, Paul Heinicker, Daria Stupina, Lukáš Likavčan).

Confirmed speakers/performers include Helen Hester, Nina Živančević, Mark Amerika, Caldera Cognitive Security, Miloš Vojtěchovský, Dalibor Knapp, Louis Armand, Vít Bohal, Tom Murphy, Negative Metropolitics, Kevin Rogan, Eli Ningú, Jo Blin, Michael Rowland, Casey Carr, Dustin Breitling, Germán Sierra, M.S. Mekibes, David Vichnar, Andre Werner in association with Directors Lounge (Berlin), Interior Ministry, Zvlášť Collective, Anarchist.Org & Diffractions Collective.
https://rageagainstthealgorithm.wordpress.com/

roz-to-mi-le

How many mentally ill people with humanities degrees does it take to equal the political-engineering power of Elon Musk?

0000086601551575011072520290422408518874

https://trust.support/

trust is a space for platform design and utopian conspiracy. We bring together startups and theorists, designers and programmers, organisms and algorithms to rethink uncertain times.
https://trust.support/posts/ghost/

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Medienwissenschaft: Východiska a aktuální pozice německé filozofie a teorie médií
Kateřina Svatoňová, Kateřina Krtilová (eds.)

Antologie představí specifický teoretický směr uvažování o médiích, který značně problematizuje dosavadní historické a archeologické pojetí média a posouvá ho do odlišných teoretických a zejména filozofických kontextů. Zahrnuje základní, doposud nepřeložené texty německé teorie a filozofie médií: jednak texty mezinárodně známých autorů (Niklas Luhmann, Friedrich Kittler a Hans-Jörg Rheinberger), jednak programové texty současné teorie a filozofie médií a také novější texty k aktuálním otázkám výzkumu médií, kultury a techniky od renomovaných autorů (Hartmut Winkler, Bernhard Siegert nebo Joseph Vogl).
https://www.artforum.sk/katalog/92362/medienwissenschaft

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Viete ako môže fungovať múzeum umenia v 21. storočí?
Príďte vo štvrtok 21. jaunára do Slovenskej národnej galérie na:
- kurátoský výklad Alexandry Kusej & Lucie Gavulovej [18.00]
- prednášky Dušana Baroka & Martina Blažíčka [19.30]

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Slovenská národná galéria pozýva na prednáškový večer venovaný témam súvisiacich s aktuálnou výstavou:
Uchovávanie sveta. Rituál múzea v digitálnom veku.

KATALÓG ONLINE: O ŠPECIFIKÁCH DIGITÁLNYCH GALÉRIÍ
Digitalizácia a publikovanie dokumentácie umeleckých diel na internete transformujú ich rolu v umeleckom diskurze. Pre orientáciu v internetovom prostredí nie je samotné fyzické umiestnenie artefaktov veľmi podstatné. Hlavným prostriedkom tu je vyhľadávač, ten pretvára všetky online galérie do jedného kontinua a dáva prioritu stránkam s unikátnymi kombináciami výrazov. Obývanie takéhoto priestoru nevyžaduje ani tak techniky "SEO" (search engine optimisation) ako zblíženie dokumentačných praktík s kurátorskými. Zdá sa, že hlavná úloha, a ostatne i moc online galérií umenia spočíva v spôsoboch, akými rekonfigurujú vzťahy medzi artefaktmi v umeleckom diskurze, ktoré skôr než konzervujú -- produkujú. S tým sa môžeme v katalógoch umenia stretnúť už minimálne od 17. storočia.
Dušan Barok sa venuje teórii, umeniu a softvéru. Je zakladajúcim členom iniciatívy pre kolaboratívny výskum umenia, médií a humanitných vied Monoskop, absolventom Piet Zwart Inštitútu v Rotterdame a doktorandom na Amsterdamskej univerzite.

AUTENTICIA, ARCHIVÁLIE, ANOMÁLIE
Pre undergoundový film 80. rokov je príznačný odklon od verejnej sféry smerom k privátnej a komunitnej umeleckej praxi s inklináciou k paralelnému znovuvytváraniu spoločenských inštitúcií. Prednáška sa zameria formou prípadovej štúdie na princípy digitálnej mediácie dispozitívu undergroundového filmu 80. rokov do formy archívneho objektu.
Martin Blažíček je vizuálny umelec, pedagóg a kurátor. Vo svojej tvorbe sa vo forme performancií zaoberá stroboskopiou a abstraktnými témami času a priestoru v analógových a digitálnych médiách. Prednáša na FAMU v Centre audiovizuálnych štúdií, kde od roku 2012 rozvíja program pre rekonštrukciu a prezerváciu filmov českého undergroundu 80. rokov.

✄ - - - - - - - - - pondelok 21. januára | 19.30 | SNG | vstup voľný
✄ - - - - - - - - - FB event

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2015-10-29-06.07.31.resized-750x495-c-default.jpg

25 kanonickych diel v novych mediach podla polskych autorov
vychadza v novembri

http://medialabkatowice.eu/projekty/klasyczne-dziela-sztuki-nowych-mediow

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http://rmozone.com/OmniSpacetime/

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transmediale/conversationpiece
03.-07.02.2016
HKW

The next edition of transmediale follows the format of a “Conversation Piece” which unfolds through a series of dialogues and participatory formats that articulate the most burning topics of post-digital culture today and that reflect the main ongoing themes of transmediale.

Conversation starters are everywhere as constant communication has become a mundane feature of post-digital culture. But to define common starting grounds for conversation in today's agonistic and rapidly changing cultural landscape is a daunting if not impossible task. Against the backdrop of different processes of social transformation, 17th and 18th century European painters perfected the group portrait painting known as the “Conversation Piece” in which the everyday life of the aristocracy was depicted in ideal scenes of common activity. The Conversation Piece that is transmediale 2016 references and problematises the ideal of finding common ground through four interconnected thematic streams: Anxious to Act, Anxious to Make, Anxious to Share and Anxious to Secure.

Through these streams we take a critical look at what we could today think about as the fragmented and contradictory “ideal scenes” of cultural production and life under digital capitalism. Can the anxiousness to take part or not to take part in these idealised activities be used in a way that does not only lead to reactionary positions based on fear and exclusion?

What are the possible new values and methodologies of cultural co-production that allows itself not only to be “open” and “free” but that also in radical ways engage questions of security, sharing, collective ways of acting and new ways of making in the post-digital culture?

Call for Workshops & Cross-Disciplinary Projects

With its 2016 Conversation Piece, transmediale asks how we face up to the anxiousness of living with technology at the beginning of the 21st century and if there are any ways to commonly re-invent processes of socio-cultural transformation?  

In addressing this and the above questions, we are looking for cross-disciplinary projects that can engage the festival audience on multiple levels. Workshops, both theoretical and/or hands-on are especially welcome, as are thematic discussions, artistic research presentations, performances, performative lectures and other hybrid formats. Proposals that include several such activities across the programme are welcome. More specifically, we are looking for proposals from ongoing local and translocal networks, projects, groups and collectives that address one or several of the following thematic streams:

Anxious to Act
This stream deals with the complexity of taking action in a world consisting of constantly networked flows and the increasing „messiness“ of the global. It zooms in on the irritated ideal scene of „media activism“ and the multiple logics and meanings of „intervention“ enmeshed in grammars of the artistic or technological. It asks: What makes people anxious to act today? What possibly hinders them to do so in more substantial forms according to the micro- and macro-political scales of a global society characterised by asymmetric power? In a world poised for change, what fundamental irritations exist about ever more mediated actions and can these irritations stimulate new effective assemblages of action?  

Anxious to Make
This stream looks closer at the new conglomeration of cybernetic automation, DIY culture and industrial production. Here, on a macro-level, anxieties of global competition come to the fore and on a micro-level there are anxieties to at all deal with the socio-political consequences, as the new maker cultures revel in the craftsmanship of the prototypical, instrumental and entrepreneurial. What are the cultural implications of the ideal scene of Industry 4.0 or the so called “third industrial revolution” where new cultures of industrial fabrication meets DIY culture?

Anxious to Share
The ideal scene of this stream is that of a sharing culture of micro-practices and cottage industries that emerged as part of innovative citizen-driven alternatives to the crisis of a receding public sphere and relentless privatisation. The stream however takes a critical, post-startup economy look at interrelated topics such as disruption and displacement, conditions of cultural production, spatial politics, and network economy. We are anxious to share but do we really want to take the responsibility for what and how something is being shared? And from a non-anthropocentric perspective, are new planetary scales of sharing emerging?

Anxious to Secure
This stream looks at the increasing securitisation of everything from individual communication, artistic and media production to corporations and nation-states. Against the ideal scene of total security, more localised and intimate ideas of networking and secure communication are developing with the rise of resilient, autonomous and hybrid networks. This stream looks at securitisation both from the point of view of the old/new military-industrial-media complex and from the point of view of the insecurity of everyday life. How can we learn to live with precarisation as the anxious position from which we now try to secure whether as hackers, whistleblowers, artists, workers or simply users?

