Apart from literature for my thesis papers, I started reading some interesting political books these months, and slowly but surely finishing them. Planning to write some proper reviews when done, now some initial impressions:

Dealing with Distractions: Confronting Green Capitalism in Copenhagen and Beyond

I was really impressed by the design and layout of the new issue of the Turbulence mag, but the content was a bit of a disappointment. Between the strikingly beautiful and monotone pictures of braking horizons I began to see the point of those people who speak about how reformist Climate Camp

On the other hand, Dealing with Distractions was exactly the opposite: while it has little analysis of actual world affairs, especially compared to the other one, it has a fine selection of articles that offer a very clear stand against the new world order of Green Capitalism. There are historical and sociological essays, manifestoes and thesises, all on the very points that are often missed out by simple critics. It provides a platform for reflection and action and defines the new playing field. I am working with others to translate some of the articles into Hungarian and hopefully disseminate and discuss them.

The main argument as far as I gauged for now is that if the green movement merely pushed its arguments through the industry and the state, it will probably mean a stronger state and an industry that is still exploiting people. Biopolitical control based on a more sophisticated and micro-level surveillance and control machine will be necessary to comply with all the miriad propositions that are demanded by the the green platform. Basically it is the red and black argument that mixes with the green one: caring about the planet shouldn't mean forgetting about the people.

I think there was a moment before Copenhagen when people started to play with the idea that the far-green movement would really have an impact without bringing the whole anticapitalist movement with it, and followed that thread of thought to its ultimate conclusion. Even if COP15 turned out to be the empty shell everybody knew it was, these arguments are still orientating in a world where McDonalds in London advertises its local field chickens, which shows that there really is a consumer power and a change of mass mentality which can influence the evil players. That one about the chickens is intriguing: (1) it counters McDo's picture of the ultimate evil urban food source, (2) it caters for the animal rights movement which is one of the strongest in the UK, (3) it has its green (sustainable) undertones, a nod for the other powerful UK movement, (4) and of course it is a nationalist move as well to have English burgers from English chickens.

End Notes 1

The typography of this volume comes close to a Bauhaus elegance and clarity, which combines pleasure and utility of handling. It may be my own snobbish attitude, but I found the careful understated preparation of the outlook a good reflection of the careful argumentations of the text. That is where I really came to appreciate old-school anarchocommunist groups: they have a real continuity of consciousness, unlike most anarchist initiatives. Instead of citing random examples and experiments, they can reflect on whole historical processes of resistance and come up with conclusions that are organically unfolding from past experiences to address present questions of strategy, tactics and theory. It is a real pleasure to see how such a semiunderground tradition can function: to find that small groups still read the writings of similar groups through the decades and maintain a conversation, follow an argument, etc. That kind of historical consciousness is something that I really miss from most of present anarchist efforts.

Moreover, the publication is a good example of the debate between marxist groups that can remain productive and doesn't end up with the parties hating each other more than their enemy. It is the blueprint of an exchange between two groups, Troploin and Theorie Communiste with several authors and throughout some years. The topic is how the concept workers' self management, which was advanced by anarchocommunists and syndicalists and arrived to a new rennaisance in the 70s workerist movement eventually lost its validity. As far as I understand this change happened in the wider context of the crossfade between workerist and autonomist movements. However, as I mentioned above, the authors draw on a wide range of interconnected historical processes, incorporating the experiences of bureacratic capitalism or "existing socialism" in the Soviet block as well as Tito's take on socialism in Yugoslavia, etc.

The debate is as much about method as about conclusions. The arguments I liked the most have a strict pro-proletarian and historical approach. Maybe they are even too idealist, but as many people know, there is a special place in my heart for Hegel. Anyway, the idea is that workers' self-management is not a bad idea per se, because there an idea is only good or bad in a precise historical context. Workers' self-management was a real potential and a progressive horizon in some given historical scenarios, and it became obsolete exactly because the actual struggle went beyond it. (Sadly/obviously that is not the same as realising the concept itself.) The admirable advantage of that argument is that it doesn't create a neutral present from which we judge the struggles of old times, arriving to the conclusion that nobody was as radical as we are, albeit in our ideas only. On the contrary: it enables a relation to past struggles where we can both appreciate our ancestors and not think them stupid or counterrevolutionary, a relation that inspires us to continue the struggle from where they left off.

So what is the problem with workers' self-management? That the self-management of production by the working class is just that: the self-management of the same exploitation. Since a real communist struggles for the abolishing of the working class, not merely its hegemony, the situation when for a moment workers control their own life should not be the situation in which they use their fresh freedom to return to the assembly line. But more on that when I finished the book and I can lay out the whole story in a manner described above.

