The Order of Things is an exhibition on the uses of archival images, image archives and image banks (and various other manifestations of a classificatory, encyclopaedic impulse) in contemporary art. It takes as its point of departure a web-based project by Vancouver photo-artist Roy Arden titled The World as Will and Representation, an online image archive consisting of a staggering 30,000+ jpegs from which Arden, who helped to flesh out many of the germinal ideas for this exhibition, selects the visual motifs for his recent digital photo-collages.

In The Order of Things, this image archive’s use of a stringent classificatory logic – alphabetical and thus eminently logical, yet also often bizarre in its (inevitably arbitrary) ordering of one ‘class’ of images after another – operates as a curatorial trigger for a sustained reflection upon the various uses of archives, databases, encyclopaedias, typologies and other “ordering devices” (the title being an allusion to a well-known book by the historian of dis/order, Michel Foucault) as methods and strategies for confronting the delirious spectacle of the contemporary image world. This delirium is of course nowhere more palpably present than in the phenomenal proliferation of (photographic) imagery that is the worldwide: the conceptual horizon of the Internet figures as one of the exhibition’s defining parameters – hence the centrality accorded to Arden’s own The World as Will and Representation in the exhibition, hence also the inclusion of one of Thoma s Ruff’s emblematic “jpeg” photographs, or of Joachim Schmid’s exploration of the aesthetic of the ordered everyday in the depths of Flickr. In some sense, The Order of Things views the world as a universe entirely made up out of images/pictures (mainly of a vernacular photographic nature) and only made accessible to us through images/pictures; a world that may seem impossibly chaotic, and therefore invites all kinds of ordering interventions that seek to domesticate and contain the natural excesses of the image-world. This partly ironic, self-conscious Will to Order – a classificatory impulse that is supremely aware of its own futility, and of the fatal contingency of its classificatory criteria – is the precise juncture where the archival and/or encyclopaedic impulse in contemporary art enters into the picture: the “art of classification” that is implied in the archive, the atlas and the encyclopaedia (or its corollaries, the data-base and image-bank) is an integral self-reflexive part of what Martin Heidegger has called “the fundamental event of the modern age” – the “conquest of the world as picture.”

Visual abundance and the excessive aesthetics of plenty, as formal qualities of the world encountered in this chaotic, delirious avalanche of images, are at the heart of this exhibition. They are features of our contemporary digitized condition that inevitably invite critical scrutiny (much of which takes the shape of art – an art that seeks to impose order, or otherwise reveal the hidden order of things), yet at the same time also act as sources of authentic wonder to which art may respond by duplicating this spectacle of visual overload, by adding to it even. This deep, irresolvable ambiguity – a seamless reflection of the ambivalence of the image proper – is a defining characteristic of the exhibition, and of much of the work included in it, and of course serves to remind us of the ironies implied in all uses of the term ‘order’. It is an irony that is also present in the awareness that, no matter how sincere and profound contemporary art’s indignant criticism of the society of spectacle may seem (and effectively be), art – and art’s desire to see everything and show everything – also irrefutably belongs to this very regime of spectacularization.

Two types of profusion, then, are at work in this exhibition. One pertains to the brute fact of the visual abundance characteristic of contemporary society proper – the realization of the world’s overwhelming visual riches, and the mirror effect it creates in any art that seeks to respond to this relative wealth by replicating it. Here we find the rationale for the exhibition’s own character of visual overload – the sheer quantity of work on display that consists, precisely, of picturing (or imaging/imagining) quantity. Secondly, there is also the fact of the fundamental heterogeneity of the visual abundance that characterizes the image-world – hence also the heterogeneity of artistic responses to this fact: not only is it an art of visual plenty, it is also one of irreducible differences and differentiations. To grasp the baffling variety of artistic attitudes, methods and practices that are at play in this labyrinthine exhibition – a reflection in itself of the labyrinthine nature of the world as such, and one that must by its very definition remain incomplete – a number of organizational principles that symbolize or reflect these varying attitudes, methods and practices have been isolated, such as “appropriation”, “archives”, “collage & bricolage,” and “typology”.

As is clear from these enumerations and taxonomies, photography will be the dominant medium in the exhibition; it is the technical innovation of photography and of the ideally limitless reproducibility of its images, theorized to such epochal effect by Walter Benjamin, that has transformed our experience of the world into an overwhelmingly visual one. Furthermore, photography has also contributed decisively to the democracy of imagery that is implied in the exhibition’s conceptual make-up: as a project, The Order of Things would be entirely unthinkable without the democratization of image production that was ushered in by the popularization of photography, beginning with the introduction of cheap cameras and film at the beginning of the twentieth century, all the way up to the advent of digital photography and the Internet as everyman’s image bank.

