The New Significance » Entries tagged with "Technology"
Lisa Veneklasen: Citizen action and the perverse confluence of opposing agendas
By Lisa Veneklasen When opposing political interests are using the same terms and tactics in diametrically opposed agendas, Lisa Veneklasen asks how we can transform the power of citizen action into sustained change for justice and equality. What with claims of “Facebook revolutions” in the Arab Spring and “leaderless movements” in Occupy-Wall-Street protests across the world, the media is abuzz with commentary on the changing nature of citizen action. But – aside from new gadgets and unexpected locations … Read entire article »
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Wu Ming1: Fetishism Of Digital Commodities And Hidden Exploitation: The Cases Of Amazon And Apple
By Wu Ming1 Italiano – Français [The original version of this essay was published on Giap on 26 September 2011, which means several days before Steve Jobs died. The French version was published on Article XI on the eve of Jobs' death. The piece had already received a lot of attention, backlinks and comments when the news arrived. However, it obviously sky-rocketed to the status of "crucial" text as soon as the media landscape was filled with iGrief, and it kept attracting people … Read entire article »
Gabriella Coleman: The Ethics Of Digital Direct Action
By Gabriella Coleman Denial-of-service attacks and similar tactics are becoming more widely used as protest tools. The political movement known as Anonymous has managed to capture the attention of the media, the hearts of many supporters, and the ire of many spectators after an eight-month spree of political interventions, stretching from Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) campaigns, to human rights technical assistance in Tunisia, to a more recent spate of hacks under the guise of Operation Antisec. The state … Read entire article »
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Biella Coleman: Is Anonymous Anarchy?
By Biella Coleman For many, the political movement known as Anonymous conjures one thing and one thing alone: anarchy. I have now seen this association made so many times, I thought it might be a good idea to lay out in some detail where the connections between Anonymous and anarchism might lie, dispel a few myths, and ask some questions for further exploration. From the outset it is key to note that anarchism can mean quite distinct … Read entire article »
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Santiago Alba Rico: How Long Do We Have To Wait?
By Santiago Alba Rico Not long ago while reading The Black Jacobins, CLR James’ classic on the independence of Haiti, a completely ordinary sentence brought to my attention the difficulty for a modern reader to understand a book about history. [Translated by John Catalinotto] The Black Jacobins relates the story of a gigantic and irreversible event: without knowing each other, separated by the Atlantic, the French poor classes and the Black Haitians took the values of the Enlightenment to … Read entire article »
Sirius & Valkyrie Ice: MondoNet Fights The Internet Power – An Interview With Aram Sinnreich
By R.U. Sirius & Valkyrie Ice If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, I’m sure you’ve heard about the“Declaration of War” by Lulzsec and Anonymous. Regardless of what you think about their actions, it should be obvious that there has been a growing effort by large corporations and governments to recreate the internet in an image completely alien to its original intentions – that of a robust decentralized network which no amount of damage could … Read entire article »
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Ryan Gallagher: A Passion For Change – LulzSec Interview
By Ryan Gallagher Source: openDemocracy A rare and candid interview conducted with Topiary, founding member of LulzSec and self-described ‘captain of the Lulz Boat’ – on becoming involved in hacktivism, fighting extortion claims, donating to Wikileaks, revolution, and the US government. Last week, hacker collective LulzSec returned with a bang, attacking a series of websites owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International in apparent response to the ongoing phone hacking scandal. For 50 days between May and June, the tight-knit, six-strong group … Read entire article »
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CassPF: From The Metroon To #WikiLeaks: People, Power And The Archive #Wlcat
By CassPF Source: WL Central What is an archive? What is its purpose? Has the kind of archive that has evolved in 20th and early 21st century Western civilisation remained consistent with the underlying principles of the contract struck between the people and the State in a democracy, whereby the State establishes the archive in part as a guarantee of its ability to carry out its actions in a fair and accountable way? WikiLeaks, embodying as it … Read entire article »
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Charles Arthur: How LulzSec Hacked The Sun’s Website
By Charles Arthur Source: The Guardian Weakness in a disregarded server was used to gain access to News International systems and then redirect traffic to fake web page, and then to LulzSec’s Twitter feed. The LulzSec attack on News International’s systems to redirect readers from the Sun to a fake story, and to try to get at its internal email store, appears to have been two-pronged. Some of the more skilled hackers, including some from the hacker collective Anonymous, had been probing it … Read entire article »
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Micah White: Dérive On The Shadownet
By Micah White: Psychogeography of the darkweb. Guy Debord and the Situationists pioneered a radical way of interacting with the urban environment, a method for revealing, and later mapping, the subtle psychic flows of the city. They called it the dérive and these psychically attuned walks became an integral part of the situationist political strategy. “In a dérive one or more persons … let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find … Read entire article »
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Beast 1333: Presents “ANONYMOUS” Prod. Backshot Beats
By Beast 1333: New Hip-Hop. Lyrics below… (video) Beast 1333 is an underground Hip Hop Emcee of Puerto Rican descent born in Brooklyn NY (Jan.13.1982). He is distinguished by his arcane lyrics, and anti-global governance imagery and symbolism. He now resides in New Jersey. In 2008 Beast1333 was invited to be part of KRS One’s “Stop the Violence Tour”, he accepted and became a templist in KRS One’s “Temple of Hip Hop” Organization. Upon completion of his studies/tour in … Read entire article »
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Dominic Basulto: What Happens When Anonymous Gets A Bank?
By Dominic Basulto: The same people who brought you Wikileaks are back, and this time, they’ve created a virtual currency called Bitcoin that could destabilize the entire global financial system. Bitcoin is an open-source virtual currency generated by a computer algorithm that is completely beyond the reach of financial intermediaries, central banks and national tax collectors. Bitcoins could be used to purchase anything, at any time, from anyone in the world, in a transaction process that it … Read entire article »
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DSG: Britain’s First Cyber Strike – How The June 30th Strike May Play Out Online
By Deterritorial Support Group: June 30th marks a very considerable mobilisation of industrial action in Britain, in the shape of a large public sector strike. The Trades Unions are making their first tentative steps towards politically motivated action for a generation, with a massive withdrawal of workers labour in response to government plans for pensions reform; whilst the pensions dispute is the legal justification for industrial action (under Britain’s strict, Thatcherite anti-strike legislation), in reality the … Read entire article »
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Marc Garrett & Dmytri Kleiner: The Telekommunist Manifesto
By Marc Garrett & Dmytri Kleiner: “At the dawn of the new millennium, Net users are developing a much more efficient and enjoyable way of working together: cyber-communism.” Richard Barbrook. Dmytri Kleiner, author of The Telekommunist Manifesto (PDF), is a software developer who has been working on projects “that investigate the political economy of the Internet, and the ideal of workers’ self-organization of production as a form of class struggle.” Born in the USSR, Dmytri grew up in … Read entire article »
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DSG: Twenty Reasons Why It’s Kicking Off In Cyberspace
By DSG: In February the Newsnight economics editor Paul Mason very succinctly laid out the radically different nature of recent popular uprisings across North Africa, the Middle East and Europe compared to earlier political movements, and the economic and sociological reasons behind it. This incisive blogpost rang true for many of those involved in those social movements, articulating, as it did, a new sentiment and new political priorities amongst those populations. The short article sketched out a … Read entire article »
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