Reading Diary:

 ... updating diary - work in progress

• week 1:

I watched only one movie:

    "Manufacturing Consent:Noam Chomsky and the Media" attempts to teach deep social, political and philosophical studies over our media. It makes you think about why you think something, and make you realize that propaganda isn't something that happens in other countries or just happened to happened years ago in communistic systems. For me it's hard to grasp all the aspects of this document, so I"ll use a quote to describe it in most simple way I could imagine:

Noam Chomsky

• week 2:

 -- review - "Simulacra and Simulations" Jean Baudrillard

Provoking, not the easiest materials to read, but I think worth the effort. A very interesting collection of observations about life. In the  beginning I was overwhelmed by the complexity of Baudrillard arguments and way of thinking, later on I kinda starting to get lost in this.
Definitely it is a book about perception of reality: what is real versus what is hyper real and how does that process take place. Although I'm not sure if I understand all of it. I want to read it again, and I'm going to try to get a polish translation of it. Subject(s) is very interesting, but reality is that I felt lost from time to time in examples, and I think my English language skills weren't good enough for it.

• week 3:

13:00
THE PROBLEM
KABK in the past, how did it start ( Confrerie Pictura )


13:15
THE METHOD
collecting information about very beginning of KABK

- finding Confrerie Pictura and Benjamin Bolomey
- their ethics and 28 rules

13:20
DOCUMENTATION/REFERENCES







references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situationist_International
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confrerie_Pictura


13:50 - 14:50
TACTICAL STRATEGY

--  "The Yes Man" - movie essay

Wooow... those guys succeeded with shutting down WTO, I'm impressed. The fact that someone is    speaking publicly about the corruption of the WTO and the large corporations and people act on it, and took it as a good thing, was just amazing.
Let me start from saying what the "The Yes Man" movie is about. It is a documentary about few guys of the anti-corporate activist group. Basically they  pull pranks in order to sabotage the large companies/organizations they disagree with, in this case mostly WTO (Word Trade Organization). They attend different events / conferences around the world masquerading as legitimate WTO officials. They present they shocking thesis in a "believable" manner, and most the times people just "swallow" it, and have no questions at all. There was one exception, prank played on student with ReBurger campaign. Most shocking part for me was that only those student were able to respond to this prank in active way.
I really like the sentence from the end prank with Textile solution from WTO in Helsinki. The essence was something like "when one fake WTO person appear and say the most crazy things in front of those highly educated people and nobody will really react, and no one will really care and it's like - what can't big corporations get away with". I think this speak for itself.
I really like the idea of creative activism as this shown in this movie, but there was certain lack of what is happening later, how people are really affected by that, but maybe at this point it's not that important.

• week 4:

-- review - "The Practice of Everyday Life" - General Intrdocution / Michel de Certeau

Rather difficult text for me, more I read it more confused I get, and I think, every time I understand a different part of it or sometimes I feel like I didn't get it at all.
Michel de Certeau proposes that everyday practice is the "investigation of ways in which users operate," or "ways of operating," or doing things. He's showing that everyday practice should not be hidden, but it's necessary to observe and understand it. Continuing with studies of popular culture or marginal groups, he points principles or determinations of the investigation of everyday practice. In the same time he emphasizes that at first everyday practice is need to "analyse" the manipulation of the consumption by users, and he I almost lost him. It's like looking for another meaning or another "sense" or nature of things or actions, I'm not sure if essence would be a good word for that.
Consumption part I would represent with the Witold Gombrowicz phrase "When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has", that was used in the text. It shows, in a way, how complicated relation between making things, "hidden" production, economic order it's not that relevant for the consumption itself, like for instance the way how we use it, and how certain products could or couldn't be related to each other using this perspective. It leads me to understanding that Michel de Certeau says that in order to understand the everyday practice we have to consider "the use" element of groups or individuals.
I think I need to read it few times, or even try to read a whole book in order to get the better idea and understanding of this subject.

• week 5:

-- essay -  In 2007, the ars electronica festival slogan was "goodbye privacy". Choose one of the essays in the present list and write a resume to be presented in the next lesson.


