CHAPTER III
Chapter three presents a prototype for cultural production over the Internet that I have created called MOAK47. It is an amalgamation of various tools necessary for the creation and recreation of culture. Through its various platforms like its fiction wiki, itÕs poetry/short fiction system, and its image gallery, it strives to promote a communal cultural labor where cultural texts are available to all (i.e. open content). This chapter also discusses the idea of the "social forge," Web sites on the Internet that have as their scope the coordination of projects to which anyone can contribute. Finally, this chapter discusses the possibility of using open content to create a subversion of the predominant conceptions of cultural ownership and the author-individual discussed in the two preceding chapters.
As we have seen, traditional book publishers and music labels are social and political projects, each a "social nexus" disguised as a book publisher or music label. MOAK47, on the other hand, is a social and political project that calls itself such and in many ways seeks complete transparency. In the prototype (version 0.8) IÕve created, MOAK47 is a web platform (www.moak47.net) for the production and reproduction of an open, resistant culture. This means the site has so-called "dynamic" pages that allow users to reproduce, upload, and interact with the artistically political material they find.
The Vancouver Resist! Collective (resist.ca) hosts the site, as part of their mission "to provide communications and technical services, information and education to the greater activist community." Its main subject areas are Art, Poetry, Fiction, Music, Publishing, and Distribution. In the publishing section there are longer print projects that MOAK47 intends to publish, while the distribution section is currently a place to download MOAK47 promotional material and user contributions in large batches.
MOAK47 is also a project that seeks to reward cultural workers for their labor, rather than selling culture and paying artist royalties. Currently, it is possible for members to receive donations in their name, and a sliding scale is used to determine their compensation (from 15% to 75%, depending on their involvement). This is done to encourage artists to stop viewing themselves as sellers of cultural products and to see themselves instead as members of a community that seeks to support one another in concrete ways. As one writer recently commented:
I should theoretically be spending all my time looking for other ways to make money, but instead, I still spend a lot of time writing, if itÕs for my blog or for whatever other project IÕm working on. I suppose it would be nice to be able to write for money, but IÕve gotten used to the idea that the writing I like to do is not going to help me to earn a living. (Richard Singer, author of the "No More Big Wheels" blog,)
The contrast between writing for a living and writing what one wants to write for a living is rather great, especially when we look at media activists, creative writers, artists, and musicians that challenge society in critical ways. It is theoretically possible to earn a living writing, but there is little possibility (outside of Time/WarnerÕs Michael Moore) that one can be politically active at the same time. We can see in statements of this kind the "gentleman idler" or "gentleman of leisre" motif which runs through the history of publishing. The difference here is that the urge of these writers is to write with and for the socially marginalized, yet they cannot overcome the social and political constraints of the market. Carl Shirkly explains "The Simple Economics of Content" when he says,
the two critical questions are "Does the support come from the reader, or from an advertiser, patron, or the creator?" and "Is the support mandatory or voluntary?" The internet adds no new possibilities. Instead, it simply shifts both answers strongly to the right.
In much of online creative work, support comes from readers and creators themselves in the form of donations to the person or groups that host music, writing, and art on the web. The idea of creative laborers organizing themselves to create a sustainable method of producing culture is rarely done but nothing new, either on the Internet or in the "offline" world.
In a realistic sense, the "begging" element and its general ineffectiveness make donations an unsatisfactory solution, so I have been investigating other methods of compensation like hidden "gift" payments. Micropayments are a form of compensation that is relative to a market value of a work of art. Redpaper.com hosts music, novels, poems, and artwork available for micropayments, usually less than five dollars. One could imagine, though, that these micropayments could be hidden from the user and their use of the piece would constitute a gift to the author. It is just this concept that is being developed under the "giftfile" system, a consumption-based method for allocating funds that could be promising, although it has not yet taken off.
The Giftfile Project [hosted by Electronic Gift Economies, Inc. a nonprofit organization] enables authors of computer files containing nonproprietary intellectual works (free music, literature, software, etc.) and their supporters (fans, users, etc.) to participate in a gift economy. It will host the first giftpool, an entity accepting tax deductible lump donations which can be allocated to these files in an automated and efficient manner, supporting transactions as little as .01 USD.
