WHW
There Is Something Political in the City Air
2016
What, How & for Whom / WHW
“There is something political in the city air”*
The curatorial collective What,
How & for Whom / WHW, based
in Zagreb and Berlin, examine
the interconnections between
contemporary art and political and
social strata, including the role of art
institutions in contemporary society.
In the present essay, their discussion
of recent projects they curated
highlights the struggle for access to
knowledge and the free distribution
of information, which in Croatia also
means confronting the pressures
of censorship and revisionism
in the writing of history and the
construction of the future.
Contemporary art’s attempts to come to terms with its evasions in delivering on the promise of its own intrinsic capacity to propose alternatives, and
to do better in the constant game of staying ahead of institutional closures
and marketization, are related to a broader malady in leftist politics. The
crisis of organizational models and modes of political action feels especially acute nowadays, after the latest waves of massive political mobilization
and upheaval embodied in such movements as the Arab Spring and Occupy and the widespread social protests in Southern Europe against austerity
measures – and the failure of these movements to bring about structural
changes. As we witnessed in the dramatic events that unfolded through the
spring and summer of 2015, even in Greece, where Syriza was brought to
power, the people’s will behind newly elected governments proved insufficient to change the course of austerity politics in Europe. Simultaneously,
a series of conditional gains and effective defeats gave rise to the alarming
ascent of radical right-wing populism, against which the left has failed to
provide any real vision or driving force.
Both the practice of political articulation and the political practices of
art have been affected by the hollowing and disabling of democracy related
to the ascendant hegemony of the neoliberal rationale that shapes every
domain of our lives in accordance with a specific image of economics,1
as well as the problematic “embrace of localism and autonomy by much
of the left as the pure strategy”2 and the left’s inability to destabilize the
dominant world-view and reclaim the future.3 Consequently, art practices
increasingly venture into novel modes of operation that seek to “expand
our collective imagination beyond what capitalism allows”.4 They not only
point to the problems but address them head on. By negotiating art’s autonomy and impact on the social, and by conceptualizing the whole edifice
of art as a social symptom, such practices attempt to do more than simply
squeeze novel ideas into exhausted artistic formats and endow them with
political content that produces “marks of distinction”,5 which capital then
exploits for the enhancement of its own reproduction.
The two projects visited in this text both work toward building truly
accessible public spaces. Public Library, launched by Marcell Mars and
Tomislav Medak in 2012, is an ongoing media and social project based on
ideas from the open-source software movement, while Autonomy Cube, by
artist Trevor Paglen and the hacker and computer security researcher Jacob Appelbaum, centres on anonymized internet usage in the post–Edward
*
1
2
3
4
5
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, Verso, London and New York, 2012, p. 117.
See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Zone books,
New York, 2015.
Harvey, Rebel Cities, p. 83.
See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World
Without Work, Verso, London and New York, 2015.
Ibid., p. 495.
See Harvey, Rebel Cities, especially pp. 103–109.
“There is something political in the city air”
289
Snowden world of unprecedented institutionalized surveillance. Both projects operate in tacit alliance with art institutions that more often than not
are suffering from a kind of “mission drift” under pressure to align their
practices and structures with the profit sector, a situation that in recent
decades has gradually become the new norm.6 By working within and with
art institutions, both Public Library and Autonomy Cube induce the institutions to return to their initial mission of creating new common spaces
of socialization and political action. The projects develop counter-publics
and work with infrastructures, in the sense proposed by Keller Easterling:
not just physical networks but shared standards and ideas that constitute
points of contact and access between people and thus rule, govern, and
control the spaces in which we live.7
By building a repository of digitized books, and enabling others to do this
as well, Public Library promotes the idea of the library as a truly public institution that offers universal access to knowledge, which “together with
free public education, a free public healthcare, the scientific method, the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Wikipedia, and free software,
among others – we, the people, are most proud of ”, as the authors of the
project have said.8 Public Library develops devices for the free sharing of
books, but it also functions as a platform for advocating social solidarity
in free access to knowledge. By ignoring and avoiding the restrictive legal
regime for intellectual property, which was brought about by decades of
neoliberalism, as well as the privatization or closure of public institutions,
spatial controls, policing, and surveillance – all of which disable or restrict
possibilities for building new social relations and a new commons – Public
Library can be seen as part of the broader movement to resist neoliberal
austerity politics and the commodification of knowledge and education
and to appropriate public spaces and public goods for common purposes.
While Public Library is fully engaged with the movement to oppose the
copyright regime – which developed as a kind of rent for expropriating the
commons and reintroducing an artificial scarcity of cognitive goods that
could be reproduced virtually for free – the project is not under the spell of
digital fetishism, which until fairly recently celebrated a new digital commons as a non-frictional space of smooth collaboration where a new political and economic autonomy would be forged that would spill over and
undermine the real economy and permeate all spheres of life.9 As Matteo
Pasquinelli argues in his critique of “digitalism” and its celebration of the
6
7
8
9
See Brown, Undoing the Demos.
Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, Verso, London and
New York, 2014.
Marcell Mars, Manar Zarroug, and Tomislav Medak, “Public Library”, in Public Library,
ed. Marcell Mars, Tomislav Medak, and What, How & for Whom / WHW, exh. publication, What, How & for Whom / WHW and Multimedia Institute, Zagreb, 2015, p. 78.
See Matteo Pasquinelli, Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons, NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, and Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2008.
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virtues of the information economy with no concern about the material
basis of production, the information economy is a parasite on the material
economy and therefore “an accurate understanding of the common must
be always interlinked with the real physical forces producing it and the material economy surrounding it.”10
Public Library emancipates books from the restrictive copyright regime
and participates in the exchange of information enabled by digital technology, but it also acknowledges the labour and energy that make this possible. There is labour that goes into the cataloguing of the books, and labour
that goes into scanning them before they can be brought into the digital
realm of free reproduction, just as there are the ingenuity and labour of
the engineers who developed a special scanner that makes it easier to scan
books; also, the scanner needs to be installed, maintained, and fed books
over hours of work. This is where the institutional space of art comes in
handy by supporting the material production central to the Public Library
endeavour. But the scanner itself does not need to be visible. In 2014, at
the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, we curated the
exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, which dealt with conflicts triggered by
struggles over access to knowledge and the effects that knowledge, as the
basis of capital reproduction, has on the totality of workers’ lives. In the
exhibition, the production funds allocated to Public Library were used to
build the book scanner at Calafou, an anarchist cooperative outside Barcelona. The books chosen for scanning were relevant to the exhibition’s
themes – methods of reciprocal learning and teaching, forms of social and
political organization, the history of the Spanish Civil War, etc. – and after
being scanned, they were uploaded to the Public Library website. All that
was visible in the exhibition itself was a kind of index card or business card
with a URL link to the Public Library website and a short statement (fig. 1):
A public library is:
• free access to books for every member of society
• library catalog
• librarian
With books ready to be shared, meticulously cataloged, everyone is a
librarian. When everyone is librarian, the library is everywhere.11
Public Library’s alliance with art institutions serves to strengthen the
cultural capital both for the general demand to free books from copyright
restrictions on cultural goods and for the project itself – such cultural capital could be useful in a potential lawsuit. Simultaneously, the presence and
realization of the Public Library project within an exhibition enlists the host
institution as part of the movement and exerts influence on it by taking
the museum’s public mission seriously and extending it into a grey zone of
10
11
Ibid., p. 29.