Participating artists & artworks by: Roy Arden (CAN), Sarah Charlesworth (US), Marjolijn Dijkman (NL), Hans Eijkelboom (NL), Daniel Faust (US), Douglas Huebler (US), Sanja Ivekovic (CRO), Luis Jacob (CAN), Cameron Jamie (US), Arthur Lipsett (CAN), Tine Melzer (D), Marc Nagtzaam (NL), Cady Noland (US), Peter Piller (D), Sigmar Polke (D), Richard Prince (US), Robert Rauschenberg (US), ROMA Publications (Mark Manders & Roger Willems) (NL), Julian Rosefeldt (D), Thomas Ruff (D), Joachim Schmid (D), Steven Shearer (CAN), Nancy Spero (US), Batia Suter (CH), Els Vanden Meersch (B), Christopher Williams(US)

Curated by Dieter Roelstraete.

Over the past ten years, Peter Horvath has experimented with new Internet-based forms of cinematic narrative. His work is known for its pioneering exploration of video in the context of the Internet, combining hypertext with sound and Web programming.

His first piece, The Guide (1995), established a link between two mass media: the Web and television. Still in its infancy, the Web demonstrated its interactive possibilities at a time when television was a more prevalent medium, but one that permitted only limited interaction insofar as viewers could select their programming. At that time, this piece questioned the medium’s relevance, granting its users an appropriate significance in relation to it. In his first works, Horvath combined photographs, texts, graphics and animation to create lyrical, a-temporal fragments. Over time, the artist’s aesthetic focused increasingly on film as he used video as a composition tool to render pared-down and yet detailed moving images in his framing and presentation of particular situations. By using pop-up windows (an endemic feature of the Internet’s multi-layered environment), Horvath emphasizes the narrative functionality of instruments specific to the Web. In his continual explorations, the artist depicts the expressive capacities of Net Cinema in works that examine substantially diverse human conditions such as displacement, envy, loneliness, love, seduction, innocence, fear, individuality and identity. His works are constructed in a medium that represents an ideal setting, associated with certain thought structures that allow him to establish a dialogue with these relatively subjective experiences.

Taking into account that the development of film over the twentieth century has given us a certain sense of increased self-perception, Horvath transfers this discourse to the complex world of the Web. He also addresses the topicality of the Web 2.0 as a social networking tool. The works presented in this retrospective at the Museo Tamayo include Boulevard (2007), Tenderly Yours (2005), Intervals (2004), The Presence of Absence (2003) and Unexpected Launching of Heavy Objects (2003).

Peter Horvath works in video, sound, photography and new media. At the age of twenty, he began exploring the concept of time-based art, which led him to co-found www.6168.org, making Net Art as the Web became a social network. His work has shown at institutions and festivals such as the Whitney Museum of American Art (Artport); 18 Stuttgarter Filmwinter, Stuttgart; FILE Electronic Language International Festival, São Paulo; Videozone-International Video-Art Biennial, Tel Aviv; the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, Québec City; as well as at galleries in New York, Tokyo and London. He has been the recipient of commissions from Rhizome.org at The New Museum, New York (2005) and Turbulence.org / New Radio and Performing Arts, New York (2004).

Arcangel Constantini
Curator

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

An event in time is a collection of many smaller moments coalesced into measure. It is composed of factors, facts, contexts, scope, details and duration. An event begins, an event ends, but its true measure is not that simple, nor should it be; time is not to be caught and cleaned on a hook like a fish, nor is an event in time just a sequence of moments with a beginning and end. It is more akin to a cumulus, that puff of cotton cloud of so many paintings and postcards, for it also is something of a single form, yes, but much more.” From Immersive Event Time by Jeremy Hight, NeMe.

After convergence: what connects? Making this question the subject of this special issue we set out to address two questions at once. The first was: ‘Are we after convergence?’ and by this we meant to invite explorations of the exhaustion of the original convergence model. The second was: ‘What kind of convergence are we after?’ Which is to say what kind of convergence do we want? These were at heart of our concerns in developing this issue, and, in posing them we also asked a series of subsidiary questions:

1. What are today’s convergent processes? Is assessing convergence a useful way to map contemporary developments in ICTs, can it adequately map a process that it is never purely technical, but always techno-cultural? Addressing this requires consideration of the critical, political, cultural stakes of contemporary forms of techno-cultural innovation. This in turn means asking what convergences with what and/or who converges with whom.

2. Are there more or less ‘desirable’ routes along which new forms of networked communications might develop? If so, once again the issue is ‘desirable for what or for whom?’

3. What was it that we are now beyond? What was distinctive about the 1990s ‘convergence’ model and the processes it mapped, and what distinguished this cycle of ‘convergence’ explored as a process, as a tool, as a dynamic, from developments today? Current processes of convergence are rooted in earlier ones: at times indeed a cycle seems to be repeated so that even as a set of developments are hailed as all new, they strike us as very familiar. A certain déjà vu arises but we are aware that this can be deceptive. What may appear to be more of the same may be new, in intent, in scale, in execution. And we may miss what is most important because of its very invisibility.

