SPAWNPOINT

25 TWEETS FOR WRKRS PWR

1.    Everything belongs to everyone.
2.    We inhabit a form-of-life. Turn alienation into subjectification.
3.    Each one teach one. Our power lies in our ability to improvise.
4.    There are no domestic issues. There are no national problems.
5.    The myth of profligacy has no basis in economic realities.
6.    Let derivatives on autonomous proletarian action become the most secure market for investment.
7.    There is no power like class power.
8.    Class development rivals and utilises capitalist development. Take it, or leave it.
9.    The proletariat is the innovative class. Capital exploits innovation, it does not innovate itself.
10.    We reject liberal sustainability discourse. Instead, we embrace a new conversation on Marxist resilience.
11.     Political organization can represent the proletariat in the same way words can describe colours.
12.    The Labour Party is an organizational skeleton. Any populist flesh could reanimate it; the Labour Zombie will not necessarily have any socialist cells.
13.    The only thing that can overcome the current blockage in capital is RAW (class) POWER. Ours, or theirs.
14.    RAW CLASS POWER.
15.    Any class organization needs to understand its limits as a class organization.
16.    Class organization is not the same thing as class power.
17.    Strategically, stimulating class power should be the primary objective for any class organization in the current situation.
18.    We should not through out class organization just because we believe that class power has primacy.
19.    30 years of wage repression and political stagnation has left a credibility deficit in governance. The time is ripe for movements of social reproduction.
20.    Labour is the core of our relationship to capital, but for capital it is a single arrow in a packed quiver. Blockages can be made elsewhere.
21.    Locate class power within the queer.
22.    Reject any ideology of anti-desire.
23.    Get in tune with the rhythm of the labour force.
24.    Do not look to the left.
25.    The Future’s Bright- The Future’s Total Old-World Ideological Collapse.

LET OUR ALGORITHMS SET THE WORLD ALIGHT. CODE FOR WORKERS POWER. CODE FOR LOVE.

(An Open Letter to my fellow coders)

Like all programmers I have a love/hate relationship with algorithms. In my particular work they are a stock in trade. They are practical mathematics at its best, building the world we inhabit through shaping our social relations. But they are out of control. Not that they are out of human control, a monster threatening to wreak havoc upon our city. But they operate outside the understanding of the majority of people upon whom they have the most effect. Through their relationship with capital, they have become trade secrets. Yet algorithms build the very substance of our world- our interpersonal relations.

I long ago realized these algorithms rule my life, make these decisions for me, and the way I live online, and in this city. And I’m not scared by them, I’m not mad at them any more. I just want them to work better. I’ve given up resisting, I want them to deliver the promises they implicitly made. I’m happy to live in the filter bubble, but why won’t it deliver love?

I realized about 3 months ago that I enjoy the mediation of experience. Some might say, I don’t know, that it means I’m not really experiencing it, but isn’t that just the crankiest position you’ve ever heard? That sounds like someone living in the past. I like the control, I like the disinvestment. I like getting the burst of information I want, when I want it, with the ability to turn it off. Life is better without risk. Why does no-one ever put across my side of the story?

I had something of a formative experience with relation to this mediation. He was a new lover, perfunctory and not passionate, but enjoyable company. We had been drunk at a city bar, and we’d fucked when we got to his flat, though I can’t remember too much about it. I had fitful sleep, the way you do when you’re sleeping with someone new, but I was dehydrated too. I was slipping in and out of a drunken delirium. I turned, close to slipping off the side of the bed, shifting myself back into a more comfortable place. As he lay his hands on me, all I could think was “I wish this were mediated”. “I wish this was data”

I want an algorithm to help me achieve better sex.
I want to crave live sex more than mediated sex. I want it to be as perfect as when they do it.

All this disgusts me. This desire is built upon a market basis. This desire is what keeps me going back to the websites, not into the world. I don’t want positive reinforcement, I want to see the conflict the algorithm smoothes over made real, writ large upon the city. Because I feel like the constant smoothing is degrading our language, our communication, which is where the human potential in the internet lies. We’re in a whirlwind of social frustration here. Since the riots that tore up the city, that’s been exposed, don’t you think? The audience for symbolic theatre has gone and the actors have failed to suspend our disbelief.

