[Nettime-bold] REMOVE

[Karin Kuschel <karin.kuschel@msbk-proximity.de>]

> ----------
> Von: 	owner-nettime-l-digest@bbs.thing.net
> Antwort an: 	nettime-l@bbs.thing.net
> Gesendet: 	Mittwoch, 13. Februar 2002 0:15 Uhr
> An: 	nettime-l-digest@bbs.thing.net
> Betreff: 	nettime-l-digest V1 #625
> 
> 
> nettime-l-digest      Tuesday, February 12 2002      Volume 01 : Number
> 625
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 01:49:14 -0000 (EST)
> From: "nettime's_mathemagical_thematist" <nettime@bbs.thing.net>
> Subject: <nettime> Hello again [spam specimen]
> 
> AS SEEN ON NATIONAL TV: This is the one!
> 
> Parents of 15-year-old find $71,000 cash hidden in his
> closet.
> 
> Does this headline look familiar? Of course it does.
> You most likely have just seen this story recently
> featured on a major nightly news program (USA).
> 
> 
> His mother was cleaning and putting laundry away when
> she came across a large brown paper bag that was
> suspiciously buried beneath some clothes and a
> skateboard in the back of her 15-year-old sons
> closet.Nothing could have prepared her for the shock
> she got when she opened the bag and found it was full
> of cash.Five-dollar bills, twenties, fifties and
> hundreds - all neatly rubber-banded in labeled piles.
> 
> 
> "My first thought was that he had robbed a bank", says
> the 41-year-old woman, "There was over $71,000 dollars
> in that bag -- that's more than my husband earns in a
> year".
> 
> The woman immediately called her husband at the
> car-dealership where he worked to tell him what she
> had discovered.He came home right away and they drove
> together to the boys school and picked him up.Little
> did they suspect that where the money came from was
> more shocking than actually finding it in the closet.
> 
> As it turns out, the boy had been sending out, via
> E-mail, a type of "Report" to E-mail addresses that he
> obtained off of the Internet. Everyday after school
> for the past 2 months, he had been doing this right on
> his computer in his bedroom.
> 
> "I just got the E-mail one day and I figured what the
> heck, I put my name on it like the instructions said
> and I started sending it out", says the clever
> 15-year-old.
> 
> The E-mail letter listed 5 addresses and contained
> instructions to send one $5 dollar bill to each person
> on the list, then delete the address at the top and
> move the others addresses Down , and finally to add
> your name to the top of the list.
> 
> The letter goes on to state that you would receive
> several thousand dollars in five-dollar bills within 2
> weeks if you sent out the letter with your name at the
> top of the 5-address list. "I get junk E-mail all the
> time, and really did not think it was going to work",
> the boy continues.
> 
> Within the first few days of sending out the E-mail,
> the Post Office Box that his parents had gotten him
> for his video-game magazine subscriptions began to
> fill up with not magazines, but envelopes containing
> $5 bills.
> 
> "About a week later I rode [my bike] down to the post
> office and my box had 1 magazine and about 300
> envelops stuffed in it. There was also a yellow slip
> that said I had to go up to the [post office] counter.
> I thought I was in trouble or something (laughs)". He
> goes on, "I went up to the counter and they had a
> whole box of more mail for me.I had to ride back home
> and empty out my backpack because I could not carry it
> all".
> 
> Over the next few weeks, the boy continued sending out
> the E-mail."The money just kept coming in and I just
> kept sorting it and stashing it in the closet,barely
> had time for my homework".He had also been riding his
> bike to several of the banks in his area and
> exchanging the $5 bills for twenties, fifties and
> hundreds.
> 
> "I didn't want the banks to get suspicious so I kept
> riding to different banks with like five thousand at a
> time in my backpack. I would usually tell the lady at
> the bank counter that my dad had sent me in [to
> exchange the money] and he was outside waiting for
> me.One time the lady gave me a really strange look and
> told me that she would not be able to do it for me and
> my dad would have to come in and do it, but I just
> rode to the next bank down the street (laughs)."
> 
> Surprisingly, the boy did not have any reason to be
> afraid.The reporting news team examined and
> investigated the so-called "chain-letter" the boy was
> sending out and found that it was not a chain-letter at
> all.In fact, it was completely legal according to US
> Postal and Lottery Laws, Title 18, Section 1302 and
> 1341, or Title 18, Section 3005 in the US code, also in
> the code of federal regulations, Volume 16, Sections
> 255 and 436, which state a product or service must be
> exchanged for money received.
> 
> Every five-dollar bill that he received contained a
> little note that read, "Please send me report number
> XYX".This simple note made the letter legal because he
> was exchanging a service (A Report on how-to) for a
> five-dollar fee.
> 
> Here is the letter that the 15-year-old was sending
> out by E-mail, you can do the exact same thing he was
> doing, simply by following the instructions in this
> letter.
> 
> 
> Dear Friends & Future Millionaires:
> 
> AS SEEN ON NATIONAL TV:
> 
> 
> Making over half million dollars every 4 to 5 months
> from your home for an investment of only $25 U.S. 
> Dollars expense one time
> THANKS TO THE COMPUTER AGE AND THE INTERNET !
> 
> =======================================================================
> 
> BE A MILLIONAIRE LIKE OTHERS WITHIN A YEAR!!!
> 
> Before you say ''Bull'', please read the following.
> 
> This is the letter you have been hearing about on the
> news lately. Due to the popularity of this letter on
> the Internet, a national weekly news program recently
> devoted an entire show to the investigation of this
> program described below, to see if it really can make
> people money. The show also investigated whether or not
> the program was legal.
> 
> Their findings proved once and for all that there are
> ''absolutely NO Laws prohibiting the participation in
> the program and if people can follow the simple
> instructions, they are bound to make some mega bucks
> with only $25 out of pocket cost. DUE TO THE RECENT
> INCREASE OF POPULARITY & RESPECT THIS PROGRAM HAS
> ATTAINED, IT IS CURRENTLY WORKING BETTER THAN EVER.
> 
> =======================================================================
> PRINT THIS NOW FOR
> YOUR FUTURE REFERENCE
> ========================================================
> 
> If you would like to make at least $500,000 every 4 to
> 5 months easily and comfortably, please read the
> following...THEN READ IT AGAIN and AGAIN!!!  FOLLOW THE
> SIMPLE INSTRUCTION BELOW AND YOUR FINANCIAL DREAMS WILL
> COME TRUE, GUARANTEED!  
> INSTRUCTIONS:
> 
> Order all 5 reports shown on the list below For each
> report, send $5 CASH, THE NAME & NUMBER OF THE REPORT
> YOU ARE ORDERING and YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS to the person
> whose name appears ON THAT LIST next to the report.
