diff --git a/WORKFLOW b/WORKFLOW
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--- a/WORKFLOW
+++ b/WORKFLOW
@@ -24,44 +24,8 @@ Ver el archivo *gitflow*.
 
 ## Propuesta de texto
 
-* Moverse a la rama *queue* y agregarlo dentro del directorio *\_queue* en
-  texto plano.
-
-Comandos:
-
-    git checkout queue
-    git add _queue/nombre-del-articulo.markdown
-    git commit
-
-
-## Traducción
-
-* Desde la rama *queue*, crear una nueva rama con el articulo a traducir.
-
-* En general la traducción se hace sobre el mismo texto original, con la
-  traducción de cada párrafo inmediatamente debajo del original (es decir,
-  intercalados).
-
-* Para facilitar la revisión, generar un commit después por cada párrafo
-  traducido.
-
-Comandos:
-
-    git flow feature start nombre-del-articulo
-    # Después de traducir un párrafo
-    git commit -a -m "Nombre del artículo, párrafo #"
-
-
-## Revisión
-
-* Se hace una lectura de prueba y se eliminan los párrafos en el idioma
-  original.
-
-* Se mergea en la rama *queue*.
-
-Comandos:
-
-    git flow feature finish nombre-del-articulo
+* Podés hacernos un issue en el
+  [repositorio](https://github.com/edsl/articulos) de los artículos.
 
 
 ## Publicación
diff --git a/_queue/accelerate.markdown b/_queue/accelerate.markdown
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-#ACCELERATE
-MANIFESTO FOR AN ACCELERATIONIST POLITICS
-01. INTRODUCTION: On the Conjuncture
-1. At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, global civilization faces
-a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational
-structures of the politics which were forged in the birth of the nation-state, the rise of
-capitalism, and a Twentieth Century of unprecedented wars.
-2. Most significant is the breakdown of the planetary climatic system. In time, this threatens
-the continued existence of the present global human population. Though this is the most
-critical of the threats which face humanity, a series of lesser but potentially equally
-destabilising problems exist alongside and intersect with it. Terminal resource depletion,
-especially in water and energy reserves, offers the prospect of mass starvation, collapsing
-economic paradigms, and new hot and cold wars. Continued financial crisis has led
-governments to embrace the paralyzing death spiral policies of austerity, privatisation of
-social welfare services, mass unemployment, and stagnating wages. Increasing automation in
-production processes – including ‘intellectual labour’ – is evidence of the secular crisis of
-capitalism, soon to render it incapable of maintaining current standards of living for even the
-former middle classes of the global north.
-3. In contrast to these ever-accelerating catastrophes, today’s politics is beset by an inability
-to generate the new ideas and modes of organisation necessary to transform our societies to
-confront and resolve the coming annihilations. While crisis gathers force and speed, politics
-withers and retreats. In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled.
-4. Since 1979, the hegemonic global political ideology has been neoliberalism, found in some
-variant throughout the leading economic powers. In spite of the deep structural challenges the
-new global problems present to it, most immediately the credit, financial, and fiscal crises
-since 2007-8, neoliberal programmes have only evolved in the sense of deepening. This
-continuation of the neoliberal project, or neoliberalism 2.0, has begun to apply another round
-of structural adjustments, most significantly in the form of encouraging new and aggressive
-incursions by the private sector into what remains of social democratic institutions and
-services. This is in spite of the immediately negative economic and social effects of such
-policies, and the longer term fundamental barriers posed by the new global crises.
-5. That the forces of right wing governmental, non-governmental, and corporate power have
-been able to press forth with neoliberalisation is at least in part a result of the continued
-paralysis and ineffectual nature of much what remains of the left. Thirty years of neoliberalism
-have rendered most left-leaning political parties bereft of radical thought, hollowed out, and
-without a popular mandate. At best they have responded to our present crises with calls for a
-return to a Keynesian economics, in spite of the evidence that the very conditions which
-enabled post-war social democracy to occur no longer exist. We cannot return to mass
-industrial-Fordist labour by fiat, if at all. Even the neosocialist regimes of South America’s
-Bolivarian Revolution, whilst heartening in their ability to resist the dogmas of contemporary
-capitalism, remain disappointingly unable to advance an alternative beyond mid-Twentieth
-Century socialism. Organised labour, being systematically weakened by the changes wrought
-in the neoliberal project, is sclerotic at an institutional level and – at best – capable only of
-mildly mitigating the new structural adjustments. But with no systematic approach to building
-a new economy, or the structural solidarity to push such changes through, for now labour
-remains relatively impotent. The new social movements which emerged since the end of the
-Cold War, experiencing a resurgence in the years after 2008, have been similarly unable to
-devise a new political ideological vision. Instead they expend considerable energy on internal
-direct-democratic process and affective self-valorisation over strategic efficacy, and frequently
-propound a variant of neo-primitivist localism, as if to if to oppose the abstract violence of
-globalised capital with the flimsy and ephemeral “authenticity” of communal immediacy.
-
-6. In the absence of a radically new social, political, organisational, and economic vision the
-hegemonic powers of the right will continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded
-imaginary, in the face of any and all evidence. At best, the left may be able for a time to
-partially resist some of the worst incursions. But this is to be Canute against an ultimately
-irresistible tide. To generate a new left global hegemony entails a recovery of lost possible
-futures, and indeed the recovery of the future as such.
-
-02. INTEREGNUM: On Accelerationisms
-1. If any system has been associated with ideas of acceleration it is capitalism. The essential
-metabolism of capitalism demands economic growth, with competition between individual
-capitalist entities setting in motion increasing technological developments in an attempt to
-achieve competitive advantage, all accompanied by increasing social dislocation. In its
-neoliberal form, its ideological self-presentation is one of liberating the forces of creative
-destruction, setting free ever-accelerating technological and social innovations.
-2. The philosopher Nick Land captured this most acutely, with a myopic yet hypnotising belief
-that capitalist speed alone could generate a global transition towards unparalleled
-technological singularity. In this visioning of capital, the human can eventually be discarded as
-mere drag to an abstract planetary intelligence rapidly constructing itself from the bricolaged
-fragments of former civilisations. However Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with
-acceleration. We may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist
-parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the increasing speed of a local
-horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an
-experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. It is the latter mode
-of acceleration which we hold as essential.
-3. Even worse, as Deleuze and Guattari recognized, from the very beginning what capitalist
-speed deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other. Progress becomes
-constrained within a framework of surplus value, a reserve army of labour, and free-floating
-capital. Modernity is reduced to statistical measures of economic growth and social innovation
-becomes encrusted with kitsch remainders from our communal past. Thatcherite-Reaganite
-deregulation sits comfortably alongside Victorian ‘back-to-basics’ family and religious values.
-4. A deeper tension within neoliberalism is in terms of its self-image as the vehicle of
-modernity, as literally synonymous with modernisation, whilst promising a future that it is
-constitutively incapable of providing. Indeed, as neoliberalism has progressed, rather than
-enabling individual creativity, it has tended towards eliminating cognitive inventiveness in
-favour of an affective production line of scripted interactions, coupled to global supply chains
-and a neo-Fordist Eastern production zone. A vanishingly small cognitariat of elite intellectual
-workers shrinks with each passing year – and increasingly so as algorithmic automation
-winds its way through the spheres of affective and intellectual labour. Neoliberalism, though
-positing itself as a necessary historical development, was in fact a merely contingent means
-to ward off the crisis of value that emerged in the 1970s. Inevitably this was a sublimation of
-the crisis rather than its ultimate overcoming.
-5. It is Marx, along with Land, who remains the paradigmatic accelerationist thinker. Contrary
-to the all-too familiar critique, and even the behaviour of some contemporary Marxians, we
-must remember that Marx himself used the most advanced theoretical tools and empirical
-data available in an attempt to fully understand and transform his world. He was not a thinker
-who resisted modernity, but rather one who sought to analyse and intervene within it,
-understanding that for all its exploitation and corruption, capitalism remained the most
-advanced economic system to date. Its gains were not to be reversed, but accelerated
-beyond the constraints the capitalist value form.
-6. Indeed, as even Lenin wrote in the 1918 text “Left Wing” Childishness:
-"Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the
-latest discoveries of modern science. It is inconceivable without planned state
-
-organisation which keeps tens of millions of people to the strictest observance of a
-unified standard in production and distribution. We Marxists have always spoken of
-this, and it is not worth while wasting two seconds talking to people who do not
-understand even this (anarchists and a good half of the Left SocialistRevolutionaries)."
-7. As Marx was aware, capitalism cannot be identified as the agent of true acceleration.
-Similarly, the assessment of left politics as antithetical to technosocial acceleration is also, at
-least in part, a severe misrepresentation. Indeed, if the political left is to have a future it must
-be one in which it maximally embraces this suppressed accelerationist tendency.
-
-03: MANIFEST: On the Future
-1. We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk
-politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what
-must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction,
-complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and
-temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in
-facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday
-infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By
-contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going
-further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.
-2. All of us want to work less. It is an intriguing question as to why it was that the world’s
-leading economist of the post-war era believed that an enlightened capitalism inevitably
-progressed towards a radical reduction of working hours. In The Economic Prospects for Our
-Grandchildren (written in 1930), Keynes forecast a capitalist future where individuals would
-have their work reduced to three hours a day. What has instead occurred is the progressive
-elimination of the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the
-emerging social factory.
-3. Capitalism has begun to constrain the productive forces of technology, or at least, direct
-them towards needlessly narrow ends. Patent wars and idea monopolisation are
-contemporary phenomena that point to both capital’s need to move beyond competition, and
-capital’s increasingly retrograde approach to technology. The properly accelerative gains of
-neoliberalism have not led to less work or less stress. And rather than a world of space travel,
-future shock, and revolutionary technological potential, we exist in a time where the only thing
-which develops is marginally better consumer gadgetry. Relentless iterations of the same
-basic product sustain marginal consumer demand at the expense of human acceleration.
-4. We do not want to return to Fordism. There can be no return to Fordism. The capitalist
-“golden era” was premised on the production paradigm of the orderly factory environment,
-where (male) workers received security and a basic standard of living in return for a lifetime of
-stultifying boredom and social repression. Such a system relied upon an international
-hierarchy of colonies, empires, and an underdeveloped periphery; a national hierarchy of
-racism and sexism; and a rigid family hierarchy of female subjugation. For all the nostalgia
-many may feel, this regime is both undesirable and practically impossible to return to.
-5. Accelerationists want to unleash latent productive forces. In this project, the material
-platform of neoliberalism does not need to be destroyed. It needs to be repurposed towards
-common ends. The existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a
-springboard to launch towards post-capitalism.
-6. Given the enslavement of technoscience to capitalist objectives (especially since the late
-1970s) we surely do not yet know what a modern technosocial body can do. Who amongst us
-fully recognizes what untapped potentials await in the technology which has already been
-developed? Our wager is that the true transformative potentials of much of our technological
-and scientific research remain unexploited, filled with presently redundant features (or pre-
-
-adaptations) that, following a shift beyond the short-sighted capitalist socius, can become
-decisive.
-7. We want to accelerate the process of technological evolution. But what we are arguing for
-is not techno-utopianism. Never believe that technology will be sufficient to save us.
-Necessary, yes, but never sufficient without socio-political action. Technology and the social
-are intimately bound up with one another, and changes in either potentiate and reinforce
-changes in the other. Whereas the techno-utopians argue for acceleration on the basis that it
-will automatically overcome social conflict, our position is that technology should be
-accelerated precisely because it is needed in order to win social conflicts.
-8. We believe that any post-capitalism will require post-capitalist planning. The faith placed in
-the idea that, after a revolution, the people will spontaneously constitute a novel
-socioeconomic system that isn’t simply a return to capitalism is naïve at best, and ignorant at
-worst. To further this, we must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a
-speculative image of the future economic system.
-9. To do so, the left must take advantage of every technological and scientific advance made
-possible by capitalist society. We declare that quantification is not an evil to be eliminated, but
-a tool to be used in the most effective manner possible. Economic modelling is – simply put –
-a necessity for making intelligible a complex world. The 2008 financial crisis reveals the risks
-of blindly accepting mathematical models on faith, yet this is a problem of illegitimate authority
-not of mathematics itself. The tools to be found in social network analysis, agent-based
-modelling, big data analytics, and non-equilibrium economic models, are necessary cognitive
-mediators for understanding complex systems like the modern economy. The accelerationist
-left must become literate in these technical fields.
-10. Any transformation of society must involve economic and social experimentation. The
-Chilean Project Cybersyn is emblematic of this experimental attitude – fusing advanced
-cybernetic technologies, with sophisticated economic modelling, and a democratic platform
-instantiated in the technological infrastructure itself. Similar experiments were conducted in
-1950s-1960s Soviet economics as well, employing cybernetics and linear programming in an
-attempt to overcome the new problems faced by the first communist economy. That both of
-these were ultimately unsuccessful can be traced to the political and technological constraints
-these early cyberneticians operated under.
-11. The left must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas, and in the
-sphere of material platforms. Platforms are the infrastructure of global society. They establish
-the basic parameters of what is possible, both behaviourally and ideologically. In this sense,
-they embody the material transcendental of society: they are what make possible particular
-sets of actions, relationships, and powers. While much of the current global platform is biased
-towards capitalist social relations, this is not an inevitable necessity. These material platforms
-of production, finance, logistics, and consumption can and will be reprogrammed and
-reformatted towards post-capitalist ends.
-12. We do not believe that direct action is sufficient to achieve any of this. The habitual tactics
-of marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming
-comforting substitutes for effective success. “At least we have done something” is the rallying
-cry of those who privilege self-esteem rather than effective action. The only criterion of a good
-tactic is whether it enables significant success or not. We must be done with fetishising
-particular modes of action. Politics must be treated as a set of dynamic systems, riven with
-conflict, adaptations and counter-adaptations, and strategic arms races. This means that each
-individual type of political action becomes blunted and ineffective over time as the other sides
-adapt. No given mode of political action is historically inviolable. Indeed, over time, there is an
-increasing need to discard familiar tactics as the forces and entities they are marshalled
-against learn to defend and counter-attack them effectively. It is in part the contemporary left’s
-inability to do so which lies close to the heart of the contemporary malaise.
-13. The overwhelming privileging of democracy-as-process needs to be left behind. The
-fetishisation of openness, horizontality, and inclusion of much of today’s ‘radical’ left set the
-
-stage for ineffectiveness. Secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in
-effective political action (though not, of course, an exclusive one).
-14. Democracy cannot be defined simply by its means – not via voting, discussion, or general
-assemblies. Real democracy must be defined by its goal – collective self-mastery. This is a
-project which must align politics with the legacy of the Enlightenment, to the extent that it is
-only through harnessing our ability to understand ourselves and our world better (our social,
-technical, economic, psychological world) that we can come to rule ourselves. We need to
-posit a collectively controlled legitimate vertical authority in addition to distributed horizontal
-forms of sociality, to avoid becoming the slaves of either a tyrannical totalitarian centralism or
-a capricious emergent order beyond our control. The command of The Plan must be married
-to the improvised order of The Network.
-15. We do not present any particular organisation as the ideal means to embody these
-vectors. What is needed – what has always been needed – is an ecology of organisations, a
-pluralism of forces, resonating and feeding back on their comparative strengths. Sectarianism
-is the death knell of the left as much as centralization is, and in this regard we continue to
-welcome experimentation with different tactics (even those we disagree with).
-16. We have three medium term concrete goals. First, we need to build an intellectual
-infrastructure. Mimicking the Mont Pelerin Society of the neoliberal revolution, this is to be
-tasked with creating a new ideology, economic and social models, and a vision of the good to
-replace and surpass the emaciated ideals that rule our world today. This is an infrastructure in
-the sense of requiring the construction not just of ideas, but institutions and material paths to
-inculcate, embody and spread them.
-17. We need to construct wide-scale media reform. In spite of the seeming democratisation
-offered by the internet and social media, traditional media outlets remain crucial in the
-selection and framing of narratives, along with possessing the funds to prosecute
-investigative journalism. Bringing these bodies as close as possible to popular control is
-crucial to undoing the current presentation of the state of things.
-18. Finally, we need to reconstitute various forms of class power. Such a reconstitution must
-move beyond the notion that an organically generated global proletariat already exists.
-Instead it must seek to knit together a disparate array of partial proletarian identities, often
-embodied in post-Fordist forms of precarious labour.
-19. Groups and individuals are already at work on each of these, but each is on their own
-insufficient. What is required is all three feeding back into one another, with each modifying
-the contemporary conjunction in such a way that the others become more and more effective.
-A positive feedback loop of infrastructural, ideological, social and economic transformation,
-generating a new complex hegemony, a new post-capitalist technosocial platform. History
-demonstrates it has always been a broad assemblage of tactics and organisations which has
-brought about systematic change; these lessons must be learned.
-20. To achieve each of these goals, on the most practical level we hold that the accelerationist
-left must think more seriously about the flows of resources and money required to build an
-effective new political infrastructure. Beyond the ‘people power’ of bodies in the street, we
-require funding, whether from governments, institutions, think tanks, unions, or individual
-benefactors. We consider the location and conduction of such funding flows essential to begin
-reconstructing an ecology of effective accelerationist left organizations.
-21. We declare that only a Promethean politics of maximal mastery over society and its
-environment is capable of either dealing with global problems or achieving victory over
-capital. This mastery must be distinguished from that beloved of thinkers of the original
-Enlightenment. The clockwork universe of Laplace, so easily mastered given sufficient
-information, is long gone from the agenda of serious scientific understanding. But this is not to
-align ourselves with the tired residue of postmodernity, decrying mastery as proto-fascistic or
-authority as innately illegitimate. Instead we propose that the problems besetting our planet
-and our species oblige us to refurbish mastery in a newly complex guise; whilst we cannot
-
-predict the precise result of our actions, we can determine probabilistically likely ranges of
-outcomes. What must be coupled to such complex systems analysis is a new form of action:
-improvisatory and capable of executing a design through a practice which works with the
-contingencies it discovers only in the course of its acting, in a politics of geosocial artistry and
-cunning rationality. A form of abductive experimentation that seeks the best means to act in a
-complex world.
-22. We need to revive the argument that was traditionally made for post-capitalism: not only is
-capitalism an unjust and perverted system, but it is also a system that holds back progress.
-Our technological development is being suppressed by capitalism, as much as it has been
-unleashed. Accelerationism is the basic belief that these capacities can and should be let
-loose by moving beyond the limitations imposed by capitalist society. The movement towards
-a surpassing of our current constraints must include more than simply a struggle for a more
-rational global society. We believe it must also include recovering the dreams which transfixed
-many from the middle of the Nineteenth Century until the dawn of the neoliberal era, of the
-quest of Homo Sapiens towards expansion beyond the limitations of the earth and our
-immediate bodily forms. These visions are today viewed as relics of a more innocent moment.
-Yet they both diagnose the staggering lack of imagination in our own time, and offer the
-promise of a future that is affectively invigorating, as well as intellectually energising. After all,
-it is only a post-capitalist society, made possible by an accelerationist politics, which will ever
-be capable of delivering on the promissory note of the mid-Twentieth Century’s space
-programmes, to shift beyond a world of minimal technical upgrades towards all-encompassing
-change. Towards a time of collective self-mastery, and the properly alien future that entails
-and enables. Towards a completion of the Enlightenment project of self-criticism and selfmastery, rather than its elimination.
-23. The choice facing us is severe: either a globalised post-capitalism or a slow fragmentation
-towards primitivism, perpetual crisis, and planetary ecological collapse.
-24. The future needs to be constructed. It has been demolished by neoliberal capitalism and
-reduced to a cut-price promise of greater inequality, conflict, and chaos. This collapse in the
-idea of the future is symptomatic of the regressive historical status of our age, rather than, as
-cynics across the political spectrum would have us believe, a sign of sceptical maturity. What
-accelerationism pushes towards is a future that is more modern – an alternative modernity
-that neoliberalism is inherently unable to generate. The future must be cracked open once
-again, unfastening our horizons towards the universal possibilities of the Outside.
-
diff --git a/_queue/celerity.markdown b/_queue/celerity.markdown
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-#Celerity: A Critique of the Manifesto for an
-Accelerationist Politics
-McKenzie Wark
-0.0 You have to love any manifesto which gets to
-climate change in only its second paragraph. It shows
-a keen attention to the actual agenda of the times.
-This is not the least merit of #Accelerate: Manifesto for
-an Accelerationist Politics. It has at least some grasp of
-contemporary conjuncture in which we find
-ourselves. But the grasp is in my view, only partial. In
-some ways it’s a rather old-fashioned text. Of course,
-one is always drawing on the past to imagine a
-future. But this process – some would call it
-détournement, some would call it hacking – has to be
-done with a little more historical depth and breadth.
-What follows, then, is a friendly commentary and
-critique of #Accelerate. The numbering of these
-counter-theses match those of the original document.
-1.1 The widening gyre of the commodity economy is a
-series of what, after Marx, we can call metabolic rifts.
-In the division between exchange value and use
-value, commodity exchange severs objects from the
-matrices of their engendering. Only one side of the
-double form of value is subject to a quantitative
-feedback loop – exchange value. Its vestigial double –
-use value – or the mesh from which things are
-
-extracted, is not so easily quantified. And so rifts open
-up in the metabolic process. Rifts which political
-systems borne of the successive eras of commodity
-economy cannot even recognize as problems, let alone
-solve.
-1.2 Climate change is the most troubling of these rifts,
-but there are many others. The problem with the
-dynamic of the commodity economy is that the
-struggle within it of subordinated classes tends,
-among other things, to force the ruling class toward
-substituting technology for direct labor. But each of
-these substitutions draws in turn on more energy and
-more material resources. The whole infrastructure of
-the global commodity economy has by now
-committed itself to the consumption of more
-resources than may even exist. The ruling class, when
-not deluding itself with various ideological ruses,
-surely knows that maintaining a commodity economy
-on full speed ahead can only worsen various
-metabolic rifts, climate disruption among them. One
-suspects it is quietly preparing for this, arming itself,
-building its private arks.
-1.3 Against this hideous prospect, its high time for a
-new imaginary, a new space for thought and action.
-Such an imaginary already exists, but in fragments.
-The difficulty for subordinate classes is always the
-
-project of the totality, the very thing over which they
-have no power. Well, nobody has power over the
-totality as totality any more! The biosphere is in
-decline as a result of a mass of private interests
-competing to chop it into bits of exchange value. The
-challenge is to claim the totality, to open it, to put
-modernity back in play as a space affording more
-than one path to a viable future.
-1.4 The ruling class would like us to imagine that the
-‘neoliberal’ future is the only one. This term needs to
-be challenged on a number of fronts. Firstly, this is
-not a restoration of a liberal order. Its something new.
-It was not a turning back of the clock to a form of
-commodity economy prior to the welfare state and all
-the other compromises wrested from the ruling class
-by organized labor and the social movements. It’s a
-new stage, based on new technical infrastructures,
-new forms of control. Secondly: what makes anyone
-think capitalism was ever ‘liberal’ in the first place?
-The autonomy of the economic sphere is itself an
-ideological proposition. The ‘liberal’ economic sphere
-was achieved through massive state violence against
-premodern peoples and their ways of life. So: there
-was no liberal capitalism; there is no neoliberal
-capitalism. But there is a new stage of the commodity
-economy whose contours are rather undefined
-
-theoretically, and not least because the left buys into
-the ‘neoliberal’ myth as much as the right.
-1.5 In the overdeveloped world of Europe, the United
-States and Japan, class composition has changed
-significantly. Manufacturing has declined within the
-composition of labor. The pressure points that
-organized labor used to have at which to struggle for
-its interests are no longer within reach. Even if we
-could shut down all the hair salons it would not have
-the same effect as shutting down a strategic industry
-like steel. Now that such strategic industries are often
-not located in the overdeveloped world, the ruling
-class has less and less interest in maintaining the
-conditions of reproduction within the space of the old
-overdeveloped nations. If your big investments are
-not there, then why care about the health or education
-of those workers? The old Keynsian solutions to the
-current crisis would in fact work very well, but there
-is no coalition of interest for them, and significant
-ruling class pressure to use the crisis to reduce the
-reproductive functions of the state. In any case, the
-emerging forms of commodification take aim at
-precisely the affective labor and informational labor
-that the state usually still provides, in health and
-education. The overdeveloped world offers few new
-domains for commodification, so these old socialized
-ones become targets.
-
-1.6 The diffusion of commodity relations throughout
-the whole domain of the overdeveloped world
-fragments and renders more and more molecular the
-points of conflict and struggle. Local and specific
-forms of challenge arise, from Occupy Wall Street to
-the quiet, passive ‘Bartleby’ tactics of not doing
-anything at work you don’t really have to do. The
-problem is finding forms of semantic glue to stitch
-such actions together rhetorically. This need not be a
-radical language, it just needs to be a plausible one. A
-popular poetics of the open totality, of there being
-more than one possible future, and more than one
-possible path out of the present.
-2.0 Celerity
-2.0 Not so fast, you may say. Let’s not get caught up
-in too quick a dismissal of existing forms of theory
-and praxis. While the manifesto form thrives on the
-pure annihilation of the past, let’s proceed will all
-deliberate speed, but not too haphazardly.
-2.1 To begin with: while the commodity economy
-presents itself as forward-moving, even as
-‘progressive’, let’s challenge that myth. It seems that a
-large part of what the ruling class is now doing in the
-overdeveloped world is cultivating and defending
-
-quasi-monopoly conditions. Using the archaic patent
-system to shut out any whipper-snappers, or to joust
-with each other for turf. Meanwhile, what the ruling
-class seems to be doing in the so-called
-underdeveloped world is rolling out the old
-industrial paradigm of the nineteenth century on a
-massive scale. It encounters there in modified form
-the recalcitrance of labor, and responds with the same
-spectacular offerings, which are met with the same
-boredom, again, on an expanded scale. The relations
-of production of the commodity economy seem more
-a fetter on the free development of new social and
-technical arrangements, new kinds of future, than
-their custodians. The commodity form itself is out of
-date.
-2.2 There’s something to be said for the thought
-exercise of imagining where the commodity form, left
-to accelerate according to its own one-track mind,
-would end up. Its replacement of recalcitrant labor by
-capital would become absolute, making labor
-obsolete, like a vestigial organ. If only there were
-enough energy and resources left. It might even make
-not only labor but the ruling class obsolete. A whole
-planet ticking over via silicon encrusting bits! But this
-is only a thought exercise, a fatal strategy in theory. In
-practice there’s not enough planet left to entertain
-such an idea. Besides: technology may have agency
-
-but it isn’t absolute. It is pressed this way and that by
-competing class interests. Even when it seems like
-alternate paths to the future are foreclosed, there’s
-always struggle, internal differentiation. There’s
-always points that can be prized open.
-2.3 Opening the path to other futures means
-reopening the qualitative dimension of modernity, its
-aesthetic dimension. This was the chosen terrain of its
-avant-gardes: the futurists and constructivists, the
-surrealists and situationists, the accelerationists and
-schizomaniacs. All of which opened up futures that
-have now been foreclosed. But: to make three steps
-forward, two steps back. There are many resources in
-the aesthetic alter-modern spaces of the past via
-which to experiment with steps forward.
-2.4 All these qualitative avant-gardes met their
-Waterloo: the quantitative rear-guard. The path to
-sustaining the commodity economy after the
-challenges of organized labor and the social
-movements reached its peak was a new kind of
-quantification, a new logistics, a new mesh of vectors
-for command and control. Initially it was crude and
-dealt only with aggregates and proxies, like the early
-computer simulations of the cold war. But what really
-led to its dominance is the embedding in everyday
-life itself of the production of the quantitative data for
-
-its expansion to the whole of life. Thus, the qualitative
-avant-gardes have to re-imagine possible spaces for
-alter-modernities based on this transformation of
-everyday life in all its forms into a gamespace of
-quantified data. Just as the situationists imagined a
-space of play in the interstitial spaces of the policing
-of the city via the dérive, so too we now have to
-imagine and experiment with emerging gaps and
-cracks in the gamespace that the commodity economy
-has become. The time of the hack, or the exploit, is at
-hand.
-2.5 Here we can follow in the path of Marx, but not by
-treating him scholastically. Rather, one has to
-reinvent his practice: his use of conceptual tools as
-tools, his use of the best empirical data, his
-attunement to the struggles around him, his
-deployment of the communicative strategies of
-modernity itself. Moreover, we need to recover
-Marx’s version of the Nietzschian slogan: “god is
-dead.” For Marx, history is not transitive. There’s no
-going back. There’s only forward. It’s a question of
-struggling to open another future besides this one
-which, as he himself intuited, has no future at all. So:
-let’s look not at what Marx says, but what he does.
-Let’s align ourselves, as he did, with the avant garde
-of the times.
-
-2.6 There’s little to be gained from re-hashing the
-various experiments in twentieth century revolution.
-Lenin and Mao have little to teach us. Their situation
-is not our situation. The rest is moot.
-2.7 Who are the forces for social change? Marx asks
-this in his Manifesto. And his answer: those who ask
-the property question. It turns out that putting all
-property in the hands of the state is not the right
-answer to the property question. Goodbye Lenin;
-goodbye Mao. But the question remains a valid one.
-Who are the agents struggling in and against the
-emergent productive forms who can shape the
-affordances of those technologies and labor
-processes? One of the answers is: the worker. But
-another is: the ‘hacker’. The worker is the one who
-struggles in and against a productive regime. The
-hacker is the one who contributes to designing new
-ones, or at the very least populating the existing ones
-with new concepts, new ideas – recuperated by the
-new property forms of so-called ‘intellectual
-property’. These are the accelerators of modernity:
-those who labor in and against it. These are the ones
-for whom the regime of the commodity economy is as
-much fetter as enabler. The relation between these
-classes, and with other subaltern classes, becomes the
-key tactical issue. An issue of not just a poetics of an
-open future, but modes of coordination.