In relation to these questions we are wary and aware. We look at a series of developments in the contemporary informational landscape both as technological innovations and as techno-cultural formations and we seek to consider their significance. As we do so, we are aware of a discourse circulating around these innovations; one that proclaims their importance, underscoring and perhaps overplaying their radical novelty. This discourse also retrospectively constitutes ‘old’ convergence in particular ways. This makes us wary, but still, we understand that there are changes in the information networks increasingly embedded into our everyday lives, our institutions, and/or/as our technologies, and we wish to understand their significance.

Amongst these changes are the arrival of wirelessness and wireless networks, the growth of pervasive and embedded computing alongside screen-focussed media ecologies, the rise of networks and services that are ’smarter’ or at least ‘more’ semantically informed than previously, the rise of a networked (media) economy increasingly based on social capital rather than (as well as) traditional content. We also see that these innovations are bound up with shifts in the political economy of information systems, that they produce transformations of the (new) media industries, and that they find their significance and form in relation to cultures of production and in relation to their everyday use.

Some of the transformations we explore might be adumbrated under the banner of 2.0. Our instinct has been to avoid this. Exploring change and its significance we want to critically examine the kind of traffic between cultural theory and technological innovation, between technical discourses and critical perspectives of various kinds, and we want to explore and perhaps judge possible future trajectories for convergence processes. 2.0, particularly in its most expansionary form, does not start with these questions, but on the contrary, tends to presume they have already been answered.

Each of the papers in this issue takes up one or more of these questions and does so in diverse ways. What the papers share is (1) a refusal to take 2.0 at face value, as the replacement for older convergence models and (2) an insistence on exploring/re-appraising both the new form and the means of critically looking at that formation. The forms of re-appraisal and analysis deployed across papers are thus critical, methodological and empirical.

One of the major innovations within ICTs in the past decade has been wireless technologies. In his piece Adrian Mackenzie, inspired by William James’ concept of radical empiricism, explores the stakes of ‘wirelessness’ through an examination of experience, and in particular through the experience of change, within contemporary networks.

Part of what Mackenzie is trying to do is to find a way to grapple with an invisible component of networking communication. David M. Berry’s piece also takes as its focus something elusive, in his case the focus is on code, regarded as the articulatory condition of possibility for the operation of computer technology.

Jonathan Sterne and his co-authors, Jeremy Morris, Michael Brendan Baker and Ariana Moscote Freire, also take for their focus not a discrete technological object but a network possibility. In this case the authors consider the distinctions between broadcasting and podcasting, anchoring the rise of each of these within specific historical contexts: such a contextualization they argue, produces a reappraisal of both the new form and the old.

Caroline Bassett is also concerned to reappraise new media systems, both in their real and their promissory aspects, in relation to their historical contexts. Her paper explores the claims ‘2.0′ makes to correct earlier cultural and industrial/technical models of convergence and offers its own map of contemporary modes of participation which draws on earlier models in a somewhat different way.

Teodor Mitew, in his piece, works through mapping, examining the cartography of convergence. The text considers locative media and its origins through two divergent spatial projections. This results in two forms of mapping: the unveiling and the attaching. The former are described as ‘totalities in need of unmasking’ while the latter are ‘effects in need of tracing and explaining’. In the final sections of the paper Mitew uses these different mapping perspectives to consider a series of locative media artworks.

Aylish Wood, concerned with aesthetic production, turns to systems theory to examine the degree to which the concept of convergence exerts influence on various expressive practices, asking in particular how we may better understand the interplay between human and technological participants in convergent systems. The idea of the digital intermediate thus operates, in this article, as a core concept in the system, and as a way of setting up a new form of thinking about the intersection of technologies of vision.

Wood’s argument extends in part to digital games, and her work is then complemented by Helen Thornham’s very different emphasis on gaming in everyday life. Thornham’s work, invoking and reminding us of the way in which ‘traditional’ forms of materiality intersect with virtual activities, offers us a rethinking of technological, narrated and domestic systems through an investigation of the ‘agency’ of game objects in domestic spaces.

There are many common threads emerging across these pieces:

One is distinction - where are the edges, the ends, the distinctions between different elements, modes, activities, spaces, technological actions and human ones, in ‘new’ new media systems? As a part of this we have asked not only what makes ‘2.0′ distinct from ‘what came before’ but also how it will be be understood in the future. We ask this question not least because we are somewhat alarmed by visions of proliferating version control as 2.0 merges with 3.0 and 4.0 looms on the horizon.

