Radical media, politics and culture.

hydrarchist's blog

- Collaborative Reputation Mechanisms in Electronic Marketplaces (Giorgos Zacharia, Alexandros Moukas, Pattie Maes: 1999) http://www.computer.org/proceedings/hicss/0001/00018/00018026.PDF

- Online Deliberative Discourse Research Project (2002) http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/projects/deliberation/

- Communication and Organization Project (2002) http://www.organizzazione.org/commorg/master_index.htm

- Managing the Virtual Commons: Cooperation and Conflict in Computer Communities (Peter Kollock, Marc Smith: 1996) http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/faculty/kollock/papers/vcommons.htm

- Media Spaces: Environments for Informal Multimedia Interaction (Wendy E. Mackay: 1999) http://www.daimi.au.dk/~mackay/pdffiles/TRENDS99.Mediaspaces.pdf

- Distributed Research Teams: Meeting Asynchronously in Virtual Space (Lia Adams, Lori Toomey, Elizabeth Churchill: 1999) http://www.fxpal.com/PapersAndAbstracts/papers/ada99.pdf

- Mudding: Social Phenomena in Text-Based Virtual Realities (Pavel Curtis) Proceedings of the 1992 Conference on the Directions and Implications of Advanced Computing, Berkeley, May 1992.

- Browsing is a Collaborative Process (Michael B. Twidale, David M. Nichols, Chris D. Paice: 1997) http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/research/cseg/projects/ariadne/docs/b cp.html

- The Hidden Web (Henry Kautz, Bart Selman, Mehul Shah: 1997) http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/kautz/papers/aimag.pdf

- Awareness: the Common Link between Groupware and Communityware (Johann Schlichter, Michael Koch, Chengmao Xu: 1998) http://www11.informatik.tu-muenchen.de/publications/pdf/Schlichter1998.pdf

- Net Surfers Don't Ride Alone (Barry Wellman, Milena Gulia: 1997) http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/netsurfers/netsurfers...

- Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community (Judith Donath: 1996) http://smg.media.mit.edu/people/Judith/Identity/IdentityDeception.html

- Self Without Body: Textual Self-Representation in an Electronic Community (Mark Giese: 1998) http://www.firstmonday.dk/issues/issue3_4/giese/index.html

- Strength of Weak Ties (M. Granovetter) American Journal of Sociology, (78):1360-1380, 1973.

This last week has somehow been swallowed by procrastination and the million details involved in actually kicking the wireless thing off for real. Thursday we're back to Acrobax with Jamie.

Posse Derive Approdi Florain Schneider Mako

crap site led to the loss of my rant

Danish DVD manufacturer Kiss Technology, who released the first DivX compatible DVD reader last October, have now released an update to their firmware to support the non-proprietary audio standard Ogg Vorbis.

The DVD Player DP-450 unit retails at 470 euros.

Florian and Jamie arrive in the next days, so we're going to seize the opportunity and hold a wireless workshop as part of the initaitive for a Roman Hub..... Something of a surprise to find that lots of the people at the meeting clearly felt an acute need to work on the politics of information and communication; looks like the zeitgeist is about to be surfed.

Mesh networking has long been the golden fleece we seek, so it seems that the experiments if possible will take place with tech [rather expensive] from http://uk.locustworld.com/. They are now producing MeshAP boxes.

Amidst great fanfare, media set-pieces, fine food and excellent, the great and the good of states International Organisations and NGOs will discuss technology, 'information' and development. Fine words will be uttered about the digital divide, the importance of technology in the development process. Wireless telephony will be hailed as having brought connectivity to areas historically neglected by an expensive physical infrastructure. Satellite operators will push for their technology to be adopted as a means for providing broadband access. But the meeting will be troubled, deja vu will strike some of the particpants cause cognitive dissonance. Because there is a specter haunting the WSIS, the specter of the New International Information Order, product of the last great assault on free market communications power, and motivation behind the United States departure from UNESCO in 1984, followed by the United Kingdom and Singapore shortly thereafter.

THE FIGHT AGAINST GM FOODS RENÉ RIESEL SUPPORT COMMITTEE

On 19 November 2002 the Appeals Court confirmed the sentencing of both José Bové and René Riesel to fourteen months in prison and payment of €19,725 each in legal costs, interest and fines; Dominique Soullier received a six-month suspended prison sentence and a fine. Their crime was the destruction of a transgenic-rice nursery at the state-supported CIRAD research centre in Montpellier in June 1999.

These prison terms are the provisional epilogue of a struggle undertaken in 1997 against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) by the Confédération Paysanne/Farmers' Confederation, of which union René Riesel was at that time secretary-general (he left the organization in March 1999). The action against CIRAD in Montpeller was supported by the Intercontinental Caravan (People’s Global Action). This same Caravan had been planning an action against the AZF factory in Toulouse before the catastrophic explosion there in 2001.

In the wake of the Appeals Court ruling René Riesel's first choice was not to seek a Presidential pardon but to file a request for non-revocation of the suspension of the eight-month prison sentence to which he was condemned at Agen in February 1998 for destroying transgenic maize seed belonging to Novartis. If successful, this procedure could reduce Riesel's prison term from fourteen to six months. A decision will be handed down in Montpellier on 29 January 2003. Until then Riesel is free. At the same time he is under indictment, along with eleven other people, for an action carried out in May 2000, at Namur in Belgium, against the cultivation of Monsanto transgenic beet and rapeseed. The accused are to appear in court at Namur on 10 March 2003.

