BIBLIOGRAPHY

(in the order of appearance)

1.      Ken Wilber. A Theory of Everything.  Shambhala, 2001

2.      Toni Negri and Michael Hardt. Empire.

3.      McLuhan, M. Understanding media: the extensions of Man. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1994

4.      Alan Page Fiske. Structures of Social Life. Free Press, 1993

5.      Norbert Elias. La dynamique de l'occident. Calman-Levy, 1975

6.      Stephane Vibert. Louis Dumont: holisme et modernite. Michalon, 2004

7.      Cornelis Castoriadis. L'institution Imaginaire de la societe. Seuil, 1975

8.      Philippe Zafirian. A quoi sert le travail. La Dispute, 2003

9.      Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. Empire. Harvard University Press, 2001

10.  Maurizio Lazzarato. Les Revolutions du Capitalisme.Les Empecheurs de Penser en Rond, 2004

11.  Pekka Himanen. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. Random House, 2002

12.  John Heron. Sacred Science. PCCS Books, 1998

13.  Jorge N. Ferrer. Revisioning Transpersonal Theory: A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality. SUNY, 2001

14.  McKenzie Wark. A Hacker Manifesto. Harvard University Press, 2004

15.  Janet Abbate. Inventing the Internet. MIT Press, 1999.

16.  Louis Dumont. Homo Hierarchicus: the caste system and its implications.  University of Chicago Press, 1981

17.  Ray Kurzweil. The age of spiritual machines. Penguin, 2000

18.  Andrew Feenberg. Critical Theory of Technology. Oxford University Press, 1991

19.  Andrew Feenberg. Questioning Technology. Routledge, 1999

20.  Lewis Mumford. Technics and Civilisation. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934

21.  Alexander Galloway . Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization
MIT Press, 2004

22.  Richard Stallman. Free Software, Free Society. Free Software Foundation, 2002

23.  Eric Raymond. The Cathedral and the Bazaar. O'Reilly, 2001

24.  Eric von Hippel. The Democratization of Innovation. MIT Press, 2004

25.  Pat Kane. The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living. Macmillan, 2003

26.  Ronald Inglehart. Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society. Princeton University Press, 1989

27.  Marshall D. Sahlins. Stone Age Economics. Aldine, 1972

28.  Edward Haskell. Full Circle. Gordon and Breach, 1972

29.  Arthur Coulter. Synergetics. Prentice-Hall Trade, 1976

30.  Jean-Louis Sagot-Duvauroux. Pour la Gratuite. Desclee-De Brouwer, 1995

31.  Richard Barbrook. Media Freedom. Pluto, 1995

32.  Steve Weber. The Success of Open Source. Harvard University Press, 2004

33.  Alan Page Fiske. Structures of Social Life. Free Press, 1993

34.  Lawrence Lessig. Free Culture. Penguin, 2004

35.  Fernand Braudel. Wheels of Commerce. University of California Press, 1992

36.  Andre Gorz. L'Immateriel. Galilee, 2003

37.  Carlo Vercelonne, dir. Sommes-nous sorti du capitalisme industriel? La Dispute, 2003

38.  Alexander Bard and Jan Soderqvist. Netocracy. Financial Times Prentice-Hall, 2002

39.  Noam Chomsky.

Page 34, 4.1.A continued

Immanuel Wallerstein. The Essential Wallerstein. New Press, 2000

Miguel Benasayag. Du contre-pouvoir. La Decouverte, 2002

June Campbell, Traveller in Space. Diane, 1996

Joel Kramer and Diane Alstad. The Guru Papers. Frog, 1993

Shumpei Kumon and Henry Rosovsky, eds., The Political Economy ofJapan: Cultural and Social Dynamics. Stanford University Press, 1992

John Arquila and David Ronfeldt. Eds. Networks and netwars. Rand Corporation, 2001

John Stewart. Evolution's Arrow. Chapman Press, 2000

Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge, 2001

Andrew Ross. No-Collar. The Humane Workplace and its Hidden Cost. Basic Books, 2001.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Capitalisme et Schizophrenie. Tome 2: Milles Plateaux. Ed. De Minuit, 1980.

Robert Jackall. Moral Mazes. Oxford University Press, 1989.

Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello. Le Nouvel Esprit du Capitalisme. Gallimard, 1999

Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. Spiral Dynamics. Blackwell, 1996

Jeremy Rifkin. The Age of Access. J.P. Tarcher, 2001

Michael Albert. Parecon. Verso, 2004

Joseph Schumpeter, Essays on Entrepreneurs, Innovations, Business Cycles, and the Evolution of Capitalism. Transaction Publishers, 1997

Ilkka Tuomi. Networks of Innovation.  Oxford Press, 2003

Lawrence Lessig. The Future  of Ideas. Vintage, 2002

Michel Foucault. Power/Knowledge. Harvester Press, 1980.

[i]

French-language books on cognitive capitalism, regularly mentioned in the magazine are: 1) Andre Gozr. L'immaterial. 2003; 2) La place des chaussettes. Christian Marazzi. L'eclat, 2001, on the linguistic turn of capitalism; 3) Corsani et al. Vers un capitalisme cognitif. L'harmattan, 2001; 4) Sommes-nous sortis du capitalisme industriel? (sous la direction de Carlo Vercellone). Ed. La Dispute; 5) Vercellone C. (ed), Transformations de la division du travail et nouvelles regulations. Le crepuscule du capitalisme industriel ?, Paris, l'Harmattan; 6) Maurizio Lazzarato. Les Revolutions du Capitalisme.Les Empecheurs de Penser en Rond, 2004.

[ii]

Two ways of knowing:

"In this realm of the history of ideas, just as in linguistics, words have meaning only insofar as they participate in a system of distinctions with other words. Relativity (or diversity, or pluralism) and its linguistic complementary opposite, universality, have been used together as a set, a system, for hundreds of years in Euro-thought. Some people prefer to explore their own truth by studying the diversity of things, and some people like to explore their own truth by studying similarities between things -- and both are okay, although they lead in different directions. If, at some point, the two camps come back together and respectfully compare notes, much can be accomplished in dialogue. And nobody has to do just one kind of research to the exclusion of the other."

(personal communication by Dan `Moonhawk' Alford , Native American scholar and participant at the SEED conferences in Albuquerque; see also http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm)

[iii]

  Some definitions in the tradition of the sociology of form:

"la forme prise par l'echange reciproque" (G. Simmel); "la configuration de cette dependence reciproque" (N. Elias); "la mise en situation de l'interaction" (G.H. Mead); "les modalites et les conventions de l'action collective" (Howard Becker). All are quoted in Claude Macquet and Didier Vrancken. Les formes de l'echange.Controle social et modeles de subjectivation. Ed. de l'Ulg, 2003.  An earlier description of the method is: G.G. Granger. Pensee formelle et sciences de l'homme. Aubier. Ed. Montaigne, 1967.

[iv]

I.e. the 'current economic system'. See section 3.1.B for a discussion of the concept of 'cognitive capitalism'. In general, we use this term for the current form of 'informational capitalism', i.e. a form of capitalism where the immaterial processes are of more importance than the material.

