Radical media, politics and culture.

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September 14, 2002 - 5:51pm -- jim

Left, historically, refers tightly to the liberal party seats on one side (gauche) of the Parisian legislative chambers of the 19th-century French republic.

The metonymic spread of meaning extends outward, and some radical critics contend that "the Left" is thus nothing other than the left of bourgeois capital, the old "loyal opposition."

Was the "new Left" in "the streets" rather than "the chambers"? Somewhat... but when they "retired", the "new Left" went to sleep, at least, in chambers, not in the streets... they weren't crowding out the poor under those famous bridges of the Seine...

September 11, 2002 - 12:23pm -- hydrarchist

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Direct Payments from Users to Producers as an Alternative to Intellectual Property Rights.Commons, Criminalization, Genral Intellect and the Politics of Technology and Culture

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Historically the need for copyright and patent laws has been postulated as necessary in order to ensure the flow of revenue back to the producer, so that the production of culture or science can ber perpetuated. These laws consitute downstream constraints on the ways in which works can be used and inventions employed. These laws, derived from a theory of creativity determined by the figure of the desocialised individual of capitalist property relations, have always functioned as a fetter on creativity. This impediment has simply been rendered more manifest in the context of digitalisation and the ubiquitous networks.

I We propose the withdrawal of the law from the creative realm. In order to finance the production of independent culture we propose instead a system of user to producer direct allocation of funds. This is already occurring in discrete areas of the web in a voluntary manner. In order to increase the kitty, we propose a non-voluntary tax, or a tax credit, usable only for the purpose of funding cultural production. Distribution of funds would be left almost entirely in the hands of the users. 'Almost entirely' becuase we would set aside a portion (20%) for the funding of local cultural venues, workshops and studios, the tools or equipment necessary for creative activity.

A small component (somewhere under 5%) would be allocated on a lottery-like, basis, so as to introduce some randomness into the process.

The majority of the monies would go directly to artists/cultural producers; in exchange all works immediately enter into the public domain, or, wjilst awaiting copyright abolition, fall under a GPL-style copyleft license.

Media studies have found that the distributio of revenues in the culture industries follows a pattern often referred to as the Zipf curve, whereby a small number of very successful artists receive the lion's share of the money, whereas the overwhelming majority toil without any significant remuneration. The nature of preference formation in the capitalist market - integrated vertical media conglomerates, public relations and marketing schemes etc - determines this outcome.

The subversive quality of our proposal is that it breaks the relationship between consumption and remuneration at the user-end. We suspect that a system such as ours would produce positive effects: - the installation of a direct non-alienated relationship between the 'artists' and 'audiences'

- a questioning of the competence of the state to make decisions over the use of the people's dead-labour (money, taxes) - a massive expansion of the number of people able to earn a sustainable living in cultural work - a cultivation of local and marginalised culture - make available works as primary matter to be trasformed, recombined and generally used to produce other works - the jettisoning of any justification for the introduction of technologies of control and privacy intrusion (such as Digital Rights Management) - the halting of the process of criminalisation of users as embodied in the No Electronic Theft Act 1997 and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act 1998 - remove the abiding influence of patronage by commercial and authoritarian institutions (music companies, Arts Councils, broadcasters) - end the cycle whereby media conglomerates ownership of the past provides the revenue to control the nature of what is produced, distributed and 'popular' in the present and consequenty proising them control over the future. -provide collective social and cultural space reversing the trend towards privatisation and gated life - evidence of the feasibility of self-management

II

Commons, General Intellect, Mass Intellectuality Recent years have witnessed the adoption of the commons argument by many particpants in the intellectual property discussion. This concept's popularity arises as a response to a widely held belief that IP laws have expanded to such a degree as to constitute an 'anti-commons' and impede innovation. The adoption of this argument by 'enlightened' capitalists, some US 'libertarians' and a section of the liberal intelligentsia should push us to critically evaluate the potential consequences of a real-world adoption of the commons as policy. In short, if - as some proponents argue - a new commons is the predicate for the next wave of capitalist innovation and development, should social radicals feel at ease with this? Innovation holds a priveliged position in this discourse and yet is treated in an entirely uncritical way, ignoring what the consequnces of innovation on the distribution of work, money. Our new liberal allies come from exactly exactly the vantage point that welcomed enclosure and all its ruinous consequences back in the days where there was a commons in land. Food for thought.

Parallel to the comons discussion, a debate has been taking place amongst the Italian autonomists on immaterial labour, new forms and modes of production and what they call the 'general intellect'. This idea is drawn from Marx's 'Fragment on Machines', where he identifies the declining importance of living labour proportionate to the advancement of technology, which comes to embody the skills and social knowledge formerly drawn from workers hands and minds. The crux of this is that capitalist value production becomes progressively separated from living labour. Given that the left parties and trade union organisations have always constituted their claims for redistribution on the basis of a moral entitlement founded upon work and exploitation, if Marx's General Intellect provides a persuasive description of modern postfordist societies, the it becomes apparent that their politcal strategies are, basically, fucked. (But we knew that already!)

Capital requires a diffuse and flexible 'mass intellectuality' so as to grease production and generate innovation, but also to consume advertising and participate in the stock-market euphoria. The centrality of knowledge, language and communication to modern social reproduction places unprecedented potential power in the hands of workers, paradoxically at a time where the disassembling of social welfare and labour-guarantees subjects huge numbers of people to constant precarity. The shackles of copyright and patent laws can be obstacles - or rather one capitalist's rent-reaping machine is anothers impediment - bringing some Italian theorists to talk of the 'communist tendecy of capital' - another phrase that requires caution and scepticism, surely?

We propose a re-examination of the idea of the commons and the general intellect in the light of its strategic political possibilities and subversive potential. Against the new enclosures and for a commons that can be a base to transform social relations, rather than another slice of primary matter for the perpetuation of capitalism and the petrification that is its trademark.

III Criminalisation is the inseperable partner of enclosure. E.P. Thompson documented the hundreds of capital offenses introduced commensurate with the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth century, inaugurating the age described by Peter Linebaugh as the '...organized death of living labour and the oppression of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital)."

