p2p definition (useful) by Michel Bauwens

So: what is peer to peer? Here’s a first tentative definition: It is a specific form of relational dynamic, is based on the assumed equipotency of its participants[v], organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good, with forms of decision-making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the network. Equipotency means that there is no prior formal filtering for participation, but rather that it is the immediate practice of cooperation which determines the expertise and level of participation. It does not deny `authority’, but only fixed forced hierarchy, and therefore accepts authority based on expertise, initiation of the project, etc…

P2P is a network, not a hierarchy (though it may have elements of it); it is ‘distributed’, though it may have elements of centralization and ‘decentralisation’; intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system.

From “Peer to Peer and Human Evolution”

http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2ptheory1#_Toc107024684

Conceptual Musings: Liberalism vs Anarchy

More often than not, I have found my resources for this project in anti-capitalist or extreme-leftist anthologies or bookstores. This being said, a primary focus of my historicization of specific aspects of punk has alluded to a confrontational anti-consumer/corporate impetus for action that denote instances of the political (i.e. fliering or postering, as Penelope Houston recalls in Fucked Up + Photocopied, part of the thrill was the fact that it was illegal).

It was pointed out to me that a contention in discussing the trajectory of DIY through Emerson and into 1950s domestic magazines is that the latter instance of the DIY ethos is more of a liberal capitalist instantiation of this ethos very much embedded in the self-made-man-American-dream version of the do-it-yourself-spirit. There then arises a need to separate the DIY ethos of punk from this all-American entrepreneur version, placing punk further left on the political spectrum.

This would not seem to be a problem for my research, per se, as the leftist leanings of punk clearly outline much of my attraction to the culture and the trajectory of its existence in the late ’70s into the ’90s. However, in discussing the practices of zine-making and music-playing, the anyone-can-do-it spirit and peer-promotion strategies of punk slowly begin to align, in my narrative, with contemporary open source software and peer-to-peer formations concomitatnt with the rise of internet technologies. What begins to surface as the problem is making a clear delineation of the radical and liberal. More specifically, this is problematized by my new thoughts around the word “democratic” in relation to the production, promotion and reproduction of punk culture by its constituents, as I have a hard time separating the term “democratic” from capitalist America. To further elucidate this musing, I refer to something I recently read, and consequently the reason for this problematization on peer-to-peer theorist Dale Carrico’s blog amor mundi:

“But I believe no less that a radical democratic politics of global technological development will likely emancipate humanity at last. Radical democracy needs to take up its revolutionary stance again, to gain and remake the world for us all before the world is utterly lost to us all.”

Now, I would not consider my thesis to enunciate technology as the emancipating of humanity, but I would edge toward the idea that I am discussing the emancipation of culture in some sense of the concept (particularly open content initiatives). Something I think punk was laboring toward (intentionally or not) by taking matters into their own hands and confronting corporate and mainstream models of music production and promotion. Further, the term “radical democracy” is one that I am not yet comfortable ascribing to my outlining of peer to peer activity (then and now), but am interested in thinking around the term in my grand and broad quest to discuss punks radical activity as outside of the liberal model while simultaneously recognizing the participatory nature of this activity inside the context of an American political climate. Even further, aside from thinking about punk from this contemporary standpoint, I have made little assertion as to any futurological meaning of these shifts in cultural production and consumption.

SF Punk Rock circa ’80s…

By Jeff Goldthorpe

http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=PUNK_ROCK

Greil Marcus located punk as son of Dada, the negationist art movement that took off from the rubble of World War I Europe (1982). But I wondered, as a bedraggled but still determined radical in the early eighties, what all this raging cynicism had to do with creating the new day of humankind. David James summarized the dilemma of punk’s negation like this:

…punk’s self-definition…made its attempt to produce itself outside of the entertainment business internally logical and indeed allowed its utopian aspiration, one form of which was the innovation of alternative modes of cultural production…Thus the increased audience participation in concerts with open passage through the stage and the flourishing of recording and record distribution outside corporate channels, as well as the constant formation and dissolution of bands and the do-it-yourself philosophy that allowed the typical producer/consumer proportions to be inverted–all were antithetical to capitalist social relations.

[But]…Having by definition no positive terms, and in the absence of any social movement that could supply them, punk was thus condemned not only to manifest itself purely as style, but condemned to manifest itself as a style that would always be in the process of pushing itself over into self-parody, to the point at which it would find itself only able to mimic its former gestures (1988, p. 168-9).

This captures two sides of punk and its ultimate dead end quite well. Yet it ignores the hopeful political currents which I was seeing punk unloose in the early eighties, even in the United States, “in the absence of any social movement” (the latter term to be redefined later)

Goldthorpe approaches the two components of the punk subcultural activity that interests me the most: the political and social, though rather lacking a full discussion.  More aligned with my research interests is his methodological approach to the essay, outlined here:

Social and political aspects of punk subculture are at the center of this study, although the punk scene was obviously musically centered. Music is discussed here as an articulation of feeling which the audience translates into behavior. Bands are emphasized for ways they typified an element of punk style, rather than how they shaped up in terms of some standard of musical excellence. Slight attention is paid to the production of music by bands in conjunction with club owners, record companies and radio stations; rather it is the consumption of music by audiences and subcultures which is emphasized.