Copyright Instead of Data Protection - by Volker Grassmuck    
 
Volker Grassmuck  in his essay called "Copyright Instead of Data Protection" is trying to give the answer for alternatives that safeguard the personal rights of information users while rewarding creativity. He assumed that the DRM (“Digital Rights Management” or “Digital Restrictions Management”— DRM) era is over,  or is almost over and we need to find a solution that will satisfy everyone (musicians, photographers, designers, independent producers, education professionals, Internet users and consumers). In the same time, using retrospective  he shows how copyrights law was used in the past, and how certain issues were sold.

I really like when he compare situation between books and DRM. In first case -  books, he wrote that, books are sold with “all rights reserved". The rights are stated in in copyright law, but this law does not affect what people do in the privacy of their own homes. If someone violate law he can be prosecuted by state or private person and as the author conclude: "...the presumption is that the customer is fundamentally honest".
Next case is DRM, where as author point out "The presumption in DRM by contrast is that the customer is dishonest", because "DRM not only monitors sale and delivery (in order, for example, to prevent actions on the digital plane that correspond to store theft), but also the use of the content on devices in the customer’s private sphere." There are other things where DRM is making life more difficult for users, first of them when we buy the media, we have to show ID, next that the content cannot be use on other platforms (copyright content cannot to transferred / played to devices that has no DRM control built in), and few others.
The point is that technology like DRM is technological very expensive to use, and it make our life more difficult and we cannot enjoy content that we paid for as we want to. Unfortunately there is a huge community of people / organizations that support use of DRM. 
Following few cases (French torrent fee, etc), that Volker Grassmuck mention in his text, he concludes that the best solution can be use of "flat fees" (as it happened few times in history, for example with radio, etc). "Flat fees ensure compensation for authors and performing artists, negotiated and administered transparently and fairly by the copyright collecting agencies under public supervision. This is why a flat fee for the permission to use music, such as the French global license, is the best possible solution for consumers, authors, performing artists and publishers" - Volker wrote. I couldn't agree more, cause as we saw in few cases with Sony rootkit, iTunes, and now Blue Ray, HDCP, enforcing DRM is expensive (hardware has to have certificate, etc)  and we cannot be sure what this hardware is doing without our knowledge. Why just allow people pay for content and use it as they want to, without all this DRM hassle. Now I cannot even play the movie that I bought via iTunes store on my beamer without getting a message "Your Display Isn’t Authorized", how about I pay for it ?!

• week 6:

-- resume - "postscript to the societies of control" by Gilles Deleuze

    Deleuze writes that we're definitely moving toward "control" societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary, by disciplinary I mean societies described by Foucault peak in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Analogical models focused on enclosure and the creation and management of productive force. Ordering/Distribution/Concetration.

To make it short we could say that "control" society response to the crisis of enclosure. Most powerful example would be the corporation as opposed to the factory.
WAGES > SALARY (variability)
MOLD/CAST > MODULATION (flexibility)
SCHOOL > PERPETUAL TRAINING (endlessness)
SIGNATURE > CODE/PASSWORD (access)

Capitalism is no longer about production (which has been relegated to the Third World). Capitalism is now about the product and it's marketing.
PRODUCTION > PRODUCT   

    In his opinion we're moving toward "control" societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication.
It's true that, even before control societies are fully in place, forms of delinquency or resistance are also appearing. Computer piracy and viruses, for example, will replace strikes and what the nineteenth century called "sabotage". Whether control or communication societies will lead to forms of resistance that might reopen the way for a communism understood as the "transversal organization of free individuals."
    Using his words: "Maybe speech and communication have been corrupted. They're thoroughly permeated by money and not by accident but by their very nature. We've to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control."

• week 7:

-- reflections - "The Political Economy of Peer Production" by Michel Bauwens's

    Michel Bauwens article describe in many aspects phenomena of P2P (Peer-to-Peer). Covering term explanation, infrastructure, characteristics, history, and what's more interesting is trying to confront it with economy, market, capitalism and few other social and cultural aspects of it.
    My first encounter with P2P networks was few years ago with first Napster. In the beginning I was just a passive user of this technology. Later on, when Napster became a huge deal in media I started to read more about this technology. I use term "technology" cause at that time not many people use P2P term in way that connected to technological side of it.
Nowadays it changed,  words like "shared resources" or P2P are used in many aspects, and like in Bauwens article is start to be a part of our live.
P2P have a huge potential, starting with P2P networks developed by huge corporations from one side, and open source communities on the other. Going our from internet - shared resources on our mobiles/computers, shared electric and internet networks (like "Ultra-wideband""), same thing in banking (Zopa.com LendingClub.com or Prosper.com), and few more.
P2P was always great as a technology/concept, but it not always come together with real life ("Ultra-wideband" is deadlock). I think there a two main problems - legislation / regulations and conflict of interests. In terms of regulations, P2P needs something like "Creative Commons" sort of overall regulations created by community of people that are using and creating this technology. Problem with that is nature of this technology. On one hand in the internet we can see that this model is working for now, but what with using this technology on the streets or in our homes ? And what happened when big corporation (legislator makings) discover power of that, who will control it. Will they control all aspects of it, or we, as a society will have a power to maintain it and use it for the our own good.


-- assignment  - built "serverless" Email System

    With help from Rui, I found an ePOST.  It is a cooperative, serverless email system. Each user contributes a small amount of storage and network bandwidth in exchange for access to email service.  ePOST provides:
    * A serverless,  peer-to-peer email service
    * Secure email emong ePOST users
    * An organically scaling service that requires no dedicated hardware
    * Very high availability and data durability
    * Compatibility with POP/IMAP clients, SMTP mail servers

All those features sounds great so I set for work and I start trying to set it up on my own computers at home.
Unfortunately after more than two hours of trying it din;t work. I follow instructions as written on the website, but I didn't succeed.
From other side I've checked "News" part of this website and I saw that last update was at 09 February 2009, so In my opinion Java version, and other components change a bit from this time,  so this could be a reason that it didn't wok.

• week 8:

-- Write a short text that: Describe centralized, decentralized and distributed networks.

Centralized network is based on of multiple clients that are attached to central point (tree). Good example of it was the the first "version" of the internet ARPA-net (later DARPA-net), where all addressing for this network was maintained by a single machine at the Stanford Research Institute.
Next type called decentralized network, has no one central point, but it's build based of few central points that can be reconnected, changed and the communication between clients does not depend on one server (central point). What's unique about this solution is fact that each acts as client and server at the same time. DNS is a good example of decentralized network, is used widely in the internet, is basically one of the most important protocols, but it's not centralized (although control of them is! - in the WWW, not corporate / private networks), and those servers can replaced / changed in many configuration, and each client can make his own server.
A distributed network is a rhizome rather than a tree (centralized), in the sense that "power" (e.g. the ability to communicate with others) is distributed horizontally, rather than being hierarchically structured. It's more like many-to-many organization without any central points, allowing free communications between clients without dealing with one or many central (controlling) points. In theory we could call it maybe "spontaneous" networking as a form of "real" free communication between clients, because it can be created at any moment, any place we want or we need to.

-- According to Galloway how does control exist in distributed networks?
        
Protocol is what allows for the openness and many-to-many organization of the Net: this is because its underlying guidelines and mechanisms are open-source and indifferent to content. (A web page is formatted the same way, regardless of what words and images it contains). But Galloway points out that this is only one side of the picture: for protocol is also an extreme form of control, in the sense that it constrains and homogenizes all content: no matter what you say, you have to say it in the approved format (or else your statement will not be communicable or readable at all). “Standardization is the politically reactionary tactic,” Galloway writes, “that enables radical openness.” As a result, the Net is never simply “free”; it is always “a complex of interrelated currents and counter-currents,” which interact in “multiple, parallel, contradictory, and often unpredictable ways”.

• week 9:

-- reflections - "Open events and their power relations" Rui Guerra

To start I would like to quote one sentence from the text:
In my opinion that's the biggest advantage of it. Conventional events tend to stick to fixed plan, where everything is scheduled, and there is no space for spontaneous actions. Every position, role is plan ahead. Artist have to perform, and audience can only play a role that was planned by certain organization, and everyone have to deal with boundaries that was scheduled before event. On the other hand in self-organized event could be totally different experience. Participants can take a part in organization, artist could change their role, and perform in different way that most of the people expect from them, or they can also be just audience, and not only if they only willing to do so.
Self organized events sound like a great way to attract people on many levels, they can feel, like certain event is accomplished with they help, or they can actively change things during the whole event. In this case it became more personal, people are more aware of their actions, and in the same time if they want to, they have absolute freedom to do whatever they want.
Other level is organization of this kind of "self-organized". For me the concept is rather new, although now I can easily see, that I saw similar things happening around me in many situations, I wasn't just aware of it on this level.
I'm gonna try it, and see what it will bring. I understand the principals of how I can set up certain event, but I really want to see how it work in real live, I'll write more about it soon.

