I cite

Parallax 15.3

New issue of Parallax (vol 15, no 3)

Jacques Rancière: in Disagreement
Paul Bowman; Richard Stamp
Pages 1 – 2

Conjunctive Times, Disjointed Time: Philosophy between Enigma and Disagreement
Sudeep Dasgupta
Pages 3 – 19

Politics without Politics
Jodi Dean
Pages 20 – 36

Politics after Aesthetics: Disagreeing with Rancière
David Ferris
Pages 37 – 49

Heteroreductives – Rancière's disagreement with ontology
Bram Ieven
Pages 50-62

Which Equality? Badiou and Rancière in Light of Ludwig Feuerbach
Nina Power
Pages 63 – 80

JR cinéphile, or the philosopher who loved things
Adrian Rifkin
Pages 81 – 87

‘A literary animal’: Rancière, Derrida, and the Literature of Democracy
Mark Robson
Pages 88 – 101

When Does Politics Happen?
Paulina Tambakaki
Pages 102 – 113

A few remarks on the method of Jacques Rancière
Jacques Rancière
Pages 114 – 123

MJ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zpTQCQEFhg

When Michael Jackson died, I was with my brother, who was on a ventilator in the intensive care unit in a hospital in Pennsylvania. We didn't turn on the television when the nurse mentioned what had happened. The next few days I was caught up in the rhythms of hospital life. As my brother improved, I found myself watching hours of video on you tube after I returned to my hotel in the evenings.

Mark K-punk and Steve Shaviro have insightful posts on their blogs.Their analyses are very smart, hooked into changes in race, sex, and commodity capitalism in the eighties. Mark emphasizes Jackson's freakishness, presenting an early talent that becomes trapped in decline, as if nothing Jackson did after Thriller can shine through or appear in the face of the Jackson's changes. It is as if Jackson is nothing but the ugliness of a signifier that has lost its signifying function, unable to open up something beyond the coarse chain of its own repetitions. Yet, Shaviro concludes (not in direct conversation with K-punk on this):

But such an interpretation, even if true, is inadequate to Jackson’s genius, to the way he created pleasure and hope and utopian aspirations in the lives of so many, and to the ways that his sufferings and his strangeness are quintessential expressions of American life and society in this neoliberal age.

I agree with Steve. And I'd like to add that there is something wonderful in the later, post-Thriller work, something that exceeds any preoccupation one might have with a disruption of the natural order of things (I wonder if the video for "Black and White"--the first time I ever saw those sorts of video morphs in a music video--was, if not a jab at those fixated on his appearance, then an instruction on how to see him). I was astounded by the clip above from the 1988 Grammy Awards. The intensity of the performance, its evocations of the black evangelical tradition and of James Brown, its ties to musical traditions, traditions of faith, and practices of community even as it urges and presents changes, indicate not the decline of a child star but a performer continuing to push himself as an artist. He doesn't moonwalk.

Would the US reception and response be different if "Earthsong" had been released here? And does the relative lack of popularity (compared to his other music) of "They Don't Really Care About Us" say that what the US audience really wanted was for Jackson to be something, someone, who wouldn't change, who was knowable and defineable, someone like the commodity he risked becoming, who was basically a brand, without a catch-phrase but with a catch-dance, a signature move, something as predictable as the repetitive circuits of popular culture?

US credit card companies jack up rates

US credit card companies jack up rates .

Credit card companies have in recent months sharply raised the rates they charge customers, as credit card defaults have risen to record levels. Citigroup, the recipient of a $25 billion government bailout, has increased rates for millions of credit card customers by around one fourth. JPMorgan, the largest issuer of credit cards, also said it would raise its minimum payment rate from 2 to 5 percent for customers behind on payments.

The hikes come amid news that default rates for personal credit cards have hit record high levels. Fitch Ratings reported Tuesday that defaults on credit cards hit a record 10.4 percent last month amid rising unemployment, falling home values and reduced wages. Total losses on loans that credit card companies have given up on collecting have risen more than 62 percent from a year ago, according to the credit-rating agency.

On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported that Citi raised interest rates on 15 million cards co-branded with companies like Sears and Macy’s. Cardholders who did not pay off their entire balance saw their credit card rates increase by an average of 24 percent, according to research by Credit Suisse cited by the FT.

