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Twelve Theses on WikiLeaks
Geert Lovink & Patrice Riemens
Thesis 0
"What do I think of WikiLeaks? I think it would be a good
idea!" (after Mahatma Gandhi's famous quip on "Western Civilization")
Thesis 1
Disclosures and leaks have been a feature of all eras, however never
before has a non-state or non- corporate affiliated group done
anything on the scale of what WikiLeaks has managed to do, first with
the "collateral murder" video, then the "Afghan War Logs", and now
"Cablegate". It looks like we have now reached the moment that the
quantitative leap is morphing into a qualitative one. When WikiLeaks
hit the mainstream early in 2010, this was not yet the case. In a
sense, the "colossal" WikiLeaks disclosures can be explained as the
consequence of the dramatic spread of IT use, together with the
dramatic drop in its costs, including for the storage of millions of
documents. Another contributing factor is the fact that safekeeping
state and corporate secrets -- never mind private ones -- has become
difficult in an age of instant reproducibility and dissemination.
WikiLeaks becomes symbolic for a transformation in the "information
society" at large, holding up a mirror of things to come. So while one
can look at WikiLeaks as a (political) project and criticize it for
its modus operandi, it can also be seen as the "pilot" phase in an
evolution towards a far more generalized culture of anarchic exposure,
beyond the traditional politics of openness and transparency.
What does Resistance Look Like? The Niger Delta Model
by Ray Boudreaux
When black plumes of oil began gushing forth from the silent bottom deep in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th, everyone in South Louisiana reverted to the crisis mode we have all lived in for periods of time since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Our first question became “What can we do to help save our wetlands?” Thousands of willing Louisianians signed up to volunteer in the protection and cleanup efforts, and people began planning to carpool down the road to the coast to help out.
Like a mine explosion, an outbreak of smallpox, or a chestnut blight, BP’s oil spill looked like just another disaster, a tragic mistake made by benevolent capitalists. But like those past tragedies, this oil spill is a predictable consequence of an industrial civilization where risks are not calculated by those who will face the consequences should something go wrong. There was no doubt a deepwater oil spill could rob people of their landbase and their ability to feed themselves, but that consequence was considered an acceptable risk by those who do not live in South Louisiana: those affected by a spill could just move to the city and work for money to buy their food if something did happen. As is always the case, the people weighing these risks were not those who would be denied the ability to feed themselves; they were lawyers, CEOs, and businessmen in corporate offices, where shrimp cocktail plates and grilled fish greet their conference room meetings exactly at 12:30pm every day.
Movement, Learning:
A Few Reflections on the Exciting UK Winter 2010
Manuela Zechner
Something starts. An event rocks our world. It produces a rupture in the continuous flow of our life; is has a ‘before’ and ‘after’, it marks a clear point or intervention in the flow of our life and into our understanding of who we are, what we are doing and why. An event is a powerful dynamic of subjectivation, a movement through which we are recomposed as subjects. It’s not a merely quantitative dynamic that determines how much of an importance a situation takes on for us, but the degree to which we are moved by it, its degree of resonance. An event resonates, and so we hold it dear even once the situation that brought it about has passed: we want to stay faithful to it. Most events are short, pass in a flash, but they can have a long echo, many waves. They can transform us, and because we want them to transform us, we operate all kinds of efforts to stay close to what they made us see, feel, grasp, become. We try to re-member events, give them a body, inhabit and incorporate them into our previous life. And so we do with this November: remember remember. After Millbank, I heard people say, over and again and in different formulations: ‘I can’t believe it’, ‘something has moved’, ‘we have done it!’, ‘it is really happening’, ‘there’s a movement’… We remember by holding meetings, assemblies, training sessions, discussions, preparing ourselves to become more, more like what we want to be. This text tries to operate this sort of re-membering through writing.We liked the taste of 50.000 people gathered in joy and anger. It rocks what our bodies can do together. This text attempts to reflect on the emergence of a student movement in November 2010 through retracing its affective dimension.
Telling the Truth about Class
Gáspár Miklós Tamás
One of the central questions of social theory has been the relationship between class and knowledge, and this has also been a crucial question in the history of socialism. Differences between people – acting and knowing subjects – may influence our view of the possibility of valid cognition. If there are irreconcilable discrepancies between people’s positions, going perhaps as far as incommensurability, then unified and rational knowledge resulting from a reasoned dialogue among persons is patently impossible. The Humean notion of ‘passions’, the Nietzschean notions of ‘resentment’ and ‘genealogy’, allude to the possible influence of such an incommensurability upon our ability to discover truth.
