nella realtà tutti quelli che hanno la stessa apertura visiva e vedono il mondo nello stesso modo non hanno osservazioni diverse da comunicarsi. solo chi ha una apertura visiva differente vede il mondo in un altro modo e può dare al prossimo un'informazione tale da allargargli il suo campo visivo. mescolate quindi i disegni, cambiate i colori degli occhi, abituiamoci a guardare il mondo con gli occhi degli altri.

(bruno munari, guardiamoci negli occhi)

sarò il 25 - 26 - 27 giugno, dalle ore 17 alle ore 21, presso lo studio matarrese - di marco con una installazione audiovisiva.

via valeria procula, 12 - 03013 ferentino fr italy

antonio coppotelli per le arti visive
zerotremilacento con installazioni
antonio matarrese per l'architettura
marco infussi con videoarte

Ovo.com, una enciclopedia in videoclip, rilegge gli eventi del mondo: andrà in tv e sul web. Al lavoro una società collegata a fininvest, alla guida il vj Andrea pezzi, sullo sfondo un discusso guru.
 
Gli uffici dove gli uomini di Silvio Berlusconi provano a riscrivere la storia sono in via Marroncelli, in un cortile della vecchia Milano. Qui ormai da un anno lavorano a pieno ritmo e nel segreto quasi assoluto una quarantina di persone. Sono i dipendenti e i collaboratori di Ovo, una srl partecipata al 47 per cento da Trefinace, una società lussemburghese che fa capo alla Fininvest. Ovo ha un obiettivo, anzi una missione, creare Ovopedia la prima enciclopedia in videoclip del mondo: un'opera colossale da migliaia e migliaia di voci che tra qualche mese entrerà nelle case degli italiani via satellite, e forse sul digitale terrestre, e sul Web.

Responsabile del progetto, molto apprezzato dall'ideatore di Forza Italia Marcello Dell'Utri, è un ragazzo simpatico e carino di 35 anni: l'ex vj Andrea Pezzi che presiede la società e la controlla al 53 per cento attraverso Nova Fronda, un'altra srl il cui nome si richiama direttamente al singolare credo psico-filosofico di Antonio Meneghetti, un ex frate francescano dal burrascoso passato giudiziario che negli anni '70 ha fondato l'ontopsicologia, una disciplina che ha come scopo la "formazione del leader, inteso come intuizione attiva di soluzioni per il collettivo".

Nel febbraio del 1998 l'Associazione di Ontopsicologia si è guadagnata quasi una pagina in un corposo rapporto del ministero dell'Interno su "sette religiose e i nuovi movimenti magici in Italia". Ma all'ex frate sentir dipingere la propria organizzazione come una psicosetta nella quale "verrebbero attuate metodologie dirette a modificare il carattere e la personalità dell'adepto, al punto di ottenere il totale condizionamento e devozione nei confronti del fondatore", proprio non andava giù. Così Meneghetti ha intentato causa al Viminale ed è riuscito a ottenere un risarcimento civile per danni d'immagine di alcune decine di milioni di lire.


Setta o non setta, resta il fatto che Meneghetti, considerato da Pezzi "un uomo straordinario e quasi magico", propaganda teorie storico-politiche sconcertanti (vedi articolo a pag. 48). Dichiaratamente filo russo e anti americano, nei suoi scritti e nelle sue conferenze l'ex frate sostiene la necessità di "relativizzare l'olocausto ebraico", perché "bisogna ricordare che gli ebrei non sono l'unico popolo che ha sofferto e pagato". "Io ho visto", spiega, "alcuni ebrei, ma anche molti italiani, molti tedeschi, molti russi e molti austriaci, morire. Ognuno ha perso, la guerra è bestiale. Tutti abbiamo perso, tutti siamo stati cattivi, tutti siamo stati partigiani".

Così Adolf Hitler, ma pure Josif Stalin, secondo Meneghetti, vanno studiati dal punto di vista del loro essere interiore, senza mai dimenticare che "la realtà è come una partita di scacchi, in cui il vicitore fa le leggi, scrive la storia e definisce la morale". "Se avessimo potuto indagare l'obiettiva motivazione interna di un leader", dice Meneghetti, "con sorpresa di molti si sarebbe notato che le fonti culturali di un Hitler sono nella dottrina dei Dalai Lama del Tibet. Lì sono i fondamenti ispirativi che giustificano il suo modo di fare, che sostanzialmente non era un voler occupare gli altri, ma voler purificare e salvare il mondo".

Simili teorie hanno una ricaduta diretta sulla linea editoriale di Ovo. In via Marroncelli, infatti, non è il solo Pezzi a frequentare i corsi a pagamento (2.500 euro) di Meneghetti, ribattezzati 'residence lideristici' e indirizzati - in Italia, in Russia e in Brasile - a "professionisti, imprenditori e politici di qualsiasi estrazione". Con lui sono seguaci del 'professore' anche il direttore editoriale Simone Ciaruffoli, un ex autore di 'Camera Cafè', la sit-com in onda su Italia 1 e l'ex direttore di produzione Andrea Andreini, proveniente dalla tv satellitare de 'Il gambero rosso', mentre in redazione circolano in numero copioso vari manuali e libri di ontopsicologia. Il risultato è per molti versi inquietante. 'L'espresso' ha potuto visionare in anteprima alcune delle videoclip finora prodotte.

In quella dedicata 'All'ascesa del nazismo', accanto a un montaggio incalzante tipico dei video musicali, accompagnato da una colonna sonora decisamente furba e coivolgente, la storia della presa del potere da parte delle croci uncinate è presentata senza indugiare in alcun tipo di giudizio storico, etico o morale. Hitler diventa così solo un leader dal fortissimo "carisma personale e dalle straordinarie virtù di oratore", mentre la questione del 'Mein Kampf', ovvero della Bibbia del nazismo, viene liquidata senza far cenno al razzismo e limitandosi a dire che nella sua opera il Führer "afferma che l'attuale declino della Germania dipende da un complotto dei comunisti e degli ebrei volto a seminare discordia e indebolire l'economia del paese".

È un po' quello che sostiene Meneghetti riferendosi all'Italia. Già nel 1997, l'ex frate scriveva: "Gli Stati Uniti - con l'appoggio del denaro ebraico (la stampa, ndr) - attraverso la 'demonizzazione' del leader hanno determinato il frammentarismo del potere del leader naturale della nostra nazione". E poi continuava dicendo che, se papa Wojtyla "va a pregare nella Sinagoga, ciò succede perché gli ebrei hanno aiutato una situazione bancaria (i debiti dello Ior, ndr)".

Insomma, viste le posizioni del 'professore', non stupisce che Hitler, stando a quanto riferiscono una serie di fonti interne a Ovo, nella biografia a lui dedicata secondo i vertici della società dovesse essere definito "un personaggio controverso", ovvero con la stessa frase che chiude il video su Stalin. Anche in questo caso viene messa in evidenza "la forza d'animo" del dittatore comunista e dopo un passaggio sui milioni di morti da lui causati "per mantenere l'ordine", la clip si conclude con queste parole: "Figura controversa del '900, l'uomo d'acciaio lascia dietro di sé un impero".

Non è un caso. Agli autori dei testi di Ovopedia, in gran parte giovani con pochissima o nessuna esperienza nel campo dell'informazione storica e scientifica, viene fornito un format preciso, che ha come comune denominatore: "La volontà".

In Ovobio, la sezione dell'enciclopedia interattiva in videoclip dedicata agli uomini che nel loro campo hanno lasciato il segno, si ordina di "mettere in luce la volontà del personaggio di raggiungere i suoi obiettivi e l'intelligenza nel saper applicare questa volontà". Mentre nel piano dell'opera Meneghetti compare tra gli "intellettuali e i mistici" cui dedicare una videoclip, accanto a figure come Aristotele, Freud, Sartre e Sant'Agostino.

Ma perché il premier ha deciso di finanziare personalmente Ovo attraverso la cassaforte di famiglia Fininvest e di inserire un suo uomo, Paolo Mazzoni, nel consiglio di amministrazione della società? Rispondere alla domanda non è semplice. Qualche dato di fatto però aiuta a capire. Già nel 2006 Meneghetti ha potuto presentare il suo libro più importante ('La psicologia del leader') alla quarta convention dei circoli giovani di Dell'Utri, mentre Pezzi nel 2005, grazie alla fortissima sponsorizzazione dell'ex assistente personale del Cavaliere e attuale parlamentare Deborah Bergamini, ha ottenuto un programma su RaiDue, 'Tornasole', in cui Meneghetti, suscitando lo sconcerto del critico televisivo del 'Corriere della Sera', Aldo Grasso, è stato tra gli ospiti d'onore. Tra gli obiettivi del 'Tornasole' c'era quello di rompere la presunta egemonia culturale della sinistra. Gli ascolti sono stati deludenti, ma quello è stato comunque un primo passo.

Poi, mentre Dell'Utri (in ottimi rapporti con Meneghetti) cercava d'intervenire sul mondo degli intellettuali con il settimanale 'il Domenicale', annunciando la scoperta dei falsi diari di Mussolini e spiegando, subito prima delle elezioni, che il Pdl "avrebbe revisionato i libri di storia, ancor oggi caratterizzati dalla retorica della Resistenza", la Fininvest si è data da fare per trovare il modo di raggiungere i giovani.

La tv interattiva di Pezzi è sembrata il sistema giusto per fare guerra a Internet (anche perché il progetto della web tv non è stato ancora scartato), ormai divenuto il primo media nella fascia d'età compresa tra i 16 e i 26 anni. Ovo ha così cercato, finora inutilmente, di trovare spazio sulla piattaforma di Sky, ha concluso un accordo con Vodafone per fornire contenuti multimediali (Ovoday) e ha bussato al mercato delle televisioni via cavo americane. In programma c'è la produzione di 2 mila clip all'anno, al costo di circa 3 mila euro l'una, cui va aggiunto il denaro per acquisire le immagini dagli archivi. Un business insomma da 7 o 8 milioni di euro ogni 12 mesi, che nel 2007, con le produzioni effettive cominciate a settembre, ha portato la società a una perdita di quasi 2 milioni.

Il progetto però è più complesso. È prevista una sezione chiamata Ovonews che si dovrebbe dedicare all'approfondimento delle notizie del giorno e una di satira politica chiamata Ovospirit. Nelle riunioni in cui Pezzi e gli altri accoliti del 'professore' discutevano con la redazione i nuovi traguardi, i vertici di Ovo hanno molto insistito sulla necessità di mettere nel mirino Antonio Di Pietro che, secondo Meneghetti, durante Mani Pulite sarebbe stato un burattino nelle mani degli americani, utilizzato per distruggere le imprese italiane.

Ancora fermo è invece il capitolo di Ovowise, dei mediometraggi dedicati al pensiero politico dei grandi leader contemporanei raccontato da loro stessi. Per il primo video, in calendario c'erano 30 minuti dedicati al premier, Silvio Berlusconi. Ma il budget era basso, poco più di 35 mila euro, e la casa di produzione straniera a cui Ovo si era rivolta ha detto no.

Ma in fondo non è un problema. Pezzi è ormai ospite fisso di molte manifestazioni di Forza Italia. Con Berlusconi vanta un rapporto personale. A convincere il Cavaliere ad allargare i cordoni della borsa ci penserà lui. Perché, in fondo, anche ad Ovo o si fa la storia, o si muore.

il brutto vizio italiano di "buttare in caciara" il dibattito politico si rivela molto efficace nell'uniformare le opinioni dei cittadini al livello più basso possibile, quello di tifo da stadio.

mi sono veramente imbestialito quando ho ascoltato che "i vescovi hanno vietato di votare bonino perchè è favorevole all'aborto" (titolo adnkronos). controllando le fonti, ho scoperto innanzitutto che era "un vescovo"; la spiegazione della seconda parte ce la metto io.

premettiamo che sono un fedele vero, chi mi conosce dovrebbe saperlo; e che dio m'aiuti ad esser santo.

il principio su cui si fonda tutta l'attività di emma bonino è la legalità, ovvero sforzarsi di regolamentare anche le parti più oscure e rognose della società moderna.
tra gli argomenti ancora mai discussi ci sono l'aborto, lo spaccio di droga e la prostituzione.
regolamentare vuol dire affermare che questi problemi esistono comunque, e che finchè non si scrive una legge (le cui misure vanno ovviamente discusse con miriadi di aggiustamenti) il loro mercato resterà in mano alla malavita.

non è forse vero che, nonostante la legge lo vieti, si abortisca ogni giorno, in cliniche private o in scantinati, per cifre attorno ai 5000€ che vanno direttamente in mano alle mafie? quante di queste persone vengono arrestate?
non è forse vero che, nonostante i decreti per la pulizia e decenza delle strade (puri spot elettorali), sia possibile trovare prostitute in giro più o meno ovunque?
per la droga poi, non c'è bisogno di retorica.

legalizzare significa quindi regolamentare, non istigare.
nessuno ha mai inneggiato a slogan del tipo "fatti mettere incinta, e poi abortisci due o tre volte: è divertente!".
abortire è una delle peggiori cose che possano capitare nella vita di una donna, sia dal punto di vista fisiologico che psicologico!

è noto inoltre che emma bonino stessa abortì tempo fa, autodenunciandosi per scontare così (volontariamente) un periodo di detenzione in carcere. questo gesto - politico e personale (vorrei vedere chi altro ha avuto il coraggio, e mi riferisco anche a silvio) - era volto a sensibilizzare l'opinione sull'argomento e a lasciare senza macchia il suo impeccabile curriculum.
infatti tutto possiamo dire della bonino, fuorchè sia mai uscita dalla legalità. è l'unica a non aver mai ricevuto avvisi di garanzia nel calderone dei nostri politici.

il discorso di emma bonino allora andrebbe letto nella chiave più idealistica possibile, ovvero come un metodo per combattere la criminalità, che purtroppo per noi trae giovamento e forti guadagni da queste situazioni.
ci si può chiedere infine se è giusto abortire. non è una buona cosa, questo è certo, ma purtroppo è un fatto che accade tutti i giorni. ma è giusto anche drogarsi, prostituirsi, o fare sesso con prostitute? chiedetelo ai nostri politici, che la sanno lunga sull'argomento e poi organizzano il family day.

questo tipo di scelte vanno lasciate alla persona, e se la persona è un buon cristiano sceglierà nella maniera più rispettosa di sè stesso e degli altri. questo è quel che possono dire "i vescovi" ai fedeli. ma non tutti sono fedeli, e c'è anche chi agisce per disperazione e chi ci specula sopra.
lo stato è un'altra cosa: un'istituzione che deve organizzare al meglio possibile la vita di tutti, cattolici e non, ed affrontare i problemi, quelli veri di tutti i giorni, che ti capitano anche se "non vai a messa".

torniamo al punto di prima: "la caciara".
il mio consiglio? ascoltate le dirette dal senato e dal parlamento, quelle senza commento, evitate tutti gli altri programmi. e fatevi le vostre idee e considerazioni sui reali interessi della politica e dei giornalisti italiani.

rettifica: ho riflettuto sull'aborto. non è giusto, come non è giusto il traffico di organi, o i bambini in vendita. sono tutte cose che esistono purtroppo anche se sono illegali. sono ingiuste ed un buon cristiano dovrebbe assolutamente evitarle. e spero proprio di non doverle contemplare mai, nemmeno per ipotesi.

detto questo vanno o combattute davvero aspramente, o controllate con una legislazione completa, che non lasci spazio all'interpretazione.
stessa idea sulle droghe, la prostituzione, l'eutanasia e quant'altro.

Riassumo qui le leggi e i decreti citati nel libro di Marco Travaglio, negli anni dal governo Craxi, fino al secondo governo Amato (dal 1985, al 2001).
Turatevi il naso.

I governi degli amici

    * Decreto Craxi
    * Legge Mammì (legge fotocopia)
    * Amato Conso - il salvaladri 1
 

Governo Berlusconi 1

    * Decreto Biondi - il salvaladri 2
    * Legge Tremonti - Mediaset detassata

Leggi ad aziendas
    * Condono fiscale
    * Condono edilizio
 

Governo Dini

    * Primo inciucio su giustizia e tv (trattativa anti referendum)
    * Primo inciucio ad mafiam - manette più difficili (riforma sulla custodia cautelare)
 

Governo Prodi 1, D'alema e Amato 2

Leggi ad aziendam (questo era il programma)
    * Legge Maccanico 1997 - secondo inciucio sulle TV (sulla sentenza della Corte Costituzionale sulle TV del 1994 )
    * Europa 7: le frequenze rubate
    * Legge sul conflitto di interessi: niente conflitto, solo interessi

Bicamerale Contra iustitiam
    * bozza Boato su CSM, giustizia, poteri dei pm, immunità ..

Leggi ad personas
    * Abuso d'ufficio addio
    * Articolo 513: prove abolite per legge
    * Articolo 111 della Costituzione: l'ingiusto processo
    * Simeone Saraceni: l'incertezza della pena
    * Carotti: l'allunga processi

Leggi ad personam
    * Sofri: l'allunga processi (istanza revisione processo spostata da Milano, a Brescia, a Venezia)
    * Cinque leggi per Dell'Utri: patteggiamento perpetuo etc. (anche in Cassazione)
    * Berlusconi Previti: se è gip, non è gup (Gip, Rossato del tribunale di Milano)

Leggi ad Castam
    * Anticorruzione? No grazie (la bozza della commissione anticorruzione di Veltri, Serra e altri, sulla corruzione)
    * Partiti, finanziamento cammuffato
    * Impunità parlamentare
    * Niente arresti per la casta (le giunte per l'autorizzazione, e il perpetuo fumus persecutionis su Previti)

Leggi ad mafiam
    * Via le supercarceri dalle isole
    * Bye bye ergastolo (col patteggiamento anche per reati gravissimi)
    * I pentiti aboliti per legge ("sono troppi" disse l'allora ministro Giorgio Napolitano)
    * Amnistia (per il Giubileo del 2000)
    * Meno scorte per tutti
    * Le indagini le fa l'avvocato (le indagini difensive)

Leggi ad aziendas
    * Falso in bilancio in modica quantità
    * Omologhe societarie addio
    * Fisco, carezze agli evasori

Infine, il centrosinista non trova il tempo, quando ha governato, di ratificare la "Convenzione penale sulla corruzione" siglata il 27 gennaio a Strasburgo.
 

Passiamo alle leggi del governo Berlusconi II e III (2001-2006), per intenderci quelle leggi vergogna che il centrosinistra avrebbe dovuto subito cancellare assieme alla regolazione del Conflitto di interessi.
Leggi fatte, come si vede, in nome dei desideri della personam, della casta, delle lobby. O anche leggi ad mafiam, o contra giustizia.
Mai, comunque, in nome degli interessi di tutti gli italiani.

Governo Berlusconi 2

Leggi ad personam.
    * Rogatorie, cancellate le prove: serviva per provare le tangenti per il processo Imi-Sir.
    * Falso in bilancio, cancellato il reato per i reati cui deve rispondere B. per le sue società.
    * Parlamento, quarto gradi di giudizio: essere parlamentare, è legittimo impedimento per non andare ai processi.
    * Mandato di cattura europeo: cancellato il trattato (inchiesta su telecinco.
    * Il governo sposta il giudice: il giudice è Guido Brambilla, uno dei tre giudici del processo Sme Ariosto.
    * Cirami, cancellato il tribunale sempre il tribunale di Milano, per il processo toghe sporche.
    * Patteggiamento extralarge: per permettere a Previti il tempo di patteggiare una eventuale condanna per la sentenza Imi-Sir Mondadori e prendere tempo.
    * Lodo Maccanico Schifani: aboliti i processi.
    * Ex Cirielli, cancellate le pene: per neutralizzare l'inchiesta sui diritti Mediaset, e salvare Previti che ha due condanne in appello.
    * Condono fiscale, cancellati altri reati. Come quelli imputati a Mediaset e al suo capo.
    * Condono per i coimputati.
    * Pecorella: cancella l'appello. B. era stato salvato in primo grado per il processo Sme Ariosto con le attenuanti generiche, rimane l'appello.

Leggi contra Iustitiam.
    * Spoltato il CSM: i membri passano da 30 a 24.
    * Tre norme anti Caselli: nuovo ordinamento giudiziario (riforma Castelli); decreto legge milleproroghe (30 dicembre 2004); emendamento di Luigi Bobbio al nuovo ordinamento giudiziario (riforma Castelli).
    * Una norma pro Carnevale: l'ex ammazzasentenze resta fino a 82 anni.
    * Ordinamento Castelli: magistrati al guinzaglio.

Leggi ad mafiam.
    * Meno scorte ai magistrati antimafia.
    * Dissociazione dolce per i boss.
    * Revisione dei processi.
    * 41 bis: carcere molle.
    * Prove tecniche di amnistia.

Leggi ad Castam.
    * Le commissioni della maggioranza per tenere sotto scacco l'opposizione: commissione Mitrokhin e Telekom Serbia.
    * Nessuno li può intercettare: specie dopo gli scandali esplosi nell'estate del 2005, con le scalate occulte.
    * Illeciti contabili condonati.
    * Partiti: finanziamenti cammuffati e raddoppiati.
    * Condonate pure le tangenti.

Leggi ad aziendam.
    * Frattini: pro conflitto di interessi.
    * Gasparri I: pro trust.
    * Decreto salva Rete 4.
    * Gasparri II: pro trust. Legge arrpovata grazie all'assenza di cinque segretari di partito del centrosinistra (Bertinotti, Diliberto, Pecoraro Scanio, Mastella, Boselli).
    * Aiuti di stati pro decoder.
    * Decreto salva Milan.
    * Pallone in TV: pro Mediaset.
    * Tassa sulla successione (legge 383/2001).
    * Autoriduzione fiscale (con l'abbassamento delle aliquote fiscali).
    * Plusvalenze esentasse.
    * Sondaggi: paga il contribuente.
    * Villa di stato con condono.
    * Mausoleo di stato (legge presentata dal senatore Lamorte ..).
    * Mediolanum si fa stato: previdenza complementare e l'uso degli sportelli delle Poste Italiane.
    * Mondadori si fa stato.

Leggi ad aziendas.
    * Due scudi fiscali: riciclaggi di stato.
    * Salva bancarottieri.
    * Esenzione Ici pro Chiesa.
    * Inquinamento legalizzato.

Il governo Berlusconi II non è riuscito a ratificare in cinque anni la Convenzione del Consiglio d'Europa sulla Corruzione, sottoscritta anche dall'Italia.
 

Il centrosinistra dell'Unione, come la Cdl prima, non si è sottratto a sfornare le sue leggi ad personam, o anche a non abrogare quelle della CDL. In nome di una concordia maggioranza opposizione, un po' anche per l'esigua maggioranza, un po' perchè il berlusconismo (ovvero intendere la democrazia e le leggi a proprio uso e consumo) ha contaminato anche la sinistra. E anche il fatto di avere come ministro Mastella, vuol dire qualcosa.

Governo Prodi 2

Leggi ad personam e ad personas
    * Indulto extra large
    * Camera, salvate il soldato Previti: le discussioni alla Camera per far decadere l'onorevole condannato.
    * Abrogare le leggi vergogna? Mai. Parola di Santagata (non c'è tempo).
    * Processo breve alla Mastella.
    * Coma Fuda: il salvaladri contabile.
    * Salva bancarottieri.
    * Ordinamento Castelli-Mastella: magistrati al guinzaglio.
    * Mastella: intercettazioni e bavaglio alla stampa.

Leggi ad spiones
    * Dopo le vicende sul rapimento delll'Imam Abu Omar, dello spionaggio illegale di Telecom, dei dossier di Pio Pompa, vengono preparate le seguenti leggi:
    * Segreto di stato.
    * Salva Pollari.
    * Due ricorsi alla Consulta anti-tribunale (di Milano, sul caso Pollari).
    * Salva Telecom 1
    * Salva Telecom 2

Leggi ad aziendam
    * Gentiloni: terzo inciucio sulla TV
    * Franceschini Violante: pro conflitto di interessi

Leggi ad mafiam
    * Antimafia, si fa per dire (con due pregiudicati come Vito e Pomicino in commissione)
    * Legge Papello 1: revisione dei processi
    * Legge Papello 1: abolire l'ergastolo

Leggi ad castam.
    * Anticorruzione? No grazie
    * Nessuno li può intercettare (grazie all'uso spregiudicato dell'autorizzazione all'uso delle intercettazioni delle Camere).

Anche il centrosinistra dell'Unione non riesce a ratificare la Convenzione del Consiglio d'Europa sulla corruzione.
 

Avevano detto tutti (basta rileggersi gli articoli del corriere, di repubblica, agli analisti della politica), commentando il risultato delle elezioni del 2008, che ora Berlusconi non si sarebbe più fatto leggi ad personam, per salvarsi (lui e si suoi siodali) dai processi.
Che la nuova legislatura sarebbe stata una legislatura "costituente", all'insegna delle riforme costituzionali e del dialogo!
E invece il cavaliere ha provveduto fin da subito a smentire così autorevoli commentatori e giornalisti.

Governo Berlusconi 3

Leggi ad personam
    * La blocca processi
    * Il non lodo Alfano
    * Intercettazioni e bavaglio alla stampa
    * Morto un lodo se ne fa un altro (nel caso, come è successo, che la Corte Costituzionale giudicasse quello Alfano incostituzionale)
    * Processo breve, anzi morto (un'amnistia nascosta, per tutti i reati dei colletti bianchi)
    * Il legittimo impedimento
    * Lodo Alfano (in)costituzionale
    * Immunità per tutti
    * Corruzione “susseguente”, cioè prescritta
    * La salva generali di Nassiriya

Leggi contra Iustitiam
    * Decreto rifiuti (per i rifiuti campani, solamente)
    * Alfano, controriforma del processo

Leggi ad Castam
    * Due condoni sui cartelloni abusivi
    * Immunità extralarge

Leggi ad mafiam
    * All'asta I beni confiscati
    * Legge anti pentiti

Leggi ad aziendam
    * Frequenze Rai a Europa 7
    * Più IVA per Sky
    * Meno spot per sky, più per Mediaset

Leggi ad aziendas
    * Niente ICI per I ricchi (dopo il taglio del governo Prodi, che nessuno ricorda ..)
    * Piano casa (con condono edilizio)
    * Scudo fiscale

Anche il governo Berlusconi 3, non riesce a ratificare la Convenzione del Consiglio d'Europa sulla corruzione (una semplice dimenticanza, tanto lui vuole vivere oltre i cento anni ....).
 

Ci sono le leggi ad personam.
Poi ci sono le leggi contra personam. Come quelle contro il giudice Caselli.
Ci sono anche le leggi ad castam (per tutte le lobby, le caste, che affollano il palazzo del potere o la palude che dir si voglia, italiana).
Le leggi ad mafiam: la legge sui pentiti del 2000, la messa all'asta dei beni confiscati, le proposte contro le intercettazioni.
Le leggi ispirate al piano di rinascita nazionale di Licio Gelli, capo della Loggia P2. Divisione dei sindacati, occupazione dell'informazione, separazione delle carriere dei magistrati.

