the last 3 paragraphs of Hardt and Negri's response to all comments in the end of the Rethinking Marxism dossier.

"Three fundamental elements constitute the actions of the multitude: resistance, insurrection, and constituent power, or really, if one does not want to be so theoretical, micropolitical practices of insubordination and sabotage, collective instances of revolt, and finally utopian and alternative projects. These are the capacities of the multitude that are real and constantly present. Our hypothesis, then, is that in order for the multitude to act as a subject these three elements must coincide in a coherent project of counterpower. We need to discover a way that every micropolitical expression of resistance pushes on all stages of the revolutionary process; we need to create a situation in which every act of insubordination is intimately linked to a project of collective revolt and the creation of a real political alternative. How can this be created, however, and who will organize it?

The obvious temptation here is to repeat, with regard to the multitude, the operation that (in his time) Rousseau operated on bourgeois society to make it into a political body. This is just the temptation, however, that we need to recognize and avoid, because for us the path leads in the opposite direction. It is not true that there can be no multiple agent without being unified. We have to overturn that line of reasoning: the multitude is not and will never be a singe social body. On the contrary, every body is a multitude of forces, subjects, and other multitudes. These multitudes assume power (and thus are capable of exercising counterpower) to the exten that they are enriched through this common productivity, that they are transformed through the force of invention they express, that they reveal and radically remake, through practices of commonality and mixture, their own multiple bodies. Self-valorization, revolution, and constitution: these become here the components of the capacity of decision of the multitude - a multitude of bodies that decides.

How can all this be organized? Or better, how can it adopt an organization figure? How can we give to these movements of the multitudes of bodies, which we recognize as real, a power of expression that can be shared? We still do not know how to respond to these questions. In the future, perhaps, we will have accumulated enough new experiences of struggle, movement, and reflection to allow us to address and surpass these difficulties - constituting not a new body but a multiplicity of bodies that come together, commonly, in action. We would like that the critiques of our book, _Empire_, be directed toward this incapacity of ours to give a complete response to these (and other) questions. We hoped that in writing _Empire_ we would provide an argument that would stimulate debate. Risking being wrong is better than remaining silent. Ours is, after all, part of a collective project of all those who really think that the revolution of this world and the transformation of human nature are both necessary and possible."

This is to confirm the Social Software gathering on November 22 and 23 in New York City, at NYU.

The current list of attendees and potential attendees is

Brad Fitzgerald (LiveJournal) Cameron Marlow (Blogdex) Chris Meyer (CGEY/CBI) Clay Shirky (NYU) Cory Doctorow (boingboing) Danny O'Brien (NTK) Geoff Cohen (CGEY/CBI) JC Herz (Joystick Nation) Jeff Bates (Slashdot) Jerry Michalski (Sociate) Jessica Hammer (Kleene-Star) Jon Udell (Byte) Marko Ahtisaari (Nokia/Aula) Matt Jones (BBC) Rael Dornfest (O'Reilly) Ray Ozzie (Groove) Rudy Ruggles (CBI) Rusty Foster (K5) Scott Heiferman (Meetup) Steven Johnson (Plastic) Tim O'Reilly (ORA) Ward Cunningham (Wiki)

with a dozen or so additional invites pending.

Also, an invite to an optional mailing list called social_software will arrive under separate cover. Between now and November, this is just for attendees of the meeting, but if the discussion gets lively (as I expect it will), I imagine we'll make it world-subscribable at the end of November.

We'll be meeting over two days, a Friday and a Saturday. The Friday sessions will be about introducing our work to one another, and uncovering important themes, wishlists, and possible fruitful areas for new research or code.

The sessions will be up-tempo, informal, and conversational. We will begin each session with a few of the participants offering descriptions of some piece of software or some open problem, and will then move to group conversation. Then we'll break (where, as we all know, the counter-conference will establish itself according the the Rules of Hallway Conversations), and do it again, with a new set of problems or themes.

Among the possible topics are: - Identity, namespaces, and personality of individuals and groups - Searching, threading, and filtering of people and content - Are there interfaces that could help a user decipher the overall mood of the group? - Why are visual elements (e.g. digital photography, cams, shared whiteboards) so poorly integrated into current social software? - Why is it so hard to get a group of people to decide anything online? - What is currently hard to do in an online group that should be easy? - Easy that should be hard? - Can we get the advantages of email and BBSes (longer, better edited, more thoughtful posts) into real-time environments like IM.

and, of course, whatever else comes up while we're talking.

There will be a group dinner Friday night, at a suitably veg-friendly establishment.

The Saturday sessions will be all brainstorming -- making lists of potentially fruitful areas of research, features, as well as lists of problems to solve in future generations of social software, ending with attempts to describe possible new types of social software thatcould be built with today's technology.

-clay

-=- Social Software: The gathering and its goals

We are living in a golden age of social software. Only twice before have we had a period of such intense innovation in software used by interacting groups: once in the early 70s, with the invention of email itself, and again at the end of that decade with Usenet, the CD-Simulator (the precursor to irc), and MUDs. This is a third such era, with the spread of 'writeable web' software such as weblogs and wikis, and peer-to-peer tools such as Jabber and Groove greatly extending the ability of groups to self-organize.

Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize. One consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create. Recognizing this, the Social Software Summit seeks to bring together a small group of practitioners and theorists (~25) to share experiences in writing social software or thinking about its effects.

The gathering will take place over two days in the late fall in NYC. Its goals are, in order of importance:

1. Introducing the participants to one another.

The great irony of social software is that many of its practitioners operate in a vacuum. We expect that simply by bringing a diverse and talented group together, we can generate a wealth of significant new ideas.

