The Surveilled Imagination – A World Watched to Make Information

NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden speaks about his leaking of information about PRISM
This is a short essay on surveillance as commodity acquisition and the social contract. I have been following the story of PRISM, which according to the United States Army Field Manual, as quoted by Mother Jones, is

“A subsystem of collection management mission application, is a Web-based management and synchronization tool used to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of theater operations. PRISM creates a collaborative environment for resource managers, collection managers, exploitation managers and customers”.

Based on information leaked by Edward Snowden, a former contracted manager for the National Security Association, PRISM is used to collect and monitor information from millions of people inside and outside of the United States of America. Unless you have been offline over the past week, you have probably heard about this, as it is just beginning to have consequences, due largely to the extent of the allegations and the time it took for most governments and public figures to understand precisely what the PRISM Leak means. It means so much and could be of such far-reaching consequences that many of the departments and institutions responsible for this sort of knowledge were initially silent, presumably trying to fathom it. One of the more intelligent speculations I saw about PRISM was from Guy Verhofstadt, President of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Group in the European Parliament. Guy tweeted;

“#prism How has data been used and is it in conflict with EU data protection? The Commission, best @BarrosoEU must answer this at next #EP”

I am sure Mr Barrosso is looking into it right now. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to PRISM. But I want to back off slightly from the revelations of PRISM to what it means in broader terms. I want to ask here, what is the reality of surveillance? I mean mass surveillance; "the pervasive surveillance of an entire population, or a substantial fraction thereof" (Wikileaks).

I started following the developments around the PRISM leak on Twitter as they were published on The Guardian website. I noticed this tweet from Mark Vanderbeeken (Senior partner at Experientia and editor of Putting People First, Turin, Italy);

“But is it actually possible to return to a non-surveillance world? The genie is now out of the bottle”

I replied to Mark that it is not possible to 'go back' to an imagined "non-surveillance world" (if that ever existed); but what we are actually witnessing today is the process of shifting power and control under the auspices of digital technology and the mass surveillance it makes possible. In writing this I thought particularly of the life of Christopher Marlowe, the famous playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare. Marlowe was at the center of a surveilled society, a society which was undergoing dramatic changes. Marlowe worked as a spy, and was also the subject for surveillance, dying at the age of 29 in 1593 as a result of an altercation in an inn under suspicious circumstances.

Up to his eyeball in surveillance; Christopher Marlowe 1564-1593 (spy poet trouble maker)

Surveillance today is beyond anything Marlowe could have imagined even in his most extravagant stage drama. With a massive digital network of communication, mediation and simulation now well established around the planet, it is possible to gather information about people at a level of detail unparalleled in human history. Many nation states are now spying on their general populations. Information is collected en masse and stored not for individual identification, but to construct patterning in the population. Mass information is about demographics, trends, movements on a large scale towards ideas, issues or cultural trends. At the same time individual privacy is no longer possible for anyone that uses digital media, although encryption such as Tor does hide connections between people and sites online.

"The expansion in the use of surveillance represents one of the most significant changes in the life of the nation since the end of the Second World War. Mass surveillance has the potential to erode privacy. As privacy is an essential prerequisite to the exercise of individual freedom, its erosion weakens the constitutional foundations on which democracy and good governance have traditionally been based in this country." -  United Kingdom House of Lords Constitution Committee, "Surveillance: Citizens and the State" (2009)

I returned to Twitter, filled with ideas about what mass surveillance was doing to our societies. If the constant unmonitored gathering of information by the public and private security industry ("70% of the intelligent budget of the USA today goes to private contractors like Booz Allen" -whistleblower Chris Pyle) is damaging democracy and individual freedom, what else it is doing? I dug up my favorite theorists when it comes to information and the body politico in a globalized interconnected 24-hour digital society. I see the perceived need for surveillance as part of the "deterritorialization of production" (Negri & Hardt) and this can be transparent or opaque. All are networks monitored and this includes production. Surveillance creates what is one of the most valuable resources of the 21st Century, information. Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, once said, "Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century". I believe surveillance is the State using the tools at its disposal to create a vast resource. So the problem with surveillance is structural. Information is resource. Value is added by scarcity, effect and processing. In this sense surveillance is monopolistic as it can only be created on a mass scale by a level of infrastructure that has a budget of governmental proportions. I could spy on my neighbors, or even a town, but it could not be used in any meaningful way and besides it is illegal. The government on the other hand is already doing this and a lot more.