Deadline: 10 August 2015

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tak pojem 'nove media' je ovela starsi nez 90te roky..

plagat Claesa Oldenburga pre vystavu "New Media - New Forms: In Painting and Sculpture", 1960

"'New Media - New Forms: In Painting and Sculpture' was a two part group exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery that included work by Dada artists Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters as well as artists who, at the time, were sometimes referred to as "neo" Dadaists: Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine and May Wilson. 'Paint on canvas' and 'flat collages' were excluded from the show which consisted mostly of installations and assemblages. Part one of the show took place from June 6 to 24, 1960 and part two from September 28 to October 22, 1960. Calling the show 'New Media' was reminiscent of the original Dada art movement. Richard Huelsenbeck, one of the founders of the Dada movement, referred to Dada art as the 'new medium' in his 1920 doctrine, En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism. Huelsenbeck wrote that "The appropriation by Dada of... bruitism, simultaneity and, in painting, the new medium, is of course the 'accident' leading to the psychological factors to which the real Dadaist movement owed its existence," and that Picasso "invented the new medium. He began to stick sand, hair, post-office forms and pieces of newspaper onto his pictures, to give them the value of a direct reality, removed from everything traditional."" (z)

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Helena Bendová, Matěj Strnad (eds.) → Společenské vědy a audiovize

"Interdisciplinární sborník teoretických textů rozličných společenských a humanitních věd předkládá ukázky studií, které výrazně ovlivnily naše uvažování o audiovizi. Sborník si bere za cíl seznámit čtenáře komplexním způsobem se všemi relevantními společenskými i humanitními vědami (estetika, filosofie, jazykověda, literární věda, psychologie, sociologie, antropologie, kulturální studia, politologie...) a s jednotlivými koncepty, které dodnes odborná veřejnost používá k uvažování o společnosti, médiích a umění (např. ideologie, znak, autor, gender, definice umění, interpretace, otázka vkusu a hodnocení umění). Výběr více než dvaceti studií zastupují významní autoři, jakými jsou Saussure, Freud, Bartlett, Popper, Mukařovský, Althusser, Bourdieu, Foucault, Radwayová, Butlerová a další. Inspirativní a vlivné ukázky z různých oblastí myšlení a věd ukazují, jak jsou tyto texty dodnes využitelné pro uvažování o filmu a dalších médiích. Publikace zaujme studenty filmových škol, filmových studií, mediálních studií, kulturologie, odbornou a vědeckou veřejnost, učitele mediální výchovy na středních školách, ale i zájemce z laické veřejnosti hledající vědecké pochopení audiovizuálních médií."

Obsah

Helena Bendová, Matěj Strnad ——— Úvod

Ferdinand de Saussure ——— Předmět lingvistiky a Povaha jazykového znaku
Doslov ——— Ferdinand de Saussure, sémiologie a strukturalismus

Sigmund Freud ——— Něco tísnivého*
Doslov ——— Sigmund Freud a psychoanalýza

Frederic Bartlett ——— Teorie vzpomínání
Doslov ——— Frederic Bartlett, schémata a kognitivní věda

Karl Popper ——— Přehled některých základních problémů
Doslov ——— Karl Popper, metodologie a filozofie vědy

Antonio Gramsci ——— Sešity z vězení, úryvky*
Doslov ——— Antonio Gramsci, ideologie a hegemonie

Jan Mukařovský ——— Estetická funkce, norma a hodnota jako sociální fakty*
Doslov ——— Jan Mukařovský, ruský formalismus a český strukturalismus

Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer ——— Kulturní průmysl: osvícenství jako masový podvod*
Doslov ——— Adorno a Horkheimer, kulturní průmysl a frankfurtská škola

Maurice Merleau-Ponty ——— Oko a duch*
Doslov ——— Merleau-Ponty a fenomenologie

Roland Barthes ——— Smrt autora
Doslov ——— Roland Barthes a koncept autora

Louis Althusser ——— Ideologie a ideologické státní aparáty (Poznámky k výzkumu)*
Doslov ——— Louis Althusser, ideologie, subjekt a státní aparáty

Arthur Danto ——— Umělecká díla a skutečné věci
Doslov ——— Arthur Danto a definice umění

Kendall L. Walton ——— Strach z fikce
Doslov ——— Kendall L. Walton, teorie fikce a emoce recipientů

Victor Turner ——— Rámec, plynutí a reflexe: rituál a drama jakožto veřejná liminalita*
Doslov ——— Victor Turner, rituál, performance a hra

Pierre Bourdieu ——— Úvod ke knize Distinkce: sociální kritika soudnosti
Doslov ——— Pierre Bourdieu a otázka vkusu

Jean Baudrillard ——— Předchůdnost simulaker
Doslov ——— Jean Baudrillard, simulakra a postmoderna

Michel Foucault ——— Subjekt a moc
Doslov ——— Michel Foucault, diskurz a archeologie vědění a moci

Janice A. Radwayová ——— Jak ženy čtou milostné romány: interakce textu a kontextu
Doslov ——— Janice A. Radwayová, kulturální studia a aktivní recipienti

Hayden White ——— Otázka vyprávění v současné teorii historie*
Doslov ——— Hayden White, historiografie a teorie

Pierre Nora ——— Mezi pamětí a historií, problematika míst
Doslov ——— Pierre Nora, místa a podoby kolektivní paměti

Donna Harawayová ——— Kyborgský manifest: Věda, technologie a socialistický feminismus*
Doslov ——— Donna Harawayová a posthumanismus kyborgů a opů

Daniel C. Dennett ——— Já jako narativní těžiště
Doslov ——— Daniel C. Dennett, vědomá mysl a narativní identita

Judith Butlerová ——— Subjekty pohlaví/genderu/touhy*
Doslov ——— Judith Butlerová a performativní gender

Friedrich Kittler ——— Počítačový analfabetismus
Doslov ——— Friedrich Kittler a média psaní

Miroslav Petříček ——— Doslov: Úvod do společenských věd

*krácená verze

https://www.namu.cz/item.php?item=283

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zajtra budem robit prierez sucasnou medialnou teoriou a filozofiou skrz obraz 'antropocenu', vo stvrtok potom v Brne

vsetci vitani

11.3. o 14.30 v H220 na VSVU na Hviezdoslavovom namesti, (FB)
12.3. o 17.30 v N51 na Masarykovej univerzite na Janackovom namesti 2a, (FB)

Antropocén, algoritmy alebo postčlovečenstvo, to je jedno
Dejiny súčasnosti skrz mediálnu teoriu

Ani sme sa nenazdali a bude to 50 rokov, čo Foucault prirovnal eventuálny koniec človeka k zmazaniu tváre v piesku na pobreží, 30 rokov, čo Friedrich Kittler zbilancoval, že sú to médiá, čo určujú našu situáciu, 30 rokov od Manifesta kyborgov Donny Haraway a 25 rokov čo Bruno Latour zvestoval, že sme nikdy neboli moderní. Humanitné vedy medzitým iste zasiahli mnohé iné otrasy, no zdá sa, že práve otázky o tom, čo je na nich humanitné, katalyzovali výskum a témy, ktoré dnes dominujú v širších spoločenských debatách. Nič väčšie si nemohli priať, je teda na mieste bližšie sa pozrieť a predstaviť amalgám myšlienkových prúdov a zázemí, ktoré za nimi stoja.

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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/anthropocene-capitalism-climate-change/

The Anthropocene myth
Blaming all of humanity for climate change lets capitalism off the hook.
by Andreas Malm

Last year was the hottest year ever recorded. And yet, the latest figures show that in 2013 the source that provided the most new energy to the world economy wasn’t solar, wind power, or even natural gas or oil, but coal.

The growth in global emissions — from 1 percent a year in the 1990s to 3 percent so far this millennium — is striking. It’s an increase that’s paralleled our growing knowledge of the terrible consequences of fossil fuel usage.

Who’s driving us toward disaster? A radical answer would be the reliance of capitalists on the extraction and use of fossil energy. Some, however, would rather identify other culprits.

The earth has now, we are told, entered “the Anthropocene”: the epoch of humanity. Enormously popular — and accepted even by many Marxist scholars — the Anthropocene concept suggests that humankind is the new geological force transforming the planet beyond recognition, chiefly by burning prodigious amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas.

According to these scholars, such degradation is the result of humans acting out their innate predispositions, the inescapable fate for a planet subjected to humanity’s “business-as-usual.” Indeed, the proponents cannot argue otherwise, for if the dynamics were of a more contingent character, the narrative of an entire species ascending to biospheric supremacy would be difficult to defend.

Their story centers on a classic element: fire. The human species alone can manipulate fire, and therefore it is the one that destroys the climate; when our ancestors learned how to set things ablaze, they lit the fuse of business-as-usual. Here, write prominent climate scientists Michael Raupach and Josep Canadell, was “the essential evolutionary trigger for the Anthropocene,” taking humanity straight to “the discovery that energy could be derived not only from detrital biotic carbon but also from detrital fossil carbon, at first from coal.”

The “primary reason” for current combustion of fossil fuels is that “long before the industrial era, a particular primate species learned how to tap the energy reserves stored in detrital carbon.” My learning to walk at the age of one is the reason for me dancing salsa today; when humanity ignited its first dead tree, it could only lead, one million years later, to burning a barrel of oil.

Or, in the words of Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill: “The mastery of fire by our ancestors provided humankind with a powerful monopolistic tool unavailable to other species, that put us firmly on the long path towards the Anthropocene.” In this narrative, the fossil economy is the creation precisely of humankind, or “the fire-ape, Homo pyrophilus,” as in Mark Lynas’s popularization of Anthropocene thinking, aptly titled The God Species.

Now, the ability to manipulate fire was surely a necessary condition for the commencement of large-scale fossil fuel combustion in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Was it also the cause of it?

The important thing to note here is the logical structure of the Anthropocene narrative: some universal trait of the species must be driving the geological epoch that is its own, or else it would be a matter of some subset of the species. But the story of human nature can come in many forms, both in the Anthropocene genre and in other parts of climate change discourse.

In an essay in the anthology Engaging with Climate Change, psychoanalyst John Keene offers an original explanation for why humans pollute the planet and refuse to stop. In infancy, the human being discharges waste matter without limits and learns that the caring mother will take away the poo and the wee and clean up the crotch.

As a result, human beings are accustomed to the practice of spoiling their surroundings: “I believe that these repeated encounters contribute to the complementary belief that the planet is an unlimited ‘toilet-mother’, capable of absorbing our toxic products to infinity.”

But where is the evidence for any sort of causal connection between fossil fuel combustion and infant defecation? What about all those generations of people who, up to the nineteenth century, mastered both arts but never voided the carbon deposits of the earth and dumped them into the atmosphere: were they shitters and burners just waiting to realize their full potentials?

