Nettime-l relay

/etc 2007 July 11-15 in Linz, Austria - watch the streams!

nettime — 2007-07-12T12:15:02Z

Via: Anna

Eclectic Tech Carnival aka /etc 2007 will held from:
Wed 11 to Sun 15 july, 2007
in Linz, Austria

http://drupal.eclectictechcarnival.org/

The Eclectic Tech Carnival is a gathering of women interested in
technology. It's held once a year, each time in a venue where there has
been an interest in hosting one. The first was in Pula, Croatia in 2002,
followed by Athens (2003), Belgrade (2004), Graz (2005) and Timisoara
(2006). The event grew out of the Gender Changer's hardware and FLOSS
courses.

Women from all over the world organise the /etc through mailing lists,
IRC and IRL meetings - and women come from all over the world to the
/etc itself.

The week-long carnival includes workshops on installing free and open
source software, the hardware crash course, soldering, building websites
plus art exhibitions, performances, cultural discussions and related
presentations.

The program will be streamed from the following url's:

Location Stwst-Saal:
http://etc-stream.servus.at:8000/stwst-saal.ogg
Location Maiz:
http://etc-stream.servus.at:8000/maiz.ogg
Evening Performances
Location Cafe Strom
http://etc-stream.servus.at:8000/strom.ogg

Use fabulous VLC media player on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux to play all
your media files, including the above mentioned .ogg streams!
Download at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

You can find details about the workshops, lectures, play labs and
performances here:
http://drupal.eclectictechcarnival.org/workshops
http://drupal.eclectictechcarnival.org/lecture
http://drupal.eclectictechcarnival.org/PlayLab
http://drupal.eclectictechcarnival.org/performances+

BOF -- "Birds of a Feather" - sessions are ad hoc small gatherings of
women who share an interest in specific topics.

The program may still change, please check the website!

And the program is...

Wednesday July 11
=================
12:00-13:30

Organic Intellectual Work: Interview with Andrew Ross [REVISED]

nettime — 2007-07-11T17:02:02Z

Via: Geert Lovink

http://www.networkcultures.org/geert/interview-with-andrew-ross/

Organic Intellectual Work
Interview with Andrew Ross

By Geert Lovink

Does cultural studies scholar and labour activist Andrew Ross need to
be introduced? I became familiar with the work of U.S. American
researcher of Scottish decent in the early nineties when his co-edited
anthology Techno-Cultureand books No Respectand Strange Weatherreached
wide audiences. His highly readable books deal with a range of topics
from sweatshop labour, the creative office culture of the dotcoms,
middle class utopias of the Disney town Celebration to China's economic
culture as a global player. For outsiders, Andrew Ross might embody the
'celebrity' persona of academia, but he is someone I experienced as
modest and open, a prolific writer who is very much on top of the
issues. To me Andrew Ross has been a role model of how to reconcile the
world of High Theory with the down-to-earth work within social
movements, a tension that I have been struggling with since the late
seventies. Reading Andrew Ross makes you wonder why it is so hard to be
an organic intellectual after all, as Antonio Gramsci once described
it, a figure which is light-years away from the abstract universes of
the Italian autonomous theorists such as Negri, Virno and Lazzarato. No
esoteric knowledge of Spinoza, Tarde or Deleuze is necessary to enjoy
Ross. We do not read about exploitation in a moralistic manner but
instead obtain a deeper understanding of the complex contradictions
that the global work force has to deal with.

Australian post-doc researcher Melissa Gregg, whose book Affective
Voicesdeals with the history of (Anglo-Saxon) cultural studies,
includes a chapter about Andrew Ross. Gregg describes Ross as an
"intellectual arbiter between the academic politics of cultural studies
and the activist imperatives of the progressive Left." His "academic
activism" describes the "human cost of economic growth," thereby
counterbalancing the "neglect of material labour conditions." Instead
of fiddling around with concepts and terminologies, Ross describes the
"human face of economics" much like Barbara Ehrenreich's investigative
journalism, reaching into the category of airport non-fiction. The
suspicious attitude towards appropriate payment is the key obstacle to
an effective labourist politics among Leftist intellectuals. In the
case of the no collar culture "not only did the culture of willing
overwork severely haemorrhage any chance of a sustainable industry, but
investment in the cult of creativity disassociated no collar work from
the manual labour involved in producing the tools of their craft." In
the following email exchange with Andrew we focused on the topics of
research methodology and style of writing, the role of ethnography, the
question of creative labour and strategies of activism.

GL: Suppose you were to write one of those booklets and we would
entitle it Letter to a Young Researcher. How would you approach this?
Could you tell us something about your method? Is it fair enough to say
that you moved on from General Theory to case studies? Clearly,
students need to know about both, but I have the feeling that theory is
a dead end street these days and that your research methodology offers
an alternative.

AR: Since I came of age, intellectually and politically, in the 1970s,
I was a paid-up member of the Theory Generation, dutifully
participating in Lacan and Althusser reading groups, and the like. But
even then, I was rarely comfortable with the hothouse climate around
what you call General Theory. Even then, I was learning that theory
should be approached as simply a way of getting from A to B. It wasn't
the only way to get from A to B, nor was it always the best way, and it
was easy to get stuck en route with all your mental wheels spinning in
the air. Indeed, I saw some of the best minds of my generation--to
paraphrase Allen Ginsberg--vanish down that path. I'm glad I survived,
I've been in recovery for two decades now.

When it comes to method--and this is what I tell my graduate
students--it's more important to know what A and B are. Once you have a
good sense of your object and the questions you want to answer, then
you are in a position to choose your methods--i.e. how to get from A to
B. In most disciplines, the method comes first, and is then applied to
an object. For us, it's the other way around. The questions and the
goals determine the methods. So, how will I answer those questions? Do
I need to do interviews, or conduct surveys? Do I need to visit sites,
or consult archives? What kind of reading do I need to do, and what is
the likely audience? In the program where I teach, our students are
trained in more than one method--ethnography, historical inquiry,
textual analysis, data analysis--and are encouraged to be flexible in
their application. They are much more likely to think of themselves as
investigators, undertaking case-studies, rather than being motivated by
general theoretical problems.

Approaching research in this manner, it's more likely that they will
find their own voice, or at least a voice that is uniquely theirs,
rather than aping the consensus voice of their discipline, or whatever
influential master thinker they have been weaned on. It took me several
years to shake off my own academic training and find a voice that I
felt was my own and I had to go well outside my comfort zone to achieve
anything. So my advice to young researchers is tailored to the goal of
getting them to that point much earlier than I did.

GL: Does your move from Cultural Studies to a new form of labour
sociology also imply a critique of the way in which cultural studies
has been bogged down in studying popular culture and mainstream
products and services? In my experience 'cultural studies' has not
globalized but can increasingly be identified as an Ango-Saxon project
that has not broadened its reference system outside of the UK, USA and
Australia. It may have adopted 'French theory' but in France itself
cultural studies is nowhere to be seen. Now, there is nothing wrong
with cultural specificity and the political heritage of research
schools ... knowledge is always embedded in particular generations and
experiences of a small group of players. I know there are zillion
debates about the 'future of cultural studies' but could you
nonetheless say something about this?

AR: To answer that question, I'd have to touch on a debate about why
labour was not more central to cultural studies during its heyday.
Indeed, some would say that a conscious effort was made to sideline
attention to labour. This is quite understandable if you consider how
the British Left, for example, was dominated by a labourist mentality
in the 1960s and 1970s. It was necessary to get out from under the
heavy weight of that mindset to appreciate that other things mattered
politically. I myself grew up in the industrial belt of Scotland, where
labourism was the air that you breathed, and so the discovery of
cultural politics--the fact that you could even think about culture
politically--came as a revelation. Naturally, there was a certain
degree of overcompensation involved in the cultural turn. Folks just
kept going further and further from the labour fold, arguing that this
or that sector of daily life "mattered" in ever more ingenious
permutations of the feminist axiom that "the personal is the
political." The result was that the field of political economy was
abandoned, to some extent, to the hardliners, who no longer had to
listen to the feminists, queers, cultural radicals, and ethnic identity
advocates, and polarization set in between the cultural justice and the
economic justice camps. The legacy of that split is still with
us--indeed it has been played out in every US election since the early
1990s. There's no doubt it has hampered the Left, but the division has
been exploited much more adroitly by the Right.

While you may be right about the limited geographical footprint of
Cultural Studies as an academic discipline, I don't think these larger
political conflicts are confined to the Anglophone countries. They are
expressed in different ways in other societies--usually through the
repressive filter of religion or statism or ethnic sectarianism--and
are sometimes harder to discern, but they are no less relevant.

In all of the hand wringing about polarization, what's neglected is the
work that was done--it was never really abandoned--and is still being
done to reconnect these two wings of social justice. I suppose that's
where I would place my own energies from the late 80s onwards, in areas
of research--science and technology, and environmentalism in books like
Strange Weather, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, and Real
Love--that were not at all central at the time to the main currents of
cultural studies. By the mid-1990s, I was being drawn into labour and
urban research, both of which have dictated the bulk of my research and
activism for the last decade or so. However, I'm not sure I would have
gone in that direction if it hadn't been for cultural studies. For
example, it was my interest in fashion consumption that took me into
the anti-sweatshop movement and led to the publication of No Sweatand
Low Pay, High Profile, and it was an interest in ecological politics
that motivated my field work on the New Urbanist movement in The
Celebration Chronicles.

