Deptford.TV diaries II: Pirate Strategies
Deptford.TV is an audio-visual documentation of the urban change of Deptford (south-east London) in collaboration with SPC.org media lab, Bitnik.org, Boundless.coop, Liquid Culture and Goldsmiths College.
The unedited as well as edited media content is being made available on the Deptford.TV database and distributed over the Boundless.coop wireless network. The media is licensed through open content licenses such as Creative Commons and the GNU general public license.
This reader problematises the notion of 'tactical media'. As McKenzie Wark and others stated already in 2003: 'can tactical media anticipate, rather than be merely reactive?' By calling for a strategic approach to media production and distribution, the intention is to overcome some of the structural paradoxes inherent to 'alternative' or 'oppositional' media, especially since much of the free / open culture dissemination on the Internet has become the new "mainstream" in itself (think of the casual defiance of copyright played out relentlessly and on a mass scale with file-sharing, social networking, and everyday media consumption).
This book is a compilation of theoretical underpinnings, local narratives and written documentation not only of the local Deptford.TV project but of phenomena relating to this new situation of 'strategic media'.
Contributors: Adnan Hadzi, Jonas Andersson, Ben Gidley, Duncan Reekie, Brianne Selman, Neil Gordon-Orr, Alison Rooke, Gesche Wuerfel, the University of Openness, Jamie King, Armin Medosch, Rasmus Fleischer, andrea rota, Bitnik Mediengruppe, Sven Koenig, Jo Walsh, Rufus Pollock, Platoniq, The People Speak, Zoe Young, Mick Fuzz, Denis Jaromil Rojo, Lennaart van Oldenborgh
Download Deptford Diaries II
Deptford.TV is an online media database documenting the urban change of Deptford, in south-east London. It operates through the use of free and open source software, which ensures the users continued control over the production and distribution infrastructure. It also aims at enabling its participants in the technical aspects of developing an on-line distribution infrastructure that they themselves can operate and control, empowering them to share and distribute production work both locally and internationally.
This book continues the debate raised in the Next 5 Minutes media conference (Amsterdam, 2003) regarding ‘tactical media in crisis’; a conference which in many ways marked the “crash” of an online activism based on a merely tactical approach. As McKenzie Wark and others stated during the conference: ‘can tactical media anticipate, rather than be merely reactive?’
The aim of a strategy is to generate a form of social contract; not only by enunciation or discursive agreements, but by actual practice. Existing networks, applications, artefacts and organisations like The Pirate Bay, Steal This Film, Deptford.TV, the Transmission.cc network etc. in effect constitute strategic entities that re-write the rules of engagement with digital media on an everyday basis. The problem being, that many of these entities become deemed illegal, quasi-legal or illegitimate by the current copyright legislation, something which can only really be addressed through finding new ethical frameworks which can appropriate what is already happening but in terms which do not frame it in the old dichotomy of ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’.
As Michel de Certeau makes us aware of, strategies differ from tactics in that they are not reactive to an oppressor or enemy. Rather, strategies are self-maintained, autonomous, and – more specifically – spatially situated. If the ‘temporary autonomous zone’ (Bey 1991) of pirates, nomads and vagabonds is characterised not by permanence but by transience, still it might be seen as a means to generate short intermissions of stability; the establishment of momentary connectors, stable points, islands in the stream. The establishment of such islands is dependent on location and manual effort: different types of strategies that will become apparent throughout this reader.
The reader thus takes as a starting point the local strategies that make apparent the geographic specificity of Deptford. Neil Gordon-Orr’s historical trajectory of cinema theatres and spot locations for cinema production in Deptford and New Cross apprises us to the urbanism, technological progressivism and cosmopolitanism of the area since early modernity; similarly, Ben Gidley’s account of the apparent drive towards regeneration makes an argument for authentic, already-existing forms of creativity and cosmopolitanism which are never-fully seized upon by property investors and marketing agencies, who proffer a view of the area which feeds on an imaginary notion of ‘pacification by cappuccino’. The middle class aspirations of urban developers somewhat fall between the always-already upper/middle class consensus of Greenwich and the much more agonising mix of working class and “creative class” that is Deptford. This whole dilemma of regeneration will become even more apparent in the coming years, given the extensive investment climate surrounding the 2012 Olympic bid, something which is mirrored in the parallel history of Stratford, north of the river. Hence the inclusion also of an account of ‘the Olympic sacrifice zone’ by the University of Openness: a psychogeographic reappropriation of an area that is set to see some tumultuous change.
The dialectic of Greenwich versus Deptford is interesting in itself, as historically it has never been one of pure opposites: it has always been class-based, sibling-like rather than polar. Think of the dock workers of Deptford depending on the patrons of Greenwich and vice versa; take the long-running heritage of Deptford rag pickers ultimately supplying the select boutiques along the richer fringes of the Park; or take what is essentially the cathedral of Greenwich’s royal naval quarters versus the bazaar of Deptford’s docks and markets (cf. Raymond 1999), where hierarchical, official society never fully closed in on itself since it thrived on the much more loosely organised labour of privateers, slave traders and entrepreneurs. This dialectic can easily be transferred to the contemporary situation and its peripheral, creative “free agents” providing the cultural industry with fresh ideas and sometimes even dissent, yet without fundamentally rocking the status quo.
Brianne Selman’s exploration of different conceptions of spatiality can here serve to open up for a renewed notion of politics, where the pirate (or the nomad in Deleuze & Guattari’s accounts) is seen to operate on the fringes of the sovereign domain of the state. His/her labour is occasionally employed, and at other times ostracised: ‘governments were perpetually at risk of attack from the same privateers they supposedly employed’ (Selman, p. 28). This reverberates what Armin Medosch concludes in his chapter (2.2) – namely, that the ‘free culture’ of the anarcho-libertarian Internet pioneers has been usurped by corporate and governmental interests to foster a kind of deregulated and depreciated mode of employment.
Where the debate relating to Medosch’s article in section 2 is in somewhat broad, abstract terms, andrea rota’s as well as Alison Rooke’s and Gesche Würfel’s articles help to substantiate the ideals of sustainability and inclusion in more manageable, organisational settings. Rooke and Würfel talk about the growing invisibility of the ageing population and outline how local projects like Deptford.TV can be employed to address this invisibility, whereas rota presents a viable ethos of ‘agile projects’ and the vanquishing of the old offline/online divide this entails.
Similarly, the technological strategies presented should be read not as entirely ‘online’ ventures but as projects that address everyday, concrete issues of access, privacy, and both political and creative mobilisation. The contributions of Jo Walsh and Rufus Pollock as well as the ones by Platoniq, Zoe Young and Mick Fuzz address the infrastructural problems of getting locally produced content “out there,” by means of better metadata and better tools for collective distribution, whereas the enigmatic Jaromil presents a case for upholding individual privacy as a means to retain an autonomous media consumption, production and distribution in the face of an oppressive copyright regime. Download Finished by Mediengruppe Bitnik and Who Wants to Be? by The People Speak constitute examples of fascinating new projects in the intersection of net.art and community involvement, where the boundaries of what is sanctioned and/or intentional are questioned: Is the manipulation of copyrighted content more tolerable when done by a machine, as an upshot of automated algorithms processing any material fed into the loop? How does the nature of the ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire’ format change when being executed in a fully collaborative fashion?
The final section of the book sees a return to more general issues pertaining to the Deptford.TV project: in short, an overarching issue for this entire volume has been the concept of ‘data spheres’ and of strategies aiming to build, uphold and defend these generative spheres. Adnan Hadzi presents a case for the strategic use of copyleft licenses within the datascapes of peer-to-peer networks by establishing data spheres: basically, acknowledging the need for a social contract which can uphold an ethical viability for those data spheres that have already emerged, but are currently branded illegitimate or at least non-sanctioned.
If this book constitutes the theoretical underpinnings of Deptford.TV, the filmwiki.org toolkit constitutes the practical side of the project. For those aspiring or aiming to put their media production into more strategic practice, look up http://filmwiki.org/ in which the toolkit for how to use Deptford.TV is further elaborated. For those interested in continuing some of the more theoretical debates presented in this reader, Armin Medosch’s site http://www.thenextlayer.org is intended to continue some loose threads. Additionally, the overall development of the project can be followed at http://www.deptford.tv.
See 2.3 for the comments by Rasmus Fleischer (Piratbyrån) and 2.4 for the comments by Jonas Andersson.
In this text I would like to reflect on the copyleft-copyright discussion that has been raging since the inception of Linux, Open Source and the Internet. After years of strong involvement in this area and then a couple of years of relative silence I felt the need to base a reassessment of the copyleft-copyright debate on my own biography as an artist and writer, to join the abstract argument from my own standpoint. I would like to pick out two main markers for this reassessment, one being my own background in and involvement with media art since the mid 1980s, the other one the much more recent history of my work with Kingdom of Piracy (KOP) and a re-evaluation of the copyright debate in the light of what happened since the last major KOP publication on the subject with DIVE in 2003. My core argument is that a situation which is already bad for cultural producers is made worse by radicals on both sides of the copyleft-copyright debate. I hope that through this reflection I can contribute to a more nuanced understanding which is at the same time more complex and more truly radical. I also hope that artists and cultural producers can recapture the initiative in this debate which currently seems to be with lawyers and extremists on both sides of a growing copyleft-right divide.
Various types of appropriation have a deep history in the arts, from Duchamp’s discovery of the readymade to the surrealists’ bricolages. The latter also experimented with collective creation to undermine individual authorship and emphasise subliminal and subconscious connections between people, linking Marx and Freud. Appropriation returned after the Second World War with Warhol and other pop artists and has never stopped growing since as these practices become more common place in the art world and, more recently, available as new cultural techniques for much larger numbers of people 1.
I was involved in what in retrospect seems a rather big if fragmented movement of appropriation practices which were characteristic for a number of art forms in the 1980s. Working with the group Subcom (for Subcultural Communications) which I had co-founded with Oil Blo and Antonia Neubacher, we tried to pinch holes into the media Stalinism2 of the cold war era. Our self-image was wrapped into a narration about a perceived dichotomy between the mainstream media and counter-cultural media. In this regard our references were provided by the DIY culture of post-punk, new wave, hip-hop and street culture, yet at the same time also contemporary fine arts and particular directions and subthreads such as performance, video art, conceptual art. A subcultural and countercultural media context was created 3 which found its common denominator in the critical analysis of and opposition to the mass media system by its proponents creating media systems of their own.
Subcom experimented with nomadic living and working situations and archiving of field recordings of an ongoing project called Europe Report. Yet the main cultural technique was appropriation. In the early years, between 1985 and 1987, we created radio art pieces which were highly intricate collages of found objects, both textual and auditive (Radio Zitrone Comics). We called those ready-mades “clichés” (in a sort of Swiss German understanding of the word, which was introduced by my then best artistic colleague Oil Blo). A cliché was originally connoting a printing plate and later took on also the meaning of stereotype. We were convinced then that by remixing clichés we could create new meanings. In this regard we were influenced by the sampling aesthetics of hip-hop artists who worked with loops from audio vinyls. We also “scratched” but used audio tape and had very different aesthetic and political goals than these hip-hop artists. From 1989 onwards we also created scratch videos combining loops and computer manipulation of images. Both in audio and video we conducted an interrogation of the “clichés,” how they functioned in their own context, and how they could be opened up for entering new relationships. The commercial media world had become completely reified and its output unacceptable and we were trying to find different ways of playing its images back to audiences as a means for liberation. Rather than trying to overtly criticise these images we tried to over-expose their ideological content through a kind of magnifying glass technique. 4
Although we did not think of it as that at the time almost all of our work was based on what is now understood to be copyright infringement. We were aware of this aspect but considered ourselves to be too economically marginal and also too much part of an avant-garde art context to have to be afraid of prosecution for those small transgressions. As we also started using the Amiga computer more, our remixes became new work which only in parts relied on the original sample for its artistic affect.5 To do what we did then one needed to make quite an effort in many ways – from getting hold of the equipment to developing artistic techniques. 20 years later the same activity is apparently carried out by millions of young people worldwide yet without any reference to the art world.
