Continental Drift

via doll_yoko at http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1360

News from the Middle East and from the USA

Wadah Khanfar was born in the Palestinian village of Rama on the West Bank in 1968. He is now director-general of Al Jazeera. In the video he explains the role of the Quatar-based channel in the recent Arab revolutions and talks about the promise that these revolutions hold for people in the region, because they come directly from the democratic aspirations of the young. He gives you insight into the politics of a contemporary satellite TV station that has been able to use the recordings of thousands of people in the streets to break state and corporate barriers to grassroots expression and help achieve the unbelievable: an exit from authoritarian regimes backed by billions of dollars of military support and “advising” from the West. Check out one of the most interesting speeches I have listened to in years.

Now compare with another media phenomenon: Brigitte Gabriel. She was born in Marjayoun district of Southern Lebanon in 1964. She is a Maronite Christian who suffered during Lebanon’s long civil war. She then moved to the US to become a voice of hatred against what she calls “Islamofascism.” As the Arab revolutions unfold, with extraordinary progress toward a substantial democracy in both Tunisia and Egypt and tremendous expressions of desire for freedom in countries all across the Middle East, Brigitte Gabriel is touring the USA, rousing crowds and stoking passions with the kind of neo-McCarthy language you find on her website, ACT! for America:

Radical Muslims have declared jihad against Christians, Jews, non-Muslims and secularists – simply because they regard us as infidels.  They even target Muslims whom they regard as insufficiently “pure.” The warriors of radical Islam are not only “over there.” Tens of thousands of Islamic militants now reside in America, operating in sleeper cells, attending our colleges and universities, even infiltrating our government. They are here – today. Many have been here for years. Waiting. Preparing.

To believe her you must suspect the suspect the hidden presence of terrorists in all national institutions, as in this quote reproduced by the New York Times: “They have infiltrated us at the C.I.A., at the F.B.I., at the Pentagon, at the State Department. They are being radicalized in radical mosques in our cities and communities within the United States.” Another article from the Times gives the current context of such delirious paranoia: “On Thursday, Representative Peter King, the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, is scheduled to open a series of hearings that seem designed to stoke fear against American Muslims.” In other words, this hate-speech is being supported by Republicans at the highest levels, and in the center of the repressive apparatus installed by G.W. Bush. Here is some more from Brigitte Gabriel:

“In the Muslim world, extreme is mainstream,” she wrote. She said that there is a “cancer” infecting the world, and said: “The cancer is called Islamofacism. This ideology is coming out of one source: The Koran.”

In what ACT! is calling “Open a Koran” day this September, the group plans to put up 750 tables in front of post offices, libraries, churches and synagogues and hand out leaflets selectively highlighting verses that appear to advocate violence, slavery and subjugation of women.

Part of American society appears unable to react to the advent of Middle Eastern democracy with anything but fear, distorted accusations and an obsessive return to the strategically constructed post-9/11 image of all Muslims as civilizational enemies. At a turning point when peace and cooperation could begin to replace hatred and war, extremists in America are making one last bid to polarize the situation permanently and chain us all to the ghosts of the past. Many of these people are probably not going to listen when you try to speak reason to them. However they are just a minority who are forced into the spotlight by the media machines of the  Right. Others have to talk back, to organize, to denounce their hate-mongering and to demonstrate how far their allegations are from the truth, on practically every point you can find and especially concerning their claims of support for terrorism within American Muslim communities, which are simply false and abusive. Such claims promote racism and risk turning the United States into a full-on police state.

For some detailed official information on current trends of terrorist activity inside the United States, see this report. We need to know the official facts, to show how wrong these fear-mongers are, and to turn the country’s attention to the real problems of war and dictatorship, both of which are often supported by our own government thanks in part to the likes of Brigitte Gabriel and of the politicians who support her. Let’s argue against the people who want to block off any hope for peace and substantial democracy in both the Arab world and in the USA. Let’s keep the country and the world from sliding back to the conditions of the early 1950s.