-
-3.0 Futurity
-3.1 The task is one of coordinating the latent energies
-of a people bored with what the commodity has to
-offer with the awareness of what shaping powers
-remain to us to open cracks towards new futures. It’s
-not either or. ‘Folk politics’ and technical politics need
-to talk to each other. To do otherwise is to lapse, on
-the one hand, into local and specific grievances, or
-purely negative energies, or a refusal to confront the
-larger picture of metabolic rift. On the other hand, to
-ignore folk politics is also a danger, the danger of the
-technocratic fix. It’s to base decisions on a refusal to
-acknowledge folk struggle and demand, but also
-insight and information from the popular struggles in
-and against commodity economy. What we need is
-neither abstraction nor occupying, but the occupying of
-abstraction.
-3.2 It’s a question of whether boredom with the
-commodity economy will work fast enough, as it
-spreads from the overdeveloped world to the
-underdeveloped, to open up a new path before
-metabolic rifts like the climate crisis forces the planet
-toward more violent, disorganizing, and frankly
-fascist ‘solutions’ to its problems. Already in China
-factory workers are starting to get restless. Beyond
-that, there’s only so much cheap labor left on the
-planet to exploit. Meanwhile, in the overdeveloped
-
-world, a rather novel regime of value extraction is
-finding ways to extract value from non-work. Search
-engines and social networking find ways to extract
-value from activity regardless of whether it is ‘work’
-and without paying for it. It’s a kind of vulture
-industry, parasitic on frankly successful popular
-struggles to free vast tracts of information from the
-commodity form and circulate it freely. But having
-beaten back the old culture industries with this tactic,
-the social movement that was free culture finds itself
-recuperated at a higher level of abstraction by the
-vulture industries and their ‘gamification’ of every
-aspect of everyday life. So: any alter-modernity
-project has to bypass the expansion of the old
-commodification regimes across the planet, but also
-these curious new ones, dominant in the
-overdeveloped world, but tending now to transform
-information flows everywhere.
-3.3 Of course, part of the old ruling class still insists
-on increasingly repressive and global measures to
-restrict information to the old property form, whether
-of patent or copyright or trademark. But the current
-productive regime respects no such antiquated
-embedding of information into particular objects.
-“Information wants to be free but is everywhere in
-chains.” But it has in part been sidestepped by
-another faction of the ruling class itself, which finds
-
-ways to extract value from the spontaneous, popular
-gift economies of information that have sprung up.
-New tactics are called for now, to work against the
-new forms of commodification as well as the old.
-Perhaps it would even be possible to design more
-efficient and useful technical and social relations, no
-matter how lo-tech, precisely because they would not
-require the cumbersome ‘digital rights management’
-and so forth of the old fettered regime.
-3.4 While there may be no going back to the old
-Fordist models of production, the partial
-socializations of the surplus that were the fruit of
-struggle of that time have much to recommend them.
-It really is the case that these ‘socialist’ systems of
-housing, healthcare and education outperformed
-their profiteering cousins. The ideology of the times
-denies this, but it’s the case. These efficient systems
-are being carved up in the overdeveloped world for
-no better reason than to produce inefficient copies of
-them which enable the ruling class to extract a
-surplus from something. Let’s never forget: it may not
-have been utopia, but socialism succeeded, in the west,
-in these domains.
-3.5 Building better futures will take all the technical
-infrastructure we can get. But it’s not as simple as
-repurposing existing infrastructures, all of which are
-
-based on ever-expanding resource use and labor
-exploitation as design givens. The first step forward is
-to get out of either/or language about technology. So
-much discussion either sees it as panacea or curse.
-Technology, as Stiegler says, is a pharamakon: its both,
-and everything in between. A technology is not what
-it does, it is also what it might do. We need an openended, experimental approach, a critical design
-approach. Being ‘for’ or ‘against’ it is one of the old
-problems of an unhelpful discourse of modernity.
-3.6 One of the best of the ‘socialist’ systems of the
-west was publicly funded big science. Science was
-always subordinated to national security and
-industrial development goals, but it was not identical
-to them. The internet was invented more or less by
-accident. Most of the breakthroughs happened before
-science was narrowly constrained to producing value
-for the commodity economy or specific defense needs.
-We need to recover a sense of the possibility of
-science. Most of its failures were not failures of
-science, but failures of politics. Pesticides like DDT
-cause damage because of a failure of the feedback
-loop from folk politics to technocratic decision
-making. The same is true of so many toxic disasters
-today. Indeed, one needs science to know when the
-product of a science is being misapplied. Climate
-science is the reason we know so much of applied
-
-science in industry is causing problems. We need
-more science, not less. Including a science of popular
-knowledge of the effects of applied industrial science.
-3.7 Even a little techno-utopianism might not be a bad
-thing from time to time, to imagine possible spaces,
-even if only conceptual spaces, like in the work of
-Constant. But if we acknowledge that tech on its own
-can’t save us, then we need to be attendant also to
-experiments in ‘social’ technology. Horizontalism, for
-example, as practiced in Occupy Wall Street and
-elsewhere, is also a technology. Whether it’s a technoutopia one is embarked upon, or a new social
-practice, one has to pay attention to how the social
-inhabits the former and the technical permeates the
-latter. Tech and the social (or the political) are not
-separate things. The phrase “the technological is
-politically (or socially) constructed” is meaningless.
-One is simply looking at the same systems through
-different lenses when one speaks of the political or
-the technical. But among intellectuals, the social, the
-political (and we can add the cultural) are something
-of a fetish. There’s something tactically useful in
-stressing the technical bases of all such perspectives.
-Among engineers and designers, of course, the
-opposite thinking strategy applies. Accelerating
-technical evolution requires a conversation that is
-
-sophisticated in such matters, and which includes all
-perspectives, including ‘folk’ ones.
-3.8 There can be no return to ‘planning’ as a panacea,
-however, as it always implies asymmetries of
-information. The excluded parties and their
-knowledge, their struggles, always turn out to be
-relevant. We need only look at the ecological disasters
-of Soviet planning for examples. The challenge is to
-coordinate qualitative knowledge as well as the
-market coordinates quantitative knowledge – and
-better.
-3.9 New kinds of quantitative measure can also help.
-Let’s use that weapon against the ruling class! But we
-also need new visualization tools, new narratives,
-new poetics. And ones which do not exclude ‘folk
-politics’ but rather include them. The question to ask
-about any new ‘cognitive mediator’ is: whose cognition
-is it mediating?
-3.10 The emphasis for an alter-modernity at this point
-has to be on its experimental practices. This means a
-synthesis not just of the qualitative and quantitative
-dimensions of modernity but also threading back
-together its critical, negative tendencies and its
-affirmative, design-based ones.
-
-3.11 All this calls for a gathering of social forces. It
-requires cross-class alliances, of workers and hackers.
-It requires transnational networks, spanning the
-overdeveloped and underdeveloped worlds. It’s not
-simply a matter of ‘reprogramming’ existing technical
-infrastructures. It’s a question of aligning the
-tendencies which struggle within it at all its points.
-3.12 It is no longer enough to say what an ideal
-‘politics’ might be. Perhaps ‘politics’ itself needs to
-become an object of sever critique. Intellectuals like to
-imagine an ideal version of politics, but are less keen
-on the actually existing ones. It’s a question of finding
-the right job for those of us who talk and write and
-don’t do much else. Perhaps as agents of a low theory,
-which tries to link up particular struggles, rather than
-plan it, top down. Let’s talk no more of what politics
-‘ought’ to be like. Comrades, roll up your sleeves!
-3.13 Certainly let’s not retreat too far back towards
-the secrecy, verticality and exclusion which got us
-into this mess in the first place. Planning has its place.
-Every economy plans. But too much closure just leads
-to information deficits.
-3.14 Neither the command of the plan nor the purely
-horizontal participatory model works on its own.
-They exist in tension with each other, and with many
-
-other social forms. Let’s play with a full deck of social
-forms.
-3.15 There is always an ecology of organizations, of a
-sort. But the problem with the current one is that it
-does not reproduce its own conditions of existence. It
-destroys them. This must be a central object of both
-critique and experiment at all levels.
-3.16 Retreating to the mountain, equipping some
-ruling elite with a new ideology and a few cognitive
-tools – only prolongs the crisis. Let’s not dally with
-the fantasy of a new prince of Syracuse.
-3.21 The Promethean mythology of the futurists
-might work for some, but a more capacious and
-global deployment of the mythic stock of images and
-stories is more what the times call for. Besides, what
-happened to Prometheus?
-3.24 The prospect of a future does however need
-reconstruction. It might begin with a synthesis of
-various strands of modernity that are now
-fragmented into separate realms, all under the reign
-of the commodity and its quantitative equivalence.
-But such a prospect means nothing without
-identifiable social actors. It calls for a popular, and
-populist, struggle, in many languages, drawing
-
-different modes of thought and experiment into
-common projects. It may not need an over-arching
-image or metaphor. Fordist models even in ideology
-seem a thing of the past. The task is not political
-rhetoric but an actually political one, of finding the
-modus vivendi for different forces in struggle, acting
-now with the utmost celerity.
-4.0 Personal Concluding Thoughts
-4.0 So: Two cheers for #Accelerate. But only two. It
-successfully develops the provocative writing of Nick
-Land, and to his left. But if Land is a ‘rightaccelerationist’, #Acclerate ends up being something
-of a centrist-accelerationist position. It defaults to
-planning, to the intellectual retreat up to the
-mountain, rather than engaging with new forms of
-struggle. Still, its reanimated futurism, its openness
-toward technology, to thinking problems at scale,
-these are positive features. What remains is to push it
-a little toward a more ‘left-accelerationist’ position,
-without lapsing into the sins of the left: the fetish of
-politics as the magical solution to everything high
-among them.
-4.1 To the extent that personally I find common
-ground here is that #Accelerate overlaps with a
-position I started to stake out ten years ago now, in A
-
-Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP 2004) and Gamer
-Theory (Harvard UP 2007). Those texts reflect the
-positive and more pessimistic dimensions of
-accelerationism respectively. I drew on different
-modernist avant garde resources, the genealogy of
-which I then sketched out in The Beach Beneath the
-Street (Verso, 2011) and The Spectacle of Disintegration
-(Verso 2013). In short: there’s other paths to the same
-territory besides the strange one that wends from Karl
-Marx via Georges Bataille to Nick Land. (Deleuze,
-however, we have in common). Perhaps the collective
-project is remap that territory, so we know better
-what our options are in what resources can be drawn
-from the past. Otherwise: damn the torpedoes, full
-speed ahead.
-
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-http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-2/peer-reviewed-papers/hacklabs-and-hackerspaces/
-
-· Hacklabs and hackerspaces – tracing two genealogies
-
-**Maxigas**
-
-1. Introduction
----------------
-
-It seems very promising to chart the genealogy of hackerspaces from the
-point of view of hacklabs, since the relationship between these scenes
-have seldom been discussed and largely remains unreflected. A
-methodological examination will highlight many interesting differences
-and connections that can be useful for practitioners who seek to foster
-and spread the hackerspace culture, as well as for academics who seek to
-conceptualise and understand it. In particular, hackerspaces proved to
-be a viral phenomenon which may have reached the height of its
-popularity, and while a new wave of fablabs spring up, people like
-Grenzfurthner and Schneider (2009) have started asking questions about
-the direction of these movements. I would like to contribute to this
-debate about the political direction and the political potentials of
-hacklabs and hackerspaces with a comparative, critical,
-historiographical paper. I am mostly interested in how these intertwined
-networks of institutions and communities can escape the the capitalist
-apparatus of capture, and how these potentialities are conditioned by a
-historical embeddedness in various scenes and histories.
-
-Hacklabs manifest some of the same traits as hackerspaces, and, indeed,
-many communities who are registered on hackerspaces.org identify
-themselves as “hacklabs” as well. Furthermore, some registered groups
-would not be considered to be a “real” hackerspace by most of the
-others. In fact, there is a rich spectrum of terms and places with a
-family resemblance such as “coworking spaces”, “innovation
-laboratories”, “media labs”, “fab labs”, “makerspaces”, and so on. Not
-all of these are even based on an existing community, but have been
-founded by actors of the formal educational system or commercial sector.
-It is impossible to clarify everything in the scope of a short article.
-I will therefore only consider community-led hacklabs and hackerspaces
-here.
-
-Despite the fact that these spaces share the same cultural heritage,
-some of their ideological and historical roots are indeed different.
-This results in a slightly different adoption of technologies and a
-subtle divergence in their organisational models. Historically speaking,
-hacklabs started in the middle of the 1990s and became widespread in the
-first half of the 2000s. Hackerspaces started in the late 1990s and
-became widespread in the second half of the 2000s. Ideologically
-speaking, most hacklabs have been explicitly politicised as part of the
-broader anarchist/autonomist scene, while hackerspaces, developing in
-the libertarian sphere of influence around the Chaos Computer Club, are
-not necessarily defining themselves as overtly political. While
-practitioners in both scenes would consider their own activities as
-oriented towards the liberation of technological knowledge and related
-practices, the interpretations of what is meant by “liberty” diverges.
-One concrete example of how these historical and ideological divergences
-show up is to be found in the legal status of the spaces: while hacklabs
-are often located in squatted buildings, hackerspaces are generally
-rented.
-
-This paper is comprised of three distinct sections. The first two
-sections draw up the historical and ideological genealogy of hacklabs
-and hackerspaces. The third section brings together these findings in
-order to reflect on the differences from a contemporary point of view.
-While the genealogical sections are descriptive, the evaluation in the
-last section is normative, asking how the differences identified in the
-paper play out strategically from the point of view of creating
-postcapitalist spaces, subjects and technologies.
-
-Note that at the moment the terms “hacklab” and “hackerspace” are used
-largely synonymously. Contrary to prevailing categorisation, I use
-hacklabs in their older (1990s) historical sense, in order to highlight
-historical and ideological differences that result in a somewhat
-different approach to technology. This is not linguistic nitpicking but
-meant to allow a more nuanced understanding of the environments and
-practices under consideration. The evolving meaning of these terms,
-reflecting the social changes that have taken place, is recorded on
-Wikipedia. The Hacklab article was created in 2006 (Wikipedia
-contributors, 2010a), the Hackerspace article in 2008 (Wikipedia
-contributors, 2011). In 2010, the content of the Hacklab article was
-merged into the Hackerspaces article. This merger was based on the
-rationale given on the corresponding discussion page (Wikipedia
-contributors, 2010). A user by the name “Anarkitekt” wrote that “I’ve
-never heard or read anything implying that there is an ideological
-difference between the terms hackerspace and hacklab” (Wikipedia
-contributors, 2010b). Thus the treatment of the topic by Wikipedians
-supports my claim that the proliferation of hackerspaces went hand in
-hand with a forgetting of the history that I am setting out to
-recapitulate here.
-
-![](http://peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/figure1Maxigas8.jpg)
-
-Figure 1. Survey of domain registrations of the hacklabs list from
-hacklabs.org
-
-2. Hacklabs
------------
-
-The surge of hacklabs can be attributed to a number of factors. In order
-to sketch out their genealogy, two contexts will be expanded on here:
-the autonomous movement and media activism. A shortened and simplified
-account of these two histories are given that emphasises elements that
-are important from the point of view of the emergence of hacklabs. The
-hacker culture, of no less importance, will be treated in the next
-section in more detail. A definition from a seminal article by Simon
-Yuill highlights the basic rationales behind these initiatives (2008):
-
-“Hacklabs are, mostly, voluntary-run spaces providing free public access
-to computers and internet. They generally make use of reclaimed and
-recycled machines running GNU/Linux, and alongside providing computer
-access, most hacklabs run workshops in a range of topics from basic
-computer use and installing GNU/Linux software, to programming,
-electronics, and independent (or pirate) radio broadcast. The first
-hacklabs developed in Europe, often coming out of the traditions of
-squatted social centres and community media labs. In Italy they have
-been connected with the autonomist social centres, and in Spain,
-Germany, and the Netherlands with anarchist squatting movements.”
-
-The autonomous movement grew out of the “cultural shock” (Wallerstein,
-2004) of 1968 which included a new wave of contestations against
-capitalism, both in its welfare state form and in its Eastern
-manifestation as “bureaucratic capitalism” (Debord [1970], 1977). It was
-concurrently linked to the rise of youth subcultures. It was mainly
-oriented towards mass direct action and the establishment of initiatives
-that sought to provide an alternative to the institutions operated by
-state and capital. Its crucial formal characteristic was
-self-organisation emphasising the horizontal distribution of power. In
-the 1970s, the autonomous movement played a role in the politics of
-Italy, Germany and France (in order of importance) and to a lesser
-extent in other European countries like Greece (Wright, 2002). The
-theoretical basis is that the working class (and later the oppressed in
-general) can be an independent historical actor in the face of state and
-capital, building its own power structures through self-valorisation and
-appropriation. It drew from orthodox Marxism, left-communism and
-anarchism, both in theoretical terms and in terms of a historical
-continuity and direct contact between these other movements. The rise
-and fall of left wing terrorist organisations, which emerged from a
-similar milieu (like the RAF in Germany or the Red Brigade in Italy),
-has marked a break in the history of the autonomous movements.
-Afterwards they became less coherent and more heterogenous. Two specific
-practices that were established by autonomists are squatting and media
-activism (Lotringer Marazzi, 2007).
-
-The reappropriation of physical places and real estate has a much longer
-history than the autonomous movement. Sometimes, as in the case of the
-pirate settlements described by Hakim Bey (1995,, 2003), these places
-have evolved into sites for alternative “forms of life” (Agamben, 1998).
-The housing shortage after the Second World War resulted in a wave of
-occupations in the United Kingdom (Hinton, 1988) which necessarily took
-on a political character and produced community experiences. However,
-the specificity of squatting lay in the strategy of taking occupied
-houses as a point of departure for the reinvention of all spheres of
-life while confronting authorities and the “establishment” more
-generally conceived. While many houses served as private homes,
-concentrating on experimenting with alternative life styles or simply
-satisfying basic needs, others opted to play a public role in urban
-life. The latter are called “social centres”. A social centre would
-provide space for initiatives that sought to establish an alternative to
-official institutions. For example, the infoshop would be an alternative
-information desk, library and archive, while the bicycle kitchen would
-be an alternative to bike shops and bike repair shops. These two
-examples show that among the various institutions to be replaced, both
-those operated by state and capital were included. On the other hand,
-both temporary and more or less permanently occupied spaces served as
-bases, and sometimes as front lines, of an array of protest activities.
-
-With the onset of neoliberalism (Harvey, 2005; 2007), squatters had to
-fight hard for their territory, resulting in the “squat wars” of the
-90s. The stake of these clashes that often saw whole streets under
-blockade was to force the state and capital to recognise squatting as a
-more or less legitimate social practice. While trespassing and breaking
-in to private property remained illegal, occupiers received at least
-temporary legal protection and disputes had to be resolved in court,
-often taking a long time to conclude. Squatting proliferated in the
-resulting ”grey area”. Enforcement practices, squatting laws and
-frameworks were established in the UK, Catalonia, Netherlands and
-Germany. Some of the more powerful occupied social centres (like the EKH
-in Vienna) and a handful of strong scenes in certain cities (like
-Barcelona) managed to secure their existence into the first decade of
-the 21^st^twenty first century. Recent years saw a series of crackdowns
-on the last remaining popular squatting locations such as the
-abolishment of laws protecting squatters in the Netherlands (Usher,,
-2010) and discussion of the same in the UK (House of Commons,, 2010).
-
-Media activism developed along similar lines, building on a long
-tradition of independent publishing. Adrian Jones (2009) argues for a
-structural but also historical continuity in the pirate radio practices
-of the 1960s and contemporary copyright conflicts epitomised by the
-Pirate Bay. On the strictly activist front, one important early
-contribution was Radio Alice (est., 1976) which emerged from the the
-autonomist scene of Bologna (Berardi Mecchia, 2007). Pirate radio and
-its reformist counterparts, community radio stations, flourished ever
-since. Reclaiming the radio frequency was only the first step, however.
-As Dee Dee Halleck explains, media activists soon made use of the
-consumer electronic products such as camcorders that became available on
-the market from the late 80s onwards. They organised production in
-collectives such as Paper Tiger Television and distribution in
-grassroots initiatives such as Deep Dish TV which focused on satellite
-air time (Halleck, 1998). The next logical step was information and
-communication technologies such as the personal computer — appearing on
-the market at the same time. It was different from the camcorder in the
-sense that it was a general purpose information processing tool. With
-the combination of commercially available Internet access, it changed
-the landscape of political advocacy and organising practices. At the
-forefront of developing theory and practice around the new communication
-technologies was the Critical Art Ensemble. It started with video works
-in 1986, but then moved on to the use of other emerging technologies
-(Critical Art Ensemble, 2000). Although they have published exclusively
-Internet-based works like *Diseases of the Consciousness* (1997), their
-*tactical media* approach emphasises the use of the right tool for the
-right job. In 2002 they organised a workshop in New York’s Eyebeam,
-which belongs to the wider hackerspace scene. New media activists played
-an integral part in the emergence of the alterglobalisation movement,
-establishing the Indymedia network. Indymedia is comprised of local
-Independent Media Centres and a global infrastructure holding it
-together (Morris 2004 gives a fair description). Focusing on open
-publishing as an editorial principle, the initiative quickly united and
-involved so many activists that it became one of the most recognised
-brands of the alterglobalisation movement, only slowly falling into
-irrelevance around the end of the decade. More or less in parallel with
-this development, the telestreet movement was spearheaded by Franco
-Berardi, also known as Bifo, who was also involved in Radio Alice,
-mentioned above. OrfeoTv was started in 2002 and used modified
-consumer-grade television receivers for pirate television broadcast (see
-Telestreet, the Italian Media Jacking Movement, 2005). Although the
-telestreet initiative happened on a much smaller scale than the other
-developments outlined above, it is noteworthy because telestreet
-operators reverse-engineered mass products in the same manner as
-hardware hackers do.
-
-Taking a cue from Situationism with its principal idea of making
-interventions in the communication flow as its point of departure, the
-media activists sought to expand what they called “culture jamming” into
-a popular practice by emphasising a folkloristic element (Critical Art
-Ensemble, 2001). Similarly to the proletarian educational initiatives of
-the classical workers’ movements (for example Burgmann 2005:8 on
-Proletarian Schools), such an approach brought to the fore issues of
-access, frequency regulations, popular education, editorial policies and
-mass creativity, all of which pointed in the direction of lowering the
-barriers of participation for cultural and technological production in
-tandem with establishing a distributed communication infrastructure for
-anticapitalist organising. Many media activists adhered to some version
-of Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony, taking the stand that cultural
-and educational work is as important as directly challenging property
-relations. Indeed, this work was seen as in continuation with
-overturning those property relations in the area of media, culture and
-technology. This tendency to stress the importance of information for
-the mechanism of social change was further strengthened by claims
-popularised by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that immaterial and
-linguistic labour are the hegemonic mode of production in the
-contemporary configuration of capitalism (2002, 2004). At the extreme
-end of this spectrum, some argued that decisive elements of politics
-depend on a performance of representation, often technologically
-mediated, placing media activism at the centre of the struggle against
-state and capitalism. Irrespectivly of these ideological beliefs,
-however, what distinguished the media practitioners in terms of identity
-is that they did not see themselves simply as outsiders or service
-providers, but as an integral part of a social movement. As Söderberg
-demonstrates (2011), political convictions of a user community can be an
-often overlooked enabler of technological creativity.
-
-These two intertwined tendencies came together in the creation of
-hacklabs. Squats, on the one hand, closely embedded in the urban flows
-of life, had to use communication infrastructures such as Internet
-access and public access to terminals. Media activists, on the other
-hand, who are more often than not also grounded in a a local community,
-needed venues to convene, produce, teach and learn. As Marion Hamm
-observes when discussing how physical and virtual spaces enmeshed due to
-the activists’ use of electronic media communication: “This practice is
-not a virtual reality as it was imagined in the eighties as a graphical
-simulation of reality. It takes place at the keyboard just as much as in
-the technicians’ workshops, on the streets and in the temporary media
-centres, in tents, in socio-cultural centres and squatted houses.”
-(Translated by Aileen Derieg,, 2003). One example of how these lines
-converge is the Ultralab in Forte Prenestino, an occupied fortress in
-Rome which is also renowned for its autonomous politics in Italy. The
-Ultralab is declared to be an “emergent pattern” on its website
-(AvANa.net, 2005), bringing together various technological needs of the
-communities supported by the Forte. The users of the social centre have
-a shared need for a local area computer network that connects the
-various spaces in the squat, for hosting server computers with the
-websites and mailing lists of the local groups, for installing and
-maintaining public access terminals, for having office space for the
-graphics and press teams, and finally for having a gathering space for
-the sharing of knowledge. The point of departure for this development
-was the server room of AvANa, which started as a bulletin board system
-(BBS), that is, a dial-in message board in 1994 (Bazichelli 2008:80-81).
-As video activist Agnese Trocchi remembers,
-
-“AvANa BBS was spreading the concept of Subversive Thelematic: right to
-anonymity, access for all and digital democracy. AvANa BBs was
-physically located in Forte Prenestino the older and bigger squatted
-space in Rome. So at the end of the 1990’s I found myself working with
-technology and the imaginative space that it was opening in the young
-and angry minds of communities of squatters, activist and ravers.”
-(quoted in Willemsen, 2006)
-
-AvANa and Forte Prenestino connected to the European Counter Network
-(now at ecn.org), which linked several occupied social centres in Italy,
-providing secure communication channels and resilient electronic public
-presence to antifascist groups, the Disobbedienti movement, and other
-groups affiliated with the autonomous and squatting scenes. Locating the
-nodes inside squats had their own drawbacks, but also provided a certain
-level of physical and political protection from the authorities.
-
-Another, more recent example is the short lived Hackney Crack House, a
-hacklab located on 195 Mare Street in London. This squat situated in an
-early Georgian house was comprised of a theatre building, a bar, two
-stores of living spaces and a basement that housed a bicycle workshop
-and a studio space (see Foti, 2010). The hacklab provided a local area
-network and a media server for the house, and served as a tinkering
-space for the technologically inclined. During events like the Free
-School, participants, including both absolute beginners and more
-dedicated hobbyists, could learn to use free and open source
-technologies, network security and penetration testing. Everyday
-activities ranged from fixing broken electronics through building
-large-scale mixed media installations to playing computer games.
-
-The descriptions given above serve to indicate how hacklabs grew out of
-the needs and aspirations of squatters and media activists. This history
-comes with a number of consequences. Firstly, that the hacklabs fitted
-organically into the anti-institutional ethos cultivated by people in
-the autonomous spaces. Secondly, they were embedded in the political
-regime of these spaces, and were subject to the same forms of frail
-political sovereignty that such projects develop. Both Forte Prenestino
-and Mare Street had written and unwritten conducts of behaviour which
-users were expected to follow. The latter squat had an actively
-advertised Safer Places Policy, stating for instance that people who
-exhibit sexist, racist, or authoritive behaviour should expect to be
-challenged and, if necessary, excluded. Thirdly, the politicised logic
-of squatting, and more specifically the ideology behind appropriative
-anarchism, had its consequences too. A social centre is designated to be
-a public institution whose legitimacy rests on serving its audience and
-neighbourhood, if possibly better than the local authorities do, by
-which the risk of eviction is somewhat reduced . Lastly, the state of
-occupation fosters a milieu of complicity. Consequently, certain forms
-of illegality are seen as at least necessary, or sometimes even as
-desirable. These factors are crucial for understanding the differences
-between hacklabs and hackerspaces, to be discussed in Section 3.
-
-A rudimentary survey based on website registrations (see Figure 1. in
-the appendix), desktop research and interviews shows that the first
-hacklabs were established in the decade around the turn of the
-millennium (1995-2005). Their concentration to South Europe has been
-underlined by the organisation of yearly Hackmeetings in Italy, starting
-in 1998. The Hackmeeting is a gathering where practitioners can exchange
-knowledge, present their work, and enjoy the company of each other. In
-North Europe plug’n’politix, hosted first by Egocity (a squatted
-Internet cafe in Zurich, Switzerland) provided a meeting point for
-like-minded projects in 2001. A network by the same name was established
-and a second meeting followed in 2004 in Barcelona. In the meantime,
-Hacklabs.org (defunct since, 2006) was set up in 2002 to maintain a list
-of hacklabs, dead or alive, and provide news and basic information about
-the movement. A review of the advertised activities of hacklabs show
-workshops organised around topics like free software development,
-security and anonymity, electronic art and media production.
-
-The activities of Print, a hacklab located in a squat in Dijon which is
-called Les Tanneries, show the kinds of contributions that came out of
-these places. People active in Print have maintained a computer lab with
-free Internet access for visitors to the social centre, and a collection
-of old hardware parts that individuals could use to build their own
-computers. They have organised events of various sizes (from a couple of
-people to a thousand) related to free software, like a party for fixing
-the last bugs in the upcoming release of the Debian GNU/Linux operating
-system. Furthermore, they have provided network support and distributed
-computers with Internet access at a European gathering of Peoples’
-Global Action, a world-wide gathering of grassroots activists connected
-to the alterglobalisation movement. In a similar vein, they have staged
-various protests in the city calling attention to issues related to
-state surveillance and copyright legislations. These actions have built
-on a tradition of setting up artistic installations in various places in
-and around the building, the most striking example being the huge
-graffiti on the firewall spelling out “apt-get install anarchism”. It is
-a practical joke on how programs are set up on Debian systems, so
-practical that it actually works.
-
-Another example from South Europe is Riereta in Barcelona, a hacklab
-occupying a separate building that hosts a radio studio ran by women.
-The activities there gravitate around the three axes of free software,
-technology, and artistic creativity. However, as a testimony of the
-influence from media activism, most projects and events are concentrated
-on media production, such as real time audio and video processing,
-broadcasting and campaigning against copyright and other restrictions to
-free distribution of information. The list of examples could easily be
-made longer, demonstrating that most hacklabs share similar ideas and
-practicesand maintains links with alterglobalisation politics, occupied
-spaces and (new) media activism.
