my_publications

A few weeks ago, I published a review of Clay Shirky's new book "Here comes Everybody" on Metamute.

In the mean time, Simon Collister was able to ask Shirky about my review, where I criticized him for talking only about non-controversial issues and omitting major questions such as copyright and business models / profiling / privacy.

In his response, Shirky focused only on the question of copyright, claiming, strangely, that while he had written a lot about in the past it is was not a real issue in the big picture. Here is what he had to say:

local copy (12MB)

Here is my review of Clay Shirky's new book, which was originally published on the great metamute site.

Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody is reputed to be the best book ever written on Web 2.0. By why the strange silence on questions of copyright, privacy and ownership? Felix Stalder delves beneath the slick prose and upbeat message.

‘Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.’ If a single sentence can represent the entire book, it must be this one. For one, it's great writing. Precise, condensed, clear. Shirky's book is full of it. It shifts attention to the right level, away from the tools and to what people do with them. It also contains the dilemma that the entire book grapples with: how to write about technology once that technology has become mundane? Lastly, it leaves a lot of things out. How do technologies become mundane? Which ones are legitimate and which ones are not? Why are some providers of ‘boring technologies’ worth billions (e.g. YouTube) while others subject to high-pressure litigation (e.g. ThePirateBay)? But Shirky doesn't want to go there, he prefers to keep the message safe and positive.

First Monday published my paper in its current edition. Below is the abstract, the full text is here

Digital communication is profoundly affecting the constitution of (civil) society by drastically lowering the costs to speak across time and space with individuals and groups of any size, and by producing abundant records of all activities conducted through these media. This is accelerating two contradictory trends. On the one hand, a new breed of social organizations based on principles of weak cooperation and peer production is sharply expanding the scope of what can be achieved by civil society. These are voluntary organizations, with flat hierarchies and trust-based principles. They are focused on producing commons-based resources rather than individual property. In general, they are transformative, not revolutionary, in character. This phenomenon is termed "bourgeois anarchism." On the other hand, the liberal state - in a crisis of legitimacy and under pressure from such new organizations, both peaceful (civil society) and violent (terrorism) - is reorganizing itself around an increasingly authoritarian core, expanding surveillance into the capillary system of society, overriding civil liberties and reducing democratic oversight in exchange for the promise of security. This phenomenon is termed "authoritarian democracy."

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This article was first published in Italian, in the journal Millepiani. An earlier version was delivered as a talk (view stream presentation at Ars Electronica, 2007, and published in their catalogue under the title "Our new public life".

30 Years of Tactical Media
Felix Stalder

Tactical media as a practice has a long history and, it seems save to predict, an even longer future. Yet its existence as a distinct concept around which something of a social movement, or more precisely, a self-aware network of people and projects would coalesce has been relatively short lived, largely confined to the internet's first decade as a mass medium (1995-2005). During that time Geert Lovink and David Garcia, two Dutch media activists/theorists at the heart of this network, defined Tactical Media, as

what happens when the cheap 'do it yourself' media, made possible by the revolution in consumer electronics and expanded forms of distribution (from public access cable to the internet) are exploited by groups and individuals who feel aggrieved by or excluded from the wider culture. Tactical media do not just report events, as they are never impartial they always participate and it is this that more than anything separates them from mainstream media.2

Like so many other things that are now common in our informational lives, the roots of tactical media lie in the cultural innovations of radical social movements that sprang up in the late 1960s. Not only did they begin to exploit technological changes enabling to self-produce media but they created entirely new ideas of what the media could be: not just conduits for more or less sophisticated state propaganda (as in Althusser's famous analysis of the “ideological state apparatuses”3) or as a source of “objective” information provided by a professional (enlightened) elite. Rather, they reconceptualized the media as means of subjective expression, by people and for people who are not represented by the mainstream.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 License.

We are in the midst an uneven shift from an information environment characterized by scarcity of cultural goods to one characterized by their abundance. Until very recently, even privileged people had access to a relatively limited number of news sources, books, audio recordings, films and other forms of informational goods. This was partly due to the fact that the means of mass communication were expensive, cumbersome and thus relatively centralized. In this configuration, most people were relegated to the role of consumers, or, if they lacked purchasing power, not even that. This is changing. The Internet is giving ever greater numbers of people access to efficient means of mass communication and p2p protocols such as Bittorrent are making the distribution of material highly efficient. For some reason to be further examined, more and more material is becoming freely available within this new information environment. As an effect, the current structure of the culture industries, in Adorno's sense, is being undermined, and with it, deeply-entrenched notions of intellectual property. This is happening despite well-orchestrated campaigns by major industries to prevent this shift. The campaigns include measures raging from the seemingly endless expansion of intellectual property regulations across the globe, to new technologies aimed at maintaining informational scarcity (digital rights management (DRM) systems), to mass persecution of average citizens who engage in standard practices on p2p networks.

How would culture be created if artists were not locked into romantic notions of individual authorship and the associated drive to control the results of their labour was not enforced through ever expanding copyrights? What if cultural production was organized via principles of free access, collaborative creation and open adaptability of works? As such, the practices of a collective and transformative culture are not entirely new. They were characteristic for (oral) folk cultures prior to their transformation into mass culture by the respective industries during the twentieth century, and as counter-currents – the numerous avant-garde movements (dada, situationism, mail art, neoism, plagiarism, plunderphonics, etc.) which re-invented, radicalized and technologically up-graded various aspects of those. Yet, over the last decade, these issues – of open and collaborative practices – have taken on an entirely new sense of urgency. Generally, the ease with which digital information can be globally distributed and manipulated by a very large number of people makes free distribution and free adaptation technically possible and a matter of everyday practice. Everyone with a computer already uses, in one way or the other, the copy & paste function built into all editors. This is what computers are about: copying, manipulating and storing information. With access to the internet, people are able to sample a wide range of sources and make their own works available to potentially large audiences.

In: Hoffmann, Jeanette (Hg.). Wissen und Eigentum. Geschichte, Recht und Ökonomie stoffloser Güter. Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung, Bonn. 2006

http://www.bpb.de/publikationen/TRRZ2E,0,Wissen_und_Eigentum.html

In den letzten 10 Jahren ist eine neue, weltweite Bewegung entstanden, die grundsätzlich neue Modelle der Produktion von und des Zugangs zu digitalen Gütern nicht nur fordert, sondern auch bereits im grossen Stil praktiziert. Wissenschaftler, Autorinnen, Künstler, Musikerinnen, Programmieren und andere 'immaterielle Produzentinnen' nutzen dabei das bestehende Urheberrecht in einer neuen Art und Weise. Das Urheberrecht gewährt ja einem Autor geistiger Werke (im Bereich der Literatur, Kunst, Wissenschaft, Design, Computerprogammierung, etc) exklusive Verfügungsrechte über seine Schöpfungen, die nur durch eng definierte Schranken eingegrenzt werden. Diese Rechte entstehen automatisch mit der Kreation des Werkes, ohne dass es registriert oder anderweitig gekennzeichnet werden muss. Der Autor kann (fast) frei bestimmen, wer, wann, wie und unter welchen Umständen sein Werk nutzen kann (siehe Beiträge von Thomas Hoeren und Till Kreutzer in diesem Band). Die neue Nutzung dieser Rechte ziehlt darauf ab, den Zugang zu den Werken zu vereinfachen, in dem etwa das freie Kopieren erlaubt wird, und Möglichkeiten der Öffentlichkeit zu erweitern, mit diesen Werken kreativ umzugehen.