A second is disappearance. Many of the writers here are concerned with what cannot be easily seen or grasped but is nonetheless central to our experience of contemporary ICTs A number also argue, in different ways, and in different contexts, that working through experience might be a way to render these elements visible. We also note that disappearance is a quality discussed in relation to material technology (wires are not the only technology to be become less here), and in relation to the cultural construction of the technological itself - for instance in Thornham’s piece on the technology of domesticity.

A third thread is restoration: a number of papers want to insist on the need to restore historical contexts to technologies and the models they discuss. It is this that directs the exploration of the podcasting in Sterne et al.’s piece and the consideration of 2.0 and its cultural analogues as a ‘corrective’ model in Bassett’s.

Finally, this special edition explores some of multiple ways in which convergences play out. And we would like to focus here on play. In these papers we have moved beyond the constant search for new terms, new applications, beyond a play with ‘newness’ as a value in itself. Instead, we have found a new depth in these papers, offering multiple perspectives on existing phenomena, looking at the stuff behind the screens, at everyday structures, at the spaces between, that can only be felt and experienced transitively. Depth is sometimes a result of play - and sometimes play manages not only to throw new light on disciplinary formations, but to break them down.

Converging ideas and using media was a necessary precondition to overcome the regimes of geography whilst producing this edition. All the authors were extremely inspiring and reliable. It was a pleasure to work with them. The same applies to the Fibreculture team. They were encouraging and helpful. We would therefore like to thank Andrew Murphie, Lisa Gye and especially Ned Rossiter, who first had the idea for this issue.

Caroline Bassett, Maren Hartmann, Kate O’Riordan

In 2005 Tim O’Reilly famously used the phrase ‘an attitude, not a technology’ to describe the burgeoning experience of Web 2.0. After 3 or 4 years, the hype surrounding associated notions of user-generated content, the ‘wisdom of crowds’, ‘the long tail’ and social networking both continues and fades. Practices such as collaborative tagging and micro-blogging have become everyday online gestures, while YouTube, Facebook and Bebo comfortably colonise the network horizon as default interfaces. ‘Objects’, ’subjects’ and ‘content’ are disappearing on a massive scale — far larger and faster than in their much-touted postmodern demise — and ‘environments’, ‘context’ and ‘worlds’ become the key modes of online generation and production. This suggests that Web 2.0 may be more akin to a topology rather than attitude or technology — one which launches us in(to) the middle of things. If Web 2.0’s cartography is topological (repeated production of selfsame space via variation), then its temporality might best be understood through considerations of ‘the event’. As Maurizzio Lazzarato has suggested, everyday actions - going to bed, turning on the television, logging on - comprise our contemporary habitual corporeal events, but these are simultaneously and only the punctuation of the more continuous event of informatic flows. If Web 2.0 is an ‘event’ that somehow semiotically launched itself around 2004-5, its temporality has now become that of an ‘always’.

In this issue of the Fibreculture Journal, however, we invite contributions that critically and creatively rethink the event of Web 2.0. To adlib with Lazzarato, and following Deleuze and Guattari’s articulation of the virtualities of events, another possible world / ‘web’ is always there, in potential. Hence Web 2.0 is not simply what it is - attitude, technology or topology - but is still under production, in active ontogenesis and therefore up for grabs. We ask authors to address the actual and potential existence of genealogies, incompatabilities and new modes of making and thinking Web 2.0. For example, should the historical relations between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 be thought in terms of radical break? Or can we - as Olia Lialina has suggested in her consideration of the recouped aesthetics of old homepages by the templates of MySpace - see Web 2.0 as a freezing of earlier more dynamic flows? What lies outside of Facebook, indeed beyond the additive logic of ‘friends’? And after we break up with our ‘friends’, what other circuits might emerge? A number of key theorists such as Terranova, Lovink and Rossiter, Galloway and Thacker have begun to address the presence of incompatibilities, counterprotocols and conflict as constitutive of the network. We are seeking papers that take these and new concepts that biurficate the ‘always’ into rethinking the topology of Web 2.0.

Specific Topics for address include:

-ontogenetic approaches to network events
-creative genealogies of Web 2.0
-investigations of ’subnetworks’ and alternatives to standardised templates and interfaces -investigations of conflictual and differential implementations of: search, APIs, social networking, micro-blogging, collaborative tagging,vlogging etc.
-critical analyses of the relations between social movements and Web 2.0 (note: no simple empirical studies of a social movement’s use of Web 2.0 services or technologies)
-aesthetic analyses and transformations of Web 2.0
-Web 3.0 as ontogenetic event, topological shift or the “network to come”.

Articles must be submitted in full Fibreculture Journal house style. You must first read the Guidelines for Submission here. Please note, submissions not in house style will automatically be returned to authors for formatting. You will not be able to have your paper considered for publication unless you have formatted it correctly.

The journal is peer reviewed and authors are expected to take readers reports into consideration when finalising their articles for publication. Negotiation with the editors over potential changes is usual practice.

