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tactical media

Vom Hashtag zur Bürgerbewegung (D.-Radio Kultur)

1 October, 2016 - 11:31 by felix
tactical media
politics
network
interview

Vom Hashtag zur Bürgerbewegung (28.09.2016). Der Beitrag von Heiko Behr geht der Frage nach, wie neue und konventionelle Protestformen zusammenhängen, am Beispiel von #BlackLivesMatter. Ich liefere dabei Hintergrund zu strukturellen Transformationen.

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<nettime> nottime: the end of nettime

3 April, 2015 - 17:54 by felix
tactical media
cooperation
network

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
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Surveillance Chess (Springerin 4/12)

16 October, 2012 - 19:15 by felix
tactical media
my_publications
art

London. Kurz vor Olympia. Die U-Bahn-Haltestellen sind zu den wohl meist-überwachten öffentlichen Räumen der Welt geworden. Hier setzt sich ein Mitglied der Zürcher !Mediengruppe Bitnik auf den Boden, im Blickfeld einer Überwachungskamera. Sie öffnet einen gelben Koffer und betätigt einen Schalter. Das Bild der Überwachungskamera fällt aus, auf dem Bildschirm im Kontrollraum erscheint ein Schachbrett und aus den Boxen ertönt eine Stimme: «Ich kontrolliere jetzt ihre Überwachungskamera. Ich bin die mit dem gelben Koffer.» Das Bild springt zurück auf die Frau in der U-Bahn-Station. Und wieder schaltet das Bild um auf das Schachbrett: «Wir wäre es mit einer Partie?», fragt die Stimme. «Du bist Weiß. Ich bin Schwarz. Ruf mich an oder schreib eine SMS, um deinen Zug mitzuteilen. Das ist meine Nummer: 07582460851.»

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Enter the Swarm: Anonymous and the global protest movements

9 February, 2012 - 23:21 by felix
tactical media
politics
my_publications
cooperation
network

This text was written for LeMondeDiplomatique, were it appeared their February 2012 issue. Below is the manuscript as I submitted it. Here's the published version in English, Deutsch, francais, Espangol, Brasilian Portuguese, Norwegian, Slovak, etc

In the course of just one year, using the identity “Anonymous” highly efficient digital attacks have been carried out against global corporations and national governments. All in the name of freedom of speech and social justice. The media coverage has done little to clarify the events, rather, contradictory characterizations of Anonymous have been espoused, ranging from an elite hacker conspiracy, to a loose network of ignorant teenagers, from a major cyber-terrorist threat to a mere nuisance driven by sophomoric humor. None of these characterizations is entirely incorrect, because each captures some fragments of the phenomenon, but they all miss the central element of Anonymous, namely that it is not one, but many, and that it is not a group or a network, but a swarm, or to be correct, multiple swarms that feed off each other.

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Von Nischen und Infrastrukturen

24 June, 2011 - 14:19 by felix
tactical media
politics
my_publications
network

Herausforderungen und neue Ansätze politischer Technologien

Neue Technologien aus dem aktivistischen Umfeld bieten radikale Alternativen zu kultureller Nischenbildung und zentralisierten Web 2.0-Infrastrukturen.

