User:Tancre/Special Issue 8/Notes

Networks & Ideology Notes on the texts of Special Issue 8

Special Issue's texts

ART & DEMOCRACY | Chantal Mouffe

Art as an agnostic intervention in public space
Public space as a battleground for the hegemony of a project vs reconciliation. Artistic practices can subvert the hegemony visualizing the repressed and destroyed by the consensus of post-political democracy.

Can art still be critical when compromised by advertising and atists become part of capitalist production?
// I think yes but in a weak way, by showing its weakness

Boltanski, Chiapello - the new spirit of capitalism, 2005
demands for autonomy of the '60s has been used in the development of post-fordist networked economy and transformed in new forms of control.
>> counterculture, authenticity, self-management, anti-hierarchicality, promote the new capitalist regulation vs the disciplinary framework of the fordist period.

Artistic and cultural production and critique, central role in capital valorisation through 'neo-management'.
>> impossibility of art to be critical because automatically neutralized // in this way it is critical but paradoxically. weak criticism
VS
Andre Gorz - when self-exploitation central role in valorization, production of subjectivity as terrain of central conflict. by contrast it appear as a political dimention, extention of the capital, and rise the possibility of a resistance. // showing a flat and always same political dimention is a symptom of weakness and passive resistance
>> opening of new strategies of opposition (living, consuming, collective appropriation of common spaces and everyday culture) // this is still a weak criticism

modernist avant-gard ideas are abbandoned but // a good way could be to rethink the avant-gard
>> undermine the imaginary environment of total social mobilization of capital by inteveining in social spaces
// is the intervention in social spaces a situationist reappropriation, so avantgardistic? it seems a weak act without memory, the ultimate act of screaming its sufference in a self-sacrification
Brian Holmes - art as chance for society to reflect on the imaginary figures it depends, for its understanding and consistency
// are the imaginary figures the very objects of art? does this means what is a space, form, color and how they are relate to each other and to the human being. are those the only things on which art really depend?

Possibility of critical role of art but only through understanding the dynamics of democratic politics, acknowledge the political in its antagonistic dimension and contingent nature of any type of social order. Only in this way is possible to grasp the hegemonic struggle of democratic politics where art can play a crucial role.
// the real relation between art and human being create a political knowledge of how control methods are applied both to science and art compromising them. it is not only about understand the politics but about a understand better what is art, related to design and science to create a political system that doesn't exploit how those works.
Let art develope its own ideology VS impose an ideology on art

The political as antagonism
Difficulty in the post-political age to envisage problems in a political way. Political qeustions not as mere technical issues to be solved by experts (neo-liberal point of view) but choice between conflicting alternatives. Liberalism as philosophical discourse based on rationalism and individualism (wittgenstein - family resemblance) unable to grasp the pluralistic nature of social world, because there is no a rational solution but dimension of antagonism. Liberalism negate the antagonism as it see harmony in the totality of pluralities, and rationalise belief in the possibility of a universal consensus based on reason, while antagonism reveals the very limit of rational consensus.

Politics as hegemony
In an ever-present possibility of antagonism, politics, requires coming to term with the impossibility, undecidability of a final ground, hegemonic nature of every kind of social order and society as order in a contingent context. Political as hegemonic insitution.
In this sense political is different from social, sedimented practices that conceal their contingent political institution, taken for garanted as self-grounded and constitutive part of any possible society.
Social and political as existentials (heidegger) as necessary dimensions of any social life. Political as hegemonic, involves the visibility of the acts of social institutions revealing its order from the temporary and precarious contingent practices VS logic exterior to itself (forces of production, laws of history, development of Spirit).
Things can be always otherwise and every order exclude others.
>> Political because expression of a particular structure of power relations
>> Power as constitutive of the social
Natural order in a given moment as a result of sedimented hegemonic practices, no deeper objectivity >> every order is political and based on exclusion of other possibilities that are repressed and can be reactivated. This process of order is a hegemonic practice, and every hegemonic prder can be challanged by a counter-hegemonic practice that attempt to disarticulate the existing order and install another hegemony.

Agonistic struggle as the core of a vibrant democracy, very configuration of power relations around which a society is structured. Struggle based on the opposition of unreconcilable hegemonic projects.
In this optic, democracy requires to comes to term with the contingent hegemonic politicoeconomal articulation of a given society in a given moment. Precarious and pragmatic constructions that can be disarticulated and transformed in the agonistic struggle vs adversaries.

Liberal Models
vs
Recognize that society is always politically instituted and each hegemonic interventions is the autcome of a previous hegemoic practices that is never neutral.
This is why it denies the possibility of a non-adversarial democratic politics and criticize who ignore the political dimension reducing it to a set of supposedly technical moves and neutral procedures.

The public space
agonistic model of democratic politics for artistic practices, in visualizing the public space. Conception of public space as the terrain where consensus can emerge VS battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted without possibility of riconciliation.

• Public spaces are always plural and the agonistic confrontation on multiple discursive surfaces.
• No unity or a predetermined center to this diversity of spaces. Diverse forms of articulation among them. no dispersion as post-modernist thinkers or 'smooth' space (Deleuze).

>> Public spaces are always striated and hegemonically structured, result of a specific articulation of a diversity of spaces. Hegemonic struggle as an attempt to create a different articulation between public spaces.

Habermas - public space as public sphere, place where deliberation aimed at a rational consensus takes place. But regulative idea, improbability to reach consensus. << but conceptual impossibility as ontological impediments, not empirical, because it would require the possibility of a consensus without exclusion, for the agonistic approach is impossible.

Arendt - agonism without antagonism. Emphasis on human plurality and politics deal with the community and reciprocity of human beings which are different. To think politically is to develop the ability to see things from a multiplicity of perspectives. ref to Kant - 'enlarged thought', so her pluralism is not fundamentally different from the liberal one, because inscribed in an intersubjective agreement, so a procedure to accertaining it in the public sphere. << but no plurality as the origin of antagonistic conflicts

Both envisage the public space in a consensual way.
Zerilli - Arendt consensus results from the exchange of voices and opinions, streiten, agreement through persuasion VS Habermas rational discours, Kantian disputieren, exchange of arguments constraied by logical rules
But neither of them is able to acknowledge the hegemonic nature of consensus and antagonism, the moment of wiederstreit (Lyotard - the differend). Both find their inspiration in Kant but they priviledge the beautiful in the aesthetic and ignore the sublime. this is related to their avoidance of the differend.

Critical artistic practices and hegemony
art and politics not as two separated fields but aesthetic aspect in politics and political in art. >> useless to distinct political and non-political art.
In the theory of hegemony art maintain or challange the given symbolic order and this is its political aspect. The political concearn the symbolic order of social relation (lefort - mise en forme) and this is its aesthetic dimension.
Which are the different typologies of critical art? those who advocate the creation of agonistic public spaces to unveil the repressed forms from the dominant consensus. vs artistic practices for consensus. Critical art foment dissensus by giving a voice to the silenced.
Richard Noble - 4 distinct ways of making critical art

• engages critically with political reality (kruger, haacke, sierra)
• explore subject positions or identities defined by otherness,marginality,oppression,victimization (feminist art,queer art,ethnic or religious minorities art, wodiczko)
• investigates its own political condition of production and circulation (fraser, muller, dion)
• utopian experimentation, attempts to imagine alternative ways of living (hirshhorn, deller,gormley)

>> agonistic interventions in the public space with the aim to don't do a total break with the existing state of affairs to create something absolutely new.
Avant-garde is no possible anymore for radical critique but not a reason to proclaim that their political role is ended, is needed the idea of be political means to offer a radical critique. this is intended badly as a neutralization such as who intend radicality as transgression or art in moralistic terms. But those approaches are anti-political because unable to grasp the specificity of the political.
With the theory of hegemony you can see how artists play an important role in subverting the dominant hegemony by bringing to the fore the repressed character and contributing to the construction of new subjectivities, crucial dimension of the radical democratic project.

THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF INFRASTRUCTURES | Brian Larkin | 2013

The ontology of infrastructure
Infrastrucutre > matter that enable the movement of matter. Pecular ontology of being things and also their relation. Things present to the senses but focused in the matter they move around. Computers not cables, light not electricity, taps and water but not piepes and sewers. Studied in the tradition of theorizing technology (Giedion,Heidegger,Marx,Mumford,Simondon,Stiegler).
Duality of being networks and objects. Different from just technologies because grounds on which other objects operate being a network.
'system of substrates' underlying the phenomenal world of piepes and cables is a linear relationship between underlying system and phenomenal world to which it gives rise BUT far more difficlut relationship and complexity of interaction. computer based on electricity based on computer ...
Focus on the built thing side. Actor-network theory but issue of elements comprised and excluded from it. Computer is based not only on electricity but telematics, software protocols, educational and cultural competence. Discussing infrastructures as a categorical act to define which aspect to discuss and which not. Infr act on different layers simoultaneously and an intellectual question have to select which levels to examine. Infr are not only 'out there' but they involve a cultural analytic that highlights epistemological and politicalcommitments involved in selecting what one sees as infrastructural and what leaves out.

System thinking and technopolitics
In the academic and scientific world studies on how infrastructures mediate exchange over distance as base of modern economic and social systems.
Giedion & Marvin > how systems of telecommunications are reconfiguring urban space and how infr bundle togheter water,energy people street in a series of networked infras defining modern life (2001).
Hughes > large-scale technical systems, massive infrastructural networks organizing everyday life. Infras as series of small independent technologies becoming infras when one rules or converge with other in a network. Ontology of a technology in the internal components but formed as a system. Invention of light bulb directly connected with all the things improved becoming an amlgamation of technical, administrative and financial techniques. (87-93)
Two insights from this work central for anthropology:

• system at the center of analysis vs focus on technology to a more synthetic perspective + machines as nontechnological elements
• focus on system building originated in one place and growing responding to its particular ecological and legal regulations + routinization and extension need of translation as an inherent process

After Hughes focus on actor-network theory emphasis on tracing associations between eheterogeeneous networks and necessity of how transltion occurs.
Anand's analysis of Mumbai > relation between the water delivery system + social networks. Infras as a mentality of living in the world. 'hydraulic citizenship'.
Von Schnitzler's analysis of Soweto > introduction of water meter in south Africa to produce a new citizen. Water deliver moral behaviour. Technological systems shapes other domains as religion and politic. (more biopolitical view).
Collier > biopolitical analysis. Infras as mixture of political rationality, administrative techniques, material systems. Interest in what they tell. Not only social aspect but engineered construction + transferment of neoliberal ideas in Russia through infrastructures as material evidence.

The unbearable Modernity of infrastructure
Infras concept from Enlightenment idea of world in movement, free circulation of goods, ideas and people to create progress. Infras to shape modern society as a mechanisms to control time instigating progress and defining civilization.
Marx > infras technologies not just material things but enacted the course of history itselfbecause industry was a system of machines taht shunted aside 'inherited evils and passive survivals'.
Integral to the organization of a market economy and the concept of progress central to liberalism. Harnessing the power of infras as becoming a kind of prosthetic God (Freud).

The Doubling of infrastructure and the aesthetics of address

Infrastructural Materials and the production of ambient experience

Conclusion
Infrastructures are so diverse and can be analyzed in many different ways, the choice of methodology is a theoretical question.

• technological and network system
• finantial instrument or management structure
• biological embodied in the physicality of men
• social, composed of practices

Priviledge to technological system even if urban space as hybrid between human and machine bundled in the infrastructural networks. But dynamic aspect in the anthropological approach allowing many different readings pointing to the instability of the basic unit of research.

Deleuze > types of machines can be matched to types of societies. If 19th century was built on industrial technologies of enclosure, the 20th and first 21st are built on structures of control mediated through computer.(society of control - 1990)
>> cybernetic turn
Fisch > study of Tokyo subway system. Production is outsourced, value produced virtually, infrastructures lie in computers protocol, capture engineering in social media platforms. (2013)

Other researches examines the media infrastructure of activism, the architectures and practices of circulation by which political ideas are encoded into medial forms.
>> Focus as media
Beller > rise of cinema and transformation of value production from industrial economy toward stimulation of desire, and so consumption. Eyes becomes the roads. The viewer perform the labor that opens the way to new commodities. (2006)
If this is true, it has multiplied in our age of social media in which control and value are indissolubly linked to the machine ensembles of contemporary digital infrastructures.

from RADICAL NETWORKS

themes
mass surveillance & over-commercialization of the www/ free and open internet/ computer networks/ DIY networking/ offline networks/ portable web servers/ mesh networks/ internet gateways/ localized networks/ experimental applications/political activism/ network security/ artistic use of networks/ personal networks/ bringing connectivity to rural areas/ experimental social networks/control and ownership of networks/ ethical hacking/stup own VPN/sniff packets/ map complex networks

questions
What would you do with your own network?
Why does it matter to understand how networks work?
Why do community networks matter?
How could free, open local networks benefit people?
What can networks be used for other than social networking and commercial use?

DECENTRALIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENT | Sarah Friend

what is there outside of centralization that is still centralized?

political movements > decentralized socialism (mao)
economical > free-market
internet > re-decentrilize the web because early internet was decentralized (ARPANET / USENET) //idea of clusters or density

ARPANET - decentralization for survive catastrophic events but military motivation //theme of survive massive segmentation

quantifying decentralization
intersectional decentralization, interrelatedness

do people want decentralization? and which?

decentralized manufacturing > liber router / raspberry pi / 3d printer

can we decentralized the building of centralized networks?
specialization and centralization as connected concepts

from PERVASIVE LABOUR UNION

Issue #1 | Terms of service

• the commodification of the image > the invisible body of terms of service
  

//how burocracy is hidden inside the software, exploits the soft part of software(code) has hard to read, burocracy as a formal code?

• network effect, life bounded with networks, exploitation hidden under 'social',
  

>>user data control and transparency from a bottom- up perspective, where users push for data controllers to respect their rights by means of negotiation, rejecting the fake binary approach upheld by social media monopolies
Issue #2 | Advertisement on Social Media
Issue #3 | Social graph
Issue #4 | User identity
Issue #5 | Like button
Issue #6 | Like button
Issue #7 | Immersive advertisement
Issue #8 | Smart city
Issue #9 | XMPP
daniel gultsch - conversations
xmpp / omemo
trust not mediated by an app + scale from large-centered services to small-decentralized
Issue #10 | Immateriality
Issue #11 | Entreprecariat
Issue #12 | Pervasiveness

BEYOND DISTRIBUTED AND DECENTRALIZED: WHAT IS A FEDERTED NETWORK | Institute of network

Paul Baran
1964 Paul Baran - On Distributed Network > distinction between centralized, decentralized and distributed networks.

Network
interconnected nodes, that can send and receive data, and can be organized in tdifferent ways building different types of network architecture:

Objects

• network
• node
• link
• server

Typologies
centralized > nodes send to a central node (server) that send back
distributed > no central server and each node is connected to other nodes. Data pass from node to node following the shorter route.
decentralized > distributed networks of centralized networks. If zoomed out seems decentralized, if zoomed in seems centralized with links to other central nodes.
Doesn't rely on a single server but split the risks.

Federation
Concept similar to the political one., union of states that are partially self-governing and independent but tranfer a set of responsabilities to a central government that unites them.

Federated Network
In the architecture of (alternative) social networks such as Diaspora, Lorea. But server architecture as a decentralized system, distributed network of centralized networks.

Is federation a synonym of decentralization?
Arvind Narayan - A critical look at decentralized personal data > analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different network architectures. Distinction between federated and distributed networks, with decentralized as umbrella term.
In common to not being centralized.

Elijah Sparrow - Crabgrass social network > decentralized refer to peer-to-peer networks (distributed) while federated for client-to-server-to-server-to-client

Lonneke van der Velden - Meeting the alternatives > decentralization means that data is not stored on the servers owned by one central actor, but on federated servers. Federation as a mode of server organization that makes the network decentralized.

