mosaik-blog.at 10.11.2015

Die sozialen Massenmedien wie Facebook, Instagram, Twitter oder Linked-In sind, zum gesellschaftspolitischen Problem geworden. Wie lässt sich das abseits hohler Technologiekritik begründen? Was braucht es gegen die Macht und Monopole von Facebook & Co?

Here are the videos of all the talks and discussions at the Algorithmic Regimes and Generative Strategies - On Regulatory Politics of Code and Machines. Friday, September 25. 2015, University of Technology ViennaConference, Vienna, 25.09.2015

Algorithmic Regimes Conference Opening

Felix Stalder and Konrad Becker: Opening and Welcome

I'm very proud to announce our new conference by the World Information Institute, in cooperation with the Institute for Design & Assessment of Technology at the

The presentation at the conference Data Traces was in German, hence also the slides. Below is unedited live written english translation created by Felix Gerloff. It's a impressive on-the-spot summary, but don't parse words.

Felix Stalder: "Politics of Data – Between Post-Democracy and Commons"

– culture as "trade floor" of meaning / interpretation
– topic: how the structure of theses processes of debating meaning in culture changed
– significant change today: big data sets instead of small data
– the quantitative change quickly becomes a qualitative change, because it needs different approaches to deal with big data

Geschrieben für die Berliner Gazette, erschienen am 27.04.2015

NDR Kultur - 12.04.2015 20:00 Uhr Autor/in: Kühn, Ulrich

Sonntagsstudio: Herrenhäuser Gespräch - Freiheit als Illusion?

Um den allgegenwärtigen Einfluss des Internets geht es beim Herrenhäuser Gespräch: Wie verändert sich unser Dasein? Zappeln wir längst wie Fliegen im Netz der Konzerne?

Der Einfluss des Internets ist so mächtig geworden, dass wir ihn häufig nicht mehr bemerken. Aber wie verändert sich unser Dasein in Abhängigkeit von einer Struktur, die als Verlängerung und Ergänzung des menschlichen Hirns ins Leben ragt? Manche meinen, wir zappelten längst wie hilflose Fliegen im Netz der Konzerne und Superhirne, angelockt durch große Versprechen von Freiheit und Transparenz. Oder sind diese warnenden Rufe, die jüngst immer lauter wurden, nichts als dumpfer Kulturpessimismus?

(download mp3 74MB)

On 1 April Ted Byfield and I announced the end of @nettime_l as a kind of backhanded joke, see below. Really amazing, however, were the responses that came in over the last few days which you can find on the nettime archive, including Ted's and mine. I also explained our reasoning in a short interview by Dirk Gehlen (in German), which centers around a line by Hannah Arendt “Power arises only where people act together, not where people grow stronger as individuals.”

Dear Nettimers, present and past --

The first nettime message was sent on 31 May 1995,[1] almost twenty
years ago. A lot has happened since then, and we're proud of how well
this list, and the larger nettime 'neighborhood,' has traced many of
these epochal changes. The list's alumni/ae is a who's who of critical
culture across an incredible range of fields. They -- really, *you*
-- have helped to redefine activism, shape national and international
legal and economic reforms, lead international cultural festivals and
some of the world's most famous musems, produce astonishing works of
art, write fiction and nonfiction that's won awards and redefined
entire disciplines, and build crucial free and open-source software,
to name just a few things. And those are just the 'heroic' stories.
There are many more obscure ones that, if anything, are even more
impressive, as even a quick glance at nettime's Wikipedia entry will
show.[2] A few nettimers have passed away, and we miss them dearly,
still. Moreover, most like-minded projects of a similar age have

Update: Review:"Felix Stalder über Diskursivität und Peer Review". LIBREAS.Library Ideas.

Aus: Kamion Nr. 0: Der Aufstand der Verlegten (PDF)
English: Scientific Writing Beyond Peer Review (original version)
Español: La escritura científica más allá del peer review

This essay was published in "Hacking" (Edition Digital Culture 2). Edited by Dominik Landwehr, Migros Kulturprozent & Christoph Merian Verlag Basel.

Hackers as Producers. Authorship and Freedom

Artists and hackers both represent contemporary types of unconventional authorship. In their own respective ways, they both appear as autonomous producers and not as contractors. Their autonomy is based on an aspiration towards individual freedom, but they each justify this in completely different ways. In an emphatic sense, freedom is the foundation of an artist’s work. This freedom legitimates or even demands a demiurgic act of positioning from which the work then unfolds – and it justifies the close relationship between “author” and “work”. In contrast, a hacker begins by experiencing an absolute dearth of freedom. His work unfolds while dealing with an omnipotent system¹ in which all options for action are predetermined. The hacker’s goal is to seize hold of moments of freedom anyway.