iDC BLOG: October 2005

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LA Weekly article

Naimark “I’m going to put the phone down now — just hang on.” http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/49/digital-willis.php

"Media art is not only notoriously difficult to define, it’s nearly impossible to sell and it’s a pain in the neck to exhibit. Generally, the term “new-media art” designates artworks that incorporate some form of electronic media, often entail viewer interaction and frequently reflect back on our immersion in a technologized world."

09:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Review of DATA browser

The Truth About Networks

Between the total hell of networked, salaried labor and the promises of the
commons

by Trebor Scholz

In short succession the first two in a series of publications called "DATA browser" were just released. Both start out with historical texts to search for effective contemporary models of cultural production that merge socio-technological with artistic critique.

"DATA browser 01" takes Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's notion of the culture industry (1944) as a departing point. "DATA browser 02" links to Walter Benjamin's essay "The Author as Producer" (1934).

Let's start with Brian Holmes' essay "The Flexible Personality," which contributes a rare meditation on today's network society and sketches out an intellectual history of anti-systemic movements that becomes the critical backdrop for both volumes of "DATA browser." Here, the Paris-based art critic, activist, and translator Holmes leads us into a social landscape of total network hell. Together with the social theorist Maurizio Lazzarato, Holmes is not on board when it comes to the techno-utopian celebration of the networked life style. Lazzarato thinks that new networked techniques are even more
totalitarian than the assembly line. Brian Holmes includes a reference to Adorno's notion of the authoritarian personality (1950), which is defined by its rigid conventionalism, submission to authority, opposition to everything subjective, stereotypy, an emphasis on power and toughness, destructiveness and cynicism, and an exaggerated concern with sexual scandal. Holmes' criticism of networked labor is sharp ˜ he argues that distributed, casualized labor is based on the ruthless pleasure of exploitation and soft coercion that the laptop as portable instrument of control affords.

The Italian philosopher Paolo Virno places questions about idleness, leisure and the refusal to work at the center of the discussion about contemporary production. Brian Holmes points to the "de-localized" production of the "networker" or "connectivist" that helps today's firms to eradicate social programs. In "flexible capitalism" networked, salaried labor can be easily monitored and leads to ever more surplus that can be extracted from the laborer to the rhythm of the mouse click. Holmes uses the term "prosumer" for a consumer who becomes an amateur producer within the networked enterprise. According to Holmes the networker as satisfied individualist and hyperactive single is always ready to jump and take advantage of every opportunity and is left unmoved by all the data mining and acceleration of consumption.

In his essay "The Producer as Power User" Pit Schultz, who describes himself as "social media architect" also talks about the marketing term of the prosumer and introduces the "power user" (neither amateur nor professional). Dependent on the participation in the global communication apparatus everyone is a power user. According to Schultz, the workplace becomes a state of mind for the power user aiming for total productivity. The power user comes in different degrees of machine addiction and is an advanced user with administration and customization skills. Her unpaid labor mainly pays off through the social reputation economy created from social capital gained from contributions to the gift economy of the public domain. The power user follows the "I post therefore I am" so that more links go to and from her name and URL. And when she publishes in books and journals, she references her ephemeral online materials. The power user produces ever more redundant work that inevitably leads to radical mediocrity and "panic publishing." Power users love free content and are passionate about the growing open archives.

Other "DATA browser" essays add a variety of examples that shed light on the hopeful potentials of network culture and open environments. The texts in these two volumes respond to the civic disengagement and decline of social connectedness and look for ways to re-connect us with the anti-systemic oppositional culture of the sixties. How can new forms of solidarity emerge and help us to create a better society based on the desire for equality? How can collective projects, and communicative activism serve to foster distributed creativity, peer relations, openness and collaboration? Which case studies can be presented that dismount criticism of blind idealism when it comes to the commons?

Today's culture-activists from Delhi and Pittsburgh to London operate through technology and networks that have the ability to reconfigure power relations through the creation of knowledge pools, free wireless networks, and sharing of information in open archives.

