http://unpredictableresistance.blogspot.com/

so, i've got a new blog. not that i'm shutting this one down. not that i really wrote that often on this one. not...well...you get the point. it's just got more of a cohesive (but not too cohesive) theme.

http://unpredictableresistance.blogspot.com/

wootsaurus.

noobology

i'd like to articulate a theory of noobology (a not-so-clever- play on noology, "The science of intellectual phenomena. [1913 Webster]")

Noob is usually a disparaging term, but i'd like to approach it from a different direction and take it out of its gaming/technology context. A noob is trying something new--steeped in the learning process. we should always seek to become noobs in some area. just as D+G recommend "cautious experimentation," and Manuel Delanda says we should "cultivate the hacker mentality" everywhere, "as naive as it may sometimes be," (i probably got that quote somewhat wrong, but you get the idea: cultivate the naive noob mentality) noobology puts us in new places where we aren't really sure what's going on. I still feel like a noob in many ways, even at things I've been trying at for a long time. Even though I've got a level 60 (currently the highest level) character in World of Warcraft, i still feel like a noob much of the time. i still feel like a noob in areas other than gaming. even though i struggle every day to not be an asshole to the people I care about (as my friend chuck says, "dude, you're kind of a dick"), i make mistakes that are far more hurtful than accidentally killing my fellow party members in WoW.

so, when i say we should become noobs, i don't mean we should act like jackasses and disrupt things (although, that's sometimes unavoidable or at least difficult), but i mean that we should put ourselves (cautiously) into new situations, pushing at the edges of ourselves, making lines of flight into new territories.

so..that's my attempt at making up a theory and trying to make this blog a little more personal and less dry and repetitive, going over the same crap like a broken record. earlier, this noobology idea sounded pretty amusing to myself, but when i went to write this entry, it seemed pretty dumb but i went ahead and forced myself to write it anyway. now, to drink cherry limeade.

Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Networks: Resistance, Control, and Coevolution

my seminar project for Language, Technology, and Culture
basically, a revision of the first part of my thesis, with a lot of new material

excerpt:

This work is generally concerned with networks. Networks, in the most general sense, consist of points and lines. The points can be called “nodes,” and the lines connecting the nodes can be called “links,” because they tie nodes together. In computer networks, computers are nodes, and the links are the wires connecting them, allowing information to flow between them. Mostly, I will be talking about computer networks and the human social networks that populate them, but it is important to remember throughout this work that many different kinds of networks exist. Networks come in all shapes and sizes. For example, the human circulatory system differs from a rain forest ecosystem, but both involve the flow of things from one place to another. The circulatory system involves the flow of blood cells. Ecosystems involve the complex, interconnected flows of water, nutrients, and the genes that organize water and nutrients into life. Networks describe both relations between and flows of things. I use such a general term, “thing,” to emphasize the versatility of the concept of networks, because, ultimately, all relationships and flows can be described by networks.

Relations between things usually involve the flow of materials. Biological reproduction involves the flow of genetic material, which forms organisms that are genetically related to their predecessors. The “family tree” of a given organism describes relations and flows. A family tree network is not metaphorical, then, but based on material—in this case, genetic material. The networks I am examining in this work are material also. Networks of computers store and exchange information in the form of electronic patterns, and the social networks that computer networks engender also consist of material bodies, that is, human beings.

read more

props to my gf carol for thinking of this

i was lamenting the loss of textz.gnutenberg.net, and carol thought of the wayback machine on archive.org

so, sure enough, i found a cache of the old textz.gnutenberg.net while it still had a working text-only version.

http://web.archive.org/web/20031208043421/textz.gnutenberg.net/index.php3?enhanced_version=http://textz.com/index.php3

there's a wealth of interesting shit on there. it's one of the places i cut my teeth on some interesting political/cyber theory. they've got more than that too, including fiction--everything from Douglas Adams to H.G. Wells.

p.s. -- if you have trouble with some of the texts not working, try searching for the exact page you want on the wayback machine and try different dates it was cached. you should eventually be able to find what you're looking for.

on my way home from work

i was cold and by the library, so i went in and decided to use my expensive privilege of checking out books. these two relatively new books are really cool so far. if you know me, you probably know that i'm a big fan of deleuze. i recommend these books to anyone interested in complexity theory

...especially deleuze and geophilosophy. it really helps put science in an upfront conversation with philosophy. it also connects signs with materialism (memetics?). and, it deals with questions of structure, agency, and determinism.

