Networked Labour University Information Bulletin No. 1 | 1-7 May 2015 [ENGLISH] | Networked Labour

1. Culture and knowledge for classless societies is networked in process! 

Networked Labour University is designed as an educational module to be integrated with a broader network composed of Global Networked Labour Union, Networked Labour Research unit, and networked labour coop GNLU. Tied to a greater ecology of universal, free and open access community projects, such as Faircoop, the Earth Cooperative, all our projects aim mutual empowerment at the bottom level. Unconditional empowerment of the dis-empowered, excluded, and oppressed with direct solidarity is the reason why we exist for. Our platform is designed to liberate knowledge from alienation and domination of any kind at the point of production and distribution. In order to enable money-free access to most essential cultural resources we rely on free/libre, open source software, but the platform also aims to facilitate broader solidarity economy by encouraging and enabling open-cooperative exchanges between participants.

Our invitation is an wide open one, anyone can join and contribute by offering and taking courses, moderating circles or skill shares, helping out with web design, platform development, promotion, or any other way!

2. Networked Labour University Opening Meeting

Date: 7 May 2015
Time: 14.00 – 17.00 (ECT / UCT+1)

Check-ins (14:00 – 14:15)

Opening and presentation of the system (14:15 – 15:00)
Networked Labour University and Worker to Worker Study Circles

Discussion (15:15 – 16:45)
How to use cross-border communication and which digital tools to build commons knowledge, culture, politics, and economy for the classless society and from the oppressed point of view?

Closing and Check-outs (16:45 – 17:00)

Access: Participation is on-line, open and free. What you need to do to is to open an account on the website below and to selfenrol for the event before. Working languages are English/Turkish

Website: networkedlabour.networg.nl/moodle
Email: networg@networg.nl

Click here to register as a user 

[Re]Build: A Call for Contributors and Participants | Deterritorial Investigations Unit

Shock and austerity. Stock market instability. Stagnant wages and the decline of purchasing power. War. Climate change. Despite these multiplying crises, capitalism retains an essential tool that allows it to perpetuate itself on a global level despite its internal contradictions: the ability to leverage technological developments to liquidate the political power of those who would oppose it. At such a crossroads, when labor as an organized force is being dissolved into flexible precarity, how does one attempt to tip the scales and reverse our accelerating fragility? The answer lies in a shift of focus, from a politics of power to a politics that looks critically at infrastructure, a politics of re-purpose, (re-)design, appropriation and the reclamation of space, and of new forms of economic expression.

Whatever the future will be, or whatever name we want to label the path to it, there is one realization that is facing us: it must be post-capitalist. We firmly believe that another world is possible, but it must be built, and the rules and programs for this construction are still largely unwritten.

We propose the creation of a zone of experimentation with the intention of bringing together dissenting agencies with critical practices in hopes of finding prototypes and models for a post-capitalist society. Such a platform calls for a cross-pollination of ideas, a shared and in-depth dialogue, and easily accessible means for hands-on experimentation. This new space will be open to all wanting to participate.

The topics we hope to cover include – but are not limited to:

• The politics of infrastructure
• The remaking of space by neoliberal capitalism
• The relationships between big data, media, and infrastructure
• Tactics and strategies for re-purposing technologies, complex systems, infrastructure and the politicization of spatial practices
• D.I.Y. techniques and how-to guides
• Alternative economies
• Sustainable living, agriculture, energy, and architecture
• The possibilities and pitfalls of automation
• Eco-activism and infra-activism
• Intervention design
• Tactical media
• New and experimental cartographies
• Peer-to-peer approaches to production and distribution

Contributions can take a variety of forms:

• Articles and essays
• Fragments and speculations
• Videos, links, and commentaries
• How-to guides, plans, and prototypes
• Reports, stories, and interviews

Anyone who is interested need only drop us a line here, or you can email me atEdmund.b.berger@gmail.com.

