Re: nettime Reverse Engineering Freedom and make world paper#3
[this message got stuck in my outbox while travelling from one outgoing mailserver to another... sorry for the delay /fls] On Wednesday, September 24, 2003, at 12:49 PM, David Garcia wrote: It is a sad truth that although imperfect, the most effective guarantor of the personal safety upon which the freedom Geert and Florian celebrate, including (perhaps especially) the innovations of the opensource movement, are not universal principals but the power sovereign states, able and willing to offer minimal conditions of safety to its resident netizens, activists and hackers whether in Brisbane, Berlin or Delhi. may i disagree? it's a bit late, and very illegitimate but i guess i still should. this argument somehow reminds me to the conservative teacher who told me when i went to my first demonstrations in the early 80ies: you are going to fight against a system that at least allows you to fight against it. he did not really understand that it was precisely that hypocrisy of the western propaganda during the cold war that was outraging me and lots of others young guys. why one should have to decide between bad and worse? geert and me are certainly not so tired that we would prefer to lay back and refer to universal principals. i also feel limited gratitude to the power of souvereign states, which tend to offer conditions of paranoia rather than safety. when we are talking about freedom of movement and freedom of communication we are referring to the everyday struggles of millions of people crossing borders as well as pirating brands, producing generics, writing open source code or using p2p-software. there is a multitude of reasons to exercise these very different practices; but first of all it refers to an impregnable autonomy of resisting and refusing both the new border and the intellectual property regimes which are set up by souvereign nation states and global corporations. apparently they rely existentially on depriving more and more people of freedoms, which are even not the privilege of some netizens anymore. what has been formerly known as a human right, became subject of all sorts of management strategies. in this situation conscience-stricken moralizing makes us only weaker than we are, because it plays into the hands of those whose power originates from granting limited, temporary or no access to sources and resources. i feel no need to feel guilty or excuse for the bizarre coincidence that i may be in possession of a passport that currently allows me to travel across most of the borders of this world. but i feel a need to enjoy such advantages with everybody on this globe. i feel a need to struggle for freedom of movement, not because i feel misery with these poor victims, who have to escape from where they have been born and should stay for the sake of authenticity, nativity and noble savageness. the reason is that i have lots of respect and admiration for anyone who makes the difficult decision to leave one's point of origin. i guess the excessive abuse of the verb share in this context (i.e. file-sharing) carries enormous ideological impact. as if one would loose something like safety, if mobility is no longer exclusive to those who pretend to be already fed up with it or are already too wise and sophisticated to be affected by it; as if one would have only half of the fun if others enjoy the same as oneself. actually the opposite is true: i am glad, when i log onto my computer in the morning and when i see how many people downloaded something they were looking for. i am glad when i was able to support somebody to get at least a chance to spend even some time in areas of the world that are supposed to be reserved for the exclusive usage of only a few. Geert and Florian's words are as always provide an inspiring dose of boosterism but nevertheless (in this paragraph at least) they are a chimera because the condition of the privileged and mobile, net-savy intelligencia they generously wish to universalize is totally dependent on the existence of the network of states and their institutions whose boarders they would dissolve. To act as though globalization and the networks (from either above or below) have rendered nation states either illusory or merely an oppressive anachronism, is to fail to see the plight of the tens of thousands of stateless people, whose membership of the human family alone affords them little pity, protection or hope, let alone freedom (reverse engineered or otherwise). This outdated narrative which claims to be going beyond the naivetes of the dot.gone era, merely succeed (here and there) in recuperating its lack of (all but the most recent) historical awareness. Despite a critical ambience we are re-visiting the euphoria of another holiday from history. Geert and Florian dissolve in the universalising solvent of their rhetoric the fact that many important liberation movements (including that taking place in Palestine) are more than
Re: nettime Reverse Engineering Freedom and make world paper#3
All too often we have encountered a fear of freedom amongst radical activists. There is a deep desire to call for regulation and control that, in the past, the nation-state and its repressive apparatus had to enforce upon the out-of-control capitalism. As true techno-libertarians we have to state: the struggle is about nothing else other than freedom (Everyone is a Californian). There is a freedom of sharing, exchanging, multiplying and distributing resources, no matter how material or immaterial. So far, freedom has always been connected with equality, and therefore tied up with the possession of or alienation from property. Today this link is broken. It is exactly the complete farce of all sorts of management scenarios (from border management to digital rights management) which make evident that property is an absolutely inadequate juridico-political relation to handle the potential and the complexity of social relationships within the immaterial sphere of production and distribution. It is an essential and unalterable fact that ideas circulate online and people are free