In the 1990s, criminal punishments hitherto reserved for commercial 'pirates' were extended to threaten individual users, copying for private purposes. The No Electronic Theft Act of 1997 abolished the requirement of financial motivation as a predicate for the bringing of a criminal prosecution in the US. The following year the Digital Millenium Copyright Act introduced criminal penalties for the 'circumvention' of digital right management systems. In addition numerous pieces of legislation have criminalised unauthorised intrusion etc.

The shift to a targetting of users points to the fear felt by media conglomerates at the power of collective processes such as file-sharing, and p2p processes more generally - unless they can control the conditions of these networks deployment.

Historically criminalisation and enclosure of land - by removing the means of sustenance from the peasantry - also had the effect of producing a labour force to fuel urban industrial development. In this sense we can talk of the 'positive' and constitiutive force of criminalisation for capital.Furthermore users must be prevented from having access to a large stock of primary matter of other creative works, in order to sabotage the emergence of a 'prod-user' mass (appropriatiosit and recombinant), which would pose a threat to the current controllers of the culture industry in terms both of financial competition and cultural autonomy or self-determination.

In the digital arena, the fuction of criminal law is to shut down anti-establishment hacking repressively, integrate the sanctions of the hacking community disposed to working as security experts into the labour force, and generate a passive audience of consumers denied restricted by the fear of law and deterred by hard/soft-wired technological protections. In short, the purpose is 'to create a market'.

Happily, this strategem has so far proved unsuccessful. The right to 'Fair Use' of copyrighted works has been a central pole of the resistance in the digital sphere, such that many people now understand intellectual property expansion as a self-interested appropriation by the media business, entailing a usurpation of users' traditional rights.When one considers the short period in which file-sharing has been a mass phenomenon, this sense of 'customary right' is amazing, and bears out E.P. Thompson's argument of another period that : " indeed some `customs' were of recent invention, and were in truth claims to new `rights'."

This section of the talk will consider the function of criminal law in the digital networks for the production of compliant subjects, attempt a realistic evaluation of the thrat of prosecution, and consider strategies for collective self-defense.

IV Prod-users of the world unite!

September 11, 2002 - 7:13am -- hydrarchist

Annoyed and Media Theoretical

Who's afraid to die?

A basic question facing producers of radical media today is the purpose of their own existence.

In the shadow of the Indymedia wave, many amongst us have criticised the model of communications that it has cultivated. The counts of indictment are multiple: that the network behaves as a franchise; that a basic precondition appears an ignorance of pre-existing digital media efforts and willingness to steamroll over their efforts; that the system of open publishing has enshrined a fact-oblivious form of writing easily and regularly manipulated; that it pedestalises the 'rights of speakers' whilst minimising the 'rights of listeners'.

But indy has undoubtedly been, on some level a success. Rather than having difficulties in self-reproduction, it has flourished and proliferated. In the wake of its public profile has arrived cash, from Chumbawamba for example, and willingness on the part of players formerly uninvolved to provide the material resources to make the network function.

The space occupied by Indy is somewhat vague, falling between a slashdot style community and a freewheeling libertarian (in the US sense) speaker's corner. But practice demonstrates that it has a function, a role, and given its capacity to support reproduction it will be a fixture for the foreseeable future, oblivious to any misgivings we may feel about its operation.

Infoshop.org has flourished as well and is established as the place for a specifically anarchist/left-libertarian discourse on the network. Driven by Chuck's determined and for a long time individual efforts, the pay-off is now clear. A clear community has formed, discussion is rich and contradictory and the site is breeding offspring such as the recent launch of a german language edition. Infoshop has further cultivated a space for research, through the emphasis given to highlighting specific themes or political campaigns, be it on the subject of intellectual property or prisons. Like Indy, infoshop has arrived at the point where it can support its own reproduction. Exhortations to readers to cough up cash seem to be paying a dividend. At the end of august, Chuck launched another 'feed the webmaster' drive to raise a $1000 before September 6th, but the objective was attained before the end of august.

Rusty at www.kuro5hin.org dabbled with various means to finance the maintenance of his discussion site, which is arguably the most intelligent mass-participatory leftish weblog around. After withdrawing from the VA linux controlled network he flirted with the idea of using text-based ads to bring in income in exchange for a non-obnoxious conduit into his users' cerebral cortex. Eventually, he decided instead to establish it as a not-for profit foundation and launched a financial appeal. Within a couple of days more than $35,000 had been raised and kuroshin.org was on its way to becoming an institutionalised part of a non-commercial public sphere on the web for infinity.

Having led the Pacifica boycott that brought commercial elements to their knees, Democracy Now set about raising cash again for the network. Their web presence is powerful with an archive of mp3's and streamed versions of the programmes accompanied by content listings. Over a weekend it is not abnormal for them to take in $3000 in donations via paypal alone. Of course Amy and her crew also raised $750,000 during the last fundraising drive, so maybe they're just in another league. But the point is that the users recognise DN's importance and support it in kind, while they produce quality factual radical journalism for the kind of mass audience which the web just does not reach. Yet.

A-Infos is the preferred channel of communication between street based anarchist organisations. Those who know go directly there to find out exactly what's happening with the people who persevere in making the impossible happen. Simplicity of format minimises the technical aspect whilst reducing bandwidth load, voluntary labour from dedicated anarchist militants, and assumably the generosity of tao on hosting the site makes it happen. If there is a Spain '36 in the 21st century, it will be the primary source for its planning and unfolding in public documentation.

Think theory on line? Answer nettime. Even those who don't read it any more can recognise a text that has passed through it.

The point in all this eulogising is that each of these sites has an obvious and appreciated reason for being. Where money is required, no problems are experienced in obtaining it - although Indy seem to have problems disbursing it, but that's another story. Each has a theatre of operations, a modus operandi broadly approved of by its own users, and were any of them to be shut down by their hosts or the state tomorrow, who doubts that they would be back on line within 24 hours.

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Unfortunately the same cannot be said for a galaxy of other radical sites. Updated rarely or inconsistently, visited seldom. Albatross on the neck of innumerable part-time webmasters. Purveyors of loony strategies or undiscovered marvels. Their polymorphous political perversity is the gold of our latter-day International, the seed of creative refractory reproduction, the beach under the paving stones of the homogenised ether. But it absorbs resources and fragments our attention and labour, often unnecessarily.