Deleuze and Geophilosophy : A Guide and Glossary by Mark Bonta, John Protevi

this book by poststructuralist anarchist theorist Todd May deals with the question "how should one live?" so far, it's just a really good take on what philosophy has had to offer on similar issues like breaking down our preconceived notions and realizing that our subjectivities are products of historical processes (also compatible with memetics).

Gilles Deleuze : An Introduction by Todd May

in other news, i wound up on the cutting room floor for a story on blogs that i was interviewed for by KVAL in eugene, OR. i guess i'm just too weird (looking and thinking), even for eugene.

Society of the Spectacle film now available online

hey, check this out. UBUWEB has an archive of weird rare films.

Including, Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1973)
based on his book of the same name: Wikipedia: Society of the Spectacle with link to full text

they're big ass files, so make sure you have teh harddrive space.

part 1
part 2

Entering the Conversation: Resistance, Control, and Coevolution in File Sharing

Entering the Conversation: Resistance, Control, and Coevolution in File Sharing

here's my latest essay

This is interesting:

Anarchy, Ants & Artificial Intelligence By: The Popular Education Commandos of the Curious George Brigade

excerpt:

Emergence is a not so much a theory as a principle of self-organization displayed by elemental particles, computer simulations, insect colonies, primate behaviors, child development and social/cultural movements. Over the past decade the obscure mathematics and science of emergence have started to seep out from the laboratories into the popular consciousness of folks studying everything from Hopi weavings to neurological functions: Yet, those seeking to replace the current exploitative systems with a “new world in our hearts” have mostly ignored emergence. This ignorance has limited our ability to expand and create a credible counter-culture of resistance. This introductory educational monograph suggests there is much for us to learn when it comes to promoting self-organization and that our teachers are sometimes the most unlikely mentors.

well...i've rewritten the abstract for my thesis for nth time. you might be sick of hearing about it, or you might want some clarification. anyway, here 'tis.

My work is an attempt to describe certain practices within the culture of the internet, and to point out some recurring themes. By looking at communities that form around specific practices, specifically filesharing, remixing, and blogging, I hope to find similarities that can give insight into how internet culture (and possibly culture generally) works. One major influence on internet culture is the control that institutions such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America attempt to foist on communities of filesharers, remixers, and bloggers. This particular type of control is generally referred to as “digital rights management” or “DRM.” The goal of DRM schemes is to control the reproduction of digital media, which includes music, movies, television shows, as well as blog entries. However, with control comes resistance. An analogy I find appropriate is that of antibiotics and antibiotic-resistant bacteria. When antibiotics are applied to a population of bacteria, the strongest bacteria live to reproduce, and over generations of reproduction, the population becomes resistant to the antibiotic. Therefore, I view resistance as an organic and evolutionary process. The view is even more appropriate considering that digital artifacts replicate when they are transferred from one computer to another. When a friend shares a file with another friend, a copy of that file is made, leaving two files where there once was one.

Because of increased connectivity and the ease of use and availability of audio, video, and text manipulating software, as well as the decentralized shape of the internet, an internet culture has emerged and rapidly evolved, in which people can create and share new artifacts in and from any location. “Participatory culture” is one of the many new terms applied to internet culture, especially because of the breakdown of the producer/consumer model of mass media. Filesharing networks, copyright infringing illegal art, and peer-to-peer online writing technologies such as blogs, are three of the components of the internet that foster such rapid evolution. Three theoretical concepts will be useful in describing the power relationships between controlling institutions and communities of resistance: memetics, biopower, and the rhizome, or, peer-to-peer network.

The term “memetics” was coined by evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. Memetics approaches cultural analysis from the standpoint of evolution, and speculates that units of culture, what memeticists refer to as “memes,” copy themselves from one person to another through communication and other artifacts. In this view, nearly anything that is transmitted from one brain to another is a meme—everything from the songs of birds to “knock, knock” jokes. The importance of memetics to my own work is that it provides a framework to study the digital artifacts that replicate on the internet with the help of human intervention.

Biopower is a concept created by French philosopher Michel Foucault to refer to the control of populations and by extension, production and reproduction within those populations. Power is exerted over life, controlling its movements and activities. However, resistance to control is possible, and perhaps even unavoidable. As Gilles Deleuze, another French philosopher and colleague of Foucault, said in his book entitled Foucault, “Life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object.” ¹ Biopower as a concept is relevant to my study in that it closely resembles the concept of digital rights management. Instead of biological life being at stake, control over the production and reproduction of digital artifacts (and by extension, the memes associated with them) is what centralized media institutions are after. Resistance, in this view, becomes the replication of files over networks that cannot be controlled, such as in the cases of filesharing, remixing, and blogging.

