MachineMachine /stream - tagged with capitalism http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com Children of Hoarders on Leaving the Cluttered Nest http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/garden/children-of-hoarders-on-leaving-the-cluttered-nest.html?pagewanted=all In dealing with her mother’s home in Minneapolis, Ms. Sholl has spent much of her life alternating between feeling shame about its squalid condition and attempting to rid it of the books, scraps of paper, empty food cartons and thrift-store tchotchkes littering every available surface. When she learned that her mother had cancer, in 2006, Ms. Sholl flew out for one last-ditch cleanup attempt, an effort that inspired “Dirty Secret.” “The stove was piled feet-high with dirty pans,” Ms. Sholl said. “It gnawed at me that she was living that way.” Many children of hoarders know the feeling. Even as… ]]> Fri, 04 May 2012 03:45:17 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/garden/children-of-hoarders-on-leaving-the-cluttered-nest.html?pagewanted=all The Cyberspace Real (Between Perversion and Trauma) http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-cyberspace-real Are the pessimistic cultural criticists (from Jean Baudrillard to Paul Virilio) justified in their claim that cyberspace ultimately generates a kind of proto-psychotic immersion into an imaginary universe of hallucinations, unconstrained by any symbolic Law or by any impossibility of some Real? If not, how are we to detect in cyberspace the contours of the other two dimensions of the Lacanian triad ISR, the Symbolic and the Real? As to the symbolic dimension, the solution seems easy — it suffices to focus on the notion of authorship that fits the emerging domain of cyberspace narratives, that of the "procedural authorship":… ]]> Fri, 30 Sep 2011 07:33:41 -0700 http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/the-cyberspace-real The London Riots: On Consumerism coming Home to Roost http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/ These are not hunger or bread riots. These are riots of defective and disqualified consumers.
Revolutions are not staple products of social inequality; but minefields are. Minefields are areas filled with randomly scattered explosives: one can be pretty sure that some of them, some time, will explode – but one can’t say with any degree of certainty which ones and when. Social revolutions being focused and targeted affairs, one can possibly do something to locate them and defuse in time. Not the minefield-type explosions, though. In case of the minefields laid out by soldiers of one army you can… ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 15:32:53 -0700 http://www.social-europe.eu/2011/08/the-london-riots-on-consumerism-coming-home-to-roost/ Violence at the Edge: Tottenham, Athens, Paris http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4142 "The everyday experience of liberal capitalism rests upon the violent defence of the boundaries against the other that the system itself produces. That banal and pacifying phrase ‘social exclusion’ allows us to forget the material experience of exclusion and the subjectivities that it tends to generate." ]]> Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:39:01 -0700 http://www.criticallegalthinking.com/?p=4142 Information Wants to be Consumed http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rlrutsky/RR/Consumption.pdf  Although information spreads, virus-like, through replication, this replication, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, involves a dispersion that allows images or data to be seen in different places, in different contexts (what Benjamin (1969) called “exhibition value”). It is, however, only through the process of consumption that this reproduction and dissemination of data can occur. Consumption, in short, is the means by which information, whether expensive or free, reproduces and spreads. Information, in fact, depends upon consumption for its very existence. Without being consumed, it ceases to be information in any practical sense, becoming merely a static and inaccessible knowledge, an eternal… ]]> Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:00:18 -0700 http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~rlrutsky/RR/Consumption.pdf Old Internet Getting You Down? Build Your Own! http://www.broadbandexpert.com/blog/wireless-carriers/old-internet-getting-you-down-build-your-own/ The role of social networking in recent rebellions against repressive regimes may have been slightly overstated, but here’s the thing with repressive regimes: they sort of tend to overreact to any perceived threat at the best of times.

Also, repressive regimes watch CNN.

Going on and on about how helpful Twitter was to protesters in Iran or Egypt and even going so far as government requests for Twitter to postpone maintenance so that protesters can use it to communicate was eventually going to clue someone in.

