In the 1980s everything revolves around “open systems”. For me the chapter on Conceiving Open Systems was a particular highlight. Kelty writes: “Openness” is precisely the kind of concept that wavers between end and means. Is openness good in itself, or is openness a means to achieve something else? and if so what? Who wants to achieve openness, and for what purpose? Is openness a goal? Or is it a means by which another goal? say “interoperability” or “integration” is achieved? According to Kelty openness is an unruly concept. “While free tends towards ambiguity (free as in free speech, or free as in free beer?), open tends toward obfuscation. Everyone claims to be open, everyone has something to share, everyone agrees that being open is the obvious thing to do.”

Two Bits is accessible and a pleasure to read, but it is not particularly theoretical, nor critical for that matter. No critiques here of the inward-looking geek nature of free software, the lack of a counter economy and therefore a much larger dependency on large IT corporations for jobs and income than necessary, and the dominance of the conservative-libertarian pop ideology within open source/free software circles (see www.slashdot.org). What Christopher Kelty does provide us with is an interesting first 80 pages in which he describes his wanderings through Berlin in the days of Mikro e.V. and WOS (2001), Bangalore and Boston. Out of these encounters with new media culture he filters a few concepts that are worth taking up elsewhere. The first one is “recursive publics”. Recursive not only points at making, maintaining and modifying, but also at the depth of the technical and legal layers. “Geeks argue about technology, but they also argue through it. They express ideas, but they also express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed in new ways.”

The second valuable concept is “polymaths”, described by Kelty as avowed dilettantism. This is a part of the book that does address the issue of a shared lifestyle amongst programmers. Polymathy is the ability to know a large and wide range of things. It’s what Adilkno describes as the positive side of vagueness in its Media Archive. “Polymaths must have a detailed sense of the present, and the project of the present, in order to imagine how the future might be different.” All in all, enough slacker insights to get this book and read it?supposing you’ve got an interest in the history of free software and share the collective drive to push its ideas further.

What follows is an email interview with Christopher Kelty, while he was moving to set up base in Los Angeles.

GL: Some say that ‘geeks’ can be studied as an ‘alien tribe’. Much like the Australian aboriginals once[?], ordinary Westerns do not really notice them and thus they continue what they have always done, unaware of the big changes ahead. Apart from a few 1990s movies and novels in which they feature, computer nerds are an invisible group. In Two Bits you decided not to emphasize the lifestyle aspect of geekness. Instead, you focused on the ideas that have been behind the early Internet, Emacs and the birth of free software, Linux and Apache, and then moving to the present with Creative Commons. Why have you chosen for an ‘anthropology of ideas’?

CK: Anthropology has pretty lousy marketing these days. Outside of the discipline our two major icons are Margaret Mead and Indiana Jones, and much of what the media expects from anthropologists is just-so stories about why humans, especially exotic humans, do the funny things they do, preferably involving sex and violence. So the appeal of the geeks-as-savages story is naturally pretty strong, and I was torn as to how to deal with that. Geeks themselves like being profiled this way and I was “anthropologist-in-residence” in start- ups in both Boston and Bangalore, and routinely introduced and paraded around as such.

However, what I think is most important in anthropological research today is the vibrancy with which researchers try to identify new “objects” emerging through cultural practices — not just new kinds of behavior or new organizations of people. And especially today, this includes new kinds of practices that are globally distributed. Even people who work with the Australian Aborigines (like Kimberly Christen http://www.mukurtuarchive.org) struggle with this issue.
Indeed, socio-cultural anthropologists arguably no longer study “cultures” as such, but only practices and meanings which are not easily (or violently) reduced to economics or biology.

In Two Bits, I wanted to capture why it is that a large and very diverse global population of people recognize and find affinity with each other. They do that by understanding, using and building free software, which is in turn deeply interconnected with the growth and spread of the Internet itself. So the type “geek” doesn’t come first — it is the result of adopting certain practices and habits, learning particular histories and myths, and becoming deeply committed to certain political ideals — and changing them as well. People want to know why some people become geeks and some don’t (or more often, why more men than women do), but I don’t have an answer to that. I think the fact that geeks exist, are multiplying and diversifying is hard enough to explain… why they don’t become investment bankers or firefighters is the wrong way to start asking questions about the phenomena at hand, I think.

When the mainstream media (and many ordinary people) talk about Aborigines, by contrast, they are often essentialized, either culturally or genetically, as trapped within their culture, usually as representatives of a primitive mode of life, rather than vibrant actors in a field of practices, technologies and politics. This can happen with Geeks as well, when one hypostatizes them as a “culture” preceding the advent of the practices and technologies that give their lives orientation and meaning… but it rings hollow, I think, even to geeks who enjoy such objectification.

GL: A highlight in Two Bits for me is the non-meeting you have Eric Raymond. He gets to sit next to a lady and during the dinner you do not get to speak to him. You mention a number of topics and controversies that you wanted to discuss with him. Instead, you get to talk to other people out of which a interesting collaboration grows (the Connexions project). Could you nonetheless perform your Raymond critique here?

CK: I wrote a lot of stuff before the book, arguing with Raymond (mostly in my head) and trying to figure out how to position this person who is the ultimate “principle informant” in anthropological terms — someone who has deep experience of, and tries to formulate theories and explanations about, the practices that an anthropologist wants to explain. It didn’t help that Raymond called himself an anthropologist. Indeed, it’s a good indication of the low status of the discipline — you can’t call yourself a physicist or a biologist without a lot more training, and you can go to jail if you call yourself an engineer or a lawyer and you aren’t!

Nonetheless, Raymond’s work is really very good in a certain 19th Century mode of anthropology?he is the Sir James Frazer of hacker anthropology — but the problem is that there is another 130 years of anthropology in between his style and that of today’s anthropology, which he ignores in favor of a pop evolutionary-psychology, which has almost zero status in anthropology today. So he’s a weird mix of old and new and it’s really hard to know what to do with him.

Take the popularity of the notion of a “gift economy” which almost every geek in the world can talk about with some familiarity, thanks to Raymond. This was a really good orienting idea — an “object lesson” which helped make sense of Free Software. On the one hand, this is exactly the right direction, and anthropologists inspired by or trained by Marilyn Strathern immediately grok how our concepts of exchange and person-hood are challenged by the emergence of Free Software. On the other hand, rather than take it in this direction, Raymond concocts a mix of vulgar Marxism (stadial theories of development), innate “territorialism” (shades of 1960s Robert Ardrey), and vague definitions of reputation and credit to offer a putative explanation of why Free Software works. Needless to say, I don’t think it will be remembered as an explanation — it will be remembered as a kind of geek-myth, which in some cases is what Raymond almost seems to think he is doing.

Ultimately, I left all this out of the book for just this reason: if I argue with him, I give him the status of a fellow researcher, and I don’t think either his research or his ideas merit that. Rather, I think it’s important for people to understand that Free Software includes Raymond as an *actor*, as one of the key actors in making it into the vibrant phenomenon it is, and so I include him (and Stallman and Torvalds and Perens and O’Reilly and others) as one component of five — the “movement” — which makes up the practices of Free Software. I needed to explain why Raymond existed more than I needed to explain why his explanations were off base.

GL: Rishab Ayer Ghosh and his Cooking Pot Theory would be another case. But anyway. Maybe it was a missed opportunity that you have not dwelled upon your Raymond criticism. There is no culture of debate and criticism in these circles. Look at Stallman and how hysterically he responds if you criticize him for his embarrassing lack of knowledge of political philosophy, talking about freedom this and that. We, social scientists and humanities scholars are supposed to learn Linux, know the technical basics of operating systems, but the other way around, forget it. Engineers can say whatever they want about society, and get away with it. You, Steven Weber and many others are from a new generation of FLOSS scholars that do try to push the boundaries of theory. Do you think there is a new wave of software studies in the making? In what direction would you like this field of knowledge to grow?

CK: I agree… and I would much rather see Rishab’s work, and work on FOSS by anthropologists like James Leach, Bernard Krieger, Gabriella Coleman and others be valued by engineers and programmers more than the ravings of Stallman and Raymond… but I also think that’s impossible. I don’t think of the latter two as scholars at all, more as politicians or demagogues, which explains why you can’t really argue with either of them. I think the same is true in many domains, where there are a few loud voices that capture all the attention.

I would argue to the contrary, however, that there is indeed an extremely well developed culture of debate in hacker circles, once you get beyond the demagogues, and this is something Gabriella Coleman has captured well in her work. Projects like Debian and Ubuntu represent the best of that culture, I think, combining an even- increasing understanding of the political and legal issues with the technical sophistication. But that kind of debate is much less visible than the histrionics of the big men, so people miss it unless they are directly involved. Such geeks are also far less libertarian than they are often accused of being and are more likely to be practicing a form of liberal communitarianism; and they are well aware of the form of sociality they are building and promoting, even if Stallman and Raymond are not. Again, I think the accusation of libertarianism comes from listening to a few loud voices, rather than getting close to the work of the mass of people involved.

I do think there is a new wave of software studies emerging and it represents a kind of generational shift away from the quick and dirty explanations towards sustained research questions that seek not only to explain FLOSS as such, but to challenge existing theory in different disciplines?whether that’s public goods and collective action theory in political science and economics or theories of technology and culture in anthropology. Much of the earliest work on FLOSS lacked depth because it was so new and responded so quickly to the phenomenon. But with sustained attention, I think some of the deeper issues have started to become clearer. A new generation of “software studies” might be able to move beyond the logic of newness that dominates the world of IT and software; it could be a chance to identify a “longer duree” of political, economic and cultural issues of which each new generation of cool tools and “new” ideas are seen to be expressions. That might allow scholars to gain purchase on this sense of rapid change and simultaneously to become more authentically critical of the claims of each new generation of toys. That would be a real achievement.