Browsing through the texts in Db 01/02 theoretical threads lead from Paolo Virno's A Grammar of the Multitude and Manuel Castells' Rise of the Network Society to Michael Hardt, Richard Barbrook, Cornelius Castoriadis, Tiziana Terranova, and Naomi Klein.

It is clear from these examples that theory here is not groomed in the academic observatory but conceived of as tool that is linked to practice. In fact reading these texts I felt like going through a transcript of a round table discussion in the sense that the authors have much common theoretical ground.

In these two volumes theory, art and political action inform each other rather than being conflated with one another. While Holmes and Schultz demonstrate new typologies of the networked laborer, the Delhi-based group of media practioners "Raqs Media Collective" points to an alternative reality. In their essay "X Notes on Practice" the group points to Argentinean workers, who faced with a failed money economy, developed their own exchange system based on self-regulation and free interchange outside of the circuit desired by capital.

Within the cooperation commons people create and distribute content. This overwhelms traditional companies that cannot match the massive amount of free content created by a multitude of user communities. These cultural reservoirs and much of cooperation-enhancing technologies allow the like-minded to connect and share knowledge. This has the potential to undermine the content hegemonies of universities, museums, companies, and the military.

Knowledge pools put in place unorthodox knowledge economies. They are communal, exchange spaces that allow anyone to re-use/share and edit content. Users move away from systems of production and distribution that are based on market relations. The London-based writer, artist and curator Armin Medosch emphasizes that the most important property of the internet is its capacity to promote the creation of social communities. He reminds us of the slogan "Under the cobblestones, the beach!" which was used during the imaginative student protests in 1968. As example for the formation of groups in the internet Medosch describes the ad hoc mode with which the democratic globalization movement approaches spontaneous organization and mobilization. Medosch makes us also aware of the opportunities afforded by ubiquitous, unwired networks such as the free wireless network groups Consume.net in London, Freifunk.net in Berlin and Funkfeuer.at in Vienna, that all follow a decentralized, self-organizing network model. In a similar search of new modes of cultural production The Institute for Applied Autonomy and The Bureau for Inverse Technology both infiltrate and critique the culture of engineering from the inside.

This series of "DATA browser" books is published by Autonomedia in New York. Its overall goal is to link emerging cultural practices to the socio-historical context out of which they evolved. Data that are sent through the physical networks of the internet are mostly interfaced through a screen and interpreted by a browser. Browsers such as Firefox display these data packages that they receive from hosting servers. In a similar manner, this series of publications frames and interprets cultural practices that bring together social, technological, and artistic critique.

In a third volume that will come out in the fall of 2005, the editors will follow the conference "Curating, Immateriality, Systems" at TATE Modern (London, June/July 2005). This event investigated a range of positions currently occupied by curators in the context of digital media and immaterial production. This upcoming volume "Curating Immateriality" will examine ways in which new media artworks are curated taking into account their ephemeral and collaborative nature. Theory in all volumes of "DATA browser" is not seen as a final word on the topics that it engages ˜ with most essays adding to a collaborative flow of ideas about networking, and current modes of cultural production.

Data Browser

Links

1. "Data Browser" - http://www.data-browser.net/
2. "Trebor Scholz" - http://collectivate.net/journalisms/

08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Incommunicado Glossary

Fwd from Incommunicado list Incommunicado Glossary Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle

Incommunicado Instead of an Introduction

Aiming to bring some of the network-cultural forms of collaboration into ICT debates dominated by standard policy and research procedure, the incommunicado project does not offer a univocal master-narrative of what's wrong with the world of ICT, or of how it should be. Members of the incommunicado network are pursueing multiple vectors of inquiry that are unlikely to converge in yet another civil society declaration or intergovernmental policy proposal but - at best - coordinate possible interventions across the imperial terrain of a global network economy. To stress the simultaneity of these efforts, and to take stock of where we think incommunicado 'is' at the time of this writing, the entries below are a first attempt to identify some of these vectors. Being incommunicado The term incommunicado generally refers to a state of being without the means or rights to communicate, especially in the case of incommunicado detention and the threat of massive human rights violations. The latter also implies an extra-judicial space of exception, where torture, executions and "disappearances" occur all-too-frequently in the lives of journalists and media activists, online or offline, across the world. After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bilateral order, the discourse of human rights has become an important placeholder for agendas of social change and transformation that are no longer articulated in third-worldist or tri-continentalist terms. Yet despite the universalizing implications of human rights, they can also invoke and retrieve the complex legacy of specific anti-colonial and third-worldist perspectives that continue to inform contemporary visions of a different information and communication order. The term 'incommunicado' was chosen as the name for this research network of activists, academics and geeks to acknowledge that while questions related to info-development and info-politics are often explored in a broader human rights context, this does not imply embracing a politics of rights as such. Instead, one of the aims of the Incommunicado project is to explore tactical mobilisations of rights-based claims to access, communication, or information, but also the limits of any politics of rights, its concepts, and its absolutisation as a political perspective. Incommunicado 05 Conference The program of the Incommunicado 05 conference, held in Amsterdam on June 15-17, 2005, had an explicitly broad and investigative character. Besides obvious WSIS topics such as internet governance and open source, the event attempted to put a few critical topics on the agenda, such as the role of NGOs, the 'critique of development' in the internet age, and the question of 'info-rights'. Some debates were also new and had to be explored, such as the role of ICT corporations as 'partners in development' at the UN or the role of culture and corporate sponsorship in the ICT4D context. While participants agreed that the standard scope of ICT4D debates and research needed to be expanded, there was not yet any agreement on how this might best be done. What is certain is that the kind of critique the incommunicado network was set up to explore and facilitate is unlikely to proceed through the consensus-building model of civil society caucuses and inter-institutional networks. Given the commitment to different, even mutually exclusive logics and models of institutionalisation in different camps, from media activists to a development NGOs and academic ICT analysts, the mutual engagement in a spirit of self-critique has its more or less obvious limits. But this is not necessarily a weakness. Part of the Incommunicado idea was a critique of the assumption of a general comprehensibility and commensurability of efforts grouped under 'civil society', a shift in emphasis to trace the faultlines of such conflicts and identify their stakes rather than their resolution and subsumption to a master-paradigm that would then serve to contextualise and inform a new politics. Info-Development We are witnessing a shift from in the techno-cultural development of the web from an essentially Euro-American post-industrialist project to a more complexly mapped post-third-worldist network, where new south-south alliances are already upsetting our commonsensical definitions of info-development as an exclusively north-south affair. Before the recent “flattening of the world” (Thomas Friedman, 2005), most computer networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and info-development - also known by its catchy acronym 'ICT4D', for ICT for development - mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge and technology transfer from North to South. The old 'technology tranfer' discourse is becoming questionable, if not put upside down. While still widely (and even wildly) talked about, the assumption of a 'digital divide' that follows this familiar geography of development has turned out to be too simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global info-politics, is emerging. Different actors continue to promote different - and competing - visions of 'info-development'. New info-economies like Brazil, China, and India have suddenly emerged and are forming south-south alliances that challenge our sense of what 'development' is all about. However tempting, these new developments and particularly the emerging alliances should not be romanticized in terms of a new tri-continentalism. However, the cohesion of the new south-south alliances originates in part from the shared resistance to an emergent Euro-American front on intellectual property rights (IPR) and related matters. Ambitious info-development projects struggle to find a role for themselves either as basic infrastructure, supportive of all other development activity, or as complement to older forms of infrastructure and service-oriented development. Often they are expected to meet a host of often contradictory aims: alleviating info-poverty, catapulting peasants into the information age, promoting local ICT and knowledge based industries, or facilitating democratisation through increased participation and local empowerment. Meanwhile, of course, info-development also facilitates trans-national corporate efforts to offshore IT-related jobs and services in ever-shorter cycles of transposition, leaving local 'stakeholders' at a loss as to whether or not scarce public subsidies should even be used to attract and retain industries likely to move on anyway. Info-development creates new