Via: "brian.holmes@wanadoo.fr"

David Garcia refers directly to me, in his text about an emerging dispute
between activist and artistic practices:

> The theorist and activist Brian Holmes described the origins of this
> dichotomy succinctly as going (at least) as far back as the cultural
> politics of the 1960s. He describes a split "between the traditional
> working-class concern for social justice and the New Left concern for
> individual emancipation and full recognition and expression of
> particular identities" According to this account corporate
> foundations and think tanks of the 80s and 90s have succeeded in
> inculcating market-oriented variations on earlier counter-cultural
> values rendering the interventions of artists (including tactical
> media makers) profoundly if unwittingly, de-politicising. Holmes goes
> on to describe (or assert, I am not quite sure which) a critique in
> which "the narcisstic exploration of self, sexuality and identity
> become the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and
> artistic license have led, in effect, to the neo-liberalization of
> culture. The puritanical and authoritarian tone of this analysis is
> just a little unnerving. At the very least this tendency could lead
> to a crass and oppressive philistinism and might signal far worse to
> come.

Garcia misquotes and misinterprets me pretty deeply, in what's otherwise a good
article. See my original text, and particularly the questions I ask about culture
and politics, at
http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0510/msg00005.html. But it doesn't
matter, it's just a mistake and the whole subject is worth going back to anyway.

The sentence that Garcia can't swallow (the one about the narcissistic exploration
of self, identity and sexuality) was written in fact by another David: David
Harvey, in his book, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. In my review of that book,
I quoted a long passage where Harvey recounts the bankruptcy of New York in 1975
and how the city and its culture were subsequently reshaped in the context of
financially driven globalization. I was interested in two things. First, a fresh
analysis, within a specific urban framework, of the way that cultural and
intellectual practices were broadly neutralized by turning them into commodities
in an economy of images and signs (a process which at the same time transforms a
growing mass of artists and intellectuals into the economically interested
producers of those same commodities). And second, I was interested in the limits
of exactly that same analysis.

Things have only gotten worse since 1975, and new problems have arisen. While
reading Irving Kristol's book, Neoconservatism, The Autobiography of an Idea, I
was struck by the Kristol's fierce rejection of a 60s counterculture that he
equated with a Nietzschean transvaluation of all values. I thought: Can I do
without that counterculture, without that Nietzschean aspiration to destroy old
values and recreate new ones? The answer was, I couldn't. For someone like myself,
the only viable option is to pursue a radically experimental work on the self and
society, expressed by signs and materials in their rupture with history. In other
words, I need something like vanguard art (only I think you can call it
post-vanguard art, because these practices have gone far beyond their old limits).
I wanted to conclude my review on Harvey's strong analysis of the subservience of
art to finance in the neoliberal economy, and at the same time, I wanted to
question the Marxist reflex that would reach back to a supposedly clearer and
truer world of working class culture and militantism that the new middle class
media culture is said to simply obscure and distort.

The problem, as Garcia shows throughout his own text, is that the contemporary
cultural economy really does have a strong coopting and neutralizing capacity,
which operates mainly through commercialization in the United States and mainly
through selective social democratic patronage in Europe. The combined renewal of
artistic and activist practices in the 90s really did require direct action,
reclaiming the streets, as Garcia knows for having theorized such things while
also participating in them.

Now that the effectiveness of direct action has been blunted by increasing police
pressure on the streets, as well as a general rise in the stakes of political
conflict, we do (or at least I do) see the cultural institutions and even the
commercial ones coming in to skim off the cream of tactical media representations,
which aren't particularly threatening or destabilizing in the absence or decline
of what they were supposed to represent. That's a real problem. I am sure plenty
of activists are suspicious of me, for publishing and spouting off my mouth and
participating in museum and festival debates. I'm even suspicious of me, to the
point where I've deliberately gone back to translating, to make sure that I'm not
tempted to write texts or do talks just for the payoff at the end. It's easy to
get confused in a great big media machine that is also made (or at lest functions)
to produce confusion. But what's mainly lacking, from my viewpoint, are not only
audacious direct action stunts, and not only (though this is of course more
important) forms of political engagement that can reach huge numbers of
participants and give them an effective way to help change society. What's also
missing are artworks that cut through the trendy flaky fashions, and go beyond the
old modernist definitions of art for art's sake, to touch the core of the human
quandry and help you transform your self and your relation to the others, at a
moment when things go on getting worse and worse and worse.

Garcia quotes Terry Eagleton to talk about how the women's movements totally
changed politics, by making what appear as cultural issues inseparable from the
economic ones. He could have drawn his examples (and probably would have, if he'd
been here) from the 6th World Social Forum in Caracas, where you could see and
hear and feel, in almost every talk and study session and activist planning round,
that the old ways of doing politics have changed. Particularly, but not only, by
the fact that women and indigenous people are participating everywhere, and often
taking the most prominent roles. I did not see much cutting edge art at the social
forum, certainly not in the concentrated forms that derive from the western
tradition. But a strong point of the forum for me was the way that it put forth
the irreducible presence of a plurality of cosmovisions. Yes, that's they say. And
you could hear it, you could feel it. At one point, Maya and Qechua women
completed a ceremony on stage in the context of a panel which was refusing the
patenting of women's knowledge. In the Q and A that followed, one of the women
said more or less this: "Our god is not up above in the sky. Our god is in the
earth. It is in us. It is us." I had a kind of insight at that point, or maybe
something I had learned from deconstruction finally made tangible sense to me. I
realized that the whole Christian recovery and reinterpretation of Platonic
idealism was inseparable from abstract, Cartesian, metaphysical, alienating
representation. The spectacle society. The military surveillance grid. And I
realized that what we were involved with was not that kind of representation.

But there I go again talking again, spouting off. Who wants to make me feel guilty
about it? While those women were performing their ritual, there was a TV cameraman
crowding on the stage. It was so annoying, this guy crowding in on our intimacy.
And then I remembered that this was being broadcast by the Bolivarian TV stations.
The revolutionary TV stations. Like Catia TV, where I saw a fantastic
montage-analysis of the way that the commercial TV channels had sought throughout
the late nineties and early years of this decade to impose a reactionary reading
on crucial events in the streets that have led, each time, to the continuation of
the revolutionary project here in Venezuela. What you could see in action, on
broadcast TV, was a critical and transformative kind of mass representation. At
one point, on broadcast TV, they were showing an interview of an Italian guy from
Telestreet, talking about the urgent situation in Italy where Berlusconi controls
all the broadcast media.

I like art. I like activism. While hanging out in Caracas, I would sift through my
mail in cybercafes, like all the gringos and all the latinos. I get so many ads
for high-class art and pseudo activist events put on by the European social
democratic institutions. One mail said: Art's good for nothing, that's its whole
necessity. The hackneyed French academic modernist version of elite vanguard art.
Another mail said: If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution.
The happy-go-lucky disco Dutch populist version of activist cooptation.

I admit it, at times I feel impatient and even angry about all that schlock.
Philistinism? Well, sometimes I also just feel very very bored.

best, Brian

Via: brian carroll

on nuclear peace and middle-east peace policy: or,
how to stop the war of terror and build upon peace

on establishing a long-term truce / c.2 (cont.)

Via: Timothy Druckrey

Nam June Paik's studio >http://www.paikstudios.com/index.html <
announced yesterday:


"Nam June Paik passed away at his Miami home at 8:00pm EST on Sunday,
January 29th, 2006. Funeral information to be announced."