COP-16 Day 2: The Specter of Tragedy and Klimaforum
Intlibecosoc
The second day of the sixteenth Conference of Parties (COP-16) summit in Cancún follows much the same as the first, a day that saw Mexican President Felipe Calderón assert in remarks before the delegates assembled in Moon Palace—a highly exclusive hotel, center of the COP-16 talks—that the potential failure of the Cancún talks—that is, their failure precisely to look beyond dominant individual and national interests—would be a “tragedy,” and that climate-negotiators should act during the summit’s two weeks with the interests of humanity in mind. He stressed in particular the concern that should be evinced in Cancún for existing children and future generations. In his address to delegates on the same day, Mario Molina, a Mexican scientist awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995, declared it to be “necessary and urgent” that COP-16 produce a climate-agreement—this, amidst a widespread lack of confidence among country-governments and commentators that Cancún will produce any agreement at all.
US Education and the Crisis
Michael Hardt
Governments across the globe are dramatically reducing funding for public education and raising university tuition rates. These measures are often cast as a response to the current economic crisis but really their implementation began well before it. Whereas in Britain, Italy, and other European countries students battle police in the streets and experiment with new means to protest such government actions, there is a relative calm on U.S. campuses.
COP-16 in Cancún: Day 1
Intlibecosoc
Entering the city of Cancún—site of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change’s sixteenth Conference of Parties (COP-16), which began today—one is struck immediately by the number of ‘areas de revisión’—checkpoints, effectively—maintained by the Mexican police, with the support of the Mexican military. The checkpoints on the highway leading north from the coastal Yucatan cities of Playa del Carmen, Tulum, and Chetumal, like their counterparts throughout Cancún itself, seem for the most part to be mere formalities: drivers are asked to slow down but not stop and are then subsequently hailed on. The purpose for these checkpoints, beyond that of being able to project force and control movement, may then in part be to intimidate onlookers and passersby, to remind members of the subordinated classes of the presently ubiquitous power of the State: any other explanation for the stationing of Hummers that have soldiers manning machine-gun mounts in locations in which large numbers of people congregate would defy the imagination.
The Antagonistic University?
A Conversation on Cuts, Conviviality and Capitalism
Anja: Let me begin by posing three questions. Firstly, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that modes of labour are appropriating cognitive, communicational and affective skills. What does this mean to you for the political potential of academic and collaborative work?
Secondly, given that there are massive cuts being proposed to the education sector through a regime of austerity measures, and given that the current labour paradigm is one that produces precarious, alienated, competitive and individualised relations between workers, do you think that the university as an institution (and the kinds of labour it engenders) is a potent site of struggle and strike?
And thirdly, what kinds of collective relations between people and modes of organising do you think are possible for the university struggles, and where do you think we should place our emphasis? How can we negotiate a transversal between micro- and macro- political desires, anxieties, exhaustions, solidarities and hopes? (Please feel free to comment on strategies you think are useful for building more caring and collective common worlds in general as well if you like).
Comments on Li Minqi's The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy
Lang Yan
The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy attempts to fit the rise of China into the world-systems approach of Immanuel Wallerstein. Luckily Li is much more critical of the contemporary Chinese model of development for creating a post-capitalist world than Giovanni Arrighi’s Adam Smith in Beijing. For all the talk about the rise of China and China’s relationship to the US-centered world economy, this is not something that has been well-theorized to date. The book, however, focuses more on introducing the world-systems approach than on contemporary China. The strongest chapter on China shows well the contradictions of socialist accumulation during the Maoist period. I wish there was an equally strong chapter on the political economy of the reform period, for such a chapter would surely support Li’s argument about China’s place in contemporary global capitalism. His section of China’s macroeconomic imbalances could benefit from a discussion of present attempts by the state to generate expanded internal demand, such as the New Socialist Countryside policy.
Gulf Coast Resistance: What Does Resistance Look Like?
The Niger Delta Model
Ray Boudreaux
Calculated Risks
When black plumes of oil began gushing forth from the silent bottom deep in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20th, everyone in South Louisiana reverted to the crisis mode we have all lived in for periods of time since Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Our first question became “What can we do to help save our wetlands?” Thousands of willing Louisianians signed up to volunteer in the protection and cleanup efforts, and people began planning to carpool down the road to the coast to help out.
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