> 
> MAKE SURE YOUR RETURN ADDRESS IS ON YOUR ENVELOPE TOP
> LEFT CORNER in case of any mail problems.
> 
> When you place your order, make sure you order each of
> the 5 reports.  You will need all 5 reports so that you
> can save them on your computer and resell them. YOUR
> TOTAL COST $5 X 5=$25.00.  Within a few days you will
> receive, via e-mail, each of the 5 reports from these 5
> different individuals. Save them on your computer so
> they will be accessible for you to send to the 1,000's
> of people who will order them from you. Also make a
> floppy of these reports and keep it on your desk in
> case something happen to your computer.  IMPORTANT - DO
> NOT alter the names of the people who are listed next
> to each report, or their sequence on the list, in any
> way other than what is instructed below in step '' 1
> through 6 '' or you will loose out on the majority of
> your profits. Once you understand the way this works,
> you will also see how it does not work if you change
> it. Remember, this method has been tested, and if you
> alter, it will NOT work !!! People have tried to put
> their friends/relatives names on all five thinking they
> could get all the money.
> 
> But it does not work this way. Believe us, we all have
> tried to be greedy and then nothing happened. So Do Not
> try to change anything other than what is instructed.
> Because if you do, it will not work for you.
> 
> Remember, honesty reaps the reward!!!
> 
> 1.... After you have ordered all 5 reports, take this
> advertisement and
> REMOVE the name & address of the person in REPORT # 5.
> 
> This person has made it through the cycle and is no
> doubt counting their
> fortune.
> 
> 2.... Move the name & address in REPORT # 4 down TO
> REPORT # 5.
> 3.... Move the name & address in REPORT # 3 down TO
> REPORT # 4.
> 4.... Move the name & address in REPORT # 2 down TO
> REPORT # 3.
> 5.... Move the name & address in REPORT # 1 down TO
> REPORT # 2
> 6.... Insert YOUR name & address in the REPORT # 1
> Position.
> 
> PLEASE MAKE SURE you copy every name & address
> ACCURATELY!
> ========================================================================
> 
> Take this entire letter, with the modified list of
> names, and save it on your computer. DO NOT MAKE ANY
> OTHER CHANGES.  Save this on a disk as well just in
> case you loose any data.  To assist you with marketing
> your business on the internet, the 5 reports you
> purchase will provide you with invaluable marketing
> information which includes how to send bulk e-mails
> legally, where to find thousands of free classified ads
> and much more.
> 
> There are 2 Primary methods to get this venture going:
> METHOD #1: BY SENDING BULK E-MAIL LEGALLY
> 
> ========================================================================
> 
> Let's say that you decide to start small, just to see
> how it goes, and we will assume You and those involved
> send out only 5,000 e-mails each. Let's also assume
> that the mailing receive only a 0.2% response (the
> response could be much better but lets just say it is
> only 0.2%. Also many people will send out hundreds of
> thousands e-mails instead of only 5,000 each).
> 
> Continuing with this example, you send out only 5,000
> e-mails. With a 0.2% response, that is only 10 orders
> for report # 1. Those 10 people responded by sending
> out 5,000 e-mail each for a total of 50,000. Out of
> those 50,000 e-mails only 0.2% responded with orders.
> That's=100 people responded and ordered Report # 2.
> Those 100 people mail out 5,000 e-mails each for a
> total of 500,000 e-mails.  The 0.2% response to that is
> 1000 orders for Report # 3.
> 
> Those 1000 people send out 5,000 e-mails each for a
> total of 5 million e-mails sent out. The 0.2% response
> to that is 10,000 orders for Report # 4.  Those 10,000
> people send out 5,000 e-mails each for a total of
> 50,000 (50 million) e-mails. The 0.2% response to that
> is 100,000 orders for Report # 5 THAT'S 100,000 ORDERS
> TIMES $5 EACH=$500,000.00 (half million).
> 
> Your total income in this example is:
> 1..... $50 +
> 2..... $500 +
> 3..... $5,000 +
> 4..... $50,000 +
> 5..... $500,000
> Grand Total=$555,550.00
> NUMBERS DO NOT LIE. GET A PENCIL & PAPER AND FIGURE OUT
> THE WORST POSSIBLE RESPONSES AND NO MATTER HOW YOU
> CALCULATE IT, YOU WILL STILL MAKE A LOT OF MONEY !
> ========================================================================
> REMEMBER FRIEND, THIS IS ASSUMING ONLY 10 PEOPLE
> ORDERING OUT OF 5,000 YOU MAILED TO.
> Dare to think for a moment what would happen if
> everyone or half or even one 4th of those people mailed
> 100,000 e-mails each or more? There are over 150
> million people on the Internet worldwide and counting.
> Believe me, many people will do just that, and more!
> METHOD # 2 : BY PLACING FREE ADS ON THE INTERNET
> ========================================================================
> 
> Advertising on the net is very inexpensive and there
> are hundreds of FREE places to advertise. Placing a lot
> of free ads on the Internet will easily get a larger
> response. We strongly suggest you start with Method # 1
> and METHOD # 2 as you go along. For every $5 you
> receive, all you must do is e-mail them the Report they
> ordered. That's it. Always provide same day service on
> all orders.
> 
> This will guarantee that the e-mail they send out, with
> your name and address on it, will be prompt because
> they can not advertise until they receive the report.
> 
> AVAILABLE REPORTS
> ==============================================
> ORDER EACH REPORT BY ITS NUMBER & NAME ONLY.  Notes:
> Always send $5 cash (U.S. CURRENCY) for each Report.
> Checks NOT accepted. Make sure the cash is concealed by
> wrapping it in at least 2 sheets of paper. On one of
> those sheets of paper, Write the NUMBER & the NAME of
> the Report you are ordering, YOUR E-MAIL ADDRESS and
> your name and postal address.
> 
> If you are interested in taking part in this program,
> please send an Email to ____________@yahoo.com with
> 'letter' in the subject line and I will send you more
> details.
> 
> I have written several advertising courses to help
> people promote this, If you take part in this, please
> send me an Email and I will send you out the
> advertising courses to get you started.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> You are in our database through our network of FFA pages, advertising
> sites
> and ezines or are a registered member of one of our optin lists. If this
> is
> due to an error, please accept our sincere apologies. Please, do remove
> your address from our database to avoid any more postings! 
> 
> To be removed from future mailings just reply with REMOVE in the subject
> line. Thank you for your kind consideration. 
> 
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> #  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 10:20:33 -0500
> From: Barbara Lattanzi <threads@pce.net>
> Subject: <nettime> Fwd: All Hail Creative Commons
> 
> Greetings.
