Re: <nettime> Ubiquitous Commons and Stakhanov at transmediale in Berlin

[allan siegel <allan@allansiegel.info>]

Hello,

Since this announcement has been cross-posted I???ll add Daniel
Verhoeven response to this as well as my own.

FROM DV:

     Dear All,

     A good start would be to define ?commons?. The fuziness about the
     commons is ubiquitous, not the commons. See for a proposal:
     https://niepleuen.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/introduction-to-the-commons-and-some-definitions/


     All the best,

     Dani?l Verhoeven

     http://danielverhoeven.deds.nl/


FROM AS:

Hello,

Thank you Daniel for pointing out the fuzziness of the use of the word
COMMONS in relation to this conference; I think fuzziness here is being
polite (as in the casual misuse of language); one could say that this
conference looks like branding the word ???commons??? in the age of
neoliberalism; because the description is among other things:
ahistorical and apolitical-pitfully so.

A good very elemental example would be the title:

"In the Network Society Information and Knowledge are ubiquitous.

Services like Google, Facebook and Twitter create a
knowledge/information, identity and information/updates ecosystem which
is spread across devices and modalities which interact with what we know
about the world and its inhabitants, and also transform the ways in
which we experience places, locations, events, monuments, tourist
locations, restaurants, venues and more."

Hello! Please tell that to the people who control and manipulate
information this; and, I am sorry, knowledge is not ubiquitous as the
Ubiquitous Commons website illustrates; it is nothing more than, as
described at the bottom, a mash-up of wikipedia definitions very far
away from the references and history that Verhoeven supplied.

It is odd, sad even, that an issue such as the commons, which has been
written about extensively (profoundly even) by the people Daniel
mentions as well as David Harvey, Lefebvre, etc??? AND which is an issue
that has come up time and again in the various occupy movements should
be watered down so casually.

In a nutshell: somebody needs to do some homework and connect the themes
that this conference wants to address with discussions about the commons
from the previous two centuries.

allan


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