[Nettime-bold] WOS 2: die neue aufrichtigkeit

[Jim Carrico <jim@at.org>]

http://www.potlatch.net/2001/10/18.html

Greetings from the world's coldest rainforest, the world's largest 
squatter's camp, a million square kilometers of unceded aboriginal 
land that is neither british nor columbian. The icy downpour (a 
little early this year!) is in stark contrast to sunny, balmy berlin, 
city of  construction sites, after-after-hours clubs, and 
international capitol of cool, where we've been hangin with hipster 
intellectuals till dawn and beyond.  (yo homes! respect to neven, 
mike, pit, erik, and sabine.)  The occasion: the Wizards-of-OS 2 [1] 
conference, an attempt to focus an amorphous worldwide movement which 
aims to apply the strategies of free software to culture. Did it 
succeed? I would have to say no - but the lack of answers is more 
than mitigated by the fact that finally we're asking the right 
questions.

It starts with noticing that the most outrageous experiment in 
practical anarchy ever attempted just happens to comprise the leading 
edge of the most massively and suddenly successful communications 
medium in history, but that this has so far had little influence on 
our 'social self-image' as a species, outside a few tech enclaves. 
Free software "works": can other forms of creative expression evolve 
which draw from a similar reservoir of seemingly untapped and 
unlimited resources? If open-ness, the lack of central control, is 
good for software, is it also good for writing, music, visual or 
virtual art of any kind? If not, why not?

No solid answers yet; no problem. As usual with these affairs, the 
important stuff happens in the hallways and interzones, in the 
randomizing churn of emergent behavour.

Some highlights:

The Sarai [2] project from New Delhi, inspired by the "public domain" 
waystations on the ancient caravan routes, aiming to create a 
'digital sarai' for collaborative, open, and exploratory art and 
communication. " The free exchange of code, information and cultural 
products is central to our conception of the digital public domain. 
That is why we will encourage everyone, scholars, practitioners and 
citizens at large, to engage and enlarge this domain. For a society 
like India, where hierarchy, inequality and control influence the 
production of ideas, a free software culture is worth fighting for."


The life sharing [3] project from Bologna - an anagram of 'file 
sharing' which extends this idea to it's ultimate limits: making 
literally everything on their server publicly accessible, a virtual 
root account for every visitor to their site - including access to 
all personal email etc - read-only, but wide open all the same. What 
nerve!

A brief report on the now-defunct Luther Blissett [4] project, a 
"multiple name" collaborative identity used by a nameless number of 
individuals for purposes of radical intervention, which overtly 
connects the 'free software' concept with situationist [5] notions of 
anti-copyright  and cultural insurrection.

And of course Michael Linton's LETS [6] system, an "open money" [7] 
project that puts the "eco" back into "economics" by reinventing 
money as community currency, a simple measurement of  value ("imagine 
running out of inches") backed by the reputation of the issuer. 
They've been working for  about 20 years in a very practical way 
developing an economic model that has been taken up by communities 
all over the world - there are thousands of LETS networks, with 
hundreds of thousands of members. The next step is to connect them 
all together.

A money system based on reciprocity and reputation may sound familiar 
to anyone who has been following the debate on artist-friendly 
micropayment systems on this and other sites over the last year or so 
- and indeed this idea of a community currency is a very close fit 
with what we see as an essential democratizing of the world's 
financial infrastructure.  It also begins to approach Todd Boyle's 
ideas [8] about using shared accounting systems (aka webledgers) to 
route around banks in our financial dealings with one another. 
Clearly, we need to start putting these ideas into practice.

And dare we mention the panel on Collaborative Journalism hosted by 
Erik Moeller of Infoanarchy [9], featuring Meg Hourihan, late of 
Blogger.com, and Timothy Lord of Slashdot. On short notice, due to 
late cancellation, I was offered the opportunity to present a talk on 
'reciprocity and gift culture', as a solution to the problem of 
finding and rewarding high quality and high resonance writing, music 
or any other cultural product, particularly in the context of p2p 
networks and ubiquitous access to distribution. Notes to the talk are 
available at http://potlatch.net/WOS/p2pj-1.html .

Despite occasional lapses into seemingly directionless discourse, 
WOS 2 was refreshingly free from irony, sarcasm, or  smug 
self-satisfaction.  Sept.11 and its aftermath have opened a portal 
into the hell dimension, a whirling vortex of perpetual warfare that 
threatens to engulf history and humanity. This adds a certain 
seriousness to everything we do, and social experiments which tend to 
oppose this bleak scenario are now being approached with a sense that 
the time for bullshitting is over - the "new sincerity" is here.

____________________________________________

1. http://wizards-of-os.org/

2. http://www.sarai.net

3. http://www.0100101110101101.org

4. http://lutherblissett.net/primer/ramp.html

5. http://nothingness.org/SI/index.html

6. http://www.gmlets.u-net.com/faq.html

7. http://www.openmoney.org

8. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/decentralization/message/4107

9. http://www.infoanarchy.org

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