http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/network-notebooks/the-telekommunist/
The telekommunist manifesto is an interesting and inventive re-imagining of the communist manifesto for the network society penned by Dmitri Kleiner. In the age of international telecommunications, global migration and the emergence of the information economy, how can class conflict and property be understood? Drawing from political economy and concepts related to intellectual property, The Telekommunist Manifestois a key contribution to commons-based, collaborative and shared forms of cultural production and economic distribution.
Proposing ‘venture communism’ as a new model for workers’ self-organization, Kleiner spins Marx and Engels’ seminal Manifesto of the Communist Party into the age of the internet. As a peer-to-peer model, venture communism allocates capital that is critically needed to accomplish what capitalism cannot: the ongoing proliferation of free culture and free networks.
In developing the concept of venture communism, Kleiner provides a critique of copyright regimes, and current liberal views of free software and free culture which seek to trap culture within capitalism. Kleiner proposes copyfarleft, and provides a usable model of a Peer Production License alongside a useful critique of Web 2.0 as a capitalist reterritorialisation of the space of possibility for commons based peer production.
Encouraging hackers and artists to embrace the revolutionary potential of the internet for a truly free society, The Telekommunist Manifesto is a political-conceptual call to arms in the fight against capitalism.
Some interesting ideas here, however:
“Encouraging hackers and artists to embrace the revolutionary potential of the internet for a truly free society”
The internet as it stands is a capitalist project, The network infrastructure is developed by big corporates, the coal-powered server farms are run by big corporates, your end user ISP is probably a big corporate, even your blog hosting is provided by a big corporate..
I’m not saying that TCP/IP technologies are evil, or even that they necessarily will always be controlled by the corporates, but that is certainly the case at the moment.
I think therefore that we need to look to developing alternate infrastructures, along the model of peer to peer mesh networks. However when you actually start trying to do this you realise there are some pretty insurmountable obstacles to building even a decent city wide wireless network.
Also the technology you are using to do this is produced by the capitalist system..
Not sure what my point is really, but if the internet really does have ‘revolutionary’ potential in a worldwide, anti-capitalist kind of way, then it would contain the seeds of it’s own demise.
That is; in the days and weeks after this revolutionary activity the infrastructure would cease to be maintained by the AOL’s and Virgins of this world, and would grind to a halt shortly thereafter.
Hi Sam, thanks for the comment.
When Kleiner talks about the potential of the Internet he does so describing the net’s potential as a P2P technology, which he contrasts sharply with the client/server model of the world wide web. For Kleiner the crucial difference is between the Internet as a distributed network of equal peers and a client server model predicated on a massive inequality of power and influence between clients and massive centralised server farms.
Indeed he goes as far as to suggest that Web 2.0 is a corporate reterritorialisation of the space and potential opened up by P2P, and he gives a passionate argument against the centralisation of networked infrastructures and for things like wireless meshworks.
While it may in the past have made sense to argue that ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’ as Audrey Lorde first did, its quite hard to see how that logic can be applied to contemporary globalised capitalism simply because there is no viable outside anymore.
If you want to use technology which is in no way tainted by technology then you simply will not be using any technology full stop, leaving yourself isolated, disconnected and thoroughly disenfranchised to contribute to any mode of social change.
Open source/open design movements along with the Internet itself have grown out of capitalism, and advocates like Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler suggest that they actually supplement capitalist market production through presenting a hyper-productive alternative under certain conditions.
However that doesn’t mean that those same technologies or models of production can’t be used in a non-capitalist mode, which is what Kleiner’s telekomminst manifest is (an admittedly somewhat utopian) call towards.
Yes, interesting ideas, but Sam seems to have a very good point about the dependence of all this technology on a fragile mass of resource intensive structures. Being a bit of a Luddite and techno-ignoramus I have no idea what “things like wireless meshworks” are let alone how they work.
How would the new structures (if they are new) that Kleiner is suggesting actually overcome what might seem to be intrinsic infrastructural constraints, to those of us less knowledgeable and imaginative perhaps than yourself and Kleiner?
I recently went to a really interesting event on Luddites… It’s their bi-centenniary coming up. Far from being techno-ignoramuses or anti-technology they were mainly craftspeople who used what then was fairly advanced technology to earn their livelihoods. What they opposed was the introduction of technology which was used in ways which were largely detrimental to society, either producing substandard goods, or as a method of driving small craftsmen out of business. Either way the Luddites stood not against technology in general, but against uses of technology be privileged elites against the common good. Far from being a term which demarcates people who dislike technology Luddite should be used to describe contemporary activists like Kleiner and anti-GM and biotech activists such as Vandana Shiva who stand not against the use of technology, but against the current practices of neoliberalism which benefit a handful of corporate elites to the detriment of the vast majority.
In terms of the types of technologies Kleiner discusses, many are already here. For example there is no technical reason why we couldn’t have city-wide free wireless Internet. It wouldn’t be as fast as a 50mb fibreoptic line run to your house, but very few people really need that type of connection speed. The only logistical problem would be people clogging up the network with bittorrent/iplayer traffic, which could be filtered, meaning that anyone in a city could have free access to a huge amount of information. However this isn’t done, and if you want roaming Internet you have to pay a mobile phone network (usually) to use their bandwidth (admittedly the government made an absolute killing selling bits of spectrum to the phone networks when they licensed 3G). This could even be done at a local community level with people on a street clubbing together to get a single Internet connection and then sharing it with each other wirelessly via a local mesh (basically through a series of wireless routers all talking to one another). This kind of thing has been done in poor neighborhoods in places like Spain, the technology to do it is cheap and readily available, and it kind of scares the crap out of ISP’s as it would break the individual consumer model they currently operate and make a huge amount of money off.
Hi Sy, thanks for your response. Cool, that’s pretty much the kind of Luddite I am too. Didn’t “The Land” magazine do an issue on them a year or so ago?
Touching on the issue is the following Twitter exchange:
http://twitter.com/#!/BristolWireless/status/123352571313258496
“Possible silly question – is Bristol Wireless’ network free? And how do you connect to it?”
Woodsy: “unfortunately due to abuse (torrenting) we’ve had to turn off 2.4 GHz access 😦 ”
I didn’t really understand what this implies.
Wireless networks surely have scope for wider use, as you describe. But can they really dispense with the need for huge servers though? Could a Google-capacity search engine, Wikipedia and email function properly using only distributed, autonomous, low resource-input networks? If not, then we will forever be dependent on the state-corporate apparatus as we are now, won’t we?
Btw how was your Watershed experience? Will you be blogging on it?