Ma quante sono le leggi ad personam, emanate negli ultimi anni?
Negli ultimi sedici anni ne sono state approvate 36, più altre 11 tentate e poi abortite, oppure approvate in un solo ramo del parlamento.
Ne hanno beneficiato in tanti, non solo il cavaliere. E nemmeno sono tutte leggi del centrodestra (che però ne detiene la maggioranza): anche il sedicente centrosinistra ha la sua parte di responsabilità: non solo perchè molte porcate sono state approvate anche col consenso della sinistra, ma anche perchè per molte, una volta raggiunto il governo, non sono state abrogate. Eppure, durante le elezioni si era detto via alle leggi vergogna: la ex Cirielli, la depenalizzazione del falso in bilancio, la riforma della giustizia di Castelli.

Sulla giustizia si è concentrata l'attenzione della classe politica: ad ogni inizio legislatura si è sentito parlare (e si parla ancora adesso) di dover riformare la giustizia. Per renderla più efficiente? Per garantire che “la legge è uguale per tutti”? Per diminuire i tempi dei processi?

All'apparenza sembrerebbe di si.
Eppure i dati parlano di altro: basta vedere cosa hanno raccontato le inchieste di Iacona (“La giustizia”), Report (“Lotta di poteri”). Tribunali sempre più affolati, con sempre meno personale, amministrativo e magistrati. Faldoni che si accumulano, pratiche che si perdono, perchè nei tribunali l'informatica è una chimera lontana, i locali sono stipati come non dovrebbero, talvolta a rischio allagamento.
Risultato di questo è processi che durano troppo (1.457 giorni nel 1999, 1.805 nel 2003, oggi non si contano più), falciati poi dalla prescrizione (180.000 prescrizioni all'anno). Chi si occupa allora delle persone che non ottengono giustizia?
Tutto ciò nasce dai tagli alla macchina della giustizia (perchè in questo paese solo la criminalità è organizzata), i tagli al personale (i concorsi che non si fanno dal 2001), le tante leggi che si accumulano una sull'altra, rendendo il processo penale sempre più simile ad un gioco dell'oca.

Nemmeno si sa quante sono le leggi in Italia (un po' come le leggi ad personam): nel paese dove esiste persino un ministro per la semplificazione delle leggi, pare che queste siano 100.000, 150.000 o anche 300.000. In Germania sono 8.000, 10.000 in Francia.

Ma è anche un'altra malattia quella che ha colpito la nostra giustizia e di riflesso, la nostra democrazia.
La sindrome del dito e della luna. La corruzione rovina l'economia e ci costa 40 miliardi di euro all'anno?
E il legislatore la rende sempre più facile.
La salva ladri, i decreti Conso e Biondi, la legge anti manette del 1995, le bozze Boato della Bicamerale, il nuovo articolo 513 dell'articolo del codice penale, la Simeone Saraceni, le norme sui pentiti, l'incompatibilità gup gip, la legge sulle rogatorie, il legittimo sospetto.

Le intercettazioni permettono di scoprire i malaffari dei colletti bianchi (scegliete voi lo scandalo che preferite, Protezione civile, l'evasione e il riciclaggio tramite le società di telecomunicazioni, lo scandalo bonifiche a Milano)? Il legislatore parla di “casi isolati”, “mele marce” (come quel Prosperini che ha appena patteggiato la pena), ma poi legifera per restringere l'uso (meglio sarebbe toglierle del tutto) delle intercettazioni.

Notizie di questi giorni: il premier avrebbe fatto pressioni per bloccare trasmissioni di informazioni scomode, ovvero che mostrano il re nudo per quello che è?
E il legislatore allora, se la prende con i giornalisti che le raccontano.

I partiti fanno pasticci nel presentare le liste per le elezioni regionali?
E il legislatore ti fa un decreto per regolarizzare ciò che non lo è, perchè le leggi devono essere interpretate quando fa comodo a lorsignori (e non quando le interpretano i giudici, intendiamoci bene).

Il nostro parlamento è frequentato da imputati, condannati in primo grado, in appello e con sentenza passata in giudicato, e cosa ti pensano, lorsignori?
All'immunita parlamentare. Che suona sempre di più come un impunità a delinquere.

E poi c'è lui: il nostro premier, che fa suola per tutti. I magistrati lo portano a processo?
E lui costringe il parlamento ad occuparsi del lodo Alfano, il legittimo impedimento, il processo breve, l'immunità parlamentare, il lodo Alfano per via Costituzionale.

Putroppo oggi sta diventando normale il non rispetto delle leggi. Il non rispetto della Costituzione. Come se non sapessimo che proprio la nostra società si regge sul rispetto reciproco, da parte di tutti, non solo dei ladri di merendine, delle leggi.
Leggi che oggi vengono fatte non più in nome di pricipi astratti, che valgono per tutti, nell'interesse di tutti, ma solo nell'interesse di una persona, di una lobby. Insomma, un comportamento non risponde alla legge, “è la legge che va cambiata, non il comportamento”.

Al centro del patto, del contratto che lega assieme gli italiani in quella cosa che si chiama democrazia italiana, ci sono le leggi. Piaccia o non piaccia, così stanno le cose. Al di fuori delle regole (e non parliamo di quelle scritte per sovvertire le leggi e i principi della Costutizione) e della legalità, dove vivono i furbetti e gli “utilizzatori finali”, sta solo il deserto, l'anarchia, la legge del più forte, il medioevo prossimo futuro.

in brevissima:

romano prodi è un professore accademico, esperto in mercati, piccole e medie imprese e capitalismo.
autore di numerose pubblicazioni in economia, è giornalista e saggista ed ha ricevuto 21 lauree honoris causa.

è stato giudicato in tutti i processi a suo carico senza subire mai condanne in alcun grado di giudizio, anche se con il sentore di leggi ad personam.

aspetti controversi:
- possibile agente kgb, aveva informazioni sul rapimento moro (giudicato non colpevole - caso moro / )
- ha forse ricevuto tangenti (giudicato non colpevole - casi telekom serbia)
- ha forse venduto un'azienda statale per cifre inferiori al reale valore (giudicato non colpevole - caso iri - sme)
- ha forse favorito un'impresa invece di un'altra in una acquisizione (giudicato non colpevole - caso cirio)
- ha forse avuto un conflitto di interessi, affidando consulenze pagate dallo stato alla sua azienda (giudicato non colpevole - caso nomisma)

silvio berlusconi è un imprenditore edile, trovatosi a gestire molto denaro appena trentenne.
con perizia e numerose manovre ha acquisito proprietà in editoria, televisione, grande distribuzione, diventando uno degli uomini più ricchi del pianeta.

non è stato giudicato in tutti i processi a suo carico, sfruttando leggi ad personam da lui stesso proposte ed emanate: prescrizioni per i reati, amnistie, assoluzioni per avvenuta modifica delle leggi in particolare attinenti il falso in bilancio. ha tutt'oggi procedimenti penali aperti.

aspetti controversi:
- oscura origine di ingenti capitali, ipotizzabile in riciclo di denaro sporco
- favoritismi nei confronti della legislazione attinente i canali tv grazie a legami personali con craxi (tutt'oggi irrisolto con rete4)
- falso in bilancio e spostamento di capitali tra aziende per risolvere loro difficoltà economiche
- modificazioni indotte tramite i media nella società: il programma politico dei suoi partiti ricalca in molti punti il ruolino di marcia della loggia massonica p2; ipotesi di revisionismo storico come in ovo.com, alcuni programmi televisivi e libri sui suoi rapporti con craxi
- numerosi rapporti con personaggi oscuri, protagonisti di grandi inchieste (sindona, marcinkus, ior vaticano, dell'utri, mangano, riina, gelli)
- conflitto di interessi irrisolto, riguardo lo sbilanciamento mediatico
- mancato rispetto del contratto con gli italiani e similari / successivi
- leggi ad personam (cirami, schifani, alfano, pecorella, gasparri, previti)
- intercettazioni telefoniche con saccà, per raccomandazioni a ragazze in rai in cambio di favori sessuali
- caso letizia: veronica lario chiede il divorzio per sue presunte pratiche sessuali con minorenni
- caso carfagna: donna eletta ministro in cambio di favori sessuali
- caso d'addario: donna candidata alle europee in cambio di favori sessuali
- caso villa certosa: feste a base di sesso e droga, ministro ceco topolanek ritratto nudo con donne in piscina

tutto questo, insieme, non può che instillare un legittimo dubbio.
la mia domanda è: possibile che di tutte le leggi "famose" perchè controverse, non ce ne sia una che riguardi i grandi temi della società di oggi? perchè riguardano in qualche modo tutte lui o i suoi protetti? ma sono forse gli unici argomenti di cui si poteva discutere?

e soprattutto: come fa questo tipaccio a stare in ottimi rapporti con la chiesa cattolica???

seguono i curricula.

romano prodi (1939)

1) nato da ingegnere e maestra elementare

2) due sorelle e sette fratelli, di cui cinque docenti universitari (matematica, fisica, storia moderna, meteorologia, patologia generale)

3) camillo ruini lo sposa nel 1969 con flavia, economista e docente universitaria; due figli

4) si laurea nel 1961 in giurisprudenza (tesi: protezionismo  nello sviluppo dell'industria italiana)

5) vita accademica
- assistente alla cattedra di "Economia Politica" della facoltà di Scienze politiche dell'Università di Bologna,
- cattedra di Economia e politica industriale all'università di trento,
- visiting professor all'Università di Harvard,
- ordinario di Economia politica e industriale" all'Università di Bologna fino al 1999
- visiting professor presso lo Stanford Research Institute
- riceve 21 lauree honoris causa

6) editoria ed altre aziende
- ha presieduto la casa editrice il Mulino
- direttore delle riviste Energia e L'Industria
- ha fondato Nomisma, una società di studi economici e consulenza

7) attività giornalistica
- ha collaborato con i maggiori quotidiani nazionali tra cui il Corriere della Sera e Il Sole 24 Ore
- conduttore nel 1992 di una serie di trasmissioni su Rai Uno: Il tempo delle scelte, in cui teneva delle vere e proprie lezioni di economia

8) interessi personali: i temi delle sue ricerche hanno riguardato principalmente lo sviluppo delle piccole e medie imprese, dei distretti industriali e la politica contro i monopoli. In un secondo momento si è anche interessato delle relazioni fra Stato e Mercato e della dinamica dei diversi modelli di capitalismo.

nota: Durante i governi Prodi nulla si è fatto per abolire le norme scandalo dei governi precedenti, non si sono ratificate le Convenzioni del Consiglio d'Europa sulla corruzione, e sono state varate ugualmente leggi ad personam, anche se di contenuto generalmente molto ampio. Tra queste vi sarebbero:

Leggi ad personam e ad personas
    * Indulto extra large
    * Camera, salvate il soldato Previti: le discussioni alla Camera per far decadere l'onorevole condannato.
    * Abrogare le leggi vergogna? Mai. Parola di Santagata (non c'è tempo).
    * Processo breve alla Mastella.
    * Coma Fuda: il salvaladri contabile.
    * Salva bancarottieri.
    * Ordinamento Castelli-Mastella: magistrati al guinzaglio.
    * Mastella: intercettazioni e bavaglio alla stampa.

Leggi ad spiones
    * Dopo le vicende sul rapimento delll'Imam Abu Omar, dello spionaggio illegale di Telecom, dei dossier di Pio Pompa, vengono preparate le seguenti leggi:
    * Segreto di stato.
    * Salva Pollari.
    * Due ricorsi alla Consulta anti-tribunale (di Milano, sul caso Pollari).
    * Salva Telecom 1
    * Salva Telecom 2

Leggi ad aziendam
    * Gentiloni: terzo inciucio sulla TV
    * Franceschini Violante: pro conflitto di interessi

Leggi ad mafiam
    * Antimafia, si fa per dire (con due pregiudicati come Vito e Pomicino in commissione)
    * Legge Papello 1: revisione dei processi
    * Legge Papello 1: abolire l'ergastolo

Leggi ad castam.
    * Anticorruzione? No grazie
    * Nessuno li può intercettare (grazie all'uso spregiudicato dell'autorizzazione all'uso delle intercettazioni delle Camere).

silvio berlusconi (1936)

1) nato da impiegato bancario e segretaria, poi casalinga

2) sorella ballerina, fratello imprenditore

3) sposa nel 1965 carla elvira, da cui ha due figli; nel 1980 conosce veronica, da cui ha tre figli, divorzia nel 1985, sposa con rito civile veronica nel 1990; nel 2009 veronica chiede il divorzio

4) si laurea nel 1961 in legge (tesi: il contratto di pubblicità per inserzione)

5) prime esperienze lavorative
- cantante e intrattenitore sulle navi da crociera con Fedele Confalonieri
- venditore porta a porta di scope elettriche
- agente immobiliare

6) edilizia popolare
- fonda la Cantieri Riuniti Milanesi Srl e acquista terreni grazie alla fideiussione  del banchiere Carlo Rasini (titolare e cofondatore della Banca Rasini, nella quale lavorava il padre di Silvio)
- fonda altre aziende edili utilizzando fondi non tracciabili provenienti dalla svizzera

7) attività nei media televisivi
- nel 1978 rileva Telemilano
- dal 1981 inizia ad utilizzare la propria rete di emittenti locali come se fosse un'unica emittente nazionale: si registra con un giorno d'anticipo il palinsesto e le pubblicità e li si trasmette il giorno seguente in contemporanea in tutta Italia.
- Nel 1982 il gruppo si allarga con l'acquisto di Italia 1 dall'editore Edilio Rusconi e di Rete 4 nel 1984 dal gruppo editoriale Arnoldo Mondadori Editore
- Nel 1984 i pretori di Torino, Pescara e Roma oscurano le reti Fininvest per violazione della legge che proibiva alle reti private di trasmettere su scala nazionale. L'azione giudiziaria viene fermata dopo pochi giorni dal governo guidato da Bettino Craxi che con un apposito decreto legge legalizza la situazione della Fininvest.

8) interessi personali:
sopravvivenza di un grande impero economico; trasformazione dell'italia probabilmente nella direzione propaganda p2; diventare presidente della repubblica.

nota: Durante i governi Berlusconi succedutisi tra il 1994 e il 2006 il Parlamento ha varato una serie di provvedimenti legislativi aspramente contestati dall'opposizione e da alcuni settori della stampa i quali ritenevano che questi provvedimenti fossero stati approvati appositamente per favorire la posizione di Berlusconi. Dette leggi sarebbero collegate sia al conflitto di interessi del politico-imprenditore, sia del politico imputato nei processi in corso. Altre ancora riferibili a familiari o colleghi di partito. Tra queste vi sarebbero:

Governo Berlusconi 1
    *Decreto Biondi - il salvaladri 2
    *Legge Tremonti - Mediaset detassata

Leggi ad aziendas
    *Condono fiscale
    *Condono edilizio

Governo Berlusconi 2
Leggi ad personam.
    * Rogatorie, cancellate le prove: serviva per provare le tangenti per il processo Imi-Sir.
    * Falso in bilancio, cancellato il reato per i reati cui deve rispondere B. per le sue società.
    * Parlamento, quarto gradi di giudizio: essere parlamentare, è legittimo impedimento per non andare ai processi.
    * Mandato di cattura europeo: cancellato il trattato (inchiesta su telecinco.
    * Il governo sposta il giudice: il giudice è Guido Brambilla, uno dei tre giudici del processo Sme Ariosto.
    * Cirami, cancellato il tribunale sempre il tribunale di Milano, per il processo toghe sporche.
    * Patteggiamento extralarge: per permettere a Previti il tempo di patteggiare una eventuale condanna per la sentenza Imi-Sir Mondadori e prendere tempo.
    * Lodo Maccanico Schifani: aboliti i processi.
    * Ex Cirielli, cancellate le pene: per neutralizzare l'inchiesta sui diritti Mediaset, e salvare Previti che ha due condanne in appello.
    * Condono fiscale, cancellati altri reati. Come quelli imputati a Mediaset e al suo capo.
    * Condono per i coimputati.
    * Pecorella: cancella l'appello. B. era stato salvato in primo grado per il processo Sme Ariosto con le attenuanti generiche, rimane l'appello.

Leggi contra Iustitiam.
    * Spoltato il CSM: i membri passano da 30 a 24.
    * Tre norme anti Caselli: nuovo ordinamento giudiziario (riforma Castelli); decreto legge milleproroghe (30 dicembre 2004); emendamento di Luigi Bobbio al nuovo ordinamento giudiziario (riforma Castelli).
    * Una norma pro Carnevale: l'ex ammazzasentenze resta fino a 82 anni.
    * Ordinamento Castelli: magistrati al guinzaglio.

Leggi ad mafiam.
    * Meno scorte ai magistrati antimafia.
    * Dissociazione dolce per i boss.
    * Revisione dei processi.
    * 41 bis: carcere molle.
    * Prove tecniche di amnistia.

Leggi ad Castam.
    * Le commissioni della maggioranza per tenere sotto scacco l'opposizione: commissione Mitrokhin e Telekom Serbia.
    * Nessuno li può intercettare: specie dopo gli scandali esplosi nell'estate del 2005, con le scalate occulte.
    * Illeciti contabili condonati.
    * Partiti: finanziamenti cammuffati e raddoppiati.
    * Condonate pure le tangenti.

Leggi ad aziendam.
    * Frattini: pro conflitto di interessi.
    * Gasparri I: pro trust.
    * Decreto salva Rete 4.
    * Gasparri II: pro trust. Legge arrpovata grazie all'assenza di cinque segretari di partito del centrosinistra (Bertinotti, Diliberto, Pecoraro Scanio, Mastella, Boselli).
    * Aiuti di stati pro decoder.
    * Decreto salva Milan.
    * Pallone in TV: pro Mediaset.
    * Tassa sulla successione (legge 383/2001).
    * Autoriduzione fiscale (con l'abbassamento delle aliquote fiscali).
    * Plusvalenze esentasse.
    * Sondaggi: paga il contribuente.
    * Villa di stato con condono.
    * Mausoleo di stato (legge presentata dal senatore Lamorte ..).
    * Mediolanum si fa stato: previdenza complementare e l'uso degli sportelli delle Poste Italiane.
    * Mondadori si fa stato.

Leggi ad aziendas.
    * Due scudi fiscali: riciclaggi di stato.
    * Salva bancarottieri.
    * Esenzione Ici pro Chiesa.
    * Inquinamento legalizzato.

Governo Berlusconi 3
Leggi ad personam
    *La blocca processi
    *Il non lodo Alfano
    *Intercettazioni e bavaglio alla stampa
    *Morto un lodo se ne fa un altro (nel caso, come è successo, che la Corte Costituzionale giudicasse quello Alfano incostituzionale)
    *Processo breve, anzi morto (un'amnistia nascosta, per tutti i reati dei colletti bianchi)
    *Il legittimo impedimento
    *Lodo Alfano (in)costituzionale
    *Immunità per tutti
    *Corruzione “susseguente”, cioè prescritta
    *La salva generali di Nassiriya

Leggi contra Iustitiam
    *Decreto rifiuti (per i rifiuti campani, solamente)
    *Alfano, controriforma del processo

Leggi ad Castam
    *Due condoni sui cartelloni abusivi
    *Immunità extralarge

Leggi ad mafiam
    *All'asta I beni confiscati
    *Legge anti pentiti

Leggi ad aziendam
    *Frequenze Rai a Europa 7
    *Più IVA per Sky
    *Meno spot per sky, più per Mediaset

Leggi ad aziendas
    *Niente ICI per I ricchi (dopo il taglio del governo Prodi, che nessuno ricorda ..)
    *Piano casa (con condono edilizio)
    *Scudo fiscale

nolapro è un software gratuito web based per la gestione d'impresa.

manca purtroppo di una traduzione in italiano, di cui mi sto occupando io. qualora qualcuno volesse dare una mano (sono circa 8.000 parole, non tantissime) prego di contattarmi via facebook (marco infussi, avatar un cagnolino bianco con una croce rossa sull'occhio) oppure commentando qui, oppure via email a 17[chiocciola]amolenuvolette.it .

cosa vuol dire web based: si installa (è uno dei pù facili) e si utilizza tramite browser (firefox, opera, safari). questo vuol dire che non è necessario installare nulla sui computer degli utilizzatori, e che il software va aggiornato solo sul server, evitando tante fatiche agli amministratori. è possibile utilizzarlo da ovunque: basta disporre di una connessione internet. per chi non avesse ancora capito, è come la posta elettronica o facebook.

cosa vuol dire gratis: in realtà è un software proprietario gratuito, non è open source. questo vuol dire che possiamo usarlo in tutte le sue funzionalità gratis, ma non modificarlo. dove ci guadagna la ditta che lo ha prodotto? perchè offrono assistenza, plugin a pagamento, e hosting su loro server e database sicuri per chi non potesse o non fosse capace ad installarselo da solo. è un modello di mercato che si chiama saas (software as service), ovvero hosting on demand.

cosa vuol dire gestione d'impresa: il software permette di gestire:
- ordini e database clienti / fornitori
- fatture e riba
- inventario
- stipendi e dati dipendenti
- libro mastro, ovvero contabilità
- calcolo del tempo di lavoro dei dipendenti
- portale internet per business to business (b2b)
- punti vendita (pos)
- sistema di messaggistica interno
- sito di e-commerce basato su una versione modificata di os-commerce open source

perchè una traduzione: perchè per farlo usare a persone che non capiscono nulla di computer, figuriamoci cosa accadrà se il software è pure in inglese!

cosa si guadagna: la ditta che produce nolapro offre tutti i plugin, manuali e file delle traduzioni gratis per i traduttori, per un valore di 250$. in più - personalmente non sono interessato a questo, ma potrebbe essere uno stimolo per qualcuno di voi - potete diventare rivenditori di nolapro in italia.

alcuni link utili: consiglio di cominciare subito, anche per gioco, o almeno per provare il sofware:
- confronto dei principali software per la gestione d'impresa su wikipedia
- nolapro su wikipedia con recensioni imparziali
- forum di nolapro + istruzioni video per l'utilizzo training base
- istruzioni per tradurre nolapro leggere attentamente, è molto semplice
- sito in cui inserire la versione italiana, seguendo le sopracitate istruzioni

as i'm just back in italy, and as i have nothing else to do, i'll post some insights from my explorations in paris, france (2nd take, this time with my lovely domitilla).

eat & drink because this is - first of all - important to have enogh energy to walk

for a delightful lunch on the rive gauche, le comptoir (9, carrefour de l'odéon, 6th arr.), run by claudine and yves  camdeborde, is unbeatable. this thirties-style bistro (complete with mirrored walls) seats just 20 inside and - in warmer months- another 16 on the sidewalk, and doesn't accept lunch reservations. but take this from a veteran: it's worth the hassle of waiting and not taking "non" for an answer. order the grilled tuna, which comes with the crispest vegetables, or opt for succulent souris de gigot (lamb knuckle) served with semolina. round out your meal with an indulgent cheese plate or double-sized pots de crème au chocolat.

ferdi (32, rue du mont-thabor, 1st arr.) serves "the best cheeseburger in paris." the tartare-worthy ground sirloin, cooked medium-rare and topped with a thick layer of cheddar and cheshire cheese, is available only at lunch, but don't worry if you don't make it till after sunset. in the evenings, the fashion-heavy crowd returns, its attention focused on ferdi's tapas-style small plates and potent mojitos and margaritas.

la coupe d'or (330, rue st.-honoré, 1st arr.), bang opposite colette, is the place to hang out, eat croque monsieurs made with poilâne bread, drink café, and watch droves of gazelle-like fashionistas. make them envious: order a scoop (or two) of the cult-status berthillon ice cream.

the packaging at fouquet (22, rue françois 1er, 8th arr.) - glass jars with dark brown-and-white labels - makes for an amazing presentation of this store's very expensive (and addictive) bonbons, caramels, and truffles.

patisserie sadaharu aoki (35, rue de vaugirard, 15th arr.) sells wonderful macarons and "buche de noel" christmas cakes.

to eat at pierre gagnaire (6, rue de balzac, 8th arr.) be ready to begin your fight for one of their hard to get reservations. gagnaire earned his three stars from the guide michelin (the highest possible rating) by creating inventive, often astonishing food, served in a parade of small plates. you may find yourself dining on foie gras paired with mussels and bean sprouts; or tiny rolls of veal stuffed with veal liver; or crayfish tempura in a sweet and sour sauce. it may all sound odd, but it tastes exquisite. a pricey meal, but well worth it.

and also: taverne henri iv (13, place pont neuf) , flo brasserie la coupole (102, bd du montparnasse).

antiques & weird and all the kind of stuff i love

tombées du camion (17, Rue Joseph de Maistre Paris, 18th arr.; also in a stand in marche au puces) is an impressive shop: lots of "anciens et oubliés, nombreux bijoux, perles, et accessoires de mode, stocks exclusifs d’usines abandonnées, séries industrielles, fonds de merceries en abondance, jouets manufacturés du siècle dernier, matériel de laboratoire, petits objets de culte à profusion, stocks de fabricants et grossistes, souvenirs des enseignes d’autrefois, trésors artisanaux en quantité, accumulations en tout genre, gadgets historiques et traditionnels, archéologie de l’enfance..."!

antiquarian pierre passebon, the curator of galerie du passage (20-22, galerie véro-dodat, 1st arr.), has impeccable taste and stocks the best 20th-century french furniture, made by the likes of jean ­royère and emilio terry, as well as works by contemporary artists such as wendy artin.

galerie j. kugel (25, quai anatole-france, 7th arr.), in the palladian hôtel collot, is run by brothers nicolas and alexis kugel, whose clients include countless rothschilds, hubert de givenchy, and henry kravis. the mansion's four floors are full of superb antiques, among them mirrors from the throne room of the 18th-century saxon king augustus ii (the strong) and an eye-popping collection of renaissance jewelry.

for a truly one-of-a-kind gift, visit claude nature (32, blvd. st.-germain, 5th arr.), a taxidermist's treasure trove of pink flamingos, foxes, and deer's heads. the spare boutique's glass cabinets display exotic shells, framed butterflies, scarabs, and the deadliest of scorpions.

papier+ (9, rue du pont-louis-philippe, 4th arr.) and never leaves paris without stocking up on lavender diaries, simple blue note­cards, a stash of colored pencils, and photo albums.

look further about passage couverts below.

art (seriously)

palais de tokyo (13, ave. du président-wilson, 16th arr.), across the seine from the tour eiffel, is a huge space with mile-high ceilings that exhibits the works of artists such as vanessa beecroft, jeff koons, and kara walker. other highlights include a bookshop and blackblock, the groovy boutique.

in the marais you can find galerie 213 (58, rue de charlot, 3rd arr.), which is devoted not to painting but to the art of some of france's leading photographers.

a real treasure is galerie yvon lambert (108, rue vieille-du-temple, 3rd arr.). its owners are hailed as the discoverers of minimalism and conceptual art.

a more traditional gallery is in st-germain-des-prés, with galerie adrien maeght (42, rue du bac, 7th arr.).

prêt-à-porter and outlets to spend your whole-life's savings!

the stylish mona blonde picks only the crème de la crème of the latest collections for her eponymous store mona (17, rue bonaparte, 6th arr.). you'll find trousers by chloé's phoebe philo, skirts by lanvin's alber elbaz, suits by alexander mcqueen, and shoes by marc jacobs.

madame andré (34, rue du mont thabor, 1st arr.) sells the gilles dufour collection plus a mix of inexpensive items, such as perky underwear by i. c. pearl and colorful bangles from india, displayed in a candy-pink interior.

follow the lead of savvy parisians to l'habilleur (44, rue de poitou, 3rd arr.) for last season's designer clothes - both men's and women's - at exceptional prices.

calesta kidstore (23, rue debelleyme, 3rd arr.) is the colette for kids. this sparse concept store sells the trendiest european accessories and clothes, including t-shirts by london's no added sugar and hippie pieces by belgian designer pilar.