Essentially, content would be free for download and visible on the site. People would use and reproduce as much culture as they wanted and this use would be recorded. Payment would be allocated to members based on the use of their work as a "gift" from the workÕs users.
Independent activist media has been most invested in producing "counter information" and besides a few video collectives, a few creative books published by AK Press or Softskull Press, has not really explored the possibility of forming a critical and artistically creative culture. One possibility seemed to open recently when the Indymedia network played with the idea of creating topical instead of regional news. One might have seen "Culture" sitting alongside "Environment" in the topic listing where various IMC video collectives would display their craft alongside independent political music and creative writing within the context of Independent Media. This has been somewhat abandoned because this topical approach supports less directly local IMCs. This lack of visibility for a creative culture within independent media is one reason for the necessity of projects like MOAK47.
The technology used in MOAK47 is varied, because I wanted to investigate many different avenues of current social software. I initially worked with Content Management Systems (CMS), specifically CuteNews/Aj-Fork, Mambo, and Xoops. A content management system makes having a large site easy, because all site administration is located on internal administration pages that generates the sitesÕ content pages. Since there is poetry and fiction on the site, there needed to be a system that was sensitive to the content the site contained.
I eventually gave up on content management systems, because they are more designed for news than for creative work, much less for creative work that has an element of reworking involved. The standard format for news articles permitted comments that could be the successive "generations" of the creative work, but I needed something that was more adapted to the poem. A page design and content system was needed that would have the user understand what to do and how it was different than adding a comment to a news article.
I had had experience with free software, as I have implemented scripts licensed under the GPL for parts of the site that required the uploading of music files and images. For the poetry and short fiction content on the site, rather than a big, news-oriented CMS, I decided to modify a PHP-based free software news-making script that uses a mysql database to store data. For longer fiction works, I have used MediaWiki, the wiki software used on Wikipedia that allows for reworking by any interested user.
Social Forges could easily be the next big wave in Internet culture. Social software is in many ways a "toolmaking tool" (Vaidhyanathan 20). Likewise, a social forge (created with social software) is a tool to promote projects that are themselves tools. In a social forge, projects are proposed, and any person with a connection can contribute. The contributions are then made available for download, ready for further development. Currently there are a few social forges, socialforge.net is just beginning, while ourproject.org has 435 registered users and 116 hosted projects. These represent efforts to make the global reach of the Internet serve the objective of realizing all-volunteer projects. In a way, a social forge is a way to organize free and global labor where individuals work sporadically, and without compensation. This does sound like a way to capitalize on a "free and global labor force" promised by the Internet and dreamed of by capitalists. But as capitalÕs involvement with the FOSS indicates, mixing goodwill and high-profit endeavors (even when hidden in non-profit organizations) is difficult. NetscapeÕs Mozilla, for the most part, attracted only Netscape employees who were paid to work in an open source environment. With the ease of access to information on the Internet, the possibility for hoodwinking a global volunteer labor force for oneÕs hugely profitable project is unlikely. One of the interesting things about ourproject.org and social forges in general is that they are user-defined projects. What ourproject.org "does" is entirely dependent on what their users create or find useful to work on. Another social forge, 43things.com, concentrates less on the actual physical labor done and more on the desire do accomplish something (no matter how grand or silly it might be). On its front page are listed numerous links to goal-phrases that people have submitted based on tasks they want to accomplish. Ideas like "find a girlfriend" and "Lose Weight" are listed on the pages alongside and "Start a Revolution" and "Conspire with other anarchist poets." Users can subscribe and comment on suggested projects, and even build a critical mass toward actually accomplishing the stated objective. One can also "output" the site via RSS news feeds for specific goal as well as mirroring your written entries on a blog. It also has a system of "cheers," where one can give credits to a person, letting them know you are cheering them on. It has the aspect of "mental chewing gum" as one user put it, something that is not encountered in more serious (but perhaps less exciting) social forges.
