Recent Posts
‘Design criteria future, love it or leave it’
Where is the designer when design becomes automated by algorithms? Will the next generation of designers come from the digital sweatshops piling up across Asia? Is there an equivalent to attention deficit disorder that defines contemporary design cultures? The impulse is to answer these last two questions in the affirmative ...
From IT Factory to Electronic Markets: Speculations on Circuits, Regions, Labour
[Published in Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, Digest no. 1, July 2010] In programming field trip visits to two seemingly incongruous settings - an IT facility on the outskirts of Shanghai and Baoshan market for electronic waste, second hand products and fake gadgets - we see how both ...
Still Waiting, Still Moving: On Labour, Logistics and Maritime Industries
Abstract: This essay considers how periods, often prolonged, of stasis underscore the passage of people and things in the maritime industries. Examining the role of logistics as a biopolitical technology central to managing the movement of labour and commodities, this essay examines those subjects, times and spaces in the maritime ...
The Informational University, the Uneven Distribution of Expertise and the Racialization of Labour
In his book Nice Work If You Can Get It, Andrew Ross opens the final chapter on ‘The Rise of the Global University’ with the following assessment: ‘Higher education has not been immune to the impact of economic globalization. Indeed, its institutions are now on the brink of channeling some ...
Urgent Aphorisms: Notes on Organized Networks for the Connected Multitudes
[Forthcoming in Mark Deuze (ed.) Managing Media Work, Sage, 2010] By Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter (The OrgMen) Four Stages of Web 2.0 Culture: Use. Modify. Distribute. Ignore. – Johan Sjerpstra In between the blog posting and the tweet there is the aphorism, a centuries old literary form that should do well amongst ...
Translating the Indifference of Communication: Electronic Waste, Migrant Labour and the Informational Sovereignty of Logistics in China
[Published in International Review of Information Ethics 11 (2009)] ‘As long as there are people on this planet, the waste industries will never die. So we're not worried about the future of the industry’. – Owner of a small e-waste processing business in Ningbo, China. This essay is interested in the relationship ...
Winter Camp 09: From Weak Ties to Organized Networks – Ideas, Reports, Critiques
By Gabriella Coleman, Geert Lovink, Ned Rossiter and Soenke Zehle Winter Camp 09 Visions Wherever we look, there is a Will to Network. In most areas of the (post-)industrial world, networks are becoming a ubiquitous feature – of life, work and play. If they can – and are allowed to – teenagers ...
Organized Networks: Questions of Politics, Translation and Time
1. In this talk I would like to address the question of time and translation as they relate to the political concept of organized networks. The Blue House project, in as much as I understand it, is an experiment in sociality, politics and culture which subsist in the space of ...
Organizing Networks: Notes on Collaborative Constitution, Translation, and the Work of Organization
Abstract The return of political ontology and its critique of representation contribute to a retrieval of the antagonistic registers of “the political.” A corresponding interest in processes of collaborative constitution has explored alternative modalities of the (conflictual) production of (political) subjectivity. Because such efforts necessarily attend to the status of a ...
The Digital Given – 10 Web 2.0 Theses
By Ippolita, Geert Lovink & Ned Rossiter 0. The internet turns out to be neither the problem nor the solution for the global recession. As an indifferent bystander it doesn’t lend itself easily as a revolutionary tool. The virtual has become the everyday. The New Deal is presented as green, ...