20 sur 20 (3, rue des lavandières st. opportune, 1st arr.) is every chic local's secret weapon. bakelite charm necklaces jingling with cherries, along with other costume jewelry dating from the forties to the sixties, can be had at serious bargain prices.

talmaris (61, ave. mozart, 16th arr.) is the destination of choice for dior's de castellane and ysl's stefano pilati for their engraved personal stationery. heavy stock is available in virtually every color of the rainbow. owner alain-paul ruzé also has an unbeatable selection of china, glassware, photograph frames, and children's toys.

sr store (64 rue de alésia, 14th arr.). that's sr as in sonia rykiel - deep discounts bring these pricey items out of the stratosphere and closer to earth.

cacharel boutique outlet (114, rue d'alésia, 14th arr.) with a voluminous selection of last season's offerings at  significant reductions.

stock jeans ober (111, bis rue alesia, 14th arr.): this closet-size store is stuffed with a wide range of body-hugging jeans and pants by the one and only french jeans label, ober. you'll pay half what you would pay at printemps.

another great street for bargain hunters is just around the corner from the bon marché department store: rue st-placide (6th arr.): here you'll find great discounts on women's apparel, children's clothes, and linens, as well as some of the less expensive chain stores.

mouton à cinq pattes (8 and 18, rue st-placide, 6th arr.): sift through the packed racks of designer markdowns and you just might find moschino slacks or a gaultier dress at a fabulous price. if you do, grab it fast - it might not be there tomorrow. these are some of the best designer discounts in town, but you really have to look. the store at no. 8 is women's apparel only; no. 18 serves both sexes, as does their other equally overstuffed store at 138 blvd. st-germain also in the 6th arr.

caroll stock (30 and 51, rue st-placide, 6th arr.), which is the outlet shop for the elegant caroll brand.

and don't forget rue de la chausée d'antin (9th arr.), which bisects the galeries lafayette department store. laden with small shops and good prices, this street excels at moderately priced shoe stores, such as la chausseria (39, rue de la chausée d'antin, 9th arr.).

culture, special places, little hidden surprises

le musée du parfum
9, rue scribe, 1st arr.
rer: a station auber / metro station opéra (lines 3,7 and 8)

parc de belleville
20th arrondissement
metro: pyrenées

musée bourdelle
16/18, rue antoine bourdelle
metro: montparnasse / bienvenüe

musée carnavalet
c/o hôtel carnavalet
23, rue de sévigné
metro: saint-paul (line 1) / chemin vert (line 8)

buttes-chaumont park
main entrance at rue botzaris, 19th arr.
metro: buttes-chaumont / botzaris (line 7 bis)
nearby sights and attractions: pere lachaise cemetery, belleville neighborhood, canal saint-martin

jardin des plantes
place valhubert, 5th arr.
metro: gare d'austerlitz (line 5, 10)
rer: gare d'austerlitz (line c)
bus: line 24, 57, 61, 63, 67, 91
nearby sights and attractions: the latin quarter, mouffetard neighborhood

rock hair
7, boulevard beaumarchais
metro: bastille
if you need an indie aircut... :D

the promenade plantée
main entrance at avenue daumesnil, above the "viaduc des arts".
metro: bastille (line 1, 5, )

marché aux fleurs
place louis-lépine
on sundays, the area is transformed into the marché aux oiseaux, where you can admire rare birds from around the  world.

marché aux pouches
metro: porte de clignancourt
there are several markets and galleries so, be prepared to long walks.

bus no. 29
begins at gare st-lazare (métro: st-lazare), aboard no. 29, you pass the famous opera garnier (home of the phantom), proceeding into the marais district, passing by paris's most beautiful square, place des vosges. you end up at the bastille district, home of the new opera. what we like about this bus is that it takes you along the side streets of paris and not the major boulevards. it's a close encounter with back-street paris and a cheap way to see the city without commentary.

passages couverts

here is just a sampling of the 20 glass-covered, shopping arcades that exist today. wander through them, browse, shop, stop for a coffee, or a snack in the bistros. thrill to the fact that you are shopping the way parisians have done for centuries and following in the footsteps of illustrious writers such as honoré de balzac, alfred de musset, gérard de nerval, and emile zola.

galerie vivienne (4, rue des petits champs or 6, rue vivienne or 5, rue de la banque; 2nd arr.; metro: bourse or pyramides): built in 1823, this is considered to be the most elegant passage with a beautiful mosaic floor, hanging lamps, symmetrical arches, and pretty potted trees. it's filled with high-fashion boutiques, antiques shops and old bookstores. (it converges with the galerie colbert.)

galerie colbert (6, rue des petits-champs or 6, rue vivienne; 2nd arr.; metro: bourse or pyramides): built in 1826 to rival the galerie vivienne, the passage was restored in the 1980s by the bibliothèque nationale (national library). it leads to a magnificent, glass-covered rotunda with a bronze statue by charles-françois leboeuf.

passage du grand-cerf (145, rue saint-denis or 10, rue dussoubs; 2nd arr,; metro: etienne marcel): built in 1835, this passage is stunningly stylish with wrought-iron work, wood-paneled shop fronts and shimmering-glass, skylight roof. it is lined with boutiques for fashion designers, artisans and decorators.

passage des panoramas (11, boulevard montmartre or 10, rue saint-marc; 9th arr.; metro: grands boulevards): built in 1799, this is the oldest covered passage in paris and the first public place lit by gaslight in 1817. it's still bustling with activity with stamp collectors, antique postcard boutiques, restaurants, new trendy shops and venerable establishments such as the théâtre des variétés opened in 1807. (it links to several other passages: galerie des variétés, galerie feydeau, galerie montmartre, and galerie saint marc. and, it's across from the passage jouffroy, which leads to the passage verdeau.)

passage jouffroy (10-12, boulevard montmartre or 9, rue de la grange-batelière; 9th arr.; metro: grands boulevards): built in 1847, passage jouffroy is full of shops selling collectible film posters, old books, postcards, vintage toys and interesting bric-a-brac. there's also a quirky wax museum, musée grévin.

passage verdeau (31bis, rue du faubourg-montmartre or 6, rue de la grange-batelière; 9th arr.; metro: le peletier): built in 1847 with neo-classical decor, the passage verdeau is only one block long and lined with old-fashioned shops selling vintage photos and prints, stamps, old books and postcards. this is my favourite one, and here is set 21, passage verdeaux, a short story that i have written a long time ago. (note: 21 is curiously a non-existent address in that passage, between cafè verdeaux - now closed, at number 23 - and a chocolate shop at 19.)

galerie véro-dodat (19, rue jean-jacques rousseau or 2, rue du bouloi; 1st arr.; metro: louvre rivoli): built in 1826 by two butchers, véro and dodat, this neo-classical style passage, with painted ceilings and copper pillars, has art  galleries and antique shops selling everything from fine stringed instruments to collectible toys and dolls.

strolling and wasting time and losing the path to the nearest metro

there are many great paris walks, but you really need to pay attention along the way. strolling through the city's streets  lets you soak up the parisian ambiance like a native.

promenade plantée
12th arr.
metro: bastille
hopefully, when the highline in new york is done, it will look like this! this former train viaduct, built in 1859 to carry a commuter train line, has been transformed into a delightful pedestrian walkway. the path, about 3 miles long, is planted with all types of flora - rosebushes, climbing plants, lime and hazel trees - and, as you stroll along, you can see right into apartment windows, courtyards, and over the rooftops of paris. the elevated walkway connects with trails and bike paths that lead straight into the bois de vincennes. but, you don't have to go all the way to the end: at various points along the path, there are stairways leading down to avenue daumesnil, paralleling the promenade plantée.

viaduc des arts
12th arr.
metro: bastille
once you reach the sidewalk, you can head right into a shopping stroll because the beautiful vaulted spaces underneath the viaduct archways have been transformed into galleries, ateliers and shops. everything from designer furniture, to handmade jewelry, to tapestry and puppetry is showcased in this unique setting. some 50 different artisans, working in a variety of materials and styles, have made the viaduc des arts a lively shopping or browsing experience with craft demonstrations and special exhibitions. you can also have coffee or a bite to eat. if the consumerism gets too much for you, head back up to the promenade plantée.

la rue mouffetard
5th arr.
metro: censier-daubenton / maubert-mutualité
yes, i know, it's gotten very touristy, but it's still a great street with a lot of history and character and attention must be paid. rue mouffetard runs down the hill sainte-geneviève from rue thouin (near the panthéon) to the église saint-médard at the intersection of rue monge. it is said to be one of the oldest parisian thoroughfares, dating back to roman times. it is as picturesque as ever with many little restaurants, old-established merchants, famous taverns, butcher shops, and cheese vendors along with some new, trendy boutiques. the open-air market in the church square sells an assortment of fresh fruits and vegetables as well as charcuterie and cheeses. it's very lively on a sunday morning when you're out for your stroll.

canal saint-martin
10th arr.
metro: republique
strolling along the canal saint-martin, which runs from the place de la republique to the place de la bastille de stalingrad, is a very pleasant experience. the canal was constructed in the early 1800s to ease barge traffic on the seine and bring drinking water into paris. today, it's just a lovely place to hang out. on sundays, the quai de valmy and quai de jemmapes, streets paralleling the canal, lined with chestnut and plane trees, are open only to pedestrian and bike traffic. there's still some commercial barge traffic on the canal, but your best bet is a canal cruise with canauxrama or paris-canal.

port de plaisance de paris-arsenal
12th arr.
metro: bastille
once an old navy harbor, located on the former moat of the bastille, the port de l'arsenal is now a nice mooring for pleasure boats, yachts, and houseboats. the port connects the seine with the canal saint-martin that leads to the la villette canal basin (this is the route the canal cruises take). it's nice to stroll along the banks, admiring the boats and the sunday sailors.

the garden at the maison de balzac (47, rue raynouard): honoré de balzac labored away on his literary masterpieces and hid from creditors in this little house. although the rooms are small, the spot is divine with a beautiful expanse of lawn. there's no café here but, on a nice day, grab a book (perhaps balzac's le père goriot) and while away the hours in the garden. walking around this district is also a treat. in the movies, you can see the eiffel tower from every apartment; in this neighborhood, you really can.

the garden & tea house at the musée de la vie romantique (16, rue chaptal; métro: pigalle or st-georges) during the romantic period, numerous artistic types lived in the neighborhood. this cozy house belonged to painter ary scheffer, and the elites of the movement gathered here - artists ingres and delacroix; musicians chopin and liszt; writers turgenev and george sand, among others. today, the house is a shrine to author george sand (née aurore dudevant). the garden café is a shrine to relaxation and bliss.

the grounds at the manufacture nationale des gobelins (42, ave des gobelins): from outside, it doesn't look like much, but the property of the gobelins tapestry factory is probably my favorite spot in all of paris. it's a walled wonderland that's hard to believe still exists. since 1662, some of the most beautiful tapestries in the world have been woven on these magnificent grounds. back in the day, some 250 tapestry-makers lived with their families within the gobelins walls. in addition to wages, they each received a tiny plot of land for a "kitchen garden." the dyers and weavers no longer live-in but the property remains the same. by all means, take the tour; admire the old tapestries and watch today's weavers at work, but be sure to linger on the grounds.

the café at the maison de l'architecture (148, rue du faubourg saint-martin; métro: gare de l'est): walking along the canal saint-martin, which runs from the place de la republique to the place de la bastille de stalingrad in the 10th arrondissement, is really enjoyable. this being paris, cafés abound. but midway along the route, near the gare de l'est, it's worth veering off for a stop at le café a at the maison de l'architecture. the maison is a meeting place for cultural exchange between architects, visiting researchers and lecturers. it's open to the public for workshops, lectures, exhibitions and special events. but, the best part is the lovely garden café hidden away behind high stone walls; a little piece of parisian paradise.

place des vosges (at the end of rue des francs-bourgeois; métro: chemin vert or saint paul): said to be the oldest square in paris, it's a knockout. it's not exactly hidden, but people often hurry by on the way to the maison de victor hugo or just stop long enough to snap a photo. there are chic cafes under the beautiful arcades that surround the square, so people tend to sit there. i suggest you plop yourself down on a bench right in the middle and soak up the atmosphere -- children playing, pigeons cooing, older folks soaking up the sun, neighbors gossiping - which is a cross section of all paris. (at the southwest corner, near no. 5, an exit door will lead you into the lovely garden of the hotel de sully - an added pleasure.)

parc de belleville (rue des couronnes, enter at rue piat; métro: belleville or pyrénées): the belleville neighborhood is a melting pot of cultures - algerian, moroccan, chinese, orthodox jewish, senegalese - with shops and restaurants that showcase the wonderful diversity of the city. the park is at the top of a hill, accessible from a staircase, then up winding pathways past vine-covered pergolas. it's worth the climb for some spectacular views of paris - yes, you can see the eiffel tower and the tour monparnasse from here. have a seat, gaze out and dream with paris at your feet.

clubs of various kinds for noctambules

les bains
7, rue du bourg-l'abbé, 3rd arr.
metro: etienne marcel;

batofar
11 quai francois-mauriac, 13th arr.

la fleche d’or
102 bis, rue de bagnolet

le galway
13, quai grands augustins

barrio latino
46, rue du faubourg st antoine

le caveau de la huchette
5, rue de la huchette

les  bains douches
7, rue du bourg l'abbè

if you are with your girlfriend...

avoid areas around metro les halles, chatelet, gare du nord and stalingrad late at night.
in addition, avoid travelling to the northern paris suburbs of saint-denis, aubervilliers, saint-ouen, etc. after dark. 
visitors to the above-mentioned areas may also take precautions by keeping a low profile and by refraining from wearing highly visible jewelry or clothing that identify them as members of a religion or political movement.

bonus: paris by arrondissement! useful!
obviously my list contains some hidden treasures and some simply non-tourist places in paris. but if it is your first time in this city, you can't forget to visit some of the main spots!

1st arrondissement: louvre
    * musée du louvre (louvre museum)
    * tuileries gardens
    * jeu de paume-national galleries
    * musée de l'orangerie
    * palais royal (former seat of royal power)
    * la comédie française (classic paris theater where french playwright molière once performed)
    * place vendôme
    * forum des halles (monstrous shopping center and district)
    * eglise saint-eustache
    * chatelet and the saint-jacques tower
    * sainte-chapelle
    * pont neuf bridge (oldest bridge in paris)

2nd arrondissement: bourse
    * the rue montorgueil neighborhood
    * grands boulevards neighborhood
    * le tour jean-sans-peur
    * paris stock exchange (bourse de paris)-- historic headquarters
    * opéra comique
    * bibliothèque nationale de france (french national library-- historic site)
    * passage des panoramas
    * le grand rex (historic movie theatre, club and concert hall)

3rd arrondissement: temple
    * the marais neighborhood (also part of the 4th arrondissement)
    * musée carnavalet (paris history museum and renaissance-era residence)
    * picasso museum
    * musée des arts et métiers
    * hotel de soubise (renaissance-era mansion) and the french national archives
    * musée de la poupée (paris doll museum)
    * centre culturel suedois (swedish cultural center)

4th arrondissement: "beaubourg", the marais and the ile st-louis
    * centre georges pompidou and the national museum of modern art
    * the "beaubourg" neighborhood
    * the marais neighborhood
    * st-gervais st-protais church
    * st-paul st-louis church
    * hotel de sens (medieval mansion)
    * place des vosges
    * hotel de ville (paris city hall)
    * old jewish district (rue des rosiers and le "pletzl")
    * place de la bastille (shared by 4th, 11th and 12th arrondissements
    * ile saint-louis neighborhood
    * notre dame cathedral
    * seine river booksellers
    * shoah memorial and museum

5th arrondissement: the latin quarter
    * the sorbonne
    * the panthéon
    * place saint-michel
    * musée and hotel de cluny (medieval museum and gardens)
    * jardin des plantes
    * la grande mosquée de paris (paris mosque, tearoom and hammam)
    * institut du monde arabe
    * rue mouffetard district
    * arènes de lutece (roman-era coliseum)
    * historic paris movie theaters

6th arrondissement: luxembourg and saint-germain-des-prés
    * luxembourg gardens
    * odéon theater
    * saint-sulpice church
    * saint-germain des prés neighborhood (and the historic abbey)
    * café les deux magots and café de flore (former haunts of artists and writers)
    * le procope (oldest café in paris)
    * hotel lutetia (famous historic hotel)

7th arrondissement: orsay, eiffel tower and invalides
    * eiffel tower and the champ de mars
    * musée d'orsay
    * french national assembly
    * hôtel matignon (seat of the prime minister)
    * école militaire
    * hôtel des invalides (not a hotel at all, but a former military complex, and resting place of napoleon i)
    * rodin museum
    * musée de quai branly (recently opened indigenous arts museum)
    * maillol museum
    * eugène delacroix museum
    * bon marché department store and gourmet market

8th arrondissement: champs-elysées and madeleine
    * arc de triomphe
    * avenue des champs-elysées (and surrounding district)
    * grand palais
    * petit palais
    * elysée palace (home to french president)
    * théâtre des champs-élysées
    * eglise de la madeleine
    * hôtel de crillon (one of world's oldest luxury hotels)
    * maxim's art nouveau "collection 1900" museum
    * musée jacquemart-andré
    * musée cernuschi (asian art museum)
    * parc monceau
    * pont alexandre iii (one of the city's most opulent bridges)

9th arrondissement: opera garnier and grands boulevards
    * opera garnier (historic paris opera)
    * galeries lafayette department store (also see paris holiday lights and window displays)
    * printemps department store
    * musée grevin (wax museum)
    * olympia theater and concert hall (historic performances by edith piaf and others)
    * les folies bergères cabaret
    * musée du parfum fragonard (perfume museum)
    * musée de la vie romantique
    * grands boulevards neighborhood

10th arrondissement: canal st-martin and goncourt
    * canal saint-martin neighborhood
    * place sainte-marthe
    * new morning (famous paris jazz club)
    * gare de l'est and gare du nord area

11th arrondissement: bastille and oberkampf
    * place de la bastille (shared with the 4th and 12th arrondissements)
    * cirque d'hiver
    * oberkampf neighborhood (vibrant nightlife scene)
    * edith piaf museum
    * maison des métallos (former metalworkers' house; currently an arts and culture center)
    * place de la république

12th arrondissement: bercy and gare de lyon
    * place de la bastille (shared with the 4th and 11th arrondissements)
    * opera bastille (opera national de paris)
    * faubourg saint-antoine district
    * promenade plantée (gardens and walkway built on the site of a defunct above-ground railway)
    * viaduc des arts
    * bois de vincennes (enormous park, often referred to as "paris's lungs"
    * picpus cemetery
    * palais omnisports de paris-bercy (stadium and concert hall)
    * parc de bercy
    * bercy village (a decidedly modern outdoor shopping "village", which was built using former wine warehouses)
    * gare de lyon (one of paris' busiest train stations, and the site of acclaimed restaurant le train bleu)

13th arrondissement: gobelins, la butte aux cailles and the national library
    * bibliothèque nationale (paris national library)
    * butte aux cailles neighborhood
    * chinatown (one of paris's largest, and major site for chinese new year celebrations in paris)
    * manufacture des gobelins (tapestries manufacturing museum)
    * gare d'austerlitz

14th arrondissement: montparnasse and denfert rochereau
    * montparnasse tower and neighborhood
    * montparnasse cemetery
    * paris catacombs museum"
    * fondation cartier pour l'art contemporain (cartier contemporary art foundation)
    * lenin museum
    * musée jean moulin (tribute to the french resistance hero)
    * rue daguerre (pedestrian market street)
    * parc montsouris
    * cité universitaire (university housing campus with buildings in various styles of architecture)

15th arrondissement: porte de versailles and aquaboulevard
    * porte de versailles exhibition center and the palais des sports
    * musée bourdelle
    * musée pasteur
    * aquaboulevard (europe's largest waterpark)

16th arrondissement: passy and trocadero
    * passy neighborhood
    * passy cemetery
    * palais de tokyo
    * musée marmottan monet
    * maison de balzac
    * fondation le corbusier
    * jardin d'acclimatation (amusement park for small children)
    * parc des princes (stadium and concert venue)
    * maison de radio france
    * musée baccarat
    * musée clemenceau
    * musée galliera

17th arrondissement: batignolles and place de clichy
    * batignolles neighborhood (former stomping grounds of artists including emile zola and edouard manet)
    * parc monceau
    * place de clichy

18th arrondissement: montmartre and pigalle
    * montmartre neighborhood
    * sacre-coeur basilica
    * montmartre cemetery
    * place des tertres
    * le moulin de la galette (real windmill, and the subject of a painting of the same name by renoir)
    * dali museum
    * le moulin rouge and the pigalle red light district
    * la chapelle: "little jaffna" (sri lankan district)
    * barbes and la goutte d'or neighborhoods (african and north african districts)

19th arrondissement: buttes-chaumont and la villette
    * buttes-chaumont park (a former limestone quarry that was transformed into a sprawling, romantic-style park)
    * canal de l'ourq
    * parc de la villette and la cité des sciences (science and industry museum)

20th arrondissement: belleville, père lachaise and bagnolet
    * père-lachaise cemetery
    * parc de belleville
    * belleville neighborhood
    * gambetta and bagnolet neighborhood (birthplace of edith piaf)
    * la flèche d'or (famous nightclub)

nota introduttiva

è la prima volta che mi trovo a recensire globalmente l'opera di un essere umano. la cavia sarà diego collaveri, livornese, che mi ha inviato tutti i suoi lavori per visionarli.
non voglio essere offensivo, perchè è un simpaticone, ma oggettivo si.

prendo allora spunto da questo caso, per spiegare a chiare lettere come funziona la selezione per un festival come il nostro ( arrivano i corti ) ovvero quel che facciamo da quando arrivano i pacchi in poi.
e poi l'importante è che se ne parli, nel bene o nel male, purchè se ne parli.

se ricordate il concetto espresso da italo svevo (e poi portato agli estremi da warhol!) ecco, qualcuno si è accorto dell'esistenza di dido collaveri e delle sue opere, e questo posiziona in via teorica il collaveri come emerso per un indice dal magma indistinto della cinematografia.

premessa

noi di arrivano i corti scartiamo i lavori straccia-festival, quelle mega produzioni che hanno già un posto nell'olimpo di questa nicchia, favorendo invece lavori con le idee giuste, anche se realizzati con pochi mezzi. quindi dialoghi intensi, punti di vista inusuali o magistrali colpi di scena vincono certamente sugli effetti speciali e sull'alta definizione.

ma non sempre anche sulla regia. quindi non si può prescindere dalla fotografia, dai giusti tempi nel montaggio, dalla recitazione degli attori: sempre di video si tratta.

dido collaveri fa tutto da solo: scrive, gira e monta. l'impegno c'è, manca la tensione a creare un haiku, una piccola scatola in cui si incastra ed entra tutto. è un processo che va intensamente studiato prima di toccare qualsiasi marchingegno, che deriva proprio da quanto tempo si è speso a rimuginare sui concetti iniziali.

recensione

il pacco è in perfetto ordine, ha anche il sigillo antieffrazione! le copertine sono di buona fattura, le custodie tutte uguali, le descrizioni dei vari dvd dettagliate. nota: ipotizziamo che tutti i corti siano stati girati durante la fascia temporale utile per participare.

heart of steel:
storia magica medievaleggiante di un amore-odio che sfocia in una lotta con effetti speciali. non può passare alle selezioni per il festival non per la trama indefinita (che a volte può funzionare) nè per il soggetto magia (che è difficilissimo da interpretare in un corto!), ma per l'unione delle due cose.

in attesa di volare:
melenso, lunghenso (48 minuti!!?), manca il sesto senso!
è basato sulle discussioni di gruppi di amici. andavano rivisti, riassunti, concentrati i dialoghi fino a renderli significativi ed evocativi di una condizione esistenziale che è quella dei quasi-quarantenni di oggi, deducibilissima dal prodotto finito, ma piuttosto ovvia. non viene quindi accettato per via della eccessiva lunghezza, per lo stile documentaristico e per l'interesse che possono avere gli spettatori nel seguire le vicissitudini dei personaggi.

quello che resta:
una ragazza sola vive in un casolare abitato da uno spirito inquieto. lo libererà. nonostante la generale completezza del prodotto (anche se oltre alla scena eliminata, presente nei contenuti extra del dvd, andavano semplificate alcune altre porzioni del girato), non passa le selezioni per via del tema abusatissimo, visto peraltro da un punto di vista comune. faccio notare come l'anno di "the blair witch project" arrivarono più di cento lavori di quel genere, senza alcun "twist". tutti scartati a priori.

il dentista: il pezzo forte del collaveri!
breve musical dal gusto "rocky horror picture show". passa le selezioni per l'insolita maniera di trattare l'argomento dentista, di utilizzare il format del musical, per la recitazione degli attori, per i costumi e generalmente per la simpatia che traspare dal girato, chiaramente rappresentativa dello stile dell'autore.

troviamo poi due cortometraggi extra nei contenuti speciali:

fastidio:
volutamente kitsch? resta il fatto che la spada jedi...

seaside rendezvous:
uno spot pubblicitario che è una perla. e ve la propongo anche senza l'autorizzazione del proprietario.

in definitiva
provo grande stima per tutte le persone che svolgono un lavoro onesto e sincero. ma come in ogni ambito, è necessario studio ed esercizio. le idee buone ci sono, quindi "in nuce" possiamo chiamare con tranquillità il collaveri "regista".

fabio volo è forse l'amico che tutti vorremmo avere in compagnia.
se umberto eco mi chiedesse di venire a giocare a calcetto, andrei volentieri ma mi metterebbe in imbarazzo.
se però ci prova con la tua ragazza, le cose si fan diverse.

non mi piace dire: fabio volo è uno shpalman. mi piace dire fabio volo è uno shpalman perchè...
allora col mio solito andare pindareggiante, copincollo le opinioni di taaanta gente internettiana e ci creo un discorso.

