ulises mejias

Here’s a project for FLEFF I just launched. You are all invited to participate!

Can you help a bunch of ghosts wage topological war, one Google Map at a time?

Welcome to Open Space, the Alternate Reality Game hosted by the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF).

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an interactive, multiplayer Web-based exercise in collective storytelling and distributed inquiry. Everyone can play, and participants can shape the actions of the characters and the outcome of the story.

The theme for this year’s FLEFF is Open Space. This ARG is intended to help us explore how exactly space is opened — not just physical space, but conceptual and political space as well.

How the Game Works

• Each month or so, we provide a street-view Google Map, a little window into our modern world.
• Then we ask our rival teams of dead or imaginary characters (including intellectuals like Marshall McLuhan, revolutionaries like Commander Ramona, or even mythical creatures like Jingwei) to explore the myriad forms and meanings of ‘open space.’
• Waging a discursive battle (a high-brow flame war), they fight to defend or liberate the Google Map.
• What does it mean to defend or liberate a Google Map? Well, that’s up to you! Go to our website, get more information, and start playing!

Play the Game

http://openspace.ulisesmejias.com/

More on Alternate Reality Games (ARGS):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game
http://www.worldwithoutoil.org/

I’m behind posting updates about various talks and projects, but meanwhile here are some photographs from recent months.

Fields, Fog and Moon (Upstate NY)

Rainstorm over Lake Ontario (Oswego, NY)

First Snow

The texts and videos of the lectures and keynotes presented during the 4th Inclusiva-net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes (July 6 through 10, 2009) are now available for download!

My paper, Peerless: The Ethics of P2P Network Disassembly, is available here (o si deseas la versión en español esta aqui). The video of the lecture is also available.

Other noteworthy presentations:

• Ál Cano Santana: Guifi.net: Peer-to-peer network and Free Social Web for collective empowerment
• Juan Martín Prada: P2P Networks and Processes: Beyond the Logics of Exchange
• Michel Bauwens: Conditions for the Radicality of P2P Paradigm
• Andrew Whelan: Leeching Bataille: peer-to-peer Potlatch and the Acephalic Response
• Bodó Balázs: Movie Piracy and (the Lack of) Cinemas in Hungary

And while you are at it, check out the sites of some of the cool people I met there or the amazing organizations I got to learn about:

• Alfonso y Co.
• Ignacio de Castro
• Universidad Nomada
• Platoniq
• Patio Maravillas
• Kirsty Boyle
• Maria PTQK

What is often lost in framing the ongoing Net Neutrality debate as one that pits the Left v. the Right is how both sides are often after the same thing: advancing the corporate agenda. The debate is increasingly eroding the notion of Internet users as citizens instead of just consumers. Sadly, this points to the lack of any real political alternatives or ‘open spaces’ around this issue. But let us examine each side’s position more carefully.

Net Neutrality started as a call from idealist cybernauts to keep the government off the Internet (wait… wasn’t the Internet a government invention to begin with?). The goal was to resist any attempt at censorship, taxes or bureaucratic regulations. Information, after all, wanted to be free! This position was popularized by academics and now, in the Obama age when it is cool to trust the government again, has been transformed into the belief that the real threat comes not from government, but from greedy corporations. Thus, we have the FCC issuing not only a defense of Net Neutrality, but hinting of regulations that would ensure transparency and corporate accountability.
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I have been invited to be a guest blogger at FLEFF 2010’s Open Space Project (I will be cross-posting the content here in my regular blog). This project asks: “How do we find open spaces in geography, community, melody, materiality, digitality, virtuality?  How do we identify, locate, question, create, and  imagine open space(s)?” My blog is called Disassembled Spaces. Below is my first post.

Disassembled Spaces:
Opening spaces through the disruption of networks

Networks are powerful determinants. They condition the ways we think and interact with the world. I’m not talking about the network just as a material structure, but as a way of thinking. From the design of living spaces to the design of information spaces, the network episteme has emerged as the dominant model for assembling the social, organizing knowledge, and mapping reality.

As with all dominant structures, the network episteme needs be questioned. The network has become a template actualized and enforced by code, by the circuitry of electronic devices. Everything can be connected, we are told. But as Kothari and Metha remind us, total inclusion allows for total exclusion.

In my work, I am interested in exploring the network as a machine for increasing participation while simultaneously widening the gap between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ nodes. Networks produce inequality. The larger the scale, the more efficient the network will need to be at creating and managing disparity.

So I guess this blog will be about open space as an un-thinking of the digital network. Obstruction, defection and disassembly will be explored as opportunities for transcending the network as technological determinant. This theorizing is in itself ‘open,’ so I hope you join me in this inquiry.

cc photo credit: wauter de tuinkabouter

I recently participated in a formal debating exercise as part of my school’s ALANA Conference. We were randomly assigned a position to argue, and I was part of the team debating that we have not seen the end of racism just because we have a black president. Since I believe that to be the case, it was easy to debate that position. Below are my notes from the debate. Interestingly, a big part of the debate ended up being about what constitutes ‘institutional’ racism. We know that racism prevails, even at an institutional level. But does the fact that these institutions officially renounce racism and have mechanisms for the redress of grievances mean that racism is no longer institutional? Does it make a difference?

