New Book Information (An OpenMute Publication) Zones of Proletarian Development Mastaneh Shah-Shuja In this book, Mastaneh Shah-Shuja presents a novel approach for the study-extension of the social movement. Employing conceptual tools from Marx, Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Activity Theory she examines the interaction of individuals within crowds in a variety of settings including London May Day celebrations, riotous Iranian carnivals, the anti-poll-tax rebellion, the great anti-war demonstration of 15 February 2003 and a number of historical and contemporary political organisations. She identifies ?zones of proximal development? (Vygotsky) where people learn from each other, solve social problems, develop consciousness and engage in collective meaning-making. Crucially, she demonstrates how capitalism is metamorphosing at a number of fronts simultaneously. She shows how new methods of exploitation and accumulation are being challenged by an emerging universal class unencumbered by some of the limitations of previou...

Academic says gadgets threaten Internet`s future Sun, May 11th, 2008 11:59 am BdST London, May 11 (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The rise of gadgets like the iPhone, Blackberry and Xbox threatens to unravel the decades of innovation that helped to build the Internet, a leading academic has warned in a new book. Professor Jonathan Zittrain says the latest must-have devices are sealed, "sterile" boxes that stifle creativity and turn consumers into passive users of technology. Unlike home computers, new Internet-enabled gadgets don't lend themselves to the sort of tinkering and collaboration that leads to technological advances, he says. The mix of gadgets, over-regulation and Internet security fears could destroy the old system where mainstream technology could be "influenced, even revolutionized, out of left field". "I don't want to see a two-tier world where only the experts can survive ... and the non-experts are stuck between something they don't understand and something that limits them," Zittrain told Reuters ...

List of Contributors http://tinyurl.com/5vbbth Download "Fear of a Muslim Planet" chapter http://shobak.org/text/hiphop.shtml # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org

If you thought immigration woes are only in Europe, here's some Muslim ummah solidarity action... "Saudi policemen have been hunting down Bangladeshis" "when our workers show their absolutely genuine papers to the police, the latter commit the sheer outrage of tearing them up" "Bangladeshis are reportedly the only people targeted by the Saudis, with others remaining untouched" "the bogey of Bangladeshis indulging in criminal activities in the kingdom" DAILY STAR Published On: 2008-05-10 Bangladeshi workers in distress Govt must send high-powered team to Riyadh http://thedailystar.net/story.php?nid=35752 Bangladeshis employed in Saudi Arabia are in dire straits. That is the truth which comes out in the media. Over the past few months, Saudi policemen have been hunting down Bangladeshis and sending them off to deportation centres despite many of them possessing perfectly valid papers. As a number of anguished Bangladeshis now in the kingdom have made it clear, the Saudi police pay no heed to the fact that thos...

Good news: Union membership is about to skyrocket! Bad news: Union members will, um, not have the right to strike or "post derogatory language about the companies on bulletin boards," and they will be able to organize only at sites "selected jointly by the companies and the unions" --Dave. ------------------- Unions Forge Secret Pacts with Major Employers By KRIS MAHER The Wall Street Journal May 10, 2008; Page A1 Two of the nation's largest labor unions have struck confidential agreements with large employers that give the companies the right to designate which of their locations, and how many workers, the unions can seek to organize. The agreements are raising questions about union transparency and workers' rights. A summary document put together by the unions says it is critical to the success of the partnership "that we honor the confidentiality and not publicly disclose the existence of these agreements." That includes not disclosing them to union members. The agreements involve workers who provide food...

dear nettimers! below you find the call for applications for a new project i am going to initiate at Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. please circulate and forward it to anybody who might be interested. i hope you allow me to add a few personal remarks before. IMAGINARY PROPERTY is a concept that can be read in at least two directions: property produced by imagination, as well as: images turning into properties. the bourgeois or modern conception of property has been characterized by anonymity and pure objectivity. the fundament of western individualism, often characterized as "possessive individualism" is the ability to "own" something and "own up" to something. today, in the age of immaterial production, digital reproduction, and networked distribution - property relations need to be made visible in order to be enforced. property exists first of all as imagery and rapidly becomes a matter of imagination. my work on IMAGINARY PROPERTY began more than two years ago when i came across a sequence of nine se...