The social web
W3C - Federated Social Web, summit in 2010 > federation, in the context of social networks, means letting people on different social networks follow each other. Not focus on architecture but in the data exchange. Unified data architecture to let emerge an heterogeneous network-of-networks. Federation as data format.

federated network >> is a distributed network with each node of this distributed network being a centralized network. Such a federated network is a type of decentralized network, with another type of such a network being the distributed network.

FEMINIST SERVER MANIFESTO | Constant

control that allow insecurity? need of a safe space Paranode > nodecentrism, we focus on the node in a network, but multitude of paranodes in between which dont conform to the organising logic of network, and cannot be seen through the algorithms of the network. Not utopia, it is not nowhere but somewhere (beyond the nodes). Not a heterotopia, ince it is not outside the network. Paranodal as Atopia because it constitute a difference that is everywhere. ...

HAVE YOU CONSIDERED THE ALTERNATIVES? | HSBC

Pattern recognition
evolution of WhatsApp
2012 against adv and small rate for the service > 2014 bought by fb > 2016 add and sharing of private infos to improve the service (also fb messenger connect fb to your phone number)
search for alternatives (telegram,viber,snapchat,threema,allo,signal) but they all fail
There are no alternatives
Because they share the same model, centralized service which facilitate vendor lock-in and marketing related surveillance in the context of neolib free market. Example of Allo which started as no adv but allows investments by venture capital firms, ideology of make money by selling ad space and infos about their users. The problem is not the maker but the fact that there is no choice within the economic system.
Cryptography matters, but then it also doesn't
Latest competitive feature is the cryptography but you don't know well. In 2016 WhatsApp and fb messenger enabled end-to-end encryption to address increasing privacy but the problem of privacy in structural and economic.
Problem of metadata as product that produce an array of very personal infos in itself more valuable of our texts.
The wrong Signal
OWS developed the encryption algorithm for Signal (open source), the new alternative, but vs decentralization because hampers innovation.
Glutsch > internet as example of working federated network. The problem is in the fact that developers working on federated systems work for free so difficulty to monetise a system that can only succeed if open, difficulty of capitalisation.
He developed Conversation, app with a decentralize approach that relies on federation. No central server but can connect to different serves, so the provider is no important. This is allowed thanks to the XMPP protocol.
XMPP, the federated messaging
New XMPP community, OMEMO as extension protocol that provides multi-user end-to-end encryption. Interoperability allows the esistence of different free and open source software clients and to run your own server from home. Several clients such as Gajim, ChatSecure. Economic sustainability but constant work, client's economic viability in the capacity to capture users.
Approaches not Apps
No alternatives but, federative network as a fragile economic model. 2 main points: scale and trust:

• Scale communication to your community and allows to match your own threat model dealing with trust not mediated by an app
• Experiment with economic model other than large-scaleinfrastructures that involves surveillance and social graph fotr financial gain
• Learn DIY networks, share the costs, meetings, societal issues, without cut yourself from the rest of the world

CONTRA-INTERNET | Zach Blas | 2016

Killing the internet
Egypt 28/1/2011 protest vs Mubarak, government terminated national access to internet (kill switch) toblock protester ti coordinate and block dissemination in social media. It lasts only 5 days.
Order to ISP to cancel routing services + fiber-optic cables owned by the government >> 88% of internet connectivity suppressed. The only ISP active was the one used fot the stock exchange.
What does it mean to kill internet? can technical infrastructure be killed? Violation of human rights but confusing because this means that internet is on the side of the revolutionaries but infrastructure is controlled by the state. Desire of political change can only persist within telecommunications itself.

• 2007 Saffor Revolution in Myanmar
• 2014 Gezi protests in Istanbul (banned Twitter)
• from 2014 internet blackouts in Iraq, from 2005 in Nepal
• little or no access in North Korea but Kwangmyong network
• filtered websites in China (The Great Firewall of China) but also in UK
• extremist surveillance in US (tramp - kill internet vs isis recruiment)
• surveillance and censorship in YT and FB

everything vs a biopolitical subject engineered by corporation to use internet compulsively and being addicted while creating content and asking to click. Internet has extension of control VS McLuhan media as extension of man.

Disappearing the internet
2015 World Economic Forum, Eric Schmidt (Google) - Internet will disappear into our environments. Difference between killing and disappearing? So many sensor and devices that it will be present all the time. Dissolve infrastructures into materialities of the world, total intergration, impossibility to kill VS internet shutdown. Internet as a new chemical element. Transparent city, never stops to produce data, emergence of IoT, reengineer all objects and beings as ontologically networkable. Exacerbation of neolib condition, life as a networked, administrable and programmable. Internet as the last silicon valley's tool fot incessant global surveillance that while desappearing, reappear as e-waste. Internet disappear also into us becoming a mode of subjectivation, set of feelings, sense of longing, human condition, metanarrative. Internet as totality with no outside, alternative, ending.
Assange - is the future of internet also the future of the world? Once internet disappear ioto the world, and the world becomes a global image of the internet, does this means that to undo this teleological trajectory, it is necessary to think beyond the world? >> transform internet in order to locate the potentialities of a militant alternative or outside to the totality the internet has become.
Postcapitalist Politics
1996 Gibson-Graham - 'the end of capitalism (as we knew)' > particular feminist take on postcapitalist politics. Critique at marxist philosophers who argue that capitalism has no outside, effect of nullifying any anticapitalist project, including marxism. 'postcapitalist' not a time after the totalization of capitalism but echonomic alternatives at play within capitalism itself. Words as 'capitalocentric' critiques the left for not being able to think outside or beyond capitalism. Shifting from thinking totality to thinking possibility as intervent into anticapitalist politics.
What is thinkable when internet, as totalized and hegemonic form of contemporary life, in post-capitalist politics? 'Post-internet' as referring to network alternatives, like mesh network and cryptography practices. New vocabulary starting with 'internetocentric'. inability to think beyond or outside internet.
Contrasexuality
2001 Paul Preciado - 'manifesto contrasexuality' > refusal of sexual norms VS articulation of sexuality as naturalized. Against sexuality in the sence of against an undersatnding of sexuality as constituted by dominating and hegemonic powers. To enact it, is to performe and perversely produce contra-pleasures in the body, utopian horizon of political transformation.
Refusal and alternative.
How a contra-internet?
Contrasexuality through 'dildotectonics' , experimental contra-science of dildos, because external to the body vs body as totalized heterosexual unit. Body mapped as a dildo, sexually unnaturalized, reconfigured, transgressive prosthesis, transformed into pure contrasexuality. Not body as a phallus because not emblem of patriarchy. Penis as a meat dildo but not dildo as a plastic penis. Reveals the potentialities of sexuality beyond the heteronormative and the phallocentric. Dildotopia exercises.
What are the dildotectonics of internet? If dildos to expse the norms and constructions of sexuality, what for reveal the internet as totality? The network, internet comprised of networks, but not necessarly the internet. Networks links life to the dominant forms of governance and control today. If dildo external to the body, contra-internet external to internet, something other of a netwrok, outside the network?
Paranodes
2013 Ulises Ali Mejias - 'Off the network', 'the outside of network as a method for acting in the world' > Paranode, alternative to a network configuration vs nodocentrism (dominant model in assembling the social), from neuroscience, paranode is the space that networks leave out, negative space of networks, noise between nodes and edges vs topological and conceptual limits of the node.
Multitudinous form, collection of dildos for the internet.
David Berry, Alexander Galloway > we are trapped in a sort of network, reticular pessimism, no escape from the networks wxcept in term of networks themselves. New metanarrative, no alternative to invasive network, reticular pessimism as deeply cinical VS utopian thinking, alternatives.
Reticular pessimism destabilizes the node and edges of the network form. Cracks and fissures appear in the solid structure of the network. The paranodal appears, beginning of all contra-internet politics.
Antiweb
Hong Kong 2014 pro-democracy demonstrations vs chines government might surveil or shut down internet. FireChats does not break into paranodal but antiwebs or networking alternatives. Not isolated but also mesh networking. Emergent network militancy to expose the inadequacies of the internet as a political horizon + utopiam glimmer of another kind of network. End of the internet as we knew it, but paranodal beginning, horizon of futurity of the contra-internet practices. Paranodal as contra-infrastructure and theoretical model propose 2 militancies:

• practical search for antiwebs
• intellectual task of making thinkable, not only outside the internet but also beyond the network itself

As the Zapatistas might say, let us approach the internet at the speed of dreams.

SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT SELF-EXPRESSION | ROB HORNING | 2014

1.
Subjectivation > end product of producers who train individual to compliance and docility VS autonomy and freedom.Structuring codes for an internal psychic coherence but becoming yourself not as a growth but a surrender of possibilities, inherently limiting. Liberating as freeing temporarily from existential doubts. Social order is protected, not by preventing self-expression and identity, but by forcing people to limit and discipline themselves, take responsability to build and clean your own cage.
Social-media > flexible tool for social control. Expression through a codified network, construct a 'personal brand' identity, adopt incentive structures of capitalist social order as their own. (Big Data - more data you supply more the algorithms can determine your reality)

2.
Inner directed process of discovery VS outer-directed pseudo-creativity (pursuit of attention overwhelmed by desperation). Maybe inner-directed as an ideological illusion, interiority in relation to social world that enable us to survive, but social-media production sold as self-expressive creativity, as self discovery, but in reality narrowing of the self as reductive, defensive aim of getting recognition, reassurance of one's own existence. This creativity VS antisocial kind, reclused, social disappearence, indifference to reputation and social capital, being someone in a network. Self-invention in a social media perpetually in search of feedback, production of communication that gives value to the network (storing and selling data) VS self. Validation for creative effort is limited, restrict itself to a tool of attracting attention, blunt instruments of novelty and prrurience. The self tends to be new, exciting, confessional,sexy... because as advertisement. Identity as series of ads for an non existent product.
Social media intensify anxiety, focus into posts waiting for judgment.Quantifying metrics makes expression as a series of discrete items to be counted,ranked. Infrastructure for a feedback loop that orient expression toward anxiety of what numbers will be, self-monitoring to become more relevant.

Actual self-invention as self-dessolution VS social life and social bounds which shapes us

Alternative as a deep focus in isolation where to accept the incompleteness of being apart from an audience, not seeking final judgment letting the ambiguity, open-ended, of the moment VS archive of identity. The best way to be yourself is to not be anybody in particular but to just be.

3.
Is the solution to get off the Internet? to don't use social media becouse the structure social behavior? It is hard to escape from the 'connected world' and its addictiveness, but anyway social media are reshaping society collectively. Even if you don't use them your social being is affected by this reshaping, because social relations are not one-way. “I fell out of sync with the flow of life.” Reciprocity of social relations VS social medias that present social life as a personal computer consumption experience. Illusion scattered by the anxiety of waiting the response, whiplash alternation between onnipotence and vulnerability. Digital and physical interpenetrated, not a problem of technological mediated social reality. Neoliberalist idea of 'personal responsability' VS collective action, express oneself as an isolated self, free of social determination, exacerbated by a connectivity that atomizes rather than collectivizes. But because internet experience mediated by capitalist entities, by capitalism itself. Even if you go outside there is the same alienation. Capitalist imperatives are still shaping subjectivity, time and experience of leisure,work,life. The problem is capitalism no internet.
social media offer singular identity but our consciousness are multiple simultaneous identities, at once unique and social individual imbued with a collectively consctructed sense of value.
Internet and social media experienced from an isolated 'node' as capitalist subjects, intensifying the social relations familiar to capitalism (asymmetries and exploitation). Immaterial labour to produce commoidities and capital relationship.

4.
Exodus won't yeld freedom. not online self VS offline self. Online self doensn't corresponf with the offline because processing of digital traces.
Seems necessary a new way of augmented sense 'transindividuality' where social being is not VS individuality. A way out of the trap of capitalist subjectivity and compulsive production and anxiety. Discover the self as some transcendent thing at once unfettered by and validated through social mediation. Not using social media to master identity but use them to balance the multitude within.

COLLECTIVE INDIVIDUATION: THE FUTURE OF THE SOCIAL WEB | YUK HUI, HARRY HALPIN

Epoch of networks, world as space of interlocking networks of infinite variety (biological,productive,cybernetic,social). Image of the network, with obvious bias toward vision, as paradigmatic representation of understanding technological society, holistic entity that otherwise escape our cognitive grasp. No image is ideologically neutral, mediation between subject and object which inscribes a conceptual apparatus into the world: nodes and links.
Due to its grasp over our immagination, the network constitutes the horizon of possible invention (Simondon - Imagination et invention) .
Where did the concept of network comes form? not from social networks but pre-digital 1930 psychologist Moreno, the digital accelerated this conceptual apparatus. Anyway the social network influence the globe. Stiegler 'how does the what of FB constitute the who?'

The industrialization of social relations
Moreno > sociometry, value of graph-theoretic approach to social relationships. Before cybernetics and internet. Study in a school with a lot of girls, because of network of social relationships, so 'map the network', 'sociogram' mapping persons to nodes and relationships to links. Pattern visible through charting. 1941 Reorganize social relations organically through superimposition VS pre-existing networks, but produce an unaware society removed from human control.
Loss of control as central problem of the technical social networks >> question the ontological presuppositions hidden in the historical development of socialnet anaysis.
Socialnet analysis as extreme expression of social atomism, presupposition that individuals constitute the network, basic unchanging units of the socialnet.
Collectivity as the sum of the individuals, social relations as the map of the quantified social graph, mathematical precision to the concept of socialnet VS anthropology where collectivity exist beyond the mere sum of individuals and their relations, and embedded in technical,historical,zoological world (families,clan,tribes...), and pre-dates the notion of autonomous individual. + social-network reactivates the spirit of industrialization. Saint-simon > but utopia not mathematical, networks as primary concept and tool for social transformation, to reallocate wealth and resources, equilibrium by unblocking circulations. More specifically question of political economy and class.
Digital social network release the imagination of a new kind of democratic society, frictionless, flattened, that permits also to the isolated to engage with each other on a global level. Sociometric revolution.

The graphical portrayl of social networks, nodes and links, reinforce the philosophical atomism. It can be a constrains of innovation because individual as primary element, extreme individualism which dismisses the position of collectivity (fb..). Non-identical social relations (Adorno) are flattened into identical space of 'friend' (terms as 'enemy' are forbidden). Fb recently inserted new types of objects as places and brands as nodes connected by 'like' relationshpis. Existence of groups instead of the only social atoms but not not developed as a concept VS intensive marketing and consumerism aimed at individuals.
Subjectivation as engineering process under intensive monitoring and control. Alienation via denial of collectivity (Francois Perroux), massive ensemble of humans but cruel mockery of being together, individual chopped into updates, interactions, ads and likes.
Stiegler > not individuals but disindividuals, they have lost their ability to act out wxcept in the apparatus of an atomitic social network.

Decentralization and Social Web
Can decentralization be a solution? Fb story based on centralization but with fb developer platform permits to build on top of fb (from social networking to all-encompassing social platform). Tim berners-lee semantic web, RDF, dataformat for metadata in the form of a network. Dan Brickley FOAF, decentralized technology for connecting social web sites and the people they describe VS risk of socialnet disappear. Brad fitzpratik possibility to export FOAF and control personal social graph 'thoughts on the social graph'. Necessity of new open social graphs. Born of federated social web. David Recordon release the like button ('open graoh protocol') based on the semantic web to centralize even more the database, example of open standard for a close platform.
Decentralization of socialnet leads to its spread but still linked to the spread of 'open' business models of centralized platforms (not ontological change of humans as atoms) >> decentralizde nature of the semantic web led to massive centralied systems. Decentralization is never fully complete and often contradictory. Internet is decentralized but the extraction of monetary value is still centralized. Decentralization can become a fetishism of peer-to-peer systems. But Stigler, decentralization as a pharmakon, both positive and negative, spread of democracy and social control, surveillance. How socialnet is embedded within a larger ideological apparatus.

