topic/open-source
Gavin C Mueller,
Tim O'Reilly,
Tiziana Terranova,
Yochai Benkler,
Daniel Joseph,
McKenzie Wark,
Sasha Lilley,
Keith A. Spencer,
Tom Slee,
Emilie Bickerton
[...] C4SS subscribes to the techno-utopian potentials for a new arrangement of production driven by digital technology, which has the potential to reduce prices on goods, making them within the reach of anyone (once again, music piracy is held up as a precursor). However, this potential has not been realized because “economic ruling classes are able to enclose the increased efficiencies from new technology as a source of rents mainly through artificial scarcities, artificial property rights, and entry barriers enforced by the state” (Carson 2015a). Monopolies, enforced by the state, have “artificially” distorted free market transactions.
These monopolies, in the form of intellectual property rights, are preventing a proper Proudhonian revolution in which everyone would control their own individual production process. [...] once these artificial monopolies are removed, corporations will lose their power [...]
This revolution is a quiet one, requiring no strikes or other confrontations with capitalists. Instead, the answer is to create this new economy within the larger one, and hollow it out from the inside:
he then goes into the invisible surplus value extracted from proletarian labour undergirding all this. next paragraph ends with
These “companies” of course are staffed by workers very different from “makers,” who work in facilities of mass production. Their labor is obscured by an influential ideology of artisans who believe themselves reliant on nothing but a personal computer and their own creativity.
The goal of this paper is not to question the creativity of remix culture or the maker movement, or to indict their potentials for artistic expression, or negate all their criticisms of intellectual property. What I wish to criticize is the outsized economic and political claims made about it. [...]
Digital Proudhonism and its vision of federations of independent individual producers and creators (perhaps now augmented with the latest cryptographic tools) dominates the imagination of a radical challenge to digital capitalism. Its critiques of the corporate internet have become common sense. What kind of alternative radical vision is possible? Here I believe it is useful to return to the core of Marx’s critique of Proudhon.
[...]
The socialization of production under the development of the means of production—the necessity of greater collaboration and the reliance on past labors in the form of machines—gives way to a radical redefinition of the relationship to one’s output. No one can claim a product was made by them alone; rather, production demands to be recognized as social. [...]
[...] The romance of “DIY” obscures the reality that nothing digital is done by oneself: it is always already a component of a larger formation of socialized labor.
!!! so good
The labor of digital creatives and innovators, sutured as it is to a technical apparatus fashioned from dead labor and meant for producing commodities for profit, is therefore already socialized. While some of this socialization is apparent in peer production, much of it is mystified through the real abstraction of commodity fetishism, which masks socialization under wage relations and contracts. Rather than further rely on these contracts to better benefit digital artisans, a Marxist politics of digital culture would begin from the fact of socialization, and as Radhika Desai (2011) argues, take seriously Marx’s call for “a general organization of labour in society” via political organizations such as unions and labor parties (212). Creative workers could align with others in the production chain as a class of laborers rather than as an assortment of individual producers, and form the kinds of organizations, such as unions, that have been the vehicles of class politics, with the aim of controlling society’s means of production, not simply one’s “own” tools or products. These would be bonds of solidarity, not bonds of market transactions. Then the apparatus of digital cultural production might be controlled democratically, rather than by the despotism of markets and private profit.
!!! holy shit
However, not everything online lent itself to the metaphor of a frontier. Particularly in the realm of music and video, artisans dealt with a field crowded with existing content, as well as thickets of intellectual property laws that attempted to regulate how that content was created and distributed. [...] The project of Lessig and others was not to create the conditions for erecting a new society upon a frontier, as a yeoman farmer might, but to politicize this class of artisans in order to challenge larger industrial concerns, such as record labels and film studios, who used copyright to protect their incumbent position. This very different terrain requires a different perspective from Jefferson’s.
recognising this terrain as the latest battleground, maybe?
