User:Eleanorg/1.3/Reading, Writing, Research/Interview: Dymitri Kleiner

Interview with Dmytri Kleiner At LiWoLi festival, 25 May 2012

E: I was thinking about what you were saying [in your blog post before LiWoLi] about 'radical openness', and what could that mean? And that just being extremely open isn't always necessarily the best way - you said, you need to be safe and you need to be alive.

D: Right, yeah. I mean, the whole 'radical' - the way in which I interpret that word is not as being extreme, or drastic. Often when you hear something described as radical, it just means something really very over the top in some direction, but to really be radical something has to make some fundamental critique. And that's why I say radical as in radish, it helps you think of a root vegetable. It helps you think that it's not really a cool, or extreme, or drastic thing that we're talking about but really a fundamental one that's at the base, at the root.

And so talking about openness, just behaving in a certain way, by being extremely open, isn not necessarily dealing with the fundamental issues that are the constraints of openness. Because that implies that the only constraints are your own constraints, what you're doing. That they're just individual constraints, and if you can overcome individual constraints then you'll achieve the openness you want to achieve.

E: What do you mean by "individual constraints"?

D: Like the only thing stopping you being more open is your own individual constraints, so that all you need to do is be extremely open then that'll be OK. But that's not necessarily true, because the constraints are not necessarily individual. They're very often social and economic constraints. If we're talking about just simple expression, in terms of people being open with their data and open with that information, I think for a lot of people that's quite viable. But for some people doing some things, that's not very viable.

Especially, it does break down on a lot of the other divisions - along race, gender, economic class, things like that. Especially where in the world you are, and what you're doing exactly.

E: In terms of security concerns...?

D: In terms of security, or just simple saftey. Or just, even as simple as the basic social consequences. Expressing certain opinions in a certain society may give you social sanction that you'd rather simply not deal with. So the ability to be open means that you need to be able to choose when and with whom to be open. So if you don't have privacy, then those situations where you might actually be open are situations when you can't be open either, because you have to be closed even then. So in that sense, openness is dependent upon the right to privacy, the ability to have privacy. Which might be an ability you never take, depending upon who are where you are. But if you don't have the right to privacy then you actually have less openness, because that means only the people with the most priviledge and position can be open - everybody else can just shut up, always. You never get to have that space where they can also be open.

But when it comes down to the economic side of it, radical openess in terms of free culture and free art, we're talking about production. We're talking about being open in what and how we produce. And that again implies we can choose what and how we produce, which is of course not the case. We live in a capitalist system where we have to pay landlords and groceries and all kinds of bills and taxes and things like that, and we have to earn that money by selling our labour to the labour market, by and large. Not everybody, obviously, but the masses of society sell their labour power as a commodity, so they don't really get to choose the conditions of their work. And they don't get to choose how their work is distributed. Artists can't create free culture on their own, any more than agricultural workers can create free food. They don't get to choose how the products of their labour get distributed.

So if you want artists to be more open, then you have to think about economic issues about art. And that again is not an individual struggle, that's a collective struggle. That's something where we have to say, well, we want artists to be able to make a living without working for these kinds of organisations that insist on closed practices and closed distribution models. But so long as those are the only sources of work available for artists - and that is the case - even if some artists exist outside that world doesn't mean that that doesn't exist. And so in order to overcome that, it's not necessarily about being open. It's about figuring out a way to make that sector grow. And that's what the copyfarleft tries to do. It tries to say, if you recognise the fact that most writers for instance make their living by selling their intellectual property rights to a publisher, and that's the way most of them make a living. And that is not a good system, same with capitalism, but it's not about whether it's a good system or not, it's a fact that most writers make their living that way. So if you're proposing a method of working that doesn't allow for that [eg the Creative Commons noncommerical licenses - E], then you're basically saying that your method of working is only going to be possible for people that aren't working as writers. So basically excluding all the people currently making a living that way.

So that's what copyfarleft tries to do, it tries to create a business model - or not a business model, an economic model - where the writer grants free access and open access, but only to other people who engage in open communities. Sort of like the copyleft license, but instead of making this distinction like the Creative Commons noncommercial license does. That's why the noncommercial license is so popular. When you talk to Creative Commons people they say, "we have thousands of licenses", but what do people use? And they'll sheepishly admit that 90% of content uses a noncommercial license. The body of material covered by Creative Commons is largely noncommercial. So what that means is, this accomplishes the first part. It allows the writers or musicians or whatever to continue to sell their rights to the industry the way they do now, so it accomplishes that which is necessary. But at the same time it sabotages any other kind of economy, because it just makes a blanket prohibition against commercial use, and that prevents them from ever *not* working for the industry, because the industry are the only ones who are allowed to make any money.