Nel disorientamento dell’era del post la letteratura, che dovrebbe descrivere le idee, ha finito per corrompersi descrivendo non le idee ma le storie. quindi il tutto per il particolare, per la stranezza, dal Giovane Holden a Palahniuk & epigoni, passando per il cinema d’exploitation diventato mainstream al cinema italiano due stanze & cucina, fino alla musica, dai Radiohead a Battiato. Così la letteratura, che dovrebbe diffondere la verità e affermare il principio del dubbio come strumento per arrivare alla verità, attualmente propaga ciò che è falso per poterlo fare senza dubbi.

Del resto comporta minor sforzo affermare con certezza il falso rispetto alla verità con il beneficio del dubbio. ciò che si legge invece, diversamente dalla fisica che spiega la verità sul funzionamento del mondo, si propone di spiegare funzione / funzionamento dell’umanità: un racconto di fisica sociale che comprenda sia l’aspetto emozionale che quello scientifico, uno sguardo dall’universo nella sua vastità in caduta verticale fino al microcosmo della singola persona, un sistema completo che contiene al suo interno i meccanismi per analizzarne il suo stesso funzionamento fino a comprendere la sua infondatezza.

La necessità di un sistema di osservazione contemporanea, che unisca sociologia e letteratura, ma che anche sappia autoverificare la correttezza del suo funzionamento, si evidenzia analizzando la biografia di Auguste Comte, l’inventore stesso del termine fisica sociale e padre della sociologia. L’opera di Comte fu influenzata dal fatto che era basso e brutto, per cui cercò di vincere il suo sentimento di inferiorità edificando un sistema filosofico che avrebbe dovuto farlo accettare dalla società (leggi: dietro a qualsiasi cosa uno dica, c'è dietro qualcos'altro). In realtà fu accettato solo dall’unica donna che si innamorò di lui, Clotilde da Vaux, e bastò quell’unico breve amore per sconvolgerlo a tal punto da modificare il suo sistema tramutandolo in una sorta di religione protetta da una donna angelo, Clotilde appunto. La fisica sociale di Comte perde tutta la sua rilevanza per le deviazioni indotte dal fatto che uno sfigato perde la testa quando finalmente riesce a conquistare una donna, e ciò implicitamente conferma la necessità di una fisica sociale, considerando che alcuni tra gli eventi più importanti occorsi sulla Terra, dalla religione cattolica alla seconda guerra mondiale, sono stati causati dal desiderio di riscatto di sfigati.

Non che ci sia qualcosa di strano, perchè lo sforzo continuo teso al riscatto dalla propria condizione (lo streben!) è la condizione di tutti gli esseri umani.
 

Arriviamo a qualche passo di questo tal Fabio Bonetti.

"Ogni volta che ho visto una donna che mi piaceva, ho sempre cercato di conoscerla, ma soprattutto di farci l'amore. Amo le donne. Senza di loro me ne sarei già andato. Senza di loro non sarei mai più tornato."

"Spesso si vive come se fosse per sempre e ci si dimentica degli attimi."

"Il problema non è quanto aspetti, ma chi aspetti."

"È stata quella volta che scherzando mi ha detto che ero un erotomane romantico. Non so esattamente cosa volesse dire. Ho immaginato di essere uno che compra una rosa, ma poi cerca di infilarla nel sedere."

"La cosa importante è ciò che mi ha insegnato. Lei non era e non è il mio tesoro ma gli strumenti per trovarlo. Lei è il cartello che indica la strada."

"Tutto ciò che ho di lei è nella mia testa e nella mia anima. Per sempre. Lei è un respiro, un pensiero, un'emozione, è confusione e chiarezza... lei per me è sempre stata una casa con il tetto di vetro: posso osservare il cielo sentendomi al sicuro."

"Il biglietto aveva una parola cancellata. Ho continuato a guardare il foglio controluce per cercare di capire cosa avesse cancellato. Le cancellature per me diventano più interessanti di ciò che si legge. Perché non penso che siano stati errori di ortografia, ma un ripensamento su una confidenza troppo intima."

"Che begli occhiali da sole che hai, Carlo. - Oh grazie. Non ho mai capito perché alcune persone ti ringraziano per un complimento fatto a qualcosa che possiedono. Mi verrebbe da dirgli: "Mica li hai disegnati tu, gli occhiali! Svegliaaaaaa!".

"Forse uno dei miei problemi è che non chiedo niente a nessuno, ma ho bisogno di tutti."

"A volte, mentre passeggio, mi viene voglia di andare in una libreria. Entrare e trascorrere del tempo, prendendo ogni tanto un libro in mano, mi rilassa. Mi fa stare bene. Mi fa sentire sempre un po' più intelligente e interessante di come sono realmente."

"La vita non è ciò che ci accade, ma ciò che facciamo con ciò che ci accade..."

"Io a volte scopro come la penso su di un argomento quando ne parlo. È parlandone che scopro la mia opinione, insieme a quelli che mi ascoltano."

"Ti ricorderò come il fidanzato che mi ha fatto ascoltare la musica migliore."

"Non c'è sempre una risposta a tutto. Magari sì, magari no. Magari tu non sei fatto per quel tipo di rapporto. Punto. Ci sono persone che non riescono a costruirsi un'armatura e altre che non riescono più a liberarsene. Io volevo riuscire a vivere questa nuova fase, fatta di fragilità, emozioni, dolore e gioia."

"Sentivo che mi leggeva dentro, e io avrei voluto essere più uomo con lei. Avrei voluto essere quell'abbraccio in cui desiderava perdersi. Protetta e libera di lasciarsi andare, perché tanto c'ero io a prendermi cura di lei, a difenderla dal freddo e dal male."

"Amo le labbra: le amo perche sono costrette a non toccarsi se vogliono dire "Ti odio" e obbligate a unirsi se vogliono dire "Ti amo"."

"A volte i minuti non sono minuti, sono reincarnazioni di vite. Nell'attesa, sono già rinato mille volte. Ho percorso tutta la catena alimentare. Sono stato zanzara, armadillo, elefante…"

"Chi non si ama può darsi a chiunque."

"Ci sono bellissime storie d'amore nel fondo delle borse, tra i pacchetti di sigarette e le chiavi; per questo a volte si fa fatica a trovarle, semplicemente perché tentano di nascondersi per poter rimanere lì."

"Comunque la felicità non è che sia fare sempre quello che si vuole, semmai è volere sempre quello che si fa…"

"Dava l'idea di essere una donna che dona tutto, ma non regala niente."

"Era come se andando via in realtà avessi preso la rincorsa per tornare più vicino."

"Erano state le lacrime ad aprirmi la porta della sua vera intimità."

"Fai conto di essere una maratoneta. Stai correndo con i tuoi amici e le tue amiche. A un certo punto capisci di avere una buona gamba, un bel passo, di poter andare più veloce, e allora decidi di seguire questa tua forza. Di convertirti al tuo talento. Dopo un po' che corri, ti accorgi di aver staccato il gruppo. Ti giri e ti scopri sola. Loro sono indietro, tutti insieme che ridono, e tu sei sola con te stessa. Siccome non riesci a reggere questa solitudine, rallenti finché il gruppo ti raggiunge e, negando il tuo talento, fingi di essere come loro. Rimani nel gruppo. Ma tu non sei così, non sei come loro. Infatti anche lì in mezzo ti senti comunque sola."

"Fai vedere al tuo sogno che veramente ci tieni a incontrarlo, senza pretendere che lui faccia tutta la strada da solo per arrivare fino a te, poi le cose accadono. I sogni hanno bisogno di sapere che siamo coraggiosi."

"Ho letto da qualche parte che il vero motivo per cui si sono estinti i dinosauri è perché nessuno li accarezzava. Bisogna sperare che l'uomo non faccia lo stesso stupido errore con le donne."

"Il cammino si fa da soli: in 2 è una scampagnata."

"In qualsiasi momento della vita si può prendere in mano le redini e cambiare il proprio destino."

"L'amore per sé è il ponte necessario per arrivare all'altro."

"La cosa più fastidiosa quando mandi un messaggio a una persona a cui tieni è che dal momento dell'invio parte il conto dei minuti. Rispondi, rispondi, rispondi. Non ha risposto. Magari ha il telefono spento. Che faccio chiamo, faccio uno squillo per vedere se è acceso? E se poi è acceso? Messaggio più chiamata: divento pesante. Chiamo con anonimo. Solo che se faccio uno squillo e poi metto giù capisce che sono io che controllo. Lo capisce? Sì, lo capisce. A volte i minuti non sono solo minuti, sono reincarnazioni di vite."

"La prima cosa che due persone si offrono stando insieme dovrebbe essere un sentimento d'amore verso se stessi. Se non ti ami tu, perché dovrei amarti io?"

"La prima volta che ci siamo frequentati non eravamo in grado di amarci. Eravamo come due persone che hanno tra le mani lo strumento che amano, ma non lo sanno suonare. Poi abbiamo imparato."

"Le cose non si vedono per ciò che sono ma per ciò che sei!"

"L'odio appartiene ad attimi di impotenza."

"Mentre la sfioravo, sentivo sulla punta delle dita una forza misteriosa che mi attraeva verso di lei. Non avevo nulla, nemmeno i mobili, ma mi sentivo pieno. Arredato dentro!"

"Non ci si può far niente, le persone che amano si finisce sempre per amarle. È una legge della natura."

"Ognuno di noi è fatto da tanti se stesso e non solamente da uno. Diciamo che siamo come un'assemblea condominiale composta da tante persone diverse. C'è quello più tollerante, c'è quello più permaloso, quello che si incazza subito, quello che parla poco e quello che non sta mai zitto."

"Pensare a se stessi non è egoismo. Egoismo semmai è occuparsi solo di se stessi."

"Voglio lasciarmi andare, voglio di più per me voglio buttarmi per cadere verso l'alto."

"Avevo capito che rinunciare a se stessi, non amarsi è come sbagliare a chiudere il primo bottone della camicia. Tutti gli altri poi sono sbagliati di conseguenza. Amarsi è l'unica certezza per riuscire ad amare davvero gli altri."

"Pare che i notai guadagnino molto perché hanno dovuto studiare parecchio. Sembra che quel parecchio sia a spese nostre. Forse pensano che, quando loro stavano studiando, noi eravamo in giro a non fare un cazzo."

"Che ne so?! Io non so nemmeno se esiste la felicità. Intendo dire come condizione perpetua. Credo che la felicità siano picchi che durano attimi, secondi."

"Flavia era come quei tulipani che compro per casa mia. Ho imparato a prenderli chiusi, così mi durano di più. Sono belli ugualmente, ma mi piacciono anche perché so come saranno quando si apriranno. Compro quella bellezza che ancora non si vede, ma che comunque si percepisce. Si conosce."

"Il mio lavoro mi rendeva uguale a tutti gli altri. Non mi permetteva di esprimermi. Ero sostituibile come un bullone di una macchina, e questo condizionava tutti i miei rapporti. Perché poi la sera, quando tornavo a casa, avevo voglia di stare con una persona che mi avesse scelto. Volevo essere SCEL-TO! Volevo una persona che voleva me. Una persona per la quale io non potevo essere sostituito da un giorno con l'altro. Una persona che mi facesse sentire speciale. Diverso da tutti. Un individuo. Una persona. Un principe azzurro."

"Mi sono seduto nella sala d'attesa. C'era una ragazza che sfogliava senza interesse una rivista. Mi piace stare in una stanza con una donna. Anche quando prendo il treno, se entro in uno scompartimento e ci trovo una donna sono più contento. E se non c'è continuo a cercare finché la trovo. Non è che poi le rivolgo la parola, o ci parlo, o ci provo per forza, anzi, ma mi piace che sia lì. Mi piace la loro compagnia anche se silenzio-sa e sconosciuta. Le donne sono belle da respirare."

"Nell'arco della vita puoi incontrare un sacco di persone e di qualcuna diventare veramente amico. Ma chi ha passato con te il periodo dell'adolescenza conserva un posto speciale. Forse più ancora dei compagni dell'infanzia."

"Prima di uscire ho apparecchiato la sua colazione. Sul sacchetto dei biscotti ho attaccato un post-it con la mia dichiarazione d'amore. Tu sei tutto ciò che prima non sono mai riuscito a dire, mai riuscito a vedere, fare, capire. Finalmente sei qui... ho aspettato tanto. Ci vediamo stasera."

"Ti ricordi quando mi hai chiesto se avevo le pastiglie per la felicità? La pastiglia è la vita. Vivi, buttati, apriti, ascoltati. Le tue paure, le tue ansie sono dovute al fatto che tu esisti ma non vivi. Sei castrato nei sentimenti. Sei bloccato. Ti ricordi quella frase di Oscar Wilde? Diceva che vivere è la cosa più rara al mondo. La maggior parte della gente esiste, e nulla più."

"Ero talmente felice che per esserlo di più avrei dovuto essere due persone."

"A Milano camminano più veloci che a Roma, ma non è ancora niente in confronto a Londra o New York. Diventeremo come loro?"

"C'è chi cerca l'altra metà della mela, io sto cercando ancora la mia mezza. Sono uno spicchio di me stesso."

"Si parla sempre delle donne che fingono l'orgasmo. Anch'io a volte lo faccio. Io sono un uomo che finge l'orgasmo: cioè non è che fingo di venire, fingo il contrario."

"Molti credono che la fantasia serva solo per sfuggire alla realtà, mentre quasi sempre serve per capirla e interpretarla meglio."

"Rispetto alla fantasia la realtà cosa può fare? È un po' come quando vai a vedere il film del tuo libro preferito: una delusione."

"Paura d'amare: credo sia paura restare soli per paura di rimanere soli. Innamorarsi è una droga, amare è una medicina."

ora, nel festival delle banalità, delle ovvietà, della generalizzazione, delle frasi ad effetto, delle robe che vendono, ragioniamo sui personaggi che incarnano questo modo di fare.
fabio volo e jovanotti affondano le loro radici nella rivoluzione sessuale. l'emancipazione della donna nella cattolicissima italia ha portato a sbarellare dall'altro lato, come capita sempre quando qualche minoranza è tenuta sotto il tappo troppo a lungo, e ingiustamente.

fabio volo & jovanotti nascono come due belle facce (e sono quindi due prodotti). a seguire, gli sono stati dati dei contenuti, come fossero vestiti: si pensi a cos'erano fabio volo "iena" e jovanotti "gimme five" agli inizi. per esempio sgarbi o lucio dalla sono esattamente oggi quello che erano quando si sono affermati.

il target di marketing di bonetti e cherubini è titillare l'ego femminile, trasformare il rapporto di naturale scambio tra uomo e donna in un rapporto unilaterale in cui la donna solo prende e pretende da un uomo che è sempre gentile ed è pure un gran figo, e le caga sebbene loro siano culonacce.

ascoltare le telefonate di volo in trasmissione è illuminante: a lui piacciono tutte, come nelle canzoni di jovanotti, in cui lei è una donna che non esiste, alla quale lui dona il suo amore a prescindere, non dice mai "ti amo perchè...".
per essere amate nelle canzoni di jovanotti è quindi sufficiente esistere, cosa che non è affatto vera nella realtà.

l'operazione letteraria di fabio volo è pertanto una declinazione di questi poveri concetti, un paulo coelho povero fatto di buonismo e (probabilmente) un denso apporto di studi di marketing sulle fasce d'età post adolescenziali.
e poi: li avrà scritti lui? comunque sia, da un libro ci si aspetterebbe di più.

"va bene, volo scrive questi libri, se non ti piacciono non li comprare, no?"
NO. sbagliato. perchè questa è arte degenere, e corrompe la società. saviano che scrive gomorra può piacere o non piacere, però alza il livello medio, può essere che magari nei giovani porti ad atteggiamenti meno omertosi, è già un grande risultato.
Invece fabio volo & jovanotti sobillano nelle donne un atteggiamento per cui a loro è tutto dovuto, quindi ok essere culone, ok avere 40 anni, ok pretendere di comportarsi ancora come delle bambine, ok fare le viziate e credere che sia un diritto far impiccare i propri partners con azioni eclatanti per rimediare ai proprio presunti schiribizzi.

allora mentre la generazione dei 20/30enni annega tra precariato e scarsa natalità, fidanzati a casa dei genitori eccetera, jovanotti e fabio volo invece di condannare la situazione se ne fanno cantori, drogano la realtà e la fanno apparire felice.

quindi, fabio volo è uno shpalman, ovvero una maschera di merda.

nota conclusiva: ringrazio una imprecisata ragazza per aver argomentato, spinta da non so quale motivo, questa posizione praticamente per intero. grazie.

che chiunque mi perdoni per l'idea bislacca, ma l'ho sognata qualche tempo fa e non potevo non scriverla.

il fabbisogno energetico delle attività terrestri si aggira attorno ai 40 gigawatt giornalieri, mentre il sole irradia per circa 1.2 terawatt ogni giorno: se si catturasse il 50% dell'energia solare si avrebbe energia pulita a sufficienza per tirare avanti ogni attività nel globo e anche qualcosa in più.

purtroppo il sole non irradia in maniera costante su tutto il pianeta, l'energia utile si aggira in media attorno ad 1.2 watt al metro quadro; i pannelli solari hanno rendimenti scarsi, sono costosi, richiedono manutenzione, e poi ci sono le perdite dovute al trasporto e l'incognita dei paesi in forte sviluppo come india e cina.

ho sognato allora che sarebbe stato possibile foderare l'intero deserto del sahara di pannelli solari.

quale regione più irradiata? siamo all'equatore!
quale regione più inutile? non ci sono città nel deserto, nè popolazione rilevante.
quale modo migliore per permettere all'africa un indispensabile sviluppo? i paesi partecipanti pagherebbero una sorta d'affitto per la grande estensione fornita: l'africa diventerebbe il nuovo medio oriente, perchè uno spazio nel sahara corrisponderà ad una quota di energia (e a questo punto si perderà interesse per il petrolio, anche se qualcuno cercherà sempre di "esportare la democrazia" da qualche parte).

è ovvio che i pannelli vadano montati su adeguate strutture, per risolvere problemi come il movimento delle dune, l'influenza della sabbia (oscurerebbe i pannelli depositandosi) e delle sue tempeste.

sarà poi necessario controllo e manutenzione, ma è presto fatto con apposite automazioni (una specie di gigantesco tergicristallo, che si muove lungo le lunghissime file di pannelli, uno per riga, come le telecamere ai bordi delle piste di atletica) e gruppi divisi equamente di militari di ogni nazione atti a controllare con l'elicottero che tutto sia in ordine.

l'unico problema rilevante che mi viene in mente è l'importanza strategica di un luogo come questo, nell'eventualità che si realizzi il progetto. squadre di guerriglieri cercherebbero di conquistare i lotti di alcuni stati, chiedendo riscatti, mentre altri cercheranno di bombardare le fonti di energia dei paesi nemici. presto risolto anche questo problema: l'energia verrà equamente divisa. quindi la rottura di un tot di pannelli influenzerà la fornitura giornaliera di tutti, indistintamente, con ovvie e giuste proporzioni. questo però presuppone che, per la prima volta nella storia, tutti siano d'accordo a partecipare al progetto. una roba mai vista: se per firmare kyoto c'è voluto obama, ci vorrebbe un santo per ogni stato.

come distribuire allora l'energia? se esistono gasdotti lunghi 10.000 km, si costruiranno elettrodotti altrettanto lunghi. e comunque sarà sempre possibile allacciare il ricavato alle reti elettriche dei singoli stati, che avranno appositi accumulatori, ad emulare la struttura di internet, che sappiamo tutti funzionare molto bene.

ultimo pensiero per flora e fauna: considerato che i pannelli sono totalmente inerti, e anzi al limite fornirebbero un pochino d'ombra, credo che non ci saranno problemi rilevanti.

che dire... tornando con i piedi per terra, l'unico limite mi sembra quello tecnologico: i rendimenti dei pannelli solari si aggirano attorno al 20%, vanno cambiati dopo 30 anni circa, e costano un bel pò. il ricavato energetico (considerando che esistono esempi in letteratura scientifica che arrivano al 44% di rendimento) sarebbe di 0.5 watt per metro quadro per un'estensione di 4.000 per 2.000 kilometri, quindi forse soli quattro gigawatt (cioè: "soli" si fa per dire... ma forse ho sbagliato i conti!). magari tutti i deserti diventeranno delle ricchezze, con adeguati investimenti. ma mi sa tanto che, come dice un proverbio indiano, "quando sarà stato pescato l'ultimo pesce, strappato l'ultimo frutto, gli umani capiranno che il denaro non si può mangiare".

1) A slaveowner decides to place an advertisement for the return of a lost slave.

2) Apple decides to develop the first salable PC.

3) Henry Ford decides to start his own company.

4) Sears, Roebuck decides to go into retail sales.

5) Julius Reuter decides to use carrier pigeons to deliver information.

6) Swiss watch manufacturers decide to collaborate.

7) Bill Gates decides to license MS-DOS to IBM.

8) Reuben Mattus decides to market ice cream to supermarkets.

9) Thomas Watson decides to change his company's name to IBM.

10) Walt Disney decides to name his cartoon character Mickey.

11) Marvin Bower decides to keep the McKinsey name for his company.

12) Richard Sears decides to sell products through a catalog.

13) Coca-Cola decides to hold a competition for the design of its new bottle.

14) Konosuke Matsushita decides to institute product demonstrations.

15) Mattel decides to add the Ken doll to its line of Barbie toys.

16) Alfred P. Sloan of GM decides to segment the market for car models.

17) The Grateful Dead decide to allow fans to tape their concerts.

18) Philip Morris decides to reposition Marlboro as a man's cigarette.

19) Henry Heinz decides his company needs a slogan.

20) William Hoover decides to distribute his sweepers through a retail network.

21) Harley-Davidson executives decide to establish the Harley Owners Group.

22) Coca-Cola decides to sell to members of the armed forces for a nickel a bottle.   

23) Henry Luce decides to rank companies as the Fortune 500.

24) Akito Morita decides to develop the Walkman.

25) Hartford doctors decide to install telephones in their offices.

26) Honda decides to market small motorbikes in the United States.

27) Aaron Feuerstein decides to keep Malden Mills open after a major fire in its factory.

28) Levi-Strauss decides to extend credit to wholesalers after an earthquake and fire, and later decides to keep employees working during the Great Depression.

29) Baron de Coubertin decides to convene a conference to establish the Olympic Games.

30) American Express decides to continue cashing traveler's checks during the Great Depression.

31) Warren Buffett decides to invest in Berkshire Hathaway.

32) Coca-Cola decides to return to its original recipe.

33) Johnson & Johnson decides to pull Tylenol from store shelves.

34) Percy Barnevick decides to merge Asea and Brown Boveri.

35) The Incas decide to build a network of roads and administrative centers.

36) The ITT board decides to appoint Harold Geneen its CEO.

37) Pierre Du Pont of GM decides to adopt Alfred P. Sloan's reorganization plan for GM.

38) St. Bernard decides to reorganize the Cistercian monasteries.

39) Michael Dell decides to sell PCs directly to consumers and built to order.

40) Procter & Gamble decides to introduce brand management.

41) Jeff Bezos decides to sell books over the Internet.

42) Henry Dunant decides to go see Napoleon III.

43) Paul Garrett of GM decides to invite Peter Drucker to study the company.

44) Elvis Presley decides to join the army.

45) John Larson decides to ask Tom Peters to make a presentation to a client.

46) Napoleon decides to promote people based on merit.

47) Jack Welch of GE decides to institute Work-Out.

48) Thomas Watson Jr. decides to commit IBM to developing a new line of computers.

49) Wal-Mart decides to move into the grocery business.

50) Edward L. Bernays decides to stage a march to promote smoking for women.

51) Harvard Business School decides to launch the Harvard Business Review and to establish the HBS Fund.

52) Lou Gerstner decides not to split IBM.

53) Rupert Murdoch decides to build a printing plant that doesn't require union labor.

54) Luciano Benetton decides to invest in an advanced clothing factory.

55) Toyota decides to implement W. Edwards Deming's quality techniques.

56) Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines decides to cut the extras.

57) Leaders of Miletus in Ancient Greece decide to specialize in one industry.

58) Belgian business leaders decide to apply the principles of action learning.

59) Cities in Northern Germany decide to form an association to promote their commercial interests.

60) Edwin Land decides to take a walk and comes up with the idea for the Polaroid camera.

61) Ray Kroc decides to buy the rights to McDonald's restaurants and franchise them.

62) The ancient Chinese decide to institute a system of currency.

63) William Wrigley decides to offer free packs of chewing gum with his cans of baking powder.

64) Kemmons Wilson decides to build his own motel.

65) Gillette decides to position itself at the high-quality, premium-price end of the market.

66) Arthur Fry of 3M decides what Post-Its can be used for.

67) Henry Ford decides to pay his workers $5 a day.

68) 3M decides to allow its researchers to spend 15 percent of their time working on their own projects.

69) Hewlett-Packard decides to hire some of the excess technical talent after World War II.

70) Emperor Hadrian decides to provide all miners in the Roman Empire with bath houses.

71) GE decides to establish a center for executive development.

72) Ricardo Semler of Semco decides to fire 60 percent of his company's top management.

73) Jan Carlzon of SAS decides to send 35,000 managers to customer service training courses.

74) Reg Jones of GE decides to implement a management succession process.

75) President McKinley decides to allow Elihu Root to restructure the U.S. armed services.

Search Engines Strategies

The idea here is not to trick the search engines, but to leave them abundant clues as to what your webpage is about.

1. Write a Page Title. Write a descriptive title for each page of 5 to 8 words. Remove as many "filler" words from the title, such as "the," "and," etc. This page title will appear hyperlinked on the search engines when your page is found. Entice searchers to click on the title by making it a bit provocative. Place this at the top of the webpage between the tags, in this format: . It also shows on the blue bar at the top of your web browser.

Plan to use some descriptive keywords along with your business name on your home page. If you specialize in silver bullets and that's what people will be searching for, don't just use your company name "Acme Ammunition, Inc." use "Silver and Platinum Bullets - Acme Ammunition, Inc." The words people are most likely to search on should appear first in the title (called "keyword prominence"). Remember, this title is nearly your entire identity on the search engines. The more people see that interests them in the blue hyperlinked words on the search engine, the more likely they are to click on the link.

2. Write a Description and Keyword META Tag. The description should be a sentence or two describing the content of the webpage, using the main keywords and keyphrases on this page. If you include keywords that aren't used on the webpage, you could hurt yourself. Place the Description META Tag at the top of the webpage, between the tags, in this format: . Some search engines include this description below your hyperlinked title.

Your maximum number of characters should be about 255; just be aware that only the first 60 or so are visible on Google, though more may be indexed.

When I prepare a webpage, I write the article first, then write a description of the content in that article in a sentence or two, using each of the important keywords and keyphrases included in the article. This goes into the description META tag. Then for the keywords META tag, I strip out the common words, leaving just the meaty words and phrases. The keywords META tag is no longer used for ranking by Google, but it is currently used by Yahoo, so I'm leaving it in. Who knows when more search engines will consider it important again? Every webpage in your site should have a title, and META description tag.