Such networks have been described as peer-to-peer networks, decentralized networks, and rhizomes. The concept of the rhizome comes from the book that Gilled Deleuze wrote with colleague Felix Guattari called A Thousand Plateaus. A rhizome, in nature, is a networked root system, like a ginger root, that grows horizontally, as opposed to the vertical structure of a tree. The rhizome is contrasted with centralized, hierarchical structures. They write:

To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment – such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency.²

Examples of rhizomes include peer-to-peer networks, through which people share music, movies, and software with each other. The concept of peer-to-peer networks is important because they lack central authority and planning, much like evolution itself. Additionally, peer-to-peer networks are important because they accurately describe ecosystems. In ecology, the shift in thinking from the linear and hierarchical “food chain” to the networked “food web” is an example of the rhizome concept being put to use to describe organic phenomena.

Technologies form complex causal networks of interaction, that resemble biological ecosystems. These systems are composed of human subjects/bodies, hardware, and digital artifacts, all of which are material. Self-sponsored production of digital artifacts has become a norm on the internet, in the form practices as diverse as email writing, blogging, remixing, music production, and programming. Digital artifacts are extensions of our subjectivity, spreading, combining, and conjugating across social and material networks. I hope to show that resistance emerges in power relations through self-organizing, evolutionary decentralization. This resistance is an evolutionary process based on evading control, which leads to escalating arms races of coadaptation. The combination of filesharing networks, access to audio and video editing software, and the growth of peer-to-peer media communities has allowed a participatory culture to emerge in which the separation of producer and consumer is transcended. I will look at “illegal” art that uses copyrighted material, as well as blogs. In both cases, media companies attempted to shut them down – sometimes successfully. The reaction from centralized media has been to attempt to establish more control (through DRM), sometimes overt and sometimes subtle and decentralized, which I argue impedes cultural evolution, while also creating an overall coadaptive situation. I will be providing examples of the replication of digital artifacts on the internet in an attempt to show that memetic diversity is at risk of being hindered through the ownership of intellectual property.

With memetics, biological and ecological models can be applied to cultural evolution. One of the questions to be explored is the nature of cultural coevolution. Coevolution can be divided into two categories: arms races and mutual cooperation. These two terms are useful for examining the relationship between the cultural hegemony (which includes the owners of intellectual property who exert control over information) and the resistance emerging in response to control. The two categories of coevolution, though, are not always easily separated in biological evolution; and therefore, care should be taken in applying those categories to cultural evolution. I argue that the relationship between the dominant culture and resistant culture is a form of coevolution, using both arms races and mutual cooperation in instances of control and resistance.

1 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 92.

2Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 17.

it's always frustrating yet fascinating when i come across an article that says what i've been trying to say and so much more thoroughly. well...it's happened again. you should really read this: P2P and Human Evolution: Placing Peer to Peer Theory in an Integral Framework by Michel Bauwens. It's mind-blowingly interesting...to me, anyway.

[Decentralized control] differs from centralized control in that it leaves the peer-to-peer aspect in tact while limiting the content that reproduces over the network. Subscription services, such as Peer Impact (http://www.peerimpact.com), use peer-to-peer technology and social networks to sell and promote copyrighted music (which is a fraction of the total of all music). In this way, they allow the right to reproduce digital artifacts. The Peer Impact FAQ page describes its service as, "allow[ing] members who have purchased content from the service to market and redistribute it to other members." The self-sponsored activity that accompanies peer-to-peer material and social networks (i.e., word of mouth) is limited to the pool of music produced by companies that are members of the RIAA. (Although, according to the FAQ, "Peer Impact is also finalizing negotiations with many of the best known Independent labels to ensure that our members have the greatest variety of music to choose from").

Because the user is providing both bandwidth and social capital, he or she is paid in "Peer Cash."

"Unlike other pay services, Peer Impact incorporates its members into the actual marketing and distribution of content. Since the members help form the infrastructure of the network, Peer Impact shares the revenue it collects with those who assist in the fulfillment of a purchase."

All of the "legitimate p2p" services will in some way control what is reproduced, thereby limiting the full potential of peer-to-peer networks.

noobeginnings

The term "filesharing" is used often to refer to the exchange of music and movies over peer-to-peer networks, even though something as inocuous as email is an example of filesharing, because a copy of a file is made in the process.

The replication of music and movie files over the peer-to-peer networks has attracted the attention of organizations such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. These organizations have sought to end the replication of music and movie files over peer-to-peer networks, and one could also argue that they have indiscriminately fought against both legitimate and alledgedly illigitimate filesharing. Their tactics can basically be divided into two categories: centralized and decentralized.

