February 2012
14 posts
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Some Critiques of the Network Society... (4)(pt 1...
I think we are now in a position to draw out some of the more obvious critiques of the use of networks and network society. Until now the focus has been on Manual Castells understanding of the concept of the network society. But things are more serious than that, for the notion of the network has become a paradigm that has become a defining ideological delusion of our present. Everything has...
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Network Society, Flows versus Places and the Role...
Manual Castells began as an urban geographer, as a result it is not surprising that the examination of space is central in his Network Society. One of the key spacial characterizations of the information age is the “space of flows”. This in his view is the domain of networks, flows of capital, of information, of business alliances, of production, of reproduction. The argument is that “While...
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Network Society: Capital and Labour
In Manual Castells understanding of the Network Society he establishes a difference between the terms “information” and “informational”. Information has always been an essential component of human societies, whether these are capitalist or not. It is unsurprising that Castells argues that in the network economy information has become a key factor in economic productivity. Presently, in the...
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Network Society as Spectacle (Draft notes)
Manual Castells claims that we have moved from the industrial age into the information age. This historical change having been brought about by the dominance of the new information technologies –specifically the communication and biological technologies. The political economy of the society remains capitalist, with until recently the dominant paradigm being neoliberalism but the basis of the...
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Notes EM: Is Norway's pension fund investing in... →
evgenymorozov:
On February 10th, Dagens Næringsliv, a Norwegian newspaper, published a long investigation into Norway’s ties with companies that produce surveillance and censorship technology that is used in authoritarian states. Their article is in Norwegian (someone should translate it!) and can be viewed on…
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This then…. “Google, then, is the reification of the general intellect. It manages to take human curiosity and turn it into capital….” Where this idea becomes an idealism rather than a scientific or properly political gesture is because it does explicitly recognize the extent to which the “spectacle is a permanent opium war waged to make it impossible tom distinguish...
“That is, our consumption, especially of information, is a mode of production....”
– From “Google and the Production of Curiosity” (via modernandmaterialthings)
Chuckles only a creature of the spectacle would believe the delusion that “our consumption, especially of information, is a mode of production”
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Surveillance and the Spectacle draft bibliography
Bibliography
Mattelart, Armand. (2010) The Globalization of Surveillance. Polity Press
Bernys, E. Propoganda (1928/2004)
Ewan, S. Captains of Consciousness (1976)
Gramsci, A. ‘Americanism and Fordism’ (1929) - in Selections fromt eh prison Notebooks (L&W 1973)
Benjamin, Walter. Theories of German Fascism…
Agamben, G. State of Exception
Mattelart, A. The Mass media and...
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Surveillance is the Future of the Spectacle -...
Part One here
http://imrinst.tumblr.com/post/14622037336/surveillance-is-the-future-of-the-spectacle
In this second part of the text we are addressing not just surveillance in the spectacle but beyond this the extent to which you are being surveyed and the extent to which this will be increased in the future and critically how this surveillance is an aspect of the way you, as a human subject...
January 2012
14 posts
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The spectacle and fashion (2 of 3)
Gilles Lipovetsky
“Fashion does not bring about the definitive alienation of the masses; it is an ambiguous but effective vector of human autonomy, even though it functions via the heteronomy of mass culture… The more ephemeral seduction there is, the more enlightenment advances, even if it does so in an ambivalent way.” p.9
“fashion has allowed public questioning to expand; it has allowed...
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Fashion and the Spectacle (1 of 3)
“No one would claim that fashion is intruding on intellectual life for the very first time. Since the seventeenth century at least, the cultural sphere has been stirred up, in worldly and intellectual circles, by countless “frenzies”, and even political views have gone through many cycles of alternation and change”. Lipovetsky
“Fashion does not bring about the definitive alienation of the masses;...
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The work of the peoples commissariat for... →
This was first read in the critical text: Communication and Class Struggle 2. Liberation, Socialism. Edited by Mattelart and Siegelaub in 1983.
Ideally an anthology like this needs to be at hand… unmediated.
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If as Franco Fortini (the communist formalist poet) can refer to poetry as a vibration of the class struggle that is so slow that it cannot be located precisely within it. Then the spectacle in its mass and social media forms vibrates so quickly that the class struggle is hidden behind the instantaneous moment.
This difference may appear to be great but it does imply that the difficult...
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#spectacle and misunderstandings.
It is curious how within the social media people still assume that the things said remain/are in some sense external to the spectacle. Which is to presume that because they say it, the statement has some authenticity. Whereas, it should without saying but still needs repeating, the social media, being commodified are not separable from the spectacle. They are the spectacle.
