Last month was a long and busy month that started in Canada and ended in South Africa.

Along the way, SecuShare’s {1} Daniel Reusche and I agitated for decentralized social platfors at Berlin’s Campus Party {2}, I presented the first Octo demo {3} at the latest reSource transmedial culture {4} event with Jeff Mann, Jonas Frankki and Baruch Gottlieb, also, Baruch, Jonas and I built the Miscommuniction Station {4} as an online project of the Abandon Normal Devices Festival.

Finally, Baruch and I traveled to the A MAZE / INTERACT festival {5} to present and represent iMine {6} and R15N {7}.

Now I’m back in Berlin and looking forward to tonight’s Stammtisch. And it’s September.

Tuesday, Septemeber 6944, 1993 to be exact {8}.

6944 days, or 19 years and 9 days after the Eternal September began.

A MAZE was fantastic, and the Braamfontein district of Johannesburg where the festival took place was an incredible place, not only to enjoy a great party in a really unbelievable community, but also to reflect on where we are now, nearly twenty years since the commercialization of the internet began to deliver a year-round flow of “newbies” to the Internet 1.0 that nobody yet called “the web”.

The Jargon File defines “The September that never ends” as “All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers’ capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. Syn. eternal September.”

Once the internet was available to the general public, outside of the research/education/ngo world that had inhabited before September, the large numbers of users arriving on the untamed shores of early cyberspace “nearly overwhelmed the old-timers’ capacity to acculturate them.”

Even in Africa, you’d have to go pretty far out of your way to find a community where it’s not September yet. Internet access is certainly not as ubiquitous, reliable or fast as it is it “the West,” but the African people do use the Internet, and are part of its culture.

The Jargon File mentions “Netiquette,” a quaint term from the innocent times of net.culture, yet Netiquette was not simply a way of fitting in like table manners at an exclusive dinner party. The cultural context of that Internet that made acculturation necessary was it’s relative openness and lack of stratification.

Netiquette was required, because the network had relatively little constraints built into it, the constraints needed to be cultural for the system to work. There was much more to this culture than teaching new users how to not abuse resources or make a “general nuisance of themselves.” Nettiquette was not so much about online manners, it was rather about how to share. Starting from the shared network resources, sharing was the core of the culture, which not only embraced free software and promoted free communications, but generally resented barriers to free exchange, including barriers required to protect property rights and any business models based on controlling information flow.

As dramatic as the influx of new users was to the “old-timers” net.culture, the influx of capital investment and it’s conflicting property interests quickly emerged as an existential threat the basis of the culture. Net.culture required a shared internet, where the network itself and most of the information on it was held in common. Capital required control, constraints and defined property in order to earn returns on investment. Lines in the sand where drawn, the primitive communism of the pre-September Internet was over. The Eternal September began, and along with it, the stratification of the internet began.

Rather than embracing the free, open, platforms where net.culture was born, like Usenet, EMail, IRC, etc, Capital embraced the Web. Not as the interlinked, hypermedia, world-wide-distributed publishing platform it was intended to be, but as a client-server private communications platform where users’ interactions where mediated by the platforms’ operators. The flowering of “Web 2.0″ was Capital’s re-engineering of the web into an internet accessible version of the online services they where building all along, such as the very platforms whose mass user bases where the influx that started the Eternal September. CompuServ and AOL most notable among them.

The Eternal September started when these Online Services allowed their users to access Internet services such as Usenet and EMail, Web 2.0 instead replaced Usenet and EMail with social platforms embedded in private, centralized web-based services that look and work very much like the old Online Services.

Scratch-off the Facebook logo, and you’ll find the AOL logo underneath.

The internet is no longer a open free-for-all where old-timers acculturate new-comers into a community of co-operation and sharing. It is a stratified place where privileged users have preferential access, including broadband at-home, servers online, users who can control there own “domain,” can run their own mail and web services and access the internet as a whole, including the old platforms such as Usenet and IRC. New users, who may have broadband at home, but have no services and need to use online services like facebook or gmail to communicate at all, subject to the terms of use of those companies. Users who have no broadband at home, and rely on internet cafes and libraries. And at the lowest tier, Users who can only access the mobile internet, on locked-down iPhones and other smart phones, where apps stores control the available apps users can us, and the apps tightly control the users that use them. And of course, each bit of data is paid for from the users’ precious mobile airtime.

