Hi netbehaviourists, An interesting article by Dmytri Kleiner
Scratch-off the Facebook logo, and you’ll find the CompuServ logo underneath. Intro… During the summer I traveled to the Monostori Fortress near Komárom, Hungary to attend IslandCQ 2013 “Crisis! Re/Constructing Europe.” This text is for the IslandCQ 2013 publication. Rather than simply transcribing my presentation, I have created this text to cover some of things we talked about, and to expand upon them and take the topic further. This text is a remix and extension of three previous texts, two from my blog, and one co-written with Baruch Gottlieb. Remixing and forking both software and text is an approach I have used for years, and indeed most of my texts contain fragments of other texts, some of which I have written myself, some co-written with others. I inherited this technique from the long history of radical art, from practitioners of cut-up, like Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, to Dada and The Situationists International, and into my own generation with the Neoist Network. The Internet and free software, to me, were a natural extension of my already existing support of free communications and anti-copyright. When I encountered the Internet for the first time I immediately embraced it, its distributed architecture, its capacity for allowing free speech, and perhaps most significantly, its culture of sharing. The Internet embodied the social relations to match my political and artistic convictions. However, when I encountered the Internet, though I didn’t know it, it was already dying. It was clear to me that there were challenges, to be sure, but I didn’t yet realize how bad the prognosis was. To me, my fight to save the Internet was against the cencorius desires of other users and the timidity of the small companies providing internet services. This was a fight that seemed winnable. However, what I didn’t know at the time, was that the real fight was against Capitalism, and as such, the inevitable end of the Internet was already evident. A good example of my early participation is a text I posted on Usenet, it was republished on Wired Magazine’s HotWired site, which claimed to be the world’s first commercial web magazine. In it, I argue that sysadmins working for internet service providers should focus on keeping their servers running, and sanction users that are abusing system resources, but not interfere with content, because if they did so, if they assumed the role of online censor, they would jeopardise the spirit of the Net, and also jeopardise the viability of their own service. In some way I was right, assuming the Net worked the way we thought it worked, worked the way that John Perry Barlow thought when he wrote “We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” or the way John Gilmore thought when he wrote “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” or the way Richard Barbrook thought when he wrote “Within the Net, people are developing the most advanced form of collective labour: work-as-gift.” Unfortunately, I wrote my article in September. The 790th day of September, 1993, to be exact. What would have been October 31st, 1995 on the pre-September calendar. The rest here http://www.dmytri.info/scratch-off-the-facebook-logo-and-youll-find-the-compuserv-logo-underneath/ _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
