Days of Free Culture and Knowledge (and the Subjugation of Science to Human Pleasure and Health)
Purpose
To give focus to: the diffuse acts of resistance against the terrorism of copyright currently being carried out as part of the everday life of million of ‘consumers’; the stranglehold of pharmaceutical and biotech companies over human health and society’s relationship to scientific development; The domination of our minds by mass media under corporate control (the media-industrial infotainment complex)
and
To socialise knowledge and technical expertise by creating spaces in which to enjoy sharing and enouraging the technically sophisticated to impart their skills to the broader community.
AND
To generate a forum where those involved in hitherto balkanised activity can find a language and broader context in which the similiarities of their struggles can be understood.
What is It?
A week-long carnival of excess fuelled by excessive acts of wanton generosity.
Practically, we need to decide a date.
We need to establish a portal where people can share ideas for actions and reports of acts already committed, crimes already perpetrated. It should also have a FAQ demonstating the egregious effects of the anti-social phenomena of property rights.
To persuade a wide range of groups in diverse areas of interest to participate. Everyone has knowledge and resources to share.
Assemble the necessary resources to assist those who do not yet know how to share in their sharing enterprise.
Activity Examples
- MP3, DVD trading, ripping
- Scanning of text – free books
- DNA sampling and GPLing
- Install Linux on your neighbour’s computer
- Free love
- Free money
- Direct actions against media corporations
- Talks and workshops (e.g. progaganda about media ownership)
- Knowledge sharing: non-proprietary pharmaceuticals
All activites to be determined by the participants (we would each have our own, for example). The free days of sharing should also recognise the value of small acts as well as those which are spectacular, public and political.
LIST INFO
http://www.jamie.com/mailman/listinfo/freedistro_jamie.com
or send message with ‘subscribe’ in header to freedistro@jamie.com
cadoe@snafu.de
subtv@lists.nadir.org
espanz@libero.it
L.A.S.E.R.
Critical Science group originating in Italy and now based in different
cities in Europe, They have begun discussion of a GPL equivalent for
patents, trick legally but an iunteresting point of depature.
Hacklabs
Another italian movement dedicated to the socialisation of knowledge,
based in the occupied social centres, running courses, providing access
and agitating around GNU-social radical ideas in a extra-state environment.
I'd suggest Blicero or Graffio, who elsewhere was one of the instigators
for the establishemt of a Hacklab in Oventic Chiapas during the summer
and is also settingup Rome's first community wireless network in Pigneto.
Access to Essential Medicines
Jamie Love, from the Consumer project on Technology.
From the dark side of the enclosures to the story of CIPRA. The discussion
about public health allows us to get out of the online morass.
Jaromil, dyne.org and DINA
Free software media tools.
Bootlab
Jamie already mentioned them (Steve) in the context of DivX Codec
technique, but also for their wireless project with other cultural
spaces in berlin and the indexing of content within the network which
leans toward actual hard disk sharing.
Chistoph Beaupoil
To talk about FLUSH. How opendesign can bring free software techniques
out of the ralm of the 'immaterial', and allow us to buld washing
machines on the same basis (nearly).
Oekonux - Free Software Society
Graham Seaman (there's a lot of sharing during revolutions!)
Stefan Meretz (self-unfolding or sharinG)
Infoanarchy/Eric Moller
Anything that's distributed, radical and concerned with production
broadly speaking and Eric is into it. If you look at his page you'll
know what I mean.
Alkan Moore
Artist communities have always functioned on the basis of sharing
and potlatch, Alan has did ton of research on artists movements in
New York for his PhD and is really into this angle.
I'm being very anti-anglo euro centered this afternoon, soon I'll write with more.
bye,
a.
ps
felix, I know I never sent you my criminalisation/IP paper, which
i'll be reworking as the Sklyarov trial unfolds, so I'll mail it to
you then, if you want.
L.A.S.E.R.
Critical Science group originating in Italy and now based in different
cities in Europe, They have begun discussion of a GPL equivalent for
patents, trick legally but an iunteresting point of depature.
Hacklabs
Another italian movement dedicated to the socialisation of knowledge,
based in the occupied social centres, running courses, providing access
and agitating around GNU-social radical ideas in a extra-state environment.
I'd suggest Blicero or Graffio, who elsewhere was one of the instigators
for the establishemt of a Hacklab in Oventic Chiapas during the summer
and is also settingup Rome's first community wireless network in Pigneto.
Access to Essential Medicines
Jamie Love, from the Consumer project on Technology.
From the dark side of the enclosures to the story of CIPRA. The discussion
about public health allows us to get out of the online morass.
Jaromil, dyne.org and DINA
Free software media tools.
Bootlab
Jamie already mentioned them (Steve) in the context of DivX Codec
technique, but also for their wireless project with other cultural
spaces in berlin and the indexing of content within the network which
leans toward actual hard disk sharing.
Chistoph Beaupoil
To talk about FLUSH. How opendesign can bring free software techniques
out of the ralm of the 'immaterial', and allow us to buld washing
machines on the same basis (nearly).
Oekonux - Free Software Society
Graham Seaman (there's a lot of sharing during revolutions!)