To create a successful new field of software studies, however, requires that scholars are willing to sustain their attention and take the risk of collecting, observing, participating and reflecting over a longer period of time. When I started this project in 1999, it was about Free Software… but by the time I finished it, the project was about the cultural significance of the various practices involved and how they could be understood and related historically to more recent changes (like Wikipedia and Web 2.0), as well as much older events (like UNIX and the Open Systems debates of the 70s and 80s). I like to think that it is a more general analysis, and a better one, as a result.

GL: Open and free are two key concepts if we want to understand the significance of free software. There is a great chapter in your book on the history, the use and abuse, of the term openness. You did not write about the confusion about free and freedom. You have not deconstructed the Cult of the Free into the realm of peer to peer networks, or the debate about precarity, for instance. Why not?

CK: Well, in a way I’ve tried to do this in a different idiom — that of publics and public spheres. For me, the language of freedom and openness — and the concern with definitions, principles and the enumeration of freedoms are a small part of the phenomenon of Free Software. I repeatedly insist that what makes Free Software interesting is that whether you call it free, libre or open, whether you are with or against Stallman, as long as the other four practices are in place (sharing source code, copyleft, coordinating collaboration, open infrastructure debates), then the shouting doesn’t matter — it only matters that those vitriolic debates are conducted *in the service of* the other four components, and the phenomenon of FLOSS as such. The debates very rarely imply clear practical choices about how to do FLOSS, they are much more often about the meaning of it.

Where the ‘public sphere’ aspect is important is that I want my readers to focus on the places where these debates (about free or open) are conducted in the service of maintaining an independent, technically mediated and radically modifiable public sphere. And independent means independent of states, corporations, professions, churches and so forth. I think this is in line with the concerns over “precarity”, “casualization” and some aspects of anti-globalization. I think it relates wherever there are questions of fairness and the construction of public infrastructures that give people the freedom both to speak freely and safely, and to modify or extend those infrastructures in ways that don’t serve only the interests of constituted powers. So I would say that skepticism about both openness and freedom is certainly warranted — but I’m trying to help give researchers ways to ask whether there is anything behind that talk that might really contribute to the expansion of an authentic public sphere, rather than just being cynical about the claims

GL: The trend is clearly away from software towards a proliferation of social, cultural and political fields where the basic notions of free software, eat themselves into the issues, so to say, as memes.
Do you also think that the core of the philosophy will remain the same, or will certain elements mutate, once they travel from context to context?

CK: Since I don’t think the philosophy is at the “core” I suspect it will not remain the same at all. What has occupied my attention is what happens when the *practices* of free software are adopted more as templates for action than as memes, and then are modified based on pragmatic concerns. So Creative Commons modulated the notion of a copyleft license, but in an attempt to be all things to all people, they also created a new problem–multiple conflicting licenses and debates about the meaning of “non-commercial” or “third world” or “sampling.” The Connexions project modulated the meaning of “source code” to include textbooks, but in doing so encountered (and has not quite solved) the problem that educators don’t write or share textbooks the way programmers do code. These modulations are interesting in themselves for what they can tell us about different domains (e.g. how film works or doesn’t as a collaboration, how music can be pulled apart, recombined and re-valued), but the bigger question, I suggest, is whether in modulating these components, the people and practices involved maintain any hope of expanding or strengthening a public sphere that provides an autonomous space for material and discursive experimentation, even if such practices are not on their surface explicitly Political (with a capital P).

So to answer your question, I think the modulation of the “philosophy” of free software will continue. The world of open educational resources has a much different approach to understanding the relationship between freedom and the tools of thought; groups like Autonomo.us are modulating the principles of Free Software to deal with web services; and perhaps the clearest case are the debates within various “free culture” movements about whether the philosophy is too software-centric, and what freedom means with respect to other cultural materials. Certainly within anthropology there is massive suspicion of projects like Creative Commons and its imperial approach to defining cultural freedom — but this is, as I say, just one component of the changing landscape — it’s also important to pay attention to whether and where the other practices are replicated — licenses, definitions of open infrastructure, tools and schemes for coordination and collaboration, the definition of what objects can be shared, etc. The modulation of the philosophy of free software is part of the more general process of these practices being adopted and transformed — and not the driver of those changes.

GL: How do you look at the Oekonux debates in 2002-2003, the current activities of www.keimform.de, the P2P foundation and theoretical work of Adam Arvidsson, Michel Bauwens and others? What do you make of such practical and theoretical efforts to bring together the principles of free software and peer-to-peer production? Do we have an economic turn ahead of us? Would this be a very European idea or do you see similar tendencies in the USA? Some say that it is really urgent that the FLOSS efforts focus on cell phones and RFID tags. In which direction would you like to see research and activism go?

CK: I think this is a huge question, far beyond what I tried to do in the book. In some ways, I see this as the next iteration of social science questioning after the “information economy” or “network
society” — ethical economies, creative capitalism, germ-forms, peer production (Benkler), and p2p societies are grand socio-economic diagnoses, and as such, crucial for debating how to analyze and make sense of the changes we are seeing. I don’t think it is particularly European, but in the U.S. it is more likely associated with things like von Hippel’s “User-driven Innovation”, Henry Chesborough’s “open innovation” and other work in management and innovation studies. Scholars in those domains in the US are often less aware of the socio- political and activist concerns that I think are much more on the surface in Europe, much more philosophically grounded in cases like Oekonux and P2P Foundation. By contrast, groups like Indymedia or Riseup.net represent a more radical genealogy in the US and abroad, which is the subject of Jeffrey Juris’ recent book (Networking Futures). So there are obviously different ways to tell the story of this confluence of ideas.

One way to understand my position vis-a-vis these debates is that I have started from the assumption that the practices involved in the creation of Free Software (and the Internet as well) which emerged in the 1980s and 1990s are at the core of the changes we are seeing — and not general economic or cultural ideologies, which I see instead as effects of changing practices. So for me, Wikipedia and Facebook are not examples of the same thing that Free Software is an example of (peer production or creative capitalism or user-driven innovation etc.) but *derivatives* of the practices that coalesced so productively in Free Software. And Free Software is also not original in this sense, but drawn from the modulation of UNIX in the 1970s, the open systems debates in the 1980s. I think it is important, for instance, to understand the role of telecommunications regulation and anti-trust politics in the US and Europe in the 1980s to understand why Free Software gained a foothold in the 1990s. I’d be less likely to attribute the emergence of Free Software to a new stage of history than I would to a detailed working out of a previous structure of legal and economic practices. In this, I think I’m in partial sympathy with the Oekonux and P2P Foundation projects because I think “critique of political economy” in the strictest sense of the term is what is needed here.

On the other hand, I’m skeptical that theorizing a new kind of economy will make any difference to the kinds of persistent inequalities and injustices already present in actually existing markets. For example, a colleague of mine Robert Foster, has just published a great book about Coca Cola’s role in the global economy (Coca-Globalization). Many of the things he describes about how Coca Cola interacts with its customers, encourages them to innovate and draws them into the “experience” of Coca Cola share a great deal with the explanations offered by the “user innovation” people. The difference of course is that Coca Cola is, well, evil. Identifying why it’s not the same thing for Coca Cola or Apple to engage in “peer production” as it is for Wikipedia seems to me to be the most difficult question. Similarly, for me it was important to identify the core practices of free software in order to distinguish what Apple and Microsoft were doing from what real free software projects are doing. That’s why I turned to the problem of publics and public spheres and their independence from constituted forms of power, rather than to the theory of public goods, or a revived Marxism. I don’t think they are incompatible, but I’m a pragmatist at the core: I want to see whether such theories help make sense of, and potentially transform, concrete realities of practice.

GL: As you may have noticed, there is no Web 2.0 platform for activists. Indymedia is more or less dead (at least, the English/ international edition). Activism and social networks do not seem to match that well. The problem of transparency for police and other services of these platforms plays an important role in this. On the other hand, social movements have always been prime examples of networks that can scale very well, if the circumstances are right. Do you also see a problem here? The social seem to have gone technical, and it is questionable if we can just make a romantic move back in such an instance?

CK: I don’t think of any of the web 2.0 platforms as being particularly true to the principles of free software. Wikipedia yes, and a few projects such as Shay David’s Kaltura are explicit about their commitment, even as they struggle with solvency and sustainability, to say nothing of profitability. But Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Ning, and so forth all lack some component that leads, in my terms, to the creation or expansion of a recursive public. I would like to think that this concept helps explain, in part, why activists might shy away from such platforms, insofar as we are talking about activist publics whose commitments are to an independent and legitimately powerful civil society whose discussions and deliberations have real effect on the constituted forms of power they address. The technical commitment of such publics is essential, however, because, yes, we cannot go back to a world without the technical infrastructures, new modes of expression and circulation that have been created. We are, in some ways, condemned to address the technical as a political problem. Rising ‘above’ such details into the realm of principles may clarify things, but only if such a move can be tested in the concrete and complex skein of the contemporary operating systems of our world.

GL: Would it be possible to identify ‘kernels’ of conceptual hegemony in projects like Debian and Ubuntu that are not corporate and conservative in nature? How can we open an intellectual dialogue about this? In the case of Web 2.0 we see again the importance of (collaborative) meme construction? Just think of all this talk of ’swarms’. How to regain the confidence to build up a counter- hegemonic discourse? Is your concept of the ‘recursive publics’ offering a way out here?

