So I’ve been rather busy doing some theoretical work and preparing for a long vacation. I shall hopefully post some of the more theoretical thoughts here shortly, dealing mostly with stuff such as the co-evolution of media technology and how we imagine models of communication, the slippery concept of the in-between (intermezzo, interstice, thirdness) and so forth. This stuff we must do, I suppose, when trying to become doctors who cure nobody.

But breaking the silence here for two separate notes. The first is an interesting development in India … Google beds Sonia Gandhi and the plot thickens. Full article HERE and HERE. I quote TechChrunch:

Today we’re hearing of another arrest, this time in India. 22-year-old IT professional Rahul Krishnakumar Vaid. His crime was writing in an orkut community named “I hate Sonia Gandhi.” Sonia Gandhi is a prominent politician in India.

Vaid was charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information TVechnology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community.

During investigations, the cyber crime cell of Pune police communicated with Google (which owns Orkut) seeking details about the who formed this forum and circulated the obscene content. It was known that the vulgar message about Sonia Gandhi was circulated through an email address – Rahulvaidindia@gmail.com . The owner of the email id Rahul Vaid was traced, using information supplied by Google, to Chakarpur in Gurgaon city of Haryana.

He was then charged under section 292 of Indian Penal Code and section 67 of the Information Technology Act because he created a profile and then posted content in vulgar language about Sonia Gandhi in the community. If he’s convicted, he can be imprisoned for up to five years and may have to pay a fine up to Rs one lakh.

The second is that I have been planning a long vacation. There was a time when I thought that productivity was an end by itself and one needed to stay connected and learn new thins all the time. Not any more. I cannot wait to go and ditch the laptop and go away for a month when emails will not be returned and the only connection I will have is a glass of wine, some mountain dust in the nostrils and my camera. I’ve been reading quite a lot of the theories of ‘general intellect’ and ‘immaterial labor’ and ‘cognitive capitalism’ via Antonio Negri and Paulo Virno. So going on an aimless vacation is a good excuse to have my creativity and critical thinking not usurped by commercial interest - leisure-time as a mode of battle against cognitive capitalism. Basically, there is a long history of thinking behind this but - for now - I recommend you read this article about what it means to be an intellectual or a thinker today. What does it mean to think for a living - however, absurd that may sound? Full article HERE and some more information HERE. I quote:

The advent of Academia Inc., aka Corporate U, is no longer an ominous prospect but an accomplished fact. Over the last twenty-five years, the universities of advanced capitalism have been metamorphosed, the shell of the ivory tower broken, and higher education firmly entrained to market-driven economic growth - in particular, to the development of high-technology industries. Universities are now frankly conceived and funded by policy elites as research facilities and training grounds for the creation of the new intellectual properties and technocultural subjectivities necessary to a post-Fordist accumulation regime. Academic traditionalists and faculty activists alike have clearly identified the dangers of this development: while the formal liberal democratic protections of academic autonomy - from tenure to civil rights guarantees - remain in place, opportunities for the practical exercise of such freedoms contracts as programme funding, research grants and curricula structuring are determined by their utility to the knowledge-for-profit economy.
Warranted as such condemnations are, they often, however, overlook an obverse aspect of Academia Inc., a verso of which their critiques are actually symptomatic. For recent years have seen the emergence within universities of new movements and modes of struggles against marketisation, provoked by cognitive capital’s expropriation of the university, mobilising the very constituencies of students and faculty commercialisation has summoned into being, and reappropriating the same technologies - especially digital networks - for which Academia Inc. has been an incubator. Continuing a discussion of these ambivalent dynamics begun several years ago in my Cyber-Marx , and recently independently renewed by Tiziana Terranova and Marc Bosquet, this essay examines the changing configuration of academia through the lens of some theoretical categories of autonomist Marxism: ‘general intellect’, ‘cognitive capitalism’, ‘immaterial labour’, ‘biopower’ and ‘multitude’. Its analysis is inevitably coloured by my situation as a professor of information and media studies in a mid-sized Canadian university, but I hope to extrapolate general tendencies relevant to a European as well as a North American context; I say ‘hope’ in all senses of the term, since my ultimate argument is that the success of business in subsuming universities paradoxically opens the campus to intensified confrontation between cognitive capitalism and the emergent forces of what I term ‘species-being’ movements.