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Read*Write*Execute*
Preamble?
The need for autonomous infrastructures.
One of the characteristics of the internet is its decentralized nature. It means that each node in the network
has the technical means to be at the same time a receiver and a diffusor. With a common machine and a good connection, you can produce and diffuse content as well as store it, browse and receive images, sound, video.
This process of diffusion can be made at little cost compared to any other media.
For a still increasing number of artists, activists, free lance journalists, musicians, programmers and hobbyists, this
medium is an apreciable opportunity in a context of monopolized communication, of confiscated expression and
formatted information.
The apparition on the market of the hand held devices especially the mobile telephone has increased the democratization of access to the digital communication. We can dream of a continuum of communication between
mobile devices and servers on the internet.The mobile and the sedentary can relate each other through wireless connection.
The dream of an etheral network is technically feasable:its name is integration.Soon, your voice or the data you send and receive through a mobile device will be treated by a server. You will be able to interact with all the possibilities of the internet(the digital media)with a little interface that can go along with you in the streets. As easy as a pocket camera and that let you interact with the most sofisticated machines at any time and in real time. It is already tempting to imagine the applications for our concerns and the benefits the non profit community could take out of it:Independant journalism in real time, tactical moves orchestrated during protests, immediate poetry, walking microphones, the connection of the mobile and the server provides with limitless applications for techno or experimental music, art practices of diverse sorts... Atremendous potential of uses is there.
The use of the cell phone has spread rapidly without any need of pedagogical structure. The use of the internet among resistants, cultural actors, alternative producers tends to be a relatively common practice. We have now reached more or less a level of technological awareness that helps people to take the best of the tools.From the point of view of the user.
And this is probably the most problematic point we have to solve.Because the user's position is determined to be weakened in a very near future.We are left with no choice: build interconnected and independant structures of production or be silenced.
The age of digital innocence is over.
We know that the existing infrastructure is not in our hands, that the access is controlled and that the ones who own the technology have a very precise agenda from which the part of the cultural organizations, independant producers and activists of all sorts and gender are excluded.
The dream of most of the big corporations that will invest in the IT field and of a large majority of the nation states is not a dream of free and equal participation.
On the contrary, it is to stop the decentralization process through the weakening of the user.
This weakening is systematic and is part of a long term strategy.
This strategy has operated on several levels:
-the law: the strenghtening of the copyright laws that allow for all kind of restrictions for the user's freedom, the acceptance of practice of profiling by e commerce companies, the legislation over the Internet Service Providers that have to keep the tracks of every move on their customers...
-the specifications about the standards:the success of the lobbyists of the mergers about the evolution of the language of the web: the standardisation of XML rather than a complexification of HTML.The efforts of the W3C which is supposed to be a democratic instance elected by the netizens are concentrated towards a language that
-the increase of the digital surveillance as well on line as offline: looking around you in the street and counting the numbers of surveillance cameras will give you an idea of the surveillance climate.The same atmosphere of surveillance is present on line: The large scale projects of total scrutiny like Echelon, Carnivore or even nearer of Frenchelon that monitor every email, fax, phone call...
And of course our intimates bugging devices: built-in chips by Bell that monitor the activity of your computer and the legality of the software you are using, the digital tatoo of your hand held device monitored by GPS (satellite)
-Last but not least, the possibilities of the material: until today a computer was supposed to do everything from editing video, to compiling a program or sending an email.The evolution of the market and of the offer will drastically change. The idea is to split the functions of the computer as we know it into separate devices that you will have to buy one by one and the machine that will host the applications they need will be a centralized server. It means that for instance the employees in a soicety/office will have in their hands terminal like machines that they can bring along wit them at home or everywhere they go (so that they can work at any time any place) but this machine won t be able to do anything important except if connected to the server of the enterprise where reside the applications, the CPU power, the hard disk ... Even the memory of the machine will consist of a cache of the one of the enterprise. It is really clear that the owner of the contents will be the one who own the server on a very pragmatic manner. A project called Rafut by a French company is very typical of this state of mind. A central server hosts an application like photoshop. So connected through the internet to this central machine you can work on a graphic file. What you actually have on your computer screen is a low definition image. A simulation of your work. The graphic file with high definition stays remote on the server.This is of course emblematic of the new generation of machines and the new spirit of the IT world: central servers will have the high (definition) and periphercial users the low.Very large investments are made into projects like JXTA (SUN) or .NET (Micro).Even the access to the internet through mobile devices is not supposed to be at the long term a complement of the access to the personal computer but a replacement. What could be seen as an opening to another kind of relationship with the internet is on the contrary the expression of a very old mentality: don't arm the masses.
But we have nothing to gain in speaking of ourselves as consumers or victims.
We have to take our chance in the action.
We have to reharness this technology for our means.Get out of the netizen's ghetto!
