The student demonstrations against the rise of tuition fees, the fourth of which took place yesterday, 9 December 2010 signals the return of King Mob to the streets of London.

In my last article, I described Eleonore as a conceptual art work, a non-utopian 'social sculpture'. It carries a proposal for the role of artists in society, working out alternative routes for social-artistic-technological development. It does so without the universalistic-totalitarian notions inscribed into previous avant-garde projects. Yet still, it contains 'future' - therefore its' characterisation as non-utopian. It is real and realistic: small, cheap, livable and as far as possible, environmentally friendly. After spending one week here, I try to summarise my insights.

On 8th and 9th of July 2010 I attended the conference "Regulationstheorie in der Krise" (Regulation theory in the era of crisis) jointly organised by the University of Vienna and the Renner Institute (political academy of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, SPOE). The title transports a double meaning, it refers to the crisis of regulation theory as well as to what has regulation theory to say about the current crisis? I do not claim to be an expert in economics and I am also a newbie to the regulation approach. However, I found this conference very interesting and thought provoking, so I try a summary in English.

This text is the preliminary outcome of a research project going back to 2003/2004 and developed jointly by Franz Xaver and Armin Medosch. It has a theoretical and artistic dimension as well as an activist one. At the point of its inception stood questions relating to the crisis of art in informational capitalism. The project sets out to bring some clarifications by word and deed about the relationships between art and technology, art and science and the role of the artist at the beginning of the 21st Century.

This text argues that the erosion of privacy is not a by-product of information and communication technologies, but a systemic property of informational capitalism. The foundational myths of the information society motivate and legitimise the building of control systems applying probabilistic techniques to control future risks. At the root of this configuration are antagonistic labour relationships which have determined the path of technological development since the Industrial Revolution. Those tendencies have reached a culmination in the recent neo-liberal crisis. The digital commons offers itself as an incomplete and tentative remedy.