Yesterday I had the opportunity to take a bus tour of famous sites in Minneapolis labor history. It was a fun trip; we went on an old bus (hired from the transportation museum) and the tour guide was an expert on the subject of local labor history. Minneapolis is a place with a lot of history, and of course this trip presented just one little slice of the picture. (But history may have a few holographic properties.)
I was interested in going on the trip after thinking about free culture as an issue akin to the 8-hour day of days yore (and writing about this in a May 1 commemorative article with akrowne).
One of the people on the bus ride was the author of the book A Union Against Unions. Interesting stuff (as it was described on the bus ride and at that link; I haven't read the book yet!) - about how local business leaders banded together to try to keep unions out of Minneapolis industry. The brutality with which police handled demonstrators was fairly shocking (though not as horrific as what is going on right now in Uzbekistan). Of course, the tour guide gave evidence to support the idea that the business leaders were working very closely with the police. (There may be further evidence of this sort in the book, but it isn't an unprecidented idea.)
As I try to apply my parallel, I have to stretch things a little. Typically hackers (in the "good" sense) are not guilty of "cybercrimes". Enforcing patents and so on is hardly "brutal". But I assume that there are plenty of examples of force being applied – even if it is mainly the force of inertia.
But maybe this is because free software (and culture more generally) has not yet organized, not yet pushed the powers that be to do anything truly egregious.
Students, for example, are generally clueless about free culture, and accept their lot in life. A student's union that demanded that free culture replace proprietary culture in education would be a very powerful force. But students are typically so clueless… it would be quite the uphill battle. (I'm not even sure if we have a general student union here in the US, though there is one in the UK). I don't know how much of an active role students are ready to play in their own educations. But the power is certainly there, and this has been recognized by some.
And yet (quoting from this link) "student unionism [is] nothing but a travesty of a travesty, the useless burlesque of a trade unionism itself long totally degenerate."
According to these folks, the power of students is to reject education – and substitute revolution.
Through struggle and rebellion,
Well, I think that free culture is a pretty good contender to be this "new social form". Let's review a couple of details.
To say that "free culture is a labor issue" is probably to do it a disservice - but it may well be a labor-like issue. In other words, a way for people to organize for social change. To say that "free culture is revolutionary culture" – may be getting somewhere. But the revolution, in the situationist lingo, must be total.
Educational reform would be nice, but I don't think it can happen in isolation: we're talking about reforming society, and maybe even human life, here.
If our decedents literally can live for free – whether it is because mechanized, self-servicing, production facilities spread throughout the world, or because humans are themselves superceded by thinking machines that run on solar power (hey, Minsky and Dyson are allowed to talk this way) – then I think we'd be pretty well qualified to say that we had totally approprated nature and human nature.
Coming back to my theme for a little recapitulation (and no, I don't mean I was backing off before). Where is the organization behind this revolution? And is one needed? - one certainly might think so. On the other hand, it is also the case that different people will do different bits and pieces of the work.
This is not a Catch-22: people can do work without being organized, and people can attempt to organize a revolution without actually doing any work. The best situation, however, would probably combine aspects of both work and organization.
In order to be ready to rebel, people need to see how crummy their situation is (comparatively speaking) and to do that, they may need to see a little glimmer of how things might be. Some science fiction movies and books are good for that. Science may even be somewhat better.
But science typically and society typically seem to support gradual change. Some of the powers that be may be directly opposed to certain kinds of reform that many others might like, or they may promise reforms and progress without offering any truly revolutionary change. That's what we're used to.
--jcorneli Tue May 17 03:54:31 2005 UTC (revised Tue May 17 18:45:55 2005 UTC)
I think libraries are becoming a bastian of free culture, which I especially realized after reviewing submissions to the FCDL conference. There really seems to be a general recognition that libraries need to do something to ensure they will even have content to make publicly available in the future. And part of the solution — perhaps the most important part — seems to be to assist efforts to produce "born free" culture.
I think they are just one constituency that is, and needs to, take part in this "revolution". Another is students, and efforts like freeculture.org are aimed towards them. And in a way, so is PlanetMath. I wonder how many students PlanetMath has made aware of free culture, and how many it has "converted" to the cause…
By the way, I don't agree with your "total" revolution remark (if I understand it correctly). In the same way that it is (or at least, seems to me) perfectly fine for closed software to co-exist with free software, why can't locked-down culture co-exist with free culture? Of course, I think we need more free culture, but I would find it hard to make a case that there should be no permission-culture (to use Lessig's terminology) at all.
--akrowne Tue May 17 04:13:37 UTC 2005
Total revolution is in the sense of "the total appropriation of nature and of human nature by man". Proprietary or free is actually somewhat irrelevant to this concern, at least at first glance.
But the issue with "proprietary" in the situationist rubric is that it means commodifiable. The situationists don't like that. Personally, I'm currently basically neutral on this issue, though I do think that a number of things that are commodified in our society shouldn't be, or should be seriously reconsidered (e.g. I'm not that thrilled about the notion of elected representatives).