> 
> I am late in considering issues of copyright, including copyleft and open 
> source strategies.  So, waking up like the church mouse, I am forwarding
> an 
> article which has obvious relevance.
> 
> Barbara Lattanzi
> 
> 
> From: Tom Damrauer <tomd@panix.com>
> To: threads@pce.net
> Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 15:07:30 -0500
> Subject: All Hail Creative Commons
> X-Sender: tomd@popserver.panix.com (Unverified)
> 
> 
> All Hail Creative Commons: Stanford professor and author Lawrence Lessig 
> plans a legal insurrection Hal Plotkin,
> Special to SF Gate (SF Chronicle) Monday, February 11, 2002
> 
> 
> URL: http://www.sfgate.com/technology/beat/
> 
> 
> Stanford law professor and author Lawrence Lessig and a small band of 
> collaborators at MIT, Duke, Harvard and Villanova are about to embark on a
> 
> new endeavor that could help reignite the global high-tech economy.
> 
> 
> A prolific thinker, writer and doer, and a national authority on 
> intellectual-property law and a former columnist at The Industry Standard,
> 
> Lessig is perhaps best known as the author of two of the most important 
> books yet produced about computers, the Internet and how our legal system 
> deals with them: "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace," and his more recent 
> work, "The Future of Ideas."
> 
> 
> In an interview last week, Lessig confirmed the basic details about his 
> latest venture, Creative Commons, which is slated to be formally unveiled 
> in a few months.
> 
> 
> In a boon to the arts and the software industry, Creative Commons will
> make 
> available flexible, customizable intellectual-property licenses that 
> artists, writers, programmers and others can obtain free of charge to 
> legally define what constitutes acceptable uses of their work. The new 
> forms of licenses will provide an alternative to traditional copyrights by
> 
> establishing a useful middle ground between full copyright control and the
> 
> unprotected public domain.
> 
> 
> The first set of licensing options Creative Commons plans to make
> available 
> are designed mostly for people looking for some protections as they move 
> their wares into the public domain. Those protections might include 
> requirements that the work not be altered, employed for commercial
> purposes 
> or used without proper attribution.
> 
> 
> Lessig adds that it's possible Creative Commons' licenses may eventually 
> evolve to include options that permit or enable certain commercial 
> transactions. An artist might, for example, agree to give away a work as 
> long as no one is making money on it but include a provision requiring 
> payments on a sliding scale if it's sold. As participation in the Commons 
> project increases, a variety of specific intellectual-property license 
> options will evolve in response to user needs, which in turn would create 
> templates for others with similar requirements.
> 
> 
> Within a few months, artists, writers and others will soon be able to go 
> online, select the options that suit them best and receive a custom-made 
> license they can append to their works without having to pay a dime to a 
> lawyer, let alone the thousands of dollars it typically costs to purchase 
> similar legal services.
> 
> 
> "We also want to facilitate machine-readable languages," adds Lessig, who 
> will be taking a partial leave from Stanford to help jump-start the 
> Creative Commons effort.
> 
> 
> In Lessig's model, an MP3 song or a document or any other intellectual 
> property would contain a special machine-readable tag that specifies the 
> exact licensing terms approved by its creator. That means film 
> studentsmaking a movie, for example, could do a search, say, for jazz
> songs 
> released under public domain-friendly licenses that they can use for their
> 
> soundtrack without charge.
> 
> 
> At the same time, Creative Commons also plans to build a "conservancy" to 
> facilitate the preservation and sharing of intellectual property.
> 
> 
> A Win-Win Proposition
> 
> 
> In one masterstroke, Lessig and colleagues will empower creators of 
> intellectual property by giving them more control over their work while 
> also increasing the communal technical resources that contribute to 
> innovation and growth. The result will be a new spark of life for the 
> Internet, and for the tech sector in general.
> 
> 
> Rather than abandon an outdated software program, for example, a computer 
> company would have the option of donating its source code to the Creative 
> Commons conservancy, where people could build on it to create other new
> and 
> useful products.
> 
> 
> Some of that activity, of course, is already taking place within the 
> often-chaotic open-source software community. But many mainstream business
> 
> executives have been reluctant to hop aboard the open-source bandwagon. 
> Some of them have expressed fears that the origins and ownership of
> certain 
> open-source code projects could eventually come into question. Many of
> them 
> would prefer to play it safe, deal with proprietary vendors and not take 
> any chances.
> 
> 
> The Creative Commons conservancy will address some of those fears, in
> part, 
> by providing access to more reliable legal protections that will make 
> participation in open-source projects more likely. The implicit guarantees
> 
> that usually accompany most open-source projects will be turned into the 
> more explicit, ironclad licensing language that helps build confidence 
> among information-technology professionals. Once an owner has formally 
> conserved a piece of work, for example, any risks of inadvertent copyright
> 
> infringement related to that work will be greatly reduced, if not 
> eliminated entirely.
> 
> 
> The project's backers hope that over time, companies and individuals may 
> even receive tax breaks for donating works to the conservancy. That
> outcome 
> could encourage the release of additional technical resources that
> everyone 
> can use.
> 
> 
> The Problem With Copyright Law
> 
> 
> For years now, Lessig and other critics have maintained that inflexible 
> copyright rules as they exist often just protect entrenched -- and usually
> 
> uncreative -- interests at the expense of virtually everyone else, 
> including many of those the copyright rules were originally supposed to 
> protect.
> 
> 
> He points out, for example, that when Congress first enacted copyright law
> 
> in 1790, the protection extended for a term of 14 years, which could be 
> renewed for another 14 years if the author was still alive. Congress has 
> since increased that term to the life of the author plus 70 years. Given 
> current life expectancies, that means a corporation can now bank on 
> preventing a piece of intellectual property produced by a 30-year-old
> today 
> from falling into the public domain for more than a century.
> 
> 
> Lessig says such practices run contrary to one of the main reasons 
> copyright law was conceived in the first place. Originally, he says, 
> copyright and patent laws sought to balance two competing interests: 
> protecting and rewarding innovators for their work, but also making sure 
> innovations were available for reuse or repurposing by others after a 
> reasonable length of time.
> 
> 
> The rationale for that policy goes something like this:
> 
> 
> The first person who figures out a new invention -- say, the wheel -- 
> deserves to get rich. But that person should not have a right to prevent 
> others from using his or her invention for so long that future progress is
> 
> hampered. What's often missed by the most ardent private-property
> stalwarts 
> (usually big-company lawyers, incidentally) is that the intended goal of 
> the copyright system was to provide incentives for creativity not only for
> 
> the originators of new ideas but also for others who want to use and build
> 
> on those ideas in other ways.
