Technopolitics?!

[christian]

This excerpt of a blogpost and the video are from an event in Berlin in May 2019. The full blogpost is to be found here: https://diem25berlin.org/diem25-presents-its-green-paper-on-technological-sovereignty-in-a-cozy-barcamp-atmosphere/?ertthndxbcvs=yes

"DiEM25 presents its Green Paper on Technological Sovereignty in a cozy barcamp atmosphere

The location for the event {Technological Sovereignty} – Doing Tech the democratic way couldn’t have been more appropriate. Located in Berlin-Mitte, the renowned hackerspace c-Base was the perfect scenery for the presentation of DiEM25s Green Paper. Around 70 people joined the 8 hour event in which lightning talks, panels and fishbowl discussions shed light on the different topics of Technological Sovereignty.

From Platform Monopolies to a Digital Commonwealth

Surrounded by modular synthesizers, 8bit-arcade-consoles and spaceship-chunks, the paper coordinators gave a brief overview of the making-of and the contents of the paper, followed by an in-depth discussion of the second chapter: “A Digital Commonwealth for the 21st Century” by Kate McCurdy and David Schwertgen.
This chapter is dedicated to the first steps DiEM25s tech policy identified to democratise the development of digital technology. It addresses the so-called Platform Monopolies, an ecosystem of companies like Alphabet (aka Google), Facebook, Apple and their numerous clones and off shoots, and claims we need to limit their power and re-open the playing field for fair competition, as well as go beyond with a positive vision for the “digital commonwealth,” a democratic alternative to monopolistic control. The paper proposes:

stronger and more versatile anti-trust enforcement,
stronger ePrivacy Regulation,
mandatory platform interoperability, and
collective representation of data producers, i.e. data unions;

and to create an infrastructure for a digital commonwealth through

de-commodification of data through a public data commons,
support of democratic economic structures for data-driven innovation, and
creation of a digital rights framework for citizens.

An example for democratic innovative structures are e.g. platform cooperatives, which were covered in depth during the second panel of the event. […]"

[christian]

A reader created with members of european pirate parties called “Leaderless Politics”:

New World Academy Reader #3: Leaderless Politics

The above mentioned as downloadable pdf.

[christian]

I read an interesting article in Luxemburg Magazine 3/19 which might, somewhat clumsily, be translated as “Control turnaround - Economic planning in the digital age” (How about controllic turn?). The excerpt gives an impression what the article is about:

"FOR A PLATFORM COOPERATIVISM

With the concept of the “Control turnaround” we describe the utopia of a social appropriation of the developed steering forces, which allows overcoming the socially and ecologically problematic market steering. In current debates about the social-ecological future of society, a fundamental energy turnaround is being called for, which will enable the successive replacement of the fossil energy forms that have shaped industrial society’s modernity with alternative, renewable forms of energy. By analogy, one can speak of the necessity of a turnaround in control, as a result of which the control medium of money, which dominates capitalist modernity, is losing its importance and is increasingly being supplemented and replaced by alternative forms of control. This in no way implies a return to state-centered, planned economy control models. Rather, the untapped potentials of cybernetics (Schaupp 2017) and debates on community-based forms of control can be taken up. Elinor Ostrom (1990) made it clear in “Governing the Commons” that community-based forms of regulation often contribute to more effective resource management than state and market-based forms of regulation. The new digital technologies and platforms are accompanied by the possibility of modernising and expanding these community-based forms of governance."

I made a translation to english with deepl.com and made a downloadable pdf: steuerungswende_deepled.pdf (84.8 KB).

[christian]

Right NOW on artsoftheworkingclass.org:

Another friendly takeover by the Future

“Wachsmann was a Killer!“

Finally we have been hacked again. It was about time.

The occasion is:

Konrad Wachsmann’s Television Week

presented by Mark Wigley

And there is the reason that a beautiful book has come out at Sternberg Press:

Konrad Wachsmann’s Television

Post-architectural Transmissions
Series Editors Nikolaus Hirsch & Markus Miessen

“In this provocative intellectual biography, architectural historian Mark Wigley makes the surprising claim that the thinking behind modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann’s legendary projects was dominated by the idea of television.“

