You can now register for R15N by calling +49308687035761 | The Official Miscommunication Platform of @transmediale 2012
January 15th, 2012 by Dmytri | Permalink
For projects like Kickstarter to scale they can not depend on the limited funds workers are able to divert from consumption, and must tap into the real source of accumulation: Surplus Value.
January 13th, 2012 by Dmytri | Permalink
I’m currently involved in a discussion on the Empyre mailing list with Tiziana Terranova, Adam Hyde and others. The topic of Kickstarter and simular sites came up, as I’ve been meaning to address these sorts of projects, both for their potential and their limitations, I though I’d repost an excerpt of my response here:
I love Kickstarter and similar sites, like Flattr, Goteo, etc. If you are a cultural worker or free software producer I highly recommend using these, as they are generating a fantastic community of cultural production, which is great to be part of, if you can.
Yet, it’s a very small community. So the vast majority of production can not be funded by these sites. It’s exactly the kind of token or fringe alternatives that we must not mistake as a genuine embodiment of social change, as cool as it is for the few it can support.
Kickstarter, for example, has raised $125 million dollars in it’s history. In total. This seems like a rather impressive sum until you remember that it’s just over half the budget of “Spiderman 2,” which is one movie, and not an especially high-budget one.
Visit the video store and walk down the aisles, imagine that each of the titles you see on the shelf had budgets more similar to Spiderman 2 than to anything funding by Kickstarter. Now imagine the total number of workers employed by the budgets of the movies you see in the video store, compared to the number of workers employed by projects funded by Kickstarter and you can see what I mean.
Does Kickstarter work? Sure! Does it fund amazing projects? Yes! Should you use it? Absolutely! Will it change the way culture is produced? No. It wont. And even imaging it could assumes a massive descaling of cultural employment. Would we even want that?
Now, you might believe that this is merely a temporary situation, that Kickstarter and similar sites can grow and grow until they can reach a similar scale to capital funded culture, but that is not possible. Why? Because “Spiderman 2″ is funded from accumulated capital, while Kickstarter is funded from the retained earnings of workers. This is a rather important difference.
What it means is that the limits of the amounts of funding available for each model are a function of the structure of wealth in society. The total pool of accumulated capital vs the total amount of retained earnings workers are able to consistently divert from consumption. The former is orders of magnitude larger than the later. In fact, the workings of the labour market will tend to push the later towards 0.
For projects like Kickstarter to scale they can not depend on the limited funds workers are able to divert from consumption, and must tap into the real source of accumulation: Surplus Value. In other words, only when money available for Kickstarter investment can be reproduced from the captured profits of the works they fund. To achieve that, Kickstarter would need to become not much different than the industry as it exists today.
Sorry if this breaks your heart. It breaks mine. But as much as I love our hacker and free culture community, let’s not mistake our subculture with a new mode of production, doing so will only make us complacent, content with our lack of complicity in evil proprietary culture, instead of standing with the great majority of cultural producers and consumers and demanding nothing less that the complete transformation of cultural production, which means the abolition of capitalism.
For the rest of this ongoing discussion, see the Empyre archives:
http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/
#R15N, The Official Miscommunication Platform of @transmediale 2012
January 10th, 2012 by Dmytri | Permalink
HTTP://R15N.NET
The Revolutionization of Communication
A delegation from Transmediale 2012 [1] came over to my place last night to discuss the latest Telekommunisten artwork, R15N [2]. In addition to various organizational and technical details that we need to work out in preparation for the not-to-be-missed upcoming Transmediale, we talked about the artistic qualities of R15N and the Miscommunication Technologies series in general, which includes works such as deadSwap [3] and Thimbl [4].
R15N in some ways represents the purest example of a miscommunication technology so far in the series, not only is it a broadcast model, thus fulfilling the Telekomunisten slogan “The Revolution is Calling,” but it really combines many of the core characteristics common to the work of Telekommunisten.
Like Thimbl, it is an economic fiction [5], a platform that for the most part is free to use, yet does not in anyway monetize user data or interaction. Like deadSwap, the system depends on the diligence and competency of the users [6] and their willingness to co-operate with random people, who are likely to be completely unknown to each other. Without such diligence and co-operation of the users, the system breaks down into nothing more than a telephonic game of broken telephone.