conflicts, putting communities in competition with each other. But it also creates new alliances. Below the traditional thresholds of sovereignty, grassroots efforts are calling into question the entire IPR regime of and access restrictions on which commercial info-development is based. Commons- or open-source-oriented organisations across the world seem more likely to receive support from southern than from northern states, and these coalitions, too, are challenging northern states on their self-serving commitment to IPR and their dominance of key info-political organisations. Meanwhile lesser-known members of the UN family, such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), are beginning to feel the heat brought on by “no-logo”-style campaigns that are targeting the entire range of public international actors and bring an agenda of accountability to the institutions of multilateral governance. As a response to the increasingly contradictory info-political activities of the major agencies like the ITU, UNDP, UNESCO, and WIPO, even the UN has begun to lose its aura. As public tagging of a perceived positive UN role in governance, humanitarianism, and peacekeeping shifts towards corruption and inter-agency rivalries, (carefully guided by neo-conservative think-tanks), the ensemble of supra-state apparatuses supposed to sustain visions of a post-imperial order suddenly seems mired in a frightening family dispute that threatens to spin out of control. Critique of Info-Development The critique of development and its institutional arrangements - of its conceptual apparatus as well as the economic and social policies implemented in its name - has always been both a theoretical project and the agenda of a multitude of 'subaltern' social movements. Yet much work in ICT4D shows little awareness of or interest in the history of such development critique. Quite the contrary, the ICT4D debate, whose terms are often reproduced in the members-only loop of a few influential NGO networks like APC, OneWorld, or PANOS, along with a small number of states and influential donor organisations, remains surprisingly inward-looking, unable or unwilling to actively challenge the hegemony of an a-historical techno-determinism. These global NGOs and Western info development government agencies are new to the fact that there are now a multitude of actors that operate in 'their' field. The Incommunicado project is just of many efforts to broaden the 'ICT4D' scope. A part of this process is a critical investigation into the role of info developmental NGOs. Even many activists believe that ICT will lead to progress and eventually contribute to poverty reduction. Have development scepticism and the multiplicity of alternative visions it created simply been forgotten? Or have they been actively muted to disconnect current struggles in the area of communication and information from this history, adding legitimacy to new strategies of 'pre-emptive' development that are based on an ever-closer alliance between the politics of aid, development, and security? Are analyses based on the assumption that the internet and its promise of connectivity are 'inherently good' already transcending existing power analyses of global media and communication structures? How can we reflect on the booming ICT-for-Development industry beyond best practice suggestions? FLOSS Pushed by a growing transnational coalition of NGOs and a few allies inside the multilateral system, open source software has moved from margin to center in ICT4D visions of peer-to-peer networks and open knowledge initiatives. But while OSS and its apparent promise of an alternative non-proprietary concept of collaborative creation continues to have much counter-cultural cachet, its idiom can easily be used to support the 'liberalisation' of telco markets. Long occupied with the struggle between free software and open source approaches, FLOSS research is only now addressing some of the paradoxes of immaterial labour and its voluntarist ethic. Civil Society vs 'The Grassroots' We have become used to thinking of 'civil society organisations' and NGOs as 'natural' development actors. But their presence is itself indicative of a fundamental transformation of an originally state-centred development regime, and their growing influence raises difficult issues regarding their relationship to state and corporate actors, but also regarding their self-perception as representatives of civic and grassroots interests. In spite of the neat sociological grammar of declarations and manifestoes, increasingly hybrid actors no longer follow the simple schema of state, market, or civil society, but engage in cross-sector alliances. Responding to the crisis of older top-down approaches to development, corporations and aid donors are increasingly bypassing states and international agencies to work directly with smaller non-governmental organisations. And while national and international development agencies now have to defend their activity against both pro- and anti-neo-liberal critics, info-NGOs participating in public-private partnerships and info-capitalist ventures suddenly find themselves in the midst of another heated controversy over their new role as junior partner of states and corporations. Responding by stepping up their own brand-protection and engaging in professional reputation management, major NGOs even conclude that it is no longer their organisational culture but their agenda alone that differentiates them from corporate actors. The spectacular world summit on the information society (WSIS), barely noticed by the mainstream media but already uniting cyber-libertarians afraid of UN interventions in key questions of internet governance, is over. While many info-activists are assessing (and re-assessing) the hidden cost of invitations to sit at 'multi-stakeholder' tables along with mega-NGOs and corporate associations, others are already refusing to allow an organisational incorporation of grassroots or subaltern agendas into the managed consensus being built around the dynamic of an 'international civil society'. Mirroring the withdrawal from traditional mechanisms of political participation, there is growing disaffection with multilateralism as the necessary default perspective for any counter-imperial politics. Unwilling to accept the idioms of sovereignty, some even abandon the very logic of summits and counter-summits to articulate post-sovereign perspectives. If WSIS actors operate with a kind of matrix that covers the relevant institutional