MyCreativity | On the Creative Question | Manifest by Geert Lovink, Sebastian Olma & Ned Rossiter

On the Creative Question – Nine Theses

By Geert Lovink, Sebastian Olma and Ned Rossiter

‘Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted’. ― Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars’. ― Oscar Wilde

1. Goodbye to Creative Industries

A creepy discourse on creativity has captured cultural and economic policy. Creativity invokes a certain pharmacological numbness among its spruikers – a special sub-species entirely unaware of how far removed their version of creativity is from radical invention and social transformation. Their claims around the science of economy are little more than a shoddy con. While ‘creativity’ is increasingly seen as a main driver of economic development, the permanent reference to creative classes, creative cities, creative industries, creative innovations and so on has rendered the notion all but meaningless. Degraded to a commercial and political marketing tool, the semantic content of creativity has been reduced to an insipid spread of happy homogeneity – including the right amount of TED-styled fringe misfits and subcultures – that can be bureaucratically regulated and ‘valorized’. To this rhetoric corresponds a catalogue of ‘sectors’ and ‘clusters’ labelled as creative industries: a radically disciplined and ordered subdomain of the economy, a domesticated creative commons where ‘innovators’ and ‘creatives’ harmoniously co-mingle and develop their auto-predictive ‘disruptions’ of self-quantification, sharing and gamification. Conflict is anathema to the delicate sensibilities of personas trading in creative consultancy.

2. Welcome to the Creative Question

The creative question has replaced the social question. In the 20th century the consequences and problems of industrial capitalism found a temporary solution in the class compromise of the welfare state. In digital capitalism we have to address the social question in terms of the creative question: what is today’s source of value and who owns it? We need to turn the pompous, meaningless chatter on creativity into a debate on how to come out on the positive side of the digital pharmakon (the nuanced combination of all things good and evil). To those who tell you ‘how we are going to live twenty years from now’, shout them down with ideas of how you want to live in twenty years!

via MyCreativity | On the Creative Question | Manifest by Geert Lovink, Sebastian Olma & Ned Rossiter.

Program: Digital Labor Conference

PROGRAM

Download the full program (PDF) Flip through the program here.

November 13, 2014

06:00 PM Workingman’s Death

November 14, 2014

08:00 AM Speaker Check-in

10:00 AM Opening Plenary

10:45 AM (Not) Getting Paid to Work & Play

10:45 AM Research & Practice on Feminist / Feminized Digital Labor

10:45 AM The Death of Employment; Long Live Worker Rights

10:45 AM Perspectives on Digital Labor & the Video Game Industry

10:45 AM Culture Workers of the World Unite!

02:15 PM Resource Sharing & Digitization in the Arts

02:15 PM Digital Labor, Sex Work, & Maria’s GentleWhispering

02:15 PM CUNY Digital Labor Working Group Roundtable:

The Place, Politics, and Function of Measure

02:15 PM Fairness in Crowd Work

02:15 PM The Labor of Love & the New Soviet Man in Silicon Valley

02:15 PM Value Capture & the Affect Machine: Non-Money Capital in the Digital Age

02:15 PM Search, Data Flows, & Vertical Extraction

05:15 PM SaysUs/GNUnion

05:15 PM Art, Art Workers, and Cloud Platforms

05:15 PM Teamsters, UPS, & the Gig Economy (Student Panel)

05:15 PM Temp Land: Working in the New Economy

05:15 PM Crowd Work: The Future of Design

05:15 PM How Interfaces Demand Obedience

05:15 PM Movement Materials & What We Can Do

07:00 PM Disability & the Digital Divide

via Program: Digital Labor Conference.

Issue #5: Shared Machine Shops » Journal of Peer Production

Despite the marketing clangour of the “maker movement”, shared machine shops are currently “fringe phenomena” since they play a minor role in the production of wealth, knowledge, political consensus and the social organisation of life. Interestingly, however, they also prominently share the core transformations experienced in contemporary capitalism. The convergence of work, labour and other aspects of life — the rapid development of algorithmically driven technical systems and their intensifying role in social organisation — the practical and legitimation crisis of institutions, echoed by renewed attempts at self-organisation.