> 
> 
> Unfortunately, over the years concentrated financial interests have 
> convinced Congress to steadily shift that balance. Privatized rights have 
> won favor over the public interests that were once a far more essential 
> aspect of copyright protections. That trend has only accelerated recently,
> 
> as Congress has caved in to one demand after another from big media firms,
> 
> Microsoft and others to "strengthen" copyright protections for a variety
> of 
> high-tech digital goods.
> 
> 
> On one level, the Creative Commons idea is all about commerce. But its 
> deeper significance does not involve commerce in its usual form. Lessig 
> isn't just trying to make his own cash register ring. Instead, his goal is
> 
> to get millions of others ringing by making it easier to create new goods,
> 
> products and services. In a larger sense, the goal is to make the world 
> safer for innovators by nurturing the conditions that lead to economic 
> growth and technological progress.
> 
> 
> Not a Moment too Soon
> 
> 
> In his most recent book, Lessig makes a convincing case that the health of
> 
> the Internet and the tech sector in general is being choked off by 
> increasingly successful efforts to erect proprietary bottlenecks that 
> prevent competition. The most obvious example is Microsoft's Windows 
> operating system, which remains the subject of federal antitrust 
> litigation. But there are many other similar, although less 
> well-publicized, cases that could prove equally worrisome over time.
> 
> 
> A company called Thomson Multimedia, for example, owns patents to the 
> popular MP3 digital music format. So far, the company has made it 
> relatively easy for others to adopt the technology, which has facilitated 
> its wide use and rapid acceptance. But like Microsoft, Thomson could
> decide 
> at some future date that the time has come to more fully exploit its 
> dominant position as the key enabler of online music-delivery systems. 
> Thatuncertainty puts at risk the business plans of every company or artist
> 
> that relies on MP3s, which is just one of the reasons there are so few 
> investors interested in online music ventures these days. It's just too 
> risky building a business in a sandlot someone else owns.
> 
> 
> Lessig says the solution to that and other problems can be found in the 
> age-old idea of the commons -- that is, the notion that society and the 
> economy are better off when certain resources are protected and made 
> freelyavailable. Public streets, for example, provide accessible places 
> where businesses can set up shop and where goods can be transported. 
> Likewise, laws that prevented phone companies from discriminating between 
> voice and data traffic allowed free use of those lines for other purposes,
> 
> which in turn helped create the Internet.
> 
> 
> The Creative Commons conservancy service is intended to extend that 
> approach to as many other areas as possible.
> 
> 
> "One of our goals is to lower the cost to give something away, and to make
> 
> it harder for people to be ambushed [by proprietary claims]," says Lessig.
> 
> 
> The result will be a more robust, healthier high-tech economy.
> 
> 
> And this time, remarkably, a lawyer will actually deserve credit for 
> helping make it happen.
> 
> 
> Veteran Silicon Valley writer and broadcaster Hal Plotkin is also a 
> contributing writer at Harvard Business School's publishing division.
> - -- 
> ==========================================================================
> tomd@panix.com
> Tom Damrauer
> 
> 
> PGP fingerprint: D9 29 D2 9D E7 92 87 23  9B B7 4B FB 56 3B CF BB
> My public key is available by fingering me or on public key servers.
> 
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> #  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 10:24:52 -0500
> From: "ricardo dominguez" <rdom@thing.net>
> Subject: <nettime> EDT deny responsibility for closing the WEF site
> 
> Hacktivists Stage Virtual Sit-In at WEF Web site
> 
> Noah Shachtman, AlterNet
> http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12374
> 
> February 7, 2002
> 
> Although the streets of New York City remained relatively subdued while
> the World Economic Forum (WEF) met here, over 160,000 demonstrators
> went online to stage a "virtual sit-in" at the WEF home page.
> 
> Using downloaded software tools that constantly reloaded the target web
> sites, the protestors replicated a "denial-of-service" attack, which
> cripples
> a webserver by sending it more requests than it can handle. 40,000
> downloaded
> the sit-in tool on Thursday, January 31st, the first day of the WEF
> meeting.
> 
> "We're getting hits like we've never had before," WEF communications
> director Charles McLean reported as the protest began.
> 
> By 10 AM Thursday, the WEF site had collapsed, and remained
> down until late Friday night.
> 
> "At first, the [WEF] website got more general traffic than it had
> experienced before. Then, [the site] had what appeared to be
> an intentional denial-of-service attack, which made it impossible
> for people to access content," said Paul Sagan, president of
> Akamai Technologies, which was called in by the WEF to get its
> site up-and-running again, and to shield the WEF's web fare from
> additional protests.
> 
> Ricardo Dominguez, co-founder of the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT),
> one of the groups that organized the sit-in, called the
> action a "global ya basta -- enough is enough!"
> 
> MORE
> http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12374
> 
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> #  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 10:37:44 -0600
> From: Bill Spornitz <spornitz@mts.net>
> Subject: <nettime> Re: the wireless future at Davos Uptown
> 
> It may just be the Cariboo[1] metabolites floating in my bloodstream 
> fogging my mardi gras morning, but I'm having a hard time believing 
> what I'm reading here.
> 
> You're telling me that these people are so cynical as to hand out a 
> stupid and useless piece of garbage to the world's decision makers, 
> proudly print their names on the tote bags and that the system 
> failure as regards this deployment was *enterprise-wide*?
> 
> Wait a minute...
> 
> I went to the AvantGo website and they tell me that
> 
> 28 of the Fortune 100 (whatever that is) use AvantGo solutions
> 
> with clients like NASA and FORD and the United States Senate. See? 
> They are a real company.
> 
> I went to the Accenture website and they told me that
> 
> Accenture has the global resources and a collaborative network of 
> businesses and capabilities to deliver innovative solutions for our 
> clients.
> 
> 
> Innovative solutions are what we need in an ever-changing world, 
> that's for sure... and collaborations...
> 
> 
> Then I went to the Microsoft website and they told me that
> 
> Microsoft's vision is to empower people through great software - any 
> time, any place and on any device. As the worldwide leader in 
> software for personal and business computing, Microsoft strives to 
> produce innovative products and services that meet our customers' 
> evolving needs. At the same time, we understand that long-term 
> success is about more than just making great products.
> 
> Clearly, even the great and powerful Oz deserves to be empowered 
> through great software - any time, any place and on any device - on 
> devices like the ipaq (imac?) btw, Compaq tells us that
> 
> 
> Ipaq is a family of innovative, personal devices which let you take 
> advantage of he Internet, make life easier and keep you in control.