-
-To summarise, due to their historical situatedness in anticapitalist
-movements and the barriers of access to the contemporary communication
-infrastructure, hacklabs tended to focus on the adoption of computer
-networks and media technologies for political uses, spreading access to
-dispossesed and championing folk creativity.
-
-3. Hackerspaces
----------------
-
-It is probably safe to state that hackerspaces are at the height of
-their popularity at the moment. As mentioned in the introduction, many
-different institutions and initiatives are now calling themselves
-“hackerspaces”. At least in Europe, there is a core of more or less
-community-led projects that define themselves as hackerspaces. The case
-of hacklabs have already been described, but it is merely one example
-from the extreme end of the political spectrum. There are a number of
-more variations populating the world, such as fablabs, makerlabs,
-telecottages, medialabs, innovation labs and co-working spaces. What
-distinguishes the last two from the others (and possibly also from
-fablabs) is that they are set up in the context of an institution, be
-that a university, a company or a foundation. More often than not ,
-their mission is to foster innovation. Such spaces tend to focus on
-concrete results like research projects or commercial products.
-Telecottages and telehouses occupy the middle of the range- They are
-typically seeded from development funds to improve local social and
-economic conditions through ICTs. Even makerlabs are sometimes
-commercial ventures (like Fablab in Budapest, not to be confused with
-the Hungarian Autonomous Centre for Knowledge mentioned above), based on
-the idea of providing access to tools for companies and individuals as a
-service. Fablabs may be the next generation of the hackerspace
-evolution, focusing on manufacturing of custom built objects. It is
-framed as a re-imagining of the factory with inspiration from the peer
-production model (MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, 2007). What sets
-hackerspaces apart — along with most fablabs — is that they are set up
-by hackers for hackers with the principal mission of supporting hacking.
-
-This is therefore the right point in the paper to dwelve on the social
-and historical phenomena of hacking. This is not to say that hacklabs —
-as is indicated by their name — would be less involved in and inspired
-by the hacker tradition. A separate study could be devoted to these two
-movements’ embeddedness in the free software movement. However, since
-both movements are contributing to an equal extent but in different
-ways, this aspect will not be elaborated here at length as the contrast
-would be more difficult to tease out. It is hence assumed that much of
-what is said here about hacker culture and its influence on the
-hackerspace movement applies equally to hacklabs.
-
-The beginnings of the hacker subculture are well-documented.
-Interestingly, it also starts in the 1960s and spreads out in the 1970s,
-much like the history of the autonomous movement. Indeed, in a sense it
-can be considered as one of the youth subcultures which Wallerstein
-attributes to the “cultural shock” of 1968 (2004). In order not to be
-lost in the mythology, the story will be kept brief and schematic. One
-hotbed seems to have been the university culture epitomised by the MIT
-Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and cultivated in half a dozen other
-research institutes around the USA. Another one was the phreaker scene
-that found its expression in the Yippie spinoff magazine TAP. While the
-former were working on engineering breakthroughs such as early computers
-and operating systems, as well as on networks precursoring the Internet,
-the latter were doing the opposite: reverse-engineering information and
-communication technologies, which mainly meant telephone networks at the
-time. In 1984 ATT was broken into smaller companies — the Baby Bells,
-but not before important parts of the network had been shut down by
-phreakers (Slatalla Quittner 1995, Sterling, 1992). The same year saw
-the last issue of TAP and the first issue of the still active 2600
-magazine. The university culture was preserved in the *Jargon File* in
-1975 which is still maintained (Steele Raymond, 1996). It was the
-inventor of cyberpunk, William Gibson, popularised the term cyberspace
-in his novel Neuromancer. He thus inspired the cyberpunk subculture
-which gave a complete — if not “real” — Weltanschauung to hacker
-culture. The idea of a dark future where freedom is found on the fringes
-and corporations rule the world spoke to both the university hackers and
-the phreakers. The stars of the phreaking underground had been
-persecuted by law authorities for their pranks on the communication
-giants, while Richard Stallman — “the last of the [first generation of]
-true hackers” (Levy [1984], 2001) — invented free software in 1983 and
-set out to fight the increasing privatisation of knowledge by
-corporations, as could then be seen in the expansion of copyright claims
-to software, the spread of non-disclosure agreements, and the
-mushrooming of start-up companies.
-
-The history of the hacker movement in Europe has been less well
-documented. An important instance is the Chaos Computer Club which was
-founded in 1981 by Wau Holland and others sitting in the editorial room
-of the taz paper in the building of Kommune I., a famous autonomous
-squat (Anon, 2008:85). The Chaos Computer Club entered into the
-limelight in 1984. Hackers belonging to the club had wired themselves
-134,000 Deutsche Marks through the national videotex system, called
-Bildschirmtext or BTX. The Post Office had practical monopoly on the
-market with this obsolete product, and claimed to maintain a secure
-network even after it had been notified about the exploit. The money was
-returned the next day in front of the press. This began the Club’s
-tumultuous relationship with the German government that lasts until
-today.
-
-In their study of the hacker culture, Gabriella Coleman and Alex Golub
-have argued that as far as it hangs together, this subculture manifests
-an innovative yet historically determined version of liberalism, while
-in its manifold trends it expresses and exploits some of the
-contradictions inherent to the same political tradition (2008). They
-concentrate on three currents of hacker practice: cryptofreedom, free
-and open source software, and the hacker underground. However, they do
-not claim that these categories would exhaust the richness of hacker
-culture. On the contrary, in a review article in the Atlantic, Coleman
-(2010) explicitly mentions that the information security scene has been
-underrepresented in the literature about hackers. The three tendencies
-identified in their text differ slightly from the classification I am
-suggesting here. Stallman’s legal invention and technical project
-cemented free software as one pillar of hackerdom for the coming
-decades. The exploits of the phreakers opened a way for the hacker
-underground where its initial playfulness developed in two directions,
-towards profit or politics.
-
-In Europe, the stance of the Chaos Computer Club paved the way for
-independent information security research. Admittedly, all of those
-approaches concentrated on a specific interpretation of individual
-freedom, one which understands freedom as a question of knowledge.
-Moreover, this knowledge is understood to be produced and circulated in
-a network of humans and computers — in direct contrast to the version of
-liberalism associated with romantic individualism, as Coleman and Golub
-observes. Therefore, this is a technologically informed antihumanist
-liberalism. Hackers carve out different positions within these
-parameters that sometimes complement and sometimes contradict each
-other. The free software community sees the universal access to
-knowledge as the essential condition of freedom. The hacker underground
-wields knowledge to ensure the freedom of an individual or a faction.
-“Gray hat” information security experts see full disclosure as the best
-way to ensure the stability of the infrastructure, and thus the freedom
-of communication. Full disclosure refers to the practice of releasing
-information and tools revealing security flaws to the public. This idea
-goes back to the tradition of 19th century locksmiths, who maintained
-that the best locks are built on widely understood principles instead of
-secrets: the only secret, to be kept private, should be the key itself
-(Hobbs, Tomlinson Fenby [1853] 1868:2 cited in Blaze 2003 as well as
-Cheswick, Bellovin Rubin 2003:120). The idea that freedom depends on
-knowledge and, in turn, knowledge depends on freedom, is articulated in
-the hackers aphorism attributed to Stewart Brand: “Information wants to
-be free.” (Clarke, 2001).
-
-During the course of the 1990s the hacker world saw the setting up of
-institutions that have been in place up until now. From all three
-sub-traditions mentioned above have grown distinct industries, catering
-to fully employed professionals, precarious workers, and enthusiasts
-alike. The Electronic Frontier Foundation was established in 1990 in the
-United States to defend and promote hacker values through legal support,
-policy work and specific educational and research projects. It occupies
-a position very different but comparable to the Chaos Computer Club in
-Europe. Early EFF discourse like John Perry Barlow’s *A Declaration of
-the Independence of Cyberspace* invokes the Western movie narrative of
-an indigenous territory prone to be occupied by the civilising East. It
-is littered withreferences to the Founding Fathers and the U.S.
-Constitution (1996). Conferences, gatherings and camps addressing the
-three tendencies above became extremely popular, similarly to how the
-film industry increasingly relied on festivals. The Chaos Communication
-Congress has run from 1984 and is now the most prominent event in
-Europe, while in the USA H.O.P.E. was organised in 1994 by the people
-around the 2600 magazine, and is still going strong. Hacker camping was
-initiated by a series of events in Netherlands running since 1989. These
-experiences solidified and popularised the hacker movement and the
-desire for permanent hacker spaces was part of this development.
-
-As Nick Farr (2009) has pointed out, the first wave of pioneering
-hackerspaces were founded in the 1990s, just as were hacklabs. L0pht
-stated in 1992 in the Boston area as a membership based club that
-offered shared physical and virtual infrastructure to select people.
-Some other places were started in those years in the USA based on this
-“covert” model. In Europe, C-base in Berlin started with a more public
-profile in 1995, promoting free access to the Internet and serving as a
-venue for various community groups. These second wave spaces “proved
-that hackers could be perfectly open about their work, organise
-officially, gain recognition from the government and respect from the
-public by living and applying the Hacker ethic in their efforts” (Farr,
-2009). However, it is with the current, third wave that the number of
-hackerspaces begun to grow exponentially and it developed into a global
-movement of sorts. I argue that the term hackerspaces was not widely
-used before this point and the small number of hackerspaces that existed
-were less consistent and did not yet develop the characteristics of a
-movement. Notably, this is in constrast with narrative of the hacklabs
-presented earlier which appeared as a more consistent political
-movement.
-
-Several accounts (for example Anon, 2008) highlight a series of talks in
-2007 and 2008 that inspired, and continue to inspire, the foundation of
-new hackerspaces. Judging from registered hackerspaces, however, the
-proliferation seems to have started earlier. In 2007 Farr organised a
-project called Hackers on a Plane, which brought hackers from the USA to
-the Chaos Communication Congress, and included a tour of hackerspaces in
-the area. Ohlig and Weiler from the C4 hackerspace in Cologne gave a
-ground-braking talk on the conference entitled *Building a Hackerspace*
-(2007). The presentation defined the hackerspace design patterns, which
-are written in the form of a catechism and provide solutions to common
-problems that arise during the organisation of the hackerspace. More
-importantly, it has canonised the concept of hackerspaces and put the
-idea of setting up new ones all over the world on the agenda of the
-hacker movement. When the USA delegation returned home, they presented
-their experiences under the programmatic title *Building Hacker Spaces
-Everywhere: Your Excuses are Invalid*. They argued that “four people can
-start a sustainable hacker space”, and showed how to do it (Farr et al,
-2008). The same year saw the launch of hackerspaces.org, in Europe with
-*Building an international movement: hackerspaces.org* (Pettis et al,
-2008), and also in August at the North American HOPE (Anon, 2008). While
-the domain is registered since 2006, the Internet Archive saw the first
-website there in 2008 listing 72 hackerspaces. Since then the
-communication platforms provided by the portal became a vital element in
-the hackerspaces movement, sporting the slogan “build! unite! multiply!”
-(hackerspaces.org, 2011). A survey of the founding date of the 500
-registered hackerspaces show a growing trend from 2008 (see Figure 2).
-
-Notably, most of these developments focused on the formal
-characteristics of hackerspaces, for instance how to manage problems and
-grow a community. They emphasised an open membership model for
-maintaining a common workspace that functions as a cooperative
-socialising, learning and production environment. However, the content
-of the activities going on in hackerspaces also shows great consistency.
-The technologies used can be described as layers of sedimentation: newer
-technologies take their place alongside older ones without it becoming
-entirely obsolete. First of all, the fact that hackers collaborate in a
-physical space meant a resurgence of work on electronics, which
-conjoined with the established trend of tinkering with physical
-computers. A rough outline of connected research areas could be (in
-order of appearance): free software development, computer recycling,
-wireless mesh networking, microelectronics, open hardware, 3D printing,
-machine workshops and cooking.
-
-From this rudimentary time line, it is evident that activities in
-hackerspaces have gravitated towards the physical. The individual
-trajectories of all these technology areas could be unfolded, but here
-the focus will be on microelectronics. This choice of focus is merited
-because microelectronics played a key role in kickstarting hackerspaces,
-as evidenced by the popularity of basic electronic classes and
-programmable microcontroller workshops in the programme of young
-hackerspaces. Physical computing was layed out by Igoe and O’Sullivan in
-*Physical Computing: Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with
-Computers* (2004), and had a great impact on the whole computing scene.
-This new framework of human-machine interaction stressed the way people
-behave in everyday situations using their whole body, and opened the way
-for exploratory research through the construction of intelligent
-appliances. The next year O’Reilly Media started to publish Make
-Magazine which focuses on do-it-yourself technology, including
-tutorials, recipes, and commentary. Among the authors one find many of
-the celebrities of the hacker subculture. “The first magazine devoted to
-digital projects, hardware hacks, and DIY inspiration. Kite aerial
-photography, video cam stabiliser, magnetic stripe card reader, and much
-more.” (Make Magazine, 2011) In Europe, Massimo Banzi and others started
-to work on the invention of Arduino, a programmable microcontroller
-board with an easy-to-use software interface. This amateur-friendly
-microcontroller system became the staple of hackerspaces and artists’
-workshops and initiated a whole new generation into rapid prototyping
-and electronics work. To put it together, physical computing provided a
-theoretical area to be explored, and the Arduino became its killer
-application, while Make magazine and similar media facilitated the
-spread of research results. It is open to speculation how this trend
-fits into the bigger picture of what seems to be a shift in
-sensibilities in society at large. If the 1990s was marked by a
-preoccupation with discourses and languages, preeminence is now given to
-materialities and embodiedness.
-
-The Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge in Budapest is a fairly
-typical third wave hackerspace. It was founded in 2009 after a
-presentation at the local new tech meetup, itself inspired by the
-hackerspaces presentation in Berlin (Stef, 2009). The location is
-comprised of a workspace, kitchen, chill-out room and terrace in an
-inner city cultural centre which hosts ateliers for artists along with a
-pub and some shops. The rent is covered by membership fees and donations
-from individuals, companies and other organisations. Members are
-entitled to a key, while visitors can look up when the space is open
-thanks to a real time signal system called Hacksense. It displays the
-status of the lab on the website, the twitter account and a database.
-Thus, visitors are welcome any time, and especially at the announced
-events that happen a few times every month. These include meetings and
-community events, as well as practical workshops, presentations and
-courses. In line with the hackerspaces design patterns, orientating
-discussions happen weekly on Tuesdays, where decisions are made based on
-a rough consensus. Hackathons are special events where several people
-work on announced topics for six hours or a whole day. These events are
-sometimes synchronised internationally with other hackspaces. However,
-most of the activity happens on a more ad-hoc basis, depending on the
-schedule and the whim of the participants. For this reason, the online
-chat channel and the wiki website are heavily used for coordination,
-documentation and socialisation. Projects usually belong to one or more
-individual, but some projects are endorsed by almost everybody.
-
-Among the projects housed at Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge,
-some arepure software projects. A case in point isf33dme, a
-browser-based feed reader. f33dme is a popular project in the
-hackerspace and as more people adopt it for their needs, it gets more
-robust and more features are added over time. Although this is nothing
-new compared to the free software development model found elsewhere, the
-fact that there is an embodied user community has contributed to its
-success. There are also ‘hardware hacks’ like the SIDBox, which is built
-from the music chip from an old Commodore C64 computer, adding USB input
-and a mini-jack output. This enables the user to play music from a
-contemporary computer using the chip as an external sound card. An ever
-expanding ‘hardware corner’ with electronic parts, soldering iron and
-multimeters facilitates this kind of work. There is also a 3D printer
-and tools for physical work. The members are precarious ICT workers,
-researchers at computer security companies, and/or students in related
-fields. It is a significant aspect of the viability of the hackerspace
-that quite a few core members work flexible hours or work only
-occasionally, so at least during some periods they have time to dedicate
-to the hackerspace. Some of the activities have a direct political
-character, mostly concentrating on issues such as open data,
-transparency and privacy. Noteworthy are the collaboration with groups
-who campaign for information rights issues in the European Parliament
-and in European countries, or helping journalists to harvest datasets
-from publicly available databases. The hackerspace sends delegations
-which represents it atevents in the global hackerspace movement, such as
-the aforementioned Congress and the Chaos Communication Camp, and
-smaller ones such as the Stadtflucht sojourn organised by Metalab, a
-hackerspace in Vienna (Metalab, 2011).
-
-To conclude, the emergence of hackerspaces is in line with a larger
-trajectory in the hacker movement, which gradually has gained more
-institutional structures. The turn towards the physical (mainly through
-utilising micro-controlers) marked the point when hackerspaces became
-widespread, since development and collaboration on such projects is
-greatly facilitated by having a shared space. While most discourse and
-innovation in the community was focused on the organisational form
-rather than the political content of hackerspaces, such less defined and
-more liberal-leaning political content allowed the movement to spread
-and forge connections in multiple directions without loosing its own
-thrust: from companies through civil society to a general audience.
-
-![](http://peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/figure3maxigas2.jpg)
-
-Figure 3. The two previous figures superimposed for the sake of
-clarification.
-
-4. Hacklabs and Hackerspaces
-----------------------------
-
-Having outlined the parallel genealogies of hacklabs and hackerspaces,
-it is now possible to contrast these ideal types with each other and
-make some comparative observations. For the sake of brevity, only a few
-points will be highlighted in this section. Hopefully, these will
-further clarify the differences between labs and spaces and provide some
-useful critierias for further research.
-
-An interesting occasion presented itself in 2010 for making a direct
-comparison between the Hackney Crack House hacklab and the Hungarian
-Autonomous Center for Knowledge hackerspace. I then had first hand
-experience of the distinct ways in which the hacklab and the hackerspace
-developed and presented one and the same artifact. The artifact in
-question is called “Burnstation”. Even a brief sketch of the different
-directions in which Burnstation was developed can serve to illuminate
-some key points deriving from the conceptual and historical genealogies
-put forth above. The Burnstation is a physical “kiosk” that enables the
-user to browse, listen, select, burn to CD or copy to USB audio files
-from a music database (Rama Cosentino platoniq, 2003). The original
-Burnstation was invented in the riereta in Barcelona, which started as a
-hacklab with a media focus in 2001 and became institutionalised in 2005,
-when it received funding from the local authorities — which means it is
-more of a hackerspace nowadays. Underlying this transformation, it is
-also registered on hackerspaces.org. The many variations of Burnstation
-have been displayed publicly in various exhibition contexts as well as
-being widely used in hacklabs and hackerspaces. Snapshots of what the
-original Burnstation and its two derivatives looked like at some point
-in its ongoing development process can be seen in Figure 4 (Rama et al),
-Figure 5 (HCH) and Figure 6 (H.A.C.K.).
-
-The most striking difference between the two recent reimplementations of
-Burnstation is that in the version built by the hacklab people, the
-original concept was altered so that the music collection includes
-exclusively Creative Commons licensed material that can be freely
-distributed to an anything-goes library, including many files which are
-illegal to copy. The message was therefore changed radically from the
-consumption and celebration of the fruits of a new kind of production
-regime to one that emphasised piracy and transgression. The public
-display of the installation was a statement against the Digital Economy
-Act that just came into force in the United Kingdom. The act
-criminalised file sharing and threatened to suspend Internet access in
-cases where intellectual property rights were violated (Parliament of
-the United Kingdom, 2010). Thus the installation was promoting illegal
-activity in direct opposition to the existing state policies — which was
-not as controversial as it sounds since the venues and exhibitions where
-it was on show were themselves on a frail legal footing. In contrast,
-the Burnstation developed by the hackerspace appeared in an exhibition
-on the 300th birthday of copyright in a prestigious institution,
-showcasing the alternative practices and legislative frameworks to the
-traditional view of intellectual property rights.
-
-Another aspect of the difference between the two installations was
-apparent in the solutions for user interaction. The hackerspace version
-was based on an updated version of the original software and hardware: a
-user-friendly web interface running behind a touch screen. The hacklab
-version, on the other hand, reimplemented the software in a text-only
-environment and had a painted keyboard, providing a more arcane
-navigation experience. Moreover, the exhibited installation was placed
-in a pirate-themed environment where the computer could only be
-approached through a paddling pool. The two different approaches
-correspond to the two broad trends in interface design: while one aims
-at a transparent and smooth experience, the other sets up barriers to
-emphasise the interface in a playful way. To conclude, the hackerspace
-members created an alternative experience that fitted in more smoothly
-into the hegemonic worldview of intellectual property and
-user-friendliness, while the hacklab crew challenged the same hegemonic
-notions, foregrounding freedom and desire. At the same time, it is plain
-to see that many factors tie the two projects together. Both groups
-carried out a collective project open for collaboration and built on
-existing results of similar initiatives, using low-tech and recycled
-components creatively. Ultimately, both projects marked a departure from
-preconfigured and consumerist relations with technology. In different
-ways, their interventions sought to put in question existing copyright
-law.
-
-![](http://peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/image1maxigas1.jpg)
-
-Figure 4. Burnstation (Rama Cosentino platoniq). Emerging Art Festival,
-2011, Buenos Aires. Photo by Dianeth Medina.
-
-Generally speaking, technological choices made in the two types of
-spaces described above seem to be conditioned by two factors: the
-historical lineage and the political-cultural surrounding. Since the
-hacklabs bloomed at a time when Internet access and even computers were
-a scarce resource and desktop computing with free software was not
-trivial, their contribution in the area of access and network
-technologies was crucial. Moreover, their contribution to technological
-development and political messages — for example in the case of the
-Indymedia network — fitted into the pattern of the alterglobalisation
-movement, while sharing some of the same defaults. Similarly, a few
-years later, hackerspaces pushed the limits of currently available
-technology by embracing and advancing microcontrollers and 3D printers.
-At the time of writing, they are the only spaces where a general public
-can freely access and learn about such devices, although it is not clear
-whether these will become as ubiquitous in daily life as computers and
-networks. The important difference is that the hackerspaces are not
-embedded and consciously committed to an overtly political project or
-idea. Of course this does not prevent political projects from being
-undertaken in hackerspacesIn the best of cases, the absence of an openly
-declared ideology will potentially lead to a wider diffusion of the
-project. In the worst case, however, the lack of a political
-conscioussness leads to the reproduction of dominant power structures
-orientated towards white middle class tech-savvy males, a claim to be
-investigated below.
-
-A more abstract issue to address in order to highlight the structural
-differences between hacklabs and hackerspaces is their policy and
-practices towards inclusion and exclusion. On the one hand, the
-autonomous or anarchist orientation of hacklabscontrasts sharply with
-the liberal or libertarian orientation of most hackerspaces. On the
-other hand, since hacklabs are more integral to a wider political
-movement, non-technological aspects play a bigger role in how they are
-run. A concrete example is that while sexism and similarly
-offensivebehaviours are mostly seen as legitimate reasons for excluding
-an individual from hacklabs, in hackerspaces such issues are either
-highly controversial and discussed at length to no avail (as in Metalab)
-or simply a non-topic (as in H.A.C.K.). Still, a lecture and discussion
-at the latest Chaos Communication Camp found that although hacker
-culture is still overwhelmingly male-oriented, it has become more and
-more welcoming to women and sexual minorities in the last decade
-(Braybrooke, 2011).
-
-The different priorities of hacklabs and hackerspaces can be
-demonstrated with their diverging policies on wheelchair accessibility.
-While the hacklab in London described above was not wheelchair
-accessible, a ramp has been built for the house itself to be so.
-Discussions about open training sessions included the issue, and a
-temporary computer room was planned on the ground floor. In a similar
-vein, the hackerspace called Metalab in Vienna was made wheelchair
-accessible, and even a wheelchair toilet was installed that a regular
-visitor was using. However, with time it was decided that the darkroom
-would take the place of the wheelchair toilet, practically excluding the
-person from the space. A similar change occurred with the shower, which
-was taken over by the expansion of the machine workshop (Anon, 2011).
-This affected a more or less homeless person who most often came to the
-hackerspace to play chess. These decisions show the reversal of an
-exceptionally inclusive social and spatial arrangement because of a
-prioritised focus on technology, coupled with the primacy assigned to
-collective interests over minority needs. Hacklabs, especially if they
-reside in occupied spaces, are less inclined to make such decisions,
-partly because of the ethos of the public space that often comes with
-occupations, and especially in social centres. However, it has to be
-notes that while accessibility and non-discriminations are legitimate
-grounds for debate in hacklabs but not necessarily in hackerspaces, as
-the above example shows even hacklabs have made little practical
-progress on the issue.
-
-![](http://peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/image2maxigas1.jpg)
-
-Figure 5. Piratepond installation from Hackney Crack House at the
-Temporary Autonomous Art exhibition in London, 2011, including a
-Burnstation. Photo in the public domain.
-
-Finally I would like to make apoint about the political impact of these
-diverging constellations, and ask to what extent and in which ways they
-contribute to and support postcapitalist practices, movements and
-subjectivities. The hacklabs gave a technological advantage to
-grassroots political movements, pioneering access to information and
-communication technologies and innovative solutions in an era where
-access was not available to most people as a consumer service. On the
-downside, those initiatives often got stuck in what has could be called
-a “activist ghetto” or an “underground”, which meant that even the
-Burnstation project described above was only available to a limited
-social group. Through a process that Granzfurthner and Schneider
-describe as the capitalist co-optation of the fertile resistance
-inherent in such scenes ([2009]), the hackerspaces managed to go beyond
-these historical limits and forged important connections. The latter
-continue to have a lasting impact through the technological artifacts —
-both abstract and physical — that they create, as well as the innovation
-and most importantly the education that they practice. The case of 3D
-printers, which according to Jakob Rigi can revolutionise production
-processes and create the conditions for a society based on craftsmanship
-rather than factories, is but one case in point ([2011]). Moreover,
-thanks to their more open dynamics, hackerspaces can foster
-collaboration between a wide range of social actors. For the hacker
-culture that has managed to catapult itself to the front pages of
-international newspapers in the last few years, it is of immense
-significance to have acquired a global network of real workshop spaces
-that provide an infrastructure. In the current global political
-atmosphere dominated by an array of crises, this scene shows vitality
-and direction. However, as the superuser command says, “With great power
-comes great responsibility”.
-
-The appreciation of history is not about passing judgement on the old
-and the dead, but it is there to inspire present efforts. As Théorie
-Communiste argues, each cycle of struggle brings something new based on
-what happened before, thereby expanding the historical limits of the
-struggle (Endnotes, 2008). Perhaps the political potential of
-hackerspaces lies precisely in the fact that they have not become a
-social movement and therefore not limited by the conventions of social
-movements. They stand at the intersection of the dystopian “geeky
-workshop paradises” (Granzfurthner and Schneider [2009]) and the utopian
-reality of genuinely contestant spaces that have wide impact. If more
-hackers can combine the technological productivity of the “hands-on
-imperative” (Levy [1968], 2001) and the wide possibilities of
-transversal cross-pollination of hackerspaces with the social critique
-of the hacklabs, there is a world to win.
-
-![](http://peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/image3maxigas1.jpg)
-
-Figure 6. Burnstation from Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge,
-exhibited at KOPIRÁJT, OSA Archivum, 2010. Photo by eapo. License: CC
-BY-NC.
-
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-
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-http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-1/debate-societal-transformation/ten-patterns-developed-by-the-oekonux-project/
-
-· Ten patterns developed by the Oekonux project
-
-by Stefan Meretz.
-=================
-
-Read also the responses by [Maurizio Teli](http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-1/debate-societal-transformation/a-practice-based-perspective/) and [Toni Prug](http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-1/debate-societal-transformation/a-note-on-evaluation-processes-for-social-phenomena-with-ambitious-claims/).
-======================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================================
-
-**Summary\
-**\
- The Oekonux project seeks to establish a new basis for analyzing a new
-historical phenomenon: the emergence of peer production, starting with
-the creation of Free Software. If the initial hypotheses of Free
-Software being the germ form of a new mode of production beyond
-capitalism is valid, it would be necessary to develop new
-epistemological patterns to be able to analyze it adequately. This
-requires understanding and criticizing old analytical notions as
-historical products of the outlived capitalist way of producing our
-livelihood, including those which aim to be in opposition to capitalism.
-In this paper I present ten patterns which have emerged from the debates
-of the Oekonux Project. They demonstrate what it means to go beyond
-traditional affirmative and traditional oppositional or “leftist”
-patterns of analysis. Although taken from the debates in the Oekonux
-Project, these have never yet been presented in such a condensed way.
-Obviously not all patterns will be shared by all the participants of
-these debates, because in the end these are my personal conclusions
-drawn from over ten years of discussion.
-
-Introduction
-------------
-
-In this text I will try to give some introduction to the main ideas
-which have been developed since the foundation of the Oekonux project in
-1999. There is no fixed set of thoughts and personally I have my own
-perspective on Oekonux ideas.
-
-Why is the Oekonux project so relevant for debates around commons-based
-peer production? There are two reasons. First, Oekonux developed many of
-the ideas many researchers are so familiar with many years before they
-reached a wider audience. Oekonux was founded as a project of reflection
-around Free Software, but from the beginning the question of
-generalizing observations about Free Software to other realms of
-immaterial as well as material goods was present. When Yochai Benkler
-(2006) coined the term commons-based peer production it only condensed a
-year-old debate into a catchy notion, but the insights itself were not
-very new and sound very familiar to Oekonux participants. Consequently
-the term has been adopted by the Oekonux project.
-
-Second, Oekonux participants have gone much further than others in
-questioning the accepted way of thinking. New theses have been developed
-which did not only reject traditional discourse patterns in computer
-sciences, sociology, and economics, but also in emancipatory political
-and theoretical approaches. Stefan Merten, the founder of Oekonux who
-comes from an anarchist-marxist background, provocatively rejects
-“leftist and other capitalist ideologies” (Merten 2011) for the analysis
-of peer production. This sounds quite post-modern, but was meant
-differently: All means of emancipation are going to be developed right
-in front of our eyes, but we also have to grasp them theoretically.
-Traditional leftist patterns are not able to do that, because they
-adhere to the given mode of production for whose analysis they are made.
