By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, August 8th, 2012 
I am still jet-lagged, or is it a cold? I can’t tell. Whatever it is, I have not been up to par for the past few weeks. The trip to Europe, including visits with my daughter and her family in Paris and the seminar in Wroclaw, was more challenging than expected. Naomi, my wife and Deliberately Considered’s Art and Design Editor, and I slowed down in our posting. But now, we are back. I expect to regain my strength, and you, dear Deliberately Considered readers, can expect in the coming weeks more posts on Wroclaw and on American and global politics and culture. Here, today and tomorrow, my thoughts on OWS responding to the discussions at the Wroclaw seminar. -Jeff
The starting point of the Wroclaw Seminar was Occupy Wall Street. It then served as our primary case for comparative investigation throughout and informed our final conclusions. Seminar participants Pamela Brown and Sidney Rose suggested additional readings for the seminar when we focused on OWS — Rose on the link between Anonymous and OWS. She was particularly interested in the online pre-history of OWS. Brown, an Occupy activist, was focused on the present challenges and recent accomplishments of the movement.
Rose suggested a piece describing an embrace between Cornell West, the philosopher, social critic and activist, and Gregg Housh, a leading figure in the shadowy group, Anonymous, at an occupy demonstration in Boston. This informed our discussion about the virtual infrastructure that supported the embodied occupations. As we tried to understand what is special about the new “new social movements,” the interaction between virtual and the embodied was a topic we knew we needed to explore.
We discussed how events in the Middle East and North Africa, combined with virtual actions, led to Occupy Wall Street, and sparked a global social movement wildfire. Following the Arab Spring, OWS developed with an Adbusters initial proposal to occupy wall street on September 17, 2011 , supported by politicized hackers such as those associated with . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: New Media and the Persistence of OWS
By Tomasz Kitlinski, January 30th, 2012 
Angry young Poles are protesting online and on the streets in the biggest demonstrations since 1989. The pretext is the government’s signing of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which jeopardizes Internet freedom. But there are more reasons for our fury: a transition which has strengthened economic inequalities and lack of perspectives for the younger generation. As sociologist Adam Ostolski writes, “Life in Poland is getting harder, the privatization-by-stealth of health services and education is going on, the prices of municipal services and staple foods are rising. Poland is now the leading country in Europe in terms of non-permanent job contracts.” Hence social anger today. Are the protests changing into a civil society movement, a Solidarity 2.0? We hope that this defiant and militant mobilization will not exclude migrants and minorities. An optimistic sign is that alternative collectives (Rozbrat in Poznan and Tektura in Lublin) are at the forefront of these events where ordinary people in Poland are demanding their rights – at last.
Poland has transitioned from fake Communism (the unrealized Marxist ideal) to turbo capitalism-cum-fake Christianity, as a religion has been instrumentalized into political anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-foreigner hatred. The economic transformation is sold as a success story, but, in fact, the situation of many groups of the population has worsened. Social justice, an empty concept under East European “socialism,” has become a dirty phrase. It’s a taboo to pronounce it, let alone practice it. Poles have been Foucault’s docile bodies of commercialization and corporatization. Until today’s wrath.
Still, the political class here believes in discipline and profit – and prejudices. The ACTA treaty was signed by the Polish government without social consultations. When the protests broke out, the first reaction of the leaders was to deny them. Later, head of the National Security Bureau, General Koziej, claimed that he wouldn’t exclude introducing emergency measures if the cyber attacks continued. When the Parliamentary Committee on Innovation was meeting to discuss ACTA, a Law and Justice (the rightist opposition party) lawmaker, Michal Suski, referred to . . .
Read more: Solidarity 2.0? Cyber and Street Protests in Poland
By William Hackmore, September 15th, 2011 
This is the second part of Hackmore’s reflections. Part one was published on Tuesday. I wonder is this digital age the cynical society on steroids, fueled by a strange combination of uneven affluence and hopelessness? -Jeff
I leave the party, and wander through the casinos. These hackers, they’re mostly Millenials. As I walk through the various game rooms, I see faces, gaunt, pale, and bleary-eyed, but excited, some old, but most as young, or even younger than “the kid” at the Xerobank party. They’re here, living like kings temporarily in Vegas, but few actually gamble anything — we all saw the news about the stock market today.
How many of these Millennials really have jobs? When they were still in school, they lived up to their moniker, and watched the world in which they grew up come to an end. For some, their coming-of-age came when they watched more than three-thousand people die, on live television, on September 11th, 2001. Some fought the war. Others went to college. They saw their society torn apart by irrational ideologies on all sides. Whichever path they took, many Millenials found themselves, highly trained, with years of college or military service behind them, living back home with their parents, out of work, enjoying a far lower standard of living.
Is a mass technological movement like Anonymous really that surprising then, given the circumstances? Most of these hackers, who can afford to go to Vegas, seem to be successful. Most of them have managed to stay afloat by wits alone, riding the tech industry, or government service, which both continue to grow in defiance of the turbulence in other sectors of the economy. Despite this, more than a few of the down-and-out have managed to get to Vegas somehow, by road trip, or by spending months scraping together whatever they have. They sleep in cars, or on the conference floor, or in other people’s rooms, and share an identity based on hardship and civic engagement, however strange and threatening the mode of that civic engagement may appear.
For those Millenials . . .
Read more: In Search of Anonymous: Down and Out in the Digital Age – Part II
|
Blogroll
On the Left
On the Right
|