The term Luddite is usually used as an insult. It suggests someone who is backward-looking, averse to progress, afraid of new technology, and frankly, not that bright. But Brian Merchant claims that that is not who the Luddites were at all.

President Obama has warned that ATMs and airport check-in kiosks are contributing to high unemployment. Sen. Marco Rubio said that the central challenge of our times is "to ensure that the rise of the machines is not the fall of the worker.

It used to be simpler. You woke up, and there was one newspaper you could read. It printed on pulp and delivered to your driveway. You got in your car, and there was a Sears strategically located within reasonable distance from your home on the highway.

Have you watched the last few moments of Saddam’s life? Or the necrophilic videos with Gaddafi’s behind? Al Zarqawi’s internet kill rooms? Magnotta’s cat suffocation videos? Ronal Poppo’s eaten face? I will admit that I have and it is ticklish, but not in a good way. Gore videos on the internet are abundant and they certainly work up the stomach. It’s no trek to watch them, but apparently that is the point. Recently, I stumbled (as one does on the internet) on a range of gore forums and videos. All sorts of weird kinks flourish in these platforms, and they will give you a good dose of weekly shock ‘n’ awe material. In these marginalized discussion groups, a certain thought intrigued me. Gore aficionados claim that watching ‘real’ murder protests the distorted and censored imagery of world horror events, and these videos correct our vision by portraying a more realistic representation of atrocities and the macabre. Also, gore audiences are stigmatized as those who engage in snuff activi

Why look at animated GIFs now? They are one of the first forms of image native to computer networks making them charmingly passé, a characteristic that gives them contradictory longevity. Animated GIFs crystallise a form of the combination of computing and the camera. As photography moves almost entirely into digital modes, the fascination with such quirky formats increases. The story of photography will be, in no small part, that of its file formats, the kinds of compression and storage it undergoes, as they in turn produce what is conjurable as an image. The Graphics Interchange Format was first developed through the computer network firm Compuserve. As an eight-bit file format it introduced the amazing spectacle of 256 colour images to be won over the thin lines of dial-up connections. Due to this, when a picture is converted to GIF, it’s likely that posterization occurs – where gradations of tone turn to patches of reduced numbers of colours. Such aliasing introduces a key part of

So when I say the internet is a gift economy, I don’t just mean that many of us read and watch and write and post for free. I mean that the way content changes hands on the internet works more like a potlatch than the stock market.

I started thinking of the internet in this way after reading Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, a modern classic that describes the artistic process using the anthropological literature on gift exchange. Gift exchanges, says Hyde, paraphrasing Marcel Mauss, create “the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate.” The gift must always be kept in motion. If you’re a one of the Uduk people in northeast Africa, for example, and someone gives you a goat, you can kill the goat and throw a big party, or you can give the goat’s milk to your neighbors, but you can’t use the goat to start an artisanal cheese business. “One man’s gift … must not be another man’s capital.”

Another example Hyde offers is the Kula gift exchange practiced by the Massim people in the South Pacific. Two items circulate in constant, ceremonial exchange: red shell necklaces move clockwise and armshells move counter-clockwise. You are obligated to give an armshell and receive a necklace in return, then pass the necklace on in the other direction. If one person refuses to give, the circle, and the community it creates, breaks.

Interview with Michel Foucault originally published in Italian, then in French in 1994

This two-story brick building is nothing special, even a bit decrepit, but as you walk up its crooked metal staircase toward the second floor, you will find the first hint that something wholly different, even a little dazzling, hides amid all that dingy gray: there it is, on the right, a painting of

In trying to think what Marx would have made of the world today, we have to begin by stressing that he was not an empiricist. He didn’t think that you could gain access to the truth by gleaning bits of data from experience, ‘data points’ as scientists call them, and then assembling a picture of reality from the fragments you’ve accumulated. Since this is what most of us think we’re doing most of the time it marks a fundamental break between Marx and what we call common sense, a notion that was greatly disliked by Marx, who saw it as the way a particular political and class order turns its construction of reality into an apparently neutral set of ideas which are then taken as givens of the natural order. Empiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo. He would have particularly disliked the modern tendency to argue from ‘facts’, as if those facts were neutral chunks of reality, free of the watermarks of history and interpretation and ideological bias and of the circumstances of their own production.

Our annual selection at the P2P Foundation

“Is an ephemeral image, a moment in a streaming video, a thing? Or if the image is frozen as a still, is it now a thing? Is a dream, a city, a sensation, a derivative, an ideology, a decay, a kiss? I haven’t the least idea.” Extract from David Miller, Materiality : An Introduction [1]

In A Thing Like You and Me, Hito Steyerl plays out her ongoing obsession with the copy, skirting briefly over her wider, yet more implicit concern: the digital. Echoing the work of Bruno Latour, Steyerl acknowledges the materiality by which images are created, scarred and destroyed in order to get to a much deeper, ontological question about autonomy. Avoiding the kind of subject/object purification Latour warns about, Steyerl asks us to consider images as something we can participate in, even model our autonomy on. Is it possible to become a thing? And where does Hito Steyerl get off calling us ‘things’ in the first place? Continue reading this essay here…

A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since World War II, there has been little mention of the fact that business depressions have been a recurrent feature of the capitalist economy since the Industrial Revolution. But even the briefest attention to history makes recent events appear far from unusual. From the early 1800s to the late 1930s, in fact, capitalism spent between a third and a half of its history in depressions (depending on how they are dated by different authorities), which increased steadily in seriousness up to the Big One in 1929. It was only the relative shallowness of the recessions since World War II that gave rise to the idea that capitalism would no longer undergo the ups and downs characteristic of its first 150 years as the dominant social form.

In the 1990s, Paul Romer revolutionized economics. In the aughts, he became rich as a software entrepreneur. Now he’s trying to help the poorest countries grow rich—by convincing them to establish foreign-run “charter cities” within their borders. Romer’s idea is unconventional, even neo-colonial—the best analogy is Britain’s historic lease of Hong Kong. And against all odds, he just might make it happen.

Halfway through the 12th century, and a long time before economists began pondering how to turn poor places into rich ones, the Germanic prince Henry the Lion set out to create a merchant’s mecca on the lawless Baltic coast. It was an ambitious project, a bit like trying to build a new Chicago in modern Congo or Iraq. Northern Germany was plagued by what today’s development gurus might delicately call a “bad-governance equilibrium,” its townships frequently sacked by Slavic marauders such as the formidable pirate Niclot the Obotrite. But Henry was not a mouse.

[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those activities the gloss of moral imperative, the cachet of environmental enlightenment. “Sustainable” has been used variously to mean “politically feasible,” “economically feasible,” “not part of a pyramid or bubble,” “socially enlightened,” “consistent with neoconservative small-government dogma,” “consistent with liberal principles of justice and fairness,” “morally desirable,” and, at its most diffuse, “sensibly far-sighted.”

[2] NATURE WILL DECIDE what is sustainable; it always has and always will. The reflexive invocation of the term as cover for all manner of human acts and wants shows that sustainability has gained wide acceptance as a longed-for, if imperfectly understood, state of being.

Perpetual online auction, internet connection, custom programming and hardware, acrylic cube... Combining Robert Morris' Box With the Sound of Its Own Making with Baudrillard's writing on the art auction this sculpture exists in eternal transactional flux. It is a physical sculpture that is perptually attempting to auction itself on eBay. Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself. If a person buys it on eBay, the current owner is required to send it to the new owner. The new owner must then plug it into ethernet, and the cycle repeats itself.