In recent years ‘remix culture’ has gone mainstream. One of its most visible protagonists is the lawyer and Creative Commons co-inventor Lawrence Lessig. In his lectures he presents the culture of remix as a paradigmatic turn from a passive read-only culture to an active read-and-write culture. Lessig uses remix culture as an argument for the necessity of the Creative Commons (CC) licensing system for content. CC is the name of a licence scheme (and also of an internationally working non-profit organisation) which allows creators to choose and mix between different levels of freedom and protection. CC are saying that their licences would allow authors to safely share their texts and music yet still to retain ‘some rights’. Like many people I initially supported the idea strongly. In 2004 the colleague and author Janko Röttgers and me convinced Heise Verlag, the publisher of our recent books Mix, Burn and R.I.P by Janko and Freie Netze by me to undertake a test trial by allowing our books to be distributed freely as a PDF under a CC licence while the books were still sold as hard copies. This announcement was made in June 2004 in Berlin when the German version of the CC licence was debuted at the Wizards of Open Source conference.
Squeezed onto a panel I had to sit on the stage for about an hour during which Lawrence Lessig gave one of his rousing speeches delivered so acutely synchronized to his Flash presentation that this effect completely transfixed the audience. As I sat there I had an epiphany and scribbled some notes about how connected every art work was anyway because of the fundamental condition of humanity as social beings. So, even if a writer had to sit in a monks cell alone for a year to write a book, s/he was in a dialogue with everyone and everything. Through language and the symbolic realm, our creation was always co-creation already and “networked” so to speak. Lessig’s continued emphasis of the Internet and digital technology as the causes of a switch from read-only to a read-and-write-culture had made me feel uncomfortable and had triggered this epiphany. The fundamental connectedness of human beings to each other through language and culture including the whole of the symbolic realm (which includes, for example, numbers and the signs that mathematics and logics uses) does not depend on the Internet and digital gadgets to make us co-creators. Lessig’s take on remix culture seemed to turn everything into a digital soup embossed with the CC logo.
Having had to listen to more such speeches at future events I started to dislike the way Lessig (re)presented remix culture (apparently he has stopped to do so now, has handed over the helm of the CC ship to other people). It was full of generalisations and seemed to have as its main point of reference the audiovisual production of children or teenagers – usually some cool teenagers in their bedrooms remixing Japanese anime. Of all the examples which he showed, the most politically “critical” one was that duet between George W. and Tony Blair which everyone had seen 10 times at least. The way audiovisual elements were used in Lessig’s lectures left no space for any real cultural difference or an interrogation of other symbolic layers than the most blunt and obvious ones. Lessig tried to sweepingly claim the whole of remix culture for his CC project, yet presented just a minute aspect of it in his lectures. While superficially similar to our remix practice in the late 1980s it had actually nothing to do with it. Back then, in our minds we fought an image war with the cultural bourgeoisie, working with the whole breadth of artistic remix and appropriation techniques. Compared to that, LL’s version of appropriation art was like decaffeinated coffee without sugar and milk. This wouldn’t be a problem if this was just Lawrence Lessig’s take on it but unfortunately the examples he showed appear to be quite representative for a lot of what actually happens today on the net. The conflict of the images does not happen on those Web 2.0 video sharing platforms, there is no danger for subversion, because this type of production is neutralized politically through its amateur character. 6
Although it preceded Web 2.0, CC is ideologically closely linked to this new mass participatory culture. While it is fantastic that many amateurs now can enjoy diving into advanced cultural practices such as remix and appropriation, the Web 2.0 paradigm is the ultimate distortion of the values of a free (net) culture, using some of its slogans and concepts while enclosing user generated content into proprietary platforms. CC is aiding and abetting this tendency. 7 Another serious flaw is that the whole concept behind CC does so far not take into account the professional who creates cultural and digital content as a member of a creative profession who has devoted her or his whole life to this. CC does not pay any attention at all to the issue of an economic model for supporting cultural production. In an interview in a recent film (which will be discussed later in this text) Lessig appears to regard this as a matter which will automatically resolve itself in the future. If CC continues to disregard concerns about revenue models for professional writers, musicians, photographers it does indeed play into the hands of venture capital driven online projects such as Flickr or Youtube who make a fortune by harnessing user generated content. The way it has been promoted CC has been instrumental in establishing a paradigm which is based on a false moral postulate according to which every cultural producer has to put out their work for free.
Despite those serious concerns, when it comes to licensing my own work as a writer, CC is still an option. I must first point out that I have always been very loose with my copyright. Once a text is produced I am happy for it to be circulated widely, as long as this does not mean I get ripped off by some multinational publishing conglomerate. Money does not induce me to write a text, I write anyway. However, of course I need some form of funding, either by cross-subsidising myself through other activities or by being funded one or the other way directly to conclude longer writing projects and conduct research. While there is no direct causal link between creating a specific text and money, money cannot be left out of the equation completely. When it comes to licensing, in a less cut-throat capitalist world I would be happy for my texts just to be in the public domain, without any specific licence, or as I joke, under the “free and creative Armin licence”. 8 However, CC is now widely adopted and the legal hawks of CC have gone to quite some length to adapt the licence scheme to legislations in different countries. CC is used in a benevolent institutional context which I interact with in various ways. Therefore it can be appropriate to use specific CC licences.
While in some cases I find it agreeable to use CC licences I cannot bring myself to see them as “the solution” for all licensing and copyright-copyleft issues. A thorny issue remains that by using a CC licence such as the ones above, I waive the exclusive rights for any collection society to collect and distribute mechanical reproduction and statutory rights in my name. Such mechanical rights can be a nice side income if radio or TV were to use your work. By signing away this possibility it feels a bit like consigning oneself to eternal poverty as public radio in Europe remains one of the last good sources of income for high quality journalism – or for writing of any genre, in the form of short stories and radio plays.
When in 2001 Shu Lea Cheang, Yukiko Shikata and I curated a net art exhibition for Taiwan’s Acer Digital Arts Centre (ADAC), we called it Kingdom of Piracy (KOP). Despite our cultural differences the three of us shared a very similar background in the 1980s appropriation art. Challenged with curating Taiwan’s first major exhibition of net art, we thought that net art and the intellectual property debate were a uniquely suitable topic. The intellectual property question formed the looking glass through which, we thought, a Taiwanese audience stood a good chance of getting a grasp of net art. We speculated that the issue was as important for international audiences, should the show ever travel. 9 The promised grant of 25.000 US$ by ADAC gave us the opportunity to commission 15 artists and 3 writers to produce new work. As Taiwan had been identified as a ‘pirate data heaven’ in a 1994 Arthur Kroker essay, we took this a bit further by calling the exhibition Kingdom of Piracy. What would have been a one-off event became, through the special circumstances that arose, a project that still continues today.
The Taiwanese government, nudged on by US foreign policy shortly after the start of our work for the exhibition, declared a ‘war on piracy,’ arrested students who engaged in file sharing, put on show trials against them and even organised a “spontaneous” pro-copyright demonstration in the streets of the capital Taipei. The following is guess-work (there might have been other, internal reasons too) but we think it was this climate that influenced our main sponsor, ADAC, to withdraw its support (although we had already commissioned the artists and writers to create new work which they had already began to create) and shut down our access to the server. From then on KOP became a floating, migrant kingdom. Our main sponsor had pulled out, yet thankfully Ars Electronica gave us the chance to premier the original KOP show in September 2002 in Linz. (After a prolonged email battle with ADAC and Acer lawyers we managed to finally get paid and reimburse commissioned artists and writers.) Shortly thereafter we were commissioned by FACT in Liverpool to create new works. This commission, received through Michael Connor, then in charge of FACT’s digital arts program, enabled Shu Lea Cheang to create the BURN installation and me to make the DIVE publication.
DIVE, as pointed out in my introductory ‘Piratology’ essay (Medosch 2003), marked a turning point. As much as I had enjoyed the provocations contained in the original KOP concept and show, I felt that the time for piracy was over. As I joked at the time, we had become converted into “good” pirates. Because of Linux and the free software movement there was no more need for the bloody old galore. Instead, we could now legitimately explore the universe of free software and add to an ever expanding public sphere of digital goods in an open commons. The thinking was as follows: The Free Software Foundation had given us a licence model, the GNU General Public Licence, which had been adopted by coders worldwide. Through the success of Linux and other GPL-based software packages the ‘copyleft’ ideas embodied in the GPL had found strong support not just by a bunch of creative software developers but had made it into the mainstream of software engineering. Multinationals such as Sun and IBM had started to support GPL-ed software, maybe as a remedy to Microsofts market dominance, maybe also because they understood that not just the GPL but also the collaborative model behind it offered an advantage in terms of enabling better and cheaper, i.e. more efficient software development – which is what an industry participant wants. Linux and other GPL-ed software as well as the open standards on which the Internet is based created a public sphere of legitimately “free” things that could be copied, used and modified. Adding to this was the Creative Commons project, which was still quite new in 2003 but maybe then at its most dynamic stage. Although other free content licences had existed before, the publicity offensive undertaken by CC and the high-flying Harvard lawyers behind it quickly proposed CC as the most advanced and widely known model for copyleft licences for content producers.
In this situation we thought that rather than fighting the copyright industry with little provocations and rebellions, it was much more promising to support this legitimate universe of free software and the collaborative ethos behind it. So we produced DIVE, a combination of CD-ROM, booklet and website. The CD-ROM contained the Linux live CD Dynebolic. Through it, most PCs can quickly be turned into multimedia live production suites without having to make a full Linux install. But the CD had more space which allowed it to contain also many free software packages which would run on PCs and Macs – things such as OpenOffice, the Gimp, Blender etc.; moreover, it contained other resources such as introductions to net art with working digital code, guides to online communities and wireless community networks.
DIVE was made for cultural producers and small organisations who had maybe heard about free software and copyleft but who were still sitting on the fence, not sure if they should get involved. The publication served as a manual for net culture offering practical and philosophical entry points into the area. It promoted the idea that content producers can also participate in the “free” universe by packaging their work with copyleft licences such as the CC licences or the GNU Free Documentation Licence. A particular inspiration and motivation for us at the time was the notion that there was no more need for fighting against somebody, but being able instead to create our own worlds, beautiful islands of free software, free media and participatory “social” media platforms.
The production of DIVE gave me also the opportunity to develop some more theoretic ideas, contained in the ‘Piratology’ essay. There I proposed that nobody is born a pirate but that historically piracy in the old sense developed in South East Asia when colonial powers created a monopoly or oligopoly which robbed people of their livelihoods and left them no other chance. This principle can be easily transferred into the contemporary cultural realm. Large international vertically integrated media corporations stifle local cultural production by completely taking over marketing and distribution channels, thereby destroying the businesses of local distributors who offer more culturally diverse and more local goods, as happened with the music and comic book industry in Taiwan10.
The lines of conflict are drawn much more sharply in those economies that capitalist media tends to label as “emerging”. Whereas the odd cracked copy of Photoshop has always been around in the West (be honest, do you know anyone who is not a business and who ever bought Photoshop or MS Word?) the real action is in Kiev, Bangalore, Delhi, etc. As our research trips with KOP confirmed, in the East every major city has its pirate market such as Bangkok’s Pantip Plaza. Despite occasional police raids, usually ahead of American state visits or WTO negotiations, the reality is that almost everything is available on CD, VCD or DVD for prices ranging between €1 and €5 (or dollars, when the $ was still on a par with the euro). The picture here gets somehow muddled, depending on one’s moral criteria. From small family stores who make a few copies at the back of a store to organised criminal groups who copy millions of CDs, many different types of organisations are involved. People do it for financial gain and it would be a romantization to portray them as champions of cyber rights and net culture. At the same time our research has shown that piracy fulfils an important role by giving access to cultural goods which otherwise would be completely unavailable to the vast majority of the people.