Please submit articles no later than October 31, 2008 to either Anna Munster, a - dot - munster - at - unsw - dot - edu - dot - au, or Andrew Murphie a- dot -murphie -at -unsw -dot -edu -dot -au. You must use the phrase ‘Web 2.0 event issue’ in your subject header.

‘Communication tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.’ If a single sentence can represent the entire book, it must be this one. For one, it’s great writing. Precise, condensed, clear. Shirky’s book is full of it. It shifts attention to the right level, away from the tools and to what people do with them. It also contains the dilemma that the entire book grapples with: how to write about technology once that technology has become mundane? Lastly, it leaves a lot of things out. How do technologies become mundane? Which ones are legitimate and which ones are not? Why are some providers of ‘boring technologies’ worth billions (e.g. YouTube) while others subject to high-pressure litigation (e.g. ThePirateBay)? But Shirky doesn’t want to go there, he prefers to keep the message safe and positive.

But let’s start at the beginning. Shirky’s core argument is a riff on an old theme. There are limits to the scale particular forms of organisation can handle efficiently. Ever since the publication of Roland Coase’s seminal article ‘The Nature of the Firm’ in 1937, economists and organisational theorists have been analysing the ‘Coasian ceiling’. It indicates the maximum size an organisation can grow to before the costs of managing its internal complexity rise beyond the gains the increased size can offer. At that point, it becomes more efficient to acquire a resource externally (e.g. to buy it) than to produce it internally. This has to do with the relative transaction costs generated by each way of securing that resource. If these costs decline in general (e.g. due to new communication technologies and management techniques) two things can take place. On the one hand, the ceiling rises, meaning large firms can grow even larger without becoming inefficient. On the other hand, small firms are becoming more competitive because they can handle the complexities of larger markets. This decline in transaction costs is a key element in the organisational transformations of the last three decades, creating today’s environment where very large global players and relatively small companies can compete in global markets. Yet, a moderate decline does not affect the basic structure of production as being organised through firms and markets.

In 2002, Yochai Benkler was the first to argue that production was no longer bound to the old dichotomy between firms and markets. Rather, a third mode of production had emerged which he called ‘commons-based peer production’.1 Here, the central mode of coordination was neither command (as it is inside the firm) nor price (as it is in the market) but self-assigned volunteer contributions to a common pool of resources. This new mode of production, Benkler points out, relies on the dramatic decline in transaction costs made possible by the internet. Shirky develops this idea into a different direction, by introducing the concept of the ‘Coasian floor’. Organised efforts underneath this floor are, as Shirky writes, ‘valuable to someone but too expensive to be taken on in any institutional way, because the basic and unsheddable costs of being an institution in the first place make those activities not worth pursuing’.

Until recently, life underneath that floor was necessarily small scale because scaling up required building up an organisation and this was prohibitively expensive. Now, and this is Shirky’s central claim, even large group efforts are no longer dependent on the existence of a formal organisation with its overheads. Or, as he memorably puts it, ‘we are used to a world where little things happen for love, and big things happen for money. … Now, though, we can do big things for love’.

The technologies that allow love to scale are relatively old and even the newer ones are technologically mundane by now (from a user perspective): email, web forums, blogs, wikis and open publication platforms such as Blogger, Flickr and YouTube. But that is precisely the point. Only now that they are well understood and can be taken for granted are they beginning to unfold their full social potential. For Shirky, what distinguishes Web2.0 from Web1.0 is not functionality but accessibility. What only geeks could do 10-15 years ago, (nearly) everybody can do today. The empowering potential of these tools is being felt now, precisely because they allow everyone – or more precisely – every (latent) group to organise itself without running into limits of scale. These newly organisable groups create ‘post-managerial organizations’ based on ad-hoc coordination of a potentially large number of volunteers with very low overheads. Thus Shirky claims, without really substantiating it, we are seeing the erosion of the power differential between formally and informally organised interests.

For Shirky organising without organisations has become much easier for three main reasons, all connected to the internet. First, failure is cheap. If all it takes is five minutes to start a new blog, there is little risk involved in setting one up. Indeed, it’s often easier to try something out than to evaluate it beforehand. This invites experimentations which sometimes pay off. If a project does take off, there is no hard limit to how large in can grow. There is little difference between a blog read by 10 or 10,000 people. Second, since everyone can publish their own stuff, it’s comparatively easy for people with common interests to find and trust each other. Perhaps most importantly, it takes only a relatively small number of highly committed people to create a context where large number of people who care only a little can act efficiently, be it that they file a single bug report, do a small edit on a wiki, or donate a small sum to the project.

