User:Cristinac/Proposal2

Tentative Title

wE wIlL gEt ThErE eVeNtUaLlY

Going straight to the point means I will have to reorganise this

What can it be?

A platform. A chain of people. Half an utopia.

Does it need to be fixed?

Not according to Hakim Bey.

A short preliminary description of the project

It involves: a network of people who have access to a server. It unfolds as follows: Subscription to this group will be realised through email. Membership will mean being willing to lend server space for material that they do not have control over. It is a test of trust. Each month an 'info collector' is invited to put together a zip file that will be hosted on one of the members' server. The collector will remain anonymous to everyone except for the person that they appoint to take on the role for the following month.

What will the content be?

It will be dependent on the choices of whoever is putting together the file.

What is your contribution to this?

Spreading out the network and documenting what is traveling among the members.

Relation to a larger context – why is it relevant?

Sharing

It is surely a sign of our times that there is a tendency to unearth the resource value of abstract concepts that previously only had civic significance. To name a few, there are the information economy, the knowledge economy, attention economy, experience economy, gift economy or sharing economy. Looking up 'sharing economy' on Forbes.com (on the 26th of October 2015) returns 2,855 hits with catchy titles such as 'How to get in on the sharing economy', 'How You Can Make Money From Unused Space' or 'How Your Small Business Can Put Sharing Economy Principles To Work'.

The title has first appeared in 2002 and was used in conjunction with community based redistribution of excess goods and products without financial gain. It became a more vernacular term in recent years when it was hijacked by corporations which create profit by building platforms around it. In the last few years commercial entities such as AirBnB or Uber have incorporated the sharing into their mantra. However, just as abruptly as the word construct has gained its momentum, it is also starting to wind down in popularity and is currently being replaced with what speculators like to call 'access economy': paying to get access to other people's goods.

The open model of resource distribution stemming from peer to peer networks is being embedded into commercial systems with great success for those at the top of the structure. It seems like the utopian ideals of P2P of access and openness are being corrupted, but can we truly testify to their innocence?

Introduction

Open/Closed

A general interest that I have seen develop alongside my practice has been that of the dichotomy between open and closed information sources. Whether the divide is realised by physical obstacles (location), digital obstacles (DRM: Digital Rights Management), or economic reasons (tickets), it is often illusory. As most dichotic splits, there is ambiguity in the space separating them. There are for example, torrent websites that allow you to download material as long as you are able to maintain the download-upload ratio. As a starting point, I am interested in sharing cultures.

Two instances of testing the limits to accessing free content provide the introduction to my proposal.

There is a growing number of information activists who are thinking about curating and making information accessible to a larger audience. One of them is Sebastian Lütgert, the person behind textz.com. The project began back in 2001, when he decided to put up a collection of texts he had acquired from various sources. The textz.com website quickly became a popular resource, which subsequently attracted the attention of Suhrkamp Verlag. The website was forced to shut down in 2004, but recently reappeared under the guise of an alternative reality game. On it, the visitors can find a link to the torrent file containing the complete source code of all published and unpublished versions of textz.com, including all texts, from around 1999 to 2006, as well as a set of instructions on how to find out the password needed to unzip the archive.

Lütgert proposes an interesting model of distributing the material. He is creating a boundary around the files, that strengthens their protection against unwanted authorities and simultaneously invites the visitors to engage with the archive in order to prove their interest. The effort that the participants are putting into finding the code becomes the currency that they exchange for access. The collection is not free anymore, but needs to be earned.

Another example that is related to the topic occurred at the 'Ideographies of Knowledge' conference in Mons. While speaking about the Advanced eBook Processor v2.2, Nikita Mazurov made a remarkable observation. After recounting the situation of one of the Russian developers that had been working on the project, he put up a jpeg file that showed a link. He did so in order to avoid directly referring to the http address of the processor, whose promotion is prohibited by law. The simplicity of Mazurov's solution almost had a comical aspect, but it also raised questions about alternative methods to circumvent intellectual property conflicts.

P2P and Temporary Autonomous Zones

What unites both examples is the reterritorialisation of the files, Lütgert and Mazurov create islands: either through passwords or geographic location. In the case of textz.com, the user needs to download the ZIP collection that will only be accessible to himself, while in the latter situation, the information included in the file is locked in pixels. They engineer distance between the external and internal observer.

“The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the state, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself, to re-form elsewhere / elsewhen, before the state can crush it.”

Hakim Bey named these islands 'temporary autonomous zones': ephemeral spaces that escape formal mechanisms of control and called such settlements “pirate utopias” whose greatest strength lies in their invisibility.

Description of the project/Possible pathways

Rerecommendations

Many closed private trackers who devote themselves to specific media justify their activity as a form of cultural archiving, filling in the gaps that exist in official archives. As a result of this, self appointed forms of curation emerge: certain sites encourage downloading the recommendation of the month through a reward based system. Inspired by the zip sharing system that Lütgert adopted, I propose to create a platform that creates compressed file packages whose contents are unknown. In order to access the package, the 'initiate' will have to upload a file that they deem of value, without the possibility to retrieve the file. -needs to be expanded upon-

Reenactment of pirate bureaucracy

Bey poetically assumed these utopian groups to be struggling towards the construction of a different reality. However, as these networks have matured, one can easily notice it is usually the case one finds themselves facing an ossified hierarchical organisation of users that is functioning on the basis of a different currency: social status within the network. The nodes become hoarders of information and obsessive collectors in order to increase their reputation. One proposal would be to use another system where the structural restrictions that are imposed on the users can be easily observed.

The Paradox of Giving While Keeping

Relation to previous practice

In the previous two thematic projects, the topic of subversive methods of escaping the proprietary ball and chain emerged. For the CAPTCHA project, I was rebuilding books by turning each line into glyph-images that were unreadable by machines, but still meaningful to the human eye. The process was automated and realised through python, which helped generate the new lines, order them and place them in a temporary database. During this project, I started considering alternative uses of the image generator, which seemed to be a possible, if unpractical, way of circumventing the DRM system of digital books. A user interface around the code that gives them an option to upload their own text file and create a CAPTCHA database from it to share with others or put up on their own website was considered.

The connection with the subject became more pronounced in the Encyclopedia of Potentialities, which was dealing with the greyness of the 'open' European patent database. A patent is an agreement between the state and the inventor, which obliges the latter to provide insight into how their invention functions in exchange for the guarantee that their work will not be copied. While the primary reason for the existence of patents is increasing communal knowledge, there is a paradox that emerges from a situation in which transparency excludes access.

Thesis intention

• Exploring the underlying structures of alternative networks, with particular emphasis on social currency: reputation as capital.
• Looking into a recurrent interest: trade within pirate cultures
• raising more questions around the desirability of extremes: how open is openness?

Practical steps

• Putting together a collection of files
• Looking at various forms of distribution and recommendation-systems
• Setting up a platform

References

• Radical Tactics of the Offline Library
• Secrecy, Authorship and Nuclear Weapons Scientists
• Knowledge Capital Osaka
• Bibliotecha
• Dead drops
• Personal Portable Library
• Pirate Box
• Telekommunisten

Bibliography

• Crypto-anarchy, cyber states and pirate utopias – Peter Ludlow
• Protocol – Alexander Galloway
• The Accursed Share – Bataille
• The Gift – Marcel Mauss
• Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping While Giving – Anette Weiner
• Anarchitexts – Joanne Richardson
• Temporary Autonomous Zones – Hakim Bey
• New Associationist Movement - Kojin Karatani
• The Utopia of Rules – David Graeber