Autonomia: Post-Political Politics

One of the three key English language sources on the "long '68" in Italy, when autonomist movement emerged from the workerist current. The other two are Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics edited by Hardt and Virno, and the excellent history-of-ideas reconstruction by Steve Wright, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomi. While the latter provides much context and the former gives an impression of the powerful ideas that came out of those historical moments, these texts are really framed as documents in the most direct sense of the word. Radical Thought opens with Hardt's excellent introduction which established the relevance of the texts to the political situation in which the reader was published, and the Wright book is really a retrospective scholarly study of the era. This book begins with excerpts from Sylvére Lotringer's diary of his visit to Italy in 1979. It is a fascinating read, another candidate for translation into Hungarian. It reads like a new wave spy novel, in the style of the early Godard, about the topics of the director's middle maoist period. By now I've covered most of the texts, but it's still too fresh to put into words.

Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropogy

This book will inspire generations of researchers because of the following reasons:

1. It is written in a very accessible language and it is short.
2. It is openly, and specifically anarchist.
3. It is "pregnant with possibilities" in the sense that it contains many research ideas that invite further elaboration, so that it is easy to base future work on it.

On the other hand, it is also inspiring for laymen and would-be anthropologists, since it argues nicely why antrhopology as a field of research is important for anarchists. It has most of the data about actually existing societies that are egalitarian and no states. If you think that's irrelevant, read on.

Unlike the other ones, I actually finished this one! It is a rather rare volume in the sense that it is openly written from a committed anarchist platform yet it also addresses an academic question and an academic (as well as general) audience. It is basically a pamphlet about anthropology and anarchism, as it says, in fragments. These fragments have some structure -- I will presently write up a table of contents because in fact these fragments come together quite nicely:

• Why there are so few anarchists in the academy?
• Graves, Brown, Mauss, Sorel
• The anarchist anthropology that almost already does exist
• Blowing up walls
• Tenets of a non-existing science
• (Anarchy)
• Anthropology (in which the author reluctantly bites the hand that feeds him)

The first chapter examines the contrast between Marxist and anarchist discourse and the former's unparalleled success in the academia. The analysis sets out from the superficial linguistic difference apparent in these discourses that communist theory is based around authors (Maoism, Leninism, Althusserian sociology, etc.), while anarchist discourse is based on practices (Syndicalism, Mutualism, Primitivism, etc.). So while leftist thinking focuses on authoritative father figures, anarchist thinking is tied to concrete movements. It is an interesting notion especially because while communism was a very real force on the historical stage of the last centuries, anarchism had only smaller roles. On the other hand, Graeber refers to Barbara Epstein who argues that by now both social movements and theorists replaced their Marxist inspiration with an anarchist one, even though anarchism is as much (or even more) an undercurrent of these processes as communism has been of the past ones. At this point I would add a notion about the diversity of anarchist thought that further underlines the first linguistic argument and ties it together with the second influence-based argument. Unlike the Marxist/communist discourse, anarchism managed to blend with a great number of other currents, which is shown even in its taxonomy. We speak about anarcho-communism, anarcho-feminism, eco-anarchism, anarcho-primitivism, anarcho-surrealism and ontological anarchism, etc. It seems that anarchism has had an affinity with almost all of the leftist ideas of the past two centuries.

Going deeper into the examination of the nature of these discourses (other than their linguistic taxonomy or their historical influence), the author arrives to a double conclusion:

1. Marxism has tended to be a theoretical and analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy.
2. Anarchism has tended to be an ethical discourse about revolutionary practice.

That echoes my frustration that especially nowadays in the anarchist/activist scene there is such a poverty of strategic ideas, which is all the more sad since there already seem to be a rough consensus about tactics and ultimate goals. What is missing is a kind of narrative that would define how these tactics can be applied effectively in order to achieve those goals. The goals are more or less defined in the last but one chapter of this book, amongst other places, and the tactics are very known to anybody familiar with the European underground: black block, food not bombs, clown army, squatting, blockade and occupation, independent media, etc. The alterglobalisation movement had at least summit hopping as a middle term strategy and the destruction of G8, IMF and World Bank as middle term goals, and these were more or less achieved by now. That's why the movement is experiencing a low tide, because the existing networks that are organised around some important topics don't have a unifying strategy and some concrete demands around which they could build an effective, coordinated struggle. In the long term, however, contemporary anarchist inspired activity needs a widely recognised theory of transition, a strategy for achieving hegemony. But as Graeber writes, there is no necessary reason why anarchists should be against theory, it is not just the main thrust of the discourse, so there is hope.

The second chapter is a kind of historical recapitulation that moves from the general area of academic discourse into the specific territory of anthropology proper, examining the anarchist tendencies in classical anthropology (Mauss et al). The third one deals with more contemporary developments in which Graeber situates his own work. The names which are mentioned are Clastres, whose antietatist anthropological arguments are still the most powerful antiauthoritarian investigations in the field, Hakim Bey whose work on pirates and other subcultures is closely coupled with the analyses of contemporary urban resistance, and the middle period of Antonio Negri whose (not anthropological) books on constituent power undermine the sovereignity-centred statist discourse by proposing an alternative starting point.

