beyondclicktivism

A 21st Century Love Story – Communique concerning UCL Stratford

By The Imaginary Party

There are several questions we have all been asking over these last few years. Where will we live? How will we be able to afford such expensive rent in London? How will we find jobs that pay enough to enjoy ourselves and live in comfort? When will we pay back our student debt? How?

We must be clear from the beginning, all the questions articulated above maintain a certain tie to one another. They are not unrelated problems, haphazardly assembled by the hands of mundane serendipity, the chaotic and capricious whim of fortuna, the inevitability of everyday life. No, we insist that they are all preciously constructed, maintained and reproduced in order to cultivate a certain set of social relations and a particular way of doing things. What ties them all together is debt, your debt, and the surplus that it creates being appropriated by Swiss private equity firms, Gulf state sovereign wealth funds, US and Japanese pension funds.

The Financial Times writes with earnest regularity on how the London student residential market represents a major source of income in these hard times for our mendicant investors, now on average making ten times the returns when compared to residential property from elsewhere in the UK. The student housing sector has ballooned from a fringe investment 10 years ago to a global market worth $200bn today with it becoming a ‘must have investment for most large funds’.

At the same time that we observe huge speculation on student accommodation and the ferocious entrance of private equity into the sector, we also see universities, now both sides of the Atlantic, issuing bonds secured against future earnings from tuition fees. The primary example here is the University of California which is presently in $13 billion debt as a consequence of various bond issues over the years and now, much as is the case with the sovereign debt of Greece and Spain, has to issue new bonds to ‘roll over’ the repayment of old ones. For institutions such as UCSC within the University of California the fact that there is no cap on fees, combined with the perpetual demand for college degrees (this is after all the only way one may enter the labour market for the overwhelming majority of ‘well paid’ jobs) means that despite their status as heavily leveraged institutions which for potential investors would not seem like a particularly good bet – they remain investment grade.

Subsequently the capacity of UCSC to raise tuition fees to whatever level it likes is advertised in every bond prospectus. Despite its high levels of debt UCSC is still seen as investment worthy precisely because it can charge what it likes, and as is meant to be the case, there are more applicants than places. This is not regarded as academic competition by university management however, rather it is seen as a situation of over-demand and insufficient supply, and hence the signal to further increase tuition fees until equilibrium and the ‘just’ price is found. Market equilibrium magistra vitae est.

We feel it important that students are in full receipt of these facts and are confronted with the inevitable outcome that the present cap of £9000 on tuition fees will not remain with us for long. Already we expect that the Russell Group of universities is lobbying to have it removed. Elsewhere those institutions such as De Montfort who, like UCSC, have begun to issue their own bonds will also need the cap to be abolished in order to guarantee the lowest costs for the debt-financing of future projects – a necessity in light of government funding being all but scrapped.

The present cap will soon go, and institutions as disparate as Cambridge and De Montfort are now issuing their own bonds. The university increasingly resembles little more than a debt factory. This is not glib comment, a casual and speculative refrain, but merely a statement of observable fact. Our future looks like Santa Cruz, only without the beach.

University College London have recently embarked on a £1 billion project – the extension of their London campus into Stratford. The fact that an institution which is failing to balance budgets in the short-to-medium term amid the most volatile period for higher education funding in decades is choosing to embark on such a large and unprecedented expansion is remarkable. Remarkable, but also of its time, in so much as it brings together many elements of the present moment and various catalysts for future crisis and present suffering. The dispossession of the land of those 300 people who still live there and the debt-financed investment in real estate and speculation on student housing, primarily for wealthier non-EU students. Social housing replaced by student housing funds run by private wealth managers, education no longer about capabilities and learning but merely a means by which to create returns from a relationship of debt.

UCL Stratford thus brings together many of the problems that you yourself face – impossible rent, debt, high fees. As a fee-paying student you are a cash cow – not just when you study, but even when you live in student accommodation. The institution does not serve your needs, rather you serve its need to service its debt and finance an ever larger number of managers who wish to ‘invest’ in land speculation and high-end residential buildings and perhaps even a few research centres. You may think of yourself as a part of the student body, but for the ‘bond guys’ and the more intelligent ones in university management you are simply thought of as what creates ‘returns’.

Universities are increasingly disposed to entering into what can only be described as PFI agreements with private equity and these ‘student housing funds’ to fund the construction of housing that students can live in throughout their university ‘experience’. We see this in the recent £1billion development in Cambridge that will see 3,000 new residential units for students  - paid for in part by a £350 million 40 year bond – in partnership with private capital.

As UK universities increasingly employ financial instruments like those seen in California such as long-term bonds (which should really be called securities) students will be seen as no more than producers of the means of repayment, their debt the axis that produces the wheel turning for private investors seeking safe and strong returns and keeping the university afloat as public funding contracts to the point of an almost infinitesimal gesture that borders upon nothingness. This is your future as a debt, a debtor, the guarantor of returns for private equity and pension funds. You will be the assurance against loans that will pay for building facilities and housing that will mean more students who can pay more fees and more rent in order to secure yet more facilities and housing. And so on. All the time fees increasing in order to find equilibrium, rent increasing as there is quite literally nowhere else for you to live and the sons and daughters of the wealthiest families from across the globe are willing to pay.

