Obsolete Capitalism: The two sides of the five-starred cosmology: analogue & digital populism (pt. III - The Birth of Digital Populism)

The two sides of the five-starred cosmology: analogue & digital populism

As it is generally known, the five-starred cosmos features an interesting dual-axis core: Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio. The couple is de facto a novelty in the crowded, bon-vivant world of Italian politics. A duumvirate is in itself a relevant fact in the context of political organisation and leadership.9 Furthermore, the division of fields of intervention between the two 5SM leaders is equally worthy of note: Grillo is the cowboy interfacing between the physical world of electors and the digital one of data wizardry; Casaleggio is the architect of the mining, processing and storage of the huge mass of data, which are collected by the same computation means that are governing the World Wide Web. The traditional side of populism, which can be identified with the former comedian Beppe Grillo, will be defined as analogue populism; while the murkier side which have been conceived and organized by Gianroberto Casaleggio according to the functioning of networked cultures, will be defined as digital populism. Here lies the novelty of this movement: such digital populism does not align, if not loosely, with the political discourse of the various European Piratenpartei, in other words the newborn parties that convey idealized views on net cultures and practices.

The Five Star Movement exploits the Internet and its experiences in order to gain power and overcome the Italian society for its own authoritarian ends. The mixture of analogue and digital populism is truly effective and incisive. Gianroberto Casaleggio has had, since the very foundation of the movement, a strategic flair. He realised that the increased theoretical and scientific ability of the digital world is ineffective unless it is corroborated and supported by the more dynamic and functional impact of the analogue populism on everyday reality. In other words, the computational world needs the faciality10 of the capture apparatus of analogue populism, since the latter provides the switch that directs and organizes the input of raw metadata channels it and subsequently outputs it into the physical world. Grillo’s face is therefore the screen through which the algorithm becomes part of the tangible world.11 The 5SM may be seen as a political device, that is : input: casaleggio ———> output: grillo. (...)

Read more @ The birth of digital populism/e.book

Matteo Pasquinelli (ed.) Gli algoritmi del capitale. Accelerazionismo, macchine della conoscenza e autonomia del comune. Verona: Ombrecorte, 2014

L’immaginario politico e l’idea di futuro sembrano oggi cancellati dall’imperativo dell’austerity. Ma quale sarebbe il vero passaggio rivoluzionario, si chiedevano un tempo Deleuze e Guattari: ritirarsi dal mercato globale o, al contrario, andare ancora più lontano, “accelerare il processo”? L’economia è in crisi, ma la tecnologia continua a evolvere sotto i nostri occhi: i social network sono sempre più pervasivi, la logistica delle merci sempre più veloce e digitalizzata, servizi segreti e finanza usano algoritmi sempre più sofisticati per analizzare e prevedere i comportamenti di massa. E se l’impasse politica fosse legata all’incapacità di comprendere le nuove astrazioni del capitale e del lavoro, gli algoritmi che controllano le relazioni sociali tanto quanto il tempo collettivo congelato dalla finanza in futures e derivati? Un nuovo nomos tecnologico sembra prendere forma a livello planetario, dove i poteri tradizionali degli Stati nazione si intrecciano con le grandi corporation della rete. Un ex direttore della Cia lo ha riassunto in modo cinico ma efficace: “Uccidiamo persone sulla base dei metadati”. Rispondendo al recente Manifesto accelerazionista e rilanciando la tesi del capitalismo cognitivo, gli autori del presente libro sostengono che lo sviluppo tecnologico possa essere ridisegnato in senso rivoluzionario, che l’astrazione più estrema dell’intelligenza debba diventare arma politica e che il futuro sia da riconquistare come terreno visionario.

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Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Mercedes Bunz, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Stefano Harney, Christian Marazzi, Antonio Negri, Matteo Pasquinelli, Nick Srnicek, Tiziana Terranova, Carlo Vercellone, Alex Williams.

