doll_yoko's blog

The Cost of Knowledge campaign: the commodification & liberation of academic research

doll_yoko — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 07:45:27 +0000

We humans are thinking, speaking creatures, with a theoretically limitless capacity to analyse the world around us, and, if we are lucky, to also make sense of our own internal worlds. Under informational capitalism an elite class of 'thought robbers' exploit our mental and affective capacities. We, and especially the untenured 'we', the indy intellectual 'we', or the cultural activist 'we', toil at our texts only to perhaps then witness them being padlocked inside hierarchies of knowledge which we cannot afford to access. The 'University Inc.' or 'edu-factory' and its co-dependent sibling, academic publishing, siphon the worst qualities of managerialism and profiteering to support systemised structures of knowledge enclosures. In response, the cognitariat have started to rebel. In 2012 a mathematician blogged the withdrawal of his labour from the Elsevier academic behemoth. His stance triggered worldwide solidarity. While the unfolding narrative of grassroots mobilisation resonates with the official, overly earnest Open Access movement, it seems to hold more anarchic possibilities for the cooperative creation of unfettered systems of production and exchange of knowledge.

Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring

doll_yoko — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 13:27:47 +0000

What is often called ‘digital piracy’ is nowadays a mundane and everyday activity. As such, piracy is a commonplace disorder within the order of information capitalism; it is both created by the ubiquitous orders of information capitalism and suppressed by those orders. In the myriad points of view of its participants piracy represents an order which is implicit within contemporary life, which we will call ‘pirarchy’.

The attached chapter entitled ‘Piracy is Normal, Piracy is Boring: systemic disruption as everyday life’ by Francesca da Rimini and Jonathan Marshall was written for the book Piracy: Leakages from Modernity edited by Martin Fredriksson and James Arvanitakis (Litwin Press, USA, forthcoming 2012, http://litwinbooks.com/piracy.php).

The JSTOR Case - US Government v Aaron Swartz

doll_yoko — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 01:01:25 +0000

Although we have thus far discussed P2P file-sharing in terms of its most representative instances, that is, the exchange of materials drawn from popular culture, other artefact classes are also swapped, from pornography to ‘serious’ publications. Sometimes genre-specific events can bring into focus larger issues arising from cultural commodification, public domain contraction, and resultant counter actions and movements. For example, recently American digital activist Aaron Swartz allegedly downloaded a massive number of papers from the JSTOR academic database. Subsequently the United States Government brought unprecedented charges against him, claiming that he planned to release the material through P2P networks. This case demonstrates how even the spectre of unsubstantiated file-sharing can trigger disordering responses across informational domains (academia, publishing, policing, justice), some of which which might be more rooted in emotions (anger, fear, revenge, spite, etc.) than in pragmatic circumspection.

Down by Law: HADOPI's diluted graduated response, iiNet's battle with Big Content

doll_yoko — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 07:30:27 +0000

Coordinated opposition had defanged the final version of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), and will continue attacking other supra-national digital enclosures such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Hence powerful copyright advocates including the International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA) have concurrently operated outside such treaty frameworks to pressure individual governments in an ‘especially aggressive’ way to force ISPs to police copyright infringements (Bridy 2010: 2). To date Britain, France, South Korea, and Taiwan, have incorporated various forms of graduated response into their domestic copyright enforcement systems (ibid.). Furthermore, other countries are exploring ‘private ordering’ options to enforce online copyright (Bridy 2010: 11-15; Toner 2011). These range from ‘cooperative relationships’ between major content distributors and broadband providers in which Internet Service Providers (ISPs) suspend repeat infringers’ accounts (in the United States), to ISPs being the ‘sole arbiter of the customer’s innocence or guilt’ terminating accounts without court orders (in Ireland). In Australia, the ISP iiNet after winning a precedent-setting law suit brought against it by an alliance of mainly US content owners proposed a graduated response model in which an ‘independent body’ meeting ‘community standards’ mediates the interests of all parties

Escaping the Digital Enclosures 1: Networked Battlegrounds produced by the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)

doll_yoko — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:44:24 +0000

File-sharing has continued to expand over the past decade regardless of some landmark legal wins against peer-to-peer companies, torrent aggregator websites, and individual file-sharers.

SUCKA my code, baby: Peer-to-Peer's production of sprawling unkempt cultural knowledge archives

doll_yoko — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 01:26:16 +0000

Introduction

Temporary Affective States (TAS): snow witches, roller bitches, and the production of radical imaginations

doll_yoko — Fri, 07 May 2010 08:47:50 +0000

The Gaze of the Snow Witch

Part 1 of my Furtherfield case study chapter - Brit Art, Situationism, Fluxus...

doll_yoko — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:44:24 +0000

This is Draft 2.5 of the first quarter of one of my 3 case study chapters, on the London-based Furtherfield art group.
Some weeks ago I posted a quarter of another of my case studies, the Hong Kong In-Media citizen journalism project.
It seems i can only work in quarter chapters - perhaps this is like semi-tones in music....

Outline for a Book Chapter attached

doll_yoko — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 09:33:36 +0000

Here is an outline of a chapter for my colleague Jon Marshall's book on It & Disorder. Like much of what I seem to be doing for uni stuff, I have clearly crammed way too many things into this chapter. probably i could reduce it by 2/3 and it could still make a good contribution to the book, which has otjer chapters on software and failure, IT and social movements, IT and financial disorder, and quite a lot of philosophy. anyway, armin's critique of my P2P text-in-progress reminded me about this other thing i am supposed to write this year, and i am thinking some of A's ideas could fit.

70% slow-cooked disorder

doll_yoko — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:39:14 +0000

About 2 weeks ago it became horribly clear I was stalled on finishing my chapter on the Hong Kong case study. I had done 3/4 of it, but i had no ideas for the final section. Days of a blank screen.

So i eventually went to the library and borrowed some of those comforting books on how to write a thesis. many of them were quite dull, but one is great ..i had read it before but had forgotten some of the good, advice...title is "writing your dissertation in 15 minutes a day" by joan bolker