Collective Individuation
Is it possible to rethink collectivity VS individualized atomism? Not mystical Stalinist collectivism but collective and individual to co-create each other. Individuation in the socialnet as disindividuation. New individuation, Simondon 'l'individuation psychique et collective'. > Individuation is both psychic (formation of the psychology and condition of individuaiton) and collective (link to social and technical world as a state of constant transformation) simultaneously. Marketing doesn't recognise this by defining structures of social norms involving individuals. For Simondon, individuation as a process akin to crystallization. Fb individuation starts fromatomistic individuals to collective VS genuine socialnet where individuation starts from collective to redesign relation between individual and the collective. How a collective social network changes and shape individuals as primary fenomenon.

What distinguish a collective from individual is the common project that then shapes the process of collective individuation. Allowing individual individuation through the collective, meaning to the investments of individuals.
On Fb, google+, Twitter, group is no different from individual, yet another atom in a network. Go beyond atoms and links, beyond nodes and vertices.

Collective Social Networking
From philosophical assumption that socialnet make concerning individuals and their relationships, change to socialnet as a technology for collective individuation. >> socialnet as dynamic and open-ended set of tools to enable creation and administration of collective projects. Collective intelligence become actual through bio-technical abilities to accomplish goals from collective individuation. User always linked to a particular collective project (defined by an agreed upon goal and tasks that are monitored and indicated) necessary to fully utilize the features and data defined by such platform. Dynamic collective where groups can be merged toghether or splitted, to discover each other, collaborate and share information.
alternative or augmented socialnet VS mainstream:

• problem of differentiation VS standard of mainstream
• decentralization VS centralization
• enable collective individuation VS atomization
• small amount of people VS massive communication (essential in political activism)

Tools for collective individuation (mostly concerning the managing of data), to allow a new internet era of free data. + possibility of anonymity and multiple and collective identites.

Conclusion: A Social Web to Come
Not against the mathemtics of graphs but vs weltbild of network, image of the totality of our world that constrains and shapes our potentialities. Ontological assumptions of social and economic order.
A collective social network is possible and necessary as we are being-in-the-world-with-others, 'group' based around a common project, project which is also a projection, emancipation of a common future of the collective individuation of groups. Individuation as a temporal and existential process, not only social and psychological.

SUSTAINABILITY AND COMMUNITY NETWORKS | Christian Fuchs | 2017

environment > contradiction between network effects and environmental problems (energy consumption and e-waste).
economic > contradiction between the monopoly power of large communications companies and the resources required for managing the network as a non profit, commonly owned and commonly governed, democratic, gratis good and service.
politic > contradiction between open, privacy-friendly participation and political control (surveillance).
culture > contradiction between geek publics and community publics.

RW&RM texts

from SELECTIONS FROM THE PRISON NOTEBOOKS | Antonio Gramsci

HISTORY OF THE SUBALTERN CLASSES
Unity of the ruling class is realised in the state and their history. not only as juridical and political but results from the organic relations between state (political society) and civil society (see 'state and civil society').
Unification of subaltern classes is only possible in becoming a State, while their history is interwined with civil society, and history of states. necerrasy to study:
1. objective formation of subaltern social groups, developments/transformations in economic production, quantitative diffusion, origin and pre-existing social groups (mentality, ideology and aims).
2. their active or passive affiliation to the dominant political formations, attempts to influence the programmers of those to press claims of their own,and consequences in determining processes of decomposition/renovation/neo-formation
3. birth of new parties of the dominant groups to conserve the assent of subaltern groups and maintain control over them
4. formations in subaltern groups to press claims of a limited and partial character (trade unions)
5. formations which assert autonomy of the subaltern groups, but within the old framework (reformist parties)
6. formation which assert intgral autonomy (communist)
THE CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY
Ideology was an aspect of sensationalism (1700 french materialism). 'science of ideas' which analyse ideas, investigation of ideas. Ideas had to be broken in their original elements that could be just sensations. Ideas derived from sensations.
but sensationalism associated with extreme belief of 'power of the spirit' and its 'immortal destinies' (manzoni) even after its conversion. Chatolicism adhere in principle to sensationalism until philosophy of rosmini.
How historical passage from 'science of ideas' to 'system of ideas'?
Freud as the last of ideologues and also De Man (interest of Croce and Crocean)
Bukharin - popular manual, trapped in ideology whereas marxism as a distinct advance and historically in opposition to ideology. Ideology in marxism as negative value and excludes ideas as sensations for its founders, but in phisiology. Ideology must be analysed historically as a superstructure.
Element of error in assessing the value of ideologies because name ideology in both
necessary superstructure of a particular structure / arbitrary elucubrations of particular individuals
The bas sense has become widespread with the effect of a modified and denatuirates analysis of this concept. The process leading to this can be resumed:
1. ideology identified as distinct from the structure, and assertion that ideology changes the structure and not viceversa.
2. it is asserted that a given political solution is ideological (not sufficient to change the structure althought it thinks that it can, so it is stupid, useless)
3. assertion that every ideology is pure appearence, useless,stupid
But one must distinguish between historically organic ideologies (necessary to a given structure) and ideologies that are rationalistic, arbitrary, willed. To the extent that ideologies are historically necessary they have a validity that is psychological, organise human masses, create terrain on which man move, acquire consciousness of their position,struggle ... While the arbitrary creates individual movements, polemics and so on (tho not completely useless, since they function like an error which by contrasting with truth, demonstrates it).
Marx 'solidity of popular beliefs' as a necessary element of a specific situation, a popular convinction often has the same energy as a material force.
Analysis of those propositions tends to reinforce the conception of historical bloc in which material forces are the content and ideologies the form, tho distinction between form and content has didactic value, since material forces would be inconceivable historically without form and ideologies individual without material forces.
CULTURAL THEMES:IDEOLOGICAL MATERIAL
study of how the ideological structure of a dominant class is organized:material organization to maintain/defend/develope the theoretical or ideological 'front.' Most prominent and dynamic part is the press: publishing houses (which have an implicit and explicit programme and are linked to a particular tendency), political news, periodicals, bullettin...
This study in a national scale would be gigantic but in a city or more. A news editor should have this study as outline for his work, make his own version. Press as the most dynamic part of ideological structure, but not he only one. Everything which is capable to influence public opinion, directly or not: libraries, schools, associations, clubs, architecture, the layout and names of streets.
Position in the Church in modern society through the constant effort to develope continuously its material structure ideology. Very importance of this study!!! living historical model + accustom to a more cautious and exact estimate of the forces acting society. What resources can be used against this formidable complex of trenches and fortification of the dominant class? Spirit of scission, progressive acquisition of the consciousness of its own historical personality, aim to spread itself from the protagonist class to the potential allies classes. All this requires a complex ideological labour, exact knowledge of the field that must be cleared of its element of human 'mass'.

THE RULING CLASS AND THE RULING IDEAS | Marx & Engels

The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas
who rule the material force of society (means of production) automatically rule the intellectual force (mental production).
Ruling ideas > ideal expression of the dominant material relations.

Individuals in the ruling class possess consciousness and think.
As they determine the extent, compass of anhistorical epoch, regualte production and distribution of the ideas of their age > ruling ideas of the epoch (presented as eternal laws ex. 'separation of powers').
Division of labour (one of the chief forces of history) manifests itself also in the ruling class:

• mental - formation of the illusions of the class
• material - passive to the illusion but active members of the class

If conflict that endangered the class, automatically vanish, and vanish also the appearence of the ideas as not the idea of the ruling class because distinct power from the power of the class. Existence of revolutionary ideas presuppose revolutionary class.
If ideas are independent but the class gives to those ideas universality presenting them as the only rational, to carry their interest as the common interest, expressed in ideal forms.