[v]

  Salvino Salvaggio, personal communication on hierarchy in FLOSS projects:

"D'abord et avant tout, il n'est pas entierement correct de soutenir que dans les initiatives P2P, les differents participants sont  "equipotents". Il suffit d'aller relire, par exemple, les archives et la documentation non-technique de la plupart des projets pour constater que certaines personnes y jouent un role de coordination et qu'elles definissent les modalites de collaboration des autres intervenants. De la meme maniere, certaines personnes dans les initiatives P2P ont une vision globale du projet alors que d'autres sont uniquement chargees de realiser des petits morceaux fonctionnels. La principale difference par rapport au capitalisme traditionnel, c'est que dans le P2P, la segmentation des niveaux de  "pouvoir" des uns et des autres est librement consentie, acceptee comme configuration des rapports visant l'optimisation de l'efficacite fonctionnelle. En tant que telle, toute configuration des rapports entre participants au projet peut etre ouvertement mise en discussion a chaque instant. Il ne s'agit pas d'une logique normative imposee et contre laquelle seule la voie du recours serait ouverte aux avis divergeants. Au contraire, la remise en cause par la discussion des pairs est inscrite au sein meme des processus d'auto-organisation. Decoule de ce premier aspect qu'il est excessif de dire que dans les projets P2P il ny a pas de hierarchie. Elle existe bel et bien mais est respectee la plupart du temps car librement consentie et discutee. J'en veux pour preuve que le projet Linux a ete coordonnepar une sorte d'instance directrice qui integre les changements et prend soin a  maintenir la coherence du projet en evitant que les contributeurs ne fassent n'importe quoi.On pourrait dire que dans les 2 cas il s'agit de pouvoir ou de hierarchie sans coercition car ceux qui ne sont pas d'accord ne sont pas  "punis", ils peuvent facilement circuler : entrer ou sortir du projet constitue un droit que nul ne conteste aux membres."

The practicalities of Equipotential selection are explored, at http://www.vecam.org/article.php3?id_article=346 . Here the process is investigated amongst young chatters when they move from a closed environment to an open public environment, and are subject to two processes: 1) la prise en charge; 2) la mise a l'epreuve

[vi]

See http://www.theyrule.net/ for examples.

[vii]

  the struggle for free access to free culture through the sharing of files:

"From the second generation on, you had distributed servers. You could run your own server and tie them into others. Searches took longer, were less accurate and there was no guarantee you would be searching a single other machine, much less the entire network. It was however, unstoppable. For every node you took the time and money to blast out of existence, there were several thousand others springing up. Clearly, the old tactics would not work. To make matters worse, these new networks were aware of the tactics being used against them, and actively tried to nullify them.  As the network programmers were adding features, they were also adding security, both for them, and for their users. Things started out simple, like support for file types other than MP3, and quickly became more sophisticated. Military grade encryption? No problem. Licence restrictions that beat the pigopolists with the very sticks they created? Sure, pick any of five. Random user names, obfuscated IP addresses, changing ports and just about everything else you could think of has been done by now.

The real stake in the heart of the RIAA and friends came with the complete removal of servers, in a true peer to peer sense. Instead of having many little servers, you had every node doing dual purpose client and server jobs. Searches were completely decentralised, and the RIAA was finished, period. The recent string of stinging court losses for the Greediest Monopoly on Earth in the US courts assured any chance the RIAA had was gone. Its worst nightmare was confirmed, as everyone else just knew, the services were completely legal. The Grokster decision affirmed the right of the companies to provide the services they always have, and to do so with impunity. People using it may be guilty of crimes, but the services themselves are not illegal. In the old days, there was one provider, and one repository, one throat to strangle. It was manageable technically if it came down to a technical solution. Instead of allowing that technical solution to blossom, they went the legal route, and lost. In the intervening years, the tech went around them, and they sat still, and possibly regressed.

The problem with forced evolution is that it tends to work. The RIAA made the networks evolve technically, from a relatively incocous MP3 network to the file sharing network from hell. There is nothing you can't get anymore, and there is no one to stop it. If they came up with a tool, unlikely as that may be, there is no place to implement it."

(http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=18206 )

Some online music resources:

An article explaining how to find legal online music, at : http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/10/a...sic/10INTE.html ; Grouper is a software tool that lets you share music amongst friends only, to ensure the fair use principle, at http://www.grouper.com/ ; user-enriched evaluations of filesharing programs at http://www.slyck.com/programs.php

[viii]

  the ascent of a third generation of peer-to-peer networking technology

"Each successive generation has decentralized more functions, making the networks harder to shut down and helping to expand the power of searches. The first first generation of file-swapping services, led by Napster, were built around big centralized indexes that would keep track of what was available everywhere on the network. These would serve as matchmakers, linking a person searching for a file with the computer where it was stored. That was efficient, allowing access to a huge range of material--but it also proved to be illegal. Courts said that Napster was responsible for a network where a vast amount of copyright infringement was happening and ultimately shut the company down. The second generation of decentralized services, led by Gnutella and the FastTrack technology underlying Kazaa, soon emerged to take its place. Neither of these had central servers. They relied instead on passing search requests from computer to computer until a file was found, and then passed that information back to the original searcher. That technology proved initially unwieldy, as millions of search requests passed through every computer on the network, creating traffic jams at low-bandwidth bottleneck points. That improved over time as programmers figured out ways to hand off these search requests more efficiently, but usually resulted in searches that included only part of a network--say 100,000 people instead of 2 million. A U.S Appeals Court recently ruled that this kind of decentralized network was legal, unlike Napster, in part because the software distributors did not have direct control over what was happening on the networks. "The (record labels and movie studios) urge a re-examination of the law in the light of what they believe to be proper public policy," the court wrote in that decision. "Doubtless, taking that step would satisfy the copyright owners' immediate economic aims. However, it would also alter general copyright law in profound ways with unknown ultimate consequences outside the present context." The third generation of networks, represented by eDonkey and now Morpheus, as well as a host of smaller independent developers, makes the tools even more decentralized than before. Distributed hash tables are essentially a way of taking a snapshot of where every file on the network is at a given moment and scattering bits of that information around the entire network. To find a given file, a search request goes first to any computer on the network. That computer will point to a different computer that has a little more information on how to find the file. The third computer might have information on the file itself--or it might take a few more hops to find the computer with the right information. The process is analogous to asking a succession of increasingly informed tour guides for directions, rather than accosting random people on the street. The information about the network in each place is constantly being updated as new files or computers are added."

(http://news.com.com/Super-powered+peer+to+peer/2100-1032_3-5397784.html?)

[ix]

  Consciously working for a participatory culture: Interview of Nicholas Reville of Downhill Battle

The following quote shows that developers of filesharing programs are aware of the social and political import of their work. See the previous quotes on how the whole development of filesharing is driven by a political and social struggle. It's not technology causing change (technological determinism), it is technology in turn determined by the dynamics of struggle.

Question by Greplaw editors: Is there anything about Bit Torrent that helps foster a participatory culture?

Reply: "It can definitely be a part of big step forward. 'Participatory culture' is how we've started thinking about the intersection of all these phenomenons like blogs, filesharing networks, wikis, and just the web in general. They all make it easier for people to create and distribute art/ideas and also let people act as filters and editors. But we're really at the very, very beginning of all this. The shift that we're going to see from the current top-down culture model will be absolutely revolutionary. As overused as that term is, there's really no other word that captures the magnitude of what's going on here.

As for BitTorrent specifically, searching for content on napster-style search and download clients really sucks and, on its own, creates a huge bias towards corporate content that people already know about. On the other hand, websites and blogs organize and present content so that you can discover things you didn't even know you were looking for. Since BitTorrent uses web-based links, it has the potential to fit very well with blogs and content management systems while making it possible for anyone to offer very large files without worrying about bandwidth."

(http://grep.law.harvard.edu/features/04/08/26/0236209.shtml)

DownHill Battle, at http://www.downhillbattle.org/ , is "a non-profit organization working to end the major label monopoly and build a better, fairer music industry"

[x]

Writeable Web tools are reviewed at http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/t/84

 

[xi]

Fortune magazine on the growing importance and effect s of blogging for the business community, at http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1011763,00.html

 

Amongst the recommended do-it-yourself blogging programs are http://movabletype.org/ and https://www.typepad.com/

 

[xii]

  Podcasting described, by the Washington Post

" The word "podcasting" is a mash-up, a contraction of broadcasting and iPod, the popular music player from Apple Computer.  The big idea is to let people save Internet audio so they can listen whenever they want from a computer or handheld device. Receiving software lets people pick podcasts from online directories, clicking a button to tell their computers to find and download new versions of those selected programs. Files automatically get copied to iPods. "

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20235-2005Mar9.html?)