In this way, MOAK47 goes a step further, and offers the possibility of its members to actually control the governance of the platform, not just the projects listed on it. MOAK47 divides visitors to the site into users ("retainers") and members ("sustainers"). Retainers have access to everything on the site, and can contribute new texts or work on existing ones. Members, on the other hand, are people who sustain the project (and server space) by paying an annual fee of 15 USD (reductions are available for the economically disenfranchised) and can take part in the guidance of MOAK47. This is important for a few reasons. One, it encourages people to support independent creative production. Second, it attempts to affront the problem of economic sustainability in independent media, a big reason why many projects eventually fail. Likewise, it provides a small barrier for an eventual "the group within the group," to protect itself from outside, less attached users.
If, If, as one media activist "Rabble" has said, IMCs are "creating a media revolution to make revolution possible," and as Toni Cade Bambara believes, "the goal of the revolutionary artist is to make revolution irresistible," then it seems natural that projects like MOAK47 would surface sooner or later. A typical contributor to MOAK47 would be someone seeking to engage in political activism through cultural expression and helping to create a "cultural resistance." Another current political situation that is pushing the creation of an open content artist collective is the fact that private property and its expression in copyright law is making personal expression a political issue. There has been a pretty strong backlash to the freedom pronounced by the Internet and the possibilities of much of its non-capitalist organization. As Siva Vaidhyanathan says, "Anarchism built the Internet. But the threat of anarchy has launched a decade-long effort to rule it and rein it in" (39). Political debates over an "ownership society," one that privatizes social services and pension programs, are strangely similar to battles over ownership in culture. In both cases, there are strong economic interests that stand to gain from a more privatized landscape, while interests of large communities (pensioners, the sick, music buyers) are unrepresented in government legislation. This debate is expressed most dramatically in culture with the question of the Mp3, but it does make its way into the world of the published word and into questions of image reproduction. The insecurity involved in the re-use of published material brought about by stringent copyright legislation is one of the reasons for supporting and contributing to a public domain. It is also a reason for the creation of "copyleft" liscenses. Creativecommons.org and archive.org are two of the main proponents of lenient copyright licenses that permit use of site content under certain circumstances defined by the author. They also publicize artists that choose to offer their works under open licensing. Like FOSS, it is not entirely inimical to for-profit endeavors, as there are newly-created record labels that produce open-content music like magnatune.com and locarecords.com.
Although open content can at times be incorporated into for profit projects, MOAK47 is an experiment in resisting the commodification of art. Jed Rasula discusses this tendency, as does Theodore Adorno. In his essay "Culture Industry Reconsidered," Adorno investigates the culture industry, a name given to the standardization of Western art. He states that "cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also commodities, they are commodities through and through." He also says that this produces "a general uncritical consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so that each product of the culture industry becomes its own advertisement" (100). For Adorno, the standardization and commodification of art is detrimental for the whole of cultural production. Although Adorno is often portrayed as representative of an elite whose theories relate only to the ruined state of "high art," he makes the point that the effects of culture industry can be seen in the decline of mass art, particularly in the loss of the "resistance" which characterized it in the past. Adorno says "the seriousness of high art is destroyed in speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within itÉ" (99). Jed Rasula reaches similar conclusions on the commodification of art, as he explains that it was the feeling of many involved in the "Language" school of poetry that language had become (to use Charles AltieriÕs words) "a commodity to manipulate." Rasula states, "the notion of a right to manipulate language as a commodity presupposes a diminished language, fit only for consumption, not communication." It was therefore fitting that the Language poets organized themselves as a group, for "the prospect of a group effort is not unanimity, but community" (398). Rasula also notes a certain impossibility of political art in United States poetry, because of its lack of a "material base" which other cultures seem to have.
The nature of American politics precludes poetry as a significant social discourse; so the choice of poetry as a medium instantly sidelines the poet. The poetic voice is devoid of political consequence. We lack, for instance, a tradition of political song, which in Latin American countries provides the material base for a genuinely political poetry for a mass audience. Furthermore, the adaptability of the novel to mass-market circulation has proven especially preemptive of any social status for poetry (386).