The class making revolution comes forward only if opposed to a class, not as a class but as the representative of the whole society VS one ruling class. It can do this because pressure of existing condition while not yet being able to develop a particular interest of a particular class. Its victory benefits individuals of other classes, not as dominant but enable them to raise into the ruling class. (Frenche revolution could have allowed proletarian to raise). Every new class achive domination only on a broader basis than the one before, but also more sharply and profoundly opposition.
This determine the fact that all the struggle against this new class becomes more radical negation of the previous conditions of society than all previous classes could have.
This whole appearence of the rule of aclass as only the rule of certain ideas, comes to and end with the end of class rule as form in which society is organised, when it is not necessary to represent a particular interest as general or general interest as ruling.

Once ruling ideas separated from ruling individuals and material relations, with the conclusion that history is always under the sway of ideas, it is very easy to abstract 'the Idea' as the dominant force in history, and separate ideas as 'forms of self-determination' of the main concept. So all the relations of man cames from the concept of Man (speculative philosophy, Hegel).

Trick of proving the hegemony of the spirit in history confined in 3 attempts:

• separate ideas of those ruling for empirical reasons, empircal conditions and as corporeal individuals, from these rulers, and thus recognise the rule of ideas or illusions in history
• order into this rule of ideas, prove mystical connection among the successive, by regarding them as 'forms of self-determination of the concept'
• remove mystical appearance of this 'self-determining concept' it is changed into a person 'self-consciousness' or series of persons who represent the 'concept' in history, into the ideologists as the manufacturers of history, 'council of guardians', as the rulers. Eliminate materialistic elements from history and given to the speculative steed.

This method reigned in Germany, illusion of ideologists in general, dogmatic dreamings and distortions, explained from theis practical position in life, job, division of labour.
While shopkeeper can distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, historiograph has not this insight and takes what words about itself says of an epoch as truth.

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE | Marshall McLuhan | 1964

Intro
Mechanical age, extension of bodies in space. Today with electric technology the central nervous system is extended in a global embrace, abolishing space and time. Final stage of extension, the technological simulation of consciousness, creative process of knowing, collectively and corporately extended to the whole society. If the extension of consciousess, as in ads for specific products, is a good thing, remains a question. Necessity to consider all of them together because any extension affects the whole physic and social complex.
In mechanical age, actions without too much concerns are possible because slow movement for reaction VS electric age, action and reaction at the same time, but we continue to think with the old pre-electric age paradigm of fragmented space and time patterns.
Western cultures, thanks to technology of literacy, acquired the power of action without reaction, fragmentation of the self, art of carrying out the most dangerous social operations with complete detachment(but posture of noninvolvement). In electric ag, where nervous system is extended, we necessarily partecipate in the consequences of our actions. >> No longer possible to be dissociated. (Beckett - theater of absurd, drammatization of the human action who appears not involved in the action).
Electrically contracted, the world become a village. Social and political functions together in an implosion of awareness of responsability. Age of anxiety that compels commitment and partecipation, regardless of any pov (also in the information level where it is substituted by the inclusive image). Passage from editorial's chair (extentsion of the posterior, of the integral being) to psychiatric's couch (need to rationalize events VS temptation of a private pov). Aspiration for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness, revulsion against imposed patterns, as natural adjunct of electronic technology VS privat outlook of the mechanical age.
Declare of beings totally, faith in the ultimate harmony of all being.

The medium is the message
In our society where everything is splitted and divided as a means of control, it is a shock to remind that the medium is the message > Personal and social consequences of any medium result from the scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension or new technology. In negative automation tend to eliminate jobs, in positive it creates roles for people. Machine technology shaped human work and associations through fragmentation and centralizationbut with superficial patters VS automation technology, integral and decentralist in depth.
Light as pure information, medium without a message. The content of any medium is always another medium.
thought-speech, speech-writing, written word-print, print-telegraph
Message of the medium, as a change of scale introduced into human affairs. (acceleration - railway, airplane)
The medium shapes and control the scale and form of human association and action. The content hides the character of the medium.
Electric light as a communication medium to show a content, moving information, eliminate time and space factors in human association as radio,tv,telephone...
Latest approach in media study consider not only the content but also the medium and the cultural matrix VS old unawareness of psychic and social effects of media.

'A thing in itself is neither good nor bad; it is the way they are used that determines their value.' >> ignore the nature of the medium. True Narcissus style of one hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form.

classical economics can't explain change or growth. Machanization as a paradox because cause of change and growth but exclude the possibility and understanding of them. Mechanization achived by fragmentation and series but (hume) no causality in a sequence, from following follow only change. >> Light change this by collapsing the sequence in an instant speed; awareness can emerge again.

Movie >> passage from the world of fragmentation and sequence to growth and organic interrelatio. By speeding up the mechanical carried us to the world of creative configuration and structure. Message of the movie medium is the transition from linear connection to configurations.

When electric speed takes over from mechanical sequence, then the forces of structures and media become loud and clear, we return to the inclusive form of the icon.

Gombrich - art and illusion >> relation between movie, illusion and dreams that money could buy, birth of cubism VS ambiguity of illusion (3D on canvas) through the interplay of points of view. Shows the reality of instant sensory awareness of the whole. Instant total awareness, the medium is the message.
When passage from sequence to simultaneity, we are in the world of structure and configuration. Passage from specialized segments to total field.
In painting you can ask what was about but not in a melody or house or dress, because sense of whole, form and function as a unity.
In electric age, structure and configuration are prevalent, also in education. Structural approach (numer theory, sets) VS specialized problem. Learn the grammar to read the coming change. Literacy.

Tocqueville > french revolution through printed word because homogenized the grech nation. Typographic principles of uniformity, continuity and lineality VS complexities of oral society. Revolution carried out by new literati and lawyers. In england the oral tradition of common law was more powerful.

Prediction and control through literacy VS subliminal state of Narcissus trance (immediate spell).

We have confused reason with literacy, rationalism with a single technology. With electrical age man seems to become irrational. Ultimate conflict between sight and sound, written and oral kinds of perception and organization of existence is upon us. (Nietzsche) Understanding stops action, to moderate this conflict by understanding media that extend us and raise there wars within and without us.

Detribalization by literacy VS tribalization and individual isolation by submersions in a floods of concepts (TV and radio) 'We are as numb in our new electric world as the native involved in our literate and mechanical culture'.

Electric speed mingles prehistory with industrial marketeers, nonliterate with semi- and post- literate. Mental breakdown as common result if uprooting and inundation iwithin information and endless new patterns of information. (Wyndham - the human age) Prehistory regard violent crimes as pathetic, the criminal appears as a nonconformist VS the demand of technology to behave in uniform and continuous patterns. Literate man is inclined to see others who cannot conform as somewhat pathetic. 'The man's world' VS victims (woman, colored person, childs, skew, dwarf). Culture that assigns roles instead of jobs. Quantitative uniformity and homogenization as erroneus cultural standards because unaware of our typographic cultural bias. Uniformity and continuity as a sign of intelligence VS ear and tactile man.

Electric technology VS Gutenberg technology. But we are unaware because is within. Our response to all media, as we use them, is as technological idiots. Content as the thing to distract the mind VS the message of the medium. The content of a movie is not related to the movie form. Content of writing or print is speech, but the reader is unaware wither of print and speech. The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception without any resistance.

'Serious artist as the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception'

Money medium in Japanese society reorganized the life of people as an extension of our sense lives. Change does not depend upon approval or disapproval of the living society.

Toynbee concept of 'etherialization' - principle of progressive simplification and efficiency in any organization or technology. But ignoring the effect of this process upon the response of our senses. 'private point of view' as part of the Narcissus fixation VS awareness that we become what we behold.
If formative power in the media are the media themselves >> media as natural resources, which create a social patterns of organization as a result.
Media configure the awareness and experience of each of us.

INTERVIEW WITH FRED TURNER | Petar Jandric | 2015

From counter-culture to cyberculture (2006) - relation between technology and culture late 60s The Democratic Surround (2013) - period between WWII and 60s

Wired magazine Stewart Brand, hero of the counterculture promoting computers as tools for counterculture VS during vietnam war and cold war computers as emblems of everything wrong, inhuman.