Via: "Frederick Noronha (FN)"

FROM SOUTH AFRICA TO THE WORLD: A GIFT OF SIX MILLION FREE SOFTWARE CDs

By Frederick Noronha

He became the first-ever Afronaut. But the debonair young
South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth has also
touched another high, by distributing for free six million
CDs of Free Software. He has posted these software tools to
enthusiasts across the globe, with the goal of planting new
ideas of sharing and creating knowledge.

Shuttleworth started young -- programming on the Free
Software platform from the ages of 11 to 14. Then he took a
gap, and resumed from the age of 19. The high-profile sale of
his digital encription company, just before the dot-com bust,
was the source of his wealth, which he is ploughing back for
the further spread of Free/Libre and Open Source Software.

Shuttleworth (32) made his name through IT entrepreneurism,
and then attracted the headlines by joining a Russian space
expedition. But, in recent years he made big news by
promoting hisUbuntu distribution of the Free and Open Source
software. Ubuntu means "humanity towards others".

"(Distributing) CDs is a labour of love. We've touched six
million CDs distributed already," Shuttleworth told this
journalist in an interview, on a moonlight night on the banks
of Lake Victoria, Uganda. At this remote setting, he joined
an international camp to promote Free/Libre and Open Source
Software among not-for-profit organisations that is currently
underway (in mid-January 2006).

But is this sustainable? Can Ubuntu go on distributing CDs
indefinitely? Even postage is not charged for...

"I don't know if it is sustainable. At this stage I fund it
because I feel it's the right think to do. I owe a lot of my
wealth to the fact that Linux was there when I needed it.
Linux allowed me to build a business in Cape Town in the
midst of the dotcom boom," says Shuttleworth.

"My goal is to keep the (Ubuntu) software free. And free of
encumbents," he said.

Recently, Ubuntu and its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, both won
awards at the Linux New Media Awards in late 2005 Linux World
Expo in Frankfurt, Germany. The Best Debian Derivative
Distribution award was judged by a 200-member international
jury from industry and the FLOSS community. This award
recognises the effort the Ubuntu team have put into working
with Debian in order to produce an easy-to-use desktop
environment, suitable for everyone.

"That was an honour," says Shuttleworth, in his modest style.

KUBUNTU, EDUBUNTU: Now, Ubuntu is spilling off into other
projects.

"We started with the single distro (Ubuntu), an what we are
trying to do is show you can produce a distro on the
six-month release schedule. And that you could make it very
usable and also keep it on to a single CD," says
Shuttleworth.

Along the way, they "found" people were taking their work and
adapting in all kinds of different directions. They found
that GNOME was being replaced by KDE. "So, we support that
and call it Kubuntu," says Shuttleworth.

"We found people using Ubuntu a lot for education. Different
groups were adding on educational applications to it. By
creating the Edubuntu (project), that work is now being
shared (with others)."

What does he see as the biggest roadblocks in the wider
adoption of Free Software and Open Source worldwide?

Says Shuttleworth: "The biggest long-term constraint in the
adoption of Linux is the availability of skills. When people
talk of access to support, they're really referring to the
[limited amount of] pervasiveness of Linux skills in IT. The
good news is that because the software is freely available,
people can give themselves the skills quietly, because they
can get it (by learning on their own)."

Shuttleworth anticipates that at some "tippling point in the
future", once the availability of skills grow, all businesses
will add the possibility of offering Linux skills to the
proprietorial software-based Windows-skills they offer. Once
that happens, we could see a great acceptance for Linux, he
says.

"We're entering a time where the functionality of Free
Software is pretty much on par with proprietorial software.
It's about the availability of skills, and also the
perception of the availability of these skills," says
Shuttleworth.

TOUR OF ASIA: The Ubuntu team is planning to have business
tour around Asia in early 2006. Says Shuttleworth: "I'm
really looking forward to the visit. It's my first to India
(and many parts of Asia). We start off in Pakistan, and then
move to India, China, Japan, Korea, Sing pore, Indonesia and
Malaysia."

"India is very interesting from an Open Source and Free
Software point of view. On the one side you have an
acknowledgment of the need for development, and the passion
and pride that comes from (achieving) in the world of
technology. One would think it would be fertile ground (for
non-proprietorial software). Surprisingly, India is a little
late in its adoption of Open Source," says Shuttleworth.

He believes that what we are seeing now is a rapid pendulum
swing. "I'm hoping we can help the swing of the pendulum. (In
Asia), I'll be visiting universities, companies that provide
professional services -- such as integration, business
process outsourcing -- as well as government officials," he
adds.

His visit takes him to India over two stretches, including
for the Linux Asia event held in New Delhi from February 8,
and also for another stint around mid-January.

ECONOMIC PRESSURES ON DEVELOPERS: Shuttleworth believes that
economic pressures could keep the 'developing' countries from
contributing more significantly to the Free Software world.

He says, "In wealthier countries, you can often find folks
who can take a personal decision to fore-go their personal
income in view of values of Free Software. It's that maybe
that has made it difficult for the young Indian software
enthusiast to throw themselves into the Free Software world."

As we talk, a young tech enthusiast from Africa wants to know
if their continent could "learn lessons from India". Says
Shuttleworth: "What India has going for it, is its scale.
Africa is fragmented by national boundaries. It's hard to
build something that is genuinely African. To get bandwidth
between Uganda and South Africa just imaging the amount of
hurdles and regulation one has to go through."

Shuttleworth believes India encouraged the early adoption of
ICTs (information and technologies for communication) and
helped investments in field. "Today India is reaping the
rewards of those involvements," says he.

"Africa could do very well in competition with India, if we
got our act together. We all have the time-zone advantage,
since our time is same as Europe's. We also speak major
European languages," says he.

EDUCATION, FUNDAMENTAL: Education is fundamental to economic
growth, he argues, bring in his social perspective into
business. He sees it as the "fundamental investment you make
in your people".

Economics of the 21st century all about either massive scale
or sophistication, in his world-view. "It's very hard to
compete with China on scale. You can compete in terms of
knowledge and specialist," he adds.

For a 32-year-old, he seems to have given away a significant
amount of his wealth to philanthropy. ("The more he gives
away, the more his net worth increases," says Ugandan IT
professional James Wire.)

Shuttleworth calculates that he gives away six million
dollars each year to the foundation he set up. (In fact, you
can just log onto the internet website
http://shipit.ubuntu.com and ask for free GNU/Linux CDs from
here, for instance. You not only get the CDs for free, but
even the postage is paid for.) Ubuntu Linux costs him ten
million dollars a year. "That is not all in philanthropy. I
hope Ubuntu would become viable one day," says he.

Says he: "My real passion is the Ubuntu project. I love the
project. Enjoy working on it. Meeting community developers.
Maybe we're just the right thing at the right time. We came
and focussed on the desktop just when all the desktop pieces
started falling in place. We cant' take credit (for its
speedy succes)." He sees its special worth coming from its
"straightforwardness, ease of installation, and ease of use".
"Our community is very very strong", as he puts it.

Ubuntu's biggest user-base today is in the US, which
Shuttleworth finds amazing. "Only one country which is very,
very strange. Japan is very, very small in terms of acceptance
of Ubuntu," says he. "Hopefully we can keep Red Hat honest,"
he says, referring to the giant GNU/Linux distribution and
its move-away from supporting a free distribution.