I think that those who cannot answer the case put and rebutted by the examples listed above ought to die or to federate. Or rather, they should commit seppuku so as to be reborn, at a higher level as it were(!). That includes the project I participate in myself incidentally, at slash.autonomedia.org. Dying could be blissful; it could be the opportunity to abandon our vanity, consolidate our resources, pitch in with others so as to eke out a new space within a greater collective endeavor. It would be a true realisation of a utopian aspect of the web, the dissolution of one community to become part of another met along the road. Vanity, and the desire to 'control one's manor' in this area has traditionally been a trait characterising the university and its critical communities, careerists are not altogether unknown in the left-libertarian/anarchist milieu either, but if we're serious about strategising for impact, their concerns have no place on our agenda. Consolidation of resources is needed, later I'll try to provide some examples of why.

Federation is an alternative. The means are obvious. The RDF/RSS standard is really all there is to it. Links are just a sad fake gesture of love in comparison with ten delicious headlines form your federated friends frontpage. Those who don't provide RDF/RSS data, or refuse to integrate others RDF/RSS boxes into their pages are traitors. Unless they're individualists, in which case my remarks will be treated with the disdain they merit anyway, or perhaps taken as an opportunity to inveigh against the ineluctable endpoint of this rationality in a gulag. I recognise their 'right' to secede.

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I think we need this type of portal cut and paste to take the next necessary steps. Collectives, in my experience, always arrive at a certain point where the fight against entropy and atrophy absorbs more time than desiring strategy and 'innovative' action. Internal dynamics exhaust themselves in frustration or fraction. What helps revitalise things is a change in context, be it a new set of social forces or involvement in a new alliance. But the rejuventaory propulsion always comes from outside.

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Who's afraid of subjectivity?

Once upon a time there was counter-information. That was in the days where a couple of hundred Algerians, for example, could be massacred on the streets of Paris and have their bodies thrown into the Seine. And the newspapers and radio/television didn't even report it. Media outlets served state interests slavishly and everyone with a critical lobe knew there was a problem, a lacuna to be filled.

Counter-information occupied that gap. As it became evident that there was a market for such information commercial operators realised that there was money to be made from that audience so they started carrying it. The advent of Usenet and then the web put an end to the dominant information issue forever, but replaced it with a distribution shortfall. The other thorny matter arising was excess info and the prospect that too much data impeded critical thinking, climaxing in a sort of paroxysm of endless 'uncertainty' stymieing action or response in terms that would make an economic theorist blush, if you know what I mean.

Anyway, back to my fable. Lots of bright sparks decided counter-information no longer being really the crux of the matter, the key was different voices: immigrants' voices; gay and lesbian voices; gypsy voices; workers voices (but that was kinda hesitant); womens' voices. That was an improvement.

Over on an isolated peninsula though there was another interesting declination of media verbs going on. Having the strongest communist tradition in the Mediterranean, a sort of permanent mass street mobilisation and an important anarchist presence (they even liberated parts of the country from Nazi-fascism during WW2) helped to make it an interesting experience. The decade-long 1968 in that country witnessed an amazing upswell of independent radio stations connected with the social movement, like Pacifica, just bigger. Some become commercial eventually. Many of them followed the militant and very ideological in content. Faithful activists tuned in and they were an important, if not central means of self-organisation, in a manner not unlike the net today. There was a wild dog amongst all these though. unmistakable. Different. She was called Alice. Radio Alice in fact. And although Alice only just about survived to see a first birthday, her impact was unprecedented. The radical information and critique was there. So were some of those other voices. And funky music. But there was more. There were 15-year-old boys ringing in to talk about breaking up with their girlfriends. There were thirteen year old girls telephoning to speak confusedly about their first menstruation. Political correspondents pretended they were in Algiers and spoke of what they imagined they saw in the local Bolognese dialect. People talked about life, their lives, in their terms, and their desires and disappointments. To do so, the parameters of militant, or as its called today, 'activist', discourse had to be discarded.

In a word Alice embodied subjectivity, the curiousity, wondering, self-doubt, joy and anger of a new generation coming to a conscious relationship with the dawning new world and its novel social conditions. Where is that space today on the web, on our sites? Does it occur to those who complain about the lack of diversity, the gender imbalance, the racial lop-sidedness, the marginalisation of both youth and age, that it may be exactly because the whole style in which we format our communications structures the exclusion of those 'subjects' (what a cold word, how it makes me shudder to write it). Is anybody else really bored with all this poorly reclothed ideologico-speak? Feel short on ludic stimulation? Forgotten what a moment of empathy with an adolescent feels like. Actually identified with a rape victim rather than experiencing a programmed response.

Our political discourse is narrow. The behaviour of the milieu often stereotypical. Humour is basically non-existent. Taking a subjective turn doesn't mean becoming amateur cultural studies pundits or evacuating substance and contact with reality from thought and action.1

Who's afraid of ambition? Text has a privileged place in the radical tradition. The consequences on network communications are plain to see. Everyone is busy getting their newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, books and miscellaneous screeds up online, and that defined the first wave of social agitation. Our own time has witnessed the indelible footprint of the blog and the discursive form it has catalysed, more focussed and accountable than a mailing list discussion.

Some feisty folks have done good stuff with radio that if there's any justice to reality should transform the capacity of low-power and pirate broadcasters to operate and the quality of the material imparted.

But I think it's safe to state that the dominant form of literacy of our time is audio-visual, and that the lack of success in the video realm is what makes radical communications in 2002 resemble more 1992 rather than that which was once, perhaps too hopefully, envisaged. What bothers me is the failure to exploit the possibilities which are available on this level. A survey almost a year ago estimated that 500,000 TV programs and films were being exchanged each day over the network using IRC, hotlines and file sharing progs. E-Donkey has cultivated a method and a community so as to make thousands of data-heavy videos available. Using cryptographic hashes and review portals to ensure that downloaders don't waste their time transferring dud files, trojans or anti-counterfeiting presentations described as 'Fight Club.divx", MFTP for maximal bandwidth efficiency etc., e-donkeyites are forging the way forward. The fact the software is proprietary is shit, but there's no alternative as Freenet's front end is still traumatising and the anonymity oriented design undermines performance.

