The Amazon-Streik-Bündnis was founded 2013 during the first strikes at the amazon branch in Leipzig. It was the purpose to organize the employers and to fight for higher wages and better labor conditions. In the end of 2015 they called for a nationwide consumer strike to increase economic pressure. In its formal make up it serves as a reaction to the specific way in which companies like Amazon operate.
Dies ist kein Boykott… Aufruf zum Konsument*innenstreik!, Leaflet
Claudia Aradau is lecturer in War Studies at King´s College, London, and part of the editing board of the magazine Radical Philosophy. In Politics of Catastrophe: Genealogies of the Unknown, as in the magazine Security Dialogue, which she edits, she forwards a critique of securitization and the shift from questions of reproduction to questions of infrastructure in state policies.
The Signature of security. Big data, anticipation, surveillance, article
Rachel Baker is a network artist who collaborated on the influential irational.org. Her art practice explores techniques used in contemporary marketing to gather and distribute data for the purposes of manipulation and propaganda. She has taught a.o. at The London School of Economics and the Leuphana University Lüneburg and worked at BBC New Media as a developer. Networks of all kinds are “sites” for Baker’s public and private distributed art practices.
Temps of the World Unite, GIF
Kendra Briken is lecturer für Human Resource Management at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her work focuses on the transformations of work in the context of new technologies. Besides, she is a part of the Institut Solidarische Moderne that aims to initiate dialogue about solidary alternatives to neo-liberalism.
Hirn und Muskeln. Arbeit in der Wissensgesellschaft, Artikel
Capulcu (turkish for “no-goods”) is a group of activists and hacktivists critical of technology. On the one hand they work practically to ward of digitalised access to our lives, which they understand as a technological attack. On the other hand they don’t stop at this digital self-defence but subjekt digitalisation to radical analysis and critique.
Facebook the Conqueror, article
Hans-Christian Dany is an author and artist from Hamburg. In a number of essays he discussed cybernetics, control-society, and the possibility of a liberated tomorrow. Dany understands cybernetic control-loop and feedback-systems as epitomising contemporary control and communication. Accordingly, resistance against such a constellation can only work through withdrawal and refusal, that is, in that we become idiots.
Warum ich Idiot werden will, article in the newspaper Standard (German).
Timo Daum is a developer and teaches at HTW Berlin as well as BTK Hamburg et al. Besides, he creates and curates audiovisual media. He publishes mainly on digital economies and online technologies. For the blog Das Filter he authors Understanding Digital Capitalism, a series of articles which deal with topics like labor relations in the information society, commodities and business models of the platform economy or Californian ideology.
Understanding Digital Capitalism, Webseries
Helmut Dunkhase is a mathematician from Berlin. His studies include the poltical economy of communism and calculation models for a planned economy. He was the editor and translator of the german issue of “Towards a new socialism” by Paul Cockshott and Paul Cottrell (2006).
Planwirtschaft im 21. Jahrhundert, article
The collective Kitchen Politics is the editor of a bookseries of the same name, which understands itself as a queerfeminist intervention into discussions and struggles around reproductive work in 21. Century capitalism. In 2015 they published the book Sie nennen es Leben, wir nennen es Arbeit, which deals with the global market for Biotechnology and reproductive medicine as well as with the question which forms of critique and resistance can react to the specific valorisation of bodies.
Bottom up!, article
Thomasz Konicz is journalist and author. Konicz discusses capitalism and its crises in the 21st century from the perspective of competition on the scale of the world market. He focusses especially on the relation between neo-imperialism and the world market. He published Kapitalkollaps: Die finale Krise der Weltwirtschaft (2016).
Anatomie einer Liquiditätsblase, article
Dagmar Fink is lecturer for cultural studies. She investigates figures of the cyborg, queer feminity, Science fiction and Techno-Sciences. She well as member of the querfeminist collective of translators gender et alia as well as a founding member of the austrian union of feminist scientists.
Wir sind die Borg. Cyborgs queer gelesen, essay
Seb Franklin is lecturer in contemporary literature at King´s college London. Franklin understands the foundations of digitalisation as rooted in the cultural logic of capitalism, which originated in the 19th century. Against this backdrop, Franklin analysis control as the central contemporary episteme, which shapes the organisation of labour, subjectivity and collectivity. Recently he published Control. Digitality as Cultural Logic (2015).
Figuring the Nerves of Economy, lecture
Freundinnen und Freunde der klassenlosen Gesellschaft are a Berlin based communist group. Together with eiszeit (Schweiz) and la banda vaga (Freiburg) they publish the magazine Kosmoprolet, which tries to advance an analyses of contemporary class-society. They discuss, among other things, marxist discussions around the concept of ‚productive forces‘ as well as the developement of a global surplus proletariat.
