New 2007 Jubilee Saints Calendar

Autonomedia

Autonomedia's new Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2007 is now back from the printers, for our fifteenth year in a row.

Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project — a reprieve from the 500-year-long sentence to life-at-hard-labor that the European colonization of the "New World" and the ensuing devastations of the rest of the world has represented. It is increasingly clear — at the dawn of this new millennium — that the Planetary Work Machine will not rule forever! Celebrate with this calendar on which every day is a holiday!

Please note:

The list price is US $9.95, but orders of 5-9 copies of the calendar will receive a 20% discount ($7.96 each). Orders of 10 or more copies will receive a 40% discount ($5.97 each). Orders for the 2007 calendar, individually or with discounts on orders in these small quantities, can be placed here.

Memoirs of a Video Activist

Joanne Richardson, Subsol

I left Bucharest when I was 9. My parents were political refugees. We
received political asylum in Austria and later moved to New York. I grew
up poor but privileged, in the sense that I had an education at some of
the best schools in America, social factories for the production of
Marxist intellectuals. And then I dropped out of my PhD, left the US, and
returned to Romania to become a video activist. For many years I was
weaned on the same canon and rules of etiquette as most Western media
activists. But they always seemed strange to me, as if I was seeing them
outside their frame and hearing them in a foreign language that I only
partly understood.

What does video activism mean today? From large demonstrations against the
World Trade Organization to small protests against Sky TV in Rome, you can
see almost as many people with video cameras as protestors. They go where
television cameras don't, providing live news about events that are
neglected or misrepresented, documenting police abuse, or challenging the
neutrality of the mass-media. Recent video activism has its roots in the
alternative media movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Although an
oppositional press with an alternative content has existed since the
nineteenth century, it privileged intellectuals as experts and maintained
structural hierarchies of knowledge. What was different about many of the
social movements of the 1960s and 1970s was the desire to provoke social
change not through alternative ideas but through the process of production
itself, by turning spectators into producers and eliminating the
difference between experts who create culture and its passive consumers.

Audio Recording of Brad Will Memorial

New York City, Nov. 11, 2006

Audio recorded and compiled by your friends at the August Sound
Coalition

Brad Will Memorial

St Mark's Church

New York, NY

November 11, 2006

Segment

John Wright "Hobo's Lullabye" (partial)

Frank Morales Introduction

Simon discusses current situation in Oaxaca

"Brad's Song" by Stephanie Rogers

Brandon Jourdan

Dyan Neary + video

Segment 2

David Rovics

Rockdove Collective Meditation

Jenny Smith, John Wright and Mark Read sing "I'll Fly Away"

Al Penley speaks

Ann Waldman, Phil Good and Bernadette Mayer read poems

Julie Patton

Pastrami sings "A Drop of Water"

Roger Manning

Segment 3


Brant Sharman

Lower East Side video footage of Brad

Aresh Javadi, Harry Bubbins and Emily Nobel Maxwell read excerpts from
"We Are Everywhere"

Tofu sings "Willie Says"

Pria/Warcry

Andy Stern + Brad's sister Wendy read Brad's last dispatch from Oaxaca

Stephan Said sings "It Rose from the Dead" to Hungry March Band
procession (partial)

Coveting the Holocaust

Chris Hedges

From TruthDig

I sent my New York University journalism students out to write stories based on any one of the themes in the Ten Commandments. A woman of Armenian descent came back with an article about how Armenians she had interviewed were covetous of the Jewish Holocaust. The idea that one people who suffered near decimation could be covetous of another that also suffered near decimation was, to say the least, different. And when the French lower house of parliament approved a bill earlier this month making it a crime to deny the Armenian genocide I began to wonder what it was she, and those she had interviewed, actually coveted.