Here, in the middle of the small volume, are the most original ideas of Graeber, based on his field work in Madagascar. If for a moment we are really looking at the narrow scientific value of the book, it can be argued that the chapters before are the introduction and the chapters following are the afterword for the idea set out here. As far as I could make out, this is an argument about imaginary counterpower. Setting out from Clastres, Graeber argues that the more egalitarian a given society is, the more haunted it is by repressive and violent myths that mirror the conflicts inherent in keeping cohesion in a horizontal powerstructure. "Every society is in war with itself" is one nice notion, and since these societies are rather peaceful, their conflicts are shifted to the plain of discourse.

The "read on" part mentioned earlier comes next, under the heading "Blowing up walls". It is an quasi-original supporting argument for the previous one about imaginary counterpower in nonstate egalitarian societies. When anthropologist present the data about these experiences one frequent counterargument is that these societies cannot be compared to our postindustrial society because they are more limited and less complex and sophisticated. In one world, our civilisation is superior. Of course it is easy to answer that this is a racist notion, but Graeber lays out the evidence, the literature and the ideas to make that easy argument in a convincing manner. There are many good reasons why other societies are as complex, historically situated and generally developed as our own. However, the arguments that would explain the global hegemony exercised by Western empires are a bit slim.

After that moment the book becomes a bit sketchy, with three chapters on various topics that contain lists with a bit of elaboration for each item. Firstly, there is an excellent and inspiring list of topics that anarchists anthropologists should develop. Since it is so productive, let me recount them here:

Tenets of a non-existing science

1. A theory of the state
2. A theory of political entities that are not states
3. Yet another theory of capitalism
4. Power/ignorance, power/stupidity
5. An ecology of volutary associations
6. A theory of political happiness
7. Hierarchy
8. Suffering and pleasure: on the privatisation of desire
9. One or several theories of alienation

Secondly, there is a kind of appendix (without a title) about the idea of Anarchy. Since the list represents a rough consensus of contemporary activist anarchists I would not dwell on it for long. You can ask your local anarchist and she will tell you similar things. Of course, that is not the weakness but the strenghts of the chapter.

Thirdly and also lastly, there is an autotherapic chapter on anthropologic discourse and research practices per se. Recounting the difficulties inherent in anthropology and field work is important since these are the reasons most anthropologists would prefer to say meaningless or overspecific things instead of supplying the general conclusions about mankind and the possibilities of societies that they could. For example, anthropology has its colonial origins when it was used to "getting to know the enemy". Then, there is the burgouise romanticism that ruled the second phase of anthropological history, when practitioners projected the otherness of their own culture on the "savages", so in describing different societies they often just explored their own subconscious. Both negative currents are still present in contemporary society and scientific discourse, and Graeber shows how. The former example is how every single act is reduced to a market act, like going out is described as nothing but consumption. The latter example is how the vocabulary of poststructuralism replaced the authentic native terms anthropologists were using to describe noncapitalist societies. Finally, there is a rather convincing closing presentation about the perception of Zapatista autonomy, how it aspires to work out another kind of social logic and how it is in defiance of that ambition has been perceived as an "indigineous" movement that is only accepted to assert ideas about "indigineous people", never about our shared reality.

Get the book by any means necessary and don't fear to read it because it is both very short and very accessible. As I wrote it is a cocktail of manifestoes that could possibly start a current of its own. Let me conclude with a quote: "In many ways, anthropology seems to be a discipline terrified of its own potential."

We are back!

The IMC network regained control of the DNS entry for indymedia.org

Websites and services are expected to be slowly coming back to the net as the routing data propagates. The cause of the shortage seems to have been that Dubster, the registrar of the domain decided to suspend it because they didn’t receive an answer for an email for two weeks. This is really funny, actually, a very stupid reason. Discussion began about the evaluation of the incident and the possible ways to avoid such things for the future.

ps: if you are wondering about the picture it is a semacode version of "Hello world!" cropped into a field.

If you are reading this page, then you probably know that Indymedia is down due to theprimary nameservers being changed from NS2.RISEUP.NET and NS.LACKOF.ORGto NS1.BADWHOISSHUTDOWN.COM and NS2.BADWHOISSHUTDOWN.COM. Peopleare presently investigating this change, however it is probably related to an ICANN whois data"inaccuracy" report (which, unfortunately, is a known tool that trolls have successfully used in the pastto get sites they don't like taken down).

This page will be updated when more information becomes available. (Last update 2009-08-07 14:52 PM GMT)

How do I get indymedia.org back?

This section hopes to provide informative instructions on how to recover the indymedia.org zone while this mess gets sorted out.

Recovering indymedia.org using BIND

If you run your own nameserver like BIND, then it is very easy. Just add the following to your nnamed.conf:

zone "indymedia.org" {
type forward;
forwarders {
// ns2.riseup.net, ns.lackof.org
204.13.164.8; 204.13.164.202;
};
};

Save the config file and restart BIND. Provided that you are resolving your DNS through this BINDinstance, indymedia.org should now be available to you. You may need to flush your DNS cache if youroperating system has one. For example, on Windows, this can be done by doing ipconfig /flushdnsin a Command Prompt.