Many citizens believe it is necessary to be surveilled. Paul Sheehan, a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia wrote that the problem for those seeing Edward Snowden’s leaking of information about PRISM as a heroic act based their assessment on  “The final inconvenient fact is a practical one: all government agencies except the tax department do not have the time, the resources, or the interest to examine the activities of private citizens without good reason. Most of us are of no interest to the government unless we are doing something dangerous to others. Paranoia is invariably self-absorption” – (Tuesday 11 June 2013). With his use of Newspeak ('Paranoia is invariably self-absorption'), Sheehan totally misses the concept of information as a resource. What if information is not gathered to catch the feared ‘bad guys’ but in order to create something of value? If this is so we have to ask how the subjects that are surveilled contribute to the creation of this value. The government does not have the ability or interest in monitoring the daily activities of the majority of the population. But it does have an interesting in monitoring mass opinion, demographic behaviors and cultural shifts that occur in the governed population. This is largely done without the consent of the people. While laws are introduced to contain and combat security threats, the same legislation used to create these laws can be used to create the ‘oil of the 21st Century’.

The most worrying possibility is that the leaks we are seeing now are not particularly relevant to the security apparatus, that these low-level figures in the system releasing information are actually playing into the argument for a greater degree of security and monitoring and as a result there will be tighter controls and less transparency in the future. The news of PRISM was first broken in May 2006 by Walter Pincus writing for USA Today

"Disclosed that the NSA "has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth," attributing that information to "people with direct knowledge of the arrangement." The newspaper continued: "The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans - most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews."

Today Pincus is writing about a history of surveillance in the USA, but few people seem to be paying attention to him then or now. Pincus states "It is worth noting that two days after the USA Today disclosure, a Washington Post poll showed that 63 percent of those polled said it was acceptable for the government to collect tens of millions of phone records, while 35 percent considered that unacceptable."

Mass surveillance contravenes the social contract, as an infringement upon the right of the sovereignty (the people) to full disclosure of the body politic;

"Rousseau emphasizes that the general will exists to protect individuals against the mass, not to require them to be sacrificed to it. He is, of course, sharply aware that men have selfish and sectional interests which will lead them to try to oppress others. It is for this reason that loyalty to the good of all alike must be a supreme (although not exclusive) commitment by everyone, not only if a truly general will is to be heeded but also if it is to be formulated successfully in the first place" - Entry, "Rousseau" in the Routelege Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward Craig, editor, Volume Eight, p. 371

For this reason there must be disclosure in order for democracy to be restored to those countries currently operating secret mass intelligence networks against their own citizens. The PRISM affair can be argued to be an attempt by one man to manifest disclosure. This is an idea shared by others. Dean and Professor of Law at the National University of Singapore Simon Chesterman writes in One Nation Under Surveillance – A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty (Oxford 2011) of a need for a “new social contract” that should be characterized by three principles:

(1) The intelligence powers exercised must be public,
(2) The entities carrying out these functions must be legal, and
(3) Accountability for activities of intelligence services must be consequence-sensitive (as opposed to having the aim of deterring or responding to abuse) (See Dreier).

These three additions to the Social Contract will change the nature and affect of mass surveillance on society. However, if the reason behind the mass surveillance that has developed in many nations is because of the value of information then there is unlikely to be a change in relation to the social contact. It is at this point we must consider the role of capitalist ideology in mass surveillance. If "Intellectual Property is the oil of the 21st century" then the masses of information gathered on the public is valuable. If surveillance is made public, legal (i.e. a result of due process), and driven by consequences then it will cease to have the same value according to commodity relations (i.e. scarcity, processing into tangible goods etc.). It is at this point I consider we are now at a crossroads for the continuation of the human project. How we move forward on this question will alter the community of the species.

One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract with Simon Chesterman (click on image)

There will always be surveillance and in an age where information is as valuable as oil there will only ever be more. But can information produced by surveillance be used for bettering society rather than controlling the more radical/progressive (depending on your perspectives) elements? Instead of using surveillance to create ‘security’ alone we could be using this information to organize community action, make free media for people to use, creating databases for culture, art, and knowledge. If we can collect the data from the phone calls people make, why can’t we make a system where information is shared for knowledge, art, science and research, social development and solidarity? This is a surveillance system that would take the forms of open information, universal access, networked and self-organizing systems run by users.

Occupying the Commons - Theater Valle Occupation

Occupying the Commons is a project supported by the International University College of Turin (IUC http://www.iuctorino.it/), a program dedicated to the study and practice of the Commons. The aim of the project is to explore the connection between the occupation movements of 2011 & 2012 with the paradigm of the "commons."