Says he: "I think Microsoft has every right to charge for
their software. They wrote 99 per cent of it. They genuinely
own the code they're selling. With Ubuntu we write a tiny
fraction of it. The cost of producing that CD are largely
borne by other people giving of their time. Therefore it
makes sense that the revenue structure should be very
different as well. We're trying to build a business model. I
don't know if it will succeed. My goal is to make is
sustainable, without charging for it."

Ubuntu started less than two years ago. For the first six
months it was "quiet", he says.

Shuttleworth is quick to point to the achievements on the
GNU/Linux front. "We have stuff like (the the e-education
platform) Moodle which is coming along very quickly. But it's
server-based. You're not conscious of the fact that your
using Linux. Where Linux has huge advantages are your ability
to do thin client solutions -- it gives you massive cost
advantages," he says.

EDUCATION: Shuttleworth sat beneath an African half-moon,
with tall trees overlooking, as he discussed with young
people from his continent on how students needed more
educational software, and about what glitches they perceive
as needed to smoothen out wider adoption of Free Software.

He says he looks forward to broaden his philantrophic
activities from education in Africa -- its current focus --
to other activities as well. "But it (the Shuttleworth
Foundation) needs to get very credible in education, before
we move ahead," he says. "It's difficult to manage...
specially when you're fighting too many learning curves at
the same time."

He explains that they've started a project to produce
computer-based curriculum for students aged 8 to 18 in
Africa. "We are not producing maths teachers in South Africa
now. It's getting harder and harder to find a good maths
teacher in South Africa. Why do we teach maths in school?
It's because we need to produce analytical skills. It really
helps, even if all of us don't remember our high school
mathematics," he says.

BIGGER HIGH: What gives him a bigger high: going to outer
space at the cost of millions of dollars aboard a Russian
spacecraft, or promoting GNU/Linux from the heart of South
Africa?

Shuttleworth laughs: "Actually, doing Ubuntu has a lot to do
with going to outer space. Space is such is such a incredible
environment, people are so fascinated by it. So, after you've
been one, it becomes very difficult to anything but be an
astronaut. So when I came back (from outer space) I decided
to look around and find something that would be really hard,
really interesting and make a big impact in the world. It
took me a while to do it."

But when he found it, it was Ubuntu. "Both give me a high for
different reasons. Space was a high for me; I spent that
money for myself. Ubuntu is for everybody".

Why does he call his user-friendly distribution "Linux for
human beings", I asked. Back home in India, this tag-line
always seems to attract attention in geek circles.

"It's a little cheek. It's also aimed at the idea that Linux
(traditionally) hasn't been people friendly. Ubuntu is built
for people, not for techies. But at the same time. you want a
project which is attractive to developers. Or you don't get
all that love, collaboration and Free Software development.
It's a fine line."

BUSINESS OR SOFTWARE: What's more difficult, developing
software or dabbling in the world of business, as a
billionaire?

"I don't think I'm that good at either," he says, with the
understatement that runs through our exchange. "I love
software development. I enjoyed the clarity of thought it
required. The intensity of the experience. It involves diving
into a problem, mentally organising yourself, and producing
code that gives a solution. I also enjoy working with the
different kind of relations that go into a business."

Why is his work based out of Africa? "Africa is important to
me; it's important to the world, I think. Open Source is one
of the key drivers for change in today's world. To leapfrog
and build an infrastructure for us. Putting those two
together, it's the right place at this time. I'm sorry I
can't be at this camp (Africa Source II, which has been meant
to encourage non-profit groups use Free Software) for the
whole week. Conversations here are fascinating."

FAST CARS, FAST WOMEN: Sometime in the past, Shuttleworth had
jokingly said he could have splurged his money on "fast cars
and fast women". When reminded, he laughs: "That's Plan B. If
I fail, maybe I go back to it."

He sees the development of Free Software and Open Source as a
"genuine post-capitalist model". Says he: "Some say it's
communist. But it's a lot about people collaborating at one
level, while still competing at another. In a lot of areas of
technology, it doesn't make sense to try and differentiate
(and compete) on everything."

Shuttleworth believes we're going to see "that spirit of
collaboration" spreading not just in Free Software, but also
in the media. He cites the example of collaborative online
media tools such as Slashdot and podcasting.

"Fpr the first time, both the skills and the tools to
practice the tools can be accessed together. To me it's a
fundamental change in the industry. It remains to be see if
it will become the defacto way of the (software) industry (to
work in the future). My instinct tells me this could happen."

Contacts: mark at ubuntu.com

Via: "kenjisiratori.com"

Interview in Russia:

Q: What motives does lay behind your writings?
A: My writing resembles in my nervous system. Word transfigures to a
neuromatic object, my brain becomes a mass of flesh more. Everything begin
from plug-in! Surface of the monitor is my head....amputate the creature
code!

Q: Our most valuable readership are underground artists. Was it hard for
you to get recognized and published? Some comments
on process?
A: As the universal language, I remix my work on my writing process. At
first my works was treated as the codework. By fusing with spam technology,
my works had become neuromatic more. Stephen Barber said that Siratori
transmits his authentic, category-A hallucinogenic product direct to his
reader's cerebellum.

Q: Key events in your writing career:
A: Probably my all works will become DNA of "Blood Electric". My writing
career has been generated spirally from "Blood Electric". When David Bowie
loves "Blood Electric", I respire his brain era.

Q: What best describes your work - a comparison to program syntax or an
analogue to data optimization/compression?
A: My work accelerates by the data-spiral. By the deconstruction of DNA
program the creature code invades our cerebral cortex. Control the genomic
neuron!

Q: Some comments on key concepts in your writings:
A: Ok. Gene-war....corpse city....brain universe....drug
fetus....abolition world.... Mankind scan the strategy of HIV to a monitor
screen. Chimpanzee goes to the cosmic drugstore!

Q: How do you perceive your desired readership?
A: WEB is the cerebral cortex of readers. I stimulate their brain by the
spam technology of the genome. My writing goes straight to the data-highway.
Amputate the creature code!

Q: There is a major copyright controversy between Russian free online
libraries and some publishing houses. What is
your personal position on an issue of online text distribution?
A: Copyright is a biological spell for me. Death is the copyright of
mankind. Explode the gene-war for the self-control of copyright!

Q: What is your opinion on "classic" cyberpunk (Gibson, Sterling, etc.) ?
Name your favourite books/other art?
A: CyberDisneyland!? My favourite books are Irvine Welsh's Filth and Chuck
Palahniuk's Lullaby and Jeff Noon's Vurt. My favourite music is Massive
Attack' 100th Window. I wrote "CyberReptilian.com" while hearing this CD.

Q: Can you tell us about Japanese cyberpunk scene? Key figures, events,
artwork that deserves attention?
A: Japanese cyberpunk scene is digital-psychopath and techono-gothic
puppet. Gimmick! Gimmick! Gimmick!

Q: When it comes to Japanese cyberpunk, many of our readers will
immediately recall "Blame!" manga and anime by
Tsutomu Nihei. What do you think of this artwork?
A: Genetic violence.

Q: Your thoughts and emotions about cyberpunk scene in general:
A: Cyberpunk is a mobile engine for the creature code. To explode the
gene-war to the cerebral cortex. To scatter a nerve-node to the data-spiral.
Debug mankind!

Q: "KILL ALL MACHINES!" - what do you mean by that?
A: Toward the deconstructive human! Execute the nerve murder!
Non-resettable....log-out.

