Sustainability, the Produser Class, and Limitations of Mere Access

V2V functions as a storage and distribution mechanism within a broader schema of an autonomous communications infrastructure. Combined with wireless mesh networks (1) and low power terrestrial transmission (a la Telestreet) (2) such a system can provide a basic outlet for communication without state endowment. This emerged despite rather than because legal and media policies advanced by the state. Instead it has been commodity competition to provide the basis for such a system - PC manufacturers and telecom competitors trying to sell surplus bandwidth and hardware.

This possibility should give us pause to evaluate current proposals made to attenuate conditions of media concentration, and specifically the legalize of pirate television in the framework of community access television. Token concessions in this direction by the funding of community access type "open channels". Such programmes have existed in Germany, Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden since the 1980s, usually funded by some percentage of the license (1% in Germany) fee or a flat sum (5 million in the Netherlands). Despite the existence of nearly 2000 such stations in the United States - financed by local cable franchises contracts - they have not slowed the immiseration of the public sphere. Cost limitations keep these initiatives marginalized, specifically: (i) lack of funds to pay people to work full-time on the production of programs, particularly those which do not follow common-garden political genre formats which are a likely by-product of other activities. (ii) inferior visibility compared to media outlets that invest huge sums in promotion, environment-saturation etc. which they can do because of their advertising budgets (and sales and licensing revenue of course).

Autonomous media projects remain stuck in chronic financial insustainability - thriving for some years before lack of resources takes its toll. At this point one of three things happens. Either they professionalise, accepting standard market practices [Liberation, Tageszeitung, the Village Voice], become dependent on institutional support [via arts councils or EU funded programs] which have consequences for the political content, or simply disappear. The modern cultural worker in many ways epitomizes the typical casualized figure: multi-skilled, mobile, short-term or freelance contracts. Likewise independent media projects themselves are precarious, ephemeral, dependent on the contribution of voluntary labour (self-exploitation or necessary virtuosity?) and small amounts of borrowed or collective fixed capital. Thus media and communication workers are confronted with two unyielding material challenges: the need to finance their own personal self-reproduction and the cash needed to ensure their projects survival. Where can it come from?

Zombie Scarcities in the Era of Abundance Ratings, however unscientific their manufacture, determine advertising revenues. Strangely this premise is not sustained in the criticism of the media itself. Rather than an annex to the world of entertainment, television and celebrity, advertising occupies a determinant position in the world of cultural production - 50% of RAI's revenues (approx 2.2bn) in 2000. Mediaset is simply an advertising business that operates television stations to this end (2.4 bn in 2002). Access to viewers', or users', attention and the chance to influence desires is the 'commodity' that has value and is traded (3). Exposure to advertising comprises a loss of autonomy even where we subjectively 'socialise' many the messages received. More pertinently, maintenance of a fictitious scarcity in broadcast spectrum so as to preserve these advertising markets guides legal regulation. In addition we are asked to pay for the pleasure of this imposition in the form of a television license: 'l'abbonamento' (4).

Initially the license was defended as a means of financing audiovisual production without the constant intrusion of advertising. This was the BBC 'Reithian' model championed by those who envisioned TV as an instrument for education, opposed to practice in the US where attainment of advertising revenues determined viability. In Italy the license fee has existed since 1954 and is currently around 100 euros for the estimated 20 million households - a notional total of 2 billion euros. The 'subscription' - in fact involuntary and blind to consumption of RAI's output - provides no respite from advertising - users get taxed for owning a television as well as having their attention sold to the marketeers of consumer desire.

Reclaim the Media - Abolish RAI The distinction between "professionals" assembling programming and "passive" users consuming ads to perpetrate the model has no technical basis. Our society is permeated by communications networks where media production equipment is diffuse, the digital output shareable - as regards modification, distribution and transmission - and the costs of coordination low, that TV need no longer be the domain of specialists. The barrier to this decentralization remains the question of the wage, of how the media producer can feed herself.