So far so good. For those who followed Web2.0 discussions there is not terribly much new here, though Shirky’s talent for crisp writing brings many aspects into sharper relief than they were before. All of this makes it probably the best Web2.0 book published so far. Yet, being just a book about Web2.0 is also its greatest weakness. Despite pronouncing that technology has become boring, it remains squarely focused on it. Beyond technology, we get not much more than a number of journalistic case studies, some of them well known (Wikipedia, open source software) others more interesting. For example, the Bishop of Boston could more or less ignore the paedophilia cases in 1992, but not in 2002. The reason, Shirky explains, is that the early ’90s the Bishop still controlled the means of organisation, the church institutions, so he could make it hard for the outraged parishioners to act. Ten years later the Bishop no longer had a monopoly on the means of organisation. Now, the parishioners could organise outside the institution with ease and their protest, instead of fizzling out quickly, gathered force and changed the church.

For a book that claims to analyse a revolution that ‘cannot be contained in the institutional structure of society’. we get extremely little on politics or power. But, if we are witnessing the largest increase in expressive capabilities in human history, can it really be that the main consequence is an explosion of disjointed volunteer projects? This lack of depth is the result of the single most problematic aspect of the book. It focuses almost exclusively on aspects that are entirely uncontroversial. Parishioners organising against the cover-up of priestly paedophilia? Who could be against that! Sharing photos of the Mermaid Parade on Flickr? How cute!

Yet, there are a lot of things that are less cute about the newly boring technologies which Shirky chooses to ignore. Shirky stresses the decentralised, ad-hoc mode of new organisations, yet they are based on very complex infrastructures that are highly centralised and that create near infinite potential to manipulate the social interactions that take place through them. These are not neutral enabling devices. For example, Flickr recently deleted a picture by the Dutch photographer Maartin Dors that showed a Romanian street kid . Why? Because it violated a previously unknown, unpublished rule against depicting children smoking! What’s the rational of this rule? As a spokesperson explained, Flickr and Yahoo! ‘must craft and enforce guidelines that go beyond legal requirements to protect their brands and foster safe, enjoyable communities’. Jonathan Zittrain points out that the ‘ever-increasing usability [of Web 2.0]has been accompanied by the deliberalising of user rights’.2 Of course, users can revolt against overt manipulation as they did when the aggregation site digg.com tried to suppress postings with the code to crack HD DVD encryption in May 2007. The management had to reverse its policy, though I wonder if they would have had they been a subsidiary of a large conglomerate.3

Thus, there is a tension at the core of the Web2.0 phenomenon created by the uneasy (mis)match of the commercial interests of the companies and social interests of their users. All this social interaction takes place within privately owned spaces so that users are basically faced with a take-it-or-leave-it decision that few of them are really aware of. There is a structural imbalance between the service providers who have a tangible incentive to expand their manipulative capacities and the average users who will barely notice what’s going on, since it would require a lot of effort to find out. To believe that competitive pressures will lead providers to offer more freedoms is like expecting the commercialisation of news to improve the quality of reporting.

This tension between commercial and social interests points to another dimension of Web2.0 that is completely missing from Shirky’s book: the new division of labour, this time between paid and unpaid. He rightly points out that we are witnessing a ‘mass amateurisation’, and explains this by way of an example. Racing car driving is difficult, so we have professionals for whom driving is not a means but an end. However, driving a normal car is so easy that amateurs can do it while trying to achieve other things (like arriving at work on time). So, through a combination of new technological tools and new cooperative strategies certain professions – photography, publishing, journalism, etc. – are becoming amateurised and their professional products find themselves in competition with ‘user generated content’. Is this pointing the way to a ‘post-capitalist’ society, as envisioned by the Oekonux project? You might think so, given the total absence of economic dimensions in this book. But, I suspect that Shirky would laugh at such a notion all the way to be bank. As a consultant to many media companies he must be keenly aware of the strategies to extract, concentrate and appropriate value from all this user generated content. I would love to hear more about it – and I’m sure Shirky knows a lot about it but, unfortunately, he is not telling us.

If he were to, he might have to mention another aspect that is deeply troubling, even though he’d say that this is inevitable (and I would probably agree): the loss of privacy. Or, to be more precise, the gathering of a lot of data on individual actions and interactions in the hands of a very small number of old school organisations which can process and turn it into actionable knowledge. What kind of activities they are going to derive from the data we don’t know. Commercial manipulation (the shaping of services to be more advertiser-friendly) is a given. Strong interest from governments’ security apparatus should be expected, as should all kinds of random abuses. Frequent scandals about lost data, strategic leaks and corporate snooping indicate the tip of an iceberg.

Depending how the current tussle over copyright evolves, we can expect much more, and more repressive use of all of this information.Viacom recently managed to force Google to hand over all user data relating to all the videos ever published on YouTube. Tussle over copyright? Reading Shirky, you wouldn’t know there is one. This is probably the most glaring absence. Number of entries for copyright in the index of the book? 0! In my view, this is inexcusable because it cuts right to the core of why ‘boring technologies’ are currently so ‘socially interesting’. File sharing, in particular, demonstrates most clearly the power of ‘organizing without organization’ so radical that, for the moment, nobody knows how to contain it within current institutional structures. Number of entries on p2p or file sharing in the index? Again, 0!