2. Spur new efforts.

The current generation of social software is still rough-hewn. Neither the designers nor the users have settled on the ideal interfaces, system behaviors, or feature lists for the newest pieces of software, such as wikis and weblogs, and even older software, such as email and instant messaging applications, are still being adapted to new purposes. The Social Software gathering will include attempt to articulate possible new features, interfaces and tools.

3. Improving the literature.

Too much of the literature concerning social software focusses on the 'whole worlds' model, where all-encompassing environments such as MUDs or multi-player games are treated as emblematic of social software generally. In fact, the most important social software has tended to be much looser -- mailing lists, Usenet, even the humble CC line. Likewise, many of the pieces of social software being created today do not aim to create whole worlds for their users, but to perform certain functions well. Though the content of the meeting itself will be off the record, participants are encouraged to write about their own experiences and observations (as if we could stop you), and we will be producing a conference blog after the fact to point to the work and thoughts of the participants.

"If you keep the code free you can do things with it, that affect the physical layer of the net, tha affect the content layer of the net, that affect the meaning of the net.... Everything's going to flow in the wires, just don't let thm notch up th resistance at the ends.

We're going to have to take at least a piece of it out of the pipes, we're going to have to put it in the air, we are going to have to generate a network that nobody owns. And in order to do that we are going to have to rely to a substantial measure on carriers that nobody owns either. We are going to have to build a layer of communication which consists of all of us routing one anothers traffic., completely without any place where anybody bottleknecks anything. In that ntwork censorship is failure and is routed around, but so is property - that gets routed around, so is control failure - that gets routed round. The wires in the ground are really important too, but we will not get that piece of the story straight unless we liberate enough bandwidth that has no carriers, to make equality."

slash under ddos attack.

and Graham on the offensive: > Secondly Jamie King has recently written an intersting essay that ties > parts of the debate around copyright enclosure and the italian > immaterial labour/general intellect debate together: Towards an Army of > Ideas - Oppositional Intellect and the Bad Frontier > http://slash.autonomedia.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/16/1644231&mode=nested >

I've been arguing with Stefan Mz over similar ideas to the ones in this essay, so I might as well further my reputation of disagreeing with everything and being the odd one out ;-)

I liked the use of Winstanley. But as well as his general ideas quoted in the essay he also had ideas on what would now be called IP - starting from the idea that 'Kingly power hath crushed the spirit of knowledge and would not suffer it to rise up in its beauty and fulness' to a concrete program for education, science and an alternative to the patent system (in The Law of Freedom).

So what are the equivalent concrete ideas in this essay? As I read it, it says we need to drop defence of the 'information commons' (the goal of 'left-liberal-lawyer lobbyists, NGO gonks, and wild-eyed info egologists' - alas poor Lessig - 'necessarily failing and doomed'), and replace it by a more active strategy of 'constituting a shared community of ideas that, expecting such co-option and acting in prescience, deliberately designs itself to appear, perhaps, palatable, but to be in fact poisonous [to capital]'. And this poison pill is to be 'a return to Artaudian insanity via Burrough's 'language virus''.

Well, the first problem for me with this is just the language. Stefan mentioned that the language of the German translation of Empire is 'ugly'. I doubt if it's any uglier than the original; and I have real problems reading or taking anything seriously that comes out of the whole Deleuze/Guattari tradition just because of this. Winstanley had a much better way of writing - clear, immediately understandable to everyone (ok, he uses religious phraseology - but that was intelligible to everyone when he wrote). I simply don't understand what a return to Artaudian insanity is (reminds me of the old Beatle's song 'all you need to do is change your head', but I hope it isn't..)

More importantly, the whole idea here seems to be wrong. The 'poison pill' already exists: it's free software, and everything associated with it. People defending the 'information commons' are part of the defence of that too; Lessig and others are allies, not 'wild-eyed gonks' or whatever. The article is asking us to desert our allies, when we need to be helping them. Free software is still something that can potentially be destroyed; every ally we can get to stop that is a plus.

So how do two people defending the same basic set of ideas arrive at such opposite conclusions (he asks, rhetorically...). This is the bit that repeats my argument with Stefan Mz:

Jamie quotes in apparent agreement 'the intellectual activity of mass culture, [is] no longer reducible to simple labor, to the pure expenditure of time and energy', which I would also agree with. But then how can it be that: 'The expected huge increase in the value of intellectual labour is occurring'? I think the two statements contradict one another. Intellectual labour has no more value than it ever had; an economy based on it is not one based on value. It can only be forced into the mould of value by the most extreme contortions, arbitrary laws, etc.

When Marx wrote about the 'general intellect' it was in exactly this context - trying to guess how the contradictions of value would eventually drive capitalism to a point where it could no longer reproduce itself successfully. As it happens his preferred solution was a very roundabout one via fall in profit and terminal crisis, rather than the direct one that is actually happening - but in either case the point is that value is not eternal, nor is capitalism a self-perpetuating system (an Althusserian orrery) but a finite one. One the one hand mass piracy is a sign of that end from within, on the other free software is the sign of an alternative. Not a magic alternative appearing from nothing, but one produced from the system itself. So it can't be co-opted.

That's quite enough for now - hope that wasn't too rude a welcome to the list-en mailing list! autonomedia.org looks an interesting site; I didn't know it... :-)

Graham

See, Police go after Belgian Napster users, CNN February 15, 2001 at http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/02/15/belgium.napster.ap/index.html.

http://www.megachip.info http://www.gruppoutopia.net