This is confirmed by the film Pirated Copy (‘Man Yan’ in Chinese), which shows the daily life of sellers of pirated movie CDs on the streets. This excellent Chinese production, shot with many hand-held camera scenes and cheekily utilizing off-screen voices and contrasting images, using all of the European novelle vague repertoire updated for the age of the DV camcorder, does more than just exposing the effect of official crackdowns on street sellers – it also shows what a surprisingly strong interest the buyers of video CDs and DVDs have in “art movies,” a catch-all term for anything between Bergman and Almodóvar. And this is probably a realistic picture. In markets such as China, piracy not only serves to provide access to the products of mainstream commercial movie industries, may it be Hollywood, Bollywood or Korea, it also fills gaps in provision and provides access to art movies and more difficult fare which does not get official distribution for whichever reason. The pirate suddenly becomes a connoisseur who caters to sophisticated tastes and needs, epitomised in the scene when a seller and a policeman argue if In the Realm of the Senses is pornography or not.
To conclude this point, in regions that still suffer from the legacies of colonialism and imperialism as well as those of the neo-colonial world expressed through the TRIPS agreement 11, piracy, despite being an entirely commercially motivated activity carried out in black or grey markets, fulfils culturally important functions. It gives people access to information and cultural goods they had otherwise no chance of obtaining. In a grossly distorted world of global “free trade” those who capitalism treats merely as cheap labour can use piracy as a counter-hegemonic force by giving them a chance to empower themselves through obtaining information, knowledge and sophisticated cultural productions.12
A recent research trip to Brazil confirmed how ‘pirate’ practices extended from software to hardware and bandwidth in the slums that the Brazilians call favelas. The favelas have a thriving small industry of so called LAN houses which are mixtures of Internet cafés, public gaming centres and computer hard- and software shops. Everything is pirated here, from water and electricity to bandwidth, which arrives through dangerously slung CAT 5 cables. The computers are imported through the black market, the software is all pirated. In this way the slum-dwellers of Brazil get access to modern communication technologies. This does not only include pirated copies such as the recent hit movie Tropa da Elite, which was a hit on pirated DVD months before it reached the theatres, but also other advantages such as access to services and information which allow a long-marginalised population to realise their civil rights and get better chances on the labour market.
Switching back to the situation in Europe and trying to assess what happened since the time KOP produced DIVE in 2003, on the positive side it is true that many people got infected by the FLOSS virus, got an interest in Linux and the collaborative principles behind free software and started to use CC licences for their own creative output. Since 1999 the Wizards of Open Source conference had been investigating how principles behind FLOSS could be applied to other areas. The seed had started to grow beyond software developers, academics and net culture intellectuals – circles traditionally concerned with such topics. Now also artists and broader circles in academia and civil society got involved. The middle class, or rather specific sectors of it, started to support things “open” and “free”. While in principle this was a positive development and a sign of success, it added impurities to an already complex picture. As the newcomers had not been involved with the thriving net culture and online communities of the 1990s they lacked a more intuitive knowledge of its values, which were derived from an earlier hacker ethics. This gradually led to a situation where an “open everything” hype started to create ever bigger waves. Increasingly “open” appeared to be conceptualised as a somehow undistinguished, generalized “openness” which was assumed to serve as an organisational principle behind the allegedly emerging global digital commons. The second major misunderstanding concerned the notion of ‘free as in freedom, not free as in free beer,’ which Richard Stallman had so tirelessly explained, yet still many people were unable to understand.
At this stage some groups and organisations tried to address those conceptual shortcomings by reassessing their own engagement with copyright and trying to deepen some of the notions that had formed the core of the discourse. The New Delhi-based research institute Sarai organised the conference Contested Commons, Trespassing Publics, in January 2005 in Delhi. As one participant put it, this was an attempt at formulating a “commons 2.0” and creating a more mature debate which did not assume a global arena of fair play but highlighted inequalities and structural differences in the global and local political economies surrounding the phantasm of a global digital commons. The Contested Commons conference opened up the debate beyond legal arguments about licensing and included topics such as urbanism 13 as well as intellectual property in agriculture and biotechnology, where enclosures of public knowledge affect people often much more directly than in the area of culture and general “information”. Many of the contributions to this conference brought home the point that the real pirates are actually the capitalists, historically, as capitalism in its rough early stages fostered a culture where everybody pirated as long as they got away with it – something which currently happens, at this day and age, as indigenous knowledge and nature itself is getting privatised by pharmaceutical and agro-industrial companies.
In 2004 and 2005 Kingdom of Piracy embarked on a research project called Commons | Tales | Rules which was designed to give more substance to the notion of self-regulation or self-organisation of the commons. In the Anglophone debate about the commons Garrett Hardin’s “The Tragedy of the Commons” (1968) counted as a canonical text for a long time. Hard to believe now, but this relatively short ideological piece which argues with biologistic metaphors of overpopulation was taken seriously enough to be the killer argument supporting “pessimism” about self-sustainability. Every commons, Hardin argued, would sooner or later be destroyed because all participants essentially acted as rational, utilitarian profit maximizers and the self-interest was higher then concern for the common resource. Research by the political scientist Elinor Ostrom (1990) however showed that Hardin’s findings were only true under specific conditions and that other conditions existed where collective commons management was indeed possible. With Commons | Tales | Rules we continued Ostrom’s thread as an artistic research project and tried, first, to find as many “tales” of susccessful commons management as possible, both in real life as well as in the digital domain. Subsequently, in the second part of the project we looked at rule-making as a process which is part of self-organisation. No resource can be held in a commons if there is not either an a priori ethic consensus or a process of communication about the rules to establish and enforce such a consensus. We tried to create situations of experimental “rule-making” in strongly decentralized power structures. We asked: how can we make rules if there are no rules and no leaders?
At about that time the media arts scene in London was preparing itself for two events: OpenCongress (Tate Gallery, October 2005; http://opencongress.omweb.org/modules/wakka/HomePage) and Node.London (March 2006; http://nodel.org/). Both appeared at a very specific point in time when not only the media arts scene but also the arts in general started to get into things “open” and “free”. The “open everything” hype peaked, yet at the same time the political economy was as conservative as ever, not conducive to things really open and free at all. There was a danger that while “openness” was widely discussed, this happened in a very unfree overall situation with a neo-colonial war waged in Iraq against the explicit will of the majority of the British people. For those and other reasons we felt the need to make a point about autonomy. The idea was not to talk about the concept of “the autonomy of art” in the way this was done by romantic art movements 150 years ago, but to claim another type of more pragmatic, less esoteric form of autonomy – autonomy as a free space of action for artists, artist-run initiatives and net culture activists. Taking this type of autonomy as a starting point we asked how this related to the “open” paradigm. Using the “free” format of OpenCongress we decided on a format where we would ask people to make statements of the format open = ‘something’ on the wiki (whereby something can be whatever you make of it) which would then be discussed in a group workshop until people either accepted the term or ruled it out by making a lot of noise using props such as spoons and half full water glasses. RULE OUT: Autonomy takes up on OPENNESS turned out to be entertaining as well as productive and encouraged us to go further in the direction of format invention and discursive intervention.
As a result of this, PLENUM was launched half a year later at Node.London, March 2006. Our investigation of rule making in a commons had led us to the issue of agenda-setting and public debate. In any given public debate, the “commons” is the communicative space which is shared. Depending on the situation, people, issues and context, different protocols rule how an agenda is defined and who takes up how much space in a debate. Instead of assuming a shared practice and methodology between participants in the Node.London project, we wanted to make visible the many differences and hidden or even unconscious agendas involved. KOP decided to organise a PLENUM for the participants of the Node.London festival whereby we would provide a very strong structure but not the content. PLENUM was conceived and realized as a theatre play in 5 acts which altogether lasted 12 hours, from dusk to dawn. The overall task for the participants was to set the agenda for media arts in London. Each act had a prescribed structure and task, yet the content of the discussion – the agenda itself – was provided by the participants. This intervention on a structural level was reinforced by a feedback loop in the shape of Pure Data sound artists led by Martin Howse who sampled and filtered the spoken word and played it back with the explicit goal of escalating the situation towards the final acts. Present were also two note-takers who penned notes on a chalk board and intervened when it appeared appropriate and thereby provided an additional element of self-reflexivity. Free alcohol and a free soup kitchen as well as a work-out area with a sandbag for boxing allowed participants to let out steam and the night duly escalated into operatic and performative extremes. PLENUM has so far been the end-point of our investigations of the tales and rules of the commons, confirming some of our ideas and leaving lots of space for further experimental research.
Returning from the elites of media and fine arts to the bigger picture of social and technological development, it seems that the gap between copyright and copyleft is widening. From a certain point of view this could really be seen like a trench war between, on one side, the copyright industry and on the other one the pirates: commercial DVD and VCD pirates, file-sharers, downloaders and the stars of the scene such as the anarchist entrepreneurs of Sweden’s The Pirate Bay or the more business-minded people behind Mininova, as well as copyright liberals such as the CC lawyers, the EFF and similar groups. One of the central arguments of this text is that on both sides there are radicals who paint a grossly distorted picture which only serves their own interest but gets in the way of moving the discussion further and maybe even find solutions. A more nuanced thinking, freed from the spells of both copyright and copyleft radicalism, is capable of creating more radically different ideas. In order to make some progress in this direction I need to briefly open up this narrative onto a more general level.
Ever since the Industrial Revolution a market started to grow for cultural goods, such as books and magazines in the late 18th century. As culture became a commodity in early capitalism, this process accelerated alongside technological innovations in the 19th century. With the electrification of the world and the telegraph, telephone, record player, radio, industrialised newspaper, cinema and television, a multitude of channels for the dissemination of cultural commodities opened up. It was this process which provided the context for the introduction of copyright to give artists and artisans some level of control over their work and a financial incentive for its publication. As the tools of reproduction forms matured from mechanic to electric to electronic and digital, the old framework for maintaining control over distribution crumbled while the morality of the system had in itself long started to rot, as the beneficiaries of copyright were no longer artists but publishing companies and holders of large stocks of copyrighted materials. The late 20th century was characterized by a huge cultural industry which wielded immense power, both economically and socio-culturally, and for which intellectual property was vital as a business model. Towards the very end of the 20th century two entwined but not causally linked processes happened. To begin with, there was what business people call a “consolidation” of the culture industry. In the overall neo-liberal climate of the late 20th century the culture industry kept expanding in volume yet concentrated on the most profitable areas. During this process many values which had long been guiding principles went overboard. For instance, while newspapers in the past were funded by their proprietors and kept alive during also those phases that were non-profitable, because they were more than just a business and allowed the proprietor to leverage political influence, all media nowadays seem to be under the same profitability criteria. Those and other factors led to a shrinking of the industry and a polarisation of its workforce between the heavily exploited and precarious freelance work of the commercial media and cultural industries and the few stars who still enjoy the old perks of being in a privileged area of cultural production.
Further, I would also like to refer to Marx’ (1957) distinction between the use value of a good and its monetary value. The link between the two is not always straightforward. In cultural production use-value and monetary value can even be opposed to each other, as Bourdieu (1993) has shown. Since the neo-liberal revolution of Reagan and Thatcher, the financial value has become the single dominant one, with increasing disregard for all other values. Completely disconnected from this is another process which has to do with the dynamics of techno-cultural development. This “dynamics” (which is a result of the interplay of many different agents, and not an anonymous technological progress, as a technological determinist would have depicted it) creates a situation which is favourable to the replication of information. As our whole intellectual production has increasingly become digital, the availability of relatively cheap computer hardware and memory as well as broadband Internet access means that the costs for reproduction and dissemination of digital files race toward near zero. Meanwhile, as it has become clear that file-sharing in p2p networks and via torrents is impossible to be stopped, the culture industry of old – particularly in the US, which enjoys a worldwide cultural hegemony – has panicked and started to pursue strategies contrary to the flow of this techno-cultural dynamics. The whole model of the cultural industry, based on individual objects as carriers of sellable units of IP, is condemned to perish. To avoid this, the industry has started going to extreme measures. It tries to influence technological development and bend and tweak an unwilling technology as to force it to allow copy control (for instance through DRM, which the industry spells out as Digital Rights Management whereas critics call it a ‘restriction’ management) and it successfully influences politicians to make insane legislation which favours the copyright industry but harms almost every other area of human interest such as education, learning, innovation and creativity.
