________________________________________________________________________________ {piggyback on} just recently there has been one of the first larger e-votes in the history of net.politics. even if non-profit the company who ran it, was overwhelmed by the requests. only those with access to the proper tools (speak voting-bots) had a good chance to get their own id-number and later the right to put a candidate into the seat. in the future (speak next election), the decision if you can vote or can't will depend very much on a number of other 'technical' circumstances. like, having an internet connection at all, or a social security number, or at least an intact media immunity system, like perceptional spam filters etc. voting in times of interactivity, is something much nearer to gaming, the demographics of consumer studies, or the gambling at wall street. Pepsi or Coke? Vote now! in the meanwhile let's switch over to: http://www.cnn.com/video/burden/2000/10/24/show.rm80.ram For american patriotic governmentalists the humour ends where the game gets real. applying e-bay to the voting system, and merging e-commerce and the emerging e-voting industry puts e- democracy where it is now: to the brink of hypercapitalism. democracy for crazy people is a world-wide health product and comes in a package with the toxic drug itself: free market and a smile of jimmy carter. even the chinese, the serbs and soon the north-koreans have to accept the dollar-democracy. as a european you might be able to buy hitler's 'mein kampf' from US based e- book-shops, but now US feds want to sue some austrians for a business plan which targets on the unalienatable right to vote. what is to be exposed is the double moral of a multi-billion election industry. at the one side, an online street theater which left the art-tank to do 'serious' business, at the other, a political theatre which left the area of real-politics to get engaged into perception management. Enter the Broadband SuperHighway! (no matter if you enter from the right or left) In Europe many kinds of bribaries are historically part of political culture and don't even have to be called lobbyism. it's just "friendship" between powerful men. like Kohl and Jelzin, or Kohl and some nameless rich guys. but the people in germany are eager to forgive him - the charts for Kohl are already going up, thanks to a perverse media logic which gives the greatest rewards to the greatest sinner. an interesting side issue was that one of the first measures to stop the activist- entrepreneurs from vote-auction was to force the domain-name administrator to take their adress off the net. This is the ICANN way of control, from the whois database to the individual, if we can't erase the content, you might still take away my domain name or adress under which people 'know' my site. but this strategy is short-sighted of course. the future is now. politics enter the stock market and vice versa. so, let's bet, how many people actually vote in the USA? and how many people have a car, a fridge, or a computer? don't forget to use the message board first! public intellectuals and media theorists first. {piggyback off} [...] # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net ________________________________________________________________________________ no copyright 2000 rolux.org - no commercial use without permission. is a moderated mailing list for the advancement of minor criticism. post to the list: mailto:inbox@rolux.org. more information: mailto:minordomo@rolux.org, no subject line, message body: info rolux. further questions: mailto:rolux-owner@rolux.org. home: http://rolux.org/lists - archive: http://rolux.org/archive