Via the Indymedia video listserv I just found a very interesting essay called "What the MySpace generation should know about working for free"

...labor has become performance, the act of being a speaker within communication systems. To paraphrase the old saying: The greatest trick that capital ever pulled was convincing the world that labor didn't exist. Labor today, is a 'casualized' and often distributed immaterial activity.

The mere presence of Tara and her friends on MySpace creates value. Surely, the generated monetary value varies; highly popular clips like the treadmill video on YouTube generated over ten million views, while others receive little attention. The quantity of small acts of labor makes YouTube profitable for Google.

Can a convincing teen-friendly version of this essay be concocted? What would kids say to this, even if it was in an easy to read, fun, non-academic tone? Would they just say "so what"? As the text goes on to say,

...I'd argue for the need of an awareness of servitude. This awareness has not been socialized among the most fervent participants of the sociable web: American teens. Despite misleading statistics, most 'MySpacesters' are young and live in the United States. Their upbringing did not instill an awareness of their embrace of market-based behavior [15] (5) . The fact that one person lives off another

• steev's blog

I've been the editor for the Indymedia U.S. Newsreal for a little over one year now, and while it's been a valuable experience for me and it's felt good to keep the project going, it has been a constant struggle to elicit contributions for it. The monthly program consists of short (1-10 minute, usually) segments sent in by videoactivists from around the country. Since the show is broadcast on Free Speech TV it seems like a great opportunity to get your work shown in front of potentially millions of viewers, and segments producers get $50 as well, but apparently this isn't enough to motivate people. I don't know what the problem is, frankly, but I'm getting tired of constanly cajoling people to send stuff in. That wasn't supposed to be my job, I was only going to be the editor, but pretty soon after I started, the outreach coordinator, Ethan, dropped off the face of the earth and stopped doing outreach.

Last month we received exactly zero submissions and Sonya, subbing for me as editor while I was in Europe, just barely managed to cobble together material for a July show. If there's still no submissions, and no renewed interest, I fear the whole project is going to have to be put to rest...

Nick Broomfield, one of my favorite documentarists, is working on a drama about the massacre in Haditha. He's in post-production and there's a preliminary trailer that looks great, and is really really intense and graphic. It's shot in a very documentary style, with documentary-like cinematography as well. Don't watch the trailer unless you're ready for how heavy it is. (Haditha, btw, is the village in Iraq where U.S. Marines went apeshit and killed a bunch of innocent people in revenge for insurgents killing one of their men.)

It turns out Broomfield also completed a previous non-documentary feature film, his first, last year called "Ghosts," based on a true story about a migrant Chinese girl. Wow. Maybe he has reached the same conclusion that I've been leaning toward, that to reach a larger, different audience and reach them more profoundly, fiction films may be the way.

Some friends of mine recently made this amazing piece of technology and bicycle activism called The Speed Vest. At first I thought it was a hoax, because one of them is well-known for his pranks and media-jamming projects. But they evidently actually built the thing, and won a contest in Minnesota. So cool!

I flew back to Tucson yesterday and got in at about 10:30 last night. Sadly, O was delayed in her own flight that was supposed to be Friday back from NYC, so the expected romantic reunion at the airport was not to be. She comes back tonite at midnight instead. I feel bad because I was off the internet for the last 3 days of my trip, which was unusual compared to the rest of the time, and O was worried. It's so unusual to have someone worry over me. I only realized the extent of her stress when I finally today read her blog entry about it from a couple days ago.

I have a lot of thinking about my trip and sorting of photos (here's a few I just uploaded to Flickr, i'll be doing a few at a time for a while, I think) and other materials collected to do. but here is a nice shot that seems relevant to my thoughts right now, as I wait for O to come back to Tucson and be with me.

One general observation about the last month that I think is interesting is that my trip was bookended by being in 2 different small German cities, one (Rostock) taken over by politics and activism and police (the G8 protests), and one (Kassel) taken over by art (Documenta). Very different motivations, but very similar in feel, I found. Which was odd.

Ok, time to go and feed O's dog.

Today I'm leaving Heilbronn after a fun week (went to the Bodensee, Bad Wimpfen, hung out at a local festival here in Heilbronn, and went to ZKM) in Baden-Wurtemburg with Allan and Jeannette, and heading up to Kassel, to spend a couple days looking at Documenta. Then Saturday it's back to Frankfurt to catch my flight home! I probably won't have time or connectivity to blog before that, so, I'll catch up once I'm back in Tucson.

I'm back in Germany, having travelled by train from Praha 2 days ago to Heilbronn, in the southern "land" of Baden-Wurttemburg (Germany is divided into 16 "lands," like states).
My brother and his wife live here and I'm staying with them for a week. Then my last 2 days in Europe will be spent at the huge contemporary art show called Documenta, which happens in Kassel only every 5 years.

This photo is of me up in the really tall, soviet-designed tower that looms over much of Prague. I uploaded it and many more to my Flickr account yesterday and today. And yet these are only a fraction of all the photos i've taken on this trip. To organize and sort them all it will be a big job that will have to wait till I'm back home. But these that are up now will at least be a very basic overview. Enjoy.

Yesterday I travelled via train from Berlin to Praha, Czech Republic (Praha is how they call Prague in Czech, and German for that matter. I'm told that the pronuciation of "h" used to sound like "g" in Czech, that's how the discrepency happened). The train ride was pleasant, the tracks following the course of the Elbe River for much of the way so the view was pretty. The border controls were rather thorough for Europe, I thought, with police on the train looking very carefully at all the stamps in my passport. What were they looking for? Perhaps if I'd ever been to Transniestria or Chechnya they would have taken me to an empty car to interrogate me? hmm.

Anway, I'm a bit culture-shocked. Prague is a very old and busy little capitol city. Lots of things are not "westernized" and "modernized" still here, whereas Berlin feels much more converted over to western, capitalized, american ways and looks (this is not a complaint, just an explanation for why it feels stranger here). The language is also really really different. But I'm staying with my friend, fellow Iowan, and fellow cultural recycler Lloyd Dunn, of The Tape-beatles, and he's orienting me pretty well.

Right now I'm sitting in Skolska 28, a small gallery in central Praha which is going to host a screening of my video work on this coming Monday. I'll be showing a mix of artist and activistic pieces, including excerpts from my Juarez film.

I should go now, get offline and see some more of this city. I think I'll head up to Pra

Here's another video I edited here in Rostock from footage shot at the G8 protests. This one is just sort of an impressionaistic glance at the blockades on Wednesday.
As before you can also download via bittorrent from v2v.cc.
Tonight is my last night in Rostock. There's a huge "finissage", a closing party for the Art Goes Heiligendamm exhibit. I've had a tad too much wine and I'm totally high on a video piece co-screenwritten by Geert Lovink called One World. It's basically all animated text with very simple animation graphics all about globalization and modern info-culture. So fucking cool.

Anyway, tommorrow back to the metropolis, Berlin.

Intrepid video journo-star Esteban Caliente was seen reporting from the road blockades around Heiligendamm yesteday:

You can also download this in ogg theora format via peer-to-peer networks (yeah, I know, what a pain in the ass, but y'know, it's ideologically great, right? like using Linux and clunky open source media tools... suspira...) from v2v.cc.

Ok, I'm off now to a big speech by Vandana Shiva, a closing keynote of the Alternative G8 Summit.