Recovering indymedia.org using Unbound

If you run your own Unbound resolver, then it is very easy. Just add the following to your/etc/unbound/unbound.conf:

forward-zone:
name: "indymedia.org"
# ns2.riseup.net
forward-addr: 204.13.164.8
# ns.lackof.org
forward-addr: 204.13.164.202

Save the config file and restart Unbound. Provided that you are resolving your DNS through this Unboundinstance, indymedia.org should now be available to you. You may need to flush your DNS cache if youroperating system has one. For example, on Windows, this can be done by doing ipconfig /flushdnsin a Command Prompt.

Home users

It has been reported that OpenDNS is working at present. This is probably because the DNS cache has notyet expired. To enable your computer for OpenDNS, go to the OpenDNSwebsite, which has useful instructions for setting up yourcomputer to use their nameservers.

You can also add the IPs for nameservers to your DNS server list, which are 204.13.164.8, and204.13.164.202. This should work on most platforms without causing problems. (note: In Windows, to add more than 2 nameservers, the options to do so are under your Network Adapter's"TCP/IP advanced settings.")

lists.indymedia.org is dead, so where are we talking about this?

On the imc-tech-emerg list. We are alsodiscussing the issue on IRC in #tech.

Home users behind firewall

There is a file with known domain name and IP address pairs. People who are blocked by firewall which can not access other dns server than internal one can use it pastingit at the end of /etc/hosts file on Unixen like Linux, etc. The windows user can paste it at end of c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and reboot.

How do I access irc.indymedia.org?

The easiest is to use this alternative address: irc.indy.punk.eu.org

/server 209.51.169.94 6667 for non-SSL, and /server 209.51.169.94 +6697 for SSL.Most clients support SSL in the format previously mentioned and SSL is recommended when connecting to the IRC server.

The webchat interface is available, but you will need to accept theSSL certificate.

What can I do to help?

Refer people to this page if they ask why Indymedia is down.

Whatever you do, please avoid doing anything involving Dotster. Right now doing anything that couldbe construed as harmful or illegal towards Dotster is probably counter-productive, as amongst other reasons,there may be legal efforts involved to recover the domain name from them, so as a result we really don'tparticularly want to be doing anything that would jeopardize the situation. People are already reportedly incommunication with Dotster about this problem.

There is an error on this page and/or I have a proposed change to make to this page.

Mention the change on #tech on the IRC server and I will try to update it as soon as I notice it.Prefixing your message with "nenolod:" will get my attention more quickly.

Sorry for all my friends, connections, enemies and business partners.

Moving to London was more like an accident than a planned project: opportunities arose and i seized them. As a result, things broke (like when you dist-upgrade your Linux) -- projects, processes, connections, deadlines, etc. i hope most of them could be fixed, and most of those which cannot don't worth the trouble. if you think i treated you badly read my excuses in this post and drop me a mail. Yes, i was not really reading email either, but i'll try now.

First of all i came for a tourist trip and found a life (read previous post), so i didn't plan too many things beforehand. Secondly, i had to deal with immigration stuff like signing a contract, finding an address, buying a phone, opening a bank account, etc. Thirdly, i bought a new computer which is always a rift in the continuity of one's communications. Fourthly, that computer got stolen, so i had to buy another one and start over again with the migration. Fifthly, i didn't have my own internet connection, so i was either using open networks or the company line. Sixthly, i started to work 8 hours a day, which i never done before, and which took away all my energy and my time. Sevently, after those 8 hours at the office the last thing i desired in the evenings was to sit in front of the computer for more 3 hours doing communication work.

Eightly, i didn't want to write to everybody individually all the commonplaces, but write some blog posts explaining the essentials, and then write to each person singularly just about the things that are singular to her/him. Ninethly, my blog engine needed updating, and the new version that i developed back then didn't compile on my new system, so i had to upgrade and downgrade software and debug a lot, etc. i felt a lacked the medium to communicate before i fixed this fucking blog. Tenthly, i had only my phone to take pictures, and the Bluetooth support was broken on my latest install, so i had to spend half a day fixing it.

But don't worry -- i've cut myself through all the these barriers just to get back to you! :)

mv /home/mxs Budapest London

Public announcement: Maxigas disappeared to London from Budapest, watch the news for appearances!

To cut a long story short: i arrived on 2009 June 19., Friday 2AM. A week later i had a squat to stay in, a social centre with a freeshop to organise, and most surprisingly a job that pays. It was an incredibly intense week that went smoothly nontheless, since most people around me were so layed back and easy going that the roller coaster ride felt like a river cruise. Things only get thick now that i look back on the flotsam i left in Budapest. :)

That was the lead for the impatient but i am sure there are some of you out there that want the full story, so it goes like this: & welcomed me heartily and took me to a walk on Brick Lane where we found some "Off License" shop. It means that they sell alcohol into the night, similar to what we call "24h" shop in Budapest -- with the obvious differences that they are less common, more expensive, and open less hours. Anyway, for me the most significant of all those nuances is that they sell cider, my drink of choice, and one which is sadly missing from the shelves of shops in Hungary. It was him that later showed my the canals of London with their narrowboats. Oftentimes London feels like a small town compared to the massive citiness of Budapest -- while foxes are extinct in Hungary as far as i know, on the London canal bank we saw one with our own eyes, and & said they are far from uncommon in the UK capital.