UCL Stratford represents an active act of dispossession, taking people by force from their homes if necessary. It is pure, unadulterated violence. It has a direct relationship to your debt and the fact that rent in London is increasingly untenable for all but the very wealthiest individuals. Like the university, student housing is a debt factory. UCL Stratford, much like this whole miserable future on offer, can not be allowed to happen. If it does, if these projects and this system continue unimpeded, our lives will be miserable, brutish and shit – make no mistake about it.

Find each other. Educate, Escalate, Destroy.

Courtesy of the Imaginary Party Collaterized Loan Obligation Escalation Working Group (IPCLOEWG) Original here.

By Tim Hardy

The only thing that grows unchecked in nature is cancer  - and even that has a limit: the death of the host.

Yet the only demand we hear from most of the political class is for a return to growth.

This will take sacrifice, we’re told. Our welfare, education and health – all these the market fundamentalist priests must slaughter.

But no matter how much misery these fanatics create, as the deaths mount up day by day as a result of coalition policy, there is no sign of a return of growth.

Even the most rabid critics of government intervention are now insisting on handouts. When Michael Heseltine warned “The market can’t deliver growth without government help” he was just joining a very long queue of well fed men in expensive suits who despise the welfare state, refuse to pay their share of taxes and yet demand special treatment and the lion’s share of the money raised from the labour of the rest of us.

The end goal has to be wealth creation. There are debates as to how wealth should be divided, but ultimately these are sterile until it is created in the first place.

The right are obsessed with a fantasy image of heroic wealth creators. Those who labour for these mythological figures must be made to work harder for longer hours and for less pay with fewer rights. Lives must be sacrificed in the name of growth.

“Wealth creation” is one of the big Tory lies. Trickle down wealth has always been a myth. The Tories have always been the party of grotesque inequality; unfortunately, Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition have also long been remarkably comfortable with the extremely rich.

You’d have to be an idiot to believe that a class that gains power from inequality is going to voluntarily renounce that influence and wealth after they’ve increased their share.

Growth, growth, growth. The only thing that matters is growth. A growth that delivers for the rich and someone else can worry about the poor later. An imagined growth that allows us to mortgage the future to make up the shortfall in the present because the rent is too damn high and wages have stagnated for decades.

But growth is not coming back. And nor should it.

Growth often fails to improve the lives of the most vulnerable. Indeed, as the example of Bangladesh shows, quality of life can improve dramatically without growth.

Economic growth since the 1970s has been poor; the country’s politics have been unremittingly wretched. Yet over the past 20 years, Bangladesh has made some of the biggest gains in the basic condition of people’s lives ever seen anywhere. Between 1990 and 2010 life expectancy rose by 10 years, from 59 to 69 (see chart 1). Bangladeshis now have a life expectancy four years longer than Indians, despite the Indians being, on average, twice as rich. Even more remarkably, the improvement in life expectancy has been as great among the poor as the rich.

 Bangladesh has also made huge gains in education and health. More than 90% of girls enrolled in primary school in 2005, slightly more than boys. That was twice the female enrolment rate in 2000. Infant mortality has more than halved, from 97 deaths per thousand live births in 1990 to 37 per thousand in 2010 (see table). Over the same period child mortality fell by two-thirds and maternal mortality fell by three-quarters. It now stands at 194 deaths per 100,000 births. In 1990 women could expect to live a year less than men; now they can expect to live two years more.

The most dramatic period of improvement in human health in history is often taken to be that of late-19th-century Japan, during the remarkable modernisation of the Meiji transition. Bangladesh’s record on child and maternal mortality has been comparable in scale.

The Path through the Fields, The Economist, November 3 2012

We have grown enough. We already have the means to feed and clothe the world and we fail to do so.

The problem is not one of growth it is one of distribution.

Growth, in the economic sense, is not about the the increase of social happiness and satisfaction of the basic needs of people, but about the expansion of the global volume of exchange value. Gross national products, the main indicator of growth, is not a measure of social welfare and pleasure, but a monetary measure.

Social happiness or unhappiness  does not generally depend on the amount of money circulating in the economy, but rather depends on the distribution of wealth, and on the balance of cultural expectations and the availability of physical and semiotic goods.

Growth is a cultural concept, more than it is an evaluative economic criterion of social health and well being. It is linked to the modern conception of the future as infinite expansion.

(Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance)

There comes a point where even if there is no welfare safety net, even if you are lucky enough to find a job, it costs too much to go to work to make it worthwhile. There comes a point where you cannot squeeze any more rent out of those who cannot afford to buy a home. There comes a point where there the worker can no longer get credit to make up the shortfall between her salary and the cost of the things she makes.

The race to the bottom ends in misery for all. Jobs replaced by automation are not coming back.

We need a politics that accepts that full employment is no longer necessary or desirable.