Q: A concept of Technological Singularity - what do you think of it?
A: As if HIV is scanned on my cerebral cortex.... I'm faced to the
gene-war exceeding chemical violence. Spiral literature!

Q: Techno music - does it inspires your work? Can you name particular
performers whom you do like? Comments on Japanese
techno scene and Tokyo Techno Tribe, if any?
A: Aphex Twin. My writing hunts techno music. Log-in the brain of the
techno-chimpanzee!

Q: Your book "Blood Electric" is going to be published in Russia. What
would you like to tell to your Russian readers?
A: My cerebral cortex beats to the Russian underground. Participate in the
gene-war! Amputate the creature code!

Thank you.


Kenji Siratori
http://www.kenjisiratori.com

Via: brian carroll

(this could be considered follow-up to B. Geer. thanks...)

Via: lotu5

Makes me wonder how many of the hack attempts on radical servers are
originating within the pentagon... Does this seem like news to people?
It seems to me like there is a lot of new information coming out lately
about surveillance and net war operations, and hopefully it'll give rise
to a strong response from autonomous groups like hacklabs, net.artists,
indymedia hackers, etc...


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4655196.stm

A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US
military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological
operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.

Bloggers beware.

As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military
opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the
modern media offer.

>From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer
network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an
electronic war.

The declassified document is called "Information Operations Roadmap". It
was obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington
University using the Freedom of Information Act.

Officials in the Pentagon wrote it in 2003. The Secretary of Defense,
Donald Rumsfeld, signed it.

The "roadmap" calls for a far-reaching overhaul of the military's
ability to conduct information operations and electronic warfare. And,
in some detail, it makes recommendations for how the US armed forces
should think about this new, virtual warfare.

The document says that information is "critical to military success".
Computer and telecommunications networks are of vital operational
importance.

Propaganda

The operations described in the document include a surprising range of
military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists,
psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and
beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to
destroy enemy networks.

All these are engaged in information operations.

Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement
that information put out as part of the military's psychological
operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and
television screens of ordinary Americans.

"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy
and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads.

"Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much
larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.

The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not
unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should
be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.

"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed
abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back
into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says
Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.



Read the roadmap here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/27_01_06_psyops.pdf

Via: david garcia

Diminishing Freedoms

On a visit to Brazil in 2004 I stayed with Grazilia Kunsch an
important artist who is also a committed political activist. Part of
her work is ?hosting? foreign visitors at her house ?Casa Grazie?. To
be hosted by Grazie is a delight, not least for her wonderful
breakfasts and the long discussions that are given the time to unfold
throughout the morning.

Like many artists who are politically active she keeps the boundaries
between the two spheres deliberately blurry. But she told me how
although this was once acceptable, she was finding it progressively
harder to declare openly that she is an artist in activist circles.

Freedom, the expressive freedom of art seems to becoming the
impossible word. Why? What is at stake? Why are so many political
activists moving to repudiate cultural politics and the expressive
freedoms that continue to inspire and draw so many to call themselves
artists?

There seems to be an oppressive philistinism emerging on the radical
left, raising the worrying prospect that it is not only neo-
liberalism that is instrumentalising all of life.

I have been troubled by these developments for some time, but I have
only recently found a framework to address discuss the problem with
myself in more detail and with a little more rigor. It was in the
context of a review for a book on DIY Media by the London based
artist activist group C6. As always Mute editors are (at least in my
case) rarely passive recipients of the articles they solicit, and I
was gently prodded into much more than a simple review. I don?t
pretend that the resulting ruminations are in any way definitive but
I hope that it triggers some discussion.

Below is an extract, the full text can be found at http://
www.metamute.org/

The Split

We have seen the emergence of three interconnected tendencies, since
the tactical media of the 90?s. Firstly there is a widespread
rejection of the homeopathic and the micro-political in favour of
ambitions scaled up to global proportions coupled with a willingness
to move beyond electronic and semiotic civil disobedience and to
engage in direct action, to literally ?re-claim the streets?. This is
almost entirely as a result of the emergence of the powerful global
anti-capitalist movement which (from their perspective) have
transformed tactical media into the ?Indy-media? project. But there
is also a third less visible and more troubling tendency, a tendency
towards internal polarisation.
This polarisation is based on a deep split which has opened up
between many of the activists at the core of the new political
movements and the artists or theorists who, whilst continuing to see
themselves as radicals, retain a belief in the importance of cultural
(and information) politics? in any movement for social transformation.
Although I have little more than personal experience and anecdotal
evidence to go on, it seems to me, that there is a significant growth
in suspicion and frequently outright hostility among activists to the
presence of art and artists in ?the movement?, particularly those
whose work cannot be immediately instrumentalised by the new
?soldiers of the left?.

So what is it that has changed since the 90s to give rise to these
tendencies? To understand we must cast our minds back to the peculiar
historical conditions of that time. The early phase of tactical media
re-injected a new energy into the flagging project of ?cultural
politics?. It fused the radical and pragmatic info politics of the
hackers with well-established critical practices based critiques of
representation. The resulting tactical media were also part of (and
arguably compromised by) the wider internet and communications
revolution of the 90?s which, like the music of the 1960s, acted as a
universal solvent not only dissolving disciplinary boundaries but
also the boundaries separating long established political formations.
The power some of us attributed to this new ?media politics? appeared
to be born out by the role that all forms of media seemed to have
played in the collapse of the Soviet Empire. It seemed as though old
style armed insurrection had been superseded by digital dissent and
media revolutions. It was as if the Samizdat spirit, extended and
intensified by the proliferation of Do-it-yourself media had rendered
the centralized statist tyrannies of the soviet empire untenable.
Some of us allowed ourselves to believe that it would only be a
matter of time before the same forces would challenge our own tired
and tarnished oligarchies. Furthermore the speed and comparative
bloodlessness of the Soviet collapse suggested that the
transformations that were coming would not have to be achieved
through violence or personal sacrifice. This would be the era of the
painless (?win win?) revolution, in which change would occur simply
through the hacker ethos of challenging the domains of forbidden
knowledge. It came to be believed that power that comes only from the
top down had lost its edge. As late as 1999 in his Reith lecture,
Anthony Giddens could still confidently assert that ?The information
monopoly upon which the Soviet system was based, had no future in an
intrinsically open framework of global communications?.
Giddens and other third way social theorists were part of a wider
movement, which acted out the dream that the profound political
differences, which had divided previous generations, had been put on
hold. This was made credible through the ubiquity of one of the
dominant myths of the information age, a myth shared by activists and
new media entrepreneurs alike. The myth that knowledge will set you
free. This founding narrative of techno-culture, visible from Ted
Nelson ?Computer Lib? onwards, recycles (in intensified form), the
age old proposition that knowledge and freedom are not only connected
but may actually entail one another.

The fact that a belief in the necessary relationship between
knowledge and freedom has gone largely unquestioned is based in part
on the depth of its lineage, ?ancient stoics and most modern
rationalists are at one with Christian teaching on this issue. ?And
ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free?. As Isaiah
Berlin pointed out in 1968 not only is ?. This proposition is not
self evidently true, if only on empirical grounds.? It is ?one of the
least plausible beliefs ever entertained by profound and influential
thinkers.?1

In addition to being fallacious the accompanying rhetoric of
transparency, freedom, access, participation, and even creativity,
has come to constitute the ideological foundation of ?communicative
capitalism?, transforming tactical media?s homeopathic micro-politics
into the experimental wing of the ?creative industries? and
corroborating the temporal mode of post-Fordist capital: short-
termism.? 2

Neo-liberalism?s effective capture of the rhetoric of ?freedom? and
?creativity?, has re-opened an old fault-line which the first wave of
tactical media did so much to bridge, the fault-line dividing artists
from the political activists.