E: So you're shooting yourself in the foot to some extent.

D: Right. You lock it in. So that is not what would be radical openness. So what copyfarleft says is: let's keep this idea, of the vision, but let's not make the division on whether it's commercial or noncommercial, but whether it's actually alienated or not. Whether we're talking about privately owned, shareholder owned corporations that hire wage labour and distribute their products under closed terms, or are we talking about co-operatively owned organisations that are controlled by their workers and distribute their material under open terms. And that's what copyfarleft tries to do. And in some sense, a lot of people might say, that's more closed. Yes it's more closed, but it's more radically open, because it addresses the fundamental problems. Not just by being extremely open, which only demonstrates your own potential freedom and priviledge - which is not a bad thing, but it's not something that everybody can have just because they choose to have it.

E: So to give up all the rights over your work, in some ways, you're saying, is all well and good but at the moment is only limited to a priviledged group who are able to do that safely?

D: Right, exactly right. And not only that, but it doesn't necessarily help the other people who aren't able to do that safely. Except maybe by inspiration or example. I'm not saying it's bad or that people shouldn't do it, I think people should do what they like, but it doesn't even necessarily help you accomplish your goals. Because it may be inspiring, but it's also inspiring in a slightly delusional way, because not everybody can do that. Even if you make that example, not everyone can follow it. So to be more radically open, you have to think about what the foundations of openness are.

E: Right. One thing I found challenging about your critique in terms of copyright is that you seem to base a lot of your critique on the Creative Commons licenses and this idea of authorship. You deconstruct the author, and you talk about the poststructuralist ideas that the author doesn't really exist, and so it's, "on what basis do you have the right to restrict how people use things which you help to create - building on lots of other work by lots of other people - because you don't really own it?".

D: Right, right.

E: So it seems to be a fairly standard critique of authorship from that point of view. So I guess my question would be, on what basis then can you assert ownership for the purposes of applying a copyfarleft license?

D: Well because you're only asserting that ownership in the context where it has to be asserted. Because that is the condition of your labour [that full copyright applies by default -E]. You're actually then denying it to other people who are also denying it. Which is one of the interesting things about the copyfarleft proposal. One of the things people often ask is, how do you make this distinction, how do you draw the line? It seems so vague. But the actual interesting thing is, that no party would want to violate the license. Because the proprietary people who believe in authors and believe in closed systems, they also want the proprietary license. So they don't want free terms actually, they want proprietary terms.

E: Well I don't know. I think a lot of people who use Creative Commons licenses have a very traditional view of authorship.

D: What do you mean?

E: In terms of, "this is mine, I made it; but I'm going to be generous and I'm going to let you use it as well". So you see these two things coexisting - a quite conservative view of authorship along with openness.

D: For sure. But what I meant was, for people like the traditional publishing industry. People that believe in authorship, they don't want free terms, because they believe in authorship. So they won't violate the license, they won't try to pretend that they're a co-operative in order to get free acess to copyfarleft covered terms. They'll want to negotiate non-free terms, because that's how they do business. And so in other kinds of community, this is where the authorship is actually not denied. Because on the other side of the community there is no special priviledge. So yes there are people in the Creative Commons that... the thing about the Creative Commons is that, the original dissent against authorship - starting back from when the first laws were written, at least in English law, the Statute of Anne and all those kinds of laws - is that the original wave of critique was focussed definitely on this issue of the author. Because before industry, and before the need to embed cultural production in a market system of exchange, the last thing artists thought about was that they were original. In fact it was standard practice to re-use themes, re-use characters, from previous artists. And if your work was too original in the modern sense, people would just think you were just not well-read enough, that all that stuff was missing, simply because you were ignorant, and that's why you're making up your own characters. It wouldn't be a positive thing. And this idea that culture is a collectively created, that doesn't mean that there aren't certain people whose ideas are more highly valued. It's not about an even contribution, but it's still a collective contribution. So even the greatest writers still drew upon works from before. And not just vaguely. I mean, like Goethe. His most famous work is Faust, and Faust was written several times before Goethe, he didn't come up with those characters and that story, he just made a masterpiece out of it, using those characters and those themes.