CK: In the cases of Debian and Ubuntu, there is a strong core of people and practices, well developed, exquisitely argued and widely implemented that I would characterize as “pure” free software.
Insofar as my characterization of the practices of free software as a kind of ideal type has a real expression of those ideal features, Debian and Ubuntu are probably the best exemplars. But just certifying these projects as pure is meaningless. The concept of a recursive public was my way of articulating the significance of these pure forms, not just the conditions of their existence. And that significance is 1) that they treat technical infrastructure and decisions about its design as political through and through, as far down the “recursive” stack of technical layers as possible and 2) they do so in order to maintain the possibility not only of an authentic public sphere that they inhabit, but the possibility of the emergence of publics oppositional to themselves, and to those that emerge, and so on. Whether or not people take advantage of these publics to develop counter-hegemonic discourses and new political powers is uncertain, it’s not implied by the form of the technology, but it is enabled by it.

Free Software provides a radical form of openness which is, perhaps, a very American way of constituting a public (suspicious of the state and corporations, obsessed with ideas of balance and fairness, and a weird mix of individualism and populism). The question I think it raises is whether, as a politics it has a content. Free Software as it exists has an insanely refined focus on form over political content (and this is the source of the suspicion about the dominance of the technical). But the question is: is this focus on form itself a particular kind of political content? At some level yes, but it is one that is open to, and maybe even encourages people to challenge it. It is a way of saying: if this is a (for instance) “libertarian” form, it is one that you are allowed to change — so make it less libertarian if you believe that will make it better. It says nothing, however, about whether people will have the power to do that, which is its weakest feature, its inability to incorporate the concrete fact that history has led us to this point.

Christopher Kelty, Two Bits, The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Duke University Press, 2008

Brian Sherwin: Nathaniel, you studied at Cornell University and at New York University. How did your academic years influence the direction of your art? Did you have any influential instructors?

Nathaniel Stern: At Cornell I studied music and fashion; I think the combination of composition and design sparked my interests in movement, visuality and embodiment. When I went on to NYU, I had already begun working with digital technologies, but ITP (the Interactive Telecommunications Program) really immerses you in them, exposes you to all sorts of people and possibilities, and so it was that saturation that helped push me towards the trajectory of exploring performativity in my work. Continue reading Art Space Talk: Nathaniel Stern.

The Free Knowledge, Free Technology Conference (FKFT) is the first international event which will centre on the production and sharing of educational and training materials in the field of Free Software and Open Standards. With the objective of promoting Free Software and the sharing of free knowledge, the FKFT 2008 Conference will bring together hundreds of people from different continents including government representatives, school and university teachers, IT companies, publishers, and NGO’s. By gathering together people from all these groups, we aim to stimulate both present and future collaboration between diverse disciplines, sectors and countries, through the medium of free software programs and the sharing of successful experiences related to free software and free technologies.

The Free Knowledge Institute and the SELF Consortium will collaborate to organise the content of the conference and to build strong relationships between attendees. The programme consists of an elegant mix between keynote speakers, panel discussions and parallel tracks on topics such as Social implications of Free Knowledge and Free Technologies, Technological aspects of e-learning, Learning Standards, Free Software in society, Legal issues of Free Knowledge, Free Knowledge in public bodies, the SELF Platform, and many more. During the social evening the Award Ceremony of the SELF Open Documentary Contest will take place.

In search of some perspective, I met up with Roz Kaveney, an expert on one type of creative writing both quintessentially internet-based, and also quintessentially non-’literary’. Fanfic – or fan fiction – is any story written using the characters, settings and conventions of a fictional universe – ‘fandom’ - such as that of Star Trek.

I learned from Roz that fanfic proper appeared with the Trekkies. The internet made it a mass phenomenon, as fans took advantage of low digital barriers to self-publication to evolve this new way of engaging with a fictional world. These days, while keen fanfic writers maintain their own archives, Livejournal is the hub of fan activity. Across the net, fans of particular shows, characters or fandoms gravitate in online communities, share work, commission stories about particular fandoms or pairings in ‘ficathons’, proof-read and critique one another’s stories and collaboratively generate massive archives of often elaborate, imaginative, well-written – and sometimes disturbing – narratives inspired by existing fictional universes.

Fanfic works through peer-to-peer commissioning and editing, and repurposing of others’ imaginative works as the springboard for its own ‘transformative’ endeavors. And this collaborative and (by the standards to which the ‘literary’ tradition of writing holds itself) ‘derivative’ nature contrasts intriguingly with the fixation on originality so inseparable from literary fiction. This fixation with originality and identifiable authorship is, in turn, inseparable from the economics that have underpinned the print industry for the last three centuries.

So, predictably, in this world of fanfic money is something of a contested issue. Keen to avoid rocking the copyright boat and alienate the creators of the fandoms they love, fanfic writers self-police strictly: attempting to monetize your work is frowned upon. “Printing out a few copies for friends is one thing,” Roz says, “but flogging your work at conventions just isn’t done.” Rather, it recalls Chris Anderson et al’s theories of the internet as a peer-to-peer economy of abundance. Fans write it because they love the fandoms, identify with particular characters, and enjoy exchanging these nuggets of narrative passion with others of the same persuasion. Stories become transactional units in a gift economy driven by the ludic desire to requite a free gift of pleasure with a return in kind.

If the literary is the critical and isolationist superego of writing, then, fanfic is the id: messy, pleasure-driven, reluctant to censor its proclivities. Existing fictional universes. It’s always been transgressive, genderbending, complicatedly queer. Slashfic (erotic fanfic) appeared at the same time as fanfic, and slash stories often see heterosexual fans penning homoerotic slash; any taboo can be the subject of a slash story.

I’ve argued elsewhere that the net follows a fairly consistent pattern not of replicating, but of inverting the tradition of the book: boundedness becomes boundlessness, authority becomes unreliable opinion, fixity becomes fluidity, physicality becomes virtuality, the presumption of universality becomes an awareness of the contextual nature of everything written there. So I did a speculative compare and contrast between the mainstream literary world and that of fanfic. And the principle seems to hold for this most popular internet writing form: take the literary world, and turn it inside-out.

Fanfic is 90-95% female, in contrast with the canon of authors I studied at college. It’s often collaborative, and engages with an existing fictional universe, while - say - literary fiction is generally written by single individuals and is fixated on the idea of originality “without realising”, Roz says, “how overrated this concept has been since the Romantic era”. Fanfic is structured socially around a gift economy of stories, and money is frowned upon; literature writers usuall aspire to earning a living from their work. Fanfic is pleasure-oriented; literature intellectual; fanfic is non-hierarchical and networked, while literature tends towards canons.

And last, but not least, fanfic in its current state evolved online, and is impressively well-supported in that space by its communities - a stark contrast to the modest successes of more ‘literary’ outputs online. Perhaps, with a long tradition of print publishing, the literary world has simply not yet paid much attention to the internet, and this will change as it becomes more familiar and pervasive. Or, perhaps, more of the attributes that constitute what we think of as ‘literary’ content are more inseparable from meatspace than might be immediately apparent.

I’ll write more about all this as our research goes on. But meanwhile this cursory glance at fan fiction invites many questions about the forms natural to the internet and to print, about the social and cultural assumptions that underpin these two, and about the implications of each for the economics and value-systems of cultural production. [posted by sebastian mary on
Future of the Book]

Thanasis/Pavlos: How central is the question of “who owns the means of production” in relation to the net economy?

Paul Hartzog: I think that what is happening now underscores the fact that ownership was never the issue. Ownership grants you the capacity to make and implement decisions about production, and to enjoy the fruits of those decisions. Ownership gives you access to production. Access has now been disaggregated and mediated.

Consequently, I would say that not “means of production” but “means of access” is the crucial factor now. Let’s look at a concrete example: Wikipedia. For wikipedia to work you need to have 1) access to the production, i.e. the pages have to be editable; 2) access to consumption, i.e. the pages have to be reachable for reading, and 3) access to the Internet. Governments make access possible for ISPs who make access possible for end-users, and the owners of wikipedia make access possible by keeping the servers running and having an open-editing system. There are numerous points in that chain for obstruction, surveillance, exploitation, etc.

Just recently we saw, through the user revolt on Digg and the similar crisis on LiveJournal, evidence of a cultural shift in values about what it means to participate in network culture.

People are increasingly demanding accountability from the people who run the servers and the ISPs. Nevertheless, as long as there are servers, ISPs, and other bottlenecks - in other words, as long as the Internet is not fully peer-to-peer - there will be ways for the powerful to shut down accounts, block access to websites, etc.

We can see the impact of this shift in a number of current disputes:

The “net neutrality” debate, for example, or the more general debate over whether internet access should be a private or a public good.

The targeting of ISPs as points of surveillance by governments and corporations is another example. The economics of the “long tail” is all about how access changes the dynamics of production insofar as it affects what will be produced and for whom. P2P file-sharing applications like BitTorrent enable access to films, music, and other media outside of traditional (and highly controlled) outlets.

To conclude, what was important about the means of production was that it was not simply producing an artefact but, as Marx said, an entire way of life. What is actually being produced is culture, knowledge, style, routine, class, etc. Anything between the producers and the production is potentially problematic. Access is what must be protected.

Trebor Scholz: Before answering your question, I’d like to respond to Paul Hartzog. The corporate lingo of Web 2.0 rings indeed the bells of openness and newness and it’s good that Paul cautions such naivete. Even within economically developed countries there are large enclaves of the working poor, illegal immigrants, and also youth in rural areas who are the real access-have-less. What does the Web do for them? Any critique of the Social Web will sound like an elitist problem that they wished they had.

