I broadly agree with this comment. In order to grasp the historicity of our moment of communications, we need to see the interaction of several layers at once. I prefer this to the binary or "revolutionary" approach, before and after, now and then as paired negation. I would add that each individual or group inserts themsleves into the social and technical movement at a particular point in time with a bundle of assets and drawbacks in terms of skills, experience, online history and offline engagements. It is how these are combined and the character of our ongoing engaement with the medium that makes different aspects of digital social life distinctive for each of us. Some people hate Facebook and want to undermine its seedy monopoly. Fair enough, but for now I have good use for it. I am less concerned with privacy than some because I grew up in a working class community after the war and so on. I offer the young geeks a vision of their place in history and they help me out as I stumble through a medium the

This assumes the static model of 'engagement'. The 'engagement' via web in the past decade or so has substantially modified the way people think and ... engage. The situation today is not the one where 1980's person is put in front of 2010's web. In that case there would definitely be a gross indignation and rejection. The situation today is where groomed mid-attention span (not the short-attention one like with TV), through amplification of short-attention events ("trending" - WTF would one care what gazillion morons click on?), does affect the rules of "rational engagement". While TV was skin-deep, the Web goes to the bone. It is not about short attention span any more. It is about hijacking the rules of engagement, and it can do it because it is interactive. They don't need banner ads any more.

Jon: Excellent question! How much do you know about advertising and how "analog" mass-media works as a business? My comments on this are the result of spending lots of time with people in that industry over the past 20 years, which was made easier by a) living in Manhattan (i.e. Madison Avenue is close-by) and b) "coining" the term "New Media," so some in the ad-world thought they might learn a bit from me (I got this email address on the AOL from Steve Case on the 1992 AOL road-show, where I was the investment banker) and c) writing about this subject since the late 90s (particularly when I "predicted" the timing of the 2000 Internet Bubble collapse, based on the failure of the online "banner-ads" of the time) and d) working with dozens of startups who were trying to figure out ad-based business models. Advertising on a mass-scale was a *new* phenomenon in the early 20th century. It was based on various psychological theories -- some behaviorist, some Freudian etc. All o

I don't want to suggest that everything is business as usual, but my understanding is that this is pretty normal in financial crises in capitalism, when there is a shortage in the money supply, and governments abandon the 'keysian solution'. Certainly where i live banks seem to be refusing to loan to anyone who cannot immediately pay them off - which basically means small business and normal people cannot borrow. So, to a certain extent the 'bottom' end of the economy, (which has never been provided for first) is finding it hard to get credit, and given that credit seems to have been the main source of spending then spending will decline. Whether this will eventually fix itself or not i don't know. But i have no idea what this has to do with 'new media', the decline of mass media, or indeed conspicuous consumption. My point was that conspicuous consumption still seems to flourish in the new media field, where status spending fits in with market drives and status claims. I'm also not sure that the mass

Commercialization makes your online rights irrelevant, more thoughts from my talk with < at >ioerror at #rp12 Last week I wrote about one of the topics Jacob Appelbaum and I discussed at our talk at Re:publica 2012 {1}; that as a result of the commercialization of the Internet, we have moved from free and open social platform, to the centralized social media monopolies we know today. Today I want to mention another issue that we covered, how commercialization is putting an end to the Internet as a public space. It's import to understand that it's not that capital does not want to fund free and open platforms, or that capitalists choose not to: capital simply can not do so. Capital can not fund free and open platforms because capitalists must capture profit or lose their capital, and thus for-profit platforms that can not capture profit must eventually vanish. In order to capture profit, capitalist funded platforms must introduce choke-points and/or toll-gates into there platforms, because their b

Hello Nettimers. Below is an essay response to an installation/intervention artwork I made last year as part of a series of commisions by Letting Space - an organisation producing site-specific works in commercial spaces left vacant since the 2008 market contractions. My project broke into the inner architecture of a 9 floor office block and took over the building's lighting system to run it via a data feed replaying that day's stock market activity. To some degree, this project was shaped by consumption of Nettime discourse. cheers, Colin LINK: http://www.lettingspace.org.nz/essay-market-testament HOPE IS NOT ABOUT WHAT WE EXPECT Martin Patrick looks retrospectively at Colin Hodson?s April 2011 Letting Space project The Market Testament "If art and politics meet at all, it?s in the obligation to work concretely in the present toward an ideal that may never be fully attainable" - Barry Schwabsky, The Nation, 12 Jan 2012 Cinematic Disasters I spent my otherwise uneventful small town pre-adolescence

Jon: Sure -- the inability of any of the "developed" economies to grow. For some "unexplained" reason -- which is not simply because people are "poor" or have no "disposable income" or "are worried about the future" -- *demand* just isn't there to re-energize the "treadmill" required to grow the GDP. Furthermore, the widely understood "mechanism" used to generate demand in excess of *needs* -- in particular, the psychological impact of mass-market advertising -- has dramatically faded in its effectiveness and the presumed "replacement" of *targeted* advertising has failed to live up to expectations (as widely understood by those in this business.) In addition, those who have been "polling" US consumers about their attitudes over the past 20+ years, such as DYG Inc., have noticed a change that has grown over the past decade -- across all "demographics" and "cohorts" -- that shows a significant shift away from "quantity" to "quality" of life. LESS-is-MORE began to be a very

