Dmytri Kleiner/ Friends.

TODAY, May 8th:: Sieges ueber den Fascismus ! TOMORROW: May 9th:: HACK.Fem.EAST ! And some Dialstation notes...

Thu, 08 May 2008 12:22:00 GMT

TODAY, May 8th:: Tag Der Sieges ueber den Fascismus Hello, I hope everyone here in Berlin can join us today at Cafe Buchhandlung, 32 Tucholskystr, this is the first of the now-on-Thursday Stammtische, and it will be a special occasion, Johannes Wilms will read a selected anti-fascist text, the first to guess the author earns a free drink! TOMORROW, May 9th:: HACK.Fem.EAST! Miss Information and her Telekommunisten will be one of the participants in HACK.Fem.EAST, with the "For Miss Information, Call" Street Art/Phone Art project. HACK.Fem.EAST presents Women, Technology and Networks in Eastern Europe. Exhibition, performances, meetings. Kunstraum Kreuzberg / Bethanien Berlin. Opening: 9 May, from 19.00. For Miss Information, Call +49 30 2000 9039 Call Now! //~~_ <a href="http://www.hackfemeast.org">http://www.hackfemeast.org</a> _~~\\ For those outside of Germany, call with Dialstation: [[--> <a href="http://www.dialstation.com/CallMissInfo">http://www.dialstation.com/CallMissInfo</a> And speaking of Dialstation... As expected, we have some rough spots in the launch of the new Dialstation and there has been some downtime in different parts, all is up now, so please check it out and spread the word. Also, PLEASE NOTE, that as a result of certain treacherous counterrevolutionaries attempting to compromise Dialstation, we have had to suspend the automatic provisioning of free credit for new accounts, for instant access you will now need to make a payment. HOWEVER, we still are more than happy to give you and your comrades some free credit to try it out, but you will need to send an email at <a href="mailto:support@dialstation.com">support@dialstation.com</a> or use the feedback box first. -- Dmytri Kleiner editing text files since 1981 <a href="http://www.telekommunisten.net">http://www.telekommunisten.net</a>

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Telekommunisten 2008 Dialstation Reimplementation Now Live!

Fri, 02 May 2008 12:32:00 GMT

Dialstation 2008 Launch <a href="http://www.dialstation.com">http://www.dialstation.com</a> May 1st, 2008 International Day of Workers Solidarity Telekommunisten The Revolution is Calling WHAT IS DIALSTATION? Dialstation is the ideal way to make international calls from your mobile telephone. Inexpensive and convenient, Dialstation works with any normal telephone and does not require any special software. Epoch-defining revolutionary changes in transportation and communication, along with the growth of the informal economy and trans-local communities are changing the world. Many of us have friends, family and business contacts in different countries. Communicating internationally is increasingly a daily fact of life. In order to make international calling affordable, new ways of calling have emerged. Most people have heard of Voice Over IP (VoIP) and Calling Cards, however each of these have their drawbacks. VoIP requires you to make your calls from a computer or IP telephone, which is not always possible. Calling cards are not always available, and cumbersome. Dialstation is a prepaid calling service designed to be used from your landline or mobile phone. Dialstation gives you Personal Direct Numbers for the people you call most often. A Personal Direct Number is a unique phone number that you can save in your contact book. You can use the PDN to reach this person simply by telephoning directly to it, as often as you like, with no codes or calling card numbers to remember. Dialstation is very inexpensive. Rates to many countries, such as China, Argentina, Venezuela, Australia, the USA and Canada are less than 1 cent per minute (0.58). Most European Landlines are also just 1 Euro cent perminute. Mobile telephones in most European countries are 14 Euro cents per minute. Calls to Russia and Brazil are less than 5 Euro cents. Calling India is just 6 Euro cents per minute. Check our website to find the detailed rates for your common destinations. <a href="http://www.dialstation.com/rates">http://www.dialstation.com/rates</a> To get you started, your first calls are free! Telekommunisten is a Berlin-based Canadian/German worker-owned technology company. WHO ARE THE TELEKOMMUNISTEN? Telekommunisten is 100% worker-owned. We are committed to free software, social justice, environmnetal protection, international development and building a worker-controlled economy. We believe that capitalism and the resulting global dominance of undemocratic corporations are the source of poverty, inequality, war and environmental catastrophe. We believe a solution can be found in workers autonomously organizing their own production. Without the theft of labour's product, the oligarchs would not have the wealth to control corrupt politicians and fund immoral wars. We believe that only socialism can create a truly free market. When you use Dialstation, you support our work. We need your help to spread the word. Please forward this announcement to where interest may be found. The Revolution is Calling. For more information please see: <a href="http://www.dialstation.com">http://www.dialstation.com</a>

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TODAY >> May 1st :: Telekommunisten Tag der Arbeit Salon @ C-BASE // Dialstation 2008 Launch <<

Thu, 01 May 2008 06:31:00 GMT

TODAY >> May 1st :: Telekommunisten Tag der Arbeit Salon @ C-BASE // Dialstation 2008 Launch << The Telekommunisten would like to invite all who can make it to C-Base Today to celebrate the International Day of Workers Solidarity with us! We will holding discussions about the Telekommunisten project as well as Introducing the brand new version of Dialstation. ~:: <a href="http://www.c-base.org">http://www.c-base.org</a> ~:: <a href="http://www.dialstation.com">http://www.dialstation.com</a> The shinny new and highly experimental DIALSTATION is now available, please try it out!! You will need to re register your account, use the new quick register form on the Dialstation website to get started with the new kommPanel. Find out more about the Tag der Arbiet festivities at: ~:: <a href="http://www.theRevolutionIsCalling.com">http://www.theRevolutionIsCalling.com</a> We will also preview and discuss our Street-art/Phone-Art project, "For Miss Information, Call, " which will be a part of the Hack.Fem.East exhibition at Kunstraum Kreutzberg. ~:: <a href="http://hackfemeast.org/web/?page_id=72">http://hackfemeast.org/web/?page_id=72</a> //// C-BASE //// Rungestrasse 20 //// 10179 Berlin ~2pm unti ~2am, Thursday May 1st, 2008 //// all are welcome, pass it on.... ////

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Belgrade, Novi Sad, Zagreb and an IMPORTANT STAMMTISCH MESSAGE

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 09:50:00 GMT

** Stammtisch *** In order to accommodate my unrelenting travel schedule, our weekly Telekommunisten amtstunden, Stammtisch, well be permanently moved from Tuesdays to Thursdays, starting May 8th, pass it on. ................................................................................................................................................................... Telekommunisten are gearing for the launch of Dialstation beta2 on May 1st, I will be doing a series of discussions about Telekommunisten and Venture Communism in Serbia and Croatia, details below, please forward. Revolucija zove! ~~ Belgrade ~~ Saturday 19th of April 7 PM, MKM, (address: Kraljevica Marka 4) Belgrade With Vladan Jeremic <<a href="http://slobodnakultura.org&gt">http://slobodnakultura.org&gt</a>; ~~ Novi Sad ~~ Sunday 20th of April 7 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, (address: Dunavska 37) Novi Sad With Vladan Jeremic <<a href="http://slobodnakultura.org&gt">http://slobodnakultura.org&gt</a>; ~~ Zagreb ~~ Tuesday 22nd of April, 7PM, Multimedijalni institut/ net.kulturni klub mama (address: Preradovićeva 18) Zagreb With Marcel Mars <<a href="http://www.mi2.hr&gt">http://www.mi2.hr&gt</a>; ///////////////////// ##english Dmytri Kleiner is a USSR-Born, Canadian software developer and cultural producer, he is a co-founder of Telekommunisten, a worker's collective that provides telephone and Internet services, and an independent researcher investigating the intersections of art, technology and political economy. With Telekommunisten, the Art & Economics Group, and Venture Communism, as well as the related writings and activities, Dmytri Keiner encourages a critical analysis of the social and economic relations of communications and promotes the ideal of worker's self-organization of production as a means of class struggle. ##serbo-croatian Dmytri Kleiner je haker, programer, teoreticar, roden u Ukrajini, odrastao u Kanadi, zivi u Berlinu. Dmytri predlaze radnicima investiranje u komunizam. 1. maja 2006. pokrenuo je Telekommunisten, prototip Venture Communism enterprisea. Dmytri je, s drugima, razvio softver za IP telefoniju i srednje veliku PBX centralu, jeftino telefoniranje, automatske sekretarice, preusmjeravanje poziva. Radnici svih zemalja, pridruzite se. Revolucija zove!

