Are Flagan on Sun, 31 Aug 2003 17:49:25 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> siva vaidhyanathan: the new information ecosystem |
Siva provides a very good overview with most of the usual facts/arguments thrown in (along with some new, to me at least, links). However, it is interesting to note how little this debate (?) has changed over the last years, even throughout the batches periodically reappearing here on nettime. Siva clearly maintains the tenor that unabashedly, and very obviously, automates nods and "compelling" labels from open democracy. Yet all the hard questions that this proverbial Universal Resource Locator might be asking are neglected in favor of what is mostly copy and paste of a mailman-generated consensus. I think Keith Hart points to and asks the harder questions. They have to do with property -- rights and regulations, definitions and borders (far beyond any glossary). If one considers the shifts from feudalism, to markets, to industrial capitalism, and toward an information society (yes, it's a big picture), a society's political, economical and thus arguably also cultural organization around _property_ is central. And with the introduction of property comes the inclusion and exclusion logic that Hart quotes in every instance of a definition, where it enters as its delineating regulation. One may then argue, as it is frequently done and also in the parent here, that the inability to clearly define and regulate property has opened up "culture" and "society" to a sort of rainbow mass of sharing; hence the public domain flourishes in a free for all that has been cast as "libre" to avoid, again, recalling the confusing yet very real questions pertaining to organizing principles, to structure or, to join this new program in nomenclature, flows. Hence the word anarchy pops up a lot and Diogenes' brand of cynicism reappears as the Grecian 2003 philosophy of a noble techno savage. But is the main neglected question still not hovering around property, a profitable nexus of inclusion and exclusion centered on politically, economically and culturally realized and agreed upon value(s)? There are of course many efforts to somehow reorganize this domain, now deeply intellectual (immaterial) as well as material, according to the models brought about by the digital, the net, p2p and so on, such as GPL, Copyleft and Creative Commons. The ensuing question then is arguably if these supposed revolutionary manifestos can reach beyond their information ecosystem, of which Siva for one primarily speaks, and affect the broader and longer historical trajectory of property as an operative extension of and foundation for oligarchy. Or, to frame it more realistically perhaps, to what extent it may or may not do so? The rhetorical cliffhanger, however, is if these changes, so lauded in online forums and the actions of a brave new p2p world (pirating, as it complicates the case, is frequently glossed over), actually pose more than a temporary trespass, a most minor infringement, on the outer edge of a more massive and encompassing transformation of property. Considering how far this process has actually come, right down to human genes -- in comparison to how many MP3s were triumphantly traded last night, how the Linux kernel improved, how the bandwidth traffic on sourceforge peaked, or the current stock-ticker index for nettime subs climbed another graphical mountain -- lends some perspective on the infospheres and biospheres within this global bubble. All this is tediously repetitive, but, due to the reluctance toward a more difficult assessment, it primarily leads to increasingly paradoxical things like "six limitations on open source," which appear to initiate cultish communes still intent on reforming the world by shouting from their compounds. What increasingly surprises me in this text and others is the grindstone allegiance to a philosophical and theoretical tradition that treats individuality and, in an easily misunderstood term in this introduced context, free will or thought as given -- or, more to the point, at all possible, fundamentally responsible, and in most cases even original (ref: anarchy and cynicism above). What, in turn, is almost completely lacking is an appreciation or knowledge of systems thinking, a view where, for example, Arney deems experts (those IP hot commodities) everything and nothing, where individuality and knowledge, finding its cultural apotheosis in the expert, succumb to a modular component view that reduces these units to, and I quote here from memory, dead but real executives of the inevitable. We were, I believe, talking about an information ecosystem (crucially after the computer and within the context of a replicating argument for anarchic open source culture being so much more "alive") where rainforests are already turned into pulp fictions for amazon.com. -af # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net