Each article in this special issue addresses a received truth which circulates unreflected amongst both academics analysing these phenomena and practitioners engaged in the respective scenes. Questioning such myths based on empirical research founded on a rigorous theoretical framework is what a journal such as the Journal of Peer Production can contribute to both academic and activist discourses. Shared machine shops have been around for at least a decade or so, which makes for a good time to evaluate how they live up to their self-professed social missions.

Here is an executive summary:

Shared Machine Shops are not new.

Fab Labs are not about technology.

Sharing is not happening.

Hackerspaces are not open.

Technology is not neutral.

Hackerspaces are not solving problems.

Fab Labs are not the seeds of a revolution.

via Issue #5: Shared Machine Shops » Journal of Peer Production.

Speech at Franco Berardi’s PhD Defence by Geert Lovink

It has been a special honour and a pleasure for me to act as opponent for Franco Berardi’s PhD defence at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki on October 23, 2014. You can read more about the event on the Future Art Base website. A video of the two hour ceremony, which included an introduction to the thesis by Franco Berardi, me reading the text below and a debate between the two of us will become available in a little while. Semiotexte will publish a version of the thesis by the end of 2015. /geert

Being a decade younger, I heard for the first time from him and his activities around 1980, when stories about Radio Alice were spreading throughout Europe. True, the Amsterdam free radio scene, operating out of the squatters movement of the time, had a multitude of local roots but Radio Alice was certainly one of them. The Bologna uprising of 1977, in which Bifo played a crucial role,  predated our most tumultuous year, 1980, and was thus a an important source of inspiration for the revolts in Amsterdam, Zurich and Berlin. What we shared was our common desire to find out what ‘autonomy’ could look like in different parts of Western Europe which lacked any trace of an ‘operaist’ workers movement.

via Geert | Speech at Franco Berardi’s PhD Defence in Helsinki.

Social (Network) Unionism and Social (Networked) Strike by Tiziana Terranova

Social unionism and digital labor in the transnational space of European austerity

Over the past few years, European social movements have struggled to find new ways of cooperating and connecting in order to oppose the verticalization of European governance. Following the crash of 2008, in fact, a regime of austerity, that is severe cuts to public spending, has gone together with a remodulation of modes of welfare and work inspired by the German model. This model has seen the massive introduction of part-time, badly paid jobs (the so called mini-jobs ) which are part of a system of workfare where the state makes sure that everybody is forced to accept whatever job available through a new capillary control of recipients’ lives. While the European Central Bank like the Federal Reserve has deployed quantitative easing, and inundated the financial system with money, none of this has effectively gone into the creation of new jobs, into expanding credit to consumers and business or to essential public services. The process of complete precarization of labor and increasing accumulation of wealth is thus unfolding along the lines of a geographical and ethnic division of labor which sees the European Union divided between centre and periphery, North and South, East and West with war pressing in on its Eastern and Southern borders.

The verticalization of European governance has thus reinforced a whole series of trends: ‘the attack on waged labor, the compression of union rights, the dequalification and privatisation of learning and research, the enclosure of common goods, a new government of labor mobility and the exploitation of migrant labor’ (http://www.autistici.org/strikemeeting/). These considerations are central to the formation of a transnational space of action for social movements aiming to reverse the tide of complete neoliberalization of Europe and opening onto the global level as the only adequate dimension of struggle.

The P2P Prince?: The form and the program of the transnational REvolutionary subjectivity

Below text is an excpert from unpublished and unedited 2012 article Another World, Now! Coming of the Transnational REvolutions and the P2P Prince.