Die sozialen und politischen Realitäten der Digitalisierung und Vernetzung sind heute von zwei konstitutiven, aber grundsätzlich unterschiedlichen, ja teilweise sogar entgegengesetzten Dynamiken geprägt. Beide stellen den Medienaktivismus vor neue Herausforderungen. Zum einen können wir ein Aufblühen neuer kultureller Nischen und horizontaler Organisationsformen beobachten. Zum anderen erleben wir gleichzeitig eine enorme Zentralisierung und Konzentration auf der Ebene der Plattformen, welche einen grossen Teil der infrastrukturellen Grundlage des Wachstum der Nischen und neuen Kooperationsmuster darstellen. Nachdem der Aufbau alternativer Infrastrukturen – Zeitschriften, TV Kanäle und Internetplattformen – in den ersten 30 Jahren medienaktivistischer Projekte eine grosse Rolle gespielt hat (Stalder 2008) sind diese Fragen in den letzten 10 Jahren etwas in den Hintergrund getreten. Denn die Komplexität der Infrastrukturen nahm stetig zu, was es immer aufwendiger machte, sie zu betreiben und die neuen, offene Plattformen, wie sie für Web 2.0 typisch sind, stellten allen - scheinbar ohne Einschränkungen - mächtige Werkzeuge zu Verfügung. Warum eine eigene Plattform betreiben, wenn grosse professionelle Anbieter das besser, sicherer und kostenfrei anbieten? Heute sind die Probleme dieser Entwicklungen aber deutlich zu erkennen. Im Folgenden werden die Herausforderungen dieser Nischenbildung, die dunkle Seite der zentralisierten Infrastrukturen sowie die darauf reagierenden, neue Entwürfe für de-zentrale Infrastrukturen skizziert.

Volltext online: Von Nischen und Infrastrukturen. Herausforderungen und neue Ansätze politischer Technologien. Medienimpluse 2/11 (21.06)

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Wikileaks und Medienaktivismus

20 May, 2011 - 10:46 by felix
tactical media
politics
my_publications

Mein Artikel zu "WikiLeaks: Neue Dimensionen des Medienaktivismus" (pdf) ist bei Kommunikation@Gesellschaft veröffentlicht worden.

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currently operating leaking platforms

11 March, 2011 - 12:53 by felix
tactical media
politics
network
  • WikiLeaks
  • GlobaLeaks
  • BalkanLeaks
  • BrusselsLeaks
  • IndoLeaks
  • OpenLeaks
  • --------

  • Read more about currently operating leaking platforms

Wikileaks und die Folgen: Suhrkamp Sammelband

19 January, 2011 - 23:15 by felix
tactical media
my_publications

Wikileaks und die FolgenDer Sammelband, von Heinrich Geiselberger herausgeben, ist erschienen:

So unübersichtlich und verwirrend wie die Lawine aus Dokumenten sind die Hintergründe und Folgen von WikiLeaks: Was sind die Motive von Julian Assange? Geht es ihm um demokratische Transparenz? Oder um die »krypto-anarchistische« Weltrevolution? Wer soll all die Akten und Depeschen auswerten? Und: Welche Folgen hat die Affäre für die Politik? Erleben wir das Ende der Geheimdiplomatie oder den Anfang einer viel geheimeren Diplomatie? Die Autoren versuchen in ausführlichen Hintergrundanalysen und Kommentaren, aus unterschiedlichen Blickwinkeln Schneisen ins diskursive Durcheinander zu schlagen, noch während hier möglicherweise Geschichte gemacht wird

Eine sehr schöne Sammlung an Texten, beileibe nicht nur wegen meines Beitrags "Wikileaks und die neue Ökologie der Nachrichtenmedien"

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Leaks, Whistle-Blowers and the Networked News Ecology

6 November, 2010 - 10:51 by felix
tactical media
my_publications
network

WikiLeaks is one of the defining stories of the internet, which means by now, one of the defining stories of the present, period. At least four large-scale trends which permeate our societies as a whole are fused here into an explosive mixture whose fall-out is far from clear. First is a change in the materiality of communication. Communication becomes more extensive, more recorded, and the records become more mobile. Second is a crisis of institutions, particularly in western democracies, where moralistic rhetoric and the ugliness of daily practice are diverging ever more at the very moment when institutional personnel are being encouraged to think more for themselves. Third is the rise of new actors, 'super-empowered' individuals, capable of intervening into historical developments at a systemic level. Finally, fourth is a structural transformation of the public sphere (through media consolidation at one pole, and the explosion of non-institutional publishers at the other), to an extent that rivals the one described by Habermas with the rise of mass media at the turn of the 20th century.

