Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Radical Commodities”

Capitalism was a radical break with the past: for the first time, production of basic goods was driven by the accumulation of wealth for its own sake, and not primarily to satisfy human needs. Likewise, we are alienated from the natural world, as the products of our own labor are no longer under our control. Our very perception of nature is shaped by an economic system that treats "the environment" as a collection of commodities to be exploited.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Determining whether the current situation of Latin America is better described as “post-neoliberalism” or as “commodities consensus” requires an analysis of recent changes in the region. Capitalism has expanded in agriculture and mining, accentuating the preeminence of basic exports. Traditional industry is declining, and remittances and tourism have increased in importance. Local capitalists associated with foreign corporations have replaced the national bourgeoisie, while the exodus of peasants consolidates labor precariousness, poverty, and inequality. At the same time, the United States is deploying troops to reorganize its domination. The South American rebellions have limited neoliberal aggression and achieved unusual victories in other parts of the world. The concept of post-neoliberalism emphasizes the region’s political turn toward autonomy but overlooks the persistence of the economic model generated during the previous phase. The opposing concept, commodities consensus, highlights the extractivism prevailing throughout the region but plays down the extreme divergences among right-wing, center-left, and radical governments in all other areas. Both concepts contain part of the truth, but neither fully explains the regional scenario. Para determinar si la situación actual de Latinoamérica es mejor descrita como “post-neoliberalismo” o como un “consenso de los commodities” hay que hacer un análisis de los cambios recientes en la región. El capitalismo se ha expandido en la agricultura y la minería, acrecentando la preeminencia de las exportaciones básicas. La industria tradicional ha disminuido, y la importancia del turismo y las remesas ha aumentado. Los capitalistas locales asociados con empresas extranjeras han reemplazado a la burguesía nacional, mientras que el éxodo de los campesinos ha consolidado la precariedad laboral, la pobreza y la desigualdad. Al mismo tiempo, Estados Unidos despliega tropas para reorganizar su dominio. Las rebeliones en América del Sur han puesto barreras a la agresión neoliberal y logrado victorias inusuales en otras partes del mundo. El concepto del post-neoliberalismo destaca el giro político de la región hacia la autonomía pero con una tendencia a la persistencia del modelo económico generado durante la fase anterior. El otro concepto, el consenso de las commodities, destaca el extractivismo que prevalece en toda la región pero minoriza las divergencias entre los gobiernos de derecha, centro-izquierda y radicales en todas las demás áreas. Ambos conceptos son parcialmente ciertos, pero no explican totalmente el escenario regional.

Moving from a critical reading of Hannah Arendt’s view of the relationship between truth and politics, this essay reframes the relationship between post-truth and politics within contemporary democracies, where a) truth acquires the same status of radical immanence as neoliberal governmentality and the same status of equivalence and exchangeability as commodities and the market, b) the imperative of transparency redefines the public sphere, c) the theatre of representation transforms into the set of presentification, without any border between the visible and the invisible, the sayable and the unsayable. Within such a framework the parresiastic practice of saying one’s own truth must be reconsidered, alongside and beyond the foucauldian proposal, as a relational and political practice rather than an individual and ethical style of life.

A promising method for the destruction of aflatoxin B1 in commodities is treatment with sodium bisulfite to yield a single major product, aflatoxin B1S. On the basis of nuclear magnetic resonance, ultraviolet and infrared spectra, elemental analysis, mass spectroscopy, deuterium labeling and stability to highly acidic conditions, the structure of aflatoxin B1S was established as the 15 α-sodium sulfonate of aflatoxin B1 The formation of aflatoxin B1 products substituted at the 15 position only is unprecedented and implies an unusual mechanism. The formation of a single trans addition product under conditions that seemingly rule out a previously proposed free radical mechanism suggested a newly proposed ionic reaction mechanism. The completeness of the reaction and the water solubility of aflatoxin B1S support the promising use of bisulfite to destroy aflatoxin.

Antioxidants are an important component of our ability to combat free radicals, an excess of which leads to oxidative stress that is related to aging and numerous human diseases. Oxidative damage also shortens the shelf-life of foods and other commodities. Understanding the structure–activity relationship of antioxidants and their mechanisms of action is important for designing more potent antioxidants for potential use as therapeutic agents as well as preservatives. We report the first computational study on the electronic effects of ortho-substituents in dendritic tri-phenolic antioxidants, comprising a common phenol moiety and two other phenol units with electron-donating or electron-withdrawing substituents. Among the three proposed antioxidant mechanisms, sequential proton loss electron transfer (SPLET) was found to be the preferred mechanism in methanol for the dendritic antioxidants based on calculations using Gaussian 16. We then computed the total enthalpy values by cumulatively running SPLET for all three rings to estimate electronic effects of substituents on overall antioxidant activity of each dendritic antioxidant and establish their structure–activity relationships. Our results show that the electron-donating o-OCH3 group has a beneficial effect while the electron-withdrawing o-NO2 group has a negative effect on the antioxidant activity of the dendritic antioxidant. The o-Br and o-Cl groups did not show any appreciable effects. These results indicate that electron-donating groups such as o-methoxy are useful for designing potent dendritic antioxidants while the nitro and halogens do not add value to the radical scavenging antioxidant activity. We also found that the half-maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) values of 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) better correlate with the second step (electron transfer enthalpy, ETE) than the first step (proton affinity, PA) of the SPLET mechanism, implying that ETE is the better measure for estimating overall radical scavenging antioxidant activities.

<p>One of the sources of functional foodstuff is carbohydrate-based commodities which contain anthocyanin. These commodities include black rice, purple corn, and purple sweet potato. The anthocyanin compound is a pigment which is responsible for the purple color to the produced commodities. This compound possesses antioxidative activities which are able to bind with free radical compounds and protect human body against various diseases.Physiological function of the anthocyanin in foodstuff has attract particular interest for further exploration, particularly on its bioavailability nature, functional food ingredients, and its product’s appearances. Several anthocyanin-rich varieties such as Jeliteng black rice, Srikandi Ungu corn, and Antin purple sweet potato has been released by Indonesian Agency for Agricultural Research and Development (IAARD). In the future, development of processed functional food product is expected to raise in line with the increase in the public’s interest on the important of the health. The specific function of antioxidant derived from the anthocyanin compound enable human immunity increase which is recently getting popular, particularly during Covid-19 pandemic. Potential development of the foodstuffs associated with anthocyanin involves various research from upstream to downstream, starting from superior varieties development which contain higher anthocyanin content, by product creation with higher functional values and preferred by the consumers.</p><p>Keywords: Carbohydrates, anthocyanin, functional food, diversification.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Abstrak</strong></p><p><strong>PROSPEK PENGEMBANGAN KOMODITAS SUMBER KARBOHIDRAT KAYA</strong><br /><strong>ANTOSIANIN MENDUKUNG DIVERSIFIKASI PANGAN FUNGSIONAL</strong></p><p>Salah satu sumber bahan pangan fungsional adalah komoditas berbasis karbohidrat dan mengandung antosianin. Komoditas tersebut antara lain padi beras hitam, jagung ungu, dan ubi jalar ungu. Senyawa antosianin merupakan pigmen yang memberikan warna ungu pada produk yang dihasilkan. Antosianin memiliki aktivitas antioksidan, yang mampu mengikat senyawa radikal dan melindungi tubuh dari penyakit. Fungsi fisiologis dari antosianin dalam bahan pangan telah menarik perhatian untuk dilakukan eksplorasi sifat bioavailability, fungsi pangan fungsional, dan tampilan produknya. Beberapa varietas unggul komoditas sumber karbohidrat kaya antosianin seperti padi hitam Jeliteng, jagung Srikandi Ungu, dan ubi jalar ungu Antin telah dilepas oleh Balitbangtan. Ke depan, pengembangan produk olahan pangan fungsional diharapkan semakin meningkat seiring dengan meningkatnya perhatian masyarakat akan pentingnya kesehatan. Fungsi khusus antioksidan dari senyawa antosianin dapat menaikkan imun tubuh yang sangat dibutuhkan masyarakat, apalagi dalam masa pandemi Covid-19. Potensi pengembangan bahan pangan berantosianin memerlukan penelitian dari hulu hingga hilir, mulai dari perakitan varietas unggul mengandung antosianin lebih tinggi sampai teknologi pengolahan untuk menghasilkan produk olahan yang lebih berkualitas, dengan sifat fungsional yang lebih tinggi, dan disenangi oleh konsumen.</p><p>Kata kunci: Karbohidrat, antosianin, pangan fungsional, diversifikasi.</p>

AbstractThis article deals with the origins, development, and popularity of boycott fatwas. Born of the marriage of Islamic politics and Islamic economics in an age of digital communications, these fatwas targeted American, Israeli, and Danish commodities between 2000 and 2006. Muftis representing both mainstream and, surprisingly, radical tendencies argued that jihad can be accomplished through nonviolent consumer boycotts. Their argument marks a significant development in the history of jihad doctrine because boycotts, construed as jihadi acts, do not belong to the commonplace categories of jihad as a “military” or a “spiritual” struggle. The article also demonstrates that boycott fatwas emerged, to a large degree, from below. New media, in particular interconnected computer networks, made it easier for laypersons to drive the juridical discourse. They did so before September 11 as well as, more insistently, afterward. Their consumer jihad had some economic impact on targeted multinationals, and it provoked corporate reactions.

Purpose This paper aims to analyse the mainstream and emerging global challenges and trends in the global agriculture sector. The analysis leads to a discussion on the present state of the Russian agroindustry and possible future strategies for adaptation in the context of the rapidly changing global environment. Design/methodology/approach The design of this study is based on the application of the core methods of Foresight. First, a trend analysis is undertaken using reviews and expert methods. Trends identified are mapped using a social, technological, economic, environmental, political and value (STEEPV) framework to ensure that a broad range of trends are covered, which may be stemming from various factors affecting the agriculture sector. The analysis of the big picture of global trends and challenges, interacting with country-specific structural factors, translates are translated into the opportunities and threats, which will in turn help to develop possible strategies for adaptation. Findings This study develops two adaptive strategies for the development of the Russian agroindustry that are feasible in different short- and long–term time horizons. The first strategy is considered to be the most likely choice for the period before 2020. It includes radical imports’ substitution (of commodities as well as machinery and high-tech components) for ensuring national food security with inevitable temporary setbacks in efficiency and labour productivity. The second strategy, which becomes feasible after 2020, considers re-integrating Russia into global supply chains and expanding commodities exports (volumes and nomenclature) based on full-scale technological modernization with the use of international capital. Research limitations/implications The study design is based on the assumption that Russia’s position as a country, which is highly self-sufficient on basic agricultural products and large exporter of crop commodities and fertilizers, will remain unchanged in the horizon of at least 20 years. However, long-term forecasts should also scrutinize the possibility of radical structural changes. Therefore, future research should concentrate on wild cards that can completely disrupt and transform the Russian agriculture industry and as well as the whole economy. Practical implications This paper suggests a number of recommendations on national science and technology policy for the three main industries of the Russian agricultural sector: crop husbandry, animal breeding and food processing (the fisheries sector is excluded from the scope of this paper). In addition, this paper proposes a number of measures towards alleviating the institutional barriers to raise the investment attractiveness of the sector. Originality/value The novelty of this paper lies in the originality of the research topic and methodology. The Russian agricultural sector has rarely been studied in the context of global agricultural challenges and threats taken on the highest level of aggregation beyond commodity market analysis or agro-climatic and logistics factors. There are few or no studies that lay out a map of possible long-term strategies of Russian agroindustry adaptive development. The Foresight methodology applied in this study is customized to better fit the practical purposes of the study.

In Argentina, farming traditionally took place in small and medium-sized family farms, mostly by means of their own land, labour, capital (financial, machinery, etc.) and entrepreneurship. Farmers owned enough equipment to cope with all the activities required for the production cycle. This traditional family farm model is the dominant organisational form in agriculture in almost every country. However, the way of managing, contracting and organising agriculture in Argentina has changed since the 1990s as a result of several institutional innovations. Even though the 2002 economic crisis created a highly uncertain scenario, farm production continued to expand and new organisational forms appeared. Since 2007, institutional changes (more related to Government intervention) had a negative impact on production and organisational forms. These different periods and scenarios enable us to explore the dynamics and interrelationships of the different institutional, organisational and technological environments. The paper discusses organisational adaptation in the agriculture sector as a response to radical changes in the technological and institutional environments, in a context of increased international demand for agricultural commodities.

AbstractThis article deals with witchcraft, missionisation, domestic slavery and social life on the emerging colonial ‘frontier’ of Onitsha, Nigeria, during the last years of the nineteenth century. The analysis centres on the confession of an accused witch and former domestic slave in the Waterside area of the town. It uses the document as a springboard for a larger discussion of the intersecting lives of Africans and Europeans in this marginal location at a moment when social relations there were undergoing radical transformation. By addressing such a text, taken down verbatim at the time of the confession, the author argues, we can gain a privileged insight into women's unofficial (and even prohibited) religious practice as well as the everyday lives of persons—notably female domestic slaves—who ordinarily receive little notice in the African colonial record. From Okuwan's confession we also learn something about how the increasing flows of commodities and new forms of colonial authority along this mercantile border were changing (and possibly devaluing) African women's labour as well as their religious power.

David McNally styles this book as beginning in a polemic and ending in a “materialist approach to language” much indebted to the German critic Walter Benjamin. The charge is that “postmodernist theory, whether it calls itself poststructuralism, deconstruction or post-Marxism, is constituted by a radical attempt to banish the real human body—the sensate, biocultural, laboring body—from the sphere of language and social life” (p. 1). By treating language as an abstraction, McNally argues, postmodernism constitutes a form of idealism. More than that, it succumbs to and perpetuates the fetishism of commodities disclosed by Marx insofar as it treats the products of human laboring bodies as entities independently of them. Clearly irritated by the claims to radicalism made by those he labels postmodern, McNally thinks he has found their Achilles' heel: “The extra-discursive body, the body that exceeds language and discourse, is the ‘other’ of the new idealism, the entity it seeks to efface in order to bestow absolute sovereignty on language. To acknowledge the centrality of the sensate body to language and society is thus to threaten the whole edifice of postmodernist theory” (p. 2).

This study aims to extract antioxidant compounds from Curculigo latifolia root by subcritical water extraction (SWE). The influence of extraction temperature and time on the antioxidant activity of C. latifolia root extract was investigated in terms of extraction yield, total phenolic content (TPC), total flavonoid content (TFC), 2, 2′-azino-bis-3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulphonic acid (ABTS), and 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical. The highest extraction yield (36.5%), TPC (92.55 mg GAE/g), TFC (13.26 mg RE/g), and antioxidant activities by ABTS (66.8 mg trolox equivalent/g sample) and DPPH (128.7 mg trolox equivalent/g sample) were detected at 180°C and 30 minutes extraction time. Based on the results, the optimum condition was selected at 180°C and 30 minutes of extraction. The sample was screened by using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS) analysis where the phenolic compounds detected were structured based on their [M-H]-peak. The detected phenolic compounds were monobenzone, hydroquinone, phloridzin, pomiferin, mundulone, scandenin, and dimethyl caffeic acid. According to these findings, SWE is a promising, environmentally friendly, and efficient technology in the exploitation of natural products for the development of food and nutraceutical commodities.

Abstract This essay offers some general reflections on the destructive dimensions of corporatized forms of food production in contemporary South America. The dialectic of production and destruction that has long defined capitalism has too often been figured as "creative destruction", a phrase that can make the negative social and environmental impact of food commodity production seem to be something acceptable and even positive. The authors who contributed to this Special Section on Production/destruction in Latin America reveal, in contrast, that destruction has been integral to industrial or large-scale forms of food production in different parts of the continent. These articles remind us that the creation of a less destructive, more egalitarian world requires (among other things) not only the creation of renewable forms of energy but also a radical rethinking of the ways in which food is produced, distributed, and consumed. And the experience of South America in the past decade teaches us about the political limits of more progressive models of accumulation that, for all their merits, did not dare to delink the production of food from the short-sighted nature of corporate models that prioritize profits and hyper-productivity over social justice and sustainability. Key words: Creative destruction; destructive production; ruination; rubble; food; commodities

While postneoliberalism is often interpreted as a societal reaction against the deleterious effects of marketization in Latin America, this paper develops a finer-grained Polanyian institutional analysis to gain better analytical purchase on the ambivalent outcomes of postneoliberal reforms. Drawing on recent insights in economic geography, and in dialogue with the Latin American structuralist tradition, we elaborate our framework through a case study of the Argentinian soy boom of the 2000s, identifying forms of market extension, redistribution, reciprocity and householding that facilitated this process. We argue for a multi-scalar approach that balances attention to national and extra-local dynamics shaping the combination of these forms, identified through the lens of the “fictitious commodities” of the soy boom: money (credit, currency and cross-border capital flows), land (in the agricultural heartland and frontier regions), labor (transformed and excluded in a “farming without farmers” model) and, we add, knowledge (biotech). Our analysis identifies internal tensions as well as overt resistance and “overflow” that ultimately led to the collapse of postneoliberal regulation of the soy complex, ushering in a wider, market-radical counter-movement. Refracting double-movement-type dynamics through the prism of heterodox institutional forms, we argue, allows for a better grasp of processes that underlie institutional recalibrations of progressive and regressive kinds.

This article examines the conflicting subjectivities and space-times of Indigenous and colonial law that underpin the recent shutdown of the Canadian economy as people barricaded railways and ports in solidarity with the Witsuwit'en hereditary chiefs’ blockade against the Coastal GasLink pipeline across their territory. The article argues that this conflict between Canadian and Witsuwit'en law reflects fundamental tensions between their respective foundations in relations of the commodity and the gift. Within settler capitalist society, the value of a commodity is constructed relationally through a political economy of exchange that aims to speed transactions to maximize profits. With an ongoing drive for time-space compression, there is continual pressure in settler capitalism to develop new infrastructure that can speed the circulation of commodities. In Witsuwit'en society, the gift presents a contrasting logic of place-time extension. Rather than focusing on closing transactions to increase profits, gift giving stretches reciprocal obligations into the past and future. Contrasting these distinct conceptions of the relationship between value and time, the article argues that the Witsuwit'en struggle with Coastal GasLink should be understood as conflict between colonial temporal enclosures and a radical promise to open futures different to those engendered by the colonial present.

Giant is a sprawling narrative, centered around the Benedict family, Texas cattle ranchers, and Jett Rink, a nouveau riche oilman. Originally serialized in Ladies' Home Journal in 1952, subsequently published as a novel, then adapted into George Stevens's 1956 film starring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor, Giant is a text that dramatizes the domestication and naturalization of the oil industry in the postwar United States while endorsing a multiracial vision of Texas. This essay explores how Giant ultimately arrives at nationalistic pluralism after representing the radical changes brought about by the modern oil industry in the US, particularly the erosion of traditional class divisions as Jett Rink's oil wealth exceeds the Benedict's ranching wealth. The subsumption of oil into liberal pluralism marks what this essay names “fossil-fuel futurity,” an ideological configuration in which normative life is produced through the commodities and modes of transportation made available by fossil-fuel culture. The essay then puts Giant into a broader context of narratives about oil in the postwar US, especially the television series Dallas (1978–91) and the film There Will Be Blood (2007). In all three texts, oil culture becomes postwar US culture, saturating aesthetic, affective, and family relations. The challenge for us, then, is to imagine a mode of futurity that does not replicate the ideological valences of “fossil-fuel futurity.”

Alexandra Urakova,“‘I do not want her, I am sure’: Commodities, Gifts, and Poisonous Gifts in Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (pp. 448–472) This essay focuses on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) in discussing the interrelation of sentimentality, slavery, and race. It asks what happens when a slave himself or herself becomes a gift in the way that Mr. Shelby buys Eliza as a present for his wife, and St. Claire seems to bestow Uncle Tom upon Eva and ultimately gives Topsy to his cousin Ophelia. Although much has been said about “sentimental property” or “sympathetic ownership” in Stowe, the instances of exchanging slaves as gifts in the novel have been surprisingly overlooked. Touching upon one of the novel’s important and precarious themes—the distinction between people and things—the aforementioned episodes not only contribute to our understanding of the novel’s gift economy but also invite us to revise the complex attitude to racial otherness in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I claim that while pursuing a sentimental ideology of the gift that comes to support racialist implications of its abolitionist rhetoric, Stowe’s novel also contains a radical potential of its critique embodied in the image of the poisonous gift of a slave child, Topsy, who figures as an unwelcome, wasteful, and repellent present. Concurring with critical opinion that Stowe’s racism is in the sentiment, this essay suggests that the novel’s unsentimental, explicitly racist metaphors paradoxically inform one of Stowe’s strongest antislavery arguments.

