• 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 :

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

    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.