We are faced with a situation where the techno-cultural dynamic improves conditions for the distribution of works, while the economy of cultural production is in a deep crisis. The old cultural industries of television, radio, book publishing, record and film employ fewer people of which only a small percentage enjoy good conditions. As opposed to what these industries would want to make us believe, this is not caused by “piracy” but has, as explained above, other causes stemming from the industry itself. The contraction within the industry coincides with it being less open for unusual and critical forms of content. This conspires with an objective situation of a worldwide information infrastructure – the Internet – hungry for bits, but with no mechanism for the payment of small sums which would enable a sort of pay-per-view system directly rewarding content producers. The old model does not work anymore; a new model is not yet in sight. Those combined factors make the economic situation of cultural producers already very precarious.
Yet on top of that there is another “bug” which has affected the system, for which I blame the “open everything” paradigm. Over the last few years I have received many more “indecent” offers than ever before. I consider “indecent” an offer when a major institution which is obviously well funded asks me to write a text but fails to mention money. Since the “open” paradigm has become mainstream, an increasing number of institutions quite deliberately rely on content creators’ willingness to contribute “freely,” i.e. without pay, to their publications. It is one thing to be approached by a grassroots initiative with a strong political, activist track record to speak at their meeting for free or contribute a text to their publication, which is something I have always done with pleasure when I was satisfied that people’s motivations and the context were right. It is something else to be asked the same by very wealthy, major institutions comprising well funded university departments, art festivals and research institutes linked to political parties alike. Sometimes they even go so far to openly say that I was known as an open source activist and therefore I had to contribute to their publication as it also promoted the good cause. In the current climate the expectations have been turned around. Whereas in the past it was clear that asking a writer for a book contribution would involve some money offered, now the basic expectation is that everybody would contribute for free.
This sort of new voluntarism often presents itself in the shape of a (false) moral imperative. Experts in this type of copyleft Stalinism are people such as CC activist Cory Doctorow. He recently denounced American sci-fi writers for trying to defend their rights against a website which offered huge amounts of their books and short stories.http://free2air.org/ who provided me with the URL pieces of this puzzle." href="#footnote14_anjlfk0">14 Cory Doctorow, himself a sci-fi writer of sorts, continues to fan the flames with vitriolic language directed at professional writers who try to earn money from their work. Doctorow revels in controversy, and for good reason. As a publicly visible anti-copyright radical he has worked himself up on a high rung of the ladder of the reputation economy so that his income does not depend on revenue from the sci-fi stories which he writes. Through his skilled working of the reputation economy he has managed to become a sought-after speaker on the international business-class circuit of “activism”. And the more fanatic he becomes in his anti-copyright stance cheered on by his geek fan club on the Boingboing website, people who obviously have a bad taste in science fiction, the more famous he becomes and the more income he generates. But this type of creating profit from copyleft zealotry works only now and only for a small number of people.
While the culture industry contracts and consolidates, the European system of art funding also changes to the detriment of cultural producers. The situation is of course slightly different in each country. In the UK deep funding cuts have led to a signature appeal through which thousands of artists declare their dissatisfaction with the Arts Council. The capitalist rhetorics of EU governments steers all arts-related funding towards a ‘creative industries’ model with ever-closer integration between the arts and the needs of businesses or causes external to art such as urban regeneration and city marketing. At the same time in countries such as Austria, Switzerland and Germany the old art forms of the bourgeoisie – opera and theatre – get preferential treatment and are funded on a very high level, while contemporary art forms get this ‘creative industry’ treatment, i.e. are condemned to more precarious conditions. This has been addressed by the Bitnik art project in Zurich with their project Opera Calling. Bitnik placed bugs in the opera house which transmitted the performances via the telephone system to the outside world.
Besides the culture industry and funding there is also of course the opportunity for artists of joining academia. Having experienced this myself in a part-time position for the past five years, I can only say how happy I am to have left that apparatus which itself undergoes a capitalist restructuring that turns higher education into a commodity, with resulting collateral effects of squeezing staff, while offering less and less to the students15. In Britain it is now appropriate to speak of an education-industry complex, which has less and less place for critical artists and dissenting voices. Last but not least, when artists start to occupy full-time academic teaching positions this often marks the end of their impact as a creative and innovative force. At the end one may be forced to make a compromise with the creative industry, but this often means to lose control over one’s licensing terms and be forced to adopt strong proprietary copyright models against one’s own will. For instance, if I wanted to publish a book with a publisher – any publisher basically, commercial or academic – I would be expected to sign a contract and hand over my rights and participate in the old-style copyright industry regime. In order to benefit from the distribution and marketing power of a publisher, my writing suddenly disappears behind a legal wall of “ownership”. Academic publishers are often in this respect the worst, charging vast sums for accessing a single article online. For all those reasons I have withdrawn myself from the whole machinery and launched The Next Layer which is now my main outlet for writing besides occasional publications in a sympathetic context such as this book.
There is a situation now where there is a deteriorating funding situation for artists’ and writers’ work, especially if their work is critically questioning social mechanisms and methodologically innovative, while at the same time institutions believe that it is not wrong at all to ask people to work for free. Sometimes this is added to by the notion that “authorship” was a somehow obsolete notion anyway. Everything writes itself just like the pages of the Wikipedia. It is easy to see how this creates a situation of negative feedback. Not only does it make it increasingly difficult to get funding for work of a certain complexity, and for work which needs long-term commitment, it also strengthens the hand of the copyright tsars and data lords as owners of the realm of commercial production where authors still get paid. The culture industry can present itself as the only “relevant” area of production vis-à-vis the amateur production on the Internet where everything is free as in gratis and therefore, in their worldview, without value. By establishing the financial value above the use value, only those who get paid are “legitimate” and “professional” producers. Not just me but many other “professionals” have returned to amateur-like ways of production regarding the financial aspect. To the same extent that independent thinking and free-spirited people are squeezed out of the culture industry, the Bertelsmanns and the Murdochs of this world benefit from a misunderstood “open” paradigm by cultural institutions who have become scroungers for free content.
A similar set of questions – the decline of the copyright industry and the new techno-cultural dynamics of file-sharing and p2p networks – has been addressed by two recent video productions, Steal This Film and Good Copy Bad Copy. Steal This Film II is another production by The League of Noble Peers, a group of copyleft activists held together by Jamie King. Steal This Film II is a definite improvement on the first Steal This Film which was a quickly cobbled together montage of images and propagandistic texts about copyleft. The second film is a quite investigative documentary, featuring many interviews with (mostly white and male) key protagonists of the copyleft paradigm – the heroes – and at least one baddy, a representative of the Motion Picture Association of America who admits that file-sharing can’t be stopped but people get sued nevertheless. The narration links together a historic overview of the effects of print on society, drawing comparisons with the pirated production of books under censorship in France in the run-up to the revolution with today’s efforts of the industry to stop the flow of pirated copies. This historic section is quite well-illustrated with many pictures from old books and contrasted with today’s copyleft heroes, the people who run The Pirate Bay.
What I disagree with is the McLuhanite take on history that the film is premised upon. Human history is presented as the shift from one media technology to another with unavoidable consequences. The implicit message is that we cannot influence technologically induced change, only adapt to it. The result of this change is that the copyright industry is doomed and, as it fights for survival, it creates artificial and harmful barriers to the free flow of information. What we can do as cultural producers is to dance on its grave. But this also implies that we cannot expect to get paid for our production according to the old model and there is not yet a new one in sight. Steal This Film II employs an interesting self-reflective strategy insofar as the video has been made with donations received after Steal This Film; it is also self-reflective insofar as it is about The Pirate Bay while at the same time being distributed via this platform (and even gets a link on the front page which will secure it a big audience); last but not least people can again donate to fund the next film.
The overall message of Steal This Film II is very similar to that of the Danish production Good Copy Bad Copy, with which it also shares some interview partners. Good Copy Bad Copy seems to have had the slightly bigger budget and was able to travel to Nigeria and Brazil and therefore was able to capture interesting insights into new models of production which have emerged there. The use of video for movie production, instead of film (which is more expensive), has made Nigeria the biggest film industry in the world in terms of numbers of films produced. In Belém in northern Brazil the Tecnobrega movement creates interesting remixes of popular “cheesy” (“brega” means cheesy) love songs with techno beats. The industry does not rely on sales of CDs, which are distributed by local dealers in markets at low cost prices, but finances itself through very large parties with big sound systems.
Both of these film projects are linked through ideology and people to yet another project called Oil of the 21st Century. Its title is inspired by a quote attributed to Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images. While it is excusable for a heir of an oil dynasty to make such a comparison between intellectual property and oil one can only wonder what has driven the usually smart, Berlin-based artist Sebastian Lütgert to adopt this rather dodgy analogy. Of course oil (or maybe water) and not IP is the oil of the 21st century. Getty may dream of creating an industrial empire with his image database. Yet the paradox is that if the analysis of Steal This Film II and Good Copy Bad Copy is right (which I assume is what Lütgert believes), then the 21st century will be much less dominated by economics than the 20th century was. Then various forms of gift, exchange and solidarity economies will replace the model of forced collaboration within large hierarchical and bureaucratically led structures that capitalism offers. In that sense, there will be no more ‘oil’.
While Oil21C similarly reproduces some silly McLuhanisms, Lütgert, together with Jan Gerber, offers an interesting proposition with the more practical, database-driven project 0xdb.org. Thousands of downloaded art movies are offered for processes of collective gathering of meta-information, exploring links between different scenes, films and actors. This project shows that dealing with cultural goods can and should indeed go beyond the fetishization of the commodity character of the good in itself. The database offers a sort of art movie flaneur’s paradise exploring and making connections between the mental landscapes recorded on film. As users can annotate the scenes, this would theoretically result in a text-searchable database of films scene by scene. This project, by emphasising the diversity of connections between films and their fans, rebuts some of the critique levelled against copyleft radicals.
The main message shared by all three projects is a critique of the greedy cultural industry. As the industry defends its revenue streams, it seriously interrupts the free flow of information. Like in the case of Lawrence Lessig, this critique is underpinned by examples of remix culture which would not have been possible if the copyright industry had had its way. Of course those examples are not nearly as naff as Lessig’s remix children. Steal This Film II for instance shows some kids on the streets of London performing grime, a London-specific, contemporary evolution of various hip-hop and dancehall styles. Yet in the end this is the same populism as Lessig’s, only with better taste. The two movies in particular have a tendency of fetishizing file-sharing technologies. Their narrations reinforce the copy-left-right gap by implying some sort of historic necessity where one can only chose to be on the wrong (old, tired, copyright) or right side of history (p2p, hip, young, future). The League of Noble Peers, by nonchalantly ignoring the question of a new economic model for cultural production, nurses a very aristocratic sort of habitus. By publicly extending their precarity, they imply that everyone who does not follow that example is a dinosaur from the old Fordist 20th century. This is, in short, a doctrinal form of leftwing McLuhanism which only underpins the reasons why more people should read Richard Barbrook’s Imaginary Future (2007) that explains exactly why ‘the net’ cannot and should not be our inevitable future anymore. 16
Projects such as those described above serve a valuable role as propaganda tools but fail to fully address the question of economic conditions for cultural production. It needs to be pointed out that money or so-called business models do not form the exclusive angle from where to view such “economies”. Cultural production, in a broader sense, is economically made possible in ways which go beyond money. It is indeed boring to ask “but how can we make money now?” but the link between cultural production and money is a fractious one under any circumstances. Culture can economically exist because in many ways it does not obey the laws of the economy – despite being, at the same time, a culture industry (Bourdieu 1993). Individuals create because they have to. As stated elsewhere (Gombrich 1971), creatives are ‘sweating out’ their creative output through their daily existence. I do not want to idealize this type of “driven” artist who will keep creating in order not to go insane. There will always also be the cool professional who does not depend on creation for psychological survival. There are further incentives such as fame and the reputation among the peer group. But let’s agree that people produce culture anyway. The argument of the copyright industry that their way is the only way of financing cultural production is a red herring. Culture exists because it serves many needs both on the creator’s and recipient’s side. Creation is supported by a fabric of social relationships. I would go further and say that culture exists because of that fabric of social relationships; it literally grows out of those. Within those networks of relationships there are also many forms of internal support which allow art to get produced and artists to get through. On top of that there are also immaterial relationships between artists and their audiences which allow work to get produced – such as shared psychological worlds, matching needs and desires. These thoughts are similar to what I felt when I was sitting on the Creative Commons panel watching Lawrence Lessig speak in Berlin in 2004. Human culture is networked in many ways, not just through the Internet, and those networks are also the source of complex economies enabling artists to be creative.
