George Caffentzis analyses contemporary energy politics: is US national energy independence enough?

A special section on the politics of precarious labour, including:

Precari-us? > Angela Mitropoulos on the use and misuse of the notion of precariousness as applied to the conditions of labour under neoliberalism
Precarious Straits > Marina Vishmidt on the dubious equation of artists with other forms of insecure (service) workers
Cheap Chinese > John Barker on the perilous and exploitative employment of economic migrants essential to capitalist productivity today

The production and development of open source software (OSS) has received substantial attention recently, following the success of projects like Apache, Perl and Linux. But what are the real dynamics of this ‘new’ mode of production? The National Institute for Space Research surveyed the production landscape of GIS OSS looking for answers. Gilberto Câmara, director of Earth Observation, shares the findings and argues for a new conceptual paradigm

Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite on how the US has used bilateral deals to secure its predominance in the information economy

The protectionist intellectual property paradigm that the US has quietly globalised over the last 20 years or so has attracted little comment outside of specialist circles. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite investigate how, alongside the multilateral policymaking forums, the US has used bilateral deals to secure its predominance in the information economy

Zoe Young explores post-war issues in the Middle East

In 1996, a family of squatters died, demolished along with their Beirut home by the private company reconstructing the post-war city.

‘There’s nothing here, no McDonalds or anything,’ said a US soldier six years later, heading for Baghdad past Uruk, site of the first city. Another: ‘Me and my boys are going to take a bite out of Iraq’. Some say West Asian (Middle Eastern) protests against this invasion reflect the Ummah, the body of Islamic believers, ‘manifesting her deep feeling for a part of her body, which is in the process of being severed’, as Yusuf Patel described it on Khalifa.com, to be subsequently quoted by Jonathan Raban in The Guardian.

The Global Environment Facility is a subtle weapon in the arsenal of state-backed globalisation. While ostensibly implementing environmentally-friendly development in the South, its long-term effect is to identify new resources for less-than-green corporate exploitation and to increase developing countries’ indebtedness to organisations like the World Bank and IMF. Zoe Young, the author of a new book on the GEF, gives an insight into its complex and hypocritical workings.

Soon after the Johannesburg Earth Summit’s resounding success in sustaining – for now – the development of global ‘business as usual’, government representatives gathered again, far more quietly, in Beijing. Their mission: to rubber stamp another two and a half billion taxpayers' dollars for the financial institution supposed to save 'global' nature from the heart of the US–led New World Order.

Thomkins Square Park, New York. The pungent odour of fresh garlic saturates the nearby atmosphere. A bright orange truck marked in large letters with the words ‘Trade for Garlic’ is attracting the attention of passersby. They stop to examine its contents, harangued by the traders who stand by the truck exhorting members of the public to ‘get garlic!’

At the Tate Modern's Border Crossing seminar, the artist/activist approaches of panelists Heath Bunting and Florian Schneider threw divergent light on the politics of migration.

Life is a burning up of questions, wrote Antonin Artaud. The projects presented at the Border Crossings seminar at the Tate Modern last Tuesday provided enough material for a bonfire, even if the ensuing discussion somehow failed to catch light.

Hari Kunzru reviews One Market Under God

The media interest that surrounded dotcom mania was perhaps as short-lived and skin deep as the supposed economic miracle itself. Shortly after the bubble burst in March 2000 and the media interest had started to wane, American journalist Paulina Borsook brought out her book Cyberselfish which examines the deeper roots of libertarianism – the ideology that fuelled the boom – as well as the deep social and environmental impact it has had in California’s Bay Area. Geert Lovink – co-founder of the media politics and culture mailing list Nettime – tracked Borsook down in San Francisco to talk about cyberselfishness past and present

From Aaron Lynch’s Thought Contagion to Seth Godin’s Idea Virus, the proliferation of interest in media spin-cycles, viral marketing, corporate memetics and cultural contagions suggests that the infective model has itself become a craze.

From Aaron Lynch’s Thought Contagion to Seth Godin’s (see article) Idea Virus, the proliferation of interest in media spin-cycles, viral marketing, corporate memetics and cultural contagions suggests that – in the latest example of non-linear hype dynamics – the infective model has itself become a craze. Ccru sent its Cyberhype correspondent Synthia Drummond (who seems much recovered from her encounter with Schwartzean ‘hype-gnosis’) to investigate the phenomenon.