Stefan Meretz (self-unfolding or sharinG)
Infoanarchy/Eric Moller
Anything that's distributed, radical and concerned with production
broadly speaking and Eric is into it. If you look at his page you'll
know what I mean.
Alan Moore
Artist communities have always functioned on the basis of sharing
and potlatch, Alan has did ton of research on artists movements in
New York for his PhD and is really into this angle.
Open Cultures:
Themes:
Access to Information: Open access to information.
- Open Access Initiative (Darius Cuplinskas)
- arxive.org
- Open Distribution (Open Video Archive, etc)
- freenet (freenetproject.org)
-
Body: Controlling then living
- compulsory licenses (Jamie Love, Ted Byfield)
- L.A.S.E.R. (Patents and GPL)
- CAE (contestational biology)
-
The Physcial Layer:
- Wirless community networks (consume.net, bootlab.de, picopeering)
- Oekonux (Stefan Mertens)
- Garlic.net
- FLUSH
Freespeech, Free Media:
- Streaming (Drazen Pantic)
- Open Source Intelligence, Nologo
- anonymity
- freenet (see above)
- Freimuth Duve (OSCE)
Greymarkets, Piracy: Freehavens and unregulated zones
- Warez, can it really not be controlled? (Bruce Sterling?)
- KOP, BURN (exhibition)
- Piratology (Armin Medosch)
Open Security: Security can be transparent and compatible with civil society
Security through obscurity vs. security through transparency.
- bugtraq
IP: Copyright and Patents beyond legal theory
- digital commons: first assessments of the usefulness of licensing templates
Alan, Felix -
f:
> I like the idea of including non-internet based sharing, but so that
> it provides some background or broader perspective to the focus of the
> event.
my impression from the conversations so far is that this event takes
form around 'knowledge sharing'. knowledge sharing via (the) network(s)
is a massively important component of this. but the category is broad.
'transmission' of knowledge obviously also takes place in a variety of
other channels and modes. We have already considered storytelling,
music, photocopying, tape-to-tape, etc. in some of the conversations. I
think that this event should be an experiment in the *enabling* of the
free sharing of knowledge. SOS should consider itself as an
infrastructure, an architecture of such enablement. That, of course,
doesn't stop us from inviting whoever we think appropriate - but I would
like to feel at SOS a festival atmosphere at which people arriving
become 'infected' and realise all the things they have to share. (I use
as my paradigm Shu Lea Cheang's Garlic=Rich Air project -, at which people actually went home to specifically find
things to trade in at the van.)
> Any idea who might be able to talk about that from, say, a broad
> cultural perspective?
As the above indicates, I don't think we should limit our focus to
talking about such 'issues'. SOS should *demonstrate* the potential of
various technologies and strategies (such as P2P) for knowledge-sharing
and do so in a way that is as approachable as possible for 'ordinary'
people. In that sense, Alan's idea of a creche is a good one. I would
add to it a collaborative music space in which people can experience the
real joy of playing together (I am exploring casually with some folk
the idea of this environment somehow being reponsive to the rest of the
space in which the conference is taking place.)
> Warez
Of course there will be warez here, hopefully a lot of warez, and I
would like to provide some big disks that could be stuffed full of warez
and mp3s and connected to a nice fast 11Mbps wlan. That is what I would
like. My only suspicion about warez is connected to my suspicions about
the Kingdom of Piracy. I don't want to come over like we're 'promoting'
piracy _qua_ piracy. SOS is about the flow of information and knowledge,
the excess enabled by the network, and the enjoyment of that excess. I
think it should not constitiute itself in opposition to, but rather in
joyful (rhetorical) ignorance of, the establishment IP regime attempts
to enclose this free flow. Let us be careful then not to foreground
specific anti-IP discourse such as the warez community in our doings here.
> health
I think it is around issues such as molecules and 'health' (a category
which it is easy to contest, but still) that people can understand the
material importance of knowledge sharing (its impact on the body i.e.)
The difficulty here is to show this in a positive rather than negative
critique - and an involving rather than polemical one. Can Jamie Love
formulate a bio-IP project that will allow people to share something, or
do something with shared knowledge, that will show them how pharma IP
works or something along these lines... (for example Jamie recently
linked the Monde Dip article on the PDing of the human genome. Could we
have copies of the human genome on disk for people to take away? How big
is it? Under 520 Megs ;-)?)
Incidentally you can tell that I do not think that health is a dilution
of the idea of knowledge sharing but a sharp end of it.
Alan - on symtoms/shivers: I am still with 'shivers' but i LIKE
symptoms, perhaps for a strand of the thing (the shivers are just one
symptom, i suppose, but we don't have to be true to the grammar of the
thing - - -) For some reason 'Shivers' has really gripped me (I know, I
am biased with regards she who formulated this) and I even see an image:
a spring twig with a few little buds of cherry blossom, shivering with
dew (warning: Flash animation). Awww.... C'mon. Can't you see it?
let me know what y'all think. I think things are shaping up nicely. I am
particularly interested in whether you like the idea of a music space
that could provide a mixed audio background to the event; whether the
idea of the thing as a jamboree chimes with yours (i see people going
from place to place taking part in different workshops, learning skills
etc.).
ciao
jamie
>
