blay

Visst, jag är en kass bloggare som återanvänder intervjusvar och inte skriver kontinuerligt. Jag känner skammen! Här kommer i varje fall ett svar till ett brittiskt galleri som undrar om piratbyrån är oroliga för att våra idéer ska kuppas av “the mainstream” och urholkas. Det kommer nog med i en antologi.

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We have always followed the way of Kopimi, the will to be copied, which flips the question of recuperation around. It is “we” that recuperate “them”. If you think like a hacker, the more advanced the media industry makes things, the better the hacks will be. The iPhone is super advanced, which means a jailbreak of the iPhone gives you a great device. Same thing with Despotify, the software that made it possible to save tracks from Spotify, the music industry straming service.

Really, I dont think recuperation is such a big problem. It’s good if it happens, because then you can advance one more step. The worst that can happen is if you are stuck in the same problem, repeating the same conflicts. And given that the innovation happen at the edges of the network, the more the complex hierarchical organisations of the industry tries to move in the direction of the network, the better it is. Because the internet will always be faster and further than what they do. If they try to recuperate what we do it only means that we have a better plattform to work on and that the problem becomes more advanced, that is filled with more potentiality.

I am also simplyfiying things here by talking about us and them, systems and mainstreams. Lately we have instead been thinking in terms of tunnels. Large and small, temporary or reinforced, with connections to each other. This is what the internet is, a system of tunnels, there is no surface or center. And you can extend this logic to things outside the net as well. For example the last years we stopped consider the EU to be a system which sends out laws and instead a system of bureucratic, legal, communication systems and discursive tunnels that is suprisingly open. Sometimes you have to dig a bit, but it is completely possible to enter into these processes and start working on them instead of seeing it as an abstraction that you can only be for or against. By whoever has the means and time, this should be done with the cultural industries as well to discover that they are in fact assembled as societies with different parts that can be disconnected and modulated. In relation to what we do, some amplfy the effect of it, some neutralize it, some straight try to attack it, but they can also be turned against one another.

We don’t feel that we have to protect our ideas and activities from recuperation because the essence of what we are is not a position but a movement. A way of moving and transversing different political issues. All projects are events and movement. So the question is how these event interact with different parts of activist, capitalist and cultural logics. This can only be answered by experimentation.

Ska till florens om en månad och svara på frågor till bloggen för tillställningen:

This is evident because intellectual property is not just a law but an entire system of production, of desire and of organizing social and networked spaces. If you go down the path of intellectual property, and of stricter and tougher intellectual property laws, there is a whole system that also needs to follow on that. The copyright industry needs the copyright law, but along with this they need networks that work in their favour, people that desire their products, controlled urban spaces for entertainment, certain kind of communication technology and devices, cities to be arranged a certain way, databases that store data on network users, certain enforcment procedures, international trade treaties and so on. They need to assemble all of these entities around the law because the law can’t sustain itself. The further network technology evolve, the more of these support structures needs to be put in place to make intellectual property work and they bring enormous damage to society and create a kind of inelasticity that prevent new social dynamics to evolve. 2)But besides trials, what do you think about corporations or

I’m not too afraid of the resources of the web being used for business purposes. Users attention is like a natural resource that can be used for business, art or activism. It’s just about learning how to use it and since we can be in a much deeper contact with the network culture than most companies I think we have all the opportunity to engage with the network in a deeper sense that the pr-departments of the companies. Networks can’t be controled by corporations, only modulated and that also means there is a possibility of contesting their use of them and turn their services or campaigns into other directions. As long as the network remain open and neutral I dont have a problem with the media industry or other actors trying to get a piece of it. Im confident enough that there are better alternatives than their so called professional content. But I say as long as they remain open and neutral because this is not necessarily the case in the future. The copyright industry can’t compete on a fair basis but always need laws and infrstructure that put them in a monopoly situation. This is what they will try to get and frankly I’m sick of them. There was a time when I kind of felt it would be nice if they learned to adapt to the ways of the internets, but ACTA is just the latest example of how they completely refuse, or rather are incapable, of transforming their complex hierarchical organizations into something different and therefor will continue to rather change the legal and infrastructural environment they operate in than change themselves. So there it’s them or the internet now…

3) In sweden we are in a time now where the first-generation entities such as Piratbyrån and Pirate Bay occupy less space (this has mostly moved abroad) in favour of new names for entities, such as telecomix, the julia group and in a certain arena, the pirate party. This is because new areas have been opened up by the former. Looking at TPB you will see some familiar names popping up elsewhere as well (check the credits of the WikiLeaks video of the helicopter attack in Iraq…). So let’s just say that the ecosystem of swedish pirate related activity is doing very well. And I think this broad ecosystem with fuzzy borders between organizations is the key. New ideas can get support easily and new problems gets discovered and tackled immediately. Around the pirate archipelago there is also a vast ocean of swedish internet life, from programmers to journalist who thanks to the web2.0 services like twitter are now in immediate contact with each other.

This post will be an english summary and extension of my talk at festa dei pirati in Rome, Italy on the 20th of March. It was called “Fighting the 3D Reptiles” and was about the media industry vision of the future internet.

Festa dei Pirati is a weekend of seminars, performances and discussions organized by a broad coalition of Italian groups interested in things from free culture to law. I spoke at last summers Festa dei Pirati too, that time about the history of Swedish file-sharing movement, the Pirate Bay trial and the activism that followed that trial dealing with EU law. Because the last year, a lot of internet activism, actually most internet activism, has come to be about fighting nasty laws on national, EU and global levels. This has been done in the name of concepts like democracy, freedom of speech and citizens rights.

This is great activism, but it also feels like in the middle of this it is easy to loose track of what you are doing and why. Its easy that the law sets the framework for the activity. Beyond fighting for these values, democracy, freedom – we also need to update our conception of how we think the internet can rearrange social relations, spaces and culture.

There used to be a time when being for the internet was enough, because everyone else was so far behind. That our opposition was against the internet, stuck in analog ways of thinking and so on. Your own position could just be one of “pro-internet” and that was fine. No need to think more about what that meant.

My talk argued that this kind of futurism is not a good position anymore and that we should look for something else.

Because the media industry is fighting a two front war today. On the one hand there is the lobbying for laws that have come to define internet activism, but on the other hand there is a lot of resources spent on research into the “future internet” which redefines what internet is about.

This future internet is composed of several components. There is a new kind of content, “immersive experiences” composed of high quality, streaming, sometimes 3D,  content on your HD-TV coupled with simple services, that is supposed to be better than the poor media experiences of internet today. There is also a new legal framework that has to be in place to support this, hence the laws. And finally there is a new kind of network that have to be implemented to carry these heavy streams, which involves new cooperation between network provider, hardware manufacturer and “content provider” where this data will be prioritized to ensure the quality of service.

This future internet has several functions. It is a way to battle piracy by providing something that can’t be pirated (only if you have deals with the network provider you can transmit this), it creates a business model (you stream it so you can charge for it) and it creates desire (people will want the media industry’s products again).

One consequence of this for the internet activism that is fighting laws is that before it could be argued that the copyright industry wanted laws so they could stop the internet and conserve their old business model. But with this, they can instead argue that the laws have to be implemented to enable the future internet. All of the sudden it is the internet activist who is the reactionary, wanting only to stay with today’s internet and not evolve into the future. Criticism against the copyright industry will sound retro and nostalgic. The media industry now “gets the internet” and can claim that they are the digital future.