Wall Drawing, Chto Delat, Serralves Foundation, 2011

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To the Arts, Citizens: it’s a fantastic title. Hearing it, anyone who’s been involved in political activism will probably think: “At last we’re getting somewhere.” The idea that art is part of citizenship, that there is a democratic exercise of the arts within the framework of public life, and that this appeal to the citizen-artist can be supported by a major cultural institution, is about as progressive as you could get today. Especially since this is a direct echo of the French republican tradition, where the phrase, Aux armes citoyens, is nothing less than a call to rise up and institute democracy against tyranny – in other words, a call to revolution. The Portuguese know the meaning of this revolutionary call to arms from decisive historical events that are still in living memory. So one can imagine that the organizers of this exhibition did not take their title lightly.

The call to arts is a recognition that citizenship does not stop at the ballot box, that an expressive politics is essential to a democracy, and that in an era saturated with media and advertising, the aesthetic dimension has become a crucial field of social interaction. What’s more, this call to arts is an acknowledgement that censorship continues to exist in all societies and is often intensifying; that archaic values and beliefs raise a barrier to free expression even more powerful than the force of the law; and finally, that citizens’ day-to-day participation in the shaping of their own societies is as urgent an occupation today as at any time in the past, precisely because of the professionalization of politics and the tendency to treat any disruption of the norm as a security issue. All this assigns challenging roles to institutions that attempt to take up the call to arts. Among them is not only that of exhibiting politically engaged art to the public, but also of mediating the ensuing debates, sustaining the inevitable critiques and scandals, archiving the results and thereby helping to build a culture of democratic exchange, which is never easy to maintain and never flourishes without the people involved taking an individual stand, beyond all bureaucratic limits and guarantees. Quite a tall order – as though we were going to wake up and start living again.

Could anything like this dream be achieved in reality? Read the rest of this entry »

by Jesus Barraza

Download and print these posters from the Justseeds artists’ cooperative:

www.justseeds.org/blog/2011/02/posters_in_support_of_wisconsi_1.html

Let your neighbors know you support public schools and collective bargaining! Most likely they do too!

….y sociedad de communicación

(2003)

En el periodo en el que vivimos se ha registrado un cambio arrollador en la organización y la misión fundamental de las instituciones estéticas (museos, escuelas, editoriales, formas de patrocinio, etcétera), un cambio impulsado por la transformación de la sociedad según el modelo de los negocios. Una de las características de este cambio acelerado ha sido la de convertir la producción artística y cultural en un campo principal de valorización del capital y en un medio importante para controlar y canalizar las aspiraciones de las poblaciones, que reemplaza en parte los marcos disciplinarios de la sociedad de producción masiva. En este contexto, es necesario un debate amplio e intenso sobre los medios, resultados y fines del ejercicio artístico, independiente de las categorías establecidas por el mercado y el estado. Ésta fue una de las motivaciones de una publicación colectiva inicial en francés, coordinada por el Bureau d’Etudes y yo, titulada Autonomie artistique—et société de communication. Aquí analizaré algunos aspectos específicos de ese mismo debate.

