Constant (eds.): Tracks in Electr(on)ic Fields (2009) [English/French/Dutch]

19 March 2011, dusan

Publication contains texts and images from Verbindingen/Jonctions 10: Tracks in electr(on)ic fields festival, organised by Constant VZW in Brussels in 2007. Its design by OSPublish won a 2009 Fernand Baudin prize.

Edited by Constant featuring Clementine Delahaut, Laurence Rassel and Emma Sidgwick
Publisher Constant, Association for Art and Media, Brussels, 2009
Free Art Licence
332 pages

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Adam Arvidsson, Elanor Colleoni: Value in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet. A Reply to Christian Fuchs (draft, 2011)

19 March 2011, dusan

This article critically engages with recent applications of the Marxist ‘labor theory of value’ to online prosumer practices, and offers an alternative framework to theorize value creation in such practices. We argue that the labor theory of value is difficult to apply to online prosumer practices for two reasons. First because value creation in such practices is poorly related to time. Second because the realization of the value accumulated by social media companies generally occurs on financial markets, rather than in direct commodity exchange. In alternative we offer an understanding of value creation as based primarily on the capacity to initiate and sustain webs of affective relations, and value realization as linked to a reputation based financial economy. We argue that this model describes the process of value creation and appropriation in the context of online prosumer platforms better than an approach based on the marxian labor theory of value. We also suggest that our approach can be cast new light on value creation within informational capitalism in general.

Available at Social Science Research Network (SSRN)
Working Paper Series
February 2011

original paper by Christian Fuchs
response to Arvidsson&Colleoni’s paper (Poor Richard, P2P Foundation)

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Sabine Bitter, Helmut Weber: Autogestion, or Henri Lefebvre in New Belgrade (2009)

16 March 2011, dusan

“The artist book by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber is based on an unpublished orginal text by French philosopher and urbanist Henri Lefebvre which is printed as a facsimile. This central text is contextualized and interpretated by accompanying commentaries and texts by Ljiljana Blagojevic, Zoran Eric, Klaus Ronnberger, and Neil Smith.

The text from Henri Lefebvre was submitted as part of a proposal with French architects Serge Renaudie and Pierre Guilbaud for the International Competition for the New Belgrade Urban Structure Improvement in 1986, sponsored by the state of Yugoslavia. In his urban vision for New Belgrade—the capital of former Yugoslavia founded in 1948—Lefebvre emphasizes the processes and potentials of self-organization of the people of any urban territory to counter the failed concepts of urban planning from above. For Lefebvre, at this late point in his life, the promises of both modernist capitalist as well as state socialist architecture and city planning had failed. Yet, Lefebvre viewed New Belgrade and Yugoslavia as having a particular position in what he has elsewhere called “the urban revolution.” As Lefebvre states, “because of self-management, a place is sketched between the citizen and the citadin, and Yugoslavia is today [1986] perhaps one of the rare countries to be able to pose the problem of a New Urban.””

Edited by Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, and Helmut Weber (Urban Subjects)
With contributions by Sabine Bitter and Helmut Weber, Ljiljana Blagojevic, Zoran Eric, Klaus Ronnberger, and Neil Smith
Publisher: Sternberg Press, with Fillip, Vancouver, 2009
ISBN 9781933128771
160 pages

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DJVU (6 MB, updated on 2013-12-8)