> 
> 
> See? The great Lord Bono (did you see him at the superbowl? Was he 
> sweating all over the american flag? Is that a slur?) anyway, _all_ 
> our Lords and Ladies need to be in control, from anywhere, on any 
> device, plus you gotta figure in their *evolving needs* - this would 
> include further empowerment and innovation, no?
> 
> 
> Actually it's pretty clear. It's a crisis of responsibility, isn't 
> it? - I imagine down at porto alegre people were doing a lot of 
> talking about taking responsibility. At Davos Uptown, not even the 
> major sponsors have a popcorn-fart of a clue about that most 
> superficial and banal responsibility - the responsibility of not 
> wasting other peoples' valuable time and resources. Twisted Cynical 
> Bastards.
> 
> 
> grumpily
> b
> 
> 
> 
> [1] Cariboo - a fortified wine served in mass quantities at the 
> Festival du Voyageur, on all this week, up here in the Ether City...
> 
> 
> 
> At 9:46 PM -0800 2/10/02, Brad DeLong wrote:
> >
> >>   And
> >>did you get the free Compaq WinCE handheld?
> >
> >Yes...
> >
> >>Did yours work?
> >
> >No. But I didn't really expect it to. By the time I picked mine up, the
>  <...>
> 
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
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> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 10:38:34 -0600
> From: "wade tillett" <wade@thefrictioninstitute.org>
> Subject: Re: <nettime> All right, I admit it -- I  went to Davos 
> 
> Alright, I admit I was there too... at the Davos in NYC.
> But my new compaq never got issued to me. The word on the street was
> that they were not free, but that they cost $25,000. What gives? In
> fact, now that you mention it, I never got a radio-frequency ID tag
> either, and no one ever even questioned me about it. But I did get an
> undercover policeman to follow me around as I went about on the
> streets and subway (for my own protection, I am sure). Did you? In
> fact, as I walked up towards the hotel, the police lined up for me,
> shoulder to shoulder for seemingly miles. What a red carpet entrance!
> But just as I was getting closer to the hotel, the police all stepped
> in front of me and all around me and put these metal barricades around
> and stood around with video cameras and nightsticks and pepper spray
> and told me to go home. Damnedest thing. Now that you mention the
> radio-frequency ID tag I wonder if maybe that is why they didn't let
> me in. (I thought they just didn't like what I was saying.) I didn't
> even bother bringing my swiss army knife. I was a little scared if
> those paranoid police found it. Instead, I stuck with the goggles and
> a bandana soaked in vinegar (so I could look good if I got to meet
> Bono). When the police still would not let me through, I pleaded and
> implored the police that there must be some mistake, that this is a
> democracy. Surely the good folks at the wef, that bastion of
> democracy, wanted to hear my voice, but the police would have none of
> it and finally forced me to leave... without my free compaq mind
> you!!!
> 
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
> #  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
> #  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
> #  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net
> 
> ------------------------------
> 
> Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 10:58:21 +0000
> From: Josephine Berry <josie@metamute.com>
> Subject: <nettime> the ass between two chairs
> 
> I forward this text from Howard Slater. I think this is a much needed 
> contribution to the whole debate around what 'knowledge' (and by 
> extension a knowledge commons) could be.
> 
> As you'll see from the title, it was written as a communique to the 
> Copenhagen Free University. Any questions or comments should be 
> directed to Howard Slater,  Jakob Jakobsen and Henriette Heise at 
> <info@copenhagenfreeuniversity.dk>
> 
> J
> 
> 
> THE ASS BETWEEN TWO CHAIRS
> 
> A Communique to the Copenhagen Free University
> 
> "Become many, brave the outside world,
> split off somewhere else..."  - Michel Serres
> 
> 
> Education systems are crumbling. Whatever country it is to which we 
> do not belong, whatever state or nationality we have been abstracted 
> into, whatever desire it is that can never be granted... we can agree 
> that education is concerned with the reproduction of conformist 
> subjectivities; it produces isolated beings rather than social 
> becomings, it produces conscientiousness rather than 
> self-consciousness, political emancipation rather than human 
> emancipation.
> 
> As the factories dissapear, new factories open. Factories of facts, 
> data and information. Factories that put the final gloss on socially 
> enforced ignorance with a machine-tool monitoring. Here people are 
> made to want to be follower-factotums. Children - careerists; 
> careerists - children. So, the enlightenment project has succeeded: 
> sensual apprehension has been driven out of mind by too much 
> education. The general intellect has been copywritten.
> 
> Nowhere does the link between the state and a capital that 
> presupposes it, show itself up more revealingly than in education. We 
> were never educated for a practice of life but, instead, were 
> disembodied for a non-practice of work. Split faculties. They never 
> mentioned that learning could be a matter of a 'desire-to' or a 
> 'desire-for'. No. They left it so that we did not know what our 
> desire could be until it was too late, until we desired the job and 
> became libidinally attached to it. Dependent on needs we know not 
> wherefrom they came.
> 
> So, the educational qualification amounts to this: it is a form of 
> value. We know that money makes equivalencies; it reduces the 
> differences between things to something that can be measured by the 
> same form. The educational qualification reciprocates by reducing 
> human differences to the same standard of measurement: it awards our 
> aptitude to reproduce the already 'known'. Both forms of value 
> operate by providing the 'practical illusion' of difference: just as 
> differences in price cover over the profit motive so too do 
> adjudicated differences in ability cover over a hierarchical 
> structure that instills ambition.
> 
> Your certificate is a cheque. You're in the queue to realise its 
> value. As with all queues there's time to reflect: what they call 
> 'knowledge' is really only a knowing how to conform without thinking 
> about it; a  downgrading of experience to the point of your being 
> made ashamed of the ellipses of intuition. What they call 
> 'qualification' is really only your being sanctioned to dispense with 
> any desire to know; it's the freedom that comes with arrogance. So, 
> education creates perfect citizens: knowledge is not practiced but 
> possessed, it becomes private property and is attracted to those 
> states and corporations that know how to accumulate masses of the 
> same thing, that offer their interest.
> 
> As an 'associate-researcher' of the Copenhagen Free University I have 
> temporarily adopted and adapted a Nietzchean maxim: "knowledge; i.e., 
> a measuring of earlier and later errors by one another" (1). Too 
> often, it seems, we are witness to a wielding of 'knowledge' that is 
> quite the reverse of the openness that Nietzsche had in mind. 
> 'Knowledge' is either wielded like a weapon or placed into 
> conversation like a rampart; it is a form of attack-defence that 
> blocks any flow, an operation sanctioned by the education system 
> whereby a modicum of difference from the prevailing norm is 
> celebrated not for its critical purport, but for the way it bolsters 
> an economy of knowledge that is in conformity to private property: a 
> culture of individualism rides eloquently over the social relations 
> that bore it.