Sharereactor and filenexus allow users to launch their searches directly from their page provided the prog is running, you don't even need to negotiate the interface. And where are the radicals? Where is the portal for radical, critical, subjective funky audio-visual victory?

Nowhere.

Periodically, I conduct the following experiment. Key in Indymedia to the search interface on a) Kazaa, Grokster b) Gnucleus, Sharereaza, Limewire c) Filedonkey, sharereactor.

The response? Occasionally you'll find Richard Stallman singing the free software song and a few videos in Italian about Genoa and the G8. Usually, you'll get nothing at all. Try Manufacturing Consent: nothing. But the director is actually rather favorable to it being available. insanity. We have exactly the type of real world networks which mean that there are machines and bandwidth enough available to us to launch a serious resource sharing initiative, squaring up to the moment when we can actually be running bandit audio-visual dissident networks and it is not being exploited.

In the meantime where courage fails, commerce acts, and we get transmission films, who are using an e-donkey derivative, Overnet, to distribute independent movies online out of Canada. They are using the file-sharing network, users' machines, as their commercial infrastructure. They are also placing Digital rights Management on the files and allowing users to have access them for 24 hours after initialisation of an access-key. On the other hand, they charge $2 a movie and state that half of that goes to the filmmaker, which for the sake of all my immiserated independent filmmaking friends and allies gives me a warm glow. But the DRM pisses me off, and the fact that payment is involuntary is limiting. But really I feel sore because they are occupying a space that could be, should be, ours. And some of us have been discussing this for months. In Italy meanwhile, they've launched a project called GNU-Global Vision precisely so as to remedy this, and helping to make a copyleft style treatment the default approach to critical documentary video on the web.

And that is just one example of the way in which Peer2Peer modes ought to benefit us. Besides that it's going to be a central area of political conflictuality on the network for years to come, implicating the whole array of media conglomerates, and their henchmen in various legislatures, in a sustained campaign against users, where ultimately there is no doubt people will be incarcerated. There is a hunger for initiatives more confrontational than the EFF, and the modern centrality of intellectual property as a means of disciplining individuals and maintaining the dominant social relationships is a mutation for which our time will be remembered.

The argument made above for a consolidation and reapportionment of resources relates derives directly from my belief that we need to get the resources to make file-sharing, particularly video, work. If we can agree to store content and provide bandwidth for access to it, with a searchable database and scheduling system, and co-ordinated system of resource alternation, there are essentially all the elements for a permanent g transnational independent TV station. Without investing false hopes in a misplaced technological messianism, I think this would be a decent start to improving our communication strategy. Install a collective T1 or T3, a wireless hub and gigantic hard disk and community wireless could really move to the next level. Hook that box up to a low power transmitter - along the lines of telestreet.it - and there's a low power terrestrial television station. The right and commerce are ambitious. We need to be more ambitious.

Who's afraid of self-analysis?

There is a shocking dearth of statistical data about radical network activity. A year or so ago Indymedia NYC took part in a large public forum on Independent media where their spokesperson told the assembled crowd of the extraordinary success they had achieved, receiving more than 35,000 hits a day. The audience interpreted this as meaning that there were 35,000 people visiting nyc.indymedia.org every day, which of course was not the case. Ironically this type of misleading presentation echoes perfectly the type of snake-oil hyperbole deployed systematically during the dot com bubble in order to boost their apparent usage level.

Individual users, numbers of individual page views etc. , no more than money accumulated through paypal, are not the only measure of site's contribution, but overall it is important knowledge not least because it throws into relief the scale of the task facing us, and provides a basic feedback mechanism to monitor the interest generated by new methods of promoting the site, identifying topics of broader interest etc.

Similarly, a content analysis on the articles published would reveal the biases that wittingly or subconsciously guide our publication choices. The absence of decent economic analysis and data on our sites, for example, is something that I find increasingly shocking. In New York from August until February about 130,000 people lost their jobs, and we simply haven't provided tools for people whose world has been shaken by that experience to understand better what is unfolding. Realising this inadequacy underlined for me the importance of a site and newsletter such as left business observer, where Doug Henwood actually crunches that data and follows the discussion of the business press from a critical standpoint. Elsewhere, we're all familiar with the way in which the Israeli-Palestinian cyber-conflict periodically overwhelms Indymedia newswires. This type of quantitative onslaught functions to really sabotage any other function of those sites during that time, and serves as a concrete example for the means by which 'open publishing' can be exploited.

Who's afraid of the limitations of the media strategy?

Working with media it is to be expected that one might indulge in a certain amount of cock-suredness about the importance of communications in an overall political context. Ultimately we must ask one another if the emphasis given to communications is excessive especially where political campaigning strategies effectively morph into pure-play media activity. There's a fine line between employing a cunning strategy that makes good media, and becoming reliant on constant media attention as oxygen. Furthermore it is a truism that many people are fundamentally distrustful of what they experience through the media, including the radical media. An obsession with tactical media action strikes me as sometimes partaking in the abandonment of the social terrain of everyday life, work or claimant centered agitation, practical tasks of community construction etc.

Some time ago I translated an interview with an Italian hacker involved in the Hacklab movement there. He has also been deeply involved in the development of alternative information structures. The Hacklabs struck me as something worth importing, as they reflect a highly socialised treatment of knowledge and informational skills. Eric does something somewhat similar in ABC.

Blogger Universalism

Slashcode, scoop and php-nuke define the new collectivist approach, but blogger revolutionised online publication for the individual, simplifying the process and consequently opening it up to mass participation. There are other areas where this could be implemented. How many collectives still struggle with poster design and magazine layout because of lack of skills, hardware or software? How difficult could it be to assemble basic templates which could be used off the shelf, filled in following the same style which animated page-builders on the likes of Geocities at the beginning? Or do the tools already exist and is the problem more that of diffusing knowledge of their whereabouts and potential?

