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Periodization, again

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Here's the difficulty I have with Kondratiev waves: it really seems to take two waves to create a complete cycle. What Perez calls a "technological style" actually unfolds over two Kondratiev waves. Between the two there is a regulation crisis with some kind of "successful" resolution (although it is very hard to call WWII "successful"); and then at the end, a kind of chaotic period during which the technological style begins to change.

BLOODY TAYLORISM AND COGNITIVE CAPITAL

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This text highlights relationships between different regimes of labour and how they are exploited by capital, in the context of textiles and clothes. Global inequalities are being exploited through the help of ICT and the general drive to labour saving techniques. What makes matters worse is that those participating as producers and consumers remain invisible to each other.

Die quantitative Revolution des Finanzwesens und dessen Crashs

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Dieser Artikel präsentiert in geraffter Form die sogenannte quantitative Revolution des Finanzwesens und dessen Crashs, aber auch dessen Widersprüche und Defizite als System. Anstatt Informationsgesellschaft sollten wir eigentlich Zeitalter des informationstechnisch gestützen Finanzkapitalismus sagen. Die paradigmatischen Leittechnologien - im technopolitischen Sinn - sind die Finanzmärkte und ihre Tools - Formeln, Bildschirme, Netzwerke, Computer. Diese "Revolution" ist begründet auf Finanzmathematik und die Computerisierung und Vernetzung der Börsen; ideologisch vollzog sie sich gleichzeitig mit dem Aufstieg des Neoliberalismus.

The Cost of Knowledge campaign: the commodification & liberation of academic research

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We humans are thinking, speaking creatures, with a theoretically limitless capacity to analyse the world around us, and, if we are lucky, to also make sense of our own internal worlds. Under informational capitalism an elite class of 'thought robbers' exploit our mental and affective capacities. We, and especially the untenured 'we', the indy intellectual 'we', or the cultural activist 'we', toil at our texts only to perhaps then witness them being padlocked inside hierarchies of knowledge which we cannot afford to access. The 'University Inc.' or 'edu-factory' and its co-dependent sibling, academic publishing, siphon the worst qualities of managerialism and profiteering to support systemised structures of knowledge enclosures. In response, the cognitariat have started to rebel. In 2012 a mathematician blogged the withdrawal of his labour from the Elsevier academic behemoth. His stance triggered worldwide solidarity. While the unfolding narrative of grassroots mobilisation resonates with the official, overly earnest Open Access movement, it seems to hold more anarchic possibilities for the cooperative creation of unfettered systems of production and exchange of knowledge.

Fieldwork, Part I: The Field as Unit and Multiplicity

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No one who suggests to do work under the title Fields should be surprised if it turns out to be fertile. Or maybe even too fertile, where the naming of the one concept, field, generates a multiplicity of connections with other things nearby, fields, whose interconnections can be thought of as pathways, channels, tracks, boundaries, trees-structures, rhizomes, lines of flight, trajectories, networks ...

Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring

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What is often called ‘digital piracy’ is nowadays a mundane and everyday activity. As such, piracy is a commonplace disorder within the order of information capitalism; it is both created by the ubiquitous orders of information capitalism and suppressed by those orders. In the myriad points of view of its participants piracy represents an order which is implicit within contemporary life, which we will call ‘pirarchy’.

The attached chapter entitled ‘Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring: systemic disruption as everyday life’ by Francesca da Rimini and Jonathan Marshall was written for the book Piracy: Leakages from Modernity edited by Martin Fredriksson and James Arvanitakis (Litwin Press, USA, forthcoming 2012, http://litwinbooks.com/piracy.php).

The JSTOR Case - US Government v Aaron Swartz

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Although we have thus far discussed P2P file-sharing in terms of its most representative instances, that is, the exchange of materials drawn from popular culture, other artefact classes are also swapped, from pornography to ‘serious’ publications. Sometimes genre-specific events can bring into focus larger issues arising from cultural commodification, public domain contraction, and resultant counter actions and movements. For example, recently American digital activist Aaron Swartz allegedly downloaded a massive number of papers from the JSTOR academic database. Subsequently the United States Government brought unprecedented charges against him, claiming that he planned to release the material through P2P networks. This case demonstrates how even the spectre of unsubstantiated file-sharing can trigger disordering responses across informational domains (academia, publishing, policing, justice), some of which which might be more rooted in emotions (anger, fear, revenge, spite, etc.) than in pragmatic circumspection.

Technopolitics - Die Grenzen der Informationsgesellschaft sprengen

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In diesem Artikel wird zunächst das Projekt Technopolitics kurz vorgestellt, was als Hintergrundinformation zur bevorstehenden Veranstaltung Technopolitics@Codedcultures am 27. September in Wien dienen soll. Im zweiten Teil werden konkrete Inhalte der Veranstaltung angesprochen. Es geht darum, über den Bildschirmrand der Informationsgesellschaft hinauszusehen und zu verstehen, inwiefern die Informationsgesellschaft mit konkreten und materiellen Entwicklungen - wie etwa Energie- und Umweltproblematik - in Verbindung steht.

Technopolitics@codedcultures: Break On Through!

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Technopolitics is a praxis oriented research project initiated by Brian Holmes and Armin Medosch. It is a self-educational project which works out a theoretic framework and vocabulary that makes complex and difficult concepts accessible to cultural producers and activists such as themselves. Technopolitics@codedcultures consists of two parts, a presentation of technopolitical issues with short talks and audivisual support materials, and a second part with a panel of respondents and open discussion with the audience.

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