actors, policy becomes a matter of shifting resources and responsibilities by way of playing different actors against each other. Some of that makes sense to us, alliance-building within the specific ensemble that constitutes the info-development regime. WSIS could perhaps been a very different space had it not been hosted by ITU but UNESCO, now everything was framed by default by ITU's a-historical don't-even-think-of-mentioning-NWICO techno-managerialism. On a different level, the very idea of info-development implies a commitment to the logic of representation - needs, actors, and remedies can all be identified etc., and this is where policy-making indeed becomes a matter of faith. The formalisation associated with development processes - the discomfort with informal economies, the translation of diffuse desires into needs, and the transformation of people into autonomous bearers of rights to development - is just a consequence of this more fundamental commitment. On this level, a critique of info-development must also explore the role the logic of representation continues to play. But often the ultimate space of 'critique' is defined in terms of an almost mythological 'grassroots' and popular democracy as authentic sources of legitimacy and 'last instance' of accountability, so all you need for a critique of civil society and NGOism is to show their gradual (and almost inevitable, it seems) estrangement from a social movement grassroots, facilitated by their adoption of corporate models of professionalisation and an emphasis on organizing efforts that are compatible with an intergovernmental summitism. The WSIS summit machine, however, continued to hum along, largely unimpressed by action plans, civil society declarations, and manifestoes, and in this failure already seemed to produce its own critique. The label 'civil society' papers over so many differences that its use should perhaps also be considered in tactical terms, a way to create a very specific kind of intelligibility for political claims that does not really limit their rearticulation in alternative idioms. Incommunicado Research Within ICT4D research hasn't been a priority. What we found most often are best practice stories, and while there must be critical assessment reports, they tend to be written for internal use only. Ministries, funding bodies, foundations and NGOs are not eager to share their inside knowledge with outsiders out of fear that any 'negative' information will compromise their position in the scramble for funds and eventually lead to budget cuts. This makes it hard, if not impossible to have an open debate about the terms that floating around, and also to come up with new concepts. Beyond setting up lists and collaborative weblogs, research is also a means of 'opening up a space' both in terms of activism and knowledge production. This also requires calling into question the assemblage of ‘mots d'ordre’ that make up the info-development discourse. Such 'mots d'ordre' - including, but not limited to 'access,' 'capacity building,' 'poverty alleviation,' and 'stakeholderism' - are not made to encourage debate but to foster agreement on a consensual perception of what info-development is. We have witnessed this in the context of WSIS, and Incommunicado got started in the context of WSIS. However, even if it maintains a critical distance to it - as do, by now, virtually all groups that have been involved - it is still marked by this focus on the critique of a policy-driven process organized around a fairly standard set of actors. But what's actually happening below the threshold of civil society is a rich and dynamic source of new forms of info-political engagement and new conceptual approaches, so research on the development discourse must engage such micro-level studies as well the 'donor discourse' - reproduced in a trans-national regime that includes state and non-state agencies, philanthropic and profit-oriented efforts - that serves to filter such efforts from the outside of the established research system. Finally, ICT4D research needs to be considered in the context of shifts in the mode of production of 'science'. Some sociologists argue, for example, that we are witnessing a transition from a an "academically-centred mode" that values scientific autonomy and peer evaluation, to a "flexible mode" that is participatory and trans-disciplinary, addressing a host of economic and social questions through research that is accountable, open, and transparent. Such a flexibilisation of scientific production is the ultimate wet-dream of donors more committed to the vague notion of a "knowledge society" than to the controversial questions of what such a new scientific ethic of accountability, openness, and transparency might actually mean in practice, including a controversy over the criteria of relevance and reliability that determine whether or not efforts that do not uncritically accept the hegemonic assemblage of 'mots d'ordre' still receive support, or a debate among researchers over whether they should really embrace a new flexibilisation paradigm that still remains committed to the exclusion of 'lay people' outside the institutionalized expertism we have come to accept as the only source of research. Public-Private Partnerships Following the growth of private-sector involvement in public infrastructure projects across the globe, corporate investments have often become a substitute for public funding formerly provided by intergovernmental agencies, international aid organizations, and governments. Usually considered in terms of a pooling of private and public resources, public-private partnerships aim at a cooperative provision of services and products to exploit synergy effects. Public institutions are expected to become more 'proactive' in terms of their engagement with private actors, the development process as a whole more equitable and sustainable. Such official pronouncements aside, assessments from the ground tend to give the relatively new tool of PPP a much more ambivalent review. While major info-corporations are indeed offering themselves as “partners in development” and support ICT development as vehicles for "effective service delivery” and "e-governance", they also take advantage of the newfound enthusiasm for Public-Private Partnerships to stake out their own commercial claims, crowd out public-sector alternatives, and actively discourage alternative forms of development cooperation. 'PPP in ICT' will be the focus of another project by members of the Incommunicado network.

07:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Incommunicado

http://www.incommunicado.info/conference

Incommuni

ncommunicado 05: information technology for everybody else
Incommunicado 05 is a two-day working conference working towards a critical survey of the current state of 'info-development', also known as the catchy acronym 'ICT4D' (ICT for development). Before the recent “flattening of the world” (Thomas Friedman, 2005), most computer networks and ICT expertise were located in the North, and info-development mostly involved rather technical matters of knowledge and technology transfer from North to South. While still widely (and even wildly) talked about, the assumption of a 'digital divide' that follows this familiar geography of development has turned out to be too simple. Instead, a more complex map of actors, networked in a global info-politics, is emerging.

Different actors continue to promote different -and competing- visions of 'info-development'. New info-economies like Brazil, China, and India have suddenly emerged and are forming south-south alliances that challenge our sense of what 'development' is all about. Development-oriented systems (like simputers and MIT’'s $100 computer system) emerge and re-emerge. The corporate sector suddenly discovers the “bottom of the pyramid” and community computing, in their drive for markets beyond those now increasingly stagnant in the OECD countries, and among the prosperous and professional in the rest of the world.

However tempting, these new developments and particularly the emerging alliances should not be romanticized in terms of a new tri-continentalism. Brazil's info-geopolitical forays are anything but selfless. And while China's investments in Africa have already been compared to the 19th century scramble for Africa led by European colonial powers, many expect it to be soon exporting its 'Golden Shield' surveillance technologies to states such as Vietnam, North Korea, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, for all of whom it is acting as a regional internet access provider.

However, the cohesion of the new south-south alliances originates in part from the shared resistance to an emergent Euro-American front on intellectual property rights (IPR) and related matters. In parallel, and in eager response to the newfound enthusiasm for ICT4D through Public-Private Partnerships (fueled largely by the ongoing UN financial crisis and the broader neo-liberal privatization agenda), major info-corporations are advertising themselves as “partners in development” and are promoting ICTs as the vehicles for “good governance and effective service delivery” („e-governance“), but also to stake out their own commercial claims, crowd out public-sector alternatives, and subvert south-south cooperation.

