We propose to develop a cooperative, open-content research format that will facilitate a detailed theoretical debate on the historical relations between technological and political transformations, culminating in studies of the present crisis of "informationalism" or the "network society." Building on existing concepts of the technological paradigm, we seek to enlarge the current horizons of research by establishing a chronological framework to track developments in the arts and the communications media as well as changing patterns of consumption, circulation, self-organization and political mobilization. The resulting more broadly integrated model of technopolitics will allow individual researchers to develop their own applications of shared concepts and resources, thus contributing to an informational commons and an enriched public sphere.
Vanguard Groups, Parties and Networks
Deliberate, idea driven, aesthetic, political and scientific-scholarly interventions by relatively small and disciplined groups.
Class, Gender and Ethnic Rights
Social movements, but also subcultural groups and communities involved in class and rights struggles and/or nursing divergent cultural values over the medium and long term which become particularly relevant during explosive moments.
Regional Blocks
The regional blocks are an important intermediate layer defining protocols.
Migratory Regimes
Norms, laws and technologies regulating the flows of people across sovereign borders.
Military Infrastructure and Strategies
Sovereign and Subaltern Military Strategies and the impact of military infrastructure on global protocols.
Trade law and liberalisation mechanisms
Expressed by institutions and conventions such as WTO, or MAI, or regional and bilateral mechanisms of securing liberalisation and managing on the level of abstract process, seemless flows.
Techno-scientific norms and standards
Technological standards such as TCP/IP, bodies such as the ITU, norms of air traffic, radio spectrum regulation, etc.
Monetary Dis-Order
Every period is characterised by a certain currency exchange regime and monetary regime. Examples would be the gold standard, fixed or floating exchange rates. Role of central banks and monetary policy and high-finance.
Core Values
Core values such as nationalism, enlightenment values, religion, work ethics or localisms.
Institutions and Relations of Care
In Marxist language the sphere of reproduction, but there is a distinction to be made between classic institutions of care for dependend people and the more molecular far less weakly institutionalised set of relations that are ultimately more important, regarding the ways humans care for each other either within families or in other relationships.
Consumption Norms
The motivation that individuals have to realise the value of the product.
Administration and Legal Apparatus
These are the institutions that provide the local codes and standards that allow the intregrative process to happen.
Wage Relation, Conflicts and Bargaining
The characteristics of the wage relation. A type of that would be a seniority based salary. Also forms of conflict resolution and baragining. The classical form is industrial action and collective bargaining, but in fact capital firms encounter many other forms of resistance and conflict, having as content environmental issues, conditions of work and rights claims.
Financing
How corporations raise money in order to grow and to survive the low points in the business cycle. How to, in business terms, sustain a cash flow that allows to survive and grow.
Market Structures and Distribution
How a distribution system creates a viable market for a product. The realisation of value in Marxist terms.
Organisational Forms
An assembly line can be an organisational form not just a technology. Other examples would be the networked firm or outsourcing or Just-In-Time production.
Post-Privacy or the Politics of Labour, Intelligence and Information
This text argues that the erosion of privacy is not a by-product of information and communication technologies, but a systemic property of informational capitalism. The foundational myths of the information society motivate and legitimise the building of control systems applying probabilistic techniques to control future risks. At the root of this configuration are antagonistic labour relationships which have determined the path of technological development since the Industrial Revolution. Those tendencies have reached a culmination in the recent neo-liberal crisis. The digital commons offers itself as an incomplete and tentative remedy.
Beyond the Regulation Approach
A book by the leading English-language regulationist, Bob Jessp, with co-author Ngai-Ling Sum, focusing on the characterization of Fordism, its breakdown and ways to characterize the period "after Fordism" in its qualitative differences, particularly due to the fully global and therefore, multicivilizational dimensions of the new regime of accumulation.
Periodisations
New comment: As I have noted somewhere in these discussions, I propose that as a a starting point economic 'cycles' should have a strong role in periodisation, because without those, we are moving outside the Kondratieff framework. Periods would then be simply named after perceived leading technologies, they would represent 'paradigms' but what drives the transition from one to the other would be difficult to argue.
A Logistical Explanation
This text by Brian Ashton, which appeared on OpenMute http://www.metamute.org/en/Logistics-Factory-Without-Walls, and was forwarded to me by a friend of mine, covers some interesting issues on logistics and Just-In-Time production.