One area where all these currents re-converge is in the emergent policy
about the "creative economy." Here is a sector that has received a
massive amount of attention from government agencies and national
economic managers desperate for a development paradigm that will allow
them to compete or play catch-up in the high-skill, knowledge economy.
And it's all about cultural workers, once seen as completely marginal
to the forces of production and now increasingly central as a source of
potential economic value. Now there does exist an extensive body of
cultural studies scholarship, initiated by Tony Bennett in the
mid-1990s, that engaged directly with cultural policy-making, but it's
only recently that this tendency has moved centre-stage, and will, I
predict, occupy more and more of the field. In many ways, it's an angle
that was missing from Raymond Williams' distinction between two
conceptions of culture: one based on the high/low value hierarchy, and
the other, more anthropological understanding of culture as "way of
life." Neither made much room for culture as a livelihood, or cultural
work as labour. In Williams's day, it would have taken a remarkable act
of social foresight to imagine that artists, writers, and designers
would come to be seen, in the governmental imagination, as model
entrepreneurs for the new economy, and yet here we are.

Let me give you an instructive example. Back in the mid-1990s, after
the leadership of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and
Congress of Industrial Organizations)changed hands, I became involved
in a organization called Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social
Justice (SAWSJ). It was founded, mostly by labour historians, in
recognition of the hope that the US labour's movement's era of
complicity in the Cold War was over, and that a rapprochement with
intellectuals was now possible. Most of the activities of SAWSJ were
dedicated to supporting the industrial and service unions. This was
entirely laudable, but it often meant ignoring the labour issues in our
own backyard of the knowledge economies. Even at that time, it was
difficult to get an audience for the view that we were not only in
denial about this, and that we should be alerting the labour movement
to the opportunities and dangers posed by the burgeoning
culture/creative/knowledge industries (I wrote an essay "The Mental
Labour Problem," which was intended to address this denial). Not long
after, managers and ideologues of the New Economy dramatically reshaped
perceptions about how value could be generated, and the labour movement
was left sucking dust. New media employees helped to glamorize the 24/7
workweek, design, art, architecture, and custom craft were embraced as
engines for boosting property values in the real estate boom, the
amateur (MyCreativity) ethic became the basis for a whole new discount
mode of production that exploited the cult of attention as a cheap
labour supply, and much, much, more along these lines.

The only development along these lines that has really attracted trade
unions is in academic organizing, and largely because it offers a
fairly traditional opportunity to recruit new members. For sure, there
are individual unionists, mostly in sectors like telecommunications,
who are keeping up with changes in the mode of production, but the
labour movement, as a whole, and not just in the US, may have
relinquished the short-term opportunity to fight over the terms of the
knowledge economy. Knowledge and cultural workers are accustomed to
think of themselves as in the vanguard, and it will probably take a
generation of "proletarianization" and another big recession to
persuade them that collective organizing is in their long-term
interest. But that's no reason not to build a movement of ideas and
actions that will be serviceable, when that moment comes.

GL: I read your Low Pay, High Profileas a search for new strategies in
activism. In your 'academic activism' you leave behind the
disempowering reform-or-revolution choice and try to imagine, being
part of a movement, where the 'global push for fair labour' can be
taken. Here in Amsterdam I have seen how the Clean Clothes Campaign is
doing this. Is it fair to say that you practice a form of 'radical
pragmatism'? Is there a politics of immersion? Many of us fear deep
engagement and try to keep the appropriation machines at a safe
distance. How do you gain the confidence to survive Disney's
Celebration, the dotcom madness, and Chinese IT culture?

AR: "Intellectual activism" is a term we use among our students. We
vastly prefer it to "public intellectual" because there are very few
slots available on the public media spectrum at any one time, and they
are usually reserved for gatekeepers or single-issue political
advocates. For sure, activists and intellectuals function in a
different kind of temporality. The activist needs something to happen
tomorrow, the intellectual needs a slower germination of ideas. But you
can't have movement of action without a movement of ideas, and the
challenge really is to try to synchronize your thought with what's
happening on the ground. If you work closely, as a scholar, with a
justice movement, then requests will invariably be made to provide
tailor-made research to further the activist cause. In some instances,
that will be straightforward, in others it won't be so easy to provide
because activists generally don't want complexity, they need black and
white, and critical scholars are not trained to think in black and
white. I have certainly encountered this dilemma in my own
labour-oriented work, in the anti-sweatshop movement, for example,
where, at times it seems that the only desirable research is that which
corroborates the existence of corporate atrocities. But I didn't
experience it as a fear of "deep engagement" as you suggest, nor as a
fear of indulging in intellectual dishonesty.

Take the work I did in the China field as an example. I had been a
China-watcher for a long time, but was clearly not a sinologist.
Nonetheless, I figured that I may be able to produce some useful
research (that a sinologist, bound by disciplinary convention, perhaps
could not) by going there. So, too, since the AFL-CIO refuses to have
any official relationship with the China labour federation, there was a
real research gap for labour scholars and educators to fill. I was
familiar with all the literature on the labour-intensive export
factories of South China, but I could find very little about the
Yangtze Delta workplaces, where the lion's share of high-tech FDI was
beginning to flow, and most of it higher up the technology curve than
in South China. At that time, there was a wave of anxiety about the
outsourcing of high-wage, high-skill jobs to China and India, but very
little was known about the conditions, aspirations, and opinions of the
new offshore workforce employees. So I enrolled in Mandarin classes for
a year to give me some language mobility and took my family off to
Shanghai to see what I could find. A trained sinologist would probably
not have started out interviewing where I did--at the American Chamber
of Commerce, in the belly of the beast, as it were--but in fact the
contacts I made there helped open doors to many of the factory and
office workplaces where I did my research. Nor do I think that a
sinologist would have followed some of the leads I did since they were
often about explicitly transnational flows of capital, knowledge,
technology, personnel, and customs.

In fact, in the year's worth of field work I did in the Yangtze Delta
industrial parks, I didn't come across a single researcher doing
anything in any of the areas I myself was pursuing--documenting the
regional labour market, workplace conditions, the nature and character
of the investments, the rate of technology transfer and knowledge
transfer into the industrial parks, the cultural conflicts between
young Chinese engineers and their foreign managers, etc. Now this is
the single biggest regional economy in China, and the most high-tech,
so it was astonishing to find no one else in the field. Even the
foreign journalists I got to know there rarely left their offices in
Shanghai--a convention, no doubt, that goes back to pre-Liberation
days.

So, to get back to the gist of your question, I think the "confidence"
you refer to has more to do with not being bound by the conventions of
a discipline or a profession that tends to dictate the conduct of
scholars, activist, and journalists much more than we imagine. I became
an agnostic in that regard a long time ago. The downside of this is
that you have no idea who your audience will be, or that you will
indeed have an audience. For example, the most detailed early review of
my China book was by George Gilder, in his newsletter for high-tech
investors. He mined it for information about the performance of Chinese
tech companies that would be especially useful to his readers. Not
exactly the kind of audience I had anticipated!

GL: How important is storytelling in your work and is it something that
we, cultural theorists, can learn? I find this skill more difficult to
practice, and teach, compared to the relatively easy act of summarizing
the theory of canon of the day, now Agamben and Badiou, in the past
Derrida and Foucault, and Althusser and Gramsci in the early 1980s. I
see your recent work in the critical anthropology tradition. Action
research also had a particular mix of observation and active
participation. Is ethnography something we should look into or do we
then again run the risk of turning it into a theory religion?

AR: You are right, it is not easy to teach, and largely because it is
so experiential. I was trained first as a textual analyst, and then as
a theorist, so I developed skills as a close reader and a conceptual
thinker. What this meant was that I was a pretty bad listener. I grew
up in a storytelling, working class culture in Scotland, but my
academic training had taught me to distrust all of that, in fact, to
distrust language tout court. Over time, and as I developed my own
ethnographic techniques, I had to re-learn how to listen to other
people's stories, and to be accountable to these people when I used
their stories for my own purposes. So listening was important. As for
telling the stories, the genre of investigative journalism has probably
been as useful to me as critical anthropology. When anthropologists are
in the field, they are often competing with journalists (though not on
deadlines) but they rarely acknowledge journalistic narrative. In the
full-length ethnographies I have done--in new media companies, in
Celebration, and in China--I was competing directly with other
journalists for stories insofar as my informants were often used to
talking to journalists. Being a scholar was an advantage in those
situations because people trust you more with their stories and
confidence.

As for ethnography becoming a religion, I don't see that happening. To
go back to what I said at the outset, it's a method for getting from A
to B, but it's not the only way, nor is it always the best way. You
have to choose your methods based on your goals. These days,
ethnography feels more honest to me than the kind of armchair criticism
that I started out doing in the 1980s, but I still do certain kinds of
writing that don't entail getting out of my seat.

GL: Activist campaigning is becoming more and more associated with
'tactical media', social networking and so on. Is this justified? Do
you think that a better understanding of Web 2.0 and new media would
alter activism as is often claimed? As you know my work is associated
with the 'tactical media' term but I have often made clear that (new)
media cannot create social movements out of nothing. A more effective
way of using cell phones and the Net is not in itself a guarantee that
the real existing discontent in global capitalism will flip into
organized resistance or even protest.

AR: I agree, these days it is necessary but not sufficient for social
movements to be tech savvy. The tactics for outwitting the oppressor
have to be continually updated, and that is the job of movement
tacticians, but the "sufficient conditions" for change haven't altered
appreciably. You need a critical mass of popular sentiment, you need a
significant fraction of elites to break with their class station and
cross over, and you need an effective formula for capturing media
attention. These days, most social justice movements have about six or
seven years to make their mark before a) activists burn out or branch
off, b) the formula exhausts its efficacy, c) the enemy coopts public
attention. The anti-sweatshop movement was a good example; the formula
of shaming the brand was like a narcotic for the media, "Nike
sweatshops" became a household phrase, and elite guilt was
appropriately mobilized. It took the lavishly funded efforts of
"corporate social responsibility" several years to convince the public
that the big garment companies had somehow "fixed" the problem and that
it was OK to go out and buy Gap clothing again. In the interim, I think
we achieved quite a lot. At the very least, the trading rules of the
global economy are now contested in the public eye, rather than written
in secret by unelected WTO officials, and consciousness-raising about
sweatshops contributed, in no small part, to that shift in the rules of
play.

