Jim Brown reviewed Intimate Bureaucracies by dj readies
Decentralized, Intimate Networks
This essay/short book is an extension of the research Saper did in Networked Art. It continues his thinking about how artists use sociopoetics to "score social situations" and how those same artists use "intimate bureaucracies" to cultivate and maintain small networks. Whereas bureaucracy is thought of as a management tool for "everyone" or for large groups of people, these groups use the tools of bureaucracy (rules, procedures, stamps) to build tigh-nit, smaller groups.
This text ties some of these ideas to Occupy Wall Street, but it also introduced me to a text I'd never heard of - 'bolo'bolo:
"The pseudonymously written bolo’bolo (1983), published by Semiotext(e) in their conspiratorial-sounding Foreign Agents series, describes the practical steps toward a utopian international social system. The author known only as “p.m.” (at least before post- publication interviews revealed the author’s identity) explains how small groups gathering outside the functions of an economy will …
This essay/short book is an extension of the research Saper did in Networked Art. It continues his thinking about how artists use sociopoetics to "score social situations" and how those same artists use "intimate bureaucracies" to cultivate and maintain small networks. Whereas bureaucracy is thought of as a management tool for "everyone" or for large groups of people, these groups use the tools of bureaucracy (rules, procedures, stamps) to build tigh-nit, smaller groups.
This text ties some of these ideas to Occupy Wall Street, but it also introduced me to a text I'd never heard of - 'bolo'bolo:
"The pseudonymously written bolo’bolo (1983), published by Semiotext(e) in their conspiratorial-sounding Foreign Agents series, describes the practical steps toward a utopian international social system. The author known only as “p.m.” (at least before post- publication interviews revealed the author’s identity) explains how small groups gathering outside the functions of an economy will form the foundation of this new social system. Instead of impersonal production and consumption, in which people’s work, for an abstract economy, defines the social system, people join together only in groups of common enthusiasms. No group, or “bolo,” forces anyone to stay, and individuals move from group to group depending on their current enthusiasm. The examples of common enthusiasms listed by p.m. include a very wide, and endlessly elastic, range of interests: garli- bolo, blue-bolo, coca-bolo, no-bolo, retro-bolo, les- bolo, etc." (7)
This decentralized (federated) structure is one more example of something folks working in/on federated networks might turn to as they think about how to build and maintain federated networks.