There’s also the small matter… ]]> Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:22:53 -0700 http://www.broadbandexpert.com/blog/wireless-carriers/old-internet-getting-you-down-build-your-own/ Politics of Art: Contemporary Art and the Transition to Post-Democracy http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/1044/ by Hito Steyerl

A standard way of relating politics to art assumes that art represents political issues in one way or another. But there is a much more interesting perspective: the politics of the field of art as a place of work.1 Simply look at what it does—not what it shows.
Amongst all other forms of art, fine art has been most closely linked to post-Fordist speculation, with bling, boom, and bust. Contemporary art is no unworldly discipline nestled away in some remote ivory tower. On the contrary, it is squarely placed in the neoliberal thick… ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2011 08:19:16 -0700 http://greekleftreview.wordpress.com/2011/06/08/1044/ Digital Autonomy http://art-research.co.uk/digital-autonomy-a-reponse-to-hito-steyerl

“Is an ephemeral image, a moment in a streaming video, a thing? Or if the image is frozen as a still, is it now a thing? Is a dream, a city, a sensation, a derivative, an ideology, a decay, a kiss? I haven’t the least idea.”

Extract from David Miller, Materiality : An Introduction [1]

In A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl plays out her ongoing obsession with the copy, skirting briefly over her wider, yet more implicit concern: the digital. Echoing the work of Bruno Latour, Steyerl acknowledges the materiality by which… ]]> Sat, 11 Jun 2011 04:02:00 -0700 http://art-research.co.uk/digital-autonomy-a-reponse-to-hito-steyerl/is-an-ephemeral-image-a-moment-in-a-streaming-video-a Capitalism's Dismal Future http://chronicle.com/article/Capitalisms-Dismal-Future/126659/ A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since World War II, there has been little mention of the fact that business depressions have been a recurrent feature of the capitalist economy since the Industrial Revolution. But even the briefest attention to history makes recent events appear far from unusual. From the early 1800s to the late 1930s, in fact, capitalism spent between a third and a half of its history in depressions (depending on how they are dated… ]]> Wed, 30 Mar 2011 02:30:54 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/Capitalisms-Dismal-Future/126659/ Riz Khan - Are we living in the end times? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIpiXJW3dYE&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Fri, 19 Nov 2010 05:53:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIpiXJW3dYE&feature=youtube_gdata Conflict or Cooperation? http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66802/richard-k-betts/conflict-or-cooperation?page=show Among the theorists who jumped into the market for models of the future, three stood out: Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. Each made a splash with a controversial article, then refined the argument in a book -- Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man, Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, and Mearsheimer in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Each presented a bold and sweeping vision that struck a chord with certain readers, and each was dismissed by others whose beliefs were offended or who jumped to conclusions about… ]]> Fri, 05 Nov 2010 05:54:00 -0700 http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/66802/richard-k-betts/conflict-or-cooperation?page=show Ha-Joon Chang: The net isn't as important as we think http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright-idea-ha-joon-chang Is it really true that the washing machine has changed the world more than the internet?

When we assess the impact of technological changes, we tend to downplay things that happened a while ago. Of course, the internet is great – I can now google and find the exact location of this restaurant on the edge of Liverpool or whatever. But when you look at the impact of this on the economy, it's mainly in the area of leisure.

The internet may have significantly changed the working patterns of people like you and me,… ]]> Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:30:00 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright-idea-ha-joon-chang Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703691804575254533386933138.html Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly progressing technologies. Once "progress" started to produce new tools, different ways of life and burgeoning populations, it accelerated all over the world, culminating in agriculture, cities, literacy and all the rest. Yet all the ingredients of human success—tool making, big brains, culture, fire, even language—seem to have been in place half a million years before and nothing happened. Tools were made to the same monotonous design for hundreds of thousands… ]]> Tue, 01 Jun 2010 02:53:00 -0700 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703691804575254533386933138.html Immaterial Labour in the Digital Economy | Eleni Ikoniadou http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/ikoniadoutext.html The Internet, arguably the most influential digital medium, has sparked an explosion of debate throughout recent years, regarding its economic, political and social status; a space where its structure is constantly criticized and its potential nurtures new and contradicting ideas. British scholar Richard Barbrook (University of Westminster) is the instigator of one of such ideas, which finds its groundwork on Marxist critical analysis of capital. According to Barbrook, the new economy of the Internet era is called "the digital economy"; its workers are "the digital artisans," and their "tools" the new technologies, that is, computer networks. [2] Barbrook believes that… ]]> Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:45:00 -0700 http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors3/ikoniadoutext.html