It’s easy to poke fun at certain forms of psychoanalysis, but attempts to attribute business-as-usual to the properties of the human species are doomed to vacuity. That which exists always and everywhere cannot explain why a society diverges from all others and develop something new – such as the fossil economy that only emerged some two centuries ago but now has become so entrenched that we recognize it as the only ways human can produce.

As it happens, however, mainstream climate discourse is positively drenched in references to humanity as such, human nature, the human enterprise, humankind as one big villain driving the train. In The God Species, we read: “God’s power is now increasingly being exercised by us. We are the creators of life, but we are also its destroyers.” This is one of the most common tropes in the discourse: we, all of us, you and I, have created this mess together and make it worse each day.

Enter Naomi Klein, who in This Changes Everything expertly lays bare the myriad ways in which capital accumulation, in general, and its neoliberal variant, in particular, pour fuel on the fire now consuming the earth system. Giving short shrift to all the talk of a universal human evildoer, she writes, “We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe — and would benefit the vast majority — are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

So how do the critics respond? “Klein describes the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet,” philosopher John Gray counters in the Guardian. “It would be be more accurate to describe the crisis as a clash between the expanding demands of humankind and a finite world.”

Gray isn’t alone. This schism is emerging as the great ideological divide in the climate debate, and proponents of the mainstream consensus are fighting back.

In the London Review of Books, Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer who has long argued that the environmental movement should disband and accept total collapse as our destiny, retorts: “Climate change isn’t something that a small group of baddies has foisted on us”; “in the end, we are all implicated.” This, Kingsnorth argues, “is a less palatable message than one which sees a brutal 1 per cent screwing the planet and a noble 99 per cent opposing them, but it is closer to reality.”

Is it closer to reality? Six simple facts demonstrate the opposite.

First, the steam engine is widely, and correctly, seen as the original locomotive of business-as-usual, by which the combustion of coal was first linked to the ever-expanding spiral of capitalist commodity production.

While it is admittedly banal to point out, steam engines were not adopted by some natural-born deputies of the human species. The choice of a prime mover in commodity production could not possibly have been the prerogative of that species, since it presupposed, for a start, the institution of wage labor. It was the owners of the means of production who installed the novel prime mover. A tiny minority even in Britain — all-male, all-white — this class of people comprised an infinitesimal fraction of humanity in the early nineteenth century.

Second, when British imperialists penetrated into northern India around the same time, they stumbled on coal seams that were, to their great amazement, already known to the natives — indeed, the Indians had the basic knowledge of how to dig, burn, and generate heat from coal. And yet they cared nothing for the fuel.

The British, on the other hand, desperately wanted the coal out of the ground — to propel the steamboats by which they transported the treasure and raw materials extracted from the Indian peasants towards the metropolis, and their own surplus of cotton goods towards the inland markets. The problem was, no workers volunteered to step into the mines. Hence the British had to organize a system of indentured labor, forcing farmers into the pits so as to acquire the fuel for the exploitation of India.

Third, most of the twenty-first century emissions explosion originates from the People’s Republic of China. The driver of that explosion is apparent: it is not the growth of the Chinese population, nor its household consumption, nor its public expenditures, but the tremendous expansion of manufacturing industry, implanted in China by foreign capital to extract surplus value out of local labor, perceived around the turn of the millennium as extraordinarily cheap and disciplined.

That shift was part of a global assault on wages and working conditions — workers all over the world being weighed down by the threat of capital’s relocation to their Chinese substitutes, who could only be exploited by means of fossil energy as a necessary material substratum. The ensuing emissions explosion is the atmospheric legacy of class warfare.

Fourth, there is probably no other industry that encounters so much popular opposition wherever it wants to set up shop as the oil and gas industry. As Klein chronicles so well, local communities are in revolt against fracking and pipelines and exploration from Alaska to the Niger Delta, from Greece to Ecuador. But against them stands an interest recently expressed with exemplary clarity by Rex Tillerson, president and CEO of ExxonMobil: “My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, then that’s what I want to do.” This is the spirit of fossil capital incarnate.

Fifth, advanced capitalist states continue relentlessly to enlarge and deepen their fossil infrastructures — building new highways, new airports, new coal-fired power-plants — always attuned to the interests of capital, hardly ever consulting their people on these matters. Only the truly blind intellectual, of the Paul Kingsnorth-type, can believe that “we are all implicated” in such policies.

How many Americans are involved in the decisions to give coal a larger share in the electric power sector, so that the carbon intensity of the US economy rose in 2013? How many Swedes should be blamed for the ramming through of a new highway around Stockholm — the greatest infrastructure project in modern Swedish history — or their government’s assistance to coal power plants in South Africa?

The most extreme illusions about the perfect democracy of the market are required to maintain the notion of “us all” driving the train.

Sixth, and perhaps most obvious: few resources are so unequally consumed as energy. The 19 million inhabitants of New York State alone consume more energy than the 900 million inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. The difference in energy consumption between a subsistence pastoralist in the Sahel and an average Canadian may easily be larger than 1,000-fold — and that is an average Canadian, not the owner of five houses, three SUVs, and a private airplane.

A single average US citizen emits more than 500 citizens of Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan, Mali, or Burundi; how much an average US millionaire emits — and how much more than an average US or Cambodian worker — remains to be counted. But a person’s imprint on the atmosphere varies tremendously depending on where she is born. Humanity, as a result, is far too slender an abstraction to carry the burden of culpability.

Ours is the geological epoch not of humanity, but of capital. Of course, a fossil economy does not necessarily have to be capitalist: the Soviet Union and its satellite states had their own growth mechanisms connected to coal, oil, and gas. They were no less dirty, sooty, or emissions-intensive — perhaps rather more — than their Cold War adversaries. So why focus on capital? What reason is there to delve into the destructiveness of capital, when the Communist states performed at least as abysmally?

In medicine, a similar question would perhaps be, why concentrate research efforts on cancer rather than smallpox? Both can be fatal! But only one still exists. History has closed the parenthesis around the Soviet system, and so we are back at the beginning, where the fossil economy is coextensive with the capitalist mode of production — only now on a global scale.

The Stalinist version deserves its own investigations, and on its own terms (the mechanisms of growth being of their own kind). But we do not live in the Vorkuta coal-mining gulag of the 1930s. Our ecological reality, encompassing us all, is the world founded by steam-powered capital, and there are alternative courses that an environmentally responsible socialism could take. Hence capital, not humanity as such.

Naomi Klein’s success and recent street mobilizations notwithstanding, this remains a fringe view. Climate science, politics, and discourse are constantly couched in the Anthropocene narrative: species-thinking, humanity-bashing, undifferentiated collective self-flagellation, appeal to the general population of consumers to mend their ways and other ideological pirouettes that only serve to conceal the driver.

To portray certain social relations as the natural properties of the species is nothing new. Dehistoricizing, universalizing, eternalizing, and naturalizing a mode of production specific to a certain time and place — these are the classic strategies of ideological legitimation.

They block off any prospect for change. If business-as-usual is the outcome of human nature, how can we even imagine something different? It is perfectly logical that advocates of the Anthropocene and associated ways of thinking either champion false solutions that steer clear of challenging fossil capital — such as geoengineering in the case of Mark Lynas and Paul Crutzen, the inventor of the Anthropocene concept — or preach defeat and despair, as in the case of Kingsnorth.

According to the latter, “it is now clear that stopping climate change is impossible” — and, by the way, building a wind farm is just as bad as opening another coal mine, for both desecrate the landscape.

Without antagonism, there can never be any change in human societies. Species-thinking on climate change only induces paralysis. If everyone is to blame, then no one is.

000008660155157501107252029042240786083607863621

historicky " legimitovaná " :)

00000866015515750110725202904224078608360786362107863870

aaa, dik )

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Text prednášky v plnom znení je k dispozícii tu: http://monoskop.org/Antropocen, naspodku sú pridané anotované odkazy k spomínaným zdrojom, videám a literatúre.

00000866015515750110725202904224078608360786288107863605

super, dik!

00000866015515750110725202904224078608360786288107863590

bolo velmi fajn, dik.

0000086601551575011072520290422407856162

I’ve seen the best minds of my generation sucked dry by the economics of the infinite scroll.

Keep Moving down the page
Scroll down until u reach the depths of ur soul
Click 2 another page
Find something else because what you found wasn’t
anything anyways.

There is a melancholy to the infinite scroll.

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http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/comite-invisible-fuck-off-google

1. There are no “Facebook revolutions”, but there is a new science of government, cybernetics

The genealogy is not well known, and it deserves to be. Twitter descends from a program named TXTMob, invented by American activists as a way to coordinate via cellphones during protests against the Republican National Convention in 2004. The application was used by some 5000 people to share real-time information about the different actions and movements of the police. Twitter, launched two years later, was used for similar purposes, in Moldova for example, and the Iranian demonstrations of 2009 popularized the idea that it was the tool for coordinating insurgents, particularly against the dictatorships. In 2011, when rioting reached an England thought to be definitively impassive, some journalists were sure that tweeting had helped spread the disturbances from their epicenter, Tottenham. Logical, but it turned out that for their communication needs the rioters had gone with BlackBerry, whose secure telephones had been designed for the upper management of banks and multinationals, and the British secret service didn’t even have the decryption keys for them. Moreover, a group of hackers hacked into BlackBerry’s site to dissuade the company from cooperating with the police in the aftermath. If Twitter enabled a self-organization on this occasion it was more that of the citizen sweepers who volunteered to sweep up and repair the damage caused by the confrontations and looting. That effort was relayed and coordinated by Cri- sisCommons, a “global network of volunteers working together to build and use tecnology tools to help respond to disasters and improve resiliency and response before a crisis.” At the time, a French left-wing rag compared this undertaking to the organization of the Puerta del Sol during the Indignants Movement, as it’s called. The comparison between an initiative aimed at a quick return to order and the fact of several thousand people organizing to live on an occupied plaza, in the face of repeated assaults by the police, may look absurd. Unless we see in them just two spontaneous, connectedcivic gestures. From 15-M on, the Spanish “indignados,” a good number of them at least, called attention to their faith in a citizens’ utopia. For them the digital social networks had not only accelerated the spread of the 2011 movement, but also and more importantly had set the terms of a new type of political organization, for the struggle and for society: a connected, participatory, transparent democracy. It’s bound to be upsetting for “revolutionaries” to share such an idea with Jared Cohen, the American government’s anti-terrorism adviser who contacted Twitter during the “Iranian revolution” of 2009 and urged them to maintain it’s functioning despite censorship. Jared Cohen has recently cowritten with Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, a creepy political book, The New Digital Age. On its first page one reads this misleading sentence: “The Internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history.”

