The Telekommunist Manifesto | Telekommunisten

Telekommunisten
►http://telekommunisten.net

Chaque visiteur de la transmediale 2013 était obligé de passer au milieu du dernier produit des Telekommunisten, un groupe d’artistes berlinois. Il occupaient toute la salle centrale aus Haus der Kulturen der Welt avec leur interprétation du pneumatique symbole des technologies du passé - accessibles et compréhensibles comme le train miniature électrique. Ils sont également les auteurs d’un manifeste pour le 21ème siecle :

http://images.zeit.de/kultur/kunst/2013-01/inline-rohrpost-transmediale/inline-rohrpost-transmediale-180x240.jpg

The Telekommunist Manifesto ▻http://media.telekommunisten.net/manifesto.pdf

http://telekommunisten.net/files/2011/11/manifestolarge.png

Competing software makers, like arms manufacturers, play both sides in this conflict: providing the tools to impose control, and the tools to evade it.

The non-hierarchical relations made possible by a peer network, such as the internet, are contradictory with capitalism’s need for enclosure and control. It’s a battle to the death; either the internet as we know it must go, or capitalism as we know it must go. Will capital throw us back into the network dark ages of CompuServe, mobile telephones and cable tv rather than allow peer communi cations to bring about a new society? Yes, if they can.

Marx concludes, ‘no social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their exis tence have matured in the womb of the old society itself’.

The Telekommunist Manifesto is an exploration of class conflict and property, born from a realization of the primacy of economic capacity in social struggles. Emphasis is placed on the distribution of productive assets and their output. The interpretation here is always tethered to an understanding that wealth and power are intrinsically linked, and only through the former can the latter be achieved. As a collective of intellectual workers, the work of Telekommunisten is very much rooted in the free software and free culture communities. However, a central premise of this Manifesto is that engaging in software development and the production of immaterial cultural works is not enough.

The communization of immaterial property
alone cannot change the distribution of material productive assets, and therefore cannot eliminate exploitation; only the self-organization of production by workers can.

About the author ►http://telekommunisten.net/the-telekommunist-manifesto

Dmytri Kleiner is a software developer working on projects that investigate the political economy of the internet, and the ideal of workers’ self-organization of production as a form of class struggle. Born in the USSR, Dmytri grew up in Toronto and now lives in Berlin. He is a founder of the Telekommunisten Collective, which provides internet and telephone services, as well as undertakes artistic projects that explore the way communications technologies have social relations embedded within them.

Privacy, Moglen, ioerror, #rp12 « @dmytri - Venture Communist
►http://www.dmytri.info/privacy-moglen-ioerror-rp12

Dmytri Kleiner, à l’origine de #thimbl ( que j’ai découvert ici : ►http://seenthis.net/messages/17652) à propos de Eben Moglen et de l’initiative #FreedomBox.

The trajectory that Moglen is using has centralized social media as the starting point and distributed social media as the place we are moving toward. But in actual fact, distributed social media is where we started, and centralized platforms are where we have arrived.
The Internet is a distributed social media platform. The classic internet platforms that existed before the commercialization of the web provided all the features of modern social media monopolies.
Platforms like Usenet, Email, IRC and Finger allowed us to do everything we do now with Facebook and friends. We could post status updates, share pictures, send messages, etc. Yet, these platforms have been more or less abandoned. So the question we need to address is not so much how we can invent a distributed social platform, but how and why we started from a fully distributed social platform and replaced it with centralized social media monopolies.

In the meantime, we have many clever and dedicated people contributing to inventing alternative platforms, and these platforms can be very important and worthwhile for the minority that will ever use them, but we do not have the social will nor capacity to bring these platforms to the masses, and given the dominance of capital in our society, it’s not clear where such capacity will come from.
As surveillance and control is enforced by the powerful interests of capital, privacy and autonomy become a question of power and privilege, not just consumer choice.