Coffee is among the most traded commodities and consumed beverages worldwide primarily for its stimulating effects. Moreover, coffee is known to contain various bioactive compounds with significant health benefits including antibacterial and antioxidant activities. However, Ethiopia as the origin of coffee and producer and exporter of varieties of Coffea arabica has made little study on the health aspects of this beverage. The aim of this study was to examine the antibacterial and antioxidant activities and content of coffee samples from different localities of Yorgacheffe and Jimma; and roasted, ground, and packed samples purchased from a coffee shop in Addis Ababa. Medium-roasted-boiled and lyophilized coffee extracts were tested on eight gram-negative and gram-positive bacterial strains. The agar-well diffusion method was used to test the extracts determining the minimum inhibitory and bactericidal concentrations. For coffee antioxidant activity and content, light-roasted (both field and shop samples) and green coffee bean extracts were tested using the free radical 2.2-diphenyl-l-pict1hydrazyl (DPPH) IC50 percent inhibition protocol. The samples showed strong antibacterial and antioxidant activity and substantial antioxidant content. Significant variation was noted in the antibacterial activities of the different coffee samples. Moreover, the growth-inhibitory strength of each coffee sample was variable for different test bacteria. A coffee sample with the best antibacterial activity had also the highest antioxidant activity/content. The shop coffee had the lowest bioactivity. The observed variations in the antibacterial and antioxidant activities among the samples probably indicate the diversity of the Ethiopian coffee related, among other factors, to the coffee plant genetics and agroecology.

<em>Cinnamon is one of the natural flavor commodities that has not been utilized optimally. One of its derivatives product is essential oil. Essential oils are obtained through the distillation process. The by-product of the distillation process is hydrosol. Hydrosol is an emulsion from essential oil which is bound by water molecules. The hydrosol used in this research was a by-product of processing of cinnamon bark essential oils using Pilot Plan-scale steam distillation. The Pilot Plant-scale steam distillation is using 50 % of destilation tank capacity, with a variety of valve openings (¼, ½, and ¾). The study aimed determine characterization of cinnamon bark hydrosols including total phenol, antioxidant activity of reducing power method, antioxidant activity of radical scavenging (DPPH) method, total flavonoids, and antimicrobial activity against Pseudomonas fluorosence; Aspergillus niger; Bacillus plantarum; Staphylococcus aureus; and E.coli. The results showed that variety of valve openings effected the chemical characteristics of cinnamon bark hydrosols including total phenol, total flavonoids, antioxidant activity (reducing power and DPPH methods). The hydrosols of ¾ valve openings treatment showed antimicrobial activity against Escherichia coli</em>, <em>Staphylococcus aureus</em>, and <em>Pseudomonas fluorescens</em><em>. All hydrosol samples</em><em> showed no antimicrobial activity against Aspergillus niger</em> <em>and</em> <em>Lactobacillus plantarum</em><em>. </em><em>This hydrosol characterization will be used for further recommendations related to the use of hydrosols in the food.</em>

Encyclopedias present and contain knowledge, but historically they have also been commercial commodities, produced for sale. In this article, we study the self-presentations of a selection of Norwegian encyclopedias, as these are expressed in the form of commercial images, advertising texts and slogans. We thus present a brief but detailed study of what might be called a number of paratextual matters associated with 20th-century Norwegian encyclopedias, with the aim of identifying the most significant or recurring topoi in the material. Our analysis shows that claims about speed and modernization are among the most conspicuous ingredients in these self-presentations, claims which, we argue, feed into a particular logic of a particular version of 20th-century modernity. The article begins with an analysis of the commercially successful Konversationslexicon, the first Norwegian encyclopedia, published in 1906 and for a long time market leader of the bourgeois tradition. The Konversationslexicon was produced with the explicit aim of providing a source of conversation for the educated classes, a new and expanding group of readers. We also show how the publisher Aschehoug went on to strengthen its own position in this market through a sophisticated process of differentiation. Seen as a contrast to these market leaders, we explore the Norwegian tradition of counter-encyclopaedias, with the radical PaxLeksikon as our main example. This encyclopaedia came into existence as a result of a strong ideological motivation and was run by left-wing idealists. Nevertheless, and perhaps inevitably, it ended up situating itself within the same market mechanisms and the same commercial logic as the bourgeois encyclopaedias. The article ends by a brief consideration of the change from commercial print encyclopaedias to internet-based encyclopaedias, and of the new challenges this poses in a small nation, rhetorically and in the struggle for funding.

The scope of this project is to study a novel methodology in the task of forecasting and trading the crack spread modelled index. More specifically in this research we are expanding the earlier work carried out by Karathanasopoulos et al. (2016c) and Dunis et al. (2005) who model the Crack Spread with traditional neural networks. In this research paper we provide for first time a more advanced approach to non-linear modelling and trading the ‘Crack’. The selected trading period covers 4500 trading days and the proposed model is a deep belief network (DBN). To model, test and evaluate the crack spread we use an expansive universe of 500 inputs correlated with the main index. Moreover we have used for reasons of comparison a radial basis function combined with partial swarm optimizer and two linear models such as random walk theorem and buy and hold strategy.

Una constatación obvia es que en Sudamérica la producción agrícola y pecuaria continúa expandiéndose, en particular aquella que está orientada a la exportación, sea en forma de materias primas agrícolas, alimentos o biocombustibles. El punto problemático está en que esto ocurre en un contexto global marcado por el "auge de commodities", cuya principal causa radica en la demanda de materias primas por China.

<p>In recent years, the investors pay major attention to invest in gold market ecause of huge profits in the future. Gold is the only commodity which maintains ts value even in the economic and financial crisis. Also, the gold prices are closely elated with other commodities. The future gold price prediction becomes the warning ystem for the investors due to unforeseen risk in the market. Hence, an accurate gold rice forecasting is required to foresee the business trends. This paper concentrates on orecasting the future gold prices from four commodities like historical data’s of gold rices, silver prices, Crude oil prices, Standard and Poor’s 500 stock index (S&P500) ndex and foreign exchange rate. The period used for the study is from 1st January 000 to 31st April 2014. In this paper, a learning algorithm for single hidden layered eed forward neural networks called Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) is used which as good learning ability. Also, this study compares the five models namely Feed orward networks without feedback, Feed forward back propagation networks, Radial asis function, ELMAN networks and ELM learning model. The results prove that he ELM learning performs better than the other methods.</p>

Straipsnyje bandoma atsakyti į klausimą, kaip Gilles’o Deleuze’o ir Felixo Guattari geismo samprata atsispindi jų politinėje filosofijoje. Tyrinėjama geismo mašinų ir jų gamybos koncepcija, jų santykis su sociumo struktūra ir kapitalo logika. Savo veikaluose šie du autoriai teigia, kad geismo mašinos kuria materialią revoliucinę energiją, kuri nuolat konfrontuoja tiek su sociumo normomis, tiek su kapitalistine priespauda. Tačiau, pasak jų, tokią energiją sociumas mėgina represuoti, paversti revoliucinį geismą fašistiniu „tvirtos rankos“ geismu, o kapitalas fetišizuoja, suprekina ir pritaiko savo tikslams. Šiame tekste, remiantis tiek Deleuze’o ir Guattari, tiek jų sekėjų tekstais, daroma prielaida, kad geismo mašinos sociumo represijoms ir kapitalistiniam suprekinimui gali priešintis pasirinkdamos atstumtųjų terpėje gimstančias kūrybingas ir radikalias mažosios politikos strategijas.Pagrindiniai žodžiai: geismas, geismo mašinos, sociumas, reakcija, kapitalas, suprekinimas, revoliucija, mažoji politika.Desire and Liberation in Political Philosophy of G. Deleuze and F. GuattariKasparas Pocius SummaryThe article analyzes Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of desire and desiring-machines, their origins and workings in the organized structure of socius and in the capitalist regime as well as the revolutionary strategies and milieus that these desiring-machines engender. Contemporary social critique often distorts the notion of desire while linking it exclusively with capital that forces people to consume identities and commodities. Meanwhile, in the conception of Deleuze and Guattari desire is a material revolutionary energy which constantly aims to confront the norms of both socius and capitalist repressions. Unfortunately, this energy is continually under the threat of being appropriated and inactivated by socius, and it also undergoes the risk of being fetishized and commodified by capital, which makes desire serve its aims of seeking profit and extracting surplus value. Desiring-machines attempt to break through to the other side of socius and capital, the former of which is decoded and deterritorialized, whereas the latter is too limited to deal with desire as an absolute limit of socius. Capital is unable to commodify potential revolutionary energy or to absorb it in another way. However, in the structure of socius active and creative desire may be reversed into reactionary fascist desire of hierarchy, exploitation, humiliation, slavery and death.The molar order of socius is distinguished by a clear structure and hierarchy where individuals have fixed identities. However, capital tries to demolish those structures and deterritorialize socius by following the desiring-machines. The discipline, laws and norms are substituted by the flexible axiomatic of capitalism, which (whenever possible) can adjust itself to the demands of desire or regenerate to the former repressive forms of command. Such milieu gives rise to a single monolithic molar class. Therefore, today the conflict lies not between the capitalist class and the working class but between the class and those who are outside the class – minor people, creating minor politics in molecular milieu.There is a paradox in the conception of minor politics by Deleuze and Guattari. Although this kind of politics originates in the space that is oppressed by socius and capital, however such space can become highly active, creative and radical. Desire as a material basis for creativity becomes a powerful revolutionary potential. Minor politics is based not on identification or representation of somebody’s interests, but on permanent creativity. This politics emerges within the milieu of mutual communication and intellect as well as uncommodified affectivity and sexuality and it embodies revolutionary desire in everyday practices of self-valorization.Keywords: desire, desiring-machines, socius, reaction, capital, commodification, revolution, minor politics.

Forecasting commodities and especially oil prices have attracted significant research interest, often concluding that oil prices are not easy to forecast and implying an efficient market. In this paper, we revisit the efficient market hypothesis of the oil market, attempting to forecast the West Texas Intermediate oil prices under a machine learning framework. In doing so, we compile a dataset of 38 potential explanatory variables that are often used in the relevant literature. Next, through a selection process, we build forecasting models that use past oil prices, refined oil products and exchange rates as independent variables. Our empirical findings suggest that the Support Vector Machines (SVM) model coupled with the non-linear Radial Basis Function kernel outperforms the linear SVM and the traditional logistic regression (LOGIT) models. Moreover, we provide evidence that points to the rejection of even the weak form of efficiency in the oil market.

During the lifetime, the human body forms a considerable amount of free radicals damaging DNA, cell membranes, and their components. A wider application of basil (Ocimum basilicum), an aromatic plant and one of the common gastronomic commodities in the human diet could help to prevent the formation of free radicals and to remove them from the human body. Therefore, determination of antioxidant activity and total content of phenolic substances in selected cultivars of basil (Ohře, Sweet green, Salad leaf, Purple opal, Thai) in a fresh and frozen state and the mixture with another plant (garlic, mint, rocket, spinach) in the fresh and refrigerated state was performed. The total content of phenolic substances in basil was established by the spectrophotometric Folin-Ciocalteu method. DPPH spectrophotometric method was used to analyze the antioxidant activity. The results have shown statistically significant differences between basil cultivars under the same growing conditions. The values of antioxidant activity in frozen samples ranged from 5.1 ±0.4 mg.g-1 AA FW to 11.71 ±0.18 mg.g-1 AA FW and the total phenolic content varied between 2.77 ±0.16 mg.g-1 GAE FW in TH and 8.93 ±0.13 mg.g-1 GAE FW. A statistically significant difference between fresh and frozen samples was established only in the “Ohře” cultivar. After the storage in cold temperatures, all mixtures showed a reduction in the antioxidant activity and total content of phenolic substances. The mixture of basil and mint performed the highest values of antioxidant activity and total content of phenolic substances and significantly differed from the other mixtures most often. The addition of basil and its mixtures to food and beverages can substantially increase their biological value and subsequently also the quality of human nutrition.

This article analyzes the behavioural changes in groups of consumers and households on the market with individual commodities, based on the classification of individual reasonable consumption. Consumers expressed the degree of influence in their decision-making on satisfying their needs through selected key marketing factors such as price, brand, quality, habits and experience, advertising, recommendation from friends and relatives, packaging, discounts, new items, and so on. The analysis sought to determine whether the changes in the economic situation in the Czech Republic have an impact on the degree of marketing instrument influence on consumer behavior and decision-making. To express the degree of influence 10 point opinion scale is used. Thanks to the investigation taking place in 2007 with 609 respondents and in 2013 with 516 respondents, it was possible, it was possible to deal with the search for evidence of differences in the importance of individual factors using the Wilcoxon test. In 2013, attention was also paid to the degree of influence of some marketing tools such as price, quality and discount events on consumer behavior and decision-making in selected groups of households created by different income levels and different level of education achieved by the head of the household. The influence is expressed by radial graphs.

The development of natural essential oil as an alternative to synthetic chemicals in the control of postharvest decay is currently in the spotlight. In the present study, the efficacy of seven essential oils in suppressing Collelotrichum gloeosporioides identified from sweet cherry was evaluated in vitro and clove oil was proved to be the most promising inhibitor. Thus, the antifungal properties and potential mechanisms of clove oil in vitro and in vivo by fumigation and contact treatments were intensively investigated. For C. gloeosporioides, the minimal inhibitory concentrations (MIC) of clove oil in air and contact phase were 80 and 300 μL/L in vitro testing, respectively. Based on the radial growth of C. gloeosporioides mycelium in medium, the fumgitoxic ability of essential oil was observed in a dose-dependent manner, which was not as dramatic as that under in vivo conditions. Furthermore, scanning electron microscopy and transmission electron microscopy of C. gloeosporioides exposed to clove oil exhibited obviously deleterious morphological and ultrastructural alterations confirming the disruption of fungal cell wall and endomembrane system, which resulted in increasing in permeability and causing the loss of intracellular constituents. In future, essential oils, combined with nano-emulsification approaches, could be good candidates as safe and effective antifungal agents for fungal spoilage of fresh commodities.

Purple sweet potato is a very familiar plant for us, and the most common is white sweet potato, purple, yellow ororange. The advantages of colored purple sweet potatoes contain anthocyanins. Anthocyanins are a secondarymetabolite of flavonoids and polyphenols that can act as antioxidants. This concentration of anthocyanins is whatcauses some kind of purple potato to have a gradient of different shades of purple. Anthocyanins provide excellenthealth effects namely as antioxidants and anticancer due to electron deficiency in its chemical structure so that it isreactive to resist free radicals. Sweet potato leaves can also be utilized as food ingredients as well as potentiallymedicines for various diseases. Purple sweet Potato (Ipomoea batatas L) is one of the agricultural commodities inIndonesia that has a number of production is quite abundant and can be used as a traditional medicine. Theproblem formulation in this study is whether purple sweet potato leaf extract (Ipomoea batatas L.) contains thechemical compounds of alkaloids, falovonoids, tannins and saponins.The purpose of this research is to know thecontent of chemical compounds in purple sweet potato leaf (Ipomoea batatas L). This research is an experimentalstudy that is by observing and conducting experimental observations of the group in various treatment conditions.The sample used in this study is the purple sweet potato leaf (Ipomoea batatas L). The results of this study showedthat the purple sweet potato leaves were positively contained.

This article offers a preliminary critical-historical reconstruction of the concept of dispossession. Part I examines its role in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century struggles against European feudal land tenure. Drawing upon Marx’s critique of French anarchism in particular, I identify a persistent limitation at the heart of the concept. Since dispossession presupposes prior possession, recourse to it appears conservative and tends to reinforce the very proprietary and commoditized models of social relations that radical critics generally seek to undermine. Part II turns to use of the term in Indigenous struggles against colonization, both in order to better grasp the stakes of the above problematic and suggest a way beyond it. Through a reconstruction of arguments by Indigenous scholars and activists, I seek to show the coherence and novelty of their formulation by suggesting that dispossession has come to name a unique historical process, one in which property is generated under conditions that require divestment and alienation from those who appear, only retroactively, as its original owners. In this way, theft and property are related in a recursive, rather than strictly unilinear, manner. Part III provides a specific historical example in the form of nineteenth-century US property law concerning squatters and homesteaders.

Fuelled by the neo-liberal division of labour, complexification acquired a life of its own. This gave a novel dimension to the growing gap between emergent knowledge and human systems, knowing and being, between the human content of work and its outcomes, value and citizenship. It is argued that here is one of the key reasons why most decisions are made in the chaotic space of ephemeral price relations manufactured by the data-rich, runaway ‘surveillance commoditism’. However, advances in quantitative, empirical methodologies also open an action space for a fresh research agenda. It is to recast our past and present into transparent, directional genealogical accounts of order generation and actualisation recording the ascent and limits of development as well as its pathways between the ‘lab & cloister’ and the social systems. It grounds a new, ‘meta-modern’ Foucauldian episteme in which the notion of order freed of power-hungry impositions assumes the role of an onto-epistemic variable and offers a rational base for defeating the prospect of ‘digitally enhanced serfdom’. The necessary condition for this agenda to begin to assert itself is a radical methodological transformation of educational and management programmes aimed at bottom up ownership of, and responsibility for the making, choosing, and symbolising, with a view to restoring value as a measure of actualisation of human independence and ability. Only then can knowledge live up to its foundational mission of liberation by reason.

We are currently faced with the problem of the Covid 19 pandemic and no cure has been found. One of the efforts made by the community is to implement health protocols to the recommendations from the government and increase the body's resistance to prevent this Covid 19 attack. Indonesia has a wealth of spices that are quite large in number and type. According to some studies that this spice can increase the body's resistance because it contains antioxidants and active compounds that can ward off free radicals. This is one of the business opportunities as well as an effort to increase the body's endurance if consumed. Community service activities organized by ATI Padang Polytechnic, Agro Industry Engineering Study Program aims to provide technology for processing instant spice drinks based on red ginger. The spices used are red ginger, cinnamon, cloves and lemongrass. The product produced is instant red ginger. Partners of this activity are UKM/communities in Bungo Pasang Subdistrict, Koto Tangah District, Padang. The method used is to deliver processing technology through virtual training and practice independently. After attending virtual training and independent practice using equipment and materials that have been assisted by team, participants submitted their products that have been packaged as evaluation materials. It is hoped that with this activity, UKM/communities can produce this product in order to increase the resilience of the family as well as their business choice. The processing of spices into instant beverage products is expected to be widely marketed, more durable and provide added value to spice commodities. Kata kunci : Minuman instan, rempah, daya tahan tubuh

En el presente artículo discutimos críticamente el fin de la sociedad del riesgo como modelo analítico para sentar las bases que nos permitan comprender los cambios recientes en materia de cultura, política y economía. La sociedad del riesgo tal y como fue imaginada por Beck, Giddens y los sociólogos postmodernos ha desaparecido, dando lugar a una nueva y más refinada versión, el capitalismo mortuorio. A diferencia del riesgo (,) que ponía a los ciudadanos en igualdad de condiciones, en el capitalismo mortuorio el valor cultural fundacional es el sufrimiento de otros como condición para maximizar el placer. El terrorismo, en este contexto, provee la materia prima esencial al sistema y crea una situación paradojal (,) ya que las audiencias globales se consternan con las imágenes que invaden sus hogares sobre guerras civiles, ataques terroristas y miseria en todo el mundo, pero adictivamente no pueden resistirse a seguir consumiéndolas.Moved by the goal of paving the ways of a new theory which would be helpful to expand the current borders of modernity, we discuss critically the end of the risk society. As it was formulated by Beck, Giddens and other senior sociologists, the theory of risk theory has gone forever, resulting a more refined version of global capitalism, we have dubbed as Thana Capitalism. Unlike what Beck noted, that risk equaled the levels and status of citizens, in Thana Capitalism the suffering of others (death) is commoditized as the mainstream cultural value. This not only seems to be the key factor towards pleasure maximization, but terrorism in this context provide with the necessary commodity in order for productive system to be buttressed. However, it creates a paradoxical situation simply because while global audiences are terrorized by the media coverage or the rise of radical groups, they cannot stop consuming death-related news.