She was not writing about the Holocaust itself—no one covets the suffering of another—but how it has become a potent political and ideological weapon in the hands of the Israeli government and many in the American Jewish community. While Armenians are still fighting to have the genocide of some 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Turks accepted as historical fact, many Jews have found in the Nazi Holocaust a useful instrument to deflect criticism of Israel and the dubious actions of the pro-Israeli lobby as well as many Jewish groups in the United States.

crudo writes:

Modesto Anarcho #1 Out Now

Direct Action Anti-Authoritarians,

"Modesto Anarcho" is a new journal produced by the Direct Action Anti-Authoritarians (DAAA) Collective, based out of Modesto, CA in the Central Valley.

The goal of the journal is to document, analyze, and give spotlight to the autonomous social struggles in the area, as well as organizing work that the collective is engaging in. The journal is also meant to be tool of propaganda, to show young people and those interested in working on local projects what is going on in the city. We are looking to get the journal out to outside collectives, (especially those in California), as well as info shops, individuals, bookstores, and various other anarchist/anti-authoritarian groupings. Some of the articles have already been posted online, and more will be posted as time goes on.

Also included in this post after the ordering information, is the introduction to the journal — enjoy!

Paolo writes:

"Ctrl-Alt-Del" Sticker Art Project

Organization for the Liberation of the Pixel

I invite everyone to see and join the "CTRL–ALT–DEL" Art Project.
It is a sticker-art collective project that has recently won the first prize at Memefest 2006, International Festival of Radical Communication in Ljubljana.
You can find it on the web here.

Please help me to shutdown the system!!

Short Description

Press Ctrl Alt Del (Canc in Italy) to reboot the system.
This is a political street-sticker action made up of four stickers attached to any location within a city.
To reboot the system you don't need ancient ideologies or violent revolutions,but you just have to press the three keys together !!

Unfortunately, alone you can't do it, because of the distance between them.

I invite all of you to print the three keys images (in A3 or A4 size )as well as the image "press ctrl-alt-del to reboot the system" and to affix them on a building or location of your choice.Please keeep the original proportions and distance (as the image shows).

Photograph it and please send me an image of your intervention to be published on line. Together, these images of urban intervention will become a collective call to reboot the system.

Organization for the Liberation of the Pixel
olp@virgilio.it

Critique of Ranking and Listing

Exchange with Kenneth C. Werbin

Geert Lovink, nettime

Since the early nineties I have been engaged in email-based
mailinglists. In the beginning it was a tool for to communicate and
exchange texts and arguments with a growing group of people. I hesitate
to use the word community as I never saw lists as safe areas for
identity building but as arenas of contestation. To me, email lists
were primarily discursive machines, essential in the making of a
networked digital public domain. As it happens things started to get
complicated. Group psychology kicked in, there was 'symbolic capital'
created and people's time and emotions had to be rewarded. Five or so
years ago the study of list cultures emerged. These were not technical,
even though many complained about the technical limitations of list
software such as Majordomo, Listserv and Mailman. It was the limited
complexity of the dialogues, the lack of overview one gets of threaded
discussions that irritated common users who had no emotional investment
in the project.

Even though I had a particular interest in contemporary studies of
German fascism, I never made the link between electronic mailing lists
and the bureaucratic efforts of Eichmann's assistants to list Jews,
gypsies and others. The computer aspect of listing deportees had been
described by Goetz Aly and Karl-Heinz Roth in their brief but excellent
1984 book Die restlose Erfassung (The Nazi Census), which, at the time,
made a big impact on me. As Michael Kater writes in his review (1),
order is the premise of destruction. We all somehow know that Ordnung
by punchcard prepared the path to Auschwitz. But to read all the
details, and then remember, and implement its consequences in everyday
politics is something else. In particular if you've made computing your
passion and profession, as happened to me. Edwin Black's IBM and the
Holocaust from 2001 provided us with the complete history. Far more
detailed, it fails the analytic clarity of Aly and Roth, and political
engagement, as this booklet was part of a poltical campaign against
organizing a census in West-Germany. The collective memory of why
authorities gather data of entire populations, back then, and a broad
resistance was still alive, back then — and vanished so rapidly,
particularly after 911. The resistance in 1970 against a census in the
Netherlands is one of the first campaigns that I remember. My parents,
and in particular my mother refused categorically and explained the
protest to me. The burning of Amsterdam's population register was one
of the many heroic acts of the Dutch resistance that I grew up with.
However, the attack in March 1943 came too late, and the question why
the deportation of Jews was so systematic, so successful, particularly
in my birth town, so proud of its Nazi resistance, could only be posed
in the nineties, and is still a matter of fierce debate.