In this coming week a variety of experts will talk about Wachsmann, television, joints, clouds and things… :

with Marianne Burkhalter, PeterChermayeff,SamChermayeff, Phillip Denny, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, John Enright, Juan Herreros,Nikolaus Hirsch, Francesca Hughes,Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Silvia Lavin,Niklas Maak, Florian Medicus,Ana Miljački,Christopher Roth, Felicity D. Scott,Deane Simpson, Shannon Starkey,Christian Sumi, Mark Wasiuta, Michael Webb and many more

See you on

“…and the victim was architecture!“

2038 is an international team of architects, artists, ecologists, economists, scientists, politicians and writers, initiated in 2019:

Today, in the year 2038, we have mastered the great crises. It was close, but we made it. The global ecological, social and economic disasters of the 2020s brought people, states, institutions and companies together. They committed themselves to fundamental rights and jointly created viable, adaptable systems and legal frameworks on a planetary basis, giving decentralized, local structures the space to maintain and create highly diverse models of co-existing.

Technology and big data helped us to turn new and old ideas into reality. And often architects were part of the solution because they had answers instead of coming up with more questions. Drama is now history. We live in a radical democracy, in a radical bureaucracy. On a planet that doesn’t know or need heroes or villains.

Blaise Agüera y Arcas, Diana Alvarez-Marin, Andrés Arauz, Arts of the Working Class, Nick Axel, Mara Balestrini, Sandra Bartoli, Diann Bauer, Jan Bauer, BBSR, Tatiana Bilbao, BMI, Oana Bogdan, Erik Bordeleau, Mohamed Bourouissa, Daniela Brahm & Les Schliesser, Arno Brandlhuber, Jakob Brandtberg Knudsen & Lorenz von Seidlein, Francesca Bria, Otis Sloan Brittain, Vera Bühlmann, Bureau N, Benjamin Burq, BVNT, Marco Carrino, Mary Ellen Carroll, Vint Cerf, cfk architetti, Kristof Croes, Elke Doppelbauer, Keller Easterling, Tobia de Eccher, Eidotech, Kurt Eggenschwiler, Ludwig Engel, Joao Enxuto & Erica Love, Marta Fernandez Guardado, Cosimo Flohr, Lenny Flohr, Becca Franks & Jennifer Jacquet, Michaela Friedberg, Yona Friedman, Renée Gailhoustet, Jan-Peter Gieseking, Goethe Institut, Olaf Grawert, Dorothee Hahn, Hecker’s Hotel Kurfürstendamm, Helene Hegemann, Holger Heissmeyer, Laura Henno, Angelika Hinterbrandner, Nikolaus Hirsch, Fabrizio Hochschild-Drummond, Ludger Hovestadt, Pan Hu, JUNG, Mitchell Joachim, Sonja Junkers, Roberta Jurcic, Claudia Kessler, Gabor Kocsis, Sénamé Koffi Agbodjinou, Ulrich Kriese, Lukas Kubina, Nikolaus Kuhnert, Christopher Kulendran Thomas & Annika Kuhlmann, Phyllis Lambert, Lawrence Lessig, Cedric Libert, Ferdinand Ludwig & Daniel Schoenle, Suhail Malik, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Hilary Mason, V. Mitch McEwen, James Meadway, Omoju Miller, Evgeny Morozov, MOTIF — Institute for Digital Culture, Motor Productions, Salum Mshamu, Caroline Nevejan, Bahar Noorizadeh, Sabine Oberhuber & Thomas Rau, Jorge Orozco, Verena Otto, Erica Overmeer & Muck Petzet, POLIGONAL — Office for Urban Communication, Joanna Pope, Leif Randt, RAUE Rechtsanwälte und Rechtsanwältinnen, Rebiennale / R3B, Denis ‘Jaromil’ Roio, Raquel Rolnik, Meghan Rolvien, Christopher Roth, Juliana Rotich, S.a.L.E. Docks, Saygel, Schreiber & Gioberti, Jan Schmidt-Garre, Patrik Schumacher, Max Senges, Deane Simpson, Solmarino, Bruce Sterling, Michael Stöppler, Lia Strenge, Audrey Tang, Target Due, Irene Tassinari, Terra0, The Laboratory of Manuel Bürger, Jeanne Tremsal, Galaad Van Daele, Iris van der Tuin, Marcus Vesterager, VITRA, Georg Vrachliotis, Julian Wäckerlin, Eyal Weizman, Julia Werlen, Glen Weyl, WHY Ventures, Mark Wigley, Hannah Wood, Erez Yoeli, Tirdad Zolghadr.