On the other hand, talk of producers on the Social Web as elite users is absurd if you think of the 160 million people on the Chinese social networking site QQ or the 180 million users who have created a profile on MySpace. Most North American students are on Facebook and the South Korean social networking site Cyworld counts some 20 million contributors. On an international scale, social networking sites like Orkut took over Brazil and India. The age, gender, and language diversity online has changed for the better and the overwhelmingly high numbers of users speak for themselves.

In the United States, many people are physically isolated due to urban sprawl, a culture of fear, overly controlling parental behaviour, a lost sense of place, and the nature of the job market, as well as widespread individualism. People move for new jobs and have extremely short vacations (an average of two weeks total in the United States).

Therefore they simply don’t have enough time to meet former friends or neighbours. Real-life public spaces are not built to accommodate meaningful face to face encounters but instead serve as transitional zones of commerce.

The Social Web allows them to stay in touch, make friends, or reconnect. Social platforms become a partial remedy, a fix for these societal ills. It would not be hard to find cases of social isolation but overall the obese teenager or the alienated adult is not a product of the Social Web but of the described problems of society at large.

In response to the question: those who can get their hands on the countless “social operating systems” gain the means of web-based production. The motivating carrot for the participation of networked publics is the “free” service that does, however, come with the hidden price tag of utilization. Users read posts on social networking sites.

They tweak the design of their MySpace pages. They enter their status on Facebook (FB) ( e.g., “O. is ummm”. not telling you what she is about to do or Y. is feeling pink or E. is feeling oppressed by her hairbrush after coming back from a Patti Smith concert.).

They respond to so-called FB wall posts, create and upload videos, update their profiles (complain that there is no option to be married to one’s job). Users groom their FB galleries, tell each other if their photos are hot or not. They poke each other or watch each other’s videos. They friend and unfriend and embed videos. Time can be spent installing one of the 400 applications on Facebook, or by just blogging on MySpace and chatting on Skype.

All these activities create monetary value, which is sometimes based on involuntary participation. Interfaces put only few hindrances in the way of contribution. However, it’s a breach of the social contract if users don’t know that they are used. At other times, people are aware of the fact that they are utilized and can live with that. It’s a trade-off?C corporations get rich while users enjoy the pleasure of creation and sociality, gain friendships, share their life experiences, archive their memories, get jobs, find dates and contribute to the greater good.

To sum up my response to the question, I’d point out that the means of production are available to networked publics; these tools and platforms are, however, owned by corporations.

Thanasis/Pavlos: Is exploitation still the key social relationship that structures immaterial labour and peer-to-peer production?

Trebor Scholz: The situation is complex and paradoxical. I started to describe it in my previous answer. On the one hand, people are more easily used through the Social Web. From Heinz Ketchup to Yaadz.com, companies experiment with crowdsourcing as part of which the work is outsourced to a large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet. The workers/producers receive little or no pay.

Many of the “free” services on the Social Web intrude into the personal life of the users. Market research leads to well-placed ads (unwanted content). Dating sites commodify intimacy and spam reigns supreme. Amazon.com helps people to find books and music but also erodes valuable processes by which people discover new authors or artists. It limits the accidents of everyday life, which are the basis for many enjoyable and meaningful yet inefficient activities. Are users used? Most definitely. Do they mind it? Not yet.

To technically support the social life of 200 million people is costly. Google runs thousands of servers. Nevertheless, in the case of MySpace, News Corp made over 14 billion dollars??this value is being created by networked publics. Such monetization of affective labour is not new. It was first attempted online in 1987 with Lucas Habitat, an early, technologically influential online role-playing game. Later, NewHoo (later called The Open Directory Project or DMOZ) made commercial use of its volunteer editors.

Paul Hartzog: I don’t think so. There’s a reason it’s called the “sharing economy.” The fact that some companies are able to take the results of that sharing and generate profit is, I think, a not-terribly-relevant footnote, because it’s not where the action is.

The economy in which commodification and the extraction of surplus value takes place is a very different network than the peer-to-peer sharing economy. Copyleft and Creative Commons are in place precisely to prevent the appropriation (via proprietization) of deliberately open shared works.

You really have two things happening. One is that people no longer require massive media companies to be effective at getting paid for their work. Just look at iStockPhoto.com. Now you COULD say that companies can now get access to good stock photos for less money, and therefore there is exploitation. But you could also say that individuals can now get paid directly without layers and layers of media, distribution, and licensing organizations, and therefore they are actually circumventing entire categories of exploitation on which the industrial era thrived. The music industry is another typical example where all of the money previously remained within a network of elites who controlled the infrastructure, and almost none of it reached the creative producers. Now the money goes directly to the creators. It’s not so much who is exploiting whom, but rather that individuals are now empowered to circumvent previously-existing exploitative structures and practices. That option for individuals forces those structures to change.

But even this is too narrow, I think. To stick with the music example, it is a common belief among music media moguls that without commodification and financial incentives creators will not create. Thanks to what Lawrence Lessig calls “remix culture” we know this is not the case (in fact, artists knew it all along). People don’t NEED a financial incentive to share their bookmarks on del.icio.us, their photos on flickr, their music on MySpace. And much of this creativity IS spawned via proprietary mechanisms, for example, the current rage of “make yourself as a Simpson’s character” at http://www.simpsonsmovie.com, which has even its own photo pool on flickr.com where people are sharing the images generated on that proprietary site. Now the Simpson’s crew is notorious for their radical copyright attitude, and yet, individuals are getting a lot of surplus value out of exploiting the image-building interface and then sharing all of the images over at flickr.com. This is definitely a complexification of the traditional “exploitation” rhetoric.

>Trebor Scholz: People are being used and empowered at the same time. It is too early to say how effective new types of content licensing will be, or in fact are, in preventing (commercial) appropriation. Being used is one thing; not knowing that your attention is monetized is another.

Paul Hartzog: Yes, I agree. It’s an interesting question as to whether the requirement for transparency should be a legal solution, i.e. a law requiring public disclosure, or a market solution, i.e. users demanding that sites disclose or going elsewhere. It’s too early to tell which way that will play out, I think.

Thanasis/Pavlos: What type of sociality does the ‘Social Web’ produce? How does it deal with the problems of individualisation and community construction?

Paul Hartzog: I think this is a key area where we can identify what is working and what isn’t, with respect to the future of social technology and online participation. One can think of the two types of sociality being produced as two forces, one pulling towards individuals, and the other towards communities.

First, you have systems with an individualistic ontology. In these systems, the infrastructure exists to provide the ideal rational utilitarian user/consumer with some obvious personal benefit. If the individual utility drops too low, the user leaves. In my opinion, this kind of sociality is not really about community at all. You don’t feel a sense of community with other visitors to amazon.com who just happened to rate or comment on the same book you did.

Contrasted with that, you have online communities where the participants see the community as something beyond themselves. In these spaces, individuals are willing to transform themselves for the good of the community. I have witnessed this firsthand recently, in fact. A long debate about the core values of that community resulted in the creation of new spaces to accommodate the questions raised. The whole affair reminded me of the U.S. civil-rights era.

Where this distinction is analytically useful is that you can immediately see that certain kinds of online participants would naturally fall into the first category. These folks are really only concerned with the first type of sociality: sociality with an agenda. It should be noted that both the site-builders as well as the users can fall into this category. I don’t really GO to amazon.com to be social; I go to buy books. Conversely, the second category regards sociality as an intrinsic good, a process to be engaged in for its own sake. The difference between the two is typically self-organization.

This distinction goes all the way back to Aristotle and the idea that we are only fully human when we are engaging in the governance of our community. The first key point is that you can identify which type of sociality you are likely to encounter by simply looking at the motives of the community creators. The second key point is that very often communities escape from the motives of the creators and do something novel. This distinction has a significant consequence for political theorizing. In the physical world, a citizen can typically engage solely in the governance of a single geographical entity (sometimes nested entities). This meant that the primary political-theoretical conversation concerned the “best” or “optimal” form of government, and this has remained the case for thousands of years. However, now, online, people can and do simultaneously engage in numerous communities with widely varying forms of governance. So the question changes from having to pick one type of regime and argue for it, to simply being able to navigate as a participant the advantages, disadvantages, and rules of appropriate action from community to community. In addition, participants bring their experiences and expectations with them from community to community. Many communities, many forms of governance, many kinds of participants. I think this multiple-identity and community mobility ultimately creates a participant (citizen) who is much more sensitive to the joys and challenges of an actively engaged political life.

Trebor Scholz: Typologies of participation on the Social web would need to start with a separation of voluntary and involuntary participation (e.g., data mining).

The main activities on the Social Web are commenting, tagging, ranking, forwarding, reading, subscribing, re-posting, linking, moderating, remixing, sharing, collaborating, favoriting, writing; flirting, working, playing, chatting, gossiping, discussing, and learning.

A crucial phenomenon of the Web is that of captive community. Users contribute their content to social environments and are not able to take it with them if they wish to leave (eg., when you have uploaded years of your home videos on YouTube and photos on Flickr). User’s friends are concentrated in only a few places, which is a key motivating factor for people to congregate there. Content, therefore, is also concentrated, which makes these sites more attractive. This captivity is not accidental but is rather central to startup business strategies.

Thanasis/Pavlos: How does this sociality address the question of cultural difference? Is it gender-blind?

Trebor Scholz: Cultural difference is a big issue. 1.114 billion people use the Internet today - this number is so high due to the growth of the economically developing world. Half of this population is made up of women today. Things are changing in terms of the gender dynamic: within the 25-34 age group, women now dominate the Web.

