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

[Dmytri Kleiner]

On 12.01.2012 21:40, tterranova wrote:

> 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.


Hey Tiziana, I strongly agree with what you have said here, very well 
said. I've left some of my favourite passages above, not because I 
intend to
respond to them, but to encourage them to be reread as we move further 
in this discussion.

What I'd like to emphasize is that we need more than just the invention 
of "new means," indeed, Pie-in-the-sky new economic models are 
commonplace, and you could hardly find any one of them, no matter how 
outlandish, that would be worse than the system we have in place today. 
I suspect an economic system that distributed money and control of 
productive assets completely at randomly would still be likely to be 
preferable to what we actually existing capitalism is. Ideas, ways, and 
models that could be used to improve the functioning of our economic 
system are not in short supply. The trouble is nobody who wants to 
improve it, can.

In order to implement any idea, any change, from the tamest reform the 
most revolutionary upheaval requires that interests who benefit from the 
change have the capacity to overcome the capacities of those who's 
interests would be harmed by such a change. In the end, it's not a 
question of invention, but of social power.

There is no unified force capable of contesting the interests of 
capital. We need to imagine how there can be one. Before we even get a 
say in how the economy should be, we need the social power to overcome 
those who want to preserve the privileges provided by the current 
system.



-- 
Dmytri Kleiner