What's good about un-security: the ballad of Wolfgang Grams and the cautionary tale of Klaus Steinmentz

Reading about the session on encryption felt very 1990s. I've been using PGP and more recently lokmail since 1996, and still can scarcely find anyone willing to exchange encrypted mail, that's not to say cryptography is pointless but just to query how effective the push has been. Reading David Kahn's epic tome 'The Codebreakers', one realises that for the truly determined no technical protocol or cryptographic method is both failsafe and feasible; security is simply a function of the weight of resources thrown at the lock, and where the state is concerned - at least in the US - those resources are basically infinite. Moreover, psychologically the consequences of dwelling upon security as a problem are pretty deleterious due to the paranoia it cultivates and the closure towards unfamiliar faces that it encourages. Now more than ever we should be actively 'miscegenating' with the public, seeking to spread radical ideas like a contagion through this rotten society.

As in hacking, most vulnerability to repression arises more often from social engineering than technical indelicacy. The vanload of putative direct actionists driven straight to the waiting cuffs of the Philadelphia police in 2000 were not victims of surveillance but infiltration. And for the really paranoid, here's a story to keep you awake. In 1992 a Red Army faction member, Wolfgang Grams, was shot dead in a train station in Bad Kleinen, Germany. The information leading to his state-execution and the arrest of his companion was provided by the third member of their cell, Klaus Steinmetz. Through a mishap he too was arrested, when the plan had been to allow him to escape and continue his covert activity. Thus the press discovered that he had been sleeping in the organisation for more than ten years, waiting for the moment of optimal utility. If we mimic the securitarian logic of the state, we have no chance, it's not where our strength and potential lies.

Slash Critique

Elsewhere I've been compiling a list of tweaks that need to be made to our slash page. Some of them are not so minor or involve fundamental divergences from the current state of slashcode, such as the suggestion that all logged in users be allocated moderation powers. Slash codes bestows these powers as occasional 'jury service' on only a small element of the user base. The problem on Aut is that very few users (15 as a maximum so far) actually log in and thus very few people will ever be able to moderate but the site's administrators always have moderation powers and thus their personal preferences are algorithmically determined to establish the scores awarded. If the administrators were systematic moderators this would be a problem of subjectivity, but in fact they exercise their powers rarely, so the nature of the problem is in fact that of a void.

If any credence is to be given to the claims that people engage in online communications/discourse to exchange knowledge/win others attention then this void is a black hole through which potential collaborators are falling. If someone takes a half-hour out to compose a thought and set it out literately before posting it as a comment, then they expect or hope for some response. The most gratifying response one could have is from the author, or from another contributor to whom you are responding. Failing that, a response from anybody at least indicates that the contribution was appreciated and not merely a waste of time. Lastly, where there is no written response, that someone, administrator or peer at least took the time to evaluate your participation is a basic expectation people bring to moderated forums of this type.

Community or Broadcast Considering the small number of comments made, slash publishes too many stories. Furthermore the majority of those stories originate with us although usually we are not actually the authors or person responsible for the html mark-up. The direction of the information flow is clear however and reflects the practices of a publishing house. Except that the concept of the web-publisher is a misnomer, as the web actually actually collapses that boundary, and all that remains is the residual product of media-socialisation in the time of physical output and scarcity.

The journal system allows us to continue to post these stories without dominating the page. It also allows the users to bring stuff to our attention with an equality absent from the submission system. By installing an RDF box as a default to the front page that lists the last twenty journal updates we also signal to the users that their participation is important and will be given prominence. New versions of slashcode contain a zoo facility that allows users to use the journal feature in more refined ways that have generated a huge amount of horizontal communication outside of the standard publication route, that is to say community based discussion.

A meta section is needed, where the actual design and engineering of the site can be subjected to scrutiny as opposed to technology being black-boxed. This would also supply a conduit for feedback and potentially assistance.

Channel or NetworkTelevision channels diversify their coverage so as to maximise audience on a lowest common denominator basis across a wide range of subject-matter. The network attacked this form of generalism by enabling the emergence of niche communities. Blogs have administered the coup de grace, facilitating access to commentary by individuals expert in each area. The newspaper with its correspondents covering broad beats cannot match the level of expertise to be found there. For aut i think that means we should not endeavour to cover everything or be involved in constant recycling. Rather we should integrate A-Infos, Nettime, Openflows, Infoanarchy, Infoshop, Doug Henwood's list etc wholeheartedly and leave them to cover the areas that they are best at, freeing us to do other stuff.

Likewise, a box listing sites administered by our users or those who link to us should be present on the front page, which should be a portal to a network, a community rather than a front page for slash.autonomedia, and our design and lay-out should reflect that.

Conclusion As administrators of the site we have the responsibility to weave a community rather than to broadcast information we deem appropriate or important, although this is not precluded - it's a matter of priorities. Every comment should be rated, and wherever possible answered, particularly in the short-term as it is discussion that generates discussion - community discourse is highly iterative, this is the lesson of successful forums.

We should publish less and facilitate more network communications, whilst also arguing with other webmasters to reciprocate. The journal system should be fixed and then pushed to the user-base. Of the sites listed above only openflows and infoanarchy run a journal system, no surprise that these are the two tech-community orientated sites mentioned. Autonomedia should be a community of writers, critics and social actors who treat one another as equals, enrich one another's perspective's and knowledge and use the space offered by slash.autonomedia.org to do that.

September 11, 2002 - 7:05am -- hydrarchist

General Intellect

"labour infused by the power of science, communication and language."

In any society the capacity to produce goods, ideas and relations relates directly to the capacities of the individuals who make up that society. As human communities develop over time this ability changes, correlated with the educational methods and institutions it cultivates, the tools developed that are accessible to the population at large, the spaces maintained for the exchange or imparting of those skills and the products thereof, and vitally the nature of the distribution of all the foregoing over the social classes which constitute it as a group.

The consequences of the general intellect may be easily illustrated with the aid of a historical comparison: the encyclopedia. Four hundred years and fifty years ago access to knowledge outside of that relating to the local geography, history, economy and culture was strictly limited. The printing press was on the precipice of invention and thus the written word was circulkated by means of manuscripts reproduced by hand. Thus supply was limited. Knowledge was atomised due to the difficulty and expense implicit in the accumulation of a library. Consequently, scholars gathered nomadically around collections, often in monasteries, but sometimes in relatively secular settings, Oxford for example. There the practice of dining together, the 'commons', contained several purposes. One surely was disciplinary, preemptively smoking out heretical research.