By RAI's admission nearly 20% currently refuse to pay the license. Let's practice and advocate allocation directly by users to people working as cultural producers whom they regard as producing pleasurable or useful things, moments or knowledge. Instead of a centralized information apparatus we would have a diffuse and variegated output, independent editors assembling the results thematically and according to sensibility, interest, perversion or prejudice. Assuming that people's satisfaction can find unexpected expressions means leaving the form - individual, collective, formal - to reflect the manifold character of diffuse social creativity and dissatisfaction. Potential recipents then would include investigative journalists, painters, film-makers, 16 year old punks, fanzine publishers, software programmers, handmade book printers, street poster designers, all types of dancers and clowns, neighborhood theatre troope's, breakfast radio presenters, local and national news teams etc. Instead of a centralized information apparatus we would have a diffuse and variegated output, independent editors assembling the results thematically and according to sensibility, interest, perversion or prejudice.

RAI and Mediaset can battle it out for the advertising.The pretense that RAI functions as an independent observatory and producer of non-commercially determined programming is a joke. The sum of the usual clientelism and lottizzazione. In fact, as every Italian knows, the notion of impartiality in RAI rests on the fact that different political rackets control the stations. The dire nature of Berlusconia should not force us to succumb to the project of Restoration advanced by the pathetic 'opposition'.

'Free' Production and the Universal Income Media producers inhabit precarious circumstances and their abilities are subordinated - the practice of their craft is not self-determined. Their jobs lack benefits and guarantees, are prone to periods of un/under-employment and often have no formal workplace organization. A guaranteed income would address these problems which are not general rather than unique to cultural work and provides a space for collective recognition. Repurposing the license may be somewhat corporatist but is immediately feasible. It can also provide the basis for an independent communications sphere capable of challenging the endemic corruption, bringing news of struggle and articulating the language for new social relations. --------------

(1) See for example the various projects at http://www.locustworld.com/

(2) On this subject see: http://www.telestreet.it/

(3) See on this "Pay For Play", Salon, 14 March 2001, http://dir.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/03/14/payola/index.html

(4) The private system's analogue to the license fee is arguably the charge for Pay TV, where the same perverse logic of paying the provider in order for them to sell your attention is executed. One useful response exploiting the infrastructure of 'mere access' is the decryption and retransmission in the clear of such programming. See: Anon, Telestreet Rome -Giving Sky the 'Boot', at http://slash.autonomedia.org

It's in the home that consensus grows up: family and television are the basic tools to create consensus and social control. If we want to traverse the trajectories of television consumption we have to become the media in the space of communication flux. In the last ten years we have witnessed a process of diffusion regarding communication technology, wider accessibility to media tools, and an increased awareness of one's expressive possibilities. This situation favours the mutation of the consumer into the producer. The consumer, following her own natural instinct towards consuming, develops the expertise that allow her to find online the shows of her favourite soap opera or the lastest Hollywood movie, and download them easily at home. This increasing experience in Internet Computer Technology and sharing introduces the consumer to networks where not only pirate materials circulate, but also independent productions. These independent productions belong to a realm which is an alternative to the market in commodities.

Examples of these alternative networks are New Global Vision (www.ngvision.org) and V2V (www.v2v..cc). The aim is to collect and distribute videos on the Internet using peer-to-peer networks. Both the projects suggest the Creative Commons license as a way to protect the productions and the authors.

V2V has the following aims:

1. To use an audio-video compression algorytm (codec) within a format (.avi, .mov, etc) which may be used on every OS (linux, windows, mac, ...) and which is free software. The developers of V2V are waiting for the release of the OGG THEORA codec, currently the suggestion is VP3.

2. To share not only final video productions but also raw footage to allow collective editing.

3. To decentralize access to the archives through the use of RSS feeds.

4. To use peer-to-peer networks such as edonkey or bittorrent to disseminate videos.

These mechanisms facilitate the circulation of content between independent producers and are a opportunity for the sustainability of innitiatives such as the Street Televisions in Italy. To fill up and create a daily palimpsest is in fact the most expensive need for independent TV. Several experiences in this field show us the simple possibility of building an antenna, transmitter and amplifier from which to start broadcasting. To broadcast not only to obtain a corner in the mediascape but to change the nature of the mediascape itself. This vision is not feasable if it is not supported by a network, as there soon becomes a need for content. This can be provided by a local space of production or by collective pool from the net. To integrate and to cross several media (TV, radio, Internet) is to create paths and time-space tunnels in a flux which attempts to drown us.

