One week to go

I have been formally accepted for a stage at Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (CSI) à  l’École des Mines de Paris – ParisTech. The stage begins on Mars and, as Mars is just at a glance, I have been reviewing some Parisian links concerning WiFi. In deed, some folks at CSI are already working-researching with “les réseaux wifi” so it will be a great opportunity to share experiences and information. CSI is one of the main researching nodes in the STS field (Mostly known for being home  of Michel Callon, Bruno Latour and Madeleine Akrich works) and it should be interesting to know what are the main interests, turns, and issues that are shaping their research agenda. Meanwhile, I have to thank Antoine Hennion for letting me know and guiding me through the procedures of CSI. Thx!

Blog entry first published in http://guifi.net/en/node/20052

It seems that the same security arguments that lead to unjustified and threatening law proposals to civil rights since 9/11 is now used to approve more laws that, in the name of “our security” (not homeland security necessarily), will widen the already open door to our privacy.

As one can read;

“the Internet Safety Act applies not just to AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and so on–but also to the tens of millions of homes with Wi-Fi access points or wired routers that use the standard method of dynamically assigning temporary addresses. (That method is called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, or DHCP.” meaning that; ”A provider of an electronic communication service or remote computing service shall retain for a period of at least two years all records or other information pertaining to the identity of a user of a temporarily assigned network address the service assigns to that user.”

Well, it is far from Catalonia but trends are trends and, while we did avoid (thanks to public demonstrations) the state of emergency and law enforcement one could expect after the 11-march attacks in Madrid, it is not clear if cities and ISP’s will mirror themselves in what is going on in the States. As usual, we would prefer to mirror ourselves with seattlewireless or NYwireless, but still, it is worth giving it a thought.

You can see the full news about this law proposal in http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10168114-38.html.

RAX! (recerca, amor i xarxa)

Yann Bona.

here it is; http://www.laquadrature.net/en

I found this link thx to Roger Baig and therefore it is now permanently added to this blog-link neighborhood. La Quadrature du Net describe themselves as a “citizen group informing about legislative projects menacing civil liberties as well as economic and social development in the digital age. La Quadrature du Net informs citizens, public authorities, organizations, corporations. It works with everyone to elaborate balanced alternative solutions. La Quadrature du Net is supported by French, European and international NGOs including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Society Institute and Privacy International.” (LQDN)

It is an interesting perspective on Collective Action guided trough the Net. Enjoy!

RAX!

In order to get some info for my first thesis chapter (there is a zero chapter as well…). As Citizen Management of Technology is my subject, I am interested in knowing what does it mean to participate today in a city such as Barcelona. And, particularly, at how have the relations between civil society and public institutions evolved. What in-between spaces can emerge from these interactions. Not being an expert on participatory dynamics, urban planning or social movements, I have started some interviews.

So far, I thank peole from PsicoSAO (Grup de recerca en psicologia social, ambinetal i organizacional) and Sitesize.

RAX!

guifi.net member and colleague Efraín Foglia has recently published and article on locative media and artistic media entitled; “Redes paralelas y cartografías detectoras: prácticas sociales y artísticas con medios locativos” (Side networks and detecting cartographies: Social and artistic practices with locative media). You can see it here (Spanish Version);

In deed, the article is splited in two parts so it covers up how people engage into open telecommunications networks such as guifi.net (1st part) as well as some entangled practices of art, locative media and control & surveillance technologies (2nd part) – drawing from Audible Distance and Transborder Immigrant Tool projects.

Another one to add to my bibliography

RAX!

Since yesterday  some mails form guifi lists are reporting a complaint about the decision from (we do not know yet) to remove and uninstall the antenna guifi.net had located at the Centre de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona (CCCB) via Platoniq.

The mail coming form the CCCB argues that, although they have interest in an initiative such as guifi.net, they have been told from the Catalan administration (they do not specify more than that so we do not know exactly from where the decision came from) that the antenna had to be removed. CCCB is still a public institution and has to follow this type of directives. Although, precisely as a public institution, it should look for the public interest, IMHO. And guifi.net, so far, does no harm to the public interest. Or does it? (Big quotation mark here). Even if it did, an explanation of the reasons that lead to this decision as well as knowing from where the decision came from are minimums one could expect from their institutions. Because otherwise, the decision seems totally arbitrary; to say the least.

Contacts have already started in order to know exactly what the reasons are, who the decisions came from (Not to point an accusative finger but to know who to argue with).

Should not the “public institutions” at large be more “kind”? More generous in the type of accounts they give to their citizens? Specially when dealing with people who have proved to accomplish many agreements with them before? As in many other cases, one wonders when and why certain agreements with catalan administration are successful whereas other don’t.

Here is a picture of the graph status activity for CCCB supernode on a year basis (though it has not been fully operative);

From February 16th ’till 20th, Miguel Morey (who has prologued many of Focuault spanish editions) will be carrying out a monographic course entitled; “Peut-être un jour…El pensament intempestiu en Michel Foucault” @ MACBA in Barcelona. You can see the program here.

Foucault from www.whatknows.com

Why post about Foucault in a WiFi Blog? Well, being a social psychologist, I have come to known countless studies that, drawing from a foucauldian perspective could talk about any imaginable phenomena. I guess this is what happens when a great thinker as Foucault becomes widely read and his perspective is shared and sometimes, it is used as a lingua franca for sociologists, psychologist, meds, criminologists, lawyers, politicians, policy makers, managers, and many others. Indeed, as a popular expression tells;

“If you give a hammer to a child, then, everything becomes smashable. Everything becomes a nail.” (popular)

Therefore, it is no surprise that, all of a sudden, everything was read under a disciplinary paradigm, everything was crossed by power relations. And, IMHO, it was great. But times are a changing (Dylan dixit).

And so did Baudrillard publishing his “Oublier Foucault” in ‘77 @  Steve Lotringers semiotexte editorial project.

Nevertheless, there is always a strange feeling of remembrance, sort of  “I know this story, but, it is such a good story that I can not resist hearing it again”. And I guess that for many scholars that will assist at this seminar this will be the case (There are no entries left). Certainly mixed w/ a will to keep learning about Foucault (Because people being able to explain Foucault  thoughts  with maestry are on short supply these days.)

Going back to the question. ¿Foucault-WiFi? It could be “just”* a matter of focusing on how the object-device (WiFi) [materiality] , the body [anatomy] and the norm (How, Where, When  to use WiFi) [politics?] come together. That is what discipline is  also about; not only distributing bodies into spaces and times but establishing, producing the ways one has to behave vis à vis certain objects. Of course there are many ways of adressing this question, as many as researchers are. Mark Poster developed his particular vision of Foucault and Databases, for instance. (But that is another story…)

See you at the seminar

RAX!

* of curse, taken seriously, if we are to follow Foucault procedures, the answer will need a carefull and detailed review of a large corpus of documents. And, probably, giving an account that does not limit his extension to the “discipline” effects. It seems that for Foucault there is always a duality between the “individual” and “individualisation” practises and the management of popultaion as a whole; as a matter of concern and as a generator of fine measuring instruments to grasp the ever increasing multiplicity that is constantly pouring out of the control mecanisms set up to contain (and legislate) her. The population or policy issues have not been adressed here. But, hey, this is just a post.