Politics Group - Day 1

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Track “Organizational logic and political implications of free culture”

Organised by Networked Politics as a continuity to a collaborative research on emerging ways of political organizing.

Summary Politics

Contents

[edit] Initial introduction to the track

A concept which is present in this track is the idea of a transion in which some organizational form are gaining in importance, in a context of a profound crisis of the nation-state and deep transformation of the market.

The goals of this track is on the one hand, reflect critically on the organizational characteristics and principles of free culture experiences and enviroment in order to better know and understand free culture; but also from a critical and interventionist perspective in order to approuch the pros, but also the contras, risks and the ambiguities of this forms; to redefine our methodologies and way of doing.

On the other hand, reflect on a broadder frame, looking to historical processes and macro socio-political-economics changes, and ambrella concepts (like the commons) and approuch the dimensions and the several dimensions linked to the free culture in order to better define our overall political strategy and our claims.


[edit] Insides from the panel presentations

BROAD FRAME:

  • David Bollier: "The Digital Republic, Its Enemies and How the Commoners Can Prevail". Chief goals of the presentation will be to note the urgent political situation with respect to IP & free culture; explain why it is important that various free culture "tribes" come together as a political force; explain how the commons is a helpful way to unite our movement and assert the supremacy of basic democratic, cultural and human rights; how the commons discourse can help us challenge the archaic neoliberal IP worldview; and how we must change the discourse and mobilize a political response to IP policies that enclose the commons.
  • Felix Stalder: “Free Culture vs Web2.0": While Free Culture is part of a larger social movement (together with free software and a2k) about creating freedom and equity in the informational domain, web 2.0 is only the simulation of freedom, masking new forms of hierarchy and control that will make the persuit of radical freedom even harder.


ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLES:

  • Mayo Fuster Morell: “Organizational and democratic logic of free culture”: Conception of participation in free culture iniciatives (online creation communities) loose the dicotomic character and adopted a diverse meaning and functions that in “representative” systems. It moves towards a conception of participation as an eco-system, in which several forms and degrees of participation are intergrated and the distribution of owvership, functions and authory generated balances of mutual-dependency.

Participation is understood as an eco-system in six senses:

  1. What is important is that the system is open to participation, but it is not expected that everybody participate and contribute equally;
  2. Participation has multiple forms and degrees which are integrated. A critical mass of active developers is essential to initiate the project and maintain the content; weak cooperation enriches the system and facilitates reaching larger fields of information resources; and lurker or non-participants provide value as audience or though unintended participation that improve the system;
  3. Participation is decentralised and asynchronous;
  4. Participation is in public;
  5. Participation is autonomous in the sense that each person decides which level of commitment they want to adopt and on what aspects they want to contribute.
  6. Participation is volunteering. Participation is not only deliberation but implementation.


  • Jamie King: “P2p organizational form and political implications? Reflections though Vodo.net experience”

[edit] Roundtable brainstorming of key issues for the agenda

Three elements emerged as aggutinators of the discussion:

I. Free culture movement?

  • Is there a Free culture movement?. There is a recognition that we are in a special moment in history, but: Could be said that there are comunalities between the several pieces (I.e.: Berkman center discourse is we are not pirates while piracy is also a practices linked to free culture)? Is free software transgelable to something else? How to interpretate Pirate Party (more than a joke to institutional politics)?
  • Which are the several pieces in the frame of free culture? Which pieces could lead to a mobilization of free culture issues?
  • It is importance to convey to the large public the importance of Free culture for democracy. But, how do we convey the importance of FC?
  • How to move beyong the core people inverted on free culture issues to generate a free culture movement?

Which similarities has the Free culture movement with other movements such as the Global Justice Movement?

II. Institutions of the commons:

  • Does the Free culture teach as something from the point of view of: How to overcome the tendency of frangmentation? How to face stability? How to build alliances that have political effects?
  • Which is the vision of transformation of society emerging from this Free culture?
  • Could commons give an umbrella conceptualization?. Which does not refer to unifies movement, but commons as a meta-frame for the movement.
  • Which is the frame that emerge from linking technology, social structures and norms?
  • The commons provides a transversal link between very different expresions (such as digital commons, but also natural ones) which have in common relations of simetry and mutual dependency.
  • How to connect the traditional political institutions (State) with the commons? In what degree commons is compatible with the market?
  • Is it culture the framing aspect that link free culture?
  • Commons as instruduction of subjectivity formation and production.