¿Por qué hablar de autonomía cuando la intención principal del arte experimental de las décadas de 1960 y 1970 fue desacreditar la obra autónoma? Esta pregunta siempre surge cuando uno habla con personas a las que, al parecer, todavía les importan los discursos académicos de 1950. De hecho, las carreras universitarias que se basan en refutar a Greenburg, deconstruir la totalidad armoniosa del sujeto blanco-masculino-kantiano, o criticar la clausura del marco artístico, son, en apariencia, infinitas. Lo mismo aplica a la descripción de las paradojas que aparecen invariablemente cuando las obras reproducidas por medios mecánicos o las representaciones realistas de la vida diaria se presentan en los espacios auráticos y singulares del museo. Sin embargo, uno se pregunta a veces si los miembros del establishment artístico, a pesar de que parecen obsesionados con estas transgresiones de un statu quo muy viejo, no tendrán, de hecho, miedo a sacar las conclusiones más elementales de sus propias ideas. Porque si uno abandona verdaderamente la idea que un objeto, por ser distinto de todos los demás, puede servir como espejo de un sujeto igualmente único e independiente, el tema de la autonomía se vuelve un problema existencial profundo. Para aquellos sin identidad sustituta, para quienes carecen de una creencia apasionada en su naturaleza negra, blanca, judía, musulmana, comunista, británica o lo que sea, la condición de existencia en la sociedad de comunicación ―es decir, la conciencia de que nuestros procesos mentales están íntimamente surcados o incluso determinados por un flujo incesante de imágenes y signos mediados― resulta al principio profundamente angustiante y, en última instancia, anestésica, a medida que las estructuras básicas del ego se disuelven y aparece la “mengua del afecto” posmoderna.c2 Siempre trabajamos bajo el sudario de esta anestesia posmoderna.

Habrá, sin duda, miles de formas muy estimulantes de hacer obras de arte donde la cuestión de autonomía no representa problema alguno. No obstante, existen ciertas dudas en cuanto a si alguna de estas formas de crear arte puede llamarse política. ¿Acaso la política, cuando menos en el sentido democrático, no presupone que uno tenga, de un modo u otro, la capacidad de tomar una decisión en libertad, y que uno no se deje llevar a ciegas por una fuerza heterónoma determinante? ¿Qué significa tomar una decisión artística? ¿Y qué sucede cuando dicha decisión es colectiva? ¿Cómo se puede dar nueva forma al mundo sensible ―es decir, el mundo compuesto por los sentidos, el intelecto y la imaginación expresiva― de acuerdo con lo que el artista François Deck llamaría una “estrategia de libertad”?

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the implosion of liberal empire

CLR James / Grace Lee Boggs

This is an answer to a startling post by Keith Hart, the anthropologist who invented the notion of the “informal economy.” Keith knew CLR James and helped to edit his book on “American Civilization.” Stimulated as we all are by the impressive events in Egypt, he puts some of James’ ideas in the present geopolitical context and writes about “a second American revolution.” Read Keith’s post here.

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Keith Hart wrote:

“After the watershed of the 1970s, we went through three decades of what came to be known as neoliberal globalization in which the power of big money to organize the world for its own benefit was unfettered. The end of the Cold War, the rise of China, India and Brazil as economic powers and the digital revolution in communications speeded up the formation of world society under American hegemony, even as these developments undermined it. This ended with the financial crisis of 2008 and we are now in the uncharted waters of the third period which might take in a full-scale depression, world war, a global democratic revolution, the end of life on earth, who knows?”

All that is so astonishing, daunting, frightful and fascinating about political life today is summed up in those two words: world society. It exists, it’s potentially accessible to everyone, it’s damnably complex, it has not eliminated nation-states or any other power formation and mostly it seems to follow inherent laws based on the blind interaction of separated spheres — corporations, militaries, government bureaucracies, financial markets etc. — whose cumulative effects appear increasingly predictable and decreasingly controllable by anybody. Nonetheless, there it is. A decade ago, some millions of us earthlings on scattered continents had a try at starting a global social movement. I’ve been hooked on world society ever since.

World society is in many ways a dialectical consequence of liberal empire. The latter refers to the military-backed free trade regime installed by the United States and its allies at the close of WWII, as a reaction against the break-up of the world economy into competing trade-and-currency blocs during the 1930s. To absorb the momentous productivity of its war-charged industrial output, the Council of Foreign Affairs claimed during the war that the USA needed a “Grand Area” comprising the entire Western Hemisphere, Western Europe, the former British Commonwealth and East Asia. To achieve this the postwar superpower had to organize the reconstruction of Germany and Japan and to rebuild their currencies which, along with the dollar and sterling, came to form the basis of a new global monetary system. A few states in Western Europe and East Asia became the key US allies, monetary backers and military-base hosts during the Cold War. Outside this partnership structure it would all be about exports, raw materials extraction, democratic promises and power politics as usual. Read the rest of this entry »

After decades of useless guns, can’t we send some flowers to the Arab Spring?