Centralized tactics are those that attack centralized parts of the filesharing networks. Such tactics create a coevolutionary situation in which centralized aspects of filesharing becomes more decentralized as they are attacked.

One piece of software that allows users to engage in filesharing is BitTorrent. The creation of BitTorrent is a watershed moment in the history of filesharing, because BitTorrent decentralized many of the aspects of filesharing that were previously centralized. For one, with older filesharing networks, such as Napster, users connected to central servers. The term "server" refers to both the physical computer and the software that it runs, which allows end users, or "clients," to connect to each other through the central server. BitTorrent, however, allows users to connect directly to each other, without a server.

While aspects of filesharing have become decentralized, other aspects remain centralized. In any given situation in which one is looking at centralization and decentralization, certain aspects can be centralized while others are decentralized. BitTorrent, specifically, decentralized the connection of peers to each other, but other aspects remained centralized. An simple explanation of how exactly BitTorrent is used may be helpful.

The first time one uses BitTorrent, one simply downloads a small file that quickly installs the software on one's computer. Afterward, to use BitTorrent, one needs to first find a torrent--the file that is identified by having the extension ".torrent" (for example, "Family.Guy.The.Movie.2005.DVDRip.XviD.iNTERNAL-AEN.3360667.TPB.torrent"). The ".torrent" files are small files that add one's computer to the "swarm" of other people who are downloading and uploading the same file. The links to these ".torrent" files are hosted on servers, called "trackers," that allow the user to search for music, movies, and more.

Such centralized trackers have been the focus of legal pressures from the MPAA, despite the fact that trackers only host the small ".torrent" files and not the actual copyrighted material. The pressure from the MPAA is an example of centralized control. The MPAA has sucessfully shut down many trackers, and in May, 2005, one such round of legal action targeted sites that trade television shows. (See, http://www.mpaa.org/MPAAPress/2005/2005_05_12_BitTorrent.pdf). As trackers shut down, more seem to appear in their wake. At current, one need only to enter the name of a particular movie, music album, or television show with the word "torrent" into Google search to find links to ".torrent" files. Furthermore, programmers have discovered new ways of decentralizing the tracking aspect of BitTorrent.

Napster, another infamous filesharing service, differs in the way that it allows peers to find their peers' files. On Napster, a user searches from a centralized database of all peers' files. This left Napster open to pressure from the RIAA and MPAA. Eventually, Napster shut down, later to be bought and used as a for-pay subscription music download service.

Instead of centralized control, the acquisition of filesharing networks is an example of decentralized control.


Wow...I hate you blogger.com. I just wrote 2 more paragraphs and my login had timed out, so, of course, it just takes me to the login screen and gets rid of any changes I made. Just so I can remember later, it referenced these two websites:

http://www.detnews.com/2005/technology/0506/23/0tech-225181.htm
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40076

"Peer-to-peer systems and applications are distributed systems
without any centralized control or hierarchical organization, where
the software running at each node is equivalent in functionality."

from "Proceedings of ACM SIGCOMM 2001, August 27-31, 2001, San Diego, California, USA"
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/papers/chord:sigcomm01/chord_sigcomm.pdf
by members of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
"Chord: A Scalable Peer-to-peer Lookup Service for Internet Applications"
Ion Stoica, Robert Morris, David Karger, M. Frans Kaashoek, Hari Balakrishnan

The standard definition of peer-to-peer networks in the computer science discipline closely resembles the "rhizome" as described in the 1980 work of poststructuralist philosophy by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:

"“To these centered systems, the authors contrast acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment – such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency."”[i]

---

[i] Deleuze and Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. p. 17

The distinction between network technology, such as online peer-to-peer networks, and social networks is collapsing as geography becomes less and less of an impedence to communication. Memetics, the idea that culture evolves as a result of information replicating from one brain to the next, further collapses the distinction between material and social networks. Subjectivity, then, ceases to be located in one "node" of a network, defined as a rational individual, and instead as a complex of, as memeticist Robert Aunger puts it, "genes plus memes and artifacts." He writes, "Taken together, genes plus memes and artifacts create a life-form of increased complexity, similar to symbiotic relationships in the biological realm such as lichen (the combination of a fungus with algae). Human culture is a phenomenon that emerges from the interactions between humans, memes, and their constructions."

Thus, the human subject is composed of replicating fragments in motion in a peer-to-peer network. Such a view of the subject as constructed in an ecosystem of technology and social constructions, is compatible with Deleuze and Guattari's, and other poststructuralists', conception of the human subject. For example, Hardt and Negri describe the subject as something that is "produced" and "generated" (195). This compatibility allows the examination of the power that institutions wield over the production and reproduction of subjectivity.