& lives in Ocean Estate, a squatted council block. Imagine 5 blocks, each at least 3 stories high with 8 flats per storey, filled with 200 or so squatters. It's a massive operation, but don't phantasize about a black army like it would be in Germany. Although squatting is still a somehow underground and recognisable subculture, squatters are a really diverse branch at Ocean Estate (and most other places), ranging from poor Asian immigrant families through the usual suspect alternative artist types to upper middle class kids who want to save up on rent in the summer. I haven't met anybody on our floor who had a strong political consciousness.

&'s flat had a guest room, and that's where i lived in the first days, gradually moving over to Noncommercial House. The atmosphere was very welcoming, especially ¬ who is a real hippy squatter with an unresistable smile. There is a kind of balcony/corridor going along the length of the house, with the doors on one side and the vista on the other -- the only social space, which is nontheless pretty effective, at least on our floor there are always neightbours hanging out, and they are always open to a chat. Many people work, many people not, some are going away all the time, and some are stuck in London for various reasons. They are open and social, but if you look at the big picture, there is a lack of gravity in the building: passivity seems to creep through the walls behind your back while you are having a conversation with somebody. Investigate later.

As i said i arrived 2AM, and i had an interview at 11AM on GreenNet. Actually the apropo for my visit was to see & and to check out this interview. I learned from & later that an interview is like an exam, they give you exercises and you get scores. It was much more laid back here, but I was still surprised when they asked me to do a n00b task of parsing a form in PHP. I had 30 minutes and nothing that I left on the server was actually doing anything, so it's plain to see that i failed miserably. In fact i spent most of my time getting root privileges on the machine and installing Emacs and setting up the code highlighing. After that part, it was questions about Drupal and mostly project management, where i could use my experience and extend my imagination. Oh yes, and they sent my a sample project description for that before, so i could prepare, which i did, more or less. Finally, they asked about my activist background, so i could do my rap about being an anarchist militant in Budapest. I left with the feeling that if they want to hire me i want to work there, and if they don't want to hire me i never wanted to work there.

We went around Soho (can you check Wikipedia about those or i should do the manual linking again?) with & after the interview, check out the fashionable bars. I had some time to clear out my mind, and drank something and smoke something, although not in adequate quantities. The worst was that i discovered the lameness of London: it is prohibited to smoke inside, so a bar is not a really useful establishment any more for the only thing most people do in Budapest: drink, smoke and talk at the same time. By the way, later i also realised that the classic English bars, albeit architecturally interesting social spaces, are in fact filled with rude, boring sports fans watching TV and blabbering amidst botched acoustics. i guess that's one good reason to have squats and squat parties, where laws don't apply so you can smoke until you and others choke. By the byway, i was at a Brazilian night in a club in Brick Lane the other night, and to my surprise it turned out that not smoking in a club makes for an even more disgusting smell than the usual smoke-n-sweat mixture -- solely the sweat remains which makes you feel like in the shambles.

In the evening i was to meet þ at the Rampart, the only stable place during the years in the fluid London underground scene for us. It was a terrible moment to arrive on site, seeing that half of Rampart Street -- the "living quarters" -- has been demolished, in such a way that the facade was still standing but going around the block i could see the somewhat familiar furniture sticking out of the bare floors, most of the back part of the building reduced to piles of bricks. Like the death of a hero after an apocalypse. The doors were closed with no sign of the squatting workshop we came for, but finally { came around to the rescue, informing us that the thing happens a few streets to the North in Commercial Street. "Look for the building with a big black flag on the roof." That's what we did, and around 11pm we found the place where i finally felt at home: a ruined building is like a supermarket -- basically the same all over the world. And the questions that self-organised activists discuss in dim lighting are not that diverse either. However, the people here were markedly less subcultural anarcho types then in other places i've visited.

The next days i mostly spent going to these workshops organised by London Free School and discovering some of the othe autonomous spaces of London: the Sunday breakfasts in the volunteer-run Pogo vegan cafe that are somethings of an establishment by now; 56a which is a combination of a food coop, the best infoshop in London and a bike repair workshop with a genuine connection to the local people; the ancient Freedom bookshop with its old-school anarchist air; the Advisory Service for Squatters with its sinister underground bureucracy, etc. i owe IMC Hungary a scene report about this anyway, so i write about it later (and in Hungarian hehe). Generally, i spent the weekend in "political business trip" mode, going around gathering info on the scene and trying to find the interesting people, places, etc.

