in a way, this is a way for change.

the change that is an inevitable reaction to the failing of the international market created by the globalization of the last two decades may or may not be good for our ilk.

those who follow the these of illogical post operationalization.

perhaps, anyone who follows any ideals outside mainstream religion or politics.

the biggest question is: what kind era are we opening to?

—

this era is ending with rampant disillusionment. while it began with a few of us, who saw the crippling nature of our society long ago, ranting into the wind with no one paying attention, it is ending with us almost feeling smug and happy to finally watch it crumble.

we (in america especially) live in a society driven by entitlement and creature comfort. days after borrowing 85 billion from the Federal Reserve, AIG was found to be spending that money on golf retreats, facials, massages, and other things i will never have enough money to do in my entire life. while the stocks for companies like google, yahoo, and facebook were tanking, many of their respective members were too busy hanging out in a mansion on the Turkish coastline making drunk and stupid online videos to realize that all the people in their companies were going to be extremely fucking pissed when they got back into the good old u. s. of a.

—

so my question is this:

how do we direct the conversation of this change to focus on what labor is really worth. it seems that while many of these people made their fortunes with hard work, once the fortune was in their hands, they spent their days piddling around wasting money and expecting people who were being paid fuck-all to keep making money for them (surprisingly, Kevin Rose doesn’t spring to mind as he actually seems to still work on his website a good bit on a personal level.).

how do we really make people understand, that even with a great person running a company/corporation/what-have-you, who had great ideas and their ideas spurred this massive profit-producing behemoth; that these people, in their capacity to keep the company afloat, are only worth as much as those who work for them. would any one of these individuals be able to have built their financial empires completely on their own without ever having anyone elses help?

of course not.

in a way, it brings to mind Marx’s critical history of technology. it seems at this point, we need another Marx. what we need is simply a man, who can make us realize that none of us is inherently “better” than anyone else, nor are we inherently “worse.” we all have our strengths, our weaknesses, our successes, our failures, some are big, some are small, and some are things only we as individuals will ever know about but will treasure until our deaths.

—

as i pen this, drowsily, lazily, not even really sure what or why im writing, all i know is that things are changing, there is a shift.
i know that maybe its time for our ideas to truly come to fruition, but how to expound upon such ideas so they will be understood and digested amongst the regular populace?

regardless.

the shift is happening. whether it will result in a new society founded on reason or it will become our worst nightmare of a police state created by the rich and powerful and corrupt, we can only wait to find out.

we can only spend our time waiting lucratively. speaking out, being daring, crazy, and unpredictable. above all else, we must be able to question our own beliefs and change ourselves accordingly.

if we cannot do that, i fear the worst.

—

by the way,
i finished playing Arcanum.

Why We’re Here

Boycott-RIAA was founded because we love music. We cannot stand by silently while the recording industry continues its decades-long effort to lock up our culture and heritage by misrepresenting the facts to the public, to artists, the fans and to our government. Our mission is to represent the position of the consumers and of the independent music artists against this nearly completely foreign-owned cartel which exhibits behaviors indicative of deliberate and outright contempt for the law, and of those whose job is to enforce it. (Simultaneously, they implore the government to persecute grandmothers and children on their behalf!!!)

We endeavor to counter misinformation with facts, and to make the public aware of the implications and dire long term consequences that our culture suffers when Congress bows to every demand that this illegal and immoral recording industry presents.

Our Goals

We really have only one true goal, that being the ‘take-down’ of the RIAA monopoly. Over the decades, it has become increasingly obvious that the industry cares nothing about our culture, the music, nor the artists that make it. To achieve our goal, several paths are available.

* Ongoing boycott of all RIAA products, including the free samples on radio, peer-to-peer and television. (The giant is very large and very hungry. This is the simplest path, which merely involves starving the giant.)
* Appeal to the media to report the facts surrounding this controversy, and to not merely echo the RIAA’s lie filled propaganda and press releases. We need to get them to discuss how our constitution requires limits, how Congress has changed laws for the sole benefit of the RIAA member labels in regards to their contracts with artists, etc., and to convey other facts which WE know …but that most people buying music today never consider.
* Reform of copyright laws to make them more fair to consumers and artists alike. (At the very least, we would like to see an affirmation that consumers have the same rights for private, non-commercial use of digital song files that they do with analog files under the 1992 Home Audio Recording Act AND an end to the record labels being able to contractually demand ownership of copyrights from the artists.

(Copyright reform will undoubtedly be extremely difficult to achieve due to the fact that the RIAA’s entire purpose is to lobby our government to change the law in their favor. Perversion of copyright law should not be allowed as a solution for the recording industry’s poor management, …but that is precisely why the RIAA lobby group exists!)

