Happy Happy

check out this dashing young radical

http://ieet.org/cybdem/2005/03/hughes-carrico-and-treder-at-basic.html

Maneki Neko by Bruce Sterling

Here it is. Prepare to discuss.

The Final Project!

1. a2k (access to knowledge)

2. acceleration

3. accelerationalism

4. accountability

5. agency

6. amateur

7. analog

8. artificial intelligence

9. artificial imbecillence

10. auteur

11. author

12. authoritarianism

13. authority

14. basic income guarantee

15. biopiracy

16. blog

17. blogipelago

18. blogosphere

19. broadcast

20. "California Ideology"

21. canon

22. citizen

22. citizen journalism

23. code

24. collaboration

25. common goods

26. commons

27. commonsense

28. consensus

29. consensus science

30. consent

31. control

32. copyright

33. creative commons

34. credentialization

35. critique

36. crypto-anarchy

37. culture

38. culture industry

39. cybernetics

40. cybernetic totalism

41. cyberspace

42. cyborg

43. democracy

44. democratization

45. digirati

46. digital

47. digital divide

48. dissensus

49. diversity

50. elite

51. enclosure

52. end-to-end principle (e2e)

53. enframing

54. enhancement

55. eugenics

56. excludability

57. externality

58. fair use

59. filtering

60. finitude

61. free software

62. "The Future"

63. futurity

64. futurology

65. genomic enclosure

66. gift economy

67. information

68. industrial model

69. liberal subjectivity

70. linking

71. mapping

72. mass culture

73. mass mediation

74. media

75. micro-payments

76. Moore's Law

77. negative liberty

78. neoliberalism

79. Net Neutrality

80. Netroots

81. network

82. node

83. objectivity

84. open source

85. participation

86. panopticon

87. peer

88. peer to peer (p2p)

89. planetarity

90. popular

91. post-humanist

92. precarity

93. precarization

94. privacy

95. private property

96. professional

97. progress

98. propaganda

99. prostheses as culture/culture as prostheses

100. public

101. publication

102. public good

103. public relations

104. reductionism

105. relational

106. representative

107. retro-futurism

108. revolution

109. rivalrousness

110. robotics

111. secrecy

112. security

113. sharing

114. Singularity

115. social

116. social aesthetics

117. social networks

118. socialization

119. sousveillance

120. spectacle

121. spontaneous order

122. stakeholder

123. surveillance

124. technocracy

125. techno-fetishism

126. technology

127. technoscience

128. techno-utopianism

129. "Tragedy of the Commons"

130. transparency

131. viral

For your Final Project you will generate a kind of personal conceptual mapping of the subject matter of the whole course. In order to produce this map, you will need to draw on readings and notes over the course of the whole term. Many connections and problems will likely become clear to you for the first time in making this map. Before you make your choices you should spend some time dwelling over the whole list above, since what may at first seem obvious choices often give way to different questions and concerns once you give them more thought.

The assignment is quite straightforward:

[one] Choose forty-four Keywords from the list above.

[two] Organize your chosen Keywords into three separate, conceptually connected, sets. You can use any criteria that seems useful to you to organize these sets. The only rule is that no resulting set can contain fewer than eight Keywords.

[three] Each of the three sets should be given a unique title or heading and an introductory paragraph (no longer than a single page) that elaborates the criteria governing your choices as to what would be included in that set.

[four] Once you have organized your three sets in this way, briefly define each one of the Keywords you have included in each set in your own words. Ideally, your definitions should be as clear and as concise as possible. These definitions should be a matter of a sentence (or at most two), NOT a paragraph or more. They really are just definitions, not essays or lengthy explanations. It should be clear from your definitions why each of the Keywords in each of the three sets are conceptually connected to each other, but it is also crucial that no terms within any set are treated by you as synonymous, and that your definitions distinguish Keywords from one another clearly (even if the resulting distinctions are sometimes matters of nuance).

[five] Once you have defined all these Keywords, provide a short quotation (feel free to edit and prune to keep your chosen citations properly pithy) from one of the texts we have read this term to accompany each one of your definitions. The quotation you choose can be a definition you found helpful in crafting your own definition, it can be an example or illustration you found especially clarifying, it can a matter of contextualization, framing, or history that you found illuminating, it can even be something you disagreed with so strongly it helped you understand better what you really think yourself.

Obviously, there are endless ways of organizing these sets, defining their Keywords, distinguishing them from one another, and connecting them up to the texts we have read. What matters here is that you follow the rules of the exercise, not that you arrive at some single "right answer" you may fancy I have in mind.