The first part of the series begins with an Occupation in Rome at the Teatro Valle, the oldest theater in Italy and one of the most important theaters in all of Europe: http://www.teatrovalleoccupato.it/.

Interview & Director: Saki Bailey
Filming & Production: Tommaso Dotti

Music by: Errichetta Underground and Et_

See: http://www.commonssense.it/s1/?page_id=938

Motherboard TV: Douglas Rushkoff in Real Life

For someone who likes to talk about the virtues of disconnecting, the media critic Douglas Rushkoff seems surprisingly always on. When I visited him at his storefront office near his home in Hastings on Hudson, New York, he was preparing to teach a new class, getting ready for a BBC interview, writing an essay, staring down a pile of articles to read, trying to figure out his new iPhone, and hurrying to finish his third book in three years – a graphic novel called ADD, which revolves around gaming culture, celebrity and the pharmaceutical industry. “It also asks the question,” he says, “what if attention deficit disorder weren’t a bug, but a feature?”

The hyper-speed hyperlinked life is familiar ground for Rushkoff, whose first book Cyberia, made him a popular tour guide to the Internet in the early 1990s, and an early prognosticator of its radical potential. But much has changed between the awkward days of “the ’Net” – then a non-commercial collection of public networks, accessed by local ISPs – and the overloaded era of Facebook, YouTube and iPhones. If Rushkoff is well versed in the language underneath the “digital revolution,” he’s also become one of its most outspoken critics.

“A society that looked at the Internet as a path toward highly articulated connections and new methods of creating meaning is instead finding itself disconnected, denied deep thinking, and drained of enduring values,” Rushkoff writes in 2010’s Program or Be Programmed. His remedy is simple, if ambitious: once people begin to understand how software works, “they start to recognize the programs at play everywhere else – from the economy and education to politics and government…All systems have embedded purposes. The less we recognize them, the more we mistake them for given circumstances."

Understanding how things work In order to make them work better is the basic hacker ethos, but Rushkoff has applied it to his broader discussion of the way the culture and politics of the many are driven by the interests of the few. Between his landmark Frontline documentary The Merchants of Cool to his recent book Life Inc., Rushkoff has indexed the risks that capitalism and corporate influence pose to democratic society. Or, to extend the metaphor, he’s sought to show how we the users routinely get screwed by an “operating system” that’s over 500 years old.

“We’re leveraged in so many ways, it’s like, our economy is leveraged to produce more than it can in order for it to survive,” he says. “It’s leveraged to grow. Human beings are financially leveraged now. So how do you roll that back and say, well, you know, ‘this is it’?” Or, rather, “How do you get the good of a zombie apocalypse without the zombies? That’s sort of what I’m trying to help people with.”

Enter Occupy. Rushkoff has watched the movement with cautious optimism, penning editorials on CNN and organizing November’s Contact Con, a powwow of net roots activists and open source hackers working to foster new civic-minded apps and hardware. To include prizes, Rushkoff enlisted the help of Pepsi, which ultimately granted $10,000 to the Free Network Foundation, which was profiled in our recent documentary.

Rather than shun corporate sponsors, Rushkoff revels in what they bring to the table, and in the contradictions of the movement. Occupy’s power, ultimately, is its meme — the idea that a citizenry can not only protest the system but demonstrate a new way of responding to it and reworking it. Like his call to program, Occupy’s nebulous mission may be hard to swallow or carry out. But that also lends it its own kind of power, he says. Its radical promise isn’t unlike the earlier Internet’s: a distributed and open system that could change civic discourse and remake culture.
But as on the strange battlefield of the Internet, Occupy could also crash against its own giant ambitions, which will be heavily tested in the next few months, starting with next week’s “general strike”. Progress will have to be made gradually, says Rushkoff. “There are ways to slowly move towards a sustainable life path, and it’s just a matter of doing that, and I’m hoping that more people in Occupy start seeing it that way – in that more subtle way, rather than exclusively in the kind of activist, let’s-get-pepper-sprayed by cops way.”

Much has changed in the decades since Rushkoff started critiquing the system. But his philosophy is still animated by a big question, one that applies not only to the digital spaces of the Internet, built by the Facebooks and the Googles, but to other kinds of “public” spaces too, in town squares, Congress, and culture: who programmed these spaces, and to what ends, and how can they be hacked into something better?

Par tous les moyens nécessaires

Slavoj Žižek, Julian Assange, Amy Goodman. Entire Conversation

Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! hosts this debate between Julian Assange and Slovenian Philosopher Slavoj Žižek -- From the Troxy Theatre in London, July 2 2011.
Also streaming in HQ from Democracy Now for those with faster lines. Brilliant debate!

WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange and renowned Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek was deemed too controversial for the University of London’s Institute of Education (IOE).

Last year, whistleblower website WikiLeaks released three of the biggest ever leaks of classified information in history: the Iraq War Logs, the Afghanistan War Logs and Cablegate.

Since then the world has undoubtedly changed. Ambassadors have resigned amid scandals exposed by leaked cables; the UK government has ordered a review of computer security; and, at the same time, a huge wave of protest has swept the Middle East and North Africa – in part fuelled, some believe, by WikiLeaks revelations.

Discussing the impact of WikiLeaks on the world and what it means for the future, for this very special event WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange is in conversation with renowned Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Žižek.

Focusing on the ethics and philosophy behind WikiLeaks’ work, the talk provides a rare opportunity to hear two of the world’s most prominent thinkers discuss some of the most pressing issues of our time.

It also marks the publication of the paperback edition of Living in the End Times, in which Žižek argues that new ways of using and sharing information, in particular WikiLeaks, are one of a number of harbingers of the end of global capitalism as we know it.

The event is chaired by Amy Goodman, the award-winning investigative journalist and host of Democracy Now!, a daily, independent news hour which airs on the internet and more than 900 public television and radio stations worldwide.

Forced Extradition on Commercial Flight

I flew from Gatwick Airport to Riga today on an Air Baltic flight. On the flight three UK Border Agency agents were escorting a deportee to Uzbekistan via Riga. The man was deeply distressed as the audio on this video illustrates. We waited for about 40 minutes while the man screamed and shouted. He was handcuffed when he arrived on the flight. He yelled that he would be killed upon return to Uzbekistan and that his family would also be punished. Finally he was removed from the flight by two more Border Agency officers along with the three that were already accompanying him. The entire event was extremely distressing and the mother and baby that were sitting in my row of the fight were both in tears. They left the plane for the final 30 minutes of the yelling and screaming before the man was removed from the flight and taken to a police van on the tarmac. We were almost an hour late taking off.

Uzbekistan is a known human rights violator. United States Department of State defines Uzbekistan as "an authoritarian state with limited civil rights" and IHF express profound concern about "wide-scale violation of virtually all basic human rights". According to the reports, the most widespread violations are torture, arbitrary arrests, and various restrictions of freedoms: of religion, of speech and press, of free association and assembly. The reports maintain that the violations are most often committed against members of religious organizations, independent journalists, human right activists, and political activists, including members of the banned opposition parties. In 2005, Uzbekistan was included into Freedom House's "The Worst of the Worst: The World's Most Repressive Societies".

Iran

Watching the huge number of protesters streaming down a street in Tehran I wondered about their lives. I can see their faces in this video. Seemingly ordinary people risking life and limb to manifest a disapproval of what passes as their government. They chant "Death to the dictator", and film each other, moving about the cars that are staled and stuck in the sea of public opinion that sweeps around them.

I have taken to the streets (and the forests) myself and disobeyed they law to express an opinion, and prevent an act which I and many others believed to be wrong from continuing. The feeling when one is in the 'protest space', where the rules of the mass society have become the rules of the group (perhaps one can say mob) is an exhilarating sensation when it goes well. If it goes badly it can be terrifying as the authorities reclaim the space for the state.

Yesterday a group of the feared Basij militia were outnumbered and overpowered and beaten by protesters.




In another incident Basij were overpowered, beaten and their motorcycles burnt:



The intensity of the protest is so much greater than it was in the June demonstrations. It seems the popular forces are no longer as cautious as they were around the time of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan.




The only certainty regarding the events in Tehran is that there will be more deaths. The protesters are clearly aware of this but it seems that it is not deterring them. The future for Iran is being decided but it is not a revolution, it is a civil war.


Nightly chant at Tehran Ashura 88

Iran News Now has been running Live-blog: Ashura in Iran – December 27, 2009.
For more see

Justice for Iran
Tumblr: Basij
Tehran Live
BBC Photos

What is Happpening in Afghanistan?

Interview with “Zoya” from RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) on GRITtv (via The Afghan Women Tug of War — Feministe)

Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Cooper Union

“First as Tragedy, Then As Farce”: Philosopher and Cultural Theorist Slavoj Žižek Speaks at Cooper Union
Dubbed by the National Review as “the most dangerous political philosopher in the West” and the New York Times as “the Elvis of cultural theory,” Slovenian philosopher and public intellectual Slavoj Žižek has written over fifty books on philosophy, psychoanalysis, theology, history and political theory.