However, in many participatory environments women prefer to read and participate silently (forward, copy, comment). Cultural difference is interesting to observe with regard to the success of certain social networking sites.

MySpace and Facebook took off in North America and Australia.

Facebook is more popular outside the US than Myspace. LiveJournal rules Russia. Orkut’s 68 million users are mainly from India and Brazil as well as Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Kuwait, Mauritius, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Peru, Portugal, Romania, Thailand, and Tunisia. Fotolog is the default in South America while Mexicans love hi5. Why do certain social networking sites dominate countries far away from their US American origin? A recent study by Zahir, Dobing and Hunter suggests that the colour schemes of the portals of these sites have something to do with it. But people also want to spend time where many other people are and once a site became the default for a certain age group in a geographic region, it’s hard to break that.

Paul Hartzog: Well we’ve known for some time that cultural difference affects knowledge and sociality in a deeply fundamental way. The book Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things by George Lakoff details how cultural differences affect not only category construction, but even things as basic as colour perception.

These differences also appear in gender studies. In fact, one of my personal crusades has been against the fact that the west has been manufacturing and exporting computers whose file systems as well as their operating systems are constrained by a western male hierarchical model, i.e. a tree of folders. Globalization and its resultant interpenetrative sociality needs to be sensitive to these elusive, often hidden, modes of domination.

But, as Trebor notes, there is a kind of counter-force that works against global homogeneity, and it manifests in the way that different groups have different modes of online participation. Culture is one; gender is another. There are others: wealth, accessibility, etc. In a general way, it can be useful to say that women tend to participate one way and men another, or that the rich participate one way and the poor another (for example, Danah Boyd’s recent exposure of class divisions being reproduced on MySpace and Facebook), but that doesn’t get us to the why of it all.

If our technologies are not difference-blind, then it is clearly because we, as human beings who have choices in how we deploy technology, are not difference-blind. But often what we are is blind to ourselves - our prejudices, our judgements, our habits, etc. The internet-worked world brings a lot of that to the forefront, and suddenly, you have some computer programmer somewhere whose work is going to be deployed globally, and he has to contend with the cultural biases in that work in a way that he never had to before. And not just individuals, but entire industries of knowledge production are pushed to adapt to this new environment.

Thanasis/Pavlos: You both maintain, at different degrees, a critical caution towards the Web 2.0 hype. What type of activism would you say would be more productive in relation to Web 2.0: the appropriation of the existing platforms of the social web, the creation of alternative ones?

Trebor Scholz: If we aim to live ethical lives in the context of the (mobile) Social Web, we’ll need any platform? Corporate, hybrid, or non-market that can serve as a place for meaningful interventions. Henry Jenkins, in Convergence Culture writes that “The debate keeps getting framed as if the only true alternative were to opt out of media altogether and live in the woods, eating acorns and lizards and reading only books published on recycled paper by small alternative presses” (pp. 248-49).

There are a few new fields of possibility in which networked publics can fight back. In September 2006 communal negotiating power was made apparent when 741,000 users joined the group against the introduction of the RSS feed on Facebook. The company withdrew the feature. In the past, such joint action of consumers was not as easy. Today’s information flows make it simpler to organize such a “rebellion.”

There are also many non-profit tools, peer-to-peer solutions and hybrid environments, and ethical businesses such as Craigslist. I’m also curious about ways in which individuals are making money on the Social Web-from Google Adsense to YouTube’s planned user pay-back scheme.

An additional example is the art practice of Kevin Killian, a San Francisco poet, who wrote 1525 reviews on Amazon.com (as of January 7th, 2006), arguably starting a new genre of literature. In a small bookstore in Brooklyn I found a booklet of the reviews that he wrote on Amazon.com . These texts are not really reviews, they are autobiographical fiction in the form of reviews, ranging from sweet potato baby food to Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago.

>Thanasis/Pavlos: How far are we from substantially connecting this type of activisms with offline critical practices?

Paul Hartzog: I think both kinds of engagement have costs and benefits. Clearly the appropriation of existing platforms saves on development costs. My earlier example of the alternative uses which have appeared on flickr.comis an example. No open-source group had to go invest time and money in an alternative photo-sharing platform. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that online platforms, which have been launched for specific reasons, will embrace or even tolerate alternative uses no matter how creative or popular. Even gmail might vanish.

Therefore, when faced with the constraints of existing structures, it is often the case that people will choose to, or be compelled, to turn aside and create something new on their own. This is the primary reason, in fact, why I keep returning to Hannah Arendt as a political thinker. From her we gain insight into the ability of people to undermine ostensibly illegitimate political and social practices, not by attacking them, but by simply engaging in some other practice that, by its very nature, calls the existing practices into question and, eventually, to account.

Ultimately, I think this is where Marxism fails, except maybe for Gramsci’s “war of position.” It’s the “tar baby” principle: You become attached to what you attack. You don’t want to take on those structures at the sites that they have defined, and which they hold, because, first of all, they operate in that space better than you do, and, second, you end up taking on their negative features in order to confront them. You lose a lot of yourself in that kind of terminal opposition. What you CAN do is refuse to play by their rules, and go off and explore what it is like to play by some other rules.

Early hackers did this, and so we ended up with open-source.

I think “long tail” and gift economics point outward as well.

MMORPG money markets, shared credit, and even systems that circumvent money (like FreeCycle) are all pioneering the new landscapes.

And this points to the other question concerning “offline” critical practices. Specifically, as writers like Paul Dourish, Malcolm McCullough, and others are pointing out, we are facing the “end of cyberspace.” In other words, as the information world becomes layered onto the physical world by mobility and ubiquity, the whole online/offline distinction becomes less useful as a framing metaphor ( e.g. see Alex Pang’s http://www.endofcyberspace.com). It is not a “here” and “there,” but rather, a relationship of complex landscapes that intersect and interact at many points. I don’t think we are far from that now, but I definitely think that the younger generations have a much better intuitive sense of what it requires of them to participate in that kind of world. What I think will become increasingly important, and here I know Trebor would agree, is that we mobilize (both in the sense of “carry around” as well as “use”) our critical faculties regardless of the particular social space in which we are present at that moment. It is “presence” that is useful as the new metaphor. On which landscapes are we present, and what do we want to do there?

In other words, in one space, you have a group of players who are saying “you have to do it our way or else,” and their model is an industrial-era model. The individuals and groups that choose not to detach themselves from those structures and practices will make themselves disappear just like Tower Records, EMI, and others (and I include traditional firms and governments in that group). Meanwhile, in this other space you have a group of people who are saying “Hey, look what we are doing! It’s pretty neat. Come join us if you are interested in cooperating to create some new rules.”

The invitation is always open.

Trebor Scholz: In 1991 Peter Lamborn Wilson (a.k.a. Hakim Bey) wrote Temporary Autonomous Zone, in which he used historical examples to describe the tactics of shaping temporary spaces that elude formal structures of control. The essay inspired Internet pioneers to experiment with the freedoms afforded by Internet. There was, for example, De Digitale Stad (“The Digital City“), which was launched by De Balie and XS4ALL as a publicly accessible (free-net) system with the goal of bringing politics and citizens together in an online community. Geert Lovink referred to De Digitale Stad as “a social experiment in Internet freedom.” It was the attempt of staying independent in an increasingly commercial environment.

Many of the altruistic projects that are still alive and kicking today, however, were funded by money entrepreneurs made in the early and mid 90s. Just take Archive.org. Brewster Khale was one of the first Internet entrepreneurs who made the 15 million dollars that allowed him to build Archive.org . Mitch Kapor made 100 million dollars with Lotus 1-2-3 and then set up the Open Source Foundation. The Omidyar Network was set up by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar with the goal to “enable individual self-empowerment on a global scale” and employ “business as a tool for social good.” Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com funds progressive film productions and has his independent space travel program.

But that’s not the only way. There is Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg, which is driven entirely by volunteers, without the initial money making scheme, without the resistance from within (the fortune 100) that so many in the US argue is inevitable. Project Gutenberg (PG) is the “oldest digital library built on volunteer efforts to digitize, archive, and distribute cultural works.” It is one of the largest single collections of free electronic books, or eBooks, online.

Third, there are uses of technologies and platforms against the intentions of the inventors. Twitter is used as human right advocacy tool in Egypt. Blogs are important in authoritarian regimes. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg provided the 741,000 people who joined the Student Against Facebook NewsFeed with a tool to unite against the company.

On May 1, 2007 an article appeared on Digg.com’s homepage that contained the encryption key for the AACS digital rights management protection of HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc. Digg removed the submissions and banned contributors. Many users saw the removals as a capitulation to corporate interests and an assault on free speech. The Digg community staged a widespread revolt. One of the Digg users referred to it as a “Digital Boston Tea Party.” Digg’s Kevin Rose responded:

“[A]fter seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be.”

While I think that there are definite limits to the negotiating power of networked publics, these examples show that they have certain manoeuvrability and that this space for manoeuvre has become larger.

Capitalism has always given space to such critical movements. Now it is easier for users/producers to join up, complain, strive for free cooperation and for the renegotiation of some rules, as Paul mentions.

This, however, has nothing to do with deep-rooted social change.

DS: Before we get into the content of the book and your current projects, I wonder if you could give an introduction to your early career as a writer, performer and educator? What was your focus in terms of early studies and what then led you into the past and into the archives with your media archaeology?