But this era of intellectual property dissent was not compatible with capitalism. In fact it was very much a reaction against capitalism. If you look at many of the dissenters, it wasn't only intellectual property that they were concerned about. They were concerned about the commercialisation of society, the transformation to a capitalist system, and the loss of traditional values and practices. And the transformation of the people into the proletariat, a class of people who had to sell their labour - including the writing class. So because of that it was by necessity obscure, and that's why these people are really on the fringes of radical art. You know, the Situationist International, and the American folk singers, these experimental musicians. Really not mainstream. I mean, OK, Woody Guthrie is maybe the most extreme example of somebody who is mainstream. But even then, he didn't have control of a lot of intellectual property, even if he wrote, "do whatever you want with this", doesn't mean that he could necessarily enforce that.

So it was incompatible with capitalism, so it was obscure. But free software came along. And free software was inspired by these same ideals - especially around the GPL and the copyleft part of free software. There's definitely this idea that there is no author, that the rights of the user should be protected, and that software, like culture, is a collectively created thing. And whether we're talking about anti-copyright movements, like we were talking about a minute ago, or the free software movement, the rights were always the rights of the user - never the rights of the author. It was always the rights of the user to become an author, to take it and for it to become productively used.

The difference is, software is capital. Software is an input to further production. Which means that companies will support the creation of software, because they need it to create other things which they then sell on the market. Software is in many cases not an end-user product, it's not a commodity, it's a capital input. Under capitalism, the only thing that's allowed to be free is capital, because it's an input for capitalists so they like it. And therefore free software has no issue with capitalism; it's not incompatible with capitalism.

E: As we saw at this Open Design Symposium.

D: Yeah, exactly. Right - and so it went huge. And so this created all of a sudden, out of the quite antiquated anti-copyright movement, which was like this radical art movement which was actually very old (I remember when I did plunder[?] in 1997, it seemed kind of old fashioned!). But because of free software it became big, and all kinds of people were complaining about copyright and worrying about these kinds of things. Now you have a different problem. The web 2.0 platforms - these are platforms that are user-generated. Now there's nothing in the old system that really had any place for user-generated content. So for these business models like Flickr and YouTube, this was kind of problematic, because there was nothing available within copyright law to make something that was possible to publish. So this is where this whole Creative Commons thing comes from. If you listen to Lessig and talk to him, he's a capitalist - he doesn't try to deny it. He's just trying to fix very simple problems, like, you can't have a mechanical copy for every video you upload to YouTube. And if you actually listen to him, all he's talking about is creating easier ways to create content.

E: Improving efficiency.

D: Right, so that's why it's "some rights reserved". So what you want is your ability to post your stuff on YouTube without losing your ability to control it commerically or whatever else. So it's simply requirements of traditional capitalism, with these new online platforms, that simply didn't have categories that could handle it. Because traditional copyright is, "copy equals royalty". So that translates to page view equals royalty. So how's that going to work if YouTube or Facebook have to send you a royalty cheque every time someone views your photo? That's simply not going to work. So you needed to get rid of certain rights, and create a culture of doing that. So you have this almost false consciousness, where you have these artists who are part of the Creative Commons, but they don't have the free software or anti-copyright ethos at all. They don't question "the artist", they just simply want a way to publish their stuff, and that's why it's all noncommercial. All they want to do is use online media to build value in their work, yet retain the entire commercial possibility of exploiting that work, and the sole identity. And even great people, like Cory Doctorow who totally knows the issue, even he put 'noncommerical' and 'no derivatives' and all kinds of stuff on his first book.

E: You've mentioned how free licenses are primarily about protecting the needs of the user and helping them become a creator, rather than protecting the creator. But it seems that in the Copyfarleft license, fairly explicitly and from a labour perspective, is about protecting the producer.

D: As a producer in a capitalist economy, not necessarily as a creative producer. I'm not necessarily acknowledging that they are really the author of this, but that's how they get paid. And that's the only way they can get paid, until we build up some other economy - which is not going to happen overnight. In order for free culture to really be able to compete with proprietary culture, it's going to have to have all the same institutional capacities that proprietary culture has. Which includes the ability actually house and feed writers, artists and musicians. And it simply does not. Although there are growing numbers of people who are finding ways to make a living in that, one of the most problematic fallacies in capitalist discussions is the "anyone, everyone" fallacy - if anyone can do it, then everyone can do it.

E: You said in your talk last night about the responses to the question of income that came up at the Open Design Symposium, that they all talked about the individual artists: "I stay up all night and I work really hard".