Instead we have a political system where even those who have worked all their lives are regarded as a burden “sponging off the state” when they claim their retirement in old age.

Growth isn’t coming back and while they’ll use it as a flag of convenience to wage war on things that reduce their ability to profit from the labour of others, I suspect most Tories don’t believe it is coming back either.

There is a reason why they are passing legislation to deregulate private security, build a surveillance state and cleanse the poor from the capital.

We have a choice. We can continue to insist that we can grow forever. If we identify as being on the left, we can perhaps pretend to ourselves that, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, this will help those that are suffering and prevent ecological disaster.

Or we can accept that this is a path to ruin and that there are better, fairer, more sustainable ways to run a society.

For decades, society has atomised us, destroyed communities and turned us against each other, making us think we’re all competing for the same crumbs from the tables of the rich.

The powerful won’t help us. They are happy to see the world burn. They think their wealth will protect them.

Even if we have forgotten the compassion and solidarity that could unite us against the challenge we face, then on purely selfish grounds we need to recognise that we do not have the luxury of living in gated communities safe from flood waters. Some might get jobs as servants. Others as guards. But for the rest of us, stuck outside the walls, we need to recognise that calls for growth by the left are doing little more than helping the right justify their assault on hard-won rights.

We need to stop making sacrifices for a future that will never come.  The future is over. The time for change is not later but now.

By Nelson

I am disability

I am disability you may not know me yet because I am very, very shy and withdrawn. Because of this I don’t make friends easily and I live in the shadows and darkness, mostly just out of sight at the edge of your vision.

If you look carefully, you can see me though! That’s me just behind the Ice cream van! I look like a car and I will cripple a child if I can. I sometimes sneak up on people from behind usually those who are old and tired, but sometimes I like a bit of fun and sneak up on the young too. Its so easy to give someone a stroke when they are least expecting it.

I am the curled up corner of carpet that trips you up at the top of the stairs. Sometimes I sneak up really slow and suddenly twist your joints out of shape as I deliver the gift of arthritis. That takes years and you never blame me, you always blame your work. I am a fibre and I will embed myself into the wall of your lung waiting years to bring you down with Cancer, oh I’m patient.

Many of you think I will never pay you a visit, well just think, I already may have been to your body, remember that fall you had as a child? It was me, laying the foundations of an arthritic knee when you were just 10. Oh yes, children are not exempt, neither are the rich, the famous or those who feel they are all powerful.

It may take me all of your life to get to you but I’m busy, I will get around to you some day, when you are least expecting it.

So remember me when you are running up stairs, when you see one of my customers in a wheel chair, the next time you visit your old mum and she says the cold is making her fingers hurt.

I am disability and I don’t care at all.

(Cross-posted from I Am Disability. H/t @Double_Karma)

By Tim Hardy

You may have heard of the enterprise and regulatory reform bill but you probably haven’t heard the worst.

The bill is another piece of legislation where the Liberal Democrats have proved themselves to be every bit as nasty as the party on which they claim to have a moderating influence.

The publicity around private equity millionaire Adrian Beecroft’s demands for “a hire and fire business culture” is an example of Tories using the anchoring effect to make their own extreme measures seem slightly less revolting.

Honorary Tory, Vince Cable may have stopped short of the measures championed by disgraced MP Liam Fox of allowing bosses to sack workers at will with no redress at all – but instead he is allowing them to sack employees with a token pay-off which amounts to the same thing.

Moreover, the bill means

• the amount of compensation unfairly dismissed workers can receive has been reduced
• protections for whistleblowers at work have been stripped back
• the legal framework protecting employees from acts of sexual harassment and racial discrimination at work by third parties is now gone.

You might also have noticed that the Liberal Democrats in the words of Caroline Lucas “had a fit of amnesia” and forgot what they’d agreed at conference just weeks ago and failed to back other amendments to the  bill that might have made the so-called “green investment bank” more than another exercise in greenwashing.

All of this is pretty vile if depressingly familiar but the worst is yet to come and you may not have noticed because the media has been distracted by other stories.

Last minute amendments have removed Section 47 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 without public consultation.

Karl Tonks, president of the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers (APIL) explained what this means.

At the moment, where an employer has been found to have breached health and safety regulations and someone has been injured as a result, the injured person has an automatic right to claim compensation. The law has been clear on this point since a landmark case was brought in 1898.

But the Government is now seeking changes which will mean the injured person will no longer be able to rely on this right, but will have effectively to start from scratch by proving that negligence has occurred. Not only is this move completely illogical to most right-thinking people, but it reduces the strength of current employment protection and will make pursuing an injured person’s rights more complicated and more expensive.

It also sends a clear signal to bosses that the safety of workers is no longer to be considered a priority.

Thompsons Soliciticors have warned that employers will be allowed to use the “general defence of ‘reasonable practicability’ (that the cost of controlling workplace health and safety risks are “grossly disproportionate” to the reduction in the risk)” to justify neglecting workplace safety.  (Word: Return of the dark satanic mills: the end of civil liability in health and safety).