SZ: Thirty-five years ago, when I began my studies, it was theater, radio, and film which interested me in the field of media. As a young man, who studied in Germany and came from a Polish-German family (from the region where Hans Bellmer was born), I was occupied analytically in the first years by a question: I absolutely wanted to know how the
Nazis had used media, how they had conquered the heads and hearts of those who supported their death-machines or even killed for them. Parallel to such analyses of power, I was interested as well in the other side and how they used media. Trained through interventionist thinkers like Bertolt Brecht or Walter Benjamin, who not only understood the controlling power of media, but also contemplated its emancipatory potential, I turned to the dimensions of media history which were practically forgotten or buried, for example, the activities of the so-called Worker-Radio Movement in the Weimar Republic who carried out their resistance activities through the medium of the radio, and even existed in the Nazi death camps, or the so-called “Free Radios” and video guerrillas of the 1970’s. “Supervision and Subversion” - so could one, in a Foucauldian manner, formulate the tensions between these media interests regarding vision by means of modern technology.

The investigation of the deep layers of media history began, however paradoxically at first, when I dedicated myself in the eighties and nineties more intensively to new electronic media. As a media researcher who had twenty years earlier written his philosophic dissertation on the history of the video recorder, I had a growing uneasiness with the idea of the future that was being suddenly and constantly announced to me. I doubted very much that our epoch embodied the greatest possibilities of progress in the history of civilization, if one used diversity - the richness of variety in existing things, forms, techniques, arts, etc - as criteria for progress. I looked for allies in other sciences and found them in geology and paleontology, for example James Hutton, who lived in Scotland at the end of the 18th century, or more recently, the Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould. I began to conduct something like a paleontology of media-development. One last important impetus for this research was the encounter with the wonderful holdings of an old Jesuit library in Salzburg, where I held my first professorship. The folios of media-visionaries from the 16th and 17th century like John Dee, Giovanni Battista della Porta, Christoph Sheiner, and Athanasius Kircher waited here to be discovered through a historically and philosophically interested art and media research. The connection of the two heterogeneous worlds, on the one hand the highly polished surfaces of the newest media and on the other the moldy, smelly magical world of unwieldy Latin texts and excessive iconography became a passion which still consumes all of my time. Although, I had to push them a bit to the background, as I was asked in the 1990s to build a special art school in Cologne, which would be fully dedicated to the changing relations of technology and art.

DS: What is unique in your work is the spirit and tone which you bring to the “case studies” that you have collected. The body of works reflects rigorous research, but also a consistent affirmation of the unexpected turns that arise throughout the process. In this way, the book represents a praxis that you have described as “anarchaeology,” and more recently as “variantology.” Could you describe this method and why you have found it particularly applicable to the study of the
history of media?

SZ: In my studies I try to connect two movements, one through the verticality of phenomena and processes, which means in effect, the attempt to get to the bottom of things - about which, above all, I was encouraged by the Polish artist and poet Bruno Schulz. The second movement is characterized by the conceptual dance on the plateau, which I have learned less from French thinkers like Deleuze and Guattari than for example from the philosopher Vilem Flusser, who the Nazis drove out from the alchemist-city of Prague to Sao Paulo, where he learned to couple a deep consideration of the world with the dynamic figure of the samba. That is however only a somewhat provocative example. Along with the poet Novalis, who died much too young, I am of the opinion that the sciences belong to the poetized and that they should be handled musically, because musical relations appear to be the “fundamental relations of Nature.” But, I do not share with Novalis the despairing search for the absolute in all things. I try to substitute this search with a method of fortuitous finds. However, such a method must renounce some things which characterize classical archeology, like the search for the origin from which all things develop. Like Nietzsche and Foucault, I favor the concept of geneaology for historical research, which asks after the developments, turns and leaps. As opposed to Foucault and his diverse archaeologies of power and knowledge, I claim no mastery, do not claim to develop one or more main ideas that would resonate semantically with archos/archein. In the case of the movement that the fortuitous find presupposes, one must let the reins fall away and let the horse gallop free, without knowing what exactly will arrive. The coupling of this with the vertical movement leads to anything but simple
arbitrariness; rather it leads to a research work that understands itself as a joyful release from a heavy burden.

When I wrote Deep Time of the Media, I had invented for it the concept of anarcheology. This term now seems to me too negative and destructive in its construction. For two or three years, I have worked only with the concept of variantology, under which I understand the imaginary sum of all possible genealogies of media phenomena. As opposed to the heterogeneous, with its heavy resonances from ontology and biology, the variantological, in its methodological and
epistemological respect, interests me as a mode of lightness. The variant is just as at home in the experimental sciences as it is in diverse artistic practices, above all in music. As different varieties or divergent interpretations, variants belong for composers or performers to a self-evident vocabulary and to practical everyday life. The semantic field of this neologism possesses a positive connotation. To be different, divergent, changing, alternating, are alternative translations for the Latin verb variare. It tips over only into the negative when it is used by the speaking subject as a means of exclusion, which the word does not actually sustain. To vary something then is an alternative to its destruction.

DS: Within Deep Time, the individuals which you bring forth are most often found on the fringes of their professional worlds and prevailing academic paradigms of research and practice. In these stories, it seems that you are trying to draw out a new kind of figure to venerate, individuals that had a wild streak, and may have been considered dangerous in regards to the institutions that kept them at arms length. Is this a fair reading, or perhaps an oversimplification of your tableau of characters?

SZ: To not accept leaders does not mean that one does not respect heroes. In my work with young artists and intellectuals in various academies, I have learned that without personalities with whom one can passionately identify, one manages only with difficulty. It is essentially better when this potential for identification is not identical with the teacher, but rather comes completely from somewhere else, from another time, another region, possibly out of books. When we are involved with art and media, we operate in the world of illusions. The Latin verb (illudere) that hides in this beautiful word means etymologically not only to bring something before others, to produce appearances, but as well to enter into a risk, to set
something into play, even, when necessary, involving oneself. This necessity is not rendered superfluous under the conditions of the production or generation of art with digital media or in technological relations. Completely the opposite - we must think them anew. My excursions into the lives of a few and their partly impossible working conditions gesture to this effect.

And something else appears to me to be significant in this context: artists and intellectuals don’t necessarily need to shove their way in the middle of society in order to be able to find recognition or to be effective. It has become narrow there in the center, and in this center, power is at home. Also, for a long time now, art that is involved with new media technologies has also arrived in the center. Movements on the periphery, which do not exclude the occasional crossing of the center, appear to me at present to be more meaningful and in the foreseeable future, more pleasurable than the overexcited pushing and shoving for the best place in the middle.

DS: You suggest a geographical relationship to media research and that much of the most diverse and vital experimentation in prior periods occurred in dispersed regions, at a remove from the cultural centers of Europe, in southern Italy for example or in areas of eastern Europe. Could you elaborate on this cartographical theme as it relates to your media research?

SZ: Cartographies are a special view of the world (the German term Weltanschauung expresses this very nicely). From a perspective of media archeology, we have to give up trusted cartographies. Technical media as we know them were made marketable and developed into products in the metropolis of the western world (London, Paris, New York, Berlin, etc). If however we are interested in deep-temporal emergence and development, we have to use a wholly other orientation. The deeper we penetrate historical layers, the more we must turn towards the far East and above all towards China, and from there we roam through Asia Minor and the Arab lands and cultures, moving then into southern Europe, before we arrive in the pre-modern regions and cities familiar to us. My thesis is that the new and arousing ideas come out of the provinces much more frequently than out of the centers of power, where they are worked over and freed from their resistances. In order to characterize the particular form of collective work which emerges out of the networking of heterogeneous ideas and fields, I use the expression “economy of friendship”. It is a positive counter-model to the globalized economy of industrialization and the only one in the field of art which functions and is alive. The geographical and cartographical implications of my anarcheological studies are to be understood, not least, as a plea for the idea of the economy of friendship.

DS: In the final chapter, one of the practical points made in reference to the experimentation of new media artists and developers is the need for safe havens, contexts for individuals or collectives to be given the gift of time and space to develop ideas. Do you find that this is part of your present role in Cologne with the Academy of Media Arts, to be hospitable in this way to the young people who come through the school?

SZ: More and more in Europe, academic institutions are permeable to the demands and desires of the fitters and guiders of the states. Poets and thinkers however need autonomy and freedom as indispensable and sustaining elixirs. Academies of the arts and sciences must not degenerate into test departments of the globalized information society. For the institutions to which I am responsible, I thus plead vehemently that they be able to proliferate as gleaming ivory towers. Study at the academy should be more than ever the offer of a protected time and space where original thoughts and idea can be developed and tried out. The possibility of failure belongs to experimentation. That is nothing other than the idea of a contemporary laboratory, whose windows and doors must above all not be closed. At the academy in Cologne for example we offer ourselves constantly up to the judgments and critiques of the public, through exhibitions, open concerts, performances and lectures. Within the dynamic of this openness, however, we maintain ourselves and don’t let it regulate us. The students and the guests of our program enjoy the freedom to experiment and offer their thanks through outstanding projects and artistic work, which have received international recognition. We remind our students and fellows in any case of their crucial duty: they have to be ready to take risks and not want to simply swim in conventional waters. And with that the circle of the project of a deep time of the media and variantology closes. Giovanni Battista della Porta’s Academy of Secrets in Naples in the 16th century, which soon after its founding was banned by the Vatican, was the first academy fully dedicated to the risky experiment of natural philosophy. It had a single admission criteria, that those who wanted to participate must bring something new into the world (and be prepared to share this knowledge with others). It is time that we again rightly restore such an Accademia dei segreti and let it finally become a flourishing reality.

David Senior is an artist, writer and student of media history who currently works in the library at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is a doctoral student at the European Graduate School, EGS.

Interview with Siegfried Zielinski by David Senior; translated by William Rauscher; commissioned by Rhizome.org.

