Lecture

The United Transnational Republics is the first known “3GO”: a Global Governmental Grassroots Organisation working towards the democratisation of the globalised world we find ourselves in:

Democracy as we know it since the last two centuries only takes place within nation-states. At the same time globalisation happens globally, outside of national definitions, legislation or agreements.

This lecture traces the socio-political background of cybernetics and the development of the computer during the Cold War, illustrated with examples taken from popular cinema of the era. From Norbert Wiener's initial experiments with an anti-aircraft gun in the early 1940s to its assimilation into general systems theory, cybernetics provided the US military with an illusion of control over the fragile equilibrium of international relations.

Everyday experiences of networked society oscillate between processes of intensified control (Facebook, data retention, profiling) and new niches of autonomy (Wikileaks, Anonymous, commons-based peer production). Where does this contradictoriness of the networks come from? What can we do to expand the niches of autonomy without facilitating the processes of control?

Chair: Christoph Nebel

Development of new features and improvements to the WWW come by way of a precarious competition between browser vendors and ad-hoc interactions among the semi-closed boards of standards committees. Because all browser vendors provide their browsers to users at zero financial cost, and the growing majority of browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) are free software, the kind of competition amongst vendors can now safely be viewed as artificial and antithetical to the inherent ideals of a universal framework for networked communication.

In the age of international telecommunications, global migration and the emergence of the information economy, how can class conflict and property be understood? Drawing from political economy and concepts related to intellectual property, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a contribution to commons-based, collaborative and shared forms of cultural production and economic distribution.

Profiles on social network sites make it not only easier for algorithms to analyze us as subjects - the information we voluntarily share with people becomes a matter of participatory surveillance. Privacy and visibility are closely tied together, openness can be mistaken for over-exposure. In an economy of sharing and being shared will we be ending up gossiping solely through templates and database structures?

School of Webcraft is a free web development training community developed by Mozilla Foundation and P2PU. Organised under an open governance model and with a goal to protect and grow the open web, the community is still developing and exploring the concepts of open, participatory and free.

To legitimize the collection of data for purposes of surveillance, scenarios of global terrorism are created which dominate public discourses on “global future threats”. The boundaries between “suspects” and “innocent individuals” are interpreted flexibly, as potentially anyone can turn into a terrorist e.g. by acting in nonconformist ways. Concurrently, terms originating from open access culture are hijacked to fit into neoliberalist logics. As the possession of data equals power, a vivid new branch is evolving: data trade.

This talk will provide elements to think about social network platforms and the evolution of national and international legal agreements. We will examine the processes of homogenization of the web and the processes of legislative harmonization within the EU and see how they influence each other. And discuss the political consequences of this dynamic.

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Naked on Pluto is a Multiplayer Text Adventure using Facebook, integrating a player's personal data and that of his “friends” as elements in a thrilling interactive fiction. The game playfully explores the nature of social networks from within, questioning the way these interfaces shape our friendships, the way social relations have become a commodity through targeted advertising based on the phenomenal quantities of information we supply these databases with, literally exposing ourselves.