January 2012
7 posts
“If you refuse to let your own suffering lie upon you even for an hour and if you...”
– Nietzsche
“To those human beings who are of any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation,...”
– Nietzsche
“The time is out of joint. The world is going badly. It is worn but its wear no...”
– Derrida, Specters of Marx
“One lives so badly because one always arrives in the present unfinished,...”
– Rilke
Personal data and the Informational Industries
Should one be in doubt as to the value of critical accounts of privacy, one only need consider the scale of informational industries. The New Scientist has an interesting snippet pointing out that in 2012 Facebook is expected to launch on the stock market with an initial public offering (IPO) valuing the social network at $100 billion. As with oil, gas, metals, diamonds or any other industry that...
Open source today
“The open source culture of new media really means one thing today: it means open interfaces. It means the freedom to connect to technical images. Even source code is a kind of interface—an interface into a lowerlevel set of libraries and operation codes. Thus, when Google or Facebook open-sources resource x, it provides an API (application programming interface) granting managed access to...
December 2011
16 posts
William Gibson on Google
Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But...
“In 1977, “competition” became the crucial word for the economy, whose project...”
– Bifo
“What clinical experience teaches in fact is not that psychological distress and...”
– David Smail
Trading Futures, Consolidating Student Debt
Debt is legitimated by its connection to productivity. If debt is not to result in a diminution of income during repayment, it presumes a rising income. Either labour is extended, intensified or acquired from others. This, crudely, is the formula of capital. It is also the logic of investment in human capital that, as it turns out, must be outfitted with moral and legal limits in the form of the...
The politics of the unrepresentable
From the French banlieu riots in 2005 to their 2011 UK counterparts, from the politics of disruption and contagion of the Lulzsec and Anonymous hacking groups to the politics of “occupy everything” adopted by some strong tendencies within the global occupy movement, there seems to be a growing presence of contemporary radical political dynamics that are largely untranslatable in existing...
Entrevista a Toni Negri
–¿Qué significa la emancipación hoy?
–Hay que situar la emancipación desde una perspectiva espacial que implica pensar “desde abajo” y desde una perspectiva temporal que pone en primer plano la tendencia que aspira a que todo aquello común, que hoy sólo compartimos a un nivel virtual y técnico, se convierta en algo actual y político. Y para esto hay que pensar, como experimento, las figuras...
“Society is imitation and imitation is a kind of somnambulism”
– Tarde
The Metaphor of the Cloud
“The metaphor of the cloud is a specific network metaphor: one that blurs the nodes, relations, topology and protocols of the network. The cloud metaphor invokes associations with innocence, and the weather, but most of all with weightlessness and immateriality - attributes already present in the metaphor of softness in software. The cloud is ‘soft’ raised to the square, without the suffix...
“The first recorded word for ‘freedom’ in any human language is the Sumerian...”
– Interview with David Graeber
November 2011
2 posts
Nietzsche sobre la deuda
“El deudor, para infundir confianza en su promesa de restitución, para dar una garantía de la seriedad y la santidad de su promesa, para imponer dentro de sí a su conciencia la restitución como un deber, como una obligación, empeña al acreedor, en virtud de un contrato, y para el caso de que no pague, otra cosa que todavía «posee», otra cosa sobre la que todavía tiene poder, por ejemplo su...
“The true and only virtue is to hate ourselves”
– Pascal
October 2011
2 posts
“One is never alone only with oneself, but also with other people, with things...”
– Sloterdijk
September 2011
1 post
“Arguably, one of the greatest challenges that philosophy faces today lies in...”
– Eugene Thaker
August 2011
1 post
June 2011
3 posts
“The fly, the dragonfly and the bee that we observe flying next to us on a summer...”
– Agamben
Total Recall
What does it say about our era that so many people think it’s cool to place these pre-faded, instant-nostalgia filters on the images that will one day constitute their treasury of precious memories? When they look back to the early 21st century, their pics will look like they were taken two or three decades earlier, summoning up a long-lost era they don’t have any reason to feel...
May 2011
2 posts
Marketing as Governmentality
”[…] to understand the relationship between marketing and consumption is to acknowledge an ethics of the self that links the ongoing production of lifestyle, identity, and self to consumption and the market (Finn,2009). From this perspective, marketing represents a perpetual questioning machine asking the modern consumer to make a project of oneself based on ongoing self-examination...
April 2011
3 posts
“Knowledge is tied to struggle. Who knows truly hates truly.”
– Tronti
Sonic Warfare
M. Fuller: A clear emphasis in the book is on tracking a real materialist politics of sound, this is a big difference to the run of the mill cultural studies approach which looks for signification, of sounds to be like something or to be about something. How does sound itself create politics?
Kode9: Sound, as I describe in the book at least, creates politics primarily by activating space-times...
March 2011
8 posts
“HOW TO DO IT
Burn boy burn
burn the central bank
and the peripheral one.
...”
– Bifo
WatchDone for / Taylor McFerrin
WatchDelimitation of Life, Mark B. Hansen
Technological determinism, affect and...
”[…] Technological rationality is not the problem. Our technologies are not a set of command and control protocols that insert us into a large, uniform structure, assign us numbers, and direct us to our proper place. Contemporary communication technologies are configured by users, consumers, capitalists, programmers and states, as well as by trial and error. They are products of...
WatchFrom Anti-Copyright to the Creative Anti-Commons (Dmytri Kleiner)
The entrepreneurial fantasy society
“In the entrepreneurial fantasy society, the delusion is fostered that anyone can be Alan Sugar or Bill Gates, never mind that the actual likelihood of this occurring has diminished since the 1970s - a person born in 1958was more likely than one born in 1970 to achieve upward mobility through education, for example. The Selfish Capitalist toxins that are most poisonous to well-being are the...
“What power needs is not science but a mass of information which its strategic...”
– Foucault
February 2011
5 posts
“Auschwitz begins wherever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re...”
– Adorno
The Cloud as ideology
“Cubitt has noted the ideological construct hiding in the catchphrase ‘cloud computing’, a term that obscures the fact that the ‘cloud’ is really made of thousands of dense cargo containers filled with computing equipment that consumes more energy than the airline industry. Cyberspace, outside the mind of the user, does not exist. Therefore, the operation is to consider and analyse...
“The story of the digital divide regarding access is old, untrue today and boring...”
– Manuel Castells
Mannig Chat Logs
(02:18:34 AM) Lamo: what’s your endgame plan, then? (02:18:36 AM) Manning: it was vulnerable as fuck (02:20:57 AM) Manning: well, it was forwarded to WL (02:21:18 AM) Manning: and god knows what happens now (02:22:27 AM) Manning: hopefully worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms (02:23:06 AM) Manning: if not… than we’re doomed (02:23:18 AM) Manning: as a species (02:24:13 AM) Manning: i...