The  modern  prince,  the  myth-prince,  cannot  be  a  real  person,  a  concrete individual. It can only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will, which has  already been recognised and has to some  extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete form. (A. Gramsci)

 

Italian political activist and theorist Antonio Gramsci’s core concepts like hegemony, organic crisis, historic bloc, war of position and war of manoeuvre are central to our understanding of today’s complex global capitalist system as well as the catastrophic changes that are currently taking place in it. Referring to the original concept developed by Gramsci, global political economy theorist Stephen Gill describes the 2008 global financial turmoil as the manifestation of an organic crisis at the global level. [1] We can also read the outcomes of the global organic crisis following another neo-Gramscian theorist Robert Cox as a mixture of three scenarios he describes.[2] First one is a global (military) Keynesian recovery being pushed by the West. Regional wars moving from the periphery to the centre involving massive destruction of lives, cities and the nature, as we witness it happening since the 9/11. The second scenario is the rise of global fascism in tandem with the regional wars. This has also been happening, especially increasingly in the centre, since 2007; highlighting the race to the bottom caused by the strengthening of totalitarian forms of capitalism at the main contenders like China, Russia and India. Finally and the last scenario is accompanying transnational revolutions, like the uprisings in the northern Africa, Americas and Europe also happening.[3]

What brought humanity to this point is not a secret and also made clear by many thinkers, intellectuals, and activists. The above mentioned article by Gill is only one of the public records. It is very clear however where we have to drive history as the humanity, the third option: Transnational revolutions. Again, following Gramsci and Gill, we can think of the realisation of the transnational revolutions in relation to the ‘Prince’. For his time Gramsci thought of it as the collective subjectivity which will give the moral leadership to a wider counter-hegemonic historic bloc, and shape the form and content of the communist revolution in a national context. And it was the communist part of the working class. Gill referred to the anti- and alter-globalisation movement.

Projects | Calafou – PostCapitalist Ecoindustrial Colony

Projects

Calafou is dedicated to encourage productive projects related with our ideas about ecology (environmental care, waste management, etc.), social economy, assemblies and a list of other requirements specified in this document. All productive projects are presented and coordinated through the Projects workgroup, and are then proposed for approval at Calafou’s general assembly.

Collective projects (which profits go for the colony), autonomous projects (initiatives from a person or a specific collective), and collective spaces (which enable project development or are the framework for community life) all coexist in Calafou. Some current projects are: the social center; Circe, a chemistry lab for research and production of soaps, oleates and essences; the hacklab, a place for collective work and learning; the serigraphy workshop; the collective workshop. All of them have been developed by Calafou’s inhabitants.

Among the projects for self-provision or sale we have home-made preserves, marmalades, or bread. There are also autonomous projects such as the garage “El noi del sucre“ or the MutangerLab (electronics, welding, and more).

Central shed which harbors:

1. kitchen
2. dining room
3. living room
4. collective workshop
5. social center
6. silk screen printing workshop
7. Hacklab
8. Garden
9. Lodging space (red House)
10. Camping site

Projects:

via Projects | Calafou.

Online Preparatory Meeting for the ‘Organizing Digital Labour and Digital Labour Organizing Workshop’ at Global Solidarity Conference

When: 10:00, 14 May 2014

Where: BigBlueButton

Preparatory and test call for planning the ‘Organizing digital labour & digital labour organizing’ workshop. The actual workshop is being planned to take place in Berlin between 23-25 May 2014, during  Labour Start‘s 5. Global Solidarity Conference.

Original Post

To open up the preparation process for the workshop as wide as possible and to allow those interested online participants to test and practice with the online system we will be using, we will be making several test conference calls in coming days. The first call will take place on Wednesday 14 May, between 10.00 am and 15.00 pm [UK time], so wider global participation will be possible during the day.

The draft description of the workshop, which we be taken as the starting point, can be found at ‘Union Upgrading’ Group Wiki created on Organizing Network -which we will be testing and using to document the workshop and the preperation, and to take the minutes. If you like to participate the preparatory call, and the workshop itself please add your name, affiliation, contact information, and any ideas or suggestion of yours on the wiki and click on ‘Save’. In order to be able to use all the functions of the Organizing Network, for instance the wiki, you will need to register first. Please read the user guide for the ON here.