If we know who are our ennemies (if we know we cannot expect a better future from...), we have to learn to know who our allies could be and from whom we could learn.
Open Source Community: the decentralization of the production and the accessibility of the tools
Against commercial imperialism
Free Software and open source community have since long now been the watchdogs of the user's freedom.To counter the monopolization of the computer world and to be able to work together on the freer way, the Free Software Foundation of Richard Stallman has produced a license the General Public License. This license begins like this:
"The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free Software--to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation's software and to any other program whose authors commit to using it. [...] You can apply it to your programs, too. When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things. To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.
We protect your rights with two steps:
(1) copyright the software,
and (2) offer you this license which gives you legal permission to copy, distribute and/or modify the software.
Also, for each author's protection and ours, we want to make certain that everyone understands that there is no warranty for this free software. If the software is modified by someone else and passed on, we want its recipients to know that what they have is not the original, so that any problems introduced by others will not reflect on the original authors' reputations. Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all."
The open source community has applied from the beginning the spirit of openness present at the early stage of the internet to the production of software, the writing of code.Far from being only an idealistic alternative to the industrial monopolies on software, the open source community has achieved technological success. The largest majority of the web servers are Apache and the operating systems on which it runs are the open source version of Unix: Linux. Linux is an operating system which is free in the sense that you can copy and distribute it and that some of its version are free ( financially to download). Other versions are commercial, it means that they have the same License that above but you have to buy your copy and the asssociated services ( an installer of packages and some utilities) all this for a very affordable price and accompagned with 1000 free softwares all that for the fifth of the prize of something like Photoshop or Office.
This operating system is far more stable than Windows or Mac OS since it is tested out by a very large community and that the bugs are fixed in a very short time.
This success is due to the fact that the community of programmers working on a free software is far more larger than any corporation could afford economically (salary wise). The code is spread everywhere on the planet on the contrary of the proprietary software which is kept hidden.Free Software is decentralization and responsabilisation of the individuals applied. Even the people responsible for supervizing the development of the packages( pieces of code used for specific functions) do not necessarily meet one another in real life.
Freenet the protection of privacy and the fight against censorship.
Against state paternalism
the Open Source developpers provide us with a great model for collaboration, with tools that are performant and gratis and with a license that makes us in the control of the technology they give us. The biggest problems they don t solve are the ones related to the surveillance and control by the nation states.A server, an autonomous one as an industrial one can be shut down. Because you are hosting forbidden content in a country, because a political regime is hostile towards your opinion,... It can happen very quickly. In France for instance an indy server, altern.org, has been shut down because a mannequin has seen pictures of herself naked.A nipple too much and it is hundreds of websites that are shut down with the servers.On the accusation of copyright infringement Napster has been shut down and its technology has been bought by a big Music Group Bertelsmann: millions of people were using it for sharing music files. Without discrimination every user has been stolen from this service. Because the model of distribution was threatening the monopolistic power of the entertainment
industry(remember that all the period Napster was in use no decline of the sales has been observed!)
Also another problem is the possibility of sharing the resources// storage space of different computer in a network. In Freenet the resources are shared by every computer making it relatively equal wether you have a large server space to donate or a cheap old machine.
The creators of Freenet describe it like this:
" Freenet is
a large-scale peer-to-peer network which pools the power of member computers around the world to create a massive virtual information store open to anyone to freely publish or view information of all kinds.
Freenet is:
Highly survivable: All internal processes are completely anonymized and decentralized across the global network, making it virtually impossible for an attacker to destroy information or take control of the system.
Private: Freenet makes it extremely difficult for anyone to spy on the information that you are viewing, publishing, or storing.
Secure: Information stored in Freenet is protected by strong cryptography against malicious tampering or counterfeiting.
Efficient: Freenet dynamically replicates and relocates information in response to demand to provide efficient service and minimal bandwidth usage regardless of load. Significantly, Freenet generally requires log(n) time to retrieve a piece of information in a network of size n. "
From the perspective of cultural workers, artists, actvists, there is a lot to learn from these models and people.
First the need for an infrastructure. If we don t install our own now, the industry and sponsors will dictate their conditions and regulate the access or content.The Free Software provide with an efficient model of collaboration and very reliable tools for free(gratis).The concept of Freenet of interconnection and decentralization, solidarity can inspire an narchiçtecture that can help to share the resources from different levels of technology.The agrement of the different contributors to cache a certain amont of content, etc.
Read*Write*Execute* proposes:
*to reflect on the evolution of the ICT today and describe how it could affect the alternative media, indy journalism, the distribution of non traditional online content.This reflection should arise technological awareness and inspire new proposals for cultural networking.Themes like copyright/left, access, de/centralization, on-line censorship, digital surveillance, network politics, autonomous diffusion, internet history will be at stake.