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So what’s wrong with 3D future internet? If the consumers want internet to be streaming content on their TV, who are we to say that this is wrong? Isn’t this just a version of old cultural critique of the false conciousness of the masses who are being fooled just because they don’t do as the avant-garde wants? No, it’s not. The reason is that it is not only about creating the subjectivity of the 3D-desiring user. The whole system of laws, networks and desire has to be put in place. It is not so much the service itself that is the problem, but all that have to be put in place in order for it so function. Also no matter if this future internet will be realized or not, it can already as a vision have damaging consequences for how decision makers imagine the future of the net. So, we need to bring forth another vision of what the future internet can be, which of course, on contrary to the coordinated vision from the media industry won’t be one single vision. I’m not going to give that vision here, but I have some points that I believe will be crucial components. Things that are not covered by the 3D-vision of the internet. Yes, I will also explain why I have this aversion against 3D…

These three points are:

• Disruptive development
• Post-digital circulation
• Artworks/Networks

Which constrasts three characteristics of the Future Internet:

• Linear
• Digital services
• Content

Let’s go through them as pairs:
Disruptive vs. linear

The Future Internet vision is a linear vision that has to create new desires by increasing the quality of transmission every 18 month or so (when the shock and awe of the last format is gone) while still retaining about the same cultural setup. Streaming film or sports will be about the same even though it is with a 3D effect or with the ability to choose angles. The linearity also means that it is possible for them to predict the future by just increasing one variable, and then have every part of the “value chain” working towards the same vision.
Against this we should pose an internet that is fundamentally disruptive. That don’t progress by linear increment but disrupting of entire ways of doing culture. It is also a perspective that acknowledges that a number of external factors can change the state of the entire cultural system. This means that it is a more risky version that can’t predict the future and that suggest that resources into developing the internet should be devoted to covering a number of different scenarios. The disruptive perspective is not about the quality of an expression that remain the same but fundamentally change and invent cultural expressions.

The linear progress also invites one to wonder what will be next. When they have gone from HD to 3D. What is next? There is not another dimension to add and more quality won’t really be perceived by humans. One suggestion that came up during a wine lunch in Rome was the bubblenets. The idea was that you would mount a bubble helmet on your head, which locks around your neck for the period of your subscription (minimum 18 months). This helmet would then augment and manipulate your reality with various special effects. Make it more beautiful, exciting, informative and so on. On the downside, the helmet woudl also only let air in if your paid for the premium service. A joke of course, but the bubblenet would have components that should be taken seriously. The locked-in, subscription-based format and the idea of takning something that used to be free (air) and charge for it. This process has been dubbed “Spotification“.

Post-digital / digital
The digital vs. analog debate is played out. The media industry is heavily pushing its “legal services” and Future Internet technology. Today it is them who has taken over the role as digital advocates while the internauts are now comfortably circulating in and out of networks. The digital services of the Future Internet wants the consumer to satisfy all possible need within the system. In the post-digital perspective on the other hand, the system always creates a surplus that must get an outlet outside of the system. Simple example is of course the relation between downloading music and music festivals/clubs/concerts. The post-digital perspective also has the advantage of regaining a perspective on the city and how the intenrets ability to form communities effect the city and creates demands for a new kind of city life.

Artwork/Network
This is a perspective that challenges the idea that culture equals content and delivery of content. That the meaning of culture is stored in the content which is retain across several relations. Instead, what makes culture meaningful is it being performed, and this performance happen in every point across its circulation and is performed by a number of different actors. The Artwork/Network perspective is an ecological perspective that focuses of where and how culture circulates.

This list of features of a different future of the internet than the one presented by the media industry is definitely not final, but points out the need for having one, or at least attacking the problem, and shows that there is a lot missing in the vision they present. Apart from the vision of the media industry, there is also a lot of future internet visions outside of the cultural field that should be thought of. For example everything that now gets the prefic “smart”. Smart cities, smart education, smart transport, smart healthcare. For a glimpse of that, check out this video by IBM.

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The important thing to remember when dealing with this is that there is no evil plan and there is no use of being against this. Rather it is about knowing that what is presented, simply because it is presented by companies with certain momentums, competences, demands and traditions, will be a very limited view of what the internet can be. It is not that they have considered the ideas we have and discarded them. They simply are ignorant (which doesn’t mean they would like what they would here). Trust me, I go to their conferences.

We must add to this and make sure it is possible to add to it. And it is possible to catch them completely by surprise, making their visions look completely ridiculous. Problem is that their stuff is all that some people with the cash get to see.

I used to love pop. Pop in the various indies of the 90′s was great, when it was taken as a serious subject of analysis and being. Styles evolved, tastes were developed and refined. Pop in the beginning of 2000 was AMAZING, when it popped up everywhere; mutated and freed from all anxiety. This is when we started Piratbyrån. Piratbyrån was pop to the bone. Piratbyrån was about going to awards and sippin champagne, hustling free tickets for movie premiers that was already out on the pirate bay, about being super good looking and fine connoisseur of movie, music, software and philosophy, living the life-style to the fullest, but getting it all for free. Piratbyrån was about accelerating contemporary culture. Wellfare begins at 100mbit, yes, let’s all live life anti-oedipal, now!

Copyriot describes the atmosphere (Please read that post and the comments on it…):
This accelerationism also enabled a certain political transversality and new alliances between hackers, artists and intellectuals, and it could quite easily be underpinned by a mainstream deleuzianism and/or benjaminism.

Skip to 2010:
To be associated with pop today is to be associated with digital music sales, innovative business models and streaming music services; which is exactly as unsexy as it sounds. There is no exciting surface, even to transverse as free flying nomads anymore.

Copyriot again from the same post:
Now in 2010, we are tunneling communications. Well, we do not only dig tunnels – we also connect them to post-digital spaces – but we certainly do not call for accelerated communications any more. At least, acceleration has ceased completely to be politically interesting

There is a need for a new strategy that i can’t quite formulate yet, but I think the new attitude and status of tunneling is a key factor. When the tunnel used to be a way of hiding from the mainstream (literary the main stream), of shying away from the flow of pop culture, that stream don’t flow so much anymore. The tunnels on the other hand have been transformed into something else than a hiding place. It seems that here is where the movements are. In a totally smoothed surface, when no movement can exist without being immediately in the spot light, transformed into a transaction, the activity moves into the tunnels. Not for reasons of shadyness, but for nurturing. Tunneling is rather than accelerationism a part of escalationism (again, following the argument form CR). It is a quest for making space, or rather place, happen. Each activity also generates its on geography and it interlocks and overlaps with other activity, in fact any activity can be connected, but it takes work to make tunnels. Tunneling is ontological.

Not how this differs from subcultures or old school cryptoanarchism. It is no longer a dialectic with the mainstream. The logic is not “OR”, surface OR underground. It is rather an AND. This tunnel AND this tunnel AND this tunnel, making up new spaces.

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Many questions remain to be explored though (tunnel activity is planned..). For example,a s i stated in a comment at the CR-post already in 2006 Piratbyrån said that: “The alternative to p2p piracy is not No Piracy, but person2person piracy” and by on the one hand stating that the efforts against piracy were fruitless, on the other hand warning against the loss of the open index. How can this be managed in tunnels? There is no map of the tunnels. Redundancy is one way of solving it, but what else is there?

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I described a similar relation about a year ago in a presentation at transmediale summarized here: http://www.blay.se/2009/01/30/transmediale-shuffle-terror/
That time it was instead the relation between the open ocean and the scrubby forest that was explored (and jungle vs. tunnel has been explored in the comments at Copyriot).