R15N will be the Official Miscommunication Platform of Transmediale 2012.
Our hope is that the system will serve to create engagement and a greater sense of community at this years Transmediale. The installation side of R15N is minimal. Some signage and two retro phones under desk lamps, along with a phone booth in which to access the website will represent the work in the physical space of the festivals, but the main purpose of these is to get visitors to register to the system.
Only once the user is registered is the artwork really experienced.
The system is extremely miscommunicative, failed calls and missed calls and occasional poor call quality seem bewildering at first, and the R15N experience begins quite mysteriously and somewhat awkwardly, as users get dropped into the network and begin to be connected with strangers, with whom they are ment to interact. But very quickly the experience starts to feel normal as users acclimatize to it’s quirks and begin to lose inhibitions.
Very quickly, the system becomes a highly efficient way to broadcast information, as despite the somewhat unmanageable communication flow happening on the system, the very cooperation and engagement such a miscommunicative platform requires amplifies the message on channels outside the system, as users share their experience with the people around them and people connected to them on other mediums. By building community though the shared experience of the system, R15N becomes a catalyst for the exogenous propagation of information as well.
Technically, this style of broadcast is similar to what is known as the “Random Phone Call” broadcast model [7], a theoretical model which proves that a given message can saturate a network very quickly by simply connecting random nodes together.
Historically, it works like a randomized, ad-hoc version of the old “phone tree” method of pushing information out to a large community. Phone trees where used by many communities, from schools to church groups to the military [8], when they needed to notify a large number of people quickly. Setting up and maintaining a phone tree was one of the essential tasks of activist groups and political campaigns.
Artistically, we have given the system a retro identity, harkening back to the early days of computer networks and telecommunication platforms and the utopian visions of a new society these new platforms inspired. Both playing on the related nostalgia, but also as a parody of modern corporate web platforms today, who peddle centralized and captured implementations of use cases that have been around for decades as somehow revolutionary and innovative because they have managed to squeeze out more powerful open alternatives by way of exclusive access to finance capital.
Economically, such a system is extremely accessible, since all calls are initiated by the system and incoming calls are free in most countries, the system is free to use for most people, even for people who have no calling credit on their mobile phones. Nothing more than a working telephone is required to participate.
The system is currently in beta stage, and thus usually inactive, however registration is open and everyone is free to sign up now. Be a part of the R15N community. Don’t miss out on important information! Register Today!
I’ll be at Cafe Buchhandlung [9] tonight at 9pm as usual, please come by.
[1] http://transmediale.de
[2] http://r15n.net
[3] http://deadswap.net
[4] http://thimbl.net
[5] http://wp.me/p24fqL-Z
[6] http://deadswap.net/HandBook
[7] http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~tfried/paper/2011STOC.pdf
[8] http://www.state.nj.us/military//familysupport/family_readiness/telephone_tree.html
[9] http://bit.ly/buchhandlung
Transnational Digital Networks, Migration and Gender | Public event – Autonomy, Labour, and the Political Economy of Social Media
January 10th, 2012 by Dmytri | Permalink
“The debt hawks are to economics as the creationists are to biology.” — Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
January 9th, 2012 by Dmytri | Permalink
– @dmytri
Still Hanging Around Berlin After #28c3? Come to Cafe Buchhandlung Tonight! Pass it on.
January 3rd, 2012 by Dmytri | Permalink
How I accidentally became a blogger and blogged the #28c3
January 3rd, 2012 by Dmytri | Permalink
TL;DR: I’ll probably show up at stammtisch a little early today, say 8pm or so. People still in town after the CCC are encouraged to come by! Hope to see you all for another drink before you sail off to your various hacker lairs. http://bit.ly/buchhandlung
Well, #28c3 has come and gone.
I’m not sure how it happened, but after all these years on the internet, It looks like I’ve somehow become a blogger.
I never really wanted to be a blogger, after all the most exciting thing about the Internet has always been the ability for users to interact on neutral turf. Yet, the web, even when it has social features, is always home-court for somebody or another.
The definitive technology of the Internet to me was always UseNet, a worldwide distributed discussion system, and this was where I first began to express and discuss political issues, where the worlds of political activism and media art intersected with my life as a computer programmer, and drew me into ideas and projects and communities I would otherwise have had no connection with.