Meanwhile JPMorgan, the largest US credit card company, said that it would raise its balance transfer fees 3 percentage points, to 5 percent. It also announced plans to raise minimum payments for customers behind on their payments to 5 percent, up from 3 percent. The rate increase, scheduled for August, will come with additional fees for those borrowers who fail to make the minimum payment.
...

From the standpoint of the banks, the seemingly absurd and self-destructive practice of raising interest rates for people already behind on their payments only makes sense in the long term. These banks are ultimately betting that borrowers who are behind on their payments now will never pay back their principal amid falling wages and persistent unemployment. The banks are moving to extract the most in interest and fees that they can get away with, even at the consequence of their borrowers’ eventual default and bankruptcy.

Commentators noted that credit card issuers are raising rates preemptively to offset new federal regulations that would make it more difficult to raise credit rates for existing customers.

The Obama administration’s Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act, signed into law in May and with some provisions taking effect next month, prohibits credit card companies from raising rates for existing customers unless they are at least two months behind on payments. (See “The credit card crisis and the false promise of the Obama administration”)

The window between the law’s signing and its adoption can only be seen as a deliberate loophole to allow credit card companies to raise rates to their preferred levels.

New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer on Tuesday made a show of denouncing the act’s ineffectiveness, noting that the present outcome was entirely predictable. “This is what many of us feared about a law that didn’t take effect right away,” he said. “Issuers are using the delay in the effective date to wring more dollars out of their customers,” Schumer added.

Citigroup’s announcement on rate hikes comes a week after it said it would increase the salaries of its top executives by as much as 50 percent. (See “Record bonuses at bailed-out US banks”) Only a few days later, Forbes noted that Citi has already put aside $3 million as signing bonuses for two unnamed former Morgan Stanley executives, and likely had even bigger bonuses in the works for other new executives.

Citigroup received $25 billion in government aid during the height of the financial crisis, and in February the company announced that this stake would be converted into stock, making the US government in effect the company’s largest shareholder. Unlike banks such as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, Citi has yet to pay back its nominal obligations to the government. This has not, however, prevented it from raising compensation for its executives.

The Obama administration has explicitly opposed all limits on executive pay, even for banks in which the US government is the largest shareholder. The government’s entire policy has been aimed at inflating the profit margins of the banking system, at the direct expense of working people. Even when the banks pursue policies—such as raising credit card rates—that hinder an overall economic recovery, the government has defended the most reckless short-term interests of Wall Street.

The Corporate Media Circus: The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free

Chris Hedges in t r u t h o u t | The Corporate Media Circus: The Truth Alone Will Not Set You Free.

The ability of the corporate state to pacify the country by extending credit and providing cheap manufactured goods to the masses is gone. The pernicious idea that democracy lies in the choice between competing brands and the freedom to accumulate vast sums of personal wealth at the expense of others has collapsed. The conflation of freedom with the free market has been exposed as a sham. The travails of the poor are rapidly becoming the travails of the middle class, especially as unemployment insurance runs out and people get a taste of Bill Clinton's draconian welfare reform. And class warfare, once buried under the happy illusion that we were all going to enter an age of prosperity with unfettered capitalism, is returning with a vengeance.

Touring Empire's Ruins: From Detroit to the Amazon

t r u t h o u t | Touring Empire's Ruins: From Detroit to the Amazon.(excerpt--read the whole piece)

Perhaps, then, we should think of the ruins of Detroit as our Roman Forum. Just as Rome's triumphal arches still remind us of its bygone imperial victories in Mesopotamia, Persia, and elsewhere, so Motown's dilapidated buildings today invoke America's fast slipping supremacy.

Among the most imposing is Henry Ford's Highland Park factory, shuttered since the late 1950s. Dubbed the Crystal Palace for its floor to ceiling glass walls, it was here that Ford perfected assembly-line production, building up to 9,000 Model Ts a day - a million by 1915 - catapulting the United States light-years ahead of industrial Europe.

It was also here that Ford first paid his workers five dollars a day, creating one of the fastest growing and most prosperous working-class neighborhoods in all of America, filled with fine arts-and-crafts style homes. Today, Highland Park looks like a war zone, its streets covered with shattered glass and lined with burnt-out houses. More than 30% of its population lives in poverty, and you don't want to know the unemployment numbers (more than 20%) or the median yearly income (less than $20,000).