That said, there is one key area of activism in which tactical media
has become particularly important, and that is in the copyfight over
intellectual property. The corporate rush to proprietize knowledge is
surely one of the biggest acts of theft in centuries, and new media
activists have a frontline role to play, because the tactical tools
they use are, more often than not, the technologies at play in the
property grab. Disciplining rogue users (for the downloading of
unauthorized content) is just the most highly publicized face of the
massive effort of capital-owners to administer an effective division of
labour within the knowledge industries. That effort increasingly
depends upon control over not only the authorized use of technologies,
but also the IP inside employee's heads. But it's not just the
high-tech employees that are suspect. The new property grabbers are in
a running battle with the ever-proficient hackers of the technocratic
fraternity, and now they have to contend with a small army of
legally-minded and tech-savvy advocates of the information commons.

As I see it, this contest is very much an elite "copyfight" between
capital-owner monopolists and the labour aristocracy of the digitariat
(a dominated fraction of the dominant class, as Pierre Bourdieu once
described intellectuals) struggling to preserve and extend their
high-skill interests. The history of shareware and its maturation into
free software/open source can be seen as the narrative of a distinctive
class fraction--a thwarted technocratic elite whose libertarian world
view butts up against the established proprietary interests of
capital-owners. While they see their knowledge and expertise generating
wealth, they chafe at their lack of control over the property assets.
Their willingness to work against the proprietary IP regime is directly
linked to their entrepreneurial-artisanal instincts, but, more
importantly, it is a power-test of their capacity to act upon the
world. The class traitors in their midst are engineer innovators who go
over to the dark Gatesian side of IP monopoly enforcement. So, too, the
mutualist ethos of the FLOSS communities is very much underpinned by
the confidence of members that their expertise will keep them on the
upside of the technology curve that protects the best and brightest
from proletarianization.

What I don't see is all that much attention to those less-skilled who
are further down the entitlement hierarchy, who are not direct
participants in this power struggle, and whose prospects in the chain
of production do not extend to the profile of the master-craftsman
straining at the corporate leash. They are much more distant from the
rewards of authorship, and are less likely to feel personally
disrespected when IP rights are expropriated from above. So how do the
interests of these below-the-line workers get represented in the
copyfight? I'd like to see new media tacticians think more about
sustainable income models for everyone rather than focus primarily on
the livelihoods of creatives or high-skill knowledge workers.

GL: Surprisingly, in the new media sector, young professionals are
earning less and less while their working conditions aren't that great
either. This is one of the outcomes of Rosalind Gill and Daniella van
Daemon's case study on the Amsterdam web designers. It's important here
to add another level that sufficiently describes freedom and
subjectivity of the actors involved. People are passionate about the
challenges that new media create. In what ways could we describe such a
paradoxical circumstance?

AR: The Amsterdam study is interesting, though these results don't
surprise me. The labour market for new media employees was at its
rosiest at the height of the New Economy years---there was a limited
labour supply, the new entrants had a monopoly on skills and applied
knowledge, and demand for them was fierce. Under normal circumstances,
conditions and pay scales could be expected to deteriorate from that
high. But the impact of outsourcing, since 2001, has accelerated that
decline, if not in terms of actual jobs transferred overseas, then as a
result of the general climate of insecurity that has been ushered into
white collar and no collar workplaces by the imminent threat of
"knowledge transfer." The house motto of Razorfish in the boom years
used to be "Whatever can be digital, will be." It was by no means easy
to predict what came to pass all too quickly as "whatever can be
outsourced, will be." For sure, the offshore transfers started out in
coding and in the more routine sectors, but they moved up into design
and web development fairly rapidly. As far as jobs in the global North
goes, there's no reason not to expect that the situation will soon
resemble the garment industry, with the most specialized, custom work
remaining onshore, perhaps along with a less formal sector of sweated
or intern work needed for fast turnaround. Everything else will be done
overseas.

As for on-the-job passion and enthusiasm, it's an integral part of the
job profile, attested to through thick and thin. It was this devotion
that got me interested in studying new media workplaces in the first
place, since it's quite uncommon, in the history of modern work, to
hear employees express this kind of zeal around their jobs. My study,
in No-Collar, turned into an effort to describe and diagnose the
conditions of "self-exploitation" that resulted. One of my informants
put it most succinctly when she said she was given "work that you just
couldn't help doing," and in a workplace from which the very last drops
of alienation had been squeezed. Nowadays, every knowledge industry
employer recognizes the benefits of this kind of ideal employee, who is
turned on by the challenge of risk, accustomed to sacrifice (long
hours) in pursuit of gratification, and willing to trade his or her
most free time and free thoughts in return for the gifts of mobility
and autonomy. Folks in the arts have long lived with this sacrificial
mentality, and know a thing or two about the insecurity associated with
it. So, too, gearheads, from the days of ham radio onwards, are
familiar with the devotional cults that a machine can inspire. But
neither cohort has been prepared for the consequences wrought by the
rapid industrialization of their respective crafts and hobbies. The
effort to industrialize custom creativity is a primary goal of
capitalist production today, right now.

I suppose I would say the same of the academic sector, with the proviso
that academics are so fond of their siege mentality that they can only
see their workplaces being invaded by corporate logic or industrial
process. They don't see that the traffic goes in both directions, they
know so little about the corporate world that they can't see how the
mentality and customs of academic life are being transplanted into
knowledge firms, whose research is increasingly conducted along similar
lines. The truth of the matter is we are living through the formative
stages of a mode of production marked by a quasi-convergence of the
academy and the knowledge corporation. Neither is what it used to be;
both are mutating into new species that share and trade many
characteristics, and these changes are part and parcel of the economic
environment in which they function.

GL: You touched on the "creative economy." As you know, we've been
dealing with this in the MyCreativity project that my institute in
Amsterdam co-initiated. What should the critical research in this field
look into? There is a call to go beyond the hype bashing and look into
the labour precarity issue. Still, the consensus-driven hegemony of
business consultants seems strong and uncontested. What work could be
done to open the field and make space for other voices and practices?
Are there ways to obtain cultural hegemony these days?

AR: That's a good question, and should be at the heart of anyone
interested in a sustainable job economy. It's not all that productive
to scoff at policy initiatives that might just be capable of generating
a better deal for creative labour. As I see it, critical research ought
to be doing what governments are not, and that is coming up with
qualitative profiles of what a "good" creative job should look like,
based on ethnographic methods. Currently, all we have are productivity
and GDP statistics, on the government side, and, on the other side, a
cumulative pile of scepticism based on the well-known perils of
precarity that afflict creative work, dating back to the rise of
culture markets in the late eighteenth century. I have yet to see a
"mapping" of the creative sector that includes factors relating to the
quality of work life. It wasn't that long ago, in the 1970s, in
response to the so-called "revolt against work," that governments
actively championed "quality of work life." Of course, corporations
came up with their own versions of "innovative" alternatives to the
humdrum routines of standard industrial employment, but the hunger for
mentally challenging work in a secure workplace has undergirded and
outlived all the management fads that followed.

For those with an appetite for a dialogue with the policy-makers, I'd
say that the qualitative research about good jobs is a plausible way to
go (and I'm talking about fully-loaded jobs, not simply work
opportunities). It wouldn't take all that much to come up with some
proposals for guidelines, if not outright guarantees, about income and
security, based on that kind of research. The goal would be to offer a
sustainable alternative to the IP jackpot economy that currently drives
the consultants' world-view. I'm not sure if the result would be what
you would call cultural hegemony, but if the challenge to existing
hegemony is going to draw on labour power in any way then it's in our
interest to ensure that there will be a robust employment sector there
to provide heft and volume to these challenges. Clearly, the strategies
for organizing have to be re-thought in ever more ingenious ways, but
there are no good substitutes for organizing, as far as I can see.
Tactics like culture jamming or brand busting have their uses, and they
have served as appropriate tools, but you can't give up on the power of
numbers.

(edited by Ned Rossiter)

more about money

nettime — 2007-07-11T12:25:07Z

Via: Keith Hart

The age of money

Ours is an age of money. If human society has any unity at this time it
is as a world 'market'. There is nothing wrong with people exchanging
goods and services as equals. Markets are indispensable to the extension
of society. The problem is that they use money: some people have lots of
it and most don't have enough. The unequal face of the age of money is
'capitalism'; and the principal source of that inequality has been a
machine revolution whose uneven development is only two centuries old.
The combination of money and machines is the engine pushing humanity
from the village to the city as our normal habitat. The result is a
polarized world society that resembles nothing so much as the Old
Regime, with an isolated elite controlling the destiny of powerless
human masses to whose fate they are largely indifferent.[1]

Textile Activism: Srebrenica Memorial Quilt Unites Massacre Survivors in Bosnia and America

nettime — 2007-07-11T12:25:05Z

Via: "AdvocacyNet"

*****
AdvocacyNet
News Bulletin 110
*****

Srebrenica Memorial Quilt Unites Massacre Survivors in Bosnia and
America

July 10, 2007, St. Louis, United States: Survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica
massacre in Bosnia and the United States have joined forces to launch a large,
hand-woven quilt in memory of more than 8,000 men and boys who were killed in
the massacre.

The quilt was unveiled in public for the first time on Sunday at a religious
ceremony in St. Louis, which is home to more than 45,000 Bosnian refugees,
including around 5,000 former inhabitants of Srebrenica. Men, women and
children paused in silence at the quilt, and many laid flowers.