The theorist and activist Brian Holmes described the origins of this
dichotomy succinctly as going (at least) as far back as the cultural
politics of the 1960s. He describes a split ?between the traditional
working-class concern for social justice and the New Left concern for
individual emancipation and full recognition and expression of
particular identities" According to this account corporate
foundations and think tanks of the 80s and 90?s have succeeded in
inculcating market-oriented variations on earlier counter-cultural
values rendering the interventions of artists (including tactical
media makers) profoundly if unwittingly, de-politicising. Holmes goes
on to describe (or assert, I am not quite sure which) a critique in
which ?the narcisstic exploration of self, sexuality and identity
become the leitmotif of bourgeois urban culture. Artistic freedom and
artistic license have led, in effect, to the neo-liberalization of
culture.?3 The puritanical and authoritarian tone of this analysis is
just a little unnerving. At the very least this tendency could lead
to a crass and oppressive philistinism and might signal far worse to
come.

At the Senegallia meeting in 2004 for Telestreets, Franco Berardi
(Bifo) made a plea to Telestreet activists (and by extension all
artist/activists) not to ?embrace our miserable marginality".
Increasingly this call is being answered. There are a growing number
of inspiring cases which we can point to, the Yes Men?s achievement
in securing global distribution in mainstream cinemas, Yomango?s high
voltage contributions to the global, protest movement and
Witness.org?s extensive inititiatives in which the provision of
indigenous activists with DIY media with their campaigns is connected
to human rights legal processes. These and many other projects are
pointing to the growing willingness to strategically globalise
dissent. This process in not unconnected to a growing willingness to
relinquish one of the shibboleths of tactical media, the cult of
?ephemerality?. In place of the hit and run guerrilla activism the
direct opposite is now required, ?duration?. It?s a time for longer-
term commitments and deeper engagements with the people and
organisations networked around contested issues.

One of the most extraordinary examples of this kind of development is
?Women on Waves? a Dutch Foundation initiated by the Rebecca Gomperts
who studied medicine at the University of Amsterdam and specialised
as an abortion doctor and then went on to study visual arts at the
Rietveld Academy and Sailing at the Enkhuizen Zeevaartschool
(Nautical College).
The most celebrated achievement of Women on Waves is the Abortion
Boat, a large floating clinic that tactically exploits maritime law,
anchoring the boat just outside the 12-mile zones of countries where
abortion is forbidden. On the Abortion Boat women can be helped with
information and with actual abortions are performed by a team of
Dutch medical practitioners (including Dr Gomperts) on Dutch
"territory". Thus, women are actively assisted and local
organisations are supported and inspired in their struggle for the
legalisation of abortion.
Along with the practical intervention of the Abortion Boat, Women on
Waves also uses art and design as part of their global campaign for
abortion rights. For instance the "I had an Abortion" installation
consisting of vests on wire coat hangers, which bear the text "I had
an abortion" in all European languages. On their website
a diary can be found of a Brazilian woman relating
her experiences of wearing one of these t-shirts. The continued
validity of the modes of political address pioneered by tactical
media are apparent in her descriptions of how the message on these t-
shirts was preferable to something that might have read like earlier
forms of agit prop say ?Legalize abortion?. These t-shirts function
?not? she declares to ?make myself a target. that was not the point;
it was to give all those women without a face a support. As to say,
don't worry, it's all right, you?re all right. This fulfils one of
the prime directives of classical tactical media, unlike traditional
agit prop?it is designed to invite discourse.

Women on Waves is a reminder that cultural politics in its modern
sense was in large part a creation of the women?s movement. Those who
question the value of a cultural politics would do well to remember
that feminism also served to transform the lives and politics of many
men who were taught (sometimes painfully) that they were failing to
live out in their ordinary lives, the democracy they were advocating
in theory.
The way in which ?culture? is central to feminism?s demands and not
peripheral is powerfully explored by Terry Eagleton in his valuable
book After Theory which describes the centrality of ?the grammar? in
which the demands are of feminism were framed. ?Value speech, image,
experience and identity are here the very language of political
struggle, as they are in all ethnic or sexual politics. Ways of
feeling and forms of political representation are in the long run
quite as crucial as child care provision or equal pay.? 3

This expanded political language was articulated not by activists and
writers alone but also by many important women artists. Women artists
who were critical in shifting the centre of gravity of the art world
of the 60?s and 70?s from Greenburg's formalism and Rosenburg's
mysticism to a new expressive and subject centred naturalism, which
remains influential and important to this day.
In our efforts to understand our new conditions and to change we must
beware of trying to eliminate all ambiguities and impurities, above
all we should not be tempted to relinquish the essential legacy of
cultural politics.

1. Isaiah Berlin From Hope and fear Set Free 1968
2.Rossiter & Lovink. Dawn of the Organised Networks (2005)
2. Brian Holmes?s review THE SCANDAL OF THE WORD "CLASS"
Posted on nettime
A review of David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism
(Oxford UP, 2005)
3. Terry Eagleton. After Theory. (Penguin 2003)
4. womenonwaves.org

Via: "Frederick Noronha (FN)"

Two percent of a Source camp... interview with Patrice Riemens

By Frederick Noronha

"We are two percent of this camp," Patrice Riemens
whispered, almost conspiratorially, as we
walked down to the beach. Patrice was referring to the Africa
Source II[1] event, we were part of on the scenic-but-isolated
island of Kalangala, in the midst of Lake Victoria, Uganda.

I've known Patrice for years. Our first meeting was odd. He
introduced himself at one of those annual, year-end Goanetter
gettogethers. I think it was at the Taj Aguada, and around
1998.

Just another lost tourist, I thought to myself then. But
Patrice was deeper than I realised. And his encounter with me
wasn't based on chance, but a deeper look at the Net, who was
posting often, and who was saying what.

We sat down for a chat, about FLOSSophy (a term Patrice has
invented, or popularised, or both... just as he has done with
the term Lusostalgia, sometimes wrongly attributed to me!).
In between, on his tent called the 'bazaar' at Africa Source
2, he narrated his long story.

Patrice explains: "I got into Goanet because I decided,
somewhere in the mid-nineties, that I wanted to go to India
again. I had spent 1990, 1991, 1992, and 1993 -- four winters
-- in Calcutta. Air India then gave you three (free flight)
legs within India. As long as you flied Air India. Typically,
these flights left at timings like 2 am in the morning, from
Delhi to Calcutta. I was looking for a place where are social
movements active. I found Goa had a very lively social
movement scene."

The first address he recalls having visited was one with an
"Opposite Palacio de Goa" address. Yes, it could well be
Reggie Gomes, the priest-turned-NGO campaigner, who is still
involved with social groups here. "They had email. I got the
idea that Goa was not only nice beaches, but a lot of
socially active groups too. Some other names I recall from
those times are (environmentalist) Claude Alvares, (Physics
professor and Goa University's Net whizzard) Gurunandan
Bhat."

So Patrice, now fifty something, went to the Goa University
for some "telnet tourism". Remember, these the days of very
limited internet access. Getting to your mail often meant a
painfully slow, dial-up access via a Telnet, non-graphical
interface.