Rasula does not pay attention to popular music or the blues tradition which might actually provide this "material base" (LeadbellyÕs "Bourgeois Blues" and other politically infused songs come to mind), but Rasula is correct in asserting a "cultural amnesia" insomuch as "the parameters of political reality faced by our parents and grandparents have prematurely become a terra incognitaÉ. [where] the political verse of the DepressionÉoften reads like bulletins from another planet" (387).
Another concept that comes into play specifically when working with open content is power relationships between people within the social nexus. Kembrew McLeod points out that the cultural power between social actors plays an important role when consciously constructing a space for "free appropriation." McLeod uses the example of "world music," which is often a source of cultural gold mining by western music companies. He states,
When producers exist in different relations to power, "free appropriation" is a problematic concept because this type of borrowing can potentially have a detrimental effect on certain groups of peopleÉThere are negative consequences when the music of minority groups is freely appropriated by musicians from more privileged groups and who are supported by powerful record companies.
Over the Internet, this problem is not as pronounced, since open content engenders a feeling that one gives as well as receives from a given project. It is a social contract of sorts within each community that regulates the free appropriation of the existing content. The non-commercial nature of most open content cultural work found on the Internet also moves producers away from using the work of others for personal economic profit.
One of the inspirations for MOAK47 is opensourcepoetry.org, a site hosted by bkk studios and maintained by Scott Krieger. The poetry platform on opensourcepoetry.org is a good example of open content, or open source poetry being used effectively in the construction and reconstruction of poems. However, OSP doesnÕt seem to try to develop a community, as writers are more or less unknown to one another. The platform also is not "educative" in that it doesnÕt provide newcomers with a context of what open source poetry is and does. One of the things MOAK47 does differently is to try to document cultural elaborations, and not only of poetry, but fiction and images as well. Like opensourcepoetry.org, MOAK47 also tries to give the reader complete control over the text they read. Another inspiration are the various literary theories that enable and inform this kind of cultural creation. Open-content platforms that produce and reproduce culture like MOAK47 and OSP are the technological equivalent of the "cut-up" method proposed by Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Popular since the 1940Õs, the "cut-up" is a method of literary production that physically cuts up and re-arranges text to create new creative works. On the web, one can find various scripts that will rearrange words using code and machine. These open content platforms bring back the human element to "cutting up" a text. The MOAK47 project is about enabling the reproduction of culture, and in its poetry and short fiction platform, it seeks to give to the reader the maximum amount of power in reconstructing what they read.
Another purpose of the MOAK47 project is demonstrating the capability and the need for artists to organize autonomously, outside of traditional capital relations. There is a need for "open content communities" like MOAK47 that use open content to produce and reproduce culture. As these communities exist in a cultural movement that could be easily subverted by new strategies of capital, it is not only helpful that they be antagonistic to capital and the market, but that they provide a means and a vision beyond them. Ownership in the cultural realm needs to be more fully critiqued. As Lawrence Lessig explains (with the help of Yochai Benkler), ownership has three distinct levels; "the different layers within a communications system that together make communications possible" (Lessig Future 23). Ownership can be at the physical layer of architecture, the layer of the code (the medium of the actual message), or at the layer of the messageÕs content. In MOAK47, members share among themselves the physical layer through their annual membership; the server (resist.ca) also shares in its physical ownership. At the code layer MOAK47 uses free software, so all the code is "copyleft" under the GNU/GPL license. MOAK47Õs third layer, content, is "Some Rights Reserved," as explained in creativecommons.orgÕs "NonCommercial Sampling Plus 1.0" license, which explicitly permits the reprinting and reworking of cultural texts in non-commercial contexts with attribution.