Art and culture rely strongly on intrinsic qualities – qualities which are values in themselves and do not need any external justification or motivation. The diverse practices in art are often simply things that people like to do because it is pleasurable doing them and because it feels as an achievement having done something. I am relating here also to the crafty aspects of the art, the work with the material, the engagement with the properties of tools. If we talk about the economy of cultural production and how to make it sustainable then we need to look at all those things together, those social networks which facilitate cultural production and the intrinsic qualities in which both artists and audiences have a strong interest and investment. Those aspects are either ignored or cynically exploited by the cultural industries and the ‘creative industry’ models proposed by the cultural funding departments of nation states. While the immaterial values of art and culture are invoked in Sunday speeches by politicians, they are trampled on by the same people the following Monday when they make their next round of funding cuts.
While money is certainly not the only problem, completely dodging that question is not a solution in the long term. The copyleft radicals are maybe still very young and live in a squat or have very rich parents or both. Radicals on both sides of the copyleft/right divide do not want a solution. The business people just want to go on as usual – no compromise. The copyleft radicals receive cultural capital by appearing as modern day Robin Hoods stealing from an evil industry. Leaving those extremes aside, how can societies afford to have a rich cultural life which also includes top-quality works of art and not only amateur-based mass production? Some quite sane and useful suggestions have been made in recent years. One would be a sort of digital Shilling (alternatively ‘broadband tax’ or flatrate system) collected by the collection societies and redistributed to everyone who visibly contributed to content online. I would have my reservations about that because of the deeply conservative nature of the collection societies who have not shown any understanding of the nature of digital and networked culture at all in the last 10 years and seemed to have been very willing to become enforcers of the copyright industry. Nevertheless, maybe the collection societies can be reformed through good legislation and a new regime be introduced which indeed rewards authors and other content producers. 17 The other option would of course be the introduction of a basic wage for everyone. I am more sympathetic to this but it comes with its own problems such as creating an addiction to automatic hand-outs. However, both a digital Shilling plus a basic wage would be better than the status quo.
As we are looking at the economy of cultural production and its sustainability, I hope to have made it clear that this goes beyond money. Sustainability is also linked to social networks supporting or even enabling cultural production and is based on the intrinsic qualities involved in shaping those networks. We have to untie the knot between cultural production as such and cultural goods. The industry, of course, focuses on the products – cassettes, CDs, DVDs, files. Sometimes it is made to look as if only the product counts and this is what indeed the culture industry does, it fetishizes and favours the products, things to be sold and owned. However, cultural production does not always need to materialise in such things and is driven by many other factors than money and supported by diverse ecologies. It is important to make this distinction. If we look away from the product as a “thing,” then the concept of ownership also opens up to different interpretations. Ownership then is not just possession of something, but also implies care and responsibilities. Similar relationships also exist between authors and their works and authors and their audiences, there are mutual responsibilities involved.
In the light of everything said I need to revise my position. I would have loved to remain at that position of 2003 where I said that being a pirate is not necessary anymore because we have free software and the digital commons. Both of those are endangered and problematic in various ways. Because of the development of recent years which I hope to have sketched out above, the situation has worsened. We are experiencing a widening of the copyright divide between the radicals of both sides. While solutions exist in principle, there is no social consensus around them because they would mean that some compromise needed to be made. In that situation I think it is important to highlight the values of cultural production and the importance of a diverse concept of authorship. Rather than denouncing authorship as a concept of the past as some copyleft radicals do (just to big up their own status as “activists”) cultural producers need to redevelop their various bonds with the social humus of their various arts. This means also to recapture the debate and bring it back to our home ground. We, as cultural producers, cannot allow ourselves to be represented neither by the stooges of the old order nor by the copyleft Jacobinites who are so eager to denounce authorship that one would fear to be hanged just for admitting to be one of “those”. As the situation keeps worsening we need to find ways of being radical without denying the complexity of the issues involved. As the oligarchy has tightened its grip, and everybody is worse off, we cannot rely on the legitimately “free” as in FLOSS world alone. Acts of piracy can be very necessary sometimes, in combination with a variety of methods of cultural resistance.
What in the age of cultural mass consumption is really in short supply is not money but respect for cultural production and the life-long commitment of people who happened to end up as professional artists because there is maybe nothing else that they can do or want to do. Knowing full well that this can be easily misunderstood I nevertheless insist on this distinction of professionalism and on the notion of respect as an expression of the appreciation of the various bonds between authors, their works and the publics supporting them. This is the real currency in the economy of cultural production. In this sense I would like to say from my best proletarian background and with all my writers pride, just like Eric B and Rakim in the seminal 1987 album I would like to be Paid in Full.
I find it very interesting to follow Armin Medosch’s way of personally historicizing these first years of the current century. He presents 2001, the year when he curated the Kingdom of Piracy exhibition, as a starting point for his engagement. As it happens it was the same year when I myself started to actively follow and write about the fights around piracy, in its online and offline varieties.
Then he presents the year 2003 as a turning point. That’s how I remember it as well: that year, we were a loose group in Sweden who initiated Piratbyrån (the Bureau of Piracy).
For Armin Medosch, on the other hand, ‘the time for piracy was over’. Instead of the ‘provocations’ inherent in the very use of the word piracy, Armin Medosch went on to affirm the existence of a separate sphere of ‘legitimately free things’. First free software; secondly free culture, a phrase which at that time got almost synonymous with the still quite young hype around Creative Commons licensing; if you added free spectrum you had a holy trinity. (Shit, now I suddenly realize: Stallman the father, Lessig the son, and the wireless spirit of 2.4 GHz...)
We never took part in this hype of a ‘legitimately free’ sphere. I don’t think anyone in Piratbyrån ever read a book by Lawrence Lessig, even if he was sympathetically mentioned in a few of the earliest texts published on our website, which were written by the Italians of Wu Ming Foundation. And while we of course saw free software as something essential and its spread as positive, the FSF crowd still tended to be sceptical if not hostile towards us when we frankly declared ourselves to be non-believers in copyright.
A decisive moment for me personally occured in Berlin early summer 2004, as I visited the Wizards of OS conference which really dedicated itself to this trinity of free things. Coming from Sweden – a country which never really had had any ‘avant-garde of net culture in the 1990s’ – this must have been the first event in my life where this mixture of hackers, artists and academics met in a sometimes intelligent exchange of ideas. This became very stimulating for me exactly because I could not agree with some of the fundamental assumptions behind the two main reform proposals brought forward at that event. One was Creative Commons, which Sebastian Lütgert in one panel aptly characterized as a ‘social democracy for the digital commons’. The other was the proposal of a so-called ‘content flatrate,’ promising legalized file-sharing while somehow giving “compensation” to all kinds of copyright holders whose material was shared. I borrowed Sebastian’s phrase for a criticism of the latter proposal, the first thing about this topics which I ever wrote in English, mailed it out on Nettime and found out that it became quite discussed and republished a number of times. I remember this as my entry into the international, or really mainly continental-European, critical discourse about copyright.
Piratbyrån became an interface between this discourse and the broader Swedish so-called ‘file-sharing debate,’ which really broke into the mainstream in the spring of 2005. (The stimuli were two: A very controversial anti-piracy raid against an ISP, and the implementation of sharpened copyright laws.) The following year this debate reached new levels of intensity after the raid against The Pirate Bay. At that time, Piratbyrån were no longer alone in pursuing copyright criticism in Sweden, at the contrary there had formed loose networks of bloggers and also politicians (from left and right alike) who strongly opposed the war against piracy.
Of course, after every escalation some new actors joined the debate by proposing the “compromise” of a flat rate compensation models. But every time, these proposals have practically soon been drawn back after being heavily criticised. And I think that Piratbyrån’s long-standing criticism of this compensation discourse has really had an impact on the Swedish situation. Imaginary solutions have simply been kept out of sight, while we have kept insisting – however hard that is – that there can never be one solution for all the problems affecting cultural production in the age of digital reproduction.
For every “event” – like a raid ordered by anti-piracy groups, or the proposal of even harder copyright laws – the public and political interest in these questions have been widened in Sweden. And every time it felt like the discussion had to start from zero again. The mass-medial discourse reproduced the conflict as “shall there be file-sharing or not,” as if file-sharing was something to maybe implement in the future and not an existing reality. This frustrated us, especially as we were perfectly aware that it somehow was Piratbyrån who once had started this whole debate some years ago. We decided to perform a symbolic action on Walpurgis Night in the spring of 2007, went up at a mountain and burned our own Copy Me book, a collection of texts from our website published in 2005. We declared the file-sharing debate to be over, that ‘the files have already been downloaded,’ and that ‘we are not about anti-copyright’. The declaration ends, with a reference to a traditional Swedish Walpurgis song:
When we talk about file-sharing from now on it’s as one of many ways to copy. We talk about better and worse ways of indexing, archiving and copying – not whether copying is right or wrong. Winter is pouring down the hillside. Make way for spring!
Going back to Armin Medosch’s text, I can see a similarity to the break with piracy that he felt to participate in back in 2003: ‘...the notion that there was no more need for fighting against somebody, but being able instead to create our own worlds’. However, while the ‘free culture’ movement of that time wanted to build ‘beautiful islands of free software [and] free media’, our 2007 performance implied another kind of perspective shift. If anything is an island, it is the religion of copyright and its weirdly restrictive notion of “culture,” seeing it as nothing more than copyrightable “things”. Outside of this boring island there are vast seas and playgrounds. Let’s go there instead and do something fun.
Well, there is more to be said about this text. Two things I would like to elaborate is the question of technological determinism (or ‘McLuhanisms’ as Medosch writes) and the common figure of finding a middle way between two imagined extremes which I find extremely problematic or sometimes directly dangerous.
Often when I debate with Rasmus Fleischer or participate in events like the ones organised by Adnan Hadzi – events which I would characterise as quite “continental” in their intellectual tradition and largely “activist” in their political orientation – I find myself coming from a very Anglo-American approach, despite being Swedish. Probably this is due to my background in relatively mainstream ‘media studies,’ an area which has been dominated not only by the U.S. American imperialism of the mass media itself but by the way cultural studies has been formulated along largely Anglo-American debates.
Still, the point of encounter is fascinating; the ever-so-slightly different understandings of the same phenomena are inherently fertile. This is also something which we have seen in the academy at large during these early years of the new millennium, with an increased adoption of theory that ascertains decidedly material, non-human energies and ontologies (key names: Marshall McLuhan, Friedrich Kittler and Gilles Deleuze) among the previously human-centred and discourse-obsessed social constructionists.
What strikes me, when reading Armin Medosch’s fascinating account of the increasingly hostile downside to all the “free” culture hype of lately, is how different logics of control become layered upon one another and serve to reinforce each other in rather nebulous ways. New technologies allow for freer exchange, but this becomes seized upon also by the cultural industries which then come to expect cheaper terms of trade for everyone involved, especially struggling artists. All this while we’re all applauding, because “free” is always good, isn’t it?