Mars, Zarroug, and Medak, “Public Library”, p. 85.
“There is something political in the city air”
291
questionable legality. The defence of the project becomes possible by making the traditional claim of the “autonomy” of art, which is not supposed
to assert any power beyond the museum walls. By taking art’s autonomy
at its word, and by testing the truth of the liberal-democratic claim that
the field of art is a field of unlimited freedom, Public Library engages in a
kind of “overidentification” game, or what Keller Easterling, writing about
the expanded activist repertoire in infrastructure space, calls “exaggerated
compliance”.12 Should the need arise, as in the case of a potential lawsuit
against the project, claims of autonomy and artistic freedom create a protective shroud of untouchability. And in this game of liberating books from
the parochial capitalist imagination that restricts their free circulation, the
institution becomes a complicit partner. The long-acknowledged insight
that institutions embrace and co-opt critique is, in this particular case, a
win-win situation, as Public Library uses the public status of the museum
as a springboard to establish the basic message of free access and the free
circulation of books and knowledge as common sense, while the museum
performs its mission of bringing knowledge to the public and supporting
creativity, in this case the reworking, rebuilding and reuse of technology
for the common good. The fact that the institution is not naive but complicit produces a synergy that enhances potentialities for influencing and
permeating the public sphere. The gesture of not exhibiting the scanner in
the museum has, among other things, a practical purpose, as more books
would be scanned voluntarily by the members of the anarchist commune
in Calafou than would be by the overworked museum staff, and employing
somebody to do this during the exhibition would be too expensive (and the
mantra of cuts, cuts, cuts would render negotiation futile). If there is a flirtatious nod to the strategic game of not exposing too much, it is directed less
toward the watchful eyes of the copyright police than toward the exhibition
regime of contemporary art group shows in which works compete for attention, the biggest scarcity of all. Public Library flatly rejects identification
with the object “our beloved bookscanner” (as the scanner is described on
the project website13), although it is an attractive object that could easily
be featured as a sculpture within the exhibition. But its efficacy and use
come first, as is also true of the enigmatic business card–like leaflet, which
attracts people to visit the Public Library website and use books, not only to
read them but also to add books to the library: doing this in the privacy of
one’s home on one’s own computer is certainly more effective than doing
it on a computer provided and displayed in the exhibition among the other
art objects, films, installations, texts, shops, cafés, corridors, exhibition
halls, elevators, signs, and crowds in a museum like Reina Sofia.
For the exhibition to include a scanner that was unlikely to be used or
a computer monitor that showed the website from which books might be
12
13
Easterling, Extrastatecraft, p. 492.
See https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/2012/10/28/our-belovedbookscanner-2/ (accessed July 4, 2016).
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downloaded, but probably not read, would be the embodiment of what
philosopher Robert Pfaller calls “interpassivity”, the appearance of activity or a stand-in for it that in fact replaces any genuine engagement.14 For
Pfaller, interpassivity designates a flight from engagement, a misplaced libidinal investment that under the mask of enjoyment hides aversion to an
activity that one is supposed to enjoy, or more precisely: “Interpassivity is
the creation of a compromise between cultural interests and latent cultural
aversion.”15 Pfaller’s examples of participation in an enjoyable process that
is actually loathed include book collecting and the frantic photocopying of
articles in libraries (his book was originally published in 2002, when photocopying had not yet been completely replaced by downloading, bookmarking, etc.).16 But he also discusses contemporary art exhibitions as sites of
interpassivity, with their overabundance of objects and time-based works
that require time that nobody has, and with the figure of the curator on
whom enjoyment is displaced – the latter, he says, is a good example of
“delegated enjoyment”. By not providing the exhibition with a computer
from which books can be downloaded, the project ensures that books are
seen as vehicles of knowledge acquired by reading and not as immaterial
capital to be frantically exchanged; the undeniable pleasure of downloading and hoarding books is, after all, just one step removed from the playground of interpassivity that the exhibition site (also) is.
But Public Library is hardly making a moralistic statement about the
virtues of reading, nor does it believe that ignorance (such as could be
overcome by reading the library’s books) is the only obstacle that stands
in the way of ultimate emancipation. Rather, the project engages with, and
contributes to, the social practice that David Harvey calls “commoning”:
“an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-becreated social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and
livelihood”.17 Public Library works on the basis of commoning and tries to
enlist others to join it, which adds a distinctly political dimension to the
sabotage of intellectual property revenues and capital accumulation.
The political dimension of Public Library and the effort to form and
publicize the movement were expressed more explicitly in the Public Li14
15
16
17
Robert Pfaller, On the Pleasure Principle in Culture: Illusions Without Owners, Verso, London and New York, 2014.
Ibid., p. 76.
Pfaller’s book, which first appeared in German, was published in English only in 2014.
His ideas have gained greater relevance over time, not only as the shortcomings of the
immensely popular social media activism became apparent – where, as many critics
have noted, participation in political organizing and the articulation of political tasks
and agendas are often replaced by a click on an icon – but also because of Pfaller’s
broader argument about the self-deception at play in interpassivity and its role in eliciting enjoyment from austerity measures and other calamities imposed on the welfare
state by the neoliberal regime, which since early 2000 has exceeded even the most sober (and pessimistic) expectations.
Ibid., p. 73.
“There is something political in the city air”
293
brary exhibition in 2015 at Gallery Nova in Zagreb, where we have been
directing the programme since 2003. If the Public Library project was not
such an eminently collective practice that pays no heed to the author function, the Gallery Nova show might be considered something like a solo exhibition. As it was realized, the project again used art as an infrastructure
and resource to promote the movement of freeing books from copyright
restrictions while collecting legitimization points from the art world as enhanced cultural capital that could serve as armour against future attacks
by the defenders of the holy scripture of copyright laws. But here the more
important tactic was to show the movement as an army of many and to
strengthen it through self-presentation. The exhibition presented Public
Library as a collection of collections, and the repertory form (used in archive science to describe a collection) was taken as the basic narrative procedure. It mobilized and activated several archives and open digital repositories, such as MayDay Rooms from London, The Ignorant Schoolmaster and
His Committees from Belgrade, Library Genesis and Aaaaaarg.org, Catalogue
of Free Books, (Digitized) Praxis, the digitized work of the Midnight Notes
Collective, and Textz.com, with special emphasis on activating the digital
repositories UbuWeb and Monoskop. Not only did the exhibition attempt to
enlist the gallery audience but, equally important, the project was testing
its own strength in building, articulating, announcing, and proposing, or
speculating on, a broader movement to oppose the copyright of cultural
goods within and adjacent to the art field.
