I attended a very cool little conference last week called Open Congress - organised by Chelsea Art Students, and featuring a delightfully motley crew of open-source radicals, intellectual-rights lawyers, seventies autonomists, and a bunch from the Creative Commons people in the UK. I got stuck into almost every discussion with great gusto, arguing (as ever) for a "creative class consciousness" (and side by side with Richard Barbrook, as usual, on that).
I also met someone I'd always wanted to meet - McKenzie Wark, an Australian-born but New York based cultural commentator of rare articulacy and fluency. His book A Hacker Manifesto is on the way to being as close to the Communist Manifesto as the soulitariat could need! He mailed me the other day, and I hope it's OK by him for me to post some of his letter here:
I bought your book at Foyles and carried it around Europe with me last week, eventually reading the whole thing. It is very rich and suggestive indeed. I particularly liked the stories about your own experiences, which put the position of the player in directly human as well as professional terms. Your 'types' are also distinctly recognisable -- the 'soulitarians', for example, who infest my neigbourhood here in NYC in considerable numbers...
We share some roots in some kind of techno-utopian Marxism, i think. Your book is full of rich descriptions of the transformation of capitalism into something else, and of the role of what were once called 'intellectuals' in that transformation. Having their ideas hard wired into cellphones, etc.
Then on the Monday after I turned up to the Guanabana bar in London, to listen to a whole bunch of Open Source Brazilians - including Gilberto Gil, the Minister of Culture for Brazil and his second in command - extol a new model of cut, mix, and paste culture (see this article in Guardian for more). Add to this the fact that I found myself sitting next to the semi-legendary Sue Steward - who's been world music's best chronicler for years - and you get one of those London weekends that makes you happy to be half-living (and fully in love) there...
Open Technologies
Corporations just love all that connected creativity
<freecooperation.org> - learning space where there is negotiation and renegociation of rules of cooperation - the right to withdraw
Right to withdraw ggdd.org
Christopher Spehr Institute for distributed creativity
Distributedcreativity.org
Two researchers per year, one annual topic, mailing list - you can focus on one topic for a year - an institution can't afford to do this.
Eg media art education - Artur Matuck, 1972 idea of free distribution preceded copyleft - in Portuguese (noone ever read it)
Selected traditions (Raymond Williams
Output and inspiration makes a network real (socialisation of research)
Fibre culture (1000 people visiting per day), Sarai
Museum shows in this inspires other artists
"Share, share widely"
newmediaeducation.org
Collaboration is scary - complex + guided by rules
What triggers participation?
Spehr's free cooperation - non-participation
Interpassivity is the default
But self help groups bloomed in this period - you get blogs and bulletins board blooming on the most culty subjects - pro anorexia, pro cutting (Wired magazines blog)
People with superdefined interests - never having to talk to anyone they don't want to.
Tiziana Terranova - Balkanisation of the net. Heard of a guy who went into a particular chat room about a particular bmw - wanted to make a general point - and was thrown out the room for being off topic.
Mediaartnet - example of cultural archive
BBC using wikipedia as a source
Trendwatching.com talks of this as a rising trend - how to tap into wiki resource as datagold - perfect post-fordist model, you profit from other people's volunteering.
MIT Open Courseware - about them becoming market leaders - there's actually not that much material there - and it puts you higher in the foodchain
H20 SITE - communities build around ideas
www.runforopensource.org
Discordia
Blips.tk
HRheingold's - cooperative technologies - says we need a 'coop tool kit'
- an ability to use these tools will be essential
TOOLKIT?
-- developing mutual trust
-- clear and attainable goals
-- defining self-interest giving reasons beyond own thinking
questions from audience
-- schumpter said that R+d had to be collaborative, inherent in the production of capitalism
Distributed creativity is interesting - question is, in 20's was artist following capital in this, or capital following artist?
Surrealists were just exemplifying Marx's ideal of the unalienated labourer in the Economic and social manuscripts
Answer: perhaps the rise of self-help is tied to assembly line - "you are not sufficient"
Question: branding - surely the problem is that a brand fails because audience wont negotiate with it, on its terms.
Question: open isn't always good... Spam is open.
If you're in dictatorship you want your network to be closed.
Not everyone is a collaborator - I'm a writer, because I like to work alone, and to see my name in front of what I do
Maybe issue is about self-organisation and self management
The difference between open forms in art and business divides along private property - fluxus, etc.
The myth of openness
Accountabilty needs transparency
social software needs theory- there's been so much practice worldwide
Without theory happening, we get a presumed framework which is like the American constitution (see critique from sarai in india).
Constitutionalism does not address question of equality of social actors
from Floor: Often the achievements of cultural collectives - their innovation and excitement - doesn't get historicised. We haven't established a theory of the Scratch Orchestra, yet to write a book about it - nor about the Exploding Cinema
How do you write an account of collective actions? Content analysis, semiotics, oral history...how do you capture the complexity of collective production?
You can do things like measure who actually came to meetings, and who claimed to be involved.
In software it's easier and clearer - you're paid by motorola or redhat to be collaborative
But no! Software can be just as irrational in its context.
Jamie Stapleton - ways of working - lawyers grapple with idea of value of art - but can only think of it
pixel by pixel - at what point could the law see the whole of the artwork?
Some of this debate is as old as that between
positivist and dialectical, habermas and adorno
Eastern bloc is the guarantor of liberalism - without it, liberalism can decay
Take Two Bristol - huge diversity of people in one room
"We are against representation"
New thinker in this is Alain Badiou - his concept of the 'singular universal' - where any singular can stand for the universal - this puts him against human rights, against openness
www.upcoming.org
Open Business
Free access to content business built on model of scarcity
www.openbusiness.cc aims to highlight how that's not the automatic model.
In south africa education industry - use open source cc to tell world about how good the research is here - HSRC press sales' are up 300%
In Brazil development agenda - open source is how we fund development
Usually development = capital
Now development = access to culture, knowhow, media (WIPO). Gilberto Gil is a statesperson, artist - he supports CC because copyright has failed in Brazil
Jan-Aug 2005: 5 major music corps in Brazil released 24 new brazilian cds - in such a vibrant climate!
85% of movies in theatres from Hollywood - 400 movies produced in Brazil last year - 20 movies in theatres per year - because distribution also owned by producers of films
Creativity in poor areas of Brazil Baile funk, funk carioca. The model here is street vendors - TecnoBrega - they don't care about copyright - make money out of sound system parties - record them, sell them next day.
Pixies were doing this at gigs last year, recording gig and selling cd's at the end - been done in Brazil for years
[but but... See article in Observer about baile - very criminalised form of music]
We should be going out int he field - learning from those models
Eg delicious - how does anyone profit from giving, sharing links - well we are all multi-active freelancers, and we benefit from this gift giving. [but but... Guy came up to me java programmer for large financial institutions - interested in alternative currencies - that the guy who founded delicious is looking for a way to create private delicious networks... Is he about to monetise this?]
Open business funded by Soros and Arts council [my point - it's not so much business as social enterprise, with publicly or charity provided capital. Could we ever socialise this? A la Andre Gorz ]
Questions on the non-monetary motivations of business - Von Hippell (MIT) talking about the 'democratisation of innovation'
Roger Wallis, Music Lessons Stockholm - another openbusiness model
Q from richard barbrook: is there a difference between accumulating capital and earning a living - that's what big corps do, that's what a small enterpreneur does.
In Brazil - recording companies like Travia are making cd with a blank cd, record this for a friend. - Album is called, 'Tired of Being Sexy'