Of course, Shirky knows about it, so the omission must be deliberate. To me, this is an indication of how constrained discourse has become, particularly in the US and particularly for the set of activist academics who like to think of themselves as progressives yet covet their positions as consultants to conservative business and government. To them, p2p poses an ugly challenge. It is clearly one of the most potent mass movements driving the deep transformation of the media industry and contributing considerably to the fabled increase in individuals’ expressive capacities. But coming out against file sharing makes you sound like a dork on the payroll of the mafia. Very unprogressive. Yet, the media conglomerates and their surrogates have succeeded in establishing such a climate of copyright maximalism that even appearing in favour of copyright infringement removes you from the mainstream. Thus, if you want to play it both ways – be part of the revolution and earn money as a consultant – you better avoid the whole issue. That, at least, would explain why neither Shirky nor anyone else in the US mainstream even dares to talk about file sharing anymore, with the exception of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Self-censorship at work.

The total absence of controversial issues creates the narrow scope typical of books written by consultants. This is unfortunate since Shirky is clearly very bright. If you want to glean some of his many insights, you could do worse than simply watching his lecture on the book’s main themes.4 In just 42 minutes you get a good sense of what he has to offer.

Felix Stalder is lecturer in theory of the media society at the Zurich University of the Arts and one of the moderators of the mailing list nettime. He lives in Vienna, travels abroad and archives his public output at http://felix.openflows.com.

Info

Clay Shirky. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, New York: Penguin Press, February, 2008

Footnotes

1. Yochai Benkler, ‘Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm’, Yale Law Journal. No. 112, 2002, http://www.benkler.com

2. http://reason.com/blog/show/127444.html

3. http://blog.digg.com/?p=74

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_0FgRKsqqU

[posted on Mute]

Brian Holmes’ response on nettime:

Felix Stalder wrote:

> In 2002, Yochai Benkler was the first to argue that production was no
> longer bound to the old dichotomy between firms and markets.

I am surprised! The notion of “commons based peer production” is certainly new with Benkler, but networked production is not. Do neither Benkler or Shirky devote even a footnote to one of the most famous papers ever to be written about the organization of production, with an explicit reference to Coase in the title? I’m talking about Walter Powell’s “Neither Market not Hierarchy: Network Forms of Organization,” published way back in 1990.

http://www.stanford.edu/~woodyp/papers/powell_neither.pdf

> For a book that claims to analyse a revolution that “cannot be
> contained in the institutional structure of society”. we get extremely
> little on politics or power. But, if we are witnessing the largest
> increase in expressive capabilities in human history, can it really be
> that the main consequence is an explosion of disjointed volunteer
> projects? This lack of depth is the result of the single most problematic aspect of the book.

I’ve not read Powell’s text in a long time, but as I recall it has little to say about the scaling-up of love (wonderful theme by the way), and an awful lot about networking for power and profit. Undoubtedly that’s because of the early successes of Italian and Japanese firms in building up informal productive networks where cooperation is based on reciprocal advantage. So I’d agree with Felix that there’s some shirking of an issue going on. If people wanna understand networked society, the only way to spot what’s really new - such as massively distributed volunteer collaboration - is to contrast it to existing formats of production. And politically, I’d say that analysis without analysis is exactly what we’re expected to produce with Web 2.0…

best, BH

Geert Lovink’s response on nettime:

Thanks, Felix, for this insightful, and clear review.

I have not finished Shirky’s book yet but read a great deal. What stroke me is that, imho, Clay Shirky and his team of editors and agents have made the wrong choice concerning the content. In my view,
Shirky should have brought together his online work of the past 10-15 years so that we can finally read his Power Laws in book form. Over the years, Clay Shirky has proven to be sharp observer and critic
of Internet culture, and social networking in particular. Felix’s review doesn’t stress that, and he doesn’t need to, because he is reviewing the book. And this book is particularly uncritical. Despite
(or should we say, inspite) all the worthy examples, it is pitched to the business/consultancy community.

Now, to come back to Felix’s specific critique, namely the absence of copyright/intellectual property controversies in Shirky’s book. This is indeed striking, but as a matter of fact, I got used it. Shirky is not a reporter, he is an ideologue, a preacher and so-called visionary, this time not from the US Westcoast but from New York. He doesn’t see it as his task to investigate and go through issues.