Below is a heartfelt letter from an American professor, Mark LeVine, who went to Tahrir Square to support the Egyptian revolution and to live it with his own being. This is a message back to a failed system, but it is our message, the people’s message, the message of everyone who lives on the other side of a power architecture that serves nothing but itself: it’s time to let that world disappear. Let’s send flowers to the Arab Spring.

Dear President Obama,

From here at Tahrir Square, it seems clear that you are a very confused person. In your heart, you obviously want Egypt to become a democracy — what rational, ethical person wouldn’t? Yet it seems that you are being fed such a sream of propaganda and dire warmings about a take over of America’s most important Arab ally by Islamists and other anti-American forces that you seem to have decided to sell Egyptians up the river Nile in order to protect US “interests” against this frightening prospect.

I could explain how this is total nonsense, how the Muslim Brothers are not at all the dominant force here, how the movement is divided, especiallygenerationally, and how Tahrir represents an unprecedented co-mingling of old and young, rich and poor, secular and religious, and political persuasions of every type. But surely you’ve been told that in your briefings, or at least read it in the more astute journalistic analyses of events on the ground here.

And yet you still can´t just bring yourself to throw the full weight of your office behind the most important revolution in a generation, your very own Tiananmen Square and Berlin Wall at the same time.

I have a solution for you to break the impasse inside your head; come to Tahrir Square now, before its too late. Spend one afternoon, or better one night, and I can assure you all doubts about which side in this epic struggle to support will be erased. Don’t worry, you will be safe here. Indeed, you will never feel safer.

Mr President, you’ve no doubt heard that this is a “Facebook revolution”. But in fact the real leaders are not Facebookers but five year olds, the majority of them little girls, who from 8am till 1am are carried around the square and lead the people in song, singing newly crafted limericks against Mubarak and his henchmen. In particular Vice President Omar Suleiman, of whom you seem so enamored, are the subjects of anger and scorn. You should know why this is the case, since Suleiman has plied his ugly trade of oppression and torture for the direct benefit of the US government. Do you really want to be denounced in the same sentence as Suleiman and Mubarak? Shouldn’t that give you pause?

Read the rest of this entry »

KAF: As of Wednesday, there have been clashes between pro- and anti-Mubarak people. Is that the correct way to describe it? Who are the “Mubarak supporters”? How are these clashes affecting the attitudes of average working class Egyptians?

It’s absolutely wrong to call them clashes between anti- and pro-Mubarak. The pro-Mubarak demonstration consisted of many baltagayyah and secret police to attack the protesters in Tahrir Square. It only began after Mubarak’s speech yesterday, after Obama’s speech too. Personally I think Mubarak feels like a slaughtered ox that tries to throw its blood over the slaughterers; he feels like Nero, who wants to burn Egypt before his removal, trying to make people believe he’s a synonym for stability, safety and security. In this way he has really made some progress. A holy national alliance has now been formed against Tahrirites (the Tahrir protesters) and the Commune de Tahrir.

Many people are saying, especially middle class people, that the demonstrations must end because Egypt has been burned, famine has begun, but it’s not true at all. It’s an exaggeration. Every revolution has its difficulties, and Mubarak is using fear and terror to stay longer. Personally I’m saying that even if the protesters were responsible for this situation, even if this is so, Mubarak must leave, he must be gone.

Excerpt from:

http://libcom.org/library/egypt-unrest-interview-egyptian-anarchist

Martes 1 de febrero de 18 a 20 horas.
MUAC – programa “Campus Expandido”
Sala de conferencia.
Entrada gratuita

¿Una crítica de la cultura para el siglo 21?