3. Include Your Keywords in Header Tags H1, H2, H3. Search engines consider words that appear in the page headline and sub heads to be important to the page, so make sure your desired keywords and phrases appear in one or two header tags. Don't expect the search engine to parse your Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) to figure out which are the headlines - it won't. Instead, use keywords in the H1, H2, and H3 tags to provide clues to the search engine. (Note: Some designers no longer use the H1, H2 tags. That's a mistake. Make sure your designer defines these tags in the CSS rather than creating headline tags with other names.)

4. Make Sure Your Keywords Are in the First Paragraph of Your Body Text. Search engines expect that your first paragraph will contain the important keywords for the document - where most people write an introduction to the content of the page. You don't want to just artificially stuff keywords here, however. More is not better. Google might expect a keyword density in the entire body text area of maybe 1.5% to 2% for a word that should rank high, so don't overdo it. Other places you might consider including keywords would be in ALT tags and perhaps COMMENT tags, though few search engines give these much if any weight.

5. Use Keywords in Hyperlinks. Search engines are looking for clues to the focus of your page. When they see words hyperlinked in your body text, they consider these potentially important, so hyperlink your important keywords and keyphrases. To emphasize it even more, the webpage you are linking to could have a page name with the keyword or keyphrase another clue for the search engine.

6. Make Your Navigation System Search Engine Friendly. Some webmasters use frames, but frames can cause serious problems with search engines. Even if search engines can find your content pages, they could be missing the key navigation to help visitors get to the rest of your site. JavaScript and Flash navigation menus that appear when you hover are great for humans, but search engines don't read JavaScript and Flash. Supplement them with regular HTML links at the bottom of the page, ensuring that a chain of hyperlinks exists that take a search engine spider from your home page to every page in your site. A site map with links to all your pages can help, too. If your site isn't getting indexed fully, make sure you submit a Google Sitemap following directions on Google's site. Be aware that some content management systems and e-commerce catalogs produce dynamic, made-on-the-fly webpages. You can sometimes recognize them by question marks in the URLs followed by long strings of numbers or letters. Overworked search engines sometimes stop at the question mark and refuse to go farther. If you find the search engines aren't indexing your interior pages, you might consider URL rewriting, a site map, and targeted content pages (see below).

7. Develop Several Pages Focused on Particular Keywords. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists no longer recommend using external doorway or gateway pages, since nearly duplicate webpages might get you penalized. Rather, develop several webpages on your site, each of which is focused on a different keyword or keyphrase. For example, instead of listing all your services on a single webpage, try developing a separate webpage for each. These pages will rank higher for their keywords since they contain targeted rather than general content. You can't fully optimize all the webpages in your site, but these focused-content webpages you'll want to spend lots of time tweaking to improve their rank.

8. Submit Your Webpage URL to Search Engines. Next, submit your homepage URL to the important Web search engines that robotically index the Web. Look for a link on the search engine for "Add Your URL." In the US, the most used search engines are: Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL Search, and Ask.com. Some of these feed search content to the other main search engines and portal sites. For Europe and other areas you'll want to submit to regional search engines. It's a waste of money to pay someone to submit your site to hundreds of search engines. Avoid registering with FFA (Free For All pages) and other link farms. They don't work well, bring you lots of spam e-mails, and could cause you to be penalized by the search engines. We'll talk about submitting to directories under "Linking Strategies" below. If your page is already indexed by a search engine, don't re-submit it unless you've made significant changes; the search engine spider will come back and revisit it soon anyway.

9. Fine-tune with Search Engine Optimization. Now fine-tune your focused-content pages (described in point 7), and perhaps your home page, by making minor adjustments to help them rank high.

10. Promote Your Local Business on the Internet. These days many people search for local businesses on the Internet. To make sure they find you include on every page of your website the street address, zip code, phone number, and the five or 10 other local community place names your business serves. If you can, include place names in the title tag, too. When you seek links to your site (see below), a local business should get links from local businesses with place names in the communities you serve and complementary businesses in your industry nationwide.

Linking Strategies

Links to your site from other sites bring additional traffic. But since Google and other major search engines consider the number of incoming links to your website ("link popularity") as an important factor in ranking, more links will help you rank higher in the search engines, too. Google has introduced a 10-point scale called PageRank (10 is the highest rank) to indicate the quantity and quality of incoming links. All links, however, are not created equal. Links from popular information hubs will help your site rank higher than those from low traffic sites.

11. Submit Your Site to Key Directories, since a link from a directory will help your ranking - and get you traffic. Be sure to list your site in the free Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.com), overseen by overworked volunteer human editors. This hierarchical directory provides content feeds to all the major search engines. Plus it provides a link to your site from an information hub that Google deems important. But don't be impatient and resubmit or you'll go to the end of the queue.

Yahoo! Directory is another important directory to be listed in, though their search results recently haven't been featuring their own directory as prominently. Real humans will read (and too often, pare down) your 200-character sentence, so be very careful and follow their instructions (http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/). Hint: Use somewhat less than the maximum number of characters allowable, so you don't have wordy text that will tempt the Yahoo! editor to begin chopping. Business sites require a $299 annual recurring fee for Yahoo! Express to have your site considered for inclusion within seven business days (http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/busexpress.html). Other directories to consider might be About.com and Business.com.

12. Submit Your Site to Industry Sites and Specialized Directories. You may find some directories focused on particular industries, such as education or finance. You probably belong to various trade associations that feature member sites. Ask for a link. Even if you have to pay something for a link, it may help boost your PageRank. Beware of directories that solicit you for "upgraded listings." Unless a directory is widely used in your field, your premium ad won't help - but the link itself will help boost your PageRank and hence your search engine ranking. Marginal directories come and go very quickly, making it hard to keep up. Don't try to be exhaustive here.

13. Request Reciprocal Links. Find complementary websites and request a reciprocal link to your site (especially to your free service, if you offer one). Develop an out-of-the way page where you put links to other sites - so you don't send people out the back door as fast as you bring them in the front door. Your best results will be from sites that get a similar amount of traffic to your site. High-traffic site webmasters are too busy to answer your requests for a link and don't have anything to gain. Look for smaller sites that may have linking pages.

Check out Ken Evoy's free SiteSell Value Exchange. It (1) registers your site as one that is willing to exchange links with other sites that have a similar theme/topic content and (2) searches for sites with similar topical content (http://sales.sitesell.com/value-exchange/). Additionally, two automated link building software programs stand out - Zeus and Arelis. These search for complementary sites, help you maintain a link directory, and manage reciprocal links. However, use these programs to identify the complementary sites, not to send impersonal automated e-mail spam to site owners. When you locate sites, send a personal e-mail to the administrative contact found in the Whois Directory (www.networksolutions.com/whois/). If e-mail doesn't get a response, try a phone call. One warning: Be sure to only link to complementary sites, no matter how often you are bombarded with requests to exchange links with a mortgage site that has nothing to do with yours. One way Google determines what your site is about is who you link to and who links to you. It's not just links, but quality links you seek.

14. Write Articles for Others to Use in their Newsletters. You can dramatically increase your visibility when you write articles in your area of expertise and distribute them to editors as free content for their e-mail newsletters or their websites. Just ask that a link to your website and a one-line description of what you offer be included with the article. This is an effective "viral" approach that can produce hundreds of links to your site over time.

15. Begin a Business Blog. Want links to your site? Begin a business blog on your website, hosted on your own domain. If you offer excellent content and regular industry comment, people are likely to link to it, increasing your site's PageRank. If you have a blog on a third-party blog site, occasionally find reasons to talk about and link to your own domain.

16. Issue News Releases. Find newsworthy events and send news releases to print and Web periodicals in your industry. The links to your site in online news databases may remain for years and have some clout with link popularity. However, opening or redesigning a website is seldom newsworthy these days. Placing your website URL in online copies of your press release may increase link popularity some. Issuing press releases is a traditional promotional strategy, but there are other traditional approaches that can help you as well.
Traditional Strategies

Just because "old media" strategies aren't on the Internet doesn't mean they aren't effective. A mixed media approach can be very effective.

17. Include Your URL on Stationery, Cards, and Literature. This is a no-brainer that is sometimes overlooked. Make sure that all reprints of cards, stationery, brochures, and literature contain your company's URL. And see that your printer gets the URL syntax correct. In print, I recommend leaving off the http:// part and including only the www.domain.com portion.

18. Promote using traditional media. Don't discontinue print advertising that you've found effective. But be sure to include your URL in any display or classified ads you purchase in trade journals, newspapers, yellow pages, etc. View your website as an information adjunct to the ad. Use a two-step approach: (1) capture readers' attention with the ad, (2) then refer them to a URL where they can obtain more information and perhaps place an order. Look carefully at small display or classified ads in the back of narrowly-targeted magazines or trade periodicals. Sometimes these ads are more targeted, more effective, and less expensive than online advertising. Consider other traditional media to drive people to your site, such as direct mail, classifieds, post cards, etc. TV can be used to promote websites, especially in a local market.

19. Develop a Free Service. It's boring to invite people, "Come to our site and learn about our business." It's quite another to say "Use the free kitchen remodeling calculator available exclusively on our site." Make no mistake, it's expensive in time and energy to develop free resources, but it is very rewarding in increased traffic to your site. Make sure that your free service is closely related to what you are selling so the visitors you attract will be good prospects for your business. Give visitors multiple opportunities and links to cross over to the sales part of your site.

E-Mail Strategies

Don't neglect e-mail as an important way to bring people to your website. Just don't spam. That is, don't send bulk unsolicited e-mails without permission to people with whom you have no relationship.

20. Install a "Signature" in your E-Mail Program to help potential customers get in touch with you. Most e-mail programs allow you to designate a "signature" to appear at the end of each message you send. Limit it to 6 to 8 lines: Company name, address, phone number, URL, e-mail address, and a one-phrase description of your unique business offering. Look for examples on e-mail messages sent to you.

21. Publish an E-Mail Newsletter. While it's a big commitment in time, publishing a monthly e-mail newsletter ("ezine") is one of the very best ways to keep in touch with your prospects, generate trust, develop brand awareness, and build future business. It also helps you collect e-mail addresses from those who visit your site but aren't yet ready to make a purchase. Ask for an e-mail address and first name so you can personalize the newsletter.
If you're just getting started you can use a free advertising-supported newsletter from Yahoo! Groups (www.yahoogroups.com).

Example:
Object: Three free e-books
Body: Subscribe to our free e-mail newsletter — Web Marketing Today®, published to 108,000+ confirmed opt-in subscribers worldwide. Just to encourage you to take this step, I'm including three free e-books that you can download and read: The Web Marketing Checklist: 32 Ways to Promote Your Website, 12 Website Design Decisions Your Business Will Need to Make, and Making & Marketing E-Books, each worth $12 - just for subscribing. No catch.

Link to our RSS feed

Form:
First name

Last Name
E-mail
Country (2-letter abbreviation)
Preferred Format: Plain text / HTML

Disclaimer: We respect your privacy and never sell or rent our subscriber lists. Subscribing will not result in more spam! I guarantee it!

22. Send Offers to Your Visitors and Customers. Your own list of customers and site visitors who have given you permission to contact them will be your most productive list. Send offers, coupon specials, product updates, etc. Personalizing the subject line and the message may increase the results.

23. Rent targeted e-mail lists. We abhor "spam," bulk untargeted, unsolicited e-mail, and you'll pay a very stiff price in a ruined reputation and cancelled services if you yield to temptation here. But the direct marketing industry has developed targeted e-mail lists you can rent - lists consisting of people who have agreed to receive commercial e-mail messages. These lists cost $40 to $400 per thousand or 4¢ to 40¢ per name. Do a smaller test first to determine the quality of the list. Your best bet is to find an e-mail list broker to help you with this project - you'll save money and get experienced help for no additional cost.

Miscellaneous Strategies

24. Promote Your Site in Online Forums and Blogs. The Internet offers thousands of very targeted e-mail based discussion lists, online forums, blogs, and Usenet news groups made up of people with very specialized interests. Use Google Groups to find appropriate sources (groups.google.com). Don't bother with news groups consisting of pure "spam." Instead, find groups where a serious dialog is taking place. Don't use aggressive marketing and overtly plug your product or service. Rather, add to the discussion in a helpful way and let the "signature" at the end of your e-mail message do your marketing for you. People will gradually get to know and trust you, visit your site, and do business with you.

25. Announce a Contest. People like getting something free. If you publicize a contest or drawing available on your site, you'll generate more traffic than normal. Make sure your sweepstakes rules are legal in all states and countries you are targeting. Prizes should be designed to attract individuals who fit a demographic profile describing your best customers.

26. Ask Visitors to Bookmark Your Site. It seems so simple, but make sure you ask visitors to bookmark your site or save it in their Favorites list.

27. Exchange Ads with Complementary Businesses. Banner exchange programs don't work well these days. But consider exchanging e-mail newsletter ads with complementary businesses to reach new audiences. Just be sure that your partners are careful where they get their mailing list or you could be in trouble with the CAN-SPAM Act.

28. Devise Viral Marketing Promotion Techniques. So-called viral marketing uses the communication networks (and preferably the resources) of your site visitors or customers to spread the word about your site exponentially. Word-of-mouth, PR, creating "buzz" and network marketing are offline models. #14 above, "Write Articles for Others to Use in their Newsletters," is a viral approach. The classic example is the free e-mail service, hotmail.com, that includes a tagline about their service at the end of every message sent out, so friends tell friends, who tell friends.

Paid Advertising Strategies

None of the approaches described above is "free," since each takes time and energy. But if you want to grow your business more rapidly, there comes a point when you need to pay for increased traffic. Advertising is sold in one of three ways: (1) traditional CPM (cost per thousand views), (2) pay per click (PPC), and (3) pay per action, otherwise known as an affiliate program or lead generation program. Do some small tests first to determine response. Then calculate your return on investment (ROI) before spending large amounts. Here are some methods:

29. Buy a Text Ad in an E-Mail Newsletter. Some of the best buys are small text ads in e-mail newsletters targeted at audiences likely to be interested in your products or services. Many small publishers aren't sophisticated about advertising and offer attractive rates.Banner ads get such a low click-through rate (0.2%) these days that I don't recommend paying much for them. Banner ads typically cost about 50¢ to $1 per thousand page views.

30. Begin an Affiliate Program. Essentially, a retailer's affiliate program pays a commission to other sites whose links to the retailer result in an actual sale. The goal is to build a network of affiliates who have a financial stake in promoting your site. If you're a merchant you, need to (1) determine the commission you are willing to pay (consider it your advertising cost), (2) select a company to set up the technical details of your program, and (3) promote your program to get the right kind of affiliates who will link to your site. Consider affiliate management software.

31. Purchase Pay Per Click (PPC) ads with Yahoo Search Marketing (formerly Overture) and Google AdWords. The top ads appear as featured links to the right of "natural" search engine results for your keywords. Your ranking is determined by how much you've bid for a particular search word compared to other businesses. This can be a cost-effective way to get targeted traffic, since you only pay when someone actually clicks on the link. Pay Per Click advertising can be quite cost-effective when you learn how to use it. Yahoo Search Marketing even offers some free credit to get you started. You can learn about software to administer such programs in Report on PPC Bid Management Software (www.wilsonweb.com/ebooks/bidmgt.htm).

32. List Your Products with Shopping Comparison Bots and Auction Sites. Shopping bots compare your products and prices to others. Google's Froogle (www.froogle.com) is free, so be sure to list your products there. A Froogle listing also helps your product page's ranking on Google. Some work on a PPC basis: mySimon (www.mysimon.com), BizRate (www.bizrate.com), PriceGrabber (www.pricegrabber.com), and Shopping.com (www.shopping.com). Others expect a commission on the sale and sometimes a listing fee, especially sales systems that host the merchant. These include eBay (www.ebay.com), Yahoo! Shopping Auctions (http://auctions.shopping.yahoo.com), Amazon zShops, Marketplace, and Auctions (http://zshops.amazon.com), and Yahoo! Shopping (http://shopping.yahoo.com). You pay to acquire first-time customers, but hopefully you can sell to them a second, third, and fourth time, too.

We certainly haven't exhausted ways to promote your site, but these will get you started. To effectively market your site, you need to spend some time adapting these strategies to your own market and capacity.

A brand name is a name (a Proper Noun in fact) in the mind of the consumer that conveys a single proposition about a particular product or service. The power in a brand name lies in its ability to positively influence purchasing behavior.

In an increasingly cluttered information society, a powerful brand image can act as a guidepost for the consumer in making a purchase decision.

“What is accelerating this trend is the decline of selling. As a profession and as a function, selling is slowly sinking like the Titanic. Today, most products and services are bought, not sold. And branding greatly facilitates this process. Branding “pre-sells” the product or service to the user. Branding is simply an efficient way to sell things.”

A successful branding program, therefore, should differentiate your product or service from all the similar products or services out there.

“A successful branding program is based on the concept of singularity. It creates in the mind of the prospect the perception that there is no product on the market quite like your product.
Can a successful brand appeal to everybody? No. The same concept of singularity makes certain that no one brand can possibly have a universal appeal.”

A major problem for companies is the temptation to extend a successful brand into other, sometimes only peripherally related, areas. (Two actual examples mentioned in the book are Harley-Davidson wine coolers and Heinz all-purpose cleaning vinegar.) Such brand extensions only serve to confuse the consumer and dilute the single message strength of the core brand.

Twenty-two ‘laws’ of branding are:

1. The law of expansion - The power of a brand is inversely proportional to its scope: “Marketers constantly run branding programs that are in conflict with how people want to perceive their brands. Customers want brands that are narrow in scope and are distinguishable by a single word, the shorter the better.”

2. The law of contraction - A brand becomes stronger when you narrow its focus

3. The law of publicity - The birth of a brand is achieved with publicity, not advertising - Ries and Ries maintain that advertising is best used to maintain a brand, but that it is very difficult and expensive to launch a new brand through advertising alone - they best way, they say, is to be first in a new product or service category, and reap the attendant publicity

4. The law of advertising - Once born, a brand needs advertising to stay healthy

5. The law of the word - A brand should strive to own a word in the mind of the consumer - “If you want to build a brand, you must focus your branding efforts on owning a word in the prospect’s mind. A word that nobody else owns.” Examples they give include: Mercedes = prestige; Volvo = safety; Kleenex = tissue; Xerox = copier; FedEx = overnight.

6. The law of credentials - The crucial ingredient in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity and the best claim to authenticity is being the leading product or service in your category, because consumers assume that if it is a leading seller, it must be good: “Never forget leadership. No matter how small the market, don’t get duped into simply selling the benefits of the category. There are also the long-term benefits of leadership. Because once you get on top, it's hard to lose your spot. A widely publicized study of twenty-five leading brands in twenty-five different product categories in the year 1923 showed that twenty of the same twenty-five brands are still the leaders in their categories today. In seventy-five years, only five brands lost their leadership.”

7. The law of quality - Quality is important, but brands are not built by quality alone. In fact, as the authors point out, most people have no idea as to the “real” quality of a product or service. Is a Rolex really better at keeping time than a Timex? How do you know?

8. The law of the category - A leading brand should promote the product or service category, not the brand - This may seen counter-intuitive, but the authors argue here that the best way for the brand leader to build sales is to promote the category, not their specific brand. This is a more effective way to build up overall market awareness and interest, and the brand leader will naturally benefit to a greater degree than other competitors, by virtue of their larger market share. (And when the overall size of the market is built up, then the leader is in a good position to increase market share still further.)

9. The law of the name - In the long run, a brand is nothing more than a name

10. The law of extensions - The easiest way to destroy a brand is to put its name on everything

11. The law of fellowship - In order to build the category, a brand should welcome other brands - see rule #8

12. The law of the generic - One of the fastest routes to failure is giving a brand a generic name - Generic names (i.e. names that describe the product or service category, such as “Wine Coolerz”), do not strongly position the product or service within the category, and are thus liable to confuse potential customers.

13. The law of the company - Brands are brands. Companies are companies. There is a difference. "The issue of how to use a company name is at the same time both simple and complicated. Simple, because the laws are so clear-cut. Complicated, because most companies do not follow the simple laws of branding and end up with a system that defies logic and results in endless brand versus company debates. Brand names should almost
always take precedence over company names. Consumers buy brands, they don’t buy companies. So when a company name is used alone as a brand name (GE, Coca Cola, IBM, Xerox, Intel), customers see these names as brands.”

14. The law of subbrands - What branding builds, subbranding (i.e. brand extensions) can destroy. The name ‘Chevrolet’ used to stand for something. Now, what is it? A large, small, cheap, expensive car or truck.

15. The law of siblings - There is a time and a place to launch a second brand. “The key to a family approach is to make each sibling a unique individual brand with its own identity.
Resist the urge to give the brands a family look or identity. You want to make each brand a different and distinct as possible.”

16. The law of shape - A brand’s logotype should be designed to fit the eye. Both eyes. The ideal shape for a logotype or brand symbol is two and a quarter units wide and one unit high.

17. The law of color - A brand should use a color that is the opposite of its major competitor’s.

18. The law of borders - There are no barriers to global branding. A brand should know no borders.

19. The law of consistency - A brand is not built overnight. Success is measured in decades, not years.

20. The law of change - Brands can be changed, but only infrequently and very carefully.

21. The law of mortality - No brand will live forever. Euthanasia is often the best solution.

22. The law of singularity - The most important aspect of a brand is its single-mindedness.

A common refrain for people thinking up business ideas is that all the good ideas have already been done. This of course isn’t true, but it sure can feel that way!

On numerous occasions I’ve had what I thought was a lightening bolt idea only to find that someone has not only thought of it before but has even gone out and built a really great business out of it. While it is rather vindicating to see that your idea really did have merit, it is also a bit disappointing. But should you give up? And if you don’t, then how do you go about taking on such a challenge?

Finding an established competitor is not necessarily cause to quit on the spot. It is however reason to think very carefully, and assess whether you have the resources, energy and ingenuity to go for it. Make no mistake, having an established and successful competitor will make things much harder. On the other hand, they prove that a market exists, and for larger competitors, even the left-overs can be very worthwhile. In one of the biggest markets - internet search - even a measly 1% of the market is apparently worth $1 billion dollars in market cap - sort of explains why companies like Ask keep at it when Google seems to have won the market hands down.

Now not all businesses are the same and not all competitors are equally established. But for the purposes of this post, let’s assume that the established competitor is pretty well entrenched, well known, and generally accepted to be the company in this space. So think the TechCrunch of tech blogging, the Twitter of short messaging, the Digg of social news. And let’s assume that you want in on the action but are coming to the field as a total unknown.

Challenging an established competitor requires you to have a solid game plan. The one thing you definitely do not want to do is try to compete head on by creating a virtually identical product. That would be sort of like playing chicken with a Mack truck when you’re in a Ford Pinto. If there is a dominant competitor already in the market that everyone knows, it’s unlikely they are going to switch over to your product, even if it’s a little bit cheaper or a little bit better. Most people have a limited attention span meaning there is only so much room for different brands to compete for. Once they’ve gotten used to a product or company, it’s hard to get them to switch.

Here are seven potential strategies on how you might go about taking on an entrenched competitor:

(1) Specialize / Subniche

Given a reasonably large market there are usually many sub-niches that can be served by a specialized provider. For example Google may dominate internet search, but there are many subsets of internet search where other companies are flourishing. Some great examples include SimplyHired and job searching, Technorati and blog searching (actually Google has been doing pretty well there too lately), travel search and Kayak, and so on. Similarly while Digg may arguably dominate social news, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for niche social news sites like Sphinn for SEO news, Tipd for stock market news, ShowHype for celebrity news and my favourite Hacker News for startup and dev news.

Specialization works because it allows you to tailor a product more specifically to niche needs. The question then is how can you use this as a strategy to grow upwards and take on the original competitor. The answer lies in horizontal expansion.

If you look at each subniche as a front to use to gain ground on the top level competitor, then dominating one should give you enough leverage to move horizontally to fill another, and then another. Once you gain enough subniches your combined audience should start becoming sizeable and you begin to really compete.

The difficulty in this strategy is that subniching requires specialization and as you add subniches you necessarily loose some of that specialization, and therefore potentially leadership of each individual subniche. It can also be pretty hard to pull a brand out of a subniche and reinvent it to fill a larger category.

The great strength of this strategy is that you can build a profitable business in a subniche before trying to bite off more than you can chew. Even if you get stumped along the way, you should still be in a good position. For example let’s say SimplyHired decided to make SimplyTravel and then later SimplyRentals, to add travel and real estate search to its portfolio. It would seem doubtful that they’d manage to take on Google, but on the other hand provided they consolidate each subniche as they go, they should end up with three related profitable subniche businesses and potentially a “Simply” brand of quality niche search engine.

(2) Dramatically Change the Product Features (and Yes, Price is a Feature)

Changing features on a product is the most obvious way to take on a competitor. And out of all the features that businesses try to use as a hook, price is probably the most common. What is important to remember though is that you need a substantial difference in features for this to work. If you say take 10% off the price, add one or two “oh that’s neat” features, chances are your product won’t be different enough to really win away many users.

A while back I was surveying project management web apps for a blog post. The first couple I looked at stuck in my head, but by the time I’d gotten to about 10, they’d all kinda blurred into one. Sure some of them were cheaper, some had an extra feature or two, but really the only ones that I’d remember were the first couple. Now a small change in features or price may win some users, and you can even build a healthy business out of it.

But you will never be able to really challenge the competition with a 10% upgrade.

If you want to go this route, you need to turn things on their head. If price is the feature, then it needs to be like 90% cheaper. If it’s a feature it has to be a feature that makes people go “wow this changes everything”. These sorts of game busting differences effectively create new markets, ones which can then be dominated.

A great example of a company that turned pricing on its head is iStockPhoto. Before they came along, traditional stock houses would charge hundreds of dollars per photo. iStock initially charged just 50 cents. Sure the product was the same - a photo is a photo (and believe me the quality sometimes is pretty indistinguishable between cheap and expensive stock) - but with that price difference they’d created an entirely new market. iStock went on to dominate so well that their original behemoth competitor Getty not only acquired them, but then made iStock a large part of the core strategy of the company.

Two examples of companies that have delivered huge non-pricing feature changes spring to mind, Dell and Amazon. In the first case, Dell introduced the ‘configure to order’ model of PC manufacturing, which along with its innovations in delivery changed a lot about how people bought PCs. In the latter case, Amazon took bookselling online effectively using online ordering and delivery as a massive feature change to a traditional business.

Of course a dramatic feature change doesn’t need to be quite as industry changing as these examples to be an effective strategy, but they do illustrate how the bigger the change, the better the play. It’s hard to imagine any other way unknown companies could have broken into the top echelons of industries like personal computers and book sales!