Peer-to-peer networks are generally associated with filesharing. However, if filesharing is defined broadly as the replication of digital artifacts, then multiple, interconnected peer-to-peer networks, that are both material and social at once, act as ecosystems for myriad digital artifacts ranging from emails to filesharing protocols themselves. Digital artifacts reproduce without central planning. An email is typed, a copy is sent to the recipient, and she may forward the email, thereby copying it again. A filesharing protocol may become popular, and after millions of downloads, use of that protocol might account for a third of all internet traffic, as is the case with BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is a filesharing protocol. A protocol is an agreed upon standard of actions by which any two computers who recognize the standard may interact. BitTorrent is unique in that it allows for users to share outgoing bandwidth, the amount of data that can be replicated to another user at a given time. Because BitTorrent breaks files into small fragments, a user immediately begins sharing pieces received with other users. This structure subverts the broadcast model of bandwidth distribution that is the industry standard--users typically get much more incoming than outgoing bandwidth from their internet service providers.

Because BitTorrent takes advantage of the rhizome shape, it evades capture by the hierarchical, central planners of culture, such as the Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America. The third of internet traffic that use of BitTorrent comprises has the shape of Deleuze and Guattari's smooth space. It is like the sea or desert upon which travel from one port to another does not follow a straight line. The RIAA and MPAA, on the other hand, are institutions that use the centralized, hierarchical broadcast model. They have the shape of striated space--space that is hierarchically ordered and organized into an easily managable shape, like a grid. The two spaces attempt to capture each other in a coevolutionary process. Deleuze and Guattari describe striated and smooth space like the difference between the games chess and Go: "in chess, it is a question of arranging a closed space for oneself, thus of going from one point to another, of occupying the maximum number of squares with the minimum number of pieces. In Go, it is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point: the movement is not from one point to another, but becomes perpetual, without aim or destination, without departure or arrival. The 'smooth' space of Go, as against the 'striated' space of chess" (353). Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that "we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space" (474).

Such digital artifacts are also more and more easily manipulated by each user. Open source software can be modified by its user. Works from different genres of music can be combined into a new composition, a "mash-up." The human subject is produced, but it also produces artifacts without being assigned managed tasks. Much of internet culture, and culture in general, is self-sponsored, without central planning and unmanaged. Artifacts are produced, and then reproduce because they are shared over networks. However, institutions that profit from intellectual property law attempt to control such reproduction.

Because digital artifacts work by replication over networks, a community of Olympic athletes, for example, could be considered a peer-to-peer network in which subjectivity is produced through the unplanned reproduction of journal entries. In a blog, the user makes journal entries that often have no distinction between the personal, political, or any other genre of journal writing. The blogger is literally a "journalist," a keeper of a journal, but entries are shared with others in a network, and peers can append comments to entries, thereby forming an ecosystem of artifacts and subjectivity.The problem arises when institutions seek to prevent such reproduction, and control and manage the " life-form of increased complexity" that is human culture, as did the International Olympic Committee in August 2004. According to a CNN.com article, “The IOC's rationale for the restrictions is that athletes and their coaches should not serve as journalists -- and that the interests of broadcast rightsholders and accredited media come first” (“Olympians” http://www.CNN.com/2004/TECH/internet/08/20/olympic.diaries.ap/index.html)

Control often comes in the form of centralization, but it can also be decentralized. Networks are often hybridized, neither entirely centralized or peer-to-peer. Resistance, on the other hand, is defined as that which grows around control, as in the case of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Resistance is life. As Deleuze says, "Life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object." Because such networks undergo evolutionary change, coevolution occurs between control and resistance. Coevolutionary relationships can come in the form of arms races and mutual cooperation. However, the relationships are often hybridized, as well.

Such mixture and hybridization pose a series of interesting problems in terms of political philosophy.

terms to define:

peer-to-peer
rational subject
networked/memetic subject

Basic but necessary: Descriptions of social (thereby material) software

digital artifacts that represent fundamental concepts for cultural evolution on the internet (distribution, combination, and production/reproduction):
BitTorrent (filesharing)
Mash-ups ("illegal" art)
Blogs/p2p journalism (ecosystems for digital artifacts/fragments of subjectivity)

Note: All of these artifacts are self-sponsored. That is, their production (and reproduction) is unmanaged labor, as opposed to an assignment (in the context of the institution of education), an order (in the military context), or a responsibility (in the context of managed labor). It is production for production's sake.

my lastest writings...