Goldthorpe goes on to evoke the importance of the Mab and Vale’s Search & Destroy in facilitating the ‘77 punk scene in San Francisco. As he emphasizes, the scene was small, which was a sort of utopic aspect of the early that Vale pointed out in our interview.

Taking on the System…

“Arctic Monkeys: … [When we went number one in England] we were on the news and radio about how MySpace has helped us. But that’s the perfect example of someone who doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. We actually had no idea what [MySpace] was.

” Not only did the fans bypass the record label executives, they bypassed the band as well. Rather than depend on their favorite band to promote themselves, the fans did it for them. And while these fans didn’t run fancy music publications or have the money to advertise the band in traditional venues, they did have access to media tools – peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, social networks like MySpace, and other such online tools. The traditional gatekeepers can only watch as their iron grip on the business crumbles around them.” (pp 28 -29)

Zuniga, Markos Moulitsas. Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era. [London: Penguin, 2008]

Notes: Constituents of a Theory of the Media (Enzensberger, 1970)

“For the first time in history, the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves.”  Productive processes that involve communicating as well as reciprocal communication. (262)

“The new media are oriented toward action, not conteplation; towards the present, not tradition. Their attittude to time is completely opposed to that of bourgeois culture, which aspires to possession, that is to extension in time, best of all, to eternity. The media produces no objects that can be hoarded an auctioned. They do away completely with ‘intellectual property’ and liquidate the ‘heritage,’ …

“That does not mean to say that they have no history or that they contribute to the loss of historical consciousness. On the contrary, they make it possible for the first time to record historical material so that it can be reproduced at will. By  making this material available for present-day purposes, they make it obvious to anyone using it that the writing of history is alway manipulation. But the memory they hold in readiness is not hte preserve of a scholarly caste. It is social. The banked information is accessible to anyone, and this accesibility is as instantaneous as its recording.” (265)

“The direct mobilizing potentialities of the media become still more clear when they are consciously used for subversive ends.”  (269)

“Written literature has, historically speaking, played a dominant role for only a few centuries…Now it is being succeeded by the age of the electronic media, which tend once more to make the people speak. At its period of fullest development, the book to some extent usurped the place of the more primitive but generally more accessible methods of production of the past; on the other hand, it was a stand-in for future methods which make it possible for everyone to become a producer.” (272)

“Spelling mistakes, which are completely immaterial in terms of communication, are punished by the social disqualification of the writer. The rules that govern this technique have a normative power attributed to them for which there is no rational basis…While people learn to speak very early, and mostly in psychologically favorable conditions, learning to write  forms an important part of authoritarian socialization by the school…” (273)

“Structurally, the printed book is a medium that operates as a monologue, isolating producer and reader…The control circuit in the case of literary criticism is extremely cumbersome and elitist.” (273)

“It is extremely improbable, however, that writing as a special technique will disappear in the foreseeable future.” (273)

“Strictly speaking, it has shrunk to its legal dimensions. A document is something the ‘forging’ – i.e. the reproduction 0 of which is punishable by imprisonment….The productions of the electronic media, by their nature, evade such distinctions…” (275)

“When carried to extremes, such attempts to produce interaction, even when it goes against the structure of the medium employed, are nothing more than invitations to freewheel.” (275)

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. “Constituents of a Theory of the Media.” The New Media Reader. Noah Wardrip-Fuin and Nick Montfort, eds. [Cambridge:  MIT Press, 2003] 259-275.

NOTES: Lawrence Lessig…

note: Lawrence Lessig’s argument that “the Internet’s legal and technical infrastructure have been designed to undercut the possibility of such openness” – the free sharing of information on the web may not be so free.. (p441, introduction by NMF)

Rick Prelinger Sings My Thesis?

“The Internet has given all of us the ability to produce, distribute, and share cultural and intellectual creations as never before, something quite threatening to a number of media companies who’d like to control the publishing process as they once did. … As with the social revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, San Francisco has become a  key center in a geography of resistance to ruling ideas about the control of culture.” (pg 232)

“What ties together all these artists and activists who work in different genres is the acceptance that creation is a synthetic process, that the seeds of new work fall out old, that culture doesn’t form in isolation, and that performing and distributing work don’t necessarily constitute billable events.” (234)

“…bloggers seek to establish (and arguably already have built) a parallel mediasphere in which shared convictions, virtuosity or expression, and the esteem of one’s peers govern what makes the news, rather than the decisions of highly paid editors and publishers. Though blogging isn’t inherently about appropriation or reworking copyright, bloggers quore, recontextualize, slice and dice, comment and crticize up to and well beyond the narrow limits of fair use.” (236)

From: Prelinger, Rick. “Toward a Copyright-Free Zone?” The Political Edge. Chris Carlsson, ed. [San Francisco: City Lights Foundation, 2004] 231 – 237.