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English blurb. The political imaginary and the idea of the future appears to be obliterated by the imperative of austerity. But which would be the real revolutionary path, Deleuze and Guattari asked once: “to withdraw from the world market… or to go in the opposite direction… to accelerate the process?”. Economy faces a financial crisis, but technology keeps on evolving: social networks become more pervasive, logistics gets faster and digitalizes any step, intelligence agencies and finance adopt more and more sophisticated algorithms to analyze and forecast mass behavour. What if the current political impasse is related to the inability to grasp the new abstractions of capital and labour, the algorithms that control social relations as well as the collective time frozen by finance into futures and derivatives? A new technological nomos is shaped on a planetary scale, where the powers of traditional nation states are interwoven with the global corporations of the internet. A former CIA director said it in a cynical yet concise way: “We kill people based on metadata”. Responding to the recent accelerationist manifesto and addressing the thesis of cognitive capitalism, the authors of the book believe that the technological progress can be redesigned in a revolutionary way, that the most extreme abstractions must become a political weapon and that the future has to be reclaimed as a terrain of collective imagination.

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Indice

Introduzione: A mezzo secolo dalla ricezione del ‘Frammento sulle
macchine’ di Marx
Matteo Pasquinelli

Parte Prima: Accelerazione e crisi

Manifesto per una politica accelerazionista
Alex Williams e Nick Srnicek

Riflessioni sul “Manifesto per una politica accelerazionista”
Antonio Negri

L’accelerazionismo in questione dal punto di vista del corpo
Franco “Bifo” Berardi

Il lavoro dell’astrazione. Sette tesi su marxismo e accelerazionismo
Matteo Pasquinelli

Piattaforme per una abbondanza rossa
Nick Dyer-Witheford

Parte seconda: Astrazione algoritmica

Capitalismo macchinico e plusvalore di rete. Note sull’economia politica della macchina di Turing
Matteo Pasquinelli

Algoritmi della conoscenza e trasformazione del lavoro
Mercedes Bunz

Istituzioni algoritmiche e capitalismo logistico
Stefano Harney

Red stack attack! Algoritmi, capitale e automazione del comune
Tiziana Terranova

Parte terza: L’autonomia del comune

Nuove note sul capitalismo cognitivo. Crisi e istituzioni del welfare
Carlo Vercellone

Sulla natura linguistica della moneta
Christian Marazzi

Read more @ Pasquinelli website

Obsolete Capitalism: The beginning of a Big Data Era in the Western political scenario (Pt. II - The Birth of Digital Populism)

The beginning of a Big Data Era in the Western political scenario

The early analyses of the explosion of the 5SM phenomenon appeared in February 2013 and weren’t satisfying. The vehement accusations of populism directed to Grillo’s anti-party by the center-left and left-wing intelligentsia above all, seemed to only partially grasp the historic success of the Five Star Movement; they hastily linked it to the crystal clear fragility of the political and institutional landscape and to the incessant work of deconstruction of the Italian society, which has been operated by Berlusconi’s vast authoritarian mediascape. The first innovative, engaged and somehow controversial analysis of the phenomenon was published shortly after the election result, on March 8 2013 by the writers' collective called Wu Ming. It was entitled Grillismo: Yet another Right-Wing Cult coming from Italy. We used this anti-5SM pamphlet as a basis for a major non-linear investigation that looks at very diverse authors, including Antonio Gramsci, Mario Tronti, Gabriel Tarde, Wilhelm Reich, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari among others. These thinkers had already examined the systematic penetration of fascism, irrational mass behaviour, collective hypnosis, national identity and capitalism, combining them with the similarly dense and controversial notions of people, crisis, organization, societies of control and data science. 