(3) Position Yourself as the Alternative

There’s a brilliant book on marketing called The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, in which the authors discuss what they call the Law of Duality. The idea is that in the long run every market becomes a two horse race. So think Coca Cola and Pepsi, McDonalds and Burger King, Crest and Colgate. The authors state that there is only really room for two brands in a consumers head - the leader and the other guy.

This idea implies that one way to take on an established competitor is to be .. the other guy! Set yourself up as the yin to their yang. You can even market yourself that way - “Project Management for when Basecamp doesn’t cut it”, “Hi I’m PC, and I’m a Mac” - banking on a certain segment of the population not liking the market leader and playing up to it.

From a branding perspective being the other guy is a tough springboard to becoming market leader, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a profitable place to be. And history has shown us that if you wait long enough companies have a tendency to make mistakes. Sooner or later a new technology will come along that you can pounce on first, or your competitor will let some aspect of the business slide leaving a hole open for you to attack. Remember when you’re in second place, you’re ideally placed to take the crown if the leader falters.

(4) Internationalize

If you’re a fellow TechCrunch reader you’ll no doubt have noticed that in social networking there are often companies that are “big in Brazil” or that “really dominate Asia”. Just because Facebook and MySpace seem to be the market leaders, doesn’t mean there aren’t a dozen other social networking sites that are absolutely massive. Hi5, Orkut, Netlog, Friendster, Bebo … The list is pretty long (and incidentally has a particularly high number of silly names).

The funniest example of how successful internationalization can be was when the German Facebook clone Studivz sold for 100 million Euros. What’s so funny about that? Well lets just say if you changed blue to red, Facebook and Studivz showed some remarkable similarities. Even today, 2 years on, you can still see the lineage pretty clearly.

(5) Generalize / Superniche

Just like you can subniche, you can superniche too. That is go over the top of your competitor and build a service or product with broader appeal to capture the larger market. In many cases the most general, top level niche is, however, the first one occupied so this is potentially not a viable strategy in many cases.

For the same reasons that subniching is a relatively safe strategy, superniching is a potentially hazardous one. It means you have to be all things to all people and you risk missing the mark on many fronts. Instead of having a safe subniche to dominate, you are going to attempt to compete with the established competitor not only on their home turf, but on others too! Definitely not for the faint of heart, or empty of wallet.

(6) Parallel Niches

Just as internationalization lets you apply the same basic product idea to different global audiences, this strategy is about applying the same basic product idea to different audiences in other contexts. A great example comes from the world of social messaging where Twitter is rapidly becoming the de facto brand. But if recently I’ve also seen a lot of reapplications of the Twitter concept to other markets, like Yammer which is “Twitter for Business” and Edmodo which is “Twitter for Education”.

Note that these aren’t subniches of Twitter’s core niche, these are alternate markets. Often they will have specific features tailored to those markets which make the product reasonably different. You might look at this strategy as a sort of combination of (1) and (2) above. But the real difference is that another way of describing Twitter is as “Twitter for External Use” whereas the other two companies are subniches of a different market, namely “Twitter for Internal Use”.

(7) Support the competitor!

One more way to take on is to supporting the competitor. In this way you get some audience and recognition in the already grown company which can be helpful for future strategies.

It’s all about differentiation

The core idea behind all six strategies is really the same - differentiation. It’s hard to win in a head to head battle when your opponent has massive advantages in size, recognition, cash, audience and brand. So if you’re going to challenge them, the best thing to do is get them off their home turf. Using this secondary battleground you can build up your own size and strength until you’re finally ready to turn around and give them a run for their money.

This is a favourite subject of mine, so I’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Are there other strategies that I’ve missed? Are these six all really a single basic strategy? Is differentiation and brand positioning the most important thing in challenging an established competitor?

Final Notes

You can also carve a piece of the market by differentiating in other aspects/functions of your business e.g the delivery/distribution model, customer service etc. A smart thing to do would be de-construct the way the big competitor “does” business, or treats its customers, and then aim to provide what they don’t.

So for example, if their customer service is rubbish, a new entrant could attract business away simply by offering a similar (or superior) product backed up by superior customer service. Or differentiating themselves through their product development function by getting the consumer/user involved.

Changing a product feature can also mean making a better product. Useful innovation is great way to gain market share. Apple did it with the I-pod, and took over the portable audio market. Innovation is not easy and requires significant research and development. For a small company this mean having a founder or co-founder that has the skill set and resources for whatever research and development that is needed to innovate.

1. It is impossible to picture empty space. All our efforts to imagine pure space from which the changing images of material objects are excluded can only result in a representation in which highly-coloured surfaces, for instance, are replaced by lines of slight colouration, and if we continued in this direction to the end, everything would disappear and end in nothing. Hence arises the irreducible relativity of space.

Whoever speaks of absolute space uses a word devoid of meaning. This is a truth that has been long proclaimed by all who have reflected on the question, but one which we are too often inclined to forget.

If I am at a definite point in Paris, at the Place du Panthéon, for instance, and I say, "I will come back here tomorrow;" if I am asked, "Do you mean that you will come back to the same point in space?" I should be tempted to answer yes. Yet I should be wrong, since between now and tomorrow the earth will have moved, carrying with it the Place du Panthéon, which will have travelled more than a million miles. And if I wished to speak more accurately, I should gain nothing, since this million of miles has been covered by our globe in its motion in relation to the sun, and the sun in its turn moves in relation to the Milky Way, and the Milky Way itself is no doubt in motion without our being able to recognise its velocity. So that we are, and shall always be, completely ignorant how far the Place du Panthéon moves in a day. In fact, what I meant to say was,

"Tomorrow I shall see once more the dome and pediment of the Panthéon,"

and if there was no Panthéon my sentence would have no meaning and space would disappear.

This is one of the most commonplace forms of the principle of the relativity of space, but there is another on which Delbeuf has laid particular stress. Suppose that in one night all the dimensions of the universe became a thousand times larger. The world will remain similar to itself, if we give the word similitude the meaning it has in the third book of Euclid. Only, what was formerly a metre long will now measure a kilometre, and what was a millimetre long will become a metre. The bed in which I went to sleep and my body itself will have grown in the same proportion. When I awake in the morning what will be my feeling in face of such an astonishing transformation? Well, I shall not notice anything at all. The most exact measures will be incapable of revealing anything of this tremendous change, since the yard-measures I shall use will have varied in exactly the same proportions as the objects I shall attempt to measure. In reality the change only exists for those who argue as if space were absolute. If I have argued for a moment as they do, it was only in order to make it clearer that their view implies a contradiction. In reality it would be better to say that as space is relative, nothing at all has happened, and that it is for that reason that we have noticed nothing.

Have we any right, therefore, to say that we know the distance between two points? No, since that distance could undergo enormous variations without our being able to perceive it, provided other distances varied in the same proportions. We saw just now that when I say I shall be here tomorrow, that does not mean that tomorrow I shall be at the point in space where I am today, but that tomorrow I shall be at the same distance from the Panthéon as I am today. And already this statement is not sufficient, and I ought to say that tomorrow and today my distance from the Panthéon will be equal to the same number of times the length of my body.

But that is not all. I imagined the dimensions of the world changing, but at least the world remaining always similar to itself. We can go much further than that, and one of the most surprising theories of modern physicists will furnish the occasion. According to a hypothesis of Lorentz and Fitzgerald, all bodies carried forward in the earth's motion undergo a deformation. This deformation is, in truth, very slight, since all dimensions parallel with the earth's motion are diminished by a hundred-millionth, while dimensions perpendicular to this motion are not altered. But it matters little that it is slight; it is enough that it should exist for the conclusion I am soon going to draw from it. Besides, though I said that it is slight, I really know nothing about it. I have myself fallen a victim to the tenacious illusion that makes us believe that we think of an absolute space. I was thinking of the earth's motion on its elliptical orbit round the sun, and I allowed 18 miles a second for its velocity. But its true velocity (I mean this time, not its absolute velocity, which has no sense, but its velocity in relation to the ether), this I do not know and have no means of knowing. It is, perhaps, 10 or 100 times as high, and then the deformation will be 100 or 10,000 times as great.

It is evident that we cannot demonstrate this deformation. Take a cube with sides a yard long. it is deformed on account of the earth's velocity; one of its sides, that parallel with the motion, becomes smaller, the others do not vary. If I wish to assure myself of this with the help of a yard-measure, I shall measure first one of the sides perpendicular to the motion, and satisfy myself that my measure fit s this side exactly ; and indeed neither one nor other of these lengths is altered, since they are both perpendicular to the motion. I then wish to measure the other side, that parallel with the motion ; for this purpose I change the position of my measure, and turn it so as to apply it to this side. But the yard-measure, having changed its direction and having become parallel with the motion, has in its turn undergone the deformation so that, though the side is no longer a yard long, it will still fit it exactly, and I shall be aware of nothing.

What, then, I shall be asked, is the use of the hypothesis of Lorentz and Fitzgerald if no experiment can enable us to verify it? The fact is that my statement has been incomplete. I have only spoken of measurements that can be made with a yard-measure, but we can also measure a distance by the time that light takes to traverse it, on condition that we admit that the velocity of light is constant, and independent of its direction. Lorentz could have accounted for the facts by supposing that the velocity of light is greater in the direction of the earth's motion than in the perpendicular direction. He preferred to admit that the velocity is the same in the two directions, but that bodies are smaller in the former than in the latter. If the surfaces of the waves of light had undergone the same deformations as material bodies, we should never have perceived the Lorentz-Fitzgerald deformation.

In the one case as in the other, there can be no question of absolute magnitude, but of the measurement of that magnitude by means of some instrument. This instrument may be a yard-measure or the path traversed by light. It is only the relation of the magnitude to the instrument that we measure, and if this relation is altered, we have no means of knowing whether it is the magnitude or the instrument that has changed.

But what I wish to make clear is, that in this deformation the world has not remained similar to itself. Squares have become rectangles or parallelograms, circles ellipses, and spheres ellipsoids. And yet we have no means of knowing whether this deformation is real.

It is clear that we might go much further. Instead of the Lorentz-Fitzgerald deformation, with its extremely simple laws, we might imagine a deformation of any kind whatever; bodies might be deformed in accordance with any laws, as complicated as we liked, and we should not perceive it, provided all bodies without exception were deformed in accordance with the same laws. When I say all bodies without exception, I include, of course, our own bodies and the rays of light emanating from the different objects.

If we look at the world in one of those mirrors of complicated form which deform objects in an odd way, the mutual relations of the different parts of the world are not altered; if, in fact, two real objects touch, their images likewise appear to touch. In truth, when we look in such a mirror we readily perceive the deformation but it is because the real world exists beside its deformed image. And even if this real world were hidden from us, there is something which cannot be hidden, and that is ourselves. We cannot help seeing, or at least feeling, our body and our members which have not been deformed, and continue to act as measuring instruments. But if we imagine our body itself deformed, and in the same way as if it were seen in the mirror, these measuring instruments will fail us in their turn, and the deformation will no longer be able to be ascertained.

Imagine, in the same way, two universes which are the image one of the other. With each object P in the universe A, there corresponds, in the universe B, an object P1 which is its image. The co-ordinates of this image P1 are determinate functions of those of the object P ; moreover, these functions ma be of any kind whatever - I assume only that they are chosen once for all. Between the position of P and that of P1 there is a constant relation ; it matters little what that relation may be, it is enough that it should be constant.

Well, these two universes will be indistinguishable.

I mean to say that the former will be for its inhabitants what the second is for its own. This would be true so long as the two universes remained foreign to one another. Suppose we are inhabitants of the universe A ; we have constructed our science and particularly our geometry. During this time the inhabitants of the universe B have constructed a science, and as their world is the image of ours, their geometry will also be the image of ours, or, more accurately, it will be the same. But if one day a window were to open for us upon the universe B, we should feel contempt for them, and we should say, "These wretched people imagine that they have made a geometry, but what they so name is only a grotesque image of ours; their straight lines are all twisted, their circles are hunchbacked, and their spheres have capricious inequalities." We should have no suspicion that they were saying the same of us, and that no one will ever know which is right.

We see in how large a sense we must understand the relativity of space. Space is in reality amorphous, and it is only the things that are in it that give it a form. What are we to think, then, of that direct intuition we have of a straight line or of distance? We have so little the intuition of distance in itself that, in a single night, as we have said, a distance could become a thousand times greater without our being able to perceive it, if all other distances had undergone the same alteration. And in a night the universe B might even be substituted for the universe A without our having any means of knowing it, and then the straight lines of yesterday would have ceased to be straight, and we should not be aware of anything.

One part of space is not by itself and in the absolute sense of the word equal to another part of space, for if it is so for us, it will not be so for the inhabitants of the universe B, and they have precisely as much right to reject our opinion as we have to condemn theirs.

I have shown elsewhere what are the consequences of these facts from the point of view of the idea that we should construct non-Euclidean and other analogous geometries. I do not wish to return to this, and I will take a somewhat different point of view.

2. If this intuition of distance, of direction, of the straight line, if, in a word, this direct intuition of space does not exist, whence comes it that we imagine we have it? If this is only an illusion, whence comes it that the illusion is so tenacious ? This is what we must examine. There is no direct intuition of magnitude, as we have said, and we can only arrive at the relation of the magnitude to our measuring instruments. Accordingly we could not have constructed space if we had not had an instrument for measuring it. Well, that instrument to which we refer everything, which we use instinctively, is our own body. It is in reference to our own body that we locate exterior objects, and the only special relations of these objects that we can picture to ourselves are their relations with our body. It is our body that serves us, so to speak, as a system of axes of co-ordinates.

For instance, at a moment a the presence of an object A is revealed to me by the sense of sight; at another moment b the presence of another object B is revealed by another sense, that, for instance, of hearing or of touch. I judge that this object B occupies the same place as the object A. What does this mean? To begin with, it does not imply that these two objects occupy, at two different moments, the same point in an absolute space, which, even if it existed, would escape our knowledge, since between the moments a and P the solar system has been displaced and we cannot know what this displacement is. It means that these two objects occupy the same relative position in reference to our body.

But what is meant even by this? The impressions that have come to us from these objects have followed absolutely different paths - the optic nerve for the object A, and the acoustic nerve for the object B - they have nothing in common from the qualitative point of view.' The representations we can form of these two objects are absolutely heterogeneous and irreducible one to the other. Only I know that, in order to reach the object A, I have only to extend my right arm in a certain way; even though I refrain from doing it, I represent to myself the muscular and other analogous sensations which accompany that extension, and that representation is associated with that of the object A.

Now I know equally that I can reach the object B by extending my right arm in the same way, an extension accompanied by the same train of muscular sensations. And I mean nothing else but this when I say that these two objects occupy the same position.

I know also that I could have reached the object A by another appropriate movement of the left arm, and I represent to myself the muscular sensations that would have accompanied the movement. And by the same movement of the left arm, accompanied by the same sensations, I could equally have reached the object B.

And this is very important, since it is in this way that I could defend myself against the dangers with which the object A or the object B might threaten me. With each of the blows that may strike us, nature has associated one or several parries which enable us to protect ourselves against them. The same parry may answer to several blows. It is thus, for instance, that the same movement of the right arm would have enabled us to defend ourselves at the moment a against the object A, and at the moment b against the object B. Similarly, the same blow may be parried in several ways, and we have said, for instance, that we could reach the object A equally well either by a certain movement of the right arm, or by a certain movement of the left.

All these parries have nothing in common with one another, except that they enable us to avoid the same blow, and it is that, and nothing but that, we mean when we say that they are movements ending in the same point in space. Similarly, these objects, of which we say that they occupy the same point in space, have nothing in common, except that the same parry can enable us to defend ourselves against them.

Or, if we prefer it, let us imagine innumerable telegraph wires, some centripetal and others centrifugal. The centripetal wires warn us of accidents that occur outside, the centrifugal wires have to provide the remedy. Connections are established in such a way that when one of the centripetal wires is traversed by a current, this current acts on a central exchange, and so excites a current in one of the centrifugal wires, and matters are so arranged that several centripetal wires can act on the same centrifugal wire, if the same remedy is applicable to several evils, and that one centripetal wire can disturb several centrifugal wires, either simultaneously or one in default of the other, every time that the same evil can be cured by several remedies.

It is this complex system of associations, it is this distribution board, so to speak, that is our whole geometry, or, if you will, all that is distinctive in our geometry. What we call our intuition of a straight line or of distance is the consciousness we have of these associations and of their imperious character.

Whence this imperious character itself comes, it is easy to understand. The older an association is, the more indestructible it will appear to us. But these associations are not, for the most part, conquests made by the individual, since we see traces of them in the newly-born infant they are conquests made by the race. The more necessary these conquests were, the more quickly they must have been brought about by natural selection.

On this account those we have been speaking of must have been among the earliest, since without them the defence of the organism would have been impossible. As soon as the cells were no longer merely in juxtaposition, as soon as they were called upon to give mutual assistance to each other, some such mechanism as we have been describing must necessarily have been organised in order that the assistance should meet the danger without miscarrying.

When a frog's head has been cut off, and a drop of acid is placed at some point on its skin, it tries to rub off the acid with the nearest foot; and if that foot is cut off, it removes it with the other foot. Here we have, clearly, that double parry I spoke of just now, making it possible to oppose an evil by a second remedy if the first fails. It is this multiplicity of parries, and the resulting co-ordination, that is space.

We see to what depths of unconsciousness we have to descend to find the first traces of these spatial associations, since the lowest parts of the nervous system alone come into play. Once we have realised this, how can we be astonished at the resistance we oppose to any attempt to dissociate what has been so long associated? Now, it is this very resistance that we call the evidence of the truths of geometry. This evidence is nothing else than the repugnance we feel at breaking with very old habits with which we have always got on very well.

3. The space thus created is only a small space that does not extend beyond what my arm can reach, and the intervention of memory is necessary to set back its limits. There are points that will always remain out of my reach, whatever effort I may make to stretch out my hand to them. If I were attached to the ground, like a sea-polyp, for instance, which can only extend its tentacles, all these points would be outside space, since the sensations we might experience from the action of bodies placed there would not be associated with the idea of any movement enabling us to reach them, or with any appropriate parry. These sensations would not seem to us to have any spatial character, and we should not attempt to locate them.

But we are not fixed to the ground like the inferior animals. If the enemy is too far off, we can advance upon him first and extend our hand when we are near enough. This is still a parry, but a long-distance parry. Moreover, it is a complex parry, and into the representation we make of it there enter the representation of the muscular sensations caused by the movement of the legs, that of the muscular sensations caused by the final movement of the arm, that of the sensations of the semi-circular canals, etc. Besides, we have to make a representation, not of a complexus of simultaneous sensations, but of a complexus of successive sensations, following one another in a determined order, and it is for this reason that I said just now that the intervention of memory is necessary.

We must further observe that, to reach the same point, I can approach nearer the object to be attained, in order not to have to extend my hand so far. And how much more might be said? It is not one only, but a thousand parries I can oppose to. the same danger. All these parries are formed of sensations that may have nothing in common, and yet we regard them as defining the same point in space, because they can answer to the same danger and are one and all of them associated with the notion of that danger. It is the possibility of parrying the same blow which makes the unity of these different parries, just as it is the possibility of being parried in the same way which makes the unity of the blows of such different kinds that can threaten us from the same point in space. It is this double unity that makes t he individuality of each point in space, and in the notion of such a point there is nothing else but this.

The space I pictured in the preceding section, which I might call restricted space, was referred to axes of co-ordinates attached to my body. These axes were fixed, since my body did not move, and it was only my limbs that changed their position. What are the axes to which the extended space is naturally referred - that is to say, the new space I have just defined? We define a point by the succession of movements we require to make to reach it, starting from a certain initial position of the body. The axes are accordingly attached to this initial position of the body.

But the position I call initial may be arbitrarily chosen from among all the positions my body has successively occupied. If a more or less unconscious memory of these successive positions is necessary for the genesis of the notion of space, this memory can go back more or less into the past. Hence results a certain indeterminateness in the very definition of space, and it is precisely this indeterminateness which constitutes its relativity.

Absolute space exists no longer; there is only space relative to a certain initial position of the body. For a conscious being, fixed to the ground like the inferior animals, who would consequently only know restricted space, space would still be relative, since it would be referred to his body, but this being would not be conscious of the relativity, because the axes to which he referred this restricted space would not change. No doubt the rock to which he was chained would not be motionless, since it would be involved in the motion of our planet; for us, consequently, these axes would change every moment, but for him they would not change. We have the faculty of referring our extended space at one time to the position A of our body considered as initial, at another to the position B which it occupied some moments later, which we are free to consider in its turn as initial, and, accordingly, we make unconscious changes in the co-ordinates every moment. This faculty would fail our imaginary being, and, through not having travelled, he would think space absolute. Every moment his system of axes would be imposed on him; this system might change to any extent in reality, for him it would be always the same, since it would always be the unique system. It is not the same for us who possess, each moment, several systems between which we can choose at will, and on condition of going back by memory more or less into the past.

That is not all, for the restricted space would not be homogeneous. The different points of this space could not be regarded as equivalent, since some could only be reached at the cost of the greatest efforts, while others could be reached with ease. On the contrary, our extended space appears to us homogeneous, and we say that all its points are equivalent. What does this mean?

If we start from a certain position A, we can, starting from that position, effect certain movements M, characterised by a certain complexus of muscular sensations. But, starting from another position B, we can execute movements M, which will be characterised by the same muscular sensations. Then let a be the situation of a certain point in the body, the tip of the forefinger of the right hand, for instance, in the initial position A, and let b be the position of this same forefinger when, starting from that position A, we have executed the movements M. Then let a1 be the situation of the forefinger in the position B, and b1 its situation when, starting from the position B, we have executed the movements M1.

Well, I am in the habit of saying that the points a and b are, in relation to each other, as the points a' and b, and that means simply that the two series of movements M and M1 are accompanied by the same muscular sensations. And as I am conscious that, in passing from the position A to the position B, my body has remained capable of the same movements, I know that there is a point in space which is to the point a' what some point b is to the point a, so that the two points a and a' are equivalent. It is this that is called the homogeneity of space, and at the same time it is for this reason that space is relative, since its properties remain the same whether they are referred to the axes A or to the axes B. So that the relativity of space and its homogeneity are one and the same thing.

Now, if I wish to pass to the great space, which is no longer to serve for my individual use only, but in which I can lodge the universe I shall arrive at it by an act of imagination. I shall imagine what a giant would experience who could reach the planets in a few steps, or, if we prefer, what I should feel myself in presence of a world in miniature, in which these planets would be replaced by little balls, while on one of these little balls there would move a Lilliputian that l should call myself. But this act of imagination would be impossible for me if I had not previously constructed my restricted space and my extended space for my personal use.

4. Now we come to the question why all these spaces have three dimensions. Let us refer to the "distribution board" spoken of above. We have, on the one side, a list of the different possible dangers - let us designate them as A1, A2, etc. - and, on the other side, the list of the different remedies, which I will call in the same way B1, B2, etc. Then we have connections between the contact studs of the first list and those of the second in such a way that when, for instance, the alarm for danger A3 works, it sets in motion or may set in motion the relay corresponding to the parry B4.

As I spoke above of centripetal or centrifugal wires, I am afraid that all I have said may be taken, not as a simple comparison, but as a description of the nervous system. Such is not my thought, and that for several reasons. Firstly, I should not presume to pronounce an opinion on the structure of the nervous system which I do not know, while those who have studied it only do so with circumspection. Secondly, because, in spite of my incompetence, I fully realise that this scheme would be far too simple. And lastly, because, on my list of parries, there appear some that are very complex, which may even, in the case of extended space, as we have seen above, consist of several steps followed by a movement of the arm. It is not a question, then, of physical connection between two real conductors, but of psychological association between two series of sensations.

If A1 and A2, for instance, are both of them associated with the parry B1, and if A1 is similarly associated with B2, it will generally be the case that A2 and B2 will also be associated. If this fundamental law were not generally true, there would only be an immense confusion, and there would be nothing that could bear any resemblance to a conception of space or to a geometry. How, indeed, have we defined a point in space? We defined it in two ways: on the one hand, it is the whole of the alarms A which are in connection with the same parry B ; on the other, it is the whole of the parries B which are in connection with the same alarm A. If our law were not true, we should be obliged to say that A1 and A2 correspond with the same point, since they are both in connection with B1 ; but we should be equally obliged to say that they do not correspond with the same point, since A1 would be in connection with B2, and this would not be true of A2 - which would be a contradiction.

But from another aspect, if the law were rigorously and invariably true, space would be quite different from what it is. We should have well-defined categories, among which would be apportioned the alarms A on the one side and the parries B on the other. These categories would be exceedingly numerous, but they would be entirely separated one from the other. Space would be formed of points, very numerous but discrete; it would be discontinuous. There would be no reason for arranging these points in one order rather than another, nor, consequently, for attributing three dimensions to space.

But this is not the case. May I be permitted for a moment to use the language of those who know geometry already? It is necessary that I should do so, since it is the language best understood by those to whom I wish to make myself clear. When I wish to parry the blow, I try to reach the point whence the blow comes, but it is enough if I come fairly near it. The n the parry B1 may answer to A1, and to A2 if the point which corresponds with B1 is sufficiently close both to that which corresponds with A1 and to that which corresponds with A2. But it may happen that the point which corresponds with another parry B2 is near enough to the point corresponding with A1, and not near enough to the point corresponding with A2. And so the parry B2 may answer to A1 and not be able to answer to A2.

For those who do not yet know geometry, this may be translated simply by a modification of the law enunciated above. Then what happens is as follows. Two parries, B1 and B2, are associated with one alarm A1, and with a very great number of alarms that we Will place in the same category as A1, and make to correspond with the same point in space. But we may find alarms A2 which are associated with B2 and not with B1, but on the other hand are associated with B3, which are not with A1, and so on in succession, so that we may write the sequence B1, A1, B2, A2, B3, A3, B4, A4, in which each term is associated with the succeeding and preceding terms, but not with those that are several places removed.

It is unnecessary to add that each of the terms of these sequences is not isolated, but forms part of a very numerous category of other alarms or other parries which has the same connections as it, and may be regarded as belonging to the same point in space. Thus the fundamental law, though admitting of exceptions, remains almost always true. Only, in consequence of these exceptions, these categories, instead of being entirely separate, partially encroach upon each other and mutually overlap to a certain extent, so that space becomes continuous.

Furthermore, the order in which these categories must be arranged is no longer arbitrary, and a reference to the preceding sequence will make it clear that B2 must be placed between A1 and A2, and, consequently, between B1 and B3, and that it could not be placed, for instance, between B3 and B4.

Accordingly there is an order in which our categories range themselves naturally which corresponds with the points in space, and experience teaches us that this order presents itself in the form of a three circuit distribution board, and it is for this reason that space has three dimensions.

5. Thus the characteristic property of space, that of having three dimensions, is only a property of our distribution board, a property residing, so to speak, in the human intelligence. The destruction of some of these connections that is to say of these associations of ideas, would be sufficient to give us a different distribution board, and that might be enough to endow space with a fourth dimension.