There is one reminder that it wasn't always so. A small historical-register plaque outside the Ford factory reads: "Mass production soon moved from here to all phases of American industry and set the pattern of abundance for 20th Century living."

New Left Review - Slavoj Zizek: How to Begin from the Beginning

New Left Review - Slavoj Zizek: How to Begin from the Beginning. This ‘red terror’ should nonetheless be distinguished from Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’. In his memoirs, Sándor Márai provided a precise definition of the difference. Even in the most violent phases of the Leninist dictatorship, when those who opposed the revolution were brutally deprived of their right to (public free) speech, they were not deprived of their right to silence: they were allowed to withdraw into inner exile. An episode from the autumn of 1922 when, on Lenin’s instigation, the Bolsheviks were organizing the infamous ‘Philosophers’ Steamer’, is indicative here. When he learned that an old Menshevik historian on the list of those intellectuals to be expelled had withdrawn into private life to await death due to heavy illness, Lenin not only took him off the list, but ordered that he be given additional food coupons. Once the enemy resigned from political struggle, Lenin’s animosity stopped.

For Stalinism, however, even such silence resonated too much. Not only were masses of people required to show their support by attending big public rallies, artists and scientists also had to compromise themselves by participating in active measures such as signing official proclamations, or paying lip-service to Stalin and the official Marxism. If, in the Leninist dictatorship, one could be shot for what one said, in Stalinism one could be shot for what one did not say. This was followed through to the very end: suicide itself, the ultimate desperate withdrawal into silence, was condemned by Stalin as the last and highest act of treason against the Party. This distinction between Leninism and Stalinism reflects their general attitude towards society: for the former, society is a field of merciless struggle for power, a struggle which is openly admitted; for the latter, the conflict is, sometimes almost imperceptibly, redefined as that of a healthy society against what is excluded from it—vermin, insects, traitors who are less than human.

This passage makes me think of the injunctions to express oneself that are necessary for communicative capitalism. Without the requirement that one express one's thoughts, desires, dreams, that one not only confess in the privacy of the confessional or analyst's couch but before others, whether on television or online, without the sense that putting into words was the essential political task, communicative capitalism could not have emerged. It could not have been a formation for or of strong silent types, for or of a repressed bourgeoisie. Rather, it depended--as is retroactively clear (the only possible path to clarity is backward)--on rap sessions, telling it like it is, speaking truth to power, expressing oneself, sharing one's feelings, not just being free to be you and me but being empowered and impelled to talk about it all the fucking time.

Why don't students talk? It's resistance, resistance to the Stalinist intolerance of silence. And, at risk of eliding Stalinism, communicative capitalism, and Nazism (I hope not an early symptom of becoming-Arendtian), I can't help but think of Schmitt's Buribunks, excerpted in Kettler:

Every Buribunk, regardless of sex, is obligated to keep a diary on every second of his or her life. These diaries are handed over on a daily basis and catalogued by district. A screening is done according to both a subject and a personal index. Then, while rigidly enforcing copyright for each individual entry, all entires of an erotic, demonic, satiric, political, and son on nature are subsumed accordingly, and witers are catalogued by district. Thanks to a precise systme, the organization of these entries in a card catalogue allows for immediate identification of relevant persons and their circumstances.
...
A series of relevant practices--such as periodic and mutual photo opportunities and film presenations, an active exchange of diaries, readings from diaries, studio visits, conferences, new journals, theater productions preceded and followed by laudatios on the personality of the artists--ensure that the interest of the Buribunk in himself and in the quintessentially Buribunkic does not become mere decorum; they prevent as well a damaging, countercultural waning of interest, which leads us to doubt whether the refined existence of the Buribunk will ever come to an end.
...
The basic outline of the philosophy of the Buribunks: I think, therefore I am; I speak therefore I am; I write, therefore I am; I publish therefore I am.
...
I write therefore I am; I am, therefore I write. What do I write? I write muself. Who writes me? I myself write myself. What do i write about? I write that I write myself. What is the great engine that elevates me out of the complacent circle of egohood? History!

All-American Squatters -- In These Times

All-American Squatters -- In These Times.

Take Back the Land, based in Miami, finds empty foreclosed homes and illegally moves homeless families into them. So far his organization has moved nine families into “liberated” houses and has at least four more occupations planned.

Squatting has a long history in the United States. During the westward expansion, much of the land was settled by squatters. Pioneers lived on land they had no legal entitlement to until the federal government recognized their rights as “homesteaders” with several pieces of legislation in the 1800s.