The test call is open to all unionists, labour organizers, social justice activists, free information and knowledge [h]activists, researchers who are interested in and experienced on the topic. The call is especially set up for those who wish to actively collaborate in the preparation of the content of the workshop, and who needs to practice with the digital tools we will be using.

#MayFirst #MetaStrike: Take part in six moth long global and systemic hackaton to take down the Prism, fascism, capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism and war

Considering the total enclosure of the Internet, the enslavement of mass free labor on it, and the rise of meta-data Orweillian society, what should one make of celebration of the rise of the Internet of Everything (IoE) or Industrial Internet and calling for the demise of capitalism by people like Jeremy Rifkin! What would be Rifkin’s advise to his ruling class clients, but more importantly why the neoconservatives and Chinese state class elite pay him high compensations?

The ruling elite way of dealing with the problem of ‘near zero marginal costs’ has been massive exploitation of zero labor cost (free labor). Now they like to capture free labor in the physical world by connecting devices and people “putting them at work on the move” -as Cisco and GE founders of the Industrial Internet Consortium publicly declare. While the translation of this ideal is the objectification of entire living labor and commons (should be read as human) to a global production process, why Rifkin celebrates this! If the plan is clearly to giving IP addresses to 50 billion devices in coming 10 years to form the IoE infrastructure, making it is possible a global scale surveillance an most logical outcome would be the total exploitation of artificially constructed happy playbouring produsers who would be living in sterile smart cities. As for the masses, there shall not be need for an hegemonic governance like bourgeois parliamentarian model what so ever in this new digital world. It has become clear by now that this ambitious capitalist project has the potential to replace the ancient industrial capitalism. It is certain by now that the fall of capitalism as we know it won’t be quite and painless. The attempt towards realizing this transition has brought about imperialist peripheral wars. If one look to the fierce clashes between Russian, Westerns and Chinese rulers in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Georgia, Chechnya, Ukraine and other frontiers of the Empires, the naked truth would appears in clear vision. The fact that crack between two giant tectonic plates is about to break up to a truly global corrective war between ruling classes. Titans are getting ready to clash, and planning for the aftermath of the great cleansing, of billions of un-exploitable and expensive to feed human.

Global Networked Labour Union invites organizers and networkers to mesh-up for the worldwide transition

GNUnion is an idea. It is a collaborative effort and a swarm like social activity aiming to interconnect emancipatory cultures, individuals, institutions, visions, strategies and networks to each other. Global networked labour union is a living, conscious and shared map of locally grounded, translocally interacting autonomous collectivities (simultaneously in and between local, regional, national, continental levels) that are forming a global whole. GNUnion of the nodes, hubs and ties involved serves to generate healthier, stronger and clearer path to emancipation beyond capitalist mode of production without destruction.

We therefore invite peers who share the idea, to network and organize to stitch a global mesh-network by linking thier struggles, network bases and labour to each other. Our call is to all who strive for building dynamic, free, libre, and open source spaces, where our autonomous agendas, geographies and visions can interact and become collectivised bottom up manner. While each of which becomes more empowered to move further independantly, in an harmony.

Join Our Email List: https://lists.riseup.net/www/info/workersoftheworld

GNUnion encourages all its peers to collectivize their individual social and communicational power to swarm around dynamical, creative and positive actions. Such collective actions we know well by now that are capable of creating real impact at unpredicted magnitude on the chosen targets, regardless how large and powerful they are.

Combining peer to peer social relations and technologies and embedding them into all its internal and external processes and relationships, GNUnion ultimately aims at hyper-empowerment of all the nodes involved in one big mesh network.

Below are some of the spaces we collaborate on N-1, and the Organizing Network -online social network spaces developed as free nodes using Lorea.

