Re: [ox-en] Re: Report on KLab9 workshop
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2007 11:13:53 +0200
Dear Kristina and all!
5 days ago colourschool wrote:
Just wanted to respond to your summary of the workshop and provide
some more information if it is at all helpful.
Thanks for the information. However, in Oekonux there are quite a lot
of people who are quite used to political writings - such as Deleuze /
Guattari. On the other hand the knowledge about art related topics is
much less. It would be really useful if you could provide us with
resources about this.
Also I'd probably should make clear that Oekonux is not part of the
Free Software movement - at least not in a narrow sense. There are
some Free Software developers here but there are also a lot of other
people here. Also Oekonux doesn't develop Free Software but analyzes
Free Software and other phenomenons.
RHIZOMES
I realize that your group has come up with this model of the onion
skin, but I would like to propose that you think about another, very
well established model of cultural, social, political, and economic
formation in the information age, which is the rhizome (or root
vegetable such as a potato).
I think I have heard about this concept back in my anarchist times. I
agree that the rhizome model is in some respects very similar to the
germ form model. Indeed the germ form unfolds in a way similar to a
rhizome.
In Free Software you could see this during the 1990ies - the time
where Free Software gained momentum among the experts because they
liked it - mostly for the quality. During this time Free Software
already spread widely without being very visible. Only after 1998 when
Free Software became part of the dot-com bubble and got visible
through it it became publicly clear how wide distribution Free
Software already has.
Interestingly, there is a website called http://rhizome.org/
which looks at the relationships between art and technology.
I think would be a good place to start developing a common language,
which I suggested at KLab9.
Thanks for the link.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES
Most importantly though, I think that what every person working in
science and technology needs to know is how they belong to history.
There have been technological and informational revolutions in the
past and they have reflected and catalyzed certain changes.
I want to make it clear though that there is not necessarily a simple
cause and effect situation between science/technology and culture,
but rather a more complicated relationship between segments and
phenomena in society (all of them). In the US, there is an academic
field called Science and Technology Studies or the History of Science
that studies these relationships and that helps scientists and
technologists to understand that what they study, how they study, and
what is then done with their research is all conditioned by their
moment in history -- we are all part of intersecting interests,
structures, ideas, politics, etc... and we must understand them so as
not to become instruments toward certain ends that we never wished to
see realized. This would have been the case for those working on
nuclear physics (such as the Chicago group[171 scientists] of the
Manhattan Project) who regretted their whole lives how their work
aided the destruction of Japanese citizens via nuclear bombs in WW2.
This is a point where there is usually some disagreement. Oekonux
comes more from a perspective on productive forces and their
mechanics. This is not about ethics. Two points.
I think Free Software gained momentum **only** because it is
non-discriminatory as far as use of the software is concerned. Would
the licenses discriminate against certain uses you would run into a
couple of problems immediately:
* Where to draw the line?
On ethical grounds it is very hard to draw the line about good and
bad. Because the form of rights Free Software gives you is expressed
by a license you need to encode good and bad in the license. This is
difficult to achieve in the first place and it is very difficult to
maintain in practice.
In effect you would have a license where only very few persons can
be sure that they have the rights the license promises. As a Free
Software user you'll never know whether the copyright holder will
sue you because on ethical ground s/he thinks you have no right to
use the Free Software.
* Different opinions would scare away good developers
If you had such ethical licenses there are certainly bright
developers who would not share the ethical standards encoded in a
certain license. In effect they would not join a Free Software
project - or create another one with a less restrictive license.
This would be probably lead to separated worlds with less
restrictive and more restrictive licenses making combination of Free
Software a nightmare. Again this would severely damage the general
utility of Free Software.
And BTW: If you check which ideological fights including forks Free
Software developers already have about *existing* non-ethical
licenses I'd not like to imagine what would happen with ethical
licenses...
Leftist people usually have a hard time to accept that the Free
Software movement is heterogeneous as far as ethics are concerned.
Indeed there are important people which IMHO have very questionable
political opinions.
However, if you look at the development of productive forces this does
not matter at all. A new form of production gains power whether it is
ethical in terms of the ancient system or not. This was similar with
capitalism BTW which indeed gained a lot from the wars of the feudals.
On the contrary to me it is a very good sign that the germ form is
*not* rooted in ethical / political grounds. To me political forms
have proven to not be able to overcome capitalism. And this is logical
if you accept that the *real* power of capitalism comes from the way
of production - and *this* power is undermined by Free Software.
I'd agree that as a result this not automatically means that a GPL
society based on the principles of the development of Free Software
means a better place in terms of a mind coined by a capitalist
environment. However, as far as I can see a GPL society will remove
crucial problems of capitalism - namely the importance of alienated
relationships.
ETHICS/POLITICS
Finally, I'd like to say that the reason I brought up form versus
content as something to think about is because mostly what open
software does is to build a form (of software) collectively. How
that form gets used is not necessarily your concern it seems, but I
ask you to think about what that means in terms of ethics.
Indeed there are ethical licenses. They simply get not used.
If your
collectively constructed form of software is used for building
weapons or for spying on people or who knows what else, then it seems
to me that you need to have a discussion on how ethically you want to
make this work available -- what kinds of limitations should you
place and what kind of use can these forms have?
I'd find it more interesting to think about political forms based on
the principles of the development of Free Software to prevent this. I
think in a GPL society where alienation plays no big role a lot of
reasons for what seems like an abuse will be gone.
I just want you to know that with each
technological invention capitalism has not been overcome as you may
hope this new stage will do -- but rather it becomes subject to many
uses not all of them beneficial, and more often than not new
technologies often allow for different kinds of accumulation of
capital that did not exist before -- meaning new kinds of imbalances
in resources too where some will have more and more and other less
and less.
Agreed. However, capitalism has been transformed by technological
inventions like the assembly line.
The point is that in Oekonux we say that Free Software - and other
Free Projects - are stronger in terms of productivity / quality than
the capitalist way of production. That is Free Projects attack the
very stronghold of capitalism. Though Free Software as we know it
would probably not be possible without the Internet technology and
certainly not without digital copy this would not be important if
there would be no different mode of production.
And this is exactly my question to the art community: Are there
similar observations? Is payed art or art created because of an order
better / worse / same in quality than Doubly Free Art? I'd really
would be interested in this.
Interesting sub-questions would be: How many (regularly) paid artists
are there? How successful is Doubly Free Art in galleries / museums /
[whatever way users of art choose to distribute art]?
Grüße
Stefan
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