"I said, I'm from the University of Amsterdam. Can I have a
Telnet session? Some kind of Telnet tourism," he recalls.

:The Goa trip was remarkably fruitful. Not very much came out
of it (just then). But I also met (Fundacao Oriente's then
delegate in India) Paulo Varela Gomes. He was on the lookout
for a way to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama
in a non-ofensive way. So we discussed the idea of a
cyberconference in Goa (which was followed-up for sometime,
but didn't actually happen)."

He recalls meeting up with Joseph "Boogie" Viegas, then one
of the pioneers of the Net in Goa, now based in Canada.
Patrice also remembers the Goanet [2] meeting at the Taj
Aguada, Candolim. Incidentally, that was the first time a
politician like Tomazinho Cardozo came in for our meeting,
and stress how serious a problem malaria was in coastal Goa.


Then, he recalls the Margao-based Dr Ivo Costa, a senior
citizen who got involved in the Net and whose family has been
in the wine business (Vinicola). "He's a big admirer of Bill
Gates," Patrice commented, in a camp meant to promote
Free/Libre and Open Source Software, the very antithesis of
proprietorial software, among non-profit organisations.

Q: Those were the days when you met someone via the internet
and he (and less often, she) became a great friend. That's
not so anymore. Would you agree?

Patrice says: "If you follow Goanet, it seems to be a Goan
feature to have 10 Goans, 12 opinions, and 16 enemies."

I asked Patrice about the Dutch role in Goa's history.

Says he: "There was a next-to-no role for the Dutch in Goa's
history. Maybe they came in as hipies (a few decades ago)."

But when we shifted attention to the Dutch blockade of Goa,
he commented: "That's part of the Dutch (attempted) kicking
the Portuguese out of Asia. The Dutch, at the apogee of their
power, in the mid-17th century, wanted to have an absolute
monopoly of navigation east of the Cape. I'm not really good
with dates. You can check these things with (Indo-Portuguese
historian Charles) Boxer."

"The Portuguese had done their thing; they were there, and
stable, but not expanding. The Dutch were expanding
massively. The English were not in the game at that point of
time. The British sea-borne empire kicked really in in the
18th century. In the east, Empires tended to be sea-borne in
the beginning. India as landmass came as a continental colony
of Britain only in the 19th century. Before that, it was the
control of the coast that mattered -- Madras, Bombay and
Calcutta... and a little land around it."

Talking to Patrice is fascinating. While he's impatient with
academic theories, his understanding of issues throws up new
insights.

He added, as we sat on the sand, and both were getting groggy
with sleep, specially him: "The legal theorist Grotus had two
theories -- the open seas, and closed seas. Open seas were
everywhere where the Dutch had no monopoly. Closed seas were
areas only for the Dutch. In the East and Baltic (for its
foreign trade) which were controlled by the Dutch."

"So the idea of the Dutch was to kick the Portuguese out
everywhere, allegedly for religious reasons, but mostly for
commercial reasons. They were quite successful, but not
completely. After some time, the English came and changed the
whole thing," he adds.

So does Patrice believe in the rise and fall of nations?
"It's not a belief, it's a fact. Who had heard of the US in
the 16th century," he laughs.

Patrice is a Dutch citizen, but a French speaker. Says he: "I
have been living in Holland for the largest part of my life,
which is 40 years. Always I've felt a bit of a foreigner in
Holland."

He's a human geographer -- a term which not be popular in
academia in Asia, but is very much part of continental Europe.

"Earlier I was much more involved in academics than I was
now. First I read Latin and Greek, and dropped out of it like
most people. After my BA in Georgaphy, I applied for a
Government of India scholarship at the Delhi School of
Echonomics. That was way back in 1980-81."

Patrice spent a little less than a year there, and "did not
study very much because I could not make sense of the
curricula". But he stayed on in India.

A senior Indian official he spoke of his problems to said:
"We do not expect fine students to seriously study. We expect
them to travel all over India, and be exposed to the country.
Then when you go back home, you will become a goodwill
ambassador for India." Patrice stresses the word 'goodwill
ambassador', that explains his views on the subject.

He then did his M.Phil in Economics, and wrote about Indian
multinationals. Published in Holland in 1989, this is one of
the few texts that looks at the global operations of Third
World firms.

At that time, the Amsterdam's department of geography was
divided into urban geography of Western countries, and rural
geography of non-Western countries. "At that time, I was
perhaps the only one advocating looking at cities in the
Third World. But that was not well taken at that time. The
consensus of the mainstream orthodoxy was that the Third
World was rural, and that cities were aberration," recalls
Patrice.

"My position was that the cities are there (existing in the
Third World), they are working, and we have to learn a lot...
from the Third World, just as the Third World can learn from
us. At some stage, after something like six years, I was more
or less kicked out from the geography department," he
recalls.

Patrice was then with INDRA, Institute for Development
Research in Amsterdam, a rather applied research centre. It
was in the university, then independent, but an inter-faculty
institute.

"I was very happy there, doing serious research, and much
appreciated. Also was more useful because of my internet
connections. I switched form studying the squatters movement
(which was then very important in Amsterdam) to looking at
the hackers movement. In Amsterdam," he narrates.

"My political culture was in the squatting movement. I very
naturally passed over in the hackers movement, because I was
convinced the computers were the next frontier. I was right
(laughs). The funny thing is that many in the squatters'
movement did not see it. I've always been ahead of my time.
People who say things with most people disagree with are
often considered irritating and are shelved," says he.

[1] http://www.tacticaltech.org/africasource2
[2] http://www.goanet.org
Email contact: patrice at xs4all.nl

Via: Felix Stalder

[This is the opening essay of a new book of mine, called "Open Cultures and
the Nature of Networks" which was published in English and Serbian by the
lovely people of kuda.org, late last year. It is being distributed by
Revolver, Archiv fuer aktuelle Kunst. Hard copies are available from the
distributor (http://revolver-books.de/w3NoM.php?nodeId=675) and a pdf with the english
portion of the book can be downloaded via my website
(http://felix.openflows.org/pdf/Notebook_eng.pdf). Felix]


The Stuff of Culture

Today, we are confronted with a strange, hard-to-categorize question: what is
culture made out of? Our answer, I am convinced, will have a profound impact
not just on future culture, with a capital C, but on the entire the social
reality of the emerging network societies. Today, culture, understood broadly
as a system of meaning articulated through symbols, can no longer be
separated from the (informational) economy, or, thanks to genetic
engineering, from life itself.

Historically, there have been two different approaches to culture. One
approach to culture would be to characterize it as object-oriented, the other
as exchange-oriented. The first treats culture as made out of discrete
objects, existing more or less independently from one another, like chairs
around a table, or books on a shelf. While such things can be arranged in
relation to one another, their meaning and function remains the same
regardless. One person can sit on one chair, no matter how many chairs there
are in a room, or how they are arranged. The content of a book does not
change when re-shelving it. The other view takes culture to be made out of
continuous processes, in which one act feeds into the other, in an unbroken
chain. Like "la ola", the wave people do in stadiums when the game they are
watching becomes boring. By looking at the individual act in isolation, one
cannot differentiate between whether someone getting up to stretch their
tired bones, or they are participating in collective entertainment. The
function and meaning of such an act are not self-contained in the act, but in
its relation to others. It is not only what people do, but also, perhaps even
more importantly, what happens between them, what flows from one to the
other. The two perspectives create different sets of concepts for
understanding culture: the timeless work of art versus the process of
creation, the individual inventor versus the scientific community, the
statement versus the conversation, the recording versus the live performance,
and so on. These two perspectives, and the practices through which they are
expressed, are currently coming into deep conflict with one another, hence
the new urgency to the question: what is culture made out of?