Another was to facilitate the sharing and exchange of information. Scholars were know to boast that when stummped by a particular question they need not even refer themselves to a book; the erudition contained in the room at dinner was adequate to resolve even the most arcane matter.

A hundred and fifty years later, the precipitous fall in the cost of reproducing literature provoked by the emergence and refinement of the printing press meant not only the mitigation of physical scarcity` and thus the flourishing of libraries, but this in turn provided the basis for an initial development of literacy. Regarding knowledge itself, it allowed not only for the wide circulation of new ideas, but also the rediscovery of the old. When considering Diderot's launching of the first Encyclopedia project, it is perhaps helpful begin the reflection against the background of this happy conjunction.

Three hundred years later, we have a new encyclopedia in construction. Wikipedia is a volunteer produced encyclopedia composed of more than 35,000 entries. That its appearance was constrained until now is obvious. Ten years ago, the commodities to allow mass participation - the pc, modem - were not available at prices to allow their ubiquity. Furthermore, the level of technical knowledge required to run such systems as were in circulation precluded the participation of many who might have been attracted to such a task.

Pralallel to our little historical example, the majority of the population in the western world has moved from the state of peasants to become, first wage, labouruers involved either in commodity production or the social apparatus necessary for its reproduction and now specialists in discrete areas of production or, and to agreater extent, the suppliers of services in the tertiary sector. Whilst the political forces that imposed the need for equitable guarantees and remuneration have evaporated, economic actors retain the need for a workforce capable of devising, marketting and distributing new commodities and servies, if indeed a distinction should be made therein. In short economic reproduction imposes the need for innovation, and innovation cannot be produced in the first instance by machines but rather only by people. And this being true at the level of product conception and commodification before giving way to automation and the cold economics of minimal cost mass manufacture and distribution, it is doubly true in the area of marketing.

Given that marketting functions on the basis of generating new needs, carefully distinguished from thsoe needs in which the market is already too competitive or saturated, through a 'means gof seduction', the magic of retail and service supply relies upon the consumer being progressively more sophisticated, simply so as to be able to experience the temptation, the desire, to perceive the need. Likewise in order to practice electronic forms of consumption the subject must be inducted into the use of the necessary equipment to allow them to wander through the barren landscape nof the virtual shopping arcade. As in advertising, where the default signifiers for all 'experiences' are sex and escapist dreams of personla finance transcendence, so has been the case with the drive to electronic cash register, where get rich quick schemes aound IPOs and the common knowledge that the network functions as a giant repository for pornography, have not been insignificant factors in getting people online and thereafter extending the amount of thier day that they devote to that activity.

The evolution of the general intellect unfolds however within precise parameters that limits this escalating sophistication to the role of the individual as consumer, and does not extend it the realm of general social life, where despite exhortations to independence and personal initiative, infantilisation is the dominant tendency. The mechanism employed to this end is regularly that of fear, although often it is mere obscurantism as in the proliferation of unnecessary specialist jargons, In concrete political tems this translates into a tendency for the removal of decsion making from the traditional political space of the parliament etc. altogether and their being entrused into the hands of bureaucrats under the guise of admininstrative orders.

This innovative force inside each of us seeks notwithstanding these constarints to break free. This same force has been the energy behind every utopian p[lan, every cooperative form. On the net we see it in an extra ordinary plurality of ways, from the assembly of massive systems of distribution and production, the assembly of huge archives of creative works accessible to all, the undertaking of the new encyclopedias, the kaleidoscope of different territoies of specialised knowledge, the systmatic outwitting of concentrated knowledges in the areas of security, programming. Exactly as a resulkt of this marvellous proliferation of individuals in community suddenly willing to assume hugely complex tasks, the extension of the laws of copyright, trademark and patents, the crimianlisation of acts of exploration and examination pose themselves as the legal fetters upon the potential to create a new, differnet way of living today. A new form of life defined by our collective ability to enlist one another's different skills (communication) for the purpose of constructing new tools and knowledge, and to do so in circumstances which jettison the historical pyramids of social and productive hierarchy. A way of existing that leaves us free to be the architects of our own life?

The concept of general intellect is pivotal today in a second and related sense. With the end of a productioj model in which the worker was socialised by the stability of a workoplace environemnt (in the sense of 'a job for life'), productive socialisation has been diffused throughout life. The office and manufacturing process may be micro-magnaged, subject to intensifying surveillance, monitoring, evaluation and alteration, but these factors are manifestations as much of a need for control in a context where the more abiding relationships that once disciplin ed labour have been jettisoned.

Emotional and affective states consequent to this ubiquitous destabilisation of the working relationship constitute a primary matter for production, which must either be capitalised upon or marshalled. Inculcated precarity also generates, or exacerbates, the spectres that haunt modern existence on a cross-income level: depression, suicide, pathology, reliance on pharmaceuticals or recreational drugs to cope with everyday dissatisfaction.

The coexistence between the actualisation of the prphecy of the general intellectet and the degraded state of the bodies which inhabit the world reminds us that there is no need for rapture at the productivist accomplishments of the path of capital. Every technical refinement integrated into the means of production has occurred on the terms of capital and at the expense of humanity. Discourses of collective intelligence, linguistic production and affective labour reduce every gesture to the character of work, and pose the question as to whether we desire to perciev and construct our life on these terms. In short, the expansion of the concept of production creates an unbounded territory for more exploitation of life, a subordination of acts to economistic rationales, open season for a truely ubiquitous commodification of activity, and ultimately a legitimation of the penetration of the violence of the market into the most emotional and affective corners of our being.

To state these reservations, or critique the potential conclusions of these tendencies is not to refute the importance of some of the collective practices that have thusfar been described or appropriated by this framework. Development of free software systems, for instance, have vital significance outside of some furnishing of proof of the capacity of a 'multitude' to self-organise production on the basis of its innately innovative character. Indeed, as Eben has underlined, the operative role of free software in the next period will be to ensure that in the war between users and copyright owners over appropriation the machines remain an instrument of conflict open to both sides.