Perhaps by bot is trying to deal with the same comparison of forest and tunnel.
02:45 + tellurian | monki: In this soggy mess, tunnels are dug more easily, even though they may collapse without warning. #tunnel()

Is that an encoded description of the raid on forskningsavdelningen?

The nobel prize winner Barack Obama has at least done something during his presidential period. He finanzed a war in Mexico. The war on drugs. American dollars are financing the horrible and pointless battle that the mexican governement and military is waging against “the narcos”.

It’s not an easy task. The narcos are well rooted in the mexican society. They build entire cities in the north. The only cities that can provide its citizens with functioning health care and infrastructure. They build their own super advanced mini-submarines and it wouldn’t be surprising if they already built their own internet.

Actually, narcos seem to be the only ones who can build something stable and functioning in the country. The rest is a series of failed attempts of privitisation therapy. The latest being the mexico city gas company which is now under siege by riot police since the president deemed it too ineffective (also following protests where the union of the electricity company thretened to cut electricity in the city).

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At a hacklab in Mexico City, a spanish guy from a hacklab in Madrid has arrived to organize a hackmeeting. Chairs are lined up on rows facing a stage in the small occupied basement. The room is too small to have any conversations without interrupting the speaker so everyone is forced to listen to them. The organiser himself is talking for two hours about his owns projects. He reads from a poster of rules for how to make a hackerspace. “…and a hackerspace must always…always be outside of the state”. Rules for how to be an anarchist, rules for how to be radical. On the wall there are notices that everyone is encouraged to help with the dishes and to sleep over since the space values community, democracy and autonomy.

The hackerspace is very careful with who is allowed to enter the space since they want to keep the autonomy. The mötley crew making up the newly formed wikiparty is not allowed since the space want to be independant from parties. Geraldines presentation of F.A.T. is looked upon with sceptisism because it’s not clear weather art is radical enough to be featured. After a while she is allowed to do the presentation with the outspoken reason that they need more female representation.

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“It’s not a question of _if_ the narcos will win but which of the narcos that will win”, someone said during a conversation. Even the government is of course filled with connections to the drug trade. They only pretend that they can institutionalize this greyzone economy.

No, in mexico city you can’t build formal institutions, not even if you call yourself an anarchist, a hacker, or a government. Mexico can forget about finding a plan to implement all throughout society. 60% of the economy is already an informal  greyzone economy. And despite that, or because of it, the city functions. As Geraldine says “we only have to make these greyzones THE PLAN instead of trying to come up with a new one.” Maybe this requires that the narcos win the war. They have build a huge, advanced economy by living of these greyzones and learned to adapt to the rapidly changing and chaotic environment that is the life in mexico city. We only have to make them stop chopping peoples heads and leaving them outside schools…

(Summary of a clinic, a deppening and intimate format giving warm associations to Guattari and SPK, about Piratbyrån at the Transitio festival here in Mexico City. This is actually the second clinic, but the first was mostly about basic Piratbyrån stuff that can be read elsewhere or about themes that will be developed furher)

Through the file-sharing debate, Piratbyrån turned into a political project  on mass media terms. It was seen as a group representing the interests of the file-sharers. It created a debate about interests groups against each other, such as pirates vs. anti-pirates and trying to find the compromise in-between and posed binary questions such as should file-sharing be legal or not, should we have intellectual property or not. It was all based on society being changed by a public debate coming up with a solution that would later be implemented by law and therefor assumed to be the state of affairs all over society.
The walpurgis ritual where the file-sharing debate was buried marked a distancing away from this debate towards a project based on a friendship investigating the interface between analog and digital environments that the internet and file-sharing had created not because of what the law said but that that was a material reality despite what the law said.

This was also due to that intellectual property itself started to look less like one of these crucial  tipping points. Perhaps a symbol for this is the story of Getty Images. Mark Getty who owns the image database getty images is the son of an owner of oil companies and famously stated sometime in the first years of the millenium that “intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century”. This would imply several things. One of them spells WAR, and we do have seen the war on file-sharing. Another thing it implies is a resource by which you control other resources. By increasing or limiting the supply of oil you can shake the entire world economy. This seems true of intellectual property as well. The coalition of record companies that control the majority of copyright for music are able to decide which digital service using music are able to exist or not by giving them or not giving them permission to use their music in their service.

But in 2008, Getty images was sold really cheap. It seemed that there were no demand for this static archives of copyrighted professional images. The news agencies preferred photos taken at the event with mobile phones and advertising agencies have moved from selling products with images to selling them with social communication and buzz marketing. So maybe intellectual property is too static, too much like physical products to really have a value in the 21st century. What instead is powerful is the micro control of attention. Controlling the realtime flows and having the power to build community and create meaning.

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This exploration is what the first clinic was about. The ability of internet to create new dynamics of communities. The second clinic is about how this exploration of the material realities of the digital experience created a return to politics, but this time on our own terms – the net politics.

The net politics in Sweden grew out of the learning experience of the oppositions to the FRA law, a surveillance law which would allow a military body that previously have monitored russian radio traffic to monitor internet cables. At first, criticism of the law was framed in an idealistic way of finding a compromise between different interests, such as the national security vs. the right to privacy, personal integrity and the right not to be surveillance by the state. But as the debate moved on, this idealistic critique was transformed into a materialistic one that rather used the knowledge of networks than appealing to abstract rights. For example, the FRA claimed that they were only going to monitor traffic going in and out if the country and therefor not monitor the communication between Swedish citizens. But anyone with basic knowledge of the internet and packet-switching networks know that it is a transnational network without fixed paths. So a digital communication between two people located in Sweden often crosses national borders depending on where the networks is the fastest. Also because of “the cloud” a lot of people might have their emails stored on servers in the US.

This material netpolitics can be said to have two characteristics:

1) It is a politics based on risk and non-linear systems. Risk first of all in the sense that it has to deal with politics about things to come. Because it deal with socio-technological systems it has to intervene before they get plugged in. But it also deals wth risk in the sense that these systems might seem secure when presented as fool-proof systems, but technological systems can always be missused and databases always leak.

The non-linearity is important because taken one by one, these surveillence systems don’t seem to be that dangerous, but the analysis have to take into account the assemblage created by combining several of these systems and the non-linear effects this might have on control and surveillence.

2) The second characteristic is about the topoogy of netpolitics. It is very different from the traditional view of politics as “both sides having their say” and that truth ro politics would be somewhere in the middle. It is not a politics that identifies with an interest, not a politics of us-against-them, but rather us-against-ourselves.It is not a politics that fight with an enemy for the power over something already present (such as power over the parliament) but one that realize that what is at stake is if we manage to build the kind of societies and communities that are able to create the world that we desire.

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So what kind of politics can be called netpolitics? One way of looking at it is to view it as politics that are about issues of the internet and is contained to these issues. This is a very reductionist way of looking at it. The opposite way of looking at it is politics that uses the internet as a tool and therefor can be extended to any issues. This would be to make it so broad that it becomes pointless. A third and better choice would be to view it as politics and practicies whose point of departure is the material experience of the internet. A politics that is affirming the open net and the communities it makes possible and tries to widen the circles of these communities.

Netpolitics creates itself by performing new kinds of communities. This is a long and hard process that have to be made step by step. This definition means that it will collide with videocrats such as Berlusconi or Ahmadinejad as well as the copyright industry and other interests that rather looks to limit the openness of the internet.