“In Tripoli, Tottenham or Wall Street people have been protesting failed policies and the meager possibilities afforded by the electoral system... They have lost faith in government and other centralized institutions of power. There is no viable justification for a democratic system in which public participation is limited to voting. We live in a world in which ordinary people write Wikipedia; spend their evenings moving a telescope via the Internet and making discoveries half a world away; get online to help organize a protest in cyberspace and in the physical world, such as the revolutions in Egypt or Tunisia or the demonstrations of the the ‘indignados’ throughout Spain; or pore over the cables revealed by WikiLeaks. The same technologies enabling us to work together at a distance are creating the expectation to do better at governing ourselves.” This is not an “ indignada"speaking, or if so, she’s one who camped for a long time in an office of the White House: Beth Noveck directed the “Open Government Initiative” of the Obama administration. That program starts from the premise that the governmental function should consist in linking up citizens and making available information that’s now held inside the bureaucratic machine. Thus, according to New York’s city hall, “the hierarchical structure based on the notion that the government knows what’s good for you is outdated. The new model for this century depends on co-creation and collaboration.”

Unsurprisingly, the concept of Open Government Data was formulated not by politicians but by computer programmers - fervent defenders of open source software development, moreover - who invoked the U.S. founding fathers’ conviction that “every citizen should take part in government.” Here the government is reduced to the role of team leader or facilitator, ultimately to that of a “platform for coordinating citizen action.” The parallel with social networks is fully embraced. “How can the city think of itself in the same way Facebook has an API ecosystem or Twitter does?” is the question on their minds at the New York mayor’s office. “This can enable us to produce a more user-centric experience of government. It’s not just the consumption but the co-production of government services and democracy.” Even if these declarations are seen as fanciful cogitations, as products of the somewhat overheated brains of Silicon Valley, they still confirm that the practice of government is less and less identified with state sovereignty. In the era of networks, governing means ensuring the interconnection of people, objects, and machines as well as the free - i.e., transparent and controllable—circulation of information that is generated in this manner. This is an activity already conducted largely outside the state apparatuses, even if the latter try by every means to maintain control of it. It’s becoming clear that Facebook is not so much the model of a new form of government as its reality already in operation. The fact that revolutionaries employed it and still employ it to link up in the street en masse only proves that it’s possible, in some places, to use Facebook against itself, against its essential function, which is policing.

When computer scientists gain entry, as they’re doing, into the presidential palaces and mayors’ offices of the world’s largest cities, it’s not so much to set up shop as it is to explain the new rules of the game: government administrations are now competing with alternative providers of the same services who, unfortunately for them, are several steps ahead. Suggesting their cloud as a way to shelter government services from revolutions -services like the land registry, soon to be available as a smartphone application- the authors of The New Digital Age inform us and them: “In the future, people won’t just back up their data; they’ll back up their government.” And in case it’s not quite clear who the boss is now, it concludes: “Governments may collapse and wars can destroy physical infrastructure but virtual institutions will survive.” With Google, what is concealed beneath the exterior of an innocent interface and a very effective search engine, is an explicitly political project. An enterprise that maps the planet Earth, sending its teams into every street of every one of its towns, cannot have purely commercial aims. One never maps a territory that one doesn’t contemplate appropriating. “Don’t be evil!”: let yourself go.

It’s a little troubling to note that under the tents that covered Zucotti Park and in the offices of planning -a little higher in the New York sky—the response to disaster is conceived in the same terms: connection, networking, self-organization. This is a sign that at the same time that the new communication technologies were put into place that would not only weave their web over the Earth but form the very texture of the world in which we live, a certain way of thinking and of governing was in the process of winning. Now, the basic principles of this new science of government were framed by the same ones, engineers and scientists, who invented the technical means of its application. The history is as follows. In the 1940’s, while he was finishing his work for the American army, the mathematician Norbert Wiener undertook to establish both a new science and a new definition of man, of his relationship with the world and with himself. Claude Shannon, an engineer at Bell and M.I.T., whose work on sampling theory contributed to the development of telecommunications, took part in this project. As did the amazing Gregory Bateson, a Harvard anthropologist, employed by the American secret service in Southeast Asia during the Second World War, a sophisticated fan of LSD and founder of the Palo Alto School. And there was the truculent John von Neumann, writer of the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, regarded as the founding text of computer science - the inventor of game theory, a decisive contribution to neoliberal economics - a proponent of a preventive nuclear strike against the U.S.S.R., and who, after having determined the optimal points for releasing the Bomb on Japan, never tired of rendering various services to the American army and the budding C.I.A. Hence the very persons who made substantial contributions to the new means of communication and to data processing after the Second World War also laid the basis of that “science” that Wiener called “cybernetics.” A term that Ampere, a century before, had had the good idea of defining as the “science of government.” So we’re talking about an art of governing whose formative moments are almost forgotten but whose concepts branched their way underground, feeding into information technology as much as biology, artificial intelligence, management, or the cognitive sciences, at the same time as the cables were strung one after the other over the whole surface of the globe.

We’re not undergoing, since 2008, an abrupt and unexpected “economic crisis,” we’re only witnessing the slow collapse of political economy as an art of governing. Economics has never been a reality or a science; from its inception in the 17th century, it’s never been anything but an art of governing populations. Scarcity had to be avoided if riots were to be avoided - hence the importance of “grains” - and wealth was to be produced to increase the power of the sovereign. “The surest way for all government is to rely on the interests of men,” said Hamilton. Once the “natural” laws of economy were elucidated, governing meant letting its harmonious mechanism operate freely and moving men by manipulating their interests. Harmony, the predictability of behaviors, a radiant future, an assumed rationality of the actors: all this implied a certain trust, the ability to “give credit.” Now, it’s precisely these tenets of the old governmental practice which management through permanent crisis is pulverizing. We’re not experiencing a “crisis of trust” but the end of trust, which has become superfluous to government. Where control and transparency reign, where the subjects’ behavior is anticipated in real time through the algorithmic processing of a mass of available data about them, there’s no more need to trust them or for them to trust. It’s sufficient that they be sufficiently monitored. As Lenin said, “Trust is good, control is better.”

The West’s crisis of trust in itself, in its knowledge, in its language, in its reason, in its liberalism, in its subject and the world, actually dates back to the end of the 19th century; it breaks forth in every domain with and around the First World War. Cybernetics developed on that open wound of modernity. It asserted itself as a remedy for the existential and thus governmental crisis of the West. As Norbert Wiener saw it, “We are shipwrecked passengers on a doomed planet. Yet even in a shipwreck, human decencies and human values do not necessarily vanish, and we must make the most of them. We shall go down, but let it be in a manner to which we may look forward as worthy of our dignity”. Cybernetic government is inherently apocalyptic. Its purpose is to locally impede the spontaneously entropic, chaotic movement of the world and to ensure “enclaves of order,” of stability, and - who knows? - the perpetual self-regulation of systems, through the unrestrained, transparent, and controllable circulation of information. “Communication is the cement of society and those whose work consists in keeping the channels of communication open are the ones on whom the continuance or downfall of our civilization largely depends,” declared Wiener, believing he knew. As in every period of transition, the changeover from the old economic govern- mentality to cybernetics includes a phase of instability, a historical opening where governmentality as such can be put in check.

2. War against all things smart!

In the 1980’s, Terry Winograd, the mentor of Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, and Fernando Flores, the former finance minister of Salvador Allende, wrote concerning design in information technology that “the most important designing is ontological. It constitutes an intervention in the background of our heritage, growing out of our already existent ways of being in the world, and deeply affecting the kinds of beings that we are...It is necessarily reflective and political.” The same can be said of cybernetics. Officially, we continue to be governed by the old dualistic Western paradigm where there is the subject and the world, the individual and society, men and machines, the mind and the body, the living and the nonliving. These are distinctions that are still generally taken to be valid. In reality, cybernetized capitalism does practice an ontology, and hence an anthropology, whose key elements are reserved for its initiates. The rational Western subject, aspiring to master the world and governable thereby, gives way to the cybernetic conception of a being without an interiority, of a selfless self, an emergent, climatic being, constituted by its exteriority, by its relations. A being which, armed with its Apple Watch, comes to understand itself entirely on the basis of external data, the statistics that each of its behaviors generates. A Quantified Self that is willing to monitor, measure, and desperately optimize every one of its gestures and each of its affects. For the most advanced cybernetics, there’s already no longer man and his environment, but a system-being which is itself part of an ensemble of complex information systems, hubs of autonomic processes - a being that can be better explained by starting from the middle way of Indian Buddhism than from Descartes. “For man, being alive means the same thing as participating in a broad global system of communication”, asserted Wiener in 1948.