This is a 114-year-old fundamental employment right that has been thrown away by a bunch of ideological fanatics using a crisis created by their peers to further their own short-term interests.

As the Labour MP for Hartlepool Mr Iain Wright pointed out:

The TUC estimates that every year at least 20,000 people die prematurely as a result of injuries, illnesses, or accidents caused by or in their place of work. That is far too many. The shocking figure from the Health and Safety Executive of 173 workers who were fatally injured at work often excludes a large number of other work-related deaths, but that figure alone means that 173 people went to work and did not come back, and that should not happen in a modern, compassionate society.

(Hansard)

But Conservatives and Liberal Democrats would rather repeat lies about the onerous burden of “political correctness” and “elf n safety” than reduce deaths and injuries in the workplace. They’re quite happy to see the death rate rise as long as share holders can profit.

In February 1932, Henry Ford’s goons used machine guns, tear gas and batons on strikers. It was a miracle that only four young men were killed.

Henry Ford, lest we forget, is now regarded as a hero of free enterprise.

We need to remind ourselves how hard workers have had to fight worldwide for the rights that protect us from extreme exploitation by the cruel and selfish.

In a world that demonises communism and lingers over the inexcusable horrors of Soviet totalitarianism, we need to remind ourselves the capitalism is not the ideology of saints and that on top of the structural violence of imposed austerity there are many examples of explicit, overt violence on the bodies of those who are tired and hungry and demand little more than to be treated with dignity as human beings.

We are seeing those rights being torn up by the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats and the welfare net that once might have protected us once cast out of work is also being destroyed.

“Cutting red tape” is the rallying cry of the evil men and women who are happy to see workplace injuries and deaths soar if it means they can squeeze even higher profits out of the labour of others.

In the words of investor Warren Buffett:

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we‘re winning.

With these last-minute changes to the enterprise and regulatory reform bill that war just got a whole lot bloodier.

By Tim Hardy

While many of us are marching on Saturday, not all of us are enthusiastic about the back-to-the-recent-past message of the march or the prospect of listening to Ed Miliband telling us that the answer to the crisis of capitalism is more episodes of BBC Watchdog.

The Green Party believes the world needs a far more radical change than a different managerial response aimed at a return to unbridled growth. While we are marching again in solidarity with the TUC we have yet again been denied a platform at the end of the march.

For me, what promises to be far more interesting than Miliband’s words is the Workfare Shutdown organised by Boycott Workfare at 2.30pm at Oxford Circus.

Mediocre Dave offers some excellent advice for those going to the march that is worth reading whether you plan to go and listen to Ed or take part in peaceful direct action like this:

Despite all being out on the same march, people will come with strikingly different agendas and ideologies. In the face of the law, the media and the reactionary backlash that attends any major protest, we need to rekindle the sense of sincere solidarity that sustained us through the intense period of protests in the Winter of 2010/2011. People are marching because they’re angry, because the lives that they were promised haven’t materialised, because they’re finding it harder and harder to cope. That anger will be visible in many different forms. Following the protest, the police, the government, the TUC and the media will all construct their own version of events; their interests are not the same as ours, their agenda is not our agenda. Life is getting increasingly difficult, the actions of the government and the capitalist class are having increasingly devastating effects on us and, though we all know marching won’t change things, coming together and sticking together is the only real hope we have. Each day it becomes truer and truer that all we have left is each other. I have no idea how the day will turn out, but whatever happens, keep each other safe.

(Notes Ahead of the TUC March)

We saw on March 26 last year with the mass arrests of peaceful protesters that the police will lie, most of the media will support those lies and supposedly progressive MPs such as members of the disgraced Liberal Democrat Party will withdraw their support of groups like UK Uncut when Cameron tells them to do so.

The TUC will distance themselves from any action and – if tempers flare – will accuse those participating of attempting to kidnap the event, in effect falling into the trap of blaming protesters for a failure of the mainstream media to report fairly.

The police, MPs, the BBC, Sky and the rest of the media will demand with all the fervour of  Joe McCarthy, that people condemn any trouble on the day while conflating all behaviour that doesn’t fit into the category of marching placidly from A to B and labelling it “violence”.

Please resist that pressure.

Last year I suggested we adopt the St Paul’s Principles.

These are a set of principles of unity  agreed in February 2008 by those planning to confront the Republican National Convention.

1. Our solidarity will be based on respect for a diversity of tactics and the plans of other groups.

2. The actions and tactics used will be organized to maintain a separation of time or space.

3. Any debates or criticisms will stay internal to the movement, avoiding any public or media denunciations of fellow activists and events.

4. We oppose any state repression of dissent, including surveillance, infiltration, disruption and violence. We agree not to assist law enforcement actions against activists and others.

Oxford Circus is a comfortable distance from the march route so people who do not wish to get involved will not find themselves caught up in it.

If you do not feel comfortable participating in direct action or are concerned for your safety (a sadly justified concern because the police response to peaceful protest is often savage) I would ask you to pause and reflect.

That you do not feel comfortable is because you think you have something to lose. That you think you have something to lose is a sign of your privilege.