This material netpolitics in Sweden eventually started to get interested in the law. Not as a way of breaking with the interest for the material in favor of traditional politics, but because it found a way to apply the same material perspective to politics and the law which is usually viewed in an idealist way. This was done by a method learned by the french group “La Quadrature du Net” which started to treat the law as a code. A code full of bugs that you need to find and submit patches to that fixes these bugs. These bugs were formulations put into law texts through backdoors which would allow the copyright industry to interpret them in internet unfriendly ways. So instead of  opposing these huge laws of the EU, traditionally done by political activists after they have become implemented, they went into the political process in realtime at the level of sentences and words and viewed these as performative, not representational. La Quadrature was interested in information policy issues and they used the internet as a political tool to great success, but what really makes their method into net politics is that they used the experience of the internet to gain a new perspective on how to do politics.

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After this introduction about net politics, the clinic turned into a conversation on a number of issues that I will present here as a set of questions and answers.

Isn’t net politics a generational issue? Yes, it is. And this is obvious if you look at statistics from the EU election where the pirate party got 7% in total, but over 25% with people under 30 years old. The reason we can’t only wait for this net friendly generation to gain power and fix everything is that these technological laws, such as the FRA law, are almost irreversible. Because they are about the material infrastructure, about plugging in the cables for this surveillance system, it is rather easy to create them by law, but much harder to reverse the process and remove the cable with law. Once they become material, politics can’t reach them as easily. This is not at least the case with laws on the internet that limits the potential political space that the internet creates. So what is at stake in net politics is the political process and the techno-social being itself. Therefor net politics is also ontopolitics.

Does this net political perspective only have relevance in Europe or does it also apply in the mexican situation? The first comment to this question was that in mexico there are neither laws nor politicians to influence. Internet is just not on the political map at all. What is the effects of this? The positive effect is that you won’t have any political energy spend on controlling the net, but the negative and overwhelming effect spells MONOPOLY. Carlos Slim can go amok and eat up most of the infrastructure and manipulate his networks in any way he pleases.

Will the internet be turned into a broadcast medium? Even in mexico this tendency is present with very asymmetrical connections and in europe this is present in proposals of what the “future internet” be about. A related comment was that facebook and other social networks are only used for everyday communication and not to talk about these issues. My response was that even this everyday communication establishes a habit of horizontal communication and challenges this idea of internet as a broadcast medium. Also these networks can be turned into tools for political communication, but this demand realtime events to trigger this. This happened for example when twitter or youtube was used during the turmoil after the iran election earlier this year. This is because these realtime political events are impacting everyday lives and are happening here and now, just like the casual information that otherwise populate these networks. However, for political communication on a more abstract and long-term level, other forums will work better. This dependence on events gives the net politics a kind of goldfish memory. The same goldfish memory is apparently present in mexican politics where events can become issues or scandals but life will soon be back in the material everyday.

What is the next big threat to the internet? AT&T. We have to watch for them. They are trying to take over the european information infrastructure. AT&T once tried to break into the mexican market but failed completely. They couldn’t fight the combination of state and slim monopoly. This might save Mexico! Mexico might have their sonderweg while the rest of the world is stuck in AT&T-net.

So how do we save the internet? This spawned a discussion on the difference between distributed and decentralized networks. Today, the internet is distributed, which means that is read out, but dependent on certain obligatory points of passage which, should they be destroyed or manipulated, would create island that wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other. A decentralized network wouldn’t be dependent on these points of passage. So even if the combination of regulation for net neutrality and a completive markets sustain the network for a while, in the long-term we also have to push the infrastructure of the internet more toward a decentralized network.

Is the internet a collective consciousness? Today, this is only an idea or a utopia that grows from the experience of the internet. Sometimes a good notion, sometimes a notion that creates smoke screens. To realize this idea, we need to change both the infrastructure and the code of the internet in the sense of not having one file on one computer belonging to one person, but decentralize the representations of the digital information and connect the surplus storeage and processing power of computers into one big network. So, in other words, to get our fluffy collective concoiusness, we first have to become hard core materialist and care about the physical location and movements and relations of every bit, storage space, cable and microprocessor.

So, the material is back. The idea during the first part of the net that the future consisted of a immaterial economy, even claims that IP is the oil of the 21st century, is fading when the material, through the current netpolitics together with the three big E:s, energy, ecology, economy, reminds us of itself again. That the cables would be less important than the information passing through them was a fiction created by the historical singularity that is the internet.

What is the future of file-sharing? Several tendencies push file-sharing from completely open system towards semi-private ones. The efforts of anti-pirates might be one reason, but more importantly is that the  value of contextless information is decreasing and that the discovering and distribution of copyrighted material gets closer to the way information is spread in social networks (both on- and offline). Here, the value of the information is in the performativity of the network as much as in the content of the file itself.

What do you think about Pirate Bay moving to the cyber bunker? This is a perfect symbol of the distributed network. We are dependent of one point of passage and therefor have to protect it at all cost. But even the bunker is dependent on the grid in the sense that a cable (actually two, one for internet and one for energy) must connect the bunker to the rest of the internet.

Often it is radio technology that saves internet in difficult situations. For example in a case such as when the government of Burma cut the cables to the rest of the world during turmoils it is satellite and other wireless technologies that are still able to function without having to rely on the Burma-grid.

Do you know of Luther Blissett? Yes, in the beginning we were inspired by Wu Ming and Luther Blissett, but we haven’t made use of similar tactics. Collective identities as this is a mass media phenomenon and only useful when you communicate through their channels, that is a channel of communication that you are not able to control. Mass media communication is based on the identity of the sender, on the source of the information, on the figure of the author. This configuration can be hacked by a collective identity.

The actual technology behind mass media is also based on the signals coming from one source, so this is reproduced in the format as well. On the internet however, information travels in packets and reaches you through the network, not directly from the source. Therefore, the format most typical of the infrastructure of the net is the meme, which is a piece of information separated from its source. Working with memes on the internet is thus much more powerful than working with identities in whatever format.

The closest we get to a collective identity on the net is anonymous, but unlike Luther Blissett, the style of anonymous, the “personality”, is in the memes, while the identity is an empty container.

(Talk given at transitio_mx 09)

I will begin to introduce myself and Piratbyrån, the bureau for piracy. And use our development as an entry point to talk about the issues we will touch upon today. A one sentence description of Piratbyrån would be a cluster, a network or a mileu that is exploring the impact of the infinite abundance brought about by digital copying by means of language and action. It can sometime be technological as with the pirate bay, sometimes artistic as with the bus project s23 and sometimes political, even trying to influence formal political processes.

We have been around a long time for an internet project. It started six years ago in september 2003 as something of a joke. There was already an anti piracy bureau, so we put up a website of the “piracy bureau” which became a site for critical discussion on intellectual property and spreading of knowledge of the filesharing techniques around at the time. The establishment of Piratbyrån as a public actor started a new public discussion in Sweden, which has going on ever since. Our curiosity and our unwillingness to form static positions but look for new spaces to explore was what made us maintain the project, instead of just letting it dissolve after a few months, as usually happens with web projects.

Our view and experience of what copying do to our lives have changed a lot since the beginning. When we started, Sweden had just had it’s IT-bubble, starting somewhere in the end of the 90’s and having resulted in massive state sponsored broadband expansion and basically a computer in every home. So this led to copying on a massive scale and new kinds of access to information. But no one had realized what consequences this would have. When we started we envisioned a linear development from analog to digital. We wanted more bandwidth and more access. To be more online and to have access to more culture was was going to transform us and our world into something better.

This made perfect sense at the time, but somewhere between then and now we ended up in a state where we can no longer just talk about digitalization as a quantitative question, or to be more or less online.  Instead we find ourselvs faced with the infinite abundance of information and culture. What counts now is not so much like speed, size, computer capacity, but what we do with all this. How do we integrate this infinite abundance into our finite lives.