Just as political economy produced a homo economicus manageable in the framework of industrial States, cybernetics is producing its own humanity. A transparent humanity, emptied out by the very flows that traverse it, electrified by information, attached to the world by an ever-growing quantity of apparatuses. A humanity that’s inseparable from its technological environment because it is constituted, and thus driven, by that. Such is the object of government now: no longer man or his interests, but his “social environment”. An environment whose model is the smart city. Smart because by means of its sensors it produces information whose processing in real time makes self-management possible. And smart because it produces and is produced by smart inhabitants. Political economy reigned over beings by leaving them free to pursue their interest; cybernetics controls them by leaving them free to communicate. “We need to reinvent the social systems in a controlled framework,” according to M.I.T. professor Alex Pentland, in an article from 2011. The most petrifying and most realistic vision of the metropolis to come is not found in the brochures that IBM distributes to municipalities to sell them software for managing the flows of water, electricity, or road traffic. It’s rather the one developed in principle “against” that Orwellian vision of the city: “smarter cities” coproduced by their residents themselves (in any case by the best connected among them). Another M.I.T. professor traveling in Catalonia is pleased to see its capital becoming little by little a “fab city”: “Sitting here right in the heart of Barcelona I see a new city being invented where everyone will have access to the tools to make it completely autonomous” The citizens are thus no longer subalterns but smart people, “receivers and generators of ideas, services, and solutions,” as one of them says. In this vision, the metropolis doesn’t become smart through the decision-making and action of a central government, but appears, as a “spontaneous order”, when its inhabitants “find new ways of producing, connecting, and giving meaning to their own data.” The resilient metropolis thus emerges, one that can resist every disaster.

Behind the futuristic promise of a world of fully linked people and objects, when cars, fridges, watches, vacuums, and dildos are directly connected to each other and to the Internet, there is what is already here: the fact that the most polyvalent of sensors is already in operation: myself. “I” share my geolocation, my mood, my opinions, my account of what I saw today that was awesome or awesomely banal. I ran, so I immediately shared my route, my time, my performance numbers and their self-evaluation. I always post photos of my vacations, my evenings, my riots, my colleagues, of what I’m going to eat and who I’m going to fuck. I appear not to do much and yet I produce a steady stream of data. Whether I work or not, my everyday life, as a stock of information, remains fully valuable.

“Thanks to the widespread networks of sensors, we will have a God’s eye view of ourselves. For the first time, we can precisely map the behavior of masses of people at the level of their daily lives,” enthuses one of the professors. The great refrigerated storehouses of data are the pantry of current government. In its rummaging through the databases produced and continuously updated by the everyday life of connected humans, it looks for the correlations it can use to establish not universal laws nor even “whys,” but rather “whens” and “whats,” onetime, situated predictions, not to say oracles. The stated ambition of cybernetics is to manage the unforeseeable, and to govern the ungovernable instead of trying to destroy it. The question of cybernetic government is not only, as in the era of political economy, to anticipate in order to plan the action to take, but also to act directly upon the virtual, to structure the possibilities. A few years ago, the LAPD bought itself a new software program called PredPol. Based on a heap of crime statistics, it calculates the probabilities that a particular crime will be committed, neighborhood by neighborhood, street by street. Given these probabilities updated in real time, the program itself organizes the police patrols in the city. A founder cybernetician wrote in Le Monde in 1948: “We can dream of a time when the machine a gouverner will - for good or evil, who knows? - compensate for the shortcomings, obvious today, of the leaders and customary apparatuses of politics.” Every epoch dreams the next one, even if the dream of the one may become the daily nightmare of the other.

The object of the great harvest of personal information is not an individualized tracking of the whole population. If the surveillants insinuate themselves into the intimate lives of each and every person, it’s not so much to construct individual files as to assemble massive databases that make numerical sense. It is more efficient to correlate the shared characteristics of individuals in a multitude of “profiles,” with the probable developments they suggest. One is not interested in the individual, present and entire, but only in what makes it possible to determine their potential lines of flight. The advantage of applying the surveillance to profiles, “events,” and virtualities is that statistical entities don’t take offense, and individuals can still claim they’re not being monitored, at least not personally. While cybernetic governmentality already operates in terms of a completely new logic, its subjects continue to think of themselves according to the old paradigm. We believe that our “personal” data belong to us, like our car or our shoes, and that we’re only exercising our “individual freedom” by deciding to let Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon or the police have access to them, without realizing that this has immediate effects on those who refuse to, and who will be treated from then on as suspects, as potential deviants. “To be sure,” predicts The New Digital Age, “there will be people who resist adopting and using technology, people who want nothing to do with virtual profiles, online data systems or smart phones. Yet a government might suspect that people who opt out completely have something to hide and thus are more likely to break laws, and as a counterterrorism measure, that government will build the kind of ‘hidden people’ registry we described earlier. If you don’t have any registered social-networking profiles or mobile subscriptions, and on-line references to you are unusually hard to find, you might be considered a candidate for such a registry. You might also be subjected to a strict set of new regulations that includes rigorous airport screening or even travel restrictions.”

3. The Poverty of Cybernetics

So the security services are coming to consider a Facebook profile more credible than the individual supposedly hiding behind it. This is some indication of the porousness between what was still called the virtual and the real. The accelerating datafication of the world does make it less and less pertinent to think of the online world and the real world, cyberspace and reality, as being separate. “Look at Android, Gmail, Google Maps, Google Search. That’s what we do. We make products that people can’t live without,” is how they put it in Mountain View. In the past few years, however, the ubiquity of connected devices in the everyday lives of human beings has triggered some survival reflexes. Certain barkeepers decided to ban Google Glasses from their establishments - which became truly hip as a result, it should be said. Initiatives are blossoming that encourage people to disconnect occasionally (one day per week, for a weekend, a month) in order to take note of their dependence on technological objects and re-experience an “authentic” contact with reality. The attempt proves to be futile of course. The pleasant weekend at the seashore with one’s family and without the smartphones is lived primarily as an experience of disconnection; that is, as something immediately thrown forward to the moment of reconnection, when it will be shared on the Internet.

Eventually, however, with Western man’s abstract relation to the world becoming objectified in a whole complex of apparatuses, a whole universe of virtual reproductions, the path towards presence paradoxically reopens. By detaching ourselves from everything, we’ll end up detaching ourselves even from our detachment. The technological beatdown will ultimately restore our capacity to be moved by the bare, pixelless existence of a honeysuckle vine. Every sort of screen coming between us and reality will have been required before we could reclaim the singular shimmer of the sensible world, and our amazement at what is there. It will have taken hundreds of “friends” who have nothing to do with us, “liking” us on Facebook the better to ridicule us afterwards, for us to rediscover the ancient taste for friendship.

Having failed to create computers capable of equaling human beings, they’ve set out to impoverish human experience to the point where life can be confused with its digital modeling. Can one picture the human desert that had to be created to make existence on the social media seem desirable? Just as the traveler had to be replaced by the tourist for it to be imagined that the latter might pay to go all over the world via hologram while remaining in their living room. But the slightest real experience will shatter the wretchedness of this kind of illusionism. The poverty of cybernetics is what will bring it down in the end. For a hyper-individualized generation whose primary sociality had been that of the social media, the Quebec student strike of 2012 was first of all a stunning revelation of the insurrectionary power of simply being together and starting to move. Evidently, this was a meet-up like no other before, such that the insurgent friendships were able to rush the police lines. The control traps were useless against that; in fact, they had become another way for people to test themselves, together. “The end of the Self will be the genesis of presence,” envisioned Giorgio Cesarano in his Survival Manual.

The virtue of the hackers has been to base themselves on the materiality of the supposedly virtual world. In the words of a member of Telecomix, a group of hackers famous for helping the Syrians get around the state control of Internet communications, if the hacker is ahead of his time it’s because he “didn’t think of this tool [the Internet] as a separate virtual world but as an extension of physical reality.” This is all the more obvious now that the hacker movement is extending itself outside the screens by opening hackerspaces where people can analyze, tinker with, and piece together digital software and tech objects. The expansion and networking of Do It Yourself has produced a gamut of purposes: it’s a matter of fooling with things, with the street, the city, the society, life itself. Some pathological progressives have been quick to see the beginnings of a new economy in it, even a new civilization, based this time on “sharing.” Never mind that the present capitalist economy already values “creation,” beyond the old industrial constraints. Managers are urged to facilitate free initiative, to encourage innovative projects, creativity, genius, even deviance - “the company of the future must protect the deviant, for it’s the deviant who will innovate and who is capable of creating rationality in the unknown,” they say. Today value is not sought in the new features of a product, nor even in its desirability or its meaning, but in the experience it offers to the consumer. So why not offer that consumer the ultimate experience of going over to the other side of the creation process? From this perspective, the hackerspaces or “fablabs” become spaces where the “projects” of “consumer-innovators” can be undertaken and “new marketplaces” can emerge. In San Francisco, the TechShop firm is developing a new type of fitness club where, for a yearly membership fee, “one goes every week to make things, to create and develop one’s projects.”

The fact that the American army finances similar places under the Cyber Fast Track program of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) doesn’t discredit the hackerspaces as such. Any more than they’re condemned to participate in yet another restructuring of the capitalist production process when they’re captured in the “Maker” movement with its spaces where people working together can build and repair industrial objects or divert them from their original uses. Village construction sets, like that of Open Source Ecology with its fifty modular machines - tractor, milling machine, cement mixer, etc. - and DIY dwelling modules could also have a different destiny than serving to found a “small civilization with all the modern comforts,” or creating “entire new economies” or a “financial system” or a “new governance,” as its current guru fantasizes. Urban farming which is being established on building roofs or vacant industrial lots, like the 1300 community gardens of Detroit, could have other ambitions than participating in economic recovery or bolstering the “resilience of disaster zones.” Attacks like those conducted by Anonymous/LulzSec against banking firms, security multinationals, or telecommunications could very well go beyond cyberspace. As a Ukrainian hacker says, “When you have to attend to your life, you stop printing stuff in 3D rather quickly. You find a different plan.”