Ambitious info-development projects struggle to find a role for themselves either as basic infrastructures supportive of all other development activity or as complement to older forms of infrastructure and service -oriented development. And often they are expected to meet a host of often contradictory aims: alleviating info-poverty, catapulting peasants into the information age, promoting local ICT and knowledge based industries, or facilitating democratization through increased participation and local empowerment. Meanwhile, of course, info-development also facilitates transnational corporate efforts to offshore IT-related jobs and services in ever-shorter cycles of transposition, leaving local 'stakeholders' at a loss as to whether or not scarce public subsidies should even be used to attract and retain industries likely to move on anyway.

Info-development creates new conflicts, putting communities in competition with each other. But it also creates new alliances. Below the traditional thresholds of sovereignty, grassroots efforts are calling into question the entire IPR regime of and access restrictions on which commercial info-development is based. Commons- or open-source-oriented organizations across the world seem more likely to receive support from southern than from northern states, and these coalitions, too, are challenging northern states on their self-serving commitment to IPR and their dominance of key info-political organizations.

Meanwhile lesser-known members of the UN family, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), are beginning to feel the heat brought on by “no-logo”-style campaigns that are targeting the entire range of public international actors and bring an agenda of accountability to the institutions of multilateral governance. As a response to the increasingly contradictory (dare one say confused) info-political activities of the major agencies like the ITU, UNDP, UNESCO, and WIPO, even the UN has begun to lose its aura. As public tagging of a perceived positive UN role in governance, humanitarianism, and peacekeeping shifts towards corruption and inter-agency rivalries, (carefully guided by neo-conservative think-tanks), the ensemble of supra-state apparatuses supposed to sustain visions of a post-imperial order suddenly seems mired in a frightening family dispute that threatens to spin out of control.

In spite of the neat sociological grammar of declarations and manifestoes, increasingly hybrid actors no longer follow the simple schema of state, market, or civil society, but engage in cross-sector alliances. Responding to the crisis of older top-down approaches to development, corporations and aid donors are increasingly bypassing states and international agencies to work directly with smaller non-governmental organizations. And while national and international development agencies now have to defend their activity against both pro- and anti-neo-liberal critics, info-NGOs participating in public-private partnerships and info-capitalist ventures suddenly find themselves in the midst of another heated controversy over their new role as junior partner of states and corporations. Responding by stepping up their own brand-protection and engaging in professional reputation management, major NGOs even conclude that it is no longer their organizational culture but their agenda alone that differentiates them from corporate actors.

The spectacular world summit on the information society (WSIS), barely noticed by the mainstream media but already uniting cyber-libertarians afraid of UN interventions in key questions of internet governance, will conclude later this year. While many info-activists are assessing (and re-assessing) the hidden cost of invitations to sit at 'multi-stakeholder' tables along with mega-NGOs and corporate associations, others are already refusing to allow an organizational incorporation of grassroots or subaltern agendas into the managed consensus being built around the dynamic of an 'international civil (information) society'. Mirroring the withdrawal from traditional mechanisms of political participation, there is growing disaffection with multilateralism as the necessary default perspective for any counter-imperial politics. Unwilling to accept the idioms of sovereignty, some even abandon the very logic of summits and counter-summits to articulate post-sovereign perspectives. And alongside this of course, is the day to day reality of those at the grassroots and most importantly working as policy, research and practice info-intermediaries to find ways of using (and remaking) ICTs to be of benefit to the “multitudes”.

History
The 'incommunicado' project started early 2004 as a web research resource combined with an email-based mailinglist. It was founded by Soenke Zehle and Geert Lovink, who had earlier collaborated during the European Make World and Neuro events, that attempted to develop critical work around new media and no border issues.

Incommunicado didn't start out of the blue. It was a merger from two lists, Solaris, founded late 2001 by Geert Lovink and Michael Gurstein, and a defunct G8 Dotforce list. The Solaris email list was an early attempt to develop a critical discourse around the ICT4D policy complex and was inspired by the then-newly opened centre Sarai in Delhi, a place that embodies new cultural practices beyond the classic development models. Beginning in late 2003, the first World Summit on the Information Society accelerated the awareness that critical voices, inside and outside the Machine, had to gather in order to reflect on the circulating metaphors and rhetoric. Poor outcomes of the alternative 'WSIS, We Seize' campaign, which positioned itself outside of the world conference spectacle, proved that there is a great need for a radical critique of notions such as 'information society', 'e-governance', 'digital divide' or 'civil society'.