Control, Resistance, and Coevolution in the Reproduction of Digital Artifacts

Life becomes resistance to power when power takes life as its object. - Gilles Deleuze (from Foucault, p. 92)

If we are to “invent…an anthropology of cyberspace,” then we must complicate the definition of immaterial labor, as defined by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire: “Since the production of services results in no material and durable good, we define the labor involved in this production as immaterial labor—that is, labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication.” This view overlooks the materiality of information, and specifically digital artifacts. Similarly the concept of affective labor misses the materiality of networked relations. They write, “What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower." When it comes to the internet, such social networks do result in durable goods: digital artifacts. It is this materiality that allows for evolution to take place.

The activities that result in the production of digital artifacts are often self-sponsored, as in the case of filesharing, illegal digital art, and peer-to-peer journalism.

One of the most relevant parts of Hardt and Negri’s work deals with networked production, which includes the networked production of subjects. They make the important point that, “The centrifugal movement of production is balanced by the centripetal trend of command.” Included in such commanding institutions are the large media companies and their lobbying organizations: RIAA, MPAA, AOL-Time Warner…etc. They describe rhizomorphous aspects of the information infrastructure as democratic mechanisms and the centralized commanding aspects as an oligopolistic mechanism of broadcasting. They stress, however, that, “The networks of the new information infrastructure are a hybrid of these two models.”

To use their terminology in describing the relationship between self-sponsored production and reproduction of digital artifacts and the institutions that agglomerate control in the name of “intellectual property”: “The multitude is the real productive force of our social world, whereas Empire is a mere apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude—as Marx would say, a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that survives only by sucking off the blood of the living.”

The democratic and oligopolistic models correspond to smooth and striated space. Striated space is hierarchical, such as the space of the internet as controlled by internet service providers. The user gets more incoming bandwidth than outgoing, more reflecting the broadcast model. BitTorrent smoothes out this imbalance of power, allowing users to pool together their outgoing bandwidth, thereby making the reproduction of files look more like an actual ecosystem.

from bittorrent.com
The key to scaleable and robust distribution is cooperation. With BitTorrent, those who get your file tap into their upload capacity to give the file to others at the same time. Those that provide the most to others get the best treatment in return. ("Give and ye shall receive!")
Cooperative distribution can grow almost without limit, because each new participant brings not only demand, but also supply. Instead of a vicious cycle, popularity creates a virtuous circle. And because each new participant brings new resources to the distribution, you get limitless scalability for a nearly fixed cost.
BitTorrent is not just a concept, but has an easy-to-use implementation capable of swarming downloads across unreliable networks. BitTorrent has been embraced by numerous publishers to distribute to millions of users.
With BitTorrent free speech no longer has a high price.

It is no surprise then, that Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent is very interested in strategy games and puzzles. He especially likes Amazons, which is a game that fits in somewhere between Chess and Go. (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html) (Chess and Go are one of D&G’s many examples of the difference between tree and rhizome, striated and smooth space).

As Deleuze and Guattari say, smooth space is always capturing striated space and vice versa. In poststructuralist philosophy, everything is always moving. BitTorrent is a testament to the viability of this philosophy as "BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet"! It is as if Bram Cohen made a brilliant move on a giant game board, placing down his piece that captured a third of the territory, smoothing out the striated space.

But, a discussion of BitTorrent only covers one aspect of distribution of digital artifacts. One must also examine how those artifacts are parts of the human subject.

from Robert Aunger's The Electric Meme
Taken together, genes plus memes and artifacts create a life-form of increased complexity, similar to symbiotic relationships in the biological realm such as lichen (the combination of a fungus with algae). Human culture is a phenomenon that emerges from the interactions between humans, memes, and their constructions.

If the subject is heterogeneous, existing in social and digital networks, then digital artifacts are an extension of the subject. Therefore, the subject itself “emerges from the interactions between humans, memes, and their constructions.” Because of this, control can be exerted over subjects by limiting contact and conjugation between their constituent parts. For example, when the International Olympic Committee banned Olympians from engaging in peer-to-peer journalism, they prevented the growth of the various subjects in a durable digital ecosystem, thereby limiting the growth of whatever resistance may have formed in those social-material networks.