4. Techniques against Technology.

The famous “question concerning technology,” still a blind spot for revolutionary movements, comes in here. A wit whose name can be forgotten described the French tragedy thus: “a generally technophobic country dominated by a generally technophilic elite.” While the observation may not apply to the country, it does apply in any case to the radical milieus. The majority of Marxists and post-Marxists supplement their atavistic inclination to hegemony with a definite attachment to technology-that- emancipates-man, whereas a large percentage of anarchists and post-anarchists are down with being a minority, even an oppressed minority, and adopt positions generally hostile to “technology.” Each tendency even has its caricature: corresponding to the Negriist devotees of the cyborg, the electronic revolution by connected multitudes, there are the anti-industrials who’ve turned the critique of progress and the “disaster of technological civilization” into a profitable literary genre on the whole, and a niche ideology where one can stay warm at least, having envisaged no revolutionary possibility whatsoever. Technophilia and technophobia form a diabolical pair joined together by a central untruth: that such a thing as the technical exists. It would be possible, apparently, to divide between what is technical and what is not, in human existence. Well, no, in fact. One only has to look at the state of incompletion in which the human offspring is born, and the time it takes for it to move about in the world and to talk, to realize that its relation to the world is not given in the least, but rather the result of a whole elaboration. Since it’s not due to a natural compatibility, man’s relation to the world is essentially artificial, technical, to speak Greek. Each human world is a certain configuration of techniques, of culinary, architectural, musical, spiritual, informational, agricultural, erotic, martial, etc., techniques. And it’s for this reason that there’s no generic human essence: because there are only particular techniques, and because every technique configures a world, materializing in this way a certain relationship with the latter, a certain form of life. So one doesn’t “construct” a form of life; one only incorporates techniques, through example, exercise, or apprenticeship. This is also why our familiar world rarely appears to us as “technical”: because the set of artifices that structure it are already part of us. It’s rather those we’re not familiar with that seem to have a strange artificiality. Hence the technical character of our world only stands out in two circumstances: invention and “breakdown.” It’s only when we’re present at a discovery or when a familiar element is lacking, or breaks, or stops functioning, that the illusion of living in a natural world gives way in the face of contrary evidence.

Techniques can’t be reduced to a collection of equivalent instruments any one of which Man, that generic being, could take up and use without his essence being affected. Every tool configures and embodies a particular relation with the world, and the worlds formed in this way are not equivalent, any more than the humans who inhabit them are. And by the same token these worlds are not hierarchizable either. There is nothing that would establish some as more “advanced” than others. They are merely distinct, each one having its own potential and its own history. In order to hierarchize worlds a criterion has to be introduced, an implicit criterion making it possible to classify the different techniques. In the case of progress, this criterion is simply the quantifiable productivity of the techniques, considered apart from what each technique might involve ethically, without regard to the sensible world it engenders. This is why there’s no progress but capitalist progress, and why capitalism is the uninterrupted destruction of worlds. Moreover, the fact that techniques produce worlds and forms of life doesn’t mean that man’s essence is production, as Marx believed. So this is what technophiles and technophobes alike fail to grasp: the ethical nature of every technique.

It should be added that the nightmare of this epoch is not in its being the “age of technics” but in its being the age of technology. Technology is not the consummation of technical development, but on the contrary the expropriation of humans’ different constitutive techniques. Technology is the systematizing of the most effective techniques, and consequently the leveling of the worlds and the relations with the world that everyone deploys. Techno-logy is a discourse about techniques that is constantly being projected into material reality. Just as the ideology of the festival is the death of the real festival, and the ideology of the encounter is the actual impossibility of coming together, technology is the neutralization of all the particular techniques. In this sense capitalism is essentially technological; it is the profitable organization of the most productive techniques into a system. Its cardinal figure is not the economist but the engineer. The engineer is the specialist in techniques and thus the chief expropriator of them, one who doesn’t let himself be affected by any of them, and spreads his own absence from the world everywhere he can. He’s a sad and servile figure. The solidarity between capitalism and socialism is confirmed there: in the cult of the engineer. It was engineers who drew up most of the models of the neoclassical economy like pieces of contemporary trading software. Recall in this regard that Brezhnev’s claim to fame was to have been an engineer in the metallurgical industry in Ukraine.

The figure of the hacker contrasts point by point with the figure of the engineer, whatever the artistic, police-directed, or entrepreneurial efforts to neutralize him may be. Whereas the engineer would capture everything that functions, in such a way that everything functions better in service to the system, the hacker asks himself “How does that work?” in order to find its flaws, but also to invent other uses, to experiment. Experimenting then means exploring what such and such a technique implies ethically. The hacker pulls techniques out of the technological system in order to free them. If we are slaves of technology, this is precisely because there is a whole ensemble of artifacts of our everyday existence that we take to be specifically “technical” and that we will always regard simply as black boxes of which we are the innocent users. The use of computers to attack the CIA attests rather clearly that cybernetics is no more the science of computers than astronomy is the science of telescopes. Understanding how the devices around us work brings an immediate increase in power, giving us a purchase on what will then no longer appear as an environment, but as a world arranged in a certain way and one that we can shape. This is the hacker’s perspective on the world.

These past few years, the hacker milieu has gained some sophistication politically, managing to identify friends and enemies more clearly. Several substantial obstacles stand in the way of its becoming-revolutionary, however. In 1986, “Doctor Crash” wrote: “Whether you know it or not, if you are a hacker you are a revolutionary. Don’t worry, you’re on the right side.” It’s not certain that this sort of innocence is still possible. In the hacker milieu there‘s an originary illusion according to which “freedom of information,” “freedom of the Internet,” or “freedom of the individual” can be set against those who are bent on controlling them. This is a serious misunderstanding. Freedom and surveillance, freedom and the panopticon belong to the same paradigm of government. Historically, the endless expansion of control procedures is the corollary of a form of power that is realized through the freedom of individuals. Liberal government is not one that is exercised directly on the bodies of its subjects or that expects a filial obedience from them. It’s a background power, which prefers to manage space and rule over interests rather than bodies. A power that oversees, monitors, and acts minimally, intervening only where the framework is threatened, against that which goes too far. Only free subjects, taken en masse, are governed. Individual freedom is not something that can be brandished against the government, for it is the very mechanism on which government depends, the one it regulates as closely as possible in order to obtain, from the amalgamation of all these freedoms, the anticipated mass effect. Ordo ab chao. Government is that order which one obeys “like one eats when hungry and covers oneself when cold,” that servitude which I co-produce at the same time that I pursue my happiness, that I exercise my “freedom of expression.” “Market freedom requires an active and extremely vigilant politics,” explained one of the founders of neoliberalism. For the individual, monitored freedom is the only kind there is. This is what libertarians, in their infantilism, will never understand, and it’s this incomprehension that makes the libertarian idiocy attractive to some hackers. A genuinely free being is not even said to be free. It simply is, it exists, deploys its powers according to its being. We say of an animal that it is en liberte, “roaming free,” only when it lives in an environment that’s already completely controlled, fenced, civilized: in the park with human rules, where one indulges in a safari. “Friend” and “free” in English, and “Freund” and “frei” in German come from the same Indo-European root, which conveys the idea of a shared power that grows. Being free and having ties was one and the same thing. I am free because I have ties, because I am linked to a reality greater than me. In ancient Rome, the children of citizens were liberi : through them, it was Rome that was growing. Which goes to show how ridiculous and what a scam the individual freedom of “I do what I feel like doing” is. If they truly want to fight the government, the hackers have to give up this fetish. The cause of individual freedom is what prevents them from forming strong groups capable of laying down a real strategy, beyond a series of attacks; it’s also what explains their inability to form ties beyond themselves, their incapacity for becoming a historical force. A member of Telecomix alerts his colleagues in these terms: “What is certain is that the territory you’re living in is defended by persons you would do well to meet. Because they’re changing the world and they won’t wait for you.”

Another obstacle for the hacker movement, as every new meeting of the Chaos Computer Club demonstrates, is in managing to draw a front line in its own ranks between those working for a better government, or even the government, and those working for its destitution. The time has come for taking sides. It’s this basic question that eludes Julian Assange when he says: “We high-tech workers are a class and it’s time we recognize ourselves as such.” France has recently exploited the defect to the point of opening a university for molding “ethical hackers”. Under DCRI supervision, it will train people to fight against the real hackers, those who haven’t abandoned the hacker ethic.

These two problems merged in a case affecting us. After so many attacks that so many of us applauded, Anonymous/LulzSec hackers found themselves, like Jeremy Hammond, nearly alone facing repression upon getting arrested. On Christmas day, 2011, LulzSec defaced the site of Strafor, a “private intelligence” multinational. By way of a homepage, there was now the scrolling text of The Coming Insurrection in English, and $700,000 was transferred from the accounts of Stratfor customers to a set of charitable associations - a Christmas present. And we weren’t able to do anything, either before or after their arrest. Of course, it’s safer to operate alone or in a small group - which obviously won’t protect you from infiltrators - when one goes after such targets, but it’s disastrous for attacks that are so political, and so clearly within the purview of global action by our party, to be reduced by the police to some private crime, punishable by decades of prison or used as a lever for pressuring this or that “Internet pirate” to turn into a government snitch.

Invisible Committee, October 2014

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nezvycajne jasny IC clanok releasnuty na ccc, stoji za pozornost, hlavne posledne casti (nadpis je nevystizny emho)

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Geert Lovink
Hermes on the Hudson: Notes on Media Theory after Snowden

Slogans for 2014: “Hope is the mother of fools” (Polish saying) — Search for Yourself — “Views stated in this email are not my own and cannot be used against me” (footer) — The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Anarchism (book title) — Tame Your Junk (three-day course) — “Hardwired for Nonsense” — “Make the most hegemoney with a career in Gramscience” (Ian Bogost) — “Why [popular technology] is [unexpected opinion]” (4chan) — Encountering Algorithmic Flags on Content — “not just anti-aesthetic, but anaesthetic” — “you restored our world” — “Why I stopped coding to focus more on my blog,” with 39,123 comments — “Please note: I am not checking my spam folder anymore. If your message is not answered soon, please rephrase and resend.” — Happy Dark Ages — “I have seen dancing soldiers on Facebook” — “Modest and quiet cryptographers have superior ethics over word artists” (John Young) — Yiddish expression: “Man plans, and God laughs.” — Petition to Google shareholders: “Be Sociable, Share!” — “You sound like the drunk guy who won’t put down his bottle as though it’s stuck in his hand all the while calling alcohol bad and terrible” — “We don’t need your aid, please fund our budget deficit” (African saying).