A text held in the...
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reading tumblr posts is often like being submerged in images from the society of the spectacle
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In the 1980s a Canadian researcher said “Today credit cards constitute one of the most serious threats to fundamental rights and liberties. Insofar as they enable service companies to gather, process and disseminate increasing amounts of information on people, their behaviours, their tastes, etc… the posses highly sophisticated means for increasing control over private individuals ...
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In all that has happened in the last twenty years the most important change lies in the the very continuity of the spectacle. This has nothing to do with the perfecting of its media instruments, which had already reached a highly advanced stage of development: it means simply that the spectacle’s domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation molded to its laws. The extraordinary...
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Often enough society’s bosses declare themselves ill-served by their media employees: more often they blame the spectators for the common, almost bestial manner in which they indulge in the media’s delights, A virtually infinite number of supposed differences within the media thus serve to screen what is in fact a spectacular convergence, pursued with remarkable tenacity. Just...
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The empty debate on the spectacle - that is on the activities of the world’s owners - is this organized by the spectacle itself: everything is said about the extensive means at its disposal, to ensure that nothing is said about their extensive deployment. Rather than talk of the spectacle, people often prefer to use the term media. And by this they mean to describe a mere instrument, a kind...
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Bernard Stiegler from @luizcarlosgarrocho →
SUFFOCATED DESIRE, OR HOW THE CULTURAL INDUSTRY DESTROYS THE INDIVIDUAL: CONTRIBUTION TO A THEORY OF MASS CONSUMPTION
Bernard Stiegler, translated by Johann Rossouw…
thanks to luizcarlosgarrocho for this…
December 2011
13 posts
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Surveillance is the Future of the Spectacle -...
The tools through which the spectacle relates to you and manages your expectations are in the process of changing. Whereas for the past twenty years the predominant method through which this has taken place has been through the heterogeneous set of tools and methods derived from the network society at the moment this is in the process of changing again. This text outlines some of the new...
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Digital and Network Politics
A digital and network politics working bibliography. Whilst its possible to locate an enormous variety of links on the subject areas of ‘Network Politics’ on the net it is our intention to collate a long term resource which will enable a more critical reading and understanding of the area.
Bibliography – Release One
Ansell, Keith. (1999) Germinal life. Psychology Press/RKP, UK
Ansell,...
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link to @The_Activists post - How The Mass Media... →
…Mass media functions based on the notion that people are susceptible to repetitious commands –sugar coated commands… commands in the form of jingles, colorful images and eloquent speech…
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Call of Duty - consume...
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has raised $1bn in sales in just over two weeks… This game is heading towards being the most important media sales event of the year. Demonstrating the extent to which video games are central to the spectacle.
#Serres malfeasance
In bygone days, the story goes, the whores of Alexandria used to carve their initials in reverse order on the soles of their sandals, This enabled prospective clients to read imprints on the sand and discover the desired person and the direction of her bed. The presidents of great brands promoted by advertisers on city billboards today would no doubt enjoy knowing that like the good sons...
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Elinor Ostrom on how to avoid overharvesting the...
The commons is being understood here as the network, the media. And the question implicit to this is how to prevent the networks seemingly inexorable slide into the #spectacle. Is the network still an Open-Access(commons) rather than Closed-Access(public, shared or corporate resources). And the assumption that there is a significant difference within capitalism between them.
The question and...
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soft #pollution… signs, media…
Let us define two things and clearly distinguish them from one another: first the hard and second the soft. By the first I mean on the one had solid residues , liquids, and gases, emitted through the atmosphere by big industrial companies or gigantic garbage dumps, the shameful signature of big cities. By the second, tsunamies of writing, signs, images and logos flooding rural, civic,...
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#Zizek
I read many notes from people that S. Zizek has not yet written a ‘great’ book. Usually this is associated with some irrelevant comment on the forthcoming book on Hegel. I suspect this is actually based on a radical misunderstanding of the main body of Zizek’s work and has some strange misunderstanding of the concept of ‘greatness’. The former is clearly related to the strange belief that...
November 2011
5 posts
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Free Speech - a note
“Secrecy dominates this world, and first and foremost is the the secret of domination. According to the spectacle, secrecy would be a necessary exception to the rule of freely available, abundant information, just as domination in the integrated spectacle’s ‘free world’ would be restricted to a mere executive body in the service of democracy. But no one really believes the...
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The Spectacle in Empire
“The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.” Guy Debord.
The theorisation of the political is not simply the representation of an ontological subset of political forms; instead what we are doing here is to define something more akin...
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#Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition of The...
But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence… illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.
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