One of the directories to find podcasting programs: http://audio.weblogs.com/

[xiii]

  Mobcasting

MotorFM allows MP3 downloads and songs streamed directly to mobile phones, at http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,66597,00.html

[xiv]

  Skype, using P2P filesharing principles for telephony:

Zennström and Friis, the creators of KaZaa, one of the early and popular P2P filesharing systems, came up with the idea of using P2P to enable free phone calls on the internet, and Skype was born, poised for an extraordinary rapid update. Beyond phone calls, users have been creatively tinkering with it to enable audio and video broadcasts (i.e. Skypecasting). Excerpts from an interview in Business Week:

"Q: Where else could this go, beyond files and people?

A: It could be other resources -- you know, storage, video streams. But this really works on two levels. First there's the peer network, and I've been stressing that because it's the enabler for everything. But then there are the applications. We could not have foreseen -- wow! -- all the things that could be developed on top of P2P. For instance, when we first used peer-to-peer technology, we didn't foresee that we could do voice. It became obvious to us after some time, but when we started we didn't know what the applications would be. But when we applied the technology to various industries, we realized we could create a sustainable competitive advantage. That's because, in the normal system you have a marginal cost for every unit you add. If your network is client/server-based, you have to add a new network card for each new Web server, central switch, and so on. But in a peer-to-peer network, you're reusing the system resources in the network, so the marginal cost of producing a phone call or a file transfer or something else is zero. "
(http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_44/b3906091_mz063.htm;

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_44/b3906087_mz063.htm)

An article explaining the rapid diffusion of Skype, at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/05/business/yourmoney/05tech.html?th

[xv]

On Vlogging: http://www.seriousmagic.com/products/vlogit/ ; http://www.vlog.com/

[xvi]

  How Bittorrent works

"Let's say you want to download a copy of this week's episode of Desperate Housewives. Rather than downloading the actual digital file that contains the show, instead you would download a small file called a "torrent" onto your computer. When you open that file on your computer, BitTorrent searches for other users that have downloaded the same "torrent." BitTorrent's "file-swarming" software breaks the original digital file into fragments, then shares those fragments between all the users that have downloaded the "torrent." Then the software stitches together those fragments into a single file that a user can view on their PC. Sites like Slovenia-based Suprnova offer up thousands of different torrents without storing the shows themselves. Meanwhile, BitTorrent is rapidly emerging as the preferred means of distributing large amounts of legitimate content such as versions of the free computer operating system Linux."

(http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,65625,00.html?)

A profile of Bram Cohen, designer of Bittorrent, in Wired at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/bittorrent.html

  Sources for Bittorrent downloads:

Note that they may disappear due to legal action.

"- Legal Torrents, which includes a wide selection of electronic music. It also has the Wired magazine Creative Commons CD, which has songs from artists like the Beastie Boys who agreed to release some of their songs under a more permissive copyright that allows free distribution and remixing.
- Torrentocracy has videos of the U.S. presidential debates and other political materials.
- File Soup offers open-source software and freeware, music from artists whose labels don't belong to the Recording Industry Association of America trade group, and programs from public television stations like PBS or the BBC.
- Etree is for devotees of "trade-friendly" bands like Phish and the Dead, who encourage fans to share live recordings, usually in the form of large files that have been minimally compressed to maintain sound quality."

(http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,65625,00.html?)

  Blog Torrent, an improvement of BitTorrent specially designed for TV-like channels:

"Blog Torrent adds features to BitTorrent that make it much easier for people to `publish' files. We've made a simple, web-based way to create a `torrent' and upload it in a one step. We've also made it easier to install a `tracker' which is necessary on the server side to connect everyone who's sharing the files. This makes it much easier for video artists, documentarians, or anyone with a camcorder and iMovie, to share their video content on a blog or website. To this point, BitTorrent has been complicated enough that it hasn't been adopted by artists, which means that most of the content people are sharing is being posted by people who didn't make it themselves, mostly Hollywood movies and TV shows. But what's exciting about peer-to-peer is that it's a free distribution method for people who could never afford distribution. With Blog Torrent, anyone can share what they make and that means totally new alternatives to mainstream media, in this case, television. We ultimately want to see internet "TV Channels" that download video in the background and let you watch at your convenience (a TiVo for the internet).

I know we're probably talking intuition rather than hard data here, but what is your sense of the potential audience for Blog Torrent (I mean content creators), and why? Is there any particular experience you've had which made you think "We have to do this and it is going to be huge."

I think the audience is very, very broad and varied. I have friends, for example, that make artistically serious video work but have never considered offering it online, because it was never practical for them. I hope Blog Torrent will let them jump in. I also expect documentary filmmakers will love this technology- they can make a name for themselves if they're new, or they can share extra footage and full-length interviews, they can offer old content that they aren't selling anymore, and I bet they'll even start to share first-run material for everyone who doesn't live near an independent cinema. People who make videos and movies always want people to see it and there's hundreds or thousands of times more content being created than gets out through mainstream channels. Not only that, but the number of content producers is set to explode: video has finally become practical on the desktop and small, hard-drive camcorders are right around the corner. We called it "Blog Torrent" - forgoing our original, and much cooler name "Battle Torrent" - because it makes sharing video as easy as blogging text or photos and, in doing so, might be able to do in the video world what blogs have done in the news world (or more). And whether it's our software or someone else's, I think TV is about to face more serious competition than they would ever imagine. There are too many talented people out there that have no space on the dial. And access to television channels is much narrower in terms of access than music, books, newspapers, or magazines- that means new pressures on the system could be even greater when things open up."

(http://broadbanddaily.gigaom.com/archives/2004/12/06/seeds-of-change-nicholas-reville-on-downhill-battles-blog-torrent-initiative/)

Good French-language summary of P2P TV, in particular the distribution of TV series through Blog Torrent, at http://www.futura-sciences.com/sinformer/n/news5076.php

[xvii]

  Exeem

"Tom Mennecke, news editor of the popular file sharing news site Slyck, claimed on 1 December (2004) that: "EXeem will marry the best features of a decentralised network, the easy searchability of an indexing server and the swarming powers of the BitTorrent network into one program." He told New Scientist: "Decentralising BitTorrent holds the potential to revolutionise the P2P community." Screenshots posted on another site by a self-proclaimed eXeem beta tester show a client that incorporates a search function and the ability to monitor downloading files. Theodore Hong, a P2P programmer in the UK, says that whether eXeem materialises or not, someone will find a way to decentralise BitTorrent searching and tracking. "Something like it is bound to come eventually," Hong told New Scientist. "It will be a big problem for the major media companies because they will have to confront the underlying fact that millions of people want to share files."

(New Scientist, http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6830)

[xviii]

  Customer-build network infrastructures, by Clay Shirky

"According to Metcalfe's Law, the value of an internet connection rises with the number of users on the network. However, the phone companies do not get to raise their prices in return for that increase in value. This is a matter of considerable frustration to them.  The economic logic of the market suggests that capital should be invested by whoever captures the value of the investment. The telephone companies are using that argument to suggest that they should either be given monopoly pricing power over the last mile, or that they should be allowed to vertically integrate content with conduit. Either strategy would allow them to raise prices by locking out the competition, thus restoring their coercive power over the customer and helping them extract new revenues from their internet subscribers.  However, a second possibility has appeared. If the economics of internet connectivity lets the user rather than the network operator capture the residual value of the network, the economics likewise suggest that the user should be the builder and owner of the network infrastructure.