And if you instinctively trust the police to act fairly and tell the truth that is another sign of your privilege.

Everyone coming to the day should participate at a level with which they feel comfortable and in support of whatever agenda they sincerely believe will help build a better world. We will not always agree with the exact aims and tactics of others but a people divided is easily defeated.  If some act in a way you legitimately cannot support, please remember that there are different ways of disagreeing without descending to tabloid, knee-jerk, blanket condemnations.

The fallout from infighting after 26 March was devastating for many who had been providing the opposition to the coalition that Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition had failed to do.

Since then as various groups have bickered and seen their members fade away, the Conservatives have continued to enrich themselves through accumulation by dispossession.

One day of action will change nothing in itself but if handled correctly it can help inspire and invigorate the constant process of community building and the dialogue and actions needed to steer our society away from its current path to social, political and environmental devastation.

Be safe and support each other tomorrow. Remember who the real enemy is. Solidarity forever.

By Tim Hardy

They say he raped them that night. They say he did it with a cunning little doll, fashioned in their image and imbued with the power to make them do whatever he desired. They say that by manipulating the doll he forced them to have sex with him, and with each other, and to do horrible, brutal things to their own bodies. And though I wasn’t there that night, I think I can assure you that what they say is true, because it all happened right in the living room — right there amid the well-stocked bookcases and the sofas and the fireplace — of a house I came for a time to think of as my second home.

A Rape in Cyberspace, first published in The Village Voice

In 1993 Julian Dibble wrote the first ever article to expose sexually abusive behaviour online with an account of a “virtual rape” in the LambdaMOO online community.

A man using an avatar named Mr Bungle used an exploit to publicly control and abuse another in-game character, traumatising the woman who controlled the victim’s avatar.

The response of some members of the community was wearily familiar:

And then there were what I’ll call the technolibertarians. For them, MUD rapists were of course assholes, but the presence of assholes on the system was a technical inevitability, like noise on a phone line, and best dealt with not through repressive social disciplinary mechanisms but through the timely deployment of defensive software tools. Some asshole blasting violent, graphic language at you? Don’t whine to the authorities about it — hit the @gag command and the asshole’s statements will be blocked from your screen (and only yours). It’s simple, it’s effective, and it censors no one.

But the Bungle case was rather hard on such arguments[...] Many of the biologically female participants in the Bungle debate had been around long enough to grow lethally weary of the gag-and-get-over-it school of virtual-rape counseling, with its fine line between empowering victims and holding them responsible for their own suffering, and its shrugging indifference to the window of pain between the moment the rape-text starts flowing and the moment a gag shuts it off.

Neither the abuse itself nor the “shut up and ignore it” response of the overwhelmingly male technical managers of such sites is new. As more and more public discourse moves online, however, what was an anthropological oddity in 1993 is becoming mainstream.

On accepting the award of  ”Twitter Public Personality” today, Laurie Penny noted:

Unfortunately, over the past two years social media has also become an increasingly hostile place for women writers and journalists, as well as for writers of thinkers of colour and of different faiths. I know of a number of talented women writers who have withdrawn from the arena of public debate in Britain because of the sheer scale and viciousness of sexist bullying that has come to poison the arena of political debate in this country, particularly online.

I would like to use this opportunity to call upon all of the editors, journalists and commentators in this room to take an active stand against sexist trolling and hate speech in your publications and on Twitter. Call it out whenever you see it and refuse to host it on your websites, because it demeans and cheapens all of us who feel proud to call ourselves members of the British press.

(Laurie Penny)

A week ago, Adrian Chen outed Michael Brutsch, the Texas man behind the notorious Reddit troll Violentacrez , an online persona who had built his reputation on distributing pictures of underaged girls in bikinis and being offensive as possible.

Chen has been widely criticised by the current generation of technolibertarians but he has refused to apologise:

Under Reddit logic, outing Violentacrez is worse than anonymously posting creepshots of innocent women, because doing so would undermine Reddit’s role as a safe place for people to anonymously post creepshots of innocent women.

I am OK with that.

As one commenter pointed out in response to those defending Brutsch:

Let’s be real here. Like all trolls, this is a story about privilege. It’s great for him to talk about niggers, to post pictures of sexualized preteen girls, to “incite reaction” from the crybabies, because he is a rich white man. He’s never had to deal with racism, sexism, being on the other end of hatred. If he had his face pounded into the cement by a gang of white thugs screaming “faggot” and “chink,” if hadn’t been able to leave the house without catcalls and the constant threat of sexual assault since he was 11, if his mother had been in a concentration camp, he wouldn’t think this was all such a joke.

I don’t believe that the increasing trend of imprisoning people for saying vile things using social media is the answer but I am concerned about the chilling effect of a culture of privilege online that silences contributions from all but a few and dismisses those who speak out against  misogyny, racism, homophobia and other forms of discrimination as “moral faggots”.

An increasingly popular belief is that there is no separation between online and offline, that to speak of the internet is an anachronism – and yet paradoxically those who hold this belief are just as likely to claim that what happens online has no consequences and should not be subject to the same codes of behaviour that govern our offline interactions.