//

This development marks the transition from two very different utopias of the internet.We can compare some of these utopias of the internet along different axises. The first axis is disembodied/embodied.

Probably the most famous and one of the first utopias of the internet is John Perry Barlows “Declaration of independence of cyberspace” in which he talks about how our identities no longer have any bodies and how we are leaving the rules and structures of the physical world behind. It was very common during the phase of popularization of the internet to envision this “digital world” where all activities was going to move to in the future. Surely Piratbyrån was guilty of this in the beginning. But then something happened. Cyberspace imploded and the disembodied freedom of a purely digital world that John Perry Barlow expressed has become a reactionary position in the hands of copyright industries dreaming of a perfect digital copyright economy of only licensed use of digital information.

As the interest for these virtual worlds faded, the energies of the net was redirected to social networks which are rather based on all the interfaces between the net and the material everyday life where things happen in a certain place at a certain time and whose major impact is creating connections between these places. This is the web today. Cultural phenomena circulate between the digital and the analog, between accessibility and localization. This event is no exception. It clearly takes place in Mexico City, enabled by connections made through the internet. Some part of the event will be digitized and circulated to be almost universally accessible while others will be hyperlocalized, such as discussions after the symposium forgotten the day after.
This embodied view of the internet could be called the post-digital perspective and features an internet that connect localities, that can intensify physical spaces and coordinate energies to one space at a particular time.

In this view, the internet doesn’t have an effect on culture of its own, but rather having numerous effects on a number of practices. Internet is therefor both less important and more important that depicted by the disembodied perspective. Less important because everything doesn’t move _to_ the internet, but more important because the internet intervenes in many practicies rather than being a separate sphere.

Another axis by which we can compare utopias of the internet is that of global vs. networked. Internet is often depicted as a global network, but I believe that the idea of something global is a massmedia term that has nothing to do with networks. Massmedia always transmits every message to it’s entire range, but while the internet is a connected infrastructure we find all over the world it is a point-to-point medium.

Perhaps the most powerful metaphor for the global net is the one of the cloud. This metaphor claims that we no longer have to worry about where our information lives. Instead of focusing on the complex infrastructure that makes the internet work, we should just put our information in the cloud and trust that somewhere out there, a machine will care for it.

This illusion of a global space can be productive. It can allow us to imagine what we do as potentially connected to other things and make us look for and create these connections, but it also hides the present conditions. Because today, the cloud functions in the complete opposite way to a dislocated, global, fluffy space. Rather the cloud is constituted of data centres, that are very place specific and localized. It is somehow ironic that the biggest decentralization of participation, that anyone can create a blog or upload a video without any advanced skills, has been made possible by the biggest decentralization of information in history into these data centres.

Far from being evenly distributed across the globe, the information in the cloud resides in proprietary and competing clouds not able to communicate with each other. You choose one provider of clouds and then the information is more of less stuck there. The extreme polarization between server and client makes you dependent on trusting the server where the information resides not to be gone tomorrow.

But once upon a time there was another cloud. During the IT-bubble of the 90’s, anyone wanting to get venture capital had to put a cloud somewhere in their presentations. Usually consisting of a few computers at the edges and a big cloud in the middle with the word INTERNET on it. Everything that went up to this cloud was immediately connected to everything else. Only ONE cloud was enough, even though at the time the implementation of this idea was very naive.

Today our computer resources start to approach the point of enabling this other form of cloud. Most of the time, our personal computers contain unused storage and processing cycles with, given enough bandwidth, could be connected in a decentralized way. There is no reason to have personal computers, storage, files and processing power. This kind of cloud also require a change in the material infrastructure of the internet that push it more towards a decentralized network rather than the present distributed one where we are dependent on a handful of obligatory points of passage.

This new cloud would not be an immaterial, always present structure, just floating around in a virtual, global space, but something that would always have to be performed by the millions of distributed computers active in the presence. It would be an emergent property of a production of presence.

//

So, despite the internet we don’t live in a single global space. Instead communication networks are very narrow networks and tunnels, connecting only specific points and a radius determined by the reach of the sensors of these points. Sometimes it only resonates inside a body, as when someone reads something and immediately forget it. Sometimes not even that, perhaps only the machine registrers the comunication. But sometimes a pice of music for example might be taken to a club and and mutate with the athmosphere and music there and form something new.

That the internet doesn’t create a global space is recognized by the term of the digital divide. It says that different locations have very different access to the internet. But I believe that we have to turn this idea upside down. The idea of the digital divide relies on a negative definition. It states internet as the standard and everyone else a lacking internet.

We should turn the idea of the digital divide upside down. It is not mexico that is lacking (internet), it is mexico that has a plentitude because they don’t have hi-speed internet. Sweden does not have backpack speakers in the subways, because we have internet. Sweden does not have over complicated bureacracy for simple tasks, because we have internet. We don’t have as many internet cafés, because we have broadband and computers at home. So internet here is not seen as a space that you have access to but rather an almost invisible force that reconfigure different situations and rather removes that adds. Sometimes it is good to get rid of things, like hierarchies, obstacles, friction of different kinds. It speeds up things, allows for faster exploration, more efficient organising. But we can also ask ourselves if there is some richness removed by the internet and how that can be reinstalled, such as internet cafés and backpack speakers. Instead of having them as a sign of lack, they becaome the way to spend the plentitude of the digital, even though the rational would be to have everything on the internet.

So what the speed of the internet does is remove some things, or turn them into superefficient instrumental computational tasks so that more time can be available for “the true life”. Let’s not deal with bureacracies or backpack pirates when we can just reduce the obstacles in the way for the actual music. Well, this is a problematic view of culture. That the core of music for example is the actual content and everything around is just obstacles on our way to the access of this content. What if it is the other way around actually, that the content itself is nothing. Just an excuse for all these other things.

We must not understand the digital divide in the sense that there is one global network and everyone that are not connected to it is outside this network. We must view every situation as an assemblage of more or less present communication forms that can be upgraded, forgotten, controlled or distributed. Time and communication is folded! There isn’t a linear development from a non-connected world, crossing the divide into the global digital information society. Rather in every situation there can be more or less interventions by digital communications and the same level of access to the internet can affect different situations in very much different ways.

//

What I want to say about this is that we should be attentive to the materialities of the network and the situations in which it intervenes and not use the global shortcut of access or not access to the internet. My way of doing this is by the concept of internetzero. This is a term I have stolen, but I use it to mark the territory of greyzones between online or offline. Internet zero is the structure of the impossibility of being completely either on- or offline. What we do and the situations we are in are never local yet never global.

In the internet zero world, everything has a possible, but always unexpected connection to anything else. That is, everything could be connected to everything else, by a combination of analog and digital, slow and fast interfaces, but this connection always has to be performed. This could be as simple as reaching for the keyboard of the internet-enabled computer, but it could also be something as complex are orally stating a message to someone writing it into the village computer as an email and once a day have someone on a motorcycle drive by and collect the emails and ride into the city where the messages are posted to the internet.

I would also claim that we as humans are always located in this territory. We are never entirely away from or entirely immersed in the digital network. The impact of the internet reaches much further than to people with personal access to computers.
InternetZero is chaotic in its precise mathematical meaning because even a minor intervention of a new way of communicating can upset a whole social situation. Chaos theory is about tipping points. It’s not about getting access or not, but how a certain situation is transformed by the internet. So we cannot put a country on a line with a fixed number of steps they have to go through to pass to the other side of the digital divide. We always have to look at transformations of the particular situation.