En esta conferencia Brian Holmes se pregunta sobre la forma adecuada de una crítica sicosocial de la cultura neoliberal globalizada. Empezando con los ejemplos clásicos de la Escuela de Frankfurt y la historiografía de Michel Foucault, el activista y ensayista norteamericano expone las bases filosóficas y existenciales de una nueva crítica de la cultura, reticular y múltiple, arraigada en territorios íntimos y abierta al sistema de escalas geográficas que caracteriza la sociedad planetaria.

El principio de la “investigación extradisciplinar” (tema de un seminario reciente al MUAC) le sirve de herramienta para una exploración de los procesos constitutivos del mundo contemporáneo. Esto le permite introducir un nuevo proyecto de largo alcance: el estudio “tecnopolítico” de los grandes ciclos de desarrollo económico, con todas sus consecuencias sobre las mentalidades, las formas de explotación y los deseos de emancipación.

¡Estimulo intelectual garantizado!

Jeff Wall, "Vampires' Picnic" (cliquear foto para ampliación)

English version of this text here

No cabe duda: Michelle Obama, con su vestido de seda de color naranja, fue estupenda a la cena de gala de la Casa Blanca en ocasión de la visita del Presidente chino Hu Jintao. Claro que el vestido es un asunto importante, y dejo los demás comentarios para los especialistas. Pero me pregunto, por razones más estrictamente estéticas, si no hay lugar de establecer unos paralelismos formales (y quizás, alegóricos) entre las fotografías de dicha cena y el famoso “tableau” del artista canadiense Jeff Wall, representando la cena al fresco de un coloquio muy contemporáneo de vampiros. ¿Qué significado inaudito tendría esta comparación para la Historia del Arte? Y sobre el plano alegórico, ¿qué lección moral para la salud y la dignidad de los pueblos?

Empezamos con lo más obvio: el magnifico retrato de Hillary Clinton, el actual Secretario de Estado y sin duda, el futur Presidente de EEUU, haciendo brindis con el ex-Presidente, su leal y querido marido Bill:

Ahora bien: ¿no hay aquí, en la postura cuasi escultórica de la antigua Primera Dama, una semejanza innegable a la figura feminina vestida de blanca al centro del famoso tableau de Jeff Wall? ¿No podemos adivinar algo misteriosamente ensangrentado en la sonrisa de hielo de Hillary, haciendo como una alusión disimulada (pero seguramente voluntaria y deseada por parte del fotógrafo) a los vampiros suburbanos de la obra tan conocida del artista canadiense? Y los dientes del personaje anónimo a la derecha de la foto: ¿no demuestran a la luz del día, y casi con pinceladas de maestro, la vocación secreta de toda esta gente?

Pero hay más, y para quien quiere ahondar, no sólo la historia del arte, sino también la historia universal, el retrato en pie del antiguo y ahora muy anciano Secretario de Estado, Henry Kissinger, con su esposa la tierna y dulce Nancy, es lo que nos proporciona las emociones más sublimes:

Read the rest of this entry »

What a feeling: something is possible in the USA!!!

It seems that last weekend opened up more than just a research program. It opened up the sense that we can take hold of a fabricated destiny and begin to change it. Right here in our own city and within our own experience.

The workshop last weekend is a continuation of Four Pathways through Chaos. It came out of a dialogue with Amy Partridge and other Mess Hall keyholders, who told me about their project for a year of politically oriented experimentation. Just for whoever doesn’t know, Mess Hall is a self-run cultural space with a free store and one basic rule, that no money changes hands: it’s an adventure in generosity to the extent that the space itself is rent-free, offered by the landlord with the sole obligation of somehow participating in the artistic life of the Rogers Park neighborhood. The subjects we discussed, basically a syncretic version of Marxist crisis theory, emerged from a collaboration with Armin Medosch in the framework of our Technopolitics project, which here in North America has already given rise to other seminars (EGS in Toronto, the Baltimore Free School. University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana). In a way this workshop was also linked back to experiences of the Compass Group at the US Social Forum in Detroit last summer – another moment when you could really feel something moving in the USA. But what I was mainly concerned with, going into this workshop, were questions that have been raised in collaboration with The Public School in Los Angeles, in the context of the ongoing struggles against the privatization of the public universities.