However, in our opinion, even the best post-electoral analyses of the Five Star Movement left a margin or a void, something that encouraged us to undertake a supplementary investigation; we felt the need for a revelatory study, one which could disclose aspects of the rising phenomenon of digital populism and of the future post-democratic system that seemed to appear on the horizon of the Big Data era. A disturbing question emerged among us: if an unlikely techno-couple of Italian cool operators caused such a big electoral tsunami, how would the champions of the Society of the Query, such as Google, and other social giants, such as Facebook and Twitter, actually affect democracy, were they to run for Western elections? Are we, perhaps, at the beginning of a huge political shift in the way the masses are governed and, ultimately, of representative democracy as we know it? Populism, in both its analogue and digital version, is a firmly European phenomenon with an extremely seductive English variation, namely the UK Independence Party, a party which is as dangerous as other anti-establishment right-wing organisations can be.

Therefore we have posed to Italian and British intellectuals – of varied political backgrounds and disciplinary skills – six questions which concern the foundations of digital populism and the relations existing between masses, power and post-democracy at the dawn of the 21st century. What you will read is the result of conversations with Tiziana Terranova, Luciana Parisi, Lapo Berti, Simon Choat, Paolo Godani, Jussi Parikka, Saul Newman, Tony D. Sampson and Alberto Toscano. (...)

Read more @ the_birth_of_digital_populism e.book

ANTOINETTE ROUVROY: ALGORITHMIC GOVERNMENTALITY – THE TAMING OF MULTITUDES @ Cent­re for Di­gi­tal Cul­tu­res

ANTOINETTE ROUVROY: ALGORITHMIC GOVERNMENTALITY – THE TAMING OF MULTITUDES

01.09.2014 18:00Hybrid Publishing Lab

Phi­lo­so­phy of the Web Lec­tu­re Se­ries

Ve­nue: Cent­re for Di­gi­tal Cul­tu­res, Sülz­tor­str. 21–35, 21335 Lüne­burg, 2. Floor

Al­go­rith­mic go­vern­ment is a form of go­vern­ment fed with raw data (in­fra-per­so­nal si­gnals), af­fec­ting in­di­vi­du­als and groups by way of in­dus­tri­al per­so­na­liza­t­i­on and preemp­ti­on. An un­pre­ce­den­ted ra­tio­na­li­ty/​mode of go­vern­ment, al­go­rith­mic go­vern­men­ta­li­ty is, An­toi­net­te Rouvroy will try to de­mons­tra­te, the mode of go­vern­ment ty­pi­cal of the age of multi­tu­des, and a uni­que­ly power­ful neo­li­be­ral re­ab­sorp­ti­on of the cri­ti­cal ethos in­heri­ted from the six­ties. The type of “know­ledge” it is fed with and pro­du­ces, the man­ner it ac­tual­ly af­fects/​neu­tra­li­zes in­di­vi­du­al and collec­tive agen­cy, and the mo­des of in­di­vi­dua­ti­on sus­cep­ti­ble to in­flux or re­sist al­go­rith­mic go­vern­men­ta­li­ty are what this talk will be about.

