Internet as Playground and Factory Conference, New York City THE INTERNET AS PLAYGROUND AND FACTORY A CONFERENCE ON THE CHANGING FACE OF LABOR IN THE DIGITAL AGE First-of-its-Kind Conference Examines How Social Media is Transforming the Economy, Labor and Society November 12—14, The New School, New York Media Contacts: Bridget Fisher, 212.229.5667 x3094; fisherb@newschool.edu Sandra Ordonez, 212.229.5667 x3994; sandratordonez@hotmail.com EUGENE LANG COLLEGE PRESENTS: New York, October 12, 2009—On November 12 to 14, Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts will host an international conference, "The Internet as Playground and Factory," which will explore the meaning and changing face of labor in the digital era. For three days, 90 theorists, artists, legal scholars, activists, students, programmers, historians, and social media experts will join to re-evaluate what constitutes unpaid labor, value, leisure, play, fun, and exploitation in an economy that is increasingly driven by the expropriation of all our blogging, data entries in online profiles, and submitted photos and videos. This event will commence a biennial series of conferences titled, “The Politics of Digital Media.”

John Holloway on "Crack Capitalism" 7-9pm, Monday 26th October, London At the height of the anti-capitalist movement, John Holloway’s book Change The World without Taking Power provoked an international debate*. Eight years later, after the failure of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, combined with the failure of the capitalist economy, anti-capitalism is back on the agenda. John Holloway will introduce his forthcoming book, Crack Capitalism, followed by a discussion on how we can change the world without repeating the tragedies of twentieth century socialism.

London Anarchist Bookfair, Mute Magazine Discussion with John Holloway 4-6pm, Saturday 24th October, London Capitalism’s Present Crisis - How Will It End? The capitalist system is facing years of crisis and social instability. This raises two questions: 1) what caused the crisis? Was it ‘greedy bankers’, the natural tendencies of the capitalist system, or the resistance of the working class? 2) how will the crisis end? Will it be with more state regulation, more cuts in living standards or with working class revolution?

Imperceptible Strategies, Unidentified Autonomous Organizations :: A Drifting Seminar :: London, October 23rd, 2009 :: Anarchist and autonomous politics are often associated, in a kneejerk way, with a celebration of chaos and disorder: a rejection of all forms of organization. The reduction of radical politics to a cheap joke (‘anarchist organization, what’s that?’) comes to substitute for an actual understanding of autonomous organizational practices. Far from rejecting organization all together, the history of autonomous politics contains a wealth of different modes of organizing, from the formation of temporary autonomous zones to affinity group models, maroon communities to networks and collectives. These are forms of organizing that not always acknowledged as being organizations because they do not conform to what it is assumed organizations necessarily are: durable, static, and hierarchical. This understanding of organization obscures and makes difficult an actual engagement with the merits and weaknesses of different forms of organizing. But what would be found if rather than working from a fixed and unchanging concept of organization, one that excludes temporary forms of organization from consideration, it was attempted to tease out the organizational dynamics from all the temporary alliances and alliances that appear and disappear? Might it be possible that we are already enmeshed in a world of unidentified autonomous organizations, a milieu of potential liberation that has remained imperceptible because of a narrow understanding of what organizations are? And might it not be that this imperceptibly, rather than being a condition to be addressed as a problem, could rather be part of building of what Robin D.G. Kelley calls an infrapolitical sphere: a space for politics coming out of people’s everyday experiences that do not express themselves as radical political organization at all. The aim of this encounter is to explore the connections between anarchism, autonomism, and the revolutions of everyday life, drawing out conceptual tools useful to developing and deepening the politics of these infrapolitical spaces and organization. How can we strategize and build from the connections and movements of the undercommons, working from everyday encounters to compose new forms of social movement? How can we connect and work between spontaneous forms of resistance without forcing them into some larger form that ossifies them?