Hailing from a long-line of Marxist thinkers and activists, as well as
Shoah descendants, Montreal-based Kenneth C. Werbin works as a PhD
student in the Department of Communication Studies at Concordia
University. His nearly finished dissertation, "The List Serves: Bare
Life in Cybernetic Order," probes questions of list culture; arguing
that the Third Reich's engagement of a conjunction of early IBM
computing technology, listing practices, and discourses of
surveillance, identification and control, was the first cybernetic
feedback system for maintaining social order around bare life; and
investigating how the resonance of this conjunction reverberates today.
Also a part-time lecturer, Kenneth participates as a moderator/event
coordinator for the University of the Streets Public Dialogue Series,
and is a student researcher with the Canadian Research Alliance for
Community Innovation and Networking. I got into contact with Kenneth
Werbin in 2005. The context of this exchange was the June 2006 debates
on the nettime list concerning moderation and the growing limits of
email lists in an era in which most users hang out on the Web, play
games on their mobile phones and no longer care about their
over-spammed email inboxes.

Ben_Meyers writes:

Massive Autonomedia Booksale
Through September 1, 2006

Autonomedia

Autonomedia — the host of the Interactivist Info Exchange — is having a fundraising and shelf-clearing warehouse sale. Nearly every Autonomedia title in the bookstore is discounted from 20–70%, in an effort to clear out some stock and generate some cash to pay the printers for our upcoming season of new titles. There are many, many hidden gems in our warehouse, and we're eager to use this sale to move them into your hands.

Some examples:


"This World We Must Leave," a collection of essays from the challenging ultra-leftist French/Italian writer Jacques Camatte, for less than $5.

"Lab U.S.A.," an illustrated investigation into racially and authoritarian motivated science, by World War 3 Illustrated artist Kevin Pyle. $7.18 (was $18).

"The Anarchists," by John Henry Mackay, a great novel set in Victorian London at the time of the Haymarket riots. This book was originally published in 1891, and reissued by Autonomedia just over a century later, and it's under-read, to say the least. It's great! And we've got it on sale for $6 and change!

And there are many more. Go to the Autonomedia Bookstore for a full list of Autonomedia books, and please consider picking up something you haven't heard of, and maybe another copy of a favorite book as a gift, or a charged object to be left in a public place...

Socialism of the Twenty-First Century International Internet Institute

Dear colleagues and friends,

We are currently seeking to establish a project to be called the Socialism
of the Twenty-First Century International Internet Institute. While we are
aware that you are heavily burdened with academic work and other
commitments, we ask you to lend your attention to this initiative.

In Russia and other “former socialist” countries, socialist scholars are
working to develop the ideas of creative Marxism. Although many of these
scholars have impressive theoretical backgrounds, they are almost totally
isolated from world developments in socialist theory. At the same time,
socialist scholars in other countries have very little information about the
studies undertaken by both Soviet and post-Soviet creative Marxists.

mh writes:

Journal of Aesthetics and Protest

Submisson Call

(Note: Spanish language call below)

Cut from a mass-culture, we so rarely directly address ourselves and one another. As such, it’s the loudest, richest and oldest voices that carry the day. So, we experience wars and Walmart instead of talking about "who am I" or "who are we" and figuring out "what can we do?"

We are interested in finding out “How do we say we?”

Proposals are invited for The Journal of Aesthetics & Protest’s Issue 5 for either examples of historic speeches, amazing contemporary speakers or created speech that resonate or cause dissonance: Speeches from stages, podiums, music clubs, soapboxes, etc...