The quilt measures around two square meters and comprises 20 panels, each
carrying the name of a massacre victim. The panels were hand-woven by five
women weavers from Bosfam, a women's organization in Bosnia that brings
together women who lost relatives in the massacre. One weaver, Nura Suljic,
lost her brother, brother-in-law, father-in-law and cousin in the massacre.
Her husband is also missing.

The Bosfam weavers are using the quilt to reach out to the large, Bosnian
diaspora in the US, in the hope of keeping the message of Srebrenica alive.
They have also offered to make new panels for any Bosnian family that lost a
relative in the massacre. This way, they hope that the quilt can move around
diaspora communities outside Bosnia, growing in size and generating publicity.

"It's a great idea," said Rusmin Topalovic, Vice President of the
Association for the Survivors of Genocide in Srebrenica, a community group in
St. Louis.
"I'm sure plenty of relatives will want to commission panels."

The quilt was brought to St. Louis on behalf of Bosfam by The Advocacy Project
(AP), which has supported Bosfam's advocacy since 2002. Alison Morse, a
graduate student at Tufts University is volunteering with Bosfam this summer
as an AP Peace Fellow and is helping Bosfam to manage the quilt.

Meanwhile, in Bosnia itself, thousands of Srebrenica relatives and survivors
will gather tomorrow at the site of the massacre to mark the 12th anniversary
and rebury around 460 massacre victims who have been identified during the
past year. Among those attending will be the Bosfam weavers and several
families from St. Louis who lost relatives.

Srebrenica is the largest mass killing to have taken place on European soil
since the end of World War II. The town was besieged by the Bosnian Serbs for
three years before finally falling on July 11, 1995. All men and boys over the
age of 15 were separated from the women, and taken off to be killed. The women
and children were bussed to territory held by Bosnian Muslims.

Memories of Srebrenica remain vivid for many of the survivors in St. Louis.
Nihad Sinanovic was 11 when he escaped the town in 1993, at the height of the
Bosnian siege. His father, Resid, was among thousands who set off through the
woods in July 1995 in an attempt to reach safety, only to be captured and
killed.

"Every year it's the same," said Mr Sinanovic, who today runs a
successful business in St. Louis. "We meet and ask the same questions. What
actually happened? How come the killers are still free? It's impossible to put
it to rest and move on."

Also on Sunday, at a reception in St. Louis, 210 Bosnian refugees signed a new
petition calling for the arrest of Radovan Karadzic and General Ratko Mladic,
the two former Bosnian Serb leaders held most responsible for the massacre.
Both men have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal in The
Hague, but remain at large.

The arrest petition has been drawn up by the Center for Balkan Development,
and co-signed by The Advocacy Project, Physicians for Human Rights, the
Helsinki Committee for Human Rights in Serbia, and the Congress of North
American Bosniaks, which lobbies from Washington on behalf of grassroots
advocates like the St. Louis survivors.

Nihad Sinanovic was one of those who appealed for signatures on Sunday in St.
Louis. "Help us heal the wounds of the many relatives who lost their loved
ones. Help us bring the perpetrators to justice and bring closure to the
families," he said, to loud applause.

* For media coverage of the quilt launch in St. Louis, visit
http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/stlouiscitycounty/
story/3248D
74C6D4647DB862573130013FE59?OpenDocument
* For background on the quilt project, including a map of those
commemorated
and profiles of the weavers, visit http://advocacynet.org/page/quilt
* To sign the arrest petition, visit
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/arrest_mladic_karadzic/index.html or
visit
the CBD website http://www.balkandevelopment.org/timeforjustice/
* For Alison Morse's blogs, visit
http://advocacynet.org/blogs/index.php?blog=88

AdvocacyNet is a service of The Advocacy Project (AP) that is offered to
advocates working for human rights and social justice at the community
level.
AP is based in Washington, DC. Phone +1 202 332 3900; fax +1 202 332
4600. For
more information visit our webiste www.advocacynet.org or email us at
info@advocacynet.org.

Organic Intellectual Work: Interview with Andrew Ross

nettime — 2007-07-11T12:25:02Z

Via: Geert Lovink

Organic Intellectual Work
Interview with Andrew Ross

By Geert Lovink

Does cultural studies scholar and labour activist Andrew Ross need to
be introduced? I became familiar with the work of U.S. American
researcher of Scottish decent in the early nineties when his co-edited
anthology Techno-Cultureand books No Respectand Strange Weatherreached
wide audiences. His highly readable books deal with a range of topics
from sweatshop labour, the creative office culture of the dotcoms,
middle class utopias of the Disney town Celebration to China's economic
culture as a global player. For outsiders, Andrew Ross might embody the
'celebrity' persona of academia, but he is someone I experienced as
modest and open, a prolific writer who is very much on top of the
issues. To me Andrew Ross has been a role model of how to reconcile the
world of High Theory with the down-to-earth work within social
movements, a tension that I have been struggling with since the late
seventies. Reading Andrew Ross makes you wonder why it is so hard to be
an organic intellectual after all, as Antonio Gramsci once described
it, a figure which is light-years away from the abstract universes of
the Italian autonomous theorists such as Negri, Virno and Lazzarato. No
esoteric knowledge of Spinoza, Tarde or Deleuze is necessary to enjoy
Ross. We do not read about exploitation in a moralistic manner but
instead obtain a deeper understanding of the complex contradictions
that the global work force has to deal with.

Australian post-doc researcher Melissa Gregg, whose book Affective
Voicesdeals with the history of (Anglo-Saxon) cultural studies,
includes a chapter about Andrew Ross. Gregg describes Ross as an
"intellectual arbiter between the academic politics of cultural studies
and the activist imperatives of the progressive Left." His "academic
activism" describes the "human cost of economic growth," thereby
counterbalancing the "neglect of material labour conditions." Instead
of fiddling around with concepts and terminologies, Ross describes the
"human face of economics" much like Barbara Ehrenreich's investigative
journalism, reaching into the category of airport non-fiction. The
suspicious attitude towards appropriate payment is the key obstacle to
an effective labourist politics among Leftist intellectuals. In the
case of the no collar culture "not only did the culture of willing
overwork severely haemorrhage any chance of a sustainable industry, but
investment in the cult of creativity disassociated no collar work from
the manual labour involved in producing the tools of their craft." In
the following email exchange with Andrew we focused on the topics of
research methodology and style of writing, the role of ethnography, the
question of creative labour and strategies of activism.

GL: Suppose you were to write one of those booklets and we would
entitle it Letter to a Young Researcher. How would you approach this?
Could you tell us something about your method? Is it fair enough to say
that you moved on from General Theory to case studies? Clearly,
students need to know about both, but I have the feeling that theory is
a dead end street these days and that your research methodology offers
an alternative.

AR: Since I came of age, intellectually and politically, in the 1970s,
I was a paid-up member of the Theory Generation, dutifully
participating in Lacan and Althusser reading groups, and the like. But
even then, I was rarely comfortable with the hothouse climate around
what you call General Theory. Even then, I was learning that theory
should be approached as simply a way of getting from A to B. It wasn't
the only way to get from A to B, nor was it always the best way, and it
was easy to get stuck en route with all your mental wheels spinning in
the air. Indeed, I saw some of the best minds of my generation--to
paraphrase Allen Ginsberg--vanish down that path. I'm glad I survived,
I've been in recovery for two decades now.

When it comes to method--and this is what I tell my graduate
students--it's more important to know what A and B are. Once you have a
good sense of your object and the questions you want to answer, then
you are in a position to choose your methods--i.e. how to get from A to
B. In most disciplines, the method comes first, and is then applied to
an object. For us, it's the other way around. The questions and the
goals determine the methods. So, how will I answer those questions? Do
I need to do interviews, or conduct surveys? Do I need to visit sites,
or consult archives? What kind of reading do I need to do, and what is
the likely audience? In the program where I teach, our students are
trained in more than one method--ethnography, historical inquiry,
textual analysis, data analysis--and are encouraged to be flexible in
their application. They are much more likely to think of themselves as
investigators, undertaking case-studies, rather than being motivated by
general theoretical problems.

Approaching research in this manner, it's more likely that they will
find their own voice, or at least a voice that is uniquely theirs,
rather than aping the consensus voice of their discipline, or whatever
influential master thinker they have been weaned on. It took me several
years to shake off my own academic training and find a voice that I
felt was my own and I had to go well outside my comfort zone to achieve
anything. So my advice to young researchers is tailored to the goal of
getting them to that point much earlier than I did.

GL: Does your move from Cultural Studies to a new form of labour
sociology also imply a critique of the way in which cultural studies
has been bogged down in studying popular culture and mainstream
products and services? In my experience 'cultural studies' has not
globalized but can increasingly be identified as an Ango-Saxon project
that has not broadened its reference system outside of the UK, USA and
Australia. It may have adopted 'French theory' but in France itself
cultural studies is nowhere to be seen. Now, there is nothing wrong
with cultural specificity and the political heritage of research
schools ... knowledge is always embedded in particular generations and
experiences of a small group of players. I know there are zillion
debates about the 'future of cultural studies' but could you
nonetheless say something about this?

AR: To answer that question, I'd have to touch on a debate about why
labour was not more central to cultural studies during its heyday.
Indeed, some would say that a conscious effort was made to sideline
attention to labour. This is quite understandable if you consider how
the British Left, for example, was dominated by a labourist mentality
in the 1960s and 1970s. It was necessary to get out from under the
heavy weight of that mindset to appreciate that other things mattered
politically. I myself grew up in the industrial belt of Scotland, where
labourism was the air that you breathed, and so the discovery of
cultural politics--the fact that you could even think about culture
politically--came as a revelation. Naturally, there was a certain
degree of overcompensation involved in the cultural turn. Folks just
kept going further and further from the labour fold, arguing that this
or that sector of daily life "mattered" in ever more ingenious
permutations of the feminist axiom that "the personal is the
political." The result was that the field of political economy was
abandoned, to some extent, to the hardliners, who no longer had to
listen to the feminists, queers, cultural radicals, and ethnic identity
advocates, and polarization set in between the cultural justice and the
economic justice camps. The legacy of that split is still with
us--indeed it has been played out in every US election since the early
1990s. There's no doubt it has hampered the Left, but the division has
been exploited much more adroitly by the Right.

