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.

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.

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.