Here is my contribution to the Social Media Reader

As more of our data, and the programs to manipulate and communicate this data, move online, there is a growing tension between the dynamics on the front (where users interact) and on the back (to which the owners have access). If we look at the front-end, the social web, or Web2.0, may well advance semiotic democracy, that is, “the ability of users to produce and disseminate new creations and to take part in public cultural discourse” (Stark, 2006). If we consider the back-end, however, may just as well turn into Spectacle 2.0, new forms of control and manipulation, masked by a mere simulation of involvement and participation, creating the contemporary version of what Guy Debord (1967: § 6) called “the heart of the unrealism of the real society.” Both of these scenarios are currently being realized. Yet, how these relate to one another, which is dominant in which situation and for which users, is not yet clear and likely to remain highly flexible. The social meaning of the technologies is not determined by the technologies themselves, rather it will be shaped and reshaped by how they are embedded into social life, advanced, and transformed by the myriad of individual actors, large institutions, practices, and projects that constitute contemporary reality.

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Mark writes Interesting point, but any evidence for it? I see conspicuous consumption of i-pads and iphones all over the place - even when people's old ones work pefectly well. Digital economy requires 'vehicles' and transmission and the conspicousness of this seems to be a status claim ('i can download a google of gigabytes a month', 'I keep up to date', 'I'm on top of things' 'Only peasants use PCs' etc etc) so what are the Chinese doing? buying more coal? displacing poorer people for dams, buying palaces for their rich in China and overseas? jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expres

Sincere apologies are offered for having beenneedlessly harsh and cynical. The winds of change are blowing over France ("Change is Now!" was after all the slogan of the president elect) so we can hope that the renewed nettime-fr is part and parcel of that change. I wish nettime-fr Good Luck, this time whole heartedly and without unbecoming irony. Cheers from patrizio & Diiiinooos! (in Torino) <...>

Thanks to Keith for the brilliant recap of Veblen's Business Enterprise (which is definitely the foundation behind The Engineers and the Price System). For anyone who hasn't read Veblen, Keith's choice phrases occasionally quoted in parentheses are there as a writer's homage to one of the greats -- because Veblen, in addition to be being brilliant and angry and the founder of institutional economics, was also a tremendously inventive prose stylist. So when I say he's the shining beacon of radical American sociology, I do mean it! On 05/12/2012 11:00 AM, Keith Hart wrote: Keith, you're sounding positively Deleuzian these days! And that is a compliment, btw. The problem I see in the States is that we have this hugely productive society (it still is, despite the useless waste and misdirection of so much of it) that oscillates continually between fevers of predatory financialism and outbursts of military aggression. So chaos is something you can feel responsible for when you live in such a place.

On Fri, May 11, 2012 at 7:04 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org>wrote: Veblen deserves more credit than as just a crypto-Marxist. The decades leading up to the First World War saw a fundamental shift in the social organization and technology of industrial economies. We will never make sense of our own times unless we grasp fully what happened then, with all the benefits of hindsight. Fortunately we have a wonderful analysis of the making of the twentieth century in Thorstein Veblen?s *The Theory of Business Enterprise *(1904), a work that is less well-known than his notorious *The Theory of the Leisure Class *(1899), but is better-known than another masterpiece, *Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution*(1915). Marx first drew attention to the importance of machines in modern development. Veblen, a Scandinavian Midwesterner, a half-century later and with the robber barons operating right under his nose, saw how machine production could be hijacked by financi

Kath O'Donnell <aliak77-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> Re: <nettime> Skyscraper Squatted: the Precarized Cognitariat Rises Rob Myers <rob-MHOfhu0kjIxg9hUCZPvPmw< at >public.gmane.org> Re: <nettime> Help Iraqi resistance in Ter Apel (NL) Rob Myers <rob-MHOfhu0kjIxg9hUCZPvPmw< at >public.gmane.org> Re: <nettime> Privacy, Moglen, < at >ioerror, #rp12 (Lascaux) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Thu, 10 May 2012 03:34:03 +1000 Subject: Re: <nettime> Skyscraper Squatted: the Precarized Cognitariat Rises From: "Kath O'Donnell" <aliak77-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w< at >public.gmane.org> this sounds wonderful. occupy! good luck On Wednesday, 9 May 2012, Alex Foti wrote: <...> - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Date: Thu, 10 May 2012 19:34:50 +0100 From: Rob Myers <rob-MHOfhu0kjIxg9hUCZPvPmw< at >public.gmane.org> Subject: Re: <nettime> Help Iraqi resistance in Ter Apel (NL)

JH: Excellent observation but . . . that is EXACTLY what has *already* happened! The *effect* of digital media is to directly undermine "conspicuous consumption" which REQUIRED mass-media to prop it up. It's OVER!! We have been living in a DIGITAL ECONOMY for 20+ years now, which is why there will be *no* recovery of "capitalist" consumption-driven growth . . . *EVER* What is called the "Eurozone Crisis" and even things like Brzezinski's lamentation about a *failure* of "Strategic Vision" are the direct playing out of this already fundamentally changed reality. (Btw, the Chinese appear to have already figured this out but apparently none of the Western elites -- or their necessary counterparts, the "protesters" -- seem to have grasped what has already occured.) Welcome to the FUTURE! Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 5/11/2012 11:57:37 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time, jhopkins-LRlVL1xtBs0sV2N9l4h3zg< at >public.gmane.org writes: Hi Brian: My experience is exactly s

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