More recently, squatters have had a quiet, countercultural presence in the urban landscape of cities with high rents and vacant buildings. Typically they have been unorganized. But during the recession of the early ’80s, organized squatting movements sprung up nationally. In 35 cities across the country, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) set up squatters’ encampments known as Reagan Ranches.

Today, as the recession roars on, organized squatting movements are springing up across the nation. Michael Stoops, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, says squatting—both organized and spontaneous—is increasing, a fact he attributes, in part, to Rameau’s work. According to Stoops, there are 12 organized squatting operations around the country. He expects that number to rise as more people slide into the ranks of the homeless.

In New York City, Rob Robinson, an organizer with Picture the Homeless, is tight-lipped about the specifics of his squatting operation. “Sometimes you have to force change on people,” he says. “If you’re going to make squatting effective, you have to keep it on the down low.”

Brian Davis, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless, brought Rameau to Cleveland, a city that was hit particularly hard by the collapse of the housing market­. But despite Rameau meeting with activists, squatting there is largely unorganized. “It is a naturally occurring phenomenon in Cleveland,” Davis says.

ACORN, the nation’s largest grassroots organization of low- and moderate-income people, uses a similar approach to fight homelessness. In February it launched the Home Savers campaign to encourage people to stay in their homes or move back in after they’ve foreclosed.

Idiot alert

The idiot is me (the grammatical error registers the idiocy at another level).

Preface: I've been feeling the urge to confess. The following wasn't what incited the urge, or the error to be confessed, but it's pressing, nonetheless.

Confession: I am shockingly ill-informed about basic aspects of political science. Like, it's really hard for me to grasp that anyone would think or have thought in terms of Westphalian sovereignty. It makes absolutely no sense. That is, it doesn't account for power in the world. Nor does it even account for power in the world in which was ostensibly dominant--the Cold War. I just can't even fathom that this has been the dominant way of thinking in international relations. Paul has been convincing me that it has been (to save me from publishing something inane). But I just don't get it at all--there can't have been a Cold War (division of spheres, MAD, Iron curtain) and a supposition of Westphalian sovereignty. But, apparently the rest of the discipline has long thought otherwise.

Maybe this is the result of a background in Marxism--class struggle, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, workers of the world, and all that. Or maybe it's just plain idiocy.

Probably the latter.

Report: Goldman Sachs on Pace to Pay Out Record Bonuses this Year

Report: Goldman Sachs on Pace to Pay Out Record Bonuses this Year.

Question: Goldman Sachs has just said that their staff can look forward to the biggest bonus bailouts in the firm’s 140-year history. How is this possible?

NOMI PRINS: It is possible because our government has chosen to effectively give Goldman the money to do that, in a number of different ways. One is the $10 billion that it got through the TARP program, which both Goldman and the government want us to believe is the only bit of federal subsidy it has gotten, which is why, when it said it would pay back the TARP program, it was all this gesture of “we’re healthy, we’re good, we’re paying it back, we didn’t really need it,” but really they didn’t want government oversight attached to it, not that there was a lot.

The bigger amount of money that has gone to Goldman has come through $12.9 billion from the AIG bailout that went straight to Goldman, its biggest counterparty; $28 billion worth of FDIC-backed guaranteed debt, meaning the FDIC put up a program last fall, and it said, “For banks that deal with consumers”—not banks that deal with multibillion-dollar companies or investors, but people—“we will provide guarantees for debt,” which means that those companies can raise debt to help consumers cheaply. Goldman said, “Alright, fine, we’ll take some of that.” And they took $28 billion worth of that, and they have up to $35 billion that they can take under the FDIC program that was never meant for a company like Goldman Sachs.

In addition, there is a ton of money, there are trillions of dollars at the Fed, not all of that went to Goldman, but that has secretly gone to a number of banks in the system, of which Goldman is one, for which the Fed refuses to disclose any information or any detail, which also goes into this. So when Goldman says—has the nerve to say, feels entitled to say—that it’s going to pay its bankers record bonuses after the travesty that it and other banks have created in the markets, it is on the back of federal subsidies that effectively come from our pockets.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, I think you’ve made the point that the $780 billion-odd TARP money is only a small portion, that the actual federal support for the banking industry is about $13 trillion?