And it’s not just the bigots hiding behind the mask of libertarianism who are are confused.

When “gay girl in Damascus” Amina Abdullah Arraf al-Omari was exposed as being a 40-year-old, married American man living in Scotland, Tom MacMaster, the Guardian ran a piece by technology commentator Aleks Krotoski arguing:

Consequence-free online environments allow us to practise and play without fear of offline repercussion, and offer an extraordinary place to experience the fluidity of our selves. On the internet, I can be anyone, even a dog. As Tom MacMaster found, there still are places online where this is possible. He found his audience, as have I: I tweet, therefore I am.

(Online identity: Can we really be whoever we want to be?)

In response to the unquestioned privilege of such a position, I can only quote two LGBT activists from Syria:

There are bloggers in Syria who are trying as hard as they can to report news and stories from the country. We have to deal with too many difficulties than you can imagine. What you have done has harmed many, put us all in danger, and made us worry about our LGBT activism. Add to that, that it might have caused doubts about the authenticity of our blogs, stories, and us.

(Sami Hamwi and Daniel Nassar, From Damascus with Love: Blogging in a Totalitarian State)

Perhaps the inherent narcissism of social media encourages us to ignore the feelings of others and instead use their reactions to feed our egos. Nobody exists but me. All that matters is my playful self-expression. I tweet, therefore you aren’t.

15-year-old Amanda Todd would neither have found Violentacrez funny nor thought that online activities were consequence free: sexual cyberbullying was an important factor in her suicide.

Right now Anonymous are engaged in vigilante action against the men they claim drove her to her death.

Unfortunately, there are many in Anonymous who are part of the very culture of casual misogyny and rape apologism that makes such intimidation and abuse possible: it was not long ago that the targets of their “doxing” were the women who have accused Julian Assange of sexual assault and rape.

I don’t want to live in a world where a woman does not dare report a rape because she is afraid a group who hide their own identities behind masks might publish her photograph and her home address.

We need to start questioning the lazy assumptions that govern our interactions online.

Next time someone attempt to blocks discussion of abusive behaviour by drawling “But it’s the internet…” – challenge them.

Next time someone says “But it’s free speech…” – challenge them.

In 1913, at a crowded Christmas party for striking mine workers and their families in Calumet, Michigan, someone shouted “fire!” Seventy-three people were crushed to death in the panic including fifty-nine children. There was no fire. Strike-breakers hired by the mines deliberately raised a false alarm.

Reckless and malicious speech, popularly described as “falsely shouting fire in a crowded theatre”, has never been part of free speech.

How many of the men who engaged in virtual rape would have carried out a rape in the flesh? How many of the men who threaten to kill or rape journalists in the comments threads below articles would make such a threat face to face? How many think that they are merely engaged in an act of self-discovery in a consequence-free environment?

We have a long way to go online and offline. As Sady Doyle argued yesterday:

Ending bigotry and sexual harassment is not as simple as selectively unmasking one or two perpetrators. It relies on all of us working daily to create a culture in which such behaviours aren’t tolerated. Harnessing internet outrage is much easier – and more immediately satisfying – than changing the attitudes of the culture itself, but it’s that longer, harder work that will save us all in the end. Knowing Michael Brutsch’s name is less important than knowing that we will challenge attitudes like his the next time we meet someone who expresses them. After all, right now he’s still likely to be applauded for them when he goes online.

(Outing online sexual predators is a sensationalist stopgap)

By Tim Hardy

Housing providers can charge higher rents than before (on average 65% of market rents in London and up to 80% elsewhere). This will affect tenants’ ability to afford the new housing and may exclude some of the poorest from accessing this new housing. Where higher rents are paid through increased housing benefit, tenants may find themselves caught in an even stronger benefit trap where it has become even harder to find sufficiently well paid employment to make working worthwhile, countering the Government’s objective of ensuring that the benefit system makes work pay.

(Conclusions and recommendations of the Public Accounts Committee, Financial viability of the social housing sector: introducing the Affordable Homes Programme)

“Affordable Rent” has always been a particularly Orwellian term to describe the precise opposite of what it pretends to be. Affordable Rents, pinned to hyper-inflated market values, are anything but affordable and the choice of name demonstrates a cynical understanding of the uselessness of a media that will repeat the words mindlessly without ever challenging the rhetoric.

High rents and house prices cause misery, limit mobility, reduce choice, inhibit enterprise, stealing time and money that could have been used productively, forcing people to make financial returns the sole criteria of their career decisions rather than seeking work that is emotionally and spiritually rewarding. Only a party of rich landowners would be so complacent to pass policies designed to increase the costs of rents and shore up hyperinflated house prices.

A society that demands its members pay an ever increasing percentage of their income on basic shelter is a society on its way to ruin.

Conservatives hate anything that stands in the way of their insatiable hunger for greater profits – be that social housing, the National Health Service or state education. In a ruthless, predatory environment, the already rich and powerful get fat on the weak so these zealots are eager to destroy any alternatives to the markets to further increase their wealth through the immiseration of the few who up until now have found a temporary harbour. Labour are fully complicit in the housing crisis and have no solution of their own.