Everyone's map will likely be quite dramatically different from everyone else's. That's a feature, not a bug.

Many students might also find it useful to introduce additional elements to their final projects -- illustration, cartography, collage, AV supplements, sculpture, games, and so on. None of these are required but students are welcome to make this final project their own, to introduce additional formal and experimental dimensions that help you come to terms with the course material as a whole in your own way once the basic requirements are satisfied.

Just For Fun

"I Tweet from Basement, Home of Mom": Is It Time for a Cyberspace Manifesto 2.0?

Laurie Anderson - The Language Of The Future

Last year, I was on a twin-engine plane coming from Milwaukee to New York City. Just over La Guardia, one of the engines conked out and we started to drop straight down, flipping over and over. Then the other engine died: and we went completely out of control. New York City started getting taller and taller. A voice came over the intercom and said:

Our pilot has informed us that we are about to attempt a crash landing.
Please extinguish all cigarettes. Place your tray tables in their upright, locked position.

Your Captain says: Please do not panic.
Your Captain says: Place your head in your hands.
Captain says: Place your head on your knees.
Captain says: Put your hands on your head. Put your hands on your knees! (heh-heh)

This is your Captain.
Have you lost your dog?
We are going down.
We are all going down, together.

As it turned out, we were caught in a downdraft and rammed into a bank. It was, in short, a miracle. But afterwards I was terrified of getting onto planes. The moment I started walking down that aisle, my eyes would clamp shut and I would fall into a deep, impenetrable sleep.

(YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THIS ...
YOU DON’T WANT TO BE HERE ...
HAVE YOU LOST YOUR DOG?)

Finally, I was able to remain conscious, but I always had to go up to the forward cabin and ask the stewardesses if I could sit next to them: “Hi! Uh, mind if I join you?” They were always rather irritated--“Oh, all right (what a baby)”--and I watched their uniforms crack as we made nervous chitchat.
Sometimes even this didn’t work, and I’d have to find one of the other passengers to talk to. You can spot these people immediately. There’s one on every flight. Someone who’s really on _your_ wavelength.
I was on a flight from L.A. when I spotted one of them, sitting across the aisle. A girl, about fifteen. And she had this stuffed rabbit set up on her tray table and she kept arranging and rearranging the rabbit and kind of waving to it: “Hi!”
“Hi there!”
And I decided: This is the one _I_ want to sit next to. So I sat down and we started to talk and suddenly I realized she was speaking an entirely different language. Computerese.
A kind of high-tech lingo.
Everything was circuitry, electronics, switching.
If she didn’t understand something, it just “didn’t scan.”
We talked mostly about her boyfriend. This guy was never in a bad mood. He was in a bad mode.
Modey kind of a guy.
The romance was apparently kind of rocky and she kept saying: “Man oh man you know like it’s so digital!” She just meant the relationship was on again, off again.

Always two things switching.
Current runs through bodies and then it doesn’t.
It was a language of sounds, of noise, of switching, of signals.
It was the language of the rabbit, the caribou, the penguin, the beaver.
A language of the past.
Current runs through bodies and then it doesn’t.
On again.
Off again.
Always two things switching.
One thing instantly replaces another.

It was the language of the Future.

Put your knees up to your chin.
Have you lost your dog?
Put your hands over your eyes.

Jump out of the plane.
There is no pilot.
You are not alone.

This is the language of the on-again off-again future.
And it is Digital.

And I answered the phone and I heard a voice and the voice said:
Please do not hang up.
We know who you are.
Please do not hang up.
We know what you have to say.
Please do not hang up.
We know what you want.
Please do not hang up.
We’ve got your number:
One ...
Two ...
Three ...
Four.

Our Syllabus

Critical Theory B: Peer to Peer Democratization and Anti-Democratization, Fall 2012

Tuesdays, 9-11.45, S#18

Instructor: Dale Carrico

Contact: dcarrico@sfai.edu, ndaleca@gmail.com

Blog: http://p2pdemos.blogspot.com/

Grade: Att/Part 15% , Essay 1 10%, Precis 10%, Report 10%, Essay 2 25%, Final 30%

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One -- August 28

Introductions

Week Two -- September 4

Laurie Anderson: The Language of the Future



Digby (Heather Parton) The Netroots Revolution
Evgeny Morozov Texting Toward Utopia Occupy: Take A Chance