Despite talking about “freedom” as a concept, what is inescapable here is what Hong Kong-based theorist Laikwan Pang (2006) labels the ‘fantasy’ of cultural control. While for example German media theory has taught us to attribute this control also to non-human, machinic or code-derived factors, Anglo-American cultural studies have often kept insisting on placing either individuals or institutions as key forces. Either this social constructionism comes in the flavour of discourse-obsessed postmodernism stressing the inherent polysemy of texts and the freedom to make aberrant readings, or it comes as “mainstream” political economy, tracing cultural control in policy documents, NGOs and trade bodies. Pang attributes socio-economists like Saskia Sassen to this latter group: Here, culture is engineered by governments or powerful institutions, instead of the scattered controls exercised and felt in the looser cultural domain. Here, legal documents are essentially what shape culture, and interestingly this is also in some way where we find the “big three” of the U.S. American copyleft literature: Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan and Yochai Benkler.
Because the Creative Commons ethos presupposes that culture follows law, and with the right laws implemented (i.e. CC), “better” or “freer” culture will follow. Like Rasmus Fleischer points out: Stallman the father, Lessig the son, and the wireless spirit of 2.4 GHz thus comes to gel to form a holy trinity of copyleft.
Funny thing, then, that this copyleft is not so different from its opposite: Compare on the one side the religion of copyright – the belief that WTO rules, restrictions and conventions can actually harness culture into preferable shapes – with this religion of copyleft; the belief that alternative rules, restrictions and conventions can harness culture, but differently. Two equally martinet, rule-obsessed approaches.
Now contrast this with the anti-transcendental, anti-dialectical urge of Deleuze, Kittler and McLuhan where technology has its own morphogenesis and rationale, distinct from human desires to harness it.
What is interesting is that depending on where one lays the emphasis, one sees different regimes of control, and ultimately different registers of who is actually leading the fight. Because this latter view – that code has a logic of its own – is what justifies the copyleft argument, while the old-school IFPI/MPAA/RIAA etc. copyright defenders tend to deliberately ignore this and instead lean on the earlier, human-centred approach.
If one understands the nature of code, through the ontological reasoning of Kittler, Florian Cramer, Norbert Bolz, the McLuhanists, the actor-network “ants,” and other theorists linked more to Deleuze and his postscriptum on control societies (Manuel de Landa, Alexander Galloway etc), one sees a dominant force of decentralisation through protocol, and unrestricted dissemination through the way the Internet is based on copying.
Yet, to entirely dismiss the role of human agency (policies, uses, appropriations) would be to somewhat miss the point as well. If one understands how policymaking, norms, and the way technologies do not develop by technical logic alone but by social and cultural conventions, one cannot but agree with Raymond Williams and a whole body of literature that serves to complicate the issue of pure technological determinism: STS (the ‘social construction’/‘social shaping’ of technology thesis), political economy (where coincidentally both Lessig and the WTO fit in), sociology (Manuel Castells) and anthropology (Arjun Appadurai, Daniel Miller, Don Slater). Different theorists tracing the workings of the digital realm, in somewhat different ways.
It is all about “finding a middle way” between the temptations on either side of the extremes. Since file-sharing, p2p and ‘piracy’ involves exchange and infrastructure, a traditional media studies approach has to give way for a perspective that takes up issues essentially of human and machinic agency. Who or what drives the whole thing forward?
What is common to all these academic accounts is that they can, after all, only debate those phenomena which are traceable. Either one could monitor the flows, movements and artefacts of online networks; or one could focus on the legal text, the lobbyist memos, op-eds and policy documents; or one could conduct participant observation, interview users about their everyday behaviour etc. The ways in which we can conceptualise these new phenomena are determined by or sensory instruments. For example Bruno Latour has presented a methodology for this in his more recent work (2005; 2007).
What I find riveting here, though, is the realisation of how much of our world that after all remains outside of these observed vectors: the ‘dark matter’ of the Internet, and of everyday life. There are so many uses out there that simply slip outside of our view, and – partially – slip outside of control. One-off file transfers, failed attempts, spontaneous exchanges. The whole phantasm of cultural control is a by-product of modernity, of Euclidian space, and yet it is our only tool to systematize what is going on.
The key, therefore, is to not remain blind to complexity, and to try seeing the strengths of each perspective – nationally, methodologically, epistemologically, politically – and further, seeing the connection points between perspectives that might appear different at first. Like Rasmus Fleischer says, there can never be one solution for all the problems affecting cultural production in the age of digital reproduction.
This is where decidedly local contexts like Deptford are important – once you spend some longer time in a local environment such as these neighbourhoods, you realize that there is so much cultural production going on, hidden from view, in the margins, simply unaccounted for, leaving few if any traces. This is in part a sad aspect of cultural meshworks like London, something I have seen especially in music production where plentifully more works are produced than is ever represented by record deals, releases or for that sake MySpace profiles (think of each MySpace artist as the tip of an iceberg of already existing connections and work hours largely external to the Internet).
Similarly, this granular, spontaneous and specifically local production is what is cool with the case of the Swedish pirates, as they never aspired to take part in the ‘hype’ or in this martinet sanctioning of a “legitimately free” sphere that Armin Medosch describes, but instead kept on copying, kept on deriving, building quirky little controversial web pranks while a norm took hold in the broadband-heavy North of not even thinking twice, but to freely and casually file-share cultural products before considering buying them.
A further reflection on Medosch’s text is how the current crisis in the cultural industries appears to be one primarily of distribution and marketing. Much of the ‘file-sharing debate’ has in the mainstream press in Sweden and elsewhere been portrayed as mainly a problem of producer remuneration: the fact that cultural consumption as it moves into the digital realm equals less warrants for profit streams within the established guilds of cultural producers. However, the viewpoint that is embraced in this reader, thanks to its focus on strategies for alternative (that is, non-sanctioned, non-guild-based) media, presents a dilemma which all the more interesting: the issues pertaining to how to get your locally produced content “out there” in the first place – as a non-established, corporately non-affiliated producer – and how to be able to find revenue streams without violating or trying to stem the rising tide of ubiquitous file-sharing.
As it happens, cultural production takes place – in local settings, worldwide – all the time. Thanks to the radical cheapening and growing access to technical tools, it is arguably easier to be a cultural producer now than ever before; similarly, crude broadcasting technologies allow for a publication (as in literally “making public”) of private life that was simply not possible before. Like Lennaart van Oldenborgh shows in chapter 4.2, blogs, vlogs, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook all allow for an extensive documentation of one’s everyday reality.
Similarly, consumption is something which the youth of today excel in; as citizens of the Western world, this is arguably the primary area of cultural expertise for all of us, being knowledgeable, demanding yet highly casual and pernickety consumers. In media and cultural studies, the term ‘consumer’ is largely interchangeable with ‘user’ since with cultural consumption, nothing is really “consumed” (as in exhausted and/or ingested). There is a dimension of disposal inherent to cultural use and consumption though; Michel de Certeau (1984) points to this ephemeral, transient dimension of everyday cultural consumption, which he defines as largely ‘quasi-invisible,’ played out in the margins. When not accounted for, or concretely materialised, the traces of consumption and use are very short-lived. Maybe the ‘datascapes’ of social networks and p2p-based technologies allow for an increase in this traceability, as Bruno Latour has recently argued (2005; 2007), but what I find as our everyday lives are increasingly permeated by these technologies is that these traces are inherently restricted to the micro level. They are short-lived – like the IP address temporarily logged in an IRC or p2p exchange, or the textual exchange maintained only during the duration of a chat session – and they are local in that they are visible and/or overseeable only to the agents directly involved. The topology of MySpace or Facebook does not stretch itself out as a vast landscape from which I can oversee it in panopticon-like ways – it rather takes the shape of several interconnected but exclusively segmented rooms, only overseeable through the local, myopic interaction that Latour (2005) rightly labels ‘oligopticon’.
The problem with distribution on the Internet is that it is granular, and dispersed in a way that is in fact antithetical to panopticon-like overview. Instead, it favours an accessibility that primarily operates through a search function.
The online topology thus overlays the offline topology of naturally segmented producers, or occasional acts of cultural production.
In local, creative environments like the London hotspots of Deptford, Hackney, Brixton etc. the problem has become one of improving the connections in-between such acts of production – essentially, making them aware of one another, so that they can start feeding off each others’ creativity, and generate those collective sums that exceed the individual parts – but also to improve the visibility, communicability and relevance of these acts to the wider world, in an economically viable way. (Hence the pressure on urban redevelopment that Ben Gidley presents in chapter 1.3.: a lot of societal benefits, and a lot of pure profit can be found in effective interlinking of such creative hotspots.)
This economic viability is precisely what also Armin Medosch’s article comes down to: once the damaging expectancy has taken root that culture is to be produced with very little economic gains or incentives to these producers, the table does turn towards a mode of production which is more sanctioned the more transient it is. Effectively, what is favoured are amateur forms which do not require much involvement in terms of personnel, time, capital investments etc.
This favouring of transient, agile, mobile, lean modes of production is not exclusive to the corporate sponsors, but is found across the board among new media sympathisers – this book included! Hence the common fascination among us all for anything “grassroots,” and hence the active support among copyleftists and activists for typically minute, D.I.Y. musical forms such as grime, dubstep, laptoptronica and punk rock over more traditional, multi-vocalist, multi-intrumentalist, studio-intensive, dare I say ambitious ones. One might say that these latter forms are dismissed for being too “polished” – not “polished” as a formal property, since a purely stylistic surface thanks to Logic, ProTools, Ableton etc. is increasingly accessible to all – but rather because they embody a mode or ethos of production that is accomplished, the opposite of minute, and comparatively investment-heavy.
What is presented to the poor struggling artist or musician who is bloody-minded enough to pursue these latter, more unweildy, more ambitious forms of expression is a double burden: a climate favouring opportunist media creation above anything else, on top of the crisis of distribution that I have already outlined. The key is to become known, to find avenues to get one’s productions recognised by the wider public in the white noise of millions of competing cultural messages. The easy route is of course to put on a funny hat and perform a YouTube mime to any given pop song, but if your aspirations are somewhat more labourious than this, what is the right outlet?
Further, even if finding an initial outlet, one can expect to be copied, appropriated, pirated to degrees that are simply beyond one’s own control. Is the luxury of public discovery something which can no longer be afforded without accepting vast degrees of free use and consumption of one’s work? Perhaps so, but in order to become pirated to begin with, one needs to have a name which is recognised and – ultimately – respected.
A concrete example of this is presented by the London-based burntprogress collective, which this spring presents their second CD compilation burntprogress 2.1 to the world, highlighting some of the artists who feature at the burntprogress monthly club night CDR – A night of ideas and tracks in the making mixed from recordable CDs and other digital media. Here, an avenue to potential recognition is provided, from starting blocks which are essentially noncommercial yet providing the potential to capitalise on one’s own production. The first compilation, burntprogress 1.1 (2006) was (besides its legally available forms) for a long while available as a ripped torrent, something which burntprogress co-founder Tony Nwachukwu welcomes as a living proof of the actual popular acclaim of this music. The illegal dispersion of the compilation, parallel to its legal dispersion, here becomes perhaps not complimentary, but in any event an unavoidable side effect which affirms some sort of success in the first place.
What is more, we see here how instances of production that might otherwise have been separated by space and time become apprised to one another – CDR very much serves as a real-world hub or community for a long list of artistic collaborations – and how an initiative like burntprogress acts as a connector or aggregator of talent.
Unlike the fragmentary, jungle-like worlds-in-their-own of MySpace and/or Facebook, who surely help to showcase creativity yet do nothing to comprehensively promote noncommercial acts in an orchestrated way, connectors like burntprogress and Deptford.TV work against the grain of the transience and de-territorialisation outlined above. They essentially re-territorialise; something which requires intentionality, the possibility of failure, and ultimately some form of political agenda. Strategy rather than tactic. Orchestrated ‘data spheres’ amid the amorphous ‘datascapes’.
Surely MySpace, with its specific disposition towards pop music, has helped many artists gain increased visibility despite its primary intention to lure unsuspecting eyes to increasingly narrow-cast marketing – but its entire mode of operation does nothing to steer away from the ultimately neo-liberal agenda of leaving ‘each to his own abilities’. Its economic externality of allowing potential collaboration and discovery can be seen as an economic subsidy to struggling artists, but it is a subsidy which is intended only as a “trickle-down” effect ultimately benefiting the hugely popular, already-established over the multitudes of unknown talent, prompting a model of society where these lesser-known artists should count themselves lucky if ever reaching the mainstream.