… a gift economy in an economy of abundance…

Vernacular Video by Tom Sherman: The technology of video is now as common as a pencil for the middle classes. People who never even considered working seriously in video find themselves with digital camcorders and non-linear video-editing software on their personal computers. They can set up their own “television stations” with video streaming via the Web without much trouble. The revolution in video-display technologies is creating massive, under-utilized screen space and time, as virtually all architecture and surfaces become potential screens. Video-phones will expand video’s ubiquity exponentially. These video tools are incredibly powerful and are nowhere near their zenith. If one wishes to be part of the twenty-first-century, media-saturated world and wants to communicate effectively with others or express one’s position on current affairs in considerable detail, with which technology would one chose to do so, digital video or a pencil? - NOEMA.

The Emergence of Open Source Culture

The Next Layer or: The Emergence of Open Source Culture :: Draft text for Pixelache publication, Armin Medosch, London/Vienna 2006-2007

First we had media art. In the early days of electronic and digital culture media art was an important way of considering relationships between society and technology, suggesting new practices and cultural techniques. It served as an outlet for the critique of the dark side of computer culture’s roots in the military-industrial complex; and it suggested numerous utopian and beautiful ways of engagement with technology, new types of interactivity, sensuous interfaces, participative media practices, for instance. However, the more critical, egalitarian and participative branches of media art tended to be overshadowed by the advocacy of a high-tech and high-art version of it. This high-media art conceptually merged postmodern media theories with the techno-imaginary from computer sciences and new wave cybernetics. Uncritical towards capitalisms embrace of technology as provider of economic growth and a weirdly paradoxical notion of progress, high-media art was successful in institutionalizing itself and finding the support of the elites but drew a lot of criticism from other quarters of society. It stuck to the notion of the artist as a solitary genius who creates works of art which exist in an economy of scarcity and for which intellectual ownership rights are declared.
In the course of the 1990ies media art was superseded by what I call The Next Layer or, for help of better words, Open Source Culture. I am not claiming that the hackers who are the key protagonists of Open Source Culture are the new media artists. Such a claim would be rubbish as their work, their ways of working and how it is referenced is distinct from media art. I simply say that media art has become much less relevant through the emergence of The Next Layer. In the Next Layer many more protagonists come together than in the more narrowly defined field of media art. It is much less elitist and it is not based on exclusivity but on inclusion and collaboration. Instead of relying on ownership of ideas and control of intellectual property Open Source Culture is testing the limits if a new egalitarian and collaborative culture.

In the following paragraphs I would like to map out some of the key components of Open Source Culture. It has been made possible by the rise of Free, Libre and Open Source Software. Yet Open Source Culture is about much more than just writing software. Like any real culture it is based on shared values and a community of people.

Open Source Culture is about creating new things, be they software, artefacts or social platforms. It therefore embraces the values inherent to any craft and it cherishes the understanding and mastery of the materials and the production processes involved. Going beyond craftmanship and being ‘open source’, it advocates free access to the means of production (instead of just “ownership” of them). Creativity is not just about work but about playfulness, experimentation and the joy of sharing. In Open Source Culture everybody has the chance to create immaterial and material things, express themselves, learn, teach, hear and be heard.

Open Source Culture is not a tired version of enforced collectivism and old fashioned speculations about the ‘death of authorship’. It is not a culture where the individual vanishes but where the individual remains visible and is credited as a contributor to a production process which can encompass one, a few or literally thousands of contributors.

Fundamental to Open Source Culture’s value system is the belief that knowledge should be in the public domain. What is generally known by humans should be available to all humans so that society as a whole can prosper. For most parts and wherever possible, this culture is based on a gift economy. Each one gets richer by donating their work to a growing pool of publicly available things. This is not a misguided form of altruism but more like a beneficial selfishness. Engaged in a sort of friendly competition everyone is pushing the whole thing forward a bit by trying to do something that is better, faster, more beuatiful or imaginative. Open Source Culture is a culture of conversation and as such based on multiple dialogues on different layers of language, code and artefacts. But the key point is that the organisation of labour is based on the self-motivated activity of many individuals and not on managerial hierarchies and ’shareholder value’.

Open Source Culture got a big push forward with the emergence of Linux and the Internet but we shouldn’t forget that it has much deeper roots. History didn’t start with Richard Stallmans problems with a printer driver. The historic roots could be seen as going back to the free and independent minded revolutionary artists and artisans in 19th century. More recently, it is based on post-World-War-II grassroots anti-imperialist liberation movements, on bottom-up self-organised culture of the new political movements of the 1960ies and 1970ies such as the African American civil rights movements, feminisim, lesbian, gay, queer and transgender movements, on the first and second wave of hacker culture, punk and the DIY culture, squatter movements, and the left-wing of critical art and media art practices.

In terms of the political economy, Open Source Culture could mark an important point of departure, by liberating the development of new technologies from being dictated by capital. The decision of what should be developed for which social goals is taken by the developers themselves. Technological development is not driven by greed but by deep intrinsic motivations to create things and to be recognized for ones contribution. Despite that, Open Source Culture is not an anti-capitalist ideology per se but has the potential to change capitalism from within and is already doing so.

Open Source Culture needs to be constantly aware of capitalisms propensity to adapt, adopt, co-opt and subjugate progressive movements and ideas to its own goals. The ‘digital revolution’ was already stolen once by the right-wing libertarians from Wired and their republican allies such as Newt Gingrich and the posse of American cyber-gurus from George Gilder to Nicholas Negroponte. More recently adept Open Source Capitalists have used terms such as Web 2.0 and social software to disguise the fact that what those terms are said to describe has emerged from open source culture and the net culture of the 1990ies and the early 2000s. Once more the creativity of the digital masses is exploited by alliances between new and old tycoons. The Next Layer emerges at a time when capitalism is stronger than ever before and it emerges at the very heart of it. This is the beauty of it. It cannot be described in a language of mainstream and underground. Open Source Culture is the new mainstream which is what capitalist media are doing their best to hide, scared by the spectre of communism as well as commonism. We don’t need to ressort to the language of the Cold War and its dichotomies, howver.

The Next Layer contains not only a promise but also a threat. It emerges at a time when the means of suppression and control have been increased by rightwing leaders who try to scare us into believing we were engaged in an endless ‘war on terror’. With their tactics they have managed to speed up the creation of a technological infrastructure for a society of control. The general thrust of technological development is coming from inside a paranoiac mindset. 25 years of neo-liberalism in the American lead empire have degraded civil liberties and human values. The education system has been turned into a sausage factory where engineers are turned out who construct their own digital panopticons. Scary new nano- and bio-technologies are created in secret laboratories by Big Science. And the bourgeioise intelligentsia meanwhile has stood still and does not recognize the world any more but still controls theatres, publishing and universities. In this situation it is better if Open Source Culture is not recognized as a political movement. The Next Layer will find ways of growing and expanding stealthily by filling the niches, nooks and crannies of a structurally militant and imperialist repressive regime from which, given time, it will emerge like a clear spring at the bottom of a murky glacier.

* The Next Layer is a book project by Armin Medosch about Open Source Culture. It has been supported by Franz Xaver and the Medienkunstlabor Graz in 2006. Passages of this text are informed by an extensive study into free software hackers and open source activists. Materials will be released in due time at http://theoriebild.ung.at/

Armin,

Interesting text. The formulation of a high art version of media art is particularly relevant at the current moment, as more and more media artists are trying to cross over into the commercial art world, getting gallerists and selling their work as commodities.

While I understand your critical view of “high art”, I wonder if you have considered an economic model for artists to survive without some form of commodification. While Open Source is clearly a viable and attractive model, most of its proponents live from other means of income or are supported by academic institutions. At the moment, many media artists are reliant on the media art “ghetto” of publicly funded festivals, but it rarely pays enough to support a family or plan a long life.

I do find it ironic that one has to subscribe to the construction of value through scarcity, when the digital object is by its nature infinitely reproducible. But if value cannot be constructed, how are artists supposed to pay their rent without taking “real” jobs? Even if YouTube etc. should find a licensing model for paying authors for their work, I doubt it will put food on the table for most artists.

Or should your text be read as saying that the role of “artist” is simply redundant , in favor of a more egalitarian model of “culture producers” not depending on institutions for support?

-marius [posted on SPECTRE]

FROM NETTIME: http://www.nettime.org

Kimberly De Vries wrote:

<…>
Well, give how poorly American students are (allegedly) doing in science, maybe this threat has a limited future, in the US, that is. But I wonder, if remaining unrecognized is so important, wouldn’t it be better not to draw attention with articles like this? I hope this doesn’t sound like heckling, but in fact large corporations and also some political groups have really gone after people/companies/groups they saw as threats. Should we actually behave in a more conspiratorial way in order to protect the Open Source movement? Anyway, it sounds interesting. When do you expect it to be finished and released?

Thanks,
Kim
<…>

From: Armin Medosch:

Hi Kimberley

thanks for your your detailed feedback. this text is a draft and some phrases or sentences are not as well considered as others. I definitely dont want to sound paranoid because I am not. Maybe I get carried away a bit rethorically at the end but I dont really see the need to ‘hide’ the political content. what I try to say, the beauty is, it happens anyway, even if it is not being seen as that.

From a European point of view I dont think there are political witchhunts for people in academia going on, not yet at least. But what does the job pretty well of weeding out the baddies, the not so ideologically well adjusted, are ’self selecting’ economic measures. ma courses closed down for low student numbers, cuts, etc. it is one of the ironies particularly here in Britain that much talkied about values of education get systematically undermined by the way the system is constructed.