> 
> This operation, the ring-fencing of ideas, their being attributed to 
> individuals rather than to practiced social relations, is one factor 
> that has always made 'knowledge' into value for capitalism. Knowledge 
> is an acquisition, a property, and, as such it needs insurance and 
> protection. This is afforded by the labour of coherence: knowledge 
> becomes aestheticised, hermetic, when it is made to take on forms and 
> structures that alienate it from the practical sensuousness of 
> discovering and sharing (a book is overcoded and copy-protected); 
> knowledge becomes currency when its bearers seek the securities of 
> non communicating  certainty and in so doing excacerbate the autistic 
> social relations of private property through seeking commendation for 
> the possession of the same patchwork coat each of us wears.  
> 
> Here we have another ramification of the education system. Its costs 
> are high. Dangerously so. For in touting learning as possession, in 
> thereby instilling intellectual property rights, there is the 
> reinforcement of ego boundaries. Knowledge, in being pegged to the 
> individual as gradiated value, becomes a contributing factor in 
> social separation rather than a proof of social wealth, abundance. In 
> the absence of equitably distributed social wealth and its 
> concomittent reevaluation of needs, the psychic cost of relating 
> knowledge to possession is immense: knowledge becomes a rarefied 
> object rather than a diffuse activity, it  hardens into certainties 
> that become dogmatic thus making us reluctant to experience the 
> emotional suppleness of not-knowing. When there is always something 
> to prove rather than to discover, a result instead of an exposure to 
> 'error', individuals become autistically attached to themselves and 
> not precipitates of social practices, intutitons of relations. Our 
> education systems offer us self-demonstrative fulfillment rather than 
> social-remonstrative questioning: knowledge bureaucratised in a paper 
> trail that could have been a tinder-flint.
> 
> For Nietzsche 'knowledge' is a practice that allows for the traumatic 
> and time-wasting experience of being wrong. This is one way of coming 
> to re-appreciate that what we 'know' is intimately tied-up with a 
> sensuality, an emotional investment. It is in history and in our own 
> history. Reminiscensitive (2). Just as Nietzsche defies the customary 
> split between 'earlier' and 'later', there should be no boundary 
> between what we know and how we know we feel it. What we know is not 
> a possession, but an achronological modality of feeling, an emotional 
> continuum. Knowledge is mood in modulation. Crucial to this is the 
> social-relation that Nietzsche places firmly in the midst of his 
> fleeting definition of  knowledge: it is the combination of an 
> openness to admit 'error' and the socialisation of being-amongst that 
> can make knowledge into a mode of intimacy. We come to know other 
> people through how they feel their knowledge, how they express it. 
> Here we begin to depart from the notion of knowledge as a value that 
> separates people (alienation of grading, patrolling of ego 
> boundaries) and come to see knowledge as that which, far from being a 
> coherent object, is a 'labour process' that must be enabled to reveal 
> both its means of production (social relation) and its means of 
> expression (celebration of 'error') if it too is not to contribute to 
> the reification of social wealth as 'scarcity'. It could be 
> tinder-flint, a spur to social change:  the abolition of property 
> goes hand in hand with an exposure, an abandonment of our 'self' to 
> 'error'. In one of his last works Foucault has written: "Does not the 
> entire theory of the subject have to be reformulated once knowledge, 
> instead of opening onto the truth of the world, is rooted in the 
> 'errors' of life? (3). We could perhaps add that such a knowledge, a 
> sensualised knowledge that demands empathy, could reformulate the 
> subject as a pre-individual, as caught up in a non-definitive 
> affectivity, and could have wider ramifications than those envisioned 
> by Foucault. Being able to be practiced everywhere, being capacitated 
> to setting up relational contexts and situations, such a knowledge 
> 'rooted in the errors of life' would no longer have need of  an 
> education system that offers itself as a pivot between the state and 
> private property. 
> 
> Is it not that the Copenhagen Free University is attempting to offer 
> an enabling change in context? To be between chairs with an 
> off-knowledge? To know to feel? What occurs when knowledge is 
> valorised is the same as happens when our capacity to produce renewal 
> is stifled into wage labour. We have no sensuous relation with the 
> objects we produce. Education alienates. Its institutional spaces are 
> stock markets. Its educators are stipended tellers filled full with 
> the arrogance of functional curriculums. There is a business of 
> knowledge and no volition.
> Rene Daumal: " I thought I knew a few things quite well. Since then, 
> however, I've been pushed into a corner and I've regurgitated my 
> small appearence of understanding. Now I know that I know only in 
> order to be silent. No more knowing, not yet understanding, the ass 
> between two chairs, tell me is it a position for discourse?" (4). 
> This could be the context for a free university - to be between 'two 
> chairs' in the way Daumal means -  to have to levitate, to refuse to 
> sit comfortably, to be exposed to 'error' - means that educators 
> should be 'idiots', which is to say, we are all educators with 
> nothing much to prove, but with many 'errors' to share. Only 'idiots' 
> can want to research, find out; only 'idiots' can have 'error' feel 
> through them enough to make desire-to-know a force, a production of 
> knowledge-objects that can carry affectivity, that, being a practice 
> of pre-individuals, are 'not yet understanding'. 
> 
> In this light, before arriving at 'knowledge' and hence perpetually 
> subverting its commercial value, there can be no divisions between 
> teachers and students. More. There can be no more curriculums, but 
> participants who, meeting as pre-individuals, willingly share their 
> own ignorance. In this way there cannot only be the production of 
> affective-objects (passion can come from what there is to know, not 
> from the already known), but the production of a crucial solidarity. 
> As with that solidarity that could be formed in the factory 
> environment, the new means of production, knowledge, could become a 
> similar factor in cohesiveness. It is necessary for such a solidarity 
> to inform the context, to be in-built into the social relation, for 
> coming to people with your own error is traumatic: we must "suffer an 
> alteration (a becoming other) through learning. Whoever already 
> possesses knowledge... is not obliged to suffer an alteration" (5). 
> This is perhaps why the education system fails and produces 
> individuals who are taught to possess knowledge and why initiatives 
> like those of the Copenhagen Free University, that come together on 
> the premiss of the freedom of 'failure', are not so much aiming at 
> potential knowledges to sell as at practices of knowledge that are 
> creative of becoming: non-definitive affectivity of pre-individuals.