to move around offline. Content should not be restricted to the Internet or any one medium for that matter. For its own sake the multitudes will refuse to be handcuffed and fettered by the myths of a nation-state or some global government. It is a sad truth that although imperfect, the most effective guarantor of the personal safety upon which the freedom Geert and Florian celebrate, including (perhaps especially) the innovations of the opensource movement, are not universal principals but the power sovereign states, able and willing to offer minimal conditions of safety to its resident netizens, activists and hackers whether in Brisbane, Berlin or Delhi. Geert and Florian's words are as always provide an inspiring dose of boosterism but nevertheless (in this paragraph at least) they are a chimera because the condition of the privileged and mobile, net-savy intelligencia they generously wish to universalize is totally dependent on the existence of the network of states and their institutions whose boarders they would dissolve. To act as though globalization and the networks (from either above or below) have rendered nation states either illusory or merely an oppressive anachronism, is to fail to see the plight of the tens of thousands of stateless people, whose membership of the human family alone affords them little pity, protection or hope, let alone freedom (reverse engineered or otherwise). This outdated narrative which claims to be going beyond the naivetes of the dot.gone era, merely succeed (here and there) in recuperating its lack of (all but the most recent) historical awareness. Despite a critical ambience we are re-visiting the euphoria of another holiday from history. Geert and Florian dissolve in the universalising solvent of their rhetoric the fact that many important liberation movements (including that taking place in Palestine) are more than than ever likely to be nationalist movements. Kurds. Tamils, Kosovar Albanians all seek statehood and the right to create a framework of legal and political protection for their people. Try telling Palestinian fighters who dream of living in their own country that they are handcuffed to the myth of the nation-state. There are many hells in this world and many (admittedly by no means all) of the worst occur when not only through oppressive by states, but when states break down. And the technologies of violence that were previously under proprietary control of the nation are opensourced (in proliferation) to the warlords and the gangsters. When a state dissolves and our predatory side is unconstrained we will all ask just one question: where will I be safe? It is then that we discover (empirically) why boarders exist. Of course even under these conditions we remain within boarders.. but these boarders shrink, drastically -along with our freedoms- as we slide from nation to tribe to clan to gang. And the much celebrated commons becomes Shakespeare's pitiless heath where (if we are luckless) we might attain the freedom of a wandering Lear, who, naked and unprotected, is thus purified to the state of natural man and so becomes that 'poor, bare forked animal' .. Is this fear of freedom? You bet! There is always great pleasure in reading the inspirational texts Geert and Florian but they also give the sense that it might be time for a slightly different tone. For at least some critical internet culture to proclaim less heroically, Zarathustra style, from lofty peaks. Maybe alongside charismatic Nietzschean flights, we might remember Gide who famously declared that fear and trembling are the best in man.. david garcia # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in
Re: nettime Reverse Engineering Freedom and make world paper#3
David Garcia writes: There are many hells in this world and many (admittedly by no means all) of the worst occur when not only through oppressive by states, but when states break down. Without going so far as Gide's fear and trembling (David, does rhetorical excess produce rhetorical counter-excess?) I'd say that politics is all about the relation between markets, governments and voluntary associations (or civil society but the term's gotten too heavily freighted). These three poles can be found to varying degrees in all modern social activity: David is right to point out how much of our freedom depends on collective frameworks, someone else would point out that market-oriented activities have contributed most of our tools as well (I'd have some return arguments there, in fact I'd have pages and chapters of social theory on how the balances between the three poles could change, how markets could transform from the current price-fixing ones, how state functions could be reinvented etc. - but the point can stand for the moment). The internet has given a big boost to the possibilities of voluntary association, and that's where Geert and Florian's tributes to freedom are interesting, because they're trying to encourage some collective initiative. And for good reasons, cause it's currently the most interesting game in town. But I'd say the point is both to continually try to carve out more space for these free associations, and to gauge the effects they're having on the ongoing stories of market and state. Because both those awesomely powerful realities show no signs of going away tomorrow - except maybe in the realm of failed states, which, I'd like to point out, are a very prominent feature of the current period of transnational state capitalism as practiced by the powerful corporations and countries, at the expense of the weaker ones. A little decay and global chaos is just part of the price for keeping up the rapacious resource extraction and military/ideological control. There's a state of affairs that the free associates ought to try and transform - maybe with some more precise strategies than we currently have on the table. Which is not to say that the last 4 or 5 years of activism have been entirely unfruitful best to all, Brian # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: [EMAIL PROTECTED] and info nettime-l in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