The conclusions and recommendations of the Public Accounts Committee, Financial viability of the social housing sector: introducing the Affordable Homes Programme makes for damning reading. It concludes:

1.  The Department has not done enough to understand the full impact of higher rent levels on tenants

2.  The allocation of funds under the Programme did not fully focus on the areas of greatest need

3.  It is unclear whether the shift of public resources from capital grants to increased housing benefits will provide better value for the taxpayer

4.  The Programme has a risky delivery profile with little room for slippage.

5.  The Programme has taken advantage of the sector’s current financial capacity but this may be a one-off opportunity.

Joe Halewood, Director of Consultancy Services at HSM, goes further and accuses Eric Pickles of knowingly misleading parliament over the reforms.

AR [Affordable Rent] is and always has been a con, a point I have made consistently and wanted to hammer home; and secondly, despite the PAC [Public Accounts Committee] using unusually strong language for any parliamentary committee – that is has ‘strong concerns’ – the PAC report still doesn’t get how inept or how costly AR is.

The minimum added cost of AR in HB terms is at least 6 times the cost than suggested.  This is because reading the report and researching the remit of the PAC a political scandal emerges and Eric Pickles, Secretary of State at the CLG must resign or be sacked because of it.

Of course Pickles won’t resign or be sacked. David Cameron’s Conservative Party is a collection of selfish petty crooks, tax avoiders, con artists and snake oil salesmen. They have no decency or honour. Even then Pickles is only part of a problem that is systemic in all three major parties.

For the extremely rich cabinet members, such disastrous policies will have no consequences beyond a few red faces during PMQs.

For the millions struggling to survive on poverty wages topped up by ever-reducing benefits, this is an impending disaster that will have a grave cost on their physical and mental health.

Rather than strengthening tenants rights, taking empty properties back into use, banning the leveraged buyout of salaried wages through buy-to-let mortgages and discouraging socially destructive property speculation, Labour, Tories and Liberal Democrats stand united in their common belief that the only thing that matters is home ownership at any cost. All three parties would rather jail people seeking shelter in disused properties than tackle the vested interest keeping prices impossibly high. That tells you all you need to know about their real priorities and their real interests and should tell you why holding your nose and voting Labour is unlikely to make any difference at all.

This is another vile step from a vile government who are concerned only with increasing the wealth of the rich. We should not be surprised that they are now making the poorest in the country walk the plank into the shark-infested waters of the property market. We should be very concerned by the lack of opposition to this.

By Tim Hardy

Marches are supposed to be shows of strength. Indeed, they often are most effective when they signal the possibility of anger spilling over into generalised excess or violence, unpalatable though that might seem. Certainly, sheer numbers seem no reliable measure of efficacy: the march against the Iraq war being the oft-cited example in this case. They can certainly build some much-needed sense of solidarity for those opposed to austerity, but even those who find themselves buoyed by listening to the usual parade of damp dignitaries are likely to admit that it won’t, in itself, do much good. Of course, the TUC speaks about marches like this as a kind of three-dimensional lobbying, or a moral pressure on politicians to serve the ‘real’ interests of their electors. This reduction of political activity to a system of lobbying via moral shame is more widespread – many also talk about strike action or more targeted protest action in the same way. But it’s a rare case where mere moral embarrassment can avert economic policy or force a capitalist employer to behave better – were it otherwise, we’d already be living post-capitalism.

The latest essay from Pierce Penniless is unmissable. If you’re vacillating over  going to the TUC Rally on October 20 then take comfort that you are not alone.

We need to participate in some form. However little the march will achieve, however risible Labour’s attempt to portray themselves as an alternative, we cannot afford not to show opposition to the coalition but nor can we afford to think that a nicely stewarded march from A to B is enough.

The growing confidence of the Chicago Boys of the Conservative party who are happy to tear up centuries of hard earned rights in order to increase the profits of the few has to be loudly resisted.

But we also need to recognise that while we are living through a crisis, one that they are using as an opportunity to enrich themselves further, the real crisis is far deeper than that.

When we talk about ‘crisis’, we shouldn’t just mean the various cyclical crises, or even a crisis in real wages masked by credit, but a permanent crisis gradually sharpening over time, centred on the defining features of capitalism itself: the dependency of the vast majority of the world on the sale of their labour-power for the means to subsist, the necessary precarity of that relation, and the paradox that even among an unprecedented ability to produce, people still starve and die.

Nightmare Politics: October 20th and after. Read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest.

By Tim Hardy

If you’re in or near London between now and Christmas consider adding the following to your diary.

Cuts Cafe (open till the October 20 TUC anti-cuts demo) 1 Stamford St., SE1 9NT.
Meetings on Occupy, UK uncut, anti-capitalism, art, policing, welfare reform, films, TUC, Luddites and more.
Speakers include Ken Loach and David Graeber.

