Where are the weapons?
I have only those of my reason
and in my violence there is no place

for even the trace of an act that is not
intellectual. Is it laughable
if, suggested by my dream on this

gray morning, which the dead can see
and other dead too will see but for us
is just another morning,

I scream words of struggle?
Who knows what will become of me
at noon, but the old poet is "ab joy"
[..]

¶ Friday, October 28, 2005 0 Comments

Geldof, having excluded African artists from the London concert, eventually gave his blessing to "Africa Calling", a hastily arranged concert in Cornwall. The sponsors included Nestlé, accused of benefiting from the HIV/Aids epidemic in Africa by selling more milk substitute products; Rio Tinto, the world's largest mining corporation, condemned for alleged human rights and environmental abuses; and Britain's biggest arms manufacturer, BAE Systems - which, according Mike Lewis of the UK's Campaign Against Arms Trade, is "fuelling conflicts across Africa". Criticism of MPH's celebrity set has particularly angered Oxfam, and insiders believe the agency will lead a breakaway from other MPH members once the coalition disbands early next year, taking Comic Relief and Bono's charity - Debt Aids Trade Africa - with it. Given Oxfam's free-trade solutions to Third World poverty, and - along with Curtis, Bono and Geldof - its leadership's close relationship to New Labour, this scenario could be an encouraging development for efforts to realign MPH with the "global justice movement". [..]

¶ Wednesday, October 26, 2005 0 Comments

Multitudes, Creative Organisation and the Precarious Condition of New
Media Labour

:: Dawn of the Organised Networks ::

Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter

At first glance the concept of "organised networks" appears oxymoronic. In
technical terms, all networks are organised. There are founders, administrators,
moderators and active members who all take up roles. Think also back to the early
work on cybernetics and the "second order" cybernetics of Bateson and others.
Networks consist of mobile relations whose arrangement at any particular time is
shaped by the "constitutive outside" of feedback or noise.[1] The order of
networks is made up of a continuum of relations governed by interests, passions,
affects and pragmatic necessities of different actors. The network of relations is
never static, but this is not to be mistaken for some kind of perpetual fluidity.
Ephemerality is not a condition to celebrate for those wishing to function as
political agents.

Why should networks get organised? Isn't their chaotic, disorganised nature a good
thing that needs to be preserved? Why should the informal atmosphere of a network
be disturbed? Don't worry. Organised networks do not yet exist. The concept
presented here is to be read as a proposal, a draft, in the process of becoming
that needs active steering through disagreement and collective elaboration.[2]
What it doesn't require is instant deconstruction. Everyone can do that. Needless
to say, organised networks have existed for centuries. Just think of the Jesuits.
The history of organised networks can and will be written, but that doesn't
advance our inquiry for now. The networks we are talking about here are specific
in that they are situated within digital media. They can be characterised by their
advanced irrelevance and invisibility for old media and p-in-p (people in power).
General network theory might be useful for enlightenment purposes, but it won't
answer the issues that new media based social networks face. Does it satisfy you
to know that molecules and DNA patterns also network? [..]
Read the whole at Nettime
 

¶ Friday, October 21, 2005 0 Comments

A teacher asks her class: "If there are 5 birds sitting on a fence and you shoot one of them, how many will be left?" She calls on little Johnny.

"None, they all fly away with the first gunshot."

The teacher replies: "The correct answer is 4, but I like your thinking."

Then Little Johnny says: "I have a question for YOU. There are three women sitting on a bench having ice cream. One is delicately licking the sides of the triple scoop of ice cream. The second is gobbling down the top and sucking the cone. The third is biting off the top of the ice cream. Which one is married?"

The teacher, blushing a great deal, replies, "Well I suppose the one that's gobbled down the top and sucked the cone."

"The correct answer is the one with the wedding ring on... but I like your thinking."

¶ Tuesday, October 18, 2005 0 Comments

Nettime - A battle has erupted over who governs the internet, with America demanding to
maintain a key role in the network it helped create and other countries demanding
more control.

The European commission is warning that if a deal cannot be reached at a meeting
in Tunisia next month the internet will split apart.

At issue is the role of the US government in overseeing the internet's address
structure, called the domain name system (DNS), which enables communication
between the world's computers. It is managed by the California-based,
not-for-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) under
contract to the US department of commerce.

A meeting of officials in Geneva last month was meant to formulate a way of
sharing internet governance which politicians could unveil at the UN-sponsored
World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis on November 16-18. A European
Union plan that goes a long way to meeting the demands of developing countries to
make the governance more open collapsed in the face of US opposition. [..]

¶ Tuesday, October 18, 2005 0 Comments

The “pornography for war gore” story that is in the New York Times, Guardian and the London Metro today (Sept.05) is an excellent example of a story flowing between the blogosphere and mainstream news outlets.

¶ Saturday, October 15, 2005 0 Comments

Tribe and Proliferation of guns to terrorise neighbours (nov. 2004)

¶ Saturday, October 08, 2005 0 Comments

Jebba's (AP) — Hours after Hurricane Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast and knocked out telecommunications across much of the region, Mac Dearman visited shelters in northern Louisiana to connect telephones.

Dearman doesn’t work for a phone company.

[..] Just as Katrina proved the vulnerability of traditional telephone and cellular networks, it also showed how Internet-based technologies could be used to speedily re-establish links with the outside world. [..] “It’s pretty clear that it was the folks out in the field who did some amazing heroics to get communications back up,”“We need to move toward a system where people are empowered to do what they can do.” said Carl Malamud, chief technology officer of the Center for American Progress think tank. [..] Read it on the Blag

¶ Wednesday, October 05, 2005 0 Comments