The creation of the fax network was the first time this happened, but it won't be the last. WiFi hubs and VoIP adapters allow the users to build out the edges of the network without needing to ask the phone companies for either help or permission. Thanks to the move from analog to digital networks, the telephone companies' most significant competition is now their customers, because if the customer can buy a simple device that makes wireless connectivity or IP phone calls possible, then anything the phone companies offer by way of competition is nothing more than the latest version of ZapMail. "

(http://shirky.com/writings/zapmail.html)

[xix]

  Definition of Collaborative Citizen Journalism

" It's called collaborative citizen journalism (CCJ), where ordinary citizens band together on the Web to write original stories and critique mainstream media stories, using the Internet to connect with each other and to make sure their thoughts reach the public.  This new form of journalism differs from its more popular blogging cousin in that, unlike blogging, which eschews (in many cases) the more rigorous elements of journalism, collaborative media efforts tap into a particular community to make sure a story is as complete as possible."

(http://technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/wo/wo_052005hellweg.asp )

[xx]

  An example of a video-broadcasting experiment, by IndyMedia, an Internet-based independent media network, related to the alterglobalisation movement

"GENEVA03 is a temporary broadcasting studio during the g8-summit transmitting video and audio streams live from the cultural center l'usine in geneva from may 29 to june 3. The livecast will be streamed on the internet and picked up and redistributed by local and international broadcasters as well as projected in the streets and theatres of Geneva. In order to cover the protests between Geneva, Lausanne and Anmasse in real time, media activists will work from the "everyone-is-an-expert" mobile studio van, which - with a self-adjusting bi-directional satellite dish - will provide a mobile internet connection and transmit live-footage from the roaming protests. The GENEVA03 project is a joint effort of a growing number of video activists and independent filmmakers together with dozens of indymedia reporters, to organize and broadcast independent news coverage from the G8 events. We are currently programming a stream, that, besides the live coverage of the mass-protests, will include movies, concerts, talk-shows, vj sessions, subvertisements and other radically innovative formats."

(http://v2v.indymedia.de/)

  Towards a worldwide video syndicate:

"A Call to Join and Contribute to the Establishment of a Video-Sharing Syndicate/Network

Project Description: For some time now the idea of utilising peer2peer structures to assemble a user-built distribution platform has been circulating. Recently, in the run-up to the G8 meeting in Evian, a concrete proposal has been made to establish a system for the sharing of video. Long-term we believe that we can assemble a sustainable and scalable platform for audio-visual materials of a critical and independent nature. This is an appeal to groups/individuals to get involved, dedicate some resources, support and expand the project generally. Works to be distributed over the system will vary from somewhat edited footage suitable for use as a stock archive to finished documentaries/films. Each file will be accompanied by metadata in an xml .info file and produced as an searchable RSS feed for people to integrate into their own sites and published on its own website (where there will also be a manifesto, how-to's. contact info for participating groups etc.) Amongst the metadata fields will be a specification for the nature of the license under which the materials may be used (e.g. Creative Commons share-alike)"
(http://v2v.indymedia.de/)

[xxi]

Citizen-based journalism initiatives are not just citizen blogs, but rather more sophisiticated attempts to create an alternative form of journalism. There are 3 main types: local news ventures, based on local communities, such as backfence.com; broadly-focused sites such as OhMyNews; and collaborative vetting services where groups of people check articles from the mainstream press.

  OhMyNews!

"OhmyNews is a kind of 'fantastic mix' of the citizen reporters and professional reporters," Oh told the audience. "It has 35,000 citizen reporters and 40 staff reporters whose reporting style is very similar to professional journalists. So they are in charge of the straight news and investigations."

(http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?article_class=8&no=201599&rel_no=1)

Similar initiatives are WikiNews,  which is based on a collective 'vetting' of news articles, at http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page ; also see News Trust as another vetting cooperative, at http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Main_Page ; Indymedia: http://indymedia.org ; Take Back the News, http://www.takebackthenews.com/

[xxii]

  Book on citizen-based journalism:

We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People For the People by Dan Gillmor 299pp, O'Reilly

From a review

"He tells us of OhMyNews.com in South Korea, which has 15,000  "citizen reporters" filing news and comment; and of wikipedia, the online encyclopedia where anyone can write or edit an article, which now has more than one million articles in more than 100 languages.  He tells us about bloggers who have bigger audiences than many   newspapers, and who have become just as influential as any specialist journalist in their sector. How Russ Kirk of the alternative news site The Memory Hole used the freedom of information act to get photos of dead US soldiers being brought back from Iraq in flag-draped caskets into the public domain; and how bloggers swarmed together to claim the scalp of Trent Lott, the majority leader in the US Senate, after he appeared to wax nostalgic for a racist past at a fellow senator's birthday dinner.  Gillmor tells of his own experience as a columnist on the San Jose Mercury, starting to write a blog and dealing with comments and criticisms from his readers, who, he claims,  "have made me a better journalist, because they find my mistakes, tell me what I'm missing and help me understand nuances".

(http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1344544,00.html)

[xxiii]

Weblogs as a process of mass-amateurisation, not mass-professionalistion, at http://shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html

[xxiv]

  Blogs defined as 'the self in conversation', by David Weinberger

"And it seems to me that one of the reasons why weblogs are being maintained by people who have a handful of readers, as well as by people who have many readers, is that the weblogs are doing something for that person, and for the groups that form around the weblogs. So, for example, a big part of it is that weblogs are a way that we have a voice on the Web. And, in fact, not simply voice, because we had that before. We could have posted a Web page or joined a discussion group or whatever. Weblogs are persistent. That space stays there, and every day or five times a week or whatever it is, you update that page. And people come back to that page, and that page becomes sort of your proxy self on the Web. The promise of the homepage was that we would have a persistent place that would be our Web presence. Well, now we do. And they're called weblogs, so weblogs are self, and they're self in conversation with others. So much of weblogging involves responding to other people or getting comments or linking to other people. So that's a big deal to have now a place that is a Web self that's created by writing and is created in conversation with other people. Of course that's a big deal. It doesn't have much to do with the media."

(http://www.itworld.com/Tech/2987/transcript_weinberger1_050201/pfindex.html)

[xxv]

  RSS Feeds

The Washington Post explains: "RSS lets Web sites publish free "feeds" of their content, which a program called a newsreader collects on a set schedule, displaying new headlines and links for you to read within the newsreader or, with one click, in your Web browser"

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A55027-2004Mar13&notFound=true)

Some sites offer the same functions as an RSS reader, i.e. the possibility to combine various blogs in folders and to monitor them all from the same place, see http://www.bloglines.com/

[xxvi]

  Nodeb.com

"On Nodeb.com, people list their open nodes, essentially inviting strangers to join a worldwide community of users. This site has more than 11,000 registered access points in the United States. Even if service providers can make it more difficult for users to share Internet access, techies will eventually find a way around them."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/opinion/19CONL.html?th )

An article about the advances of the "Personal Telco" movement in the U.S., at http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0615/p01s03-ussc.html ; home page at http://www.personaltelco.net/static/index.html

[xxvii]

Wireless Commons in Hawaii

Here's a description of what is happening in Hawaii, where a peer to peer wireless network is covering more than 300 square miles:

"Now people all over the island are tapping into Wiecking's wireless links, surfing the Web at speeds as much as 100 times greater than standard modems permit. High school teachers use the network to leapfrog a plodding state effort to wire schools. Wildlife regulators use it to track poachers. And it's all free. Wiecking has built his network through a coalition of educators, researchers, and nonprofit organizations; with the right equipment and passwords, anyone who wants to tap in can do so, at no charge."