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Farewell Oekonux, we barely knew you.

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 00:38:00 GMT

Farewell Oekonux, we barely knew you: A Open Goodbye to the Neo-Utopians. Dmytri Kleiner, 2008. "The undeveloped state of the class struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes Socialists of this kind to consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see it in the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?. Hence, they reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the way for the new social Gospel." -- Marx & Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848. By 1848 the European continent may have been haunted by the spectre of communism, as feudal relations where unraveling and transforming while the major European powers where experiencing violent social spasms as they adopted the Industrialism pioneered by Great Britain, however back in the "Workshop of the World," the newly privileged English working class had noticeably mellowed. As Great Britain entered the second phase of the Industrial Revolution, her own industry turned away from (now highly competitive and thus low profit) textile markets, and moved to far more lucrative Capital Goods. Income from Steel and Machines sold to newly industrialising nations on the continent, the new world and beyond made the United Kingdom the world's dominant financial power. Her workers, if perhaps only for a brief moment, enjoyed a level of relative wealth and social stability far removed from the gruesome, inhumane conditions brutally imposed during the first phase of Industry. After a century of Capitalization, all the newly formed productive capacity created a massive increase in the supply of basic consumer goods, prices where in free-fall across the board. And, with the repeal of the protectionist Corn Laws in 1846, British tables where overflowing with cheap imported food. The radical convulsions of Luddites, Levelers, and Diggers, from the eras of enclosures, civil wars and the birth of industry, where long over and even Chartism was quickly disappearing. Wealth, however briefly, had fattened the worker, the Capitalist, the Landlord and the State alike, whose raw, ruthless, violent power, so crucial in the primitive accumulation that created the basis of Capitalist social relationships, whose history is written in "Letters of Blood and Fire," was now hidden behind the chubby, smiling face of British Imperialism and wrapped in the legitimizing veneer of Tradition. The Socialism of the day, the Socialism denounced by Marx & Engels in their Communist Manifesto, was Utopian Socialism. A Socialism that doesn't chose sides, denies struggle, denies even class. A socialism that ignores the dialectic nature of change, and assumes that some new form of organisation, born from the inspiration of a kind of enlightened social designer, driven by a technologically determinist world view, will be adopted whole-scale on the basis of it's undeniable merit by worker, capitalist, and landlord alike, the latter two classes happily abandoning the privileges that distinguish them and uniting with the meritous worker in a new homogeneous mono-class of postindustrial Utopian Man, living happily in Phalanstère and New Harmonies ever after. Utopian Man never came about. The brief gravy train of the British worker derailed in a train-wreck of depression, unemployment, general glut and Capital flight. The teeth and claws of Power and naked Imperialism where again shamelessly exposed as two world wars shook the world. Utopian Socialism quickly became a historical curiosity as Anarchist and Marxist Communism spread among workers, politicians, and intellectuals world wide and erupted in various syndicalist, political and insurrectionist forms, none of which hesitated in denouncing the Bosses. In the aftermath of Soviet collapse, the dream of Homo Utopicus returned. An accelerated plundering of second and third world alike, unhindered by a now lost geostrategic balance of power, valourised triumphant Capitalism and the Capitalist State alike. The Internet, born of Cold War military funding, introduced the most significant technological development since the dawn of electricity, a medium of communication and exchange that was synchronous, peer to peer, and international. A network of equals, communicating and exchanging globally, A free network that could route around censorship and State intervention alike, a network where citizen journalist played on equal footing with media tycoon, a network that could expand anywhere where one node consented to inter-connect with another. The territorial monopoly on violence that was the essence of the State and its landlords now made obsolete by Cyberspace. The control of the circulation of capital and product that was the lynch-pin of Capitalist wealth now undone by direct online commerce. The scarcity of the instruments of production that chained the worker to his employer and social station now obliterated by immaterial capital, nonreciprocal production, free software, free culture. "The Californian Ideology," replaced class struggle with techno-utopianism and economic liberalism. The Neo-Utopians where born. However once again, Utopian man hasn't come about. The Internet, born in the generous nursery of the arms race, was now forced to pander for finance from the very Capitalist ruling class it's anarchic structure was supposed to neutralize. Mom and Pop ISPs with backrooms full of consumer-grade modems are replaced by giant telecommunications corporations with shiny and expensive DSL infrastructure. Networks become less neutral and more asymmetrical. Like the downfall of the heyday of the pre-Depression British industrial worker, the dotCom bust marked the explosion of the era of domino asset bubbles, precarious McJobs, wars of economic desperation and naked State repression. Strengthened copyright laws, enhanced data retention laws, digital rights management, software patents and other. political legal, and capital interventions combine to make the data you store, receive, and transmit a matter of national security and property privilege. Usenet is replaced by Yahoo! Groups, email is replaced by Facebook, Napster is replaced by iTunes. IRC by Skype, All funded by great accumulations of wealth and firmly in the hands of the ruling class. Day by day, communications systems are becoming more and more centralized and exclusively mediated. The role of peer to peer technology, the core breakthrough of the Internet, is more and more a contraband technology, a technology for criminals, pirates, rebels, maybe even "terrorists." The days that we can continue to pretend, despite all evidence to the contrary in a world of rapidly increasing wealth stratification, that mankind will anyminutenow be emancipated by Ubuntu, Wikipedia and Facebook are over. If we are to create a society where we produce and share as peers, where direct unmediated communications and commerce allows peer producers in informal, translocal communities to throw off the chains of Monopolist and Rentier, then we must resurrect the language of resistance, of class struggle, and acknowledge the fact that no privileged class will give up it's advantage gladly, that bottom up revolution will always face top-down repression. If we are unwilling to identify the thieves, we can never end the theft.