Presenting such a movement in an art institution changes one of the
basic tenets of art, and for an art institution the project’s main allure probably lies in this kind of expansion of the art field. A shared politics is welcome, but nothing makes an art institution so happy as the sense of purpose that a project like Public Library can endow it with. (This, of course,
comes with its own irony, for while art institutions nowadays compete for
projects that show emphatically how obsolete the aesthetic regime of art is,
they continue to base their claims of social influence on knowledge gained
through some form of aesthetic appreciation, however they go about explaining and justifying it.) At the same time, Public Library’s nonchalance
about institutional maladies and anxieties provides a homeopathic medicine whose effect is sometimes so strong that discussion about placebos
becomes, at least temporarily, beside the point. One occasion when Public
Library’s roving of the political terrain became blatantly direct was the exhibition Written-off: On the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Operation
Storm, which we organized in the summer of 2015 at Gallery Nova (figs.
2–4).
The exhibition/action Written-off was based on data from Ante Lesaja’s
extensive research on “library purification”, which he published in his book
Knjigocid: Uništavanje knjige u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih (Libricide: The Destruction
of Books in Croatia in the 1990s).18 People were invited to bring in copies of
18
Ante Lesaja, Knjigocid: Uništavanje knjige u Hrvatskoj 1990-ih, Profil and Srbsko narodno
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books that had been removed from Croatian public libraries in the 1990s.
The books were scanned and deposited in a digital archive; they then became available on a website established especially for the project. In Croatia during the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of books were removed from
schools and factories, from public, specialized, and private libraries, from
former Yugoslav People’s Army centres, socio-political organizations, and
elsewhere because of their ideologically inappropriate content, the alphabet they used (Serbian Cyrillic), or the ethnic or political background of the
authors. The books were mostly thrown into rubbish bins, discarded on
the street, destroyed, or recycled. What Lesaja’s research clearly shows is
that the destruction of the books – as well as the destruction of monuments
to the People’s Liberation War (World War II) – was not the result of individuals running amok, as official accounts preach, but a deliberate and systematic action that symbolically summarizes the dominant politics of the
1990s, in which war, rampant nationalism, and phrases about democracy
and sovereignty were used as a rhetorical cloak to cover the nakedness of
the capitalist counter-revolution and criminal processes of dispossession.
Written-off: On the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Operation Storm
set up scanners in the gallery, initiated a call for collecting and scanning
books that had been expunged from public institutions in the 1990s, and
outlined the criteria for the collection, which corresponded to the basic
domains in which the destruction of the books, as a form of censorship,
was originally implemented: books written in the Cyrillic alphabet or in
Serbian regardless of the alphabet; books forming a corpus of knowledge
about communism, especially Yugoslav communism, Yugoslav socialism,
and the history of the workers’ struggle; and books presenting the anti-Fascist and revolutionary character of the People’s Liberation Struggle during
World War II.
The exhibition/action was called Written-off because the removal and
destruction of the books were often presented as a legitimate procedure
of library maintenance, thus masking the fact that these books were unwanted, ideologically unacceptable, dangerous, harmful, unnecessary, etc.
Written-off unequivocally placed “book destruction” in the social context
of the period, when the destruction of “unwanted” monuments and books
was happening alongside the destruction of homes and the killing of “unwanted” citizens, outside of and prior to war operations. For this reason,
the exhibition was dedicated to the twentieth anniversary of Operation
Storm, the final military/police operation in what is called, locally, the
Croatian Homeland War.19
The exhibition was intended as a concrete intervention against a political logic that resulted in mass exile and killing, the history of which is
glossed over and critical discussion silenced, and also against the official
19
vijeće, Zagreb, 2012.
Known internationally as the Croatian War of Independence, the war was fought between Croatian forces and the Serb-controlled Yugoslav People’s Army from 1991 to
1995.
“There is something political in the city air”
295
celebrations of the anniversary, which glorified militarism and proclaimed
the ethical purity of the victory (resulting in the desired ethnic purity of the
nation).
As both symbolic intervention and real-life action, then, the exhibition
Written-off took place against a background of suppressed issues relating
to Operation Storm – ethno-nationalism as the flip side of neoliberalism,
justice and the present status of the victims and refugees, and the overall character of the war known officially as the Homeland War, in which
discussions about its prominent traits as a civil war are actively silenced
and increasingly prosecuted. In protest against the official celebrations
and military parades, the exhibition marked the anniversary of Operation
Storm with a collective action that evokes books as symbolic of a “knowledge society” in which knowledge becomes the location of conflictual engagement. It pointed toward the struggle over collective symbolic capital
and collective memory, in which culture as a form of the commons has a
direct bearing on the kind of place we live in. The Public Library project,
however, is engaged not so much with cultural memory and remembrance
as a form of recollection or testimony that might lend political legitimation
to artistic gestures; rather, it engages with history as a construction and
speculative proposition about the future, as Peter Osborne argues in his
polemical hypotheses on the notion of contemporary art that distinguishes
between “contemporary” and “present-day” art: “History is not just a relationship between the present and the past – it is equally about the future.
It is this speculative futural moment that definitively separates the concept
of history from memory.”20 For Public Library, the future that participates
in the construction of history does not yet exist, but it is defined as more
than just a project against the present as reflected in the exclusionary, parochially nationalistic, revisionist and increasingly fascist discursive practices of the Croatian political elites. Rather, the future comes into being as
an active and collective construction based on the emancipatory aspects of
historical experiences as future possibilities.
Although defined as an action, the project is not exultantly enthusiastic
about collectivity or the immediacy and affective affinities of its participants, but rather it transcends its local and transient character by taking
up the broader counter-hegemonic struggle for the mutual management
of joint resources. Its endeavour is not limited to the realm of the political
and ideological but is rooted in the repurposing of technological potentials
from the restrictive capitalist game and the reutilization of the existing infrastructure to build a qualitatively different one. While the culture industry adapts itself to the limited success of measures that are geared toward
preventing the free circulation of information by creating new strategies
for pushing information into a form of property and expropriating value
20
Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, Verso, London
and New York, 2013, p. 194.
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fig. 1
Marcell Mars, Art as Infrastructure: Public Library, installation
view, Really Useful Knowledge, curated by WHW, Museo
Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2014.
Photo by Joaquin Cortes and Roman Lores / MNCARS.
fig. 2
Public Library, exhibition view, Gallery Nova, Zagreb, 2015.
Photo by Ivan Kuharic.
fig. 3
Written-off: On the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Operation
Storm, exhibition detail, Gallery Nova, Zagreb, 2015.
Photo by Ivan Kuharic.
fig. 4
Written-off: On the Occasion of the 20th Anniversary of Operation
Storm, exhibition detail, Gallery Nova, Zagreb, 2015.
Photo by Ivan Kuharic.
fig. 5
Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum, Autonomy Cube,
installation view, Really Useful Knowledge, curated by WHW,
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, 2014.
Photo by Joaquín Cortés and Román Lores / MNCARS.
through the control of metadata (information about information),21 Public Library shifts the focus away from aesthetic intention – from unique,
closed, and discrete works – to a database of works and the metabolism
of the database. It creates values through indexing and connectivity, imagined communities and imaginative dialecticization. The web of interpenetration and determination activated by Public Library creates a pedagogical endeavour that also includes a propagandist thrust, if the notion of
propaganda can be recast in its original meaning as “things that must be
disseminated”.