On Monday i got the call from ä that GreenNet wants to hire me for the mission. It was one of those moments when i feel that my life is not a boat on the sea like Horace's but a Pursuit Special with wheels squeeking as i make that U-turn with precision on the rough ground. Definitely staying, then, in Sinister City. Later when we signed the contract ä said i'll have some time to enjoy the "English summer", and since then my understanding of what an oximoron is that only deepened. But i didn't come because of the lovely weather. i came since it is the only Metropolis where i speak the language and generally have a grasp of the local culture. if i love it -- that i will decide in December i guess.

i was definitely on the edge of burning out as an activist, having fought for 6 years for a social center and trying to establish the basic infrastructure for revolutionary organisation in Budapest. On the other hand i saw very interesting things coming out of London and i had phantasies about sinking confortably into an established scene without having to participate in everything and worry about all the problems. i thought a metropolis would also give the necessary inspiration of moving on from my university years towards even more interesting things, be they Phd, professional work, dropping out or being a lighthousekeeper in Bretagne. those month i felt very old in Budapest, repeatedly having the feeling that i am wasting my time. i sought another playing field, a field of operation full of surprises but within my field of experience. In retrospect, i found what i was looking for:

On Tuesday there was a meeting about the future of the house, and to my (second) surprise my tentative proposal of a freeshop got through. We spent the next week doing the "24/7 occupation" thing which means that ideally at least one person is always on the premises in case the owners or their lot comes over to check out. While walking on the street with a crowbar can get you arrested for "going equipped", squatting itself is legal in England (not in Scotland and other UK parts), so the building was thought to last for some time, not like our 24 and 36 hour squats in Budapest -- where walking the street heavy tools is not a problem. Because of the occupation i began sleeping over and spend less time at Ocean Estate, and during the next weeks i gradually moved here which came to be called Noncommercial House (i'm not sure about the hyphen though). At the end of the week i felt part of the whole thing, and the job offer seemed serious enough as well. i reported back to my closest associates that after one week in London i found a suitable political project to continue my militant activities, a wellpaying job to feel safe as an immigrant, friends to trust and a squat to stay.

For the Alternative Culture and Urban Space conference, but also for our foreign visitors, here is this map of Tűzoltó utca which has an interesting although not too apparent history of self-organisation. This is still a draft and once there is a version I am totally satisfied with it could go Hungarian since maybe not too many people know all of these. Also, the people who know more should add their bits! Certainly I missed out on some key spaces like an old gallery which operated before my time, and the future riots that will hopefully bring justice to the local population. :)

The Fire Tour explores the alternative history of Tűzoltó Street and Tűzraktér through visits to specific sites and discussions with key people who are/were involved in the various initiatives. Alternative culture in this particular sense is understood as the critical evaluation of the present conditions followed by practical engagement to improve the situation, ranging from armed struggle through social work in the local community to staging international exhibitions. For a reason not understood properly, Tűzoltó ("Fireman") Street has been the location of multiple such critical projects in the past and present, even though they failed to leave an impression on the face of the street itself. Thus, what we explore during the Tour may not be evident for the casual observer.

In case you are wandering the graphics was created with Inkscape, a free vector graphics application, and the sources are available in the cool W3C SVG format: foo bar

maxigas

Today i was sleeping until noon and left the flat with a big immigrant style bag full of clothes for the freeshop. There are many leftover things in the flat and we put them in the freeshop so other people can take them if they need. We organised an event for the 90th anniversary of the Hungarian Soviet Republic at the infoshop, not because it was perfect but because it was a really interesting historic experience. At the end we didn't project any movie but the 3+ hour discussion was quite satisfying and I learnt a lot. Finally, i visited our friends and got home with the bag full of free vegetables that they collected from the market today. Every Saturday somebody from our informal federation is going to the market and ask for leftover vegetables. It combines with trips to a bakery on Tuesday and Friday to get free bread into a steady supply of free food. The system is grassroots, unofficial, informal, involves around a dozen people and each person has to work around 8 hours a month to participate. If you are interested, drop me a line with the subject "no wage labour". .)

Tada! First Morze Infoshop flyers in English and Hungarian, focusing on the newspaper/journal distro part. We need to get more local materials. Also we need to make sure we have a steady line of supply from these gr34t mags. From next week, however, we open (Thu 6-9pm) with a whole fresh collection of periodicals and a bunch of new booklets are also coming in!

For printing and distribution, A4 PDF with 4 flyas: front and back.

(Click on the images to get a bigger version.)

After days my friend found the way to setup Thunderbird to send and receive mail from Riseup, one of the Radical Technology Collectives that work to keep activist communication channels secure. They provide IMAP for downloading your mails, and downloading your mails is the preferred method indeed, even more so if you want to use PGP for encrypting emails as well. Tutorials on their pages were for an old Thunderbird version that didn't look like what we had in the latest Ubuntu. The winning combination:

• Edit > Preferences > Privacy > Security > Verification > Do not use OCSP
• Account Settings > your@riseup.net > Server Settings > Incoming options: IMAP, mail.riseup.net, port 143, TLS, do not use secure authentication
• Account Settings > Outgoing Server > SMTP, mail.riseup.net, port 465, SSL

And the PGP worked (of course with the Enigmail plugin installed) with setting "Use pgp-agent" off:

• OpenPGP > Preferences > Advanced > Do not use gpg-agent.

Ps: At some point i will detail how we configured a PUSCII (another Radical Technology Collective) email address for Emacs and Mew on another friends' computer.

