Srnicek & Williams “Inventing the Future” made quite a stir when it was released, as did their Accelerationist manifesto. As usual, when I hear such excitement I am concerned, concerned that a lot of people are getting sidetracked by glamourous, new-sounding formulations, away from the very urgent work at hand, which is to understand, confront […]
structural challenges to technological emancipation: socially necessary discipline The interplay between discipline and freedom, how the former generates the latter and the latter requires the former has been a critical dilemma since the beginning of civilization. Without going into the rich philosophical literature on the question of freedom, I would like to outline two paradigmatic […]
Is “free expression” a right or a product? If Turkey shut off its market to Coca cola or McDonald’s would there be the same outrage and ridicule we see today? “Wait! Twitter is not Coca-cola!” you cry? Just as Coca cola is not all beverages, Twitter is not the Internet. It is not “free speech” […]
This world of high technologies is positively breath-taking, dizzying, ecstatic. The birth of the machine for work was the birth of the machine for pleasure. The freedom we taste is contingent on a very regimented and domesticated environment. The freedom of the bungee jumper is contingent on the perfectly functioning textiles technology in the bungee […]
Julian Assange, in his skyped-in address at the 30th Chaos Communication Congress a few days ago used the phrase “a hellhole dystopia” to refer to the current security state, and also to the situation he finds himself in at the dawn of 2014. Julian exhorted the system administrators of the world to discover their class […]
…a corollary to Dmytri’s post today Public pressure to demand legislative reforms is the conventionally condoned response to government overreach in democratic countries. Governments are thus naturally always positioned against the accumulation of such pressure. Throughout history they have honed various means to carefully channel and disrupt the coalescence of public outrage. A superb tactic […]
The tides appear to be turning. We all need to be aware: the Internet is not the Plain Old Telephone System (as if POTS ever was only merely what it appeared to be), not to mention the Plain Old Postal System (which was vulnerable to if not amenable to intersession by intelligence agents), the Internet […]
On March 27th, 2013, I published a response to Bruce Schneier’s CNN article which started out by criticising the conflation of Internet and State in its title (“The Internet is a surveillance State”). Bruce Schneier has for several years been one of the most insightful commentators on online security, however we, at telekommunisten, were struck […]
In his March 16, 2013 opinion column on CNN.com, Bruce Schneier called the Internet a “surveillance state”. In the piece, Schneier complains that the Internet now serves as a platform which enables massive and pervasive surveillance by the State. State sponsored and ordained surveillance, however, is not synonymous with the Internet. Schneier’s use of the […]