How was it that people who had been leaders in what I thought was an anti-war counter-culture should be promoting computers now? >> tracing network of writers and thinkers associated with Wired mag > story of Stuart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog

1968 Hippies were reading all kind of thinkers from 40s Erich Fromm / Wilhelm Reich / Buckminster Fuller /Norbert Weiner Why Fuller and Weiner, leading military industrial researchers and active in cold wae propaganda become so important to the counterculture? In the 1940s, many American intellectuals, journalists, and even government officials shared a deeply egalitarian vision of what the United States could be. Fight against totalitarianism, racism, homophobia. 40s as inspiration for the 60s, especially in the realm of media. Margaret Mead, Gordon Allport, John Cage, Edward Steichen, all promoted multimedia environments, the same who raised the psychedelia of Haight Ashbury as tools for making more democratic, flexible, creative people. All those ideas suffused the Whole Earth Catalog shaping our dreams for the internet.

Information technologies dialectically intertwined with (the fight against) totalitarianism. But now return to a more conservative discourse.

In 40s psychologist thoughts that just by interacting with multimedia we would learn tolerance in all forms. Resistance to encountering difference. We can and should hope that the increase in media’s availability might have a similar effect on today’s totalitarian movements.From techno-universalism to cyber-libertarianism.

No just one counterculture VS cold war, but two: New Left VS New Communalists. About Internet: New Com > How does it connect individual to individual? simply linking our minds by means of communication technology will in turn enable us to leave traditional party-based institutional politics behind. Living in a state of constant communicational intimacy, we will be able to build new kind ok communities. Change your local surroundings to change the world.

New Left > How does it connect individual to institutions? How am I monitored and monetized by corporations on my laptop? Be engaged with democratic institutions of politics and change state systems that regulate those companies and those states.

"Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for New Media Production" (2009) those two approaches in the heart of present day consumerist culture. Ideas of the 60s not only appropriated by neoliberal capitalism but also contributed to create its digital infrastructure. Relation between couterculture/cyberculture/capitalism.

New com and its vision of digital life encouraged consumption instead of party politics, and the self and network instead of institutions. during 60s and 70s americans saw the largest amount of communes, people lives together VS politics to buil a shared mindset...but consuming drugs, fashion, amplified music and leftover cars. Transform massproduced technologies of mainstream society into tools for the reformation of one's mind an life, would change the world. Consumption and self-reformation VS politics. But communes collapsed and the idea remains as a space to be exploited by capitalism. If you belive party-politics and institutions are by nature bankruot, bureaucratic, hierarchical, you are much more vulnerable to those institutions. After Snowden states and corporations hardly stopped concentrating power or monitoring our behaviour. Consuming small-scale technologies and use the symbols or devices provided by the corporate world, doesn't save us, it is a naive thought.

Burning Man serves as a key cultural infrastructure for the Bay Area’s new media industries. Religious terms or more pragmatically as business and networking opportunity.

Burning Man as example of how counterculture and consumer culture works together. But concrete, cultural infrastructure for the newmedia industries of Silicon Valley. It mirrors the techniques of high individuality and creativity used in places like Google + share a special bond with the people you saw there who lives in Silicon Valley and you can see around. Special bond and trust needed to do business together.

Religious aspect, New Age philosophies. Despite information science is based on math, physics, engineering, quest for spiritual LSD usage. Why counterculture reject traditional system of belief? Only resistance or deeper logic? Does the age of information need its own religion?

New com > Not new beliefs but way back to older and better world, fusion between deep American beliefs in the power of the individual, existence of open landscape, frontier where to remade the self WITH highly technological context. Today in cyber-libertarianism you can still hear echoes of the techno-universalism of the 40s. New religion not to build network and universal information but to build institutions where to do things and build communities.

Communes VS inequalities BUT opposite daily practices.Without formal laws, communes fell back on social norms. Deep Irony. The ideal in networks is having the same effect.

TECHNOLOGY & JOURNALISM
Decline of journalism transformation from watchdog of democracy into a merciless tool of global neoliberal capitalism.

Why print press still exist in some country (fr,de) while in US is corroded? Much of the answer relation with technology but also profit. new media > speed the process of newsgathering and dissemination, diversify number and kind of people, made easier to capture fragments of info from anywhere. becomes hard to make money, expecially with investigative reporting and commentary work on short periods which are very expensive. digital media undercut the traditional business model of mainstream journalism, become harder to pay for the journalism we need most.

Computational journalism to balance forces? Technologies can lower the cost of finding and creating informations.

TECHNOLOGY & ART
Relation between technology and contemporary art is more productive. Collaboration between artists and engineers. Bells lab + Rauschenberg and Cage. Nasa artists in residence. Artist as repositories of creative energy driving innovation. 60s artists built using technologies echhoed theories of control developed by who designed the machine.
Pepsi Pavillon > a kind of three-dimensional computer-monitored environment in which your whole experience would be shaped by your interactions with sensors, tape machines and computers.
The arts of engineering create multiscreen environments in which our attention is carefully managed, carefully monitored, and carefully monetized, technology-centered mode of citizen management.

Be hyper-individualistic in collective spaces;

CONTEMPORARY TEACHER
What does it mean to be a teacher in the contemporary university?
Your job is to help students learn to identify the most important questions of their age and the questions that most animate them. + help them develop techniques and skills to pursue answers to those questions effectively. undergraduate > help our students become more openminded and more fully themselves. graduate > introduce students to the most important questions in their fields, give them the history of their fields, and help them take their fields forward in time and space.

NETWORK INTELLECTUAL
What does it mean to be a public intellectual in the age of the network?
Network entrepreneurship (Brand, Wiener, O'Reilly)
We still live with the myths that intellectuals are only those people who write books and say things, deeply involved with culture and literature rather than business and technology, they are perforce critical. A new kind of intellectual has arisen with computer networks, he lives more by building networks than by writing books (Brand). Rarely an expert in the intellectual areas of the network he gathers.
Network intellectuals I think are simultaneously masters of ideas and masters of social worlds. In fact, it is the mastery of the social world that leads to the ideas. Not vice versa. From cyber-knowledge to cyber-learning.

TRADITIONAL DISCIPLINES VS FRINGES
inter-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary, multi-disciplinary, anti-disciplinary
The non-standard approach during the WWII was justified on the rethoric of cybernetics. But why traditional disciplines persist?
Because are structural, long time to concentrate knowledge and expertise. So interest in maintain it. As monks in middle age inside monasteries, the same now with academy.
The cybernetic rethoric was one thing but it was driven also by the scare of lose the cold war vs totalitarianisms. So they tried everything.
Now also inter-disciplines are strong.

BIOLOGICAL METAPHOR AND INTERNET
Cybernetics is based around "computational metaphor: "electrically powered machines based on physics and logic. But also "biological metaphor". Which is the relation between the bio metaphor and internet?
Intrenet as an organic living system, lets you think more creatively and holisticallyBUT de-politicizes our relation with internet, inteded more as a force of nature than a site of political struggle. Things in nature seem harder to change than in political realm, but internet belongs in the political realm.

CYBORG THEORY
new researches show how the cyborg theory is incomplete and points toward post-humanism and cogni-sphere (Hayles).
The benefits depends on how it is used. Man-machine hybrids have a long history within the sciences and particularly, within war related research and development.
Haraway, cyborg as emblem of the multiplictous person, amplified human by an attached machine. Reclaim machine for feminist politics.
The question of whether the cyborg can be completely stripped of the militaristic, masculine tenor of the communities in which it first appeared remains open.

INTERNET AS INFRASTRUCTURE
Polical nature of intrenet is becoming increasingly invisible, hidden in the everyday infrastructure as electric grids and sewage system. Should it be treated differently from the other infrastructures? No it should be treated more as the other infrastructures, state and public should protect them. We need more texts to think at internet as an infrastructure, learning their very beginnings.

LEARNING VS FORMAL EDUCATION
Thematic of the WEC (Understanding Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and Craft, Communications, Community, Nomadics, Learning).
Contribution of counter/cyberculture to understanding learning?
People learn all the time, and they learn more when their environments are more intellectually, culturally, and materially wealthy. We were in charge of our own learning. But not everyone lives in a world like that, this life for everyone is a myth.

