A struggle is ensuing to produce and protect what is being called the Knowledge Commons in defiance of the latter day regime of enclosures around knowledge and informational goods. As with the pre-capitalist common lands on which the majority of people subsisted, the idea is that we can build a resource, a life source, of intellectual wealth to sustain people within informatic capitalism. But this endeavour is not without political, tactical and philosophical problems. In this first issue of the new format Mute, we foreground the antagonisms which the Knowledge Commons throw up. Texts by: Gregor Claude, Yves Degoyon, Martin Hardie, Benjamin Mako Hill, Jaromil, Yuwei Lin, Peter Linebaugh, Aymeric Mansoux, Agnese Trocchi, RampArt Hacklab, Palle Torsson, James Wallbank, Steve Wright, Simon Yuill and Soenke Zehle

Underneath the Knowledge Commons

Arts & Photography

Mute

According to UN research data, by 2030 half of the world's population will be living in slums. Meanwhile, in Durban, residents of Forman and Kennedy Road settlements risk arrest and police violence to protest forced eviction and demand clean drinking water and sanitation. The statistics are not supposed to talk back. This issue of Mute, largely sparked by Mike Davis' claim that in the megaslums Muhammad and the Holy Ghost have superceded Marx, considers another view of the world's burgeoning 'naked cities'. Where the populace are refugees without rights or basic amenities, are new forms of political action emerging? Texts by: Amita Baviskar, Iain Boal, Anna Dezeuze, Michael Edwards, Melanie Gilligan, Anthony Iles, Demetra Kotouza, Penny Koutrolikou, Josaphat Robert Large, Félix Morisseau-Leroy, Kevin Pina, Richard Pithouse, Benedict Seymour and Rachel Weber

Naked Cities - Struggle in the Global Slums

xxxxx proposes a radical, new space for artistic exploration, with essential contributions from a diverse range of artists, theorists, and scientists. Combining intense background material, code listings, screenshots, new translation, [the] xxxxx [reader] functions as both guide and manifesto for a thought movement which is radically opposed to entropic contemporary economies. xxxxx traces a clear line across eccentric and wide ranging texts under the rubric of life coding which can well be contrasted with the death drive of cynical economy with roots in rationalism and enlightenment thought. Such philosophy, world as machine, informs its own deadly flipside embedded within language and technology. xxxxx totally unpicks this hiroshimic engraving, offering an dandyish alternative by way of deep examination of software and substance. Life coding is primarily active, subsuming deprecated psychogeography in favour of acute wonderland technology, wary of any assumed transparency. Texts such as Endonomadology, a text from celebrated biochemist and chaos theory pioneer Otto E. Roessler, who features heavily throughout this intense volume, make plain the sadistic nature and active legacy of rationalist thought. At the same time, through the science of endophysics, a physics from the inside elaborated here, a delicate theory of the world as interface is proposed. xxxxx is very much concerned with the joyful elaboration of a new real; software-led propositions which are active and constructive in eviscerating contemporary economic culture. xxxxx embeds Perl Routines to Manipulate London, by way of software artist and Mongrel Graham Harwood, a Universal Dovetailer in the Lisp language from AI researcher Bruno Marchal rewriting the universe as code, and self explanatory Pornographic Coding from plagiarist and author Stewart Home and code art guru Florian Cramer. Software is treated as magical, electromystical, contrasting with the tedious GUI desktop applications and user-led drudgery expressed within a vast ghost-authored literature which merely serves to rehearse again and again the demands of industry and economy. Key texts, which well explain the magic and sheer art of programming for the absolute beginner are published here. Software subjugation is made plain within the very title of media theorist Friedrich Kittler's essay Protected Mode, published in this volume. Media, technology and destruction are further elaborated across this work in texts such as War.pl, Media and Drugs in Pynchon's Second World War, again from Kittler, and Simon Ford's elegant take on J.G Ballard's crashed cars exhibition of 1970, A Psychopathic Hymn. Software and its expansion stand in obvious relation to language. Attacking transparency means examining the prison cell or virus of language; life coding as William Burrough's cutup. And perhaps the most substantial and thorough-going examination is put forward by daring Vienna actionist Oswald Wiener in his Notes on the Concept of the Bio-adapter which has been thankfully unearthed here. Equally, Olga Goriunova's extensive examination of a new Russian literary trend, the online male literature of udaff.com provides both a reexamination of culture and language, and an example of the diversity of xxxxx; a diversity well reflected in background texts ranging across subjects such as Leibniz' monadology, the ur-crash of supreme flaneur Thomas de Quincey and several rewritings of the forensic model of Jack the Ripper thanks to Stewart Home and Martin Howse. xxxxx liberates software from the machinic, and questions the transparency of language, proposing a new world view, a sheer electromysticism which is well explained with reference to the works of Thomas Pynchon in Friedrich Kittler's essay, translated for the first time into English, which closes xxxxx. Further contributors include Hal Abelson, Leif Elggren, Jonathan Kemp, Aymeric Mansoux, and socialfiction.org.