Judith Butler at the People's Mic



Slavoj Zizek at the People's Mic



Seeds of Change: On the Egyptian Revolution



POST FIRST ESSAY ONLINE

Week Three -- September 11

Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas, Chapter Three: Commons on the Wires

Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks, Chapter 12: Conclusion

Michel Bauwens, The Political Economy of Peer Production

Week Four -- September 18

John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

Eric Hughes, A Cypherpunk's Manifesto

Vernor Vinge, Technological Singularity

Marc Steigler, The Gentle Seduction

Week Five -- September 25

Katherine Hayles, Liberal Subjectivity Imperiled: Norbert Weiner and Cybernetic Anxiety

Jaron Lanier, One Half of a Manifesto

Jaron Lanier, First Church of Robotics

Week Six-- October 2

Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, California Ideology

Jedediah Purdy, God of the Digirati

Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology

Week Seven -- October 9

Cory Doctorow You Can't Own Knowledge

Nicholas Wadhams Pharmaceutical Patent Pools Seen As A Life And Death Matter In Kenya

James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain

James Boyle, Enclosing the Genome?

David Bollier, Reclaiming the Commons


Week Eight -- October 16

Screening the film, "Desk Set"

SECOND ESSAY DUE IN CLASS

Week Nine -- October 23

Dan Gillmour, We the Media, Chapter One: From Tom Paine to Blogs and Beyond

Save the Internet, Net Neutrality FAQ

Aaron Bady, Julian Assange and the Computer Conspiracy

Week Ten -- October 30

Socially Engaged Art, Critics and Discontents, an Interview with Claire Bishop

Clay Shirky, Blogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing

Clay Shirky Why Micropayments Won't Work

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Chapter Two: Sharing Anchors Community

Week Eleven -- November 6

David Brin, Three Cheers for the Surveillance Society!

Jamais Cascio, The Participatory Decepticon

Paul D. Miller (DJ Spooky), Material Memories

Week Twelve -- November 13

Charles Mann, Homeland Insecurity

Bruce Schneier, How Science Fiction Writers Can Help, Or Hurt, Homeland Security

Lawrence Lessig, Insanely Destructive Devices

Week Thirteen -- November 20
Thanksgiving Holiday
ALL PRECISES AND REPORTS DUE

Week Fourteen -- November 27

C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

Slavoj Zizek, Bring Me My Philips Mental Jacket

Week Fifteen -- December 4

Steve Mann, The Post-Cyborg Path to Deconism

Donna Haraway, The Promises of Monsters

Bruno Latour Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?

FINAL PROJECT DUE IN CLASS

Course Objectives:

One -- Introduce students to Science and Technology Studies, Media Studies, and Network Theory, and situate these in respect to broader critical theoretical discourses: Marx on fetishized commodities, Benjamin on auratic media-artifacts, Adorno on the Culture Industry, Barthes on naturalizing myth, Debord on the Spectacle, Chomsky and Herman on propaganda, Klein on the logo.

Two -- Discuss "science" as one among many forms of differently warranted belief (others: moral, legal, familial, instrumental, religious, ethical, political, subcultural, aesthetic); discuss "technoscience" as a particular and usually at once reductive and imperializing figuration and narrativization of the scientific; discuss "technology" as the collective elaboration of agency, not so much as a constellation of artifacts and techniques but as familiarizing and de-familiarizing, naturalizing and de-naturalizing investments of environmental events with significance in the service of particular ends.

Three -- Discuss access-to-knowledge (a2k), end-to-end (e2e), many-to-many, peer-to-peer (p2p) networks, formations, ethoi as occasions for democratizing and anti-democratizing technodevelopmental social struggle; discuss "democracy" not as an eidos we approach but as ongoing interminable experimental implementations of the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them; discuss "democratization" as the struggle through which ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.

Four -- Discuss the connection of a2k/p2p-formations and media/network theories grappling with these to relational, social, participatory aesthetic and curatorial practices and theories.

Five -- This course takes as its point of departure the insight that the novelties and perplexities of our experience of emerging p2p-formations are, on the one hand, clarified when understood in light of the unique formulations of Hannah Arendt's political thinking but also that these novelties and perplexities provide, on the other hand, illustrations through which to better understand Hannah Arendt's political thinking in its own right: Discussions will include her delineation of the political (as a site other than the private, the social, the violent, the cultural), her notion of the peer (as someone other than the citizen, the intimate, the colleague, the subject, the celebrity), and her accounts of civitas, revolution, public happiness, futurological think-tanks and AI, and totalitarianism both as manifested historically in Nazism and potentially in neoliberalism.