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30 Years of Tactical Media (book chapter)

19 May, 2008 - 12:36 by felix
tactical media
politics
my_publications

30 Years of Tactical Media
Felix Stalder

Tactical media as a practice has a long history and, it seems save to predict, an even longer future. Yet its existence as a distinct concept around which something of a social movement, or more precisely, a self-aware network of people and projects would coalesce has been relatively short lived, largely confined to the internet's first decade as a mass medium (1995-2005). During that time Geert Lovink and David Garcia, two Dutch media activists/theorists at the heart of this network, defined Tactical Media, as

what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.2

Like so many other things that are now common in our informational lives, the roots of tactical media lie in the cultural innovations of radical social movements that sprang up in the late 1960s. Not only did they begin to exploit technological changes enabling to self-produce media but they created entirely new ideas of what the media could be: not just conduits for more or less sophisticated state propaganda (as in Althusser's famous analysis of the “ideological state apparatuses”3) or as a source of “objective” information provided by a professional (enlightened) elite. Rather, they reconceptualized the media as means of subjective expression, by people and for people who are not represented by the mainstream.

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Notes & nodes: society, technology and the space of the possible,
by Felix Stalder

Talks & Events

13.03. “Civilization, Technology and Consciousness” (Bitwäscherei, Zürich)
04.03. Civilization, Technology and Consciousness (Athens)
02.03. Civilization, Technology and Consciousness (Screening, Vienna)
28.02. Research Day (Zurich)
03.02. Structures of Belonging (Post-script to Commons to NFTs) /rosa (Berlin)
more

Projects & Institutions

ZHdK Logo

Zurich University of the Arts

Latent Spaces (current research project)

Creating Commons (previous research project)

World Information Institute (Vienna)

Technopolitics Working Group (Vienna)

Recent Books

Diaphanes, 2021 Polity Press, 2018 Suhrkamp Verlag, 2016 Buch & Netz, 2014 PML/Mute, Winter 2013

Less Recent Books

  • Vergessene Zukunft. transcript Verlag, 2012
  • Cultures and Ethics of Sharing / Kulturen und Ethiken des Teilens Innsbruck University Press, 2012
  • Deep Search. The Politics of Search Beyond Google Studienverlag / Transaction Publishers, 2009
  • Manuel Castells and the Theory of the Network Society. Polity Press, 2006 and Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2012
  • Open Cultures and the Nature of Networks. edited by Kuda.org, Futura publikacije, Novi Sad and Revolver - Archiv für aktuelle Kunst, Frankfurt a.M. (October 2005)
  • Making Money. Notes on technology as environment Ph.D. Thesis, Faculty of Information Studies. University of Toronto, 2001
  • README! ASCII CULTURE AND THE REVENGE OF KNOWLEDGE. FILTERED BY nettime, Autonomedia, NYC, 1999

    List of all books (according to worldcat)

Twitter Archive

Local archive of my 12.2K tweets (Oct 6, 2010 -  Nov 7, 2022)

Latest Posts (Mastodon)

Organizing

  • tdlr.nettime.org (Mastodon/Hometown instance, since Nov. 2022)
  • Leben Unter der Kurve. Sept/Okt.2021
  • Lecture Performance with Michael Taussig, 29.05.2019
  • Painted by Numbers A Discursive Installation on Algorithmic Regimes, ongoing
  • Algorithmic Regimes, Vienna, 25.09.2015
  • Digitale Wolken und Urbane Räume.Wien, Juni 2014
  • Netzpolitischer Konvent der österreichischen Zivilgesellschaft, 2013
  • Shared Digital Futures Conference, Wien 2013
  • Free Culture Forum, Barcelona, 2010
  • Deep Search II, Conference, Vienna, May 28 2010
  • World Information City Conference, Paris, 2009
  • Kunstfreiheit.ch, Schweiz, 2009
  • Deep Search. Politik des Suchens jenseits von Google, Wien, 2008
  • nettime-l, co-moderating, since 1998