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

[jmp]

On 12/01/12 16:02, Simon Biggs wrote:
> I'm an academic and an artist and totally champion the open book. Knowledge is made best when it is made shared.

Knowledge, as language, is always shared, always public and can never be
private, but it can be conjured up in a private setting by an
individual. To my mind it is perfectly fine to conjure up knowledge on
your own - for some particular project and purpose. Rather the "problem"
I see in this context is when such a knowledge-conjuring individual is
not actually embedded in a collectivity (which wage slavery is not) to
which s/he can return and from and for which the conjuring unfolds.

Academics pretend to be in networks and clusters and so on, but pretend
is the key word here: primarily, academics dabble in production to
produce their own careers. Maybe things used to be different, I don't
know, but as universities have become sausage factories they mainly
attract, retain and produce competitive individuals. In such an
environment the "open" and "collaborative" memes appear to become
substitutes, - displacements even, hiding the nature of the underlying
business.

> I'm not sure what you mean by texture Adam, but the open source ethic certainly gives life a different texture than a capitalist model.

The open source ethic *is* a capitalist model. It was extracted from the
Free Software model for the purpose of presenting to capitalists an
engineering methodology that would appeal and that would take advantage
of the networking potential of the interweb. It might give a different
texture - a virtual one at that - but this is precisely where Tiziana's
point of the alienated, disconnected, virtual/disembodied (if I
understood it right) subject becomes crucial.

It is here tempting to ask: Once we are all connected to everyone else
through this environmentally destructive (mining, electricity etc.)
thing called the net, then what will we realise? Probably that it is
time to log off and knock on our neighbour's door and get a community
assembly together.

It might well be that we need to go that far to get to that - but that
just goes to show that we have come nowhere: "destroying the (global)
village in order to save it is still the order of the day.

-m


-- 
http://commoning.wordpress.com

"...I thought we were an autonomous collective..."