Of course, culture always consists of both, that is of stable objects (such as
furniture, cloths, works of artifice, timeless tunes, written laws) and of
ongoing, fluid exchanges (for instance spoken languages, values, customs and
routines). The issue is not an ???either/or???. We do not have to choose one over
the other. The dichotomy just sketched is an analytical device to highlight
the differences. The real issue is how these two aspects relate to one
another. Put simply, is the fixed a local, temporary hardening of the fluid,
or is the fluid nothing but a residual aspect of the fixed? These are not
only philosophical questions, but also political and economic ones. How do we
organize society, to facilitate the creation of objects, or the creation of
exchanges? How do we value the work of keeping the conversation flowing,
versus the work going into the production of discrete units?
It is no coincidence that this question is pressed upon us today because the
issue is eminently technological. Before the invention of writing it was
difficult to fix ideas on to material objects.

Culture was oral and the way of maintaining culture was to keep exchanging it,
to re-tell stories far and wide. In the process story tellers, bards and
other traveling performers, some more talented, others less, created infinite
versions of the same basic material and these versions dissipated as quickly
as the performers moved on. The technology of writing allowed for the first
time the transfer parts of their fluid performances into fixed objects. The
earliest work of Western literature, Homer's Odyssey, is exactly that: an
oral epic written up. The earliest written philosophy, Plato's, is mainly
dialogs.

Slowly, culture began to gravitate towards objects, both in terms of
production and reception. Yet, until the development of print, the
difficulties of (re)producing manuscripts put serious limits on the extent to
which the object-orientation they contained could spread throughout culture.
With print, and later with the mechanical recording of sound and images, the
balance shifted decisively. Culture became re-made as a series of stable
objects. With these objects came a distinct class of producers: artists. Now,
one could think of speech without a speaker. Thus, the question of authorship
became an issue. Who is speaking was no longer self-evident, as it was in
oral cultures where speech and speaker were one and the same. At the same
time, the new producers began to free themselves from the dependence of
wealthy patrons who treated them as mere servants, like other talented
artisans: cooks and gardeners for example. Instead they came to rely on
dedicated apparatuses of specialized services to stabilize authorship and to
organize the reproduction and distribution of the cultural objects they
produced: texts, music, images, and the things in between. These organizers
of (re)production and distribution were the cultural industries, born in the
18th Century, and coming into their own during the 20th century.

Initially, however, mechanical (re)production of culture, for all its
improvements over manuscripts, was still cumbersome and its objects did not
fully penetrate society for a very long time. An uneasy balance emerged
between the new object-oriented and older exchange-oriented aspects of
culture. Copyrights, turning fluid expressions into fixed objects, were
introduced, but on a very limited scale. Most culture remained as fluid as
its materiality allowed. One way or the other, this was an issue of relevance
only to specialists. The lack of education restricted the number of producers
and consumers of cultural objects and hence the size and influence of the
cultural industries intrinsically tied to them; but not just that. The
balance also reflected the fact that the movement from the exchanges to
objects was strictly one way. Once fluid culture was realized as a fixed
material object, for instance a book or a painting, it was almost impossible
to convert it back into a fluid exchange because they are made to be passed
around as objects. Of course, we still had exchanges about the objects. The
question of interpretation and critical reading became important such as
commentary upon original, unchanging texts. However, the texts themselves
were always understood as objects: discrete, fixed, and final. During the
19th and 20th century, an interlocking complex of legal, moral, and social
practices was put in place to support and expand this view of culture. They
managed to enshrine into common sense what was already in the material
reality of objects: culture as a collection of discrete and stable objects.
The most valuable of these were housed in museums, to be removed from the
flow of time and context for good and frozen for eternity.

Now, today, all of this is changing. The old balance is no longer manageable
and the common sense it embodied is challenged. We are in the midst of a
struggle of how to establish a new balance. For one, media literacy has
spread through societies at large, expanding the range of people able consume
cultural objects. Thus the markets, and the industries dedicated to serving
them, have grown immensely. The spread of literacy has also enlarged the
range of people able to produce culture accessible beyond their immediate
environment. In fact, the self-conscious production of culture, high and low,
is now an everyday activity of a large number of people, not just artists.
Secondly, digital technologies have made cultural production cheap and
distribution virtually free of costs. Equally as important, the materiality
of many cultural objects has been transformed: from analog objects to digital
flows. As an effect, the fixed and the fluid, the objects and the exchanges,
are becoming harder and harder to differentiate. Email is blurring the
distinction between spoken and written language, after centuries of hard work
establishing the difference between the two. Copy and paste, remixing,
sampling and other basic digital operations make it trivial to take fixed
objects and reinsert them into fluid, ongoing exchanges. Just think of the
difference between what a literary critic does (writing about literature to
produce criticism) and the work of a DJ (using music to make new music). One
is additive, the other transformative. One refers to the source material, the
other embodies it.

The distinction between an object-oriented and the exchange-oriented
conception of culture is not the same as the artificial and, from this
approach, a useless distinction between material and immaterial culture.
There are material objects defined by the exchanges they structure, and there
are fluid processes rendered into distinct, immaterial objects. The first
type is hard to imagine because it has been so thoroughly exorcised from our
culture. Yet, there are still some remnants. One example is trophies, such as
the ones given out in tournaments like the football World Cup, where the
winner has only a temporary hold. These are, basically, objects made for
circulation. Not even Brazil owns the World Cup (they have in their permanent
possession only a replica). The value of the World Cup, then, is not in the
cup itself but in the fragile and contested social relationships it embodies.
It is valuable because it is so hard to get, and impossible to keep. If there
were no more football world championships, the title would become meaningless
and the cup reduced to the value of the gold is contains. Of course, the
ultimate object made for circulation is money. We usually think of money as
something sitting, or not sitting, in our wallets. However, it is much better
to think of it as a means of communication. It moves and, like a rumor, it
can shift its shape, form, speed, and direction at any time. Money is a very
particular form of language; the more money you have, the louder speak your
actions, at least in the markets. Its value is precisely its fluidity, that
it can be translated into (virtually) everything. The moment it can no longer
circulate, it is reduced to its material value, which is close to nothing. In
short, there are still several objects which are made for circulation rather
than possession and whose value depends on the entire chain of circulation,
as opposed to their value as objects alone.

The other case, immaterial processes treated as objects, used to be much
harder to imagine, until quite recently. How can something as fluid as an
idea be fixed, counted and owned? Much less, how can a tune that has already
been sung in public be stolen? However, today, we are witnessing major
attempts to establish exactly this conception of culture at the core of
global, informational capitalism. The basic argument is simple: the
immaterial and the material need to be treated in the same way. There is no
difference. An idea is like a cow. In the same way that the owner of a cow
can freely decided whether to sell the milk, the live animal or chunks of
dead meat, the creator of an idea is free to do whatever she wants with it:
license it for one time use, license it perpetually for certain uses, sell it
altogether, keep it to herself, or give it away. As with cows, any use what
is not specifically authorized is prohibited: clear and simple.