While you may be right about the limited geographical footprint of
Cultural Studies as an academic discipline, I don't think these larger
political conflicts are confined to the Anglophone countries. They are
expressed in different ways in other societies--usually through the
repressive filter of religion or statism or ethnic sectarianism--and
are sometimes harder to discern, but they are no less relevant.

In all of the hand wringing about polarization, what's neglected is the
work that was done--it was never really abandoned--and is still being
done to reconnect these two wings of social justice. I suppose that's
where I would place my own energies from the late 80s onwards, in areas
of research--science and technology, and environmentalism in books like
Strange Weather, The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, and Real
Love--that were not at all central at the time to the main currents of
cultural studies. By the mid-1990s, I was being drawn into labour and
urban research, both of which have dictated the bulk of my research and
activism for the last decade or so. However, I'm not sure I would have
gone in that direction if it hadn't been for cultural studies. For
example, it was my interest in fashion consumption that took me into
the anti-sweatshop movement and led to the publication of No Sweatand
Low Pay, High Profile, and it was an interest in ecological politics
that motivated my field work on the New Urbanist movement in The
Celebration Chronicles.

One area where all these currents re-converge is in the emergent policy
about the "creative economy." Here is a sector that has received a
massive amount of attention from government agencies and national
economic managers desperate for a development paradigm that will allow
them to compete or play catch-up in the high-skill, knowledge economy.
And it's all about cultural workers, once seen as completely marginal
to the forces of production and now increasingly central as a source of
potential economic value. Now there does exist an extensive body of
cultural studies scholarship, initiated by Tony Bennett in the
mid-1990s, that engaged directly with cultural policy-making, but it's
only recently that this tendency has moved centre-stage, and will, I
predict, occupy more and more of the field. In many ways, it's an angle
that was missing from Raymond Williams' distinction between two
conceptions of culture: one based on the high/low value hierarchy, and
the other, more anthropological understanding of culture as "way of
life." Neither made much room for culture as a livelihood, or cultural
work as labour. In Williams's day, it would have taken a remarkable act
of social foresight to imagine that artists, writers, and designers
would come to be seen, in the governmental imagination, as model
entrepreneurs for the new economy, and yet here we are.

Let me give you an instructive example. Back in the mid-1990s, after
the leadership of the AFL-CIO (American Federation of Labor and
Congress of Industrial Organizations)changed hands, I became involved
in a organization called Scholars, Artists, and Writers for Social
Justice (SAWSJ). It was founded, mostly by labour historians, in
recognition of the hope that the US labour's movement's era of
complicity in the Cold War was over, and that a rapprochement with
intellectuals was now possible. Most of the activities of SAWSJ were
dedicated to supporting the industrial and service unions. This was
entirely laudable, but it often meant ignoring the labour issues in our
own backyard of the knowledge economies. Even at that time, it was
difficult to get an audience for the view that we were not only in
denial about this, and that we should be alerting the labour movement
to the opportunities and dangers posed by the burgeoning
culture/creative/knowledge industries (I wrote an essay "The Mental
Labour Problem," which was intended to address this denial). Not long
after, managers and ideologues of the New Economy dramatically reshaped
perceptions about how value could be generated, and the labour movement
was left sucking dust. New media employees helped to glamorize the 24/7
workweek, design, art, architecture, and custom craft were embraced as
engines for boosting property values in the real estate boom, the
amateur (MyCreativity) ethic became the basis for a whole new discount
mode of production that exploited the cult of attention as a cheap
labour supply, and much, much, more along these lines.

The only development along these lines that has really attracted trade
unions is in academic organizing, and largely because it offers a
fairly traditional opportunity to recruit new members. For sure, there
are individual unionists, mostly in sectors like telecommunications,
who are keeping up with changes in the mode of production, but the
labour movement, as a whole, and not just in the US, may have
relinquished the short-term opportunity to fight over the terms of the
knowledge economy. Knowledge and cultural workers are accustomed to
think of themselves as in the vanguard, and it will probably take a
generation of "proletarianization" and another big recession to
persuade them that collective organizing is in their long-term
interest. But that's no reason not to build a movement of ideas and
actions that will be serviceable, when that moment comes.

GL: I read your Low Pay, High Profileas a search for new strategies in
activism. In your 'academic activism' you leave behind the
disempowering reform-or-revolution choice and try to imagine, being
part of a movement, where the 'global push for fair labour' can be
taken. Here in Amsterdam I have seen how the Clean Clothes Campaign is
doing this. Is it fair to say that you practice a form of 'radical
pragmatism'? Is there a politics of immersion? Many of us fear deep
engagement and try to keep the appropriation machines at a safe
distance. How do you gain the confidence to survive Disney's
Celebration, the dotcom madness, and Chinese IT culture?

AR: "Intellectual activism" is a term we use among our students. We
vastly prefer it to "public intellectual" because there are very few
slots available on the public media spectrum at any one time, and they
are usually reserved for gatekeepers or single-issue political
advocates. For sure, activists and intellectuals function in a
different kind of temporality. The activist needs something to happen
tomorrow, the intellectual needs a slower germination of ideas. But you
can't have movement of action without a movement of ideas, and the
challenge really is to try to synchronize your thought with what's
happening on the ground. If you work closely, as a scholar, with a
justice movement, then requests will invariably be made to provide
tailor-made research to further the activist cause. In some instances,
that will be straightforward, in others it won't be so easy to provide
because activists generally don't want complexity, they need black and
white, and critical scholars are not trained to think in black and
white. I have certainly encountered this dilemma in my own
labour-oriented work, in the anti-sweatshop movement, for example,
where, at times it seems that the only desirable research is that which
corroborates the existence of corporate atrocities. But I didn't
experience it as a fear of "deep engagement" as you suggest, nor as a
fear of indulging in intellectual dishonesty.

Take the work I did in the China field as an example. I had been a
China-watcher for a long time, but was clearly not a sinologist.
Nonetheless, I figured that I may be able to produce some useful
research (that a sinologist, bound by disciplinary convention, perhaps
could not) by going there. So, too, since the AFL-CIO refuses to have
any official relationship with the China labour federation, there was a
real research gap for labour scholars and educators to fill. I was
familiar with all the literature on the labour-intensive export
factories of South China, but I could find very little about the
Yangtze Delta workplaces, where the lion's share of high-tech FDI was
beginning to flow, and most of it higher up the technology curve than
in South China. At that time, there was a wave of anxiety about the
outsourcing of high-wage, high-skill jobs to China and India, but very
little was known about the conditions, aspirations, and opinions of the
new offshore workforce employees. So I enrolled in Mandarin classes for
a year to give me some language mobility and took my family off to
Shanghai to see what I could find. A trained sinologist would probably
not have started out interviewing where I did--at the American Chamber
of Commerce, in the belly of the beast, as it were--but in fact the
contacts I made there helped open doors to many of the factory and
office workplaces where I did my research. Nor do I think that a
sinologist would have followed some of the leads I did since they were
often about explicitly transnational flows of capital, knowledge,
technology, personnel, and customs.

In fact, in the year's worth of field work I did in the Yangtze Delta
industrial parks, I didn't come across a single researcher doing
anything in any of the areas I myself was pursuing--documenting the
regional labour market, workplace conditions, the nature and character
of the investments, the rate of technology transfer and knowledge
transfer into the industrial parks, the cultural conflicts between
young Chinese engineers and their foreign managers, etc. Now this is
the single biggest regional economy in China, and the most high-tech,
so it was astonishing to find no one else in the field. Even the
foreign journalists I got to know there rarely left their offices in
Shanghai--a convention, no doubt, that goes back to pre-Liberation
days.

So, to get back to the gist of your question, I think the "confidence"
you refer to has more to do with not being bound by the conventions of
a discipline or a profession that tends to dictate the conduct of
scholars, activist, and journalists much more than we imagine. I became
an agnostic in that regard a long time ago. The downside of this is
that you have no idea who your audience will be, or that you will
indeed have an audience. For example, the most detailed early review of
my China book was by George Gilder, in his newsletter for high-tech
investors. He mined it for information about the performance of Chinese
tech companies that would be especially useful to his readers. Not
exactly the kind of audience I had anticipated!

GL: How important is storytelling in your work and is it something that
we, cultural theorists, can learn? I find this skill more difficult to
practice, and teach, compared to the relatively easy act of summarizing
the theory of canon of the day, now Agamben and Badiou, in the past
Derrida and Foucault, and Althusser and Gramsci in the early 1980s. I
see your recent work in the critical anthropology tradition. Action
research also had a particular mix of observation and active
participation. Is ethnography something we should look into or do we
then again run the risk of turning it into a theory religion?

AR: You are right, it is not easy to teach, and largely because it is
so experiential. I was trained first as a textual analyst, and then as
a theorist, so I developed skills as a close reader and a conceptual
thinker. What this meant was that I was a pretty bad listener. I grew
up in a storytelling, working class culture in Scotland, but my
academic training had taught me to distrust all of that, in fact, to
distrust language tout court. Over time, and as I developed my own
ethnographic techniques, I had to re-learn how to listen to other
people's stories, and to be accountable to these people when I used
their stories for my own purposes. So listening was important. As for
telling the stories, the genre of investigative journalism has probably
been as useful to me as critical anthropology. When anthropologists are
in the field, they are often competing with journalists (though not on
deadlines) but they rarely acknowledge journalistic narrative. In the
full-length ethnographies I have done--in new media companies, in
Celebration, and in China--I was competing directly with other
journalists for stories insofar as my informants were often used to
talking to journalists. Being a scholar was an advantage in those
situations because people trust you more with their stories and
confidence.