III. How do we conceve free culture (beyong free licences)? The new points of control over cultural production: The politics of principed production in free culture

  • How does the new technologies changing the cultural insdustry? How does change the control that nevertheless the industry keep over cultural production? Such as control of promotion/visibility become key element of the new industry as promotions happen in radio and TV that we do not control.
  • Cultural industry could work without IP (copyright) and work, what is left from a change of a IP industrial industry to a post-IP industry? And linked to it, how to think free culture beyong free licences?
  • How to build relationship with audiences? How to develop forms of promotion, visibility and distribution of free culture works in a way that we agree with such as in term of "producers" controlling the promotion? (I.e.: Vodo) Does it mean a new way of capitalism?

Other menor issues that emerged at the brainstorming was Open goverment:

  • How to organise the access to public admisnistration information?
  • How free culture could be applied to the management of the city?


[edit] Division in three sub-groups:

[edit] I. Institutions of the commons

(Reporter David Bollier)

Can the commons function as an “umbrella concept” to unite different free culture communities? There was a general agreement that it could. But it must be recognized that the term “the commons” is not simply a new way to name collective management of a resource; it must describe a vital social practice and ethic. These will naturally differ from commons to another, which is why it is difficult to provide a single, universal definition of the commons. A commons is more of a meta-term that describes a broad, diverse class of communities that have different ways to govern themselves and their resources.

Yet it is possible to identify a number of principles that apply to most commons. A commons must act as a steward or trustee of shared resources, and manage them collectively for the benefit of the commoners. A commons attempts to provide equal access to the resource and to assure a basic social equity for all commoners. A commons also strives to honor participation, inclusion, transparency and long-term sustainability. There are rules and boundaries for managing commons, as well as systems of monitoring and punishment for vandals.

A special challenge for the future is developing institutions to sustain the commons (understood as the social practice of a distinct community that manages a resource for collective benefit). Government is the most obvious institution that could support the commons. If government provides multiple forms of support for markets to function well, why shouldn’t it also support the commons, which is an equal if not more potent means for generating value? The chief difference is that value generated by the commons tends to be social, creative and cultural in nature, not monetary or privatized.

But there are complications that could come with government support. Would government money, facilitating laws and other support prove helpful? Or would it politically co-opt or corrupt the commons? Either is possible. It is also possible, however, that government working closely with various commons could transcend this dualism, and produce a new, hybrid political model of governance. Government institutions that work with commons could bring citizens into a new, more transparent and mutually productive relationship than current government institutions allow. This appears to be the experience in Brazil, where President Lula is using commons-based models to develop new types of government-citizen relationships and conversations, which in turn could lead to structural reforms of government institutions and practices.

The commons may be valuable, also, for enlarging our understanding of what constitutes “the economy.” Traditional economists regard the economy as the monetary value that is produced through private property, contracts and cash exchange in the marketplace. But this general definition of value-production does not take into account a wide range of hidden costs. These include the hidden subsidies that government provides to the marketplace (e.g., free access to natural resources, the airwaves, government research, taxpayer-financed infrastructure, etc.) and unacknowledged “externalities” that the market displaces onto the commons in the form of pollution and social disruption.

A difficult question is how to sustain the commons financially. One idea, which has greater appeal in European countries, is a basic income for all citizens. The goal would be to recognize social production as an important source of value by compensating it financially. Politically, this may be a difficult proposition for the short term.

Another intriguing idea is to develop alternative digital currencies, using new types of software platforms and secure authentication for individuals. Again, the goal would be to recognize value that the official monetary system ignores. Alternative currencies would enable the participants in a commons to retain the value that their talents and energies generate, rather than allow them to be siphoned off into the conventional cash economy.

An important consideration for the sustainability of commons – beyond any financial support – is the “architectural design” of it – the fundamental rules for governance, management of the resource, and its social practices and norms. The institutions of the 21st Century may take the form of shared protocols, and not simply reflect conventional legal forms (such as a corporation or nonprofit). The protocols for commons may be technological, legal or social, but the point is that they are collectively negotiated rules for governing a shared resource. Once the protocols are accepted, cooperation can occur more automatically, without people having to make a conscious choice or enter into a negotiation each time they wish to use the resource. In this way, a commons of shared protocols can provide a platform for diverse sorts of individual creativity. The result is cooperation and individualism.

[edit] II. Free Culture Movement?

(Reporter Vittorio Bertola)

The second sub-working group was tasked with discussing the question: “is there really a Free Culture Movement?”.

First of all it was noted that the answer to this question also depends on what you mean by the term “movement”. To this purpose, the approach that we followed was to examine a number of specific cases and to try and find commonalities among them, to determine whether there could be any universal features that could be used to define a single “movement”.