A similar didactic impetus and constructivist praxis is present in the work
Autonomy Cube, which was developed through the combined expertise of
artist and geographer Trevor Paglen and internet security researcher, activist and hacker Jacob Appelbaum. This work, too, we presented in the
Reina Sofia exhibition Really Useful Knowledge, along with Public Library
and other projects that offered a range of strategies and methodologies
through which the artists attempted to think through the disjunction between concrete experience and the abstraction of capital, enlisting pedagogy as a crucial element in organized collective struggles. Autonomy Cube
offers a free, open-access, encrypted internet hotspot that routes internet
traffic over TOR, a volunteer-run global network of servers, relays, and services, which provides anonymous and unsurveilled communication. The
importance of the privacy of the anonymized information that Autonomy
Cube enables and protects is that it prevents so-called traffic analysis – the
tracking, analysis, and theft of metadata for the purpose of anticipating
people’s behaviour and relationships. In the hands of the surveillance
state this data becomes not only a means of steering our tastes, modes of
consumption, and behaviours for the sake of making profit but also, and
more crucially, an effective method and weapon of political control that
can affect political organizing in often still-unforeseeable ways that offer
few reasons for optimism. Visually, Autonomy Cube references minimalist
sculpture (fig. 5) (specifically, Hans Haacke’s seminal piece Condensation
Cube, 1963–1965), but its main creative drive lies in the affirmative salvaging of technologies, infrastructures, and networks that form both the leading organizing principle and the pervasive condition of complex societies,
with the aim of supporting the potentially liberated accumulation of collective knowledge and action. Aesthetic and art-historical references serve
as camouflage or tools for a strategic infiltration that enables expansion of
the movement’s field of influence and the projection of a different (contingent) future. Engagement with historical forms of challenging institutions
becomes the starting point of a poetic praxis that materializes the object of
its striving in the here and now.
Both Public Library and Autonomy Cube build their autonomy on the dedi21
McKenzie Wark, “Metadata Punk”, in Public Library, pp. 113–117 (see n. 9).
“There is something political in the city air”
305
cation and effort of the collective body, without which they would not
exist, rendering this interdependence not as some consensual idyll of cooperation but as conflicting fields that create further information and experiences. By doing so, they question the traditional edifice of art in a way
that supports Peter Osborne’s claim that art is defined not by its aesthetic
or medium-based status, but by its poetics: “Postconceptual art articulates a post-aesthetic poetics.”22 This means going beyond criticality and
bringing into the world something defined not by its opposition to the real,
but by its creation of the fiction of a shared present, which, for Osborne,
is what makes art truly contemporary. And if projects like these become a
kind of political trophy for art institutions, the side the institutions choose
nevertheless affects the common sense of our future.
22
Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, p. 33.
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“There is something political in the city air”
307
Sollfrank & Kleiner
Telekommunisten
2012
Dmytri Kleiner
Telekommunisten
Berlin, 20 November 2012
[00:12]
My name is Dmytri Kleiner. I work with Telekommunisten, which is an art
collective based in Berlin that investigates the social relations in bettering
communication technologies.
[00:24]
Peer-To-Peer Communism
[00:29]
Cornelia Sollfrank: I would like to start with the theory, which I think is
very strong, and which actually informs the practice that you are doing. For
me it's like the background where the practice comes from. And I think the
most important and well-known book or paper you've written is The
Telekommunist Manifesto. This is something that you authored personally,
Dmytri Kleiner. It's not written by the Telekommunisten. And I would like to
ask you what the main ideas and the main principles are that you explain, and
maybe you come up with a few things, and I have some bullet points here, and
then we can discuss.
[01:14]
The book has two sections. The first section is called "Peer-To-Peer Communism
Vs. The Client-Server Capitalist State," and that actually explains – using
the history of the Internet as a sort of a basis – it explains the
relationship between modes of production on one hand, like capitalism and
communism, with network topologies on the other hand, mesh networks and star
networks. [01:39] And it explains why the original design of the Internet,
which was supposed to be a decentralised system where everybody could
communicate with everybody without any kind of mediation, or control or
censorship – why that has been replaced with centralised, privatised
platforms, from an economic basis. [02:00] So that the need for capitalist
capture of user data, and user interaction, in order to allow investors to
recoup profits, is the driving force behind centralisation, and so it explains
that.
[02:15]
Copyright Myth
[02:19]
C.S.: The framework of these whole interviews is the relation between cultural
production, artistic production in particular, and copyright, as a regulatory
mechanism. In one of your presentations, you mention, or you made the
assumption or the claim, that the fact that copyright is there to protect, or
to foster or enable artistic cultural production is a myth. Could you please
elaborate a bit on that?
[02:57]
Sure. That's the second part of the manifesto. The second part of the
manifesto is called "A Contribution to the Critique of Free Culture." And in
that title I don't mean to be critiquing the practice of free culture, which I
actively support and participate in. [03:13] I am critiquing the theory around
free culture, and particularly as it's found in the Creative Commons
community. [03:20] And this is one of the myths that you often see in that
community: that copyright somehow was created in order to empower artists, but
it's gone wrong somehow, at some point it's got wrong. [03:34] It went in the
wrong direction and now it needs to be corrected. This is a kind of a
plotline, so to speak, in a lot of creative commons oriented community
discussion about copyright. [03:46] But actually, of course, the history of
copyright is the same as the history of labour and capital and markets in
every other field. So just like the kind of Lockean idea of property
attributes the product of the worker's labour to the worker, so that the
capitalist can appropriate it, so it commodifies the products of labour,
copyright was created for exactly the same reasons, at exactly the same time,
as part of exactly the same process, in order to create a commodity form of
knowledge, so that knowledge could play in markets. [04:21] That's why
copyright was invented. That was the social reason why it needed to exist.
Because as industrial capitalism was manifesting, they required a way to
commodify knowledge work in the same way they commodified other kinds of
labour. [04:37] So the artist was only given the authorship of their work in
exactly the same way as the factory worker supposedly owns the product of
their labour. [04:51] Because the artist doesn't have the means of production,
so the artist has to give away that product, and actually legitimizes the
appropriation of the product of labour from the labourer, whether it's a
cultural labourer or a physical labourer.
[05:07]
(Intellectual) Labour
[05:10]
C.S.: And why do you think that this myth is so persistent? Or, who created
it, and for what reasons?
[05:18]
I think that a lot of kind of liberal criticism sort of starts that way. I
mean, I haven't really researched this, so that's kind of an open question
that you are asking, I don’t really have a specific position. [05:30] But my
impression is always that people that come at things from a liberal critique,
not a critical critique, sort of assume that things were once good and now
they’re bad. That’s kind of a common sort of assumption. [05:42] So instead of
looking at the core structural origin of something, they sort of have an
assumption that at some point this must have served a useful function or it
wouldn’t exist. And so therefore it must have been good and now it’s bad.
[05:57] And also because of the rhetoric, of course, just like the Lockean
rhetoric of property: give the ownership of the product of labour to the
worker. Ideologically speaking, it’s been framed this way since the beginning.
[06:14] But of course, everybody understands that in the market system the
worker is only given the rights to own their labour if they can sell it.
[06:22]
Author Function
[06:26]
C.S.: Based on this assumption, developed a certain function of the author.