The motivations behind independent media projects are highly differentiated: desire to reconstruct the public sphere; interest in experimentation and the development of media production skills; longing to tell new stories in different ways; will to develop a mass medium to counterpose a critical political message to that emanating from the commercial broadcast networks. Obviously Italy's curious blend of political and media power is even somewhat particular.

Beyond Mere Access

V2V functions as a storage and distribution mechanism within a broader schema of an autonomous communications infrastructure. When combined with wireless mesh networks and low power transmission (a la Telestreet) such a system is capable of providing a basic outlet for communication to all. The irony is that this potential has emerged in spite rather than because of the legal and media policies underpinned by the state. Instead it has been the commodification of personal computers and later bandwidth which have provided the rudimentary basis for such a system.

This possibility should give us pause to evaluate the typical proposals made to rectify or alleviate conditions of media concentration, and specifically on the current legal proposals to legalize pirate television and normalise it in the framework of community access television. Such a system has existed in the United States for twenty years - known as PEG (Public, Educational and Governmental) channels - and provides access for non-commercial broadcasters to cable and satellite systems. Thousands of these channels exist but they have scarcely attracted any audience attention at all. Why?

(1) lack of funds to pay people to work full-time on the production of programs, particularly those which do not follow common-garden political genre formats which are a likely by-product of other activities.

(2) The imbalance in user motivation stemming from lack of visibility in comparison to media outlets investing huge amounts of money in promotion, environment -saturation etc. which they can do because of their advertising budgets (and sales and licensing revenue of course).

Sustainability Thus, autonomous media projects remain stuck in a quagmire of chronic financial insustainability - they can thrive for some years before the lack of resources takes its toll. At this point one of three things happen. Either they professionalise and accept standard market practices [Liberation, Tageszeitung, the Village Voice], become dependent on institutional support [via arts councils or EU funded programs] which have consequences for the political content, or simply disappear. The modern cultural worker in many ways reflects the typical casualized figure: multi-skilled, mobile, short-term or freelance contracts. Likewise independent media projects themselves are precarious, ephemeral, dependent on the contribution of voluntary labour (self-exploitation or necessary virtuosity?) and small amounts of borrowed or collective fixed capital. Thus media and communication workers are confronted with two unyielding material challenges: the need to finance their own personal self-reproduction and the cash needed to ensure their projects survival. Where can it come from?

The TV License/Arts Council At its inception the television license was defended as the only means of financing audiovisual production without the constant intrusion of advertising. This was the Reithian model championed by those who envisioned tv as an instrument for education, opposed to that in evidence in the US where stations advertising revenues determined what programs could or could not be produced. In Italy the license fee has existed since 1954 and is currently set at almost 100 euros for each of the estimated 20 million households - a notional total of 2 billion euros. The inaptly named subscription - which is in fact involuntary and is legally required without consumption of RAI's products - provides no safety from advertising however. Thus users get the worst of all worlds: they are taxed for owning the means of reception, and then their attention is given to the manufacturers of consumer desire to be saturated. That fund has been used to maintain a 'public' media under the model of clientelism and rival political party mouthpieces. That system has now been put in crisis by the extension of Berlusconi's control over the CDA and the eviction of presenters like Santoro.

By way of comparison, in the Netherlands, a country of 16 million people, there are 330 community radio stations and 100 community television stations, most of which also have an Internet presence. They operate year round with a public service remit on a non-profit-distributing basis and are locally controlled and accountable. The Dutch licence fee service agency distributes £5M per annum in structural support to the community broadcasting sector. The total turnover of the sector is near to £25M per annum with the remainder coming from local grants, sponsorship and advertising. The average community radio station has a turnover of £60,000. Community television services in the Netherlands operate at a similar economic level by mixing text, still images and teletext with a limited amount of moving image production. The Dutch community broadcasting sector sustains some 500 jobs but involves more than 25,000 active volunteers.

http://italy.indymedia.org/news/2004/01/469551.php

p2p

We practice and encourage the circulation of all media, irrespective of its proprietary or free (as in software) character. We reject the laws which would stigmatize and criminalize the practice of sharing.

Practically the proposal is for people to bring whatever media they have which they woyu;ld like to circulate and make it available for all to access and copy. External disks are the simplest way ro do this, but bringing CDs, DVDs or portable loaded with delicious data is equally desired.

