[-empyre-] OSW: open source writing in the network

[Simon Biggs]

Hi Tiziana

Thanks for your thoughtful post, responding to Dmytri's and Adam's provocative texts.

Interesting you ask whether the internet will have an impact on the current crisis in the world economy? Perhaps the internet is part of the reason for the crisis? The world is going through a period of fundamental geo-political change driven by globalisation. I wonder if it isn't a "crisis in capitalism" (that might be wishful thinking) but another stage in its evolution. This means a shift away from state to corporate power. Many countries appear unable to adapt. Some can as they mimic corporate structures (the state as corporation). Singapore is an exemplar here. China also has these characteristics (perhaps a Confucian outlook is appropriate in this new world?). Globalisation itself is driven by changes in global infrastructure. The emergence of the internet as key to both our communications and logistical systems is undoubtedly intrinsic to these changes.

Horrible as it might sound, many of the liberties and opportunities we have taken for granted in Western liberal democracies will probably not be sustainable in the new world order. The rights we assume we have, to personal property, a job, a private identity, education, healthcare, pensions, etc, are likely to be wiped away. Most people on this planet can only dream of having these things and as the West collapses this short period of history, when a privileged population living in the colonial and post-colonial bubble that is Europe and its progressively exhausted empires/diasporas, will become a murky memory.

In many ways the Western way of life our governments have indulged us in has been unsustainable all along and now we are waking up from our comfortable sleep to realise the nightmare our lives really are. Perhaps this is a dark vision of the world but I see little reason to be optimistic. I agree that something must be done and that open source and alternate models of production need to be part of any effective strategy of resistance - but I fear that this is what it will amount to, heroic but futile resistance to inevitable change.

best

Simon

On 12 Jan 2012, at 20:40, tterranova wrote:

> I think that this touches on the problem I've been thinking about. The big issue right now is whether networked and personal media with all the range of applications and platforms running on the Internet are really going to have an impact on the outcome of this latest and rather big crisis of capitalism. I think we do need to locate 'open content and software' in this situation. The Internet has been 'massified' over the past ten years or so. Obviously 'massified' for networked personal media cannot mean the same thing as with broadcasting, industrial media, but there are undeniable processes of centralization and homogenization going on. It is also a corporate economy, thoroughly embedded in financial capital and business.
> All I'm saying is that I think this changes the questions asked to open strategies of production and distribution. I think that we might agree with Dmytri when he says that they have been mostly incorporated or marginalized (with the possible exception of file sharing, torrent etc, whose inventor not by chance is the only Internet innovator of the year 2000s not to have become a billionaire with it).
> At the same time those researchers I mentioned in my first post are bringing back mixed news from ethnografic and critical research on  the corporate web's communication cultures and subjectivity (which is a shorthand of course for ways of feeling, sensing, understanding and living the world and relating to others). Users of corporate networked, personal media are experiencing a kind of communication that is compulsive, addictive but also deeply unsatisfying at many levels.
> Let's take writing and publishing in the world of the corporate web. Access and content is free but the influence of marketing and business with their need to harvest personal data, their impact on the design of the software which must maximize capabilities targeted at income generation is felt at the level of the interface and also the larger culture I would say. People are publishing content, writing comments on corporate platform but this is producing mostly an endless circulation and clashes of opinions (the 'revolutionary' and 'militant' use of social networks is still the exception not the rule)
> So free culture cannot be simply about copyright. It should be about the invention or even reinvention of tools which help to produce different ways of communicating through the Internet. The battle against the corporate giants must involve some imagination, the exercise of cultural sensitivity towards technological and economic innovation. Sensing the ways for example in which many users have become involuntary locked in certain ways of writing and publishing and imagining other ways of doing it which might be more attractive.
> I have read enough of Dmytri's work to maybe guess that his answer is going to be that it will take money and wealth to do that - and I agree that the invention of new means of financialization, of creation of liquidity are crucial to give substance to current resistance against capitalist reentrenchment. But I also think that something must be done also at the level of the culture and tools of networked communication so that even those new means of financialization might find people who can actually make use of them in a different way.
> 
> best
> 
> tiziana
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Il 12/01/12 18.40, Dmytri Kleiner ha scritto:
>> 
>> Definitely Simon. But as mentioned, this is only a tiny fringe. A small percentage of the total number of cultural workers, who are are currently working for the capitalist cultural industry.
>> 
>> Thus, within Capitalism, our social capacity for the production of open works will always be tiny in comparison to our social capacity for "closed" works. Is this what we mean by "There is no disconnect?"... that out of the entire body of our cultural productive forces, a small minority is able to exist as open producers on the fringes of capitalism? If this is the limit of our ambition, than "Free Cultural" is nothing more than a sort of lumpen proletariat in the cultural field.
>> 
>> And end even within this meagre ambition of maintaing an "open" subcultural fringe, there is still a "disconnect" with capitalism since not only will capital not fund open works, but the logic of capital conflicts with open practice in the space of what they perceive as their rightful consumer market, as we have seen in the persecution of artists such as John Oswald, Negitvland, DJ Dangermouse, and many others, not to mention the war on file sharing, etc.
>> 
>> Is Free Culture content to be a beleaguered, insular, fringe? Or is Free Culture meant to be a critique of our curent cultural industries? Does it aim only for it's own meagre existence? Or does it aim for the transformation of cultural production? If the answer is the later, than this ambition can not be reconciled with capitalism.
>> 
>> Or is Free Culture simply proposing the elimination of the popular cultural industries and a massive descaling of cultural production and employment? Even this is jousting a windmills. Capitalism will not accept the argument that they should just chill out and abandoned copyright because the culture they make sucks anyway, and that we can make better works with the free time of dilettantes, studends and hobyists.
>> 
>> If this our position? Scrap big culture? Personally, like I suspect many on list, I generally prefer more experimental and independent cultural works and wouldn't really mis Hollywood and friends. But make no mistake, understand that in taking such a position we are operating without the solidarity of the vast majority of cultural consumers and against the interests of the vast majority of people employed in the cultural industries. Which means such a position has no social power, no political power and no relevancy what so ever.
>> 
>> 
>> Best,
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On 12.01.2012 18:12, Simon Biggs wrote:
>>> This question of who pays for the writers to write isn't very
>>> different as to who pays for artists. Many net artists receive no
>>> payment for their work but they put their work in the public realm for
>>> nothing anyway. Some artists in other media also work this way. Many
>>> such artists do not look to their work to generate income directly but
>>> indirectly - eg: having work in the public realm raises their profile
>>> and they get museum shows and fees for that. Then they get tenured
>>> academic positions in art schools because of their shows, etc... This
>>> economic model has something in common with the software developer
>>> model you mentioned Dmytri.
>>> 
>>> best
>>> 
>>> Simon
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 12 Jan 2012, at 16:56, Dmytri Kleiner wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On 12.01.2012 17:26, adam wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Well I think the open source ethic is well aligned with capitalism.
>>>>> There is no disconnect there.
>>>> 
>>>> Yet, software has different economics than cultural works. Open Source developers are paid by organisations that employ such software in production, and thus the availability of open source packages reduces their production costs, allowing them to retain more earnings.
>>>> 
>>>> The same situation occurs only infrequently when it comes to books, there may be situations where it does, i.e. reference books or documentation. I can see these being supported by organisations that are consumers of such works, but not much else.
>>>> 
>>>> So, if capital will not pay creators of open works. Who will? No doubt, some fringe can be maintained by cultural grants and simular social funds, and a wider fringe can maintain itself by working for free and earning subsistence elsewhere (or simply being rich to begin with), yet this says nothing of the great majority of books, read by millions, produced today by the capitalist industry, which offers no way to make these open books.
>>>> 
>>>> Best,
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -- 
>>>> Dmytri Kleiner
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> empyre forum
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>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Simon Biggs
>>> simon at littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK
>>> skype: simonbiggsuk
>>> 
>>> s.biggs at ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
>>> http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/
>>> http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> empyre forum
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>> 
> 
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Simon Biggs
simon at littlepig.org.uk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk

s.biggs at ed.ac.uk Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/