Some people will be astonished at such a result. The exterior world, they think, must surely count for something. If the number of dimensions comes from the way in which we are made, there might be thinking beings living in our world, but made differently from us, who would think that space has more or less than three dimensions. Has not M. de Cyon said that Japanese mice, having only two pairs of semicircular canals, think that space has two dimensions? Then will not this thinking being, if he is capable of constructing a physical system, make a system of two or four dimensions, which yet, in a sense, will be the same as ours, since it will be the description of the same world in another language?

It quite seems, indeed, that it would be possible to translate our physics into the language of geometry of four dimensions. Attempting such a translation would be giving oneself a great deal of trouble for little profit, and I will content myself with mentioning Hertz's mechanics, in which something of the kind may be seen. Yet it seems that the translation would always be less simple than the text, and that it would never lose the appearance of a translation, for the language of three dimensions seems the best suited to the description of our world, even though that description may be made, in case of necessity, in another idiom.

Besides, it is not by chance that our distribution board has been formed. There is a connection between the alarm A1 and the parry B1, that is, a property residing in our intelligence. But why is there this connection? It is because the parry B1 enables us effectively to defend ourselves against the danger A1, and that. is a fact exterior to us, a property of the exterior world. Our distribution board, then, is only the translation of an assemblage of exterior facts; if it has three dimensions, it is because it has adapted itself to a world having certain properties, and the most important of these properties is that there exist natural solids which are clearly displaced in accordance with the laws we call laws of motion of unvarying solids. If, then, the language of three dimensions is that which enables us most easily to describe our world, we must not be surprised. This language is founded on our distribution board, and it is in order to. enable us to live in this world that this board has been established.

I have said that we could conceive of thinking beings, living in our world, whose distribution board would have four dimensions, who would, consequently, think in hyperspace. It is not certain, however, that such beings, admitting that,, they were born, would be able to live and defend 'themselves against the thousand dangers by which they would be assailed.

6. A few remarks in conclusion. There is a striking contrast between the roughness of this primitive geometry which is reduced to what I call a distribution board, and the infinite precision of the geometry of geometricians. And yet the latter is the child of the former, but not of it alone; it required to be fertilised by the faculty we have of constructing mathematical concepts, such, for instance, as that of the group. It was necessary to find among these pure concepts the one that was best adapted to this rough space, whose genesis I have tried to explain in the preceding pages, the space which is common to us and the higher animals.

The evidence of certain 'geometrical postulates is only, as I have said, our unwillingness to give up very old habits. But these postulates are infinitely precise, while the habits have about them something essentially fluid. As soon as we wish to think, we are bound to have infinitely precise postulates, since this is the only means of avoiding contradiction. But among all the possible systems of postulates, there are some that we shall be unwilling to choose, because they do not accord sufficiently with our habits. However fluid and elastic these may be, they have a limit of elasticity.

It will be seen that though geometry is not an experimental science, it is a science born in connection with experience; that we have created the space it studies, but adapting it to the world in which we live. We have chosen the most convenient space, but experience guided our choice. As the choice was unconscious, it appears to be imposed upon us. Some say that it is imposed by experience, and others that we are born with our space ready-made. After the preceding considerations, it will be seen what proportion of truth and of error there is - in these two opinions.

In this progressive education which has resulted in the construction of space, it is very difficult to determine what is the share of the individual and what of the race. To what extent could one of us, transported from his birth into an entirely different world, where, for instance, there existed bodies displaced in accordance with the laws of motion of non-Euclidean solids - to what extent, I say, would he be able to give up the ancestral space in order to build up an entirely new space?

The share of the race seems to preponderate largely, and yet if it is to it that we owe the rough space, the fluid space of which I spoke just now, the space of the higher animals, is it not to the unconscious experience of the individual that we owe the infinitely precise space of the geometrician? This is a question that is not easy of solution. I would mention, however, a fact which shows that the space bequeathed to us by our ancestors still preserves a certain plasticity. Certain hunters learn to shoot fish under the water, although the image of these fish is raised by refraction ; and, moreover, they do it instinctively. Accordingly they have learnt to modify their ancient instinct of direction, or, if you will, to substitute for the association A1, B1, another association A1, B2, because experience has shown them that the former does not succeed.

Postmodernism is not something we can settle once and for all and then use with a clear conscience. The concept, if there’s one, has to come at the end, and not at the beginning, of our discussions of it.
Fredric Jameson

The good news from Washington is that every single person in Congress supports the concept of an information superhighway. The bad news is that no one has any idea what that means.
Edward Markey

It has now become common to view the succession of economic paradigms since the Middle Ages in three distinct moments, each defined by the dominant sector of the economy: a first paradigm in which agriculture and the extraction of raw materials dominated the economy, a second in which industry and the manufacture of durable goods occupied the privileged position, and a third and current paradigm in which providing services and manipulating information are at the heart of economic production. The dominant position has thus passed from primary to secondary to tertiary production. Economic modernisation involves the passage from the first paradigm to the second, from the dominance of agriculture to that of industry. Modernisation means industrialisation. We might call the passage from the second paradigm to the third, from the domination of industry to that of services and information, a process of economic postmodernisation, or better, informatisation.

The most obvious definition and index of the shifts among these three paradigms appear first in quantitative terms, in reference either to the percentage of the population engaged in each of these productive domains or to the percentage of the total value produced by the various sectors of production. The changes in employment statistics in the dominant capitalist countries during the past one hundred years do indeed indicate dramatic shifts. This quantitative view, however, can lead to serious misunderstandings of these economic paradigms. Quantitative indicators cannot grasp either the qualitative transformation in the progression from one paradigm to another or the hierarchy among the economic sectors in the context of each paradigm. In the process of modernisation and the passage toward the paradigm of industrial dominance, not only did agricultural production decline quantitatively (both in percentage of workers employed and in proportion of the total value produced), but also, more important, agriculture itself was transformed. When agriculture came under the domination of industry, even when agriculture was still predominant in quantitative terms, it became subject to the social and financial pressures of industry, and moreover agricultural production itself was industrialised. Agriculture, of course, did not disappear; it remained an essential component of modern industrial economies, but it was now a transformed, industrialised agriculture.

The quantitative perspective also falls to recognise hierarchies among national or regional economies in the global system, which leads to all kinds of historical misrecognitions, posing analogies where none exist. From a quantitative perspective, for example, one might assume a twentieth-century society with the majority of its labour force occupied in agriculture or mining and the majority of its value produced in these sectors (such as India or Nigeria) to be in a position analogous to a society that existed sometime in the past with the same percentage of workers or value produced in those sectors (such as France or England). The historical illusion casts the analogy in a dynamic sequence so that one economic system occupies the same position or stage in a sequence of development that another had held in a previous period, as if all were on the same track moving forward in line. From the qualitative perspective, that is, in terms of their position in global power relationships, however, the economies of these societies occupy entirely incomparable positions. In the earlier case (France or England of the past), the agricultural production existed as the dominant sector in its economic sphere, and in the later (twentieth-century India or Nigeria), it is subordinated to industry in the world system. The two economies are not on the same track but in radically different and even divergent situations of dominance and subordination. In these different positions of hierarchy, a host of economic factors is completely different exchange relationships, credit and debt relationships, and so forth.’ In order for the latter economy to realise a position analogous to that of the former, it would have to invert the power relationship and achieve a position of dominance in its contemporary economic sphere, as Europe did, for example, in the medieval economy of the Mediterranean world. Historical change, in other words, has to be recognised in terms of the power relationships throughout the economic sphere.
Illusions of Development

The discourse of economic development, which was imposed under U.S. hegemony in coordination with the New Deal model in the postwar period, uses such false historical analogies as the foundation for economic policies. This discourse conceives the economic history of all countries as following one single pattern of development, each at different times and according to different speeds. Countries whose economic production is not presently at the level of the dominant countries are thus seen as developing countries, with the idea that if they continue on the path followed previously by the dominant countries and repeat their economic policies and strategies, they will eventually enjoy an analogous position or stage. The developmental view fails to recognise, however, that the economies of the so-called developed countries are defined not only by certain quantitative factors or by their internal structures, but also and more important by their dominant position in the global system.

The critiques of the developmentalist view that were posed by underdevelopment theories and dependency theories, which were born primarily in the Latin American and African contexts in the 1960s, were useful and important precisely because they emphasised the fact that the evolution of a regional or national economic system depends to a large extent on its place within the hierarchy and power structures of the capitalist world-system. The dominant regions will continue to develop and the subordinate will continue to underdevelop as mutually supporting poles in the global power structure. To say that the subordinate economies do not develop does not mean that they do not change or grow; it means, rather, that they remain subordinate in the global system and thus never achieve the promised form of a dominant, developed economy. In some cases individual countries or regions may be able to change their position in the hierarchy, but the point is that, regardless of who fills which position, the hierarchy remains the determining factor.

The theorists of underdevelopment themselves, however, also repeat a similar illusion of economic development. Summarising in schematic terms, we could say that their logic begins with two valid historical claims but then draws from them an erroneous conclusion. First, they maintain that, through the imposition of colonial regimes and/or other forms of imperialist domination, the underdevelopment of subordinated economies was created and sustained by their integration into the global network of dominant capitalist economies, their partial articulation, and thus their real and continuing dependence on those dominant economies. Second, they claim that the dominant economies themselves had originally developed their fully articulated and independent structures in relative isolation, with only limited interaction with other economies and global networks.

From these two more or less acceptable historical claims, however, they then deduce an invalid conclusion: if the developed economies achieved full articulation in relative isolation and the underdeveloped economies became disarticulated and dependent through their integration into global networks, then a project for the relative isolation of the underdeveloped economies will result in their development and full articulation. In other words, as an alternative to the “false development” pandered by the economists of the dominant capitalist countries, the theorists of underdevelopment promoted “real development,” which involves de-linking an economy from its dependent relationships and articulating in relative isolation an autonomous economic structure. Since this is how the dominant economies developed, it must be the true path to escape the cycle of underdevelopment. This syllogism, however, asks us to believe that the laws of economic development will somehow transcend the differences of historical change.

The alternative notion of development is based paradoxically on the same historical illusion central to the dominant ideology of development it opposes. The tendential realisation of the world market should destroy any notion that today a country or region could isolate or de-link itself from the global networks of power in order to re-create the conditions of the past and develop as the dominant capitalist countries once did. Even the dominant countries are now dependent on the global system; the interactions of the world market have resulted in a generalised disarticulation of all economics. Increasingly, any attempt at isolation or separation win mean only a more brutal kind of domination by the global system, a reduction to powerlessness and poverty.
lnformatisation

The processes of modernisation and industrialisation transformed and redefined all the elements of the social plane. When agriculture was modernised as industry, the farm progressively became a factory, with all of the factory’s discipline, technology, wage relations, and so forth. Agriculture was modernised as industry. More generally, society itself slowly became industrialised even to the point of transforming human relations and human nature. Society became a factory. In the early twentieth century, Robert Musil reflected beautifully on the transformation of humanity in the passage from the pastoral agricultural world to the social factory: “There was a time when people grew naturally into the conditions they found waiting for them and that was a very sound way of becoming oneself. But nowadays, with all this shaking up of things, when everything is becoming detached from the soil it grew in, even where the production of soul is concerned one really ought, as it were, to replace the traditional handicrafts by the sort of intelligence that goes with the machine and the factory.” The processes of becoming human and the nature of the human itself were fundamentally transformed in the passage defined by modernisation.

In our times, however, modernisation has come to an end. In other words, industrial production is no longer expanding its dominance over other economic forms and social phenomena. A symptom of this shift is manifest in the quantitative changes in employment. Whereas the process of modernisation was indicated by a migration of labour from agriculture and mining (the primary sector) to industry (the secondary), the process of post-modernisation or informatisation has been demonstrated through the migration from industry to service Jobs (the tertiary), a shift that has taken place in the dominant capitalist countries, and particularly in the United States, since the early 1970s. Services cover a wide range of activities from health care, education, and finance to transportation, entertainment, and advertising. The jobs for the most part are highly mobile and involve flexible skills. More important, they are characterised in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, affect, and communication. In this sense many call the postindustrial economy an informational economy.

The claim that modernisation is over and that the global economy is today undergoing a process of postmodernisation toward an informational economy does not mean that industrial production will be done away with or even that it win cease to play an important role, even in the most dominant regions of the globe.

just as the processes of industrialisation transformed agriculture and made it more productive, so too the informational revolution will transform industry by redefining and rejuvenating manufacturing processes. The new managerial imperative operative here is, “Treat manufacturing as a service.” In effect, as industries are transformed, the division between manufacturing and services is becoming blurred. Just as through the process of modernisation all production tended to become industrialised, so too through the process of postmodernisation all production tends toward the production of services, toward becoming informationalised.

Not all countries, of course, even among the dominant capitalist countries, have embarked on the project of postmodernisation along the same path. On the basis of the change of employment statistics in the G-7 countries since 1970, Manuel Castells and Yuko Aoyama have discerned two basic models or paths of informatisation. Both models involve the increase of employment in postindustrial services, but they emphasise different kinds of services and different relations between services and manufacturing. The first path tends toward a service economy model and is led by the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. This model involves a id decline in industrial jobs and a corresponding rapid rise in service-sector jobs. In particular, the financial services that manage capital come to dominate the other service sectors. In the second model, the info-industrial model, typified by japan and Germany, industrial employment declines more slowly than it does in the first model, and, more important, the process of informatisation is closely integrated into and serves to reinforce the strength of existing industrial production. Services related directly to industrial production thus remain more important in this model relative to other services. The two models represent two strategies to manage and gain an advantage in the economic transition, but it should be clear that they both move resolutely in the direction of the informatisation of the economy and the heightened importance of productive flows and networks.

Although the subordinated countries and regions of the world are not capable of implementing such strategies, the processes of postmodernisation nonetheless impose irreversible changes on them. The fact that informatisation and the shift toward services have taken place thus far primarily in the dominant capitalist countries and not elsewhere should not lead us back to an understanding of the contemporary global economic situation in terms of linear stages of development. It is true that as industrial production has declined in the dominant countries, it has been effectively exported to subordinated countries, from the United States and japan, for example, to Mexico and Malaysia. Such geographical shifts and displacements might lead some to believe that there is a new global organisation of economic stages whereby the dominant countries are informational service economies, their first subordinates are industrial economies, and those further subordinated are agricultural. From the perspective of stages of development, for example, one might think that through the contemporary export of industrial production, an auto factory built by Ford in Brazil in the 1990s might be comparable to a Ford factory in Detroit in the 1930s because both instances of production belong to the same industrial stage.

When we look more closely, however, we can see that the two factories are not comparable, and the differences are extremely important. First of all, the two factories are radically different in terms of technology and productive practices. When fixed capital is exported, it is exported generally at its highest level of productivity. The Ford factory in 1990s Brazil, then, would not be built with the technology of the Ford factory of 1930s Detroit, but would be based on the most advanced and most productive computer and informational technologies available. The technological infrastructure of the factory itself would locate it squarely within the informational economy. Second, and perhaps more important, the two factories stand in different relations of dominance with respect to the global economy as a whole. The Detroit auto factory of the 1930s stood at the pinnacle of the global economy in the dominant position and producing the highest value; the 1990s auto factory, whether in São Paulo, Kentucky, or Vladivostok, occupies a subordinate position in the global economy subordinated to the high-value production of services. Today all economic activity tends to come under the dominance of the informational economy and to be qualitatively transformed by it. The geographical differences in the global economy are not signs of the co-presence of different stages of development but lines of the new global hierarchy of production.

It is becoming increasingly clear from the perspective of subordinated regions that modernisation is no longer the key to economic advancement and competition. The most subordinated regions, such as areas of sub-Saharan Africa, are effectively excluded from capital flows and new technologies, and they thus find themselves on the verge of starvation.” Competition for the middle-level positions in the global hierarchy is conducted not through the industrialisation but through the informatisation of production. Large countries with varied economies, such as India and Brazil, can support simultaneously all levels of productive processes: information-based production of services, modern industrial production of goods, and traditional handicraft, agricultural, and mining production. There does not need to be an orderly historical progression among these forms, but rather they mix and coexist. All of the forms of production exist within the networks of the world market and under the domination of the informational production of services.

The transformations of the Italian economy since the 1950s demonstrate clearly that relatively backward economies do not simply follow the same stages the dominant regions experience, but evolve through alternative and mixed patterns. After World War II, Italy was still a predominantly peasant-based society, but in the 1950s and 1960s it went through furious if incomplete modernisation and industrialisation, a first economic miracle. Then, however, in the 1970s and 1980s, when the processes of industrialisation were still not complete, the Italian economy embarked on another transformation, a process of postmodernisation, and achieved a second economic miracle. These Italian miracles were not really leaps forward that allowed it to catch up with the dominant economies; rather, they represented mixtures of different incomplete economic forms. What is most significant here, and what might usefully pose the Italian case as the general model for all other backward economies, is that the Italian economy did not complete one stage (industrialisation) before moving on to another (informatisation). According to two contemporary economists, the recent Italian transformation reveals “an interesting transition from proto-industrialism to proto-informationalism.” Various regions will evolve to have peasant elements mixed with partial industrialisation and partial informatisation. The economic stages are thus all present at once, merged into a hybrid, composite economy that varies not in kind but in degree across the globe.

Just as modernisation did in a previous era, postmodernisation or informatisation today marks a. new mode of becoming human. Where the production of soul is concerned, as Musil would say, one really ought to replace the traditional techniques of industrial machines with the cybernetic intelligence of information and communication technologies. We must invent what Pierre Levy calls an anthropology of cyberspace. This shift of metaphors gives us a first glimpse of the transformation, but we need to look more closely to see clearly the changes in our notion of the human and in humanity itself that emerge in the passage toward an informational economy.
The Sociology of Immaterial Labour

The passage toward an informational economy necessarily involves a change in the quality and nature of labour. This is the most immediate sociological and anthropological implication of the passage of economic paradigms. Today information and communication have come to play a foundational role in production processes.

A first aspect of this transformation is recognised by many in terms of the change in factory labour — using the auto industry as a central point of reference — from the Fordist model to the Toyotist model. The primary structural change between these models involves the system of communication between the production and the consumption of commodities, that is, the passage of information between the factory and the market. The Fordist model constructed a relatively “mute” relationship between production and consumption. The mass production of standardised commodities in the Fordist era could count on an adequate demand and thus had little need to “listen” to the market. A feedback circuit from consumption to production did allow changes in the market to spur changes in productive engineering, but this communication circuit was restricted (owing to the fixed and compartmentalised channels of planning and design structures) and slow (owing to the rigidity of the technologies and procedures of mass production).

Toyotism is based on an inversion of the Fordist structure of communication between production and consumption. Ideally, according to this model, production planning will communicate with markets constantly and immediately. Factories will maintain zero stock, and commodities will be produced just in time according to the present demand of the existing markets. This model thus involves not simply a more rapid feedback loop but an inversion of the relationship because, at least in theory, the production decision actually comes after and in reaction to the market decision. In the most extreme cases the commodity is not produced until the consumer has already chosen and purchased it. In general, however, it would be more accurate to conceive the model as striving toward a continual interactivity or rapid communication between production and consumption. This industrial context provides a first sense in which communication and information have come to play a newly central role in production. One might say that instrumental action and communicative action have become intimately interwoven in the informationalised industrial process, but one should quickly add that this is an impoverished notion of communication as the mere transmission of market data.

The service sectors of the economy present a richer model of productive communication. Most services indeed are based on the continual exchange of information and knowledges. Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labour involved in this production as immaterial labour — that is, labour that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication.” One face of immaterial labour can be recognised in analogy to the functioning of a computer. The increasingly extensive use of computers has tended progressively to redefine labouring practices and relations, along with, indeed, all social practices and relations. Familiarity and facility with computer technology is becoming an increasingly general primary qualification for work in the dominant countries. Even when direct contact with computers is not involved, the manipulation of symbols and information along the model of computer operation is extremely widespread. In an earlier era workers learned how to act like machines both inside and outside the factory. We even learned (with the help of Muybridge’s photos, for example) to recognise human activity in general as mechanical. Today we increasingly think like computers, while communication technologies and their model of interaction are becoming more and more central to labouring activities. One novel aspect of the computer is that it can continually modify its own operation through its use. Even the most rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence allow the computer to expand and perfect its operation based on its interaction with its user and its environment. The same kind of continual interactivity characterises a wide range of contemporary productive activities, whether computer hardware is directly involved or not. The computer and communication revolution of production has transformed labouring practices in such a way that they all tend toward the model of information and communication technologies. Interactive and cybernetic machines become a new prosthesis integrated into our bodies and minds and a lens through which to redefine our bodies and minds themselves. The anthropology of cyberspace is really a recognition of the new human condition.

Robert Reich calls the kind of immaterial labour involved in computer and communication work “symbolic-analytical services-tasks that involve “problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic brokering activities.” This type of labour claims the highest value, and thus Reich identifies it as the key to competition in the new global economy. He recognises, however, that the growth of these knowledge-based jobs of creative symbolic manipulation implies a corresponding growth of low-value and low-skill jobs of routine symbol manipulation, such as data entry and word processing. Here begins to emerge a fundamental division of labour within the realm of immaterial production.

We should note that one consequence of the informatisation of production and the emergence of immaterial labour has been a real homogenisation of labouring processes. From Marx’s perspective in the nineteenth century, the concrete practices of various labouring activities were radically heterogeneous: tailoring and weaving involved incommensurable concrete actions. Only when abstracted from their concrete practices could different labouring activities be brought together and seen in a homogeneous way, no longer as long and weaving but as the expenditure of human labour power taken in general, as abstract labour. With the computerisation of production today, however, the heterogeneity of concrete labour has tended to be reduced, and the worker is increasingly further removed from the object of his or her labour. The labour of computerised tailoring and the labour of computerised weaving may involve exactly the same concrete practices — that is, manipulation of symbols and information. Tools, of course, have always abstracted labour power from the object of labour to a certain degree. In previous periods, however, the tools generally were related in a relatively inflexible way to certain tasks or certain groups of tasks; different tools corresponded to different activities — the tailor’s tools, the weaver’s tools, or later a sewing machine and a power loom. The computer proposes itself, in contrast, as the universal tool, or rather as the central tool, through which all activities might pass. Through the computerisation of production, then, labour tends toward the position of abstract labour.

The model of the computer, however, can account for only one face of the communicational and immaterial labour involved in the production of services. The other face of immaterial labour is the affective labour of human contact and interaction. Health services, for example, rely centrally on caring and affective labour, and the entertainment industry is likewise focused on the creation and manipulation of affect. This labour is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible, a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, or passion. Categories such as “in-person services” or services of proximity are often used to identify this kind of labour, but what is really essential to it are the creation and manipulation of affect. Such affective production, exchange, and communication are generally associated with human contact, but that contact can be either actual or virtual, as it is in the entertainment industry.

This second face of immaterial labour, its affective face, extends well beyond the model of intelligence and communication defined by the computer. Affective labour is better understood by beginning from what feminist analyses of “women’s work” have called “labour in the bodily mode.” Caring labour is certainly entirely immersed in the corporeal, the somatic, but the affects it produces are nonetheless immaterial. What affective labour produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower. Here one might recognise once again that the instrumental action of economic production has been united with the communicative action of human relations; in this case, however, communication has not been impoverished, but production has been enriched to the level of complexity of human interaction.

In short, we can distinguish three types of immaterial labour that drive the service sector at the top of the informational economy. The first is involved in an industrial production that has been informationalised and has incorporated communication technologies in a way that transforms the production process itself Manufacturing is regarded as a service, and the material labour of the production of durable goods mixes with and tends toward immaterial labour. Second is the immaterial labour of analytical and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative and intelligent manipulation on the one hand and routine symbolic tasks on the other. Finally, a third type of immaterial labour involves the production and manipulation of affect and requires (virtual or actual) human contact, labour in the bodily mode. These are the three types of labour that drive the postmodernisation of the global economy.

We should point out before moving on that in each of these forms of immaterial labour, cooperation is completely inherent in the labour itself. Immaterial labour immediately involves social interaction and cooperation. In other words, the cooperative aspect of immaterial labour is not imposed or organised from the outside, as it was in previous forms of labour, but rather, cooperation is completely immanent to the labouring activity itself. This fact calls into question the old notion (common to classical and Marxian political economics) by which labour power is conceived as “variable capital,” that is, a force that is activated and made coherent only by capital, because the cooperative powers of labour power (particularly immaterial labour power) afford labour the possibility of valorising itself. Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to orchestrate production. Today productivity, wealth, and the creation of social surpluses take the form of cooperative interactivity through linguistic, communicational, and affective networks. In the expression of its own creative energies, immaterial labour thus seems to provide the potential for a kind of spontaneous and elementary communism.
Network Production

The first geographical consequence of the passage from an industrial to an informational economy is a dramatic decentralisation of production. The processes of modernisation and the passage to the industrial paradigm provoked the intense aggregation of productive forces and mass migrations of labour power toward centres that became factory cities, such as Manchester, Osaka, and Detroit. Efficiency of mass industrial production depended on the concentration and proximity of elements in order to create the factory site and facilitate transportation and communication. The informatisation of industry and the rising dominance of service production, however, have made such concentration of production no longer necessary. Size and efficiency are no longer linearly related; in fact, large scale has in many cases become a hindrance. Advances in telecommunications and information technologies have made possible a deterritorialisation of production that has effectively dispersed the mass factories and evacuated the factory cities. Communication and control can be exercised efficiently at a distance, and in some cases immaterial products can be transported across the world with minimal delay and expense. Several different production facilities can be coordinated in the simultaneous production of a single commodity in such a way that factories can be dispersed to various locations. In some sectors even the factory site itself can be done away with as its workers communicate exclusively through new information technologies.

In the passage to the informational economy, the assembly line has been replaced by the network as the organisational model of production, transforming the forms of cooperation and communication within each productive site and among productive sites. The mass industrial factory defined the circuits of labouring cooperation primarily through the physical deployments of workers on the shop floor. Individual workers communicated with their neighbouring workers, and communication was generally limited to physical proximity. Cooperation among productive sites also required physical proximity both to coordinate the productive cycles and to minimise the transportation costs and time of the commodities being produced. For example, the distance between the coal mine and the steel mill, and the efficiency of the lines of transportation and communication between them, are significant factors in the overall efficiency of steel production. Similarly, for automobile production the efficiency of communication and transportation among the series of subcontractors involved is crucial in the overall efficiency of the system. The passage toward informational production and the network structure of organisation, in contrast, make productive cooperation and efficiency no longer dependent to such a degree on proximity and centralisation. Information technologies tend to make distances less relevant. Workers involved in a single process can effectively communicate and cooperate from remote locations without consideration to proximity. In effect, the network of labouring cooperation requires no territorial or physical center.