Here, as elsewhere, the universe of possible outcomes is dictated as much by the situation - contextualised in terms that recognise the balance of forces - that will; determine whether the tendency abets the smooth restructuring of domination or escapes it, constituting a resistance and allying itself with other refractory elements that also escape the long arm of capitalist reproduction.

- centrality of intellectual, immaterial and communicative labour - see page 344 Emp.

September 9, 2002 - 8:51am -- hydrarchist

"[Capital punishment is]...organized death of living labour and the oppression of the living by dead labour (the punishment of capital)."

September 8, 2002 - 3:02pm -- hydrarchist

Some factual background is useful to grasp the context of the interview with Toni Negri which follows."

Paolo Persichetti was born in Rome in 1962. He became politically involved in the wake of the movement of 1977, and was arrested in May 1987 for involvement in the BR-UCC -- one of the two factions that emerged from a split in the Red Brigades in the early 1980s. He returned to liberty two years later, the period of prevetitive detention having run its course. Convicted in 1991 to twenty two years and six months in prison, he found refuge in Paris where he was arrested in 1993 and then targetted with an extradition order. He returned to freedom in January 1995 thanks to a public campaign in his favour (including hunger strikes by prominent individuals such as the Abbey Pierre).

In what appears to have been a gift between right-wing regimes, the new French government of Jean Pierre Rafarin has brought to a swift end the so-called 'Mitterand policy' which protected political dissidents from extradition. Persichetti, now a professor of political science in University of Paris VIII and living openly in Paris, was arrested last saturday and immediately transported to Turin, Italy. According to sources in the Minsitry of the Interior, now presided over by Nikolas Sarkozy, he is only the first. At least fifteen others are believed to be under threat, including Giorgio Pietrostefani, a former leader of Lotta Continua sentenced some years ago for the murder of the police Commissioner Calabrese (central protagonist in the Piazza Fontana investigation, responsible for the death of Pinelli, the incident that inspired 'Accidental Death of an Anarchist' by Dario Fo).

The Italian Minister for the Interior Pisanu celebrated Persichetti's involuntary return, exclaiming that Persichetti was far from being someone of the 'second rank' and attempting to associate him with the Biagi killing. In fact, to the extent that the case involves links with the older generation of Brigadisti, police investigations of the D'Antona and Biagi murders have centered on the other faction, BR-PCC,.

Persichetti has repeatedly distanced himself from the new Red Brigades - should such an organisation exist - and has stated that he sees no role for the armed struggle today. The motivation for Pisanu's brouhaha likely stems from the scrutiny which the Italian government has been subject to over the Biagi murder, where attention has now focussed on the governments refusal to provide him with a escort, despite his repeated requests, shortly before his shooting near his home in Bologna.A flare-up between journalists and the former minister for the Interior Scajola concluded with him stating that Biagi had been a pain in the arse and interested only in keeping his job. This ill-advised outburst led shortly to his resignation.

In addition the government remains under pressure over the Genoa investigations, particularly now that some of its top cops have been revealed on video (chuckling to one another!) in the company of the police officer who shortly afterwards planted the molotov cocktails which served as retrospective justification for the search and destroy raid on the Diaz school, leading to twenty hospitalisations, sixty injured and ninety three arrests, many of which were later deemed to be illegal. Beteween the two incidents, both the two 'supercops' charged with anti-terrorism in Italy are under the spotlight.

Persichetti was tried on the basis of an alleged participation in the murder of an Italian Airforce General, Ligio Giorgieri, on 12 March 1987. He was convicted five years later, althugh never accused of direct participation, but rather 'concorso moral: involvement with the group which carried out the act. Fingered by a supergrass he was accused of participating in an 'inquest' of the BR-PCC that preceded and determined the attack. The court also found him guilty of participation in another attack one year before against Antonio Da Empoli, a former adviser to the Presidency of the Italian Counsel. At first instance the Italian court absolved him of the accusations, and afterwards the supergrass withdrew his testimony, stating that it was a case of mistaken identity. Unforunately this did not impede an Appeals Court from convicting him to over twenty years.

Commenting on the story of another refugee, writer Cesare Battisti, novelist ad former militant Valerio Evangelisti comments:"What should be understood is that France, in the 1980s, welcomed about a hundred Italian refugees not out of some preconceived hostility to Italy, but because they judged absurd the sentences which were being provided for here, under the pretext of the fight against terrorism. When he was tried in France, the magistrates were appalled: he had receive two life sentences in abstentia for two offences committed, at the same time, in two different cities! In the judgement, which permitted Battisti to remain, was written that he had been the victim of 'Italian Military Justice.'"

In the late 1970s and early 80s thousands of Italian radicals were subjected to extra-judicial killings, torture, detention without trial up to ten years and repeated grotesque simulation of 'justice'. The broad brush of terrorist demonisation was employed in order to criminalise the core of the social movement, literally removing key actors from the street in a form of internment.

Given the current climate in Italy and the nature of the Berlusconi regime it comes as no surprise that the state should now be exercising its memory, vengefully.

------------------------------ The following interview was originally published in the French Communist newspaper L'Humanite on August 28th. --------------------------------------------------

Interview with Toni Negri

"This securocrat madness which has taken hold of Europe."

For the Italian Philosopher, the arrest and extradition of Paolo Persichettihas the charcteristics of a kind of 'hysteria', aiming to liken all opposition to terrorism.

An importamnt philosopher of our time, Toni Negri, whose ideas are linked to 'that great current of modern poliical philosophy that goes from Machiavelli to Spinoza and Marx', was accused in the '70s, of having inspired the exactions of the armed wing of 'worker's autonomy', known under the name of the Red Brigades. Arrested in 1979, he then spent four and half years in prison - during which he published notably "Marx Beyond Marx" - before briefly recovering his freedom in 1983, by means of his election as a deputy of the Radical Party. His parliamentary immunity soon removed, he fled for Paris, where he taught until 1997 at the univesity of Paris VIII and the International College of Philosophy. In July of that year, he decided to return to Rome in order to 'relaunch the debate on amnesty' for the period of the 'years of lead'. Incarcerated upon his arrival at the airport, he has been subject, up to recent months, to a regime entitled 'semi-liberty', which allows him to teach during the day at the University of Padua, before going each night to 'sleep' in prison.

