English

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.

Ten Postulates for Technopolitics

The point of the technopolitics project is not so much to carry out an original historical analysis of industrial capitalism, but instead, to test and modify the existing theories and then use them for engaged cultural critique. That requires a lot of reading and evaluating of ideas. To get through the existing literature without getting lost along the way, we’ll periodically have to reformulate what we're talking about. Each reformulation will add something, subtract something, forget something; but the essence is to keep on working cooperatively. To that end I want to propose ten postulates. They revisit what has already been written in the programmatic text on technopolitics, but with a different emphasis, mainly in terms of geography, culture and the cumulative nature of historical sequences. They're not set in stone, just some departure points, and it may be that a magical eleventh postulate is needed. Here they are:

Vision in Networks (1)

Whether it originates from statistical tabulation or remote sensors, whether it flows in real time or out of recombinant databases, whether it serves the needs of private individuals, globe-spanning corporations or government agencies, information visualization is the operative technology of the networked age, a language of vision for the control society. Infoviz proliferates on the screens of factory workstations, financial trading floors, military commands and surveillance watchspots, everywhere that decisive movements are subject to managerial scrutiny.

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.

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