> 
> How is knowledge practiced? To begin to grope we could perhaps offer 
> that the basic activity of the Copenhagen Free University, the 
> activity that institutes its social relation, is speech; simple 
> relational talking. But, how does this social practice of speech 
> effect the 'knowledge' that a university is supposed to produce? In 
> the social relational space of the Copenhagen Free University it 
> could be said that an 'object of knowledge' does not form from those 
> "myriads of drifting minds" (6) that are not minded individually, but 
> comes to be attributable only to a relational context by means of 
> which subjects can reformulate themselves as the precipitate of 
> histories of interaction, as pre-individuals displaced by their 
> affectivities. With speech, then, language, the conduit of knowledge, 
> the means of 'knowing things' and a 'self', is made malleable by the 
> immediacy of its practice. The uncensored enters into it as an 
> associative interruption and any resultant  'knowledge' is 
> sensualised ... immeasurable ... continuously open (7).
> 
> When we speak to each other we do not simply exchange quanta of 
> information, but practice language by means of an erring and 
> meandering speech that has no definitive object. Rather than finding 
> the 'last word', rather than drawing the conversation to a close, 
> this very spoken stumbling, the feeling in intonated language, is 
> itself the presence of intervening emotion. The presence of 'error' 
> in what we say, assured by the emotional quotient in an unedited 
> sentence, means that we experience our practice of language as an 
> effort of articulation that is premissed on what Giorgio Agemben has 
> referred to as the 'unsayable'. Whereas a defined 'object of 
> knowledge' in all itsvarious guises as 'truth', 'coherence', 
> 'judgement', hinders the will to communicate, the unsayable, not only 
> makes communication a necessity, but, as a thought-emotion beyond our 
> grasp, is creative of becoming.
> 
> If, for some, then, it is an immense effort to speak it is perhaps 
> because our experience of the education system is one that, not 
> premissed on 'error' and paying no cognizance to the unsayable in 
> each - the same struggle with articulation whatever the potentially 
> expressed content -  instills in us a notion that to speak is to 
> speak the 'truth' of a centred self. So, an education system that 
> judges and measures, that has a conception of  'knowledge' that is 
> viewed as appropriate to a 'self'  effects a servility that is linked 
> to a diminishment of the unsayable: like a mass produced object that 
> which has already been said is repeated in the hope of commendation. 
> Rather than an 'object' of knowledge becoming sensualised through 
> speech-acts informed by 'error' and openness,which in turn leads to a 
> reformulation of the subject, everything and nothing becomes sayable 
> and we not only have a diminishment of the desire to gather together 
> to communicate to know, but a standardisation of the means of 
> expression. In short, we have the 'sayable' as politics; the 
> covering-over of 'error'.
> 
> Following on from this it should be said that the pursuit of the 
> unsayable as the spur to a sensualised practice of knowledge is not 
> another way of seeking an original formation of thought, something 
> entirely new or filled with 'genius'. These latter are what form an 
> 'ideology of knowledge' that reinforces the whole idea of individuals 
> being in possession of some 'object' of knowledge that is measureable 
> (or capacitated by a certificate). What militates against this 
> pervasive outlook is that when knowledge is practiced as speech in a 
> context of solidarity it is not knowledge that takes on a life of its 
> own (alienated object), but the relation between participants who 
> come to a practice of life by means of being free to express 
> themselves regardless of institutional legitimation. The 'unsayable' 
> in this instance, then, is the spur to singular means of expression, 
> which is to say, the risk of improvised thought coupled to the risk 
> of saying it with a language that is not only enabled to speak of 
> experience and intuition (i.e. outlawed conjecture), but can become 
> acknowledged as originating in a speech-act made original by its 
> time, place and interlocutors. Does this not amount to an affectivity 
> that reformulates the subject as a composite of the context: a 
> pre-individual? So, so many sensuous deceptions that deceive a sense 
> of self, so much becoming: "I invented the colour of vowels... I 
> organised the shape of every consonant, and by means of instinctive 
> rhythm, flattered myself that I was the inventor of a poetic 
> language, accessible sooner or later to all the senses" (8).
> 
> Taking a cue from Rimbaud it may be that the question of knowledge is 
> a misnomer. How can it be differentiated from sensual experience? How 
> can it be separated from an emotional investment? The reason seems to 
> be that knowledge, prized as a commercial value, must be failsafe. As 
> a component of production it must take on the greased, metallic turns 
> of fixed capital, it must be that which is regurgitatable without 
> glych. But this is knowledge in its alienated form: as information 
> that cannot admit of its basis in 'error'. Admitting this basis would 
> not only create the 'absolute doubt' that Charles Fourier pursued, 
> but it would necessitate an awareness of the emotional component in 
> what we 'know', which is to say, following Nietzsche's maxim of the 
> 'falseness' of emotions per se, that what we 'know' would become a 
> matter for experimental personae in conflict with a sense of self 
> shored-up by the activity of possessing.
> 
> The much instilled mania for paraphrasing, for getting at an 
> 'essence', for 'finical criticism', has the effect of severing 
> knowledge from sensual experience and thus makes the effort to say 
> the unsayable even more of a non-starter. The narrative form of 
> knowledge (pedagogy), with all its indicators of being rehearsed, 
> with its need to keep within the bounds of a syllabus, comes to 
> police any improvisational speech-act that takes its impetus from 
> intuited experience: the attempt to recount a tale 'as' another 
> person, an enactment of another, reveals' knowledge' as a matter of 
> bringing emotion into expression by means of experimental personae, a 
> play of the 'false', a becoming the 'other'.
> 
> The emotions cannot be trusted so we sever them from our utilitarian 
> conception of 'knowledge'. As 'variable labour' they cannot be 
> trusted because they are destabilising, they urge us to alternate, to 
> be receptive, to be between forms, between chairs, to be 
> error-ridden, to 'suffer an alteration'. As the 'unsayable' they urge 
> us to become rather than to be. Rather than this be a case of the 
> inferiority of emotions in relation to the powers of conceptualising, 
> we could say that emotions, being compounds of feelings and 
> receptivity to place and to others, are what can redraw knowledge as 
> our capacity to be 'affected'. This is maybe what Marx meant when he 
> offered that the "senses have... become theoreticians in their 
> immediate praxis" or what, much later, Deleuze meant when, in his 
> last work, he offered that "sensation is pure contemplation" (9). For 
> both is it not that the illegilibility of emotions, their 
> imperviousness to instant expression in language, is what provokes in 
> us a form of thought that cannot be readily articulated; a form of 
> thought that subtends what we call 'knowledge'; a means of expression 
> that is a sub-tense marking out what is 'unsayable'? 
