On 12/01/12 16:02, Simon Biggs wrote: > I'm an academic and an artist and totally champion the open book. Knowledge > is made best when it is made shared.
Knowledge, as language, is always shared, always public and can never be private, but it can be conjured up in a private setting by an individual. To my mind it is perfectly fine to conjure up knowledge on your own - for some particular project and purpose. Rather the "problem" I see in this context is when such a knowledge-conjuring individual is not actually embedded in a collectivity (which wage slavery is not) to which s/he can return and from and for which the conjuring unfolds. Academics pretend to be in networks and clusters and so on, but pretend is the key word here: primarily, academics dabble in production to produce their own careers. Maybe things used to be different, I don't know, but as universities have become sausage factories they mainly attract, retain and produce competitive individuals. In such an environment the "open" and "collaborative" memes appear to become substitutes, - displacements even, hiding the nature of the underlying business. > I'm not sure what you mean by texture Adam, but the open source ethic > certainly gives life a different texture than a capitalist model. The open source ethic *is* a capitalist model. It was extracted from the Free Software model for the purpose of presenting to capitalists an engineering methodology that would appeal and that would take advantage of the networking potential of the interweb. It might give a different texture - a virtual one at that - but this is precisely where Tiziana's point of the alienated, disconnected, virtual/disembodied (if I understood it right) subject becomes crucial. It is here tempting to ask: Once we are all connected to everyone else through this environmentally destructive (mining, electricity etc.) thing called the net, then what will we realise? Probably that it is time to log off and knock on our neighbour's door and get a community assembly together. It might well be that we need to go that far to get to that - but that just goes to show that we have come nowhere: "destroying the (global) village in order to save it is still the order of the day. -m -- http://commoning.wordpress.com "...I thought we were an autonomous collective..." _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