As for ethnography becoming a religion, I don't see that happening. To
go back to what I said at the outset, it's a method for getting from A
to B, but it's not the only way, nor is it always the best way. You
have to choose your methods based on your goals. These days,
ethnography feels more honest to me than the kind of armchair criticism
that I started out doing in the 1980s, but I still do certain kinds of
writing that don't entail getting out of my seat.

GL: Activist campaigning is becoming more and more associated with
'tactical media', social networking and so on. Is this justified? Do
you think that a better understanding of Web 2.0 and new media would
alter activism as is often claimed? As you know my work is associated
with the 'tactical media' term but I have often made clear that (new)
media cannot create social movements out of nothing. A more effective
way of using cell phones and the Net is not in itself a guarantee that
the real existing discontent in global capitalism will flip into
organized resistance or even protest.

AR: I agree, these days it is necessary but not sufficient for social
movements to be tech savvy. The tactics for outwitting the oppressor
have to be continually updated, and that is the job of movement
tacticians, but the "sufficient conditions" for change haven't altered
appreciably. You need a critical mass of popular sentiment, you need a
significant fraction of elites to break with their class station and
cross over, and you need an effective formula for capturing media
attention. These days, most social justice movements have about six or
seven years to make their mark before a) activists burn out or branch
off, b) the formula exhausts its efficacy, c) the enemy coopts public
attention. The anti-sweatshop movement was a good example; the formula
of shaming the brand was like a narcotic for the media, "Nike
sweatshops" became a household phrase, and elite guilt was
appropriately mobilized. It took the lavishly funded efforts of
"corporate social responsibility" several years to convince the public
that the big garment companies had somehow "fixed" the problem and that
it was OK to go out and buy Gap clothing again. In the interim, I think
we achieved quite a lot. At the very least, the trading rules of the
global economy are now contested in the public eye, rather than written
in secret by unelected WTO officials, and consciousness-raising about
sweatshops contributed, in no small part, to that shift in the rules of
play.

That said, there is one key area of activism in which tactical media
has become particularly important, and that is in the copyfight over
intellectual property. The corporate rush to proprietize knowledge is
surely one of the biggest acts of theft in centuries, and new media
activists have a frontline role to play, because the tactical tools
they use are, more often than not, the technologies at play in the
property grab. Disciplining rogue users (for the downloading of
unauthorized content) is just the most highly publicized face of the
massive effort of capital-owners to administer an effective division of
labour within the knowledge industries. That effort increasingly
depends upon control over not only the authorized use of technologies,
but also the IP inside employee's heads. But it's not just the
high-tech employees that are suspect. The new property grabbers are in
a running battle with the ever-proficient hackers of the technocratic
fraternity, and now they have to contend with a small army of
legally-minded and tech-savvy advocates of the information commons.

As I see it, this contest is very much an elite "copyfight" between
capital-owner monopolists and the labour aristocracy of the digitariat
(a dominated fraction of the dominant class, as Pierre Bourdieu once
described intellectuals) struggling to preserve and extend their
high-skill interests. The history of shareware and its maturation into
free software/open source can be seen as the narrative of a distinctive
class fraction--a thwarted technocratic elite whose libertarian world
view butts up against the established proprietary interests of
capital-owners. While they see their knowledge and expertise generating
wealth, they chafe at their lack of control over the property assets.
Their willingness to work against the proprietary IP regime is directly
linked to their entrepreneurial-artisanal instincts, but, more
importantly, it is a power-test of their capacity to act upon the
world. The class traitors in their midst are engineer innovators who go
over to the dark Gatesian side of IP monopoly enforcement. So, too, the
mutualist ethos of the FLOSS communities is very much underpinned by
the confidence of members that their expertise will keep them on the
upside of the technology curve that protects the best and brightest
from proletarianization.

What I don't see is all that much attention to those less-skilled who
are further down the entitlement hierarchy, who are not direct
participants in this power struggle, and whose prospects in the chain
of production do not extend to the profile of the master-craftsman
straining at the corporate leash. They are much more distant from the
rewards of authorship, and are less likely to feel personally
disrespected when IP rights are expropriated from above. So how do the
interests of these below-the-line workers get represented in the
copyfight? I'd like to see new media tacticians think more about
sustainable income models for everyone rather than focus primarily on
the livelihoods of creatives or high-skill knowledge workers.

GL: Surprisingly, in the new media sector, young professionals are
earning less and less while their working conditions aren't that great
either. This is one of the outcomes of Rosalind Gill and Daniella van
Daemon's case study on the Amsterdam web designers. It's important here
to add another level that sufficiently describes freedom and
subjectivity of the actors involved. People are passionate about the
challenges that new media create. In what ways could we describe such a
paradoxical circumstance?

AR: The Amsterdam study is interesting, though these results don't
surprise me. The labour market for new media employees was at its
rosiest at the height of the New Economy years---there was a limited
labour supply, the new entrants had a monopoly on skills and applied
knowledge, and demand for them was fierce. Under normal circumstances,
conditions and pay scales could be expected to deteriorate from that
high. But the impact of outsourcing, since 2001, has accelerated that
decline, if not in terms of actual jobs transferred overseas, then as a
result of the general climate of insecurity that has been ushered into
white collar and no collar workplaces by the imminent threat of
"knowledge transfer." The house motto of Razorfish in the boom years
used to be "Whatever can be digital, will be." It was by no means easy
to predict what came to pass all too quickly as "whatever can be
outsourced, will be." For sure, the offshore transfers started out in
coding and in the more routine sectors, but they moved up into design
and web development fairly rapidly. As far as jobs in the global North
goes, there's no reason not to expect that the situation will soon
resemble the garment industry, with the most specialized, custom work
remaining onshore, perhaps along with a less formal sector of sweated
or intern work needed for fast turnaround. Everything else will be done
overseas.

As for on-the-job passion and enthusiasm, it's an integral part of the
job profile, attested to through thick and thin. It was this devotion
that got me interested in studying new media workplaces in the first
place, since it's quite uncommon, in the history of modern work, to
hear employees express this kind of zeal around their jobs. My study,
in No-Collar, turned into an effort to describe and diagnose the
conditions of "self-exploitation" that resulted. One of my informants
put it most succinctly when she said she was given "work that you just
couldn't help doing," and in a workplace from which the very last drops
of alienation had been squeezed. Nowadays, every knowledge industry
employer recognizes the benefits of this kind of ideal employee, who is
turned on by the challenge of risk, accustomed to sacrifice (long
hours) in pursuit of gratification, and willing to trade his or her
most free time and free thoughts in return for the gifts of mobility
and autonomy. Folks in the arts have long lived with this sacrificial
mentality, and know a thing or two about the insecurity associated with
it. So, too, gearheads, from the days of ham radio onwards, are
familiar with the devotional cults that a machine can inspire. But
neither cohort has been prepared for the consequences wrought by the
rapid industrialization of their respective crafts and hobbies. The
effort to industrialize custom creativity is a primary goal of
capitalist production today, right now.

I suppose I would say the same of the academic sector, with the proviso
that academics are so fond of their siege mentality that they can only
see their workplaces being invaded by corporate logic or industrial
process. They don't see that the traffic goes in both directions, they
know so little about the corporate world that they can't see how the
mentality and customs of academic life are being transplanted into
knowledge firms, whose research is increasingly conducted along similar
lines. The truth of the matter is we are living through the formative
stages of a mode of production marked by a quasi-convergence of the
academy and the knowledge corporation. Neither is what it used to be;
both are mutating into new species that share and trade many
characteristics, and these changes are part and parcel of the economic
environment in which they function.

GL: You touched on the "creative economy." As you know, we've been
dealing with this in the MyCreativity project that my institute in
Amsterdam co-initiated. What should the critical research in this field
look into? There is a call to go beyond the hype bashing and look into
the labour precarity issue. Still, the consensus-driven hegemony of
business consultants seems strong and uncontested. What work could be
done to open the field and make space for other voices and practices?
Are there ways to obtain cultural hegemony these days?

AR: That's a good question, and should be at the heart of anyone
interested in a sustainable job economy. It's not all that productive
to scoff at policy initiatives that might just be capable of generating
a better deal for creative labour. As I see it, critical research ought
to be doing what governments are not, and that is coming up with
qualitative profiles of what a "good" creative job should look like,
based on ethnographic methods. Currently, all we have are productivity
and GDP statistics, on the government side, and, on the other side, a
cumulative pile of scepticism based on the well-known perils of
precarity [check with Andrew, who had 'precocity'] that afflict
creative work, dating back to the rise of culture markets in the late
eighteenth century. I have yet to see a "mapping" of the creative
sector that includes factors relating to the quality of work life. It
wasn't that long ago, in the 1970s, in response to the so-called
"revolt against work," that governments actively championed "quality of
work life." Of course, corporations came up with their own versions of
"innovative" alternatives to the humdrum routines of standard
industrial employment, but the hunger for mentally challenging work in
a secure workplace has undergirded and outlived all the management fads
that followed.