Anarchist Bookfair Saturday 27th October 10am to 7pm. Queen Mary University, Mile End Road, E1 4NS. (Mile End tube)
Speakers include Michael Albert, David Graeber, Selma James, Chris Knight.
Meetings on anarchist economics, Pussy Riot, South Africa, Palestine, G4S, workplace organising, workfare, feminism, 2013 G8 summit and much more.

Historical Materialism Conference November 8-11, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornaugh St, WC1 (Russell Sq. tube)

Loren Goldner November meeting on capitalism’s crisis. See www.metamute.org for more details.

Up The Anti Conference, Saturday 1 December, Queen Mary University. Speakers include: David Graeber, Mark Fisher, Ewa Jasiewicz, Hillel Ticktin. Sessions on: debt strikes, Syria, housing, Occupy, UK Uncut, Greece, trade unions etc…

AN INTRODUCTION TO ANTHROPOLOGY - From Evolution to Revolution
Oct 16 – Dec 18. Every Tuesday, 6.30-9pm, St. Martin’s Community Centre, 43 Carol St., NW1 OHT (2 mins from Camden tube).

(Oscar Wilde never actually said “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings” but whoever thought it up may not have been entirely wrong.)

By Tim Hardy

Ubiquitous personal communications media turn our activity into passivity, capturing it and putting it into the service of capitalism. Angry, engaged, desperate to do something, we look for evidence, ask questions, and make demands. Yet the information we need to act seems perpetually out of reach; there is always something we misunderstand or do not know.

Jodi Dean, Communist Horizon 

I’ve never made a secret of my unease with social media. For all its potential advantages, I always feel lessened by the time I spend using it. Whether I’ve been engaging in a collective Two Minutes Hate in response to the troll du jour, or trying to argue a point before the number of participants in the thread overwhelms the claustrophobia of 140 characters  or digging into a new story that old media is reluctant to touch, the effect is always the same. I feel slightly depressed, emotionally drained and frustrated every time I engage with the world via twitter. I cannot bring myself to use Facebook where the despair sets in the moment I see the front page.

Social media is compulsive in the way that a fruit machine is compulsive. It is designed to hook you in and to keep sticking coins in the slot in the hope of a jackpot retweet or response, the little ego-strokes of recognition and reward that condition us to keep coming back.

It promises a cure for boredom and in doing so robs us of the time alone and silence needed to think.

Let me just check one more time if anyone has responded and then I’ll move on.

We switch from our phone to our laptop – then check once more that nothing has changed in the moments we were away.

At times we scroll backwards endlessly, trying to read everything, determined that nothing will escape our attention, like Canute trying to turn back the tide, until, hours later, we tear ourselves away with painful, dry eyes and cramped fingers, having learned nothing.

Social media plays on the same anxieties from which advertising profits. Am I popular? Do people think I’m interesting? Attractive? Funny?  And it measures it with ruthless precision. You know exactly how many people follow you. You know exactly how many times someone has liked or repeated your words or images. You cannot switch this off or ignore it.  It is by design part of your identity on that network and the bare statistics are shoved in your face every time you log in.

Perhaps this is just me but I do not feel that I am alone in responding this way.

In a substantial excerpt from her new book Communist Horizon at Guernica, Jodi Dean warns of the danger that social media encourages us to focus on the spectacle at the cost of organising:

The cost of the exponentially expanding circuit of information and communication is particularly high for progressive and left political movements. Competition for attention—how do we get our message across?—in a rich, tumultuous media environment too often and easily means adapting to this environment and making its dynamic our own, which can result in a shift in focus from doing to appearing, that is to say, a shift toward thinking in terms of getting attention in the 24/7 media cycle and away from larger questions of building a political apparatus with duration. Infinite demands on our attention—demands we make on each other and which communicative capitalism captures and amplifies—expropriate political energies of focus, organization, duration, and will vital to communism as a movement and a struggle. It’s no wonder that communicative capitalism is participationist: the more participation in networked media environments, the more traces to hoard and energies to capture or divert.

She hints in the following parenthetical aside at ways in which network technology could however be used to empower left political movements:

The limits of attention are not only the limits of individuals (and so can be resolved by distributing labor and crowdsourcing).

We cannot return the genie to the bottle nor would I argue is it desirable to do so. I am deeply concerned about our collective political failure to adjust to the many consequences of technological change not least that of “de-skilling” – the automation of routine manual tasks – but to wish for a return to a simpler past is simply nostalgia and an indulgence we cannot afford. Just as technology can send labour overseas so to can it be used to organise collective labour for our own ends. The Global Village Construction Set is using distributed intelligence and skills sharing to build an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that will enable industrial productivity on a small scale, allowing small communities to become self-sufficient more easily.

Technology can be genuinely disruptive. Even if, in the long-term, social media distracts and makes dissent easy to track and control, it can mobilise at short notice, bringing people together onto the streets in sufficient numbers to topple a regime.

This does not mean that we should reject technology but that we need to be more critical about it, to ask more questions about the circumstances of its production, the purposes to which we put it and the potentials we are not using. It is too easy to confuse the flickering shadows on the cave wall of your screen for reality.