Technopolitics

Tracing Information Society – A Timeline

drupaladmin — Thu, 26 Nov 2015 08:08:01 +0000

Tracing Information Society is the new project of the Technopolitics Working Group. This text was collectively written on the occasion of the Technopolitics Salon@Social Glitch where the timeline project was discussed together with two respondents, Aneta Stojnić and Noit Banai, and the audience.

Rewind: Grexit and the Politics of Self-destruction (after Polanyi)

Armin Medosch — Sat, 27 Jun 2015 08:05:57 +0000

The Greek Referendum Alexis Tsipras has announced last night, June 26th 2015, is probably the best they can do. The story that has been going on here was one, where from the very start, the new Greek government was insisting that this was political and could only be solved by heads of state, while the creditors - and we are to be reminded who they are, the governments and nations of the Eurozone, the European Central Bank and the IMF - kept insisting that this was a technical issue which Greeks had to solve with the "Troika" rechristened as "institutions".

Die post-anthropologische Kondition? (Ankündigung)

drupaladmin — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 16:32:38 +0000

Immer mehr Bereiche der menschlichen Kultur werden von technologischen Entwicklungen erfasst, die man der Automatisierung zurechnen kann. Die Technowissenschaften haben ein Niveau erreicht, das es ihnen ermöglicht, Natur nicht nur zu erforschen oder zu verstehen, sondern aktiv zu gestalten. Der Salon Technopolitics macht die post-anthropologische Kondition zum Thema, im Rahmen von Vienna Open.

Technopolitics in a Nutshell: Commented Reading List on Key Categories

Armin Medosch — Tue, 25 Feb 2014 09:58:38 +0000

This article presents in overview form some of the key categories of Technopolitics together with essential reading. Technopolitics is a project that has began as a collaboration between Brian Holmes and me on these pages in 2010. Since 2011 a Technopolitics working group exists in Vienna. There is a lot of additional material which you can find spread out over Thenextlayer, so I thought for newcomers its time to collect a few basic references.

Contradictions of a Tiger Cub, Part I

Armin Medosch — Sun, 12 Jan 2014 10:51:32 +0000

Video sequence taken during recent Vietnam trip. What strikes me is the contradicition between Vietnam's apparent dynamism, allegedly having joined the club of fast growing economies as a 'tiger cub' - in reference to the other Asian 'tiger economies' such as Taiwan, South Korea or Thailand - while at the same time this catching up modernisation process starts from a very low level.

Check out this river view of a village between Can Tho and Cai Be, in the Mekong delta.

Periodization, again

Brian Holmes — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 18:46:49 +0000

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

John Barker — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 09:24:37 +0000

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

Armin Medosch — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 17:14:45 +0000

Topic:

Special tag:

Technopolitics

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

doll_yoko — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 07:45:27 +0000

Topic:

Special tag:

Technopolitics

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.

So what will the 6th Kondratiev look like?

Brian Holmes — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 15:28:01 +0000

Industrial investment at the end of the Great Recession will likely be in the new generation of robots, used in both manufacturing and distribution.

Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring

doll_yoko — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:27:47 +0000

Topic:

Special tag:

Technopolitics

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

doll_yoko — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 01:01:25 +0000

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

Armin Medosch — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 09:10:53 +0000

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.

Down by Law: HADOPI's diluted graduated response, iiNet's battle with Big Content

doll_yoko — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:30:27 +0000

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

Three Crises: 30s-70s-Now. A self-organized seminar at Mess Hall in Chicago.

Brian Holmes — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 03:48:09 +0000

Here is the outline of an autonomous technopolitics course which I plan to co-teach next fall with a Chicago collective. The focus is on US conditions but it's meant to have use-value for everyone involved, whether close or afar. Significant comments will result in changes to the outline. Selected readings and a full bibliography will eventually be added.