While the thrust of these critiques of copyright focus on egregious overreach by the culture industries and their assault upon all manner of benign noncommercial activity, they also reveal a vision of an alternative cultural economy of independent producers who, while not necessarily anti-capitalist, can escape the clutches of massive centralized corporations through networked digital technologies. This facilitates both economic and political freedom via independence from control and regulation, and maximum opportunities on the market. [...] As it so often does, the fusion of ownership and labor characteristic of the petty producer standpoint, the structure of feeling of the independent artisan, articulates itself through the mantra of “Do It Yourself.”
These analyses and polemics reproduce the Proudhonist vision of an alternative to existing digital capitalism. Individual independent creators will achieve political autonomy and economic benefit through the embrace digital network technologies, as long as these creators are allowed to compete fairly with incumbents. Rather than insist on collective regulation of production, Digital Proudhonism seeks forms of deregulation, such as copyright reform, that will chip away at the existence of “monopoly” power of existing media corporations that fetters the market chances of these digital artisans.
aaaahhhhh
very relevant to decentralisation!!
Online platforms aren’t simply replacing stores by replicating their function. Instead they are making themselves gatekeepers capable of controlling and regulating commerce — just as Steam regulates the weapon skins market — playing a decisive role in which sellers continue to exist and which workers get to show up to work tomorrow. Culture is constrained and warped by this gatekeeping dynamic, which not only maintains the existing monoculture — in which a few popular titles dominate markets — but intensifies it.
This is not a matter of goods or marketplaces being digital, but how digitality proves conducive to monopolistic domination. In Monopoly Capital (1966), Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezy define what they call “epoch-making” technologies: those which radically reshape space and time — that “shake up the entire pattern of the economy and hence create vast investment outlets in addition to the capital they directly absorb.” [...]
In the 21st century, networked computing and phones have superseded autos as the epoch-making technology. If the previous age of monopoly capitalism was defined by cars, suburban landscapes, and regular trips to the department store, then our new age is defined by ride-sharing apps, gentrified landscapes, Prime Day sales, and the fulfillment centers that make it possible. Online connectivity — virtual assistants like Alexa, PCs with internet browsers, smart TVs with streaming services, and phone apps — all reduced the space and time consumers had to traverse to engage in commerce, but at the same time it has centralized it.
The resulting new monopoly capitalism has produced a new kind of consumerism — if not a new way of life, at least a new intensity of it — that passes principally through the gates of Amazon, Paypal, Venmo, Salesforce, Steam, Shopify, the iOS App Store, and other platforms. Amazon, for instance, is now larger by valuation than virtually all other retailers combined. Together, these platforms plug us into a more “frictionless” system of commerce: In exchange for a modest increase of speed and convenience, they etch themselves into our collective consciousness as we etch ourselves into their databanks as consumer profiles. The platform [...] You half-expect the word platform to be capitalized, like some Platonic ideal.
As commerce has consolidated into digital platforms, digital commodity production — which best suit the platforms’ economic advantages — has ramped up: skins in Counter-Strike and Fortnite and Twitch.tv’s “Cheer chat” badges, along with conventional digital products like games and Adobe’s software suites. These are capable of near-instant delivery and are more amenable to platform-sustained content restrictions: DRM, paywalls, subscriber access, and other forms of intermediate fees. The consolidation of retailing into platforms has also triggered the development of dropshipping — when a entity sells products it doesn’t have in stock and has them shipped from a third party directly to the consumer. As Alexis Madrigal reported, there are Instagram brands that don’t buy or sell goods but exploit aspirational lifestyle imagery and the platform’s advertising algorithms to lure customers. They simulate manufacturing and professional branding but exist only as social media accounts. All this may seem to diversify economic participation — so many products! so many retailers! — but the profits still flow to the a single monolithic place.
i should probably read monopoly capital tbh
(tagged as open source tho it's really about centralisation)
[...] It used to be that software was something you installed on your machine; now, many software-makers have moved towards software as a service (SaaS), which involves accessing software through one's browser, without having to install anything. [...] companies like Microsoft can now 'leverage the gratis work of the open-source community to run the servers' that power SaaS services. 'As a result, it is beneficial for [companies like Microsoft] to rehabilitate their image in the open source community,' in order to 'garner goodwill from the community and attract talented developers,' Robinson added.
some good stuff on open source vs free software that chimes with my logic piece
speaks to the failure of the aGPL (too little, too late)