*to encourage the reappropriation of the cell phone technology for alternative practices
*to learn the basics of networking:
as the need for digital infrastructure is urgent, we feel it is important not to stay at a critic/theoritical level towards contemporary technology but to get the hands dirty and give the means to ACT NOW.
*to work on concrete proposal for a cultural network:
Inspired by the examples of the free software community and the freenet(peer to peer), to design the basis for a larger scale network of cultural institutions, independant artists, musicians
Read*Write*Execute* will take the form of:
december 2001:
a website: http://www.centrodearte.com will host a serie of articles, interviews and resources(statistics, free software mirrors, links, manuals...)
january 2001:
a workshop:
this workshop will consist in lectures and practice work:
-how to build a server with free software and a low budget?
-how to install a freenet server and publish content on Freenet?
a proposal:
collaborative redaction of a draft for a network of indy cultural actors.
a cell phone project:
remote participants use the SMS to send slogans in a mailing list for cell phones.
This project will explore the links between digital communication and the compression of language.
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what we can learn from this, what we can use:
Free Software decentralization and solidarity
Realizing what the industry want to forbid for the user: ,a real interaction between the mobile and the sedentary.
*centralization
the story of de centralization and re centralization
the infrastructure of ARPANET is produced by the US Army in a context of pyramidal heirarchy
Reapropriated by the scientifics, new protocols, new social model it becomes the internet in 1969
the processes of centralization and de become separate during the early public age of the internet:
on the one hand the construction of intranets and extranets (privatization of the network) on the other hand decentralization through the individual use of the internet(home pages, organizations, open schools, art...).
This co existence between centralized and decentralized entities was relatively of a peaceful nature or ignorance.
From two or three years on, a conflict is more and more virulent. Attacks are made essentially on the argument of copyright infringement. Everything that can potentially lead to free sharing of proprietary resources is under attack or suspicion at least.But this was the defensive part of the recentralization.
Now we are in the active/agressive politics:
- the formatting of the computing language: XML has been shaped accordingly to the need of the e commerce and the emerging market. Simplification of the HTML rather than extension of its complexity
- the shift from an empowering technology to a terminal based one: the sophisticated tool that an imac is for a rather low prize ( always in comparison of traditional tool of diffusion)is now abandoned for light interfaces with low computng power
connected to central servers that hosts the applications and the contents.
- the remote acces computing: a company owns a server farm and the employees connect to it for using software and retrieving data. Their computers will not have applications anymore and the data will only be a cache of the files they are allowed to use on the central computer of the office.
- new laws that protect the technical protection are used to bypass the few rights on content of the user.
- increase of digital surveillance :
by the industry(built-in chips that monitors the activity of a computer,
by the nation states: Echelon, Carnivore, Frenchelon...
ISP that have to keep track of the moves of their netizens in Belgium for five years!
What is a centralized medium
definition by Guy Debord in La Société Du Spectacle
Example:
Today 95% of the music production and diffusion belongs to// is controled by 5 conglomerates
· Universal Music Group — world market share appr. 27%; owner: Universal Studios, USA (film); merge of Polygram and MCA by the end of 1998 [17]
· Warner Music Group — world market share appr. 20%; owner: Time-Warner, USA (media and publishing)
· Sony Music Entertainment — world market share appr. 18%; owner: Sony, Japan (entertainment electronics)
· EMI/Virgin — world market share appr. 16%; owner: Thorn, Great Britain (electronics and military technology)
· BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) — world market share appr. 14%; owner: Bertelsmann AG, Germany (media and publishing)[18]
The same for the press, the media, the entertainment.
This is a direct threat to the freedom of speech and the variety of opinions, the objectivity
of information , the richness of culture. Even the UNESCO, an organization that noone would consider as a bunch of anarchists
has marked serious suspicions about the monopolization of cultural goods from the part of the Western corporations.
see Joost Smiers
We need autonomous channels of communication, diffusion and production.
Each time a new form of communicaton appears//is invented, this claim is made stronger///* by those who are
considered as minorities.That is a paradox to declare that the vast majorities whose voices are negated or distorted by
the traditional medias are to be considered as minorities.Women, black people, disable//handicapped persons,oriental people,
... ///*
For some time now, the web has been a real opportunity to spread text-based knowledge opinions novels stories essays
political opinions etc.This was not considered really as a challenge for the media and entertainment groups.
One of the characteristics of the internet is that is a decentralized medium. It means that each node in the network
has the technical means to be at the same time a receiver and a diffusor. With a common machine and a good connection, you can produce and diffuse content as well as store it, browse and receive images, sound, video.
This is probably the big difference with the other media today.The traditional media have turned us into passive consumer of
images and sound.The television and the radio we buy today are only receivers
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Dernière modification le : 17/10/2001 @ 05:51
Catégorie : draft
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