Could you please elaborate on this a bit more? The invention of the individual
author.
[06:39]
The author – in a certain point of history, in line of the development of, you
know, as modern society – capitalist industrial society – began to emerge, so
did with it the author. [06:53] Previous to this, the concept of the author
was not nearly so engrained. So the author hasn't always existed in this
static sense, as unique source of new creativity and new knowledge, creating
work ex nihilo from their imagination. [07:10] Previous to this there was
always a more social understanding of authorship, where authors were in a
continuous cultural dialogue with previous authors, contemporary authors,
later authors. [07:20] And authors would frequently reuse themes, plots,
characters, from other authors. For instance, Goethe’s Faust is a good example
that has been used by authors before and after Goethe, in their own stories.
And just like the Homeric traditions of ancient literature. [07:42] Culture
was always seen to be much about dialogue, where each generation of authors
would contribute to a common creative stock of characters, plots, ideas. But
that, of course, is not conducive to making knowledge into a commodity that
can be sold in the market. [08:00] So as we got into a market-based society,
in order to create this idea of intellectual property, of copyright, creating
something that can be sold on the market, the artist and the author had to
become individuals all of a sudden. [08:16] Because this kind of iterative
social dialogue doesn’t work well in a commodity form, because how do you
properly buy it and sell it?
[08:28]
Anti-Copyright
[08:33]
C.S.: The Next concept I would like to talk about is the anti-copyright. Could
you please explain a little bit what it actually is, and where it comes from?
[08:46]
From the very beginning of copyright many artists and authors rejected it from
ideological grounds, right from the beginning. [08:35] Because, of course,
what was now plagiarism, what was now illegal, and a violation of intellectual
property had been in many cases traditional practices that writers took for
granted forever. [09:09] The ability to reuse characters; the ability to take
plots, themes and ideas from other authors and reuse them. [09:16] So many
artists rejected this idea from the beginning. And this was the idea of
copyright. But, of course, because the dominant system that was emerging – the
market capitalist system – required the commodity form to make a living, this
was always a marginal community. [09:37] So it was radical artists, like the
Situationist International, or artists that had strong political beliefs, the
American folk musicians like Woody Guthrie – another famous example. [09:47]
And all of this people were not only against intellectual property. They were
not only against the commodification of cultural work. They were against the
commodification of work, period. [09:57] There was a proletarian movement.
They were very much against capitalism as well as intellectual property.
[10:04]
Examples of Anti-Copyright
[10:08]
C.S.: Could you give also some examples in the artworld for this
anti-copyright, or in the cultural world?
[10:15]
DK: Well, you know Lautréamont’s famous text, “plagiarism is necessary: it
takes a wrong idea and replaces it with the right idea.” [10:29] And
Lautréamont was a huge influence on a bunch of radical French artists
including, most famously, the Situationist International, who published their
journal with no copyright, denying copyright. [10:44] I guess that Woody
Guthrie has a famous thing that I quote in some article or other, maybe even
in the [Telekommunist] Manifesto, I don’t remember if it made it in – where he
expressly says, he openly supports people performing, copying, modifying his
songs. That was a note that he made in a song book of his. [11:11] And many
others – the whole practice is associated with communises, from Dada to
Neoism. [11:18] Much later, up to the mid-1990s, this was the dominant form.
So from the birth of copyright, up to the mid-1990s, the intellectual property
was being questioned on the radical fringes of artists. [11:34] For me
personally, as an artist, I started to become involved with artists like
Negativland and Plunderpalooza – sorry, Plunderpalooza was an act we did;
Plunderphonics is an album by John Oswald – the newest movements and the
festival of plagiarism. [11:51] This was the area that I personally
experienced in the 1990s, but it has a long history going back to Lautréamont,
if not earlier.
[12:01]
On the Fringe
[12:05]
C.S.: But you already mentioned the term fringe, so this kind of
anti-copyright attitude automatically implied that it could only happen on the
fringe, not in the actual cultural world.
[12:15]
Exactly. It is fundamentally incompatible with capitalism, because it denies
the value-form of culture. [12:22] And without the commodity form, it can’t
make a living, it has nothing to sell in the market. Because it’s not allowed
to sell on the market, it’s necessarily marginal. [12:34] So it’s necessarily
people who support themselves through “non-art” income, by other kinds of
work, or the small percentage of artists that can be supported by cultural
funding or universities, which is, you know, a relatively small group compared
to the proper cultural industries that are supported by copyright licensing.
[12:54] That includes the major movie houses, the major record labels, the
major publishing houses. Which is, you know, in orders of magnitude, a larger
number of artists.
[13:05]
Anti-Copyright Attitude
[13:10]
C.S.: So what would you say are the two, three, main characteristics of the
anti-copyright attitude?
[13:16]
Well, it completely rejects copyright as being legitimate. That’s a complete
denial of copyright. And usually it’s a denial of the existence of a unique
author as well. [13:28] So one of the things that is very characteristic is
the blurring of the distinction between producer and consumer. [13:37] So that
art is considered to be a dialogue, an interactive process where every
producer is also a consumer of art. So everybody is an artist in that sense,
everybody potentially can be. And it’s an ongoing process. [13:52] There’s no
distinction between producer and consumer. It’s just a transient role that one
plays in a process.
[13:59]
C.S.: And in that sense it relates back to the earlier ideas of cultural
production.
[14:04]
Exactly, to the pre-commodity form of culture.
[14:11]
Copyleft
[14:15]
C.S.: Could you please explain what copyleft is, where it comes from.
[14:20]
Copyleft comes out of the software community, the hacker community. It doesn’t
come out of artistic practice per se. And it comes out of the need to share
software. [14:30] Famously, Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation
started this project called GNU (GNU’s Not Unix), which is the, kind of, very
famous and important project. [14:44] And they publish the license called the
GPL, which sort of defined the copyleft idea. And copyleft is a very clever
kind of a hack, as they say in the hacker community. [14:53] What it does is
that it asserts copyright, full copyright, in order to provide a public
license, a free license. And it requires that any derivative work also carries
the same license. That’s what is different about it to anti-copyright. It’s
that, rather than denying copyright outright, copyleft is a copyright license
– it is a copyright – but then the claim is used in order to publicly make the
work available to anybody that wants it under very open terms. [15:28] The key
requirement, the distinctive requirement, is that any derivative work must
also be licenced under the same terms, under the copyleft terms. [15:38] This
is what we call viral, in that it perpetuates license. This is very clever,
because it takes copyright law, and it uses copyright law to create
intellectual property freedom, within a certain context. [15:55] But the
difference is, of course, that we are talking about software. And software,
economically speaking, from the point of view of the way software developers
actually make a living, is very different. [16:11] Because within the
productive cycle – the productive cycle can be said to have two phases,
sometimes called "department one" and "department two" in Marxian language or
in classical political economics. Producer’s goods and consumer’s goods; or
capital’s goods and consumer's goods models. [16:17] The idea is that some
goods are produced not for consumers but for producers. And these goods are
called capital. So they are goods that are used in production. And because
they are used in production, it’s not as important for capitalists to make a
profit on their circulation because they are input to production. [16:47] They
make their profits up stream, by actually using those goods in production, and
then creating goods that can be sold to the masses, circulated to the masses.