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Saturday, March 8: Art & Economics Group Quarterly Forum 2008, Q1

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:22:00 GMT

Hello everyone, thanks for all the congratulations emails for Henriette's kleiner bruder Nikolai! Franziska and I will respond to each and every one over the weekend! Maybe we'll even figure out how this digital photograph stuff works. Please not that the Art & Economics Group will have our quarerly discusion this Saturday, and that we have changed the time to a more family-freindly 5pm. Details follow: Cheers, --------------------- Art & Economics Group Quarterly Forum 2008, Q1 Presented by Tanja Ostojic / David Rych / Dmytri Kleiner on behalf of the Art & Economics Group Projektraum, Galerie 35 Simon-Dach-Str. 35 Berlin-Friedrichshain Saturday, March 8, 2008 at 17h Galerie 35 Simon-Dach-Straße 35 10245 Berlin-Friedrichshain Program: - Quarterly report - Talk with the guest of the evening: Stephan Kurr, artist based in Berlin - Special edition of Art-bonds: designed by Stephan Kurr - Stephan Kurr will auction a money sculpture! The Quarterly Workshop of the Art & Economics group will be on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 17h at Project room, Gallery 35. The Art & Economics group that was established in 2006, investigates the intersection of art and political economy. This will be the first in a series of four discussions held this year. Topics include political economy as a theme in art, the economics of art production and economic activity as an action based art practice. The discussion of the evening focuses on the economical development of the art market, its relation to the stock market and the price of an art work as a final criterion for quality. It ends with money, subject in the art practice of Stephan Kurr. (www.kurr.org <<a href="http://www.kurr.org&gt">http://www.kurr.org&gt</a>;) Please join us if you can. Yours, Art & Economics Group contact: <a href="mailto:tostojic@web.de">tostojic@web.de</a> --------------------------------------- Galerie 35 Simon-Dach-Straße 35 10245 Berlin-Friedrichshain <a href="mailto:mail@galerie35.de">mail@galerie35.de</a> <a href="http://www.galerie35.de">http://www.galerie35.de</a> tel 030 - 25 76 88 89

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Introducing Nikolai Kleiner: Baby #2 seems to like the number 3.

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:17:00 GMT

Franziska, Dmytri and Henriette Kleiner would like to announce the brith of our new baby Nikolai. Born 3.3 2008, at 23:33 weighing 3330 grams, Nikolai was born at the Charite, in Berlin-Mitte. Sorry, no digital photos, online photo streams or baby home page. We're old school. You'll have to wait for the photos to come back from the lab, and for us to eventually scan them. Well, until somebody else takes a digital for us first anyway. Henriette has now received a promotion to "Big Sister," and is eagerly embracing the added authority this new position brings. Mother and Baby are well, please send congratulations to kleiner AT trick DOT ca, our family email address. Kind Regards, Franziska, Dmytri, Henriette & Nikolai kleiner AT trick DOT ca

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Venture Communist Downloads, The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 13:11:00 GMT