Crucial to maintaining the object-oriented view of the immaterial is to
fortify the boundary between the fixed and the fluid. Fluid exchanges, the
ongoing processes of telling, re-telling, changing and transforming are,
almost by definition, uncontrollable. Objects, on the other hand, with their
distinct form and shape, with their clear beginning and end, can be numbered,
measured, and controlled. Only then can they be bought and sold in the
markets. This seems to make sense when thinking of the immaterial in material
metaphors. For example, the folders on a computer are deleted by throwing
them into the trash bin. What such metaphors mask is that the immaterial and
the material are very different in important ways. While it is possible to
steal a music Compact Disc from a store, depriving the rightful owner of its
possession, copying a song from someone's hard drive does not deprive the
original owner. Digital technologies enable infinite, perfect copies. Within
a digital system, moving a file is, in fact, always a process of copying (and
later deleting), rather than of displacing.

An open, digital, networked culture is profoundly exchange-oriented. It is
much less like a book, and much more like a conversation. That is, it is
built upon a two-way relationship between the fixed and the fluid enabled by
new technologies. No longer all that is sold melts into the air, as Marx
famously put it, but now, digital air can be turned into solids any time.
Yet, fortifying the boundary between the two makes precisely this impossible.
A two way relationship, a give and take between peers, is artificially
pressed onto a one-way relationship where one side does all the giving, that
is selling, and the other does all the taking, that is, buying. Instead of
the creation of culture, we have the culture of consumption.

This situation, per se, is not new and not bad. Rather, distinction between
the creator and the audience is at the core of conventional cultural
industries. Yet, there is a substantial difference between the culture of
consumption created by old media, and the culture of consumption to be
enforced through networked media. There are two main differences. Firstly,
one-way broadcast media were restricted to relatively few channels each in
their own, self-contained medium: books, newspaper, radio, television. In
other words, these media were pervasive, but still relatively isolated
instances. A television was for watching television and not much else; it was
the same with the radio and newspapers. Secondly, the analog quality of these
media supported the object-character of the products. There was not much a
television viewer could do with what he saw, based on the materiality of the
broadcast. He could react to it, interpret it, but not really change it. So,
there was no need to control the media user. Now, both of these aspects are
changing. Networked communication technologies are expanding, creating a huge
network of multi-media hypertext bringing together what used to be entirely
separate communication universes. Private and public communication, work and
play, business and social activism are all based on the same technological
platform, the Internet. It becomes harder and harder to get away from the
communication networks without abandoning some of the most fundamental tools
of social participation. Today, turning off the computer is far more
consequential than turning off the television. With the growth of wireless
access and the connection of all sorts of objects (such as cars,
refrigerators and implants) to the Internet, this is only getting more
pronounced. This, by itself, is not necessarily a problem.

However, because of its digital, two-way nature, this new global communication
platform does enable anyone to transform fixed cultural objects into fluid
cultural exchanges, undermining a core aspect of contemporary capitalism,
which, as we have seen, is tied to an object-oriented view of culture.
Consequently the boundary between static one-way distribution and dynamic
two-way communication needs to be reinforced where it is being eroded: at the
level of the individual user. Given the pervasiveness of the communication
networks, it means that all users need to be controlled, everywhere, all the
time. Contrary to television channels, communication networks are used in all
aspects of life. This means that control will have to extend into the
capillaries of mediated communication, that is, into every aspect of social
life.

So, this is what is at stake: a profound struggle over the stuff digital,
networked culture will be made out of. Will it be a culture of fixed object,
circulating through an infrastructure of control, where everything that is
not authorized is prohibited? Lawrence Lessig called this a ???permissions
culture???. Before doing anything permission must be asked for which may, for
no particular reason, be withheld. This is a culture that continues to make a
hard distinction between production and consumption, between sender and
receiver. There are a small number of producers and a large number of
consumers and access to the resources of future cultures (the culture of the
past ready to be embodied in the new) is restricted to a few, and controlled
by even less. To bring this vision about, copyright law is being
strengthened, seemingly without limits. The desire to control is enforced
technologically through digital rights management systems, and propaganda
campaigns, which are mounted to teach children that copying files is
unethical and evil.

This is the culture of the media conglomerates, and their global stars. In
this culture, the place of artists is ambivalent. For most, it means
difficult conditions, as independent production becomes more complicated due
to the ever more stringent control controls being placed on source materials.
But ensuing practice of cold, hard media capitalism is counterbalanced by a
warm, soft story: the artists as the gifted individual and also the special
social status that this position confers. To the lucky few, the capital
accrued is not just social, but includes wealth and fame beyond imagination
of artists of earlier generations.

The alternative is a culture based on free access to the raw material of
creativity, other people's work to be embodied in one's own. This is the
culture of collaborative media production, of free and open source software,
of reference works such as the Wikipedia Encyclopedia, of open access
scientific journals and music that is being made and remixed by the most
talented of artists (rather than those whose legal departments manage to
clear all the necessary rights). Free access to the source material of
culture is a precondition for creativity to flourish. Nobody knows this
better than the creators themselves. It is not a coincidence that most
writers have substantial personal book collections and spend much of their
time in libraries. Not even writing is a solitary process. The promise of
open access is matched by the promise of free distribution and of being able
to actually reach the audiences who value what one is producing. This promise
is particularly important for those who produce for audiences too specialized
to be of interest to the commercial cultural industries.

However, free distribution of works is a double-edged promise to artists and
other creative producers. On the one hand, it enlarges the range of people
who can appreciate the works; this is good in terms of reputation-building.
On the other hand, it undermines a potentially important income stream: the
sale of their works. As a result creative producers are forced to find new
ways of generating income, and thus making their work sustainable. In the
field of software, there are two ways this is being done. One is the growth
of service companies which create customized adaptations of existing packages
to fit particular client needs. Thus, programmers are paid to change existing
software to make it better work for their clients. In the processes, they
create code that released back onto the open source project, thus
contributing to the advancement of the project as a whole. The other is that
programmers are paid by their companies to contribute to a project, either
because the company wants to use the software internally, or because they
want to create a service based on that software. In both cases, the code thus
produced remains open source, but paid-for services are derived from it. In
the arts, a somewhat similar process can be observed. Artists are less and
less 'autonomous producers' who create the works by themselves and then seek
to sell it (say, as painters do). Avant-garde art, throughout much of the
20th century, was moving away from the production of artifacts (see the essay
Culture Without Commodities). Rather, artists are becoming providers of
specialized services (or performances). Particularly in the field of new
media art, most work is being done as commissions. Artists have to apply with
a project and some form of jury decides which is being financed and which
not. Such works are not dependent on markets where objects are sold, but are,
again, becoming directly dependent on wealthy patrons, public or private
institutions, that decide which art is going to be financed. This enables
artists to produce works that are not in a sellable format (stable objects
that can be passed around), but also creates new kinds of dependencies
potentially undermining the freedom of art so crucial to the culture of
modernity. As culture is infusing more and more aspects of contemporary life,
and the range of producers is widening but the special status of the artist
and the social capital attached to this position, is being eroded. Artists
are becoming, again, artisans, not fundamentally different from others
creative producers.

The controversy between the object-oriented and the exchange-oriented visions
of culture is currently being fought on all levels, legal (expanding versus
narrowing copyrights and patents), technical (digital rights management
versus distribution and access technologies), and economic (exchange of
commodities versus provision of services). Crucially, however, it is also
fought in the field of culture itself, in ongoing experimentations on how we
can produce, reproduce, and interpret new forms of meaning. This is the
native environment of artists and other creative producers, whose everyday
practice puts them at the heart of this epic struggle.



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