Organic Intellectual Work: Interview with Andrew Ross
Posted: July 11, 2007 at 9:55 am | 2 Comments
I have posted an email interview with the US-American intellectual activist Andrew Ross on my blog pages and to the nettime-l mailinglist. The reason for this exchange was the MyCreativity conference in Amsterdam that we organized in November 2006. At the last minute Andrew Ross was not able to attend the event. In the months leading up to the event I read his latest book “Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai” with great pleasure. I was struck by the continuity in his work, the threads that lead you from his New York dotcom book, the “clean clothes” anti-sweatshop movement account to earlier works, which all have in common that they are beautifully narrated and thoroughly researched. Another reason, as I mentioned, is the current ‘creative industries’ and ‘precarity’ debate that we started with MyCreativity project in which Andrew Ross is playing a significant role.
July 12th, 2007 at 6:57 am (#)
excellent, excellent interview – thanks for posting it.
September 25th, 2007 at 1:59 am (#)
[...] Geert Lovink’s latest book is entertaining preparation for the blogging conference. I don’t often follow all of Geert’s writing because I’m not sufficiently attached to the same anarcho- artist- activist scenes, but when he does cover topics that cross over with mine I find his voice an incredibly refreshing mixture of gross generalisation, useful new references, and hilariously cheeky asides. Some of my favourite passages: There is no doubt that technology such as the Internet lives on the principle of permanent change. There is no normalization in sight. The “tyranny of the new” rules, and it is this echo of the dot-com era that makes Web 2.0 look so tired right out of the gate. We can despise the relentless instability as a marketing trick, and ask ourselves why we, time and time again, get excited by the latest gadget or application. Instead of transcending the market noise and detaching ourselves, we may as well reconcile ourselves to the same old change and enjoy precisely selected and manufactured revolutions. (xi) [...]