Fortunately, life is opportunistic, and can grow around control.

so, Hilary Rosen, a former head of the Recording Industry Association of America is guest blogging on http://www.lessig.org/blog/ which is the blog of Larry Lessig, the creator of Creative Commons and author of Free Culture. weird. in my wide-eyed optimism, i replied to her post that basically asked why corporations were getting such a bad rap in the debate over copyright, thinking that she might read it. as one commentor put it to a later post:

"Hilary,

Will you be responding directly to any comments within the threads or will you simply be in lecture mode and stick to top-level posts the entire visit? I hope not as that would defeat the beauty of blogging…"

so, it turns out, formed heads of the RIAA are not as open minded as i thought (hahaha). since it seems that no one read my comment at all, even fellow commentors, i figure someone might at well read it. in the spirit of not letting the meme die so young, i'm reposting it here:

Hilary,

I present you with my 16 theses:

1) All digital artifacts (i.e., files) (e.g., emails, mp3s..etc) must be copied to be used. A received email is a copy of a sent email. A musician records her song, encodes it to mp3 on her harddrive, puts a copy on her iPod, and sends a copy as an attachment to her friend, who saves it on his harddrive..etc.

2) All activities that result in a copy of a file are “filesharing.”

3) Because digital artifacts replicate over networks, they have allowed for cultural evolution to flourish on the internet.

4) Evolution is an autopoietic process. In other words, evolution has no central planning. Genes were organized into complex plants, birds and all other life without central planning.

5) Organizations such as the MPAA and RIAA seek, through copyright, to agglomerate intellectual property, thereby limiting the reproduction of digital artifacts (as well as limiting the combination of various artifacts to make new ones — “remixing”).

6) Centralized control impedes evolution.

7) Ecosystems do not have a centralized shape. They are meshworks.

8) The situation with digital artifacts is analogous to the biotech industry’s patenting of genes. The ceaseless accumulation of genetic copyrights can lead only to centrally planned biological reproduction.

9) Contrary to statements made by people like Richard Parsons (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/24/0526204&mode=nested) and Mitch Bainwol, culture will not “atrophy” without central planning and agglomeration of ownership in the hands of a few.

10) Cultural evolution, on the contrary, will flourish as central planning dwindles.

11) Programs like BitTorrent allow for decentralized cultural evolution as they enable decentralized distribution/replication of digital artifacts.

12) The price of producing artifacts continues to decrease as production technologies become cheaper and more ubiquitous. “Investment” will no longer be a viable model for the creation of cultural artifacts, as the price of production decreases.

13) The decrease in accountability to investors and copyright holders (i.e., corporations) will decrease the central planning of culture.

14) The culture industries attempt to capitalize on decentralized distribution and end-user participation. “Legitimate” mp3 downloads are an example. However, these schemes still reflect the centralized shape of the culture industries.

15) Creative Commons is an example of a way to give control over reproduction of artifacts to their original creator rather than to a corporation that is in the business of accumulating control.

16) An evolving culture “from below”/”in the periphery” is at once in an arms race and a mutual cooperation with corporations. The RIAA and filesharers are locked in a coevolutionary arms race; however, the success of iPod would not have been possible without “illegitimate” filesharing.

It is difficult to imagine what cultural evolution would look like if it were completely free from centralized agglomeration. I happen to think it would look pretty sweet. Personally, I can’t be bothered to shed a tear for the music and movie industries’ current troubles. To use cliches, they had their time in the sun, but all empires must fall.

Centralization will likely never go away completely; therefore, a totally decentralized culture may be utopian, but I think it’s a principle worth holding. Let’s see how the future unfolds.

Best Wishes,
Chris V
» posted by Chris V on Aug 17 05 at 10:48 PM

(x-posted from lj)

man, i haven't posted in so long. should we blame world of warcraft? maybe, but that doesn't mean i haven't been writing. i just needed more time than i thought to put things together. i woke up with a pretty bad headache today that's still pounding.

so, i'm still writing that thesis. i hope this shit's all worth it when i'm done. it's hard to stay positive, but, and this is the most horrible of cliches, i need to stay focused and picture my success instead of my failure.

i'll tell you a little bit about where my research is going. i'm focusing on BitTorrent (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html) more than i originally thought i would. but, it really is a good model of what i'm trying to describe.

you may or may not be familiar with a philosophy book called A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0816614024/qid=1124812727/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-3399295-8044154?v=glance&s=books&n=507846).

either way, one way to make sense of this dense work is to use BitTorrent as an example of its philosophy in action. one concept from the book involves the contrast of the games Chess and Go. while chess pieces are coded -- they each have a particular range of motion -- pieces in Go (which i think is the same as Reversi) capture space in a different way. the two ways of conceiving of space are Striated space and Smooth space.

Think of striated space as a piece of woven cloth. it has grids, layers, all the shapes that we generally associate with civilization -- just look at the layout of a city; it's a grid (unless you live in a place like New Orleans, where the river smashes the grid shape into wackiness). Smooth space, on the other hand is more like felt. fibers are tangled and, if you look closely, shaped more like the Mississippi River than lines on the Cartesian plane.

what the hell does this have to do with BitTorrent, you're asking? our Internet Service Providers give us more incoming bandwidth than outgoing. So, even though we think of the internet as less like a grid-shape and more food-web/ecosystem shaped, the flow of information (and as we've all been taught, information is power) radiates outward, pushing down on us for the most part.