As the African people finally cross the digital divide, the once-vibrant cyberspace they arrive in has already been colonized, enclosed and captured by the profit motive. The culture of sharing and co-operation destroyed by the terms of service of online platforms, by copyright lobies pushing for greater and greater restrictions and by governments that create legislation to protect the interests of property and “security” against the interests of sharing.

The culture of co-operation and sharing has been replaced by a culture of surveillance and control.

We once believed that perhaps getting the Africans onto our Internet would help them in their struggles, now perhaps we can hope their capacity for struggle will allow us to find ways to make the Internet a transformational force again. Yet, like the urban centers of cities like Johannesburg, once access is finally won, the centers have been abandoned. The common squares and open markets have already been deserted in favour of protected suburbs and gated communities. Access is allowed not to extend freedom and welcome, but to facilitate exploitation.

If the modern Internet can’t be the liberating force early net.culture believed it could be, maybe we can hope that as the African people come online, their experience in working within environments where inequality, repressions and privilege rule will bring a transformational consciousness to us. They might be our last hope.

If you’re in Berlin this evening, join us at Cafe Buchhandling {9}, while we reminisce and reflect on the unforgettable experience we had in Johannesburg at AMAZE / INTERACT. I’ll be there around 9pm.

{1} http://secushare.org
{2} http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GW_imx0z3LY
{3} http://telekommunisten.net/octo/
{4} http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/miscommunication-station
{5} http://www.amaze-festival.de
{6} http://i-mine.org
{7} http://r15n.net
{8} http://www.eternal-september.org/?language=en
{9} http://bit.ly/buchhandlung

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Tomorrow I head to Linz, Austria to participate in LiWoLi 2012.

LiWoLi: 24-26 May 2012
Location: I/O Stadtwerkstatt, Kirchengasse, Linz, Austria
LiWoLi is a community festival, open lab and annual meeting spot for artists, educators and developers using and creating Free Software (FLOSS), Open Hardware and Open Design in the artistic and cultural context. This event is all about sharing artistic skills, code and knowledge within the public domain and discussing the challenges of an open practice.
This year’s edition will have a special focus on artworks that can be created, performed or exhibited outdoors and in public space. Like every year, numerous activities such as lectures, workshops and audiovisual performances will take place during the course of this three-day festival.

Thinking about “the challenges of a open practice” gets me thinking about what “radical openness” could mean. On the surface, it could just mean really, really, extremely, very open. But that’s a overly colloquial understanding of the word radical, as in “totally rad,” as opposed to “radical critique.”

Extreme or drastic is not necessarily radical. Radical requires a fundamental transformation, change so deep it goes to the root, the “radix”. Radical has the a same linguistic root as “radish,” the edible root vegetable of the Brassicaceae family.

Thus, to be radical, a practice has to get at the root, to work towards a fundamental transformation, no matter how moderate or gradual.

Radical openness would not necessarily mean being as open as one could be, but rather working towards removing the fundamental obstacles to openness that exist, perhaps even in ways that are not open, or less open than we might like.

To be open, we need to be safe and we need to be alive.

To be safely open requires us to have the freedom and privileged to speak our mind, to do as we please. When what you want to say, or do is unwelcome by powerful forces, perhaps because what you are saying
or doing is something they consider threatening to their interests, you can not be safe. So long as inequality and intolerance exists in society, any chance we have to get the freedom to pursue radical openness requires us to have privacy, requires us to be able to chose
when and with whom to be open. Not having privacy means that we will have less openness.

Radical openness requires privacy.