Two new presentations I have made recently are online: The "Client-Server State vs. P2P Communism" from Civil Media -> <a href="http://cba.fro.at/show.php?eintrag_id=3D8360">http://cba.fro.at/show.php?eintrag_id=3D8360</a> "Hacking Ideologies" panel from the CCC. -> <a href="http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_m4v_2311.html">http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_m4v_2311.html</a> Also, Matteo Pasquinelli writes a very interesting text "bringing post-Operaismo into network culture" drawing on several Telekommunisten texts, including "Copyfarleft, Copyjustright and the Iron Law of Copyright Earnings," as well as the Anna Nimus text, "Copyright, Copyleft and the Creative Anti-Commons." Matteo's text is included below. BTW, for those based in Berlin or in town for Transmediale, after a long absence, I will be at Stammtisch Tuesday February 5th. So please come to Cafe Buchhandling. Dmytri Kleiner ~ Telekommunisten <a href="http://www.telekommunisten.net">http://www.telekommunisten.net</a> ---- Matteo Pasquinelli is a theorist and editor of Rekombinant. He edited the books Media Activism (Rome, 2002) and C=92Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (Amsterdam, 2007). He writes frequently on French philosophy, media culture and Italian operaismo. His texts has been published and translated in many languages. With Katrien Jacobs and the Institute of Network Cultures he organised in Amsterdam the Art and Politics of Netporn conference (2005) and the C=92Lick Me festival (2007). Based between Amsterdam and London. Matteo Pasquinelli The Ideology of Free Culture and the Grammar of Sabotage <a href="http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Ideology-of-Free-Culture.pdf">http://www.rekombinant.org/docs/Ideology-of-Free-Culture.pdf</a> <a href="http://www.rekombinant.org/mat">http://www.rekombinant.org/mat</a> Abstract. Bringing post-Operaismo into network culture, this text tries to introduce the notion of surplus in a contemporary media debate dominated by a simple symmetry between immaterial and material domain, between digital economy and bioeconomy. Therefore a new asymmetry is first shaped through Serres' conceptual figure of the parasite and Bataille's concepts of excess and biochemical energy. Second, the crisis of the copyright system and the contradictions of the so-called Free Culture movement are taken as a starting point to design the notion of autonomous commons against the creative commons. Third, a new political arena is outlined around Rullani's cognitive capitalism and the new theory of rent developed by Negri and Vercellone. Finally, the sabotage is shown as the specular gesture of the multitudes to defend the commons against the parasitic dimension of rent. * The living energy of machines. * Michel Serres and the cybernetic parasite * Digitalism: the impasse of media culture * The ideology of Free Culture * Against the Creative Anti-Commons * Towards an Autonomous Commons * Rent is the other side of the Commons * The four dimensions of cognitive capitalism * A taxonomy of the immaterial parasites * The bicephalous multitude * The grammar of sabotage ------ The parasite invents something new. He obtains energy and pays for it in information. He obtains the roast and pays for it with stories. Two days of writing the new contract. He establishes an unjust pact; relative to the old type of balance, he builds a new one. He speaks in a logic considered irrational up to now, a new epistemology and a new theory of equilibrium. He makes the order of things as well as the states of things - solid and gas - into diagonals. He evaluates information. Even better: he discovers information in his voice and good words; he discovers the Spirit in the wind and the breath of air. He invents cybernetics. - Michel Serres, The Parasite The living energy of machines: Michel Serres and the cybernetic parasite Below technology, there is energy - living energy. In The Accursed Share Bataille described society as the management of energy surplus that constantly reincarnates itself in new forms of state and economy. 1 Being consequent with his intuition, even the contemporary mediascape can be framed as an ecosystem driven by the growth of natural energies. Media are indeed feral habitats whose underground belly is crossed daily by large torrents of pornography and whose surface provides the battlefield for geopolitical warfare. Media are fed by the same excess of energy that shapes economy and social conflicts. But has the energy surplus of media ever been described in an effective way? If not, which understanding of energy is unconsciously employed by the schools of media criticism? What is the role of technology in the production, consumption and sacrifice of surplus? And exactly what kinds of surplus are involved: energy, libido, value, money, information? Looking at today's media discourse, Bataille is enrolled only to justify a sort of digital potlatch - a furious but sterile reproduction of digital copies. On the contrary, under his "general economy," energy seems to float around and inside the machines, crossing and feeding a multitude of devices. To overcome an endogamic destiny media culture should be redesigned around a radical understanding of surplus. Bataille himself considered technology as an extension of life to accumulate energy and provide better conditions for reproduction. Like "tree branches and bird wings in nature" technology opens news spaces to be populated.2 However something new happened when information networks entered the biosphere. What kind of energy do digital machines incarnate? Are they a further extension of biochemical energy like the classical technologies that Bataille had in mind? Digital machines are a clear bifurcation of the machinic phylum: semiotic and biologic domains represent two different strata. The energy of semiotic flows is not the energy of material and economical flows. They interact but not in a symmetrical and specular way, as propagated by the widespread digital ideology (that I will introduce later as digitalism). Energy always flows one way. Acquainted with the scenario of the network society and the celebration of its space of flows,3 a safari with Bataille along the ecosystems of excess is useful to remind the dystopian nature of capitalism. In Bataille economic surplus is strictly related to libidinal excess, enjoyment and sacrifice. Yet between endless fluxes and their "glorious expenditure"4 a specific model that explains how surplus is accumulated and exchange is missing. In his inspiring and seminal book The parasite Michel Serres catches the asymmetry of universal life in the conceptual figure of the parasite: there is never an equal exchange of energy but always a parasite stealing energy and feeding on another organism. At the beginning of the computer age (the book was published in 1980), the parasite inaugurates a materialistic critique of all the forms of thought based on a binary model of energy: Serres' semiconductors steal energy instead of computing. Man is a louse for other men. Thus man is a host for other men. The flow goes one way, never the other. I call this semiconduction, this valve, this single arrow, this relation without a reversal of direction, "parasitic."5 If Bataille calls attention to the expenditure of energy after its production, Serres shows how "abuse" is at work since accumulation: "abuse appears before use." Serres introduces an abuse-value preceding both use-value and exchange-value: "quite simply, it is the arrow with only one direction." The parasite is the asymmetrical arrow absorbing and condensing energy in a natural continuum from small organisms to human beings: "the parasite parasites the parasites." The parasite is not binary but ternary. The concept of parasite appears like a dystopian version of Deleuze and Guattari's desiring machines, as it is focused more on surplus exploitation than on endless flows. Serres shares the same vitalism of Bataille, but provides in addition a punctual model to understand the relation between material and immaterial, biologic and semiotic, economy and media. In this sense the organic model of the parasite should be embraced as the core concept of a new understanding of media ecosystems.6 Indeed Serres prophetically introduced cybernetics as the latest manifestation of the parasitic food chain (as the opening quote of this text reminds). Moreover, Serres uses the same parasitic model for intellectual labour and the network itself (as Technology is an extension of the deceptive nature of Logos): "this cybernetics gets more and more complicated, makes a chain, then a network. Yet it is founded on the theft of information, quite a simple thing." Serres' opportunistic relation between intellectual and material production may sound traditionalist, but even when Lazzarato and Negri started to write in 1991 about the "hegemony of intellectual labour"7, the exploitive dimension of capital over mass intellectuality was clear. Today the immaterial parasite has become molecular and endemic - everybody is carrying an intellectual and cybernetic parasite. In this scenario what happens to the notion of multitude when intellectual labour enters the political arena in the form of a parasite? What happens to network subcultures when the network is outlined as a massive cybernetic parasite? It is time to re-introduce a sharp asymmetry between the semiotic, technological and biological levels, between material and immaterial. By the conceptual figure of the immaterial parasite I name precisely the exploitation of the biological production through the semiotic and technological domain: material energy and economic surplus are not absorbed and consumed by digital machines but simply allocated. The immaterial flow extracts surplus from the material flow and through continuous exchanges (energy-commodity-technology-knowledge- money). The immaterial parasite functions first as a spectacular device: simulating a fictional world, building a collaborative environment or simply providing communication channels, it accumulates energy through and in favour of its physical substratum. The immaterial parasite belongs to a diverse family, where rents seems to be the dominant form of metabolism. It survives in different kinds of habitat. Its tentacles innervate the metropolis (real estate speculation through the Creative Industries hype), the media (rent over material infrastructures and monopoly of online spaces), software (exploitation of Free Software to sell proprietary hardware), knowledge (revenues on intellectual property), financial markets (stock exchange speculation over collective hysteria) and many other examples. Digitalism: the impasse of media culture Digitalism is a sort of modern, egalitarian and cheap gnosis, where knowledge fetishism has been replaced by the cult of a digital network.8 Like a religious sect it has its peculiar theology. Ontologically the dominant techno-paradigm believes that the semiotic and biologic domains are perfectly parallel and specular to each other (like in the Google utopia of universal digitisation). A material event can be easily translated on the immaterial plane, and conversely the immaterial can be embodied into the material. This second passage is the passage of a millenary misunderstanding and anthropology has a lot to say about the relation between magic and logocentrism. Economically digitalism believes that an almost energy- free digital reproduction of data can emulate the energy-expensive material production. For sure the digital can dematerialise any kind of communication but it can not affect biomass production. Politically digitalism believes in a mutual gift economy. Internet is supposed to be virtually free of any exploitation and tends naturally towards a social equilibrium. Here digitalism works