The grain handling industry plays a significant role in U.S. agriculture by storing, distributing, and processing a variety of agricultural commodities. Commercial grain elevators are hazardous agro-manufacturing work environments where workers are prone to severe injuries, due to the nature of the activities and workplace. Safety incidents in agro-manufacturing operations generally arise from a combination of factors, rather than a single cause, therefore, research on occupational incidents must look deeper into identifying the underlying causes, through the application of advanced analyses methods. In occupational safety, it is possible to estimate and predict probability of safety risks through developing artificial neural network predictive models. Due to the significance of safety risk assessment in the design and prioritization of effective prevention measures, this study aimed at classifying and predicting causes of occupational incidents in grain elevator agro-manufacturing operations in the Midwest region of the United States. Workers’ compensation claims data, from 2008 to 2016, were utilized for training multilayer perceptron (MLP) and radial basis function (RBF) neural networks. Both MLP and RBF models could predict the probability of safety risks with a high overall accuracy of 60%, 61%. Based on values of AUC (area under the curve) from the ROC (receiving operating charts), both models predicted the probability of individual safety risks with a high accuracy rate of between 71.5% and 99.2%. In addition, sensitivity analysis showed that nature of injury is the most significant determinant of safety risks probability, along with type of injury. The novelty of this study is the use of the artificial neural network methodology to analyze multi-level causes of occupational incidents as the sources of safety risks in bulk storage facilities. The results confirm that artificial neural networks are useful in safety risk estimation, and identifying the incidents’ risk factors. The implementation of safety measures in grain elevators can help in preventing occupational injuries, saving lives, and reducing the occurrence and severity of such incidents in industrial work environments.

Abstract Background Biomass valorization has been suggested as a sustainable alternative to petroleum-based energy and commodities. In this context, the copper radical oxidases (CROs) from Auxiliary Activity Family 5/Subfamily 2 (AA5_2) are attractive biocatalysts for the selective oxidation of primary alcohols to aldehydes. Originally defined by the archetypal galactose 6-oxidase from Fusarium graminearum, fungal AA5_2 members have recently been shown to comprise a wide range of specificities for aromatic, aliphatic and furan-based alcohols. This suggests a broader substrate scope of native CROs for applications. However, only 10% of the annotated AA5_2 members have been characterized to date. Results Here, we define two homologues from the filamentous fungi Fusarium graminearum and F. oxysporum as predominant aryl alcohol oxidases (AAOs) through recombinant production in Pichia pastoris, detailed kinetic characterization, and enzyme product analysis. Despite possessing generally similar active-site architectures to the archetypal FgrGalOx, FgrAAO and FoxAAO have weak activity on carbohydrates, but instead efficiently oxidize specific aryl alcohols. Notably, both FgrAAO and FoxAAO oxidize hydroxymethyl furfural (HMF) directly to 5-formyl-2-furoic acid (FFCA), and desymmetrize the bioproduct glycerol to the uncommon L-isomer of glyceraldehyde. Conclusions This work expands understanding of the catalytic diversity of CRO from AA5_2 to include unique representatives from Fusarium species that depart from the well-known galactose 6-oxidase activity of this family. Detailed enzymological analysis highlights the potential biotechnological applications of these orthologs in the production of renewable plastic polymer precursors and other chemicals.

The project of ‘free culture’ is committed to the creation of a cultural space, rather like the ‘public domain’, seeking to complement/replace that of proprietary cultural commodities and privatized meaning. This has been given a new impetus with the birth of the Creative Commons. This organization has sought to introduce cultural producers across the world to the possibilities of sharing, co–operation and commons–based peer–production by creating a set of interwoven licenses for creators to append to their artwork, music and text. In this paper, we chart the connections between this movement and the early Free Software and Open Source movements and question whether underlying assumptions that are ignored or de–politicized are a threat to the very free culture that the project purports to save. We then move to suggest a new discursive project linked to notions of radical democracy.

Several food commodities can be infected by filamentous fungi, both in the field and during storage. Some of these fungi, under appropriate conditions, are capable of producing a wide range of secondary metabolites, including mycotoxins, which may resist food processing and arise in the final feed and food products. Contamination of these products with mycotoxins still occurs very often and that is why research in this area is valuable and still evolving. The best way to avoid contamination is prevention; however, when it is not possible, remediation is the solution. Enzymatic biodegradation of mycotoxins is a green solution for removal of these compounds that has attracted growing interest over recent years. Due to their ability to detoxify a wide variety of recalcitrant pollutants, laccases have received a lot of attention. Laccases are multi-copper proteins that use molecular oxygen to oxidise various aromatic and non-aromatic compounds, by a radical-catalysed reaction mechanism. Being non-specific, they are capable of degrading a wide range of compounds and the radical species formed can evolve towards both synthetic and degradative processes. The present review provides an overview of structural features, biological functions and catalytic mechanisms of laccases. The utilisation of laccases for mycotoxin degradation is reviewed, as well as shortcomings and future needs related with the use of laccases for mycotoxin decontamination from food and feed.

Resumo A digitalização das informações provocou uma crise na apropriação privada dos bens culturais como mercadorias. Paralelamente, movimentos políticos vêm se organizando internacionalmente, visando ao questionamento do tratamento dos bens culturais como mercadorias privadas. A análise do sentido e do papel desses movimentos exige uma revisão do conceito de mercadoria. Para questionar o conceito de mercadoria são revistos dois autores críticos do sistema capitalista, Karl Marx e Karl Polanyi, discutindo-se as possíveis contribuições de cada um para a compreensão desses movimentos políticos.Palavras-chave mercadoria, direitos de autor, Karl Marx, Karl PolanyiAbstract The digitalization of information provoked a crisis in the private appropriation of cultural goods. Simultaneously, political movements are being internationally organized aiming at criticizing cultural goods being treated as commodities. The analysis of the meaning and role of those political movements demands reviewing the concept of commodity. To question the concept of commodity two radical authors are reviewed: Karl Marx and Karl Polanyi, their possible contributions to the comprehension of those political movements being so evaluated.Keywords commodity, copyrights, Karl Marx, Karl Polanyi

As his friend Niall Hobhouse claimed, Cedric Price ‘wasn’t really an architect, but a social critic to the left of the Left who stumbled on the post-war ruins of modernism’.1 The role of Price’s unbuilt legacy for Western architectural culture has been praised extensively, with a special emphasis on the unorthodox nature of both his practice and academic contributions.2 Succeeding generations have found inspiration in Price’s personal view of the architectural profession, his work being positioned often within radical and utopian approaches yet involving a committed social agenda. The social role of architecture was for Price tightly linked to the capacity of the built environment to be adapted by its users. Buildings should be understood as temporary commodities, malleable objects with a short lifespan dictated by their usefulness for the community. Conceived as infrastructures, unbuilt projects such as the famous Fun Palace, Potteries Thinkbelt, or Magnet were formulated as productive objects with a profound commitment for socially regenerating the contexts into which they were to be inserted.

Low of relations between farmers and the market causes the marketing of vegetable commodities to not run optimally. The relationship between various marketing agencies and farmers produces a social network. Based on this, the social network in the marketing aspect is the main capital for the development of farming. The objectives of this study were (1) to identify the characteristics of farmer members of the Katenzo Farmers Group, (2) to analyze the structure of the social network on the marketing aspects of vegetable commodities in the Katenzo Farmer Group, (3) to analyze the position of actors in social networks on the marketing aspects of vegetable commodities based on the degree of centralism. at the Katenzo Farmers Group. This study used a qualitative research design with a case study approach. Samples were taken using census techniques to all member farmers, amounting to 13 people. The analysis method used is Social Network Analysis (SNA). The results of this study indicate that all respondents are male farmers who are included in the category of young farmers who have an average high school education level and have business experience under 5 years. The network structure that is formed is a personal radius network structure (Radial Personal Network), with the central actor is the Head and Public Relations Division of the Katenzo Farmers Group.

Crude Palm Oil (CPO) is one of Indonesia's best export commodities. CPO production competition causes price fluctuations so that it can trigger losses. The solution that can be taken to avoid losses is to predict the price of CPO. Time series data in the previous months, starting from January 2009 until January 2020, are used as a reference to predict the next CPO price. In this research, CPO price prediction is carried out with a combination of artificial intelligence concepts, namely Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBFNN), and fuzzy logic. The combination of these methods, namely Fuzzy Radial Basis Function Neural Network (FRBFNN), is then optimized using genetic algorithms. The prediction results show that the error based on the MAPE value for FRBFNN prediction on training data is 11.7% and the MAPE value for testing data is 9.4%. In the FRBFNN prediction that was optimized using a genetic algorithm, the MAPE value was 10.2% for training data and 8.3% for testing data.

A common criticism of the rhythm video games genre — including series like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, is that playing musical simulation games is a waste of time when you could be playing an actual guitar and learning a real skill. A more serious criticism of games cultures draws attention to the degree of e-waste they produce. E-waste or electronic waste includes mobiles phones, computers, televisions and other electronic devices, containing toxic chemicals and metals whose landfill, recycling and salvaging all produce distinct environmental and social problems. The e-waste produced by games like Guitar Hero is obvious in the regular flow of merchandise transforming computer and video games stores into simulation music stores, filled with replica guitars, drum kits, microphones and other products whose half-lives are short and whose obsolescence is anticipated in the annual cycles of consumption and disposal. This paper explores the connection between e-waste and obsolescence in the games industry, and argues for the further consideration of consumers as part of the solution to the problem of e-waste. It uses a case study of the PC digital distribution software platform, Steam, to suggest that the digital distribution of games may offer an alternative model to market driven software and hardware obsolescence, and more generally, that such software platforms might be a place to support cultures of consumption that delay rather than promote hardware obsolescence and its inevitability as e-waste. The question is whether there exists a potential for digital distribution to be a means of not only eliminating the need to physically transport commodities (its current 'green' benefit), but also for supporting consumer practices that further reduce e-waste. The games industry relies on a rapid production and innovation cycle, one that actively enforces hardware obsolescence. Current video game consoles, including the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, are the seventh generation of home gaming consoles to appear within forty years, and each generation is accompanied by an immense international transportation of games hardware, software (in various storage formats) and peripherals. Obsolescence also occurs at the software or content level and is significant because the games industry as a creative industry is dependent on the extensive management of multiple intellectual properties. The computing and video games software industry operates a close partnership with the hardware industry, and as such, software obsolescence directly contributes to hardware obsolescence. The obsolescence of content and the redundancy of the methods of policing its scarcity in the marketplace has been accelerated and altered by the processes of disintermediation with a range of outcomes (Flew). The music industry is perhaps the most advanced in terms of disintermediation with digital distribution at the center of the conflict between the legitimate and unauthorised access to intellectual property. This points to one issue with the hypothesis that digital distribution can lead to a reduction in hardware obsolescence, as the marketplace leader and key online distributor of music, Apple, is also the major producer of new media technologies and devices that are the paragon of stylistic obsolescence. Stylistic obsolescence, in which fashion changes products across seasons of consumption, has long been observed as the dominant form of scaled industrial innovation (Slade). Stylistic obsolescence is differentiated from mechanical or technological obsolescence as the deliberate supersedence of products by more advanced designs, better production techniques and other minor innovations. The line between the stylistic and technological obsolescence is not always clear, especially as reduced durability has become a powerful market strategy (Fitzpatrick). This occurs where the design of technologies is subsumed within the discourses of manufacturing, consumption and the logic of planned obsolescence in which the product or parts are intended to fail, degrade or under perform over time. It is especially the case with signature new media technologies such as laptop computers, mobile phones and portable games devices. Gamers are as guilty as other consumer groups in contributing to e-waste as participants in the industry's cycles of planned obsolescence, but some of them complicate discussions over the future of obsolescence and e-waste. Many gamers actively work to forestall the obsolescence of their games: they invest time in the play of older games (“retrogaming”) they donate labor and creative energy to the production of user-generated content as a means of sustaining involvement in gaming communities; and they produce entirely new game experiences for other users, based on existing software and hardware modifications known as 'mods'. With Guitar Hero and other 'rhythm' games it would be easy to argue that the hardware components of this genre have only one future: as waste. Alternatively, we could consider the actual lifespan of these objects (including their impact as e-waste) and the roles they play in the performances and practices of communities of gamers. For example, the Elmo Guitar Hero controller mod, the Tesla coil Guitar Hero controller interface, the Rock Band Speak n' Spellbinder mashup, the multiple and almost sacrilegious Fender guitar hero mods, the Guitar Hero Portable Turntable Mod and MAKE magazine's Trumpet Hero all indicate a significant diversity of user innovation, community formation and individual investment in the post-retail life of computer and video game hardware. Obsolescence is not just a problem for the games industry but for the computing and electronics industries more broadly as direct contributors to the social and environmental cost of electrical waste and obsolete electrical equipment. Planned obsolescence has long been the experience of gamers and computer users, as the basis of a utopian mythology of upgrades (Dovey and Kennedy). For PC users the upgrade pathway is traversed by the consumption of further hardware and software post initial purchase in a cycle of endless consumption, acquisition and waste (as older parts are replaced and eventually discarded). The accumulation and disposal of these cultural artefacts does not devalue or accrue in space or time at the same rate (Straw) and many users will persist for years, gradually upgrading and delaying obsolescence and even perpetuate the circulation of older cultural commodities. Flea markets and secondhand fairs are popular sites for the purchase of new, recent, old, and recycled computer hardware, and peripherals. Such practices and parallel markets support the strategies of 'making do' described by De Certeau, but they also continue the cycle of upgrade and obsolescence, and they are still consumed as part of the promise of the 'new', and the desire of a purchase that will finally 'fix' the users' computer in a state of completion (29). The planned obsolescence of new media technologies is common, but its success is mixed; for example, support for Microsoft's operating system Windows XP was officially withdrawn in April 2009 (Robinson), but due to the popularity in low cost PC 'netbooks' outfitted with an optimised XP operating system and a less than enthusiastic response to the 'next generation' Windows Vista, XP continues to be popular. Digital Distribution: A Solution? Gamers may be able to reduce the accumulation of e-waste by supporting the disintermediation of the games retail sector by means of online distribution. Disintermediation is the establishment of a direct relationship between the creators of content and their consumers through products and services offered by content producers (Flew 201). The move to digital distribution has already begun to reduce the need to physically handle commodities, but this currently signals only further support of planned, stylistic and technological obsolescence, increasing the rate at which the commodities for recording, storing, distributing and exhibiting digital content become e-waste. Digital distribution is sometimes overlooked as a potential means for promoting communities of user practice dedicated to e-waste reduction, at the same time it is actively employed to reduce the potential for the unregulated appropriation of content and restrict post-purchase sales through Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies. Distributors like Amazon.com continue to pursue commercial opportunities in linking the user to digital distribution of content via exclusive hardware and software technologies. The Amazon e-book reader, the Kindle, operates via a proprietary mobile network using a commercially run version of the wireless 3G protocols. The e-book reader is heavily encrypted with Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies and exclusive digital book formats designed to enforce current copyright restrictions and eliminate second-hand sales, lending, and further post-purchase distribution. The success of this mode of distribution is connected to Amazon's ability to tap both the mainstream market and the consumer demand for the less-than-popular; those books, movies, music and television series that may not have been 'hits' at the time of release. The desire to revisit forgotten niches, such as B-sides, comics, books, and older video games, suggests Chris Anderson, linked with so-called “long tail” economics. Recently Webb has queried the economic impact of the Long Tail as a business strategy, but does not deny the underlying dynamics, which suggest that content does not obsolesce in any straightforward way. Niche markets for older content are nourished by participatory cultures and Web 2.0 style online services. A good example of the Long Tail phenomenon is the recent case of the 1971 book A Lion Called Christian, by Anthony Burke and John Rendall, republished after the author's film of a visit to a resettled Christian in Africa was popularised on YouTube in 2008. Anderson's Long Tail theory suggests that over time a large number of items, each with unique rather than mass histories, will be subsumed as part of a larger community of consumers, including fans, collectors and everyday users with a long term interest in their use and preservation. If digital distribution platforms can reduce e-waste, they can perhaps be fostered by to ensuring digital consumers have access to morally and ethically aware consumer decisions, but also that they enjoy traditional consumer freedoms, such as the right to sell on and change or modify their property. For it is not only the fixation on the 'next generation' that contributes to obsolescence, but also technologies like DRM systems that discourage second hand sales and restrict modification. The legislative upgrades, patches and amendments to copyright law that have attempted to maintain the law's effectiveness in competing with peer-to-peer networks have supported DRM and other intellectual property enforcement technologies, despite the difficulties that owners of intellectual property have encountered with the effectiveness of DRM systems (Moore, Creative). The games industry continues to experiment with DRM, however, this industry also stands out as one of the few to have significantly incorporated the user within the official modes of production (Moore, Commonising). Is the games industry capable (or willing) of supporting a digital delivery system that attempts to minimise or even reverse software and hardware obsolescence? We can try to answer this question by looking in detail at the biggest digital distributor of PC games, Steam. Steam Figure 1: The Steam Application user interface retail section Steam is a digital distribution system designed for the Microsoft Windows operating system and operated by American video game development company and publisher, Valve Corporation. Steam combines online games retail, DRM technologies and internet-based distribution services with social networking and multiplayer features (in-game voice and text chat, user profiles, etc) and direct support for major games publishers, independent producers, and communities of user-contributors (modders). Steam, like the iTunes games store, Xbox Live and other digital distributors, provides consumers with direct digital downloads of new, recent and classic titles that can be accessed remotely by the user from any (internet equipped) location. Steam was first packaged with the physical distribution of Half Life 2 in 2004, and the platform's eventual popularity is tied to the success of that game franchise. Steam was not an optional component of the game's installation and many gamers protested in various online forums, while the platform was treated with suspicion by the global PC games press. It did not help that Steam was at launch everything that gamers take objection to: a persistent and initially 'buggy' piece of software that sits in the PC's operating system and occupies limited memory resources at the cost of hardware performance. Regular updates to the Steam software platform introduced social network features just as mainstream sites like MySpace and Facebook were emerging, and its popularity has undergone rapid subsequent growth. Steam now eclipses competitors with more than 20 million user accounts (Leahy) and Valve Corporation makes it publicly known that Steam collects large amounts of data about its users. This information is available via the public player profile in the community section of the Steam application. It includes the average number of hours the user plays per week, and can even indicate the difficulty the user has in navigating game obstacles. Valve reports on the number of users on Steam every two hours via its web site, with a population on average between one and two million simultaneous users (Valve, Steam). We know these users’ hardware profiles because Valve Corporation makes the results of its surveillance public knowledge via the Steam Hardware Survey. Valve’s hardware survey itself conceptualises obsolescence in two ways. First, it uses the results to define the 'cutting edge' of PC technologies and publishing the standards of its own high end production hardware on the companies blog. Second, the effect of the Survey is to subsequently define obsolescent hardware: for example, in the Survey results for April 2009, we can see that the slight majority of users maintain computers with two central processing units while a significant proportion (almost one third) of users still maintained much older PCs with a single CPU. Both effects of the Survey appear to be well understood by Valve: the Steam Hardware Survey automatically collects information about the community's computer hardware configurations and presents an aggregate picture of the stats on our web site. The survey helps us make better engineering and gameplay decisions, because it makes sure we're targeting machines our customers actually use, rather than measuring only against the hardware we've got in the office. We often get asked about the configuration of the machines we build around the office to do both game and Steam development. We also tend to turn over machines in the office pretty rapidly, at roughly every 18 months. (Valve, Team Fortress) Valve’s support of older hardware might counter perceptions that older PCs have no use and begins to reverse decades of opinion regarding planned and stylistic obsolescence in the PC hardware and software industries. Equally significant to the extension of the lives of older PCs is Steam's support for mods and its promotion of user generated content. By providing software for mod creation and distribution, Steam maximises what Postigo calls the development potential of fan-programmers. One of the 'payoffs' in the information/access exchange for the user with Steam is the degree to which Valve's End-User Licence Agreement (EULA) permits individuals and communities of 'modders' to appropriate its proprietary game content for use in the creation of new games and games materials for redistribution via Steam. These mods extend the play of the older games, by requiring their purchase via Steam in order for the individual user to participate in the modded experience. If Steam is able to encourage this kind of appropriation and community support for older content, then the potential exists for it to support cultures of consumption and practice of use that collaboratively maintain, extend, and prolong the life and use of games. Further, Steam incorporates the insights of “long tail” economics in a purely digital distribution model, in which the obsolescence of 'non-hit' game titles can be dramatically overturned. Published in November 2007, Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3) by Epic Games, was unappreciated in a market saturated with games in the first-person shooter genre. Epic republished UT3 on Steam 18 months later, making the game available to play for free for one weekend, followed by discounted access to new content. The 2000 per cent increase in players over the game's 'free' trial weekend, has translated into enough sales of the game for Epic to no longer consider the release a commercial failure: It’s an incredible precedent to set: making a game a success almost 18 months after a poor launch. It’s something that could only have happened now, and with a system like Steam...Something that silently updates a purchase with patches and extra content automatically, so you don’t have to make the decision to seek out some exciting new feature: it’s just there anyway. Something that, if you don’t already own it, advertises that game to you at an agreeably reduced price whenever it loads. Something that enjoys a vast community who are in turn plugged into a sea of smaller relevant communities. It’s incredibly sinister. It’s also incredibly exciting... (Meer) Clearly concerns exist about Steam's user privacy policy, but this also invites us to the think about the economic relationship between gamers and games companies as it is reconfigured through the private contractual relationship established by the EULA which accompanies the digital distribution model. The games industry has established contractual and licensing arrangements with its consumer base in order to support and reincorporate emerging trends in user generated cultures and other cultural formations within its official modes of production (Moore, "Commonising"). When we consider that Valve gets to tax sales of its virtual goods and can further sell the information farmed from its users to hardware manufacturers, it is reasonable to consider the relationship between the corporation and its gamers as exploitative. Gabe Newell, the Valve co-founder and managing director, conversely believes that people are willing to give up personal information if they feel it is being used to get better services (Leahy). If that sentiment is correct then consumers may be willing to further trade for services that can reduce obsolescence and begin to address the problems of e-waste from the ground up. Conclusion Clearly, there is a potential for digital distribution to be a means of not only eliminating the need to physically transport commodities but also supporting consumer practices that further reduce e-waste. For an industry where only a small proportion of the games made break even, the successful relaunch of older games content indicates Steam's capacity to ameliorate software obsolescence. Digital distribution extends the use of commercially released games by providing disintermediated access to older and user-generated content. For Valve, this occurs within a network of exchange as access to user-generated content, social networking services, and support for the organisation and coordination of communities of gamers is traded for user-information and repeat business. Evidence for whether this will actively translate to an equivalent decrease in the obsolescence of game hardware might be observed with indicators like the Steam Hardware Survey in the future. The degree of potential offered by digital distribution is disrupted by a range of technical, commercial and legal hurdles, primary of which is the deployment of DRM, as part of a range of techniques designed to limit consumer behaviour post purchase. While intervention in the form of legislation and radical change to the insidious nature of electronics production is crucial in order to achieve long term reduction in e-waste, the user is currently considered only in terms of 'ethical' consumption and ultimately divested of responsibility through participation in corporate, state and civil recycling and e-waste management operations. The message is either 'careful what you purchase' or 'careful how you throw it away' and, like DRM, ignores the connections between product, producer and user and the consumer support for environmentally, ethically and socially positive production, distribrution, disposal and recycling. This article, has adopted a different strategy, one that sees digital distribution platforms like Steam, as capable, if not currently active, in supporting community practices that should be seriously considered in conjunction with a range of approaches to the challenge of obsolescence and e-waste. References Anderson, Chris. "The Long Tail." Wired Magazine 12. 10 (2004). 20 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html›. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Dovey, Jon, and Helen Kennedy. Game Cultures: Computer Games as New Media. London: Open University Press,2006. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2008. Flew, Terry. New Media: An Introduction. South Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2008. Leahy, Brian. "Live Blog: DICE 2009 Keynote - Gabe Newell, Valve Software." The Feed. G4TV 18 Feb. 2009. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/693342/Live-Blog-DICE-2009-Keynote-–-Gabe-Newell-Valve-Software.html›. Meer, Alec. "Unreal Tournament 3 and the New Lazarus Effect." Rock, Paper, Shotgun 16 Mar. 2009. 24 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2009/03/16/unreal-tournament-3-and-the-new-lazarus-effect/›.Moore, Christopher. "Commonising the Enclosure: Online Games and Reforming Intellectual Property Regimes." Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society 3. 2, (2005). 12 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.swin.edu.au/sbs/ajets/journal/issue5-V3N2/abstract_moore.htm›. Moore, Christopher. "Creative Choices: Changes to Australian Copyright Law and the Future of the Public Domain." Media International Australia 114 (Feb. 2005): 71–83. Postigo, Hector. "Of Mods and Modders: Chasing Down the Value of Fan-Based Digital Game Modification." Games and Culture 2 (2007): 300-13. Robinson, Daniel. "Windows XP Support Runs Out Next Week." PC Business Authority 8 Apr. 2009. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.pcauthority.com.au/News/142013,windows-xp-support-runs-out-next-week.aspx›. Straw, Will. "Exhausted Commodities: The Material Culture of Music." Canadian Journal of Communication 25.1 (2000): 175. Slade, Giles. Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006. Valve. "Steam and Game Stats." 26 Apr. 2009 ‹http://store.steampowered.com/stats/›. Valve. "Team Fortress 2: The Scout Update." Steam Marketing Message 20 Feb. 2009. 12 Apr. 2009 ‹http://storefront.steampowered.com/Steam/Marketing/message/2269/›. Webb, Richard. "Online Shopping and the Harry Potter Effect." New Scientist 2687 (2008): 52-55. 16 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20026873.300-online-shopping-and-the-harry-potter-effect.html?page=2›. With thanks to Dr Nicola Evans and Dr Frances Steel for their feedback and comments on drafts of this paper.