I suppose that one theoretical problem with commodifiable stuff is that it creates situations in which people are likely to be "kept down" – think of the unions and the Citizen's Alliance (union against unions) that I described at the beginning of the note; more generally, it seems to be associated with conflicts of interest.
By contrast, economically speaking, free stuff seems somewhat less likely to have conflicts of interest associated with it. As more freedoms become supported, presumably fewer and fewer conflicts arise. My interpretation of the "total appropriation" thing is that the world should become an increasingly hyperreal place. More freedoms, less conflicts of interest. The logic kind of fits together.
But the primary reason I'd choose to support free stuff in this "total revolution" is the hypothesis that it is a mode of production that is better suited to revolutionary doings than the proprietary mode. This is a hypothesis that can be refuted (after the terms have been sufficiently defined).
I'm not talking about a revolution from proprietary culture to free culture per say, I'm talking about social (and scientific) revolution that just happens to find a friend in free culture. If this makes sense.
BTW, I don't know off hand what "permission culture" means, maybe you could create a wiki page about that.
--jcorneli Tue May 17 05:12:22 2005 UTC
Thanks to some recent trends in copyright law, specifically the provisions which not only make certain cases of infringement a criminal offense but a felony at that, your analogy is not all that stretched anymore. As of April 21, 2004, the Department of Justice has an "intellectual property taskforce" and the FBI has raided people who are running websites which distribute copyrighted material without the copyright owners authorization. Computers have been confiscated and webmasters sent to jail. While this isn't as brutal as what happened to striking workers, let alone what went on in Uzbekhistan, it is certainly not the genteel world of nineteenth and twentieth century copyright which was mostly a matter of civil law. (In fact, from 1783 to 1897, copyright was entirely a matter of civil law, from 1897 to 1982, certain types of infringement were misdemanors, nowadays there is felony infringement. Also, it might be worth adding that prior to 1992, infringement could only be considered as a criminal offense if it was done "for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain." but nowadays not only is it considered a more serious crime but this provosion has been dropped, although the retail value of the work infringed is a criterion in determining whether a particular case constitutes a felony. This sounds really lopsided to me — why should someone who distributes copies of a commercial program go to jail and have his computer confiscated and lose the right to vote in addition to paying damages while someone who sells copies of a free program only have to pay statutory damages? )
--rspuzio 6 July 2005
"Political Appointees Re-Write Commerce Department Report On Offshore Outsourcing; Original Analysis Is Missing From Final Version" http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/05/1012/art1.html
"U.S. urged to back science education, research National Academy committee warns of foreign competition" http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9675847/
.....
Someone ought to connect the dots, maybe help those folks who worry about outsourcing and the state of US education. Why learn about math and science if there won't be a job waiting for you one day in America because you're competing globally and US corporations are incentivized to replace Americans with Indians, Chinese, etc.?
And is there a connection with Open Source? Why do programmers write code for zero pay? How can India and China compete with that wage scale!@#?
{I started programming before there were cubicles :) I will write code as long as I breathe. It is more pleasant now, especially since we got rid of the punch card machines :) Who wants to work for a corporation anyway! You want to be a monkey for the guys in suits and ties? IMO, knowledge is not only its own reward, but will be rewarding otherwise.}
I applaud the efforts of Planet Math and the folks that are working to make knowledge accessible to all, regardless of nationality or economic status.
Keep up the good work!
ocat – 15-Oct-2005
This point about accessibility is really tops.
The essay above alludes (vaguely) to the fact that even many people at the "top" of the economic hierarchy are being denied content, as they are caught in a mechanizing/commodifying educational system that reduces them to cogs in a machine.
I'm not sure about the connection with programmers willing to write for zero pay: as you say, knowledge is rewarding. Personally speaking, my experience coding & interacting with other people interested in free software, free content, and free culture has been more fun and educational than my experiences in higher education. Said coding experience even made me employable, once upon a time, and maybe it will do it again in the future. But for the future, while I think I'd be happy to get money as part of my reward-basket, I'm keen on sticking to free software development only. The main ideological reason for this, in my case, is that I think free software, content, and culture are the ways to bring about "total revolution" in the situationist sense.
This conversation relates to a topic we were talking about in Atlanta recently, namely the idea of revising copyright law. – jcorneli Oct 16 05
This sci-fi novel is new and relevant:
http://www.accelerando.org/2005/06/28/#download-2
I am deep into chapter 7, and maybe the ending will suck, but so far I am quite happy with my time investment :)
Mind candy. I don't think any buzzwords were omitted!
Just download the html zipped version at 360K size, then text zoom once in the browser so you can kick wayyyy back and relax, hitting page down in comfort as each page gestalt registers in the back of your skull :0)
--ocat 16-Oct-2005