<nettime> How I accidentally became a blogger and blogged the #28c3

[Dmytri Kleiner <dk@telekommunisten.net>]

Well, #28c3 has come and gone.

Iâm not sure how it happened, but after all these years on the 
internet, It looks like Iâve somehow become a blogger.

I never really wanted to be a blogger, after all the most exciting 
thing about the Internet has always been the ability for users to 
interact on neutral turf. Yet, the web, even when it has social 
features, is always home-court for somebody or another.

The definitive technology of the Internet to me was always UseNet, a 
worldwide distributed discussion system, and this was where I first 
began to express and discuss political issues, where the worlds of 
political activism and media art intersected with my life as a computer 
programmer, and drew me into ideas and projects and communities I would 
otherwise have had no connection with.

I didnât start out thinking about what I was doing as âpublishingâ so 
much as fishing, posting not so much so people would read my texts, but 
so people would respond to them. Their responses give me new ideas, 
insights, and more leads to better understand these topics I could now 
begin to access, byway of the Internet.

UseNet was an ongoing multiparty dialogue.

When people started blogging I couldnât see the point. Why post 
something on just one website, instead of millions of news servers all 
around the world? Why force people to use dodgy webforms to leave 
comments, instead of slick news reading software? It seems so 
retrograde, so hierarchical, privileging one writer as the blogâs 
âauthorâ with everyone else reduced to âcommentators,â under the 
tyrannical moderation of the blogger, meaning that the presence of 
opposing views, that made UseNet groups so vibrant, was absent.

A personal website seemed to me no more useful than as an elaborate 
.plan file, a kind of online brochure, good for a CV and Contact info, 
maybe even a archive of what you had really posted online (meaning on 
UseNet), but certainly no way to reach any community.

Sadly, UseNet has become increasingly obscure, for reasons that I have 
discussed at length, as part of the Capital-financed enclosure of the 
peer-to-peer Internet with centrally controlled client-server 
technologies.

As a result for years Iâve been lost in wilderness, making my 
contributions on web-boards like Autonomediaâs InterActivist, mailing 
lists, etc, and even *gasp* âSocial Media,â Eventually being published 
by Mute Magazine, and other websites, leading to the Telekommunist 
Manifesto being released by the Institute for Network Cultures.

In an effort to co-ordinate my use of these disparate platforms, 
somehow a blog emerged.
So here we are. Iâve accidentally become a blogger.

Last week the #28c3 occurred in Berlin, and it served as the point of 
departure for the last  six texts that Iâve written. For completeness, 
Iâve collected links to all of them below.

- Nobody Goes There Anymore, Itâs Too Crowded! | http://wp.me/p24fq

When a place becomes too crowded, things like getting in, getting a 
table, getting service, etc, become more competitive and thereby 
difficult. Some of the original regulars become crowded out and stop 
going, eventually the others stop too, âbecause nobody goes there 
anymore.â

- The Suck Principle | http://wp.me/p24fqL-qo

Only places that suck can really have a continuous community, because 
if nothing about the place sucks, it will attract more and more people 
until it sucks because of crowding. So if you want a continuous, closely 
knit community, something about the venue or event must suck, your only 
choice is what should suck or how it should suck.

- Exceptionalism and The Internet Surveillance Industry | 
http://wp.me/p24fqL-r1

Expressing outrage that enemies of the US and itâs allies are using the 
technology being developed by the west also seems misplaced, and rests 
on regressive exceptionalist view that privileges western states as 
being somehow noble enough to be trusted with the ability to survey 
their citizens, but  not sinister foreign powers.

- Capital and The War on General Computing | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rg

It is not ignorance, nor even genuinely the needs of law enforcement 
that is driving the war against general computing and a general network. 
Itâs too simple to understand this war as simply tyrannical law 
enforcers and paranoid music execs duping clueless legislatures into 
locking-down cyberspace to save Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Rather this 
war is simply a consequence of the fact that our technology industry is 
funded by finance capital, and finance capital requires profit as a 
return.

- There Is No A List | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rC

Certainly the freedom-loving free markets will punish peddlers of 
tyranny and domination! No doubt ethically minded investors will move 
their investments to the virtuous firms of list A, leaving the B listers 
starved of Capital. Justice conscious consumers will immediately dump 
Bâs products and take up the A list! Politicians, eager to please their 
constituents,  will kick the B listers to the curb and shower the A 
listers with all the lucrative governments lucre. The sinister B-list 
companies will collapse and the bold and brave A listers will take their 
market share and refuse to implement censorious or freedom-denying 
features into their products, and certainly not enable sinister foreign 
powers to oppresses their people. Cackling foreign despots and their 
bumbling mad scientists are now foiled for good by the freedom loving 
actors on the glorious free market system!

- Class Struggle Among Cyborgs | http://wp.me/p24fqL-rN

So long as we have an economic system that allows an owner/lender class 
to exploit a worker/borrower class, we will have communications systems 
and social institutions that are controlled of the owner/lender classes 
and structured in their interests, and against the interests of the 
worker/borrower class, for the simply reason that since the owner/lender 
class will aways be able to retain earnings and accumulate while the 
worker/borrower class can only earn enough to service their bills and 
debt.


Iâll be at Buchhandlung as usual this evening, all are welcome to come 
along for a drink.

--
Dmyri Kleiner
Venture Communist





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