-
-This was an enormous provocation to many people, traditionalists on all
-sides. And there have been many cultural and political clashes within
-the project. But there also have been a core of people, who continuously
-drove the Oekonux approach further. In the following I try to describe
-some Oekonux patterns, which of course represent my interpretation of
-the Oekonux debate. When I use the past when talking about Oekonux, it
-is not because the project does no longer exists. It still exists, and
-the Critical Studies in Peer Production journal is not the only spin-off
-of the project, there have been many others, so that the focus
-decentralizes to diverse projects inspired by Oekonux.
-
-In an interview with Joanne Richardson Stefan Merten (2001) described
-Oekonux as a project to evaluate Free Software with respect to its
-“potential for a different society beyond labor, money, exchange”. Here,
-he gives the keywords Oekonux thinking was built around. I will take and
-extend them to illustrate why and how the main ideas contradict
-traditional leftist thinking so much, especially when Oekonux started in
-1999 (Merten 1999).
-
-Pattern 1: Beyond Exchange
---------------------------
-
-Free Software, or more generally, commons-based peer production is not
-about exchange. Giving and taking are not coupled with each other. From
-today’s perspective this might not be surprising, but at the beginning
-of the Oekonux project it was. Still today traditional Leftist
-approaches are based on the assumption that someone is only allowed to
-get something, if s/he is willing and able to give something back,
-because if everybody is only taking then society would perish. This
-position could reference to a painful Socialist (and Christian)
-tradition saying that the one who does not want to work, should not eat.
-However, Free Software clearly showed that developers do not need to be
-forced to do what they love to do (cf. pattern 5).
-
-One important approach which tried to grasp the new developments of Free
-Software, although sticking with old thinking, was the “gift economy”
-approach. However it is not coincidental that the correct term should be
-“gift exchange economy”: The giver can expect to get something back,
-because it is a moral duty in societies based on the exchange of gifts.
-This kind of personal reciprocal duty does not exist in Free Software.
-Even if a developer says that s/he wants to “give something back”, then
-this giving is not a precondition to receive something. In general,
-commons-based peer production is based on unconditional voluntary
-contributions.\
- From a Leftist perspective, uncoupled giving and taking could only be
-possible in a mythical land in a distant future called Communism – if at
-all. But never today, because before communism is possible, an
-unfriendly interphase called Socialism sticking with the exchange dogma
-is necessary (cf. pattern 8). Historically, “real existing Socialism”
-trying to implement this necessity failed, which will happen with all
-Socialist approaches accepting the exchange dogma.
-
-*If one does not want to give up exchange, then capitalism is the only
-option.\
-*
-
-Pattern 2: Beyond Scarcity
---------------------------
-
-It is a common misconception that material things are scarce while
-immaterial things are not. It seems justified to keep material goods as
-commodities while immaterial goods are required to be free. However,
-this assumption turns a social property into a natural one. No produced
-good is scarce by nature. Scarcity is a result of goods being produced
-as commodities, thus scarcity is a social aspect of a commodity created
-for a market. In the digital era this is obvious for immaterial goods,
-as we can clearly see the measures to artificially make the good scarce.
-Such measures include laws (based on so-called “intellectual property”)
-and technical barriers to prevent free access to the good. It seems to
-be less obvious for material goods, because we are used to the
-non-accessibility of material goods unless we have paid for them. But
-the measures are the same: law and technical barriers, accompanied by
-continuous destruction of goods to keep the commodities rare enough to
-obtain a suitable price on markets.
-
-Furthermore it seems obvious that we all depend on material goods which
-may not be available in sufficient amount. Even immaterial goods depend
-on a material infrastructure, at least our brains (in the case of
-knowledge), which also need to be fed. This is definitely true, however,
-it has nothing to do with a “natural scarcity”. Since all goods we need
-are to be produced, the only question is, how they are to be produced in
-a societal sense. The commodity form is one option, the commons form
-another. Commodities must be produced in a scarce manner to realize
-their price on the market. The commons good can be produced according to
-the needs of the people using the given productive capacity. There might
-be current limitations, but limits always have been subject to human
-creativity to overcome them.
-
-Maybe some limitations may never be overcome, but this again is no
-reason to make goods artificially scarce. In these rare cases social
-agreements can be used to organize responsible use of the limited
-resource or good. The commons movement learned that both rival as well
-as non-rival goods can be produced as commons, but they require
-different social treatment. While non-rival goods are agreed to be
-freely accessible to prevent under-use, it makes sense to avoid over-use
-for rival goods by finding appropriate rules or measures either to
-organize sustainable use or to extend collective production and thus
-availability of the rival good.
-
-*Scarcity is a social phenomenon which is unavoidable if goods are
-produced as commodities. Often scarcity is confused with limitations
-which can be overcome by human efforts and creativity.\
-*
-
-Pattern 3: Beyond Commodity
----------------------------
-
-In her studies Elinor Ostrom found, that “neither the state nor the
-market” is a successful means for commons management (1990). Based on
-traditional economics she analyzed the practices of natural commons and
-finally simply proved liberal dogmatics wrong. Markets are not a good
-way to allocate resources, and the State is not a good way to
-re-distribute wealth and manage the destructive results of markets. Best
-results occur if the people organize themselves according to their
-needs, experiences and creativity and treat resources and goods not as
-commodities, but as common pool resources.
-
-This is exactly what happens in Free Software. Interestingly it took
-many years to understand that Free Software is a commons and that it is
-basically identical to what Elinor Ostrom and others were talking about
-much earlier. One weak aspect of the traditional commons research and
-the early phase of Free Software was that a clear notion of a commodity
-and a non-commodity did not exist. It was the Oekonux Project which
-clearly said: Free Software is not a commodity. This dictum is closely
-related to the insight that Free Software is not exchanged (cf. pattern
-1).
-
-Critics from the left argued that being a non-commodity is limited to
-the realm of immaterial goods like software. From their viewpoint Free
-Software is only an “anomaly” (Nuss, Heinrich 2002), while “normal”
-goods in capitalism have to be commodities. This assumption, however, is
-closely linked to the acceptance of the scarcity dogma (cf. pattern 2).
-Moreover, it treats capitalism as a kind of normal or natural mode of
-production under conditions of “natural scarcity” (as they think). This
-view completely turns real relations upside down. Capitalism could only
-establish itself by enclosing the commons, by depriving the people from
-their traditional access to resources in order to transform them into
-workers. This enclosure of the commons is an ongoing process. Capitalism
-can only exist if it continuously separates people from resources by
-making them artificially scarce. A commodity – as nice as it may appear
-in the shopping malls – is a result of an ongoing violent process of
-enclosure and dispossession.\
- The same process occurs in software. Proprietary software is a way of
-dispossessing the scientific and development community from their
-knowledge, experiences, and creativity. Free Software was first a
-defensive act of maintaining common goods common. However, since
-software is at the forefront of the development of productive forces it
-quickly turned into a creative process of overcoming the limitations and
-alienations of proprietary software. In a special field Free Software
-established a new mode of production which is going to spread into other
-realms (cf. pattern 10).
-
-*Goods which are not made artificially scarce and are not subject to
-exchange are not commodities, but commons.*
-
-Pattern 4: Beyond Money
------------------------
-
-Since money only makes sense for commodities, a non-commodity (cf.
-pattern 3) implies that there is no money involved. Thus Free Software
-is beyond money. On the other hand, there is obviously a lot of money
-around Free Software: developers are paid, companies spend money, new
-companies are formed around Free Software. This has confused a lot of
-people, even on the left. They stick to an either-or thinking, being
-unable to think these observations as a contradictory process of
-parallel development in a societal period of transition (cf. pattern
-10).
-
-Money is not a neutral tool, money can occur in different social
-settings. It can be wage money, invested money (capital), profit, cash
-money etc. Different functions have to be analyzed differently. In Free
-Software there is no commodity form involved, so money in the narrow
-sense of selling a commodity for a price does not exist. However, Eric
-Raymond explained how to make money using a non-commodity: by combining
-it with a scarce good. In a capitalist society where only a few goods
-had broken out of the commodity realm, it is beyond question that all
-other goods continue to exist as commodities. They are kept scarce and
-they are combined with a priceless good. Using a perspective of
-valorization this is nothing new (e.g. spreading gifts to attract
-customers). Using a perspective of recognizing a germ form this way a
-new mode of production starts to develop within the still existing old
-model.\
- But why do companies give money if this money is not an investment in
-the traditional sense, but a kind of a donation, e.g. to pay Free
-Software developers? Why did IBM put one billion dollars into Free
-Software? Because they were forced to do so. Economically speaking they
-have to devalue one business area to save the other profit-making areas.
-They have to burn money to create a costly environment for their sales
-(e.g. server hardware). As the enclosure of the commons is a
-precondition for capitalism, the other way around is also true.
-Extending the commons in a field currently dominated by commodities
-means that this field is replaced by free goods.
-
-However, the “four freedoms” of Free Software – use, study, change,
-redistribute – (Free Software Foundation, 1996) do not speak about
-“free” in the sense of “gratuitous”. The slogan “free as in freedom, not
-in free beer” is legion. This is completely fine and does not contradict
-the “beyond money” dictum, because the four freedoms do not say anything
-about money. The four freedoms are about free availability, are about
-abundance. Thus, the absence of money is an indirect effect. Abundant
-and thus non-scarce goods cannot be a commodity (cf. pattern 2) and
-cannot make any money. However, making money is not forbidden per se.
-
-There have been a lot of attempts to integrate the non-exchange,
-non-commodity, commons-based free circulation of Free Software into the
-traditional economic paradigm, which is based on exchange and commodity.
-The most prominent one was the “attention economy” saying that the
-producers do not exchange goods, but attention (Goldhaber, 1997). They
-concluded that attention is the new currency. But this was only a
-desperate attempt do cling to old terms which neither worked properly
-nor delivered any new insights and thus was not relevant. Various other
-similar attempts are skipped here.
-
-*Being beyond money directly results from not being a commodity.\
-*
-
-Pattern 5: Beyond Labor
------------------------
-
-Free Software and commons in general is beyond labor. This can only be
-understood if you grasp labor as a productive activity specific to a
-certain historical form of society. Selling labor power – i.e. the
-ability to work – to some capitalist who uses it to produce more value
-than the labor power is worth, is unique in history. This has two
-important consequences.
-
-First, it turns productive activity – which has always been used by
-people to produce their livelihood – into alienated labor. This
-alienation is not imposed by personal domination, but by structural
-coercion. In capitalism humans can only survive if they pay for their
-livelihood, which compels people to make money. Making money can be
-either done by selling their own labor power or by buying and valorizing
-the labor power of others. The result is a distorted process where
-structural requirements prescribe what a person has to do (cf. pattern
-6).
-
-Second, it creates the homo economicus, the isolated individual seeking
-for maximization of his/her own utility – if necessary even at the
-expense of others. Traditional economists then assert that the homo
-economicus is the archetype of a human being, which confuses the
-specific historical result with a natural presupposition.
-
-Instead of labor, Free Software is based on Selbstentfaltung. The German
-notion of Selbstentfaltung is not easy to translate. On the one hand it
-starts from “scratching an itch” (Eric Raymond), “doing what you really
-really want” (Fritjof Bergmann), and “having a lot of fun” (the Free
-Software developer). On the other hand it integrates other fellow
-developers to strive for the best solution possible. This also means
-high engagement, passion, and effort, not just picking the low hanging
-fruits. It includes a positive reciprocity with others striving for the
-same goal in a way, that the Selbstentfaltung of the one is the
-precondition of the Selbstentfaltung of the others. Not by chance this
-is reminiscent of the Communist Manifesto where the “the free
-development of each is the condition for the free development of all”
-(Marx, Engels 1848). However, in Free Software it is not a goal of a
-future society, but it is an inalienable feature of the beginning new
-mode of production on the way to that new free society.
-
-*Instead of selling one’s energy for alienated purposes, usually called
-labor, Free Software is based on Selbstentfaltung which is the free
-development of all the productive forces of the people.*
-
-Pattern 6: Beyond Classes
--------------------------
-
-Capitalism is a society of separations. Buying vs. selling, producing
-vs. consuming, labor vs. capital, concrete vs. abstract labor, use value
-vs. exchange value, private production vs. social distribution etc.
-Capitalist development is driven by the contradictions between these
-separated parts. Among them, labor and capital is only one
-contradiction, but it seems to be the most relevant one. A person seems
-to be defined by being a labor seller or a labor buyer, a worker or
-capitalist. However, in fact labor and capital are not properties of
-individuals, but opposite societal functions like all other separations
-capitalism generates.
-
-Therefore, it is not true that only one side of the various separations
-represents the general or progressive one. On the contrary, both parts
-of a separation depend on each other. Labor produces capital, and
-capital creates labor. It is an alienated cycle of a permanent
-reproduction of the capitalist forms. Thus, both sides of these
-separations, e.g. labor and capital, are necessary functions of
-capitalism. The so called antagonism of labor and capital is in fact a
-purely immanent mode of historical development of capitalism. The
-working class does not represent emancipation, by no means.
-
-Free Software and peer production in general is not recreating classes,
-it is rather beyond that mode. It represents a germ form (cf. pattern
-10) of a new mode of production which generally is not based on
-separations, but on integrating different personal needs, behavior and
-wishes as a powerful source of development. Exploitation does not exist,
-because selling and buying of labor does not exist and money can only
-play a role in retro games about antiquated societies called
-“capitalism”.
-
-*Selbstentfaltung as a free developing human being is the source of
-societal transition towards a free society, not the class adherence.*
-
-Pattern 7: Beyond Exclusion
----------------------------
-
-One of the most basic separations capitalism generates is the separation
-of those who are inside and those who are not. This inside/outside
-pattern is not a class separation (cf. pattern 6) and it is not only one
-big separation. It is a structural mechanism of inclusion and exclusion
-along all possible lines of society: job-owner vs. jobless, rich vs.
-poor, men vs. women, people of color vs. white people, bosses vs.
-subordinated, owners of means of production vs. non-owners, members of
-social security vs. non-members etc. It has to be recognized as a basic
-structural principle of capitalism: An inclusion of the one side implies
-an exclusion of the other side. For the individual this means that any
-personal progress is realized at the expense of others who stagnate or
-regress.
-
-In general the commons are beyond the mechanism of exclusion. In Free
-Software, for example, the more active people join a project the faster
-and the better a goal can be achieved. Here, the relationship between
-people is not structured by inclusion-exclusion mechanisms, but by an
-inclusive reciprocity (Meretz 2012). The maintainer of a project tries
-to include as many active people as possible, strives for a creative
-atmosphere, and tries to solve conflicts in a way, that as many people
-as possible can follow the “rough consensus” and the “running code”.
-
-If a consensus is not possible the best solution is then a fork: a risky
-but valid option to test different directions of development. If you
-look at existing forks (e.g. between KDE and GNOME), then many of them
-are working closely together or maintain an atmosphere of cooperation.
-Yes, there are other examples of fights against one another. But these
-non-productive forks are mainly due to alienated interests playing an
-important role. Oracle tried to implement a command and control regime
-after having bought OpenOffice as part of the Sun package. The fork to
-LibreOffice by many important developers was an act of self-defense and
-self-determination to maintain their environment of Selbstentfaltung.
-They don’t want to go back into the old “labor mode” of development (cf.
-pattern 5).
-
-*While capitalism is structurally based on exclusion mechanisms,
-commons-based peer production generally creates and advances inclusion.*
-
-Pattern 8: Beyond Socialism
----------------------------
-
-Socialism, as defined by Karl Marx in the “Critique of the Gotha
-Programme” (Marx, 1875) is a commodity-producing society ruled by the
-working class. Historically this was realized by the so called “real
-existing Socialism”. There have been many critiques of real socialist
-countries (lacking democracy, etc.) from within the left. Nevertheless,
-a good part of the left shares the assumption that an interphase between
-a free society (which may be called communism) and capitalism is
-unavoidable. The general concept is that the working class holding the
-power can reconstruct the whole economy according to their interests
-which represent the majority of the society. In short: power comes
-first, then a new mode of production will follow, in order to build a
-really free society. This concept has failed historically.
-
-The reason for this failure is not due to internal tactical differences
-and shortcomings. Instead it is due to the unrealistic concept of
-qualitative historical transformation. Never in history was the question
-of power placed first, it was always the new mode of production which
-emerged from the old way of producing which prepared the historical
-transition. Capitalism initially developed from craftsmanship in
-medieval towns, then integrated manufactures, finally leading to the
-system of big industry. The question of power was solved “on the way”.
-This does not diminish the role of revolutions, but revolutions only
-realize and enhance what was already developing. The revolutions of the
-Arab Spring do not create anything new, but try to realize the
-potentials of a normal democratic bourgeois society.\
- This analysis of historical developments (discussed in more detail in
-pattern 10) has to be applied to the current situation. Historical
-transition can not be realized by taking over political power – be it by
-parliament or by street actions – but by developing a new mode of
-production. The criteria for being “new” can be derived from the
-negation of the old mode of production: instead of commodities: commons
-production, instead of exchange and mediation by money: free
-distribution, instead of labor: Selbstentfaltung, instead of exclusion
-mechanisms: potential inclusion of all people. However, care needs to be
-taken since not all developments of capitalism are to be abolished.
-Rather some continue – though in a transcended form.
-
-*Commons-based peer production transcends capitalism as well as
-commodity-based socialism.*
-
-Pattern 9: Beyond Politics
---------------------------
-
-Since commons-based peer production is mainly about constructing a new
-mode of production, it is basically a non-political movement. Here,
-politics is understood as addressing the state and its institutions to
-demand changes in some desired direction. Such politics are based on
-interests which in capitalism are generally positioned against each
-other. If a society is structured along inclusion-exclusion patterns
-(see pattern 7), then it is necessary to organize common but partial
-interests in order to realize them at the expense of the common partial
-interests of others. In this sense commons are beyond politics, because
-they basically do not operate in the realm of interests but of needs.
-
-It is important to distinguish between needs and interests. Needs have
-to be organized in the form of interests, if the usual mode of
-realization is the exclusion of the interests of others. Commons on the
-other hand are based on the variety of needs of their participants,
-which act as a source of creativity. The mediation of these different
-needs is part of the process of peer production. Thus, it is not
-necessary that participants additionally organize their needs as
-interests and try to implement them politically. Instead, they achieve
-this directly.
-
-One aspect which makes this clear is the question of hierarchies.
-Usually hierarchies are part of capitalist commodity production.
-Therefore, a common left topic was to reject any hierarchies to avoid
-domination. This ignores the fact that hierarchies as such do not
-generate domination, but rather the function hierarchies have in a given
-context. In a company hierarchies express different interests, for
-example the interests of workers and of the management (cf. pattern 5).
-However, in a peer production project a hierarchy may express different
-levels of expertise or different responsibilities, which are shared by
-those who accept someone in a leading position. Being a maintainer does
-not mean following different interests at the expense of project
-members. Such a project would not prosper. On the contrary, a maintainer
-is keen to integrate as many active and competent members as possible.
-This does not avoid conflicts, but conflicts are solved on the common
-base of the project’s goals.
-
-*Commons-based peer production does not require to articulate people’s
-needs in the form of opposing interests and thus is beyond politics.*
-
-Pattern 10: Germ Form
----------------------
-
-Last but not least, the most important pattern is the germ form or
-five-step-model (Holzkamp, 1983). It is a model to understand the
-concurrent existence of phenomena with different qualities. When
-discussing peer production the debate is often dominated by two groups:
-those who are in favor of peer production and who try to prove peer
-production is anti-capitalist and those who see peer production only as
-a modernization of capitalism. The challenge is to think it as both. The
-germ form model accomplishes this by viewing the emergence and
-development of commons-based peer production as a process of its own
-contradictory unfolding in time.
-
-Normally applying the five-step-model is a retrospective procedure where
-the result of the analyzed development is well known. By mentally
-assuming the result of a transition towards a free society based on
-commons-based peer-production the emergence of this result can be
-reconstructed using the model. Here is a very rough sketch of the five
-steps applied to the case of peer production.
-
-​1. Germ form: A new function appears. In this phase the new function
-must not be understood as a rich germ or a seed enclosing all properties
-of the final entity which only has to grow. Rather in this phase the
-germ form shows only principles of the new, but it is not the new
-itself. Thus, commons-based peer production is not the new itself, but
-the qualitatively new aspect it shows is the need-oriented mediation
-between peers (based on Selbstentfaltung, see pattern 5). During this
-phase this is visible only on a local level.
-
-​2. Crisis: Only if the overall old system falls into a crisis can the
-germ form leave its niche. The capitalist way of societal production and
-mediation via commodities, markets, capital, and state has brought
-mankind into a deep crisis. It has entered a phase of successive
-degradation and exhaustion of historically accumulated system resources.
-The recurring financial crisis makes this obvious to everyone.
-
-​3. Function shift: The new function leaves its germ form status in the
-niche and gains relevance for the reproduction of the old system. The
-former germ form is now double-faced: On the one hand it can be used for
-the sake of the old system, on the other hand its own logic is and
-remains incompatible with the logic of the dominant old system. Peer
-production is usable for purposes of cost-saving and creating new
-environments for commercial activities, but it rests upon non-commodity
-development within its own activities (cf. pattern 3). Cooptation and
-absorption into normal commodity producing cycles are possible (De
-Angelis, 2007), and only if peer production is able to defend its own
-commons-based principles and abilities to create networks on this ground
-will the next step be reached. Free Software as one example of peer
-production quite clearly is at this stage.
-
-​4. Dominance shift: The new function becomes prevalent. The old
-function does not disappear immediately, but steps back as the
-previously dominant function to marginal domains. Commons-based peer
-production has reached a network density on a global level, so that
-input-output links are closed to self-contained loops. Separated private
-production with subsequent market mediation using money is no longer
-required. Need-based societal mediation organizes production and
-distribution. The entire system has now qualitatively changed its
-character.
-
-​5. Restructuring: The direction of development, the backbone
-structures, and the basic functional logics have changed. This process
-embraces more and more societal fields which refocus towards the new
-need-based mode of societal mediation. The state is stripped down, new
-institutions emerge, which no longer have a uniform State character, but
-are means of collective Selbstentfaltung (cf. pattern 5). New
-contradictions may come up, a new cycle of development may begin.
-
-This is only an epistemological model, not a scheme for immediate
-action. The main advantage is the possibility to escape unfruitful
-either-or debates. It allows for thinking the emergence of a new mode of
-production being useful for the old system while maintaining its
-transcending function towards a free society as concurrent phenomena.
-
-*The germ form model adapted in the Oekonux context is a dialectical
-conceptualization of historical transition.*
-
-Conclusion
-----------
-
-Far from being a consistent theory of historical transition towards a
-free society these patterns give a fairly good impression of why they
-don’t fit into any of the traditional approaches. There might be some
-accordances with one approach or the other, and most of the Oekonux
-participants will not agree with all of the patterns, but no single
-approach could answer to all challenges at once in a consistent way.
-
-This is not coincidental. On the one hand the formation of a new society
-can not be entirely grasped in terms of the already fully developed
-society which is going to be made history. On the other hand, there are
-overarching aspects which continue to exist in all societies, but which
-undergo a reconfiguration. Other aspects dissolve completely. And
-finally some aspects are leveraged in a way that they hardly have
-anything in common with their origin. These three forms of transition –
-preservation, dissolution, leverage – describe the meaning of what
-G.W.F. Hegel called sublation (Aufhebung). Ten patterns of societal
-transition presented in this paper try to fulfill this requirement.
-
-**Credits**
-
-Special thanks to Stefan Merten and Mathieu O’Neil for editing support.
-Tomislav Knaffl gave valuable hints.
-
-**Works cited**
-
-Benkler, Y. (2006), The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
-Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press, URL:
-cyber.law.harvard.edu/wealth\_of\_networks/ (2011-10-10)
-
-De Angelis, M. (2007), The Beginning of History. Value Struggles and
-Global Capital, London: Pluto Press.
-
-Free Software Foundation (1996), The Free Software Definition, URL:
-www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html (2011-10-10)
-
-Goldhaber, M.H. (1997), The Attention Economy and the Net, in: First
-Monday, Vol. 2, No. 4, URL:
-firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/519/440
-(2011-10-10)\
- Holzkamp, K. (1983), Grundlegung der Psychologie, Frankfurt/Main, New
-York: Campus.
-
-Marx, K., Engels, F. (1848), Manifesto of the Communist Party, URL:
-marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ (2011-10-10)
-
-Marx, K. (1875), Critique of the Gotha Programme, URL:
-marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ (2011-10-10)
-
-Meretz, S. (2012), The Structural Communality of the Commons, In:
-Bollier, D. et al. (2012), Self-Sustaining Abundance, in print.
-
-Merten, S. (1999), Willkommen bei ‘oekonux’, URL:
-www.oekonux.de/liste/archive/msg00000.html (2011-10-10)
-
-Merten, S. (2011), Leftist and other capitalist ideologies and peer
-production, URL: www.oekonux.org/list-en/archive/msg06135.html
-(2011-10-10)
-
-Merten, S., Richardson, J. (2001), Free Software & GPL Society. Stefan
-Merten of Oekonux interviewed by Joanne Richardson, URL:
-subsol.c3.hu/subsol\_2/contributors0/mertentext.html (2011-10-10)
-
-Nuss, S., Heinrich, M. (2002), Freie Software und Kapitalismus, in:
-Streifzüge 1/2002, URL:
-www.streifzuege.org/2002/freie-software-und-kapitalismus (2011-10-10)
-
-Ostrom, E. (1990), Governing the Commons. The Evolution of Institutions
-for Collective Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
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-tripleC 11(2): 412-424, 2013 http://www.triple-c.at
-
-The Parody of the Commons Vasilis Kostakis1 and Stelios Stavroulakis2 1
-
-Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia, P2P Lab,
-Greece, kostakis.b@gmail.com, www.p2plab.gr/en 2 P2P Lab, Greece,
-sstavra@gmail.com, www.p2plab.gr/en
-
-## Abstract
-
-This essay builds on
-the idea that Commons-based peer production is a social advancement
-within capitalism but with various post-capitalistic aspects, in need
-of protection, enforcement, stimulation and connection with progressive
-social movements. We use theory and examples to claim that peer-to-peer
-economic relations can be undermined in the long run, distorted by
-the extraeconomic means of a political context designed to maintain
-profit-driven relations of production into power. This subversion can
-arguably become a state policy, and the subsequent outcome is the full
-absorption of the Commons as well as of the underpinning peer-to-peer
-relations into the dominant mode of production. To tackle this threat,
-we argue in favour of a certain working agenda for Commons-based
-communities. Such an agenda should aim the enforcement of the circulation
-of the Commons. Therefore, any useful social transformation will be
-meaningful if the people themselves decide and apply policies for their
-own benefit, optimally with the support of a sovereign partner state.
-If peer production is to become dominant, it has to control capital
-accumulation with the aim to marginalise and eventually transcend
-capitalism.  Keywords: Peer Production, Free Software, Collaboration,
-Commons, Emancipation, State Policy, Economic Theory, Partner State,
-Peer Property Acknowledgement: This essay has immensely benefited from
-two anonymous reviewers. We want also to thank Christos Giotitsas for
-his critique. Moreover, Vasilis Kostakis would like to acknowledge
-financial support received by the grants SF 014006 “Challenges to
-State Modernization in 21st Century Europe” and ETF 8571 "Web 2.0 and
-Governance: Institutional and Normative Changes and Challenges”.
-
-It has been claimed that an increasing number of people are now able to
-manage their political, social, and productive lives through a variety
-of interdependent networks enabled by the Information and Communication
-Technologies (ICT) (Castells 2000, 2003; Benkler 2006; Bauwens 2005; Perez
-2002). However, authors, such as Webster (2002a, 2002b), have argued
-against the idea of an “information society”. They emphasise the
-continuities of the current age with former capitalist-oriented social
-and economic arrangements (Schiller 1981, 1984, 1996; Webster 2002a,
-2002b). Kumar (1995, 154) maintains that the information explosion
-“has not produced a radical shift in the way industrial societies
-are organized” to conclude that “the imperatives of profit, power
-and control seem as predominant now as they have ever been in the
-history of capitalist industrialism”. In addition, Berry (2008, 369)
-postulates that scholars such as Benkler (2006) fail to recognise the
-extent to which network forms of production “will be co-opted into
-mainstream 'industrial' ways of production”.  Through several cases of
-successful networked-based, collaborative projects such as free software
-or Wikipedia, we see the emergence of new ‘‘technological-economic
-feasibility spaces’’ for social practice (Benkler 2006, 31). These
-feasibility spaces include different social and economic arrangements,
-in contrast to what Kumar and Webster claim, where profit, power,
-and control do not seem as predominant as they have been in the
-history of modern capitalism. Benkler (2006) has argued that from this
-new communicational environment a new social productive model, i.e.,
-Commons-based peer production, is emerging different from the industrial
-one. Peer production, exemplified by various free software (GNU, the Linux
-kernel, KDE) and free content (Wikipedia) projects, makes information
-sharing more important than the value of proprietary strategies and
-allows for large-scale information production efforts (Benkler 2006). In this context, peer production could
-be considered an early seed form stage of a new mode of production
-enabled through Internet-based coordination where decisions arise from
-the free engagement and cooperation of the people. They coalesce to
-create common value without recourse to monetary compensation as key
-motivating factor (Bauwens 2005; Orsi 2009; Kostakis 2013).  Our take is
-that peer production is a social advancement within capitalism but with
-various post-capitalistic aspects, in need of protection, enforcement,
-stimulation and connection with progressive social movements around
-Commons-oriented policy platforms. As “Commons” we understand the
-cultural and natural resources, which are held in common (not owned
-privately) and remain accessible to all members of a society (see Ostrom
-1990; Hardt and Negri 2011; Bollier 2009). In this essay, our point of
-departure is the digital Commons (knowledge, software, design) since peer
-production was first noticed in the information sphere of production. We
-consider the “Commons” a third sector alongside the market and the
-state, which conceptualises the deep affinities amongst several forms
-of collaboration and helps validate their distinctive social dynamics
-as significant forces in economic and cultural production (Bollier in
-Laisne et al. 2010).  The term “peer production” or “peer-to-peer
-production” originates from the innovative nature of peer-to-peer (P2P)
-networking architecture that enabled the advent of the Internet.  The
-introduction of P2P architecture in the social relations of production and
-exchange of goods and services is based on the idea that every networked
-community, just like every networked node, becomes a “server” to
-satisfy the needs of other communities, as well as a “client” to
-satisfy its own. Peer production operates on a non-competitive, synergetic
-basis leading to an optimal distribution of resources (Benkler 2006;
-Bauwens 2005, 2009). The traditional market approach with its pricing
-mechanism has mostly been unable to achieve such optimal allocations due
-to productive information asymmetry whereas peer production maximises
-the access to information. Contrary to the traditional economic thought,
-in peer production we become witnesses of consumer/producer dichotomy's
-collapse towards a new understanding in the form of the “multitude”
-(Hardt and Negri 2001), “prosumers” (Toffler and Toffler 2006),
-“produsers” (Bruns 2008), or “user-innovation communities” (von
-Hippel 2005).  Further, it has been shown (Benkler 2002, 2006; Bauwens
-2005) how peer production, given certain resources, optimally exploits the
-skills and abilities of the producers involving participatory ownership
-structures, participatory learning and decision-making (Fuchs 2013).