NOMI PRINS: That’s exactly right. The media has constantly focused, and Wall Street has been very happy about this focus, on this measly—and I say “measly”—$700 billion worth of TARP money that Congress allowed to be allocated last October. And that money has gone out to a number of banks, including Goldman and JPMorgan and Bank of America, Citigroup and other banks.

But in addition to that, there have been over two-and-a-half trillion dollars’ worth of guarantees and other types of subsidies from the Treasury Department; over seven-and-a-half trillion from the Federal Reserve, which a lot has gone through the bank at—the New York Federal Reserve during the Tim Geithner period, when he was running it, as well as the Federal Reserve component in Washington; and then all these extra FDIC guarantees, which have the backing of the Fed and the Treasury Department.

So we’re talking about almost 13.6, actually, now—the count keeps going up every time I look at it—trillion dollars’ worth of subsidization of the banking industry. $700 billion is a part—it’s a big part, but there are so many more trillions, that just do not get the right coverage and the right perspective from the media, that exists, that are secret. Some are not. But it’s a lot, a lot of money. It could basically pay for every single mortgage in this country and healthcare and subsidizing student loans. So when it wants to, the government can come up with a way to subsidize what it wants to subsidize. It chose to subsidize the banking industry.

Obama's New Economic Plan: The Good, the Bad and the Weak

Obama's New Economic Plan: The Good, the Bad and the Weak (by Nomi Prins).

The Bad

To oversee big insurers, the Obama team wants to create an Office of National Insurance within the Treasury Department. Now, if it weren't for the fact that many insurance companies, notably AIG, had themselves classified as S&Ls, while others are housed within the bank holding company complexes of firms like Citigroup -- thanks to the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 -- this plan might even work.

But this isn't the case, and since the plan makes no mention of reconstructing the financial system, this part of it is unlikely to help matters. Establishing a Financial Services Oversight Council chaired by the Treasury Department seems redundant; slapping a new layer of regulatory bureaucracy on an increasingly complex banking system seems more an exercise in appearances than action.

On the subject of derivatives, the clear winner is Wall Street. "We propose to bring the markets for all OTC [over-the-counter, meaning they are traded between private parties] derivatives and asset-backed securities into a coherent and coordinated regulatory framework," notes the Obama white paper.

If you didn't quite get that, neither does anybody else. The paper gives no hints about how this would be accomplished, the constraints of this so-called framework, or the reporting requirements. And by noting that the derivatives in question include "all standardized OTC derivative transactions," the white paper implies that the derivatives deemed too complex to be traded in this more generic fashion can still trade off-exchange -- a loophole coveted by the banks that lets them continue to create convoluted securities with little scrutiny. (Mojo's Nick Baumann has more on this, as does Rachel Morris: Cap-and-trade derivatives, anyone?)

British Airways workers urged to work for nothing

British Airways workers urged to work for nothing. The appeal by British Airways (BA) to its 40,000 employees to volunteer for up to a month’s unpaid leave, or even unpaid work, marks a new stage in the efforts by big business to impose the burden of the worsening economic crisis onto the working class.

Sent by e-mail and published in BA’s in-house magazine, the appeal comes after the airline posted a record annual loss of £401 million, against a record profit of £922 million a year earlier. The company message asks staff to volunteer for between one week and one month of unpaid leave or unpaid work by the end of June. The lost salary will be spread over between three and six months.

This reminds me of hype around open source: people work for free! If it works with software--iphone does great with freelance, barely paid workers making apps for them--then it will work in other capitalist enterprises. By the way, the senior management at British Air make hundreds of thousands of pounds a year. The best paid cabin staff averages about 30 thousand pounds a year.

Roller derby!

Roller derby!
Originally uploaded by Jodi3425.

Peru: Amazon Watch

Indigenous people in Peru were able to get the Peruvian government to repeal two of its decrees. This after a month of protests (in the Amazon and in the cities) and the massacre of scores of protesters by the police.

And why, we should ask, is there comparatively little attention given to these successful instances of collective action? Is it because they are too busy actually opposing the government to Twitter about it? Or maybe because it is unbearable to face up to the actual power of organized people to effect change--it's too much of a trauma for the over-mediated to bear? Or maybe because their actions actually work to build a way of living independent of the entrapment of the nets? Yes, we can't use these protests as prostheses through which to fantasize what might have happened had we actually protested the decision in Bush v. Gore in 2000.

