Essay

Recently I and Claire Pentecost went on an artistic research trip in Argentina with local collaborators. What we call a "Continental Drift." This was a perceptual encounter with the productive processes of a country subject to intense neoliberal restructuring. Hopefully next year we will do more collaborative research in a public seminar context in Buenos Aires, both to define Argentina's position as a hi-tech agro-exporter within Neoliberal Informationalism, and to contribute in some small way to the political breakdown of that hegemony, which is being actively sought by many on the official Argentine left. In the meantime you can read the one post I wrote in English during the experience:

http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/this-way-to-the-port

Coordinated opposition had defanged the final version of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and will continue attacking other supra-national digital enclosures such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Hence powerful copyright advocates including the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) have concurrently operated outside such treaty frameworks to pressure individual governments in an ‘especially aggressive’ way to force ISPs to police copyright infringements (Bridy 2010: 2). To date Britain, France, South Korea, and Taiwan, have incorporated various forms of graduated response into their domestic copyright enforcement systems (ibid.). Furthermore, other countries are exploring ‘private ordering’ options to enforce online copyright (Bridy 2010: 11-15; Toner 2011). These range from ‘cooperative relationships’ between major content distributors and broadband providers in which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) suspend repeat infringers’ accounts (in the United States), to ISPs being the ‘sole arbiter of the customer’s innocence or guilt’ terminating accounts without court orders (in Ireland). In Australia, the ISP iiNet after winning a precedent-setting law suit brought against it by an alliance of mainly US content owners proposed a graduated response model in which an ‘independent body’ meeting ‘community standards’ mediates the interests of all parties

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.

Let’s play hide-and-seek with future generations. We hide. The seeker is not among us yet. He or she lives in another era, a time yet to come. We don’t know if he or she will be a finder. We are not even sure we want or need to be found. We might simply just jump from our lair one day, reveal ourselves, unexpectedly, to win the game.

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.

This text is a first draft, trying to identify key topics for an inquiry into the new organisation of labour. It starts with a historic analysis and then explores the notion of Post-Fordism.Specific sections are devoted to cognitive capitalism, the creative industries, informational capitalism and the split between manual and mental labour. It ends with a modest proposal for an alternative path of development.