To be alive we require food and shelter and the necessities of life, and in a capitalist society, what we do, our practice, is largely formed by our participation in the labour market, in order to obtain such necessities. As such, not only the practice, but what becomes of the results of our work, is determined not by our own wishes, but by the logic of capitalism. This logic means that in most cases we can not chose either the conditions of our labour nor the terms of distribution of what we create. For the masses, openness in terms of their productive life is simply not a practice they can chose. This means that the degree of openness that we can have is not determined by individual choice, but by collective struggle.

Radical openness requires collective struggle.

In this light, radical openness can only mean the collective struggle for a more open society, which is a society where open practice is not threatened by repression or economic consequence.

Which means that radical openness must be closed to violations of privacy and to economic exploitation.

I’ll be at stammtisch {2} this evening around 9pm as usual.

{1} http://liwoli.at
{2} http://bit.ly/buchhandlung

Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12

I gave a talk with Jacob Applebaum at last week’s Re:publica conference in Berlin.

It seems it had fallen to us to break a little bad news. Here it is.

– We are not progressing from a primitive era of centralized social media to an emerging era of decentralized social media, the reverse is happening.

– Surveillance and control of users is not some sort of unintended consequence of social media platforms, it is the reason they exist.

– Privacy is not simply a consumer choice, it is a matter of power and privilege.

Earlier at Re:publica, Eben Moglen, the brilliant and tireless legal council of the Free Software Foundation and founder of the FreedomBox Foundation, gave a characteristically excellent speech.

However, in his enthusiasm, he makes makes a claim that seems very wrong.

Moglen, claims that Facebook’s days as a dominant platform are numbered, because we will soon have decentralized social platforms, based on projects such as FreedomBox, users will operate their own federated platforms and form collective social platforms based on their own hardware, retain control of their own data, etc.

I can understand and share Moglen’s enthusiasm for such a vision, however this is not the observable history of our communications platforms, not the obvious direction they seem to be headed, and there is no clear reason to believe this will change.

The trajectory that Moglen is using has centralized social media as the starting point and distributed social media as the place we are moving toward. But in actual fact, distributed social media is where we started, and centralized platforms are where we have arrived.

The Internet is a distributed social media platform. The classic internet platforms that existed before the commercialization of the web provided all the features of modern social media monopolies.

Platforms like Usenet, Email, IRC and Finger allowed us to do everything we do now with Facebook and friends. We could post status updates, share pictures, send messages, etc. Yet, these platforms have been more or less abandoned. So the question we need to address is not so much how we can invent a distributed social platform, but how and why we started from a fully distributed social platform and replaced it with centralized social media monopolies.

The answer is quite simple. The early internet was not significantly capitalist funded, the change in application topology came along with commercialization, and it is a consequence of the business models required by capitalist investors to capture profit.

The business model of social media platforms is surveillance and behavioral control. The internet’s original protocols and architecture made surveillance and behavioral control more difficult. Once capital became the dominant source of financing it directed investment toward centralized platforms, which are better at providing such surveillance and control, the original platforms were starved of financing. The centralized platforms grew and the decentralized platforms submerged beneath the rising tides of the capitalist web.

This is nothing new. This was the same business model that capital devised for media in general, such as network television. The customer of network television is not the viewer, rather the viewer is the product, the “audience commodity.” The real customer is the advertisers and lobby groups that want to control this audience.

Network Television didn’t provide the surveillance part, so advertisers needed to employ market research and ratings firms such as Nielson for that bit. This was a major advantage of social media, richer data from better surveillance allowed for more effective behavioral control than ever before possible, using tracking, targeting, machine learning, behavioral retargeting, among many techniques made possible by the deep pool of data companies like Facebook and Google have available.

This is not a choice that capitalist made, this is the only way that profit-driven organizations can provide a public good like a communication platform. Capitalist investors must capture profit or lose their capital. If their platforms can not capture profit, they vanish.

So, if capitalism can not fund free, federated social platforms, what will? For Moglen’s optimistic trajectory to pan out, this implies that funds can come from the public sector, or from volunteers/donations etc? But if these sectors where capable of turning the tide on social media monopolies, wouldn’t they have already done so? After all, the internet started out as a decentralized platform, so it’s not like they had to play catch-up, they had a significant head start. Yet, you could fill many a curio case with technologies dreamed up and abandoned because they could not be sustained without financing.