XXXXX

Science & Math

Peak Oil - A User's Guide

Business & Money

Industries

http://www.theclassofthenew.net  Netizens, elancers, cognitarians, swarm-capitalists, hackers, produsumers, knowledge workers, pro-ams... these are just a few of the monikers that have been applied to the new social class emerging from the networked workplace.   In this short book, Richard Barbrook presents a collection of quotations from authors who in different ways attempt to identify an innovative element within society -  'the class of the new'. Announcing a new economic and social paradigm, this class constitutes a 'social prophecy' of the shape of work to come. From Adam Smith's 'Philosophers' of the late 18th century, down to the 'Creative Class' celebrated by sociologist Richard Florida today, the class of the new represents the future of production within and beyond capitalism.   An OpenMute production http://openmute.org

The Class of the New

Politics & Social Sciences

Barbrook, Richard

Philosophy

Schengen with ease 'Extra-comunitarios', or citizens of non-European countries, have the 'extra' bureaucratic task of changing their status, to one that will allow them to move and work 'freely' within the European Union. The length and complexity of this process can vary depending on the type of 'extra-comunitario' in question. Almost everyone agrees that bureaucracy is the most boring thing on the world. Time spent in waiting rooms and lines is not considered as a part of living, but an interference, daily life put on hold, with the hope that, when it's all over, it will be possible to take up 'real' life again as though nothing had ever happened. It is wasted, meaningless time that has to be erased as soon as the new status is achieved - in the case that process was successful. A card with a number becomes the key to freedom and the desire for it grows stronger as the bureaucratic process, transition, irresolution, legislative limbo or whatever becomes longer and more convoluted. If it's true that we learn from life by living it, what teaches us this most boring experience? Queue better? Be more severe, obedient, or lie to the authorities better? And how did we come to this that a piece of paper can provide us freedom? "Schengen with ease" is a compilation of material from a variety of official and non-official sources, brought together to explain how daily practices are affected by the application of the EU Foreign Legislation and the Schengen Agreement in the territory of the European Union. Adopting the Assimil method (Alphonse Chérel, Paris, 1929) this book gives a systematic study of all the bureaucratic steps a "non-EU" citizen might face while trying to obtain EU status. All the required steps are taught through lessons like those found in foreign language skill books, comparing the administrative language of European immigration legislation to an unknown language that has to be mastered first in order to assimilate in to a new environment, receiving determined status. How is this legislative language written? How is it applied? And how can it be mastered? How this law really functions is that it is an exceptional law dictated by a 'economic community', that being applied from the top to the different inferior levels, national legislations, and local administrations, is creating robust bureaucratic architectures, which in practice prevent the resolution of the legal status of new arrivals, forcing them to wander around in this labyrinth without exit or to look for other solutions on another side of the law. The book also offers a comparative study of the different approaches to this legal-bureaucratic situation: While in narrative part of the lessons is exposed laic-experiential relation to the law, law as it is confronted on the part of those who have to fulfill it (that recollects some 30 personal experiences that run through the book and could be followed in independent way), grammatical part of the lessons puts together the legal-normative approximation, law as it is written (information recollected from legal sources from different EU countries and administrative levels). Finally exercise part of the lessons mix up of different bureaucratic forms, press cuttings, and parts of original documents.

Schengen Sin Esfuerzo / Schengen With Ea

Ramujkic, Vahida

DiY Survival - There is no subculture only subversion. DiY or do it your self survival is a collection of essays, tips and case studies collated from an online call for participation by the maverick art group C6. The eclectic mix presented within these pages shows the breadth and current diversity of art/activism practice today from around the world. Whether that is creating wireless networks, pissing on national monuments or building cardboard friends, it is certain that these submissions show that practitioners are taking their work to new spaces and audiences, redefining, through the engagement with the community, what we have considered to be 'art'.

Diy Survival

Computers & Technology

Web Development & Design

No Sex, No Drugs, No Rock'n'Roll Just freak-beat, psyche-garage, prog-techno and artyness. Who do they think they are these performance artists who want to be the new Golden Gods of Art-Rock? Find out as you join The Panacea Society on their 2006 North American tour. When asked by one of his students what he would be doing during the Easter break, performance artist André Stitt decided to write a tour diary. This was to be in the form of a daily blog on his web site reporting on his latest visit to the USA with members of the TRACE collective and his band The Panacea Society. Published by TRACE:SAMIZDAT PRESS, Cardiff, Wales in association with curcioprojects, New York Samizdat Press is a series of peer reviewed publications reflecting the theory and discourse of performance art cultivated by the activities of TRACE Installaction artspace, Cardiff, Wales. ISBN 0 9553927 0 5

Tour Blog

Stitt, Andre

History & Criticism

Mute Vol II #4 - Web 2.0

This issue features articles by Anthony Davies, Paul Helliwell, Howard Slater, and Peter Suchin, and a special section on climate change and capital with texts by Will Barnes, James Woudhuysen, Tim Forsyth and Zoe Young, Kate Rich, George Caffentzis, Anthony Iles, Chris Wright, and Samantha Alvarez.

Mute Magazine - Vol 2 #5, It's Not Easy Being Green

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Books by Mute