In the end, it became pretty clear that while all participants to the supposed “movement” adopt similar practices in terms of ways to license and distribute content, not all of them do it with the same purpose and for the same reasons. Roughly, two big groups can be identified: people and environments that see the free culture distribution models as a tool, even for professional and business activities, and adopt them in a utilitarian manner – because they work better than others – without questioning the structure of society and without adopting a political agenda, and people and environments that see the free culture distribution models as an end in themselves, and as a way to promote a political agenda and foster a change in society and economy.

This difference can be also traced back to historical reasons, considering for example the cultural differences between the U.S. hacker culture where free software was born, and the European and Southern social centres where free software was embraced and promoted inside a set of broader political actions.

There was some discussion on whether free culture distribution models embody certain values in themselves, so that even the utilitarian adopters might be unwillingly helping to promote the political agenda of the ideological adopters, and on whether an economic co-existence of free culture models and traditional intellectual property-based models is sustainable in the long term, making the utilitarian approach sustainable in the long term as well. While there certainly are values embedded in the models, it is also likely that if the political agenda of the ideological adopters were to be pushed too far, the utilitarian adopters would disassociate themselves from the “movement” - this was evident in recollection of the distance existing between, for example, Creative Commons and the peer-to-peer file sharing movement.

In the end, we made an attempt to identify some commonalities among the several cases of adoption of free culture models that we examined, and among their adopters:

  • they see value in the act of sharing, though the type of value (political, social, economical or all of these) varies case by case;
  • they draw on the horizontal, networked, distributed organization typical of the Internet model, and on the lack of hierarchies and centralized validation and authorization processes;
  • they struggle for acceptance of the new distribution models in their own environments, though acceptance by whom and for which reasons varies case by case;
  • they tend to become self-aware as a reaction to the threats by established players who want to resist such acceptance, though again the type and motivations of these players varies case by case.

Rather than a “movement”, free culture looks like a big square which people are entering and leaving in different directions. The fact that we meet in the square and share a part of our path together may give the illusion that we all move in the same way, but it is not enough to define all of us as being part of a single “free culture movement”.

[edit] III. The Politics of Principled Production in Free Culture

(Reporters: Felix Stalder and Mayo Fuster)

(Report: David Evan Harris, Tina Ryoon Andersen and Stina Marie Hasse Jorgensen)

First and foremost, the group agrees that free culture means much more than free licenses. In as much as what we are doing can be construed as a social movement, it is essential that both the content that we produced and the means by which it is distributed enable us to convey a new constellation of ideas to a new and broader set of audiences, who in turn act as both recipients and remixers of our content.

The near instantaneousness of global distribution afforded us by new technologies offers both new opportunities to communicate ideas and consequently new ways of thinking and sharing ideas across space that were not possible through the communications technologies available in previous decades.

As cultural practitioners, we strongly believe in the importance of non-exclusive distribution methods via community-owned or community-controlled infrastructures. When we engage with corporate-owned media distribution networks, we insist that these networks offer us a guarantee of data portability and transparency. In the selection of distribution media for our work, we favor open formats and open protocols that allow our work to reach broad audiences across platforms and operating systems.

As a cultural and social movement, we strive to produce cultural works that go beyond the works produced in previous generations of media and cultural production through top-down models. While some of our works may fall into the same genres as mainstream cultural works (comedy, fiction, journalism, documentary, etc.), we also valorize the work of marginalized communities of cultural producers and new genres. Much of our work is distinct in the techniques, methods and means of production. Remixing each other's work and collaborating across cultural and national boundaries enables us to develop these new ways of communicating. These new methods of both production and distribution have enabled us to produce new and different works.

With the rise of mainstream employment of "Web 2.0" technologies by many large corporations, we see a growing tendency for profit-seeking entities to embrace the use of nominally free forms of production and distribution of cultural content. As Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies continue to develop, a growing contingent of corporate actors are beginning to abandon this specific method of control of cultural works. We foresee a growing movement on the part of companies to embrace a broadly construed model of "free" cultural production and distribution as a market strategy, following on the tails of highly successful for-profit development of free and open source technologies.

We see these business strategies not as employing a new set of enlightened approaches to technological challenges, but rather as a necessary move to compete with the widely adopted peer-to-peer file-sharing networks which, by both legal and illegal means distribute media quickly, efficiently and at virtually zero cost to end users. Our group identifies the business model of nominally free cultural production and distribution on the part of mainstream, large corporations as a way to maximize profits, as opposed to that of the free culture movement, which explicitly seeks to maximize freedom of communication of ideas in the interest of positive social change.

Within our community, there is a divide with regard to the legitimacy of profit-seeking in the production and distribution of cultural work on a variety of scales. While some members of the free culture movement see markets and the profit motive as integral and essential to the production of culture, others prefer a more radical shift away from these models which currently dominate global cultural systems.