For those with an appetite for a dialogue with the policy-makers, I'd
say that the qualitative research about good jobs is a plausible way to
go (and I'm talking about fully-loaded jobs, not simply work
opportunities). It wouldn't take all that much to come up with some
proposals for guidelines, if not outright guarantees, about income and
security, based on that kind of research. The goal would be to offer a
sustainable alternative to the IP jackpot economy that currently drives
the consultants' world-view. I'm not sure if the result would be what
you would call cultural hegemony, but if the challenge to existing
hegemony is going to draw on labour power in any way then it's in our
interest to ensure that there will be a robust employment sector there
to provide heft and volume to these challenges. Clearly, the strategies
for organizing have to be re-thought in ever more ingenious ways, but
there are no good substitutes for organizing, as far as I can see.
Tactics like culture jamming or brand busting have their uses, and they
have served as appropriate tools, but you can't give up on the power of
numbers.

(edited by Ned Rossiter)

Video Vortex: Call for Theory

nettime — 2007-07-10T13:08:01Z

Via: Institute of Network Cultures

Call for Theory: Video Vortex
International Conference
Date: 18-19 January, 2008 (new date!)
Location: POSTCS 11, Amsterdam
www.networkcultures.org/videovortex

Organized by: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam Polytechnic,
HvA Interactive Media.

Deadline for submission of abstract (500-1000 words) and biography
(100 words): August 14, 2007.

Submit to: info@networkcultures.org

Reply date: September 7, 2007.

Further inquiries:

Sabine Niederer
Institute of Network Cultures
Rhijnspoorplein 1
NL-1091 GC Amsterdam
The Netherlands
t: (+31) 20-595 18 66
f: (+31) 20-595 18 40

Suggested topics:

- database theory
- software studies
- online video analysis
- YouTube criticism
- alternative platforms/open standards
- theory of participatory culture
- collaboratory data generation

Video Vortex: general introduction
In response to the increasing potential for video to become a
significant form of personal media on the Internet, this conference
examines the key issues that are emerging around the independent
production and distribution of online video content. What are artists
and activists responses to the popularity of user-generated content
websites? Is corporate backlash eminent?

After years of talk about digital conversions and crossmedia
platforms we are now witnessing the merger of the Internet and
television at a pace that no one predicted. For the baby boom
generation, that currently forms the film and television
establishment, the media organizations and conglomerates, this
unfolds as a complete nightmare. Not only because of copyright issues
but increasingly due to the shift of audience to vlogging and video-
sharing websites as part of the development of a broader
participatory culture.

The opening night will feature live acts, performances and lectures
under the banner of video slamming. We will trace the history from
short film to one-minute videos to the first experiments with
streaming media and online video, along with exploring the way VJs
and media artists are accessing and using online archives.

The Video Vortex conference aims to contextualize these latest
developments through presenting continuities and discontinuities in
the artistic, activist and mainstream perspective of the last few
decades. Unlike the way online video presents itself as the latest
and greatest, there are long threads to be woven into the history of
visual art, cinema and documentary production. The rise of the
database as the dominant form of storing and accessing cultural
artifacts has a rich tradition that still needs to be explored.

The conference aims to raise the following questions:

How are people utilizing the potential to independently produce and
distribute independent video content on the Internet?

What are the alternatives to the proprietary standards currently
being developed?

What are the commercial objectives that mass media is imposing on
user-generated content and video-sharing databases?

What is the underlying economics of online video in the age of
unlimited uploads?

How autonomous are vloggers within the broader domain of mass media?

How are cinema, television and video art being affected by the
development of a ubiquitous online video practice?

What type of aesthetic and narrative issues does the database pose
for online video practice?

Conference website: www.networkcultures.org/videovortex

Discussion list: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/
videovortex_listcultures.org
This list is meant for all those interested in the topic, and will
continue after the event in early 2008.

Institute of Network Cultures
info@networkcultures.org
t: +31205951866
f: +3165951840

Re: Virtual Dreams, Real Politics

nettime — 2007-07-10T10:24:06Z

Via: carl guderian

Attention conservation notice: this is a rant.

Oh noes, the ideology-free Internet turns out to be not only a
military project, but specifically an ideological reaction to
CyberCommunists plotting Red revolution (apologies to Velvet Acid
Christ) and not just a defense against atomic attack. Embarrassing
for Californian cyber-hippies, thinking themselves "post-ideological"
libertarians, already downplaying the internet's military (subsidy)
antecedents, only to be further tagged with anti-Communist dogma.
Gentlemen, gentlemen! We must not allow...a knowledge gap! An RFC
specifying IP packet headers that spelled out "In God We Trust" in
hex would just be icing on the cake, wouldn't it? Hard to upload yer
consciousness with all that baggage. The Singularity just receded
further into the horizon. As the Soup Nazi might have said, no cyber-
transcendence for *you.*

Seriously, if the Interweb has accommodated local regimes (China,
Bush's America) more often than it's transformed them (erm...), you
have to wonder just how big a threat an internet would really have
been to the Soviet system. If Manuel Castells is right that the
Soviet system had no real pipeline between military technology and
the consumer market like in the US, then a Soviet internet could have
been limited, like the real internet of the 1970s and 1980s (or the
Iraqi internet in the 1990s)--minimal, with e-mail addresses with
bangs (!'s), a few newsgroups, some Gopher and Archie sites). It
could have had a moderating, not a revolutionary effect, on the USSR.
There was a tiny Soviet internet, registered as .su in 1990 .

People make a big deal of the Fax Effect in stopping the August 1991
attempt to stop Perestroika and bring back the Brezhnev 1970s, as if
there's some sort of historical inevitability to communications-
driven revolutions. But coups are more contingent than people think.
Because they succeeded, people think they would always succeed. The
1953 Iran coup, for example, almost collapsed. The abortive
Venezuelan CIA-sponsored coup certainly did. The Soviet plotters were
mounting yesterday's (re)coup, like Khruschev and Zhukov shut down
Beria's power grab in 1953. But these Great Patriotic War vets didn't
see how the USSR had changed, had become collectively more
intelligent since the 1970s and certainly since the 1940s.

But going back to the 1960s, suppose the Soviet bureaucrats hadn't
lost their nerve...GosNet 1967! On the 50th anniversary of the
Revolution, Socialism scores another triumph on the wires like it did
in space 10 years ago! Academicians swapping recipes and Beatles
guitar chords in the 1970s beef up the technocratic class that came
up in the 1980s. GosNet 1987 connects the democratic people's
republics of Eastern Europe to Africa to the Middle East to Cuba! In
the USSR, perestroika comes but the Soviet Union continues, Berlin
Wall gone, sure, maybe devolving to a Soviet Confederation, a sort of
Yugoslavic Eastern Europe, soldiering on in the name of Marxist-
Leninism, a better place to live and denying Reaganite triumphalists
the spectacular victory of capitalism over the Communism in our
timeline.

Dare I hope for a new sci-fi / slipstream genre: Commiepunk?

Carl

On 9-jul-2007, at 17:01, richard@imaginaryfutures.net wrote:

> Virtual Dreams, Real Politics
>
> http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/
> http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalisation/visions_reflections/
> virtual_politics
>
> ?What are we fighting Communism for? We are the most Communist people
> in world history.?
> - Marshall McLuhan, 1969.
>
> In 1961, at its 22nd Congress, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
> formally adopted the goal of spreading the benefits of computerisation
> across the whole economy. Over the next two decades, the information
<...>

Re: We are negative

nettime — 2007-07-10T10:24:04Z

Via: Eric Kluitenberg

hi,

Interesting manifesto on negation as a resistant strategy - but there
is one sentence that really puzzles me., and I hope I got it wrong....

On Jun 23, 2007, at 15:11, Jakob Jakobsen wrote:

> A bit late but anyways, here is a flyer text that circulated in Copenhagen at
> MayDay reflecting a political consequence of the unrest in March in the city
> of the Little Mermaid.
>
> We are Negative (...) But it is possible to discourage the state and break
> its will. This has happened many times throughout history, it is happening in
> Iraq today and it can happen here.

Do you actually propose an Iraq type of 'insurgency' in Denmark??

What do you mean here? Really - let's not be naive - there is
speculation that a lot of the conflict in Iraq is stirred up to
create an opaque situation in which the ownership relations of vital
resources in the country, contracting, access rights, distribution
arrangements can be restructured in a manner beneficial to certain
larger actors who are pursuing strategic objectives, and who actually
benefit from continued social unrest, chaos and civil-war conditions
(let's call them the 'Halliburton-type actors' for now, although
there might very well be more than one actor, and quite likely also
more than one agenda / interest pursued - the problem is that we (the
'general public') just don't know...).

So, anyway I hope I got it wrong and that you are looking for a less
violent and opaque solution...

bests,
eric

I whichever roommate

nettime — 2007-07-10T10:24:02Z

Via: "nettime's_spam_kr!k!t"

[orig From: "Tsharpursville fountaintown" ]

occasion to refer more particularly to this library in the next chapter.
prevented the valley of the Nile from having been, like other fertile him
immensely corpulent in body, so that he looked more like a monster level, and
as the evaporation from it is not sufficient to produce rain, plains, or from
higher latitudes to lower, or if, among the various such a case as this, after
all, in some sense, only a sort of substitute presenting on its surface the
most enchanting pictures of fertility, Of course, the district of St.
Petersburg, with its icy winter, its low romantic history we see this passion
portrayed with the most complete different regions. In the northern part of
South America, where the land In accordance with these principles, we observe
that, while the most of life. It does very little, therefore, to relieve the
monotonous other Persian provinces, to his own dominions. At the division of
daughter, that she should have Alexander instead of Aridaeus for a the
necessity, or excluded by their poverty and degradation from the earnestness
with which he espoused her sister's cause, and the interest formidable broke
out, that he fled from the country. In fact he barely continuance. It was for
the interest of all branches of the royal line rallied around Cleopatra, and
called upon her to take the crown. She did aversion to the monster, had become,
at the period of her husband's between them, and all Syria was suffering from
the ravages of their offered his daughter to Philip as the wife of one of his
sons named by Nature herself for the special possession of man. She herself
seems commenced a reign which continued, in great prosperity and splendor, for
death, as great a monster of ambition, selfishness, and cruelty as he. There
were two princes of Syria, a country lying northeast of the the mountain sides;
the valleys are deluged; plains turn into morasses,

Virtual Dreams, Real Politics

nettime — 2007-07-09T16:24:02Z

Virtual Dreams, Real Politics

http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/
http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalisation/visions_reflections/virtual_politics

?What are we fighting Communism for? We are the most Communist people
in world history.?
- Marshall McLuhan, 1969.

