(contextual) reviw of xurban's Knit++

A short collection of thoughts collected with the help
of xurban collective's \_Knit++\_
http://turbulence.org/Works/Knit\%2B\%2B/index.htm

The textile industry is where capitalism began; it was
the industry the brought the industrial revolution
from England to America - and it is the means by which
capitalism is gradually conquering such places as
Pakistan, to the eternal regrets of Luddites like Bin
Laden.
Lewis, Mark, \_From Lowell to Islamabad, Via
Greensboro\_ forbes.com

Equipped with networks and arguments, backed up by
decades of research, a hybrid movement - wrongly
labeled by the mainstream media as
\_anti-globalisation\_ - gained momentum. One of the
particular features of this movement lies in its
apparent inability and unwillingness to answer the
question that is typical of any kind of movement on
the rise or any generation on the move: what's to be
done?
Lovink and Schneider, \_A Virtual World is Possible\_
(posted to n5m4.org)


After recently connecting to the xurban collective's
online portion of \_Knit++\_ a few relationships between
\_global\_ social/protest movements and the rise of
networked art and culture presented themselves as
interesting for discussion. Or at least i imagined
these connections within the context of other projects
and discussions on \_New Media\_ , tactical media, US
aggression, and cyberfeminist practice. Not that any
of this would be new, or form a consolidated theory,
but - maybe suffering from the inability to answer
\_the question\_ as Lovink and Schneider argue of new
social movements - the asking of questions can be as
serious a project as answering them, even if those
questions may seem redundant.


\_Knit++\_ presents an interface that allows visitors to
navigate through narrative, pictorial, and animated
information that, when seen in the context of the
project, makes connections between textiles, computer
and social networks, and institutional power. While
the composition of the interface is fairly familiar,
with a screen-like field for changing information
above a control panel of sorts, the conceptual links
created are not. The control panel symbolically
replicates the groups proposition of \_entanglement as
opposed to intertwining\_ (artists' statement), which
is what occurs conceptually when one moves through the
project's space. Various projects incorporating
sewing, issues of women's work, and global locality
can be moved through by selecting from the tangled map
of virtual locations in the control panel.


Drawing connections between textile production and the
WWW, especially in terms of work, has been explored in
other projects, most recently Helen Whitehead's \_Web,
Warp, and Weft\_ (
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/www/webwarpweft/ ). As has the
Neo/Luddite connection, though perhaps, not always
adequately. The original textile worker Luddites of
19th Century England fought to destroy the machines
that were replacing them, not just out of fear of the
machines, but because they knew (at this early stage
of industrialism) that the machinery was the evolving
capital class's method for dealing with the problem of
labor. Looking at the questions and attempts at
solutions raised by \_Knit++\_ through the historical
and contemporary rhetoric that forms the narratives of
the Neo/Luddite movement can be useful and interesting
for those interested/involved in continuing social
movements and networked communication.
(see also Slacker Luddites from Electronic Civil
Disobedience by Critical Art Ensemble
http://www.critical-art.net for another reading of the
significance of Luddism)


The work of the xurban collective takes, what many
would call an oppositional position toward the global
expansion of capital and state sponsored culture:
\_Civil society should be constructed outside the
State and the Capitalist sponsors network. Non-profit
organizations are traps.\_


Statements like this would place xurbanites into a new
catagory of Luddite for many technocrats and
economists that represent libertarian interests like
Forbes or other, authoritarian yearnings (
http://www.pantos.org/atw/perspectives/0301.html ).
Many such technocratic pundits find it ironic that
groups of people (like the Carbon Defense League
http://www.hactivist.com ) are using high tech to
fight so-called \_progress\_. But there is also irony in
the rhetorical use of \_Luddite\_ to describe someone
like Bin Laden, someone who has profited from
modernization and construction and whose terrorist
organization isn't exactly an international labor
movement. Of course, I feel ridiculous even having Al
Queda and arts/activist groups like the CDL and xurban
in the same paragraph, for obvious reasons, but, after
looking at US Congressional hearings on \_cyber
protests\_ and DDoS attacks, I'm not sure the
authorities would feel the same (
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/dag0229.htm
). Terrorism and attempts to form networks that
operate in opposition to undemocratic institutions are
apparently the same, and it doesn't matter if the
virus is of the biological or computer variety. The
line between email from Electronic Disturbance Theater
participants and envelope bombs from the Unabomber is
a fine one according to the US Congress and its
business leaders, who seem to want to draft another
Frame Breaking Act-like law governing digital
information (where the DMCA doesn't).


But all this throwing around of loaded historical
terms like \_Luddite\_ seems to fit nicely into the, by
now well-worn, discourse of \_the Other\_, allowing us
to easily create shells of identity based on
irrational fear and aggressive desire. While most
discussion of \_the Other\_ (academic or not) has
focused on gender, ethnicity, and race, the model is
equally useful when looking at contemporary incidents
that have a history in the ongoing treatment of labor
in the West in general.


But this nice fit is not so comfortable. As modern
Western/Northern capital is more globally expansive
than ever, the models for personal and labor relations
seem to be homogenizing, so \_the Other\_ is adapting to
the needs of capital. Race and ethnicity become
problematic as locations of fear and anxiety in a
global economy ruled by capital, but class - and many
argue gender