Cultural production and consumption takes place everywhere all the time; the problem is when these instances remain discrete, muted, and soon-forgotten. The digital ameliorates this, it helps making known that which is unknown, but only to a degree:
Any Internet-mediated cultural production, no matter how banal, becomes textually instantiated and searchable. As Clay Shirky recently, rather provocatively stated, most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum, and hence not actually “content” at all, since it is not designed for an audience in the first place (Shirky 2008). All this conversational material drowns out the potentially audience-orientated, adds to the noise.
So the common word that digitisation makes it easier to access stuff is in fact only superficially true. Once again, on the raw, jungle-like networks this accessibility is directly determined by the search function. Mesh-like spheres like p2p and Web 2.0 networks might help to heighten the visibility of individual acts of consumption/production, but only in a way which is temporary, never fully overseeable, and ultimately statistical, where a panoptic view can only be attained by means of a search. And searches, as we all know, require prior knowledge.
Precisely because of this, well-maintained and comprehensive metadata is not enough. Active and deliberate connectors are still needed, especially since one of these primary connecting practices is the one linking the online with the offline, a gap which should not be seen as a barrier but which becomes exacerbated by the purely online ventures of social networks and torrent archives. Here Piratbyrån, Deptford.TV and burntprogress share similarities, despite the decidedly different practices of these three examples. They re-territorialise and by doing so, compel everyone into opinion or at least awareness. They shed light. They editorialise. They redistribute, or at least help users organise themselves to privately re-distribute in more orchestrated and thus more meaningful, potentially profitable ways. That can only be a good thing.
Tell me, and I will forget.
Show me, and I may remember.
Involve me, and I will understand. (Confucius, BC 450)
We are in many ways living in times of slavery of the mind. Through Intellectual Property, our culture is owned by a few. As parts of this reader take up the fraught issue of how Deptford’s history is entangled in slavery I want to elaborate upon this idea of slavery, extending it to our ideas and our minds through referring to Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762/1968).
Thus, however we look at the question, the “right” of slavery is seen to be void; void, not only because it cannot be justified, but also because it is nonsensical, because it has no meaning. The words “slavery” and “right” are contradictory, they cancel each other out. Whether as between one man and another, or between one man and a whole people, it would always be absurd to say: “I hereby make a covenant with you which is wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I will respect it so long as I please and you shall respect it so long as I wish.” (Rousseau 1762/1968)
The Debian Foundation, one of the biggest platforms for the Linux operating system, coined the ‘Debian Social Contract’ for the free and Open Source software community reflecting many of Rousseau’s thoughts:
Our priorities are our users and free software. We will be guided by the needs of our users and the free software community. We will place their interests first in our priorities. We will support the needs of our users for operation in many different kinds of computing environments. We will not object to non-free works that are intended to be used on Debian systems, or attempt to charge a fee to people who create or use such works. We will allow others to create distributions containing both the Debian system and other works, without any fee from us. In furtherance of these goals, we will provide an integrated system of high-quality materials with no legal restrictions that would prevent such uses of the system. (Debian, 2004)
In this chapter I will extend the idea of the Debian Social Contract to media, suggesting similar principles that can be applied to free and open media and define these as a pre-condition for peer-to-peer database documentaries such as Deptford.TV. In the field of media, so-called Open Content licenses have been created over the last decade in response to how copyright laws have changed in favour of huge media conglomerates. A famous example is the copyright-term extension act of 1998 – often labeled the ‘Mickey Mouse Protection Act’, due to the extensive lobbying by the Walt Disney corporation that ensured that Mickey Mouse’s absence from the public domain.
Another, more recent example of the battle over social contracts and the sharing of rights – and its connected wealth – is the Writers Guild of America Strike which took place in Hollywood in 2007: more than 12,000 writers went on strike from November 2007 until February 2008. The strike was against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers which cares for the interests of the American film and television producers. The strike started because the two sides could not agree on how to handle the revenues from digital media sales such as DVDs and, more importantly, the increasing revenues from Internet-distributed media. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers refused to negotiate an increasing share for the digital media sales.
On the 8th of January 2008 the strikers had a symbolic victory with the shutting down of the Golden Globe TV gala and it looked likely that also the Oscar Award Ceremony would be cancelled for the first time in its history. The writers decided to compete with the studios by collaboratively producing and distributing their own shows online and The Independent went so far as to state that the strike could ‘potentially [...] revolutionise the way television is made and consumed in the online area’ (Gumbel, 2008).
With social contracts such as the Debian Social Contract in place one can decide how to produce, distribute and share media. But these alternatives are quickly corrupted if the issues, especially in regards to author’s rights, are not looked at in a sincere way as once defined by Rousseau and rewritten by the Debian Software Foundation.
I ask: are FLOSS (Free / Libre / Open Source Software) and other, related open and free content licenses likely to develop further in the future providing a platform for alternative media practices? I argue that the development of computers and microchips with built-in copy control technology, and the current changes in the Intellectual Property legislation endanger the sustainability of such alternative practices and licensing schemes. Worryingly, the social contracts that relate to copyright and intellectual property tend to breach the current privacy protection of consumers: in order to enforce new copyright laws, control needs to be tightened by surveying the computers consumers use in their private sphere. Unfortunately these new control mechanisms can also be used to silence critical voices.
These are ultimately issues of legislation. I know that I am now digressing into the legal terrain, but I do so in an attempt to outline a possibility practiced with the Deptford.TV project. The concern was how to move from an abstract idea of social contracts to a concrete legislation which could enable a cultural production that is not deemed antithetical, or oppositional. This can be done through defining the independent terms and conditions, namely free and open content licenses. At this point I would like to offer the reader a link to the video clip Staking a Claim in Cyberspace from Paper Tiger TV, in order to involve you into the practice of media production. Unfortunately this is not legally possible within the academic context: one can only get hold of a copy or link to the file through the more nebulous file-sharing networks...
Yet in spite of this broad spectrum of possibilities, there is no place where one can prepare for a collective practice. At best, there are the rare examples where teams (usually partnerships of two) can apply as one for admission into institutions of higher learning. But once in the school, from administration to curriculum, students are forced to accept the ideological imperative that artistic practice is an individual practice. (Critical Arts Ensemble, 2000)
With the concept of social contracts, the assumption that all individuals are sovereign changes. With social contracts the people give up sovereignty to a system that will make sure that individual rights are protected. A portion of each individual’s sovereignty is given up for the common good (in anarchist terms one would speak of solidarity). Rousseau believes that the sovereignty stays with the people. If the people are not content with the governing force they rise up. Rousseau’s social contract was therefore one of the main references for the French Revolution.
In the 18th century Rousseau published The Social Contract (1762/ 1968). Rousseau thinks that there is a conflict between obedience and people’s freedom. He argues that our natural freedom is our own will. Rousseau defined Social Contract as a law “written” by everybody. His argument was that if everybody was involved in making the laws they would only have to obey to themselves and as such follow their free will. How could people then create a common will? For Rousseau this would only have been possible in smaller communities through the practice of caring for each other and managing conflicts for the common good – ultimately through love. He imagined a society of the size of the city of Geneva, where he came from, as an ideal ground for the implementation of the Social Contract theory. Ironically it was France through its revolutionaries (amongst whom Robespierre was a great admirer of Rousseau’s writing) which implemented the Social Contract theory. Nevertheless France read it differently, imposing Social Contracts to the people.
In this chapter I outline the concept of social contracts in terms of freedom and ownership through a form of coalition as defined by the Critical Arts Ensemble. I explain how one can have an ad-hoc coalition to implement a strategy in order to achieve a common aim. Therefore the coalition only needs to function until the strategy has been implemented. Then a standard is created which can be adapted by society.
In other words, for peer-to-peer film-making the extension of copyright legislation is an important social contract. As argued below, copyright laws are not in effect functioning anymore in regard to digital distribution. Consequently, artists, programmers and activists have been looking for alternatives and extensions of these laws. According to the Critical Arts Ensemble (CAE), collectives can configure themselves to address any issue or space, and they can use all types of media. The result is a practice that defies specialization.
Solidarity is based on similarity in terms of skills and political/aesthetic perceptions. Most of the now classic cellular collectives of the 70s and 80s, such as Ant Farm, General Idea, Group Material, Testing the Limits (before it splintered), and Gran Fury used such a method with admirable results. Certainly these collectives’ models for group activity are being emulated by a new generation (Critical Art Ensemble, 2000)
In the Deptford.TV project the groups doing a documentary film together often share a similar political and/or aesthetic approach to the film but different levels of technological know-how. I borrow the term ‘cell’, used by the CAE to describe the organism of their group, to refer to the Deptford.TV collective. In these cells, solidarity arrives through difference. Because the individuals bring in different knowledge into a cell, the possibilities of endless conflicts are reduced. Film teams are ideally built up with participants specialised in directing, editing, producing, operating the camera etc. When a cell decides how to produce the film/project those members with the most know-how in their special fields are becoming authoritative in the sense of deciding how to film, direct, edit etc. CAE argue that solidarity based on difference creates functional and more powerful groups. They compare this to the dominant approach of solidarity based on equality and consent democracy, which was adopted by many tactical media groups such as the Ant Farm collective. Such groups had a fear that hierarchy would lead to stronger members becoming dominant over the weaker members within the collective. The Critical Art Ensemble does not follow the democratic model.
The collective does recognize its merits; however, CAE follows Foucault’s principle that hierarchical power can be productive (it does not necessarily lead to domination), and hence uses a floating hierarchy to produce projects. [...] Consequently, there has always been a drive toward finding a social principle that would allow like-minded people or cells to organize into larger groups. Currently, the dominant principle is “community.” CAE sees this development as very unfortunate. The idea of community is without doubt the liberal equivalent of the conservative notion of “family values.” [...] Talking about a gay community is as silly as talking about a “straight community.” The word community is only meaningful in this case as a euphemism for “minority.” The closest social constellation to a community that does exist is friendship networks, but those too fall short of being communities in any sociological sense. (Critical Art Ensemble, 2000)
In Deptford.TV people are coming together from different backgrounds but share similar concerns. We deliberately try to group together participants with different skills. These participants choose to document specific topics that fall within their personal interests thus accepting that conflicts could occur, while approaching these as positive for the overall production of the documentation process. CAE explain that this kind of alliance, ‘created for purposes of large scale cultural production and/or for the visible consolidation of economic and political power, is known as a coalition’ (Critical Art Ensemble, 2000). Those who take responsibility within a Deptford.TV cell are also those who are most involved in decision-making in the spirit that, in order to keep the coalition together, what is important is tools, not rules.
Similarly, theorists of the online world like Howard Rheingold increasingly acknowledge that notions of ‘community’ with all its gemeinschaft-like connotations (close-knit, familial, based on mutual solidarity etc.) are often overstated. Steven Jones (1995) notes how ‘community’ is generally conceptualised as (1) solidarity institutions, (2) primary interaction or (3) institutionally distinct groups. Only really the third of these, Jones argues – community as institutionally distinct groups – makes sense in the context of computer-mediated-communications. While I would diverge from Jones’s argument in that this mode of communication is not only socially produced, but equally technically constituted, it is notable how it still challenges the idea of community as being based on geographic proximity to the extent that one could, like Jones, talk about computer-mediated communities as ‘pseudo-communities’.
Communities formed by CMC have been called “virtual communities” and defined as incontrovertibly social spaces in which people still meet face-to-face, but under new definitions of both “meet” and “face”. (Jones 1995: 19)
With the recognition borrowed from Miller & Slater (2000) and effectively repeated by andrea rota both in this reader and our previous one (2006) we must not assume an insurmountable gap between the alleged ‘online’ and ‘offline’ worlds: Deptford.TV is a local, situated practice as well as one which stretches into the online world. Nevetheless, it is one which should not be mistaken for a permanent, tight-knit community; rather, it is a temporary, tool-based (technological as much as social), if not occasional coalition.
