Technologies of the common : toward an ethics of collaborative constitution

The arrival and generalization of social software - often subsumed under the misnomer Web 2.0, conveniently (and in true new economy manner) obscuring decades of social innovation - was greeted with a wave of economic enthusiasm (new markets), as well as a corresponding sense of political possibility regarding remedies to the democracy deficit of institutions of governance (e-democracy, e-inclusion, m2m/p2p as new model for public sphere communication). In the following, I will insist on a more comprehensive sense of social technologies as technologies of the common that take seriously the return of political ontology and its engagement of the question of political constitution. Situated between social technologies and techniques of governance, technologies of the common serves here as a heuristic device to explore differences and similarities of related processes of social constitution, and identify their relevance to the articulation of alternative modalities of governance

Interventionist media in times of crisis

On December 3rd, 2003, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) announced that "Ferdinand Nahimana, founder and ideologist of the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, high ranking board member of the Comité d';initiative of the RTLM and founding member of the Coalition for the Defence of Republic (CDR), and Hassan Ngeze, chief editor of Kangura newspaper, were convicted today for genocide, incitement to genocide, conspiracy, and crimes against humanity, extermination and persecution.'; 1 In what was dubbed 'the media trial';, the ICTR examined the role of the radio station RTLM and the newspaper Kangura in the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to address, for the first time since the Nuremberg Trials, the role of the media in the context of international criminal justice. The ICTR judgment echoes the 1946 judgment of the International Military Tribunal against the NS journalist Julius Streicher, and will continue to inspire commentary on media accountability and the status of the long-dormant 1948 UN Genocide Convention as a core element of contemporary international criminal justice

Platform politics and a world beyond catastrophe

In this chapter the authors set out some of the stakes of platform politics at the current conjuncture. Data governance issues concerning the social production of value, data rights in automated markets, data surveillance motivated by pervasive paranoia and a general ideological intolerance against off-message articulations of disaffection. These are just some of the prevailing discursive and governmental tendencies that define the horizon of our platform present. Yet there is more, and the authors write their way through crisis to find some bearing and orientation in a world of real-time updates and automated injunctions. The machinic signalling of pervasive despair is wrought by contagion, climate and a future at once forestalled and bearing down upon us

Network ecologies : geophilosophy between conflict and cartographies of abundance

In this concluding chapter in a festschrift volume in my honor, I respond to the twenty-three commentators on my work. The topics range widely – various issues in criminal law, constitutional law, and moral theory. The reader will judge how well I deal with the critiques of these commentators

Unsichtbare Kosten : ungleiche Verteilung ökologischer Risiken in der globalen Computerindustrie

Obwohl die Computerproduktion ressourcenintensiv und giftig ist, assoziieren die meisten Menschen mit dem Computer ein "sauberes" High-Tech-Produkt. Dem entsprechend sind Forderungen nach Computern, die ökologisch hergestellt und auch entsorgt werden bislang rar. Zudem werden die ökologischen Probleme der Computerproduktion und -verschrottung häufig nicht mit den sozialen Problemen verbunden. Die Verwendung toxischer Stoffe wirkt sich aber z.B. sowohl auf die Natur als auch auf die Beschäftigten aus. Gegen diese Defizite wird in dem vorliegenden Arbeitspapier der Zusammenhang zwischen den sozialen und ökologischen Konflikten entlang der Wertschöpfungskette eines Computers aufgezeigt. Zudem wird auf die global ungleiche Verteilung sozialer und ökologischer Belastungen und Risiken verwiesen. Das Arbeitspapier stellt beispielhaft zentrale Stationen der Kette vom Rohstoffabbau über die Produktion bis zur Entsorgung vor. Dabei wird die Eignung entsprechender Regulierungsansätze untersucht sowie soziale Initiativen und Kampagnen vorgestellt, die sich lokal und global für eine ökologisch und sozial nachhaltige Computerproduktion und -verschrottung einsetzen

From flows of culture to the circuits of logistics : borders, regions, labour in transit

In Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders. No. 2 (Dec. 2010). When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural

Data Politics and Infrastructural Design

The current celebration of invisible design strategies claims to be the inevitable next iteration of a process that deliberately deemphasizes autonomous user agency to ‘empower’ ever-more efficient forms of interaction through natural interfaces. It makes sense to move outward from the user, now situated and redefined as a node of multiple infrastructures. Yet rather than focusing on this networked self, we instead see a critical purchase through analyses of how overlapping infrastructures constitute the user as a new kind of economic and epistemological subject. Such an undertaking is no longer a matter of making visible the invisible. Part of what needs to happen is an exploration of how the digital economy changes the way we understand and constitute infrastructure.