One interesting anti-capital cultural group is the Crimethinc Ex-Workers Collective, which is a small hardcore-punk record label that has published a book of poetry, short fiction, and multiple political works. The goal of their organization is not commercial but increased political participation; publishing and recording music help fund their political activity. It stands as an example that producing culture is not always an end in itself. The goal of politicized art is to remain politically engaged, constantly critiquing both capitalism and oneÕs relation to it. In some ways, Crimethinc is occupying themselves with the "external functions" mentioned by Pierre Bourdieu in "The Field of Cultural Production." He says,
The status of Ōsocial artÕ is, in this respect, thoroughly ambiguous. Although it relates artistic or literary production to external functions (which is what the advocates of art for artÕs sake object to about it) it shares with art for artÕs sake a radical rejection of the dominant principle of hierarchy and the ŌbourgeoisÕ art which recognizes it. (95)
Just as politically active groups like Crimethinc work on ideology, the technologies they use can be a political choice as well. As we have seen with Indymedia and other open-publishing platforms, the ideas behind the technology can sometimes be as important than the technology itself. For as Siva Vaidhyanathan believes,
[t]echnologies do embody ideologies. Some reflect those ideologies more than others. Some technologies--such as the general computer or the distributed network--are complex enough that they might embody multiple or conflicting ideologies. (149)
The Anonymity in Wikis and over the internet shows people building communities that are not inherently or architecturally exclusive. If we see these "politicized" forums as ideologically self-limiting, it should be noted that differences in opinion or worldviews could lead to increased participation, not less. Whereas Bourdieu sees the actions of social actors in a static sense, and their relations to one another partly programmed, these new technologies make it almost impossible or unrealistic to find out which contributors are "enemy agents." Social battles take place within the text and through language, which is exactly what complicates any notion of original authorship. As we have seen, the claim to original authorship, even within the nexus of relations of a publishing industry is dubious, and new media obliterates them altogether.
With the breakdown of authorship, culture is still created. In both traditional and new media, many social actors collaborate to create culture. The publishing industry (and the implied social nexus thereof) is like the social project of a wiki, only the infrastructure and the relations of individual actors are different. Print publishing, however, officially subscribes to the myth of original authorship that has (for the most part) sustained the industry for more than two hundred years. The use of a wiki is a real acknowledgement of collaboration, community, and low to non-hierarchical spaces. Traditional media is fundamentally hierarchical and because of its for-profit nature, limits participation. Within a wikiÕs vision of authorship is a conception of cultural ownership that is itself labor. Property, in the cultural interactions on a wiki, is the ability for oneÕs work to be visible. For oneÕs work to be visible in MOAK47 or any community in fact, one needs to contribute. Ownership over cultural property in this context is not private ownership over cultural texts but participation and inclusion in a group; which implies labor. Labor is likewise contributing to a community, just as it is in the real world, but more so, since this social space is more egalitarian than the real world. One gives to this community and the community gives back, both in terms of cultural rewards and in terms of the indirect compensation described above. The labor of a publishing house or record label, disguised as original, unique authorship and founded in law as rights and privileges of the producing corporation, is made transparent in these contexts. In MOAK47, as in other projects, there is a free use of the raw materials of culture, the existing content contributed by other users. As this project ultimately shows, contributing labor should not be seen in terms of narrow self-interest or in market-based ideas of labor expended/profit accrued. Marketplaces for cultural labor already exist online, and MOAK47 in many ways rejects the ideals of the market and the necessity to produce saleable products for their own sake.
MOAK47 is a social project for the continuation of a non-hierarchical media environment where members take part both in the cultural production and the maintenance of the organization. This is done in the spirit of independent media, whose off-quoted phrase (coined by Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys) is "Be The Media." This project expands what that term "media" means. Until now, it has been used to tackle the problems of a vertically integrated news environment. It is an environment where workers, minorities, and women have been excluded in favor of celebrities and high-profile politicians. MOAK47 uses the lessons of independent media and proposes an inherently cultural political project to favor the voices of these excluded. It also uses the lessons of independent, autonomous, collective organization and applies them to cultural texts. It is also an experiment in building a low- or non-commercial social space that is interested primarily in the political engagement of its members and users. Finally, it challenges traditional notions of authorship and posits a community-based labor as the defining characteristic of cultural ownership.