Give the continuous march of neoliberal public sector retrenchment, the austerity craze, and the ever increasing precariousness of most communities, it seems unlikely the public or voluntary sectors will be the source of such a dramatic turnaround. Given the general tendency of capitalist economies toward accumulation and consolidation, such a turnaround seems even less likely.

Thus, there is no real reason to believe Moglen’s trajectory will come about. The obstacle to decentralized social media is not that it has not been invented, but the profit-motive itself. Thus to reverse this trajectory back towards decentralization, requires not so much technical initiative, but political struggle.

So long as we maintain the social choice to provision our communication systems according to the profit motive, we will only get communications platforms that allow for the capture of profit. Free, open systems, that neither surveil, nor control, nor exclude, will not be funded, as they do not provide the mechanisms required to capture profit.

Facebook is worth billions precisely because of it’s capacity for surveillance and control. Same with Google.

Thus, like the struggle for other public goods, like education, child care, and health care, free communication platforms for the masses can only come from collective political struggle to achieve such platforms.

In the meantime, we have many clever and dedicated people contributing to inventing alternative platforms, and these platforms can be very important and worthwhile for the minority that will ever use them, but we do not have the social will nor capacity to bring these platforms to the masses, and given the dominance of capital in our society, it’s not clear where such capacity will come from.

As surveillance and control is enforced by the powerful interests of capital, privacy and autonomy become a question of power and privilege, not just consumer choice.

It’s not simply a question of choosing to use certain platforms over others, it’s not a question of openness and visibility being the new way people live in a networked society. Rather it’s a fact that our platforms are financed for the purpose of watching people and pushing them to behave in ways that benefit the operators of the platform and their real customers, the advertisers, and the industrial and political lobbies. The platform exists to shape society according to the interests of these advertisers and lobbies.

As such, how coercive these platforms are largely depend on the degree to which your behaviour is aligned with the platform-operators’ profit-driven objectives, and thus privacy and autonomy is not just a feature any given platforms my or may not offer, but determine the possibility of resistance, determine our ability to work against powerful interests’ efforts to shape society in ways we disagree with. As Jake said at our talk “We can’t have post-privacy until we are post-privilege”

Eliminating privilege is a political struggle, not a technical one.

I’ll be at Stammtisch as usual around 9pm, please come by, anybody still hanging around after #rp12 is more than welcome to join us. You can find us here: http://bit.ly/buchhandlung

In continuation from the last two essays looking at the macroeconomics  of class struggle (#1)  (#2) we will try to describe the process of revolution within the framework as developed so far.

The old acrimonious accusations between so-called “Reformist” and so-called “Revolutionary” positions are counter productive.

The reformist strives to improve certain conditions within the current society. A revolutionary strives for a complete transformation of society. In the context of the struggle against economic exploitation, a reformist fights for wages and benefits by organizing collectively and politically against capital, while the revolutionary organizes collectively and politically towards to abolition of capitalism.

Reformists argue the revolutionaries are unrealistic and divisive, while revolutionaries consider the reformists delusional and as simply serving to preserve capitalism.

In many cases, both are right.

Utopianism (#3 #4) is rampant among reformists, making& much of what is proposed among proponents of so-called “Alternative Economics” utterly nonsensical.

However, one must differentiate among those engaging in direct struggle for wages and benefits, that is, those who recognize and acknowledge class conflict, and those who, as Marx wrote, “want to improve the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favored. Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without distinction of class; nay, by preference, to the ruling class. For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to see it in the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?” That is, those that “reject all political, and especially all revolutionary, action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful means, and endeavor, by small experiments, necessarily doomed to failure.”

And conversely, certain kinds of nihilism and disassociation are rampant among revolutionaries. A tendency to mock and often even hold in contempt all those who are actively trying to improve the conditions of life within capitalism, sometimes with the extremely vulgar belief that to abolish capitalism we must not improve the conditions of life within it, or even actually celebrate its further decline, for only when the conditions become so miserable that they become unbearable will the masses rise up and abolish capitalism!