-Whereas the firm binds by contract only a fraction of capabilities,
-which considers appropriate for realising a certain goal. In a peer
-production project the motive emerges when a full set of capabilities
-is accessing a given amount of resources. Peer production achieves
-the optimal allocation of resources being a more productive system
-for information than the market-based or the bureaucratic-state ones
-(Bauwens 2005; Kostakis 2012).  This article begins with a brief outline
-of how the initial architecture of the Internet is being distorted
-into a client-server format as observed in proprietary social networks
-managed by the cognitive capitalists of the web. We, then, address
-and question the main arguments in relation to “the tragedy of the
-Commons” and the phenomenon of Commons-based peer production. What is
-the role of the peer produced Commons in the capitalist accumulation
-while the emancipatory potential of peer communities is neutralised
-without affecting their productive function? To answer this question,
-we discuss how the emancipatory promise of the (digital) Commons and of
-peer production can evolve into a parody bringing to the fore the case
-of free software. To tackle the threat of the Commons' full absorption
-as well as of the underpinning peer-to-peer relations into the dominant
-mode of production, we conclude by arguing in favour of a certain working
-agenda for Commons-based communities.
-
-1. From the Tragedy to the Parody of the Commons Benkler (2006)
-postulates his assumptions about the conditions for the development of
-peer production, taking for granted a general stable economy. He does
-not deal with the threats Commons-based peer production will face once
-exposed to a hostile economic environment.  An emerging question is why
-the dominant socio-economic framework would resist to the building of a Commons sphere. After all, one may argue, it is within
-this sphere that the Internet and many other digital technologies have
-been developing. Our position is that the aforementioned statement is
-partially true: The emergence of web technologies, and of the Internet
-itself, has taken place in a contradictory framework. The previously
-failed attempts for the adoption of ACTA/SOPA/PIPA proposals that seek to
-restrict the freedom of the individuals through a global enforcement of
-strict “intellectual property” standards; the efforts for a regulatory
-regime with an architecture of transactions in the first place (rather
-than policing the transactions afterwards) (Boyle 1997); the attempts for
-surveillance and censorship by both authoritarian and liberal countries;
-and “the growing tendency to link the Internet’s security problems
-to the very properties that made it innovative and revolutionary in
-the first place” (Mueller 2010, 160), are only some reasons that have
-made scholars, like Zittrain (2008), worry that digital systems may be
-pushed back to the model of locked-down devices centrally controlled
-information appliances.  The initial P2P architecture of the Internet,
-based on the end-to-end principle, has been distorted into a client-server
-format where the server has the absolute authority over the client,
-who stands unprotected with limited intervention possibility (Kempf and
-Austein 2004).  The “addiction” of the client to assign tasks, which
-concern him/her on the first place, to the supposed convenience that the
-server offers is a phenomenon observed in proprietary, centralised social
-networks and SaaS models (i.e., “Software as a Service” acronym;
-for example, think of Facebook). This exemplifies the tendency of the
-user population to neutralise and detach from issues important for their
-online and offline future.  Further, in this contradictory framework we
-observe nuanced changes not only in the institutional design concerning
-the Internet but also in the used terminology. For instance, see the
-shift from “free” to just “open source” software. The term
-“open source” has become related to ideas and arguments based only
-on practical values, such as having powerful software (Stallman 2012). As
-Stallman (2012) writes: “the two terms describe almost the same category
-of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different
-values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a
-social movement.” The open source implies that non-free software is an
-inferior solution to the practical problem at hand, whereas for the free
-software advocates non-free software “is a social problem” (Stallman
-2012). “If it's the same software (or nearly so), does it matter which
-name you use?”, Stallman asks to answer, “yes, because different words
-convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give
-you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends
-above all on teaching people to value freedom.” We attempt to move from
-a strict techno-economic analysis towards a discussion of the Commons
-within a turbulent, contradictory socio-economic framework. In other
-words, what is the role of the Commons in the capitalist accumulation
-while the emancipatory potential of peer communities is neutralised
-without affecting their productive function? The capitalist system
-arguably seeks to incorporate Commons-based, peer communities because
-of their cost-effective advantage (low-cost labour with high quality
-products). We argue that the development of P2P relations in itself,
-if placed in the current socio-economic conditions, can take place
-only temporarily because in the long run it will be undermined by
-means designed to maintain profit-driven relations of production into
-power. We call this transformation process “parody of the Commons” in
-relation to what Benkler (2006) defines as “tragedy of the Commons”.
-In 1968, Garret Hardin first introduced the concept of the tragedy of
-the Commons referring to the degradation of a finite resource used by a
-group of individuals who act independently and rationally on the basis of
-their self-interest. If individuals agreed to assign private management
-responsibility, which would implement a protection fence around the
-resource against the “rational” behaviour of all, the resource would
-be safe (Hardin 1968). Elinor Ostrom (1990) understates Hardin's approach
-claiming that if those, who share a certain resource, belonged to a local
-community, then they would adopt the optimal solutions to serve their
-interests. In certain cases the aforementioned statement cannot apply,
-because of a lack of confidence amongst community members due to the high
-communication costs and/or because of the small benefit from the problem
-solving. However, the criteria that Ostrom (1990) articulates are also immanent in Hardin's definition as a
-matter of the rational behaviour of individuals. Ostrom (1990) correctly
-denotes that the resource sustainability can be achieved by adopting best
-practices without the need of privatisation. What eludes both Hardin and
-Ostrom is that the best practices or the technical means are defined by
-those in power. There is arguably almost no possibility of implementing
-measures that would not enforce the established structure. The shared
-resource may not become private, but the extraeconomic support of
-other privatised means in the infrastructure of the common resource
-(e.g. friendly policies toward activities regardless of business plan)
-could gradually eradicate the resource. Once again, the ruling agenda
-defines whether the technical means can be considered best practice.
-Hardin's (1968) position about salvation through privatisation has been
-claimed for forests. If forests get privatised, the manager's best
-interest would be to protect the wood from fire and the uncontrolled
-work of woodcutters. What we have here is a category error. What
-the managers protect is their fenced area rather than the forest
-itself. In front of the “sacred” ownership rights there is no legal
-document to guarantee that the area will remain a forest.  Nowadays,
-the destruction of natural environment does not occur because the
-environment is a common resource. It is arguably happening because the
-applied policies are designed to support means of production of private
-appropriation, which exploit the common resource unconditionally. To
-that point, Hardin's and Ostrom's approaches are equally unhelpful,
-since their difference is related solely to the composition of the
-mixture. For Hardin, more privatisation is required, whereas according
-to Ostrom it should be constrained.  Benkler (2006, 378) explains that
-traditionally the tragedy of the Commons is described by (i) the absence
-of incentives, i.e., nobody invests resources in a project since no
-privatisation follows; (ii) the absence of leadership, i.e., nobody has
-the appropriate authority to guide and accomplish such a project. What
-Benkler says is this: Let's assume that Hardin's proposition is true:
-Privatisation secures the sustainability of a resource. But how do we
-get there? To begin with, what is our incentive to assume ownership or
-management of a common resource, if we do not charge for its use? And
-suppose that the incentive has been found: Are we capable of achieving
-the sustainability goal when this capability is part of collective
-intelligence? The difficulty to meet both conditions means inadequacy
-of assuming responsibility, hence, the common resource has no future,
-according to Hardin. Benkler (2006) states that this does not apply in
-peer production: Commons-based communities manage to find their own ways.
-However, counter-examples can be found against the cases Benkler brings
-to the fore to support his argument. For instance, see the software
-development in traditional corporate environments on projects released
-under permissive free software licenses (examples include the MIT license
-and the BSD licenses), which allow privatising code modifications and,
-thus, do not take action against patent “treachery” (see Peren
-1999; GNU 2013; Fitzgerald 2006). In that way software misses its free
-component and its quality becomes questionable, since the distribution
-of code's changes depends on the personal stance of the entrepreneur
-who can package them up under restrictive terms. That is to say, the
-programmer or the entrepreneur can shift from a permissive license to
-an “end-user license agreement”. In addition, production shifts to
-the terms with which the non-free, proprietary software is produced.
-Thereby the software community experiences higher pressure and the rights
-of the end users are eventually reduced. In other words, permissive free
-software licenses can lead to a “tragedy” or rather a “parody
-of the Commons” because of free software's allegedly emancipatory
-promise. In such a scenario maximising individual freedom away from
-society needs would have worse total consequences than would have resulted
-by applying regulation to maximise societal freedom instead. One might
-claim that code is in abundance, as an informational good with almost
-zero marginal costs; however it needs improvement and maintenance, i.e.,
-labour hours. Hence, investing free labour hours in dead-end projects,
-permissive free software licenses may trigger a parody of the Commons,
-by slowing down the overall adoption pace of free software. By contrast
-the copyleft licenses (for example the GPL, General Public License)
-guarantee end users the freedoms to use, study, share (copy), and modify
-the software. Copyleft is a method of social production as well as a
-process of knowledge sharing, which makes a program or other work free, and requires all modified and
-extended versions of the program to be free as well (GNU 2012). Hence,
-copyleft licenses define the relations amongst the members of software
-communities and in that sense they create ecologies outside or rather
-in the interstices of the capitalist market. To ensure there is no
-misunderstanding, we need to clarify the meaning of free software. The
-“free” in free software, unlike “free” in free labour, does not
-mean gratis. Free software is defined by the four freedoms the user
-of that software has in order to use, study, share copies, and share
-modified versions of the software.
-
-2. Defining the Parody of the Commons We name “parody of the Commons”
-the introduction of privatisation in the management of the common
-resources realised either by the assignment of ownership to individuals or
-by the interference of state regulation, when capital is the prevailing
-force as well as the appropriation of the financial results. Both
-routes rely on the assumption of owning better information pools,
-which is challenged by the current developments of liberal-democratic
-societies. If Commons-based peer production does not become the dominant
-mode of production, the conditions for a tragedy will be arguably met
-and then the emancipatory promise of the Commons will be torn apart. It
-can be claimed that the state policies have to be considered as a
-parameter. We argue that the state intervention – when it legislates
-enforcing or facilitating measures – actually applies Hardin's schema
-following other routes. The state perceives as “public” all goods and
-resources of some value and then intervenes introducing regulations for
-the “common good”.  However, this intervention is an attack to the
-public sphere and subverts communities. If a community starts to grow,
-inspectors from above turn up to define specifications, procedures,
-financial constraints, setting the direction for the future of the common
-resource. Also they set aside the immediate interests of those who now
-must obey rules set by bodies irrelevant to the local needs. The basic
-idea originating to the bounded rationality principle is that regulation
-cannot stop the abuse and eventually the depletion of the Commons
-occurs. This approach does not adopt the position that the state is
-incapable by nature or due to its size.  The state policies are, most of
-the times, what they are because of commitments and facilitations by the
-political system to the financial sector.  We define two main features
-of the parody of the Commons. The first feature is the institutional
-integration, which is the absorption of the proportional dividend of
-every individual by a mandatory private appropriation enforced through
-legislation. The applied policies cannot affect free software communities
-in large scale, but they directly harm other forms of Commons as much
-as any other type of industrial unit involved with the production of
-any material. Individuals enter the Commons to enjoy the participatory
-nature of a productive and/or creative endeavour carrying the belief
-that the involvement of other members alongside with theirs builds a
-sum that belongs to all and from which all benefit from. In that sum,
-every contributor to a Commons-based community expects a contributory
-return plus a reward for nonvoluntary work. The capital markets seriously
-challenge this belief by pursuing their own agenda, based on onerous
-and illegal, concerning the international law, debts that stifle the
-real economy. The central or local administrations in an attempt to
-fulfil financial obligations to creditors, apply policies that oblige
-a whole society to transfer a large part of the national income toward
-payments to creditors. Instead of re-investments for the local needs,
-the society is deprived from valuable resources and assets. The state
-treats Commons-based communities as any other business unit and applies
-heavy non-contributory taxation. Any ambitious activity is finally
-ceased and one of the first victims is the voluntary work done by the
-members of peer communities. This is not an imaginary situation; it is
-the reality in the Eurozone today, where the banking sector is allowed
-to have an unprecedented concentration of power. The link, which makes
-this situation unbearable for all, is arguably the iron fist of the
-common currency. Even Germany, the most powerful economy in the Eurozone,
-is turning slowly into recession (Indexmundi 2013; The Economist 2011)
-while most of the cities and towns there now belong to the banks rather
-than the federal state (Czuczka 2012). For the European south, there are many examples of structural reforms taking
-place that damaged equally the industrial and agricultural sector in
-the last 40 years. This is arguably a path to a dead-end.  The second
-feature is the external outsourcing, according to which, regardless of
-the partners’ intentions and plans, the project is converted into a
-mode of crowdsourcing/aggregation economy. In the aforementioned scenario
-the peer produced use value serves certain for-profit interests no matter
-if peer producers are aware of it. The owners/administrators of the web
-platforms/network, i.e., the “netarchists” such as Facebook or Google
-(for an overview of the concept see Bauwens 2007, 2013; Kostakis 2012)
-can be considered as the web capitalists, who renounce their dependence on
-information accumulation through intellectual property and become enablers
-of social participation (Bauwens 2007, 2013; Kostakis 2012). They combine
-open and closed elements in the architecture of their platforms to ensure
-a measure of profit and control by expanding the reach of neoliberal
-economy through cognitive capitalism (see Aytes 2013; Andrejevic 2013;
-Bauwens 2007, 2013; Kostakis 2012). Fuchs (2013, 219-220) notes that
-in proprietary-based platforms the productive labour is outsourced to
-users “who work completely for free and help to maximize the rate of
-exploitation [...] so that profits can be raised and new media capital
-may be accumulated. This situation is one of infinitive exploitation
-of the users”. In a similar vein, Terranova (2013, 53) addresses the
-relevance of the concept of the Commons: “as the wealth generated by
-free labour is social, so should be the mode of its return”. Hence, she
-concludes, “social networking platforms should be deprivatized – that
-is, that ownership of users’ data should be returned to their rightful
-owners as the freedom to access and modify the protocols and diagrams
-that structure their participation”.  So, free labour is voluntary. In
-peer production projects, the knowledge worker owns the final artefact
-(which is always open to further development) of the productive process
-and gains experience, knowledge, relations and/or even money (however,
-monetary profit is not the key motivating factor) through it. In states
-of privatisation (according to the aforementioned categorisation that
-would be in the crowdsourcing/aggregation economies) free labour implies
-exploitation. In addition to the social media monopolies, the development
-of Apple's MacOS X is another example of external outsourcing. In short,
-MacOS X is based on UNIX, software that begun as a free-shared product to
-later become proprietary under different brand names and then free again
-(for example, FreeBSD and NetBSD). Parts of the latter free software
-components along with the mach kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon
-University were included into NeXTSTEP operating system, which was
-finally renamed into OS X.  Hence, we argue that the Commons firstly
-emerge as a tragedy due to long-term inertia and then evolve to a
-farce or a parody. As soon as the gradual destruction is perceived
-(tragedy) everybody agrees to privatise the management and in case
-they do not agree, the state may force agreement in order to implement
-the assignment. The common resource remains common by its name only
-(parody). We argue that, unfortunately, this is a likely scenario. To
-put it in software terminology, this constitutes a security hole in the
-ecology of peer production, and, for the moment, no patch (i.e., solution)
-has been proposed. The question, therefore, is whether the peer producers
-will actually benefit from the development of P2P relations and the
-production of commonly produced use value, or whether the Commonsbased
-peer production phenomenon will just constitute a part of a neoliberal
-Plan B, put in Caffentzis' terms (2010). Supposing peer production will
-be progressively emerging as a dominant productive model upon which will
-rely the prosperity of the people (see Hardt and Negri 2011; Rigi 2012;
-Bauwens and Kostakis in press; Kostakis 2013), then the transcendence
-of the parody is not just a theoretical issue to be dealt with. It is
-rather a practical, political issue that will determine the success of the
-Commons-based communities in general.  Hence, it is necessary to approach
-the Commons concept within the ongoing socio-economic context that is
-blooming and discuss how it affects the function of the real economy.
-While the triggering event of its burst was the failure of subprime
-mortgages, many opinions have been voiced concerning the causes of the
-2008 financial bubble. Some of technoeconomic nature (for example Perez
-2009a, 2009b) and others (for instance Sowell 2010; Krugman 2009, 2012;
-Stiglitz 2010), which focus more on the symptoms rather than on the inherent contradictory characteristics of the capitalist system. According
-to Karl Marx (1992/1885, 1993/1983), the general pattern of the capitalist
-system, which makes economic crises inevitable, is created by the combined
-action of two laws of capitalist integration. The first law concerns the
-tendency of profit's quota to decrease whereas the second law describes
-the need for an increasing capital concentration and accumulation. These
-two laws contradict each other leading the system to collapses and
-crises: Capital cannot be invested when the declining rate of profit's
-quota is faster than the increasing rate of capital accumulation. In
-Marx's analysis, capitalism is inherently built on a Sisyphean logic
-reaching always a dead-end in which the escapable policy often concerns
-the partial destruction of the total capital. For a certain period of
-time, capitalism –a process of “creative destruction”, to remember
-Schumpeter (1975/1942, 1982/1939) who shares many views with Marx in the
-analysis of the capitalist dynamics– may seem sustainable, introducing
-innovative products and services. Williamson (1995, 1998), also, from
-a different perspective reaches a similar conclusion: Every firm will
-stop developing once its organisational costs surpass the organisational
-costs of a smaller firm.  The partial transformation of the stagnant
-capital into loan capital is used as a pressure valve for overcoming
-the dead-end (Marx 1992/1885; Harvey 2007, 2010; Lapavitsas 2012).
-The overflow of loan capital with compound interest into international
-markets along with the shift of policy decision-making from democratically
-elected state governments to the banking sector firms and institutions
-preserves a global debt crisis. Once the loanable capital secures its
-dominant position in the market, the debt crisis becomes permanent
-and is reinforced regardless of the progress in the annual economic
-indices. Even a prosperous economy will start declining in the course of
-time if the annual surplus is being used to serve external debts. Serving
-the external debt does not necessarily mean that the debt is reduced,
-it may as well increase if the interest is accumulated into capital,
-thus neutralising not only the benefit of the local producers, but also
-any advantage on innovation achieved by their talent and effort. This
-situation occurs when the creditor and the debtor sign an unbalanced
-agreement, the interest rates and spreads are unfairly high and there
-is no flexibility in monetary policy. In that case, and especially in
-bankrupting economies, the individuals who participate in Commons-oriented
-communities may fall into the trap of a parody of the Commons.  The peer
-producer participates to satisfy his/her inner positive motives, interests
-and needs (for instance, the need to create, learn, communicate and share)
-on a voluntary basis (Benkler 2006; Hertel, Niedner and Herrmann 2003;
-Lakhani and Wolf 2005). As Hertel, Niedner and Herrmann (2003, 1174)
-point out, the Linux kernel community participants are driven “by
-similar motives as voluntary action within social movements such as the
-civil rights movement, the labour movement, or the peace movement”. On
-the other hand, the peer producer has no idea that his/her voluntary
-inputs contribute to the retention of the average profit quota's decrease,
-offering the chance to capital to develop, appropriate, expand and grow.
-Therefore, we argue that those who have a competitive advantage over the
-P2P relations of production will benefit from the appropriation of the
-commonly peer produced use value. The aforementioned is a typical case of
-the transformation of the tragedy into parody, once the lack of authority,
-observed in several Commons-based peer projects, gives the chance to
-extra-economic means to take advantage of creative communities' inertia.
-
-3. The Parody of Free Software?  For the economic system the accumulation
-of means of production is both a functional necessity and cause for
-deadlock. In the area of information sciences, computers and other
-digital devices, the technical capacity of using all those devices as
-means of production is at the hands of the majority. The private property
-in the means of production at this economic sector for the first time is
-universal and the amount of means that people own decisively influences
-their potential. Today, free software, due to its technical excellence,
-is being widely used by organisations that compete against the philosophy
-and practice of peer communities. One of the causes is the division of
-the developers' community to those who use the term “free software”,
-thus, contributing to an increasing power of software communities and
-to those who prefer constructs like “open source” or “shared
-source” arguing in favour of the ease of free software penetration into
-the world of business. The latter removed from all users, individuals or
-legal entities, the ability to understand that their political freedom
-that depends on the use of digital media is far more important than the
-technical superiority of the free software that enables those media.
-The majority of the people cannot be aware of all these, when free
-software is not a corner stone of the public education system. This
-shortcoming severely damages society or part of it in the face of
-urgent social issues. Even the application of wide consent policies
-is doomed to fail if the technical infrastructure does not deal with
-immediate social problems.  One may observe two heavy consequences of
-the community division. The approaches closer to “open source”
-are anti-pedagogical due to their axiological neutrality, thereby
-cannot get promoted as educational material, while friction with free
-software does not offer teachers a clear direction. Then society,
-due to absence of guidance, is moving conceptually to what people
-intuitively understand. That software technology is more technology and
-less software, hence, a business for specialised engineers.  When the new
-technology of typography was invented, its high cost kept the majority
-at a distance from these new means of production. In our days, when
-the excuse of keeping a distance from digital media is not an option,
-the misinformation, even by official sources, regarding the dynamics
-of software has become epidemic. In that way, it prevents people from
-finding out how to use computers for their own benefit, instead forcing
-them to assign even the simplest task to computer experts.  The network,
-i.e., a sum of networked nodes, is actually the “real computer” since
-coherence and economies of scale are both possible in the network. The
-traditional state policies that give way to monopoly power cannot easily
-apply here. The advocates of P2P architecture are struggling against a
-coordinated international effort to control the power of peer nodes before
-the majority realises the width of opportunities it offers. The chosen
-policy to subvert Commons-based communities is on one hand the pressure
-for signing international agreements against the freedom of Internet,
-which is a typical operation of institutional integration, and on the
-other the binding of users to monopoly corporations. Those corporations
-charge for pre-installed proprietary technologies that come with any
-newly purchased device and deprive all from basic freedoms in exchange
-of a presumed ease of use.  Although the “golden cage” is a syndrome
-that cannot last forever, companies that develop non-free software may
-estimate that one way or another it will be a source of income driven by
-the power of inertia. Proprietary technologies in operating systems and
-software applications have two major consequences. They keep the users
-divided and helpless (Stallman 2008), deconstruct local cultures (Greve
-2006a, 2006b) and increase digital illiteracy. This is a good example of
-external outsourcing, which holds a more or less important role, however
-the institutional integration appears to be the most appropriate way of
-undermining the Commons.
-
-4. Overcoming the Tensions In times when the global economy is relatively
-stable, the parody of the Commons can be easily avoided. There is
-insignificant migration of labour power from the corporate model
-towards the Commons, hence no serious pressure to apply institutional
-integration and the mobility of community members practically cancels the
-consequence of crowdsourcing. But in an era of economic collapse and while
-mobility becomes a risk, gradually more people direct their attention to
-communities, with many of them doing so for survival purposes.  The state
-seems to face Commons-based peer communities as ordinary economic units
-subject to heavy taxation while supports “intellectual property”-based
-activities. Those activities are injected into communities blocking
-their growth. The hope that the multiplicity of communities will help
-them rise into dominant relations of production is refuted since
-the political system will allow communities to grow only if their
-operations and functions become integrated to the established mode of
-production. History shows that the capitalist mode of production allowed
-no other form of production. The future of pre-capitalist or novel produc-
-tion modes was predetermined: destruction or integration. While P2P
-relations are not dominant, their dependence on a friendly economic
-environment becomes imperative.  A recent example where a Commons might be
-commodified is the case of ERT's digital archive. ERT was the Greek state
-television and radio network. It was a constituent of the public sector
-and had been funded through a mandatory tax implemented into the bill of
-the public electricity enterprise (DEI) for decades. In December 2007,
-the launch of the effort to digitise the old ERT archives was announced,
-which first delivered results a few months later. Although initially this
-endeavour was considered an important step for the public availability
-of a unique cultural wealth, the decision to be distributed in that
-specific way was met with the opposition of several Commons-oriented
-communities and civilians. According to the protesters, behind this
-initiative lies an “innocent fraud”: The digital archive remained
-in the exclusive ownership of ERT. Patented file types and video, text
-and picture formats were selected to implement the digitisation while
-download and further use of the material was forbidden. Further, in the
-current event of ERT's dissolution as a consequence of the Greek crisis,
-(at the time of this writing, August 2013, the fate of ERT's archive is
-still unknown) this national cultural aggregation, created and funded by
-the Greek citizens, may revert to private ownership. Already during the
-summer absence of a public Greek network, private stations broadcasted
-parts of the archive. The ERT case highlights the traditional concept for
-state ownership of public goods: The state manages a resource on behalf
-of the civilians over which they have no authority. And in turbulent
-times the exploitation of the Commons, as part of “shock doctrine”
-policies (see Klein 2008), more easily takes place contributing to
-and catalysing the process of capital accumulation.  An effective
-treatment is arguably the use of means that guarantee the smooth growth
-of communities. Structurally, a measure is the adoption by society of
-the five maturity conditions to enter the Commons: open standards, free
-software, P2P architecture, advanced learning system and communities. As
-far as the political context is concerned, the parliamentary democracy,
-for instance in Greece, is trying hard to secure the current status
-quo by demolishing various citizens' rights and occasionally violating
-constitution. One should not rest his/her hopes on the political party
-system and the associated policies mainly due to three characteristics
-inherent to political party policies: i) restrictions on democracy is
-a policy to overcome economic crisis; ii) supranational centralism in
-deciding and applying fiscal and monetary policies serves the vision
-of a United Europe; iii) in a long period of depression, increased
-capital borrowing is the best method to return to growth.  This set
-of characteristics makes this intentional absurdity evident in the
-behaviour of political parties, for which the probability to adopt P2P
-practices is practically zero, since this perspective requires immediate
-implementation of P2P infrastructures, something which is in contrast
-with the notion of “property” as it is embedded in the philosophy
-of the political system. How is it possible for a political system that
-defends the constitutional interpretation of “property”, to take the
-lead in confiscating private properties? One possible answer is that while
-the political system simply declares itself as an adherent of property,
-it only defends a particular monopolising trend, a form of impersonal
-appropriation against the real individuals.  When Jean Monnet (1976)
-declared “nous ne coalisons pas des Etats, nous unissons des hommes”
-(“we are not building a coalition of states; we are creating a union of
-peoples”), his wish came along with the deconstruction of the national
-state, conceptually prepared in various publications. The philosophical
-background of that approach was clearly Manichaeistic since the bipolar
-schema national-supranational is interpreted on the basis of a theocracy
-that proclaims a dualism of absolute extremes. Only a few scholars,
-Victor Hugo one of them, attempted to transcend the anti-dialectic
-heritage of the discourse around the “ideal of a unified Europe”
-(Swedberg 1994).  The answer to the problem should be a type of democracy
-capable to emerge from the activity of Commons-based communities and
-the interactions among them. A political project at both national and
-international level is required to release the healthy forces that demand
-the construction of communities for the benefit of their members. Given
-the estimated lengthy time period of the economic crisis as well as its
-structural peculiarity, which is a combination of monetary inflexibility
-and debt accumulation regardless the possible reduction of deficit, 
-the parody of the Commons can be eliminated only if communities adhere to
-their mission: To ensure a high maturity level and make their requests
-for a Commons infrastructure a government policy towards a “partner
-state”, i.e., democratically-run, civic institutions that protect
-the common good (see Bauwens 2012; Kostakis 2012).  This high maturity
-level could be achieved through the establishment of a democratic legal
-jurisdiction, which would impose restrictions on the exploitation of the
-Commons (Kleiner 2010; Fuchs 2013; Bauwens and Kostakis in press). Peer
-production might be collectively sustainable but it is not individually:
-Most of the peer contributors cannot make a living and they are dependent
-on wages from the capitalist market. We side with Bauwens and Kostakis
-(in press) who suggest “the creation of Commons-friendly, ethical
-enterprises, consisting of the commoners themselves, who also control
-their own governance and have ownership. Such enterprises would be
-legally structured so that theirs is an obligation to support the
-circulation of the Commons”. The development of the Peer Production
-Licenses, introduced by Kleiner (2010) as a copyfarleft type license,
-could be part of the debate. These licenses could be oriented towards
-a plural form of ownership, which would include “maker ownership
-(i.e. a revisiting of worker ownership for the P2P age), combined with
-user ownership, i.e., a recognition that users of networks co-create
-value; and eventually a return for the ethical funders that support
-the enterprise” (Bauwens and Kostakis in press). In that way profit
-making is allowed, but profit-maximisation would not be the driving
-force of economic development.  Against the capital accumulation,
-which leads to the parody of the Commons-based communities' political
-struggle should include the creation of an infrastructure that protects,
-enables and catalyses the circulation of the Commons. In that way peer
-production i) could become sustainable on the personal level as well;
-ii) expand more easily to the manufacturing of tangible products building
-on its conjunction with the emerging desktop manufacturing technological
-capabilities (see Kostakis 2013); iii) and, thus, protect itself against
-capital accumulation with the aim to marginalise, control and eventually
-transcend capitalism.