as an disembodied politics with no acknowledgement of the offline labour that is sustaining the online world (a class divide that precedes any digital divide). Ecologically digitalism promotes itself as an environmentally friendly and zero emission machinery against the pollution of the old Fordism. Yet it seems that an avatar on Second Life consumes more electricity that the average Brazilian.9 As Marx spotlighted commodity fetishism right at the beginning of Capital, a fetishism of code should be put at the basis of the network economy. "God is the machine" was the title of Kevin Kelly's digitalist manifesto whose points proclaimed distinctly: computation can describe all things, all things can compute, all computation is one.10 Digitalism is one of those political models inspired by technology and not by social conflicts. As McLuhan once said, "We shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us."11 Internet in particular was fuelled by the political dreams of the American counter-culture of the '60s. Today according to the Autonomist Marxist tradition12 the network is at the same time the structure of the Empire and the tool for the self-organisation of the multitudes. But only the Anglo-American culture conceived the faith in the primacy of technology over politics. If today activists apply the Free Software model to traditional artefacts and talk of a "GPL society"13 and "P2P production"14 the do so precisely because they believe in a pure symmetry of the technological over the social. In this sense the definition of Free Culture gathers all those subcultures that shaped a quasi-political agenda around the free reproduction of digital file. The kick-off was the slogan "Information wants to be free"15 launched by Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984. Later the hacker underground boosted the Free Software movement and then a chain of new keywords was generated: Open Source, Open Content, Gift Economy, Digital Commons, Free Cooperation, Knowledge Sharing and other do-it-yourself variants like Open Source Architecture, Open Source Art and so on. "Free Culture" is also the title of the book of Lawrence Lessing, founder of Creative Commons. Without mentioning the social improvements and crucial battles of the Free Software movement within the digital sphere, what it is questioned here is the off-line application of these paradigms. An old saying still resounds: the word is made flesh. A religious unconscious is at work behind technology. Florian Cramer in his book Words made flesh16 provides a genealogy of code culture rooted in the ancient brainframes of Western world belonging to Judaism, Christianity, Pythagoreans and Hermeticism. However, as Serres may suggest, the primordial saying must be reversed: the flesh is made code. The spirit itself is a parasitic strategy of the flesh. The flesh is first, before the Logos. There is nothing digital in any digital dream. Merged with a global economy, each bit of "free" information carries its own micro slave like a forgotten twin. The ideology of Free Culture Literature on freeculturalism is vast but can be partially unpacked through focusing the lens of surplus. Reading authors like Stallman and Lessig, a question rises: where does profit end up in the so- called Free Society? Free Culture seems to focus only on the issue of immaterial property rather than production. Although given a closer look, the ghost of the surplus reappears. In his book Free Culture Lawrence Lessig connect the Creative Commons initiative to the Anglo- American libertarian tradition where free speech always rhymes with free market.17 Lessig takes inspiration from the copyleft and hacker culture quoting Richard Stallman,18 but where the latter refers only to software, Lessig applies that paradigm to the whole spectrum of cultural artefacts. Software is taken as an universal political model. The book is a useful critique of the copyright regime and at the same time an apology of a generic digital freedom, at least until Lessig pronounces the evil word: taxation. Facing the crisis of the music industries, Lessig has to provide his "alternative compensation system"19 to reward creators for their works. Lessig modifies a proposal coming from Harvard law professor William Fisher: Under his plan, all content capable of digital transmission would (1) be marked with a digital watermark [...]. Once the content is marked, then entrepreneurs would develop (2) systems to monitor how many items of each content were distributed. On the basis of those numbers, then (3) artists would be compensated. The compensation would be paid for by (4) an appropriate tax. In the "tradition of free culture" the solution is paradoxically a new tax. Tracking internet downloads and taxation imply a public and centralised intervention quite unusual for US and imaginable only in a Scandinavian social-democracy. The question remains unclear. More explicitly another passage suggests the sacrifice of intellectual property to gain a larger internet. Here Lessig's intuition is right (for capitalism). Lessig is aware that the market needs a dynamic and self-generating space to expand and establish new monopolies and rents. A dynamic space is more important than a lazy copyright regime. Is it better (a) to have a technology that is 95 percent secure and produces a market of size x, or (b) to have a technology that is 50 percent secure but produces a market of five times x? Less secure might produce more unauthorized sharing, but it is likely to also produce a much bigger market in authorized sharing. The most important thing is to assure artists' compensation without breaking the Internet. In this sense Creative Commons licences help to expand and lubricate the space of market. As John Perry Barlow puts it: "For ideas, fame is fortune. And nothing makes you famous faster than an audience willing to distribute your work for free."20 Despite of its political dreams, the friction-free space of digitalism seems to accelerate towards an even more competitive scenario. In this sense Benkler in his The Wealth of Networks is absolutely wrong when he writes that "information is nonrival." The nonrivalry of information is another important postulate of freeculturalism: Lessig and Benkler take for granted that the free digital reproduction does not cause more competition but only more cooperation. Of course rivalry is not produced by digital copies but by their friction on real space and other limited resources. Benkler celebrates "peer production" but actually he is merely covering immaterial reproduction. Free Software and Wikipedia are extensively over-quoted as the main examples of "social production" but these examples actually only points to online social production. Against the Creative Anti-Commons After an initial honey-moon the Creative Commons (CC) initiative is facing a growing criticism that comes especially from the European media culture. Scouting articles from 2004 to 2006, two fronts of critique can be distinguished: those who claim the institution of a real commonality against Creative Commons restrictions (non- commercial, share-alike, etc.) and those who point out Creative Commons complicity with global capitalism. An example of the first front, Florian Cramer provides a precise and drastic analysis: To say that something is available under a CC license is meaningless in practice. [...] Creative Commons licenses are fragmented, do not define a common minimum standard of freedoms and rights granted to users or even fail to meet the criteria of free licenses altogether, and that unlike the Free Software and Open Source movements, they follow a philosophy of reserving rights of copyright owners rather than granting them to audiences.21 Berlin-based Neoist Anna Nimus agrees with Cramer that CC licences protect only the producers while consumer rights are left unmentioned: "Creative Commons legitimates, rather than denies, producer-control and enforces, rather than abolishes, the distinction between producer and consumer. It expands the legal framework for producers to deny consumers the possibility to create use-value or exchange-value out of the common stock."22 Nimus claims the total freedom for consumers to produce use-value out of the common stock (like in Free Software) but more important to produce even exchange- value (that means commercial use). For Nimus a commons is defined by its productive consumers and not merely by its producers or passive consumers. She claims that CC licences close the commons with many restrictions rather than opening it to a real productivity. In a new nickname, they are "Creative Anti-Commons." Both Nimus and Cramer's critiques remain closer to the libertarian tradition with few accounts of the surplus-value extraction and big economy behind IP (in any form: copyright, copyleft or CC). On the opposite among post-Autonomist Marxists a stronger criticism is moved against the ideology implicitly pushed by CC and other forms of a digital-only commonism. For instance activist Martin Hardie thinks that "The logic of FLOSS seems only to promise a new space for entrepreneurial freedom where we are never exploited or subject to others' command. The sole focus upon 'copyright freedom' sweeps away consideration of the processes of valorisation active within the global factory without walls."23 Hardie criticise FLOSS precisely because it never questions the way it is captured by capital and its relations with the productive forces. In conclusion a tactical notion of autonomous commons can be imagined to include new projects and tendencies against the hyper- celebrated Creative Commons. In a schematic way, autonomous commons 1) allow not only passive and personal consumption but even a productive use of the common stock - implying commercial use by single workers; 2) question the role and complicity of the commons within the global economy and put the common stock out of the exploitation of large companies; 3) are aware of the asymmetry between immaterial and material commons and the impact of immaterial accumulation over material production (e.g. IBM using Linux); 4) consider the commons as an hybrid and dynamic space that dynamically must be built and defended. Towards an Autonomous Commons Among all the appeals for "real" commons only Dmytri Kleiner's idea of 'Copyfarleft' condenses the nodal point of the conflict in a pragmatic proposal that breaks the flat paradigm of Free Culture. In his article "Copyfarleft and Copyjustright"24 Kleiner notices a property divide that is more crucial than any digital divide: the 10% of the world population owns the 85% of the global assets against a multitude of people owning barely nothing. This material dominion of the owning class is consequently extended thanks to the copyright over immaterial assets, so that they can be owned, controlled and traded. In the case of music for example the intellectual property is more crucial for the owning class than for musicians, as they are forced to resign their author rights over their own works. On the other side the digital commons do not provide a better habitat: authors are sceptical that copyleft can earn them a living. In the end wage conditions of the authors within cognitive capitalism seem to follow the same old laws of Fordism. Moving from Ricardo's definition of rent and the so-called "Iron Law of Wages"25 Kleiner develops the "iron law of copyright earnings." The system of private control of the means of publication, distribution, promotion and media production ensures that artists and all other creative workers can earn no more than their subsistence. Whether you are biochemist, a musician, a software engineer or a film- maker, you have signed over all your copyrights to property owners before these rights have any real financial value for no more than the reproduction costs of your