Less than a month after the Appeals Court decision, the French Academy of Sciences and Academy of Medecine and Pharmacy have both given their approval to the growing of genetically modified food. In actuality their reports merely rubber-stamp a decision, already taken at the European level and embodied in successive measures passed on 28 November and 9 December 2002, to end the moratorium on the cultivation of GM foods. Even this moratorium, which never amounted to much, and which is thus now on the way out, would never have been imposed had it not been for the actions of people like José Bové et René Riesel. The reason why this Committee has chosen to support René Riesel in particular is twofold: first, his attitude has in every circumstance remained consistent and determined; secondly, unlike Bové et Soullier, he has no trade-union support. Our goal is to disseminate the facts concerning his situation and to collect funds to help him cover the costs imposed on him by the justice system. As we await a new mobilisation around the judgements at Montpellier (29 January 2003) and Namur (10 March 2003), we invite everyone to disseminate this text as widely as possible.

Paris, 7 January 2003.

To support René Riesel: Checks/money orders may be made payable to "René Riesel" to cover fines, and to "Association COSEDI" (Association against Scientistic Obscurantism and Industrial Despotism) to cover damages and interest and legal costs. Please send all contributions to: Boîte 19, 52 rue Damrémont, 75018 Paris, France. To contact the René Riesel Support Committee: send e-mail to: soutien.riesel@tiscali.fr; or write to: Comité de soutien en faveur de René Riesel, 3 rue Xaintrailles, 75013 Paris, France.

Elsewhere I provided a brief report about the self-managed Hub space that took place duriong but external to the European Social Forum in November. As is frequently the case here in Italy people were anxious to move on to the next ten things as opposed to engaging in some serious dissection and reflection on the experince, to the extent that the notes documenting related to the closing plenary were never in fact completed. What was producved can be found here:

Key problems were: - a miscalculation as to the extent of the impact of the Official Forum - inadequate organisation - a low level of self-organisation that meant that the Italians, to their credit, effectively put on a show for the rest. - insufficient social space, too activist-centred - an inability to interven on the level of disruptive actions that could pose the difference between our perspectives and those of the institutionalised left, including the NGOs. - persistence of crypto-hierarchies in the decision making structure - failure to generate new tools for documenting discussion and pivital decision moments - the total absence of any follow up, whether of the sessions themselves or the conclusions of the discussiona nd workshops (what happened in the democracy workshop for example!)

That Acrobax have issued this call is extremely positive as the need for propagating a practice and culture of self-management is sharpened rather than dissipated by the onward march of the process of social democratic recomposition known as the Social Forum and the leninist disobeddienti.

Self-organisation must pose itself as a constitutive political proposition, as a choice open to application and capable of delivering real gains. The real critique of the WSF process is the critique of actions. As Jamie put it elsewhere:

The movement must solve the question of how to 'represent the unrepresentable' to prevent future WSFs from occuring. The questions of knowledge sharing, community decision making, possible infrastructures for many-to-many and peer-to-peer communications, and the status of free circulation of information against privacy and security, are critical in this respect, since it seems likely that the movement will have to pose multitudinous political involution against spectacular representality in order to depotentiate attempts by sovereigntists to close down avenues for such representation that are anyway inimical to its form.

How to tackle the sunk networks of power, deeply imbricated in the personal relations of protagonists of recent years and the relative weight accorded to individuals views based on the most unpredictable variables, means by definition that this problem is only addressable in part through technical and dsicursive means: elements are too rooted culturally to be amenaple to prefunctory expiation by enraged hierarachy-trashers.

"Indeed, those discussions are necessary at every level, both to fight the emergence of the crypto-hierarchies that are troubling the movement at a variety of levels, and to begin to find ways of creating a public decision-making structure that can truly enact the distributed will of the multitude that Negri once spoke of so optimistically."

(Jamie) Social movements have some hierarchies that have passed untroubled by the egalitarian wave, particularly those intellectual vectors that have always exercised a guidance function over sections of the street movement and thgis is all particularly evident in the cobntext of the disobeddienti-posse-negri nexus. The hazard in addressing this is the temptation to lapse into a crude anti-intellectualism rather than positing the problem as one of recognition for the social authorship of ideas and events. Plumbing the depths of the anti-copyright argument to its logiocal conclusion means not only a rejection of the proprietary luxuries afforded to the few stars of the system but also the socialisation of the cultural capital that accrues in other cuurencies. A GPL for ideas, thus, a change in perspective and the abolition of the individual/collectivity tension, no less. Otherwsie our diviusions, ruptyres, the gold of our international, is of no use to us, influenced as it is by the most abject gossip, manipulation, ego-clashes and sexual intrigue. These are all beautufukl aspects of our humanity but are no less inimical to our ambitions for that.

Cory Dotorow is a fine fellow, and I enjoyed the two novels he kindly posted in advance of our shinding. Now 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", containing his speculations on the potential inflections of a post-scarcity world where wealth is measured in whuffie, or tokens of respect or admiration awarded by peers, has been published.

Being a righteous chap and busy beaver in the people's struggle against tyrannical copyright laws, Cory has also made the full text available for free over the net, releasing it under the creative commons license.

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