EXHIBITION: New Media-New Networks VENUE: Galerija Galzenica, Zagreb/Velika Gorica, http://www.galerijagalzenica.info/english.html DATE: May 9, 2008 TIME: 8:00 - 10:00 pm --- The exhibition entitled New Media - New Networks is the first retrospective dedicated to the new media art and culture in Croatia. The exhibition is a result of last year's research on new media art in Croatia proposed by Ljiljana Kolešnik (Institute of Art History from Zagreb) and conducted by Klaudio Štefan?i? (the research results will be soon available for download). The new media art in Croatia is presented as a practice of social and artistic networking in the wider context of applying new communication technologies to old institutions of civil society, public and mass media, art and higher education. Instead of the best of presentation of the artists who have experimented with new media, we decided to represent the new media art in relation to concepts of chronology and social network. Distinguishing the three chronological lines...

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/guilds.html> *. Xster's guild is titled _Carpe *Pwn *um_. X/Xster is currently immersed in a specific game variable within WoW. This game variable is an *instance *called _Karazhan _ [ *Kara *] which is an example of a *raid *. X is present in the instance with 9 of his fellow guild members. Each member has been included specifically for their race, class and talent make-up. The raid members have just completed one of their raid targets by killing a boss *Non-Player Character *. The unsuccessful attempts ended in the successive deaths of each raid member, otherwise known as a *wipe<" href="http://wipef...

don't bother? really! oh sure, spend years pathetically recycling your newspapers only to enable bastard 'look-at-me-I'm-Green' corporations to profitably deposit multiple copies of gigantic phone-directories on millions of doorsteps; it's all a big scam: better to burn-up as much oil and rice-as-oil as possible before the US military gets it... and don't let the malicious-thugs-with-badges (why would anyone be forced to take such a deplorable job?) beat you down; and mercy-sakes-alive, don't waste income on school... I've spent 30 years looking for decent work or even a simple art-exhibition, (with a dumm-ass masters degree)... it's bullshit! I urge you all to cause as much damage as possible as quickly as possible if you really care about an implausible future... otherwise carry-on as usual... no difference hey you could pay me for my work! oh my goodness! why do that unless I hold a gun to your head? here you go idiots: _ |__ __| | /_ |__ \| | | __| | | | (_) | | __/ (__| |_ __ | | | | | | __/ | |/ /_| | |...

All's changing in UK's historic Bangladeshi restaurants. In addition to UK's new immigration laws, here's a significant demographic shift... "Today's young British Bangladeshis are not interested in the antisocial hours and relatively low wages of curry house work." Curry houses test Europe's eastern promise EU workers try to leap cultural gap as restaurant bosses struggle to find staff Rachel Williams The Guardian, Monday May 5 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/may/05/immigration.immigrationandpublicservices/print Mario was used to plain Romanian dishes but now is learning to adjust his taste buds to the spiciness of curry. Photograph: Corbis A framed review telling of "modern magic in the city suburb" hangs alongside the abstract artwork on the walls of the Monsoon Indian restaurant. Beneath it is a photograph of owner Mahmud Miah with a beaming David Cameron. The lighting at the eatery in Hollywood, a few miles south of Birmingham and its balti triangle, is minimalist; there is not a scrap of flock w...

Responsibilities Include * In collaboration with the director, deputy director, curators and artists, plan, design and implement exhibitions * Generate materials and labor cost estimates based upon exhibition plans * Devise exhibition and project schedules, including artist's involvement in installation * Arrange scheduling, materials, technical needs and staffing for installation and de-installation periods * Recruit, train, retain and supervise diverse on-call installation staff * Manage fiscal and human resources related to purchasing and staffing * Oversee organization of gallery storage and back room spaces * Supervise and facilitate installation of exhibitions and site-specific works in gallery spaces on SF campus, as well as any off-site or special projects * Assign, schedule and supervise on-call technicians in the completion of exhibition installations and special projects * Collaborate with visiting artists, curators, and other members of the artistic community on assigned projects and exhibition-r...

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Thanks Patrice for bringing up the Bengal Famine. Amartya Sen famously argued in his study that famines do not occur in functional democracies with free press and democratic institutions. As Bangladesh debates "hidden hunger" (new euphemism for near-famine) or "monga" (a new Bengali phrase for near-famine), we look at the Military-backed Caretaker Government and wonder if Sen's prediction will prove correct again. Will a military junta fail to acknowledge the crisis in time. The Economist analyzes how the food crisis has queered the pitch for the military's plans: http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11058143 Then again, the counter to Sen's democracy=food formulation can be the biggest famine in Bengal since 1943, which was under the democratic government of Sheikh Mujib. But there too, there are other obfuscating factors. Christopher Hitchens argued in THE TRIAL OF HENRY KISSINGER that HK should be on genocide trial for blocking US grain shipments to Bangladesh. Alexander Cockburn ...