The Pirate Pride Lounge will take place throughout We Seize! whenever two pirates meet, but we will organise to make external disks with several hundred gigs of films and music available for fixed locations.

x.

"Criminal Mass"

Information Insurgency and Its Limits Self-determination of where and how we want to live, and ability to communicate those decisions, constitute the fundamental vectors of individual choice. Limitations on the exercise of the first are the stuff of migration regulation. The second is contingent on the information we have as to the life-choices available. Capacity to communicate beyond a micro-public is constrained by a legal infrastructure that has favored the development of a concentrated ownership of transmission and a system of property rights that denies the possibility of recycling the works of others whether to convey our argument or contest that of another.

Pirate Pride Where are the advocates of freedom in the new digital society who have not been decried as pirates, anarchists, communists? Have we not seen that many of those hurling the epithets were merely thieves in power, whose talk of "intellectual property'' was nothing more than an attempt to retain unjustifiable privileges in a society irrevocably changing?" - Eben Moglen, the DotCommunist Manifesto

Laws expanding the scope and duration of exclusive private rights in information (copyright, patent and trademarks and trade secrets) have been a constant since at least the late 1970s. Growing awareness of the consequences of this has produced a counter-movement in the last years, often rallying around notions of fair use, ‘a balance between public and private claims’ or information as a commons. Factual justification for such a movement is easily available but in the typical fashion of politics the point has been made hysterically, by caricature, so as to better illustrate the point. Thus the propagation of terms which convey events only as a movement of enclosure, commodification, information lockdown and the panoptical surveillance – a language of dystopia, hopelessness and victimhood. Such despondency would be legitimate if the promulgation of laws from on high was enough to control human behaviour and creativity; such a description is however false in several respects and risks being a self-fulfilling prophecy by fostering changes in social norms in flagrant contradiction with the law.

Everyone is an Enemy An estimated 150 million people are now using a diversity of p2p systems to shares music, video, software and text files on a regular basis. Competition within hardware manufacturing and broadband provider sectors is ensuring that access to the necessary commodities – storage space for media, transmission channels for delivery - expands. Copyright industry interests anticipated these developments on the basis of their observation of software piracy and Bulletin Board based media distribution in the late 80s and early 90s. One response was the introduction in the United States of the No Electronic Theft Act in 1997. Prior to NET copyright infringement was merely a civil offence if performed for non-commercial purposes but this law made non-profit distribution of copyright goods a criminal offense, or even a felony, once low thresholds of value and numbers of copies were exceeded. Jeffrey Gerard Levy, a college student in Oregon was the first to be tried under the new law - he pled ‘’guilty’’ of sharing texts and music from a site hosted on his university webserver. Subsequent legislation extended criminal sanctions to the development and distribution of tools devised to defeat ‘’digital rights management’’ technologies - technical measures integrated into media products to restrict their use. These devices, whose integration into hardware is demanded by the info-tainment complex, constitute the other thrust of the industry’s war against the wave of sharing between strangers.

A comparable introduction of criminal sanctions has occurred in the area of payTV. Since its inception in the early 80s there has been a battle between decryption-card hackers and companies such as Sky, DirectTV and Canal+. Tens of millions are using modified cards so as to evade payment of extortionate monthly subscription fees. Initially the industry pursued the commercial distributors of the cards, but as this failed they shifted their attention to users. The result is that it is now a criminal offence even to receive a decrypted programme in your home – also known as a ‘’conditional access service’’ – without the authorised card. Here as in p2p the focus of repression has shifted from commercial counterfeiting entrepreneurs to individual end-users to their machines and their homes. Once-docile consumers are now to be approached as enemies. DirectTV are currently threatening action against nearly 10,000 users in the US.

That is the story from above. Let us look instead, critical eyes open, from below.