DRM and copy-protected CDs lock up the music forever, even after the work in question returns to public domain. Such was NOT part of the copyright bargain our forefathers struck, providing specific rights to the authors for a LIMITED TIME. These copyright protections were intended for the artist and creator, not the corporations. Also, copyright was never intended to provide income for the heirs of the copyright holder in perpetuity. Today, the major labels OWN virtually all of the sound recording copyrights that should belong to their artists. In its present form, copyright law has ceased to fulfill its true purpose for being.
* Achieve a level playing field where independents can compete with major artists and are not excluded from distribution or broadcast simply because they did not offer Clear Channel (and the like) a large enough payola check.
* Support for aspiring musicians, warning them of the dangers to their financial future and creative integrity should they ever succumb and sign a Faustian major-label contract.
* Aggressively urge the music-buying public to put their dollars into independent support where they will get more for their money. The major label monopoly continually puts out fewer and fewer increasingly homogenized offerings. Those who refuse to sign are free to create and express. You want more bang for your buck?

…Support Local and Independent Music!

(Our “mission statement” is “open source” in nature and shall continue to be revised in accordance with YOUR input. Please hit the contact button or post in the “Open Thread” with any updates/corrections/improvements that you would like to have implemented.)

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (”you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (”you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure–prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors–scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

II. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything–the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it’s because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates the individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest–the flock and each of its animals–but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay “priest.”) In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society–not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines–levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner–state or private power–but coded figures–deformable and transformable–of a single corporation that now has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

III. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position–licit or illicit–and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine “without doctor or patient” that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation–as they say–but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a “dividual” material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

L’autre journal, Nr. I, Mai 1990.

“We need, across the board, to move IP enforcement up the agenda of the federal government,” [NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker] said.To that end, the [U.S.] Chamber [of Commerce] is pushing for the creation of a new White House post called “chief intellectual property enforcement officer,” increased spending for border and law enforcement, and stepped-up coordination with industry and foreign governments.

The culture industry is stepping up its efforts to maintain culture as a spectacular commodity by expanding its War on Piracy.

Also, the recent RIAA trial victory shows that things are getting more heated — not to mention bandwidth throttling by ISPs that directly interfere with our ability to communicate.

We thought DRM was bad, but that was just the beginning.

Praxis and theory go hand in hand, so if we are going to ensure the fall of the culture industry and the spectacle, then we need begin building our arsenal of theory.

I propose the formation of an international journal dedicated to building a philosophical foundation for the War on the War on Piracy.

If art can be a non-human activity, why is it that only humans mark certain artifacts as “intellectual property”? Deleuze and Guattari, in the same conversation state:

The artist: the first person to set out a boundary stone, or to make a mark. Property, collective or individual, is derived from that even when it is in the service of war and oppression. Property is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard. (316)

Would this make someone who marks someone else’s art with their own mark (“This is my intellectual property”, “This is my watermark on a video I did not make”) an artist him or herself?

We’ll leave that complicated question aside for the moment and ask another complicated question. If making art and tools (artifacts) is a pre-human activity, then is copyright unique to humans? It would seem so at least at first glance. Copyright is a recent invention. Apes generally share their tool making skills with each other, or more accurately, they copy each other. Birds copy each others’ songs, and even modify them.

Some birds are so good at copying, that they become a medium in itself—and not just a medium, but a recording and playback device.

Embedding has been disabled on the video I wanted to use (BBC Worldwide: Attenborough – Lyre Bird) by the BBC—another marking of territory.

EDIT by biz-marquis de sade: found an embeddable version.

The question I then ask, is the human animal also not another record/edit/playback device? If ”[p]roperty is fundamentally artistic because art is fundamentally poster, placard”, then where does this leave us in terms of promoting the free recording/editing/playing back of artifacts and tools?
——-

I use the concert situation as a place for research, like a “social studio” to try things out. Also the conversations that I might have with the audience and other musicians are very important to me to try to find out what it was that actually happened.

In a somewhat related note, Deleuze and Guattari also say “Artists are stagemakers, even when they tear up their own posters” (317). This has interesting implications for the experimental musician. I came across a video of Mattin yesterday in which he plays 10 minutes of white noise while staring at the audience, followed by an interrogation of the audience as to why they clapped. It seemed his point was to challenge the the division of audience and performer. As he says in an interview:

Although in this video, he seems to be very confrontational. It would seem that the marking of territory is inevitable, even when tearing up your own poster. Is he inviting people to participate in his own territory or not? I’m not sure.

