Peter Jakobsson: Öppenhetsindustrin / Openness Industry (2012) [Swedish]

“Over recent decades several competing descriptions of the media and cultural industries have been put forward. The media and cultural industries have been described as creative industries, copyright industries, and as constitutive of an experience economy. One key element in these descriptions has been the importance of copyright law in a postindustrial economy.

The present study is an analysis of an emerging idea of an industry that functions, in part, outside of the market created by copyright law, and by exploiting, or by building markets on top of, digital, cultural and informational commons. The study is about how this idea is expressed in various forms by business organisations, companies, consultants and policymakers. I have invented the concept of the openness industry to denote the businesses that these organisations and policy makers claim are forerunners and promoters of the idea of ‘openness’ as a business model for the media industry. The purpose of the thesis is to analyse the governmentality and ideology of the openness industry.

A key element in the idea of the openness industry is that internet users can be persuaded to produce symbolic products for it by other means than the economic incentives provided by copyright. Another key element is the high value placed on single individuals in the creation of economic value; but in contrast to how the copyright industries are thought to be dependent on ‘authors’, the openness industry relies on the ‘entrepreneur’. Previous notions of the media and cultural industries have given publishers and producers of film, music and games a central role.The companies that are seminal to the idea of the openness industry are internet and technology companies.” (Abstract)

Doctoral thesis
Media and Communication, Örebro University, Sweden, 2012
Supervisors: Göran Bolin, Mats Ekström
ISBN 9789176688533
209 pages

commentary (Jonas Andersson, in Swedish)

publisher

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Carolin Wiedemann, Soenke Zehle (eds.): Depletion Design: A Glossary of Network Ecologies (2012)

“Depletion Design suggests that ideas of exhaustion cut across cultural, environmentalist, and political idioms and offers ways to explore the emergence of new material assemblages. Soenke Zehle and Carolin Wiedemann discuss Depletion Design with Marie-Luise Angerer, Jennifer Gabrys and David M. Berry, inviting tm13 participants into a collaborative reflection on the necessity to understand human beings as one species among others – constituted by interactions of media, organisms, weather patterns, ecosystems, thought patterns, cities, discourses, fashions, populations, brains, markets, dance nights and bacterial exchanges (Angerer); on the material leftovers of electronics as provocations to think through and rework practices of material politics that may be less exploitative within our natural-cultural relationships (Gabrys); and on lines of flight from and through the computational – about expanding them into new ways of living beyond current limitations and towards new means of judgment and politics (Berry).

We, or so we are told, are running out of time, of time to develop alternatives to a new politics of emergency, as constant crisis has exhausted the means of a politics of representation too slow for the state of exception, too ignorant of the distribution of political agency, too focused on the governability of financial architectures. But new forms of individual and collective agency already emerge, as we learn to live, love, work within the horizon of depletion, to ask what it means to sustain ourselves, each other, again. Of these and other knowledges so created, there can no longer be an encyclopedia; a glossary, perhaps.”

Contributors: Marie-Luise Angerer (Cyborg), Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (Exhaustion, Soul Work), David M. Berry (On Terminality), Zach Blas (Queer Darkness), Drew S. Burk (Grey Ecology), Gabriella Coleman (Anonymous), Heidi Rae Cooley (Ecologies of Practice), Sebastian Deterding (Playful Technologies, Persuasive Design), Jennifer Gabrys (Natural History, Salvage), Johannes Grenzfurthner & Frank A. Schneider (Hackerspace), Eric Kluitenberg (Sustainable Immobility), Boyan Manchev (Disorganisation, Persistence), Lev Manovich (Software), Sonia Matos (Wicked Problems), Timothy Morton (Ecology without Nature), Jason W. Moore (Crisis), Anna Munster (Digital Embodiment), Eduardo Navas (Remix[ing] Re/Appropriations), Brett Neilson (Fracking), Sebastian Olma (Biopolitics, Creative Industries, Vitalism), Luciana Parisi (Algorithmic Architecture), Jussi Parikka (Dust Matter), Judith Revel (Common), Ned Rossiter (Dirt Research), Sean Smith (Information Bomb), Hito Steyerl (Spam of the Earth)

Publisher Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, Dec 2012
Theory on Demand series, 8
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Netherlands License
ISBN 9789081857512
via jussiparikka.net

Publisher

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Continental Drift Zagreb (2008)

“It’s always useful to turn dreams into realities, because you get to measure the differences and even let yourselves be guided by the intrinsic gaps between the two. Continental Drift was the dream of a geopolitical analysis carried out by a diverse group (theorists, artists, activists) and mapped onto everyday social and political life as an expanding set of explanations and expressive potentials. The dream was made in USA, and even on Wall Street in New York City, but it was realized by a group of immigrants, returning exiles and general misfits, all marked by the basic heresy of left positions in an age of liberal capitalist empire. By transplanting this inquiry to Zagreb, Croatia – the home of the What, How & For Whom? collective – it seems we are bringing a new dream into focus. The desire is that of widening the intrepretative circle, crossing divides of language and historical experience, trying to build capacities of understanding and confrontation between the immigrants, exiles and misfits of the big continental blocs and especially their edges – the cracks that open up wherever anyone can no longer stand what is taken and imposed as the norm. Empire as we see it is always falling apart, for better and usually for worse, under the pressure of massive processes which we are unlikely to even see coming, let alone grasp or have the agency to change in any way. Yet as the urgency and also the absurdity of the present predicament begins to rise in intensity, at least all around there are people trying similar experiments.” (Brian Holmes)

Novine Galerije Nova, No 15, May 2008
Publishers: What, How and for Whom/WHW, Zagreb; AGM, Zagreb
Editors: Continental Drift Zagreb team (Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Brian Holmes, Claire Pentecost, What, How and for Whom/WHW, Ivet Ćurlin, Ana Dević, Nataša Ilić, Sabina Sabolović)
Design: Dejan Kršić
36 pages

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