(http://www.business2.com/articles/mag/0,1640,38492,00.html)

The Wireless Commons reading list:

Additional Reading

- "Radio Revolution: The Coming Age of Unlicensed Wireless" by Kevin Werbach, published by the New America Foundation. [http://www.newamerica.net/Download_Docs/pdfs/Pub_File_1427_1.pdf]
- Building Wireless Community Networks. 2001. by Rob Flickenger. O'Reilly.
- Wired/Unwired: The Urban Geography of Digital Networks. 2003. by Anthony Townsend. Unpublished PhD dissertation. [http://urban.blogs.com/research/2004/03/dissertation.html]

(http://www.wirelesscommons.org/ )

[xxviii]

Municipal and local wireless networks

  Reports by Business Week, on wireless and WiFi developments: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_40/b3902057_mz011.htm http://www.businessweek.com/technology/tc_special/03wireless2.htm, http://www.businessweek.com/technology/tc_special/tc_04wifi.htm

  Cities like Philadelphia are developing free wireless broadband systems for their citizens, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54754-2004Sep1.html?

  Muniwireless.com - best site for news on developments in unlicensed wireless at the municipal level worldwide.

[xxix]

Mark Pesce on building the alternative media network

Pesce proposal is specifically for a network which could also distribute similar programming, not all nodes doing different things.

"So how do you turn these little stations into a network? Well, there are two answers to this question.  The first is fairly obvious: you put the transmitters close enough together that each station is a paired receiver/transmitter, and in so doing you create a mesh network of transmitters.   The receiver picks up the signal and passes it along to the transmitter, which rebroadcasts it on the same frequency.  This is somewhat analogous to how mobile networks work - you move from cell to cell and the signal follows you seamlessly - and is very well suited to densely populated urban districts, college campuses, public events, and so forth. The costs for each node in such a system are very low - probably less than fifty dollars for both the AM receiver and the transmitter....) Now it isn't possible to blanket an sparsely populated entire country....   In situations like this, Internet streaming comes to the rescue.  Any signal which can be delivered via AM radio can also be delivered via the internet at dial-up speeds.   The streaming signal output can put plugged into the AM transmitter, and, once again, you've got your network.  In this way you can cover both the densely populated areas and the spaces in between them with one network.Now both of these proposals are more than just idle ideas - they're the heart of a new network - RADIO RHIZOME - which launched in Los Angeles."

(http://www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce/fbm.html)

[xxx]

Mark Pesce on the internet TV tuner and its disruptive effects on traditional broadcasting:

"I do believe that it is appropriate to examine the politics of scarcity with respect to television broadcasting, and engineer a solution which effectively routes around the problem (to steal a phrase from John Gilmore), recapitulating the Britannica to Wikipedia process. As media consumers, we need to liberate ourselves from the anti-market forces of the free-to-air commercial networks, and, as creators and purveyors of audiovisual content, we need to free ourselves from the anti-market forces of commercial networks as programme distributors. In other words, we need to develop a comprehensive computational and emergent strategy to disintermediate the distributors of audiovisual media, directly connecting producers to consumers, and further, erasing the hard definition between producer and consumer, so that a producer's product will only be identifiable by its inherent quality, in the eyes of the viewer, and not by the imprimatur of the distributor.., the pieces are in place for a radical reconfiguration of the technology of programme delivery to the TV viewer. Digital television, thought to be the endpoint of this revolution, was actually only its beginning, and while digital televisions are very useful as display monitors, their broadcast tuners with their sophisticated analog electronics will be completely obsolete once broadband supplants broadcast as the delivery medium. The digital TV is a great output device, but a lousy tuner, because the design of the device reinforces the psychology of spectrum scarcity. What we need, therefore, is a new device, which sits between the Internet, on one hand, and the digital television set, on the other, and acts as a new kind of tuner, thereby enabling a new, disintermediated distribution mechanism. The basic specification for this device is quite simple: it would be capable of locating, downloading and displaying audiovisual content, in any common format, on the viewer's chosen display device. That display device doesn't even need to be a digital television - it could be a PC. Or the soon-to-be-released PSP, the PlayStation Portable. Or a 3G cell phone. This intermediary device - the "Internet tuner," if you will - could be a hardware-based set-top box, or a piece of software running on a more general-purpose computing device - it doesn't really matter...When the idea for the Internet tuner popped into my head... I presumed that I'd stumbled onto a completely novel idea. InI've discovered how wrong I was. Projects like the BBC Internet Media Player, MythTV on LINUX, Media Portal for Xbox and Windows, Video LAN Controller for Mac OS X, Windows and LINUX - the list goes on and on. Just four weeks ago TiVO announced that they're going to release a software upgrade which will make their PVRs Internet-aware, so that they can locate and download Internet audiovisual content. These ideas are floating around the commercial software community, too, in products like Microsoft IPTV, and SnapStream's Beyond TV. Many people are working toward the features of the Internet tuner, but none of them - to my knowledge - have brought these pieces together with an emphasis on the emergent qualities of the tuner as a tool for communication...the Internet tuner or something very much like it will do for audiovisual media what the Web did for print - make it immediately accessible from anywhere, at any time, for any reason. Because of the Web, libraries are transforming from repositories of knowledge into centers where people come to be pointed toward online repositories. The library is evolving into a physically constituted Google."

(http://www.disinfo.com/site/displayarticle4565.html; see also http://www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce/fbm.html)

[xxxi]

Voice over Wi-Fi

"Today people take laptops to wireless hot spots in coffee bars and airports to check their e-mail messages and to explore the Internet. Soon they may pack a new type of telephone and take it along, too, to make inexpensive calls using those wireless connections. The phones are called voice over Internet protocol over Wi-Fi (or, simply, voice over Wi-Fi) handsets. Like conventional voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, services, they digitize the voice and send it as data packets over the Internet. But they do it wirelessly, over an 802.11, or Wi-Fi, network.  And also like conventional VoIP, the technology may become popular with people who want to economize on their long-distance bills by using Wi-Fi connections when possible."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/03/technology/circuits/03next.html?8cir)

[xxxii]

The economics of netcasting, by Mark Pesce

"A broadcaster spends the same amount of money whether 10 people or 10 million are watching a broadcast, because the broadcast tower reaches all who want to tune into it.  The economics for netcasting are quite different.  Anyone can set up a server to send out ten simultaneous program streams - but it requires a million times the infrastructure and bandwidth to serve the same program to 10 million people. Or it used to. The BBC doesn't have the bandwidth to netcast its programming to all 66 million of its viewers.  Fortunately it doesn't that kind of capability, because the BBC has cleverly designed the Flexible TV application to act as a node in a Peer-to-Peer network.  Anyone using Flexible TV has access to the programs which have been downloaded by any other Flexible TV client, and can get those programs directly from them.  All BBC need do is provide a single copy of a program into the network of P2P clients, and they handle the work themselves.   More than this, because of the P2P technology used by the BBC (more on this in a moment) a Flexible TV user can get a little bit of the program from any number of other peers; rather than going through the process of downloading an entire program from one other peer, the Flexible TV client can ask a hundred other clients for small sections of the program, and download these hundred sections simultaneously.  Not only does this decrease the amount of traffic that any clients has to handle, it also means that it produces a virtuous cycle: the more popular a program is, the more copies of it will exist in the network of peers, and therefore the more easily a peer can download it.

In other words, the BBC has cracked the big problem which has prevented netcasting from taking off.  In this system of "peercasting" the network is actually more efficient than a broadcast network, because more than one program can be provided simultaneously, and failure in any one point in the network doesn't bring the network down.

(http://www.hyperreal.org/~mpesce/fbm.html)

[xxxiii]

P2P as the necessary model for interactive TV:

Fortune magazine uncovered yet another aspect of the coming peer to peer age in technology, by pointing out that the current `central server based' methods for interactive TV are woefully inadequate to match supply and demand:

"Essentially, file-served television describes an Internet for video content. Anyone--from movie company to homeowner--could store video on his own hard disk and make it available for a price. Movie and television companies would have tons of hard disks with huge capacities, since they can afford to store everything they produce. Cable operators and satellite companies might have some hard disks to store the most popular content, since they can charge a premium for such stuff. And homeowners might have hard disks (possibly in the form of PVRs) that can be used as temporary storage for content that takes time to get or that they only want to rent--or permanent storage for what they've bought."