In his latest book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek analyzes how the United States has moved from the tragedy of 9/11 to what he calls the farce of the financial meltdown.

He spoke on that same theme at Cooper Union during a recent trip to New York.

Society of the Spectacle

Guy Debord's THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE, originally published in 1967,
is easily the most important radical book of the twentieth century.

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Debord's book is neither an ivory tower
"philosophical discourse" nor an impulsive "rant" or "protest." It is an
effort to clarify the nature of the situation in which we find ourselves and
the advantages and drawbacks of various methods for changing it. It examines
the most fundamental tendencies and contradictions of the present society --
what is really going on behind the spectacular surface phenomena that we are
conditioned to perceive as the only reality.

This means that it needs to be reread many times, but it also means that it
remains as pertinent as ever while countless radical and intellectual fads
have come and gone. As Debord noted in his later "Comments on the Society
of the Spectacle" (1988), in the intervening decades the spectacle has
become more pervasive than ever, to the point of repressing virtually any
awareness of pre-spectacle history or anti-spectacle possibilities:
"Spectacular domination has succeeded in raising an entire generation molded
to its laws."

Debord's strategy is to cut through the mass of false solutions so as to
open the way for real ones. His method may seem negative and abstract, but
his aim is positive and concrete. No matter how many times you read his
book, you will never really understand it until you use it. Which means
using your imagination and experimenting for yourself. The purpose of the
book is to help you do just that.

* * *

Ken Knabb's translation of THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE is
online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord

The translation is also available in book form --
http://www.bopsecrets.org/cat.htm

A new PDF version is online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/images/sos.pdf

Debord also made a film of his book, which is available in various
formats -- http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/index.htm

Related texts by Debord and other members of the Situationist International
are online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/index.htm

Meanwhile in Iran

Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election

In Iran, One Woman's Death May Have Many Consequences

Western companies sell "deep packet inspection" technology to Iran

Siemens, Nokia aided Iran's Web censorship

What a summer we are in for.......

Iran.Media.Image.Change

Like many others I have been following the text emerging from what has been tagged #IranElection on Twitter. I stare fascinated at the screen as horror and hope are mixed in dizzy ratios with short sharp statements and links to media.

I did the same thing back in January when the last Gaza War raged. It is different this time. The Iran twitter cascade has recourse to a sophistication that the desperate Palestinians and ideological Israelis seemed to miss. Iranians are online and have been for a long time. The use of blogs in the nation is famous. Watching the images from the street demonstrations and battles from Tehran I see young people dressed in designer jeans and tops, all carrying mobile media devices. One video I watched this morning has a group of young people gathered in a chaotic bunch around a supine body of a young man. He appears to be dead, but as some try to open an airway and clumsily maneuver his still head, others thrust mobile cameras into his still and bloody face. I began to feel something I remember from 1989.

When the students gathered in Tienanmen Square in Beijing China in June 1989 (strangely exact 20 years ago) I understand they had little collective idea of what their goal was beyond 'democracy'.

The protests lacked a unified cause or leadership; participants included disillusioned Communist Party members and Trotskyists as well as free market reformers, who were generally against the government's authoritarianism and voiced calls for economic change and democratic reform within the structure of the government. Wikipedia

Nobody is sure how many died in Tienanmen square. We know the 100 000 protesters gathered there faced tanks. That local regiments refused to attack them and they were replaced by soldiers from outlying regions who would do the job. I remember seeing then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke weep as he read out a report of what had happened, tanks rolling over the bodies of students in the square.

While the catalyst for the present wave of protest in Iran is the alleged (but looking at the track record, likely) rigging of an election, the thousands on the street in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and so on seem to be mostly young and mostly just fed up with living in a theocratic dictatorship. So far I have seen 'freedom' used in numerous contexts related to #IranElection. These include American folk music of the 1960's folk variety, the words of Che Guevara (the short, pithy phrases found on T-shirts around the world), and even reclaim the streets style tactics including artificial traffic jams that are blocks long. The diverse collection of concerns pointing towards 'freedom' through spontaneous protests that are becoming increasingly blood soaked bind it all together into a mediated frenzy.

It will take a while to determine what is happening in Iran beyond the images that are being re/produced and recycled around the theme/meme of #IranElection. Something that impressed me back in 1989 following Tienanmen was how the students had been basically let down and left to their fate by what little leadership they had (which also suffered greatly as a result of their own actions and limited abilities to bring about change). While Mousavi may be the figurehead for this movement, I am not sure he represents it. As well, his own abilities to do anything are severely restricted by the present political structure of Iran (hence the impetus for change). In the meantime the images of what this movement could be and what it is circulate around the online world. Distinguishing between the two, even for those involved, seems to be a difficult thing. Not being able to distinguish between them can be a very dangerous thing for those running through the streets and campuses of Iran just now.