The thing is that on the level of those public universities, so much has already been lost, and so much was compromised to begin with. Despite everything that has happened in California, the revolution just ain’t comin’ from the hallowed halls, not in the US at least, not yet anyway. We have a lot to learn from what’s going on in Europe, but we’re gonnna have to do it under the conditions of North America. I’m convinced that without some pressure from the outside, no deep resistance or transformative proposals will take root in the universities, mainly for the reason that both students and professors feel their hands to be tied by debt, by administrative rules, by the competitive nature of contemporary research, publication and job-seeking, and therefore by the general governmentality of neoliberal academia. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t tens of thousands of professors and adjuncts and students and staff who are in there right now, trying to do something! So how to help them, how can they help people outside, how to create new desires, set up a new permeability, find new standpoints from which to address the economic crisis and the general decay of human equality and ecological possibility? In short, how to create and embody a transformative knowledge of this changing society, and how to put that knowledge into practice?

Read the rest of this entry »

In advance of the workshop at Mess Hall I’m posting a text from the Technopolitics group at The Next Layer (you have to sign in for access). A seminar organized by Armin Medosch will also be held in Vienna on the first weekend in March. The point is to understand the process of long-term social change whose onset is marked by the major events of the last decade. Anyone interested in these themes can contact me.

1. Technopolitics describes the influence of social, governmental, economic and cultural factors on industrial development, and vice-versa. In the history of industrial capitalism we can distinguish at least five successive technopolitical paradigms, originating in particular places at particular moments, sparking innovations and rivalries, gaining in capacity to structure society, then losing that capacity in a phase of decline until they are finally replaced by another paradigm. The full historical development of a given paradigm constitutes a period or era, as seen from a particular hegemonic center or from one of its many “edges” (devalorized class, cultural or geographical positions). The periods of technopolitical development are our basic units of study. Viewpoints from the edges are the basis of our critique.

2. In each of the periods a set of “lead technologies” is associated with particular work processes and social relations of production (that is, capital-labor relations), as well as specific modes of financing the fixed-capital investments and marketing the finished products. The central technologies and organizational forms take on a pace of production-distribution-interaction-innovation that helps define the rhythm of an entire era. But the interesting thing are the interruptions, the bifurcations. Moments of crisis in social relations and in finance can be read as turning points in the class struggle, but also as episodes in the rivalry between different interest groups, industrial or financial sectors or regional alliances of capitalists (eg continental blocs). One of the big questions for our approach is whether geographical divides, cultural inventions and perhaps even scientific breakthroughs can be seen as effective forces what the existing Marxist interpretations of cycle and crisis have mainly analyzed as class struggle.

3. Each paradigm extends its characteristic social relations and its modes of financing and marketing outwards from its points of origin to attain a maximum geographical scale, which includes some countries and regions in a hierarchical order and leaves other countries and regions partially or totally out of the circuits of exchange (as more or less lawless peripheries subject to “primitive accumulation,” or as battlegrounds). The dynamics of geographical extension brings geopolitics to the fore, and demands that inter-state relations be analyzed in direct connection with the relations between classes and fractions of capital. This means that to understand how a productive paradigm develops in a given nation we also have also to define the changing nature of the state, its legitimacy and characteristic forms of governmentality, and its position in the inter-state system at any given moment. And in the contemporary period we have to go further: we have to define how a productive paradigm unfolds with respect to the transnational state functions that characterize globalized capitalism.

4. The duration of each period seems to follow a roughly similar sequence of phases, including a tumultuous moment of financial crisis in the middle of its development and another phase of saturation and decline at the end. Over the two centuries of industrial capitalism these periods have typically lasted from 45 to 60 years, following a wave-like pattern of fluctuation first identified by Kondratiev. However, the Kondratiev cycles by themselves are merely formal, they explain nothing of any value. Rather they ask us to specify, not just the “success” of a particular technological tool-kit, but above all the full set of class struggles, cultural upheavals, inter-capitalist rivalries and inter-state conflicts whose temporary resolutions give consistency to each phase. And they also ask us to find out what changes irreversibly with the end of each era, such that the underlying pattern of capital accumulation can never be the same again.