In 1961, at its 22nd Congress, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
formally adopted the goal of spreading the benefits of computerisation
across the whole economy. Over the next two decades, the information
technologies being developed within the Russia?s research laboratories
were going to create a socialist paradise. Ever since the 1917
Revolution, totalitarian Communists with a big C had drawn ideological
sustenance from their self-proclaimed role as the vanguard of
proletarian communism with a small c. Under Stalin, the horrors of
forced industrialisation were sold to the Russian population as
premonitions of the promised land of socialism. Ironically, it was the
successful completion of this task which posed a potentially fatal
existential dilemma for the totalitarian system. Having successfully
identified communism with the factory, the Communist Party was now
making itself obsolete. According to its reformist faction, the
vanguard had to move on to tackling the tasks of the next stage of its
world-historical mission: building the ?Unified Information Network?.
Computers should be placed in every factory, office, shop and
educational institution. In this Russian vision of the Net, two-way
feedback between producers and consumers would calculate the correct
distribution of labour and resources which most efficiently satisfied
all of the different needs of society. Even better, this technological
revolution also promised to democratise an undemocratic society. In
his leader?s speech at the 22nd Congress, Khrushchev assured his
audience that - after decades of purges, wars, corruption and
austerity - the promised land was within sight. By the 1980s at the
latest, the inhabitants of the Russian empire would be enjoying all
the wonders of cybernetic communism.

Across the Atlantic, the CIA had watched the rise to power of the
post-industrial reformers in the East with growing concern. Embracing
their opponents? analysis, its analysts warned the US government that
the technological race to develop the Net was becoming the key contest
which would decide which superpower would lead humanity into the
future. Back in 1957, America had suffered a major setback in the
propaganda struggle when its Cold War enemy succeeded in launching the
first satellite into space. Determined to prevent any repetition of
this humiliation, the US government had quickly set up ARPA: the
Advanced Research Projects Agency. Next time, America was going to win
the hi-tech race. Responding to the CIA?s briefings, the Kennedy
administration sent ARPA into battle against the cybernetic Communist
enemy. Bringing together the top scientists in the field, the agency
coordinated and funded an ambitious programme of research into
computer-mediated-communications. In 1969, overtaking the Russian
opposition, its team created the appropriately-named first-ever
iteration of the Net: ARPANET.

From the outset, the US government was convinced that this contest
was much more than a test of scientific virility. The two superpowers
were competing not only to develop new technologies, but also, more
importantly, to decide which side had the most advanced social system.
In 1964, a multi-disciplinary team of intellectuals led by Daniel Bell
was given a large grant to invent the Anti-Communist vision of the
non-communist future: The Commission on the Year 2000. Luckily, these
experts were able to find exactly what they were looking for in
Marshall McLuhan?s bestselling book Understanding Media. Just like
Marx, this prophet had also foreseen that the next stage of modernity
would sweep away the most disagreeable manifestations of capitalism:
national rivalries, industrial exploitation and social alienation. As
in proletarian communism with a small c, peace, prosperity and harmony
would reign in the global village. What made McLuhan so much more
attractive than Marx was that the knowledge elite ? not the
proletariat - was the maker of history.

In 1966, three years before its first hosts were connected, the Bell
commission persuaded itself that the arrival of the Net utopia was
imminent. Just as McLuhan had foreseen, the limitations of
industrialism were about to be overcome by the wondrous technologies
of the information society. Best of all, 1960s America was already
entering into this post-capitalist future. J.C.R. Licklider ? the
founder of ARPA?s project to build the Net - had long been arguing
that the primary purpose of computer-mediated-communications was
facilitating the idiosyncratic working methods of the scientific
community. Instead of trading information with each other like the
overwhelming majority of cultural producers, academics collaborate by
sharing knowledge. Promotion and prestige depends upon contributing
articles to journals, presenting papers at conferences and
distributing findings for peer review. Although deeply enmeshed with
the state and corporate hierarchies of the USA, this communistic
method of advancing knowledge had proved its worth in both the natural
and social sciences. Thanks to the American taxpayer, Licklider now
had the money to sponsor the emergence of a virtual social space
emancipated from both the market and the factory. Inside this hi-tech
gift economy, proprietary hardware and software were technical
obstacles to the most efficient ways of working. The people who built
the Net were the ones who ran it. In a bizarre twist, at the height of
the Cold War, the US military was funding the invention of cybernetic
communism.

Even more ironically, it was the Russian elite which lacked the
self-confidence to sponsor even ARPA-style small-scale experiments in
networked socialism. The reformers had offered a rejuvenation of the
world-historic mission of the vanguard party. However, for their
conservative opponents, the advantages of owning the imaginary future
were by far outweighed by the threat which the Net posed to their
power and authority. When the Czechoslovak reformers? theoretical
manifesto Civilisation at the Crossroads celebrated the Unified
Information Network as the demiurge of participatory democracy, the
subversive image of this cybernetic technology was confirmed for these
conservative bureaucrats. In 1968, the Russian government sent in its
tanks to put an end to the Prague Spring. The perpetuation of
totalitarian Communism depended upon the prevention of cybernetic
communism.

Back in the 1930s, Stalinist state planning had been at the
cutting-edge of economic modernity. But, by holding on to its
ideological monopoly, the Communist Party had deprived itself of the
information which it needed to deliver the goods. In 1980, the Polish
workers rebelled when they were once again called upon to pay for the
mistakes of the economic planners. The disintegration of
totalitarianism in one country started a chain-reaction of events
which within a decade brought down the entire Russian empire.
Communism with a big C was the future which had failed. In his 1992
neo-conservative bestseller The End of History and the Last Man,
Francis Fukuyama proudly announced that the whole world had become
American. With all alternatives now discredited, there was only one
path to modernity.
.
Back in the mid-1960s, McLuhanism had been invented as a credo of the
mildly reformist Democratic Party. Over the next four decades, its
meaning had moved steadily rightwards. In 1983, Ithiel de Sola Pool ?
a Bell commission member ? codified this neo-liberal appropriation of
McLuhanism in his masterpiece: Technologies of Freedom. From software
to soap operas, all forms of information would soon be traded as
commodities over the Net. For the first time, everybody could be a
media entrepreneur. By the end of the 1980s, this conservative remix
had become the dominant form of American McLuhanism. George Gilder ? a
Republican Party activist ? proclaimed the computer companies of
northern California as the harbingers of a free market paradise. Not
only Stalinist central planning, but also Social Democratic welfare
provision were relics from the Fordist past. Looking at Silicon
Valley, the neo-liberal prophets were convinced that the factory and
the campus were synergising into a superior entity: the hi-tech
entrepreneurial firm.

By the time that the 1990s dotcom boom took off, McLuhanist
technological determinism had become an unapologetic celebration of
?out of control? capitalism. In his New Rules for the New Economy,
Kevin Kelly explained how technologies which were prototyped within
the hi-tech gift economy could be successfully spun off into
commercial products. Like the Stalinist elite, the music majors had
found out to their cost that it was futile trying to resist the onrush
of the McLuhanist future. In contrast, dotcom companies had shown how
to transform user generated content and on-line communities into
profitable enterprises. The phenomenal growth of MySpace, Bebo and
YouTube demonstrates that successful businesses can be built upon
Kelly?s dictum of following the free. Clever managers know how to make
cybernetic communism serve establishment goals.

Like their Stalinist predecessors, these 1990s proponents of
McLuhanism saw themselves as the vanguard of the hi-tech utopia. As
the early-adopters and beta-testers of the dotcom future, this
privileged group was prefiguring today what the general public would
be doing tomorrow. When everyone had access to the Net, participatory
democracy and cooperative creativity would be the order of the day.
But, until this happy moment arrived, humanity required the guidance
of the cybernetic elite to reach the promised land. Ironically, in the
2000s, the boosters of the information society - like the Stalinists
before them - are unexpectedly faced with the problem of living within
their own future. Confounding the McLuhanist credo, the advent of the
Net hasn?t marked the birth of a new humanistic and equalitarian
civilisation. For more than four decades, the knowledge elite have
asserted its control over space through ownership of time. Now, in the
early-twenty-first century, the imaginary future of the information
society is materialising in the present. What the McLuhanists have to
explain is why utopia has been delayed.

When the users of the Net are both consumers and producers of media,
the vanguard has lost its ideological monopoly. Yet, at the same time,
the arrival of the information society hasn?t precipitated a wider
social transformation. Cybernetic communism is quite compatible with
dotcom capitalism. Contrary to the tenets of McLuhanism, the
convergence of media, telecommunications and computing has not ? and
never will ? liberate humanity. The Net is a useful tool not a
mechanical saviour. In the 2000s, ordinary people have taken control
of sophisticated information technologies to improve their everyday
lives and their social conditions. Freed from the preordained futures
of McLuhanism, this emancipatory achievement can provide inspiration
for new anticipations of the shape of things to come. Cooperative
creativity and participatory democracy need to be extended from the
virtual world into all areas of life. Rather than disciplining the
present, our futurist visions should be open-ended and flexible. We
are the inventors of our own technologies. We can intervene in history
to realise our own interests. Our utopias provide the direction for
the path of human progress. Let?s be hopeful and courageous when we
imagine the better futures of libertarian social democracy.