Notes: “Freedom” Chapter of Lipstick Traces by Greil Marcus

In reading this chapter, entitled “Legends of Freedom,” I am drawn to the historical trajectory of notions of production and distribution via the activity of the Situationists. Having read none of the rest of Lipstick Traces, I find in this chapter Marcus eloquently discusses Guy Debord and SI. Most certainly notions of this fringe-organization relate to punk culture.

Active in the 1950s and 1960s SI is described by Marcus as a group not known for action, rather for its thinking/instigating from their tipped cafe chairs. Here is where I find the biggest divergence from punk culture, rooted in action. What hits closer to home is the Situationist philosophy surrounding the media and the spectacle – especially in how it relates to popular consumer culture and imagery, something the punks avidly disavowed.  The activity of the Situationists also touches on their existence in the urban environment.

Marcus writes of Debord’s statement: “The city would no longer be experienced as a scrim of commodities and power; it would be felt as a field of ‘psychogeography,’ and this would be an epistemology of everyday time and space, allowing one to understand, and transform, ‘the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” (164) This new experience of the city reminds of posting flyers and of Eric Lyle’s account of living under the radar in abandoned buildings, playing in front of businesses on the street.

The marrying of art and life of the SI, or rather the exaltation of life as art merged into a sort of appropriation that could be found in their publications. Appropriation and subversion of images (devaluing “the currency of the spectacle” 179), that is what Jello Biafra would speak of 15 years later.

“These means were two: the ‘derive,’ a drift down city streets in search of signs of attraction or repulsion, and ‘detournement,’ the theft of aesthetic artifacts from their context and their diversioninto contexts of one’s own devise.”  (168)

“To make art would be to betray the common, buried wishes art once spoke for, but to practice detournement-to write new speech balloons for newspaper comic strips, or for tha tmatter old masters, to insist simultaneously on a ‘devaluation’ of art and its ‘reinvestment’ in a new kind of social speech, a ‘communication containing its own criticism,’ a technique that could not mystify because its very form was a demystification – and to pursue the derive – to give yourself up to the promies of the city, and then to find them wanting-to drift through the city, allowing its signs to divert, to ‘detourn,’ your steps and then to divert those signs yourself, forcing them to give up routes that never existed before-there would be no end to it. It would be to begin to live a truly modern way of life, made out of pavement and pictures, words and weather: a wya of life anyone could understand and anyone could use.” (170) … becoming “the masters and possessors of their own lives.” (174)

Jameson Passage…

“But I think it would be better to characterize all this in terms of History, a History that we cannot imagine except as ending, and whose future seems to be nothing but a monotonous repetition of what is already here. The problem is then how to locate radical difference; how to jumpstart the sense of history so that it begins again to transmit feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia. The problem to be solved is that of breaking out of the windless present of the postmodern back into real historical time, and a history made by human beings. I think this writing is a way of doing that or at least of trying to. Its science-fictionality derives from the secret method of this genre: which in the absence of a future focuses on a single baleful tendency, one that it expands and expands until the tendency itself becomes apocalyptic and explodes the world in which we are trapped into innumerable shards and atoms. The dystopian appearance is thus only the sharp edge inserted into the seamless Meobius strip of late capitalism, the punctum or preceptual obsession that sees one thread, any thread, through to its predictable end.” (76)

“Future City”, New Left Review. 21 May/June 2003. Oxford: Alden Press. 66-79.

DIY & Helvetica…

http://www.artforum.com/film/#entry21793
by Joseph Logan

“Enter the “expressionists,” designers we now associate with the ’80s—David Carson, Stefan Sagmeister, and Paula Scher—each of whom takes umbrage with, among other things, Helvetica’s corporate appeal. Hustwit illustrates their point via montages of iconic logos: Con Edison, Toyota, Crate & Barrel, Target, Verizon, MUJI, Jeep, Sears, Greyhound—all somehow different and immediately identifiable, yet all designed with Helvetica. They note the alacrity with which governments and institutions adopted Helvetica as the typeface of authority. Scher goes so far as to derisively call Helvetica the font of the Vietnam War. And so in response, the expressionists infuse their work with all things un-Helvetica: the handwritten, the experimental, the stylized, the emotional, the do-it-yourself—or, as designer Michael Bierut calls it, “grunge typography.” Hustwit reminds us that this typographic free-for-all roughly coincides with the advent of desktop computing, which, while it enabled more people to get in on the game, didn’t necessarily foster more talent. (On this point, even the modernists and postmodernists agree.)”