Stratobe: Stratified Blog Engine

The software behind the main metatron.sh areas have the following design goals:

1. For people and projects: Metablog engine where tags and usernames are not separated. If i want to post something on my personal blog i tag it "maxigas" and if i want to post on a project page i tag it "projectname" and that's it. Tags are aggregated on tag.metatron.sh pages. (Implementation level: all this but it's only metatron.sh/tag not tag.metatron.sh.)
2. Privacy-aware: Tags have read and write authentication. I can make sure that only me can write "maxigas" tagged posts but i can also make sure that only my intimate friends can read my "personal" posts. Many bloggers are writing about their private life online because they want to share only with their friends, but it's not always easy to manage this from a technical point of view. On social networking sites you restrict your data flow to your friends only, but the invididuals who are my "criminal friends" don't necessary overlap with my "intimate friends": maybe i want to share my personal moments with a certain group of people but my hacks with another group. But how clumsy it is to tell your friends: "here's my blog, and here is your password for it". Since it's clumsy i'd prefer a blog engine that authenticates based on Jabber or where authentications can be bookmarked. The disadvantages are that on the one hand not everybody uses Jabber and on the other hand bookmarking doesn't seem very secure. (Implementation level: 'null)
3. Filesystem based: Administered is possible with or without a browser, online or offline. The whole data structure could be managed through SCP or GIT, so it's possible to work directly on the server through SSH, locally on the road after downloading the latest version. Web interfaces are user friendly but they also thrust back application usability 20 years into the past. Even with AJAX interfaces they are slow, clumsy and have poor keyboard support. They should be provided for beginner users and those who like them but for specialists there should be specialised tools. It's all a question of design goals: to be userfriendly or to be efficient. I am willing to learn if i can be efficient, but that shouldn't mean i exclude others, at least not from the managent of a blog engine. :j (Implementation level: it's already efficient but not userfriendly.)
4. Pet project: It's a Do-It-Yourself effort in autonomy -- producing your own tools for your own purposes. It's written in a programming language from the 70s MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, therefore a true hacker tool. This dialect of LISP called Scheme does live coding, web apps, classic executables with GUIs, scripts and whatever you want, but it's not widely used in any of these areas. Therefore it's a challange and a learning experience to work with it. Let's see if it's Functional Programming methods are highly efficient or not. (More about this in the Scheme blog).

Meeting Astrid Proll at a discussion organised by the Goethe Institute was not too inspiring -- in fact her speech was essentially what I learned from the Weather Underground film. She also seemed to have censored herself a lot, which is understandable for sure. So only a few scattered notes: one point she stressed and which was really new for me is that the superior fame of the RAF amongst similar organisations operating at the time was due to their well-chosen friends and enemies, namely a fanatic RAF researcher and the Axel Springer the journalist and media magnate who conducted a true news war against them at the time.

One typical misunderstanding was when Proll said that they had no idea what they were fighting for (no programme) but they were motivated by rage against exploitation, imperialism, etc. and their prime objective was to mobilise the masses around these issues. The liberal listeners and media and as far as I understand even herself understood this as a very good reason to dismiss the whole story as some youngsters running wild without self-reflection. However, my interpretation is completely the opposite. RAF was a marxist-leninist organisation with an anarchist spin, and such a strategy comletely falls in to the line pursued in this tradition. The communist critique starts from the analysis of the material conditions of everyday life and it is purely negative: it is an attack on the system and a call for mass action. If they would have had a programme of a plan for the future they would have been a vanguardist bolshevik style of organisation that I really despise because they want to impose their will on the people. The plan for the future should be decided by the people through spontaneous mass action and self-organisation and the world of communism cannot be possibly conceived by anybody living under capitalism!

We didn't ask any question but some comrades went on record in the news reports prophesising a general havoc for the coming years incited by the same problems RAF fought their war, thanking for the example. True indeed, as another questioner asked: "Were the methods of the RAF more cruel than those of the capitalist system we still live in?"

Info event at Morze Infoshop
Tűzraktér, Hegedű utca 3., 1. emelet, folyosó vége
2009, February 4., 18:30

The murder of Alexis Grigoropoulos last December initiated one of the more massive uprisings in Greece, from the era of dictatorship until now. The murder of the 15-year-old boy by the agents of violence and oppression from the state ignited a general insurrection of the greek youth, as well as an international solidarity movement. The solidarity movement was directed not only towards the actual incident of the murder, but also caused a number of actions and criticism against the innumerable capitalistic barbarities, financial crisis and the right wing government.

We call for a public info night including discussion about the Greek insurrection and the upcoming revolts in Europe as well as presenting/discussing the history of the Greek radical movements. According also with the current situation into the Greek youth during the ''new capitalist fact'' of the financial crisis , violent precarization and other related issues to that popular uprising.

We would like also to initiate a discussion about some questions and problems that this movement tried to make visible!