Pirate Party Elected to EU Parliament

Christian Engström (left) and leader of the Swedish Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge as activists. Christian is now on his way to a seat in the European Parliament

The winning of a seat in the European Parliament by Christian Engström from the Swedish Pirate Party (PP) should be considered an important turn in the ongoing (and far from over) developments around the law and the conceptualization of intellectual property.

Only a dismal 44% of Swedes actually bothered to vote in the 2009 EU elections (compared to around 89% that voted in the last national election in 2007) and the PP received 7.1% of the vote. The primary base for the PP vote is apparently younger people (under 30) and males. The commentators attributed this demographic to the PP preventing an extreme right wing party gaining a Swedish seat in the EU parliament.

While the figure are flying in the Swedish media tonight about how many and who brought this new political party into a representative institution, the broader ramifications are yet to be discussed on television or in the press. On the state broadcast news tonight Rickard Falkvinge was questioned about policies on tax, abortion, employment and health care. The PP does not have policies on these issues in a sense that they are dealt with separably from policies on the development of an information based society. I find this extreamly important as a development in the media ecology of the region.

If I were to go into describing the revolution we are living in when it comes to media I would be stuck at this keyboard for a longer time that I can afford, but consider this example that I gleaned from my Twitter feed just now:

"There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn." Edge

At the moment many universities are struggling to keep up with changes in media and information creation, storage and distribution. One of the major epistemological tenets of the struggle to come to terms with what is happening is the concept of 'real life' and the virtual, online, cyberspace or 'whatever it is that people are doing with digital media' (even finding names for some of these practices and realisations is difficult and confusing).

My impression is that the virtual/real discrepancy is prevalent in university leadership throughout much of Europe. The major parties in the Swedish EU elections expressed a 'real life' and 'virtual life' dichotomy when describing such issues as Peer to Peer file sharing prior to the EU election day last weekend. In the recent Pirate Bay trial here in Sweden the now mythic phrase "We don't use IRL. Everything is real life. We use AFK." (IRL- In Real Life, AFK- Away From Keyboard) was uttered in the courtroom by one of the defendants. The concept of AFK summarises many of the problems that have brought a representative of the PP to a seat in the EU parliament. These problems should be considered in light of Sweden being a land that has a very advanced level of digital media connectivity. Fast broadband is standard in Sweden. I believe that the situation in Sweden represents a future scenario for many presently less connected societies.

The narrowness of confining multimedia representation and embodiment to a 'virtual' sphere is fast running out of currency. The list of examples I could summon on the reality of what is happening just in online, so-called 'virtual worlds' is long. The Swedish tax authorities are struggling to find a solution for taxing the income of those who work with such communities as Second Life. How does one organise a working day according to union regulations when one works in a 24 hour world mediated by super-fast high resolution three dimensional internet worlds. Last term I tried to convince students (yes, young people who are supposed to be 'digital natives') that they can work according to the time it is in Second Life. Weekends could be used for socialising inworld rather than in the local pub. They did not like the idea. But this is something many of us are dealing with already. I read that our local hospital here has sent two doctors to live and work in Australia. Their jobs are to review x-rays that are done by Umeå Univesity Hospital in the north of Sweden during the day and are then sent to them in Sydney, where there is a 8 to 9 hour time difference. While the patient sleeps through the night here, the doctors in Australia examine the x-rays, sending a report by morning. The savings from not having to pay a night rate to two doctors makes the project worth while. These are just a few examples of the digital society we are seeing developing around us now.

Mr. Engström alone in Brussels will probably not be able to accomplish much. The desired goal of the PP of

"All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created." Pirate Party

Involves the dissolution of several international treaties to which Sweden and the rest of Europe are party to. Furthermore I am uncertain of the logic involved in the idea that all "culture and knowledge are good things". I think it does seem idealistic and somewhat naive. But is is also brave, and the sentiment behind the idea is to be admired. I think that what we see in the election of Mr Engström to the EU assembly is an important turn. This turn is away from the court rooms and the police raids that have filled the pages of our dying newspapers over the past few years, to the activities in the legislative bodies of the democratic state. I think there will be more stories in the coming year or two about how those that oppose the attempted preservation of the hierarchical media model as it has been for the past hundred years are seeking direct political representation.