[16:56] And so because culture – art and culture – is normally a “department
two” good, consumer’s good, it’s completely, fundamentally incompatible with
capitalism because capitalism requires the capture of profits and the
circulation of consumer’s goods. But because software is largely a “department
one” good, producer’s good, it has no incompatibility with capitalism at all.
[17:18] In fact, capitalists very much like having their capital costs
reduced, because the vast majority of capitalists do not make commercial
software – license it. That’s only a very small class of capitalists. For the
vast majority of capitalists, the availability of free software as an input to
their production is a wonderful thing. [17:39] So this creates a sort of a
paradox, where under capitalism, only capital can be free. And because
software is capital, free software, and the GNU project, the Linux and the
vanilla projects exploded and became huge. [17:39] So, unlike the marginal-by-
necessity anti-copyright, free software became a mass movement, that has a
billion dollar industry, that has conferences all over the world that are
attended by tens of thousands of people. And everybody is for it. It’s this
really great big thing. [18:26] So it’s been rather different than
anti-copyright in term of its place in society. It’s become very prominent, very
successful. But, unfortunately – and I guess this is where we have to go next
– the reason why it is successful is because software is a producer’s good,
not a consumer’s good.
[18:38]
Copyleft Criticism
[18:42]
C.S.: So what is your basic criticism of copyleft?
[18:47]
I have no criticism of copyleft, except for the fact that some people think
that the model can be expanded into culture. It can’t be, and that’s the
problem. It's that a lot people from the arts community then kind of came back
to this original idea of questioning copyright through free software. [19:12]
So they maybe had some relationship with the original anti-copyright
tradition, or sometimes not at all. They are fresh out of design school, and
they never had any relationship with the radical tradition of anti-copyright.
And they encounter free software – they are like, yeah, that's great. [19:29]
And the spirit of sharing and cooperation inspires them. And they think that
the model can be taken from free software and applied to art and artists as
well, just like that. [19:41] But of course, there is a problem, because in a
capitalist society there has to be some economic sustainability behind the
practice, and because free culture modelled out of the GPL can’t work, because
the artists can’t make a living that way. [20:02] While capital will fund free
software, because they need free software – it’s a producer’s good, it’s input
to their production – capital has no need for free art. So they have also no
need to finance free art. [20:15] So if they can’t be financed by capital,
that automatically gives them a very marginal role in today’s society. [20:19]
Because that means that it has to be funded by something other than capital.
And those means are – back to the anti-copyright model – those are either non-
art income, meaning you do some other kind of work to self-finance your
artistic production, or the relatively small amount of public cultural
financing that is available – or now we have new things, like crowd funding –
all these kinds of things that create some opportunities. But still
marginally small compared to the size of the capitalist economy. [20:52] So
the only criticism of copyleft is that it is inapplicable to cultural
production.
[21:00]
Copy-left and cultural production
[21:04]
C.S.: Why this principle of free software production, GPL principles, cannot
be applied to cultural production? Just again, to really point this out.
[21:20]
The difference is really the difference between “department one” goods,
producer's goods, and “department two” goods, consumer’s goods. [21:27] It’s
that capitalists, which obviously control the vast majority of investment in
this economy – so the vast majority of money that is spent to allow people to
realise projects of any kind. The source of this money is capital investment.
[21:42] And capital is happy to invest in producer’s goods, even if they are
free. Because they need these goods. So they have no requirement to seek these
goods. [21:53] If you are running a company like Amazon, you are not making
any money selling Linux, you are making money selling web services, books and
other kinds of derivative products. You need free software to run your data
centre, to run your computer. [22:08] So the cost of software to you is a
cost, and so you're happy to have free software and support it. Because it
makes a lot more sense for you to contribute to some project that it’s also
used by five other companies. [22:21] And in the end all of you have this tool
that you can run on your computer, and run your business with, than actually
either buying a license from some company, which can be expensive, inflexible,
and you can't control it, and if it doesn't work the way you want, you cannot
change it. [22:36] So free software has a great utility for producers. That's
why it's a capital good, a producer's good, a "department one" good. [22:45]
But art and culture do not have the same economic role. Capital is not
interested in developing free culture and free art. They don't need it, they
don't do anything with it. And the capitalist that produces art and culture
requires it to have a commodity form, which is what copyright is. [23:00] So
they require a form that they can sell on the market, which requires it to
have the exclusive, non-reproducible commodity form – that copyright was
developed in order to commodify culture. [23:14] So that is why the copyleft
tradition won't work for free culture – because even though free culture and
anti-copyright predates it, it predates it as a radical fringe. And the
radical fringe isn't supported by capital. It's supported, as we said, by
outside income, non-art income, and other kind of things like small cultural
funds.
[23:38]
Creative Commons
[23:42]
C.S.: In the last ten years we have seen new business models that very much
depend on free content as well. Could you please elaborate on this a bit?
[23:56]
Well, that’s the thing. Now we have the kind of Web 2.0/Facebook world.
[24:00] The entire copyright law – the so-called "good copyright" that
protected artists – was all based on the idea of the mechanical copy. And the
mechanical copy made a lot of sense in the printing press era where, if you
had some intellectual property, you could license it through mechanical
copies. So every time it was copied, somebody owed you a royalty. Very simple.
[24:26] But in a Web 2.0 world, where we have YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and
things like that, this doesn't really work very well. Because if you post
something online and then you need to get paid a royalty every time it gets
copied (and it gets copied millions of times), this becomes very impractical.
[24:44] And so this is where the Creative Commons really comes in. Because the
Creative Commons comes in just exactly at this time – as the Internet is kind
of bursting out of its original military and NGO roots, and really hitting the
general public. At the same time free software is something that is becoming
better known, and inspiring more people – so the ideas of questioning
copyright are becoming more prominent. [25:16] So Creative Commons seizes on
this kind of principles approach that anti-copyright and copyleft take. And
again, one of the single most important things about anti-copyright and
copyleft is that in both cases the freedom that they are talking about – the
free culture that they represent – is the freedom of the consumer to become
the producer. It's the denial of the distinction between consumer and
producer. [25:41] So even though the Creative Commons has a lot of different
licenses, including some that are GPL compatible – they're approved for free
cultural work, or whatever it's called – there is one license in particular
that makes up the vast majority of the works in the Creative Commons, one
license in particular which is like the signature license of the Creative
Commons – it's the non-commercial license. And this is obviously... The
utility of that is very clear because, as we said, artists can't make a living
in a copyleft sense. [26:18] In order for artists to make a living in the
capitalist system, they have to be able to negotiate non-free rights with
their publishers. And if they can't do that, they simply can't make a living.
At least, not in the mainstream community. There is a certain small place for
artists to make a living in the alternative and fringe elements of the
artworld. [26:42] But if you are talking about making a movie, a novel, a
record, then you at some point are going to need to negotiate a contract with
the publisher. Which means, you're going to have to be able negotiate non-free
terms. [27:00] So what non-commercial [licensing] does, is that it allows
people to share your stuff, making you more famous, getting more people to
know you – building its value, so to speak. But they can't actually do
anything commercial with it. And if they want to do anything commercial with
it, they have to come back to you and they have to negotiate a non-free
license. [27:19] So this is very practical, because it solves a lot of
problems for artists that want to make work available online in order to get
better known, but still want to eventually, at some point in the future,
negotiate non-free terms with a publishing company. [27:34] But while it's
very practical, it fundamentally violates the idea that copyleft and
anti-copyright set out to challenge – and this is distinction between the producer
and the consumer. Because of this, the consumer cannot become the producer.