Enlightenment not only promises new knowledge, it also shatters mythologies. The Snowden revelations in June 2013 mark the symbolic closure of the “new media” era. The NSA scandal has taken away the last remains of cyber-naivety and lifted the “internet issue” to the level of world politics. The integration of cybernetics into all aspects of life is a fact. The values of the internet generation have been dashed to pieces: decentralization, peer-to-peer, rhizomes, networks. Everything you have ever clicked on can and will be used against you. In 2014, we’ve come full circle and returned to a world before 1984. That was not only Orwell’s year, but also the moment Apple hit the mediascape with the personal computer. Until 1984, a small conglomerate of multinationals such as IBM, Honeywell-Bull, and GE defined the public imagination of computers with their sterile, corporate mainframes that processed punch cards. Until then, computers had been used by large bureaucracies to count and control populations and had not yet shaken off their military origins. Now, thirty years later, the computer is once again the perfect technical instrument of a cold, military security apparatus that is out to allocate, identify, select—and ultimately destroy—the Other. The NSA, with the active support of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and allied secret services, has achieved “total awareness.” Precisely at the moment when the PC is disappearing from our desks, large and invisible data centers take their place in the collective techno-imaginary.

The Turkish-American web sociologist Zeynep Tufekci reflects on the new state of affairs:

Resistance and surveillance: The design of today’s digital tools makes the two inseparable. And how to think about this is a real challenge. It’s said that generals always fight the last war. If so, we’re like those generals. Our understanding of the dangers of surveillance is filtered by our thinking about previous threats to our freedoms.1

She calls on us to update our nightmares. Let’s take this call seriously. In what ways can we still read our terrifying dreams with (Freudian) tools based on ancient Greek myths? In the age of smartphones, archetypal layers have been rewired and have mutated into a semi-collective techno-subconscious. We never dream alone. The digital is being pushed into the realm of the subliminal. The subject-as-user, the one who takes selfies, can indeed no longer productively distinguish between real and virtual, here and there, day and night. What is citizen empowerment in the age of the driverless car?

The University of Chicago Press recently released the third volume of its Trios series. Excommunication contains three extended essays written on the brink of the Snowden affair by three New York-based new media scholars—theory royalty who belong to the digital nineties generation: Alex Galloway, Eugene Thacker, and McKenzie Wark. The “three inquiries in media and mediation” open with the widely shared discontent that “new media” has become an empty signifier: “One of the things the trio of us share is a desire to cease adding ‘new media’ to existing things.”2 As the nineties slogan says: new media are tired, not wired. Or, to put it in eighties theory jargon: new media have moved from the schizoid revolutionary pole to the paranoiac, reactionary pole. Fashion over, next hype? If so, how do we deal with the Media Question, knowing that it is over but hasn’t gone away? To put it in the German context, what’s media theory after Friedrich Kittler? This question has been with us for some time. It is not enough that the historical wing—media archaeology—is doing well. Can we speak of a next generation that grew up under postmodernism, matured in the post-Cold War era of digital networks, and is currently taking over? Taking over what? There is a lot to say for the thesis that the height of speculative media theory was in the 1980s. The rest has been implementation—a boring and predictable collision with the existing political economy of global capitalism. This leaves us with the question of the mandate and scope of today’s media theory—if there is anything left. Are you ready to hand over the “new media” remains to the sociologists, museum curators, art historians, and other humanities officials? Can we perhaps stage a more imaginative “act of disappearance”? Are we ready to disguise ourselves amidst the new normality?

There are many ways to read Excommunication. One way would be to see this trio as a possible trend. Are new media theorists ready to become the next generation of public intellectuals following the example of Evgeny Morozov? It is hard to speak of an “emerging” New York School of Media Theory. It would be cool, but that’s not really what’s happening. What ingredients do we need in order to speak of a school? A program? Large quantities of research money? Institutional power? Influential academic positions, such as chairs? None of these seem to be present now. There are—not yet—distributed schools. Instead of endlessly comparing New York to LA, London, Paris, or Berlin as part of the city marketing logic, it makes more sense to return to the eighteenth-century model of philosophy as correspondence—through email lists, forums, blogs, Twitter. Pick your platform and start to insert the ideas of this print collaboration into the digital domain.

Is it the task of media (theory) to explain the world? The New York Three seem to have given up on this idea. Not only do they have doubts about the very possibility of communicating, there is also a growing uncertainty that theory can unfold the truth about our technological objects and processes. What does it mean in the context of “new media” that hermeneutics is, as Alex Galloway writes, in crisis? “Why plumb the recesses of the human mind, when the neurological sciences can determine what people think? Why try to interpret a painting when what really matters is the price it demands at auction?”3

As was noted in the 1990s, most media theory had been speculative in nature and projected its concepts into the future in the hope of cashing out at some stage. Already two decades ago, theory was incapable of understanding chips, computer code, and related interfaces (with the odd exception of Friedrich Kittler and a few others). The inability of theory to take apart the prime drivers of our civilization has caused a self-marginalization of the arts and humanities.

So what if we’ve lost our faith in media’s future, and we are left to our devices in the cold storage of Big Data? The contrast with 1980s film analysis, dominated by semiotics, postmodern philosophy, and psychoanalysis, couldn’t be greater. New media was, and still is, speculative and not hermeneutic. This is precisely because it has become so difficult to lay out the object of study, to put computer code, network architectures, user interfaces, and so forth, on the dissection table and spread them out in order to be able to read the material, with the aim of pouring out details that would reveal the bigger picture. The Will to Exegesis might still be there, but the black box cannot be dissected. This is the real hermeneutics crisis. This is the case in part because theorists have not learned to code, and also in part because the objects of study are simply not available (think of all the corporate algorithms).

A narrative reconstruction of a deeper meaning is hard to pull off in the digital media age, not least because in this McLuhan era, no one walks into the trap of content analysis. The message of the medium is its underlying structure, and both Google and Facebook are perfect examples of this law.

This is the background of the Greek turn in New York media theory, where the internet gets interpreted through comparisons to Hermes, Iris, and Fury (as well as through fashionable channels such as Badiou, Laruelle, Nancy, and others). As Wark summarizes: “Hermes stands for the hermeneutics of interpretation, Iris for the iridescence of immediacy, and the Furies for the swarm of the distributed network.”4

Thus Excommunication takes the liberty of stepping back from the political everyday of the Snowden scandals to turn to a highly coded language that uses Greek mythological names to speak to the revolutionary few. According to Leo Strauss, persecution gives rise to a peculiar type of literature “addressed … to trustworthy and intelligent readers only.”5 Is this the form and address that Wark, Galloway, and Thacker have in mind? Are they under surveillance and in danger? Do they encrypt their conversations in order to protect themselves from both the NSA and the constant barrage of banalities on Twitter and Facebook? Who knows. Suppression of independent thought through self-censorship has a long history, as Strauss explains. Could we call it a voluntary act of self-marginalization? Or rather, a desire to be accepted by established philosophers? Is it the overflow of social media that urged the authors to “combine understanding with caution,” or is it ostracism? Whatever the case, the question remains as to what discourse can revitalize freedom of speech in a digital age. I don’t want to read between the lines. With so much at stake, instead of dragging this text into a pool of misinterpretations, I propose to open up the debate. Can we say that media theory as such is regarded as suspect by the majority? Because of the growing gap between computer use (and similar devices) and the stagnation of new media theory coming from academia, we need to take this question seriously.

The informal critique from German circles that Excommunication does not move beyond the level of a German high school essay is a statement that I cannot verify. I have missed Michel Serres’s impressive work on Hermes. Ulysses does not run through my Dutch-Anglo veins. The fact remains that our German friends have failed to invest in translating their work into English so that a proper international dialogue can take place (recent examples would be Sybille Krämer’s study on media and messengers and Kittler’s last works on music and mathematics, both exclusively positioning their ideas inside ancient Greek philosophy). Contemporary German theorists are still rare in international discourse, and are usually in their fifties or sixties before they get translated. To dismiss the New York trio as would-be continentals that speak in a Greek tongue avoids the debate that’s really at stake here. Kill all your darlings, or, how to say farewell to new media.

There are so many pressing issues in this climate of stagnation, rage, and depression, during a time when no one cares about newness anymore. The trend in media theory of moving away from its own object of study can be traced back to a wild variety of sources: from Neil Postman, to Adilkno’s Unidentified Theory Objects in its 1998 Media Archive collection, to George Steiner’s Real Presences, to Goffey and Fuller’s ambivalent Evil Media strategies, to Florian Cramer’s Anti-Media, to Lüneburg’s Post-Media Lab (a collaboration between Mute magazine and Leuphana University that produced Provocative Alloys: A Post-Media Anthology), to comparable incarnations of the “post-digital” concept. As its promoter, Florian Cramer explains: “Anti-media is what remains if one debunks the notion of media but can’t get rid of it.”6

For the New York trio, the key question is: “What is mediation?” To pose this question means to imagine the opposite: there is no communication without excommunication. What if we stop mediating? Instead of digging into the ongoing rise of the connected world, the authors favor studying the “insufficiency of mediation,” and “modes of mediation that refuse bi-directionality, that obviate determinacy, and that dissolve devices entirely.”7 Not everything that exists has to be represented and mediated.

To what extent is this different from the traditional “deconstruction” agenda, the “glitch” aesthetics à la Rosa Menkman, or even the “exploit” philosophy as formulated by Galloway and Thacker themselves?8 Already at that point the authors argued in favor of a “counterprotocol,” an “anti-web,” or, to put it in philosophical parlance, an “exceptional topology.” If we exclude offline romanticism, how could we translate this analysis into a workable political program? It is one thing to imagine a specific aesthetic. There are multitudes of artists working in this direction. In the post-Snowden age, it is no longer sufficient to call for open-source alternatives that merely copy the corporate premises of the dominant platforms (the friends logic and so on). The social graph order itself has to be questioned. Can we bring together a collective intelligence that is capable of formulating the very principles of another communication order?