• "What does it means in the age of post fordist capitalist western or western ''inspired'' metropolis to win?"
• "Which popular demands are again in the surface of the movement?"
• "How horisontality can function successfully in the anticapitalist movements of the modern world?"
• "How can practical autonomy and local alternatives to global capitalism and self organization remain relevant?"
• "Which new forms of organization and networking are necessary to coordinate successfully the international resistance against capitalism in our daily lives?"
• and YES! for establishing again "new Seattles", "new greek revolts", "new temporary autonomous zones", "new grassroot movements and victories?"

These are only some questions related to the Greek insurrection but we hope to discuss more. Our aim is to avoid the gap between presenters and consumers. You are definitely welcome to add your questions and statements to this debate...

Why was I nervous all day if I use privacy tools all the time? Because of specialisation. Professionals use professional tools, so they can be very stupid when it comes to empowering people who have only 3 hours to spend on a thing. We already discussed this in Dijon: system administrators simply don't log into the webmail interface their collective provides as a service because it's a lame and clumsy thing to do: they have their own 1337 mailreaders. Yesterday I was talking a Riseup person about their web interface: if it provides PGP support or not. He was not sure about it since he never uses this, but most users use it every day. That's why Riseup introduced a ticket system through which users can help each other: as the example above shows, sometimes the novices can learn more effectively from the advanced users than from the administrators. We had a similar dynamic in today's workshop about online privacy: the participants who achieved one task helped out those who struggled with it, and we went forward like this, step-by-step together like a swarm.

PGP or Pretty Good Privacy is a way to encrypt (and sign) your emails. It does not provide anonymity, just encryption and authentication, so your social network and communication habits are still public. You need to use anonymous remailers if you want anonymity as well, but they constitute a lore more obscure. So with PGP the Subject of the mail, the time and the addresses involved are up for grabs, but at least the body is encrypted.

The most fascinating thing about PGP is that is uses an irreversible mathematical algorhytm. Everybody has two keys: the public key for propagation and the private key which is a personal secret not to be shared with anyone even if they ask. A signed and encrypted message will be jumbled using a combination of the recipient's public key and the sender's private key, and restored using a combination of the recipient's private key and the sender's public key. Because of this you need to exchange keys with your partners, which is a fascinating social ritual, like in a Stevenson novel. At one point the United States government banned it from export because they categorised it as ammo.

So we spent one hour talking and doing a walk-through and then two hours in two small groups. We went from creating an account to exchanging encrypted messages. Of course there were problems, typically about people forgetting their passphrases just after they created their keys, and in one case we couldn't figure out what was going on until the end. The rest is nonexact statistics: at least 6 new email addresses with radical technology collectives, 8 PGP keypairs generated, 2 new Tor users on the block, and around 10 people all-in-all at the workshop. I repeated our mantra "There is no perfect security." enough times that some people asked for further explanations, so we will have a smaller workshop next week and another big one at the end of February. Another bad day for the authorities, another day when people share knowledge and arm themselves with it.

• 2009-01-29 18:00
• Sirály, Király utca 50.
• Encrypted emailing
• Anonymous browsing
• Bring your computer!

Watch your back in cyberspace and defy the omniscient gods of control society! The workshop covers the very basics of online stealth like email encryption with Pretty Good Privacy and anonymous browsing with Tor. In order to take more advantage of these technologies we will learn how to get a pirate email address and how to run an Internet browser from a pendrive. No special prior knowledge required.

Why is it necessary to operate an infoshop?

An infoshop is a free place of self-organisation, information exchange and public debate. There are many similar institutions like public libraries, pubs, universities, art galleries and the like. However, almost all of them have been set up by an official and hierarchical organisation which seeks to advance its economic and/or political interests through framing the discourse in a particular way. The infoshop should be different for three reasons. Firstly, the interests that call into existence and maintain it are nonhierarchical and self-organised. Secondly, there is an open structure with weekly meetings where anybody can join in, so the power relations are not based on representation. Thirdly, it is a very lightweight infrastructure which leaves little place for abuse even if it happens. On the other hand, the infoshop is not a place for a public discourse based on pure rationality, unbiased by power relations. Maybe it would be nice, but it's impossible. Objectivity is just a functional part of the liberal ideology: every communication is shaped by the power structure in which it happens. There is no "free speech" as such, nor naked truth. A place where anybody can say anything they want -- that would be an empty discourse without mutual understanding and practical consequences. What an infoshop can offer is an inclusive environment where the discourse is based on the interest of the people without power. The development of such discourse is one necessary condition for revolutionary social change that introduced nonhierarchical power relations and self-organisation into everyday life on a massive scale.

An infoshop is a place where...

• You can hang out in a noncommercial environment, meet like-minded people, educate yourself and others.
• You can find the latest newspapers, periodicals, calls and announcements, leaflets, etc.
• Punks and professors can find rare academic books, hardcore fanzines, and do research against the system.
• People who come to Budapest for the first time can get in touch with the antiauthoritarian political underground.
• All horizontalist grassroots groups can hold open or closed meetings, debates, workshops, working sessions.
• You can browse the archive of materials (from flyers through thesis papers to books) on:

• Anarchism
• Class struggles
• Gender
• Antiglobalisation
• Climate change
• Animal liberation