D: Yeah, right: "...and I'm just a little bit crazy". And I'm just like - does that help to grow this new kind of art practice? Is everyone just going to stay up all night? And would that even work, or would it just create a race to the bottom, where everyone else is staying up all night, so now you've got to stay up two nights?

E: Well it's the perfect capitalist work-ethic.

D: Yeah right, exactly. And it might not even achieve what you want, because the point is that capitalism is a system which accumulates. So if we work twice as hard, they'll just take twice as much. So all you're doing by working so hard is just staying one step ahead of your peers, actually. And making it that little bit harder to do what you do. Because you're actually in a race for a very small number of positions, because this community can only support a small number of positions at this stage. So this extra work you're doing is not making what you do possible, it's just making it you rather than somebody else, competing for the same slot.

E: So it becomes a question of solidarity, then.

D: Yes, and that's why we shouldn't be asking the personal questions, but the social questions. And those are often harder to ask, especially in creative areas where everyone thinks of themselves as a vanguardist. So it's a difficult question, to say, "shouldn't we just have more of this?". We were allowed to say, at one time, that we should have healthcare, that we should have education, that we should have safe roads or whatever. That at one time was considered to be an OK thing to think. People wouldn't say, "we can't have safe roads because the businesses aren't very pofitable". Now, these days they do say that: "we can't have good healthcare because the businesses can't make any money that way; we simply can't have it as a society". But I think we really have to work against that kind of thinking. And that kind of thinking really sneaks its way in. I mean, in the hacker culture I hear the word 'meritocracy' all the time. Why is that considered a good term, a positive term? All that means is that certain people who are generally more privileged to begin with, which is why they have this merit - because they have more social capital, more education - can elbow other people out. This is now a positive thing? I don't actually see that as positive.

E: Well from a capitalist mindset it is.

D: But they don't think it's positive. They think that capitalism is a system of privilege and hierarchy, which it is, but they seem to think that the answer is not equality but merit. Merit is an extremely dodgy thing; equality is equality.

E: Well this links to my question about 'the author'; what's the difference for you between an author and a worker? Because traditioanlly in the copyright headspace, authorship comes from originality - not necessarily from the input of hours for example. For you, are they the same thing?

D: No, for me, an author is a worker who writes. It's not some kind of divine vocation or anything like that. It's just somebody who spends their labour time writing. And in view of originality, I don't know, I'm by no means saying that there aren't certain people who have talent as writers. There are certain writers that people will like more or less, and for sure that will play a role in them having these roles, in any society. But the idea they're producing something that's a unique idea, I don't think it's necessary. It's simply, we need books, we need articles, we need essays, we need movies. And people have to write them, as much as they have to make the costumes and write the music and bake the cakes, and whatever else is involves.

E: Obviously you are using copyright in a practical way, sort of against itself, to achieve a certain aim within a capitalist system. But if you're not an author in the sense of creating something out of your original brain ex-nihilo, and you're just a worker producing it, then why should writers have copyright and, say, construction workers not?

D: They shouldn't. Except that in a market system, copyright is required to commodify the cultural form. The construction worker makes buildings - that's the commodity. And they don't own the building, any more than the cultural worker doesn't own the book either. That the author is attributed with ownership of the product of their labour is just a pretext, in the same way that the Lockean idea of self-ownership leads to the ownership of their product. That's a pretense, for the capitalists to then take ownership of that product. That's the reason the rights are granted to the worker, because that gives the worker the right to sell it, and the capitalist has a situation where the worker has no choice but to sell their labour. So the author doesn't own their work any more than the construction worker owns their building. So it isn't a case of giving privileges to authors which construction workers don't have. It's actually exactly the same thing.

We live in a market society, so we have to work with the comomdity form. We have to understand its life as a commodity outside of our proposed commons, which we're still developing, and only persists in a small segment of society. But then we have to not allow that to sink back in, which is what Creative Commons does wrong. It doesn't provide for a real commons-based way of working to develop. And just the existence of Copyfarleft doesn't create this commons-based work, it just provides for it. It just means that, should there actually be a way of supporting this kind of culture outside of capitalism, that this work becomes a commons.

That's the main thing. If you want to call something a commons, the main thing that makes it a commons is that it can be productively employed by other people who are working in a commons-based way. If it can't be productively employed, then it can't really be considered a commons.

E: I guess there's also the problem that there are a lot of cultural workers who don't have copyright over their stuff. Think of the woman who paints Damien Hirst's dots, for example. Would a Copyfarleft license be useable in that scenario?

D: Yeah, Damien Hirst shouldn't get to take credit for the work of every single person that he employs.