-
-5. Conclusion We defined two main features of the parody of the Commons:
-the institutional integration and the external outsourcing, according
-to which the Commons-based peer production is converted into a mode of
-crowdsourcing. In these conditions, we described how the Commons emerge
-as a promise, then a tragedy and evolve into a parody. As soon as the
-gradual destruction is perceived (tragedy) the management of the commons
-resource is privatised: The common resource remains common by its name
-only (parody). We argue that this is a likely scenario, particularly
-damaging communities devoted to the production of tangible goods, in
-the absence of free hardware and open specifications. Since information
-sources as well as ICT are uniformly distributed, we claimed that the
-best management is one applied by groups of conscious individuals
-without orders from above. This should take place away from the
-traditional perception of the market, which, despite its imperfections,
-secured its place in a distant past, when the technology level could
-not possibly support analogous claims. Subdivision of communities
-into groups organised by a particular information-based competitive
-advantage or preferential access and control delegation to the most
-powerful parts cannot be possible if Commons-based communities follow
-their principles. The opening of a path to such a perspective depends on
-whether the majority decides to take creative control of their future.
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-About the Authors Vasilis Kostakis is a political economist and
-founder of the P2P Lab. Currently he is serving as a research fellow
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-
-
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-The fundamental dialectic of our struggle is this: will we be enslaved by our
-technology, or liberated by it?
-
-La dialéctica fundamental de nuestro conflicto es ésta: ¿seremos esclavizados
-por nuestra tecnología, o liberados por ella?
-
-It was in cognizance of this notion, and in service to our collective freedom
-that the Free Software Movement was born. It is in this spirit that we aim here
-to define exactly what it means to say that a network is free.  We hope that
-the existence of this definition will help illuminate the path to a more just
-world.
-
-Fue en la apreciación de esta noción, y en servicio de nuestra libertad
-colectiva, que el Movimiento del Software Libre nació. Es en este espíritu
-que aquí tratamos de definir exactamente lo que significa que una red es
-libre. Esperamos que la existencia de esta definición ayude a iluminar el
-camino hacia un mundo más justo.
-
-Our intention is to build communications systems that are owned by the people
-that use them, that allow participants to own their own data, and that use
-end-to-end encryption and cryptographic trust mechanisms to assure privacy. We
-call such systems 'free networks' and they are characterized by the following
-five freedoms:
-
-Nuestra intención es construir sistemas de comunicación que son de la gente que
-los usa, que permiten a los participantes ser dueños de sus propios
-datos, y que usan encriptación de punta a punta y mecanismos de confianza
-criptográficos para garantizar la privacidad. Llamamos a tales sistemas 'redes
-libres' y están caracterizados por las siguientes cinco libertades:
-
-* Freedom 0) The freedom to participate in the network.
-
-  Freedom 0 regards your right to organize cooperative networks.
-
-  Conventional networks are characterized by a distinction between provider
-  and user. This mode of organization encourages network operation in the service
-  of self-interest. The provider builds and owns the infrastructure, and the user
-  pays for access.  In a free network, however, nodes connect to one another,
-  rather than to a single, monolithic provider. By nature of its design, a free
-  network is owned by those that make use of it. Participants act as providers
-  and users as the same time, and growth is auto-distributed by treating any
-  profits as investment. In this way, those that join the network are able to
-  become owners. This mode of organization encourages network operation in the
-  service of the common good.
-
-* Libertad 0) La libertad de participar en la red.
-
-  La libertad 0 trata sobre tu derecho de organizar redes cooperativas.
-
-  Las redes convencionales se caracterizan por una distinción entre proveedor
-  y usuario. Este modo de organización promueve la operación de la red en
-  servicio del interés propio. El proveedor construye y posee la
-  infraestructura y el usuario paga por el acceso. En una red libre, sin
-  embargo, los nodos se conectan entre sí, en vez de a un único proveedor
-  monolítico. Por la naturaleza de su diseño, una red libre es poseída por
-  aquellos que le dan uso. Los participantes actúan como proveedores y usuarios
-  al mismo tiempo, y el crecimiento es distribuido automáticamente al tratar
-  cualquier ganancia como inversión. De esta forma, aquellos que se unen a la
-  red son capaces de volverse propietarios. Este modo de organización promueve
-  que la operación de la red sea al servicio del bien común.
-
-* Freedom 1) The freedom to determine where one's bits are stored.
-
-  Freedom 1 regards your right to own the material stores of your data.
-
-  Conventional networks encourage (if not force) their participants to store
-  their data in machines which are under the administrative auspices of an
-  external service provider or host. Most folks are not able to serve data from
-  their homes. Participants ought to be free to store their own data (so that it
-  is under their care) without sacrificing their ability to publish it.
-
-* Libertad 1) La libertad de determinar dónde son guardados los bits propios.
-
-  La libertad 1 trata sobre tu derecho de poseer el almacenamiento material de
-  tus datos.
-
-  Las redes convencionales promueven (si no fuerzan) que sus participantes
-  almacenen sus datos en máquinas que están bajo la protección administrativa
-  de un proveedor de servicio o alojamiento externos. La mayoría de la gente no
-  es capaz de servir datos desde sus casas. Los participantes deben ser libres
-  de almacenar sus propios datos (a fin de que estén bajo su cuidado) sin
-  sacrificar su habilidad para publicarlos.
-
-* Freedom 2) The freedom to determine the parties with whom one's bits are shared.
-
-  Freedom 2 regards your right to control access to your data.
-
-  Data mining and the monetization of sharing has become common practice.
-  Participants should be free to chose those with whom they would like to share a
-  given piece of information. Only someone who owns their own data can fully
-  exercise this freedom, but it is an issue regardless of where the relevant bits
-  are stored.
-
-* Libertad 2) La libertad para determinar con quiénes son compartidos los bits
-  propios.
-
-  La libertad 2 trata sobre tu derecho a controlar el acceso a tus datos.
-
-  La minería de datos y la monetización del compartir se ha vuelto una práctica
-  común. Los participantes deberían ser libres de elegir a aquellos con quienes
-  les gustaría compartir una determinada información. Sólo alguien que posee
-  sus propios datos puede ejercitar completamente esta libertad, pero es un
-  problema sin importar dónde estén guardados los bits relevantes.
-
-* Freedom 3) The freedom to transmit bits to one's peers without the prospect
-  of interference, interception or censorship.
-
-  Freedom 3 regards the right to speak freely with your peers.
-
-  Information flows in conventional networks are routinely and intentionally
-  intercepted, obstructed, and censored. This is done at the behest of corporate
-  and state actors around the world. In a free network, private communications
-  should remain unexamined from the time they enter the network until the time
-  they reach their destination.
-
-* Libertad 3) La libertad para transmitir bits a un igual sin el prospecto de
-  interferencia, interceptación o censura.
-
-  La libertad 3 trata sobre el derecho de hablar libremente con tus pares.
-
-  Los flujos de información en las redes convencionales son rutinaria e
-  intencionalmente interceptadas, obstruidas y censuradas. Esto se hace a
-  instancias de actores corporativos y estatales alrededor del mundo. En una
-  red libre, las comunicaciones privadas deberían permanecer sin examinar desde
-  el momento en que entran a la red hasta el momento en que llegan a su
-  destino.
-
-* Freedom 4) The freedom to maintain anonymity, or to present a unique, trusted
-  identity.
-
-  Freedom 4 regards your right to construct your own identity
-
-  There is increasing pressure to forbid anonymity, and yet trustworthy
-  communications remain rare. While it is essential to liberty that individuals
-  be able to remain anonymous in the online public sphere, it is also essential
-  that they be able to construct and maintain persistent, verifiable identities.
-  Such identities might bear a legal name, a common name, or an avatar that masks
-  one's corporeal self – individuals could have many such identities, and switch
-  between them at will. Clear delineation between anonymous, pseudonymous, and
-  onymous actors would enable all of us to better asses the trustworthiness of
-  others on the network.
-
-* Libertad 4) La libertad para mantener el anonimato, o presentar una identidad
-  única y confiable.
-
-  La libertad 4 trata sobre tu derecho a construir tu propia identidad
-
-  Hay una creciente presión para prohibir el anonimato, y sin embargo las
-  comunicaciones confiables permanecen escasas. Mientras que es esencial
-  para la libertad que los individuos puedan mantenerse anónimos en la esfera
-  pública online, también es esencial que sean capaces de construir y mantener
-  identidades persistentes y verificables. Tales identidades podrán mostrar un
-  nombre legal, uno común, o un avatar que enmascara nuestro ser corpóreo - los
-  individuos pueden tener muchas de tales identidades, y cambiar entre ellas a
-  voluntad. Una clara delineación entre actores anónimos, pseudónimos y
-  ónimos[^NdT] nos permitiría a todos evaluar mejor la confiabilidad de otros
-  en la red.
-
-[^NdT]: WTF!
diff --git a/_revision/hacelocracia.markdown b/_revision/hacelocracia.markdown
deleted file mode 100644
index e726018bcd77ccd4809adf4b2afe9ae7bb03d7dc..0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
--- a/_revision/hacelocracia.markdown
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,107 +0,0 @@
-# La Hacelocracia
-
-Tomado de la [Wiki de Noisebridge][0] y liberado bajo [CreativeCommons
-Atribucion-NoComercial-CompartirIgual 3.0][1].
-
-En general cuando alguien quiere hacer algo o hacer un cambio importante en
-Noisebridge, lo menciona en una reunión y pasa por nuestro [Proceso de
-consenso][2]. La mayor parte de las veces muchos de nosotros no tenemos ganas
-de pasar una semana determinando si todos estamos de acuerdo con alguna cosa
-pequeña o mundana, por lo que tenemos la Hacelocracia. La Hacelocracia tiende
-a funcionar siempre que nuestra única regla sea respetada, ser excelente con
-los demás.
-
-Hacelocracia significa: 
-
-> Si querés que algo se haga, hacelo, pero sé excelente con los demás mientras
-> lo hacés.
-
-Una parte importante de ser excelente es documentar tus cambios. Escribí una
-nota en el [Log de cambios][3] de Noisebridge o dejala sobre lo que hayas hecho
-hacelocráticamente. Dejar números de contacto resulta especialmente importante
-si querés que la gente te contacte sobre el cambio que hiciste. El reto
-principal de la hacelocracia no es la posibilidad de revertir los cambios, sino
-en asumirse responsable.
-
-## Casos de uso
-
-### Versión corta
-
-* Pepe pregunta en general si a alguien le parece que el [bicicletero][] sea
-  rosado. A nadie le molesta.
-
-* Pepe pinta el bicicletero de rosa.
-
-
-### La versión siendo excelente con los demás
-
-* Pepe pinta el bicicletero de rosa.
-
-* Pepa no cree que el bicicletero que ayudó a construir tenga que ser rosado.
-
-* Pepa discute amigablemente con Pepe sobre por qué Pepe pensó que estaba bien
-  pintarlo de ese color. Pepe se da cuenta que la otra gente con la que
-  comparte el espacio también tiene sentimientos.
-
-* Pepe y Pepa decidan pintar el bicicletero de azul.
-
-
-### La versión de lo que pasa normalmente
-
-* Pepe pinta el bicicletero de rosa.
-
-* Noisebridge es tan grande que siempre hay alguien con una opinión sobre algo
-  (en general siempre es alguien que no participa activamente del espacio o que
-  no está casi nunca), así que Pepa se enoja con Pepe y lo amenaza de muerte.
-  A Pepa no le gusta el rosa y ya que no tiene un trabajo y está pasando la
-  mayor parte de su tiempo en Noisebridge, es como su segundo hogar y quiere
-  que se maneje como a ella le gusta.
-
-* Pepa y Pepe se gritan en la lista de discusión, molestando a cientos de
-  personas.
-
-* Durante la semana siguiente, Pepe convierte a Noisebridge en un lugar de
-  discusión sobre lo turra que es Pepa y cómo los demás deberían decirlo en la
-  lista de discusión.
-
-* Pepa le da el número y la dirección de Pepe a [#bantown][4].
-
-* Pepe pasa el resto del mes siguiente diciéndole a todo el mundo que va
-  a dejar o dejó de participar en Noisebridge, o alguna combinación de las dos.
-
-* Pepa, en venganza porque Pepe revierte constantemente sus cambios en la wiki,
-  caga sobre la mesa de electrónica, como demostración para aquellos (todos)
-  que no han dejado de hablarle a Pepe.
-
-* Pepe cena con Pepa y después de un rato de chamuyar terminan en la casa de
-  Pepa. La mañana siguiente se despierta en la cama de Pepa, sintiéndose
-  culpable. Ninguna ducha lo hará sentirse limpio.
-
-En este punto una de dos cosas pasa:
-
-* Los amigos de Pepe y Pepa se conocen, por lo que sin darse cuenta terminan
-  emborrachándose juntos en un bar y hacen las paces, llorando en los hombros
-  del otro sobre la pérdida de tiempo que es Noisebridge.
-
-* El drama continúa hasta que alguien se rinde y sigue con lo suyo. Nadie se
-  acuerda cómo fue que empezó esta batalla épica.
-
-
-### Notas
-
-* La Hacelocracia funciona la mayor parte del tiempo. Cuando no, es una cagada.
-
-* Escribí una nota (con tu nombre o nick) explicando lo que hiciste.
-
-* Si alguien te pide amablemente que lo dejes como estaba, sé amable también
-  y cambialo.
-
-* Si alguien te forrea sobre algo que cambiaste, sé amable y cambialo. Si tenés
-  que lloriquear hacelo después de restaurar lo que cambiaste.
-
-[bicicletero]: http://bicicletero.hackcoop.com.ar
-[0]: https://www.noisebridge.net/index.php?title=Do-ocracy&oldid=28180
-[1]: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
-[2]: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Consensus_Process
-[3]: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/ChangeLog
-[4]: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bantown
diff --git a/_revision/jopp_caring-about-the-plumbing.md b/_revision/jopp_caring-about-the-plumbing.md
deleted file mode 100644
index 62fb297e3f2246cb8520ec37d1f9b599063a4cf0..0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
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+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,958 +0,0 @@
-http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-1/peer-reviewed-papers/caring-about-the-plumbing/
-
-· Caring about the plumbing: On the importance of architectures in
-social studies of (peer-to-peer) technology
-
-**Francesca Musiani**
-
-*Study an information system and neglect its standards, wires, and
-settings,\
- and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and
-change.*\
- - Susan Leigh Star (1999, p. 339)
-
-1. Introduction
----------------
-
-“Peer-to-peer is plumbing, and most people don’t care about plumbing,”
-pointed out some years ago Dan Bricklin, the father of the first
-spreadsheet VisiCalc, in a seminal book about peer-to-peer (P2P)
-technology’s potential as a “disruptive” technology (Bricklin, 2001 in
-Oram, 2001, p. 59). The “most people” Bricklin refers to in this
-citation are, of course, end users of the popular first-generation P2P
-file-sharing applications, like Napster, that were experiencing their
-hour of glory at the dawn of the 21st century.
-
-Indeed, Bricklin may have been right in his assessment of the first P2P
-file-sharing applications’ success: likely, it owes more to the
-suitability of such tools to rapidly find a song and obtain it, than to
-their underlying peer-to-peer architecture in itself. Yet, this argument
-raises new and interesting methodological questions for scholars of
-social studies of networking technologies, be they used for
-communication, sharing, or production purposes. To what extent may
-Bricklin’s perception of indifference towards architecture apply not
-only to a majority of users of Internet-based services, but to these
-scholars, as well – and why, instead, it is important for them to
-“care”?
-
-This article discusses the relevance, for scholars working on social
-studies of network media, of addressing elements of application
-architecture and design as an integral part of their subject of study.
-By discussing an ongoing research on “alternative” or “legitimate”
-(Verma, 2004) applications of P2P networking models, the article argues
-that social studies of network media need to “care about the plumbing,”
-or as Susan Leigh Star has effectively put it, “surface invisible work”
-(1999, p. 385) underlying networked practices, uses and exchanges – as
-an integral part of the “processes of constitution, organization, and
-change of […] the network society” (Castells, 2000, p. 693).
-
-In doing so, the article proposes to acknowledge how Internet-based
-services’ current trajectories of innovation increasingly suggest that
-particular forms of distribution and decentralization (or their lack),
-impact specific procedures, practices and uses. As Barbara van Schewick
-has recently suggested, architectures should be understood an
-“alternative way of influencing economic systems” (2010, p. 3), indeed,
-the very fabric of user behavior and interaction. Most notably, the
-status of every Internet user as a consumer, a sharer, a producer and
-possibly a manager of digital content is informed by, and shapes in
-return, the technical structure and organization of the services (s)he
-has access to: their mandatory passage points, places of storage and
-trade, required intersections. This article is a call to study the
-architecture of networking applications as a “relational property, not
-as a thing stripped of use” (Star & Ruhleder, 1996, p. 113), “as part of
-human organization, and as problematic as any other” (Star, 2002, p.
-116). It suggests that such an approach provides an added value to the
-study of those communities, groups and practices that, by leveraging
-socio-technical dynamics of distribution, decentralization,
-collaboration and peer production, are currently questioning more
-traditional or institutionalized models of content creation, search and
-sharing.
-
-2. Architectures, fieldwork and methods: fleshing out the invisible
--------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-The architecture of a network or an application is its underlying
-technical structure (van Schewick, 2010), designed according to a
-“matrix of concepts” (Agre, 2003): its logical and structural layout,
-consisting of transmission equipment, communication protocols,
-infrastructure, and connectivity between its components or nodes.[1] The
-choice of taking architectures, artifacts transparent to end users by
-fiat of their creators, as the starting point – or at least as an
-important and integral part – of a study of practices and uses with
-network media raises a number of challenges, as well as great promise.
-
-As Barbara van Schewick points out, the compartmentalization of
-disciplines may have led in the past to a general understanding of
-architectures as artifacts that are “relevant only to engineers”, and as
-such, should be exclusively left to their purview (2010, p. 2). However,
-in relation to network media, software, code and cyberinfrastructure
-studies have recently taken up the challenge of interdisciplinarity
-(e.g. Fuller, 2008), drawing on past endeavours in the field of
-sociology of technology and science, exploring the social and political
-qualities of infrastructures (e.g. Star, 1999). In addition, some
-authors experimenting at the intersection of computer science,
-sociology, law and science & technology studies (STS) explore innovative
-methodological approaches to architectures, working on the integration
-of architectures and practices in their analyses. These bodies of work
-will now be addressed in some more detail.
-
-**2.1. Disciplines and layers**\
- Literature in computer science and computer engineering has, perhaps
-quite obviously, paid a great deal of attention to architectures of
-Internet-based applications and networks: their definition (Schollmeier,
-2002; Schoder & Fischbach, 2003 ; Shirky et al., 2001), their technical
-advantages and disadvantages in a comparative perspective (e.g.
-client/server vs. peer-to-peer architectures, Verma, 2004, p. 11-16) and
-their application to specific projects serving a variety of uses (Oram,
-2001, p. 67-159); these “purely” technical aspects of such systems are
-seldom addressed in relation to their societal, relational and
-organizational properties (Taylor & Harrison, 2009, p. 113-115). In some
-cases of highly publicized, debated applications – as it has been the
-case for some P2P systems – engineers have at times sought to present a
-technical perspective on the limits and advantages of specific
-architectures within at-large political and public debates (Auber, 2007;
-Le Fessant, 2006, 2009). Other scholars, interested in the metrology of
-networks, seek to model interactions by means of large-scale graphs, so
-as to study patterns of information propagation, the robustness of
-networks, the forms of exchange and sharing (e.g. Aidouni et al., 2009).
-Their aim is to build measuring tools that are better adapted to the
-ever-increasing size and complexity of networks, and more able to face
-the increasing inadequacy of traditional statistical and sampling
-methods to account for the magnitude of this scaling process (Baccelli,
-2005).
-
-On the other hand, as of today, an important number of works in economic
-and social sciences has sought to explore the practices of sharing,
-cooperation and interaction facilitated or enabled by online
-environments: it is the case of many contributions exploring new forms
-of organization, contribution and collaboration, like social networks
-(e.g. Boyd, 2004; Cardon, 2008) or online communities (Auray, 2011), be
-they composed of fans (Hellekson & Busse, 2006), contributors to wiki
-projects (Reagle, 2010), or specialized professionals (Lock, 2006).
-
-The body of work on the law of network technologies has extensively
-addressed, on its hand – again, perhaps unsurprisingly – the dynamics of
-file-sharing practices by means of direct-exchange networking
-technologies, and has focused the debate on the ways in which innovative
-networking practices may be assimilated, by analogy, to mechanisms of
-remuneration and compensation similar to those in place for material,
-private copies (e.g. Gasser & Ernst, 2006). As pointed out by Mélanie
-Dulong de Rosnay (2005, 2007), as of now, only a comparatively small
-number of works has been devoted to the ways in which law can take into
-account the objects and sources of value (such as metadata and personal
-data) produced by new technical configurations.
-
-**2.2. Towards an integration of architectures and practices: the STS
-legacy\
-**Some examples in recent literature open very interesting paths by
-undertaking the next step in the experimentation with
-interdisciplinarity. These authors, coming from a variety of different
-backgrounds, approach architectures in innovative ways by integrating
-the link between architectures and practices in their analyses.
-
-Perhaps the most notable attempt in this direction is constituted by the
-work, carried out during the last fifteen years by Susan Leigh Star and
-colleagues within the field of STS, on infrastructures as constantly
-evolving socio-technical systems, informed not only by physical elements
-invisible to the end user, but also by factors such as social
-organization and knowledge sharing (Star & Ruhleder, 1996; Neumann &
-Star, 1996; Star, 1999; Star, 2002; Star & Bowker, 2006) Through her
-“call to study boring things,” Star effectively conveys the idea that
-architectural design choices, technical specifications, standards and
-number sequences are no less important to the study of information
-systems because they are “hidden mechanisms subtending those processes
-more familiar to social scientists” (Star, 1999, p. 337). As she writes
-in a seminal article on the ethnography of infrastructure:
-
-It takes some digging to unearth the dramas inherent in system design
-creating, to restore narrative to what appears to be dead lists. […]
-Much of the ethnographic study of information systems implicitly
-involves the study of infrastructure. Struggles with infrastructure are
-built into the very fabric of technical work […]. However, it is easy to
-stay within the traditional purview of field studies: talk, community,
-identity, and group processes, as now mediated by information
-technology. […] Study an information system and neglect its standards,
-wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of
-aesthetics, justice, and change (Star, 1999, p. 337-339).
-
-This “relational” approach brings about considerable changes in methods,
-as the scope of the fieldwork enlarges to include arenas where the
-shapes of architecture and infrastructure are observed, deconstructed,
-reconstructed, and decisions are made about codes, standards,
-bricolages, reconfigurations (Star & Bowker, 2006, p. 151-152), where
-the scholar undertakes a combination of “historical and literary
-analysis, traditional tools like interviews and observations, systems
-analysis, and usability studies” (Star, 1999, p. 382).
-
-Emergent bodies of work such as software studies, critical code studies
-and cyberinfrastructure studies (Manovich, 2001; Fuller, 2008; Marino,
-2006; Ribes & Lee, 2010) owe a lot to the STS approach, seeking, as Matt
-Kirschenbaum (2003) puts it, to balance “the deployment of critical
-terms like ‘virtuality’ […with] a commitment to meticulous documentary
-research to recover and stabilize the material traces of new media”. The
-materiality of software, code, and so-called virtual elements of the
-Internet user’s experience is reaffirmed, and the relationship between
-these layers (or “levels”, as defined by Mark Marino) explored:
-
-Meaning grows out of the functioning of the code but is not limited to
-the literal processes the code enacts. Through CCS, practitioners may
-critique the larger human and computer systems,from the level of the
-computer to the level of the society in which these code objects
-circulate and exert influence (Marino, 2006).
-
-**2.3. Architectures: social, legal, political\
-**On the side of computational and quantitative sociology, David Hales
-and colleagues seek to explore features of particular groupings that he
-calls “virtual tribes”, such as dynamic formation and dissolution
-overtime, cooperation, specialization, reputation systems, and
-occasional antagonist behavior; he considers that a thorough
-understanding of such phenomena is a necessary precondition for the
-construction of robust and resilient software systems, both today and in
-the future (Hales, 2006; Marcozzi & Hales, 2008; Hales, Arteconi,
-Marcozzi & Chao, 2008).
-
-Information studies scholar and Internet pioneer Philip Agre explores on
-his side the relationship between technical architecture and
-institutions, notably the difference between “architecture as politics”
-and “architecture as a substitute for politics” (Agre, 2003). He argues
-that technologies “often come wrapped in stories about politics”, and
-while these stories may not explain the motives of the technologists,
-they are indeed useful to account for the energy that makes a technology
-an inherently social one, and projects it into the larger world (p. 39).
-Defining architectures as the matrixes of concepts (e.g. the distinction
-between clients and servers) designed into technology, and institutions
-as the matrixes of concepts that organize language, rules, job titles,
-and other social categories in particular societal sectors, Agre
-suggests that the engineering story of rationally distributed
-computation and the political story of institutional change through
-decentralized architecture are not naturally related. They reconfigure
-and evolve constantly, and for these reconfigurations and evolutions to
-share a common direction, they need work:
-
-Decentralized institutions do not imply decentralized architectures, or
-vice versa. The drive toward decentralized architectures need not serve
-the political purpose of decentralizing society. Architectures and
-institutions inevitably coevolve, and to the extent they can be
-designed, they should be designed together. […] Radically improved
-information and communication technologies do open new possibilities for
-institutional change. To explore those possibilities, though,
-technologists will need better ideas about institutions (Agre, 2003, p.
-42).
-
-At the crossroads of informatics, economics and law, Barbara van
-Schewick has recently put forward the idea that the architecture of the
-Internet, and of the applications running on it, is relevant to
-economics. Her work seeks to examine how changes, notably design
-choices, in the Internet’s architecture (that she defines operationally
-as the “underlying technical structure” of the network of networks)
-affect the economic environment for innovation, and evaluates the impact
-of these changes from the perspective of public policy (2010, p. 2).
-According to van Schewick, this is a first step towards filling a gap in
-how scholarship understands innovators’ decisions to innovate and the
-economic environment for innovation: after many years of research on
-innovation processes, we understand how these are affected by changes in
-laws, norms, and prices; yet, we lack a similar understanding of how
-architecture and innovation impact each other (p. 2-3). Perhaps, van
-Schewick suggests, this is due to the intrinsic appeal of architectures
-as purely technical systems:
-
-Just as the architecture of a house describes its basic inner structure,
-the architecture of a complex system describes the basic inner structure
-of the system — its components, what they do, and how they interact to
-provide the system’s functionality. That such a technical structure may
-have economic consequences at all is a relatively recent insight. Most
-people still think of architectures as technical artifacts that are
-relevant only to engineers. Thus, understanding how the Internet’s
-architecture affects innovation requires us to think more generally
-about how architectures affect innovation (van Schewick, 2010, p. 4).
-
-Traditionally, she concludes, policy makers have used the law to bring
-about desired economic effects. Architecture de facto constitutes an
-alternative way of influencing economic systems, and as such, it is
-becoming another tool that actors can use to further their interests (p.
-389).
-
-Along the same lines, within a large-scale project investigating how the
-corpus of Requests for Comments (RFCs) of the Internet Engineering Task
-Force provides indications on the ways in which the Internet’s technical
-designers understood and engaged with law and policy issues, Sandra
-Braman has most recently (2011) explored how the core problem in the
-Internet’s technical design was to build structures that not only
-tolerated, but actually facilitated change. By addressing the ways in
-which change and stability themselves were conceptualized by Internet
-designers, Braman argues that undertaking research on architectural «
-design for instability » as applied to the Internet provides insight not
-only into the Internet itself, but into its social, legal and technical
-relations with other information and communication technologies (ICTs).
-
-Drawing on pioneering works such as those of Yochai Benkler on sharing
-as a paradigm of economic production in its own right (2004) and of
-Lawrence Lessig on “code as law” (2002), the relationship between
-architecture and law is further explored by Niva Elkin-Koren (2002,
-2006); a common trait of her works is its underlying perspective on
-architecture as a dynamic parameter, and she treats it as such while
-studying the reciprocal influences of law and technology design in
-information and communication systems. Elkin-Koren argues that the
-interrelationship between law and technology often focuses on one single
-aspect, the challenges that emerging technologies pose to the existing
-legal regime, thereby creating a need for further legal reform; thus,
-she notes how juridical measures involving technology both as a target
-of regulation and as a means of enforcement should take into account
-that the law does not merely respond to new technologies, but also
-shapes them and may affect their design (Elkin-Koren, 2006).
-
-3. What architecture for the future Internet (-based services)?
----------------------------------------------------------------
-
-The Internet’s current trajectories of innovation are making it
-increasingly evident by the day: the evolutions (and in-volutions) of
-the “network of networks”, and at a broader level of electronic
-communications, are likely to depend in the medium-to-long term on the
-topology and the organizational/technical model of Internet-based
-applications, as well as on the infrastructure underlying them (Aigrain,
-2011).
-
-The development of services based on distributed architectures is
-currently affirming itself as one of the Internet’s most important axes
-of transformation. The concept of distribution is somehow shaped and
-inscribed into the very beginnings of the Internet – notably in the
-organization and circulation of information fluxes – but its current
-topology integrates this structuring principle only in very limited ways
-(Minar & Hedlund, 2001). The limits of the “classic” urbanism of the
-Internet, which has been predominant since the beginning of its
-commercial era and its appropriation by the masses, are becoming evident
-with regards to phenomena such as the widespread success of social media
-(Schafer, Le Crosnier & Musiani, 2011). While Internet users have
-become, at least potentially, not only consumers but also distributors,
-sharers and producers of digital content, the network of networks is
-structured in such a way that large quantities of data are centralized
-and compressed within specific regions of the Internet, at the same time
-when they are most suited to a rapid re-diffusion and re-sharing in
-multiple locations of a network that has now reached its full
-globalization.