At the moment there are 300+ subscribers to the list, and at any given moment in time 50-70 users are either reading the incommunicado rss-news or searching the collaborative weblog, whose topic areas include network(ed) ecologies, ICT for Development, internet governance, analyses of the NGO sector, and emerging South-South relations. So far, incommunicado has been an exclusively online resource and list community, consisting of researchers, ICT practitioners, activists and social entrepreneurs. The event in Amsterdam in June 2005 will be the first meeting of this emerging network. Future plans include the launch of an open-access journal or an incommunicado reader.

On Being Incommunicado
The term incommunicado generally refers to a state of being without the means or rights to communicate, especially in the case of incommunicado detention and the threat of massive human rights violations. The latter also implies an extra-judicial space of exception, where torture, executions and "disappearances" occur - all-too-frequently in the lives of journalists and media activists, online or offline, across the world.

After the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the bilateral order, the discourse of human rights has become an important placeholder for agendas of social change and transformation that are no longer articulated in third worldist or tricontinentalist terms. Yet despite the universalizing implications of human rights, they can also invoke and retrieve the complex legacy of specific anti-colonial and third-worldist perspectives that continue to inform contemporary visions of a different information and communication order.

The term 'incommunicado' was chosen as the name for this research network to acknowledge that while questions related to info-development and info-politics are often explored in a broader human rights context, this does not imply embracing a politics of rights as such. Instead, one of the aims of the incommunicado project is to explore tactical mobilizations of rights-based claims to access, communication, or information, but also the limits of any politics of rights, its concepts, and its absolutization as a political perspective.

09:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's Always Best to be Open...

Rhizome Net Art News:

Opencongress What does free software mean to cultural producers? As the UK government prepares to host a pan-European conference on the regulation of Intellectual Property, the Open Congress will attempt to answer this question. The organizers (including the Chelsea College of Art and Design, NODE.London, Wireless London, Mute, and Tate Digital Programmes) note, 'The development of Free and Open Source Software has revitalised interest in collaborative creativity, the public domain, and the 'openness' of public institutions.' Their two-day congress, held 7th-8th October at one of London's best-known public institutions (Tate Britain), takes up the themes of Governance, Creativity, and Knowledge, and invites artists, academics, and activists to present and discuss their work. The line-up includes the EFF's Cory Doctorow, the Alternative Law Foundation's Lawrence Liang, 'Hacker Manifesto' author Mckenzie Wark, Libre Society's Johanna Gibson, and Trebor Scholz, of The Institute for Distributed Creativity. - Charlotte Frost

http://opencongress.omweb.org

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Making Visible the Invisible

Legrady George Legrady, September 14, 2005

Visualizing the Collective Data Space: The Library As Data Exchange

http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~g.legrady/glWeb/Projects/spl/spl.html

Center, a public arts commission for the Seattle Central Library

“Making Visible the Invisible” is a commission for the Rem Koolhaas designed Seattle Public Library featuring the visualization of the circulation of books by the hour for the next ten years. The installation consists of 6 large LCD panels located on a glass wall horizontally behind the librarians’ main information desk in the Mixing Chamber, a large open 19,500 sq ft space dedicated to information retrieval and public accessible computer research. The visualizations consist of real-time animations generated by custom designed software using processed data based on the circulation of books and media being checked out of the library. The 4 visualizations include “Vital Statistics” which provides circulation statistical data, “Floating Titles” condenses the hourly checked-out items into a linear stream of titles floating by, “Dewey Dot Matrix Rain” separates Dewey coded items from others into falling or flashing actions, and “Keyword Map Attack” consisting of extruded keywords associated with the checked-out items. These are sequentially animated to be positioned at precise locations based on their associations to the library’s classification categories. For additional information, visit the project website at:

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