E: So to summarize your position. Am I right in saying that you don't believe in 'the author', in that traditional sense?

D: Yes, I don't believe in the author. I think it's a negative idea. That isn't that I don't think that individuals are creative, and contribute, I just don't think you can isolate that contribution, or whether you should isolate that contribution. I used to say that everything is at the same time original and derivative. No matter how hard you try, you can't do something that is completely derivative, because just a simple difference in time and space will mean there will be something different about it. You're literally in a different position in the universe when you're doing it, because the Earth is not in the same position. So it's not exactly the same - you can't step in the same river twice. At the same time, every expression is the extension of a previous perception. So while nothing can be wholly derivative, also nothing can be wholly original. And I think it's futile to try to figure out, "what portion of it...?". Because it's a dialogue. We're having that dialogue, and you should enjoy that dialogue as you percieve it. If you enjoy a performance, you should enjoy it as a performance. You shouldn't think, "well should I really have enjoyed that performance? How original was it?". I think originality is really over-rated as a concept, I don't actually care. If I enjoy something then I've enjoyed it. I don't really care if it was never experienced by anybody else in history, actually because it wasn't - not like that. So I think that this idea of the emphasis on the value of a cultural worker's work as being something to do with their originality is also some capitalist-derived idea, of endless new products and obsoleting old products. And I don't think it needs to be commodified; I think it can be very subjective and very local.

E: So copyright ideally shouldn't exist, but in a capitalist system it's a tool that can be used to protect workers in that position.

D: Well we have no choice about it existing within a capitalist system. We have to deal with the forms we encounter - we have no choice. In the end, copyright should just be abolished, but it won't be. So what's the point of saying that it should be? We should just have open support for cultural workers, but we're not going to. So how do we deal with the commodity form of culture as it exists in capitalism? Even if we don't like it, we can't pretend it doesn't exist. Just like the more problematic aspects of the anarchist community basically think we shouldn't be in solidarity with big labour unions and factory workers etc, because they should just quit their jobs and live in squats. And they don't understand that we have to fight for the working conditions of the people, in the work that they have. The idea that seven million people are just suddenly going to go and live in squats is not really realistic. And again, it's surprising to call it a privileged position, but it still is. These people of course are very poor, and don't have a lot of privilege compared to other members of their own society, but still the vast majority of the world doesn't have that privilege.

For the same reason that people who are lucky enough to be able to live in an intentional community and work for some small cooperative should still be in solidarity with regular union members in regular factories, for the same reason people that are lucky enough to be part of the free culture comunity and be able to make some portion of their living from working in this emerging community, must nonetheless be in solidarity with people working in the mainstream industry as well, as workers. And not consider them as enemies. Consider their bosses enemies, but not consider them enemies.

E: So one last question. To look at the material conditions of cultural production as you do poses a real challenge to the ideals of what the world could be like or what we wish it would be like, even if that's not going to happen soon. Personally I find the idea of the symbolic gesture of completely relinquishing copyright, and challenging yourself to let go of all that control which we're so conditioned to hold onto whatever the cost, I find that enormously attractive. But as you say, it's only very privileged people who are able to do that. And I just wonder: can you see any space where there might be possibilities for that gesture to exist alongside other forms? Is there a role for it, do you think?

D: Definitely, definitely. I mean, the only thing I've ever actually published under the Copyfarleft license is the manifesto itself. But typically I don't even specify what kind of license I'm publishing under, or I make fun of it. I make up made-up licenses that don't actually exist. I definitely think there's space for that - you just have to understand what you're doing. You have to understand that not everybody can make that space. It really depends. Even though I'm a cultural worker in that I produce cultural material like artworks and writing, it's not my livelihood - my livelihood is still programming. And hopefully one day I'll be more of a cultural worker in that sense, but I still don't think I'm going to make a living from making crazy telephone systems and giving talks.

E: So you don't feel that you're betraying your cause somehow by relinquishing those rights?

D: No. My background is very activist, so I don't really think of my writing and my artworks as being cultural commodities that I'm creating, but just as efforts of trying to communicate certain ideas. And I don't really care if people that get the ideas even know that it's me that gave them those ideas; I don't care. I'm just trying to get the ideas out, so I don't even think of them as things that I need to control or not. I guess when it gets to more formal forms, like a manifesto which is a little book, then it's a good example of the Copyfarleft license, so other people can re-print it. I really don't think people are going to start taking my Nettime articles, and start commercially distributing them somewhere. So it feels silly to specify the terms under which that can be done.