Earlier this year the edu-factory organizers invited me to comment on the passage from hierarchisation to autonomous institutions. Indeed, I think it appropriate to maintain the connection between hierarchy and autonomy. This constitutive tension is apparent in the political economy and social-technical dimensions of both open source and proprietary software that provides the architecture for communicative relations. And it manifests on multiple fronts in the modalities of organization that attend the creation of autonomous spaces and times of radical or alternative research and education projects, experiments and agendas. There is no absolute autonomy, but rather a complex field of forces and relations that hold the potential for partial autonomy, or 'the difference which makes a difference' (Bateson).

Alessandro Delfanti and Ned Rossiter, ‘La sfida del lavoro al tempo della rete [The challenge of working at the time of network: Interview with Ned Rossiter]’, Il Manifesto, 1 May, 2008. Italian version available here.

Alessandro Delfanti: What's the best way to rebuild labour organizations in the network society? The anti-globalisation movement (a network-based movement) is dead and unions are incapable to intercept the needs of precarious and cognitive workers ...

Readers in the West have for some time now associated the economic ascendancy of China with a proliferation of social conflicts and ongoing abuse of human rights. For those on both the Left and Right there is a logic of affirmation about such tensions: state-capitalism is at its authoritarian worst in China.

For the Left, social conflict registers as the condition or symptom of intense economic transformation. This grafts nicely with well-rehearsed humanist, if not Marxian formulations, on the inequalities inherent to capitalism. The Right, meanwhile, cannot quite reconcile the fact that increasingly open markets do not equate with the emergence of liberal democracy.

Different media of expression make intelligible the creative industries in unforeseen and novel ways that depart from the self-referential script of policy discourse and its circumscribed ‘mapping’ exercises. It must be said, however, that all idioms and modes of expression are necessarily self-referential. This is how they obtain their distinct grammar and singularity. In this sense, modes of expression (media of communication) can be likened to the concept of genre.

[here's a paper I wrote from a couple of weeks ago that has some relevance for the bei-ci project]

Design Mai
Digitalability Symposium
Tools, Talents and Turnovers: New Technologies in Design
Berlin, 12-13 May, 2007
http://www.designmai.de

Session: Working Environment and New Business Models

'Can Organized Networks Make Money for Designers?'

Ned Rossiter