This paper is included in the First Monday Special Issue #3: Internet banking, e-money, and Internet gift economies, published in December 2005. Special Issue editor Mark A. Fox asked authors to submit additional comments regarding their articles. How has the hi-tech gift economy evolved since 1998, when the paper was written? This article was a product of its time. When I originally wrote The Hi-Tech Gift Economy, the Net was still a novelty for most people even in the developed world. Nearly 8 years later, using this technology is no longer something special. This means that it is impossible to understand my article without remembering the bizarre moment in the late-1990s when so many pundits believed that the Net had almost magical powers. Led by Wired, dotcom boosters were claiming that the Net was creating the free market only found up to then in neo-classical economics textbooks. Inspired by post-modernist gurus, new media activists were convinced that humanity would soon liberate itself from corporate control by escaping into cyberspace. What intrigued me at the time was how these devotees of irreconcilable ideologies shared a common faith in McLuhan-style technological determinism. The Net – not people – was the subject of history. This demiurge promised the final victory of one – and only one - method of organizing labor: the commodity or the gift. When I was writing this article, my goal was to attack these almost totalitarian ideologies. The sharing of information over the Net disproved the neo-liberal fantasies of Wired. The leading role of capitalist businesses within the open source movement was incompatible with the anarcho-communist utopia. I wanted to argue that the choice wasn’t the commodity or the gift. On the Net, the same piece of information could exist both as a commodity and a gift. Nowadays, this conclusion is hardly controversial. My ideological opponents have long ago left the theoretical battlefield. We won’t hear their arguments again until the next wave of innovation within the information technologies creates the conditions for another revival of McLuhanist prophecy. In the meantime, it is common sense to describe the Net’s economy as a mixed economy. Information is shared and sold. Copyright is protected and broken. Capitalists benefit from one advance and lose out from another. Users get for free what they used to pay for and pay for what they used to get for free. In 2005, the dotcom commodity economy and the hi-tech gift economy are – at one and the same time – in opposition and in symbiosis with each other. What are some current examples of the hi-tech gift economy in action? Over the past decade, the hi-tech gift economy has moved from the fringes into the mainstream. When I was writing The Hi-Tech Gift Economy, the open source movement was the iconic example of non-commercial production over the Net. In the intervening period, blogging has become the public face of this new way of working. What was once the preserve of a small minority is now a mass phenomenon. Crucially, just like their techie predecessors, the participants in this enlarged hi-tech gift economy don’t have to think about the political implications of their method of working together. Free market fanatics can happily give away their blog-making labor without realizing they’ve become cyber-communists! This ideological inconsistency has hidden the social impact of the hi-tech gift economy. Allowing people to download your photos for free from Flickr doesn’t seem very radical. Putting up your latest tunes on-line can’t really be a threat to the music moguls. Making your own website doesn’t look like attack on the media corporations. Yet, when large numbers of people are engaged in these activities, commercial self-interest is checked by social altruism within the mixed economy of the Net. Before buying information, every sensible person checks whether you can download it for free. What are the impediments and what are the driving forces of the hi-tech gift economy? Is it possible to distinguish between the two? Long ago, Karl Marx pointed out that socialists had been forced to define their own political position to counter attacks by their liberal and conservative critics. It seems to me that we could make a similar observation today about the two sides in the copyright debate. During the past few decades, American and European politicians have steadily increased and extended the legal privileges of the media corporations. Entranced by the neo-liberal version of the McLuhanist prophecy, they’re convinced that the knowledge economy will be built around the buying and selling of intellectual property – and the state must punish anyone who threatens this new paradigm. In the digital Panopticon, Big Brother will spying on you to make sure that you don’t have any illegally copied files on your hard drive. Since the mid-1960s, the ideological appeal of the post-industrial future has protected the interests of the copyright owners. According to neo-liberal pundits, the global marketplace is founded upon the North exchanging its information commodities for the South’s manufactured goods. Economic prosperity now depends upon the World Trade Organisation imposing copyright protection as a universal obligation. Ironically, by proclaiming their global ambitions, the media and software corporations have exposed the weakness of their economic position. Across the developing world, governments know that copyright laws are unenforceable. Only the rich can afford to pay Northern prices in the South. If piracy can no longer be tolerated, alternatives must be found. In Brazil, the ministry of culture is promoting open source software as not just a more affordable product, but also an opportunity to create local employment. At the international level, they’re advocating the replacement of rigid copyright protection with flexible copyleft licenses. Inspired by this good example, other governments in the South are launching their own open source initiatives. In the developing world, participating within the hi-tech gift economy is a necessity not a hobby. During the last year, the American movie and music industries have forced the leading file-sharing services to limit unauthorized copying by their users. But, as soon as one threat is seen off, another arises. In 2005, over three-quarters of online music is still distributed for free. By forcing the issue, the owners of intellectual property have proved that the hard-line definition of copyright is as anachronistic in the North as in the South. Up-and-coming bands long ago learnt that giving away tunes attracts punters to their gigs and – in due course – sells their music. Yet, in contrast with the South, few politicians in the developed world have accepted the copyright laws need updating for this new dispensation. But, eventually, legislation must match social reality. The dotcom commodity economy can’t displace the hi-tech gift economy. Miscegenation is the epitome of the Net. During the Sixties, the New Left created a new form of radical politics: anarcho-communism. Above all, the Situationists and similar groups believed that the tribal gift economy proved that individuals could successfully live together without needing either the state or the market. From May 1968 to the late Nineties, this utopian vision of anarcho-communism has inspired community media and DIY culture activists. Within the universities, the gift economy already was the primary method of socialising labour. From its earliest days, the technical structure and social mores of the Net has ignored intellectual property. Although the system has expanded far beyond the university, the self-interest of Net users perpetuates this hi-tech gift economy. As an everyday activity, users circulate free information as e-mail, on listservs, in newsgroups, within on-line conferences and through Web sites. As shown by the Apache and Linux programs, the hi-tech gift economy is even at the forefront of software development. Contrary to the purist vision of the New Left, anarcho-communism on the Net can only exist in a compromised form. Money-commodity and gift relations are not just in conflict with each other, but also co-exist in symbiosis. The 'New Economy' of cyberspace is an advanced form of social democracy.

The Digital TurnMuch of the 19th century disappeared from public view during the 20th century. Historians recovered what they could from archives and libraries, with the easy pickings-the famous and the fortunate-coming first. Latterly, social and political historians of different hues determinedly sought out the more hidden, forgotten, and marginalised. However, there were always limitations to resources-time, money, location, as well as purpose, opportunity, and permission. 'History' was principally a professionalised and privileged activity dominated by academics who had preferential access to, and significant control over, the resources, technologies and skills required, as well as the social, economic and cultural framework within which history was recovered, interpreted, approved and disseminated.Digitisation and the broader development of new communication technologies has, however, transformed historical research processes and practice dramatically, removing many constraints, opening up many opportunities, and allowing many others than the professional historian to trace and track what would have remained hidden, forgotten, or difficult to find, as well as verify (or otherwise), what has already been claimed and concluded. In the 21st century, the SEARCH button has become a dominant tool of research. This, along with other technological and media developments, has altered the practice of historians-professional or 'public'-who can now range deep and wide in the collection, portrayal and dissemination of historical information, in and out of the confines of the traditional institutional walls of retained information, academia, location, and national boundaries.This incorporation of digital technologies into academic historical practice generally, has raised, as Cohen and Rosenzweig, in their book Digital History, identified a decade ago, not just promises, but perils. For the historian, there has been the move, through digitisation, from the relative scarcity and inaccessibility of historical material to its (over) abundance, but also the emerging acceptance that, out of both necessity and preference, a hybridity of sources will be the foreseeable way forward. There has also been a significant shift, as De Groot notes in his book Consuming History, in the often conflicted relationship between popular/public history and academic history, and the professional and the 'amateur' historian. This has brought a potentially beneficial democratization of historical practice but also an associated set of concerns around the loss of control of both practice and product of the professional historian. Additionally, the development of digital tools for the collection and dissemination of 'history' has raised fears around the commercialised development of the subject's brand, products and commodities. This article considers the significance and implications of some of these changes through one protracted act of recovery and reclamation in which the digital made the difference: the life of a notorious 19th century professional agitator on both sides of the Atlantic, John De Morgan. A man thought lost, but now found."Who Is John De Morgan?" The search began in 1981, linked to the study of contemporary "race riots" in South East London. The initial purpose was to determine whether there was a history of rioting in the area. In the Local History Library, a calm and dusty backwater, an early find was a fading, but evocative and puzzling, photograph of "The Plumstead Common Riots" of 1876. It showed a group of men and women, posing for the photographer on a hillside-the technology required stillness, even in the middle of a riot-spades in hand, filling in a Mr. Jacob's sandpits, illegally dug from what was supposed to be common land. The leader of this, and other similar riots around England, was John De Morgan. A local journalist who covered the riots commented: "Of Mr. De Morgan little is known before or since the period in which he flashed meteorlike through our section of the atmosphere, but he was indisputably a remarkable man" (Vincent 588). Thus began a trek, much interrupted, sometimes unmapped and haphazard, to discover more about this 'remarkable man'. "Who is John De Morgan" was a question frequently asked by his many contemporary antagonists, and by subsequent historians, and one to which De Morgan deliberately gave few answers. The obvious place to start the search was the British Museum Reading Room, resplendent in its Victorian grandeur, the huge card catalogue still in the 1980s the dominating technology. Together with the Library's newspaper branch at Colindale, this was likely to be the repository of all that might then easily be known about De Morgan.From 1869, at the age of 21, it appeared that De Morgan had embarked on a life of radical politics that took him through the UK, made him notorious, lead to accusations of treasonable activities, sent him to jail twice, before he departed unexpectedly to the USA in 1880. During that period, he was involved with virtually every imaginable radical cause, at various times a temperance advocate, a spiritualist, a First Internationalist, a Republican, a Tichbornite, a Commoner, an anti-vaccinator, an advanced Liberal, a parliamentary candidate, a Home Ruler. As a radical, he, like many radicals of the period, "zigzagged nomadically through the mayhem of nineteenth century politics fighting various foes in the press, the clubs, the halls, the pulpit and on the street" (Kazin 202). He promoted himself as the "People's Advocate, Champion and Friend" (Allen). Never a joiner or follower, he established a variety of organizations, became a professional agitator and orator, and supported himself and his politics through lecturing and journalism. Able to attract huge crowds to "monster meetings", he achieved fame, or more correctly notoriety. And then, in 1880, broke and in despair, he disappeared from public view by emigrating to the USA.LostThe view of De Morgan as a "flashing meteor" was held by many in the 1870s. Historians of the 20th century took a similar position and, while considering him intriguing and culturally interesting, normally dispatched him to the footnotes. By the latter part of the 20th century, he was described as "one of the most notorious radicals of the 1870s yet remains a shadowy figure" and was generally dismissed as "a swashbuckling demagogue," a "democratic messiah," and" if not a bandit … at least an adventurer" (Allen 684). His politics were deemed to be reactionary, peripheral, and, worst of all, populist. He was certainly not of sufficient interest to pursue across the Atlantic. In this dismissal, he fell foul of the highly politicised professional culture of mid-to-late 20th-century academic historians. In particular, the lack of any significant direct linkage to the story of the rise of a working class, and specifically the British Labour party, left individuals like De Morgan in the margins and footnotes. However, in terms of historical practice, it was also the case that his mysterious entry into public life, his rapid rise to brief notability and notoriety, and his sudden disappearance, made the investigation of his career too technically difficult to be worthwhile.The footprints of the forgotten may occasionally turn up in the archived papers of the important, or in distant public archives and records, but the primary sources are the newspapers of the time. De Morgan was a regular, almost daily, visitor to the pages of the multitude of newspapers, local and national, that were published in Victorian Britain and Gilded Age USA. He also published his own, usually short-lived and sometimes eponymous, newspapers: De Morgan's Monthly and De Morgan's Weekly as well as the splendidly titled People's Advocate and National Vindicator of Right versus Wrong and the deceptively titled, highly radical, House and Home. He was highly mobile: he noted, without too much hyperbole, that in the 404 days between his English prison sentences in the mid-1870s, he had 465 meetings, travelled 32,000 miles, and addressed 500,000 people. Thus the newspapers of the time are littered with often detailed and vibrant accounts of his speeches, demonstrations, and riots.Nonetheless, the 20th-century technologies of access and retrieval continued to limit discovery. The white gloves, cradles, pencils and paper of the library or archive, sometimes supplemented by the century-old 'new' technology of the microfilm, all enveloped in a culture of hallowed (and pleasurable) silence, restricted the researcher looking to move into the lesser known and certainly the unknown. The fact that most of De Morgan's life was spent, it was thought, outside of England, and outside the purview of the British Library, only exacerbated the problem. At a time when a historian had to travel to the sources and then work directly on them, pencil in hand, it needed more than curiosity to keep searching. Even as many historians in the late part of the century shifted their centre of gravity from the known to the unknown and from the great to the ordinary, in any form of intellectual or resource cost-benefit analysis, De Morgan was a non-starter.UnknownOn the subject of his early life, De Morgan was tantalisingly and deliberately vague. In his speeches and newspapers, he often leaked his personal and emotional struggles as well as his political battles. However, when it came to his biographical story, he veered between the untruthful, the denial, and the obscure. To the twentieth century observer, his life began in 1869 at the age of 21 and ended at the age of 32. His various political campaign "biographies" gave some hints, but what little he did give away was often vague, coy and/or unlikely. His name was actually John Francis Morgan, but he never formally acknowledged it. He claimed, and was very proud, to be Irish and to have been educated in London and at Cambridge University (possible but untrue), and also to have been "for the first twenty years of his life directly or indirectly a railway servant," and to have been a "boy orator" from the age of ten (unlikely but true). He promised that "Some day-nay any day-that the public desire it, I am ready to tell the story of my strange life from earliest recollection to the present time" (St. Clair 4). He never did and the 20th century could unearth little evidence in relation to any of his claims.The blend of the vague, the unlikely and the unverifiable-combined with an inclination to self-glorification and hyperbole-surrounded De Morgan with an aura, for historians as well as contemporaries, of the self-seeking, untrustworthy charlatan with something to hide and little to say. Therefore, as the 20th century moved to closure, the search for John De Morgan did so as well. Though interesting, he gave most value in contextualising the lives of Victorian radicals more generally. He headed back to the footnotes.Now FoundMeanwhile, the technologies underpinning academic practice generally, and history specifically, had changed. The photocopier, personal computer, Internet, and mobile device, had arrived. They formed the basis for both resistance and revolution in academic practices. For a while, the analytical skills of the academic community were concentrated on the perils as much as the promises of a "digital history" (Cohen and Rosenzweig Digital).But as the Millennium turned, and the academic community itself spawned, inter alia, Google, the practical advantages of digitisation for history forced themselves on people. Google enabled the confident searching from a neutral place for things known and unknown; information moved to the user more easily in both time and space. The culture and technologies of gathering, retrieval, analysis, presentation and preservation altered dramatically and, as a result, the traditional powers of gatekeepers, institutions and professional historians was redistributed (De Groot). Access and abundance, arguably over-abundance, became the platform for the management of historical information. For the search for De Morgan, the door reopened. The increased global electronic access to extensive databases, catalogues, archives, and public records, as well as people who knew, or wanted to know, something, opened up opportunities that have been rapidly utilised and expanded over the last decade. Both professional and "amateur" historians moved into a space that made the previously difficult to know or unknowable now accessible.Inevitably, the development of digital newspaper archives was particularly crucial to seeking and finding John De Morgan. After some faulty starts in the early 2000s, characterised as a "wild west" and a "gold rush" (Fyfe 566), comprehensive digitised newspaper archives became available. While still not perfect, in terms of coverage and quality, it is a transforming technology. In the UK, the British Newspaper Archive (BNA)-in pursuit of the goal of the digitising of all UK newspapers-now has over 20 million pages. Each month presents some more of De Morgan. Similarly, in the US, Fulton History, a free newspaper archive run by retired computer engineer Tom Tryniski, now has nearly 40 million pages of New York newspapers. The almost daily footprints of De Morgan's radical life can now be seen, and the lives of the social networks within which he worked on both sides of the Atlantic, come easily into view even from a desk in New Zealand.The Internet also allows connections between researchers, both academic and 'public', bringing into reach resources not otherwise knowable: a Scottish genealogist with a mass of data on De Morgan's family; a Californian with the historian's pot of gold, a collection of over 200 letters received by De Morgan over a 50 year period; a Leeds Public Library blogger uncovering spectacular, but rarely seen, Victorian electoral cartoons which explain De Morgan's precipitate departure to the USA. These discoveries would not have happened without the infrastructure of the Internet, web site, blog, and e-mail. Just how different searching is can be seen in the following recent scenario, one of many now occurring. An addition in 2017 to the BNA shows a Master J.F. Morgan, aged 13, giving lectures on temperance in Ledbury in 1861, luckily a census year. A check of the census through Ancestry shows that Master Morgan was born in Lincolnshire in England, and a quick look at the 1851 census shows him living on an isolated blustery hill in Yorkshire in a railway encampment, along with 250 navvies, as his father, James, works on the construction of a tunnel. Suddenly, literally within the hour, the 20-year search for the childhood of John De Morgan, the supposedly Irish-born "gentleman who repudiated his class," has taken a significant turn.At the end of the 20th century, despite many efforts, John De Morgan was therefore a partial character bounded by what he said and didn't say, what others believed, and the intellectual and historiographical priorities, technologies, tools and processes of that century. In effect, he "lived" historically for a less than a quarter of his life. Without digitisation, much would have remained hidden; with it there has been, and will still be, much to find. De Morgan hid himself and the 20th century forgot him. But as the technologies have changed, and with it the structures of historical practice, the question that even De Morgan himself posed – "Who is John De Morgan?" – can now be addressed.SearchingDigitisation brings undoubted benefits, but its impact goes a long way beyond the improved search and detection capabilities, into a range of technological developments of communication and media that impact on practice, practitioners, institutions, and 'history' itself. A dominant issue for the academic community is the control of "history." De Groot, in his book Consuming History, considers how history now works in contemporary popular culture and, in particular, examines the development of the sometimes conflicted relationship between popular/public history and academic history, and the professional and the 'amateur' historian.The traditional legitimacy of professional historians has, many argue, been eroded by shifts in technology and access with the power of traditional cultural gatekeepers being undermined, bypassing the established control of institutions and professional historian. While most academics now embrace the primary tools of so-called "digital history," they remain, De Groot argues, worried that "history" is in danger of becoming part of a discourse of leisure, not a professionalized arena (18). An additional concern is the role of the global capitalist market, which is developing, or even taking over, 'history' as a brand, product and commodity with overt fiscal value. Here the huge impact of newspaper archives and genealogical software (sometimes owned in tandem) is of particular concern.There is also the new challenge of "navigating the chaos of abundance in online resources" (De Groot 68). By 2005, it had become clear that:the digital era seems likely to confront historians-who were more likely in the past to worry about the scarcity of surviving evidence from the past-with a new 'problem' of abundance. A much deeper and denser historical record, especially one in digital form seems like an incredible opportunity and a gift. But its overwhelming size means that we will have to spend a lot of time looking at this particular gift horse in mouth. (Cohen and Rosenzweig, Web).This easily accessible abundance imposes much higher standards of evidence on the historian. The acceptance within the traditional model that much could simply not be done or known with the resources available meant that there was a greater allowance for not knowing. But with a search button and public access, democratizing the process, the consumer as well as the producer can see, and find, for themselves.Taking on some of these challenges, Zaagsma, having reminded us that the history of digital humanities goes back at least 60 years, notes the need to get rid of the "myth that historical practice can be uncoupled from technological, and thus methodological developments, and that going digital is a choice, which, I cannot emphasis strongly enough, it is not" (14). There is no longer a digital history which is separate from history, and with digital technologies that are now ubiquitous and pervasive, historians have accepted or must quickly face a fundamental break with past practices. However, also noting that the great majority of archival material is not digitised and is unlikely to be so, Zaagsma concludes that hybridity will be the "new normal," combining "traditional/analogue and new/digital practices at least in information gathering" (17).ConclusionA decade on from Cohen and Rozenzweig's "Perils and Promises," the digital is a given. Both historical practice and historians have changed, though it is a work in progress. An early pioneer of the use of computers in the humanities, Robert Busa wrote in 1980 that "the principal aim is the enhancement of the quality, depth and extension of research and not merely the lessening of human effort and time" (89). Twenty years later, as Google was launched, Jordanov, taking on those who would dismiss public history as "mere" popularization, entertainment or propaganda, argued for the "need to develop coherent positions on the relationships between academic history, the media, institutions…and popular culture" (149). As the digital turn continues, and the SEARCH button is just one part of that, all historians-professional or "amateur"-will take advantage of opportunities that technologies have opened up. Looking across the whole range of transformations in recent decades, De Groot concludes: "Increasingly users of history are accessing the past through complex and innovative media and this is reconfiguring their sense of themselves, the world they live in and what history itself might be about" (310). ReferencesAllen, Rob. "'The People's Advocate, Champion and Friend': The Transatlantic Career of Citizen John De Morgan (1848-1926)." Historical Research 86.234 (2013): 684-711.Busa, Roberto. "The Annals of Humanities Computing: The Index Thomisticus." Computers and the Humanities 14.2 (1980): 83-90.Cohen, Daniel J., and Roy Rosenzweig. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web. Philadelphia, PA: U Pennsylvania P, 2005.———. "Web of Lies? Historical Knowledge on the Internet." First Monday 10.12 (2005).De Groot, Jerome. Consuming History: Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.De Morgan, John. Who Is John De Morgan? A Few Words of Explanation, with Portrait. By a Free and Independent Elector of Leicester. London, 1877.Fyfe, Paul. "An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers." Victorian Periodicals Review 49.4 (2016): 546-77."Interchange: The Promise of Digital History." Journal of American History 95.2 (2008): 452-91.Johnston, Leslie. "Before You Were Born, We Were Digitizing Texts." The Signal 9 Dec. 2012, Library of Congress. <https://blogs.loc.gov/thesignal/292/12/before-you-were-born-we-were-digitizing-texts>.Jordanova, Ludmilla. History in Practice. 2nd ed. London: Arnold, 2000.Kazin, Michael. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Anchor Books, 2006.Saint-Clair, Sylvester. Sketch of the Life and Labours of J. De Morgan, Elocutionist, and Tribune of the People. Leeds: De Morgan & Co., 1880.Vincent, William T. The Records of the Woolwich District, Vol. II. Woolwich: J.P. Jackson, 1890.Zaagsma, Gerban. "On Digital History." BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review 128.4 (2013): 3-29.