-
-**3.1. Architectures and the Internet’s “social value”**\
- The current organization of Internet-based services and the structure
-of the network that enables their functioning, with its mandatory
-passage points, places of storage and trade, required intersections,
-raises many questions, both in terms of the optimized utilization of
-storage resources, and of the fluidity, rapidity and effectiveness of
-electronic exchanges. Other interrogations, on the security of exchanges
-and on the stability of the network, must also be added to these issues:
-a series of malfunctions and breakdowns with important consequences at
-the global level [2] draw our attention on questions of security and
-data protection, inherent to the Internet’s current structure.
-
-These questions impact largely the balance of powers between users and
-network providers, and reach questions of net neutrality. To what extent
-can network providers interfere with specific uses? Can the network be
-optimized for specific uses? As Barbara van Schewick points out, by
-enabling users to use the Internet in the way that creates the most
-value for them, changes in architecture are not only likely to impact
-the value of the Internet for users, but also to increase or diminish
-the Internet’s overall value to society:
-
-But the social value of architectures […] goes beyond that. The Internet
-has the potential to enhance individual freedom, provide a platform for
-better democratic participation, foster a more critical and
-self-reflective culture, and potentially improve human development
-everywhere. The Internet’s ability to realize this potential, however,
-is tightly linked to features — user choice, non-discrimination,
-non-optimization (van Schewick, 2010, p. 387),
-
-that may be achieved in different ways by designing its underlying
-architecture in different ways. Resorting to decentralized architectures
-and distributed organizational forms, then, constitutes a different way
-to address some issues of management of the network, in a perspective of
-effectiveness, security and digital “sustainable development” (better
-resource management), and of maximization of its value to society.
-
-This idea is further explored by Michel Bauwens (2005) who, proposing a
-vision of the P2P model that is based on but goes beyond computer
-technology, puts forward a P2P theory as a “general theory” of
-collaborative and direct human interaction, an emerging, pervasive and
-inherently social phenomenon that may be profoundly transforming the way
-in which society and human civilization is organised.
-
-**3.2. The peer-to-peer model: a return to the past, a promise for the
-future**\
- Since the inception of the Internet, the principle of decentralization
-has governed the circulation of transmissions and communications on the
-“network of networks” (Aigrain, 2011). However, the introduction of the
-World Wide Web in 1990 has progressively and widely led to the diffusion
-of “client-server” architecture models; the most widespread and diffused
-Internet-based services (social networks, instant messaging tools,
-digital content storage services…) are based upon technical and economic
-models in which end users ask for information, data, services to “farms”
-of powerful servers, stocking information and/or managing network
-traffic (van Schewick, 2010, p. 70). Even if traffic on the Internet
-functions on the generalized distribution principle, it has now taken
-the form of concentration around servers delivering access to content.
-Yet, this modality of organization for structure and services, in and on
-the network, is not the only possible one – and while being the most
-widespread, it is maybe not the most effective. Thus, the search for
-alternatives is currently in progress (Aigrain, 2010, 2011; Moglen,
-2010).
-
-Peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture is reclaiming its place among these
-alternatives. It is a computer network model structured in such a way
-that communications and/or exchanges take place between nodes having the
-same responsibility within the system. The dichotomy between server
-(provider of the service) and client(s) (requesters of the service),
-typical of the client-server model, is replaced by a situation where
-every client becomes a server as well, where all peers have a resource
-and all peers request it (Schollmeier, 2002).
-
-The P2P model is not per se innovative in the history of the Internet.
-Indeed, the original Internet was fundamentally designed as a
-peer-to-peer system, before the network started being populated by an
-ever-increasing number of end users, and became the device through which
-millions of consumer clients communicated with a “relatively privileged”
-set of servers (Minar & Hedlund, 2001, p. 4). Yet, as the quantity and
-quality of bandwidth increased, home computers became more powerful, and
-domestic users progressively diversified their activities beyond
-browsing the Web and trading emails, the conditions were set for another
-change – or, perhaps, a reversion, with “machines in the home and on the
-desktop are connecting to each other directly, forming groups and
-collaborating to become user-created search engines, virtual
-supercomputers, and file systems”. So, while noticing the “many specific
-problems where the Internet architecture has been strained”, application
-developers often find themselves looking back to the Internet of twenty
-years ago when considering how best to solve a problem (Minar & Hedlund,
-2001, p. 3; Figueiredo et al., 2008).
-
-P2P architecture embraces the decentralization principle by harnessing
-the network in a different way than client-server applications. In this
-architecture, users ask for services to a cluster of servers of limited
-capacity; unless there is the possibility to add further servers at any
-time, a critical point in data transmission for and to all users may be
-eventually reached depending on additional clients joining the network
-(and, in extreme conditions, turn into denial-of-service situations). In
-P2P architecture, users are not only exploiting a resource (be it
-bandwidth, storage space, computing power) but are providing it, as well
-– so that, if the request to which the system must respond augments, the
-total capacity of the system increases, too. P2P systems may also
-present advantages in terms of stability and endurance, as the
-distributed nature of the system improves its overall strength and
-avoids its complete invalidation in case one of the nodes fails to
-perform as expected or disconnects from the system. Indeed, the
-effectiveness of P2P as a distribution model is strictly linked to its
-“plumbing”: the repartition of computing power and bandwidth among all
-components of the system, which changes the distributive structure and
-the allotment of costs by increasing bandwidth use at the level of the
-network, not of the server(s) (Elkin-Koren, 2006, p. 21-23).
-
-In the course of their relatively short history, P2P systems have often
-been considered as a threat to the interests of the industries of
-digital content, as their main use by the public has been the
-unauthorized sharing of materials covered by intellectual property
-rights, notably copyright. More specifically, this reputation has been
-forged in the first years 2000, with the advent of exchange and sharing
-practices at the global scale, concerning millions of users – the most
-emblematic case being that of Napster and its sixty millions of sharers,
-a service functioning on a centralized P2P architectural model, that was
-shortly followed by hybrid and purely decentralized versions. Shortly
-after the explosion of these “renewed” P2P technologies, attempts have
-also been made to find economic models promoting this means of exchange
-within the current legal framework, but they have generally proven
-unsatisfactory [3].
-
-The crucial role that such considerations have had in shaping the
-controversial status of P2P technologies vis-à-vis the media and the
-public may have led researchers to some pitfalls, as well. A
-reductionist interpretation of the “P2P effect”, often underplayed as a
-proxy for illegality, should be avoided – a perspective that is
-particularly evident, Niva Elkin-Koren remarks (2006), in the juridical
-literature on P2P and law. Also, social scientists should watch out for
-the traps that P2P, a model with strong a priori connotations of
-equality and decentralization, may set up. As noted by Philip Agre, it
-is particularly easy in the case of P2P to juxtapose architecture to the
-stories of institutions, individuals and groups, assuming that one
-determines the other – but this may lead to a misleading shortcut:
-
-In the case of P2P technologies, the official engineering story is that
-computational effort should be distributed to reflect the structure of
-the problem. But the engineering story does not explain the strong
-feelings P2P computing often evokes. The strong feelings derive from a
-political story, often heatedly disavowed by technologists but
-widespread in the culture: P2P delivers on the Internet’s promise of
-decentralization. By minimizing the role of centralized computing
-elements, the story goes, P2P systems will be immune to censorship,
-monopoly, regulation, and other exercises of centralized authority. This
-juxtaposition of engineering and politics is common enough, and for an
-obvious reason: engineered artifacts such as the Internet are embedded
-in society in complicated ways […] the case of P2P computing (is good)
-to analyze the relationship between engineering and politics—or, as I
-want to say, between architectures and institutions. […] The P2P
-movement understands that architecture is politics, but it should not
-assume that architecture is a substitute for politics (Agre, 2003, p.
-39-42).
-
-P2P-based socio-technical systems may be better analyzed and understood
-with an approach that addresses, studies, explores architecture as the
-very fabric of those interactions and examines how these shape, in
-return, subsequent negotiations and redesigns of the system. Scholars
-interested in networking technologies of communication and exchange need
-to “learn to read these invisible layers of control and access. In order
-to understand how this operates, however, it is necessary to
-‘deconstruct’ the boring, backstage parts […], to disembed the
-narratives it contains and the behind-the-scenes decisions […], as part
-of material information science culture” (Star, 2002, p.110).
-
-4. When architectures matter: the many faces of P2P systems
------------------------------------------------------------
-
-This article has sought to discuss the relevance, for social scientists
-interested in network media and systems, of paying analytical attention
-to elements of application architecture and design, as a core feature of
-their subject of study. In particular, by discussing P2P technology as a
-technical networking model and a dynamic of social interaction that are
-inextricably intertwined, it has endeavored to illustrate the potential
-and challenges of this approach when addressing issues of transformation
-and sustainability of the current Internet model. While the primary
-purpose of the article has been to discuss the foundations of a
-methodological perspective, and not to delve into the field by its means
-[4], this last section introduces – as both a conclusion and an overture
-– some elements on how I have actually taken architectures into account
-in my methodology when addressing an often underplayed, yet promising
-area of innovation within the field of Internet-based services: that of
-“alternative” or “legitimate” applications of peer-to-peer networks.
-
-**4.1. “Alternative” P2P and Internet-based services**\
- A critical examination of different models of technical architectures,
-in terms of their impact on Internet-based cooperation and production
-practices – a better understanding of what the “plumbing” is about –
-makes it possible to single out a growing number of P2P applications,
-under-represented and somewhat hidden by the media buzz and the trials
-engendered by the illegal sharing of musical files (Laflaquière, 2005).
-
-In recent years, mostly since 2004, many projects and applications have
-seen the light, that propose alternatives – built on decentralized or
-P2P-based architectures – to Web-based online services occupying an
-important place in the daily life of Internet users. The uses entailed
-by such tools include information search and retrieval, sharing, and
-communication. Thus, these projects are positioning themselves with
-respect to services proposed by actors every Internet user is well
-acquainted with, such as Google, Facebook, Picasa. By harnessing the
-potential of P2P and of decentralization, the developers of such
-projects aim at satisfying the same needs from the point of view of the
-end user (who continues to search keywords, network with friends, share
-pictures with them), but building the application on a different
-architectural model or technical platform. A move that has potentially
-long-reaching implications vis-à-vis the service provider’s status, its
-access to information, and the material locations in which storage and
-sharing operations of user-created content are conducted.
-
-The analysis of how the integration of architecture and practices is
-enacted in “alternative” P2P applications appears especially useful when
-studying up-and-coming experiments with the decentralization of storage
-and search services with a social networking component. This
-investigation has been at the core of my PhD dissertation, currently in
-the writing phase, parts of which have been published in previous papers
-(Musiani, 2010a, 2010b, 2011). These applications reveal their
-specificities with respect to both their centralized counterparts
-(serving the same purpose, but underlying a different architecture) and
-file-sharing P2P networks. The attention to the “plumbing” allows to
-delve into dynamics of articulation between local and global dimensions
-in a distributed application; of sharing of disk space and bandwidth as
-the cornerstone of a socio-economic model for P2P; of deployment of
-technical uncertainty and social opportunity at the “edges” of the
-network, where under-utilized resources, both human and material, can be
-leveraged.
-
-**4.2. A pragmatic approach to P2P architectures**\
- Thus, the elaboration of case studies on “alternative” P2P applications
-– when it becomes an exploration of the ways and means in which the
-opportunity of change is constituted with P2P – entails a plural
-approach, that follows on one hand the innovators, trying to identify
-their strategies in the construction of the technologies, as well as
-their valors, cultures and imaginaires of reference, and on the other
-hand, the role played, where possible, by the first users of the
-systems. The objective is threefold: retracing and breaking down, in
-developers’ and users’ narratives, the actions and dynamics that
-represent at once P2P technology and the changes it purports; following,
-by means of onsite and online ethnography, how P2P innovators manage the
-economic, political and social “relapses” of technical changes
-development processes; tracing how discussions and controversies that
-take place on technical forums between developers and users, and among
-users themselves, progressively shape directions of mobilization for and
-by means of P2P.
-
-For all these reasons, it proves useful to avoid considering “P2P” as a
-pre-defined object. Adopting a pragmatic approach, the starting point
-for the fieldwork becomes the observation that, in the ICTs domain,
-currently exists a variety of research projects and applications that,
-in different manners and for different purposes, take up with a “P2P
-technology” that is defined in a transversal way as a decentralised,
-legal, private, social and user-centered alternative. A name and five
-adjectives that become the entry points into the fieldwork, of which to
-observe the (re)configurations and (re)compositions in the hands of the
-actors and the shaping of the systems.\
- An empirical inquiry carried out by means of this approach helps
-identifying “live”, and in a manner transversal to the different cases,
-uses and technologies “in the making” (Callon, 1987; Callon & Latour,
-1990), trying to obtain a common vision of the directions of
-appropriation of P2P technologies. What I have called a “real-time
-sociology of innovation”, with which I have experimented during my PhD,
-proves a viable method to apprehend variable, multi-dimensional
-situations, and attempt to draw some conclusions on their possible
-developments and applications. At the same time, there is a need to
-address the more ideological and utopian dimension of these
-“alternatives” – that which speaks of an Internet ideal of
-decentralization and autonomy – that is taken as a subject of inquiry,
-to try and show how it leads to ways of doing things, explains choices,
-validates assumptions. Along these lines, and once again following an
-STS-based tradition, the observation of transformations, passages,
-negotiations, modifications of objects, and of the moments where these
-are put on “trial” beyond the scheduled phases of development, are of
-special importance.
-
-A particularly stimulating aspect of this approach is the consideration
-of how law and rights take shape with the P2P alternative, in the
-pursuit of three objectives. Firstly, in order to successfully define
-the “legality” of such services, strictly linked to their constantly
-evolving architecture that is often only partially accounted for in
-written juridical documents. Secondly, to try and give instruments of
-analysis able to rise above a conception of the relationship between law
-and technology that all too often focuses on one aspect: the fact that
-emerging technologies pose challenges to existing legal regimes,
-creating a need for reform of these regimes. Thirdly, so that the
-objects and the resources enabling P2P, and being produced by P2P, may
-be fully conceived and treated as means of definition and protection of
-the rights of users of Internet-based services.\
- In short, the acknowledgment of the importance of architectures calls,
-in the specific case of the study of “alternative” P2P for
-Internet-based services, for a process of methodological readjustment.
-It implies delving into the technical functioning of direct transmission
-of data between machines of a decentralized network, perhaps including
-mechanisms of file fragmentation, encryption and maintenance, and take
-it as a core feature (even if not necessarily the cause) of the types of
-exchanges taking place within a service, of their effectiveness, of
-their directness. It implies addressing the total or partial removal of
-technical “intermediaries” (Elkin-Koren, 2006) in online networking and
-sharing activities, as a structuring dynamic in new-generation
-participative instruments. It means understanding where in the “fringes
-and materialities of infrastructures” (Star, 2002, p. 107) a password is
-stored, a file is indexed and encrypted, a download starts and ends, so
-as to understand how new dynamics for the protection of personal
-liberties and rights are taking hold – or are endangered. In short,
-learning to read the “invisible layers” of P2P-based socio-technical
-systems is as much a challenge as it is an opportunity to explore
-collaborative practices carried out in, on and through them, and to
-observe how these practices in-form the architecture in return, the
-sharing of resources it entails, its medium- and long-term
-socio-technical sustainability.
-
-However, in a connected world where more applications than ever want to
-use the network, send packets, consume bandwidth – thereby placing new
-strains and tensions on the Internet’s architecture – social scientists
-need to accept the challenge just as much as the technical people who
-are working on the future topology of the “network of networks”. It is,
-likely, one of the most promising ways to shed new light on dynamics of
-content creation, sharing, publishing and management, that are shaping,
-and being shaped by, the future Internet – one of the best ways to
-contribute to its future sustainability.
-
-5. Conclusions. The “lower layers”, a key for the sociology of networks
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-
-“Caring about the plumbing”; “[f]inding the invisible work […] in the
-traces left behind by coders, designers, and users of systems” (Star,
-1999); the inclusion of the lower layers in the analysis – this article
-has wished to suggest – means doing a sociology of networks that is not
-afraid of its subject of study.
-
-A consequence of this approach is a specific attention to an aspect of
-networks that is not only very discreet, but even invisible to the eyes
-of the users: their architecture. Of course, we remain social
-scientists: this interest in architectures derives from the hypothesis
-that particular forms of distribution call for specific procedures,
-particular uses, peculiar “user portraits”. In doing so, one is able to
-flesh out how some attributes of technology, of which users often lack a
-direct knowledge or awareness, are bound to fully influence and inform
-issues that are often crucial for uses and practices, such as the
-treatment and physical location of data, the management of computing
-resources, the shape and results of their queries to search engines.
-
-In the specific context of P2P, this article is also an invitation to
-further pursue the renovation of academic (and political) debates on
-what are currently very lively, but “alternative”, processes of content
-creation, search and sharing. Considering the architectural dimension
-helps to overcome today’s prevailing paradigm when taking P2P as a
-subject of study, that which, even when it focuses on forms of
-organization in or by means of P2P dynamics, opts for a reduction of P2P
-to the uses it entails and makes possible, one among them in
-particular.\
- The link between the ways in which P2P applications take shape –
-notably evolutions of their technical architecture – and their possible
-influences on practices, relations and rights still remains quite
-under-explored. Yet, the shaping of links, nodes, mandatory transit
-points, information propagation protocols – in one word, their
-architecture – tell us social scientists many things about the
-specificities and promises of P2P-based applications, the challenges
-they face, the opportunities they may present for the medium-term
-evolution of the Internet model.
-
-[1] The IEEE Standard for Architectural Description of
-Software-Intensive Systems (IEEE P1471/D5.3) defines [technical]
-architecture as ‘the fundamental organization of a system embodied by
-its components, their relationships to each other and to the environment
-and the principles guiding its design and evolution’ (Bredemayer &
-Malan, 2001).
-
-[2] E.g., respectively, Twitter’s repeated outages and the controversy
-over the service’s long-term sustainability (see Pingdom, 2007: Twitter
-had about six fully days of downtime in 2007, due to server overload and
-the service’s failure to scale according to user demand), and the 2008
-worldwide YouTube paralysis (see Bortzmeyer, 2008: the lack of access to
-the popular video streaming website was due to a massive routing of BGP
-requests by Pakistan Telecom, aimed at blocking the diffusion of some
-contents in the country).
-
-[3] As is the case for “Peer Impact”, a 2005-born pay-for-download file
-sharing service running on a BitTorrent-like peer-to-peer distributions
-system while maintaining centralized control of verification and
-authorization of downloads.
-
-[4] Something I attempt to do in other venues: see Musiani 2010 and
-2011.
-
-**Francesca Musiani** is based at the Centre de Sociologie de
-l’Innovation, MINES ParisTech, Paris, France. This work is supported by
-a grant of the French National Agency for Research (ANR), Programme
-CONTINT-Contenus et Interactions, Project ADAM-Architectures distribuées
-et applications multimédias.
-
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-the Privatization of Peer-to-Peer Systems. tripleC, 9(2): 126-140.
-
-Musiani, F. (2010a). When Social Links Are Network Links: the Dawn of
-Peer-to-Peer Social Networks and Its Implications for Privacy.
-Observatorio, 4 (3), 185-207.
-
-Musiani, F. (2010b). Ménager le droit à la vie privée, entre anonymat et
-connaissance de l’identité: les débuts des réseaux sociaux en
-pair-à-pair, Terminal, 105: 107-116.
-
-Neumann, L. & Star, S. L. (1996). Making Infrastructure: the Dream of a
-Common Language. In J. Blomberg, F. Kensing, & E. Dykstra-Erickson
-(Eds.), Proceedings of the PDC ’96 (pp. 231-240). Palo Alto, CA:
-Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
-
-Oram, A. (Ed., 2001). Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive
-Technologies, Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.\
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-Lots of Downtime in 2007. Royal Pingdom (blog of Pingdom). Retrieved
-March 31, 2011, from
-http://royal.pingdom.com/2007/12/19/twitter-growing-pains-cause-lots-of-downtime-in-2007/
-
-Reagle, J. (2010). Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia.
-Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.\
- Ribes, D. & Lee, C. P. (2010). Sociotechnical Studies of
-Cyberinfrastructure and e-Research: Current Themes and Future
-Trajectories. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 19, 231-244.
-
-Schafer, V., Le Crosnier, H., & Musiani, F. (2011). La neutralité de
-l’Internet, un enjeu de communication. Paris: CNRS Editions/Les
-Essentiels d’Hermès.
-
-Shirky, C., Truelove, K., Dornfest, R., Gonze, L., & Dougherty, D.
-(Eds., 2001). 2001 P2P networking overview. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly.
-
-Schoder, D. & Fischbach, K. (2003). Peer-to-peer prospects.
-Communications of the ACM, 46 (2), 27–29.
-
-Schollmeier, R. (2001). A Definition of Peer-to-Peer Networking for the
-Classification of Peer-to-Peer Architectures and Applications.
-Proceedings of the IEEE 2001 International Conference on Peer-to-Peer
-Computing (P2P2001) (pp. 101-102), Linköping, Sweden, August 27-29,
-2001.
-
-Star, S. L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American
-Behavioral Scientist, 43 (3), 377-391.
-
-Star, S. L. (2002). Infrastructure and ethnographic practice: Working on
-the Fringes. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 14 (2),
-107-122.
-
-Star, S. L. & Bowker, G. (2002). How To Infrastructure. In Lievrouw, L.
-A. (Ed.), Handbook of New Media (pp. 151-162), London: Sage.
-
-Star, S. L., and Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps Toward an Ecology of
-Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.
-Information Systems Research, 7, 111-133.
-
-Taylor, I. & Harrison, A. (2009). From P2P to Web Services and Grids:
-Evolving Distributed Communities. Second and Expanded Edition. London:
-Springer-Verlag.
-
-van Schewick, B. (2010). Internet Architecture and Innovation.
-Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
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-Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
-
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-http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-1/invited-comments/changing-the-system-of-production/
-
-Changing the system of production
-=================================
-
-By Jean Zin
------------
-
-The economic and financial crisis, serious as it may be, will not
-provoke the end of capitalism which has weathered worse. But if an exit
-from capitalism has begun, it is for other reasons, which are more
-profound and more durable, and which are linked to our entry into the
-digital era and immaterial labor. It is these new productive forces
-which question the very basis of industrial capitalism, such as payment
-for wage labor or exchange value.
-
-It is for material reasons, connected to the reproduction of productive
-forces, that the production system is forced to change radically, just
-as it is for reasons connected to material reproduction that this system
-will have to integrate ecological limits, by favoring the relocalisation
-of the economy. If the exit from the society of wage labor has already
-started, it is for the moment to our detriment, through the destruction
-of welfare protections and the explosion of precariousness. Social
-struggles will as always be necessary to conquer new rights and to
-reorient this new system towards our emancipation and a more sustainable
-economy. Nothing will happen by itself.
-
-It is in any case within this material framework that our action can be
-decisive, far from any utopia or value subjectivism. “New technologies”
-occupy here a central place, comparable with the steam engine. However,
-it’s not only the materialism of reproduction and of techniques which it
-is necessary to take into account, but also the flows which constitute
-production as a whole system. To abandon capitalist productivism and its
-industrial model, neither isolated initiatives nor partial measures will
-suffice; the new productive relationships and new arrangements must
-operate as a system (of production, distribution, circulation) by
-ensuring their reproduction.
-
-What is a system of production?
--------------------------------
-
-The systemic crisis concretely expresses everything that materially
-connects us to the rest of the world, whether we like it or not.
-Political economy itself was born from the inflation caused by the
-influx of gold from the Americas at the end of XVIth century, as noted
-at the time by Jean Bodin, demonstrating the influence of remote events
-which are completely independent from us. Mercantilism initially tried
-to respond to this kind of “natural catastrophy” by accumulating as much
-precious metals as possible, but the intensification of world trade
-which ensued was already reinforcing interdependencies. It was necessary
-to wait until 1758 for Doctor Quesnay to show, with his “economic
-table”, the analogy between economic circuits and the circulatory
-system, connecting social classes and distant parts in a totality which
-makes elements interdependent. Later, others attempted to reduce
-economic flows to their thermodynamic equilibriuum (theories of balance
-and of market self-regulation). To the contrary, one can consider that
-Marx’s principal contribution will have been to show that production was
-indeed organized as a system combining production, reproduction and
-circulation, a system with its own dynamic (based on profit and
-innovation), its specific relations of production (wage labor) adapted
-to productive organization as well as to the stage of technical
-development. Capitalism differentiated itself from feudalism as well as
-from a predatory economy by being a mode of production determined by
-circulation, industrial investment and waged work.
-
-That production and reproduction inevitably compose a system does not
-mean that there is only one system, albeit a dominant one! It is vital
-to understand the fact that we belong to a plurality of systems,
-effective totalities which determine us materially more than we
-determine them, but in the gaps between which we can function. Indeed,
-against the contemporary individualistic gospel, a system is defined by
-the relatively independent operations of the elements which constitute
-it. No isolated individuals can fail to be integrated into a system on
-which they depend and which constrains them, like the transport system.
-The concept applies beyond the realm of production, up to the ecosystems
-exhibiting interdependencies between species and flows of matter, of
-energy and of information which run through them. In his marvellous book
-“The Macroscope”, Joel de Rosnay (1979) applied systems theory to the
-economy as well as to the biosphere, leading to what he called an
-ecosocialism. Thinking in a global manner does indeed means thinking in
-terms of systems, circuits, flow, interdependencies, organisation,
-division of functions, coordination, etc, where autonomy and
-self-organization play in any case an irreplaceable role of adjustment.
-
-The totalitarian tendency of markets, with their liberal theories which
-do not recognize any value to non-commercial phenomena, has driven the
-fact that we belong to different systems of production into the
-background. However, it is a fact that there is no such thing as an
-economy which is not a mixed economy, a plural economy, where at the
-very least domestic, public and commercial exchanges coexist. This is
-precisely what made it possible for capitalism to emerge from the free
-cities on the margins of the feudal system, just like today a new
-alternative system based on relocalistion should emerge.
-
-What is important to understand is that it is useless to want to leave a
-system of production if one is unable to propose a viable alternative
-system. It is therefore crucial to be effective, and to not propose
-simple correctives, even less to lecture people about the error of their
-ways. We need new rules, new social relations, new modes of distribution
-and exchanges which must not only connect together but also have an
-internal dynamism and a synergy with the techniques employed. It is a
-question of viability, of durability and of reproduction, where ecology
-obviously becomes the central concern. These interdependences strongly
-constrain what is feasible but are not sufficiently taken into account,
-unfortunately, by those who want to change the system (it is not enough
-to take control of it to change its operations), nor by those who simply
-want to correct it with norms and laws.
-
-Capitalism as productivism
---------------------------
-
-Of course all systems are not equal, being distinguished by their means
-and ends. However a system does not become dominant because of its good
-intentions but because of its material effectiveness, of its capacities
-of reproduction and expansion, according to a broadly Darwinian logic
-(which should not be confused with a reductive Social Darwinism). What
-made capitalism successful was its productivism which renders profit
-dependent on the improvement of productivity resulting from to
-investments and innovations, which in turn rely on technological and
-scientific advances to lower the price of goods. This positive feedback
-loop, a true snowball effect, lies at the root of the takeoff of
-economies and of the “virtuous circle of growth”, a galloping
-industrialization which must be paid a high price in terms of
-inequalities, poverty and pollution.
-
-The reasons for the success of an invasive organism or of an overly
-voracious predator inevitably turns back against it when it has
-colonized all the available living space. Though Africa remains to be
-exploited, we can say that capitalism has reached its ecological limit
-with globalisation, which does not leave it with an outside. The problem
-is that it cannot stop its race towards growth. We can say that
-capitalism initially imposed itself through its productivity but has
-lasted thanks to the consumer society, which is of course ecologically
-unsustainable. Material degrowth is thus unavoidable, but it is not
-enough to declare this is the case, nor to exhibit voluntarism in the
-reduction of our consumption and working time in order to hope to
-significantly reduce a productivism which is at the core of a
-growth-dependent capitalism. We really need to change the system! In
-order to achieve this, we should not go backwards but instead take
-advantage of the immaterial economy, which can help with material
-degrowth, and especially to draw on the productive forces which enter in
-contradiction with the very bases of capitalism.
-
-Indeed, capitalism is first and foremost industry. Wage-labor is a kind
-of temporary slavery (subordination) but the fact of paying work
-according to time spent (machine time) is essential to separate workers
-from their products and to appropriate the surplus value obtained by the
-improvement of the productivity of capitalistic investments. However,
-immaterial labour can be characterised by its non-linearity, as
-production is not proportional to time spent. This is what opposes it to
-physical labour, as information is opposed to energy. In the same way,
-the more labour is skilled, incorporating training time, the less it is
-reducible to immediate work, just like the work time of the virtuoso is
-not confined to the concert. For all these reasons, the remuneration of
-time spent becomes inapplicable (much as in the artistic field)
-requiring a posterior assessment, based on results. This would seem to
-result in the abolition of the separation between workers and their
-products, which they could all the more claim their share of now that
-they possess their own means of production with their personal
-computers. Except that it is very difficult to evaluate the contribution
-of everyone in performances which are mainly global and collective. So,
-not only does wage labour measured against working time become
-completely inappropriate in the age of information, being progressively
-replaced by project contracts and outsourcing, but it is the measure of
-value itself which becomes problematic (people speak of a “crisis of
-measure”). The commodity therefore loses its status of exchange value to
-the benefit of a pure opportunity value (or of prestige, of brand, or
-speculation), which is often quite ephemeral and which has only a
-distant connection to its reproduction value (except perhaps when it is
-on sale).