There might be another explanation, and I found it in a recent, truefully commercial book on the history of Web 2.0, written by the Businessweek columnist and Sillicon Valley reporter Sarah Lacy. It is called Once You’re Lucky. Twice You’re Good. She does write about p2p as it forms the technological rational behind big Web 2.0 players like Skype. She notices that the two greatest influences that laid the foundation for Web 2.0 economics “were a couple of underground movements called open source software and peer-to-peer files sharing. And ironically, both were mostly born in stodgy old Europe, not in the Valley.”

It might very well be that Clay Shirky has a similar opinion. It is a known trick of the US consultancy class to project projects with a different agenda onto the Old Continent. It is a rhetorical trick, as we know that the inventors of the Web and Linux are Europeans, and the leaders of free software and open source are US-American citizens. Nonetheless, at times, it can be practical to just push distruptive and potentially subversive ideas into a corner and marginalize it as ‘European’.

Geert

After more than 9 months (a real pregnancy), the new § release and website we’ve been working on is finally out!

• The code is totally rewritten!
• The system is much more stable.
• Support for Firefox 3
• There’s a new developer API and a bunch of new space-developers using it.
• Every shift has a copy on a static url outside of ShiftSpace (to show your IE-using grandma).
• New user preferences.
• You can attach shifts to elements on the page (using the new Pin API).
• The SourceShift space has been completely rewritten.
• Imageswap has new features.
• More spaces from our commissions program winners are coming up…

On The Website:

• We redesigned the whole darn thing.
• We launched the ShiftSpace Public Square where you can browse all of ShiftSpace’s content and find public shifts by user, domain, or space.
• We wrote user manuals for the system and every space & plug-in.
• For you hackers out there:
  • We have a step by step manual to walk you through your first steps of ShiftSpace.
  • We installed Trac, so you can follow our development and develop your own code with us.
  • We are working on more documentation of the core system.
  • We have an active developer list, which we would love you to be a part of.
• Posting bugs is easier on the new issue tracker
• We have a new Forum (which we prefer using for discussion instead of our Google Group).
• We will be dishing out more screencast videos regularly so we can better show you how to use ShiftSpace.

We are already working on a new release with some new and even cooler features. Congratulations to us all! [posted by Mushon on ShiftSpace blog]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8xr17Sl038

Nicola Feiks and Mario Strk performing betwixt and between in Brut Konzerthaus, Vienna.

The playhouse is dark. Two performers enter the space, each of them equipped with a mobile phone capable of recording video. Slowly the light is turned on illuminating the audience while the stage remains dark, thus hiding the camerawoman and -man. After three minutes, the room is darkened and both performers leave the stage. End of the first part.

Several minutes later, youtube.com is displayed on a videowall. A search for ‘betwixt and between 001′ is run, the result projected. In it, the audience is confronted with the movie recorded in part one. Even so, to the soundtrack of the mobilephone - recording a voiceover has been added, directing all visible actions milliseconds in advance, formulated as imperative, thus turning the spectators into involuntary actors. End of second part.

n.e.w.s. is a horizontally-organised, cumulative knowledge-based website for contemporary art and new media framed by curatorial contributions from around the globe, bringing together voices and images from North, East, West and South. n.e.w.s. reflects geographic diversity and facilitates a framework for collaboration, content and visions of change outside the normal parameters of the established art world networks.

Launch at ISEA 2008: Contributing curators and n.e.w.s. representatives will talk about building the platform, the way content is determined through curatorial positions, and further collaborative tactics.

Contributors: Ade Darmawan/Ruangrupa, Ingrid Commandeur, Thomas Berghuis, Inti Guerrero, Mia Jankowicz, Rich Streitmatter-Tran, Mustafa Maluka, Stephen Wright, Yuliya Sorokina, and Branka Ćurčić/Kuda.

Moderators: Lee Weng Choy/The Substation, Renée Ridgway/n.e.w.s.

More about n.e.w.s.

A tool for distributing immaterial resources and intellectual goods in an era of diversification, n.e.w.s. attempts to initiate, build and foster relations and provide a valuable portal dedicated to cultural bricolage, enabling less seen artistic endeavors worldwide visibility.

n.e.w.s. structures contributions in the form of Web 2.0 technology: a blog/archive (images and text), along with a wiki-like ‘books’ (collaborative writing), tagging (shared vocabulary) and polling. Content is curatorially determined: images, texts, podcasts and links provide information in the form of documentation of previous works or new media online.

Open-sourced, collaborative action and authoring are not only encouraged but also are integral to n.e.w.s. along with a community developed event calendar and database. Building upon shared knowledge and past references, contributors engage with each others’ practices. Multilingual translation, tagging and commentary will eventually contextualise the contributions and open up new possibilities, collaboration in the form of further projects as well as producing printed multilingual publications.

Comments and user feedback welcome! Please add your events to our calendar or subscribe to our mailing for further projects and announcements.

n.e.w.s.: Tiong Ang, Sannetje van Haarst, Renée Ridgway.