Postmodernism is supposed to identify the conditions of contemporary cultural production when human affairs in general, and the dissemination of prevailing ideas in particular, have become fully enmeshed in relations of commodity exchange. (Martin 2002, p. 30) The accumulation of capital within industrial economies keyed on the surplus value derived from the production of raw materials into mass manufactured products, and their subsequent exchange in the capitalist marketplace. Within what Poster (1990) described as the contemporary mode of information , surplus capital is generated from the manufacturing of product’s symbolic values, which in turn substantiate their use and ultimately exchange values within the consumer market. This, in essence, is the centrifugal process undermining the brand (Klein 1999), promotional (Wernick 1991), or commodity sign (Goldman and Papson 1996), culture that characterizes contemporary capitalism: Through the creative outpourings of “cultural intermediaries” (Bourdieu 1984) working within the advertising, marketing, public relations, and media industries, commodities—routinely produced within low wage industrializing economies—are symbolically constituted to global consuming publics. This postmodern regime of cultural production is graphically illustrated within the sporting goods industry (Miles 1998) where, in regard to their use value, highly non-differentiated material products such as sport shoes are differentiated in symbolic terms through innovative advertising and marketing initiatives. In this way, oftentimes gaudy concoctions of leather, nylon, and rubber become transformed into prized cultural commodities possessing an inflated economic value within today’s informational-symbolic order (Castells 1996). Arguably, the globally ubiquitous Nike Inc. is the sporting brand that has most aggressively and effectively capitalized upon what Rowe described as the “culturalization of economics” in the latter twentieth century (1999, p. 70). Indeed, as Nike Chairman and CEO Phil Knight enthusiastically declared: For years, we thought of ourselves as a production-oriented company, meaning we put all our emphasis on designing and manufacturing the product. But now we understand that the most important thing we do is market the product. We’ve come around to saying that Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool. What I mean is that marketing knits the whole organization together. The design elements and functional characteristics of the product itself are just part of the overall marketing process. (Quoted in (Willigan 1992, p. 92) This commercial culturalization of Nike has certainly sparked considerable academic interest, as evidenced by the voluminous literature pertaining to the various dimensions of its practices of cultural production (Donaghu and Barff 1990; Ind 1993; Korzeniewicz 1994; Cole and Hribar 1995; Boje 1998; Goldman and Papson 1998; Lafrance 1998; Armstrong 1999; Denzin 1999; Penaloza 1999; Sage 1999; Lucas 2000; Stabile 2000). Rather than contribute to this body of work, our aim is to engage a sporting shoe company attempting to establish itself within the brand universe defined and dominated by Nike. For this reason we turn to German-based Puma AG: a dynamic brand-in-process, seeking to differentiate itself within the cluttered sporting landscape, through the assertion of a consciously fractured brand identity designed to address a diverse range of clearly-defined consumer subjectivities. Puma’s history can be traced to post-war Germany when, in 1948, a fraternal dispute compelled Rudolf Dassler to leave Adidas (the company he founded with his brother Adi) and set up a rival sports shoe business on the opposite bank of the Moselle river in Herzogenaurach. Over the next three decades the two companies vied for the leadership in the global sports shoe industry. However, the emergence of Nike and Reebok in the 1980s, and particularly their adoption of aggressive marketing strategies, saw both Adidas and Puma succumbing to what was a new world sneaker order (Strasser and Becklund 1991). Of the two, Puma’s plight was the more chronic, with expenditures regularly exceeding moribund revenues. For instance, in 1993, Puma lost US$32 million on sales of just US$190 million (Saddleton 2002, p. 2). At this time, Puma’s brand presence and identity was negligible quite simply because it failed to operate according to the rhythms and regimes of the commodity sign economy that the sport shoe industry had become (Goldman and Papson 1994; 1996; 1998). Remarkably, from this position of seemingly terminal decline, in recent years, Puma has “successfully turned its image around” (Saddleton 2002, p. 2) through the adoption of a branding strategy perhaps even more radical than that of Nike’s. Led by the company’s global director of brand management, Antonio Bertone, Puma positioned itself as “the brand that mixes the influence of sport, lifestyle and fashion” (quoted in (Davis 2002, p. 41). Hence, Puma eschewed the sport performance mantra which defined the company (and indeed its rivals) for so long, in favour of a strategy centered on the aestheticization of the sport shoe as an important component of the commodity based lifestyle assemblages, through which individuals are encouraged to constitute their very being (Featherstone 1991; Lury 1996). According to Bertone, Puma is now “targeting the sneaker enthusiast, not the guy who buys shoes for running” (quoted in (Davis 2002, p. 41). While its efforts to “blur the lines between sport and lifestyle” (Anon 2002, p. 30) may explain part of Puma’s recent success, at the core of the company’s turnaround was its move to diversify the brand into a plethora of lifestyle and fashion options. Puma has essentially splintered into a range of seemingly disparate sub-brands each directed at a very definite target consumer (or perceptions thereof). Amongst other options, Puma can presently be consumed in, and through: the upscale pseudo-Prada Platinum range; collections by fashion designers such as Jil Sander and Yasuhiro Mihara; Pumaville, a range clearly directed at the “alternative sport” market, and endorsed by athletes such as motocross rider Travis Pastrana; and, the H Street range designed to capture “the carefree spirit of athletics” (http://www.puma.com). However, Puma’s attempts to interpellate (Althusser 1971) a diverse array of sporting subjectivies is perhaps best illustrated in the “Nuala” collection, a yoga-inspired “lifestyle” collection resulting from a collaboration with supermodel Christy Turlington, the inspiration for which is expressed in suitably flowery terms: What is Nuala? NUALA is an acronym representing: Natural-Universal-Altruistic-Limitless-Authentic. Often defined as "meditation in motion", Nuala is the product of an organic partnership that reflects Christy Turlington's passion for the ancient discipline of Yoga and PUMA's commitment to create a superior mix of sport and lifestyle products. Having studied comparative religion and philosophy at New York University, model turned entrepreneur Christy Turlington sought to merge her interest in eastern practices with her real-life experience in the fashion industry and create an elegant, concise, fashion collection to complement her busy work, travel, and exercise schedule. The goal of Nuala is to create a symbiosis between the outer and inner being, the individual and collective experience, using yoga as a metaphor to make this balance possible. At Nuala, we believe that everything in life should serve more than one purpose. Nuala is more than a line of yoga-inspired activewear; it is a building block for limitless living aimed at providing fashion-conscious, independant women comfort for everyday life. The line allows flexibility and transition, from technical yoga pieces to fashionable apparel one can live in. Celebrating women for their intuition, intelligence, and individuality, Nuala bridges the spacious gap between one's public and private life. Thus, Puma seeks to hail the female subject of consumption (Andrews 1998), through design and marketing rhetorics (couched in a spurious Eastern mysticism) which contemporary manifestations of what are traditionally feminine experiences and sensibilities. In seeking to engage, at one at the same time, a variety of class, ethnic, and gender based constituencies through the symbolic advancement of a range of lifestyle niches (hi-fashion, sports, casual, organic, retro etc.) Puma evokes Toffler’s prophetic vision regarding the rise of a “de-massified society” and “a profusion of life-styles and more highly individualized personalities” (Toffler 1980, pp. 231, 255-256). In this manner, Puma identified how the nurturing of an ever-expanding array of consumer subjectivities has become perhaps the most pertinent feature of present-day market relations. Such an approach to sub-branding is, of course, hardly anything new (Gartman 1998). Indeed, even the sports shoe giants have long-since diversified into a range of product lines. Yet it is our contention that even in the process of sub-branding, companies such as Nike nonetheless retain a tangible sense of a core brand identity. So, for instance, Nike imbues a sentiment of performative authenticity, cultural irreverence and personal empowerment throughout all its sub-brands, from its running shoes to its outdoor wear (arguably, Nike commercials have a distinctive “look” or “feel”) (Cole and Hribar 1995). By contrast, Puma’s sub-branding suggests a greater polyvalence: the brand engages divergent consumer subjectivities in much more definite and explicit ways. As Davis (2002, p. 41) emphasis added) suggested, Puma “has done a good job of effectively meeting the demands of disparate groups of consumers.” Perhaps more accurately, it could be asserted that Puma has been effective in constituting the market as an aggregate of disparate consumer groups (Solomon and Englis 1997). Goldman and Papson have suggested the decline of Reebok in the early 1990s owed much to the “inconsistency in the image they projected” (1996, p. 38). Following the logic of this assertion, the Puma brand’s lack of coherence or consistency would seem to foretell and impending decline. Yet, recent evidence suggests such a prediction as being wholly erroneous: Puma is a company, and (sub)brand system, on the rise. Recent market performance would certainly suggest so. For instance, in the first quarter of 2003 (a period in which many of its competitors experienced meager growth rates), Puma’s consolidated sales increased 47% resulting in a share price jump from ?1.43 to ?3.08 (Puma.com 2003). Moreover, as one trade magazine suggested: “Puma is one brand that has successfully turned its image around in recent years…and if analysts predictions are accurate, Puma’s sales will almost double by 2005” (Saddleton 2002, p. 2). So, within a postmodern cultural economy characterized by fragmentation and instability (Jameson 1991; Firat and Venkatesh 1995; Gartman 1998), brand flexibility and eclecticism has proven to be an effective stratagem for, however temporally, engaging the consciousness of decentered consuming subjects. Perhaps it’s a Puma culture, as opposed to a Nike one (Goldman and Papson 1998) that best characterizes the contemporary condition after all? Works Cited Althusser, L. (1971). Lenin and philosophy and other essays. London: New Left Books. Andrews, D. L. (1998). Feminizing Olympic reality: Preliminary dispatches from Baudrillard's Atlanta. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 33(1), 5-18. Anon. (2002, December 9). The Midas touch. Business and Industry, 30. Armstrong, K. L. (1999). Nike's communication with black audiences: A sociological analysis of advertising effectiveness via symbolic interactionism. Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 23(3), 266-286. Boje, D. M. (1998). 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Swoosh: The unauthorized story of Nike and the men who played there. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Toffler, A. (1980). The third wave. New York: William Morrow. Wernick, A. (1991). Promotional culture: Advertising, ideology and symbolic expression. London: Sage. Willigan, G. E. (1992). High performance marketing: An interview with Nike's Phil Knight. Harvard Business Review(July/August), 91-101. Links http://about.puma.com/ http://www.puma.com Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Grainger, Andrew D. and Andrews, David L.. "Postmodern Puma" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/08-postmodernpuma.php>. APA Style Grainger, A. D. & Andrews, D. L. (2003, Jun 19). Postmodern Puma. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/08-postmodernpuma.php>