Calling something global is a complicated form of scaling. It is at the same time rendering something very large and very small. Large, because it assumes something to be immediately present everywhere at the same time. But at the same time small because calling something global is a shortcut that makes sure you don’t have to explain how this phenomenon actually functions and moves through time and space. It is impossible to oppose or change something that is viewed as global.

So the alternative to using the global term is to localize the global and redistribute the local, two terms that comes from Bruno Latour. Localizing the global is about finding the tipping points that is crucial for the functions of the system and localizing the flows that go through them. So things that seem global is actually consisting about networks of localities in which the “global” phenomena is unequally distributed (this is for example true of “the cloud”). But alongside this we also have to distribute the local. All local phenomena are preceded by networks that takes place somewhere else and that have been transported to the current situation and the action that takes place in this local situation are also always transported to other situations. Not immediately and not globally but through the complex networks of internet zero.

Nedan följer fri omarbetning av anteckningarna inför presentationen på horitzo.tv. För er som känner till Piratbyrån och svensk fildelnings-debatt finns det mest nyskapande under rubriken “Archive / Event” där jag utvecklar förhållandet mellan direkta upplevelser och digitala arkiv.

Also available as PDF

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Ownership and Belonging

- Event: Presentation @ La Capella, Barcelona
- Setting: TV studio in church turned art gallery, I am seated in front of a green screen, audience is behind the cameras and spotlights.

1. About – Introducing Piratbyrån

Let me begin with a few words about Piratbyrån and the file-sharing debate in Sweden, as I’m sure not everyone is familiar with it. Piratbyrån is a bunch of people from Sweden. Internationally we are most known for creating the bittorrent tracker – The Pirate Bay. But in Sweden, we are mostly known as one of the dominant figures of the file-sharing debate. Not at least because of The Pirate Bay, and the controversies surrounding that, we have a rather active debate on file-sharing and copyright in Sweden – in the press, on TV, in blogs, in seminars, in the academia and in everyday lives.

This was not the case when we first started out back in 2003. To understand the situation then, we must first understand that Sweden was and is very proud of its cultural industries. From the present idea of the Swedish music export success – important for the branding of Sweden and as a source of income -  to the film history with Ingmar Bergman – a golden age the film industry hopes to re-create. There is an almost arrogant pride to it.
What you had in the mainstream press at the time was the anti-piracy lobby portraying piracy as the anti-thesis of a healthy cultural climate. As something that would reduce tax incomes from the music export and prevent this re-bergmanisation. So it was provocative to see a potential in file-sharing back then. But that’s what we did. We saw it as a good thing, that piracy created a dynamic cultural climate and the free sharing of information as something future society would have to build on.

So who is in Piratbyrån? Well, depending on how you define it you could say we are anything from 5 to thousand of members. Piratbyrån does not consist of a given group of people, but the links and exchanges between people – it works as a network. And in a network, some links are strong, with lots of activity. These create the necessary trust needed to keep the consistency of the network. They hold it together, creating a core. To view this core as Piratbyrån would be to view it as an organization with just a few members.

But in a network, most links are weak, rarely activated. They create the necessary links to other groups, networks, cultures and scenes. Without them, Piratbyrån would only be an internal matter for a group of friends. To include these weak links would be to view Piratbyrån as an ongoing conversation. We have different degrees of nearness and distance. Nearness allows for exchange of ideas. Distance allows for independent development and fresh outlooks. The oscillation between these is what creates a dynamic network.

Working as a network clashes with the mass media logic and their perception of us, of social movements and of politics. The mass media and others influenced by that way of thinking often ask for opinions the network holds, solutions we propose, if we are for or against this and that. But for a network the object is not an opinion or a program – like for a political party – but experimentation, development, activity, production. For our selfs and for others. This calls for a new kind of ethic that is not based of formulating a goal or a common moral ground. The network is not just a way of organizing people or information but also the ideas themselves. There is no output outside of the network, it can’t be represented. What we do today, here in Barcelona, is not me representing Piratbyrån but us creating an instance of this network from where new ideas can emerge. So ideas have to begin at one point in the network and then spread, not involve the whole thing at once.

The focus of Piratbyrån has not primarily been a critique of copyright laws or an effort to reform the laws,
but instead to show how we are already in many ways are beyond copyright. Despite the law, despite what is being done to enforce it – habits are changing, culture is changing, economies are changing. The interesting things seem to happen in the grey zones – between private and public, legal and illegal – where copyright is either not important, impossible to enforce or even preventing creative processes. So the focus is not on what the law says, but what is socially and technically possible. The law, or at least the enforcement of the law, obviously have a strong impact on what is possible, but an investigation of it can’t begin from the perspective of the law.

2. Abundance – Thinking “after Copyright”

This way of exploring what is already “after copyright” means abolishing the idea of the One solution – a single model that will replace copyright and work for all kinds of artistic practices. The conditions for different cultural activities are too different. But there are tendencies that can be generalized. If you are interested in the future of the cultural industries – the more pressing issue than the economical impact of file-sharing is the general impact of the abundance of information, the surplus of information we have today and what to do with it. The task of  finding ways to create meaning from a situation of cultural superabundance.

We have access to more information and culture that we can ever digest in our lifetime. Within 15 years or so, we will have reached the point when every cheap pocket-size storage devices will be able to hold all recorded music ever released – ready for direct copying to another person’s device.

Someone who has understood the importance of this is Bill Drummond, former member of The KLF and a music business hacker. When creating a project called “The 17”, that consisted of him putting together a choir, rehearsing with it and than performing only once, with no recordings – in other words a performance that is technologically forgotten – he sent out a letter of invitation where he wrote the following.

A time has arrived where we can listen to any recorded music,
from the entire history of recorded music,
wherever, whenever while doing whatever we want.

This is good for numerous reasons.
But a by-product of this is, recorded music will no longer contain
the meaning it once held for us.
This will entail it no longer gives us what we need and desire from it.
Once a music has lost it’s meaning it has no value.

Thus as we edge our way deeper into the 21st Century we will begin to
want music that can not be listened to wherever, whenever while doing
whatever.

We will begin to seek out music that is both occasion and
place specific, music that can never be merely a soundtrack.

We have a paradox here.
On the one hand – Copyrighted material is our world, our memories and our environment. These memories and environments are owned and controlled, but through file-sharing they are still accessible. And as Bill Drummond says – this is a good thing.
On the other hand – These works are unable to create meaning on their own. Simply because of their accessibility. They are fragmented memories – that needs to be completed.

3. Anti-Piracy – Still here…

But lets hold that thought for a moment.
Even if this is a more interesting and pressing issue than the economic impact of file-sharing and it’s meaningless to talk about imaginary losses of profit due to file-sharing if you don’t grasp this – we still have anti-piracy. We still have a copyright industry, concerned with short-term profits and protection of their immaterial resources. There are still those who want to conduct business the same way they did before the internet. In fact they’re more aggressive than ever.

In development right now is ACTA – the Anti-Counterfeit Trade Agreement – where the US, EU and some other countries in great secrecy are drawing up the fundamentals of a new era of anti-piracy. Among the proposals are incrimination of all facilitators of copyright infringements, liability for search engines and ISPs and the right for border security to search devices and goods suspected of containing pirated material. This agreement will then be “locked” and forced on other countries all over the world.

Anti-Piracy is clearly about more than protecting a business model. To some extent – piracy seems just as an excuse. As if the war on piracy is sort of a micro-version of the war on terror, where all sorts of enforcements are created in its name. But it’s also a matter of control. The copyright industry of course wants people to be creative and do what they want, break with old ways and create new desires – otherwise there wouldn’t be any new music, lifestyles or markets. But they also want to control this creativity, make sure the value that it creates ends up under their control and is turned into profit for them. They want to make culture and communication manageable.

