[ox-en] Impressions from WOS 4
- From: Stefan Meretz <stefan.meretz hbv.org>
- Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 16:58:51 +0200
Hi all,
I participated two days at the conference "Wizards of OS 4", and I was
really positively surprised. The german online news mag Heise brought
these reports about the conference:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/search.shtml?T=WOS[PHONE NUMBER REMOVED]
mirroring quite well what was debated. From my view now some additional
remarks.
What was only a fantasy at first Oekonux conference in Dortmund (2001),
has now become reality: The ideas of free software had been overtaken
in many areas of the society -- globally. Like the GNU GPL for the
domain of software had been an important trigger and safeguard of a
free space, so are the CreativeCommons-Licenses for content of
any kind. Meanwhile the CC project counted 140 million backlinks to
their website. What GPL is for software, is CC for the area of culture.
Therefore "free culture" was the most used key term on WOS 4. If one
imagine this as a model of an "onion" consisting of "shells", then with
free culture we reached the second "shell" after the first "shell" (or
core) being free software. The third "shell" of the onion -- witch had
become clear at different points -- will be the core of societal
production, following my rampant thesis:-)
Which evidences did I find for this thesis? Example 1: Lawrence Lessig
has given an impressive presentation at WOS 4 (I wish I could do it as
good as he did). Title: "The Read-Write Society". Using the filesystem
metaphor of "read-only" (RO) and "read-write" (RW) Lessig went through
the history of bourgoise society along the 4 dimensions of labor,
cuture, something (I forget), and politics. Concerning culture -- and
only this dimension he looked at in the following -- the society of the
19th century was a RW society, where generally all citizens
had "write access" to society creating the culture. Ok, I have some
objections in mind, but anyway. The 20th century, however, had been
transformed into a RO society where lazy couch potatos of degenerated
consumers absorb given offers. Powerful leverages are rules around the
so called "intellectual property", especially copyright. In the
internet the struggle blusters between RO and RW, where big content
companies want to make the people be only passive consumers. But, this
is his thesis, the 21th century brings back a turn to RW culture where
people will be themselves the producers of their (cultural) lives. Core
of the RW cultur will be remixing, which means using cultural products
for the creation of new cultural products. -- Lots of examples
especially from brasil were impressing. Or, watch this example ("Read
my lips"), really funny:
http://www.atmo.se/zino.aspx?articleID=399
Or this ("Jesus must survive"):
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/63576/jesus_must_survive/
I found it a bit curios speaking about a "turn back" to a RW culture.
Lessing also talked about chances for some cultures (in my words) to
directly jump from the 19th to the 21st century without using the
nonsense of copyright etc. at all. Hm, ok, is this true? Descriptively,
yes. On another panel people from brasil (which had a somewhat
special "guest status" on the WOS) told us about the kids of the
favelas who never spend a second on stuff like copyrights when they
make their music and sell their music on the streets (and _only_ on the
streets). If then european musicians take, remix and commercialize
their music, then this is ok too. Question from the audience: Isn't
this cutural imperialsm? Answer: No, because making culture always
implies using other cultural products. Therefore in brasil there is no
notion of "piracy" (maybe except in the music industry which are there
too).
Back to Lessig. Following his RO/RW analogy I want to know from him if
he sees similar developments concerning the other dimensions he
mentions before -- especially concerning "labor". And if this is about
making a "free societal operation system" where the RW culture can run
on? Unfortunately he didn't get my question, well, that may happen
which such sorts of analogies. His answer was very general, and fast he
jumped from "labor" to "politics", because he had some more examples on
this topic. Ok, the third "shell" will come into his thinking some
time -- remember me to claim the copyright;-)
Example 2: Final panel "Brazil, the Free Culture Nation". Besides others
on the podium was Claudio Prado, director of the department of digital
culture of the brasilian ministry of culture (lead by Gilberto Gil)
calling himself a "Hippie". A nice abstract (and Film) to this:
http://wiki.whatthehack.org/index.php/How_we_hacked_a_project_into_the_Ministry_of_Culture_in_Brazil
I thought I misheard when he said, that it isn't the goal to
create "work" and "social security" for the people, because this is not
possible any more: "Jobs and employment are things of the 20th century.
The future has nothing to do with employment." Therefore the new goal
is: "Jumping from the 19th century to the 21th century bypassing the
bullshit of the 20th century." This is about empowering the people to
act autonomously and to appropriate the digital technology in order to
become independent from government. He said, that it is a bit
schizophrenic when he said this as a representantive of a government,
but the goal must be to make the government superfluous. -- Whow, not
bad!
After that, Volker Grassmuck, maintainer of WOS, takes this idea and
said, that now the topic of WOS 5 is found. Ok, we will see, what he
understands with the statement of Claudio Prado. If it goes well, then
he means the "third shell" of the onion, that is, the question of the
societal production not only of cultural goods, but all goods for the
life of the people -- beyond governments, jobs, and social security
from above as we knew it sometime.
OK, I stop here. There were much more exciting panels at WOS. The
conference would deserve more visitors, but for this purpose the
admission price was simply much too high (60 EUR for 3 days, reduced
half of it).
If the WOS takes the "third onion shell", then it would be a nice thing
to have the next OX conference together wth WOS. But this is only a
fantasy...
Ciao,
Stefan
Sorry for stupidities in my english.
--
Start here: www.meretz.de
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