work. This is what I call the Iron Law of Copyright Earnings. Kleiner recognizes that both copyright and copyleft regimes keep workers earnings constantly below average needs. In particular copyleft does not help neither software developers nor artists as it reallocates profit only in favour of the owners of material assets. The solution advanced by Kleiner is copyfarleft, a license with a hybrid status that recognises class divide and allow workers to claim back the "means of production." Copyfarleft products are free and can be used to make money only by those who do not exploit wage labour (like other workers or co-ops). For copyleft to have any revolutionary potential it must be Copyfarleft. It must insist upon workers ownership of the means of production. In order to do this a license cannot have a single set of terms for all users, but rather must have different rules for different classes. Specifically one set of rules for those who are working within the context of workers ownership and commons based production, and another for those who employ private property and wage labour in production. For example "under a copyfarleft license a worker-owned printing cooperative could be free to reproduce, distribute, and modify the common stock as they like, but a privately owned publishing company would be prevented from having free access". Copyfarleft is quite different from the 'non-commercial' use supported by some CC licences because they do not distinguish between endogenic (within the commons) commercial use and exogenic (outside the commons) commercial use. Kleiner suggests to introduce an asymmetry: endogenic commercial use should be allowed while keeping exogenic commercial use forbidden. Interestingly this is the correct application of the original institution of the commons, that were strictly related to material production: commons were land used by a specific community to harvest or breed their animals. If someone can not pasture cows and produce milk, that will not be considered a real common. Kleiner says that if money can not be made out of it, a work does not belong to the commons: it is merely private property. Rent is the other side of the Commons How does cognitive capitalism make money? Where does a digital economy extract surplus? While digerati and activists are stuck to the glorification of peer production, good managers but also good Marxists are aware of the profits made on the shoulders of the collective intelligence. For instance the school of post-Operaismo has always carried on a dystopian vision of the general intellect produced by workers and digital multitudes: it is potentially liberating but constantly absorbed before turning into a true social autonomy. The cooperation celebrated by freeculturalists is only the last stage of long process of socialisation of knowledge that is not improving the life conditions of the last digital generations: in the end online "free labour"26 appears to be more dominant than the "wealth of networks." The theory of rent recently advanced by the post-Operaist school can disclose the digital economy more clearly. Autonomist Marxism has become renown for shaping a new toolbox of political concepts for the late capitalism (such as multitude, immaterial labour, biopolitical production and cognitive capitalism to name only a few). In an article27 published in 2007 in Posse Negri and Vercellone make a further step: they establish rent as the nodal mechanism of contemporary economy thus opening a new field of antagonism. Until then Autonomist Marxism has been used to focus more on the transformations of the labour conditions than on the new parasitic modes of surplus extraction. In classical theory rent is distinguished from profit. Rent is the parasitic income an owner can earn just by owning an asset and traditionally is referred to land property. Profit on the contrary is meant to be productive and is referred to the power of capital to generate and extract surplus (from commodity value and workforce). 28 Vercellone criticises the idea of a "good productive capitalism" pointing the becoming rent of profit as the driving force of current economy: below the hype of technological innovation and creative economy, the whole of capitalism is breeding a subterranean parasitic nature. So Vercellone's motto goes "rent is the new profit" in cognitive capitalism. Rent is parasitic because it is orthogonal to the line of the classic profit. Parasite means etymologically "eating at another's table," sucking surplus not directly but in a furtive way. If we produce freely in front of our computers, certainly somebody has his hands in our wallet. Rent is the other side of the commons - once it was over the common land, today over the network commons. Becoming rent of profit means a transformation of management and cognitive workforce too. The autonomisation of capital has grown in parallel with the autonomisation of cooperation. Today managers are dealing more and more often with financial and speculative tasks, while workers are in charge of a distributed management. In this evolution the cognitariat is split into two tendencies. On one side the high-skilled cognitive workers become "functionaries of the capital rent"29 and are co-opted within the rent system through stock options. On the other side the majority of workers faces a declassing (declassement) of life conditions despite skills get more and more rich in knowledge. It is not a mystery that the New Economy has generated more McJobs. This model can be easily applied to the internet economy and its workforce, where users are in charge of content production and web management but do not share any profit. Big corporations like Google for instance make money over the attention economy of the user-generated content with its services Adsense and Adwords. Google provides just a light infrastructure for web advertisement that infiltrates websites as a subtle and mono- dimensional parasite and extracts profit without producing any content. Part of the value is shared of course with users and the Google coders are paid in stock options to develop more sophisticated algorithms. The four dimensions of cognitive capitalism The digital revolution made the reproduction of immaterial objects easier, faster, ubiquitous and almost free. But as the Italian economist Enzo Rullani points out, within cognitive capitalism, "proprietary logic does not disappear but has to subordinate itself to the law of diffusion."30 Intellectual property (and so rent) is no longer based on space and objects but on time and speed. Apart from copyright there are many other modes to extract rent. In his book Economia della conoscenza Rullani writes that cognitive products easy to reproduce have to start a process of diffusion as soon as possible in order to maintain control over it. As an entropic tendency affects any cognitive product, it is not recommended to invest on a static proprietary rent. More specifically there is a rent produced on the multiplication of the uses and a rent produced on the monopoly of a secret. Two opposite strategies: the former is recommended for cultural products like music, the latter for patents. Rullani is inclined to suggest that free multiplication is a vital strategy within cognitive capitalism, as the value of knowledge is fragile and tends to decline. Immaterial commodities (that populate any spectacular, symbolic, affective, cognitive space) seem to suffer of a strong entropic decay of meaning. At the end of the curve of diffusion a banal destiny is waiting for any meme, especially in today's emotional market that constantly tries to sell unique and exclusive experiences. For Rullani the value of a knowledge (extensively of any cognitive product, artwork, brand, information) is given by the composition of three drivers: the value of its performance and application (v); the number of its multiplications and replica (n); the sharing rate of the value among the people involved in the process (p). Knowledge is successful when it becomes self-propulsive and pushes all the three drivers: 1) maximising the value, 2) multiplying effectively, 3) sharing the value that is produced. Of course in a dynamic scenario a compromise between the three forces is necessary, as they are alternative and competitive to each other. If one driver improves, the others get worse. Rullani's model is fascinating precisely because intellectual property has no central role in extracting surplus. In other words the rent is applied strategically and dynamically along the three drivers, along different regimes of intellectual property. Knowledge is therefore projected into a less fictional cyberspace, a sort of invisible landscape where cognitive competition should be described along new space-time coordinates.31 Rullani describe his model as 3D but actually it is 4-dimensional as it runs especially along time. The dynamic model provided by Rullani is more interesting than for instance Benkler's plain notion of "social production" but it is not yet employed by radical criticism and activism. What is clear and important in his perspective is also that the material can not be replaced by the immaterial despite the contemporary hypertrophy of signs and digital enthusiasm. There is a general misunderstanding about cognitive economy as an autonomous and virtuous space. On the contrary, Rullani points out that knowledge exists only through material vectors. The nodal point is the friction between the free reproducibility of knowledge and the non-reproducibility of the material. The immaterial generates value only if it grants meaning to a material process. A music CD for example has to be physically produced and physically consumed. We need our body and especially our time to produce and consume music. And when the CD vector is dematerialised thanks to the evolution of digital media into P2P networks, the body of the artist has to be engaged in a stronger competition. Have digital media galvanised more competition or more cooperation? An apt question for today's internet criticism. A taxonomy of the immaterial parasites A taxonomy of rent and its parasites is needed to describe the cognitive capitalism in detail. Taxonomy is not merely a metaphor as cognitive systems tend to behave like living systems.32 According to Vercellone, a specific form of rent introduced by cognitive capitalism is the cognitive rent that is captured over intellectual property such as patents, copyrights and trademarks. More precisely Rullani contextualises the new forms of rent within a speed-based competitive scenario. He shows how rent can be extracted dynamically along mobile and temporary micro-monopolies, skipping the limits of intellectual property. The possibility of the cognitive rent has been strictly determined by the technological substratum. Digital technologies have opened new spaces of communication, socialisation and cooperation that are only virtually "free." The surplus extraction is channelled generously along the material infrastructure needed to sustain the immaterial "second life." Technological rent33 is the rent applied on the ICT infrastructures when they established a monopoly on media, bandwidth, protocols, standards, software or virtual spaces (including the recent social networks: Myspace, Facebook, etc.). It is composed by different layers: from the materiality of hardware and electricity to the immateriality of the software running a server, a blog, a community. The technological rent is fed by general consumption and social communication, by P2P networks and the activism of Free Culture. The technological rent is different from the cognitive one as it is based on the exploitation of (material and immaterial) spaces and not only knowledge. Similarly attention economy34 can also be described as an attention rent applied on the limited resource of the