Criminal Mass Heedless of their redefinition as criminals by the global media godfathers together with their crooked political friends, there are now an estimated six million people swapping media online at any given moment. The Recording Industry Association of America began their jihad with 261 legal actions against individuals in September, having encountered obstacles in their war against p2p software developers in the spring. Instead of turning off their computers and returning to shopping as usual, however, users’’ reaction was one of rage. Boycotts began. Vilification of media companies for their capitalist rapaciousness became a commonplace in innumerable forums. One of the victims of the RIAA attack, a 12 year old girl living in social housing in Brooklyn, received so many donations that she ended up making a profit despite having agreed a $3,000 settlement with the RIAA to persuade them to drop the case. A legal fund to coordinate and finance collective defence for p2p users was set up at the tellingly titled www.downhillbattle.com. Lastly, and most saliently, the sharing went on in defiance of the threat of individualized punishment, with decreases in the numbers on public networks balanced by an increase in those participating in semi-private spaces for exchange and distribution. Despite the existence of the criminal provisions of the NET, they have yet to be employed

Likewise PayTV hacking continues unabated in both traditional and innovative forms. Sky Italia, launched in July and monopolist of the Italian satellite market, seek to use their control over premiership soccer so as to infiltrate every home with their annual six hundred Euro ransom. In response, pirate television operators in Rome connected a television equipped with an authorized card to a transmitter and rebroadcast the signal in the clear to whole districts of the city on several occasions this autumn. This exemplary action constituted a spectacular intervention into the popular imagination, responded to a real need and sense of identity felt by Romans and attacked the commercialization of popular culture using acts rather than words.

Phantasmagora of Control: No Need to Feed the Machine In addition to severe commercial and social problems, the schemes [hardware based copy-control mechanisms] suffer from several technical deficiencies, which, in the presence of an effective darknet, lead to their complete collapse. We conclude that such schemes are doomed to failure.”” Microsoft Engineers, The Darknet and the Future of Content Distribution

Technical schemes to foreclose redistribution have fared no better. CSS, the content scrambling system conceived to prevent the copying of DVDs was reverse engineered and the resulting program DeCSS provided the key to unlock a large portion of the divx files now available on the web. The Motion Picture Studios vengefully pursued a fifteen year old Norwegian, Jan Johansen, with criminal charges for which he was later cleared. Meanwhile Secure Digital Music Initiative wasted years of research and millions of dollars in an attempt to develop a control mechanism for digital music to no avail. A last prototype was profferred to researchers for testing and summarily cracked. In the aftermath, the SDMI attempted to silence researchers from discussing the techniques employed with threats of legal action under the DMCA, later retracted. Microsoftt’s DRM also yielded its secrets and flaws shortly after release. Finally, and most clamorously, a Russian programmer, Dimitri Sklyaraov, was arrested by the FBI before thousands of people at the hacker-meet DefCon in Las Vegas 2001. He had just delivered a presentation describing flaws in Adobe’s ebook encryption scheme that had allowed the his employers’, Elcomsoft to produce a program capable of circumventing all controls. Charged under the criminal provisions of the DMCA and imprisoned for six weeks in California, charges against Sklyarov were ultimately dropped, but not before a widespread campaign for his release had brought hacker IP activism onto the streets with self-organized demonstrations in 14 cities.

That the pursuit of total hardwired control has so far proved fruitless is not to say that this tendency will disappear. So long however as free software systems have machines on which they can function, users will always be able to control their behaviour and defeat all panoptical devices. This is the fundamental political battle that gives meaning to the free in ‘’free software.’’

In All Tomorrow’s Economies: the Emergence of the “Prod-User’’ Class and Decommodification The phenomenal success and complexity of the free software movement has inspired the study of its means for organizing co-operation and a search for other areas where this mode of production finds form. Examples have not been in short supply. At an infra-structural level they range from the self-organised storage transmission structures of file-sharing networks to the pooling of hardware resources in projects such as SETI. At the level of knowledge and information production there are projects such as Wikipedia (a volunteer build non-proprietary encyclopedia) and a slew of news and discussion sites (Kuro5hin and Indymedia) built on collaborative writing engines have become the de facto standard for the organization of opinion native to the web. Science and research too has benefited from the restless curiosity of the army of amateur collaborators.

Each of these projects demonstrate the advanced state of self-organized production in the networked environment, and its capacity to subtract goods and services from a free market model built on the market and the firm. Hopes that these examples augur a more equitable world rest on the particularity of informational public goods nature of immaterial resources: non-excludability and non-rivalrousness. The first means that the cost of the provision of a good is the same if it's produced for a limited number of people as for all. The second means that your ability to enjoy a given good does not impede my use of it at the same time.

