Julie E. Cohen: Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (2012)

The legal and technical rules governing flows of information are out of balance, argues Julie E. Cohen in this original analysis of information law and policy. Flows of cultural and technical information are overly restricted, while flows of personal information often are not restricted at all. The author investigates the institutional forces shaping the emerging information society and the contradictions between those forces and the ways that people use information and information technologies in their everyday lives. She then proposes legal principles to ensure that people have ample room for cultural and material participation as well as greater control over the boundary conditions that govern flows of information to, from, and about them.

Publisher Yale University Press, 2012
ISBN 0300125437, 9780300125436
Printable version is under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike license
352 pages

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dj readies (Craig J. Saper): Intimate Bureaucracies: A Manifesto (2012)

Intimate Bureaucracies is a history from the future looking backward at our present moment as a turning point. Our systems of organization and control appear unsustainable and brutal, and we are feeling around in the dark for alternatives. Using experiments in social organization in downtown New York City, and other models of potential alternative social organizations, this manifesto makes a call to action to study and build sociopoetic systems.

One alternative system, the Occupy movement, has demands and goals beyond the specific historical moment and concerns. This short book/manifesto suggests that the organization and communication systems of Occupying encampments represent important necessities, models, goals, and demands, as well as an intimate bureaucracy that is a paradoxical mix of artisanal production, mass-distribution techniques, and a belief in the democratizing potential of social media.

Participatory decentralization, a mantra of political networks, expresses a peculiar intimate bureaucratic form. These forms of organization represent a paradoxical mix of artisanal production, mass-distribution techniques, and a belief in the democratizing potential of social media. Borrowing from mass-culture image banks, these intimate bureaucracies play on forms of publicity common in societies of spectacles and public relations. Intimate bureaucracies monitor the pulse of the society of the spectacle and the corporatized bureaucracies: economics as in Big Business, culture as in Museums and Art Markets, mass media as in Studio Systems and Telecommunication Networks, safety as in Big Brother militarized police forces, and politics as in Big Government. Rather than simply mounting a campaign against big conglomerations of business, government, police, and culture, these intimate bureaucracies and their works use the forms of corporate bureaucracies for intimate ends. Rather than reach the lowest common denominator, they seek to construct what those in the business world would call niche marketing to ultra-specific demographics. Businesses, interested in utilizing the World Wide Web and the Internet, already use these strategies for niche marketing. The historical examples and sketches, explored in this pamphlet, examine how these cultural experiments emulate and resist the systems used in Internet marketing.

The apparent oxymoron, intimate bureaucracies, suggests not only a strategy, but the very basis for the new productive mythology surrounding the electronic World Wide Web.

Intimacy, the close familiarity of friendship or love, by definition depends on a small-scale system of communication. Its warmth, face-to-face contact, and fleeting impact has often made it the subject of art and literature. It usually only appears in administration situations as either an insincere ornamentation of a political campaign (“pressing the flesh” or “kissing babies”), or as inappropriate office behavior (affairs, gossip, child abuse, etc.), but rarely as the center of a political system. The “small is beautiful” movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s did suggest the possibility of an intimacy in politics, but not how to scale the system to the size of a government.

Publisher Punctum Books, Brooklyn, New York; with AK Press Tactical Media, Baltimore / Oakland / Edinburgh; and Minor Compositions, Wivenhoe / Brooklyn / Port Watson, March 2012
ISBN 978-0615612034
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
60 pages

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Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies, Issue One: A Billion Gadget Minds (2011)

Computational Culture is an online open-access peer-reviewed journal of inter-disciplinary enquiry into the nature of cultural computational objects, practices, processes and structures.

“This first issue of Computational Culture is loosely based on the proceedings of a workshop held in Central London in October 2010. Entitled ‘A Billon Gadgets Minds: Thinking Widgets, Data and Workflow’, the aim of the workshop was: “To evaluate the ways in which contemporary hardware and software augment and distribute intelligence, as well as the ensemble of social relations which form around thinking practices as they synchronise, mesh, de-couple, breakdown and collapse with variable effects”.” (from Editorial)

With contributions by Michael Wheeler, Anna Munster, Ingmar Lippert, Luciana Parisi and Stamatia Portanova, Lev Manovich, Yuk Hui, Benedikte Zitouni, Michael Batty, Olga Goriunova, Jentery Sayers, M. Beatrice Fazi

Editorial group: Matthew Fuller, Andrew Goffey, Olga Goriunova, Graham Harwood, Adrian Mackenzie
Published in December 2011
Open access
ISSN 2047-2390

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