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07/24/11--05:37: Comment on The Telekommunist Manifesto by sytaffel (chan 1360457)

Hi Sam, thanks for the comment. When Kleiner talks about the potential of the Internet he does so describing the net's potential as a P2P technology, which he contrasts sharply with the client/server model of the world wide web. For Kleiner the crucial difference is between the Internet as a distributed network of equal peers and a client server model predicated on a massive inequality of power and influence between clients and massive centralised server farms. Indeed he goes as far as to suggest that Web 2.0 is a corporate reterritorialisation of the space and potential opened up by P2P, and he gives a passionate argument against the centralisation of networked infrastructures and for things like wireless meshworks. While it may in the past have made sense to argue that 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House' as Audrey Lorde first did, its quite hard to see how that logic can be applied to contemporary globalised capitalism simply because there is no viable outside anymore. If you want to use technology which is in no way tainted by technology then you simply will not be using any technology full stop, leaving yourself isolated, disconnected and thoroughly disenfranchised to contribute to any mode of social change. Open source/open design movements along with the Internet itself have grown out of capitalism, and advocates like Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler suggest that they actually supplement capitalist market production through presenting a hyper-productive alternative under certain conditions. However that doesn't mean that those same technologies or models of production can't be used in a non-capitalist mode, which is what Kleiner's telekomminst manifest is (an admittedly somewhat utopian) call towards.


08/15/11--13:03: Comment on Media Ecologies: An Introduction by Advanced Media Issues » Archive » Media Ecologies (new approaches): Sy Taffel (chan 1360457)

[...] Great lecture by Sy Taffel on new approaches to media ecologies, which are a central concern of this course. More notes here. [...]


08/15/11--13:07: Comment on Media Ecologies: An Introduction by The new media ecologies | Adventures in Jutland (chan 1360457)

[...] does this mean? Well, here is a great lecture by Sy Taffel on new approaches to media ecologies. More notes here. [...]


09/01/11--14:53: Comment on The Telekommunist Manifesto by between the lines (chan 1360457)

Yes, interesting ideas, but Sam seems to have a very good point about the dependence of all this technology on a fragile mass of resource intensive structures. Being a bit of a Luddite and techno-ignoramus I have no idea what "things like wireless meshworks" are let alone how they work. How would the new structures (if they are new) that Kleiner is suggesting actually overcome what might seem to be intrinsic infrastructural constraints, to those of us less knowledgeable and imaginative perhaps than yourself and Kleiner?


09/28/11--06:55: Comment on McLuhan’s Message by between the lines (chan 1360457)

Now there's a piece of synchronicity. Just listening to talk about the Graun now Face-sucking wi da Book and the ongoing debate about what they call sharing. For all those millions blithely entering the panoptikon there will be millions more who see that for what it is and thus exclude themselves from zuckerberg's walled garden. Then there's the Twitter compound, the blogging compound, and so on and on. All this seems a process more divisive than cooperative.


09/29/11--13:43: Comment on Media Ecology, Memetics and the Evolution of Ideas by Tim Tyler (chan 1360457)

Your entire critique is that defining memes as "smallest quantifiable units of ideas" doesn't make much sense? I checked with the dictionary. That is not, in fact how memes are defined there. I think your critique collapses at this point.


09/29/11--15:06: Comment on Media Ecology, Memetics and the Evolution of Ideas by sytaffel (chan 1360457)

Hi Tim... Dictionary definitions are not standard and so I don't have any idea which definition you are referring to. Are you claiming that memes were not introduced by Dawkins in 'The Selfish Gene' as a cultural analogue of genes?! Have fun with that argument... The dictionary.com definition of meme is: 'a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes'. The definition of gene is: 'the basic physical unit of heredity; a linear sequence of nucleotides along a segment of DNA that provides the coded instructions for synthesis of RNA, which, when translated into protein, leads to the expression of hereditary character.' So a meme is allegedly analogous to the 'basic physical unit of heredity.' The basic unit, building block or smallest quantifiable unit are all the same thing, and the notion of a basic conceptual unit of heredity is nonsensical.


09/29/11--15:24: Comment on The Telekommunist Manifesto by sytaffel (chan 1360457)

I recently went to a really interesting event on Luddites... It's their bi-centenniary coming up. Far from being techno-ignoramuses or anti-technology they were mainly craftspeople who used what then was fairly advanced technology to earn their livelihoods. What they opposed was the introduction of technology which was used in ways which were largely detrimental to society, either producing substandard goods, or as a method of driving small craftsmen out of business. Either way the Luddites stood not against technology in general, but against uses of technology be privileged elites against the common good. Far from being a term which demarcates people who dislike technology Luddite should be used to describe contemporary activists like Kleiner and anti-GM and biotech activists such as Vandana Shiva who stand not against the use of technology, but against the current practices of neoliberalism which benefit a handful of corporate elites to the detriment of the vast majority. In terms of the types of technologies Kleiner discusses, many are already here. For example there is no technical reason why we couldn't have city-wide free wireless Internet. It wouldn't be as fast as a 50mb fibreoptic line run to your house, but very few people really need that type of connection speed. The only logistical problem would be people clogging up the network with bittorrent/iplayer traffic, which could be filtered, meaning that anyone in a city could have free access to a huge amount of information. However this isn't done, and if you want roaming Internet you have to pay a mobile phone network (usually) to use their bandwidth (admittedly the government made an absolute killing selling bits of spectrum to the phone networks when they licensed 3G). This could even be done at a local community level with people on a street clubbing together to get a single Internet connection and then sharing it with each other wirelessly via a local mesh (basically through a series of wireless routers all talking to one another). This kind of thing has been done in poor neighborhoods in places like Spain, the technology to do it is cheap and readily available, and it kind of scares the crap out of ISP's as it would break the individual consumer model they currently operate and make a huge amount of money off.


09/30/11--11:52: Comment on Media Ecology, Memetics and the Evolution of Ideas by Tim Tyler (chan 1360457)

It makes little difference which dictionary you use - since none of them say "smallest" - and that is what the critique in this post revolves around.


10/10/11--10:52: Comment on The Telekommunist Manifesto by between the lines (chan 1360457)

Hi Sy, thanks for your response. Cool, that's pretty much the kind of Luddite I am too. Didn't "The Land" magazine do an issue on them a year or so ago? Touching on the issue is the following Twitter exchange: http://twitter.com/#!/BristolWireless/status/123352571313258496 "Possible silly question - is Bristol Wireless' network free? And how do you connect to it?" Woodsy: "unfortunately due to abuse (torrenting) we've had to turn off 2.4 GHz access :( " I didn't really understand what this implies. Wireless networks surely have scope for wider use, as you describe. But can they really dispense with the need for huge servers though? Could a Google-capacity search engine, Wikipedia and email function properly using only distributed, autonomous, low resource-input networks? If not, then we will forever be dependent on the state-corporate apparatus as we are now, won't we? Btw how was your Watershed experience? Will you be blogging on it?