As a coder, I want to say this to you. We speak a young, international language. I like to think of coding as the language of the proletariat, because it is a language that cannot fail to build, to be productive. We’re not using it. I’m happy with all my own contradictions, I think I know how to work them out: but it’ll take all of us. We need to code for community, not for this filter bubble. There was a slogan on the Paris streets on May 68- “you will end up by dying of comfort”. I think that might be what we’re doing here. We’re not coding for happiness, but for comfort, and I think maybe we need to shake ourselves out of that habit. We need to learn to take risks again. We have to make things exciting.

We are proletarianised white-collar workers; not only in our working conditions, pay-check to pay-check, buying our own tools, funding our own training with future pay-cuts; but also in our completely disempowered relationship between what we make and its effect on our lives, day to day. These algorithms shape our very being, our understanding of what it is like to be human. These are the flowers that garland our chains.

We must understand what it means to have our bodies shaped by our technological development, to have our brains rewired, to have our sexualities reformulated. I do not believe this is identity politics, in that most derogatory term. If we fail to address it, we fail to create a new world. Until we develop a revolutionary strategy of algorithmic emancipation, we are nothing.

First distributed online, October 2011

Distributed 9th March 2009, Paris and Lyon

LES CHIENS DU BANLIEUE

Non au gouvernement !
Non aux socialistes !
Non au Trotskyists, les anarchistes, les flic !
Non aux pères de nos amies !
Non à la sécurité sociale !
Non à la pauvreté, au Renault et au Le Monde !
Non à l’histoire !
Non à la République !
Non à l’UE, au facebook et à l’ATTAC !
Non à l’Internet !
Non à Adidas !
Non au lycée, aux démonstrations et à la métro !
Non à l’opéra !
Non à Canal+ !
Non aux universitaires, au Wi-Fi
et à l’Air France !
Non à la mort sociale !

OUI AUX CHIENS !

[English translation]

THE DOGS OF THE BANLIEUE

No to the government !
No to the socialists !
No to the Trotskyists, the anarchists, the police !
No to the fathers of our girlfriends !
No to social security !
No to poverty, Renault and Le Monde !
No to history !
No to the Republic !
No to the EU, facebook and ATTAC !
No to the internet !
No to Adidas !
No to high school, demonstrations and the metro !
No to the opera !
No to canal+ !
No to academics, wi-fi and Air France !
No to social death !

YES TO THE DOGS !

January 15th 2013

Sirs and Madams,

On good days we take pride in our work. We work hard and with supreme diligence to provide a very specific service: the reproduction of a codified and ritualistic bourgeois form of life. It is a stripped and mottled reflection, however, of a lifestyle that has ceased to exist in all but a tiny handful of households across the country. It is stripped, because all the cultural mores and etiquette are removed. The social context of the club is not a bastion that supports a society of deference; rather, it is the last refuge of that society. But it is a mottled reflection because it is a performance of respect and deference. You no longer treat us with dignity and respect, and in turn we offer you our deferential courtesies because we have high rents in low-quality property to pay.
    This open letter is a call for this charade to be over. We are a group of workers, ranging from kitchen porters to maître d’s, from across London’s top historic private members clubs. We take pride in our tradition, but it is due to this understanding that we recognise the historic changes that we are seeing across Europe. We have been inspired by the actions of service staff across the continent, not least the brave actions by the waiters and waitresses in Rome and throughout Italy, and we call for an end to this redundant social order in the workplace. Over the last 10 years we have been the wet-nurses to the deals that have ripped apart our continent. We understand better than most how the reproduction of power happens in our country; it goes hand in hand with our role, the reproduction of a fabricated bourgeois comfort, and of all the social relations than accompany it.
    We reject this now. That is why we marched with millions of others last October, and why we too (in hundreds, if not unanimously) risked our livelihoods by refusing to work for the week-long strike. That is why we have started to organise. But here we go further. We refuse to perpetuate the traditional reproduction of social forms we feel our job entails- servility masked as civility, social and gender hierarchies, licensed sexual assault, denigration and dehumanisation dressed as banter. We believe we should act as humans through mutual respect, not as automatons through the cudgel of the pay-packet.
    We demand change from you!

The Staff