And that is the criticism of the Creative Commons. [27:52] That's why I want
to talk about this thing, I often say, a tragedy in three parts. The first
part is a tragedy because it has to remain fringe, because of its complete
incompatibility with the dominant capitalism. [28:04] The second part,
copyleft, is a tragedy because while it works great for software, it can't and
it won't work for art. [28:10] And the third part is a tragedy because it
actually undermines the whole idea and brings the author back to the surface,
back from the dead. But the author kind of remerges as a sort of useful idiot,
because the "some rights reserved" are basically the rights to sell your
intellectual property to the publisher in exactly the same way as the early
industrial factory worker would have sold their labour to the factory.
[28:36]
C.S.: And that creates by no means a commons.
[28:41]
It by no means creative a commons, right. Because a primary function of a
commons is that it would be available for use by others producers, and the
Creative Commons isn't because you don't have any right to create your own
work to make a living from the works in the commons – because of the non-
commercial clause that covers a large percentage of the works there.
[29:09]
Peer Production License
[29:13]
C.S.: But you were thinking of an alternative. What is the alternative?
[29:19]
There is no easy alternative. The fact is that, so long as we have a cultural
industry that is dominated by market capitalism, then the majority of artists
working within it will have to work in that form. We can't arbitrarily, as
artists, simply pretend that the industry as it is doesn't exist. [29:41] But
at the same time we can hope that alternatives will develop – that alternative
ways of producing and sharing cultural works will develop. So that the
copyfarleft license... [29:52] I describe the Creative Commons as
copyjustright. It's not copyright, it's copyjustright – you can tune it, you
can tailor it to your specific interests or needs. But it is still copyright,
just a more fine-tuneable copyright that is better for a Web 2.0 distribution
model. [30:12] The alternative is what I call copyfarleft, which also starts
off with the Creative Commons non-commercial model for the simple reason that,
as we discussed, if you are an actually existing artist in the actually
existing cultural industries of today, you are going to have to make a living,
on the most part, by selling non-free works to publishers, non-free licenses
to publishers. That's simply the way the industry works. [30:37] But in order
not to close the door on another industry developing – a different kind of
industry developing – after denying commercial works blankly (so it has a non-
commercial clause), then it expressly allows commercial usage by non-
capitalist organisations, independent cooperatives, non-profits –
organisations that are not structured around investment capital and wage
labour, and so forth; that are not for-profit organisations that are enriching
private individuals and appropriating value from workers. [31:15] So this
allows you to succeed, at least potentially succeed as a commercial artist in
the commercial world as it is right now. But at the same time it doesn't close
the door on another kind of community from developing, other kind of industry
from developing. [31:35] And we have to understand that we are not going to be
able to get rid of the cultural industries as they exist today, until we have
another set of institutions that can play those same roles. They're not going
to magically vanish, and be magically replaced. [31:52] We have to, at the
same time as those exist, build up new kind of institutions. We have to think
of new ways to produce and share cultural works. And only when we've done
that, will the cultural institutions as they are today potentially go away.
[32:09] So the copyfarleft license tries to bridge that gap by allowing the
commons to grow, but at the same time allowing the commons producers to make a
living as they normally would within the regular cultural industry. [32:25]
Some good examples where you can see something like this – might be clear –
are some of the famous novelists like Wu Ming or Cory Doctorow, people that
have done very well by publishing their works under Creative Commons non-
commercial licenses. [32:42] Wu Ming's books, which are published, I believe,
by Random House or some big publisher, are available under a Creative Commons
non-commercial license. So if you want to download them for personal use, you
can. But if you are Random House, and you want to publish them and put them on
bookstores, and manufacture them in huge supply, you have to negotiate non-
free terms with Wu Ming. And this allows Wu Ming to make a living by licensing
their work to Random House. [33:10] But while it does do that, what it doesn't
do is allow that book to be manufactured any other way. So that means that
this capitalist form of production becomes the only form that you can
commercially produce this book – except for independents, just for their own
personal use. [33:25] Whereas if their book was instead under a copyfarleft
license, what we call the "peer production" licence, then not only could they
continue to work as they do, but also potentially their book could be made
available through other means as well. Like, independent workers cooperatives
could start manufacturing it, selling it and distributing it locally in their
own areas, and make a commercial living out of it. And then perhaps if those
were to actually succeed, then they could grow and start to provide some of
the functions that capitalist institutions do now.
[34:00]
Miscommunication Technology
[34:05]
The artworks that we do are more related to the topologies side of the theory
– the relationship between network topologies, communication topologies, and
the social relations embedded in communication systems with the political
economy and economic ideas, and people's relationships to each other. [34:24]
The Miscommunication Technologies series has been going on for a quite a while
now, I guess since 2006 or so. Most of the works were pretty obscure, but the
more recent works are getting more attention and better known. And I guess
that the ones that we're talking about and exhibiting the most are deadSwap,
Thimbl and R15N, and these all attempt to explore some of the ideas.
[35:01]
deadSwap
[35:06]
deadSwap is a file sharing system. It's playing on the kind of
circumventionist technologies that are coming out of the file sharing
community, and this idea that technology can make us be able to evade the
legal and economic structures. So deadSwap wants to question this by creating
a very extreme parody of what it would actually mean to really be private.
[35:40] It is a file sharing system, that in order to be private it only
exists on one USB stick. And this USB stick is hidden in public space, and its
user send text messages to an anonymous SMS gateway in order to tell other
users where they've hidden the stick. When you have the stick you can upload
and download files to it – it's a file sharing system. It has a Wiki and file
space, essentially. Then you hide the stick somewhere, and you text the system
and it forwards your message to the next person that is waiting to share data.
And this continues like that, so then that person can share data on it, they
hide it somewhere and send an SMS to the system which then it gets forwarded
to the next person. [36:28] This work serves a few different functions at
once. First, it starts to get people to understand networks and all the basic
components. The participants in the artwork actually play a network node – you
are passing on information as if you are part of a network. So this gets
people to start thinking about how networks work, because they are playing the
network. [36:52] But on the other hand, it also tries to get cross the idea
that the behaviour of the user is much important than the technology, when it
comes to security and privacy. So how difficult it is – the system is very
private – how difficult it is to actually use it, not lose the stick, not to
get discovered. [37:11] It's actually very difficult to actually use. Even
though it seems so simple, normally people lose the USB key within like an
hour or two of starting the system. It doesn't... All the secret agent manuals
that say, be a secret agent spy – isn't easy, and it tries to get this across,
that actually it's not nearly as easy to evade the economic and political
dimensions of our society as it should be. [37:45] Maybe it's better that we
politically fight to avoid having to share information only by hiding USB
sticks in public space, sticking around and acting like spies.