Antoinette Rouvroy, Doc­tor of Laws of the Eu­ro­pean Uni­ver­si­ty In­sti­tu­te (Flo­rence), is per­ma­nent re­se­arch as­so­cia­te at the Bel­gi­an Na­tio­nal Fund for Sci­en­ti­fic Re­se­arch (FNRS) and se­ni­or re­se­ar­cher at the Re­se­arch Cent­re In­for­ma­ti­on, Law and So­cie­ty, Law Fa­cul­ty, Uni­ver­si­ty of Na­mur (Bel­gi­um). She is also mem­ber of the French CNIL (Com­mis­si­on In­for­ma­tique et Li­bertés)’s Fo­re­sight com­mit­tee. She aut­ho­red ‘Hu­man Ge­nes and Neo­li­be­ral Go­ver­nan­ce: A Fou­caul­di­an Cri­tique’ (Rout­ledge-Ca­ven­dish, 2008) and co-edi­ted, with Mi­reil­le Hil­de­brandt, ‘Law, Hu­man Agen­cy and Au­to­no­mic Com­pu­ting: Phi­lo­so­phers of Law meet Phi­lo­so­phers of Tech­no­lo­gy’ (Rout­ledge, 2011). In her wri­tings, she has ad­dres­sed, among other things, is­su­es of pri­va­cy, data pro­tec­tion, non-dis­cri­mi­na­ti­on, equa­li­ty of op­por­tu­nities, due pro­cess in the con­text of “data-rich” en­vi­ron­ments (the so-cal­led ge­ne­tic re­vo­lu­ti­on, the so-cal­led in­for­ma­ti­on/​sur­veil­lan­ce so­cie­ty) with an ap­proach com­bi­ning le­gal and po­li­ti­cal phi­lo­so­phy. Her cur­rent in­ter­di­sci­pli­na­ry re­se­arch in­te­rests re­vol­ve around the con­cept of al­go­rith­mic go­vern­men­ta­li­ty. Un­der this fou­caul­di­an neo­lo­gism, she ex­plo­res the se­mio­tic-epis­te­mic, po­li­ti­cal, le­gal and phi­lo­so­phi­cal im­pli­ca­ti­ons of the com­pu­ta­tio­nal turn (Big Data, al­go­rith­mic pro­filing, in­dus­tri­al per­so­na­liza­t­i­on). She ex­plo­res the im­pact of al­go­rith­mic go­vern­men­ta­li­ty on our mo­des of pro­duc­tion of what counts and ac­counts for “rea­li­ty”, on our mo­des of go­vern­ment, and on the mo­da­li­ties of cri­tique, re­sis­tan­ce or re­cal­citran­ce.

This event is part of the se­ries Phi­lo­so­phy of the Web, or­ga­ni­zed by Dr. Yuk Hui, CDC. 

Read more

Obsolete Capitalism: The explosion of digital populism (Pt. I - The Birth of digital populism)

The explosion of digital populism

On 24^th and 25^th of FebSruary 2013, the general elections for the XVII legislation of the Italian Republic were held in Italy. The election result was defined by most political observers as an earthquake of unprecedented dimensions. For the first time in the history of the West a newly born political association, the Five Star Movement (5SM), which define itself to be an anti-party, ran in a parliamentary electoral competition and won it by a narrow margin; it became the first party in the Italian Chamber of Deputies5 with 25.5% of the votes. Despite the fact that, considering the total amount of votes (including those from Italians living abroad) the Democratic Party (DP) - the leading center-left party- received only 150,000 more votes than the Five Star Movement, the Italian electoral system conferred a substantial ‘majority premium’ on the DP. Regardless of this action, the infant movement led by Beppe Grillo affirmed itself firmly enough to deeply subvert the Italian political panorama. It is suitable, if not even obvious, to define Grillo’s anti-party as a new form of digital Populism. To understand this one only need look at the sharp innovation of the devices used by politics, which has been introduced by the Five Star Movement, such as the extended and innovative use of communication channels provided by the Internet. This has been combined with both the brutal simplification of the political message, in order to attract political consensus, and the dissipation of all acquired forms of institutional-systemic ratio. It is clear that following the unsettling result of Italy’s general election in February 2013, a new time has violently knocked on the door of Italian society, and it is now interrogating real problems with unusual and fast-paced questions.  (...) 
Read more @ e.book The Birth of Digital Populism

Society of the Query #2 - Antoinette Rouvroy: Algorithmic Governmentality and the End(s) of Critique

Society of the Query #2 - Antoinette Rouvroy: Algorithmic Governmentality and the End(s) of Critique from network cultures on Vimeo.

L'EFFONDREMENT PART II #3 - ANTOINETTE ROUVROY

L'EFFONDREMENT PART II #3 - ANTOINETTE ROUVROY from ANTIDATAMINING on Vimeo.