I didn’t start out thinking about what I was doing as “publishing” so much as fishing, posting not so much so people would read my texts, but so people would respond to them. Their responses give me new ideas, insights, and more leads to better understand these topics I could now begin to access, byway of the Internet.
UseNet was an ongoing multiparty dialogue.
When people started blogging I couldn’t see the point. Why post something on just one website, instead of millions of news servers all around the world? Why force people to use dodgy webforms to leave comments, instead of slick news reading software? It seems so retrograde, so hierarchical, privileging one writer as the blog’s “author” with everyone else reduced to “commentators,” under the tyrannical moderation of the blogger, meaning that the presence of opposing views, that made UseNet groups so vibrant, was absent.
A personal website seemed to me no more useful than as an elaborate .plan file, a kind of online brochure, good for a CV and Contact info, maybe even a archive of what you had really posted online (meaning on UseNet), but certainly no way to reach any community.
Sadly, UseNet has become increasingly obscure, for reasons that I have discussed at length, as part of the Capital-financed enclosure of the peer-to-peer Internet with centrally controlled client-server technologies.
As a result for years I’ve been lost in wilderness, making my contributions on web-boards like Autonomedia’s InterActivist, mailing lists, etc, and even *gasp* “Social Media,” Eventually being published by Mute Magazine, and other websites, leading to the Telekommunist Manifesto being released by the Institute for Network Cultures.
In an effort to co-ordinate my use of these disparate platforms, somehow a blog emerged.
So here we are. I’ve accidentally become a blogger.
Last week the #28c3 occurred in Berlin, and it served as the point of departure for the last six texts that I’ve written. For completeness, I’ve collected links to all of them below.
- Nobody Goes There Anymore, It’s Too Crowded! | http://wp.me/p24fq
When a place becomes too crowded, things like getting in, getting a table, getting service, etc, become more competitive and thereby difficult. Some of the original regulars become crowded out and stop going, eventually the others stop too, “because nobody goes there anymore.”
- The Suck Principle | http://wp.me/p24fqL-qo
Only places that suck can really have a continuous community, because if nothing about the place sucks, it will attract more and more people until it sucks because of crowding. So if you want a continuous, closely knit community, something about the venue or event must suck, your only choice is what should suck or how it should suck.
- Exceptionalism and The Internet Surveillance Industry | http://wp.me/p24fqL-r1
Expressing outrage that enemies of the US and it’s allies are using the technology being developed by the west also seems misplaced, and rests on regressive exceptionalist view that privileges western states as being somehow noble enough to be trusted with the ability to survey their citizens, but not sinister foreign powers.
- Capital and The War on General Computing | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rg
It is not ignorance, nor even genuinely the needs of law enforcement that is driving the war against general computing and a general network. It’s too simple to understand this war as simply tyrannical law enforcers and paranoid music execs duping clueless legislatures into locking-down cyberspace to save Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Rather this war is simply a consequence of the fact that our technology industry is funded by finance capital, and finance capital requires profit as a return.
- There Is No A List | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rC
Certainly the freedom-loving free markets will punish peddlers of tyranny and domination! No doubt ethically minded investors will move their investments to the virtuous firms of list A, leaving the B listers starved of Capital. Justice conscious consumers will immediately dump B’s products and take up the A list! Politicians, eager to please their constituents, will kick the B listers to the curb and shower the A listers with all the lucrative governments lucre. The sinister B-list companies will collapse and the bold and brave A listers will take their market share and refuse to implement censorious or freedom-denying features into their products, and certainly not enable sinister foreign powers to oppresses their people. Cackling foreign despots and their bumbling mad scientists are now foiled for good by the freedom loving actors on the glorious free market system!
- Class Struggle Among Cyborgs | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rN
So long as we have an economic system that allows an owner/lender class to exploit a worker/borrower class, we will have communications systems and social institutions that are controlled of the owner/lender classes and structured in their interests, and against the interests of the worker/borrower class, for the simply reason that since the owner/lender class will aways be able to retain earnings and accumulate while the worker/borrower class can only earn enough to service their bills and debt.
I’ll be at Buchhandlung as usual this evening, all are welcome to come along for a drink.
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