How do you explain the decision of the french authorities to arrest Paolo Persichetti, and then to extradite him immediately to Italy? Must one see in it, in your view, a type of agreement given by Paris to the assertions of the Berlusconi government, such that there would exist a link between the assassination of Marco Biagi, on the 19 March last, and certain Red Brigade militants of the '70s and '80s?

TN: Paolo Persichetti was the only one, among a hundred or so Italian political refugees living in France, able to be extradited immediately: my feeling is that he has been expelled, in some way, as an example. or some time already the Italian authorities have been developing the idea of a supposed reorganisation of the 'Red Brigades", taking place in interaction between Italy and foreign countries. The fact that several dozen formed Brigadisti remain in exile in Paris has without doubt been at the root, and utterly false conflations and extremely strong pressure by the Berlusconi governemnt. There is here a thematic that is more than dangerous: everyone I know who are living in France have all distanced themselves from what was their political thinking and involvement in the 1970s and 80s. They have been perfectly faithful in regard to the state and the French authorities, and, to my knowledge, none of them has ever taken any position in favour of, or in support of, terrorism. The war is over. And for a long time time now.... Thus I think that the decision of the French authorities takes place amidst the sort of securitarian madness which is in the process of turning Europe upside down.

How exactly does this 'securitarian madness' manifest itself today in your country?

TN: At the moment in Italy there are strong social movements which have always considered the actions of those who declare themselves the new 'Red Brigades' as being entirely opposed to their own objectives, and who even see them as a sort of provocation. Personally, I think that there doesn't exist any place today for armed actions in the Italian political struggle. The new Red Brigades are completely isolated, and they express nothing, not even corporatist or sub-altern interests: there's just a fake nostalgia, projected backwards in resentment elsewhere. Is it necessary to underline that Paolo Persichetti, who I knew as a student in Paris VIII at the time when I was teaching there, has nothing at all to do with these groups? In reality, the likening of any contestation, whatever it may be, to terrorism has attained in Italy a level of hsteria that it is difficult to imagine. Recently the police arrested four Moroccans in a church in Bologna because they were looking at a fresco depicting Mohamad falling into hell: they were initially identified as belonging to a cell of al Qaeda who were prepaing an attack, before being released the following day.

In July 1997 when you decided to go back to Italy to put a full-stop to your 'judicial story', you had, and I quote, 'the intention to relaunch the debate about amnesty' and and to put an end to the state of exception under which your country has lived since what are called 'the years of lead'. Where is that at today.

TN: In 1997 we at last managed to speak of an amnesty for the period that you refer to, even if the process was blocked very quickly: the House of Deputies had voted for a project with this meaning, but it was rejected in the month of october that same year by the Senate. Very quickly, it was explained to us that were we to benefit from an amnesty, it would then be neccessary to grant it to all those convicted under the common law. I think the arrest and extradition of Paolo Persichetti should be the moment to relauch the public debate on this question. Who can accept that he should be imprisoned for seventeen years, which here means at least twelve or thirteen without any hope of remission? It's a whole life... That situation is for me quite simply unimaginable. I think a massive mobilisation must take place in Italy, but also in all of Europe, so that a line can at last be drawn under the 'years of lead'.

In Empire(1), you proposed new trails of analysis of the world system of capitalism defined as a new mode of transnational control, and you suggested new subversive utopias: soldiarity without frontiers, 'multitudes' as much as 'counter-powers'.. What would you have to add, briefly, to your analysis following the events of September 11th.

TN: I am convinced that war has become an essential instrument of legitimation for imperial power. At the same time, I don't think that there exists an a priori agreement on this point between the different 'elites' of the Empire. There are major divergences, in proportion to the affirmation of a devestating unilateralism on the part of the United States, which collides with multiple contradictions, with the imperial aristocracies and the multinational groups. At the same time, the first experience of struggles, declared or underground, which have taken place in the new territory of power, provide some interesting indications. Firstly, on the demand for a new expression of democracy over the control of the political conditions of the reproduction of life. Next, in the development of the movements beyond the national body-politic, which aspire to the suppression of borders and universal citizenship. Lastly, these actions involve individuals and multitudes who are trying to reappropriate the wealth produced thanks to instruments of production which, by dint of the permanenet technoloical revolution, have become the property of their subjects. Fundamentally, only the 'common', in the sense which Spinoza spoke of it, allows a rising against the Empire.

Interiew conducted by Jean Paul Monferran (1) Written with Michael Hardt, 2000 (HUP)."

August 6, 2002 - 10:52am -- hydrarchist

Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.

The exchange of living labour for objectified labour -- i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour -- is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is -- and remains -- the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. (The development of this science, especially natural science, and all others with the latter, is itself in turn related to the development of material production.) Agriculture, e.g., becomes merely the application of the science of material metabolism, its regulation for the greatest advantage of the entire body of society. Real wealth manifests itself, rather -- and large industry reveals this -- in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body -- it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition -- question of life or death -- for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations -- two different sides of the development of the social individual -- appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. 'Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time' (real wealth), 'but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.' (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

August 5, 2002 - 6:05pm -- hydrarchist

O'Reilly http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/p2pweb2001/pub/w/16/sessions_metada...

Lada Adamic http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/people/ladamic/research.html

From Bitzi http://www.google.it/search?q=cache:oJ9m49mnazQC:bitzi.com/about/metadat...

Robert Mohr http://xavvy.com/

Brandon Wiley's Weblogblanu.net/

Over the past several weeks, three Gnutella vendors have released versions of their software featuring "Bitzi Lookup" as an option on local files and some search results.

Shareaza unveiled the feature in their 1.2 release LimeWire offers the feature in their 2.5.2 public beta BearShare is testing the feature in their 4.0.1 BearShare Labs beta.

August 5, 2002 - 12:49pm -- hydrarchist

Aggy K & Andrew (2002) ‘Renegotiating the Terrain — Autonomous Social Movements’, http://www.melbourne.indymedia.org/front.php3?arti cle_id=26875&group=webcast, accessed 26 May 2002. Arnison, M. (2002) ‘Open publishing is the same as free software’, http://www.cat.org.au/maffew/cat/openpub.html, accessed 1 March 2002.

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