So what is it that they’re trying to do? The copyright industry reduces culture to content, knowingly or not. They want to define “creativity” as the ability to create as many reproducible end products as possible. Any performative aspects are either neglected or viewed only as secondary or as marketing for the products. Any positive impact file-sharing might have on these performative aspects are ignored. This perspective is not only boring and sterile, it is also dangerous for the very idea of internet as a communication medium. Internet is only to e used as a new form of distribution for the same industry. It is not simply about money but also about controlling desires. Content is manageable, quantifiable, predictable – easy to own.

When confronted by the media, no matter what question is posed to the lobby organizations of the copyright industry, the answer is always the same.

Does Anti-Piracy really work?
All I know is that the rights holders must be compensated for the work effort they put into making the works.

Aren’t your business models obsolete?
Maybe, but the rights holders must be compensated for the work effort they put into making the works.

The rights holders must be compensated for the work effort they put into making the works.
First of all, the answer is problematic in itself. Do they really mean that anyone that create something should be compensated? No, it must only apply to some. Is a free download of your work enough to qualify? Probably not.
And should it really be the amount of work they put in that they should be compensated for? No, the value of a work of art can not be measured by work hours.

Even more problematic is when this answer is linked with tougher laws and harder enforcement. Because they haven’t understood the problem of information abundance, they can claim that harder enforcement will lead to better compensation for artists. When studies show that the most active file-sharers are also the most active media consumers and when the most important thing for business and brands today is that they can gain the trust of consumers or users, that they can build relationships, to make people want more than a digital copy – it is clear that another strategy is needed. Anti-piracy destroys trust. Trust in the media corporations and trust in the legal system itself.

But although anti-piracy is an absurd response, what is the problem they are trying to get at although they fail?

I believe it can be formulated like this:
Certain people, or rather a lot of people, generate value – things, knowledge, communication, culture, software, in a way that we, our society, recognize as valuable, as important, but have no way or measuring and compensating – no way of valuing individual efforts.

- Market economies fail to measure it. It’s to fast, to distributed, to complex, to micro. There can’t be a monetary transaction with every exchange of information.
- Equating them with analog counterparts can’t measure it. Saying that a song distributed for free equals a loss of the market value for that song is not correct.
- Work hours can’t measure it. It’s too dynamic an non-linear.
- Distribution systems can’t measure it – either state programs or initiated otherwise.

4. Archive / Event – The Primal Scene of Archivation

Right now we are in a phase, maybe a transition phase, where the economy around these activities – digital information -  are centered around complementary activities. The immeasurable value generates measurable value in traditional markets. For example, the a song being distributed in file-sharing networks generates extra value for live concerts, festivals and merchandize. Blogging leads to advertising, presentations or lectures. So the digital content is not an end product but a hyperlink to other markets and activities. This is the attention economy.

But maybe complementary activities is the wrong way to put it. First of all, it presents it as if the archived content is the primary activity and the real-time event the secondary. For example that music is really about recorded music and live music is only a complement to this. This is not the case. In fact such an idea has only a recent history. Earlier it was recorded music that was seen as a threat to the employment of musicians.

Calling it complementary also presents the two as separate. As if a failure to create a market in the digital domain creates an economy that return to traditional markets, such as live music that remains unchanged by the digital transformations (as Drummond suggests, that which can’t be listened to everywhere). But that live, direct, un-copyable experience is not the same as it was before the digital came. What we’re saying here today does not stay here. It is not to be seen as an analogue event separate from the digital archive. This is important to remember because at first they seem disconnected. The archive is about remembering, storing, filtering out what is to be remembered. The event is about forgetting, letting go, wasting time. But today events incorporate recording, storing, memorizing, archiving, as well.

In this kind of economy, in this kind of culture, the business model of the copyright industry based on exclusive grant of access to archives is clearly obsolete. It prevents attention, prevents the flow of information and the cultivation of meaning. The importance of the kind of archives they try to grant access to is declining. A personal example is my hard drive on which many of my favorite movies is stored. I never watch these films. I open the drive, look at the files, and say: Oh, so much to see. Oh, so little time. What to do? Anyone who has ever lost such an archive or an mp3 library in a hard disk failure recognizes the liberating feeling that accompanies it. The importance of forgetting when you can store everything. Meaning is not created by the data alone, but by the meta-data, the context the data emerges in. The importance of the way data is accessed. The importance of the present when you have access to the past. The remembering of the archives is linked to experiences, the present, the context. In news media, a blurry picture from a mobile phone taken at the instance an event happens is more valuable than a high-quality image taken half an hour later.

All of these real-time events are always archiving. To take part in them is to take part in the primal scene of archivation, of the establishment of a new archive, or of a new section of the networked archive we call Internet.
Maybe this is even more the case the less that event is directly – technologically – archived, thus allowing the participants to speak for the archive, to become guardians of it. To give it their interpretation. The more an event is wasted, forgotten – the more meaning the stored fragments of it gets – the louder they speak.

Archives are created by archiving events – their primal scene is in the foreground.
Some examples from the web:

Youtube. Videos become popular because they document real events with as little interference as possible.
Facebook. Information is linked to events. Attendance, changes, updates, friendships.
Sartorialist. Styles are only meaningful because someone wore them on the street. Someone had the experience of carrying them, being looked at, being archived.
Stureplan.se. Wannabe celebs attending only to be archived.

The information is of course not always reliable. Ads on Youtube are being made to look like amateur documentations on spontaneous events. Sartorialist photos are taken outside fashion events, not on regular streets. If this was explicit they wouldn’t be meaningful anymore, but maybe it is right here, in the grey zone between real and imaginary that the most interesting things happen – when we are not really sure. Reality intensified by the imaginary.

There is a feedback loop between digital archives and events. Between the remembering and accumulation of archives and the forgetting and waste of participating in an event. One could be pessimistic and say that events are never experienced directly because of this – you are never really in the moment. They are only experienced to look good in the archive. This is certainly true for some and it’s very important not to forget the waste of time and energy involved in events. This event we are taking part of right now is located somewhere between a real-time event and an archivation. What is the difference between seeing it live and viewing it in the archive later? Cameras, the direction of the spotlights, the border between studio and audience creates a screen between us – much like the computer screen.

But a more optimistic view is that these events can be intensified due to this link to digital archives. Different events can be connected, they can build on each other, become viral, transfer experiences. They can involve more waste of time and energy because they are being archived.

5. Barcelona – As creative city

Lets turn to economics – this time to the macro level, because here is where archives and events are connected to the global economy. Because if the economy of the information age is not to be found in selling digital information, in granting access to archives, in copyright – it is exactly here – in the links between events, experiences and the symbolic. This is what drives the so called creative economy on a regional and city basis. When manufacturing moves to cheaper countries, something else has to be installed in its place. What we have today is a global competition between cities and regions for qualified work, companies, tourists and finance. As these become more mobile, cities all over the world compete to keep and attract these flows of goods, people and money.

They do this by creating distinctive marks – a unique profile that will separate this city from other cities – city branding. This is certainly true for Barcelona. The city is using old catalan history as symbolic capital together with new spectacular architecture and an idea of a certain Barcelona lifestyle to attract tourists and comers and distinguish the city from other european cities. In this process, creative activities have a key role, from the grand architectural projects to small scale, alternative or independent scenes, events and projects. Not at least an old church turned into an art gallery inviting projects from all over the world. All get caught up the city branding game. They become symbolic capital connected to the experience of Barcelona, which will give the city a competitive advantage.