Conspiracy Brings Power Closer (as Narrative)

Yesterday a good friend told me about a film he saw on the net that made an impression on him. It is called The Obama Deception and it deals with:

The Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order. He is being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American people into accepting global slavery.

Last night I watched some of it with this blog post in mind and a critical eye at the ready. My thoughts congealed around the idea that power for 99% of the population is as distant as the moon. Conspiracy (and I will explain what I mean by that) is one way of bringing the conception of power closer to the mundaneness of daily life. To explain how I came to this idea I go back to the Goombungee school bus in the hot summer of 1983. The Australian government had just changed and after 8 years of centre-right leadership the adults who could had just voted in a Labour government led by Robert (Bob) Hawke, then holder of the beer sculling world record, a yard glass - approximately 3 imperial pints or 1.7 litres - in eleven seconds.

On my school bus sat several teenagers from religious families. I remember one of these kids speaking at length about Hawke "being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American Australian people into accepting global slavery" involving a world bank and Zionist plots. There was even a prophecy from Nostradamus involved in his explanation (something about "a man with the name of a wild bird in a land yet undiscovered coming to power"). We on the Goombungee bus looked out over the eucalyptus scrub and dry fields and felt somehow involved in the functions of power by being privy to this 'truth'. The machinery of power may have been impossibly distant from us there in that hot tin box on wheels, but we understood something that perhaps others did not. There was a conspiracy at work and we had come into contact with it through narrative.

Later in my life, in 1994 I attended a lecture at Sydney University by Noam Chomsky (who no doubt is part of the same conspiracy as Bob Hawke but we on the Goombungee bus did not get much exposure to the anarchist linguist so he was never in the story). I remember Chomsky touched on the idea of conspiracy theories in his presentation. He said that conspiracy theories are dependent on distance; if it is an enemy state it is not a conspiracy, it is intelligence (think Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the famine that has been going on in North Korea for a decade and so on). If the theory under consideration is closer to 'home' and involves one's own government then we are talking conspiracy.

In the decade and a half since I saw Chomsky speak, power has drifted even further away from the masses in many lands. With jobs moving to the new industrial economies of the East and governments moving upwards into a level of global blocs (NAFTA, EU, ASEAN and so on) the average citizen can be forgiven for feeling there is more to the story of government than what they are being told. The concept of politic agency at the individual level is not strong and healthy at the moment in many nations. It is here that the conspiracy enters into the fabric of political narrative. Conspiracy, such as The Obama Deception brings power closer to people via narrative and thereby provides a sense of mythic agency in relation to politics.

The tragedy of media such as The Obama Deception is not the possible degrees of truth value that can be related to it as a text. Rather, that political agency is translated into complex narratives and enacted out along reactionary lines of behaviour as a part of the political process (it has had 2.5 million views on just one of its YouTube sites) I find very disturbing. The more time people spend putting together the pieces of The Obama Deception puzzle (even if it is just in their minds) the less time is being spent on actually doing something to participate in the democratic political process. Of course the people behind The Obama Deception would say that there is no democratic process today. That's the way they want it. The result of such a narrative as The Obama Deception and "the man with the name of a wild bird" from 1983 is a negation of what few democratic rights we have remaining.

European Union Elections and the Fear

"We build the knowledge society" - Election poster from the Swedish Pirate Party, Umeå May 2009.

On June 7th those adults living in the European Union who have not submitted a postal vote already go to the ballot boxes for an election of members to the EU parliament. Sweden is of course taking part in this process and I tell you things could not be more interesting if you are a researcher in digital culture and textuality.

Since January the membership of The Pirate Party in Sweden has risen from 14000 to 55000. If current polls are reflecting how people will vote they are now a serious contender for seats in the EU parliament. The problem for the PP in the 2007 Swedish general election was few of its supporters actually voted. This may change on June 7th but it is not for certain. In a recent poll, the Pirate Party Showed 5.1% of the vote. The second largest party for Sweden in the 18-29 age group and the fourth largest for the 30-44 group.

All this attention has not gone unnoticed by the larger parties. The Vanster (Left) party are the only one of the other serious contenders for EU seats which is adopting a position even sympathetic to that held by the PP. The center left Social Democratic Party is against the digital surveillance and copyright laws passed recently by the government in principle, but have failed to take a strong stand by providing any sort of dramatic alternatives. The Green Party of Sweden (Miljöpartiet de Gröna) are somewhat silent on the issue of file sharing, and their coalition with the Social Democrates probably has something to do with it.