Resolved: We have seen the end of racism in the United States
with the election of the first President of Color

Ulises Mejias: “No, we have not.”

Rebuttal (4 mins):

Racism is a system of group privilege. In the US, this means that white people have constructed a system where they enjoy certain advantages just by virtue of being white, and where they deny these advantages to non-white people.

The election of a black president has not magically dismantled this system of oppression, which has been developed over the course of centuries. In contrast to my opponents’ genuine but misplaced optimism, I would like to offer some plain facts that suggest racism is not on its way out:

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There’s a new piece in the online ‘Comment is Free’ section of the UK newspaper The Guardian by my wife that I think is (obviously) quite brilliant.

Only Muslims can change their society

The sub-heading is: “The US invasion of Afghanistan had nothing to do with its women – change in Islamic nations must come from within.”

Last year, Andrea Batista Schlesinger interviewed me for a book project (our exchange is posted here). The book is finally available! Check it out:

Here’s the book blurb:

We exercise our power as citizens by asking questions. Inquiry is less valued today, however, as our society demands quick and dirty answers. We see this play out all around us: in the increased ideological segregation that divides us, the outsize role of Google, a news industry that opines rather than investigate, and the decline in value of civics education where young people are taught to question their democracy. In The Death of “Why?” Andrea Batista Schlesinger, a prominent progressive voice, offers a passionate defense of the role of questioning in fulfilling the promise of democracy. And she profiles those individuals and institutions renewing the practice of inquiry–particularly in America’s youth–at a time when our society demands such activity from us all.

More info (including a free chapter): http://thedeathofwhy.com/

This is from our back yard. Very unusual clouds. Moments later there was a gentle rain, the deer was gone, and now it’s sunny.

I have been invited to give a paper at the 4th Inclusiva-net Meeting: P2P Networks and Processes, organized by Medialab-Prado (in Madrid). The meeting will focus on “an analysis of ‘peer-to-peer’ networks and network processes, highlighting the social potentials of cooperative systems and processes based on the structures and dynamics inherent to these types of networks.”

I’ve heard good things about this workshop, and it looks like an interesting selection of papers. My own contribution is titled Peerless: The Ethics of P2P Network Disassembly. The proposal is below.

In theory, P2P networks embody a model of collaboration that spells out the end of monopolies of communication. Like the Inclusiva-net Call for Papers states, P2P exemplifies principles like “equality of power among participants, free cooperation among them, putting into circulation or forming what are considered ‘common goods’, and participation and communication ‘from many to many.’” While all this has been empirically confirmed in isolated cases, we need to question the ‘goodness’ of these premises at a large societal scale.

Even if we are to accept the claim that P2P network architecture engenders publics instead of markets, we should not put aside Kierkergaard’s critique of publics as nihilistic systems intended to facilitate the accumulation of information while postponing action indefinitely. While Kierkergaard was putting down newspaper media, his critique couldn’t be more fitting in the age of Web browsers, RSS aggregators and bitTorrent clients. Another way of putting this is to say that while P2P networks may indeed democratize access to cultural contents, we still need to ask: Whose cultural contents? The whole piracy debate revolves around the fact that the statistical majority of ‘pirates’ are using P2P networks not to disseminate radical countercultural products, but to share the latest Hollywood blockbuster or teen idol musical hit. We need to question how network processes normalize monocultures, and to do so we need to theorize what form of resistance is embodied by existing in the peripheries of networks.

In my work, I argue that digital technosocial networks (DTSNs) function not just as metaphors to describe sociality, but as full templates or models for organizing it. Since in order for something to be relevant or even visible within the network it needs to be rendered as a node, DTSNs are constituted as totalities by what they include as much as by what they exclude. I propose a framework for understanding the epistemological exclusion embedded in the structure and dynamics of DTSNs, and for exploring the ethical questions associated with the nature of the bond between the node and the excluded other. Contrary to its depiction in diagrams, the outside of the network is not empty but inhabited by multitudes that do not conform to the organizing logic of the network. Thus, I put forth a theory for how the peripheries of the network represent an ethical resistance to the network, and I suggest that these peripheries, the only sites from which it is possible to un-think the network episteme, can inform emerging models of identity and sociality.

This is important because we are perhaps entering an age when deviation from social norms will only be possible in the private, non-surveilled space of the paranodal (the space beyond the nodes), away from the templates of the network as model for organizing sociality. Subjectivization, as Rancière argues, happens precisely through a process of disidentification: parts of society disidentify themselves from the whole, and individuals and groups recognize themselves as separate from the mainstream. Thus, to paraphrase Rancière, the paranodal is the part of those who have no part; it is the place where we experience—or at least are free to theorize—what it is like to be outside the network. Articulating this form of disidentification, of imagining and claiming difference even in relation to ‘democratic’ P2P networks, is an important step in the actualization of alternative ways of knowing and acting in the world.