Proletarische Bewegung und Produktivkraftkritik, accompanying commentary
Christian Frings is an author, translater and activist. His themes are global class-struggles and the critic of the political economy. His last publication was in the anthologie “Was tun mit Kommunismus?” (2013).
Über Operaismus und zur Kritik des Sozialstaats, radiolecture
Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He is the founder of internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are “Dark Fiber”(2002), “Uncanny Networks”(2002) and “My First Recession”(2003).
Wem läuft die Netzavantgarde nach, Herr Lovink, interview
Rüdiger Mats did his PhD on the economy of real existing socialism and publishes frequently to leftist political concepts as well as to the idea, the organisation and the historical defensive of communism. He has been member of the communist group “the future is unwritten” in Leibzig until 2016.
Butter bei die Fische. Debatte um einen neuen Sozialismus, article
Sandro Mezzadra is associate lecturer at the University of Bologna. Mezzadra takes logistics as the central element of capitalism in the 21st century. As such it allows to understand its global functioning as well as its fragility and problems. Together with Brett Neilson he published the book “Border as Method. The Multiplication of Labor” (2013).
Operations of Capital, article
Out of the woods is blog run by a lose collective investigating climate change, its bases and implications. It combines anticapitalist and ecological perspectives.
Human Nature. A review of Jason W. Moore´s book on world-ecology, reviewessay
Matteo Pasquinelli is a philosopher and Visiting Professor in Media Theory at the University of Arts and Design, Karlsruhe. He edited a.o. the anthologies “Gli algoritmi del capitale” (2014) and “Alleys of Your Mind: Augmented Intelligence and its Traumas” (2015). He has been writing extensively on the algorithmization of contemporary life and thought in recent years.
The Eye of the Algorithm. Cognitive Anthropocene and the Making of the World Brain, article
Johannes Paul Raether is a Berlin-based performance artist who creates drag-avataras which materialize utopia and catastrophe of the capitalist relation between human and technology. His work has been exhibited at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Transmission Gallery Glasgow and currently at Kunstpalais Erlangen, among others. One character, the “world healing witch” Protektorama studies our obsession with smartphones, while Transformella is concerned with today’s reproductive technologies. Transformella visits spaces of their industrialization and presents an emancipatory appropriation in a “repro-techno-tribe”.
For Re_vision Medienkollektiv, based in Bielefeld, Media and Technology are not purely theoretical matters. Besides the discussion of possible futures, contemporary promises of technology and accelerationism, the members of the collective build robots, document or undertake interventions. They are working on a collection of essays, which deal with a critical questioning of perspective on the development and application of technology in leftist politics which is supposed to come out in 2017.
The machine to be the other. Virtual reality, body swap narratives and reinforcements of heteronormative gender matrix, essay
Nina Scholz lives and works as a journalist in Berlin. She is editor of HATE magazine and writes for Der Freitag, Jungle World, die tageszeitung, Frankfurter Rundschau and Missy Magazine about digital change, social movements and pop-culture. Her book “Nerds, Geeks und Piraten. Digital Natives in Kultur und Politik” was published 2014 in Bertz und Fischer press.
Die “Kalifornische Ideologie” und die Linke, essay
Ana Teixeira-Pinto is currently finishing her PhD at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and publishes as an art-critics and theoretician in journals like e-flux, Frieze/de oder Texte zur Kunst. Her work focuses on the transformation of social spheres – like the body, home or city – through digitalization and financialization. She discusses artistic positions which hint at very contemporary futures, at control as well as resistance of the subject-as-user.
Home Alone. On art, architecture, and domestic effects of digitalization, article
Andrea Vetter (http://www.postwachstum.de/author/andreavetter) is writing her doctoral thesis on the concept of convival technology at the Humboldt University Berlin. After an education in journalism she was the programm-coordinator for the Attac-Conference Jenseits des Wachstums?! (Berlin, 2011) and coorganised the fourth international Degrowth-Conference (Leipzig, 2014).
#Degrowth – Wachstumskritik und konviviale Technik, talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inFvNQMMMUo
Carolin Wiedemann is a sociologist and freelance journalist in Berlin. She writes about control societies, utopias, migration and protest in the feuilleton of FAS, Spiegel Online, analyse&kritik and missy magazine. Her dissertation is about new forms of collectivity and resistance and comes out soon in transcript press.
Weggebeamt. Warum virtuelle Realität 2015 wieder das nächste große Ding wurde, newspaperarticle