While the term “visual literacy” has grown in popularity in the last 50 years, its meaning remains nebulous. It is described variously as: a vehicle for aesthetic appreciation, a means of defence against visual manipulation, a sorting mechanism for an increasingly data-saturated age, and a prerequisite to civic inclusion (Fransecky 23; Messaris 181; McTigue and Flowers 580). Scholars have written extensively about the first three subjects but there has been less research on how visual literacy frames civic life and how it might help the public as a tool to address disadvantage and assist in removing social and cultural barriers. This article examines a forerunner to visual literacy in the push to create an international symbol language born out of popular education movements, a project that fell short of its goals but still left a considerable impression on graphic media. This article, then, presents an analysis of visual literacy campaigns in the early postwar era. These campaigns did not attempt to invent a symbolic language but posited that images themselves served as a universal language in which students could receive training. Of particular interest is how the concept of visual literacy has been mobilised as a pedagogical tool in design, digital humanities and in broader civic education initiatives promoted by Third Space institutions. Behind the creation of new visual literacy curricula is the idea that images can help anchor a world community, supplementing textual communication. Figure 1: Visual Literacy Yearbook. Montebello Unified School District, USA, 1973. Shedding Light: Origins of the Visual Literacy Frame The term “visual literacy” came to the fore in the early 1970s on the heels of mass literacy campaigns. The educators, creatives and media theorists who first advocated for visual learning linked this aim to literacy, an unassailable goal, to promote a more radical curricular overhaul. They challenged a system that had hitherto only acknowledged a very limited pathway towards academic success; pushing “language and mathematics”, courses “referred to as solids (something substantial) as contrasted with liquids or gases (courses with little or no substance)” (Eisner 92). This was deemed “a parochial view of both human ability and the possibilities of education” that did not acknowledge multiple forms of intelligence (Gardner). This change not only integrated elements of mass culture that had been rejected in education, notably film and graphic arts, but also encouraged the critique of images as a form of good citizenship, assuming that visually literate arbiters could call out media misrepresentations and manipulative political advertising (Messaris, “Visual Test”). This movement was, in many ways, reactive to new forms of mass media that began to replace newspapers as key forms of civic participation. Unlike simple literacy (being able to decipher letters as a mnemonic system), visual literacy involves imputing meanings to images where meanings are less fixed, yet still with embedded cultural signifiers. Visual literacy promised to extend enlightenment metaphors of sight (as in the German Aufklärung) and illumination (as in the French Lumières) to help citizens understand an increasingly complex marketplace of images. The move towards visual literacy was not so much a shift towards images (and away from books and oration) but an affirmation of the need to critically investigate the visual sphere. It introduced doubt to previously upheld hierarchies of perception. Sight, to Kant the “noblest of the senses” (158), was no longer the sense “least affected” by the surrounding world but an input centre that was equally manipulable. In Kant’s view of societal development, the “cosmopolitan” held the key to pacifying bellicose states and ensuring global prosperity and tranquillity. The process of developing a cosmopolitan ideology rests, according to Kant, on the gradual elimination of war and “the education of young people in intellectual and moral culture” (188-89). Transforming disparate societies into “a universal cosmopolitan existence” that would “at last be realised as the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop” and would take well-funded educational institutions and, potentially, a new framework for imparting knowledge (Kant 51). To some, the world of the visual presented a baseline for shared experience. Figure 2: Exhibition by the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Vienna, photograph c. 1927. An International Picture Language The quest to find a mutually intelligible language that could “bridge worlds” and solder together all of humankind goes back to the late nineteenth century and the Esperanto movement of Ludwig Zamenhof (Schor 59). The expression of this ideal in the world of the visual picked up steam in the interwar years with designers and editors like Fritz Kahn, Gerd Arntz, and Otto and Marie Neurath. Their work transposing complex ideas into graphic form has been rediscovered as an antecedent to modern infographics, but the symbols they deployed were not to merely explain, but also help education and build international fellowship unbounded by spoken language. The Neuraths in particular are celebrated for their international picture language or Isotypes. These pictograms (sometimes viewed as proto-emojis) can be used to represent data without text. Taken together they are an “intemporal, hieroglyphic language” that Neutrath hoped would unite working-class people the world over (Lee 159). The Neuraths’ work was done in the explicit service of visual education with a popular socialist agenda and incubated in the social sphere of Red Vienna at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (Social and Economic Museum) where Otto served as Director. The Wirtschaftsmuseum was an experiment in popular education, with multiple branches and late opening hours to accommodate the “the working man [who] has time to see a museum only at night” (Neurath 72-73). The Isotype contained universalist aspirations for the “making of a world language, or a helping picture language—[that] will give support to international developments generally” and “educate by the eye” (Neurath 13). Figure 3: Gerd Arntz Isotype Images. (Source: University of Reading.) The Isotype was widely adopted in the postwar era in pre-packaged sets of symbols used in graphic design and wayfinding systems for buildings and transportation networks, but with the socialism of the Neuraths’ peeled away, leaving only the system of logos that we are familiar with from airport washrooms, charts, and public transport maps. Much of the uptake in this symbol language could be traced to increased mobility and tourism, particularly in countries that did not make use of a Roman alphabet. The 1964 Olympics in Tokyo helped pave the way when organisers, fearful of jumbling too many scripts together, opted instead for black and white icons to represent the program of sports that summer. The new focus on the visual was both technologically mediated—cheaper printing and broadcast technologies made the diffusion of image increasingly possible—but also ideologically supported by a growing emphasis on projects that transcended linguistic, ethnic, and national borders. The Olympic symbols gradually morphed into Letraset icons, and, later, symbols in the Unicode Standard, which are the basis for today’s emojis. Wordless signs helped facilitate interconnectedness, but only in the most literal sense; their application was limited primarily to sports mega-events, highway maps, and “brand building”, and they never fulfilled their role as an educational language “to give the different nations a common outlook” (Neurath 18). Universally understood icons, particularly in the form of emojis, point to a rise in visual communication but they have fallen short as a cosmopolitan project, supporting neither the globalisation of Kantian ethics nor the transnational socialism of the Neuraths. Figure 4: Symbols in use. Women's bathroom. 1964 Tokyo Olympics. (Source: The official report of the Organizing Committee.) Counter Education By mid-century, the optimism of a universal symbol language seemed dated, and focus shifted from distillation to discernment. New educational programs presented ways to study images, increasingly reproducible with new technologies, as a language in and of themselves. These methods had their roots in the fin-de-siècle educational reforms of John Dewey, Helen Parkhurst, and Maria Montessori. As early as the 1920s, progressive educators were using highly visual magazines, like National Geographic, as the basis for lesson planning, with the hopes that they would “expose students to edifying and culturally enriching reading” and “develop a more catholic taste or sensibility, representing an important cosmopolitan value” (Hawkins 45). The rise in imagery from previously inaccessible regions helped pupils to see themselves in relation to the larger world (although this connection always came with the presumed superiority of the reader). “Pictorial education in public schools” taught readers—through images—to accept a broader world but, too often, they saw photographs as a “straightforward transcription of the real world” (Hawkins 57). The images of cultures and events presented in Life and National Geographic for the purposes of education and enrichment were now the subject of greater analysis in the classroom, not just as “windows into new worlds” but as cultural products in and of themselves. The emerging visual curriculum aimed to do more than just teach with previously excluded modes (photography, film and comics); it would investigate how images presented and mediated the world. This gained wider appeal with new analytical writing on film, like Raymond Spottiswoode's Grammar of the Film (1950) which sought to formulate the grammatical rules of visual communication (Messaris 181), influenced by semiotics and structural linguistics; the emphasis on grammar can also be seen in far earlier writings on design systems such as Owen Jones’s 1856 The Grammar of Ornament, which also advocated for new, universalising methods in design education (Sloboda 228). The inventorying impulse is on display in books like Donis A. Dondis’s A Primer of Visual Literacy (1973), a text that meditates on visual perception but also functions as an introduction to line and form in the applied arts, picking up where the Bauhaus left off. Dondis enumerates the “syntactical guidelines” of the applied arts with illustrations that are in keeping with 1920s books by Kandinsky and Klee and analyse pictorial elements. However, at the end of the book she shifts focus with two chapters that examine “messaging” and visual literacy explicitly. Dondis predicts that “an intellectual, trained ability to make and understand visual messages is becoming a vital necessity to involvement with communication. It is quite likely that visual literacy will be one of the fundamental measures of education in the last third of our century” (33) and she presses for more programs that incorporate the exploration and analysis of images in tertiary education. Figure 5: Ideal spatial environment for the Blueprint charts, 1970. (Image: Inventory Press.) Visual literacy in education arrived in earnest with a wave of publications in the mid-1970s. They offered ways for students to understand media processes and for teachers to use visual culture as an entry point into complex social and scientific subject matter, tapping into the “visual consciousness of the ‘television generation’” (Fransecky 5). Visual culture was often seen as inherently democratising, a break from stuffiness, the “artificialities of civilisation”, and the “archaic structures” that set sensorial perception apart from scholarship (Dworkin 131-132). Many radical university projects and community education initiatives of the 1960s made use of new media in novel ways: from Maurice Stein and Larry Miller’s fold-out posters accompanying Blueprint for Counter Education (1970) to Emory Douglas’s graphics for The Black Panther newspaper. Blueprint’s text- and image-dense wall charts were made via assemblage and they were imagined less as charts and more as a “matrix of resources” that could be used—and added to—by youth to undertake their own counter education (Cronin 53). These experiments in visual learning helped to break down old hierarchies in education, but their aim was influenced more by countercultural notions of disruption than the universal ideals of cosmopolitanism. From Image as Text to City as Text For a brief period in the 1970s, thinkers like Marshall McLuhan (McLuhan et al., Massage) and artists like Bruno Munari (Tanchis and Munari) collaborated fruitfully with graphic designers to create books that mixed text and image in novel ways. Using new compositional methods, they broke apart traditional printing lock-ups to superimpose photographs, twist text, and bend narrative frames. The most famous work from this era is, undoubtedly, The Medium Is the Massage (1967), McLuhan’s team-up with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, but it was followed by dozens of other books intended to communicate theory and scientific ideas with popularising graphics. Following in the footsteps of McLuhan, many of these texts sought not just to explain an issue but to self-consciously reference their own method of information delivery. These works set the precedent for visual aids (and, to a lesser extent, audio) that launched a diverse, non-hierarchical discourse that was nonetheless bound to tactile artefacts. In 1977, McLuhan helped develop a media textbook for secondary school students called City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. It is notable for its direct address style and its focus on investigating spaces outside of the classroom (provocatively, a section on the third page begins with “Should all schools be closed?”). The book follows with a fine-grained analysis of advertising forms in which students are asked to first bring advertisements into class for analysis and later to go out into the city to explore “a man-made environment, a huge warehouse of information, a vast resource to be mined free of charge” (McLuhan et al., City 149). As a document City as Classroom is critical of existing teaching methods, in line with the radical “in the streets” pedagogy of its day. McLuhan’s theories proved particularly salient for the counter education movement, in part because they tapped into a healthy scepticism of advertisers and other image-makers. They also dovetailed with growing discontent with the ad-strew visual environment of cities in the 1970s. Budgets for advertising had mushroomed in the1960s and outdoor advertising “cluttered” cities with billboards and neon, generating “fierce intensities and new hybrid energies” that threatened to throw off the visual equilibrium (McLuhan 74). Visual literacy curricula brought in experiential learning focussed on the legibility of the cities, mapping, and the visualisation of urban issues with social justice implications. The Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute (DGEI), a “collective endeavour of community research and education” that arose in the aftermath of the 1967 uprisings, is the most storied of the groups that suffused the collection of spatial data with community engagement and organising (Warren et al. 61). The following decades would see a tamed approach to visual literacy that, while still pressing for critical reading, did not upend traditional methods of educational delivery. Figure 6: Beginning a College Program-Assisting Teachers to Develop Visual Literacy Approaches in Public School Classrooms. 1977. ERIC. Searching for Civic Education The visual literacy initiatives formed in the early 1970s both affirmed existing civil society institutions while also asserting the need to better inform the public. Most of the campaigns were sponsored by universities, major libraries, and international groups such as UNESCO, which published its “Declaration on Media Education” in 1982. They noted that “participation” was “essential to the working of a pluralistic and representative democracy” and the “public—users, citizens, individuals, groups ... were too systematically overlooked”. Here, the public is conceived as both “targets of the information and communication process” and users who “should have the last word”. To that end their “continuing education” should be ensured (Study 18). Programs consisted primarily of cognitive “see-scan-analyse” techniques (Little et al.) for younger students but some also sought to bring visual analysis to adult learners via continuing education (often through museums eager to engage more diverse audiences) and more radical popular education programs sponsored by community groups. By the mid-80s, scores of modules had been built around the comprehension of visual media and had become standard educational fare across North America, Australasia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. There was an increasing awareness of the role of data and image presentation in decision-making, as evidenced by the surprising commercial success of Edward Tufte’s 1982 book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Visual literacy—or at least image analysis—was now enmeshed in teaching practice and needed little active advocacy. Scholarly interest in the subject went into a brief period of hibernation in the 1980s and early 1990s, only to be reborn with the arrival of new media distribution technologies (CD-ROMs and then the internet) in classrooms and the widespread availability of digital imaging technology starting in the late 1990s; companies like Adobe distributed free and reduced-fee licences to schools and launched extensive teacher training programs. Visual literacy was reanimated but primarily within a circumscribed academic field of education and data visualisation. Figure 7: Visual Literacy; What Research Says to the Teacher, 1975. National Education Association. USA. Part of the shifting frame of visual literacy has to do with institutional imperatives, particularly in places where austerity measures forced strange alliances between disciplines. What had been a project in alternative education morphed into an uncontested part of the curriculum and a dependable budget line. This shift was already forecasted in 1972 by Harun Farocki who, writing in Filmkritik, noted that funding for new film schools would be difficult to obtain but money might be found for “training in media education … a discipline that could persuade ministers of education, that would at the same time turn the budget restrictions into an advantage, and that would match the functions of art schools” (98). Nearly 50 years later educators are still using media education (rebranded as visual or media literacy) to make the case for fine arts and humanities education. While earlier iterations of visual literacy education were often too reliant on the idea of cracking the “code” of images, they did promote ways of learning that were a deep departure from the rote methods of previous generations. Next-gen curricula frame visual literacy as largely supplemental—a resource, but not a program. By the end of the 20th century, visual literacy had changed from a scholarly interest to a standard resource in the “teacher’s toolkit”, entering into school programs and influencing museum education, corporate training, and the development of public-oriented media (Literacy). An appreciation of image culture was seen as key to creating empathetic global citizens, but its scope was increasingly limited. With rising austerity in the education sector (a shift that preceded the 2008 recession by decades in some countries), art educators, museum enrichment staff, and design researchers need to make a case for why their disciplines were relevant in pedagogical models that are increasingly aimed at “skills-based” and “job ready” teaching. Arts educators worked hard to insert their fields into learning goals for secondary students as visual literacy, with the hope that “literacy” would carry the weight of an educational imperative and not a supplementary field of study. Conclusion For nearly a century, educational initiatives have sought to inculcate a cosmopolitan perspective with a variety of teaching materials and pedagogical reference points. Symbolic languages, like the Isotype, looked to unite disparate people with shared visual forms; while educational initiatives aimed to train the eyes of students to make them more discerning citizens. The term ‘visual literacy’ emerged in the 1960s and has since been deployed in programs with a wide variety of goals. Countercultural initiatives saw it as a prerequisite for popular education from the ground up, but, in the years since, it has been formalised and brought into more staid curricula, often as a sort of shorthand for learning from media and pictures. The grand cosmopolitan vision of a complete ‘visual language’ has been scaled back considerably, but still exists in trace amounts. Processes of globalisation require images to universalise experiences, commodities, and more for people without shared languages. Emoji alphabets and globalese (brands and consumer messaging that are “visual-linguistic” amalgams “increasingly detached from any specific ethnolinguistic group or locality”) are a testament to a mediatised banal cosmopolitanism (Jaworski 231). In this sense, becoming “fluent” in global design vernacular means familiarity with firms and products, an understanding that is aesthetic, not critical. It is very much the beneficiaries of globalisation—both state and commercial actors—who have been able to harness increasingly image-based technologies for their benefit. To take a humorous but nonetheless consequential example, Spanish culinary boosters were able to successfully lobby for a paella emoji (Miller) rather than having a food symbol from a less wealthy country such as a Senegalese jollof or a Morrocan tagine. This trend has gone even further as new forms of visual communication are increasingly streamlined and managed by for-profit media platforms. The ubiquity of these forms of communication and their global reach has made visual literacy more important than ever but it has also fundamentally shifted the endeavour from a graphic sorting practice to a critical piece of social infrastructure that has tremendous political ramifications. Visual literacy campaigns hold out the promise of educating students in an image-based system with the potential to transcend linguistic and cultural boundaries. This cosmopolitan political project has not yet been realised, as the visual literacy frame has drifted into specialised silos of art, design, and digital humanities education. It can help bridge the “incomplete connections” of an increasingly globalised world (Calhoun 112), but it does not have a program in and of itself. Rather, an evolving visual literacy curriculum might be seen as a litmus test for how we imagine the role of images in the world. References Brown, Neil. “The Myth of Visual Literacy.” Australian Art Education 13.2 (1989): 28-32. Calhoun, Craig. “Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary.” Daedalus 137.3 (2008): 105–114. Cronin, Paul. “Recovering and Rendering Vital Blueprint for Counter Education at the California Institute for the Arts.” Blueprint for Counter Education. Inventory Press, 2016. 36-58. Dondis, Donis A. A Primer of Visual Literacy. MIT P, 1973. Dworkin, M.S. “Toward an Image Curriculum: Some Questions and Cautions.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 4.2 (1970): 129–132. Eisner, Elliot. Cognition and Curriculum: A Basis for Deciding What to Teach. Longmans, 1982. Farocki, Harun. “Film Courses in Art Schools.” Trans. Ted Fendt. Grey Room 79 (Apr. 2020): 96–99. Fransecky, Roger B. Visual Literacy: A Way to Learn—A Way to Teach. Association for Educational Communications and Technology, 1972. Gardner, Howard. Frames Of Mind. Basic Books, 1983. Hawkins, Stephanie L. “Training the ‘I’ to See: Progressive Education, Visual Literacy, and National Geographic Membership.” American Iconographic. U of Virginia P, 2010. 28–61. Jaworski, Adam. “Globalese: A New Visual-Linguistic Register.” Social Semiotics 25.2 (2015): 217-35. Kant, Immanuel. Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Cambridge UP, 2006. Kant, Immanuel. “Perpetual Peace.” Political Writings. Ed. H. Reiss. Cambridge UP, 1991 [1795]. 116–130. Kress, G., and T. van Leeuwen. Reading images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Routledge, 1996. Literacy Teaching Toolkit: Visual Literacy. Department of Education and Training (DET), State of Victoria. 29 Aug. 2018. 30 Sep. 2020 <https://www.education.vic.gov.au:443/school/teachers/teachingresources/discipline/english/literacy/ readingviewing/Pages/litfocusvisual.aspx>. Lee, Jae Young. “Otto Neurath's Isotype and the Rhetoric of Neutrality.” Visible Language 42.2: 159-180. Little, D., et al. Looking and Learning: Visual Literacy across the Disciplines. Wiley, 2015. Messaris, Paul. “Visual Literacy vs. Visual Manipulation.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 11.2: 181-203. DOI: 10.1080/15295039409366894 ———. “A Visual Test for Visual ‘Literacy.’” The Annual Meeting of the Speech Communication Association. 31 Oct. to 3 Nov. 1991. Atlanta, GA. <https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED347604.pdf>. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, 1964. McLuhan, Marshall, Quentin Fiore, and Jerome Agel. The Medium Is the Massage, Bantam Books, 1967. McLuhan, Marshall, Kathryn Hutchon, and Eric McLuhan. City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media. Agincourt, Ontario: Book Society of Canada, 1977. McTigue, Erin, and Amanda Flowers. “Science Visual Literacy: Learners' Perceptions and Knowledge of Diagrams.” Reading Teacher 64.8: 578-89. Miller, Sarah. “The Secret History of the Paella Emoji.” Food & Wine, 20 June 2017. <https://www.foodandwine.com/news/true-story-paella-emoji>. Munari, Bruno. Square, Circle, Triangle. Princeton Architectural Press, 2016. Newfield, Denise. “From Visual Literacy to Critical Visual Literacy: An Analysis of Educational Materials.” English Teaching-Practice and Critique 10 (2011): 81-94. Neurath, Otto. International Picture Language: The First Rules of Isotype. K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1936. Schor, Esther. Bridge of Words: Esperanto and the Dream of a Universal Language. Henry Holt and Company, 2016. Sloboda, Stacey. “‘The Grammar of Ornament’: Cosmopolitanism and Reform in British Design.” Journal of Design History 21.3 (2008): 223-36. Study of Communication Problems: Implementation of Resolutions 4/19 and 4/20 Adopted by the General Conference at Its Twenty-First Session; Report by the Director-General. UNESCO, 1983. Tanchis, Aldo, and Bruno Munari. Bruno Munari: Design as Art. MIT P, 1987. Warren, Gwendolyn, Cindi Katz, and Nik Heynen. “Myths, Cults, Memories, and Revisions in Radical Geographic History: Revisiting the Detroit Geographical Expedition and Institute.” Spatial Histories of Radical Geography: North America and Beyond. Wiley, 2019. 59-86.