Excommunication is not just a reference to a world after media, to post-media or the post-digital, as some characterize this next phase. We also must perform a literal reading of acts of power. We are excommunicated from the new media paradise and suddenly confronted with the cold logic of Big Politics. A generation thought it was possible to refine the very terms under which they were communicating. One impulse, do-it-yourself, brought together punks, geeks, and entrepreneurs. The radical disillusionment after Snowden should be classified as a secular version of the late-nineteenth-century discovery that God is Dead. However, the ecclesiastical censure of this age is non-technological in nature. We have not been expelled from the networks. Smartphones and tablets have not been confiscated. The problem is neither increasing censorship nor advanced filter techniques that we are only half aware of. Technological blockades can be circumvented. We can armor ourselves with layers of crypto protection, but the problem goes much deeper. What the NSA revelations have unleashed is the existential uncertainty that comes along with “everything you say can and will be used against you.” The long-term implications of such destruction of informal exchange are yet unknown. Will online communication become more formal? Will there be fewer trolls? In short, will new cultures of conflict arise, or be suppressed from the start—or not show up in the first place?

We are not excluded from the communion of believers. Rather, we excommunicate ourselves because the consensual thrill has dried up. Many feel the social pressure of Facebook and Twitter, and withdraw, or shut up and turn the “participatory culture” into a silent nightmare of presence. When community becomes a commodity, we should not be surprised that we burn through these platforms quickly and abandon them so easily.

Social media without the libidinous drive is a deadly boring routine. The playful dialectics between anonymous voyeurism and the exhibitionist display of the selfie have driven the hypergrowth of social media. Once this productive couple becomes a routine, user statistics tumble and mass migration to the next platform sets in. The crisis caused by Snowden is one of an entirely different nature. To submit emails to a non-responding, deserted cyberspace is death; the non-responding Other is Hell. This has now expanded from email and linking to the social media realm: What happens when re-tweets and the like dry up and the frantic 24/7 obsession becomes meaningless? It has proven to be not enough to follow and have followers. The act of following remains passive and invisible as long as there is no communication. To refrain from commenting equals death.

There is an emerging consensus that “the internet is broken.” It is becoming harder for the Googles and Facebooks to go back to business as usual. In this historical moment, it is of strategic importance to hear the voices of technically competent public intellectuals. Slavoj Žižek, with all his shortcomings, is able to effectively raise his in the cases of Pussy Riot, Occupy Wall Street, Snowden, and demonstrations in Bosnia. When it comes to (new) media, Žižek inevitably falls back into a 1980s film analysis of Hollywood. Jodie Dean does a better job with her analyses of blogging and “communicative capitalism,” but in the end remains trapped in the ghetto of American academia.

The state of radical disillusionment we find ourselves in also calls for a reassessment of the role of theory. If we look around us, the role of theorists has been taken over by commentators and journalists. As in most countries, there is only a weak institutional representation of media theory in the US, and the fact that most internet critics in the US are not (established) academics (Carr, Lanier, Keen, Morozov, Pariser, among others) says it all. We can make similar observations about the new media (arts) programs and festivals that are on their way out. It is not hard to see that traditional film and television programs have won the game. Digital humanities won’t help us out here. Neither will “communication science” with its applied PR knowledge. In this context, we have to read the Greek gods for allegories of media theory.

The post-media tendency results in a withdrawal of theory in favor of largely uncritical tools and methods that are eagerly being implemented by mainstream social science, which has long been on the lookout for new fields of employment. The digital humanities can be seen as a distraction—a pragmatic but desperate gesture to hold off the disappearance of the humanities. Digital potency is not a unique selling point for shrinking disciplines such as history, philosophy, and literature. It is not the task of media theory to build visualization tools that prove the usefulness of ideas. We can rest assured: the Big Data wave will be over soon, but the related questions will remain.

Why hammer out concepts, be it speculative, critical, or pragmatist, if there is a meta-authority overseeing it all? Why conspire in the light? In a variation of Pink Floyd, we could say: we don’t need no Second God. Big Brother and his Little Sister have arrived, and are here to stay, unless we have the collective courage to dismantle the installed technical infrastructure. We need to develop dissident knowledge of how to bring down drones, detect sensors, hack servers, distort GPS signals, and disrupt Google by fooling its algorithms. Forget the next innovation cycle. If the common hacker’s paranoia informs us correctly, we lost the war years ago and are surrounded. Soon we will be called to surrender, one by one.

To put it in Deleuzian terms, is it still our task to create concepts, or do we switch and spend our time destroying worlds? Over the past decade, the affirmative, light part of this French philosopher has been emphasized. Now the pendulum moves to the dark side.9 Are we in the process of un-becoming, disassembling identities, withdrawing from the overexposed public realms, unfolding the networks, interrupting the flows of links and likes, putting the joyous production of signs on hold?

The trio rightly states that what’s at stake is the destiny of media theory an sich. Old or new, visual or literary, digital or post-digital, what media theory invites you to do is read the past in a different way. But why must it be the case that if we merge media with theory, we’re inevitably drawn into the past? We may as well posit the thesis that the media angle results in speculative tinkertoy theory, and the perfect critical tool to dissect the present.

“Media are forever those things foreign to us,” Galloway says in Excommunication.10 The vitalist impulse has left the media sphere. Media is dead, long live the pure and direct experience. Have the three removed themselves from the scene? I beg to differ. After all, they wrote a book, they tweet, and so forth. Exodus ain’t no withdrawal. Dionysian darkness helps us to step out of the unbearable lightness of transparency. Theory and criticism need to claim their own space in the debate, next to Reddit, Hacker News, and Verge, where ZDNet, Wired, Slashdot, and TechCrunch were in the past. Will Medium, the newest startup by the founder of Twitter, be a gesture in this direction?

Theory might spin off into its own realm and lose touch with the current issues that cry for critical interventions. We cannot afford to withdraw. As we speak, there is an assault on theory happening in the form of Big Data hype, which threatens to marginalize both speculative and critical approaches. Why study concepts and their origins if you can indulge in a sea of data? We desperately need a counterattack, starting with an overall rejection of “digital humanities.” In this Methodenstreit 2.0, we need to go beyond the pitiful bourgeois defense of “liberal arts” and demonstrate that there is no software without concepts. The weakness of software studies is widely felt. Where is software studies now that we need it?

Bernard Stiegler’s pharmacological approach, on the other hand, seems capable of counterbalancing the exodus sentiment. Despite his dark analysis, Stiegler remains one of the few contemporary thinkers who works with both an online and offline strategy, without trying to construct an artificial synergy between the two. Likewise, Evgeny Morozov, the Eastern European migrant to the United States who refuses to submit to the American Dream, has written about Silicon Reality and its alternatives, which are all presumably infected by hegemonic concepts, including NSA backdoors. His uncompromising attacks work, and the uptake of his recent term, “solutionism,” is remarkable. Digital disgust is out there, and the impulse of offline romanticism is widely felt. But for the NSA, these are irrelevant sentiments. The security complex is agnostic about our movement back and forth between the online and offline worlds.

From Gezi Park to Brazil and Ukraine, we are indeed turning into furies and delinquent packs (to use Wark’s terms). Our enigma is known: Are the uprisings occurring despite or because of social media? Tufekci advises that the “state-of-the-art method for shaping ideas is not to coerce overtly but to seduce covertly, from a foundation of knowledge.” How can theory play a role in this seduction? A temporary break might seem inevitable, to cut routines. Excommunication as a strike against meaning, a boycott of messaging. Tufekci explains: “Internet technology lets us peel away layers of divisions and distractions and interact with one another, human to human. At the same time, the powerful are looking at those very interactions, and using them to figure out how to make us more compliant.” In 2014, we’re torn between the seductive aspect of coming together and the fear that we are consciously producing evidence that will be used against us. Let’s move away from the binary logic of online/offline, of participation/exodus, and instead design other forms of social interaction and organization together, based on sustainable exchanges, strong ties, and a sensual imagination that allows us to transcend the given cultural formats (from edu-factory formats to Facebook).

What we need now are philosophical responses to the cult of selfies, more interventions in the moral panic over the loss of attention and the presumed distraction epidemic, further investigations into the 24/7 economy and sleep deprivation (with Jonathan Crary as a brilliant start11), a straight-on confrontation with the contemporary arts system over its digital blindness, a further strengthening of New Materialism and similar investigations into hybrids of the real and the virtual, drone aesthetics, Internet of Things politics, and the role of gender in programming. How can media theory jump over its own shadow? Excommunication is an attempt to find new inroads. If there ever was a Media Question, it is now reaching its existentialist moment.

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30-minutova uvaha o sucasnej situacii a specifikach publikovania v humanitnych vedach a o monoskope

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buntingov statement k nominacii na vizionara od AE
http://post.in-mind.de/pipermail/spectre/2014-March/016679.html

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rapujuci excel sheet http://soundcloud.com/omnia-sunt-comunia/leaking-transmediale (bigger data: http://rebelart.net/wp-database/uploads/2014/01/131122_BpB_Budget-Update_sb.pdf)

kontext: http://copyriot.se/2014/02/02/art-hack-day-at-transmediale-how-to-get-artists-to-work-without-pay/

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post-digital transition junkware media garbology dumpster diving decycled digital native trashure high gloss new aesthetics tube-trash overload uncertain value smart city junk spam body post-functional bitrot drone zombie selection excess big data waste pollution trash

afterglow

The digital revolution is over again and this time “YOU” lost.

In the wastelands of its aftermath, what is still burning?

http://www.transmediale.de/content/transmediale-2014-call-for-works

DEADLINE: 31 JULY 2013

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PDF

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s Florianom Cramerom maju ale fajn rozhovor -- PDF

axone forumz