[37:57]
Thimbl
[38:02]
Thimbl is another work, and it is completely online. This work in some ways
has become a signature work for us, even though it doesn't really have any
physical presence. It's a purely conceptual work. [38:15] One of the arguments
that the Manifesto makes is that the Internet was a fully distributed social
media platform – that's what the Internet was, and then it was replaced,
because of capitalism and because of the economic logic of the market, with
centralised communication platforms like Twitter and Facebook. [38:40] And
despite that, within the free software community and the hacker community,
there's the opposite myth, just like the copyright myth. There's this idea
that we are moving towards decentralised software. [38:54] You see people like
Eben Moglen making this point a lot, when he says, now we have Facebook, but
because of FreedomBox, Diaspora and a laundry list of other projects, we're
eventually going to reach a decentralised software. [39:07] But this makes two
assumptions that are incorrect. The first is that we are starting with
centralised media and we are going to decentralised media, which actually is
incorrect. We started with a decentralised social media platform and we moved
to a centralised one. [39:40] And the second thing that is incorrect is that
we can move from a centralised platform to a decentralised platform if we just
create the right technology, so the problem is technological. [39:34] With
Thimbl we wanted to make the point that that wasn't true, that the problem was
actually political. The technological problem is trivial. The computer
sciences have been around forever. The problem is political. [39:43] The
problem is that these systems will not be financed by capital, because capital
requires profit in order to sustain itself. In order to capture profit it
needs to have control of user interaction and user's data. [39:57] To
illustrate this, we created a micro-blogging platform like Twitter, but using
a protocol of the 1970s called Finger. So we've used the protocol that has
been around since the 1970s and made a micro-blogging platform out of it –
fully, totally distributed micro-blogging platform. And then promoted it as if
it was a real thing, with videos and website, and stuff like that. But of
course, there is no way to sign up for it, because it's just a concept.
[40:22] And then there are some scripts that other people wrote that actually
made it to a certain degree real. For us it was just a concept, but then
people actually took it and made working implementations of it, and there are
several working implementations of Thimbl. [40:38] But the point remains that
the problem is not technical, the problem is political. So we came up with
this idea of the economic fiction, or the social fiction. [40:47] Because in
science fiction you often have situations where something that eventually
became a real technology was originally introduced in a fictional context as a
science fiction. [40:59] The reason it's fictional is because science at the
time was not able to create the thing, but as science transcends its
limitations, what was once fictional technology became real technology. So we
have this idea of a social or economic fiction. [41:15] Thimbl is not science
fiction. Technologically speaking it demonstrably works – it's a demonstrably
working concept. The problem is economic. [41:23] For Thimbl to become a
reality, society has to transcend its economic limitations – it's social and
economic limitations in order to find ways to create communication systems
that are not simply funded by the capture of user data and information, which
Thimbl can't do because it is a distributive system. You can't control the
users, you can't know who is using it or what they are doing, because it's
fully distributed.
[41:47]
R15N
[41:52]
The R15N has elements of both of those things. We wanted to create a system
that was basically drawn a little from deadSwap, but I wanted to take out the
secret agent element of it. Because I was really... [42:08] The first place it
was commissioned to be in was actually in Tel Aviv, in Israel, the [Israeli]
Center for Digital Art. And this kind of spy aesthetic that deadSwap had, I
didn't think it would be an appropriate aesthetic in that context. [42:22] The
idea that of trying to convince young people in a poor area in Tel Aviv to act
like spies and hide USB sticks in public space didn't seem like a good idea.
[42:34] So I wanted to go the other way, and I wanted to really emphasise the
collaboration, and create a kind of system that is pretty much totally
impossible to use, but only if you really cooperate you can make it work.
[42:45] So I took another old approach called the telephone tree. I don't know
if you remember telephone trees. Telephone trees existed for years before the
Internet, when schools and army reserves needed to be quickly dispatched, and
it worked with a very simple tree topology. [43:01] You had a few people that
were the top nodes, that then called the list of two or three people, that
then called the list of two or three people, that then called the list of two
or three people... And the message can be sent through the community very
rapidly through a telephone tree. [43:14] It is often used in Canada for
announcing snow days at school, for instance. If the school was closed, they
would call three parents, who would each call three parents, who would each
call three parents, and so forth. So that all the parents knew that the school
was closed. That's one aspect. [43:30] Another aspect of it is that
telephones, especially mobile phones, are really advertised as a very freedom
enabling kind of a thing. Things that you can go anywhere... [43:41] I don't
know if you remember some of the early telephones ads where there are always
businessmen on the beach. I remember this one where this woman's daughter
wants to make an appointment with her because she only has time for her
colleague appointments, and so it's this whole thing about spending more time
with her daughter – so she takes her daughter to the beach, which she is able
to do because she can still conduct business on her mobile phone. So it's this
freedom kind of a thing. [44:04] But in areas like the Jessi Cohen area in Tel
Aviv where we were working, and other areas where the project has been
exhibited, like Johannesburg – other places like that, the telephone has a
very different role, because it's free to receive phone calls, but it costs
much to make phone calls, in most parts of the world, especially in these poor
areas. [44:25] So the telephone is a very asymmetric power relationship based
on your availability of credit. So rather than being a freedom enabling thing,
it's a control technology. So young people and poor people that carry them
can't actually make any calls, they can't call anybody. They can only receive
calls. [44:40] So it's used as a tedder, a control system from their parents,
their teachers, their employers, so they can know where they are at any time
and say, hey why aren't you at work, or where are you, what are you doing.
It's actually a control technology. [44:54] We wanted to invert that too. So
the way the phone tree system work is that, when you have a message you
initiate a phone call, so you initiate a new tree, the system phones you...
[45:05] And you can initiate a new tree in the modern versions by pushing a
button in the gallery. There's a physical button in the gallery, you push the
button, there's a phone beside it, it rings a random person, you tell them
your message, and then it creates an ad hoc telephone tree. It takes all the
subscribers and arranges them in a tree, just like in the old telephone tree,
and each person calls each person, until your message, in theory, gets through
the community. [45:28] But of course in reality nobody answers their phones,
you get voicemail, and then you get voicemail talking to voicemail. Of course,
voice from the Internet is fake to begin with, so calls fail. So it actually
becomes this really frenetic system where people actually don’t know what's
going on, and the message is constantly lost. [45:44] And of course, you have
all of these missed phone calls, this high pressure of the always-on world.
You are always getting these phone calls, and you're missing phone calls, and
actually nobody ever knows what the message is. So it actually creates this
kind of mass confusion. [46:00] This once again demonstrates that the users –
what we call jokingly in the R15N literature, the diligence of the users, is
so much required for these systems to work. Technologically, the system is
actually more or less hindered. [46:21] But they also serve not only to make
that message, which is a more general message – but also, like in the other
ones, in R15N you are a node in the network. So when you don’t answer a call
you know that a message is dropped. [46:36] So you can image how volatile
information is in networks. When you pass your information through a third
party, you realise that they can drop it, they can change it, they can
introduce their own information. [46:50] And that is true in R15N, but is also
true in Facebook, in Twitter, and in any time you send messages through some
third party. That is one of the messages that is core to the series.