Matteo Pasquinelli (2004) 'Radical Machines Against the Techno-Empire: From Utopia to Network', trans. Arianna Bove, http://www.rekombinant.org/downloads/radical_machines.pdf (french version, part of 'Subjectivation du Net : postmŽdia, rŽseaux, mise en commun', _Multitudes 21_, http://www.eurozine.com/partner/multitudes/current-issue.html).


'Rather than of general intellect we should talk of general intellects. There are multiple forms of collective intelligence. Some can become totalitarian systems, such as the military-managerial ideology of the neocons or of Microsoft empire. [...] 'Good' collective intelligences, on the other hand, produce international networks of cooperation such as the network of the global movement, of precarious workers, of free software developers, of media activism. They also produce the sharing of knowledge in universities, the Creative Commons open licenses and participative urban planning, narrations and imaginaries of liberation.' (Pasquinelli 2005: 1)

Matteo Pasquinelli sees three kinds of action - labour, politics and art - as integrated into each other making us all 'workers-artists-activists' or rather that that they no longer hold much significance and belong to the sphere of collective intellect (2005: 2). In the knowledge-based economy, the distinction between 'cognitive' and 'precarious' work has collapsed (or the networkers and networked in Castells terms) into what chainworkers.org describe as 'precogs'. 
[note: Chainworkers.org's slogan is 'Chain and brainworkers unite'(http://www.chainworkers.org/) in which brainworkers are the creative workers and chainworkers are workers working in distribution according Lazzarato 2003.]
Therefore new collective characterisations are required, according to Pasquinelli, who is suspicious of the hegemony of the terms 'multitude' and the concept of 'immaterial labour'. More so: 'There is a hegemonic metaphor in political debate, in the arts world, in philosophy, in media criticism, in network culture: that is Free Software.' (2005: 3) His concern is how the rhetoric around open source and free software relates to action in the real world. 

If the whole of society has become a factory, then how do workers-artists-activists 'reappropriate the means of production' where the control of production is exerted in immaterial, cognitive and networked forms? (or precarious ways of working and living) New antagonisms are formed around 'social software' representing two intelligences of exploitation and resistance to exploitation. Pasquinelli asks: 
'How can we turn the sharing of knowledge, tools and spaces into new radical revolutionary productive machines, beyond the inflated Free Software? This is the challenge that once upon the time was called reappropriation of the means of production.
'Will the global radical class manage to invent social machines that can challenge capital and function as planes of autonomy and autopoiesis? Radical machines that are able to face the techno-managerial intelligence and imperial meta-machines lined up all around us? The match multitude vs. empire becomes the match radical machines vs. imperial techno-monsters. How do we start building these machines?' (2005: 4)

He is looking towards dysfunction in this respect:   
'Technical machines obviously work only if they are not out of order. Desiring machines on the contrary continually break down as they run, and in fact run only when they are not functioning properly. Art often takes advantage of this property by creating veritable group fantasies in which desiring production is used to short-circuit social production, and to interfere with the reproductive function of technical machines by introducing an element of dysfunction.' (Deleuze & Guattari, quoted in Pasquinelli 2005: 1)