EDIT: This essay by Mattin, “oh I love freedom! but what is it?” from his site may shed more light on this.

and then, in the last few days, we’ve lost demonoid.com as well as the ever useful oink.me.uk

now, demonoid claims the timing is a coincidence, and has ‘blog’ messages updated daily on their status of migrating to a new system.

oink, on the other hand, does not resolve at all.

why should i be worried about this?

shit like this happens to metafilter all the time.

well.

metafilter doesnt host torrents to pirated content.
—-

on a semi-related note. exxon (this is an assumption as to who did it.) got the exxon parody site the yes men set up taken down, and had their main email shut down. it was over a ‘complaint’.
unfortunately, at the moment, i cannot find the original article. i am also tired, so i will instead direct you to the vivoleum site.
note that theyve been required to remove any mention of exxon from their page to be able to have their email reinstated. the domain they had registered for the vivoleum website, however, has not been released or re-enabled.
—-

on a more similar note to the subject we just touched on:

http://yesmen.org/ (link)

this web address is owned by ‘netster.com’ and seems to be ‘parked’ for advertising. this means that the domain is possibly up for sale.

should we detourn the modern detourners?

or perhaps the yes men have been sitting on this opportunity for some recuperation retaliation.

EDIT: nevermind, after a quick check of the WHOIS database, this domain seems to be parked specifically for advertising. it is owned by these guys. they buy domains based on traffic generated from ‘mistaken identity’ web traffic. props to the yes men if they sold yesmen.org to them to generate traffic.

boo, if its some other jerkhole who owned yesmen.org and decided to make a quick buck off of it.

In broad terms, Debord’s theories attempted to account for the spiritually debilitating modernisation of both the private and public spheres of everyday life by economic forces during the post-WW2 modernisation of Europe. He rejected as the twin faces of the same problem both capitalism of the West and the statism of the Eastern bloc. Alienation, Debord postulated, could be accounted for by the invasive forces of the ‘spectacle’ – “a social relation between people that is mediated by images”.

I found these excerpts from something called “Alice in Wonderland or Who is Guy Debord?” on Youtube. “Who is Guy Debord?” you might ask? Luckily there’s a new fangled interwebs to look it up on: Guy Debord according to Wikipedia.

Oh you don’t want to click a link? Too much trouble? Here’s an excerpt. This paragraph is pro. And cherry.

He also promoted detournement which is basically hijacking cultural materials and slapping them together in new and interesting ways, regardless of ‘ownership’ and ‘intellectual property’, since those concepts are just capitalist conceits anyway. These videos are an example of that. Enjoy.

for the first time, complete, in easy to read (and copy) html

We decided to try Psiphon out and see what it is like.

The installation is simple, but not self-explanatory. After the installation is over, the program does not open up, nor are you instructed on what to do now that this has happened, and there is no readme file readily available to explain either. The Psiphon website does provide a forum with more information.

Other than needing to set up port forwarding (which you are warned you’ll need to be able to do when the download begins), the program sets itself up from the start. As long as you’ve got the default port, 443, open, you will be able to let people log in. It doesn’t have any explanation of how to set up port forwarding, but neither does any online service that needs it these days. Perhaps we will write an article on that in the near future.

Now, Psiphon is just host software. The international user who is using the server as a surfing tool does not need to install Psiphon. They will just need to log into your computer as a host. So they will type https://yourIP:443/login/ (“yourIP” being your physical IP address number in xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx format.) into their address bar and they will find a login screen.

The host manager window. (Ignore Chuck’s mac skinned winxp machine)

The setup options.

This is where things got confusing for us. We understand that this program is supposed to help those people in need, but this essentially requires that you know those people in need personally, because it requires you to set up your own usernames and passwords.

Perhaps you could visit a few Chinese national forums and drop a line, but we would think that would be helpful in getting your IP banned from the country as well if too many people find out about it.

Also, they’re using your bandwidth as a browser, and some of them may get trigger happy. So maybe it is a good thing the only people that can get on are people you have spoken to personally.
—-

Chris logged into my computer to see how the interface worked for the casual browser using a Psiphon server. We had an interesting occurence. We found our first site that doesn’t work this with this: Infoshop.org. As of yet, we have no idea why. We intend to find out.

In this set of screenshots, please click on the thumbnail to see a larger version of each graphic.

The Psiphon log in screen.

The main browser window for Psiphon.

Error with infoshop…

digg works…
—-

Overall, we’d say that Psiphon definitely aims high and scores high. It needs a little work to be a little more user friendly (Basically in just explaining what you’re doing. Like we said, it essentially sets itself up.), and probably a little code work to make sure you can access all of the web.

Nevertheless, for the future of an uncensored internet, this could be a solid first step.