Social Network-, Wiki-, Meta- Strikes

Our first direct and mesh networked action will be a transnational meta-strike to target PRISM contractors. Priority objectives of the strike will be forcing the state elite and capital to hand-off private and public data, and stop abusing people and democratic rights for their commercial and tyrannical objectives. The action will reclaim what is ‘social’ and belong to people in societal communication and bring about mass awareness about using FLOSS!

We will bring high-tech and industrial workers, hackers, system admins, digital artists and activists and their powers coming from production, consumption, communication and knowledge -so a being social individuals and society.

Working Groups on the ON and N-1:  https://on.usilive.org/groups/profile/323/mayfirst-meta-strike

https://n-1.cc/g/social_network_strike

All the Net workers of the world, mesh network!

This wiki is a meta-strike developing space created by GNUnion. Inviting interested digital and analog workers, labour and union activists to use it for inventing, initiating and networganising collective hactions to target Meta-Data abuses of the Capital. Besides PRISM contractors, there is a need to forge class struggle against digital capitalists of Amazon.com, Huffington Post, and others who undermines human dignity and rights, gained after hundereds of years fighting back!

*Operation PRISM Knock-out!
Objective: To stop PRISM contractors abusing people and data, and promote an escape route to FLOSS alternatives
Targets: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, Skype, Yahoo
Twitter: GNUnion – One Big Mesh Network
HashTag: #OPprismknockout
Planning: Irc

*Operation Mechanical Jurk
Objective: developing direct hacktion operation targeting Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk mass-exploitative model
Target: Amazon.com
Twitter: @GNUnion
Hashtag: #OPmechanicalJurk
Planning: Irc

Venture Communism and Technological Miscommunication: a Conversation with Dmytri Kleiner

This interview with Dmytri Kleiner, conducted by KMO for his C-Realm Podcast, was transcripted by Guerrilla Translation at KMO’s request. The audio was, unfortunately, unusable for the podcast because of background noise, but the resulting interview was too good to not to share. The following is re-posted from the C-Realm blog.

KMO: You are listening to the C-Realm Podcast, I am your host, KMO, and I’m speaking with Dmytri Kleiner, venture capitalist and miscommunications technologist. Dmytri, welcome to the C-Realm Podcast.

Dmytri: Thank you, but that’s “venture communist.”

Did I say “capitalist?”

It’s an easy mistake.

You know, I’ve read the phrase “venture communist” several times in the past few hours in preparing for this interview, and yeah… it just rolled out “venture capitalist,” didn’t it?

[chuckles]

So, Dmytri Kleiner, “Venture Communist” – what does that mean?

Well, it’s sort of the name of a research project I started awhile ago. My background comes from the social justice movement of the 90s. I was part of some of the kinds of hacker groups that eventually became things like Indymedia, and stuff that we called technology affinity groups. At that time there was something going on called the dotcom boom, that you probably remember. A lot of us who were part of these hacker affinity groups supporting activist projects were working for these dotcoms.

Seven Billion Struggles, One Hashtag #WaveOfAction

Autonomous, independant, distributed, collaborative, focused, disciplined, connected, meshed and outraged!

#WaveOfAction

FOR ANOTHER WORLD, NOW!

All the fists of the world are GNUniting! First Brainstorm – Online Meeting This Sunday at 13.00 PM GMT

All the fists of the world are GNUniting!
First Brainstorm – Online Meeting This Sunday at 13.00 PM GMT
https://www.facebook.com/GlobalNetworkedLabourUnion

We are the workers whose free labour and privacy has been stolen, and sold
for greed! We have been abused, spied on and betrayed constantly. Before
this massive exploitation and surveillance machine turns into a global
apparatus in the hands of fascism, being operationalized for direct
oppression, we have to unite our fists and strike back!

This May Day is the time… How and what is not decided yet, there are
initial ideas but much is needed to put the global collective intelligence
at work to defend our and our children’s rights and dignity! Join us this
Sunday and bring your most free, creative, powerful and peaceful ideas and
dreams along… We did beat Freon, Caesars, Barons, Kings, Emperors,
Merchants, Industrial Capitalists and Nazis in the past, we can beat the
TNCs, CEOs and 1% as well!