ENDLESS FRONTIER & ANTHROPOCENE
Technological development bumps into its natural limit. Vannevar bush metaphor of science and technology as the endless frontier VS more holistic understanding of human relationships with the environment such as the McKenzie Wark's Anthropocene. (the futures of the human and material worlds are now totally entwined). What should we bring from the endless frontier to the anthropocene?
Technology helps to increase the sense of globalization and this help reducing differences between countries not anymore sees as aliens. Increase empathy and prevent conflict. Shows how entwined we are wit the organic world.

Florian's texts

WHY PUBLISH NOISE | Miekal And

Publishing > expanded definition of publishing surpasses the production of books to include mail,computer bulletin boards, fax, telephone, video, artist multiples
Noise > particles which escape automatic assimilation by the cognitive machine. Outside the bounds of production & coherency.
Print Noise > information which can never become appropriated by mainstream media (experimental literature, book art, visual/verbal, anarchist&radical criticism).

Because:

• one unchecked & unleashed, visual/verbal thought form is instinctive sensory behaviour
• information + transmission = publishing
• noise VS the habitual nausea of mediated language.
• publishing experimedia reunites the instrument of difference with the social model of communication
• visual/verbal thought as productive, radical departure VS linear rational brain. Impule toward counter-media propagates a sympathetic experimental audience
• 'artists are the antennae of the race' by Ezra Lb
• cultural dyslexia is only countered by reconstructed alternatives to mass media.
• underground print culture extended to transform the act of reading in mental publishing, imaginary reproduction. No reader/writer/publisher segregation but publishing as distribution of select information to readers who become publicists.
• to optimize dissemination of radical media, syndacating & plagiarizing as matter of interdependent survival. Anonimity & identity of ideas as disguise for a collective bashing of the profit economy of infos.
• In the world of mail art correspondance is spontaneous publishing, global transmission delimits a sustainable cultural ignorance
• experimental publishing as the reversal of a disposable media which reduces all information to identical & easy to swallow info pills. Conservation of unassimilatible artistry, denied penetration into the popular culture. Oscurity as a survalistic necessitu, only action is producing disinformation-objects which threaten aesthetics or investigate divergence. Ecology of infos as continual documentation of the ideational process, uncensored assertion of obscurity & radical shifts from institutionalized info. Best for scholars & readers are deviant & outside the mainstream works.
• experience acquired from maneuvering a thought-form to its object-state is part of the inherent architexture of producing new ideas. Learning to be responsible for the production of your own media from start to finish is an obvious holistic strategy. Away with specialization.
• publishing duplicate the act of communication. In isolation, the existence of only an original constitutes appropriate publication.
• publishing is furtherance
• for the first time publishing signifies the utter decentralization of experimentalism. Resistance to isolation as invasion of the mysteries of the future, the yet to be created.
• stagnation as symptomatic fear of the unknown + antidote, permutation and change are rendered most effectively by the utopia of publishing not only blasphemous noise. Subliminal campaign of strategically administered doses of print noise can alter the cultural pillars of rationality forever
• if you're going to say something, you might as well be heard, otherwise you are talking to yourself
• anaphora is a most insistent prosody

Mine

MUSICAL MEANING | Kramer

Problem of meaning in music. Has music meaning? what kind and for whom? (individual, social, cultural context)
music as something to be listened 'for itself' (autonomy, universality, self-presence, sublime trascendence of meaning) VS something mixed in with soical (continget, historical, constructed, intellegible production of meaning)
In europe push on the music 'for itself' creating a slef-sufficient idealized, unitary conception of music + variants alongside to challange this emergent model.
Fruitful:
This process encouraged to develope both analytical devices for understanding music as autonomous and interpretative strategies for understanding music as meaningfully engaged with language, imagery and the wider world.
Fruitless:
because it is not about the nature of music itself but how we authorize to listen to it and talk about it.
>> both sides are right even if you are inclined to prefer one side over the other.
The apparent dilemma of musical meaning is actually its own solution. The question whether music has a meaning is the meaning of music.

The dual character analogue to Wittgenstain duck/rabbit where you can't see both at once. Interplay of autonomy and contingency as higher-order context and condition of intellegibility in music, kind of template, quasi-grammatical or a priori ambiguity. Either sides are ambivalent (both good and bad). Every kind of musical composition, performance, listening or understanding engage some and ignore others, define itself by the interplay of autonomy and contingency.

In music this theme autonomy/contingency is particularly urgent and ubiquitous as the art of the ear more than the eye, music collapses the senses if distance associated with visuality and broadly with concepts, images, words. Sense of immediacy which tend to be felt like bodily self-present, coming from the intimacy with one's own embodiment. Suspension of autonomy and contingency not aroud our selves but inside ourselves.

' The a priori ambiguity of music goes beyond the vagaries of perception to articulate one of the core conditions of subjectivity. The sense of self, too, is poised between a unique and absolute self-presence and a contingent social constructedness, and no one ever escapes from this dilemma — which, however, is also its own solution. '

Certain sense as hunger, love ... are percived as occurring beyond relativity and contingency, and the absolutely particular seems to merge with the universal. Others occur as parts of particular life histories whose meanings are contingent.
'What we experience as unconditional is always somewhere marked by the irrationality of its attachment to the contingent. Music, the art of collapsing distances, palys out this paradox as nothing else can.'

Modern western music associated to noncontingent subjectivity, latter theorists have associated it to historical, cultural and social construction of subjectivity. But both associated with the iconic relationship between antonomy and contingency to give a conflicted formation of subjectivity in modern era.
Link to subjectivity as the old contraddiction between pure (not affected by things) and applied (affected by things) music.
Limitless subtractability of music as paradigm of autonomy in arts and in the construction of subjectivity. Trascendental aspect.
VS
(from Hegel to Batkin to Lacan) the subject is meaningless in itself alone and necessarily seeks to enunciate itself in relation to others. Seeks connections, interrelationships, to enunciate itself in relation to others, in order to be. Even the purest music can's escape from this potential which can be activated by the casual or intentional sign, visual, verbal or gestural.
'Meshes of relationship where the reminder comes to act both as the material medium and the fantasy space or screen through which the subjective content may be enfranchised and played out'

In discourses about music, autonomy as superior. Here a counter discourse but ' to acknowledge the historical, ideological, functional importance of the experience of autonomy in the context of a view in which the primary term is contingency.'

'I want to take autonomy seriously by finding its indispensableplace in the network of indispensably contingent practices'
'music as more a means of engagement with the world than of disengagement'

• 'Music as cultural practice' > music as communicative action embedded in a continuous texture of psychological, social and cultural relations. It models the 'symbolization' of experience. Musical meaning is understood, by grasping the dynamic relations between musical experience and its contexts.
• Classical music and postmodern Knowledge > the form taken by musical meaning is the construction of modes of subjectivity implicating and “condensing” larger dramas of social and cultural identity. Music dramatizes or enacts the scenarios of subjectivity from “inside” the listener or performer, radical potentiality within his subjectivity as that subjectivity is permeated by the music.
• Musical meaning > Process of subjectivation as specific manifestation of music's a priori ambiguity calling the listener to decide when how and whether to resolve the ambiguity credibly. Music thus addresses the subject from a (virtual, symbolic) liminal zone set between particular manifestations of autonomy and contingency, internal or external creating boundaries of style, form, genre, performance, medium... The listener is invited to

renegotiate these boundaries: to reexperience through the music what does or does not, may or may not, belong, be included, be excluded, be incorporated in or expelled. Horizon within musical subjectivity is negotiated, but no fixed content and set of values or embodiments.

'As we will see, although contingency and autonomy are structurally equal, their relationship is dynamically geared to the production of contingency. The “secret debt” of autonomy to contingency is always available to tip the balance.'
>>
'musical meaning consists of a specific, mutual interplay between musical experience and its contexts; the form taken by this process is the production of modes or models of subjectivity carried by the music into the listener’s sense of self; and the dynamics of this production consist of a renegotiation of the subject’s position(s) between the historically contingentforms of experience and the experience of a transcendental perspective that claims to subsume (but is actually subsumed by) them.'