The Next Layer is a collaborative environment combining open source, experimental and artistic research methodologies.
Escaping the Digital Enclosures 1: Networked Battlegrounds produced by the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)
File-sharing has continued to expand over the past decade regardless of some landmark legal wins against peer-to-peer companies, torrent aggregator websites, and individual file-sharers.
Smelling the Rat: Technopolitics@Boem (Workshop)
Public Presentation and Discussion, 8 pm CET, Saturday March 5, 2011: The financial crisis of 2008 and the resulting fiscal crisis now unfolding throughout the developed world should have finally made it clear to all that neoliberalism as a political ideology is finished. But neoliberal recipes prevail in the official sphere of politics while several other crises loom, from an ecological crisis to an energy and food crisis to a crisis of education and the political systems. Meanwhile, no clear unifying political agenda is visible on the horizon. Is it not possible to begin searching for a concerted response by all those groups who want a different way of life?
The Stalder/Holmes debate on technopolitics
This continues the series of "Three nettime posts on the Egyptian Uprising." Felix launched this debate by suggesting that the fall of Mubarak was the end of the process of eliminating outmoded central-planning and dictatorial state-forms that started in 1989. I proposed it was beginning of the breakdown of a 30-year attempt to stabilize the new conditions of globalization. The discussion then shifted onto technopolitical ground in the posts below, as I tried to describe the paradigm of neoliberal informationalism and Felix sorted out what he would and would not accept in that description. This pushed me to finally accept (in a slightly modified form) the idea that the current crisis is a regulation crisis of informationalism. Great debate!
Do Containers Dream of Electric People?
This article is a first attempt to specify some technical and conceptual aspects of the productive process under Informationalism, and to cut through some of the ideology surrounding it. The text suggests the role of the imaginary both in enabling and potentially disabling this social form (i.e. the value-form as expressed in contemporary society); but it doesn't deal with the integrative processes. Some research on migrant labor struggles in the US intermodal and warehouse sectors is underway, so hopefully we will publish something on it soon. All comments welcome, changes can still be made. Thanks to Armin for the just-in-time critique on version 1.0.
