DARK MARKETS – INFOPOLITICS, ELECTRONIC MEDIA AND DEMOCRACY IN TIMES OF CRISIS
CONFERENCE BY PUBLIC NETBASE / t0, 03/04.10.2002, http://darkmarkets.t0.or.at
For press information / photos please contact:
Christina Werner | w.hoch.2wei | Kulturelles Projektmanagement
T ++ 43 1 524 96 46 DW 22 | F ++ 43 1 524 96 32 | E werner@kunstnet.at

PROGRAMME - THURSDAY OCTOBER 3

14:00 WAS TUN? (Video, 43 min.)

14:45 INTRODUCTION

15:00 PAULINA BORSOOK

Byzantium 550 AD: What might we see as a New Dark Ages dawns?

Strangely, there is a clear precedent for our post dotcom-crash/post 9/11 era. Disparate phenomena, such as the global rise of religious fundamentalism, and the recycling of television programs from decades ago into feature-length movies, are not so very different from what went on during the reign of the Emperor Justinian.

15:30 OLEG KIREEV

Russian Cultural Situation in the Age of Chechen War

Russia is on a peak of globalization, and Moscow is a new mega polis. The city is constantly infused with investments. But, at the same time, stagnation of cultural activity is obvious. The same kind of stagnation hits the radical political life, there is strict division between private and public life style. Now Russia seems to lack any public opinion. But this new situation gave birth to numerous new forms of artistic and social activity.

16:00 BREAK

16:30 SOENKE ZEHLE

After the NGO Revolution: Non-state actors at a CrossRoads

Spilling into the vacuum created by transformations of the international system and the statist notions of sovereignty at its core, NGOs have become very important. NGOs are now the core actors of an emerging international civil society. Trying to offer a sober assessment of the concept of an international civil society, the talk will focus on several exemplary controversies over the role NGOs have come to play today.

17:00 FRANCO BERARDI BIFO

Market-ideology, Semiocapitalism and the digital Cognitariat

With the rise of the New Economy a new virtual class was born: the cognitariat. Due to a split in the virtual class cognitive workers became the proletarians of the 90ies. The question of social identity after the dotcom-crash is obvious. Can the global movement against corporate capitalism since the days of the Seattle riots be seen as the global movement of self-organization of cognitive workers?

17:30 BREAK

18:00 DARK MARKETS PANEL I

LAST MINUTE: NED ROSSITER

Whose Democracy? Information Flows, NGOs and the Predicament of Developing
States

Everyone likes to claim their organisations operate in ways that adhere to basic democratic principles. The complex of informational relations between African states, supranational entities, corporations, civilian populations and NGOs is defined by various scalar tensions that seriously undermine the constitutive dimensions of a democratic polity. Herein lies the logic of uneven modernities. The talk considers the paradoxical role played by NGOs in developing civic infrastructures, and suggests that greater focus needs to be placed by NGOs on securing intellectual property rights for developing states as the condition of political and economic sovereignty within informational and biotech economies.

PROGRAMME - FRIDAY OCTOBER 4

14:00 BIGGER THAN ENRON (Video, 60 min., PBS Frontline)

15:00 CHANTAL MOUFFE

Which Democracy in a post-political Age?

We live today in a post-political age where dissent is increasingly taking the form of a total rejection of traditional democratic institutions. This can favor the growth of authoritarian movements. The only way to prevent such an outcome is the creation of a properly agonistic debate about possible alternatives to the existing hegemonic order. How could the new media contribute to such a project?

15:30 ARIANNE BOVE / ERIK EMPSON

The Dark Side of the Multitude

The impossibility of representing the multitude, calls for a reflection on the inadequacy of the approach to the political as an autonomous realm of thought and action. We aim to look at how the limits of the current conception of democracy and representability operate within contemporary modes of political intervention and to explore the potential and unwritten power of forms of dissent, refusal and disobedience that escape capture in the prevailing politics of democracy, mediation and recognition.

16:00 BREAK

16:30 CHRISTOPH SPEHR

Dark Horses: The Theory of Free Cooperation and the Capability of the Net for Emancipation and Oppression

The theory of free cooperation is an attempt to reconstruct left theory and practice, based on the critique and theoretical inputs by the new social movements of the last decades. It's an answer to the question: If we let go the belief in the "automatical" development of freedom and emancipation through economic progress, the belief in hierarchies, in superficial forms of "democratization" - what is left? How can we build up politics on that, and what does it look like? This will also give new perspectives on the Internet, its power structures and counter-power possibilities.

17:00 GEERT LOVINK / FLORIAN SCHNEIDER

A Virtual World is Possible: The Digital Commons and Internet Democracy

The concept of "digital commons" oscillates between past, present and the future. Before 1993, the entire Internet was "public domain." In this rational and egalitarian environment engineers, academics freely exchanged ideas and resources. Paradoxically, it has been society that spoiled the purity of the early cyber settlers' paradise. Alternative to this doom and gloom scenario, digital commons could better be described as temporary and unstable events, rather than a program or ideology. Arguably, the music file platform Napster was the biggest commons of all times. The same could be said about the "tragedy of Internet democracy", which is simultaneously a utopia in the making and a widely neglected topics within cyber culture itself.

17:30 BREAK

18:00 DARK MARKETS PANEL II