Naomi Klein’s global bestseller No Logo was published in paperback in the USA in December 2000; in the UK in January 2001. Few blockbuster publications can have been more sweetly timed. All around the world, spectacular public protests were occurring at major international forums: at the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle in 1999, at Melbourne’s World Economic Forum meeting in September 2000 and later that month at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Prague. In what was dubbed a ‘year of global protest’ in journals from the Providence Phoenix to the Socialist Review, Klein’s book seemed to offer a story that lent coherence to what was otherwise seen as a bewilderingly heterogenous ‘movement’. Though protestors were often described in the media as criticising and opposing ‘globalisation’, the sense of this perennially vague word, and the nature and purpose of oppositional practice, seemed to change depending on who was asked: French farmers, Washington trade unionists, African politicians, feral DJs, or those emblematic ‘anarchists in black ski masks’ with whom reporters everywhereseemed to be so fascinated. Amidst media and public confusion, and concerns that the new movements might simply be incoherent, Klein suggested that the major target of these plural global protests was, and ought to be postmodernity’s hegemon, the trans-national corporation, particularly where it was operating in its newer, brand-driven mode. At a time when we were told that symbolic production was the dominant economic mode in the West, the logo which was the new corporation’s organising principle, its key property and the talisman of its identity was, in Klein’s view, a sensible, even inevitable focus for dissent. The logo, and a corporation’s brand, partly since they were its central commodities, were also its vulnerabilities. Describing the often-horrific consequences of TNCs’ negiligent or nasty labour and environmental practices (on- and offshore), their voracious co-optation of popular culture, and pointing out the contradictions between these tendencies and the companies’ lovingly nurtured brand identities, Klein offered a rationale for those practices which themselves acted on the symbolic level, and turned the logo against its masters. With Klein (and others like Adbusters) describing, validating and promoting new (and not so new) forms of anticorporate activism, methods of creative resistance with lineage stretching back at least as far as dada became nominalised, - or perhaps branded – as “culture-jamming”, “adbusting”, “hacktivism” etc. In academe, scholarly capital was made from taxonomies and histories of such practices produced for an audience anxious to know about radical cultural action that seemed to be premised on a critical semiotics. These practices themselves became popular (or was it just that they were, suddenly, easier to recognise?) Activist appropriations of the logo began to proliferate, dotting the landscape of our visual culture like pimples on the cheeks of McDonald’s staff. The visual-cultural hack had been codified, incorporated, disseminated, not least through the circuits of that paradigm of international capitalism, publishing. Some questions arose almost immediately. Was the work of Klein and the culture-jammers, whose critique parasitised its object, simply doing its merry, viral work within the body of its late-capitalist host? Or was Klein’s packaging of dissent the final, grand co-optation of oppositional practice? Did either question make sense? And, finally, what was the Matrix? More questions have arisen about Klein’s book and what it described as time has passed. Though her publisher, forgivably, drew comparisons with Marx, whereas Lenin required a prison sentence to come to grips with Capital, No Logo requires only a weekend of a moderately speedy reader. Is the book’s easily digestible analysis sufficient to its object – nothing less than global capitalism – and is a sufficient basis for effective critical action? Does the book, and the practices it describes, simply represent a recrudescence of the tendency on the left, related to Puritan iconoclasm, to be suspicious of visual culture, wary of pleasure and alert for what the illusion conceals? Does Klein’s description of the contradictions between brand identity and corporate practice represent a repetition of ideological critique, where brand management is collapsed into the manufacturing of false consciousness? Does it all proceed from an anxiety around the operation of the sign and its circulation? Or is the opposite true, and is this activism as a playful semiotic contest with(in) corporate culture? Does Klein’s (and, she implies, her generation’s) self-confessed fascination with ‘the shiny surfaces of pop culture’ lead to a fetishism of branding practices and a lack of attention to the operations of what Marxists once called the ‘base’, and do her solutions amount to a strategy of consumer sovereignty-style activism, which leaves the structures of global inequality intact? Does No Logo privilege Western consumer activism as a solution, and does it, through its deployment of the suffering of the Oriental other, simply reconstitute a ‘zone of safety’ around the Western subject? Is it possible, in any case, for any more detailed or nuanced analysis to have a non-specialist circulation? Is it significant that almost all responses to the book are structured by ambivalence? You may be relieved to know that the ‘logo’ edition of m/c, though it needs to be situated in relation to the popular emergence of ‘logo-centric’ critique and practice, doesn’t try to answer too many of these questions directly. Instead, the authors approach the issue theme from the perspective of 2003, where, among other things, a war has intervened and exposed again the strengths and weaknesses of global dissent, and the ambitions of global capital. What this edition of m/c indicates is the variety of possible responses to, and uses of, corporate visual culture. Some of the authors write about or speak to the ‘celebrities’ of anticorporate activism – the new avant-gardes – showing not only that their plurality of political positions, motivations, and means of expression always meant a diverse and surprising range of actions beyond the scope of terms like ‘culture jamming’, but that the character of anticorporate activism has changed since (or always evaded) Klein’s attempt to map them. McKenzie Wark’s feature article is written in the finest tradition of cultural histories of the avant-garde. It tells the story of etoy, the Swiss collective who through fortuity and their own taste for refusal were thrown into a confrontation with one of the brightest rising corporate stars of the e-commerce boom. The importance of this confrontation and its implications increased in direct proportion with its growing absurdity. Danni Zuvela’s chat with the producers of Value-Added Cinema, Susie Khamis’s piece on ®™ark and jOhn pAce’s on the Yes Men show us the interesting and, importantly, very funny methods used by anticorporate activists in challenging the operations of global corporations and the metanational . Some of the authors tell new kinds of stories about brands and their use. Douglas Rushkoff gives us a brief history of the brand and its use in coercion. Lucy Nicholas, in ‘What kind of fucked version of Hello Kitty are you’, ingeniously maps generational and political contest within feminism onto the differing readings, uses and appropriations of that emblem of Japanese-style cuteness, Hello Kitty, based on her research on, and practice of riot grrrl feminism. Andrew Grainger and David L. Andrews, in ‘Postmodern Puma’, tell of how Puma’s commercial recovery in recent years has been premised on ‘nurturing of an ever-expanding array of consumer subjectivities’, and suggest that the very mutability of Puma’s brand identity may ensure its survival in the global style wars. The reader will also find extended theoretical consideration of the mechanisms and functionings of the logo in meaning-making, and of its place in contemporary visual culture. While Helene Frichot carries out a Deleuzean critique of the operations of the logo and its makers, Douglas Kellner thinks about the logo in terms of Situationist ideas about the society of the spectacle, and wonders about the logo as both stimulus to, and object of consumption. In two of the collected pieces, we find scholars turning the lens around on educational institutions, and considering the genesis and uses of the scholarly ‘brand’. Jeremy Hunsinger is concerned with the conversion of the university, and academic reputation, into brand identity. Ned Rossiter worries about the rise of ‘creative industries’ as a scholarly and institutional paradigm in place of the traditional humanities, and and wonders how much it really helps the students in whose name it is instituted. This is related to a paper Rossiter delivered with Danny Butt at the Cultural Studies Association of Australia conference in 2002, which gave rise to lively discussion. While Craig Bellamy echoes and expands on themes in this introduction with a survey of global protest and social movements in the years since No Logo was published, the issue’s cover art – ‘logo’s’ logo – subtly amplifies and complements the themes of the whole issue. In the beginning, we are told, was the word (‘logos’), later we get the word made flesh. Here then is the flesh-made word; the visceral, original meaning of brand presented to us by Melbourne artist busa<>aat. Here is the logo (home)-branded on meat, reminding us of the brand’s genesis as a marker for organic chattels, and parodying and predicting the trajectory of symbolic capital – beyond the adolescent “love-marks” of contemporary branders and into the fusion of flesh and fantasy – real branding, where the good defines the Good. From a present where footballers rename themselves ‘Whiskas’ for a day, busa<>aat sees a future where we can dance together toe to logo, jiggling to a jingle, competing like microscopic Spanish dancers on an Arnott’s Shape. One where we can all get on down at the logo au-go-go. May we have this dance? Works Cited Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. New York: Picador, 2000. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Pace, John and Wilson, Jason A.. "(No) Logo Au-go-go " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Pace, J. & Wilson, J. A. (2003, Jun 19). (No) Logo Au-go-go . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/01-editorial.php>

In one of his final pieces of writing, Timothy Leary—one of the most singularly iconic and influential figures of the 1960s counterculture, known especially for his advocacy of a “molecular revolution” premised upon hallucinogenic self-medication—proposes that [c]ounterculture blooms wherever and whenever a few members of a society choose lifestyles, artistic expressions, and ways of thinking and being that wholeheartedly embrace the ancient axiom that the only true constant is change itself. The mark of counterculture is not a particular social form or structure, but rather the evanescence of forms and structures, the dazzling rapidity and flexibility with which they appear, mutate, and morph into one another and disappear. (ix) But it is not just radical activists and ancient philosophers who celebrate the constancy of change; on the contrary, it is a basic principle of post-industrial capitalism, a system which relies upon the constant extraction of surplus value—this being the very basis of the accumulation of capital—through an ever-accelerating creation of new markets and new desires fostered via a perpetual cycle of technical obsolescence and social destabilisation. Far from being unambiguously aligned with a mode of resistance then (as seemingly inferred by the quote above), the imperative for change would appear to be a basic constituent of that which the latter seeks to undermine. The very concept of “counterculture” as an ideal and a practice has been challenged and contested repeatedly over the past fifty or so years, both inside and outside of the academy. For the most part, the notion of counterculture is understood to have emerged out of the tumultuous cultural shifts of the 1960s, and yet, at the same time, as Theodore Roszak—who first coined the term—notes, the intellectual heritage of such a movement draws upon a “stormy Romantic sensibility, obsessed from first to last with paradox and madness, ecstasy and spiritual striving” (91) that dates back to nineteenth century Idealist philosophy and its critique of a rapidly industrialising civilisation. My purpose in this paper is not to address these numerous conceptualisations of counterculture but instead to analyse specifically the enigmatic definition given by Leary above, whereby he conflates counterculture with the demand for continual change or novelty, arguing that the former appears precisely at the point when “equilibrium and symmetry have given way to a complexity so intense as to appear to the eye as chaos” (ix). Concerned that this definition is internally inconsistent given Leary’s understanding of counterculture as a profoundly anti-capitalist force, I will cursorily illustrate the contradictions that proceed when the notion of counterculture as resistance to capitalist hegemony is combined with the identification of counterculture as an authentic and repeated irruption of the new, albeit one that is inevitably domesticated by and subsumed into the dominant culture against which it is posed, as occurs in Leary’s account. The claim that I make here is that this demand for change as an end in itself is inextricably capitalist in its orientation, and as such, cannot be meaningfully understood as a structural externality to the capitalist processes that it strives to interrupt. Capitalism and Growth The study of counterculture is typically, and probably inevitably premised upon an opposition between a dominant culture and those emergent forces that seek to undermine it. In the words of Roszak, the American counterculture of the 1960s arose in defiance of the “modernizing, up-dating, rationalizing, planning” tendencies of technocracy, “that social form in which an industrial society reaches the peak of its organizational integration” (5). Similarly, for Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher perhaps most closely associated with this counterculture, and whose writings formed the intellectual lynchpin of the student protest movement at that time, “intensified progress seems to be bound up with intensified unfreedom,” and as a consequence, we must strive for “a non-repressive civilization, based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man [sic] and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations” (Eros 4-5). In both cases, the dominant culture is associated with a particular form of repression, based upon the false sense of freedom imposed by the exigencies of the market. “Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom,” argues Marcuse, “if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear” (One-Dimensional 10). Most importantly, Marcuse observes that this facile freedom of choice is propped up by processes of continual renewal, transformation, and rationalisation—“advertising, public relations, indoctrination, planned obsolescence”—operating on the basis of a “relentless utilization of advanced techniques and science,” such that “a rising standard of living is the almost unavoidable by-product of the politically manipulated industrial society” (One-Dimensional 52-53). Writing at a time when the Keynesian welfare state was still a foregone conclusion, Marcuse denounces the way in which an increase in the quality of life associated with the rise of consumerism and lifestyle culture “reduces the use-value of freedom”, for “there is no reason to insist on self-determination if the administered life is the comfortable and even the ‘good’ life” (One-Dimensional 53). The late industrial society, in other words, is presented as driven by a repressive desublimation which does not merely replace the objects of a so-called “high culture” with those of an inferior mass culture, but totally liquidates any such distinction, reducing all culture to a mere process of consumption, divorced from any higher goals or purposes. This desublimation is able to maintain growth through the constant production of novelty—providing new objects for the purposes of consumption. This society is not stagnant then; rather, “[i]ts productivity and efficiency, its capacity to increase and spread comforts, to turn waste into need, and destruction into construction” all represent the demand for a continual production of the new that undergirds its own stability (One-Dimensional 11). This necessary dynamism, and the creative destruction that goes along with it, is a result of the basic laws of competition: the need not only to generate profit, but to maintain this profitability means that new avenues for growth must constantly be laid down. This leads to both a geographical expansion in search of new markets, and a psychological manipulation in order to cultivate needs, desires, and fantasies in consumers that they never knew they had, combined with a dramatic shift in the search for both raw materials and labour power toward the developing economies of Asia. The result, notes David Harvey, is to “exacerbate insecurity and instability, as masses of capital and workers shift from one line of production to another, leaving whole sectors devastated, while the perpetual flux in consumer wants, tastes, and needs becomes a permanent locus of uncertainty and struggle” (106). What we are seeing then, as these processes of production and demands for consumption accelerate, is not so much the maintenance of the comfortable and carefree life that Marcuse sees as destructive to culture; conversely, this acceleration is engendering a sense of disorientation and even groundlessness that leaves us in a state of continual anxiety and disquietude. Although these processes have certainly accelerated in recent years—not least because of the rise of high-speed digital networking and telecommunications—they were prominent throughout the second-half of the twentieth century (in varying degrees), and indicate a general logic of rationalisation and technical efficiency that has been the focus of critique from the proto-countercultural romanticism of the nineteenth century onward. It is Marx who observes that “[t]he driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital to the greatest possible extent,” and it is precisely this seemingly unstoppable impetus toward accumulation that finds its most acute manifestation in our age of digital, post-industrial capitalism (449). What needs to be kept in mind is that capitalism is not opposed to those exteriorities that resist its logic; on the contrary, it is through its ability to appropriate them in a double movement whereby it simultaneously claims to act as the condition of their production and claims the right to represent them on its terms (through the universal sign of money) that capitalism is able to maintain its continual growth. Put simply, capitalism as an economic system and an ideological constellation has proved itself time and time again to be remarkably resilient not only to intellectual critique, but also to the concrete production of new forms of living seemingly contrary to its principles, precisely because it is able to incorporate and thus nullify such threats. The production of the new does not harm capitalism; on the contrary, capitalism thrives on such production. The odd contradiction of the mass society, writes Walter Benjamin, coheres in the way that “the novelty of products—as a stimulus to demand—is accorded an unprecedented importance,” whilst at the same time, “‘the eternal return of the same’ is manifest in mass production” (331). This production of novelty is, in other words, restricted by the parameters of the commodity form—the necessity that it be exchangeable under the terms of capital (as money)—such that its potential heterogeneity is restrained by its identity as a commodity. Capitalism is perfectly capable of creating new modes of living, but it does so specifically according to its terms. This poses a difficulty then for the study and advocacy of counterculture in the terms for which Leary advocates above, because the progressivism of the latter—referring to its demand for continual change and innovation (a demand that admittedly runs counter to the nostalgic romanticism that has motivated a great deal of countercultural thought and praxis, and is certainly not a universally accepted definition of counterculture more broadly)—is not necessarily easily distinguishable from the dominant culture against which it is counterposed. Raymond Williams expresses this frustration well when he observes that “it is exceptionally difficult to distinguish between those which are really elements of some new phase of the dominant culture […] and those which are substantially alternative or oppositional to it” (123). In other words, given that capitalism as an economic system and hegemonic cultural formation is so effective in producing the novelty that we crave—creating objects, ideas, and practices often vastly different to those residual traditions that preceded them—there is no obvious metric for determining when we are looking at a genuine alternative to this hegemony, and when we are looking at yet another variegated product of it. Williams makes a distinction here, whereby the emergence (in the strict sense of coming-into-being or genesis) of a new culture is presumed to be qualitatively different to mere novelty. What is not adequately considered is the possibility that this distinction is entirely illusory—that holding out hope for a qualitatively different mode of existence that will mark a distinct break from capitalist hegemony is in fact the chimera by which this hegemony is sustained, and its cycle of production perpetuated. There is an anxiety here that is present within (and one might suggest even constitutive of) present-day debates over counterculture, particularly in regard to the question of resistance, and what form it might take under the conditions of late capitalism. From Williams’s perspective, it can be argued that “all or nearly all initiatives and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic,” such that “the dominant culture, so to say, at once produces and limits its own forms of counter-culture” (114). To argue this though, he goes on to suggest, would: overlook the importance of works and ideas which, while clearly affected by hegemonic limits and pressures, are at least in part significant breaks beyond them, which may again in part be neutralized, reduced, or incorporated, but which in their most active elements nevertheless come through as independent and original. (114)Authentic breaks in specific social conditions are not just a fantasy, he correctly observes, but have occurred many times across history—and not merely in the guise of violent revolutionary activity. What is needed, therefore, is the development of “modes of analysis which instead of reducing works to finished products, and activities to fixed positions, are capable of discerning, in good faith, the finite but significant openness of many actual initiatives and contributions” (114). For Williams, this openness is located chiefly within the semiotic indeterminacy of the artwork, and the resultant potentiality contained within it for individuals to develop resistant readings contrary to any dominant interpretation. These divergent readings become the sites upon which we might imagine new worlds and new ways of living. There is a sense of resignation in his solution though: an appeal to the autonomy of an artwork, and a momentary sublime glimpse of another world, that will inevitably be domesticated by capital. The difficulty that comes with understanding counterculture as an uncompromising demand for the new, over and against the mundane repetitions of commodity culture and lifestyle consumerism, is that it must reckon with the seemingly inevitable appropriation of these new creations by the system against which they are opposed. In such cases, the typical result is a tragic and fundamentally romantic defeatism, in which the creative individual (or community, etc.) must continue to create anew, knowing full well that their output will immediately find itself domesticated and enervated by the forces of capital. This specific conception of counterculture as perpetual change knows that it is doomed to failure, but takes pleasure in the struggle that nonetheless ensues. The Subsumption of Counterculture “Marx and Freud, perhaps, do represent the dawn of our culture,” writes philosopher Gilles Deleuze, “but Nietzsche is something entirely different: the dawn of counterculture” (142). Friedrich Nietzsche seems like an unlikely candidate for the originator of counterculture—his writings certainly bear little overt resemblance to the premises of the various movements that emerged in the 1960s, even though, as Roszak remarks, these movements actually largely issued forth from “the work of Freud and of Nietzsche, the major psychologists of the Faustian soul” (91)—but what he does share with Leary is a belief, expressed most clearly in his posthumous text The Will to Power (1967), in the political and ethical power of becoming, and the need to celebrate and affirm, rather than resist, a world that appears to be in constant, ineluctable flux. Rather than seeking merely to improve the status quo, Nietzsche works toward total and perpetual upheaval—a transvaluation of all values. In Deleuze’s words, he “made thought into a machine of war—a battering ram—into a nomadic force” (149). At a time when resistance to capitalism seems futile; when the possibility of capitalism ending seems more and more distant (which is not to say that it is unlikely to end anytime soon, but merely that its plausible alternatives have been evacuated from the popular imagination), such a claim can seem rather appealing. But how might we distinguish this conception of perpetual revolution of values from the creative destruction of capitalism itself? Why do we presume that there is such a distinction to be made? Why should Leary’s call for rapidity and flexibility—and more broadly, a celebration of change over constancy—be seen as anything other than an acknowledgement and reinforcement of capitalism’s accelerating cycle of obsolescence? The uncomfortable reality we must consider is that the countercultural, as an apparent exteriority waiting to be appropriated, plays an essential role in the accumulation of capital that drives our economic system, and that accordingly, it cannot be plausibly understood as external to the structural conditions that it opposes. This is not to suggest that counterculture does not produce new possibilities, new opportunities, and new ways of living, but simply that its production is always already structured by capitalist relations—the precise anxiety acknowledged by Williams. Once again, this is not a dismissal of counterculture, just the opposite in fact. It is a rejection of the conflation that Leary makes between counterculture and novelty, the combination of which is supposed to provide a potent threat to capitalist hegemony. “The naive supposition of an unambiguous development towards increased production,” argues German philosopher Theodor Adorno, “is itself a piece of that bourgeois outlook which permits development because […] it is hostile to qualitative difference” (156). Capitalism produces many different types of commodities (within which we can include ideas, beliefs, means of communication, as well as physical goods in the traditional sense), but what unites them is their shared identity under the regime of exchange value (money). This exchange value masks their genuine heterogeneity. But what use is it simply reassuring us that if we continue to produce, we may eventually produce something so new, so different that it will evade capture by this logic? Does this not merely reinforce a complicity between the appeal of the countercultural as a force of change and the continuous accumulation of capital? I would contend that to define counterculture as the production of the new underwrites the inexhaustible productivism of the capitalist hegemony that it seeks to challenge. What if, then, this qualitative difference was created not through the production of the new, but the total rejection of this production as the means to resistance? This would not be to engender or encourage a state of total stasis (which is definitely not a preferable or plausible scenario), but rather, to detach the hope for a better world from the idea that we must achieve this by somehow adding to the world that we already have—to recognise, as Adorno would have it, that “the forces of production are not the deepest substratum of man [sic], but represent his historical form adapted to the production of commodities” (156). Leary’s peculiar conception of counterculture that we have been examining throughout this paper refuses to give countenance to any kind of stability or equilibrium, instead proffering an essentially Nietzschean mode of resistance in which incessant creativity becomes the means to the contrivance of a new world—this is part of what Roszak records as the rejection of Marx’s “compulsive hard-headedness” and the embrace of “[m]yth, religion, dreams, visions” which mark the fundamental romanticism of (post-)1960s counterculture, and its heritage in nineteenth century bourgeois sensibilities. For all the benefits that such a conception of counterculture has provided, it would seem misguided to ignore the ways in which Leary’s rhetoric is undermined by the simple fact that it presumes a hierarchy between a dominant culture (capitalism) and its resistant periphery that is already structured by and given through a capitalist mode of thought that presumes its own self-sufficiency (that is, it assumes the adequacy of the logic of exchange to homogenise all products under the commodity form). The postulate that grounds Leary’s understanding of counterculture is a covert identification of man/woman as a restless, alienated being who will never reach a state of stability or actualisation, and must instead continue to produce in the vain hope that this might finally and definitely change things for the better. Instead of embracing the constancy of change, an ideology that ends up justifying the excesses of a capitalist order that knows nothing other than production, perhaps it is possible to begin reconceptualising counterculture in terms that resist precisely this demand for novelty. As Alexander Galloway declares, “[i]t is time now to subtract from this world, not add to it,” for the “political does not arise from the domain of production” (138-139). We do not need more well-intentioned ideas regarding how the world could be a better place or what new possibilities are on offer—we know these things already, we hear about them every day. What we need, and what perhaps counterculture can offer, is to affirm the truth of that which does not need to be produced, which is always already given to us through the immanence of human thought. In the words of François Laruelle, this is an understanding of human individuals as ordinary, “stripped of qualities or attributes by a wholly positive sufficiency,” such that “they lack nothing, are not alienated,” whereby the identity of the individual “is defined by characteristics that are absolutely original, primitive, internal, and without equivalent in the World […] not ideal essences, but finite, inalienable (and consequently irrecusable) lived experiences” (48-49). The job of counterculture then becomes not so much creating that which did not exist prior, but of realising “what we already know to be true” (Galloway 139). References Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. London and New York: Verso, 1974. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge and London: The Belknapp Press, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles. “Nomad Thought.” The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation. Ed. David B. Allison. New York City: Dell Publishing, 1977: 142-149. Galloway, Alexander R. The Interface Effect. Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2012. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Laruelle, François. From Decision to Heresy: Experiments in Non-Standard Thought. Ed. Robin Mackay. Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2012. Leary, Timothy. “Foreword.” Counterculture through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House. Ken Goffman and Dan Joy. New York City: Villard Books, 2004: ix-xiv. Marcuse, Herbert. One Dimensional Man. London and New York: Routledge, 1991. ---. Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. London: Routledge, 1998. Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume One. London: Penguin, 1976. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Will to Power. Ed. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1967. Roszak, Theodore. The Makings of a Counter Culture. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.