We call all the workers, hackers, makers, farmers, artists, indignant and
outraged to GNUnite all their constructive capacity around the most
spectacular free libre and open sourced swarm to fight back and win!

Hasta la Siempre Victoria!
https://www.facebook.com/events/583310555077672/?ref=3&ref_newsfeed_story_type=regular
https://www.facebook.com/events/252508808246947/?ref=22&source=3&source_newsfeed_story_type=regular

World Revolutionary Forum: Towards WorldWideWave of Actions in 2014 (#www)

Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/593164267417330/

HashTags: #WREF, #www

#www call: http://gnunion.wordpress.com/www/
#WREF: http://gnunion.wordpress.com/worl-revolutionary-forum/
GNUnion: http://gnunion.wordpress.com/

Hosted by GNUnion – One Big Meshwork for All the Working People

Again, 2014 will be full of struggles, actions and mobilisations for a real global change. This Mumble call will be about starting a new series of forums and assemblies that are open to all individuals who will able to make independent efforts from any corporate, state and NGO funded agenda and; who could be exactly themselves when changing the world, when getting together, discussing and collaborating with others; either as a part of a collective, group, network or individually, and by using either online, or face to face means, or both.

Organized Networks: From Weak Ties to Strong Links by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter

(Ned Rossiter and I wrote a piece on ‘organized networks’ for the technology special of Occupied Times (#23). Here it is. The URL: http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=12547)

Organized Networks: From Weak Ties to Strong Links by Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter

Sloganism for late 2013: “I feel protected by unpublished Suite A algorithms.” (J. Sjerpstra) – “I am on an angry squirrel’s shitlist.” – Join the Object Oriented People – “When philosophy sucks—but you don’t.” ­– “See you in the Sinkhole of Stupid, at 5 pm.” – “I got my dating site profile rewritten by a ghost writer.” – “Meet the co-editor of the Idiocracy Constitution” – The Military-Entrepreneurial Complex: “They are bad enough to do it, but are they mad enough?” – “There really should be something like Anti-Kickstarter for the things you’d be willing to pay to have not happen.” (Gerry Canavan) – Waning of the Social Media: Ruin Aesthetics in Peer-to-Peer Enterprises (dissertation) – “Forget the Data Scientist, I need a Data Janitor.” (Big Data Borat)

If we look back at the upheavals from the past years (2011-2013) we see bursts of ‘social media’ activity. From Tahir to Taksim, from Tel-Aviv to Madrid, from Sofia to Sao Paolo, what they have in common is communication peaks, which fade away soon after the initial excitement, much in line with the festival economy that drives the Society of the Event. Corporate social networking platforms such as Twitter and Facebook are considered useful to spread rumors, forward pictures and reports and comment on established media (incl. the Web). But no matter how intense the street events may have been, they often do not go beyond ‘short ties’. As temporary autonomous spaces they feel like carnevalist ruptures of the everyday life. Revolts without consequences?

Assange, Appelbaum and Harrison Calls on Hightech Workers and Computer Hackers to GNUnite Against NSA Surveillance!

via LeakSource December 29, 2013 at 10:56 PM

WIRED:

Faced with increasing encroachments on privacy and free speech, high-tech workers around the world should identify as a class and fight power together, said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Sunday.

In a video speech to the Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) here, Assange drew parallels between the labor movements of the industrial age and the technology workers of today. As workers joined into unions to fight for better working conditions, technology workers should unite to fight government encroachments on Internet and speech freedoms, he said.

System administrators, who have access to confidential government or corporate documents, have particular ability to play a role in what he painted as a new class war, he said.

“We can see that in the case of WikiLeaks, or the Snowden revelations, it’s possible for even a single system administrator to have very significant constructive effect,” he said. “This is not merely wrecking or disabling, not going on strikes, but rather shifting information from an information apartheid system from those with extraordinary power … to the digital commons.”