The intended book will still take a while. This text is an attempt of getting a meta-view, away from the detail. I have made interviews with free software developers and artists and I will make them accessible on the theoriebild.ung.at wiki, at least in excerpts, slowly and bit by bit, cause its lots of work to edit them into some consumable shape.

regards
Armin

From: kanarinka:

[...]

I am reading an interesting book (”From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”) which is not line with what you are saying above and goes against the commonly held assumption that “capitalism” commodified an otherwise pure cultural force. The author Fred Turner tracks how computer technology became “liberating” and how digital utopianism was always hand-in-hand with various forces: corporate, market-driven, scientific, and institutional. He also shows how Wired came out of leftist libertarian New Communalist politics and long practices (on the part of Stewart Brand) of creating networked spaces of social utopianism, discussion and exchange between various actors.

From: Alexander Galloway

[...]

Thanks for this interesting polemic. First a minor point: can you please qualify the “we” in “First ‘we’ had media art”? Who is the we? One can only assume that by “we” you mean happy-go-lucky nettimers? The sorts of people who attend net art conferences? Lefty westerns in Euramerica who hand out Ubuntu disks on the street? I think I know who you mean, but some precision in your clarion call would be helpful.

A more thorny problem however is this question of “the new.” This strikes me as inadequate for any progressive polemic today. If you maintain this position, fine, but you will have to make your peace with a number of formidable socio-political critiques that have emerged in recent years. I’m speaking of the growing list of authors and critics who recognize that “the new” is precisely the location of exploitation and valorization in today’s economy, not an escape from it.

Armin’s post recalls the German romantic poet Friedrich Schiller who in 1795 in his “On the Aesthetic Education of Man” put forward a notion of play as integral to human evolution and liberation. But by the early twentieth century, Adorno is on record critiquing this position: “Playful forms are without exception forms of repetition,” wrote Adorno in his “Aesthetic Theory.” “In art, play is from the outset disciplinary [and] art allies itself with unfreedom in the specific character of play. [...] The element of repetition in play is the afterimage of unfree labor” (pp. 317-318).

The work of Pierre Bourdieu would also undermine your position. There are certainly reasons to be skeptical of his work, but one must admit that Bourdieusian theory essentially scuttles any notion that intellectuals or knowledge workers are “creating” and working in communities free from capitalization and exchange. Bourdieu’s pseudo-deterministic “fields” of cultural production indicate that there are indeed new modes of capital that exist entirely within the superstructure.

Similarly, Alan Liu’s “The Laws of Cool” would also cast doubt on your claims. While I find his reading of digital art unsatisfying, his assessment of knowledge work and capitalist cultures of creativity is excellent. In my view it’s the best book on the subject, at least the best one that doesn’t treat creativity and “the new” as simply a question of political economy (as someone like Manuel Castells does). For Liu it is entirely a question of aesthetics and cultural production. Liu also does the extremely valuable task of providing an overview and critique of recent management theory. This body of literature–exemplified by Tom Peter’s 1992 book “Liberation Management”–also casts doubt on your credo due to its explicit endorsement of “chaos,” “flexibility,” “change,” “innovation,” “diversity,” “the next” as central virtues of the new economy. The management consultants know that creativity is highly valorizable. In my view this mode has been hegemonic in the economy since the 1990s, and central but not yet dominant since the 1970s. (The work of Hardt and Negri on immaterial labor is also important here, but this material is likely more familiar to nettimers.) Technology-wise, Google, Flickr, Myspace, youTube, del.icio.us, etc. are all examples of what you call “playfulness, experimentation and the joy of sharing,” but I hope we can admit that all these are at the same time extremely shrewd new models for production and exploitation. (Example: Google makes money based on lots of very small amounts of unpaid “creative” labor performed by billions of web users. This is what exploitation looks like under
post-Fordism.)

Additionally, there are a number of people in art history who suspect the uninterrogated category of “the new.” I’m thinking of Rosalind Krauss’ “The Originality of the Avant-Garde” and Peter Burger’s “Theory of the Avant-Garde.”

But on the other hand, there are a number who agree with you about the essentially liberatory and progressive nature of “the new.” Derrida and others from the ‘68 generation would be important figures here. But in the contemporary debate, McKenzie Wark’s book “A Hacker Manifesto” might be the best endorsement of the resistive and progressive nature of “the new.” In his view, hackers are those who “produce new concepts, new perceptions, new sensations, hacked out of raw data” (p. 2). Wark’s work is extremely evocative in general, yet this point is problematic for the reasons hinted at above.

Perhaps it might help to divide the rhetoric of your piece between (1) creativity, play, and the new, and (2) the gift, the public domain. The second group of terms strike me as still fundamentally corrosive for capitalist valorization (even if capitalism might still rely on “common” entities like protocols or natural resources to grow and prosper). Furthermore, I think you can make your same argument, while avoiding pie-in-the-sky proclamations about the miraculous advent of “the new” or the liberatory potential of the knowledge labor of the creative classes.

Finally, in this age of dotcom boosterism, I’m surprised you selected a phrase like “The Next Layer” to describe your project. This sounds more like a Vista service pack, no?

… with warm regards from the evil empire,

- -ag

From: Kimberly De Vries

Hey Armin,

I don’t mean you should hide it, but maybe mention/document some examples when you talk about various covert deals made between groups–just claiming they exist won’t convince a reader who doesn’t already agree, and I assume you would like to persuade them.

I think in the US, at least, people are sometimes so reluctant to believe these things that you have practically club them over the head with evidence.

[...]

I think that is a problem in the US as well, especially since educations has been underfunded since probably the 70s–perhaps not coincidentally the point at which it was most closely allied to civil rights and anti-war movements.

And now in Arizona, a state-level House committee has approved legislation that would ban any public school educator or college professor from advocating for or against a political candidate in class, or advocating for a social, political, or cultural issue that is part of a partisan debate. If this passes, I can’t imagine what they will talk about or write about in History class, or composition, or really any of them. I guess we can all just switch to multiple choice tests.

[...]

Perhaps you should make that aim explicit and say more about how it will help? I’ll be interested to see the interviews. How many people have you spoken or will you speak to?

Best,

Kim

From: Kimberly De Vries

Armin,

Sorry for being unclear earlier. I was thinking of passages like this:

“The ‘digital revolution’ was already stolen once by the right-wing libertarians from Wired and their republican allies such as Newt Gingrich and the posse of American cyber-gurus from George Gilder to Nicholas Negroponte. ”

And this:

“The education system has been turned into a sausage factory where engineers are turned out who construct their own digital panopticons. Scary new
nano- and bio-technologies are created in secret laboratories by Big Science.”

In the US, some people will nod in agreement when reading this, but by no means all, and probably most people would question many assumptions implicit in these statements.

I personally agree that coding really can’t help but be political, given the current debate about copyrights and IP, etc. (among other things) and also with your ultimate proposal that the cocoa coop and hack-lab should unite. I am just pointing out that some of these underlying assumptions will probably provoke considerable resistance in some readers. You might persuade more of them if you unpack those genral statements a bit and offer some concrete examples.

Best,

Kim

Sean Cubitt: Cheap and easy is always good. talk, as they say, is cheap. Thank God. It takes millions of people talking (and writing, which is nearly as cheap) to produce one poet; and it takes millions strumming away to produce one musician. Those of us who only talk and strum are nonetheless experts, in the sense that we know how hard it is to make words and sounds do what you want them to, and so we are the perfect audience for the poet and the muso. It will take a million mash-ups to make one work that will really make your jaw drop.
And yet I canÂt help fretting that the NewsCorp purchase of MySpace, and the Google buy-out of YouTube, are exemplary moves towards the commercialisation of cultural democracy. A million content-producers raise the levels, and create the audience, but the coming Homer will be just another unpaid prosumer in the gardens of digital labour. The cynic in me sees digital gaming as training for the unpaid labour that was informally organised in the TV era. Already back then, as Dallas Smythe noted in the 1950s, all non-working, non-sleeping time was being colonised by another form of work, which he called the production of attention-value. When broadcasters sell audiences to advertisers, they obviously don’t enslave them body and soul. What is changing hands is the attention of viewers. And how are the viewers paid for their attention? I suppose you could answer that they receive some kind of gratification from the endless repetition of adverts and jingles, but it seems a paltry recompense when compared with the billion-dollar trade in eyeballs. The same has to be said of content-producing internet users, with bells on.

There is no longer any reason to believe the internet is intrinsically democratic, or intrinsically anything. The network is the network, in the same way air is air. Air is of course intensely democratic, but then we thought the same about water, and look how that has become a user-pays industry, and a weapon of war. This doesn’t mean we should withdraw from drinking and washing; and it doesn’t mean we should refrain from struggling for a viable ecology. Ditto the internet: we can no longer live as if it did not exist. To abandon it to NewsCorp would be unthinkable. Historically, the net, the web, and almost every working application has been thrown together by creatives, whether for fun or profit. Almost nothing has been produced by corporations. Clearly corporate structures, however they benefit from network communications, are inadequate to the cultural innovations that users produce. And yet they have the inherited wealth that allows them to buy, one by one, every new tool and toy. I admire Wikimedia for holding out as long as they have, and longer. Linux likewise. These are the models: pirate enclaves, temporary autonomous zones. The reason we keep our smiles, as the greedy, incompetent commercial sector mops up our devotion to the internet gift economy, is that they manifest with every purchase their inability to originate, and in that admission, their incapacity for the global rule to which they lay claim.

Perhaps I’m wrong in thinking that democracy is commercialised in web 2.0 formats. Perhaps instead commercialism is being democratised. Certainly the nature of both is changing. Some of me is conse