 
 
 There is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points it connects up, certain relatively free or unbounded points, points of creativity, change and resistance, and it is perhaps with these that we ought to begin in order to understand the whole picture. (Deleuze, “Foucault” 37) Monty Cantsin: Why do we use a pervert software robot to exploit our collective consensual mind? Letitia: Because we want the thief to be a digital entity. Monty Cantsin: But isn’t this really blasphemic? Letitia: Yes, but god – in our case a meta-cocktail of authorship and copyright – can not be trusted anymore. (Amazon Noir, “Dialogue”) In 2006, some 3,000 digital copies of books were silently “stolen” from online retailer Amazon.com by targeting vulnerabilities in the “Search inside the Book” feature from the company’s website. Over several weeks, between July and October, a specially designed software program bombarded the Search Inside!™ interface with multiple requests, assembling full versions of texts and distributing them across peer-to-peer networks (P2P). Rather than a purely malicious and anonymous hack, however, the “heist” was publicised as a tactical media performance, Amazon Noir, produced by self-proclaimed super-villains Paolo Cirio, Alessandro Ludovico, and Ubermorgen.com. While controversially directed at highlighting the infrastructures that materially enforce property rights and access to knowledge online, the exploit additionally interrogated its own interventionist status as theoretically and politically ambiguous. That the “thief” was represented as a digital entity or machinic process (operating on the very terrain where exchange is differentiated) and the emergent act of “piracy” was fictionalised through the genre of noir conveys something of the indeterminacy or immensurability of the event. In this short article, I discuss some political aspects of intellectual property in relation to the complexities of Amazon Noir, particularly in the context of control, technological action, and discourses of freedom. Software, Piracy As a force of distribution, the Internet is continually subject to controversies concerning flows and permutations of agency. While often directed by discourses cast in terms of either radical autonomy or control, the technical constitution of these digital systems is more regularly a case of establishing structures of operation, codified rules, or conditions of possibility; that is, of guiding social processes and relations (McKenzie, “Cutting Code” 1-19). Software, as a medium through which such communication unfolds and becomes organised, is difficult to conceptualise as a result of being so event-orientated. There lies a complicated logic of contingency and calculation at its centre, a dimension exacerbated by the global scale of informational networks, where the inability to comprehend an environment that exceeds the limits of individual experience is frequently expressed through desires, anxieties, paranoia. Unsurprisingly, cautionary accounts and moral panics on identity theft, email fraud, pornography, surveillance, hackers, and computer viruses are as commonplace as those narratives advocating user interactivity. When analysing digital systems, cultural theory often struggles to describe forces that dictate movement and relations between disparate entities composed by code, an aspect heightened by the intensive movement of informational networks where differences are worked out through the constant exposure to unpredictability and chance (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning”). Such volatility partially explains the recent turn to distribution in media theory, as once durable networks for constructing economic difference – organising information in space and time (“at a distance”), accelerating or delaying its delivery – appear contingent, unstable, or consistently irregular (Cubitt 194). Attributing actions to users, programmers, or the software itself is a difficult task when faced with these states of co-emergence, especially in the context of sharing knowledge and distributing media content. Exchanges between corporate entities, mainstream media, popular cultural producers, and legal institutions over P2P networks represent an ongoing controversy in this respect, with numerous stakeholders competing between investments in property, innovation, piracy, and publics. Beginning to understand this problematic landscape is an urgent task, especially in relation to the technological dynamics that organised and propel such antagonisms. In the influential fragment, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze describes the historical passage from modern forms of organised enclosure (the prison, clinic, factory) to the contemporary arrangement of relational apparatuses and open systems as being materially provoked by – but not limited to – the mass deployment of networked digital technologies. In his analysis, the disciplinary mode most famously described by Foucault is spatially extended to informational systems based on code and flexibility. According to Deleuze, these cybernetic machines are connected into apparatuses that aim for intrusive monitoring: “in a control-based system nothing’s left alone for long” (“Control and Becoming” 175). Such a constant networking of behaviour is described as a shift from “molds” to “modulation,” where controls become “a self-transmuting molding changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (“Postscript” 179). Accordingly, the crisis underpinning civil institutions is consistent with the generalisation of disciplinary logics across social space, forming an intensive modulation of everyday life, but one ambiguously associated with socio-technical ensembles. The precise dynamics of this epistemic shift are significant in terms of political agency: while control implies an arrangement capable of absorbing massive contingency, a series of complex instabilities actually mark its operation. Noise, viral contamination, and piracy are identified as key points of discontinuity; they appear as divisions or “errors” that force change by promoting indeterminacies in a system that would otherwise appear infinitely calculable, programmable, and predictable. The rendering of piracy as a tactic of resistance, a technique capable of levelling out the uneven economic field of global capitalism, has become a predictable catch-cry for political activists. In their analysis of multitude, for instance, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt describe the contradictions of post-Fordist production as conjuring forth a tendency for labour to “become common.” That is, as productivity depends on flexibility, communication, and cognitive skills, directed by the cultivation of an ideal entrepreneurial or flexible subject, the greater the possibilities for self-organised forms of living that significantly challenge its operation. In this case, intellectual property exemplifies such a spiralling paradoxical logic, since “the infinite reproducibility central to these immaterial forms of property directly undermines any such construction of scarcity” (Hardt and Negri 180). The implications of the filesharing program Napster, accordingly, are read as not merely directed toward theft, but in relation to the private character of the property itself; a kind of social piracy is perpetuated that is viewed as radically recomposing social resources and relations. Ravi Sundaram, a co-founder of the Sarai new media initiative in Delhi, has meanwhile drawn attention to the existence of “pirate modernities” capable of being actualised when individuals or local groups gain illegitimate access to distributive media technologies; these are worlds of “innovation and non-legality,” of electronic survival strategies that partake in cultures of dispersal and escape simple classification (94). Meanwhile, pirate entrepreneurs Magnus Eriksson and Rasmus Fleische – associated with the notorious Piratbyrn – have promoted the bleeding away of Hollywood profits through fully deployed P2P networks, with the intention of pushing filesharing dynamics to an extreme in order to radicalise the potential for social change (“Copies and Context”). From an aesthetic perspective, such activist theories are complemented by the affective register of appropriation art, a movement broadly conceived in terms of antagonistically liberating knowledge from the confines of intellectual property: “those who pirate and hijack owned material, attempting to free information, art, film, and music – the rhetoric of our cultural life – from what they see as the prison of private ownership” (Harold 114). These “unruly” escape attempts are pursued through various modes of engagement, from experimental performances with legislative infrastructures (i.e. Kembrew McLeod’s patenting of the phrase “freedom of expression”) to musical remix projects, such as the work of Negativland, John Oswald, RTMark, Detritus, Illegal Art, and the Evolution Control Committee. Amazon Noir, while similarly engaging with questions of ownership, is distinguished by specifically targeting information communication systems and finding “niches” or gaps between overlapping networks of control and economic governance. Hans Bernhard and Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com (meaning ‘Day after Tomorrow,’ or ‘Super-Tomorrow’) actually describe their work as “research-based”: “we not are opportunistic, money-driven or success-driven, our central motivation is to gain as much information as possible as fast as possible as chaotic as possible and to redistribute this information via digital channels” (“Interview with Ubermorgen”). This has led to experiments like Google Will Eat Itself (2005) and the construction of the automated software thief against Amazon.com, as process-based explorations of technological action. Agency, Distribution Deleuze’s “postscript” on control has proven massively influential for new media art by introducing a series of key questions on power (or desire) and digital networks. As a social diagram, however, control should be understood as a partial rather than totalising map of relations, referring to the augmentation of disciplinary power in specific technological settings. While control is a conceptual regime that refers to open-ended terrains beyond the architectural locales of enclosure, implying a move toward informational networks, data solicitation, and cybernetic feedback, there remains a peculiar contingent dimension to its limits. For example, software code is typically designed to remain cycling until user input is provided. There is a specifically immanent and localised quality to its actions that might be taken as exemplary of control as a continuously modulating affective materialism. The outcome is a heightened sense of bounded emergencies that are either flattened out or absorbed through reconstitution; however, these are never linear gestures of containment. As Tiziana Terranova observes, control operates through multilayered mechanisms of order and organisation: “messy local assemblages and compositions, subjective and machinic, characterised by different types of psychic investments, that cannot be the subject of normative, pre-made political judgments, but which need to be thought anew again and again, each time, in specific dynamic compositions” (“Of Sense and Sensibility” 34). This event-orientated vitality accounts for the political ambitions of tactical media as opening out communication channels through selective “transversal” targeting. Amazon Noir, for that reason, is pitched specifically against the material processes of communication. The system used to harvest the content from “Search inside the Book” is described as “robot-perversion-technology,” based on a network of four servers around the globe, each with a specific function: one located in the United States that retrieved (or “sucked”) the books from the site, one in Russia that injected the assembled documents onto P2P networks and two in Europe that coordinated the action via intelligent automated programs (see “The Diagram”). According to the “villains,” the main goal was to steal all 150,000 books from Search Inside!™ then use the same technology to steal books from the “Google Print Service” (the exploit was limited only by the amount of technological resources financially available, but there are apparent plans to improve the technique by reinvesting the money received through the settlement with Amazon.com not to publicise the hack). In terms of informational culture, this system resembles a machinic process directed at redistributing copyright content; “The Diagram” visualises key processes that define digital piracy as an emergent phenomenon within an open-ended and responsive milieu. That is, the static image foregrounds something of the activity of copying being a technological action that complicates any analysis focusing purely on copyright as content. In this respect, intellectual property rights are revealed as being entangled within information architectures as communication management and cultural recombination – dissipated and enforced by a measured interplay between openness and obstruction, resonance and emergence (Terranova, “Communication beyond Meaning” 52). To understand data distribution requires an acknowledgement of these underlying nonhuman relations that allow for such informational exchanges. It requires an understanding of the permutations of agency carried along by digital entities. According to Lawrence Lessig’s influential argument, code is not merely an object of governance, but has an overt legislative function itself. Within the informational environments of software, “a law is defined, not through a statue, but through the code that governs the space” (20). These points of symmetry are understood as concretised social values: they are material standards that regulate flow. Similarly, Alexander Galloway describes computer protocols as non-institutional “etiquette for autonomous agents,” or “conventional rules that govern the set of possible behavior patterns within a heterogeneous system” (7). In his analysis, these agreed-upon standardised actions operate as a style of management fostered by contradiction: progressive though reactionary, encouraging diversity by striving for the universal, synonymous with possibility but completely predetermined, and so on (243-244). Needless to say, political uncertainties arise from a paradigm that generates internal material obscurities through a constant twinning of freedom and control. For Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, these Cold War systems subvert the possibilities for any actual experience of autonomy by generalising paranoia through constant intrusion and reducing social problems to questions of technological optimisation (1-30). In confrontation with these seemingly ubiquitous regulatory structures, cultural theory requires a critical vocabulary differentiated from computer engineering to account for the sociality that permeates through and concatenates technological realities. In his recent work on “mundane” devices, software and code, Adrian McKenzie introduces a relevant analytic approach in the concept of technological action as something that both abstracts and concretises relations in a diffusion of collective-individual forces. Drawing on the thought of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, he uses the term “transduction” to identify a key characteristic of technology in the relational process of becoming, or ontogenesis. This is described as bringing together disparate things into composites of relations that evolve and propagate a structure throughout a domain, or “overflow existing modalities of perception and movement on many scales” (“Impersonal and Personal Forces in Technological Action” 201). Most importantly, these innovative diffusions or contagions occur by bridging states of difference or incompatibilities. Technological action, therefore, arises from a particular type of disjunctive relation between an entity and something external to itself: “in making this relation, technical action changes not only the ensemble, but also the form of life of its agent. Abstraction comes into being and begins to subsume or reconfigure existing relations between the inside and outside” (203). Here, reciprocal interactions between two states or dimensions actualise disparate potentials through metastability: an equilibrium that proliferates, unfolds, and drives individuation. While drawing on cybernetics and dealing with specific technological platforms, McKenzie’s work can be extended to describe the significance of informational devices throughout control societies as a whole, particularly as a predictive and future-orientated force that thrives on staged conflicts. Moreover, being a non-deterministic technical theory, it additionally speaks to new tendencies in regimes of production that harness cognition and cooperation through specially designed infrastructures to enact persistent innovation without any end-point, final goal or natural target (Thrift 283-295). Here, the interface between intellectual property and reproduction can be seen as a site of variation that weaves together disparate objects and entities by imbrication in social life itself. These are specific acts of interference that propel relations toward unforeseen conclusions by drawing on memories, attention spans, material-technical traits, and so on. The focus lies on performance, context, and design “as a continual process of tuning arrived at by distributed aspiration” (Thrift 295). This later point is demonstrated in recent scholarly treatments of filesharing networks as media ecologies. Kate Crawford, for instance, describes the movement of P2P as processual or adaptive, comparable to technological action, marked by key transitions from partially decentralised architectures such as Napster, to the fully distributed systems of Gnutella and seeded swarm-based networks like BitTorrent (30-39). Each of these technologies can be understood as a response to various legal incursions, producing radically dissimilar socio-technological dynamics and emergent trends for how agency is modulated by informational exchanges. Indeed, even these aberrant formations are characterised by modes of commodification that continually spillover and feedback on themselves, repositioning markets and commodities in doing so, from MP3s to iPods, P2P to broadband subscription rates. However, one key limitation of this ontological approach is apparent when dealing with the sheer scale of activity involved, where mass participation elicits certain degrees of obscurity and relative safety in numbers. This represents an obvious problem for analysis, as dynamics can easily be identified in the broadest conceptual sense, without any understanding of the specific contexts of usage, political impacts, and economic effects for participants in their everyday consumptive habits. Large-scale distributed ensembles are “problematic” in their technological constitution, as a result. They are sites of expansive overflow that provoke an equivalent individuation of thought, as the Recording Industry Association of America observes on their educational website: “because of the nature of the theft, the damage is not always easy to calculate but not hard to envision” (“Piracy”). The politics of the filesharing debate, in this sense, depends on the command of imaginaries; that is, being able to conceptualise an overarching structural consistency to a persistent and adaptive ecology. As a mode of tactical intervention, Amazon Noir dramatises these ambiguities by framing technological action through the fictional sensibilities of narrative genre. Ambiguity, Control The extensive use of imagery and iconography from “noir” can be understood as an explicit reference to the increasing criminalisation of copyright violation through digital technologies. However, the term also refers to the indistinct or uncertain effects produced by this tactical intervention: who are the “bad guys” or the “good guys”? Are positions like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (something like freedom or tyranny) so easily identified and distinguished? As Paolo Cirio explains, this political disposition is deliberately kept obscure in the project: “it’s a representation of the actual ambiguity about copyright issues, where every case seems to lack a moral or ethical basis” (“Amazon Noir Interview”). While user communications made available on the site clearly identify culprits (describing the project as jeopardising arts funding, as both irresponsible and arrogant), the self-description of the artists as political “failures” highlights the uncertainty regarding the project’s qualities as a force of long-term social renewal: Lizvlx from Ubermorgen.com had daily shootouts with the global mass-media, Cirio continuously pushed the boundaries of copyright (books are just pixels on a screen or just ink on paper), Ludovico and Bernhard resisted kickback-bribes from powerful Amazon.com until they finally gave in and sold the technology for an undisclosed sum to Amazon. Betrayal, blasphemy and pessimism finally split the gang of bad guys. (“Press Release”) Here, the adaptive and flexible qualities of informatic commodities and computational systems of distribution are knowingly posited as critical limits; in a certain sense, the project fails technologically in order to succeed conceptually. From a cynical perspective, this might be interpreted as guaranteeing authenticity by insisting on the useless or non-instrumental quality of art. However, through this process, Amazon Noir illustrates how forces confined as exterior to control (virality, piracy, noncommunication) regularly operate as points of distinction to generate change and innovation. Just as hackers are legitimately employed to challenge the durability of network exchanges, malfunctions are relied upon as potential sources of future information. Indeed, the notion of demonstrating ‘autonomy’ by illustrating the shortcomings of software is entirely consistent with the logic of control as a modulating organisational diagram. These so-called “circuit breakers” are positioned as points of bifurcation that open up new systems and encompass a more general “abstract machine” or tendency governing contemporary capitalism (Parikka 300). As a consequence, the ambiguities of Amazon Noir emerge not just from the contrary articulation of intellectual property and digital technology, but additionally through the concept of thinking “resistance” simultaneously with regimes of control. This tension is apparent in Galloway’s analysis of the cybernetic machines that are synonymous with the operation of Deleuzian control societies – i.e. “computerised information management” – where tactical media are posited as potential modes of contestation against the tyranny of code, “able to exploit flaws in protocological and proprietary command and control, not to destroy technology, but to sculpt protocol and make it better suited to people’s real desires” (176). While pushing a system into a state of hypertrophy to reform digital architectures might represent a possible technique that produces a space through which to imagine something like “our” freedom, it still leaves unexamined the desire for reformation itself as nurtured by and produced through the coupling of cybernetics, information theory, and distributed networking. This draws into focus the significance of McKenzie’s Simondon-inspired cybernetic perspective on socio-technological ensembles as being always-already predetermined by and driven through asymmetries or difference. As Chun observes, consequently, there is no paradox between resistance and capture since “control and freedom are not opposites, but different sides of the same coin: just as discipline served as a grid on which liberty was established, control is the matrix that enables freedom as openness” (71). Why “openness” should be so readily equated with a state of being free represents a major unexamined presumption of digital culture, and leads to the associated predicament of attempting to think of how this freedom has become something one cannot not desire. If Amazon Noir has political currency in this context, however, it emerges from a capacity to recognise how informational networks channel desire, memories, and imaginative visions rather than just cultivated antagonisms and counterintuitive economics. As a final point, it is worth observing that the project was initiated without publicity until the settlement with Amazon.com. There is, as a consequence, nothing to suggest that this subversive “event” might have actually occurred, a feeling heightened by the abstractions of software entities. To the extent that we believe in “the big book heist,” that such an act is even possible, is a gauge through which the paranoia of control societies is illuminated as a longing or desire for autonomy. As Hakim Bey observes in his conceptualisation of “pirate utopias,” such fleeting encounters with the imaginaries of freedom flow back into the experience of the everyday as political instantiations of utopian hope. Amazon Noir, with all its underlying ethical ambiguities, presents us with a challenge to rethink these affective investments by considering our profound weaknesses to master the complexities and constant intrusions of control. It provides an opportunity to conceive of a future that begins with limits and limitations as immanently central, even foundational, to our deep interconnection with socio-technological ensembles. References “Amazon Noir – The Big Book Crime.” http://www.amazon-noir.com/>. Bey, Hakim. 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