-
-“As soon as work, in its immediate form, has ceased to be the main
-source of wealth, working time ceases and must cease to be its measure,
-and exchange value thus ceases also to be the measure of use value.”
-(Marx, Grundisse II, pp. 220-221).
-
-Changing eras
--------------
-
-It is not only capitalism’s industrial bases that are weakened, digital
-costlessness directly attacks intellectual property rights, its infinite
-capacity for reproduction providing immediate access to all works, an
-access that no-one will want to give up. This endangers cultural
-industries (and they certainly complain enough about it) who will need
-to reinvent themselves. It is on these grounds that one finds the
-strongest opposition of digital culture to the capitalistic logic, to
-old media, to music and movie corporations. The issue of downloading
-divides the generations and unleashes freedom-killing reactions which
-oppose themselves to technical reproduction capacities inherent to
-digitisation and networks! The end of the industrial model does
-represent the end of the system of capitalist production, of wage labour
-and of the commodification of culture and life. Of course, for the
-moment, in the absence of another system more suited to immaterial
-production, this contradiction of the new productive forces and of
-former relations of production is translated into additional and
-ever-more unbearable stress borne by an ever-increasing share of
-employees, with the rise of precariousness and the regression of
-welfare. For the moment the old system is trying to maintain itself
-through untenable laws that attempt to match technological innovation by
-fiercely maintaining obsolete property rights. These are contradictions
-on which it is possible to rely; productive forces that can be mobilised
-to build a new system of production.
-
-Make no mistake, neither the crisis, nor the ecological limits, nor our
-good intentions, will be enough to overcome capitalism, but only digital
-technologies, now at the heart of production, as well as the immaterial
-labor that pushes the reorientation of the economy towards human
-development. This does not mean that things will happen by themselves,
-nor necessarily to our advantage if we do not vigorously defend our
-rights, but it is what conjures and enables a new system of production
-with new relations of production. Admitting the central place of
-digitality therefore assumes a crucial importance in the determination
-of a strategy for a future-oriented political ecology in the age of
-information.
-
-If digital technologies were not sustainable, as some environmentalists
-contend, this would not imply their disappearance but would only reserve
-them to an elite as well as to production processes. However, it seems
-rather that these technologies are spreading at an until-now unheard-of
-speed, including in the poorest countries which have little
-infrastructure. It is all the more urgent to reduce their consumption
-and to make them more sustainable because it is certain that we cannot
-continue on the current slope, nor rely on the market to take into
-account environmental issues that most of the time translate into an
-increase in costs (there is no energy shortage, the problem is that
-fossil fuels, oil and coal, are too abundant and their prices were too
-low so far, thus constituting an obstacle to renewable energy).
-
-Even if the battle is not won in advance, there is nothing here that
-seems out of reach, as digitality is one of the essential bases of
-ecological consciousness and global regulation. In addition
-dematerialisation can make a decisive contribution to a necessary
-material degrowth in many areas. Thus, we know that digital networks can
-facilitate relocalisation thanks to their capacity for decentralisation,
-which have long been implemented in corporations. No future ecology can
-do without, which implies caring about their sustainability, reducing
-waste and guiding them towards energy efficiency.
-
-Creating a system
------------------
-
-We have evoked most of the elements of a surpassing of capitalism in the
-era of information, ecology and human development: the new relocalised
-and immaterial production system will primarily have “to be a system”
-and adapt to the new productive forces, to new technologies as well as
-to the material constraints of reproduction and thus to environmental
-constraints. This has nothing to do with moral or even purely political
-approaches proposing laws and norms, which are indeed often necessary.
-We must insist on the fact that we need to go back to causes and not
-only worry about the most conspicuous effects. This means that we must
-address the question on the side of production more than on that of
-consumption, on the side of the system more than on that of the
-individual, on the side of offer more than on that of demand, on the
-side of the quality of the work more than on that of the quantity
-produced. We need to convince ourselves that the simple degrowth of
-waste and of commodification cannot change the productivist logic of
-capitalism, any more than the reduction of working time. Leaving
-productivism means first leaving the waged society dependent on
-consumption and on a profit-driven capitalist production.
-
-It is not enough to declare something or to take one’s desires for
-reality, but it is vital to get the context right and to understand the
-stakes, which have only been sketched here. These stakes already
-strongly constrain an exit from capitalism which has already started but
-is still far from constituting an alternative. We must start from what
-is, from the “actual movement which abolishes the current state of
-things”, from ongoing experiments, which should be constituted as a
-complete and operational production system to become a real alternative.
-No isolated initiative or partial measure can replace this.
-
-André Gorz was probably the first to present a coherent representation
-of a new relocalised system of production in the era of information,
-ecology and human development, by gathering in “Misère du présent”
-(1997) the various initiatives and proposals where the seeds of the
-future could be perceived. In fact, these proposals had already been
-defended for some time by Jacques Robin and the Transversales journal,
-without being quite connected together. They were replaced in the early
-1990s by the reduction of working time (“réduction du temps de travail”
-or RTT), a strategy that would show its limits with the establishment of
-the 35h working week which increased wage flexibility.[1] Not only was
-André Gorz one of the main theorists of RTT but he was firmly opposed to
-the guaranteed wage, which was a rising claim in social movements
-despite its apparently utopian nature. The category of “third sector”
-was also ambiguous, and “plural currencies” a little too fuzzy. Yet by
-bringing together and defining these mechanisms (guaranteed income,
-local currency, self-managed workers unions), André Gorz allowed a great
-step forward to be made, not so much in terms of the alternative’s
-credibility (these measures still seem too exotic and minuscule in
-relation to the immensity of the task) but rather for his success in the
-constitution of a new articulation between production, distribution, and
-exchanges. I have done little more than focus on the systemic coherence
-and combine these mechanisms with the libertarian municipalism of
-Bookchin – though it is far from a detail to anchor relocalisation in
-municipal democracy.
-
-The most difficult to admit remains the fact that there are only local
-alternatives to globalised commerce. However, by definition, there can
-only be relocalisation at the local level, and thus we can start right
-away, even if these actions only makes sense inasmuch as they are
-integrated into alternative circuits and a Global Justice perspective.
-
-It is impossible to describe in detail this post-capitalism which
-refutes too-simple solutions such as nationalisation of the economy or
-the collective ownership of means of production, leaving relations of
-production and the productivism of the system unchanged. To repeat, none
-of the isolated measures are determining in itself, only their
-combination is. It is indeed at all levels that the potentialities of
-digitality must be put to use, that small circuits need to be favoured
-and the rules of the game changed in international exchanges (fair
-trade, alternative circuits), in national redistribution systems and in
-local life. The point really is to change the world in its totality and
-to build a new system of production, but contrary to totalitarian
-utopias, there can be no question of abolishing the plurality of systems
-and lifestyles. It is necessary to fight against authoritarian policies,
-and all kinds of green fascisms, in order to defend our autonomy and to
-continue the fight for our emancipation. We locate ourselves in a plural
-and free economy, where capitalism will thus not disappear any more than
-industry but should employ less and less wage earners in an increasingly
-automated and relocalised production.
-
-The point is to extract the maximum number of workers from dependency on
-profit-oriented production as well as alienated work (without claiming
-to abolish all alienation). Rather than everyone becoming civil
-servants, the point is to give to everyone the means of autonomy and of
-choosing their life (including a more natural life), replacing a good
-share of commercial leisure by self-developing activity; this should as
-a consequence radically modify consumption, without feedback effects
-(contrarily to the strategies aiming to reduce consumption). The point
-is to leave behind waged work in favour of autonomous work, immaterial
-work, chosen work, which does not only mean supporting digital
-creativity but also local services, artistic activities, and even
-revitalising crafts and small-scale subsistence agriculture. For that
-one needs at the same time a guaranteed income, which allows autonomous
-work, municipal co-operatives to practise an activity and be associated
-with other autonomous workers, and finally local currencies to ensure
-more outlets to local production without closing oneself to the outside.
-
-The least one can say is that all these concepts are neither familiar
-nor credible, being a thousand miles from ordinary representations and
-even unacceptable ideologically for the majority, which does not prevent
-them from materially imposing themselves all over the world. In any
-case, new relations of production which create a system and are adapted
-to the digital era do represent the condition for a less productivist
-relocalised economy. This is the framework in which our future should be
-conceived. This does not mean that this would be enough to resolve all
-problems! Numerous measures are necessary to regulate capitalism, make
-agriculture more sustainable and cities more livable, but without
-falling into techno-utopianism, we should make sure our understanding of
-our era and our goals are accurate. So, whether we like it or not, it
-will be necessary to make use of the potentialities of telework, of
-teleconferences, of teleshopping and even of 3D printers (or perhaps of
-future digital personal fabricator) which can not only stimulate
-personal creativity but especially facilitate the obtaining of spare
-parts for repairs, or of any other small object, by eliminating material
-transport. This will undoubtedly not save us, it’s only a small portion
-of the solution, but we will need to accept it (like eating less red
-meat) and without forcing anybody!
-
-None of the instruments in our possession can be neglected but what
-needs to be insisted on, is on the need for a systemic approach and a
-general coherence. We need a global approach taking into account all the
-dimensions of our life. Our capacity to make a correct diagnosis and to
-come up with the right answers will be more crucial than our good
-intentions. If it is necessary to fight for an emancipating ecology, the
-room for maneuver is indeed very weak, even if it still exists, between
-technical, ecological and systemic constraints. In any case, these
-modest instruments could prove rather quickly extremely useful if the
-monetary system breaks down, but the good news is that the municipal
-character of the bases of this new system of production allows its
-advantages to be tested immediately, here and now, as long as local
-conditions lend themselves to it.
-
-[1] In 2000 in France under the Jospin government – Ed.
-
-**Works cited**\
- Gorz, A. (1997) Misères du present, richesse du possible. Paris:
-Galilée.\
- Rosnay, de, J. (1979). The Macroscope: A New World Scientific System.
-New York: Harper & Row. [Originally published 1975]
-
-This article originally appeared in [EcoRev](http://ecorev.org/), 33:
-44-51 (2009).
-
-**Translation:**Mathieu O’Neil
-
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-
-Journal of Peer Production - ISSN: 2213-5316 \
- All the contents of this journal are in the **public domain**.
diff --git a/_revision/reescribiendo-hacking-the-spaces.markdown b/_revision/reescribiendo-hacking-the-spaces.markdown
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-Reescribiendo el Hackeando los espacios
-=======================================
-
-Johannes Grenzfurthner, Frank Apunkt Schneide y usuarios de hackerspaces.org
-
-Una proclama crítica, de lo que fue, es y será un hackerspace (o hacklab, para
-el caso)
-
-Hackerspaces 1 // Historia
---------------------------
-
-La historia de los llamados hackerspaces se remonta al momento en que el
-movimiento de contracultura se encontraba por alcanzar un estado de madurez. En
-la década posterior en que los hippies intentaron establecer nuevas formas de
-relacionarse social, política, económica y ecológicamente, una gran cantidad de
-experiencias fueron realizadas referentes a la construcción de nuevos espacios
-en los que vivir y trabajar. Estos eran considerados nichos para revivir y
-rescatar a personas del monótono estilo de vida en que la sociedad burguesa
-conducía los espacios cívicos, desde los jardines de infantes hasta los
-cementerios, para resultar exactamente iguales, y reproducir su orden
-patriarcal y económico.
-
-Las políticas de establecer espacios abiertos fueron pensadas como
-declaraciones explícitas que confrontaban una sociedad capitalista (y en el
-Este: un comunismo autoritario) cuya propia estructura, propósito y modo de
-funcionamiento se consideraba en términos generales como alienante, para tomar
-control de, y para modificar sus relaciones y necesidades básicas humanas. Así,
-la fallada revuelta de los sesentas sobrevivió y floreció en las sombras de un
-omnipresente estilo de vida burgués.
-
-La idea de cambio fue conjurada desde lo alto de los sueños nebulosos
-lisérgicos y discursos patéticos para conseguir los sueños de uno y/o tener los
-pies en tierra firme -para ser des-obamizado, si se quiere. Esta conversión
-ganó su fama debido al sueño hippie macro-político ("Tenía mucho que soñar
-anoche" como el título de una clásica canción de sicología pop de 'The Electric
-Prunes' sonando) se deterioró completamente. Los hippies aprendieron que el
-cambio social y político requiere más que simplemente unir el mantra de los
-carteles, canciones pop y fantasías de drogas que estaban promoviendo.
-
-El mundo real era muy duro como para ser impresionado por un puñado de sucios
-burgueses marginados que mantra-cionaban acerca del cambio. El imperativo
-capitalista del mundo real era demasiado efectivo para cambiar realmente. Y aún
-así, cuando todo finalizó en 1972, algunas de las personas involucradas aún no
-se rendían ni se entregaban al sistema para desaparecer en la integración, por
-consiguiente lanzando tácticas de micro-política. En lugar de tratar de
-transformar el viejo mundo en uno nuevo, la gente comenzó a construir pequeños
-nuevos mundos dentro del viejo mundo. Compusieron espacios abiertos donde las
-personas pudieran reunirse y probar diferentes formas de vivir, trabajar, tal
-vez amar, y lo que sea que hace la gente cuando quieren hacer algo.
-
-Es necesario darle una mirada al desarrollo histórico de los movimientos
-políticos y su relacionamiento con los espacios y la geografía: la revolución
-estudiantil de 1969 fue conducida por la idea de recuperar los lugares y
-establecer una sicogeografía distinta entre el laberinto de la ciudad a través
-de la desviación. Del mismo modo, el movimiento autónomo de la década del
-setenta que cobró vida en Italia y luego influenció personas en países de habla
-alemana y los Países Bajos sobre la apropiación de los espacios, ya sea para
-centros juveniles autónomos como para la apropiación de las ondas de radio
-piratas.
-
-En consecuencia, los primeros hackerspaces se adaptan mejor en un mundo de
-topografía contracultural, que consta de casas ocupadas, cafés alternativos,
-cooperativas agrícolas, empresas de gestión colectiva, comunas, centros de
-cuidado infantil no autoritarios, y así. Todo esto estableció una estrecha red,
-para un estilo de vida alternativo en el corazón de las tinieblas burguesas.
-
-
-Hackerspaces 2 // Presente
---------------------------
-
-Los hackerspaces brindaron lugares donde la gente podía ir a trabajar en un
-ambiente no-represivo relajado y tranquilo (al menos, tanto como cualquier tipo
-de espacio o entorno dentro de la sociedad capitalista puede ser llamado
-no-represivo, relajado y tranquilo). Sociológicamente llamados 'terceros
-espacios', son espacios que rompen con el esquema dual de la estructura
-espacial burguesa, con lugares para vivir y lugares para trabajar (más lugares
-para actividades recreativas).
-
-Representan un camino integrador que se niega a aceptar un estilo de vida
-formado mediante tal estructura. Esto significa que pueden llegar a formas de
-trabajo cooperativo y no-represivo, por ejemplo, en problemas técnicos que
-pueden resultar en soluciones nuevas e innovadoras. Y allí es exactamente donde
-'Vida Equivocada' de Adorno podría caer en exceso. El sistema capitalista es
-una entidad altamente adaptable por lo que no sorprende que espacios y modos de
-vida alternativos proveyeran ideas interesantes que pudieran ser ordeñadas y
-comercializadas.
-
-Ciertas características estructurales producto de este movimiento 'indie'
-fueron repentinamente muy aclamadas, aplicadas y reproducidas en laboratorios
-de desarrollo capitalistas. Estas cualidades se adaptan mejor a la tendencia en
-que -finalizando los setentas- la sociedad burguesa comenzó a actualizarse y
-relanzarse usando las experiencias adquiridas a través de los proyectos
-contraculturales. La corriente principal cosechó el conocimiento obtenido en
-estos proyectos y lo aplicó. La normalización de la disidencia. Oh, sí.
-
-Así, la revuelta de los sesentas y todas las micro-revoluciones que le
-siguieron resultaron una especie de refresco periódico. Como sistema, el
-capitalismo está siempre interesado en librárse de sus antiguos rasgos
-opresivos que pueden bloquear su evolución y perfeccionamiento en conjunto.
-Como un ejemplo: el eco-capitalismo se puso de moda, y resultó muy eficaz en la
-generación de "buenas riquezas" capitalistas y "buenos sentimientos"
-capitalistas. Hoy en día los hackerspaces, funcionan en forma distinta de como
-lo hacían inicialmente. Cuando el primer hackerspace se formó siempre habían
-claras distinciones (un "antagonismo") entre "nosotros" (las personas
-resistiendo) y "ellos" (las personas controlando).
-
-Cierta gente no quería vivir y trabajar dentro del esquema de trabajo burgués
-clásico y se negó a ser parte de su proyecto ideológico y político, por algunas
-muy buenas razones. La alteridad de los espacios en ese entonces era
-determinada por la consistencia de una cultura dominante burguesa sobre la base
-de un orden dualista de guerra fría mundial. Una vez más demostraron ser los
-terceros espacios de una clase diferente: ni el Estado ni el capitalismo de
-libre comercio. Y siendo estructural e ideológicamente diferentes de los que
-habían sido una importante declaración y postura política. En una sociedad de
-fácil distincción entre las categorías principal y clandestina, cada actividad
-llevada a cabo en el espacio abierto del tipo clandestino, es un paso en la
-dirección equivocada.
-
-La misma práctica de hacer uso un personal de estructuras alternativas viene
-con la seguridad de estar del lado bueno. Pero la sociedad pos-guerra fría
-estableció un orden diferente que afectaba profundamente la posición de los
-hackerspaces. Mientras que por un lado se fortaleció y se tornó más represivo,
-el sistema (uno listo!) aprendió a tolerar cosas que son distintas (de camino a
-su integración o asimilación) y a entender que siempre han sido los bordes de
-la normalidad donde la nueva sustancia creció. Ordeñando cultura cubierta.
-Antes de eso, la intolerancia abierta y seguidamente la brutal opresión llevada
-a cabo contra los espacios contraculturales únicamente los hizo más fuertes y
-su necesidad más evidente (al menos donde la sociedad no tuvo éxito en su
-aplastamiento).
-
-Así, las formas de vida alternativas se aplicaron idealmente como un
-rejuvenecimiento de lo que era viejo, aburrido, conservador e impotente para
-progresar y adaptarse en el constantemente cambiante presente burgués. Nuevas
-formas de resolver problemas técnicos (y estéticos) se cocinaron en la
-clandestinidad y los burgueses cazadores de talento observaron de cerca para
-ocasionalmente seleccionar esto o aquello, tal como pasó en el campo de la
-música pop con el tan llamado rock alternativo de los noventas. Corriente
-alternativa, ahoi![^1]
-
-Por otro lado, los noventa marcaron el triunfo de la democracia liberal, tal
-como Slavoj Žižek escribe:
-
-> La caída del Muro de Berlín el 9 de noviembre de 1989 marcó el inicio de la
-> "feliz década de 1990". De acuerdo a Francis Fukuyama, la democracia liberal
-> ha, en principio, ganado. La era es generalmente vista como finalizada tras
-> el 9/11. Como sea, parece que la utopía debió morir dos veces: el colapso de
-> la utopía política liberal-demócrata del 9/11 no afectó la utopía económica
-> del mercado global capitalista, que ahora ha llegado a su fin.
-
-Es por tanto muy irónico que los geeks y nerds, mientras observan la muerte de
-la liberal-democracia en su forma política (libertades civiles concedidas a fin
-de mantener la paz social) así como en su forma económica (crisis) se vuelven
-defensores liberal-demócratas de una ideología que ya ha fallado. Sin las
-líneas de demarcación política de una sociedad de una guerra fría, los
-hackerspaces cambian cada tanto aún sin ser notado. La agenda política fue
-multiplicada por problemas individuales que los techno nerds intentaron
-resolver en una agradable atmósfera sin miedo, estados no agresivos donde la
-agresividad del mercado fue suspendida; donde uno puede hablar de problemas y
-desafíos técnicos y creativos y desafiarse cortésmente con personas con ideas
-afines.
-
-Como tal, el enfoque político se desvaneció en el camino a pequeños talleres
-paraísos frikis. La micro-política falló en la misma escala y en el mismo
-alcance que los antiguos proyectos macro-políticos fueron pulverizados por la
-irreversibilidad del capitalismo. La idea de tener una revolución (de cualquier
-tipo) fue domesticada en un reformismo de buena limpieza, y las únicas
-revoluciones que yacían delante eran semi-revoluciones tecnológicas de internet
-y sus brotes de red social. Sin las antiguas agendas políticas los hackerspaces
-se convirtieron en pequeños lugares que en realidad no hacen diferencias
-fundamentales.
-
-Comparable a la caída de las casas okupas obteniendo un estado de legalidad y
-convirtiéndose en nuevos proyectos de vivienda burguesa donde los bohemios
-urbanos copados viven sus vidas alternando continuamente entre el mundo del
-arte, lo clandestino, negocios de IT, y agencias de publicidad. Este puede no
-ser el caso para todos los hackerspaces que existen hoy en día, pero debería
-notarse que esto le ocurre a la mayoría. Y mientras por un largo tiempo el
-esquema macro-político funcionó bastante bien para proporcionar la diferencia
-inherente que se había únido a todas las actividades realizadas en los
-hackerspaces (incluso a las cosas más triviales como soldaruras, lecciones de
-alfarería, o clases de malabares), es lo que falta ahora.
-
-Debido a esta deficiencia los hackerspaces ya no pueden ser formados y
-politizados en una escala más amplia. Esto claramente significa que cualquier
-cosa que debamos hacer: nuestras comunidades de hackerspaces permanecen
-restringidas; nada más que el fluido de nutrientes para la cría de recursos
-humanos. (¡Soylent Google está hecho de personas!)
-
-Hackerspaces 3 // Futuro
-------------------------
-
-Entonces, -¿Qué se puede hacer al respecto?- Realmente, no es muy difícil
-encontrar algo sobre lo que protestar. Vigilancia, lo que sea. Utilizar el
-prefijo "anti" no es un problema. Usar la regla 76 -Siempre y cuando se pueda
-pensar en eso, se puede estar en contra de eso. Pero eso es demasiado simple.
-Nunca antes en la historia de la sociedad burguesa todo ha estado tan jodido
-como lo está ahora. Pero lo que falta en todas las prácticas que ocurren en los
-hackerspaces es una teoría concisa de a qué se parece la sociedad burguesa y
-qué debería ser atacado por nosotros construyendo y manteniendo espacios
-abiertos dentro de esa sociedad.
-
-El hermoso enfoque alternativo que compartimos debería basarse en una teoría, a
-ser leída: una agenda política que le de cierto glamour revolucionario a lo que
-realizamos a diario creando artilugios técnicos, tendiendo redes por el mundo,
-o utilizando nuestra tecnología y habilidades de programación. Para alcanzarlo
-realmente necesitamos un sentido más explícito y un entendimiento de la
-historia de lo que estamos haciendo, de los acercamientos políticos y de las
-demandas que se hicieron hace mucho tiempo y aún están allí, escondidas en lo
-que hacemos ahora mismo.
-
-Para comenzar nos gustaría organizar ciertos talleres en los hackerspaces donde
-podamos aprender acerca de la filosofía, historia y otros aspectos que
-necesitamos recobrar en nuestras vidas. La teoría es un conjunto de
-herramientas para analizar y deconstruir el mundo. Además, la necesitamos para
-reflejar y entender lo que los hackerspaces de hoy hacen bajo el "benevolente"
-control de un cierto grupo de mayormente hombres blancos trabajadores técnicos
-nerds hábiles con las manos. Y que dan forma a una práctica en ellos mismos que
-destina a la mayoría de los hackerspaces actuales. (Resulta difícil comprender
-que existen hackerspaces en algunas partes de los Estados Unidos que no tienen
-un solo miembro Afro-Américano o Latino. Pero nos gustaría mantener nuestra
-presunción europea para nosotros mismos.
-
-Debemos observar a nuestra pero-que-tan-multicultural escena hacker en Europa y
-preguntarnos a nosotros mismos si los hackers de origen inmigrante de Turquía o
-los estados del norte de África están representados en números que uno puede
-esperar de su porcentaje de la población. O, simplemente, contar con la
-representación de la mujer y ver si tienen el 50% de los miembros.
-
-Por lo tanto, nos encontramos con que los hackerspaces de hoy están excluyendo
-una gran cantidad de grupos étnicos y sociales que no parecen encajar o tal vez
-se sienten así, y tienen miedo por el dominio del hombre blanco nerd, sus (tal
-vez) bromas sexistas o excluyentes, o cualquier cosa que pueda ser aportado por
-ellos. O tal vez no tienen las habilidades adecuadas para comunicarse y/o
-cooperar con los grupos de chicos geek (o al menos pueden pensar lo
-contrario).
-
-Lo que se necesita es la inclusión no-represiva de todos los grupos marginados
-por la sociedad burguesa tal como ha sido la intención de los primeros
-hackerspaces en la historia de la contracultura. Si aceptamos la idea marxista
-que la misma naturaleza de la política eśtá siempre en el interés de los que
-actuan, las políticas de los hackerspaces son por ahora en el interés de
-hombres blancos de clase media. Esto tiene que cambiar.
-
-Bueno, eso es todo por ahora. Empecemos a trabajar en esto y veamos qué pasaría
-si cambiamos los de alguna manera aburridos hackerspaces del presente en
-algunas glamorosas fábricas de una impredecible libertad para todos nosotros,
-incluso aquellos que no encajan en el clásico esquema nerd. Cambiemos a los
-nerds. Hagamoslos un mejor espacio. Para vos y para mí y para toda la raza
-humana.
-
-Agradecimiento a Jens Ohlig por los comentarios y consejos. Gracias a Melinda
-Richka por la severidad gramática.
-
-http://www.monochrom.at/english/
-http://www.monochrom.at/hacking-the-spaces/
-
-[^1]: "Ahoi" - Seguramente significa "Ahoy", el saludo original telefónico sugerido
-por Alexander Graham Bell, remplazado por "Hola"
-
-N. del T. ☠♥☠. Agradecimiento a los hermanos de QuilmesLUG por tanta buena
-onda.
diff --git a/_revision/telnik.bib b/_revision/telnik.bib
deleted file mode 100644
index 871012ad84a73feb7496b3ede774a4d1af4b82ff..0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
--- a/_revision/telnik.bib
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,274 +0,0 @@
-@ARTICLE{bell-1960,
-    author = "Bell, Daniel",
-    title = "The Subversion of Collective Bargaining",
-    year = "1960",
-    month = "March",
-    publisher = "Commentary Magazine"
-}
-
-@ONLINE{charter-sf,
-   author = "Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge 2.0.1",
-   title = "Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge ‘Introduction’",
-   url = "http://fcforum.net/charter_extended"
-}
-
-@ONLINE{dablade-2006,
-    author = "DaBlade",
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-}
-
-@ONLINE{iww-sf,
-    author = "Industrial Workers of the World",
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-    publisher = "Industrial Workers of the World: A Union for All Workers",
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-@ONLINE{khayati-1966,
-    author = "Khayati, Mustapha",
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-@ONLINE{kretschmer-sf,
-    author = "Kretschmer, Martin",
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-@ONLINE{kretschmer-2006,
-    author = "Kretschmer, Martin",
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-    year = "2006",
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-}
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-@CONFERENCE{lessig-2006,
-    author = "Lessig, Lawrence",
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-@BOOK{macmillan-2007,
-    author = "Macmillan, Fiona",
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-@ONLINE{mandel-1981,
-    author = "Mandel, Ernest",
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-    author = "Marx, Karl",
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-    year = "1859"
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-@BOOK{manifesto-1848,
-    author = "Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick",
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-@BOOK{mill-1848,
-    author = "Stuart Mill, J.",
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-@ONLINE{miller-2004,
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-@ARTICLE{oreilly-2007,
-    author = "O’Reilly, Tim",
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-@BOOK{proudhon-1890,
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-@BOOK{seuss-1956,
-    author = "Dr. Seuss",
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-@ARTICLE{joost-2009,
-    author = "Smiers, Joost and van Schijndel, Marieke",
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-@BOOK{cohen-2009,
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-    publisher = "PC World"
-}
diff --git a/cite2md.rb b/cite2md.rb
deleted file mode 100644
index ff74f30a8bd91ef08f13a3b4a37f956c35a93528..0000000000000000000000000000000000000000
--- a/cite2md.rb
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,55 +0,0 @@
-# convierte citas LaTeX en Markdown
-# mandown estaria bueno para esto pero no funciona en ruby 1.9
-# licencia: GPLv3
-# autor: Nicolás Reynolds <fauno@kiwwwi.com.ar>
-# gem install bibtex-ruby citeproc-ruby
-require 'bibtex'
-require 'citeproc'
-
-bib = BibTeX.open('_revision/telnik.bib')
-#citere = /\\cite{([^}]+)}/
-citere = /\[\^([a-z][^\]]+)\]/
-
-ARGV.each do |f|
-# Leer todo el texto
-    text = File.read(f)
-
-# Obtener todas las citas únicas
-    cites = text.scan(citere).uniq
-
-# maruku agrega un <hr> a las notas al pie
-    #text << "\n\n## Bibliografia\n"
-
-# recorrer todas las citas
-    cites.each do |c|
-        citeref = ""
-
-        puts "Procesando #{c}"
-
-# puede haber varias citas en un mismo \cite{}
-        c[0].split(', ').each do |k|
-
-# Una nota al pie con el nombre del bib
-            citeref << "[^#{k}]"
-
-# La nota al pie con la referencia bibliografica
-            citenote = "[^#{k}]: "
-            citenote <<  CiteProc.process(bib[k.to_sym].to_citeproc, :style => :apa)
-
-# Saltar dos espacios
-            citenote << "\n\n"
-
-# Agregar la nota al final del texto
-#            text << citenote
-            puts citenote
-        end
-
-# Cambiar los \cite{} por las referencias
-#        text.gsub!(/\\cite{#{c[0]}}/, citeref)
-    end
-
-# Devolver el texto
-#    puts text
-#    puts citenote
-
-end