The center-right coalition which forms the government in Sweden is not silent on the issue of either surveillance or P2P file sharing. This afternoon I listened to Hans Wallmark, a Moderate Party candidate for the EU parliament speak about

"Where is the limit for freedom on the internet? Shall we accept child pornography and drug trafficking on the internet? I believe freedom has its limits on the internet. Just as one warns of integrity but one must also give answers to the questions. Drugs on the net? Child pornography on the net? What is permitted?"

Serious questions but it all sounds very familiar to one who follows the news on the other side of the globe, and the net filter that is currently being debated, often irrationally, in Australia:

"There is no political content banned in the existing Broadcasting Services Act," he said.

"We are not building the Great Wall of China. We are going after the filth - like child pornography. Its been done around the world and it can be done here."

How it is done "will be guided by the outcome of the trials."

Most of the assertions otherwise are "patently a scare campaign [against] a policy objective we think is fair and reasonable," he said.
Australian Communications Minister Stephen Conroy

Fear is the key to this, as Senator Conroy points out. Fear is also being peddled in Sweden. Fear of lawlessness and the idea that in order to be safe media must be controlled and those who use it monitored. If we go further back we can easily find connections between media, fear and politics:

"Something that stood even deeper than the fear of Protestantism was also at stake in the great refusal of 1496. The decision to stand by the Vulgate, to veil the gospels, and stress lay obedience over lay education was certainly framed as a reaction to the Protestant threat. Fear of the threat of the spread of Lutheran heresy undoubtedly loomed large in the debates. Actions taken by Catholic churchmen, however, were designed to counteract forces which had begun to subvert the medieval church before Luther was born and which continued to menace the Roman Catholicism long after Protestant zeal had ebbed.
It was printing, not Protestantism, which outmoded the medieval Vulgate and introduced a new drive to tap mass markets."
The Printing Press as an Agent of Change By Elizabeth L. Eisenstein p353

The account of the printing press and the revolution it brought about, while often verging on a tale of technodeterminism, is undoubtedly worth considering when listening today to the members of the Pirate, Left, Moderate, Green, Social Dems and so forth on internet controls. Those with an insight into the long term effects of what we, in the economically developed parts of the world, are experiencing in media ecology should not resort to fear in order to express themselves.
And don't forget to vote.

John Berger reads Ghassan Khanafani’s Letter from Gaza

John Berger reads Ghassan Khanafani's Letter from Gaza from Palestine Festival of Literature on Vimeo.

I have seen few examples of online videos that demonstrate such powerful ability to evoke emotion. Berger reads Khanafani with an understated certainty and warmth that is extremely moving. This is brilliant.

From People's Geography

Art:21 | Alfredo Jaar | Gramsci & Pasolini

Alfredo Jaar in his installation "Infinite Cell" (2004) in Santiago, Chile, and various works.

Through installations, photographs, and community-based projects, Alfredo Jaar explores the public's desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Jaar's work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations, often taking the form of an extended meditation or elegy.

Alfredo Jaar is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Protest of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Artwork courtesy: Alfredo Jaar. Thanks: Fundación Telefónica, Santiago, Chile.

"Art is critical thinking and by its essence it is political." Alfredo Jaar

The Day After

Ill Doctrine: Why I’m Happy, Why I’m Not Satisfied


A very stumbling fuzzy sort of oath taking.

Farewell

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." Washington DC, 12 May, 2008

Division Empire and Time

When I look at this image of the slow erosion of Palestine I think also of the Partition of India. The British did the same thing with India (in the very same year that the UN partition plan was rejected). The Indian catastrophe is a division along ethnic and religious groundings that haunt the world to this day. I recomend (once again) Yasmin Kahn's book, The Great Partition:

The Partition of India in 1947 promised its people both political and religious freedom—through the liberation of India from British rule, and the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. Instead, the geographical divide brought displacement and death, and it benefited the few at the expense of the very many. Thousands of women were raped, at least one million people were killed, and ten to fifteen million were forced to leave their homes as refugees. One of the first events of decolonization in the twentieth century, Partition was also one of the most bloody.

In this book Yasmin Khan examines the context, execution, and aftermath of Partition, weaving together local politics and ordinary lives with the larger political forces at play. She exposes the widespread obliviousness to what Partition would entail in practice and how it would affect the populace. Drawing together fresh information from an array of sources, Khan underscores the catastrophic human cost and shows why the repercussions of Partition resound even now, some sixty years later. The book is an intelligent and timely analysis of Partition, the haste and recklessness with which it was completed, and the damaging legacy left in its wake.

It seems like dividing occupied populations was quite the thing to do in 1947. And then leaving them to sort out the mess.