SPAZMs on the Uncommons

SPAZ | Semi-Permanent Autonomous Zones

In 1985 the anarchist philosopher, poet and activist Hakim Bey wrote a small but influential book called Temporary Autonomous Zone (or TAZ). Bey proposed the political necessity for the creation of autonomous, horizontally-organised process-oriented productive spaces.(1) The temporary nature of alternative initiatives was crucial, ensuring creative dynamism and an inbuilt resistance to corruption and ossification. TAZ became a kind of a manifesto and blueprint within various activist communities worldwide, and influenced the shaping of innumerable creative projects.

Building upon Bey's TAZ notion, I propose that the selected case studies in my PhD thesis could be conceived as examples of what I call SPAZ, or Semi-Permanent Autonomous Zones. These are not temporary initiatives, as their founding groups believe that the underlying social needs and political realities that their initiatives address cannot be answered by fleeting campaigns, temporary erruptions or short-term fixes. However, none of the projects aim to establish themselves as permanent institutions, with all the familiar compromises and problems. Hence the condition of being semi-permanent is optimal, offering the potential for longer-term planning and short-term responsiveness to changing conditions and imperatives.

Autonomy is critical, self-managed initiatives coming from the ground up, not imposed from and answerable to an above. To be autonomous, to act in unison as autonomous agents, implies a commitment to the principles of shared power and decision-making, to heterarchy rather than hierarchy, to political independence rather than passive dependence.

Finally, the semantic choice of designating the projects as zones rather than centres or organisations suggests interrelated fields of ideas and activities, spaces with unclear or permeable boundaries, of imaginative potentialities as much as embedded actualities.

By recognising the 'small' in the here and now, in a handful of SPAZ's selected from the rich field of contemporary cultural activism, the future potential of the 'large' and the many can also be apprehended. My examination will add to an empirical knowledge base of real world projects which complements contemporary philosophical ideas of the “multitude” and the “network of networks”. This leads me to a second lens which I will apply to my analysis of the three case study projects, and that is my notion of 'the uncommons'.

THE UNCOMMONS

The concept of a global digital commons—a dynamic and expanding sphere enlivened by peer labour, and free exchange of information, knowledge and digital commodities—has been steadily gaining currency. From the circulation of free software to the collaborative building of disciplinary-specific or encyclopaedic public knowledge databases, the new electronic commons is made manifest through the internet. Personal diaries in the form of web-based blogs, and prolific contributions to video-sharing platforms like YouTube, create popular audiences and instant intercontinental soups of fan bases. Ever diversifying legal instruments are developed and championed under the commons banner, such as the virally popular Creative Commons digital content licensing system. (2)

Originally a useful way of thinking about productive peer activity in the electronic realm, discussion around the digital commons has quickly been mainstreamed. This recalls similar discursive narrowing, such as the way that early discussions in the media arts field around artist/activist built 'social software' have now been almost totally supplanted by mass media discourse on the vast 'social networking' commercial sites such as Facebook and MySpace. (3) An even stronger example is the discursive and ideological split between the free software movement (driven by a kind of radical libertarianism in the United states, and by more anarchic [eg, Italy and Germany] or social emancipatory principles [eg, Brazil]), and the open source development paradigm (driven by commercial free market principles), which has been comprehensively described by Moody and others. (4) Although participation in free software remains vibrant, it is the open source model which captures the lion's share of media attention.

Hence, although it would be easy for me to discuss the case studies in terms of the digital commons by examining how their creative projects and intellectual 'goods' are shared online, because the notional commons is being rapidly commodified, there is another more innovative way to consider them. I want to tease out the idea of the uncommons, that which distinguishes the selected projects from more conventional and now profit-driven endeavours in the digital realm. By identifying their 'uncommon' features and attributes, and by referencing other grassroots projects, I will reflect upon the nature of creativity and social action in an emerging sphere of imaginative socio-political practice that I will term 'the uncommons'.

The etymology of the English prefix 'un' has a few distinct meanings. Firstly, it indicates absence or lack. Secondly, it can mean contrary or opposite. Thirdly, it can mean reverse. And finally, it can signify release, free, remove, and extract. It can be useful to hold some of these meanings, particularly the last, in mind when contemplating what could constitute the, or an, uncommons, in the framework of informational capitalism and its creative collaborative discontents.

The utopian vision of a digital commons is at odds with the rapid changes apace in the 'real' e-world. Much digital creative expression and peer-to-peer communication is quickly becoming commodified, as media moguls (exemplified by Rupert Murdoch, owner of MySpace) and IT whizkids (such as Mark Zuckermann, the founder/co-owner of Facebook) extract vast profits leveraged from the value of both unpaid labour and also the installed 'customer base' of millions of user-creators of social networking and other online sites. Peer labour, the incalculable millions of hours devoted by individuals in creating personal 'content', becomes the raw material of a 'product' (basically electronic real estate to be sold to advertisers, and corporate shareholders) which is making a handful of individuals and shareholders extremely wealthy. (5)

And as user/creators discover, if and when they read the End User Licence Agreements (EULA) attached to most social networking sites, they are waiving very basic rights over what happens to their content (from photos of pets to video diaries to lists of favourite albums). Users themselves become commodities (the so-called eyeballs for advertisers), and demographic units. Suddenly the public space of the commons is feeling more like the private space of the mega-mall. We cosmopolitan 'netizens' might be hyper social and super networked, but we surely are not free.

This commodification of creativity and communication is accompanied by increasing regulation of both users, and internet service providers (ISPs). The internet itself is now subject to multiple national and international laws, as once-unfettered communicative activities become recognised, criminalised and punished. Twinned towering spectres of electronic stranger danger and content 'piracy', political dissent and terrorism, provide cover for Orwellian levels of State surveillance, entrapment and data interception.

A cartoon depicting a couple of canines and a computer, with one explaining “On the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog” recalls a more innocent and playful time. (6) Again the utopian vision of a global commons disintegrates, a joyous and generous anarchy supplanted by the rule of law. Downed by law.

Endnotes

1. http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html

2. Although there are some little known pertinent critiques of the CC system, which convincingly argue it to be a means of knowledge restriction and enclosure rather than a faciliator of free exchange. See for example Berry, D.M. & Moss, G. 2005, On the 'Creative Commons': A Critique of the Commons without Commonality, Free Software Magazine, viewed 2 September 2005
http:www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_05/commons_without_commonality

3. To the extent that the term 'social software' now means something completely different to its original usage. In his seminal book Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software, Matthew Fuller (2003, p. 24) describes social software (in the old-school sense) as:

Primarily...built by and for those of us locked out of the narrowly engineered subjectivity of mainstream software. It is software which asks itself what kind of currents, what kinds of machine, numerical, social, and other dynamics, it feeds in and out of, and what others can be brought into being. [....] It is...directly born, changed, and developed as the result of an ongoing sociability between users and programmers in which demands are made on the practices of coding that exceed their easy fit into standardised social relations.

4. Moody, G. 2001, Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London.

5. The Guardian (UK) article on facebook 14 jan 2008

6. The cartoon by Peter Steiner was published in the July 5, 1993 issue of The New Yorker, (Vol.69 (LXIX) no. 20, p. 61), and quickly became a classic. See http://www.unc.edu/depts/jomc/academics/dri/idog.html.