(http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=208364 )

"The new TiVo technology, which will become a standard feature in its video recorders, will allow users to download movies and music from the Internet to the hard drive on their video recorder. Although the current TiVo service allows users to watch broadcast, cable or satellite programs at any time, the new technology will make it possible for them to mix content from the Internet with those programs."

(personal communication)

[xxxiv]

Review of U.S.-based TV-IP developments, in The Washington Post:

"Now comes a fresh group of contenders for the Internet TV throne, all trying new twists on sending video over the global computer network. They carry funky names, too, like Akimbo, DaveTV, RipeTV and TimeshifTV. All are trying to exploit the increasing number of high-speed Internet links in homes and the declining costs for transmitting and storing digital video Some offer personalized entertainment networks, ones you or I create by mixing and matching niche programs that appeal to our inner couch-potato. Like TiVo, the digital recorder company, these services are trying to break away from the static program lineups that dominate today's TV. Unlike earlier Web video networks -- flops such as Pseudo.com and Digital Entertainment Network -- today's contenders collect content from other companies rather than producing their own.  Most of the new players are operating on the fringes of the Internet video free-for-all. That's because virtually all the leading cable and satellite companies, along with the movie studios, are rushing to develop their own video-on-demand services. "

(http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A2165-2004Oct27.html?)

European TVIP plans reviewed by Wired

"The BBC is quietly preparing a challenge to Microsoft and other companies jostling to reap revenues from video streams. It is developing code-decode (codec) software called Dirac in an open-source project aimed at providing a royalty-free way to distribute video. The sums at stake are potentially huge because the software industry insists on payment per viewer, per hour of encoded content. This contrasts with TV technology, for which viewers and broadcasters alike make a one-off royalties payment when they buy their equipment. Tim Borer, manager of the Dirac project at the BBC's Kingswood Warren R&D lab, pointed out: 'Coding standards for video were always free and open. We have been broadcasting PAL TV in this country for decades. The standard has been available for anyone to use... If the BBC had to pay per hour of coding in PAL we would be in trouble.'

( http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,65105,00.html?)

[xxxv]

Overview of some digital radio developments and recording and management tools

Radio Your Way

"It's bizarre that five years into the digital video-recorder era, you still can't buy a digital VCR for radio. Why has the electronics industry developed so many machines that let us time-shift Dr. Phil and "Saturday Night Live," but so few that do so for Dr. Joy Browne and "Science Friday"?Actually, there is one such device. Radio YourWay (pogoproducts.com) looks at first glance like a pocket-size (2.2 by 3.9 by 0.7 inches) AM-FM transistor radio, which, in part, it is. But it also contains a built-in timer, so that you can set up a schedule for recording radio broadcasts. Programming it is exactly as easy - or as difficult - as programming a VCR, except that it uses a military-style 24-hour clock instead of AM and PM designations. At the specified time, the radio turns itself on. It tunes in the station, records for the requested interval and then turns off.Once you've captured a show, you can play it back at a more convenient time (or in an area with no reception), pause it while you take a shower or a meeting, fast-forward through the ads, or even archive it to a Windows PC using a U.S.B. cable."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/technology/circuits/26stat.html?th )

Audiofeast

"AudioFeast: Radio listeners looking for on-demand access to talk and music programs might want to consider a new Internet service that records radio shows. Like a kind of TiVo for Internet radio, AudioFeast can be set to save hundreds of shows, from "Washington Journal" to "Stamp Talk," and manage their transfer onto certain audio players. AudioFeast carries news, weather, business and entertainment programs from dozens of media partners, including National Public Radio, the Arts and Entertainment Network, and The Wall Street Journal. Operating until recently as Serenade Systems, AudioFeast also offers 100 music channels in 16 genres, including blues, jazz and electronica. AudioFeast costs $49.95 a year; a free 15-day trial is available at www.audiofeast.com"

(quote from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/t...?pagewanted=all)

TimeTrax.

"Created by 35-year-old Canadian programmer Scott MacLean, TimeTrax allows subscribers of XM Radio's satellite radio service to record music off the radio, appending track title and artist information to each song. Fans of indie rock could, for example, cue their satellite radio receivers to an indie rock station, click on Record in the TimeTrax software, go to sleep, and wake up the next day with eight hours' worth of music by the likes of The Fiery Furnaces and Spoon. What's more, users can schedule the software to record a certain channel at a certain time, much the same way people can program a VCR or a TiVo to record a TV show while they're on vacation or at work. Right now the service only works with XM Radio on a device called the PCR, which the company sold so users could listen to satellite radio in their homes instead of just in their cars. Since TimeTrax came out, XM Radio discontinued the device, creating a lucrative market on eBay where the $49 retail units are selling for more than $350. MacLean says that the program has been downloaded about 7,000 times in the two weeks that it has been available. TimeTrax is on the forefront of what will likely be the music and technology industry's next world war: the recording of broadcast digital audio. "We're at the beginning of the next P2P," says Jim Griffin, CEO of Cherry Lane Digital, a music and technology consultancy. "Peer-to-peer is small by comparison." What has Griffin and others interested is the concept that when radios all broadcast digital music signals, programs such as TimeTrax will allow users to search for and capture songs similar to how they do it today with programs such as Kazaa. Instead of grabbing a song from someone's hard drive, users will pluck it from the air via a digital radio signal. It's a new situation, which in part is what makes TimeTrax such an interesting case."

(quote from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/t...?pagewanted=all)

 - Audio Xtract

"connects you to a database of Internet radio stations that can be sorted by genre or bandwidth. Once you've found one that appeals to you, just click on Record. The software enables the computer to record the material in the form of individual MP3 files and stores them in a folder. The files are named according to their content, making it easy to delete those - like commercials - you don't want. Because the contents are recorded as MP3 files, they can be played on computers and portable media players and burned onto CD's. Audio Xtract is $50 at www.audioxtract.com"

(quote from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/16/t...?pagewanted=all)

[xxxvi]

Shoutcast aims to enable the setting up of streaming radio broadcasts on the internet, see http://www.shoutcast.com/

[xxxvii]

Business Week, on the future of internet telephony, at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/tc_special/04voip.htm

[xxxviii]

Mesh Networks or Ad Hoc Networks for the telecom sector, as described in The Economist:

"The mesh-networking approach, which is being pursued by several firms, does this in a particularly clever way. First, the neighbourhood is "seeded" by the installation of a "neighbourhood access point" (NAP)--a radio base-station connected to the Internet via a high-speed connection. Homes and offices within range of this NAP install antennas of their own, enabling them to access the Internet at high speed.Then comes the clever part. Each of those homes and offices can also act as a relay for other homes and offices beyond the range of the original NAP. As the mesh grows, each node communicates only with its neighbours, which pass Internet traffic back and forth from the NAP. It is thus possible to cover a large area quickly and cheaply."

(http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=1176136)

[xxxix]

In the following website, Andrew Feenberg discusses technological determinism, a critical theory of technology, the technical code as the locus of social struggle, and places all that and more in the context of earlier thinkers such as Heidegger, Habermas, Baudrillard, Virilio and others, which he explains with great clarity.Click on the essays at the bottom of the webpage under the heading, `Some Background Texts and Applications'.

(URL = http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/ )

[xl]

Cornelis Castoriadis on the mutual imbrication of the techno-social:

"Organisation sociale et technique sont deux termes qui expriment la creation et l'autoposition d'une societe donnee: dans l'organisation sociale d'ensemble, fins et moyens, significations et instruments, efficacite et valeur ne sont pas separable. Toute societe cree son monde, interne et externe, et cette creation n'est ni instrument ni cause, mais 'dimension' partout presente. (p. 307)

"Le monde moderne est sans doute determine, a une foule de niveaux, par sa technologie; mais cette technologie n'est rien d'autre qu'une des expressions essentielles de ce monde, son 'langage', a l'egard de la nature exterieure et interieure." (p. 311)

Source: Cornelis Castoriadis. L'institution imaginaire de la societe.  Seuil (Points /Essais), 1975

[xli]

A.Y. Aulin-Ahmavaara, "The Law of Requisite Hierarchy", Kybernetes, Vol. 8 (1979), p. 266

[xlii]

Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm. Yochai Benkler

URL = htpp://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html

[xliii]

Principles of the free software movement, described at Fsf.org:

`Free software'' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ``free'' as in ``free speech,'' not as in ``free beer.''

Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

  The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

  The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

  The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).

  The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits. (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this." (Stallman website)

[xliv]

The GPL license explained:

"The GPL governs the programming instructions called source code that developers write and then convert into the binary files that computers understand. At its heart, the GPL permits anyone to see, modify and redistribute that source code, as long as they make changes available publicly and license them under the GPL. That contrasts with some licenses used in open-source projects that permit source code to be made proprietary.  Another requirement is that GPL software may be tightly integrated only with other software that also is governed by the GPL. That provision helps to create a growing pool of GPL software, but it's also spurred some to label the license "viral," raising the specter that the inadvertent or surreptitious inclusion of GPL code in a proprietary product would require the release of all source code under the GPL."

(http://news.com.com/Sprucing+up+open+sources+GPL+foundation/2100-7344_3-5501561.html?tag=nefd.lede)

An article about the 'copyleft attitude' and the emergence of the free art license, at http://infos.samizdat.net/article301.html

Richard Stallman on the free software principles:

"My work on free software is motivated by an idealistic goal: spreading freedom and cooperation. I want to encourage free software to spread, replacing proprietary software that forbids cooperation, and thus make our society better. That's the basic reason why the GNU General Public License is written the way it is--as a copyleft. All code added to a GPL-covered program must be free software, even if it is put in a separate file. I make my code available for use in free software, and not for use in proprietary software, in order to encourage other people who write software to make it free as well. I figure that since proprietary software developers use copyright to stop us from sharing, we cooperators can use copyright to give other cooperators an advantage of their own: they can use our code.:"

(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/pragmatic.html )

French-language interview with Stallman: http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=214

[xlv]

Richard Stallman on why it is okay to charge for free software:

"The word ``free'' has two legitimate general meanings; it can refer either to freedom or to price. When we speak of ``free software'', we're talking about freedom, not price. (Think of ``free speech'', not ``free beer''.) Specifically, it means that a user is free to run the program, change the program, and redistribute the program with or without changes. Free programs are sometimes distributed gratis, and sometimes for a substantial price. Often the same program is available in both ways from different places. The program is free regardless of the price, because users have freedom in using it."

(http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html )

[xlvi]

Steve Weber, professor of political science at U.C. Berkeley, maintains:

"that the open source community has built a mini-economy around the counterintuitive notion that the core property right in software code is the right to distribute, not to exclude. And it works! This is profound "and has much broader implications for the property rights regimes that underpin other industries, from music and film to pharmaceuticals. Open source is transforming how we think about  "intellectual" products, creativity, cooperation, and ownership--issues that will, in turn, shape the kind of society, economy, and community we build in the digital era." (publisher statement)

[xlvii]

Overview of the commercial uptake of Open Source software, June 2005 update

"And so Linux entered commercial use. Its first, and still most successful, niche was Web servers; for at least five years, the majority of the world's Web servers have used open-source software. Then, several years ago, IBM started to contribute money and programmers to open-source efforts. IBM, Intel, and Dell invested in Red Hat Software, the leading commercial Linux vendor, and Oracle modified its database products to work with Linux. In late 2003, Novell announced its purchase of SuSE, a small German Linux vendor, for more than $200 million. IBM invested $50 million in Novell. IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell began to sell hardware with Linux preinstalled. IBM also supports the Mozilla Foundation, developer of the open-source Firefox browser, and with Intel, HP, and other companies recently created the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), a consortium promoting the business use of Linux, which has hired Torvalds and other open-source developers.

Now, Linux is running on everything from $80 routers to cell phones to IBM mainframes, and is much more common on desktop PCs. Red Hat is a highly profitable $200 million company growing 50 percent per year, and commercial open-source vendors serve many important software markets. For instance, in databases, there is MySQL, which now has annual revenues of about $20 million, doubling every year. In application servers, there is JBoss, and in Web servers, Covalent. In the server market, the eventual dominance of Linux seems a foregone conclusion. Michael Tiemann, Red Hat's vice president for open-source affairs, told me, "Unix is already defeated, and there's really nothing Microsoft can do either. It's ours to lose." Of course, Microsoft, which refused all interview requests for this article, sees things differently. But surveys from IDC indicate that in the server market, Linux revenues are growing at more than 40 percent per year, versus less than 20 percent per year for Windows. Unix, meanwhile, is declining."

(Charles Ferguson, Technology Review, June 2005, at  http://technologyreview.com/articles/05/06/issue/feature_linux.asp?p=2 )

[xlviii]

The Professionalization of Linux

The following article by Business Week is the result of an in-depth investigation regarding the actual production of Linux:

"Little understood by the outside world, the community of Linux programmers has evolved in recent years into something much more mature, organized, and efficient. Put bluntly, Linux has turned pro. Torvalds now has a team of lieutenants, nearly all of them employed by tech companies, that oversees development of top-priority projects. Tech giants such as IBM (IBM ), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ ), and Intel (INTC ) are clustered around the Finn, contributing technology, marketing muscle, and thousands of professional programmers. IBM alone has 600 programmers dedicated to Linux, up from two in 1999. There's even a board of directors that helps set the priorities for Linux development. Not that this Inc. operates like a traditional corporation. Hardly. There's no headquarters, no CEO, and no annual report. And it's not a single company. Rather, it's a cooperative venture in which employees at about two dozen companies, along with thousands of individuals, work together to improve Linux software. The tech companies contribute sweat equity to the project, largely by paying programmers' salaries, and then make money by selling products and services around the Linux operating system. They don't charge for Linux itself, since under the cooperative's rules the software is available to all comers for free."

(http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_05/b3918001_mz001.htm?)

[xlix]

Personal characteristics of FLOSS developers, an Asian survey and study:

"1) Development time is short (less than 5 hours par week); 2) Main targets of development are networks and Web services. 3) The number of projects are few, but about half of the developers have leadership experience; 4) More then 40 percent acts globally in Japan and Asia; 5) Many developers are not engaged in programming work; 6) Most developers learn their skill by themselves and do not have an interest in formal qualifications; 7) Main purpose is to obtain and share skills and knowledge; 8) About 60 percent of the developers regard their signature as important; 9) Main sources of assistance are government agencies and public foundations in Japan, educational institutions in Asia, and various organizations and individuals in US

(http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_11/shimizu/index.html )

[l]

Production without a manufacturer, an example from the field of music:

"Record companies, schmecord companies - who needs `em? That's not where the money is. The business is with the real customers - the fans. That's who we're trying to connect with," band member Frank Black, AKA Black Francis, told the Associated Press this week.  "I never really was much of a believer in the album anyway," Black said. "Singles are what people relate to."  Apparently, the band doesn''t feel it needs a record label any more and, while their plans are still unformed at the moment, the idea generally is to combine selling live CDs made and then sold at concerts, producing music for movies and commercials and distributing singles via the internet.."

(email communication from Christophe Lestavel, original source DM Europe at http://www.dmeurope.com/ )

[li]

Production without a manufacturer, or the supply-side supplying itself:

"Few people in mainstream world even recognize that a radically new kind of economics is emerging - the "demand-side" supplying itself! Searls said that open source is the victory of ST - "social technology" -- over IT - information technology. This stems directly from the commons principles that lie at the heart of the Internet - "No one owns it. Everybody can use it. Anyone can improve it. One comment by Searls really reverberated with me. He said that the word "authority" means that we grant certain people the right to "author" who we are. Now that hierarchical authority is being supplanted by decentralized, networked authority, in effect, "We are all the authors of each other."