So events happen, cultures form, networks take shape in Barcelona.
These are supported and turned into symbolic capital creating an archive of what Barcelona is.
This is used to attract tourists, money etc to barcelona.

The development has its downsides. First of all the feedback effects of having more tourism and money coming in to Barcelona. It often leads to increased real estate prices, higher rents, more traffic in the city centre, more expensive living and more global brands taking the place of distinctive local businesses. From a strictly economic stand point this has long term negative effects since the city loses its distinctiveness and the attraction that was based on Barcelona not being like other cities. These new events rewrite the archive for the worse.

What’s also at stake is the history, the archive, the symbolic of the city. The experience of coming to Barcelona is sustained by a story of the history of the city and the lifestyle associated with it. But the archiving is not done by the people that took part in the archiving events. These are often based on alternative communities, artists, squatters, anarchists, that developed self-organizing networks before this feedback process started.
Whose history is invoked when the symbolic capital of Barcelona is to be increased? Who are the guardians of this archive? What happens to the movements that potentially can create another story, another archive – or that are a part of the story told?

6. Creative Industries – Two Approaches

The process of city branding is not unique to Barcelona, but is at the moment a very influential discourse in European policy that goes under the name on creative industries or creative industry policies. Since it is a reaction to a post-industrial situation, it will probably only be more influential the more manufacturing is moved away from Europe. The basic idea is that the former marginalized cultural economy or rather the creative economy – the economy based on innovation, creativity, design etc, from art to software – takes on a crucial role in an economy that can’t support itself on manufacturing anymore.

We can identify two forms of creative industry policies – although they are far from always separated.
One is where culture is directly profitable through intellectual property, thus generating tax revenues. In this view, the most importance political measure is securing this intellectual property by tougher laws and enforcements on piracy. How the creativity of the creative industries comes about is not as explored.
The other form of policy is where culture is only indirectly profitable. The presence of creative industries in a city attracts tourism or the establishment of companies. These policies can either be geared towards creating a generally healthy climate for creative industries where its activities attract tourists or migration which boost the economy through comers or real estate, or they can be focused on creating a well developed creative industry that attract companies to establish branches in the city, either to hire people with special competence from the local creative industries or to establish themselves as a “listening post” to find and learn about the unique styles, desires and markets in that particular city.

Companies need this external, self-organizing culture and creativity. The creation of meaning happens in self-organizing networks. It can not be produced by corporations, advertising or artists alone. Billboard advertising is  being replaced by storytelling connected to brands that spread through social networks, innovation in mobile phone interfaces and features comes from the creative uses and adaptions of teenage mobile users, the fashion industry need its street styles. What companies can try to do is to facilitate this meaning-creation, take part in it, support it.

7. DIY

So, in all of this, how does the future look for DIY media or DIY culture – this spontaneous, self-organizing culture that creates the cultural meaning, the symbolic capital.

Previous attempts at DIY media were stuck in the home or small circles, as private resistance to mainstream media, because there were no proper distribution system. Today there is an opportunity to have a real impact.  Small scale experimentation and events can spread through the digital archive – the tools for production and communication are accessible. But that DIY is not restricted either to the home or to private distribution networks also mean that DIY cannot avoid engaging with the rest of the cultural and communication industries. There is no outside anymore. DIY culture is dependent on businesses – not at least IT as platforms and on standardized formats. It is dependent on living conditions provided by the public sector – cost of living, access to spaces, subsidies and funding. DIY is perhaps a misleading name.

We will probably see more active efforts from the public sector and companies to engage with this self-organized culture. The public sector needs it both for branding as symbolic capital to distinguish themselves and to solve social problems, to communicate, to reach out to communities they can’t reach anymore.
Companies need to use external resources – they need special competence, they need someone to create meaning, give credibility. Companies value local, unique initiatives – the opposite of what was thought to be commercial culture.

The idea of creative industries is a discourse in the exact sense of the word. A way of talking and thinking that generates effects, that can be used for different purposes, but one that is not easily escaped. Copyright is not only a law that can be reformed or abolished – it is a way of viewing culture and economy that needs to be escaped.

So what is needed today, and is already happening around us, is both a new language of media that is not focused on end products and does not separate between archive and event and a new way of organizing and networking – with companies and the public sector, making use of their resources, but also being able to work without them, self-organized and self-sustained.

Today we have formed one particular blend of archive and experience, made possible by a particular way of communicating, networking and resource gathering. There are infinite ways of doing it differently. So, I end the same way Bill Drummond ended his letter:

Please accept my invitation to embrace the unknown opportunities of what lies ahead in whatever way excites you.

Seminar with Michel Bauwens at Copenhagen University today. Bauwens is the head of the P2P Foundation and a full time advocate of p2p as a new, emergent form of social dynamic on all fields of human endeavors. Read more on his arguments here. http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499

While Bauwens has lots to say on social production and its properties, I would like to situate the phenomena in a less utopian and world changing context. But that’s just where our styles differ. Here are my reflections from the seminar.

The social dynamic of p2p (for which I would rather use a less positively charged word as network hierarchies, networked organization or the like) opens up for organic hierarchies. Bauwens sees this as a third mode of production as separated from capitalist markets and state planning. Without the ideological overtones I would claim that it creates a spectrum of control/freedom organizations, where during a large part of the 20th century, the choice was between the anarchy of the emerging mass or the control of the mass by an elite. Something that spawned both bureaucracies rationalizing population control and revolutionary groups wanting to overthrow this order. P2P is not a revolution in this sense that is overthrows a previous way of organizing society (although Bauwens thinks it is both immanent, but has a transcendental capability to capitalism). It is a silent revolution if you will in the sense that it turns a binary choice into a spectrum of possible organizational forms. This mode of thinking is a healthy injection into a left that was previously left to revolutionary utopian dreams or a resigned, cynical world view of a totalitarian capitalist dystopia.

But pure p2p is not always the most optimal form of organization. When it comes to file sharing, the distributed systems are surely the best for transferring large amounts of data efficiently, but when it comes to creating meaningful cultural experiences and deepening perspectives, you have to close it of and moderate the information flow to ensure continuity, engagement and make sure opposing viewpoints meet each other instead of falling into the trap of p2p-secterist consensus groups.

There is always a danger of open systems turning into islands of gang like structures or wolf packs with flat and flexible hierarchies based on merit and reputation on the inside, but strict and hostile borders to the outside world. “Open” when it comes to digital networks is not an open space as the idea of the public town square is open. The sqaure is limited in space, forcing its population to meet different opinions, to compromise, to listen. The web is open in the sense that there is an abundance of space and therefor always room for you and your likes to create your own world separated from any sign of conflict. This is why the large hubs that are to large to be ignored and fled from are important.

P2P enables us in a flexible way to think about control and freedom, opened and closed, consensus and conflict that open up opportunities to “hack the system”, intervene and modify structures on a case to case basis.

Questions arose after the seminar on the exlusion from peer to peer production. We can from that identify three kinds of people.

1. People like Bauwens, who are able to make a living being engaged in peer production. The knowledge workers, the creative class.
2. People like myself, who only having myself to support and myself to lose, can sustain an active participation in peer production while having my main income from a non-p2p corporate part time job.
3. People who have entire families to support on an unskilled job in the service sector, who only under exceptional circumstances and with proper support are able to take part in social peer production.

1)When people meet a stranger on the other side of the world and they find out that they have some common acquaintance, the reaction is usually one of surprise about the meeting.”What a coincidence that we had this acquaintance!”