P2P reverses this situation at least in part. As the range of its productive practices grow it substructs, or removes, tasks from the market and the firm. Instead of 'management' or 'planning' these projects rely upon horizontal negotiation, modular production and exploitation of the cheap and easy nature of digital communications to overcome the need for a centrally located decision-maker -- formerly known as the boss. Widespread social cooperation is no longer constrained to the firm - this is the fundamental change of peer to peer. Distinguishing this practice from real-world volunteerism are the low costs of coordination, the role of information (and its public good characteristics) as both raw material and output of the productive process and the access to a near infinite range of expertise and paralellizable workers through the network.

Qualification: Our Invisible Labour for Capital and State The fact that the fruits of this collaboration, like the warez in circulation on file-trading networks, are free does not mean that they sketch future liberation. Such a conclusion could only proceed from a naïve belief that capital accumulation only operates where there is a fee for access. Service and knowledge industries are based precisely on extracting value on the back of free or cheap access to a basic product.

Some degree of pirate circulation of media commodities, for example, is desirable from an accumulation perspective as it ensures that the profile of the film, song, software or game reaches a broader community. In software it means that young designers train themselves in using photoshop and quark express, programs which later in ‘’professional life’’ they will continue to use and will pay for licenses for, due to the inconvenience of learning alternatives. Similarly the Matrix may be downloaded and viewed for free but the public excitement will help to sell t-shirts, posters and a hundred other spin-offs. Counterband circulation in this sense can be the perfect accompaniment for the efforts now commonly made by companies to add allure to their products by integrating ‘’street-hip’’, enlisting scores of marketing and cool-hunting agencies to keep them close to their desired demographic.In a world where retail price has no relationship to the cost of physical production, every positive description of cultural objects participates in the creation of a market for sales of the product directly or some derivative thereof – the mobilization of our subjectivity in the profit-cycle.

Likewise the benefits of networked voluntary labour do not only accrue to the music-collectors, free software users/producers and humanity in general. State and commercial apparatus get their cut as well. Clear examples are the common practice amongst gaming companies of using enthusiastic players as ‘’guides’’ to help new enthusiasts find their way around the game, overcome cul-de-sacs created by bugs in the code, and generally create a sense of community. Effectively these guides provide, for free, customer service which otherwise the company itself would have to finance. What’s more this fact is baldly stated by games companies themselves. Elsewhere NASA operate volunteer projects that harness free labour for banal techno-scientific tasks formerly requiring the attention of PhDs. What are those people now working on? The next Manhattan project?

Further Excavating the Potential for Liberation: Excarceration “”An important meaning of liberation …. [is suggested]… the growing propensity, skill and success of …. working people in escaping from the newly created institutions that were designed to discipline people by closing them in. This tendency I have dubbed 'excarceration' because I wish to draw attention to the activity of freedom in contrast to its ideological or theoretical expressions.’’ – Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged

“”The street finds its own use for things”” – William Gibson

There is a more precise connection between this mass 'criminality' and the merging productive power; the desire to obtain media commodities for free is a powerful motivation for self-education the acquisition of new skills and knowledge: how to use cryptographic hashes, compression techniques, wider knowledge of less-charted (and thus safer) network spaces, port-management, network architecture, search algorithms, familiarity with formats and the ability to render digital forms as physical objects such as mastered CDs and DVDs, familiarity with publishing techniques, wikis etc. File-sharing forums function as veritable apprentice-yards for the diffusion of techniques which once acquired are portable to uses outside of the reproduction of the commodity circuit.

Whilst much of current pirate sociality revolves around consumption, the proliferation of the necessary skills for digital production and distribution allow us to anticipate the possibility of a more contestatory appropriation. To paraphrase a feminist phrase of long ago, it’s the possibility of taking the master’s characters, cultural icons embedded in everyday sociality, and repurposing them to tell new stories and offer the possibility of organizing the world in a different way which seduces us. This is what Harry Cleaver elsewhere has referred to as self-valorization, or ‘’those aspects of struggle which went beyond mere resistance or negation…’. These practices of reappropriation that act in disregard to the law and the scoial relations that law fixes, “... the search for the future in the present, the identification of already existing activities which embody new, alternative forms of social cooperation and ways of being."

Today’s pirates can be tomorrow’s agents of transformation, authoring their, and our lives, anew.

http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?s=dea56eb31425bbe0224a6e80d...