Open Content Licensing schemes, as outlined in Lawrence Liang’s book Guide to Open Content Licenses (2004), help to create an understanding of a shared culture – culture as a communication medium rather than a commodity. Culture and creativity very often build upon previous works, through reusing, remixing and reinterpreting works; often this is a fundamental part of any creative practice. Therefore the academic and journalistic concept of ‘fair use’ could be an import part of social contracts for creative practices. But fair use and even ‘public domain’ is under threat. New digital copyrights such as the Millennium Copyright Act (1998) where written in order to tackle file-sharing, illegalising this new technology in many countries without considering any of its the benefits.
This is a recurring discussion that tends to take place around any invention of new communication technologies. An example is the invention of VCR recorders: at the time it became clear that those trying to stop the distribution and production of VCRs, especially the big studios, made huge profits from rentals and sales in the new home-video market. The same could prove to be the case in regards to the file-sharing technologies.
The original intention behind copyright laws was to support a vibrant production of culture through the protection of producers and artists. As the current copyright legislation cannot be fully implemented when it comes to practices of online distribution and file-sharing, new copyright laws are proposed by the lobby of media giants which violate the private sphere of the consumer and threaten the existence of a democratic public sphere. The irony behind the attempt to create a more strict copyright through eliminating fair use is that this original intention to support cultural production might come to a stand-still, as the artists will not be able to access and use cultural materials they need in order for them to produce new work. As a result, stricter copyright laws disadvantage artists and small producers while they work for the benefit of the already powerful media conglomerates.
For the most part, copyrights are not held by individuals, but by corporate entities who are part of the content industry. The content industry would argue that strengthening their position allows them to provide greater incentives to individual creators, but many creators vociferously challenge that notion. Strengthening copyright laws does improve the position of the content industry by giving them a relatively untempered monopoly over content, but it does so at the expense of the public good. (Besser, 2001)
The public sphere has traditionally been determined by law. Here I coin the term data sphere as an extension of the public sphere following Fenton & Downey’s (2003) argumentation on ‘counter-public’ spheres, in order to describe a digital and networked public sphere where practices such as peer-to-peer networking cannot possibly adhere to traditional copyright laws and cultural content is made available in complete disregard of current legislation. This happens largely through processes that are wholly machinic: automated, self-emergent, governed by protocol rather than direct human intent. Consequently, these copyright laws are, for the first time, being breached by a critical mass of technology; technologies which are mainly in the hands of consumers. When observable coalitions arise out of this mass, they resemble a ‘data sphere’ more than an intentional, human-centred ‘public sphere’ in the traditional sense, since the coming-together need not be by personal volition but by the ways the actual infrastructures are configured. If the ‘datascapes’ of Latour and others (which Jonas Andersson writes about in chapter 2.4 of this volume) make possible a tracing and documentation of how existing social structures come together and become constituated, ‘data spheres’ are the more particular instantiations that form through an actual mobilisation within these datascapes.
Social contracts and laws will eventually be defined for these data spheres, but until then the big ‘user-generated’ platforms such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook try to get their hands on every uploaded piece of content in accord with the old, non-efficacious, copyright legislation. Reading the terms and conditions of those mega-platforms makes one wonder how it can be that so many artists and independent producers hand over the rights for their content to these platforms. This is an excerpt from Facebook’s own terms and conditions:
By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing. (Facebook Terms & Conditions, 2008)
These platforms present themselves as open-content providers that host a democratic discourse by offering members of the public freedom of speech. In reality they hold the contributors as slaves to advertisement which is, at the moment, the only real means of income generation and profit-making for these ventures. Investments in this field can be on a grand scale: Google bought YouTube in 2007 for $1.65 billion. These companies need to see a quick return on their investment so they become a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” marketing themselves as providers of free and open content while in fact implementing strict proprietary rules.
Consciousness of desire and the desire for consciousness together and indissolubly constitute that project which in its negative form has as its goal the abolition of classes and the direct possession by the workers of every aspect of their activity. The opposite of this project is the society of the spectacle, where the commodity contemplates itself in a world of its own making. (Debord, 1994)
I suggest that the only use of these platforms should be tactical – as when publishing content on YouTube one can benefit from higher visibility, but this comes with abandoning one’s rights. The use of file-sharing technologies on the other hand is strategic – as the participants do not need to abandon their rights and can bypass the draconian terms and conditions imposed by platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. Michel de Certeau defines ‘strategy’ in The Practice of Everyday Life:
I call a “strategy” the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an “environment.” A strategy assumes a place that can be circumscribed as proper (propre) and thus serve as the basis for generating relations with an exterior distinct from it (competitors, adversaries, “clienteles,” “targets,” or “objects” of research). Political, economic, and scientific rationality has been constructed on this strategic model. (de Certeau 1984)
Often strategic models depend on the building of infrastructures and the production of laws, goods, literature, inventions, etc. Through this production process a strategy aspires to sustain itself. I argue that Internet is such an infrastructure and is, by its very ontology, a file-sharing technology. As such, use of the Internet through file-sharing is almost impossible to restrict by enforcing non-realistic copyright laws. This use is a strategical utilisation of an infrastructure that is already anti-hierarchical. This strategic utilisation generates data spheres, which have to be moderated through social contracts since the anti-hierarchy and openness of the datascapes does not lend itself to restriction in the traditional sense.
Adding Open Content licensing schemes to the file-sharing distribution technology enables audiences to become active not only in the process of viewing and criticising content but also, and more importantly, in its production process. Open, free content licenses are often referred to as ‘copyleft’.
In the online hacker lexicon jargon.net, copyleft is thus defined as:
copyleft /kop’ee-left/ /n./ [play on ‘copyright’]
1. The copyright notice (‘General Public License’) carried by GNU EMACS and other Free Software Foundation software, granting reuse and reproduction rights to all comers (but see also General Public Virus)
2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to achieve similar aims.
In 1983 Richard Stallman, a software programmer, started the GNU Project, creating software to be shared with the goal to develop a completely free operating system. For this, Stallman invented the General Public License (GPL) which allows for the freedom of reuse, modification and reproduction of works.
Copyright asserts ownership and attribution to the author. Copyright protects the attribution to the author in relation to his/her work. It also protects the work from being altered by others without the author’s consent and restricts the reproduction of the work. Copyleft is not, as many think, an anti-copyright. Copyleft is an extension of copyright: it includes copyright through its regulations for attribution and ownership reference to the author. But it also extends copyright by allowing for free re-distribution of the work and, more controversially, the right to change the work if the altered version attributes the original author and is re-distributed under the same terms.
For the “copy-paste generation,” copyleft is already the natural propagation of digital information in a society which provides the possibility of interacting through digital networks. In doing so one naturally uses content generated by others, remixing, altering or redistributing this.
Simple “public domain” publication will not work, because some will try to abuse this for profit by depriving others of freedom; as long as we live in a world with a legal system where legal abstractions such as copyright are necessary, as responsible artists or scientists we will need the formal legal abstractions of copyleft that ensure our freedom and the freedom of others. (Debian, 1997)
One of the main current Linux platforms is the Debian Project. Debian describes itself as ‘an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system’ (Debian, 1997). Debian, as a group of volunteers, created the Debian GNU Linux operating system. ‘The project and all developers working on the project adhere to the Debian Social Contract’ (Debian, 2004). In this social contract Debian defines the criteria for free software and, as such, which software can be distributed over their network.
The Deptford.TV project is strategically building up its own server system with the goal to distribute over file-sharing networks rather than relying on YouTube or MySpace, thus distributing the files over the Free Art License in the spirit of the GPL and the Creative Commons ‘Share-Alike’ attribution license. Nevertheless, Debian reviewed the Creative Commons licenses and concluded that none of the Creative Commons core licenses actually are free in accordance to the Debian Free Software Guidelines, recommending that works released under these licenses ‘should not be included in Debian’ (Debian, 2005).
Creative Commons (CC) was critically discussed in the first Deptford.TV reader by rota & Pozzi (2006), specifically criticising the ‘Non-Commercial’ clause of the CC license. This Non-Commercial (NC) license forbids for-profit uses of works. Despite that, it is often used by content creators who want their media to be distributed and find useful the exchange of information and critical opinions about their work. In this way, a common pool is created. For commercial use of material distributed under the the NC license, one would have to contact the original author for permission. Nevertheless, the definition of ‘Non-Commercial’ is, strictly speaking, very difficult. Many producers use CC licenses to distribute content cheaply via the Internet in order to raise attention to their works. It is interesting that through this attitude we see more artists relying on revenues coming from higher visibility rather than sales of their work. For musicians, for example, this can be live concerts; for photographers, ad-hoc commissions. According to rota, ‘the Non-Commercial clause would only limit diffusion of their works, as well as limit the availability of freely reusable work in the communal pool from which everyone can draw and contribute back’ (rota & Pozzi 2006).
Unfortunately these uncertainties in the Creative Commons system made it corruptible. This is the reason why YouTube, MySpace etc. are often referred to as “open” user-generated content platforms. They provide tools which merely make it seem as if there’s real sharing going on, whereas in reality these sites are about driving traffic to one single site and controlling this site.
Deptford.TV uses the General Public License (GPL), the Free Art License and the Creative Commons Share-Alike attribution license as a statement of copyleft attitude. The basic reference for the Deptford.TV project is the General Public License, a Free Software license, which grants to you the four following freedoms:
0. The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
1. The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.
2. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour.
3. The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. You may exercise the freedoms specified here provided that you comply with the express conditions of this license. The principal conditions are:
• You must conspicuously and appropriately publish on each copy distributed an appropriate copyright notice and disclaimer of warranty and keep intact all the notices that refer to this License and to the absence of any warranty; and give any other recipients of the Program a copy of the GNU General Public License along with the Program. Any translation of the GNU General Public License must be accompanied by the GNU General Public License.
• If you modify your copy or copies of the program or any portion of it, or develop a program based upon it, you may distribute the resulting work provided you do so under the GNU General Public License. Any translation of the GNU General Public License must be accompanied by the GNU General Public License.
• If you copy or distribute the program, you must accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code or with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to furnish the complete corresponding machine-readable source code.
Michael Stutz (1997) describes how the GPL can also be applied to non-software information. The GPL states that it ‘applies to any program or other work which contains a notice placed by the copyright holder saying it may be distributed under the terms of this General Public License,’ so according to Stutz this ‘program,’ then, may not necessarily be a computer software program – any work of any nature that can be copyrighted can be copylefted with the GNU GPL (Stutz, 1997).
The Free Art License as well as the CC Share-Alike attribution license follow the attitude of the GPL. As the Creative Commons ‘SA-BY’ license states, you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work).
In many ways, the GPL provides a de-militarized zone. Everyone agrees to leave the big guns at the door. Period. The non-commercial CC license, on the other hand, is a pledge not to use the guns, if you play nice. And, to be on the sure side, being nice means to consume, but not to build upon works in a serious way. [...] essentially (and to daringly simplify) GPL comes from an ethical conflict/dilemma, while CC comes from economic/jurisdictional observation. (Princic, 2005)
These licenses are unfortunately not entirely compatible with each other, however they carry the same attitude. Like with the discussion between free and open-source licensing schemes and the resulting labeling of FLOSS (Free / Libre / Open Source Software) I argue that alternatively the same can be done with media to represent the same attitude. Therefore one could perhaps speak of “FLOMS” (as in Free / Libre / Open Media Systems), since the discussions and differences in the open media field between GPL and CC are like the ones in the software field between free software and open-source software. To use file-sharing as technology and to apply the attitude of copyleft is a possible strategy for alternative media practices with the aim of creating a social contract, a legal model in which the culture of sharing becomes valuable. Therefore concentrating on a copyleft attitude for media production might be a better way forward to bring social contracts into the data sphere and with it a new discussion around the meaning of the public sphere and the shared cultural heritage of the file-sharing generation.
Thanks to Jonas Andersson and Maria X for comments and contributions.
all communication is propaganda.
all publication is political.
all business is personal.
all art is pornographic.
mind you,
free your mind.