• week 10:

-- project - idea of self-organized event

Concept:
        - "Like polish do..." - self organized podcasting session at fixed location including polish natives talking about their experiences in The Netherlands.
           So far only date is fixed, and the fact that we will record everything and publish it without any cuts or edits. Topics, language,etc, remain open for the other participants.

18/11 - first phone calls about the possibility of event
19/11 - emails to few people about planning self organized podcasting session with fixed time - sunday, no location yet
20-22/11 - emails contacts with four people that agree to participate in this event, we set up time - 18.00 @ Vapniano restaurant in the centre of Den Haag
23/11 - meeting - Vapiano restaurant in Den Haag. I was there with one friend (Wolny) waiting for others and even before that one person cancelled. Few minutes after we talked via mobile telephone with others and we find out that they will not come, for various reasons, mostly because of the weather (it was snowing, and rather "ugly" outside).
We decide to have dinner and record some stuff, we did simple test of new recording device, and we record our "geeky" opinions about it. I come up with plan to try do it again another day via skype, we send some sms'es to other 3 people and they agree on it.   
23/11 - evening - I send some emails for my friends that are doing podcasting if they are interested  in making skype podcasting session.
24/11 - during the day - I get some emails that 2 other people will join, friend from Ireland and one friend from US
24/11 - podcasting skype session was planned for about 21.00. After 21.00 I get messages, that we have to wait a bit for other people, and they will appear about 22.00. Till about 22.00 I was talking mostly with one friend from Ireland (Filip). About 22.00 two other people show up. We start to set up a decent connection, fixing some networking issues, and after few minutes we have working conference call via skype hosted by Filip, and I set up recording on my computer. At that point there was four of us, one person from Holland (me), Ireland (Filip), US (Maciek), and Poland (Grzegorz) that just join us on skype because he saw message on our "avatars" on skype (it was something like this - "skype podcasting session in progress"). We start some sort of show. I was kinda busy with setting and testing recording, so in the meantime other people start talking about possibility of making a meeting in real live, cause we're so use to to do it via skype. Just after 22.30 my internet connection failed, so I had to quit. As far as I know they continue to have the session, but unfortunately they didn't record it, cause I was the only one with good software for it (WireTap Pro)
24/11 - new idea - during my "chat" with Filip we come with making a podcasting session in real life together as didi few times. We decide to make it this weekend, in Dusseldorf (I was planning to go there for internship interview) so he want to join, and one other person decide to join as well (Gosia - from Germany). For now, I'm not sure how many people will join it, and how it will be organized.
24/11 - conclusion - due to few technicalities I didn't succeed to make a session how I intended to do, but maybe it is a good thing, although I prefer to have more content. I do have some recordings and  I'll put then online on my podcast website as soon as possible.
27/11 - we decide to make the session via internet again, this time we did it with video (iChat) - all material was published on the Filip website (this time he decide to record everything, due to our communication problems from last time)
30/11 - Dusseldorf idea was realized, we meet as 4 people, and we did few podcasting sessions, that will be published in near future on Filip website (he propose to edit material, and publish it on his website)

Some pics from events:

• week 11:

-- review - "Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse" (2000) directed by Agnès Varda

    Varda's filmed with a digital video-camera focuses on gleaners, in a very gleaning way, by collecting images, sounds, light, color and spaces. With her handheld digital toy, she pans around her house and pauses to appreciate a patch of ceiling mol or "catch" with her hand trucks on the highway. It's a documentary like movie with lot's of reflections about what she see.
    What she does is a round trip, with different characters, with different background, age, position in the society, with one common thing - gleaning. Different reasons drives those people to do it. For some of them is survival, inspiration, re-use, art, or just alternative that they believe in, as a direct result of beliefs, education or parents.
    I really enjoy this film. On many levels, it rise a lot of questions about how our states are regulated (in this case France or EU), other people, society or how we conduct our choices on daily basis concerning for instance food, furniture's and other things that we tend to throw away without thinking about it. On top of that it's a well presented story, universal, and quite often provoking.