The tendency toward the deterritorialisation of production is even more pronounced in the processes of immaterial labour that involve the manipulation of knowledge and information. Labouring processes can be conducted in a form almost entirely compatible with communication networks, for which location and distance have very limited importance. Workers can even stay at home and log on to the network. The labour of informational production (of both services and durable goods) relies on what we can call abstract cooperation. Such labour dedicates an ever more central role to communication of knowledges and information among workers, but those cooperating workers need not be present and can even be relatively unknown to one another, or known only through the productive information exchanged. The circuit of cooperation is consolidated in the network and the commodity at an abstract level. Production sites can thus be deterritorialised and tend toward a virtual existence, as coordinates in the communication network. As opposed to the old vertical industrial and corporate model, production now tends to be organised in horizontal network enterprises.

The information networks also release production from territorial constraints insofar as they tend to put the producer in direct contact with the consumer regardless of the distance between them. Bill Gates, the co-founder of the Microsoft Corporation, takes this tendency to an extreme when he predicts a future in which networks will overcome entirely the barriers to circulation and allow an ideal, “friction-free” capitalism to emerge: “The information highway will extend the electronic marketplace and make it the ultimate go-between, the universal middleman.” If Gates’s vision were to be realised, the networks would tend to reduce all distance and make transactions immediate. Sites of production and sites of consumption would then be present to one another, regardless of geographical location.

These tendencies toward the deterritorialisation of production and the increased mobility of capital are not absolute, and there are significant countervailing tendencies, but to the extent that they do proceed, they place labour in a weakened bargaining position. In the era of the Fordist organisation of industrial mass production, capital was bound to a specific territory and thus to dealing contractually with a limited labouring population. The informatisation o production and the increasing importance of immaterial production have tended to free capital from the constraints of territory and bargaining. Capital can withdraw from negotiation with a given local population by moving its site to another point in the global network — or merely by using the potential to move as a weapon in negotiations. Entire labouring populations, which had enjoyed a certain stability and contractual power, have thus found themselves in increasingly precarious employment situations. Once the bargaining position of labour has been weakened, network production can accommodate various old forms of non-guaranteed labour, such as freelance work, home work, part-time labour, and piecework.

The decentralisation and global dispersal of productive processes and sites, which is characteristic of the postmodernisation or informatisation of the economy, provokes a corresponding centralisation of the control over production. The centrifugal movement of production is balanced by the centripetal trend of command. From the local perspective, the computer networks and communications technologies internal to production systems allow for more extensive monitoring of workers from a central, remote location. Control of labouring activity can potentially be individualised and continuous in the virtual panopticon of network production. The centralisation of control, however, is even more clear from a global perspective. The geographical dispersal of manufacturing has created a demand for increasingly centralised management and planning, and also for a new centralisation of specialised producer services, especially financial services.” Financial and trade-related services in a few key cities (such as New York, London, and Tokyo) manage and direct the global networks of production. As a mass demographic shift, then, the decline and evacuation of industrial cities has corresponded to the rise of global cities, or really cities of control.
Information Highways

The structure and management of communication networks are essential conditions for production in the informational economy.

These global networks must be constructed and policed in such a way as to guarantee order and profits. It should come as no surprise, then, that the U.S. government poses the establishment and regulation of a global information infrastructure as one of its highest priorities, and that communications networks have become the most active terrain of mergers and competition for the most powerful transnational corporations.

An adviser to the Federal Communications Commission, Peter Cowhey, provides an interesting analogy for the role these networks play in the new paradigm of production and power. The construction of the new information infrastructure, he says, provides the conditions and terms of global production and government just as road construction did for the Roman Empire. The wide distribution of Roman engineering and technology was indeed both the most lasting gift to the imperial territories and the fundamental condition for exercising control over them. Roman roads, however, did not play a central role in the imperial production processes but only facilitated the circulation of goods and technologies. Perhaps a better analogy for the global information infrastructure might be the construction of railways to further the interests of nineteenth-and twentieth-century imperialist economies. Railways in the dominant countries consolidated their national industrial economies, and the construction of railroads in colonised and economically dominated regions opened those territories to penetration by capitalist enterprises, allowing for their incorporation into imperialist economic systems. Like Roman roads, however, railways played only an external role in imperialist and industrial production, extending its lines of communication and transportation to new raw materials, markets, and labour power. The novelty of the new information infrastructure is the fact that it is embedded within and completely immanent to the new production processes. At the pinnacle of contemporary production, information and communication are the very commodities produced; the network itself is the site of both production and circulation.

In political terms, the global information infrastructure might be characterised as the combination of a democratic mechanism and an oligopolistic mechanism, which operate along different models of network systems. The democratic network is a completely horizontal and deterritorialised model. The Internet, which began as a project of DARPA (the U.S. Defense Department Advanced Research Projects Agency), but has now expanded to points throughout the world, is the prime example of this democratic network structure. An indeterminate and potentially unlimited number of interconnected nodes communicate with no central point of control; all nodes regardless of territorial location connect to all others through a myriad of potential paths and relays. The Internet thus resembles the structure of telephone networks, and indeed it generally incorporates them as its own paths of communication, just as it relies on computer technology for its points of communication. The development of cellular telephony and portable computers, unmooring in an even more radical way the communicating points in the network, has intensified the process of deterritorialisation. The original design of the Internet was intended to withstand military attack. Since it has no center and almost any portion can operate as an autonomous whole, the network can continue to function even when part of it has been destroyed. The same design element that ensures survival, the decentralisation, is also what makes control of the network so difficult. Since no one point in the network is necessary for communication among others, it is difficult for it to regulate or prohibit their communication. This democratic model is what Deleuze and Guattari call a rhizome, a non-hierarchical and non-centred network structure. 29

The oligopolistic network model is characterised by broadcast systems. According to this model, for example in television or radio systems, there is a unique and relatively fixed point of emission, but the points of reception are potentially infinite and territorially indefinite, although developments such as cable television networks fix these paths to a certain extent. The broadcast network is defined by its centralised production, mass distribution, and one-way communication. The entire culture industry — from the distribution of newspapers and books to films and video cassettes — has traditionally operated along this model. A relatively small number of corporations (or in some regions a single entrepreneur, such as Rupert Murdoch, Silvio Berlusconi, or Ted Turner) can effectively dominate all of these networks. This oligopolistic model is not a rhizome but a tree structure that subordinates all of the branches to the central root.

The networks of the new information infrastructure are a hybrid of these two models. just as in a previous era Lenin and other critics of imperialism recognised a consolidation of international corporations into quasi-monopolies (over railways, banking, electric power, and the like), today we are witnessing a competition among transnational corporations to establish and consolidate quasi-monopolies over the new information infrastructure. The various telecommunication corporations, computer hardware and software manufacturers, and information and entertainment corporations are merging and expanding their operations, scrambling to partition and control the new continents of productive networks. There will, of course, remain democratic portions or aspects of this consolidated web that will resist control owing to the web’s interactive and decentralised structure; but there is already under way a massive centralisation of control through the (de facto or de jure) unification of the major elements of the information and communication power structure: Hollywood, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, and so forth. The new communication technologies, which hold out the promise of a new democracy and a new social equality, have in fact created new lines of inequality and exclusion, both within the dominant countries and especially outside them.
Commons

There has been a continuous movement throughout the modern period to privatise public property. In Europe the great common lands created with the break-up of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity were eventually transferred to private hands in the course of capitalist primitive accumulation. Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth. During the consolidation of industrial society, the construction and destruction of public spaces developed in an ever more powerful spiral. It is true that when it was dictated by the necessities of accumulation (in order to foster an acceleration or leap in development, to concentrate and mobilise the means of production, to make war, and so forth), public property was expanded by expropriating large sectors of civil society and transferring wealth and property to the collectivity. That public property, however, was soon reappropriated in private hands. In each process the communal possession, which is considered natural, is transformed at public expense into a second and third nature that functions finally for private profit. A second nature was created, for example, by damming the great rivers of western North America and irrigating the dry valleys, and then this new wealth was handed over to the magnates of agribusiness. Capitalism sets in motion a continuous cycle of private reappropriation of public goods: the expropriation of what is common.

The rise and fall of the welfare state in the twentieth century is one more cycle in this spiral of public and private appropriations. The crisis of the welfare state has meant primarily that the structures o public assistance and distribution, which were constructed through public funds, are being privatised and expropriated for private gain. The current neoliberal trend toward the privatisation of energy and communication services is another turn of the spiral. This consists in granting to private businesses the networks of energy and communication that were built through enormous expenditures of public monies. Market regimes and neoliberalism survive off these private appropriations of second, third, and nth nature. The commons, which once were considered the basis of the concept of the public, are expropriated for private use and no one can lift a finger. The public is thus dissolved, privatised, even as a concept. Or really, the immanent relation between the public and the common is replaced by the transcendent power of private property.

We do not intend here to weep over the destruction and expropriation that capitalism continually operates across the world, even though resisting its force (and in particular resisting the expropriation of the welfare state) is certainly an eminently ethical and important task. We want to ask, rather, what is the operative notion of the common today, in the midst of postmodernity, the information revolution, and the consequent transformations of the mode of production. It seems to us, in fact, that today we participate in a more radical and profound commonality than has ever been experienced in the history of capitalism. The fact is that we participate in a productive world made up of communication and social networks, interactive services, and common languages. Our economic and social reality is defined less by the material objects that are made and consumed than by co-produced services and relationships. Producing increasingly means constructing cooperation and communicative commonalities.

The concept of private property itself, understood as the exclusive right to use a good and dispose of all wealth that derives from the possession of it, becomes increasingly nonsensical in this new situation. There are ever fewer goods that can be possessed and used exclusively in this framework; it is the community that produces and that, while producing, is reproduced and redefined. The foundation of the classic modern conception of private property is thus to a certain extent dissolved in the postmodern mode of production.

One should object, however, that this new social condition of production has not at all weakened the juridical and political regimes of private property. The conceptual crisis of private property does not become a crisis in practice, and instead the regime of private expropriation has tended to be applied universally. This objection would be valid if not for the fact that, in the context of linguistic and cooperative production, labour and the common property tend to overlap. Private property, despite its juridical powers, cannot help becoming an ever more abstract and transcendental concept and thus ever more detached from reality.

A new notion of “commons” will have to emerge on this terrain. Deleuze and Guattari claim in What Is Philosophy? that in the contemporary era, and in the context of communicative and interactive production, the construction of concepts is not only an epistemological operation but equally an ontological project. Constructing concepts and what they call “common names” is really an activity that combines the intelligence and the action of the multitude, making them work together. Constructing concepts means making exist in reality a project that is a community. There is no other way to construct concepts but to work in a common way. This commonality is, from the standpoint of the phenomenology of production, from the standpoint of the epistemology of the concept, and from the standpoint of practice, a project in which the multitude is completely invested. The commons is the incarnation, the production, and the liberation of the multitude. Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.

In speaking of "Mathematical logic", I use this word in a very broad sense. By it I understand the works of Cantor on transfinite numbers as well as the logical work of Frege and Peano. Weierstrass and his successors have "arithmetised" mathematics; that is to say, they have reduced the whole of analysis to the study of integer numbers. The accomplishment of this reduction indicated the completion of a very important stage, at the end of which the spirit of dissection might well be allowed a short rest. However, the theory of integer numbers cannot be constituted in an autonomous manner, especially when we take into account the likeness in properties of the finite and infinite numbers. It was, then, necessary to go farther and reduce arithmetic, and above all the definition of numbers, to logic. By the name "mathematical logic", then, I will denote any logical theory whose object is the analysis and deduction of arithmetic and geometry by means of concepts which belong evidently to logic. It is this modern tendency that I intend to discuss here.

In an examination of the work done by mathematical logic, we may consider either the mathematical results, the method of mathematical reasoning as revealed by modern work, or the intrinsic nature of mathematical propositions according to the analysis which mathematical logic makes of them. It is impossible to distinguish exactly these three aspects of the subject, but there is enough of a distinction to serve the purpose of a framework for discussion. It might be thought that the inverse order would be the best; that we ought first to consider what a mathematical proposition is, then the method by which such propositions are demonstrated, and finally the results to which this method leads us. But the problem which we have to resolve, like every truly philosophical problem, is a problem of analysis; and in problems of analysis the best method is that which sets out from results and arrives at the premises. In mathematical logic it is the conclusions which have the greatest degree of certainty: the nearer we get to the ultimate premises the more uncertainty and difficulty do we find.

From the philosophical point of view, the most brilliant results of the new method are the exact theories which we have been able to form about infinity and continuity. We know that when we have to do with infinite collections, for example the collection of finite integer numbers, it is possible to establish a one-to-one correspondence between the whole collection and a part of itself. For example, there is such a correspondence between the finite integers and the even numbers, since the relation of a finite number to its double is one-to-one. Thus it is evident that the number of an infinite collection is equal to the number of a part of this collection. It was formerly believed that this was a contradiction; even Leibnitz, although he was a partisan of the actual infinite, denied infinite number because of this supposed contradiction. But to demonstrate that there is a contradiction we must suppose that all numbers obey mathematical induction. To explain mathematical induction, let us call by the name "hereditary property" of a number a property which belongs to n + 1 whenever it belongs to n. Such is, for example, the property of being greater than 100. If a number is greater than 100, the next number after it is greater than 100. Let us call by the name "inductive property" of a number a hereditary property which is possessed by the number zero. Such a property must belong to 1, since it is hereditary and belongs to 0; in the same way, it must belong to 2, since it belongs to 1; and so on. Consequently the numbers of daily life possess every inductive property. Now, amongst the inductive properties of numbers is found the following. If any collection has the number n, no part of this collection can have the same number n. Consequently, if all numbers possess all inductive properties, there is a contradiction with the result that there are collections which have the same number as a part of themselves. This contradiction, however, ceases to subsist as soon as we admit that there are numbers which do not possess all inductive properties. And then it appears that there is no contradiction in infinite number. Cantor has even created a whole arithmetic of infinite numbers, and by means of this arithmetic he has completely resolved the former problems on the nature of the infinite which have disturbed philosophy since ancient times.

The problems of the continuum are closely connected with the problems of the infinite and their solution is effected by the same means. The paradoxes of Zeno the Eleatic and the difficulties in the analysis of space, of time, and of motion, are all completely explained by means of the modern theory of continuity. This is because a non-contradictory theory has been found, according to which the continuum is composed of an infinity of distinct elements; and this formerly appeared impossible. The elements cannot all be reached by continual dichotomy; but it does not follow that these elements do not exist.

From this follows a complete revolution in the philosophy of space and time. The realist theories which were believed to be contradictory are so no longer, and the idealist theories have lost any excuse there might have been for their existence. The flux, which was believed to be incapable of analysis into indivisible elements, shows itself to be capable of mathematical analysis, and our reason shows itself to be capable of giving an explanation of the physical world and of the sensible world without supposing jumps where there is continuity, and also without giving up the analysis into separate and indivisible elements.

The mathematical theory of motion and other continuous changes uses, besides the theories of infinite number and of the nature of the continuum, two correlative notions, that of a function and that of a variable. The importance of these ideas may be shown by an example. We still find in books of philosophy a statement of the law of causality in the form: "When the same cause happens again, the same effect will also happen." But it might be very justly remarked that the same cause never happens again. What actually takes place is that there is a constant relation between causes of a certain kind and the effects which result from them. Wherever there is such a constant relation, the effect is a function of the cause. By means of the constant relation we sum up in a single formula an infinity of causes and effects, and we avoid the worn-out hypothesis of the repetition of the same cause. It is the idea of functionality, that is to say the idea of constant relation, which gives the secret of the power of mathematics to deal simultaneously with an infinity of data.

To understand the part played by the idea of a function in mathematics, we must first of all understand the method of mathematical deduction. It will be admitted that mathematical demonstrations, even those which are performed by what is called mathematical induction, are always deductive. Now, in a deduction it almost always happens that the validity of the deduction does not depend on the subject spoken about, but only on the form of what is said about it. Take for example the classical argument: All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal. Here it is evident that what is said remains true if Plato or Aristotle or anybody else is substituted for Socrates. We can, then, say: If all men are mortal, and if x is a man, then x is mortal. This is a first generalisation of the proposition from which we set out. But it is easy to go farther. In the deduction which has been stated, nothing depends on the fact that it is men and mortals which occupy our attention. If all the members of any class a are members of a class s, and if x is a member of the class a, then x is a member of the class s. In this statement, we have the pure logical form which underlies all the deductions of the same form as that which proves that Socrates is mortal. To obtain a proposition of pure mathematics (or of mathematical logic, which is the same thing), we must submit a deduction of any kind to a process analogous to that which we have just performed, that is to say, when an argument remains valid if one of its terms is changed, this term must be replaced by a variable, i.e. by an indeterminate object. In this way we finally reach a proposition of pure logic, that is to say a proposition which does not contain any other constant than logical constants. The definition of the logical constants is not easy, but this much may be said: A constant is logical if the propositions in which it is found still contain it when we try to replace it by a variable. More exactly, we may perhaps characterise the logical constants in the following manner: If we take any deduction and replace its terms by variables, it will happen, after a certain number of stages, that the constants which still remain in the deduction belong to a certain group, and, if we try to push generalisation still farther, there will always remain constants which belong to this same group. 'This group is the group of logical constants. The logical constants are those which constitute pure form; a formal proposition is a proposition which does not contain any other constants than logical constants. We have just reduced the deduction which proves that Socrates is mortal to the following form: "If x is an a, then, if all the members of a are members of b, it follows that x is a b." The constants here are: is-a, all, and if-then. These are logical constants and evidently they are purely formal concepts.

Now, the validity of any valid deduction depends on its form, and its form is obtained by replacing the terms of the deduction by variables, until there do not remain any other constants than those of- logic. And conversely: every valid deduction can be obtained by starting from a deduction which operates on variables by means of logical constants, by attributing to variables definite values with which the hypothesis becomes true.

By means of this operation of generalisation, we separate the strictly deductive element in an argument from the element which depends on the particularity of what is spoken about. Pure mathematics concerns itself exclusively with the deductive element. We obtain propositions of pure mathematics by a process of purification. If I say: "Here are two things, and here are two other things, therefore here arc four things in all", I do not state a proposition of pure mathematics because here particular data come into question. The proposition that I have stated is an application of the general proposition: "Given any two things and also any two other things, there are four things in all." 'The latter proposition is a proposition of pure mathematics, while the former is a proposition of applied mathematics.

It is obvious that what depends on the particularity of the subject is the verification of the hypothesis, and this permits us to assert, not merely that the hypothesis implies the thesis, but that, since the hypothesis is true, the thesis is true also. This assertion is not made in pure mathematics. Here we content ourselves with the hypothetical form: It- any subject satisfies such and such a hypothesis, it will also satisfy such and such a thesis. It is thus that pure mathematics becomes entirely hypothetical, and concerns itself exclusively with any indeterminate subject, that is to say with a variable. Any valid deduction finds its form in a hypothetical proposition belonging to pure mathematics; but in pure mathematics itself we affirm neither the hypothesis nor the thesis, unless both can be expressed in terms of logical constants.

If it is asked why it is worth while to reduce deductions to such a form, I reply that there are two associated reasons for this. In the first place, it is a good thing to generalise any truth as much as possible; and, in the second place, an economy of work is brought about by making the deduction with an indeterminate x. When we reason al-out Socrates, we obtain results which apply only to Socrates, so that, if we wish to know something about Plato, we have to perform the reasoning all over again. But when we operate on x, we obtain results which we know to be valid for every x which satisfies the hypothesis. The usual scientific motives of economy and generalisation lead us, then, to the theory of mathematical method which has just been sketched.

After what has just been said it is easy to see what must be thought about the intrinsic nature of propositions of pure mathematics. In pure mathematics we have never to discuss facts that are applicable to such and such an individual object; we need never know anything about the actual world. We are concerned exclusively with variables, that is to say, with any subject, about which hypotheses are made which may be fulfilled sometimes, but whose verification for such and such an object is only necessary for the importance of the deductions, and not for their truth. At first sight it might appear that everything would be arbitrary in such a science. But this is not so. It is necessary that the hypothesis truly implies the thesis. If we make the hypothesis that the hypothesis implies the thesis, we can only make deductions in the case when this new hypothesis truly implies the new thesis. Implication is a logical constant and cannot be dispensed with. Consequently we need true propositions about implication. If we took as premises propositions on implication which were not true, the consequences which would appear to flow from them would not be truly implied by the premises, so that we would not obtain even a hypothetical proof. This necessity for true premises emphasises a distinction of the first importance, that is to say the distinction between a premise and a hypothesis. When we say "Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal", the proposition "Socrates is a man" is a premise; but when we say: "If Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal", the proposition "Socrates is a man" is only a hypothesis. Similarly when I say: "If from p we deduce q and from q we deduce r, then from p we deduce r", the proposition "From p we deduce q and from q we deduce r" is a hypothesis, but the whole proposition is not a hypothesis, since I affirm it, and, in fact, it is true. This proposition is a rule of deduction, and the rules of deduction have a two-fold use in mathematics: both as premises and as a method of obtaining consequences of the premises. Now, if the rules of deduction were not true, the consequences that would be obtained by using them would not truly be consequences, so that we should not have even a correct deduction setting out from a false premise. It is this twofold use of the rules of deduction which differentiates the foundations of mathematics from the later parts. In the later parts, we use the same rules of deduction to deduce, but we no longer use them immediately as premises. Consequently, in the later parts, the immediate premises may be false without the deductions being logically incorrect, but, in the foundations, the deductions will be incorrect if the premises are not true. It is necessary to be clear about this point, for otherwise the part of arbitrariness and of hypothesis might appear greater than it is in reality.

Mathematics, therefore, is wholly composed of propositions which only contain variables and logical constants, that is to say, purely formal propositions-for the logical constants are those which constitute form. It is remarkable that we have the power of knowing such propositions. The consequences of the analysis of mathematical knowledge are not without interest for the theory of knowledge. In the first place it is to be remarked, in opposition to empirical theories, that mathematical knowledge needs premises which are not based on the data of sense. Every general proposition goes beyond the limits of knowledge obtained through the senses, which is wholly restricted to what is individual. If we say that the extension of the given case to the general is effected by means of induction, we are forced to admit that induction itself is not proved by means of experience. Whatever may be the exact formulation of the fundamental principle of induction, it is evident that in the first place this principle is general, and in the second place that it cannot, without a vicious circle, be itself demonstrated by induction.

It is to be supposed that the principle of induction can be formulated more or less in the following way. If we are given the fact that any two properties occur together in a certain number of cases, it is more probable that a new case which possesses one of these properties will possess the other than it would be if we had not such a datum. I do not say that this is a satisfactory formulation of the principle of induction; I only say that the principle of induction must be like this in so far as it must be an absolutely general principle which contains the notion of probability. Now it is evident that sense-experience cannot demonstrate such a principle, and cannot even make it probable; for it is only in virtue of the principle itself that the fact that it has often been successful gives grounds for the belief that it will probably be successful in the future. Hence inductive knowledge, like all knowledge which is obtained by reasoning, needs logical principles which are a priori and universal. By formulating the principle of induction, we transform every induction into a deduction; induction is nothing else than a deduction which uses a certain premise, namely the principle of induction.

In so far as it is primitive and undemonstrated, human knowledge is thus divided into two kinds: knowledge of particular facts, which alone allows us to affirm existence, and knowledge of logical truth, which alone allows us to reason about data. In science and in daily life the two kinds of knowledge are intermixed: the propositions which are affirmed are obtained from particular premises by means of logical principles. In pure perception we only find knowledge of particular facts: in pure mathematics, we only find knowledge of logical truths. In order that such a knowledge be possible, it is necessary that there should be self-evident logical truths, that is to say, truths which are known without demonstration. These are the truths which are the premises of pure mathematics as well as of the deductive elements in every demonstration on any subject whatever.

It is, then, possible to make assertions, not only about cases which we have been able to observe, but about all actual or possible cases. The existence of assertions of this kind and their necessity for almost all pieces of knowledge which are said to be founded on experience shows that traditional empiricism is in error and that there is a priori and universal knowledge.

In spite of the fact that traditional empiricism is mistaken in its theory of knowledge, it must not be supposed that idealism is right. Idealism at least every theory of knowledge which is derived from Kant-assumes that the universality of a priori truths comes from their property of expressing properties of the mind: I things appear to be thus because the nature of the appearance depends on the subject in the same way that, if we have blue spectacles, everything appears to be blue. The categories of Kant are the coloured spectacles of the mind; truths a priori are the false appearances produced by those spectacles. Besides, we must know that everybody has spectacles of the same kind and that the colour of the spectacles never changes. Kant did not deign to tell us how he knew this.

As soon as we take into account the consequences of Kant's hypothesis, it becomes evident that general and a priori truths must have the same objectivity, the same independence of the mind, that the particular facts of the physical world possess. In fact, if general truths only express psychological facts, we could not know that they would be constant from moment to moment or from person to person, and we could never use them legitimately to deduce a fact from another fact, since they would not connect facts but our ideas about the facts. Logic and mathematics force us, then, to admit a kind of realism in the scholastic sense, that is to say, to admit that there is a world of universals and of truths which do not bear directly on such and such a particular existence. This world of universals must subsist, although it cannot exist in the same sense as that in which particular data exist. We have immediate knowledge of an indefinite number of propositions about universals: this is an ultimate fact, as ultimate as sensation is. Pure mathematics-which is usually called "logic" in its elementary parts-is the sum of everything that we can know, whether directly or by demonstration, about certain universals.

On the subject of self-evident truths it is necessary to avoid a misunderstanding. Self-evidence is a psychological property and is therefore subjective and variable. It is essential to knowledge, since all knowledge must be either self-evident or deduced from self-evident knowledge. But the order of knowledge which is obtained by starting from what is self-evident is not the same thing as the order of logical deduction, and we must not suppose that when we give such and such premises for a deductive system, we are of opinion that these premises constitute what is self-evident in the system. In the first place self-evidence has degrees: It is quite possible that the consequences are more evident than the premises. In the second place it may happen that we are certain of the truth of many of the consequences, but that the premises only appear probable, and that their probability is due to the fact that true consequences flow from them. In such a case, what we can be certain of is that the premises imply all the true consequences that it was wished to place in the deductive system. This remark has an application to the foundations of mathematics, since many of the ultimate premises are intrinsically less evident than many of the consequences which are deduced from them. Besides, if we lay too much stress on the self-evidence of the premises of a deductive system, we may be led to mistake the part played by intuition (not spatial but logical) in mathematics. The question of the part of logical intuition is a psychological question and it is not necessary, when constructing a deductive system, to have an opinion on it.

To sum up, we have seen, in the first place, that mathematical logic has resolved the problems of infinity and continuity, and that it has made possible a solid philosophy of space, time, and motion. In the second place, we have seen that pure mathematics can be defined as the class of propositions which are expressed exclusively in terms of variables and logical constants, that is to say as the class of purely formal propositions. In the third place, we have seen that the possibility of mathematical knowledge refutes both empiricism and idealism, since it shows that human knowledge is not wholly deduced from facts of sense, but that a priori knowledge can by no means be explained in a subjective or psychological manner.