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.