Hehehe Brian, Of course I was having another of my little 'theoretical' fits when reacting to yr. mail, no harm intended. Yet I did intend to serve some useful discussion purposes with that rejoinder. Which you largely picked up (and thank you for pointing to these excellent FT maps). To clarify a few points: The conspiracy theory I alluded to resided not in any separate point, but in their combination. Also I think that the 'endocolonialist' (aka 'biopolitical') explanation of current capitalist development is very true, but has exhausted its mileage, as far as a solution is concerned. The same holds for the call for regulation and intervention. It is entirely true that it would work better than laissez-fairew, but it is equally true that it simply is not going to happen (otherwise than piecemeal, localised, opportunistically, and in the end inefectively). I think we must look beyond, and much deeper than that. It is what I call trying to address by 'parliamentary' means (ie in classic political fashion) wh...

Hi All, Despite the fact of having written in my thesis (1985) (*) that just like History according to Karl Marx is the history of class struggle, our economy is the economics of transfering incomes from household to firms, and that up to the point where all incomes are transfered and the the world stops (really the capitalists' least of worries), I still think that our friend Brian has fallen of the edge here. In what ressembles so much a conspiracy theory that it is one (**), he endorses the rickety combination of the latest version of the capitalists need ever fresh terrains of endocolonialst exploitation blame game to that very old cow (Roman history anyone?) 'the speculators did it' explanation. The whole thing has some traction, but it won't get us all the way over the hill. The current food squeeze looks like, and has indeed all the frightening potential to become, a remake of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. In this largely unknown biggest tragedy of WWII, where almost as many people perished as in t...

Patrice Riemens wrote: > our friend Brian has fallen of the edge here. > > In what ressembles so much a conspiracy theory that it is one (**), he > endorses the rickety combination of the latest version of the capitalists > need ever fresh terrains of endocolonialst exploitation blame game to that > very old cow (Roman history anyone?) 'the speculators did it' explanation. > The whole thing has some traction, but it won't get us all the way over > the hill. Hello Patrice - My abilities in this domain consist mainly in recognizing a good argument. That's why I sent what I think is a great article, and also noted that the links are valuable. The one I got the most out of are these: http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8794 http://www.newstatesman.com/print/200804170026 The point is that the general rise in food prices is driven over the long term by underlying factors (energy prices, rising demand for meat, shift to biofuel production) but that the current dramatic price swings are the result of w...

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more on the true world plus representations of time and time's death in the grips of the true world from one scale to another, from human to true world, from mind to emanent. entities are present within the true world filtered through the history of ties, around emanents and 'true worlds,' around edge phenomena distorted worlding, 'bringing one out of the true world' (etc.) what con- stitutes the true world? worlding? 'true world' in which lines/angles are 'trued' (affine geometry), 'true world' in the sense of 'trued' phen omen- ologies within which reflects real unclarity, the house of the world, transforming the world and the true world into praxis and real difference. and there's truth to this. least, when the true world is considered, em- anent and organism are intermingled, interpenetrated, within them, they are true-world true world? carnated/carnal/knowledge - we could begin by introducing the true world, primordial, in other words backgrounding. in this sense, the true world is materialist; how the ...

INDIA: Robust growth and a loss of diversity -------------------------------------------------- IFJ's South Asia Press Freedom Report for 2007-08. Released on May 1 http://www.ifj-asia.org -------------------------------------------------- India's media grew robustly over the year under review. Concerns about diversity and choice, however, remained high. Firm estimates on concentration of ownership and control in the media cannot be made in the absence of reliable statistics. The greatest malaise of the Indian media may well be a lack of transparency. Even so, it seems that the quantitative growth of the media in India has been accompanied by a qualitative deterioration and a loss of diversity. There has been little to suggest an improvement in the conditions of employment of journalists and other workers in the regulated sector, where the Indian Working Journalists' and Other Newspaper Employees' (Conditions of Service) Act apply. Two wage boards were created for media workers (nominally separate institutio...

Hello friends - I don't forward a tremendous amount of articles, but this overview of the current world food crisis, pasted below, is really worth a post-Mayday read. What emerges from the text and its many references is the existence of a "commodities super-cyle" on Wall Street, connected to and driving the increase in food prices all over the world. The successive speculative bubbles around communications technology, suburban housing, and now food, have fed ambiguously off our minds, insidiously off our need for housing, and now, desperately and dangerously off the most basic human requirement: getting something to eat. Each time, the speculators have moved to a broader, more distributed terrain from which profit can be extracted. Now they have reached the very basis of existence, the ground from which the harvest springs. For them this is a kind of endgame: the still-unfolding credit crisis is so big and so threatening to speculators that another terrain for bubble-formation had to be found, lest capital ...