Update - Amazon Watch.

Speaking on behalf of indigenous peoples, the vice-president of the Inter-Ethinc Association for Development in the Peruvian Amazon (AIDESEP), Daysi Zapata, expressed her satisfaction with the decision of the Congress of the Republic to repeal the illegitimate legislative decrees 1090 and 1064 and called on the government to initiate a sincere and transparent dialogue for the good of the country.

"Today is a historic day. We are grateful because the will of the indigenous peoples has been heard and we only hope that in the future governments listen and attend to indigenous peoples, that they not legislate behind their backs," she said.

Accompanied by dozens of national and regional leaders with whom she attended the congressional debate, Zapata welcomed the attitude of President Alan Garcia for agreeing with the overturning of the decrees that the indigenous peoples considered to be a threat to the Amazon.

She once again expressed, however, that if this same decision had been made earlier the unfortunate deaths and confrontations between fellow Peruvians would have been avoided. "Starting today we will call to our members and ask them to discontinue their various protests," she said. "My brothers from Yurimaguas," she added, "confirmed that they will return to their communities as soon as the members of congress repeal the decrees."

Under the market

t r u t h o u t | The Market? A Paper Tiger. All this secret, hidden (open source software) GDP is based on cooperation. It's the immersed surface of the iceberg! While real GDP (proprietary software) is based on rivalry, exclusion, competition.

This little excerpt is from a typical celebration of open source software. As usual open source is celebrated for its volunteerism and cooperation. It's a wonderful example of a primary (primal?) human urge to cooperate, to produce for pleasure, and to devote oneself to the greater good.

What do we make of this? Is an imaginary unity necessary for undermining the hold of capitalism? Or, does it repeat the pattern of supposing an originary oneness, perhaps that of a prehistoric (precapitalist) tribe or that of the domestic arena where women's maternal instincts lead them to care for others naturally?

Why do some feel the need to posit such a myth? Is it to stimulate a desire for liberation from being engulfed in and by the maternal? Is it limit the terrain of thinking to 2 options--cooperation or competition--rather than inciting inquiries into the ways that cooperation and competition inform, reinforce, and undermine each other? For example, there are forms of competition that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with recognition, honor, fame, glory. And, there are forms of cooperation that have everything to do with capitalist exploitation and enrichment--we've seen the bankers and hedge fund managers engaging in all sorts of cooperation.

The real secret is that cooperation and rivalry are not opposed; they are interconnected.

Looking for volunteers. Must be willing to get hands dirty.

Sage replaces editor of Political Theory

The following is in the comment section of the political theory and public law job rumor mill blog:

"A number of us have just learned that SAGE has moved to undermine the integrity and autonomy of Political Theory.

Over the many decades of its existence, the editorship of Political Theory has been determined by a process of consultation and advice with editors, board members, and interested members of the political theory community. Mary Dietz has been told that at the end of her current contract, she will be replaced by an editor chosen by SAGE (as of this writing, Mark Bevir). None of us, I think, doubt Bevir's abilities; the issue here is SAGE's decision to usurp the authority of the community the journal serves.

This is a very disturbing development. I hope that others will weigh-in here with reactions and -- perhaps most importantly -- ideas about how we ought to respond to this violation of the integrity of what is, by broad agreement, the field's flagship journal.

 --Steve Leonard UNC-Chapel Hill Treasurer, Foundations of Political Theory"

Izvestia (1984)

Cute cat theory of the internet by Ethan Zuckerman

A friend sent me this link to a terrific paper by Ethan Zuckerman. Here are some excerpts but read the whole thing here.

Zuckerman's focus is on cute cats and activism. He identifies the issue:

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

For Zuckerman, the popular uses, even if they seem to overflow the information networks with all sorts of boring content, are actually inseparable from the net as a medium for activists (he also discusses this in terms of the porn test--the presence of porn in a medium means that the medium is working; the blogger equivalent might be the troll test; the presence of trolls means you've got readers). He writes:

With web 2.0, we’ve embraced the idea that people are going to share pictures of their cats, and now we build sophisticated tools to make that easier to do. As a result, we’re creating a wealth of tech that’s extremely helpful for activists. There are twin revolutions going on - the ease of creating content and the ease of sharing it with local and global audiences.