Many free culture activists are employing a multitude of both new and old strategies for producing works and stimulating cultural production. In previous generations, many of our societies' most important artists produced their seminal work while receiving some form of state support, ranging from welfare or social security benefits which afforded them a meager but sufficient means of survival while developing their work, to formal institutional support through state-funded universities, museums, and other cultural institutions. These forms of state support—complemented in many cases by private foundations and cultural institutions which insulate cultural producers from market forces—are absolutely essential for the development of both individual cultural creators and their communities.

In order for individual creators to be successful, they must be afforded by society a level of financial security that gives them the time to develop a deep knowledge of previous work and to experiment—and fail—in their own work with the knowledge that they will be able to fulfill their own basic material necessities.

State support for cultural creators—while critical for cultural production—also presents a potential problem in cases where it compromises the autonomy of producers to determine the content of their work. Censorship is not the only concern in this area; systematic support for certain types of cultural work at the expense of others also constitutes a significant concern for our movement. Allocation of state support for the arts must be transparent, sustained, and meritocratic to the fullest extent possible. Free digital distribution of state-supported work is a key priority for our movement, which in turn calls for novel ways of states to rethink the granting of rewards for popular and successful works.

Community-driven models of supporting cultural production are an increasingly viable option for members of our community seeking to develop new works. Online platforms such as Kickstarter.com, Firstgiving.com, Fundable.com, Chipin.com and numerous others offer creators fast and relatively easy ways to raise a limited amount of funds for projects. These platforms support both donation-based models as well as offering the ability to return physical or digital finished products to the community of funders. Unfortunately, these forms of fundraising are not sustainable ways of supporting cultural creators in many cases.

Collectives, cooperatives and fair-trade cultural goods offer additional alternative models of supporting the production of free and autonomous cultural work. By creating new communities or finding new ways of connecting producers and their audiences, these alternative arrangements produce important and distinct results as compared to the other means described above.

Music, film, books and other cultural forms each require different methods of both production and distribution. While musicians are increasingly succeeding in supporting their work through live performances and the simultaneous sale of merchandise, this model is difficult to translate into film or books, which have no clearly viable analogues in the context of free digital distribution. Participation in a reputational economy of honoraria, fellowships and sometimes-lucrative freelance work offers certain successful creators economic opportunities, but does not present a defined or reliable career path for creators to develop high-quality work.

Producing, distributing and collaboratively developing qualitatively new and challenging cultural work remains at the center of our movement. Free access to all cultural works in their digital form —both mainstream and marginal, historical and contemporary—is fundamental to our work as well. From scientific research to artistic expression to documentation of human rights abuses to the interrogation of entrenched power structures, we aim to make way for a new generation of free and open access to knowledge in the pursuit of a better world.

[edit] List of Participants

  • Mayo Fuster Morell (Coordination) (Phd researcher on Goverance of digital commons at the European University Institute www.onlinecreation.info and Fcforum organization).
  • Hilary Wainwright (Transnational Institute Amsterdam and Red Pepper Manchester)
  • Joan Subirats (Institut de Govern i Politiques Publiques, Barcelona)
  • Marco Berlinguer (Transform! Italia)
  • David Bollier (On the commons, USA)
  • Felix Stalder (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Zurich, Institute for New Cultural Technologies in Vienna and Openflows in New York)
  • Jamie King (Film maker and Intellectual Property specialist Berlin and London)
  • Vittorio Bertola (United Nations Internet Governance Forum)
  • Pablo Ortellado (Epidemoa Brazil)
  • David Harris (Global lives project and Institute for the Future)
  • Tina Ryoon Andersen, tinarandersen@yahoo.com – Student of Modern Culture at The University of Copenhagen
  • Stina Marie Hasse Jorgensen, stinahasse@hotmail.com – Student of Modern Culture at The University of Copenhagen
  • William F. Souza, williamnsfs@gmailcom (Brazil)
  • Jose Murilo - Brazilian Ministry of Culture
  • Ál Cano Santana, al@blogmail.cc – Blogx Populi, guifi.net
  • Laura Gimenez
  • Adria
  • Maria Jose
  • Daniel
  • Xabier Eskisabel (Basque and Culture Department of the Council of Gipuzkoa, Basque Country) Official Observer.
  • Mariano

[edit] Collection of readings for preparing the final documents of the politics track

  • Lula and Free Software - Lula da Silva, Brazilian President, talks about the importance of Free Software and the Internet at the 10th Free Software Internacional Forum (FISL), in Porto Alegre, Brazil - June 26th, 2009
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