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[F]rom the very beginnings of informatics—the science of information—as an institutionalized field in the 1960s, anti-capitalists have tried to imagine less oppressive, perhaps even liberatory, ways of indexing and searching information. Two Latin American social movements in particular—Cuban socialism and liberation theology—inspired experiments with different approaches to informatics from the 1960s to the 1980s. Taken together, these two historical moments can help us imagine new ways to organize information that threaten the capitalist status quo—above all, by facilitating the wide circulation of the ideas of the oppressed.
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On the occasion of the birthday of Yugoslavian director Dušan Makavejev, who passed away last year, we explore what his classic 1971 film WR: Mysteries of the Organism has to offer today’s struggles against nationalism, fascism, and dogmatism.
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Instead, what would it look like relate to today’s machines as the 19th century weavers did, and make decisions about technology in the present? To look past the false promise of the future, and straight at what the robot embodies now, who it serves, and how it works for or against us.
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This paper seeks to trouble and complicate core assumptions about transitional justice and archives and to critically examine the relationship between them. Records about conflict and dictatorship are like records in general never only a reflection of realities, but they constitute these realities. Following Harris’ plea to find ‘exigencies’ to the transitional justice paradigm it suggests the term transitional archives to highlight the multi-layered afterlife of human rights records. It thereby emphasises the open-ended nature, ‘the in-becoming’, of transitional archives. It argues that by including critical archival studies in our thinking of transitional justice and a violent past, we can push beyond the dominant discourse of healing, closure and reconciliation, and open up space to investigate not only how the past but also transitional justice itself is produced at the intersection of power, memory, narrative and violence.
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We know academic institutions have great desire and need for what we have to offer. We feel it in being incessantly called upon to give of ourselves. We want to contribute our expertise in ways that feel just, supported, acknowledged, duly compensated. Right now, we feel like it is taken from us, that we are a resource being mined. You frequently tell us you welcome our voice, but we do not feel silenced; we feel wrung out. Your current methods of working with us are unsustainable.
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Live cheap. Fungi disassemble what they have available to them and build with the resulting molecules. This is what voice of the mushroom said to Terence McKenna: ‘when you’re a mushroom, you live cheap!’. We must strive to allow for running nodes with the lowest possible resource inputs.
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As Congressman Edward Markey said in a debate on the fairness doctrine, “It does not seem to me to be an outrageous idea that broadcasters – who are granted, at no cost, the exclusive use of a scarce public resource, the electromagnetic spectrum – be required to inform the public in a responsible manner.” Indeed, to the extent that broadcasters or other users are given a government-protected monopoly over a particular range of spectrum, it does seem fair that they have to pay for the privilege. This rationale would disappear, however, insofar as an area of the spectrum is governed as a commons. Just as the users of the atmosphere (that is, everyone who breathes) do not need to pay the government for the privilege, neither should those spectrum users who participate in commons governance.
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The moment demands not another protocol, not another manifesto, not another social network, but a savvy understanding of the political dynamics of protocols and the nakedness of today’s networks. By embracing a reverse Shock Doctrine as a Service, developing clear, historically-grounded narratives, and building sensitivity to the user’s abilities and safety, these new decentralisation reformists can succeed where others have failed. Their solution cannot mimic an existing platform, and they must resist the temptation to trust their personal ephemera to the cloud. The phone books, calendars, notepads, photo albums and secrets that communities upload are exactly the debased thrills that extrajudicial perverts hunger after. These communities, their communications, their social graphs and their movements are ripe for exploitation. The only future is one where this is reality is embraced and fought against with every possible effort.
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Any community that uses a technology should develop a deep relationship to it. Instead of being framed for specific applications, the technology would be allowed to freely connect and grow roots to all kinds of areas of human and non-human life. Nothing is “just a tool” or “just a toy”, nobody is “just a user”.
There would be local understanding of each aspect of the technology. Not merely the practical use, maintenance and production but the cultural, artistic, ecological, philosophical and historical aspects as well. Each local community would make the technology locally relevant.
Each technology would have one or more “scenes” where the related skills and traditions are maintained and developed. Focal practices are practiced, cultural artifacts are created, enthusiasm is roused and channeled, inventions are made. The “scenes” would not replace formal institutions or utilitarian practices but would rather provide an undergrowth to support them.
🔄 repost from @neauoire@merveilles.town
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On power efficiencies in the data center at rack-level architectures.
Mark A. Matienzo