Zuckerman uses as his primary example the story of some events in Tunisia. Tunisian activists made a video exposing governmental corruption:

Sami and Astrubal posted the video on their personal blogs… but as known activists, their blogs have been blocked in Tunisia for years. They also posted it on DailyMotion, a video site popular in the French-speaking world. Shortly after, the Tunisian government blocked access to DailyMotion.

This is a good thing if you’re an activist. Most Tunisians don’t identify as activists and might not be engaged with politics. But, like Americans and Europeans, they’re interested in seeing cute cats being adorable online. When the government blocks DailyMotion, it impacts a much wider swath of Tunisians than those who are politicially active. Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites. And even those who could care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos on DailyMotion to block a few political ones.

Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents - they learn to find and use anonymous proxies, which happens to be a key first step in learning how to blog anonymously. Every time you force a government to block a web 2.0 site - cutting off people’s access to cute cats - you spend political capital. Our job as online advocates is to raise that cost of censorship as high as possible.

...

China’s censorship genius is that they’ve found a way to let people have their cute cats and have censorship as well. While China will block sites like Human Rights Watch, they won’t block domestic Web 2.0 sites, and hence the collateral damage from blocking banal content doesn’t draw non-activists to become aware of activist issues. Is this unique to China, or will we see this technique spread? It’s hard to imagine Ethiopia, for instance, being capable of building their own Amharic internet applications and blocking all Web 2.0 tools.

(ps--Zuckerman has another article that mentions a cool app where cnn updates appear as lolcaptions on cute kitteh photos. Unfortunately, the link goes to a 404. What I really don't get is why cats are so much more popular than other cute animals.)

The Great Debt Scare: Why Has It Returned? | Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace | AlterNet

Robert Reich: The Great Debt Scare: Why Has It Returned? 

The Great Debt Scare is back.

Odd that it would return right now, when the economy is still mired in the worst depression since the Great one. After all, consumers are still deep in debt and incapable of buying. Unemployment continues to soar. Businesses still are not purchasing or investing, for lack of customers. Exports are still dead, because much of the global economy continues to shrink. So the purchaser of last resort -- the government -- has to create larger deficits if the economy is to get anywhere near full capacity, and start to grow again.

Odder still that the Debt Scare returns at the precise moment that bills are emerging from Congress on universal health care, which, by almost everyone's reckoning, will not increase the long-term debt one bit because universal health care has to be paid for in the budget. In fact, universal health care will reduce the deficit and cumulative debt -- especially if it includes a public option capable of negotiating lower costs from drug makers, doctors, and insurers, and thereby reducing the future costs of Medicare and Medicaid.

Even odder that the Debt Scare rears its frightening head just as the President's stimulus is moving into high gear with more spending on infrastructure. Every expert who has looked closely at the nation's crumbling infrastructure knows how badly it suffers from decades of deferred maintenance -- bridges collapsing, water pipes bursting, sewers backed up, highways impassable, public transit in disrepair. The stimulus, along with the President's long-term budget, also focus on the nation's schools, as well as America's capacity to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. These public investments are as important to the nation's future as are private investments.

Parker-Zizek: another round

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Ian Parker Posted June 4, 2009 at 7:14 am | Permalink

Lighten up comrades! The piece Slavoj objects to, ‘Ambivalence and oscillation’, was posted on the http://www.nskstate.com site five years ago. Readers can decide for themselves whether that bit of gossip works as a joke and as hook into the discussion of connections between his work and the NSK project, or not. My ‘Slovene preface’, just published, spells out in more tedious detail my admiration for his work and political solidarity with him against seriously reactionary attempts to undermine it. An English version is available at http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/34/250

slavoj zizek Posted June 8, 2009 at 3:29 am | Permalink

Unfortunately, the only way I can understand Parker’s reply is to read it as an exemplary case of postmodern cynicism: he tries to sell as a harmless joke what the large majority of readers take as a serious insinuation. And why shouldn’t they? We are talking about the first paragraph of a long “serious” analysis of my alleged “ambiguities”: the story about my acting as a Communist party “commissar” denouncing colleagues is quoted as a starting point (or a “hook into”) the analysis of how my work relates to the NSK project. In short, Parker acts as a moral coward who wants to have a cake and eat it: to spread malicious lies about me while claiming they are innocent jokes exchanged among comrades. The least he should have learned from his visits to Slovenia is that here, stories about denouncing colleagues to the Communist authorities are NOT a joke!