BitTorrent smooths out this imbalance of power, allowing users to pool together their outgoing bandwidth, thereby making the reproduction of files look more like an actual ecosystem.



It is no surprise then, that Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent is very interested in strategy games and puzzles. He especially likes Amazons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_of_the_Amazons) which is a game that fits in somewhere between Chess and Go.

as Deleuze and Guattari say, smooth space is always capturing striated space and vice versa. In poststructuralist philosophy, everything is always moving. BitTorrent is a testament to the viability of this philosophy as "BitTorrent traffic accounts for more than one-third of all data sent across the Internet" (from Wired article cited above). It is as if Bram Cohen made a brilliant move on a giant game board, placing down his piece that captured a third of the territory, smoothing out the striated space. to me, that's pretty amazing.

This is my attempt at explaining my thesis with as few obscure references as possible. I'll cross post this since I hardly post anymore (something that I'd like to change).

In common usage, the term "meme" has come to mean: a digital artifact (or component thereof) that is successful at replicating on the internet.

The term "meme" also refers to the structure in the brain that is replicated via language and artifacts. Whether or not memes exist in this sense (I believe they do), digital artifacts do exist and require replication by their very nature.

For example, this text you're reading is a copy of text I entered into a browswer window, which was copied onto a server, and then copied again into your computer's random access memory for your reading pleasure. The cause, in this case, of replication is human activity (mouse clicking). So, we can be said to be a necessary step in the replication of digital artifacts, but that does not mean that this replication is centrally planned in any way. On the contrary, it works in a similar way to biological evolution.

So, from here on, I will use "meme" to mean: a component of a digital artifact that has made its way into other artifacts. (This is where semiotics and memetics come together.)

I would like to focus on the Lynndie England meme as an example.

Surely you've seen these infamous images:





However, you may or may not have seen Lynndie photoshopped (an important verb in cultural remixing on the internet) into other situations.












My thesis tends to focus on the cultural remixing of memes from copyrighted material and the ensuing conflicts between copyright owners and cultural remixers. But, as we can see with these images that I can only assume are open for public use, a variety of mutations have occurred.

These mutations result in a kind of semiotic/memetic diversity similar to the genetic diversity present in healthy ecosystems. The conlifct arises when central forces attempt to corral the free flow of objects, whether in the patenting of genes or the copyrighting of memes. This seems to be the model for all political struggle: a conflict between organizational patters, or, diagrams.

x-posted at blogspot and liverjournal

interesting article that i'll be using: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/current.issue/15.1gunderson.html
Danger Mouse's Grey Album, Mash-Ups, and the Age of Composition Philip A. Gunderson San Diego Miramar Collegepgunders73@hotmail.com
© 2004 Philip A. Gunderson. All rights reserved.
Review of:Danger Mouse (Brian Burton), The Grey Album, Bootleg Recording
Depending on one's perspective, Danger Mouse's (Brian Burton's) Grey Album represents a highpoint or a nadir in the state of the recording arts in 2004. From the perspective of music fans and critics, Burton's creation--a daring "mash-up" of Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' eponymous 1969 work (popularly known as The White Album)--shows that, despite the continued corporatization of music, the DIY ethos of 1970s punk remains alive and well, manifesting in sampling and low-budget, "bedroom studio" production values. From the perspective of the recording industry, Danger Mouse's album represents the illegal plundering of some of the most valuable property in the history of pop music (the Beatles' sound recordings), the sacrilegious re-mixing of said recordings with a capella tracks of an African American rapper, and the electronic distribution of the entire album to hundreds of thousands of listeners who appear vexingly oblivious to current copyright law. That there would be a schism between the interests of consumers and the recording industry is hardly surprising; tension and antagonism characterize virtually all forms of exchange in capitalist economies. What is perhaps of note is that these tensions have escalated to the point of the abandonment of the exchange relationship itself. Music fans, fed up with the high prices (and outright price-fixing) of commercially available music, have opted to share music files via peer-to-peer file sharing networks, and record labels are attempting in response to coerce music fans back into the exchange relationship. The Grey Album and the mash-up form in general are symptomatic of an historical moment in which the forces of music production (production technology, artistic invention, and web-based networks of music distribution) have greatly exceeded the present relations of production expressed by artist/label contracts, music property rights, and traditional producer/consumer dichotomies.
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Also, if you haven't seen this, check it out: http://www.libresociety.org/