Thus, those trying to improve the conditions of life are actually counter-revolutionaries, and those remaining aloof and inactive are the true revolutionaries!

Just as much as Utopianism is to be rejected, this view, what we might call “Cataclysmism” must likewise be rejected.

Neither waiting for the collapse of the ruling class, nor appealing for their mercy will lead to communism. Social collapse is much more likely to lead to despotism and fascism than communism. Appeals will fail because the ruling class is compelled to protect their privilege by any means necessary, just as the workers are compelled to keep working. If they fail to do so, they lose their privilege, not to the working classes, but to competing elites.

Any realistic path to overcoming economic exploitation requires both reform and revolution.

Which brings us back to Macronomic Identities.

Our capacity to change society begins with what I have described as “The social capacity of workers to invest” and identified macroenomically as Iw.

If Iw is zero, we can not change society at all, because we are not able to retain any more wealth than is required for our own subsistence. Thus we would have no wealth available to apply towards organizing collectively or politically towards anything at all, only just enough to toil another day.

The working of the capitalist labour market will always push Iw toward zero, thus only through political struggle is Iw kept above zero.  Our revolutionary capacity depends on pushing for as much reform as possible, whatever serves to increase wage levels and benefits gives us more left over to invest towards revolutionary aims.

However, such reforms will not serve our purposes unless they come with revolutionary aims. Increases in wages and benefits are easily absorbed in capitalist consumption, often simply in increased rents, if not intentionally intvested in worker’s productive capacity.

We can understand flows between modes of production similar to the way that imports and exports are understood.

Returning to our basic macroeconomic identity, W + P =  C + I, if we want to factor in imports and exports we can say that W + P = C + I + N, wages plus profits are equal to Consumption plus Investment plus net exports, that us exports minus imports. This allows us to look at the macroeconomy of one country within a global context that includes other countries.

A country can increase it’s wages and profit above what it’s own consumption and investment can fund when it has a trade surplus because the consumption from other countries are funding wages and profits within the country. However, at the global level net exports must always be zero, so a trade surplus in one country implies a trade deficit elsewhere.

When a country has a trade deficit then N is negative, meaning that the country’s total wages and profits are below it’s consumption and investment. This naturally means that the country is building debt and thus, such a situation is not normally sustainable. The economy of the country with a trade deficit is shrinking relative to the economy of the country with the trade surplus.

We can look at intermodal economic flows in the same way.

We can define the capitalist sector of the economy with P + Wm = Cm + Ip + Nm, or profits plus wages of workers working for capital equals consumption of the output of capital (market consumption) plus investment derived from profit plus net intermodal consumption. That is, the “exports” from the capitalist sector to the communist sector minus the “imports” from the communist sector to the capitalist sector.

Whenever money earned in the capitalist sector is used to consume wealth produced in the communist sector, the net effect is that the capitalist sector shrinks relative to the communist sector, and vice versa.

Conversely, we can define the communist economy as Wc = Cc + Iw + Nc, that is wages of commons-based producers are equal to commons based consumption plus workers’ investment plus net intermodal consumption.

Of course, Nm + Nc = Zero.

Thus, economic reformism is only to be dismissed with it simply increases Cm and thereby does not change the balance of economic power, while a revolutionary must strive to push Nc above zero, for if it can be sustained as such then this means the inevitable disappearance of the capitalist sector.

To abolish capitalism and replace it with a commons based economy we need to build an intermodal trade surplus.

I’ll be at Stammtisch as usual at 9pm (#5).  Please come!

(1) http://www.dmytri.info/its-the-macroeconomy-stupid/

(2) http://www.dmytri.info/the-macroeconomic-identity-of-communism

(3) http://www.dmytri.info/false-defences-of-utopian-thought/

(4) http://wp.me/p24fqL-2E

(5) http://bit.ly/buchhandlung