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And if you want to understand what’s going on in this country and see one hell of a great congressional campaign video from the right in Arizona just check

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqnjzONrPiA

January 15, 1 pm – 6 pm

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How does social change actually happen in a complex and tightly articulated society like the United States? Are we likely to see any deep and pervasive change in our own lifetimes? How to perceive it when it comes, how to participate when it’s still in flux? How to cultivate an understanding of the processes of social change among those who are directly affected?

To open up these questions, Brian Holmes has begun developing a multimedia archive containing articles, images, audiovisual materials, web pages and full-length books. The idea is to carry out an analysis of long waves of change lasting roughly fifty years, during which interrelated patterns of social, economic, geopolitical and cultural development all cohere into recognizable eras. One such era was the Keynesian period of mass-manufacturing industry and welfare-state governance that held sway from the New Deal of the 1930s to the long recession of the 1970s. Another is the era of globalized neoliberal or informational capitalism with its powerful emphasis on communications and finance, through which we have been living quite precariously since the early 1980s. The archive uses four fundamental categories to examine specific features of each rising and falling wave and to analyze the contradictions that gradually take hold in each domain of collective life. The accumulation of such contradictions ultimately precipitates a deep crisis, a period of relative chaos transforming social relations. The financial meltdown of 2008 and the continuing recession no doubt mark the beginnings of such a crisis, with other tumultuous events sure to follow in the coming decade. We have been submerged by these waves before. But it will never be “just like the last time.”

Brian’s in-depth lecture at Mess Hall will concentrate on the theoretical models that have been developed to organize the archive: a selective synthesis from the Marxist traditions, including long-wave theory, the technological innovation school, regulation theory and world systems analysis. These technical approaches are explained briefly and without jargon, in order to provide frameworks for experiences that we are living through every day. Organizing ideas from autonomous Marxism and psychosocial insights from Felix Guattari also help to see how individuals and groups become agents of change. So far the archive covers the emergence of Fordism, its crisis in the late 60s and 70s, and the onset of neoliberalism. Our discussion will focus on the turning points of the present, since 2008. By examining each others’ socially engaged projects we can probably start to see a pattern emerging. To operate within a recognizable pattern, to sense that each situation is part of a larger dynamic, shaped by particular agents and reshapable by others: this is the political and existential use-value of such a study.

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The WikiLeaks Mirror Sites

Should information about the US government’s dealings with the rest of the world be free? A lot of European hackers and NGOs seem to think so — and let’s not forget all the people on the other sides of the globe who agree.

An excellent Google Earth dataset of the Wikileaks mirror sites has been developed by a guy named Laurence Muller, so you can see the 1344 places where the US Department of State cables were available when the map was made (1697 mirrors exist at the time of writing). The closure of the wikileaks.org domain name has done nothing to this network, nor to the originating site itself which is hosted at http://46.59.1.2. Of course this map does not show the undisclosed number of people holding the whole stash of US diplomatic cables, because after all, the point is to keep that information secret — until it goes public in an emergency, and is then mirrored by a similar network of hundreds of sites. Distributed information power is a reality in the 21st century.

Interestingly, a former WikiLeaks collaborator has announced a new project, openleaks.org, which is due to go online on Monday Dec. 13. This will only multiply the “whac-a-mole” situation confronting repressive governments who don’t know which unflattering mirror to shatter with their thugs and police. As the world slides into a deepening economic crisis, it seems that giant corporations and sovereign state apparatuses no longer hold all the cards.

As they say in France: At least we’ll know what sauce we’re going to be eaten with.

For details on the mirroring process see:

http://wikileaks.ch/mirrors.html

Download and unzip the Google Earth files to play around with the map:

http://www.multigesture.net/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=33