> 
> The ramifications of this for the Copenhagen Free University or any 
> akin initiative of self-institution are manifold: with 'error' rather 
> than 'expertise' as the watchword there are no barriers, patrolled by 
> experts, placed before participation which means that trust comes to 
> replace judgement; that the 'unsayable' is identified as the impetus 
> to a winning of the means of expression means that there is a 
> permanent constituting tension played out in improvisational 
> speech-acts or through a clash of differing means of expression i.e 
> lingual, visual, aural; that there is a sensitvity to 'knowledge' as 
> that which is subtended by the 'theoretical' work of the senses means 
> that 'contemplation' is valued as a constant attribute of lives lived 
> in practice.
> 
> But perhaps the most telling ramification is that capital's benign 
> relaunch as a 'knowledge economy' has not only effected a 
> 'for-profit' colonisation of the education system but, by having 
> 'knowledge' as a component in the production of value it has redrawn 
> the question of the 
> 'revolutionary organisation'. Whereas the left has managed to produce 
> much knowledge and theory it has consistently failed to bind 
> knowledge to social experience in such a way as to undermine the 
> paradigm of the education system. Be it  'summer schools' or 
> 'seminars' the same social relation has been replicated, a relation 
> to knowledge as private property rather as a modulation of social 
> experience, a glut of the sayable rather than a reach for the 
> unsayable, a dogmatic 'making true' rather than an experimental 
> 'making false'. Such an adoption of the educational paradigm with its 
> fear of 'error' and its mania for 'empirical affidavits', means that 
> its associated authoritarian and defensive positions are perpetuated 
> at the expense of an affectivity that increases participation by 
> being creative of trust and solidarity. The Left falls into the trap 
> of overestimating the power of an informatised knowledge to change 
> things: if only people knew what was going on...
> 
> That 'labour power' is becoming more explicitly equatable with 
> 'knowledge' is nothing new -  what is a syllabus if it is not a 
> manufacuring blueprint upon which both teachers and students labour 
> to complete? But, what is maybe new about the situation is that it 
> reveals that there has always been a knowledge component to labour 
> whether our work was classed as 'intellectual' or 'manual'. Whether 
> 'knowledge' is seen as raw material or private property it is still 
> that, a means of production, through which we are defined as 'labour 
> power'. The point, then, is that capital is not just saying that it 
> wants our 'labour power', but that it wants our 'knowledge'. In the 
> terms we have discussed knowledge here this represents a request for 
> our very sensuality: capital has always been bio-political 
> production;  it has always aimed at the subsumption of surplus 
> energies. Similarly, under the terms of the 'knowledge economy', the 
> wage-relation remains unchanged and the question to pose is still one 
> of reappropriating the means of production and taking control of our 
> own energies, our own 'intermutuomergent' desires.
> 
> So, rather than its being a matter of our having to work to live, to 
> be the objects of a labour process, it should be possible for us to 
> live to work, to produce our own becoming: "the only thing distinct 
> from objectified labour is non-objectified labour, labour which is 
> still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity" (10). This process 
> of objectifying our work under our own terms, in our own time and by 
> means of our own institutional contexts is what differentiates it 
> from its being objectified for us in the education system or at a 
> place of work. Such institutions have always been underwritten by the 
> presupposition of private property, but if we begin to view knowledge 
> as collective endeavour, an activity premissed on the idea of the 
> 'error' of emotion, an assemblage of desiring-energy, then could it 
> be that any resultant 'knowledge' could challenge the concept of 
> 'labour' itself?
> 
> The notion of a 'knowledge economy' can present an opportunity to 
> shift the space of struggle to meet bio-political production head on. 
> If it is that the 'object' of bio-political power is the production 
> of subjects - a production based on the premis that an individual is 
> the paradigm of private property (an 'owner' of genes)  - then, 
> 'labour as subjectivity', what Marx has elsewhere called 'free 
> expression' and 'the enjoyment of life', is still the stake in any 
> revolutionary endeavour. Is this endeavour tantamount now to a 
> fledgling politics of becoming? Under the regime of bio-political 
> power we could say that the subject is reduced to a knowable being 
> rather than an unknown and unforeseeable becoming. The possible is 
> reduced to what is probable, empircally ascertainable and 
> exhaustible. Here knowledge, to quote Nietzsche, is "possible only 
> only on the basis of belief in being" (11), and it is a knowledge 
> that reduces life to a state of equilibrium by excluding the 
> non-knowledge of the emotions, the sensuous knowledge of 
> affectivities. These latter, as provocations to forms of thought that 
> resist categorisation as 'knowledge' and as such defy the surety of 
> being, are factors that  can inform a 'labour as subjectivity' and 
> secure its potential to resist a bio-political power that values 
> 'knowledge' as that which reinforces being as an object, that 
> delineates it to the point of incarcerating it. So, is it not that 
> free university initiatives, in contesting the relation between 
> knowledge and economy, are tantamount to new forms of revolutionary 
> organisation? Can they be factories of everyday life wherein 
> knowledge is sensualised away from its status as private property to 
> become a  component in the production of subjects as 'non-definitive 
> affectivities' ? Can these factories' produce pre-individuals as the 
> affective classes? 
> No more occupations!
> Put the ass between two chairs!
> All Power to the Affective Classes!
> 
> Howard Slater
> @ Break/Flow: January 2002
> 
> Notes:
> 
> (1)Friedrich Nietzsche: Will To Power, Vintage 1968,  p281
> (2)James Joyce: Finnegans Wake, Penguin 2000, p23
> (3)Michel Foucault: Life: Experience and Science cited by Giorgio 
> Agamben in Potentialities,  Stanford University Press 1999, p221.
> (4)Rene Daumal: Between Two Chairs,  Nouvelle Review Francais, March 
> 1936. Translated by Louise Landes-Levi for Text 7, 1978.
> (5)Giorgio Agamben: Potentialities, ibid, p179.
> (6)James Joyce, ibid, p179.  Could also insert here  Joyce's  phrase 
> "intermisunderstanding minds", ibid, p118.
> (7)cf Gilles Deleuze: "... interactions caught at the point where 
> they do not derive from pre-existing social structures and are not 
> the same as psychic actions and reactions, but are the correlate of 
> speech-acts or silence, stripping the social of its naturalness, 
> forming systems which are far from being in equilibrium or invent 
> their own equilibrium - interactions are established in the margins 
> or at crossroads, constituing a	whole mis-en-scene or dramaturgy of 
> daily life, opening up a field of special perception..." See Deleuze: 
> 		Cinema Two, Athlone 1989, p227.
> (8) Arthur Rimbaud: Collected Poems, Oxford 2001, p135.
> (9) For  Marx  see 1844 Manuscripts in Early Writings, Penguin 1975, 
> p352.  For Deleuze see citation by Agamben, ibid, p233.
> (10) Karl Marx: Grundrisse, Penguin 1971, p272.
> (11) Friedrich Nietzsche, ibid.
> 
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> 
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