consumer time-space. In the society of the spectacle and pervasive media the attention economy is responsible of the commodity valorisation at a large degree. The attention time of consumers is a like a scarce piece of land that is constantly disputed. At the end the technological rent is a large part of the metabolism sustaining the techno-parasite. It is well known how the new economy hype was a driver of the speculation over stock markets. The dot-com bubble exploited a spiral of virtual valorisation channelled across the internet and the new spaces of communication. More generally the whole finance world is based on rent. Financialisation is precisely the name of rent that parasites domestic savings.35 Today even wages are directly enslaved by the same mechanism: workers are paid in stock options and so fatally co-opted in the destiny of the owning capital. Finally even the primordial concept of land rent has been updated by cognitive capitalism. As the relation between artistic underground and gentrification show, real estate speculation is strictly related to the "collective symbolic capital" of a physical place (as defined by David Harvey in his essay "The Art of Rent"36). Today both historical symbolic capital (like in Berlin or Barcelona) and artificial symbolic capital (like in Richard Florida's marketing campaigns37) are exploited by real estate speculation on a massive scale. All these types of rent are immaterial parasites. The parasite is immaterial as the rent is produced dynamically along the virtual extensions of space, time, communication, imagination, desire. The parasite is indeed material as the value is transmitted through physical vectors like commodities in the case of cognitive rent and attention rent, media infrastructure in the case of technological rent, real estate in the case of the speculation over symbolic capital, etc. (only the financial speculation is a completely dematerialised machine of value). The awareness of the parasitic dimension of technology should inaugurate the decline of the old digitalist media culture in favour of a new dystopian cult of the techno-parasite. The bicephalous multitude and the grammar of sabotage Many of the subcultures and political schools emerged around knowledge and network paradigms (from Free Culture to the 'creative class' and even many radical readings of these positions) do not acknowledge cognitive capitalism as a conflictive and competitive scenario. Paolo Virno is one of the few authors to underline the "amphibious" nature of the multitude, that is cooperative as well as aggressive if not struggling "within itself."38 The Bildung of an autonomous network is not immediate and easy. As Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter put it: "Networks thrive on diversity and conflict (the notworking), not on unity, and this is what community theorists are unable to reflect upon."39 Lovink and Rossiter notice that cooperation and collective intelligence have their own grey sides. Online life especially is dominated by passivity. Digitalism itself can be described as a sublimation of the collective desire for a pure space and at the same time as the grey accomplice of a parasitic mega- machine. A new theory of the negative must be established around the missing political link of the digital culture: its disengagement with materiality and its uncooperative nature. Networks and cooperation do not always fit each other. Geert Lovink and Christopher Spehr ask precisely this: when do networks start not to work? How do people starts to un-cooperate? Freedom of refusal and not-working are put by Lovink and Spehr at the very foundation of any collaboration (an echo of the Autonomist refusal to work).40 "Free uncooperation" is the negative ontology of cooperation and may provide the missing link that unveils the relation with the consensual parasite. Furthermore, a new right and freedom to sabotage must be included within the notion of uncooperation to make finally clear also the individualistic and private gesture of "illegal" file- sharing. Obfuscated by the ideology of the Free, a new practice is needed to see clearly beyond the screen. If the positive gesture of cooperation has been saturated and digitalised in a neutral space, only a sharpened tool can reveal the movements of the parasite. As profit has taken the impersonal form of rent, its by-effect is the anonymity of sabotage. As rent changed its coordinates of the exploitation, a new theory of rent demands a new theory of sabotage before aiming to any new form of organisation. Which kind of sabotage is affecting the social factory? In cognitive capitalism competition is said to be stronger, but for the same reasons sabotage is easier, as the relation between the immaterial (value) and the material (goods) is even more fragile. The grey multitude of online users are simply learning a grammar of sabotage against capital and its concrete revenues along the immaterial/material conflict. To label as Free Culture the desolate gesture of downloading the last Hollywood movie sounds rather like armchair activism. If radical culture is established along real conflicts, a more frank question is necessary: does "good" digital piracy produce conflict, or simply sell more hardware and bandwidth? Is "good" piracy an effective hazard against real accumulation or does it help other kinds of rent accumulation? Alongside and thanks to any digital commonism, accumulation still runs. Nevertheless in contemporary hype there is no room for a critical approach or a negative tendency. A pervasive density of digital networks and computer-based immaterial labour is not supposed to bring any counter-effect. Maybe as Marx pointed out in his "Fragments on machines," a larger dominion of the (digital) machinery may bring simply an entropy and slowing down of the capitalistic accumulation. That means a more clouded and dense parasitic economy. A therapeutic doubt remains open to a dystopian destiny: is cognitive capitalism simply tending to slow-down capitalism instead of fulfilling the self-organisation of the general intellect? A breaking point of the capitalist accumulation is not found only in the cognitive rent of the music and movie corporations. The previous taxonomy of cognitive parasites has shown how the symbolic and immaterial rent affects daily life on different levels. The displaced multitudes of the global cities are starting right now to understand gentrification and how to deal with the new symbolic capital. In his novel Millennium People Ballard prophetically described the riots originating within the middle class (not the working class!) and targeting cultural institutions like the National Film Theatre in London. Less fictionally and less violently new tensions are rising today in East London against the urban renovation in preparation of the 2012 Olympics. In recent years in Barcelona a big mobilisation has been fighting against the gentrification of the former industrial district Poble Nou following the 22@ plan for a "knowledge-based society."41 Similarly in East Berlin the Media Spree42 project is trying to attract big media companies in an area widely renown for its cultural underground. It is not a coincidence then the Kafkaesque saga of Andrej Holm - an academic researcher at Humboldt University - who was arrested in July 2007 and accused of terrorism because of his research around gentrification and radical activism in Germany.43 As real estate speculation is one of the leading force of parasitic capitalism, these types of struggles and their connections with cultural production are far more interesting than any Free Culture agenda. The link between symbolic capital and material valorisation is symptomatic of a phenomenon which digitalists are not able to track and describe. The constitution of autonomous and productive commons does not pass through the traditional forms of activism and for sure not through a digital-only resistance and knowledge-sharing. The commons should be acknowledged as a dynamic and hybrid space that is constantly configured along the friction between material and immaterial. If the commons becomes a dynamic space, it must be defended in a dynamic way. Because of the immateriality and anonymity of rent, the grammar of sabotage has become the modus operandi of the multitudes trapped into the network society and cognitive capitalism. The sabotage is the only possible gesture specular to the rent - the only possible gesture to defend the commons. Matteo Pasquinelli Amsterdam, January 2008 Thanks to Geert Lovink, Wietske Maas and Arianna Bove for the precious suggestions. A copy of this file can be downloaded from: www.rekombinant.org/mat References Bataille, Georges. La part maudite, Paris: Minuit, 1949. Trans.: The Accursed Share, Vol. I, New York: Zone, 1988. Benkler, Yochai. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press, 2006. Carr, Nicholas. Does IT matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, Harvard Business School Press, 2004. Cramer, Florian. Words Made Flesh: Code, Culture, Imagination, Rotterdam: Piet Zwart Institute, 2005. Davis, Erik. Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, Mysticism in the Age of Information, London: Serpent's Tail, 1999. Hardie, Martin. "Change of the Century: Free Software and the Positive Possibility", Mute, 9 Jan. 2006. www.metamute.org/en/Change- of-the-Century-Free-Software-and-the-Positive-Possibility Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio and. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Harvey, David. "The Art of Rent: Globabalization and the Commodification of Culture" in Spaces of Capital, New York: Routledge, 2001. Kelly, Kevin. "God is the Machine", Wired, Dec. 2002, www.wired.com/ wired/archive/10.12 Kleiner, Dmytri. "Copyfarleft and Copyjustright", Mute, 18 Jul. 2007. Web: www.metamute.org/en/Copyfarleft-and-Copyjustright Kleiner, Dmytri and Richardson, Joanne (alias Anna Nimus). "Copyright, Copyleft & the Creative Anti-Commons", Dec. 2006. subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/nimustext.html Lazzarato, Maurizio and Negri, Antonio. "Travail immateriel et subjectivite", in Futur Anterieur n. 6, Summer 1991, Paris. Lessig, Lawrence. Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, New York: Penguin, 2004. Lovink, Geert. "The Principles of Notworking", Amsterdam: Hogeschool van Amsterdam, 2005. www.hva.nl/lectoraten/documenten/ol09-050224- lovink.pdf Lovink, Geert and Rossiter, Ned. "Dawn of the Organised Networks", Fiberculture 5, 2005. Web: journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/ lovink_rossiter.html Lovink Geert and Spehr, Christoph. "Out-Cooperating the Empire?" in: Lovink, Geert and Rossiter, Ned (eds). MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007. Marazzi, Christian. Capitale e linguaggio: Dalla New Economy all'economia di guerra, Roma: Derive Approdi, 2002. Negri, Antonio and Vercellone, Carlo. "Il rapporto capitale/lavoro nel capitalismo cognitivo", in Posse, "La classe a venire", Nov. 2007 Parikka, Jussi. "Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture", Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organisation, volume 7(2): 2007. Rossiter, Ned. Organized Networks: Media Theory, Creative Labour, New Institutions, Rotterdam: NAi Publisher, Institute of Network Cultures, 2006. Rullani, Enzo. Economia della conoscenza: Creativita' e valore nel capitalismo delle reti. Milano: Carocci, 2004. Terranova, Tiziana. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, London: Pluto Press, 2004. Vercellone, Carlo. "La nuova articolazione salario, rendita, profitto nel capitalismo cognitivo", in Posse, "Potere Precario", 2006. Serres, Michel. Le parasite, Paris: Grasset, 1980. Trad.: The Parasite, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Notes: [ please find notes in the online PDF ]

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Saturday, Dec. 22: Art & Economics Group Quarterly Forum 2007, Q4

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 11:38:00 GMT

Hello Everyone, I will be back in Berlin Tomorrow! Also, Femke Snelting has posted an Interview I did in Brussels in the Open Source Publishing site, please have a listen: --> <a href="http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/?p=380">http://ospublish.constantvzw.org/?p=380</a> Art & Economics Group Quarterly Forum 2007, Q4 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Presented by Tanja Ostojic / David Rych / Dmytri Kleiner on behalf of the Art & Economics Group Projektraum, Galerie 35 Simon-Dach Str. 35 Berlin-Friedrichshain Saturday, December 22, 2007 at 20h Program: - Quarterly report - Talk with the guest of the evening: Alexander Nikolic, artist, researcher and filmmaker based in Vienna - Special edition of Art-bonds: designed by slum-tv / Alexander Nikolic The Forth Quarterly Workshop of the Art & Economics group will be on Saturday, December 22, 2007, 20h, at Galerie 35. The Art & Economics group investigates the intersection of art and political economy. This will be the last in a series of four discussions held this year. Topics include political economy as a theme in art, the economics of art production and economic activity as an action based art practice. The discussion of the evening will start with an introduction of the recent project slum-tv by our guest of the evening, artist Alexander Nikolic (Vienna), and will be dealing with the art of empowerment projects, as much as with micro-economies of representation in cross-cultural exchange. <a href="http://www.slum-tv.info/">http://www.slum-tv.info/</a> Please join us if you can. Yours, Art & Economics Group

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Saturday, September 29, Art & Economics Group Quarterly Forum 2007, Q3

Wed, 26 Sep 2007 21:30:00 GMT

Art & Economics Group Quarterly Forum 2007, Q3 Presented by Tanja Ostojic / David Rych / Dmytri Kleiner on behalf of the Art & Economics Group Projektraum, Galerie 35 Simon-Dach Str. 35 Berlin-Friedrichshain Saturday, September 29, 2007 at 20h Program: - Quarterly report - "Opportunities for Artists", a talk with the guest of the evening, Wooloo Productions. Wooloo is an artists-run organization based in Berlin, Germany. The purpose of Wooloo is to foster new and relevant opportunities for emerging artists. - Special edition of art bonds designed by Wooloo Productions. The Third Quarterly Workshop of the Art & Economics group will be on Saturday, September 29, 2007, 20h, at Galerie 35. The Art & Economics group investigates the intersection of art and political economy. This will be the third in a series of four discussions held this year. Topics will include political economy as a theme in art, the economics of art production and economic activity as an action based art practice. This discussion will be on the topic "Opportunities for Artists", our guest of the evening, Wooloo productions will talk about the history of their project, and we will investigate the topic of the "market" for art labour-power; precarious proletarian, lumpen bourgeois freelancer, and leisure time voluntarism as modes of art production. <a href="http://www.galerie35.de">http://www.galerie35.de</a> Please join us. Yours, Art & Economics Group

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Telekommunisten launches IPO: Invest Labour in Worker's Control.

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:35:00 GMT

/* interested parties should respond to <a href="mailto:contribute@telekommunisten.net">contribute@telekommunisten.net</a> ~ please forward and distribute ~ <a href="http://www.telekommunisten.net">http://www.telekommunisten.net</a> */ --> <a href="mailto:contribute@telekommunisten.net">contribute@telekommunisten.net</a> --> <a href="http://www.telekommunisten.net">http://www.telekommunisten.net</a> The Venture Communist Telephony Collective, Telekommunisten, launches Initial Public Offering giving labour-investors the opportunity to earn equity in this anti-capitalist technology startup. Founded in May 1st, 2006, Telekommunisten is working toward experimenting with and developing the practise of Venture Communism. Starting from the point of departure that political power is an extension of economic power, Venture Communism proposes that the workers of the world can not address the many problems that Capitalism and Corporate Rule is inflicting on the world unless we first start producing and sharing differently, enclosing labour power into commons-based production communities, and thereby reducing surplus value extraction. Worker's should exchange their labour product, not sell their labour power. Any change in the social structure can only follow, and never precede, a change in the mode of production. Telekommunisten believe such a change in the mode of production is emerging from the classical anarchist belief in worker's self management along with epoch defining developments in international telecommunications, peer to peer network technology and the growth of the informal economy being spread by international migration and diasporic/trans-local communities. The existence of Capitalism has always been dependant on privilege granted by the State and enforced by violence, trans-local peer production has the potential to challenge State granted privilege. On May 1st 2007, Telekommunisten launched it's first consumer product, Dialstation, which allows inexpensive international telephone calls to be made from any normal or mobile telephone and includes a user-generated voucher system which enables any user to transfer credit to any user and thus create their own business or local gift economy. Telekommunisten is looking to expand their operations and reach and is thus launching an Initial Public Offering, offering labour investors to become worker-owners and take part in the expansion of our economic and political activities. Currently, Telekommunisten most needs graphic designers/artists to create graphics, animations, and videos to help promote and explain our products as well as the political issues involved and to help us create new products such as t-shirts, stickers and other memorabilia. We also need writers and translators to improve our communications and make them available in other languages. Also, we need energetic and friendly people to distribute Telekommunisten materials in their local area and help spread the word. Major labour investors of ~1000 hours will be granted equal ownership in Telekommunisten and it's assets, becoming full members of the Telekommunisten collective. However even modest contributions from supporters are greatly appreciated and will be rewarded with credit toward Telekommunisten products, such as Dialstation, the soon to be released products such as trick.ca Micro Web/Email Hosting and Tricked, Wiki-based community collaboration and publishing platform and our SOHOBridge VoiP enabled VPN product. We look forward to hearing from interested parties, please send questions and contribution offers to <a href="mailto:contribute@telekommunisten.net">contribute@telekommunisten.net</a> The Revolution Is Calling. /* interested parties should respond to <a href="mailto:contribute@telekommunisten.net">contribute@telekommunisten.net</a> ~ please forward and distribute ~ <a href="http://www.telekommunisten.net">http://www.telekommunisten.net</a> */ --> <a href="mailto:contribute@telekommunisten.net">contribute@telekommunisten.net</a> --> <a href="http://www.telekommunisten.net">http://www.telekommunisten.net</a>

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