(copy from unknown blog, received by personal communication)

[lii]

See also an analysis of the relation between free software and capitalism, at http://www.oekonux.org/texts/marketrelations.html

[liii]

Structural use of interactive consumers to externalize costs, by Johan Soderbergh:

"The shifting of time-consuming tasks from paid employees to unpaid customers when accessing banking services, is one example of enhanced interactivity. Another example would be the 15.000 volunteer maintainers of AOL's chat-rooms. Or the attempt by the Open Source initiative to co-opt the labour power of free software engineers.These are highpoints in a broader pattern, according to Tiziana Terranova. Free labour has become structural to late capitalist cultural economy. It is therefore totally inadequate to apply the leftist favourite narrative of authentic subcultures that are hijacked by commercialism. Authentic subcultures at this point of time is a delusion, she charges. `Independent' cultural production takes place within a broader capitalist framework which has already anticipated and therefore modified the `active consumer'. Interactivity counts to nothing else than intensified exploitation of the audience power of the user/consumer. It is not different to the intensification of exploitation of wage labourers."

(http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/soderberg.html )

[liv]

How the use of FLOSS methods leads to lower transaction costs in business, at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_11/soares/index.html

[lv]

The history of Linux

"This paper will establish the development of Linux, complexity theory and its relationship to Linux, the Linux business model, rules governing Linux and the possible lessons that future managers can learn. Comprehensive ranges of secondary sources have been used to compile a detailed but accurate picture of this fascinating story of Linux."

(http://journal.hyperdrome.net/issues/issue1/wright.html)

[lvi]

FS/OS development in Asia:

Linux making great strides in China, at http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2004/tc20041115_4873_tc057.htm?

Characteristics of Asian open source development, http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_11/shimizu/index.html

Home page for Asian OSS, at http://www.asia-oss.org

[lvii]

Firefox, the alternative browser

"Tuesday, the answer to IE arrived: a safe, free, fast, simple and compatible browser called Mozilla Firefox. Firefox (available for Win 98 or newer, Mac OS X and Linux at www.mozilla.org) is an unlikely rival, developed by a small nonprofit group with extensive volunteer help. Its code dates to Netscape and its open-source successor, Mozilla, but in the two years since Firefox debuted as a minimal, browser-only offshoot of those sprawling suites, it has grown into a remarkable product. Firefox displays an elegant simplicity within and without."

(http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/business/yourmoney/19digi.html?th)

The Linux desktop:

"as DESKTOP OPERATING SYSTEM, replace MS Windows with Linspire Lindows, Gnome, or BeOS Max' as INSTANT MESSAGING SERVICE, replace AOL AIM with Jabber; as OFFICE SUITE, replace MS Office with OpenOffice or Gnome Office ; as ACCOUNTING PROGRAM, replace Inuit with Compiere; for PROJECT MANAGEMENT, replace IBM Lotus Notes, with Horde Project, or Net Office Project;

as DATABASE PROGRAM, replace MS Access with Twiki, Druid, Gnome DB ; for FAX MGT., replace Esher VSI Fax, with HylaFax or Mgetty+Sendfax; for BROWSING, replace Internet Explorer with Firefox."

(personal communication, inspired by a Wired article)

Mono is an open source alternative to the Microsoft .Net specifications, at  http://www.mono-project.com/about/index.html

Five fundamental reasons why Open Source projects do not make great inroads amongst ordinary users, at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_4/levesque/index.html#l5

[lviii]

An in-depth series of reports on the usage of FLOSS methodologies and their institutionalization, http://www.infonomics.nl/FLOSS/report/, June 2002

[lix]

Co-founder Jimmy Wales on the ambitious aims of Wikipedia

"One of the most important things to know about Wikipedia is that it is free to license and that the free license enables other people to freely copy, redistribute, modify our work both commercially and non-commercially. We are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License and we've been around since January 2001, so that's about four years ago. The Wikimedia Foundation is our non-profit organization that I founded about a year and a half ago and transferred all the assets into the foundation, so the foundation actually manages the website and runs everything. The mission statement of the foundation is to distribute a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet in their own language. And we really mean that because every single person on the planet, this includes a lot more than just a cool website."

(Jimmy Wales lecture at Stanford University, 2-9-2005, quoted by Howard Rheingold on the SmartMob blog)

Wikipedia.org: The pro's and cons of Wikipedia (vs. traditional encyclopedia production) are discussed in this article: http://soufron.free.fr/soufron-spip/article.php3?id_article=57

This paper explores the character of "mutual aid" and interdependent decision making within the Wikipedia at http://reagle.org/joseph/2004/agree/wikip-agree.html

[lx]

Example of innovation as a diffuse process, from a report by Business Week:

" To get an idea of how diffuse the innovation process has become, try dissecting your new PDA, digital cameraphone, notebook PC, or cable set-top box. You will probably find a virtual U.N. of intellectual-property suppliers. The central processor may have come from Texas Instruments (TXN ) or Intel, and the operating system from BlackBerry (RIMM ), Symbian, or Microsoft. The circuit board may have been designed by Chinese engineers. The dozens of specialty chips and blocks of embedded software responsible for the dazzling video or crystal-clear audio may have come from chip designers in Taiwan, Austria, Ireland, or India. The color display likely came from South Korea, the high-grade lens from Japan or Germany. The cellular links may be of Nordic or French origin. If the device has Bluetooth technology, which lets digital appliances talk to each other, it may have been licensed from IXI Mobile Inc., one of dozens of Israeli wireless-telecom companies spun off from the defense industry."

(http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_41/b3903409.htm?)

[lxi]

The socialization of innovation 'outside' of the enterprise

"Only a fraction of the aesthetic innovations made in society occurs within the wage labour relation. That is, in the space conceptualised by Tessa Morris-Suzuki as `before' production, in laboratories and in ad agencies. Most aesthetic innovation takes place `after' production. It happens 'after' the wage labour relation, in consumption, in communities, on the street, and on the school yard. It is here the social factory casts its long shadow. The social factory is a place with no walls, no gates, no boss, - and yet rift with antagonism."

(Jan Soderbergh in http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/09/29/1411223)

The contribution byTessa Morris-Suzuki mentioned above was written in wrote: Jim Davis, Thomas A. Hirschl & Michael Stack, eds. Cutting edge: technology, information capitalism and social revolution, 1997

[lxii]

Examples of user innovation communities at work

The music identification technology of Gracenotes, was almost entirely produced by music fans, at http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,64033,00.html?. But because it has turned private MusicBrainz has been created as a true open source alternative ; iPodLounge contains more than 220 creative designs of future iPods, at http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,63903,00.html?

[lxiii]

'Customer-made' production and marketing, special issue of Trendwatching newsletter, May 2005, at http://www.trendwatching.com/newsletter/newsletter.html

[lxiv]

Collab.net helps corporations implement open source methodologies, at http://www.collab.net/

[lxv]

A successful corporate adoption of the participatory model, the SEMCO case

In the book,The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works, CEO Ricardo Semler explains the counter-intuitive m measures he took to make his company succesfull, by relying on the self-organisation skills of his workers. A paradoxical top-down implementation of the hacker culture:

 

" * Give up control (e.g., no organization charts, dress code, fixed offices or policies; complete flex-time for all workers, including those on assembly lines).

    * Share information (e.g., make all salaries public and invite everyone to attend board meetings; Semler even shares profit calculations with customers).

    * Encourage self-management (i.e., force people to think independently, question everything, and solve their own problems; manage by doing nothing yourself when problems arise).

    * Discourage uniformity (e.g., rotate jobs, allow extreme flexibility in work and pay)."

(source: from the review: http://www.opensourcetutorials.com/tutorials/Server-Side-Coding/Book-Reviews/the-seven-day-weekend/page1.html)

[lxvi]

User-driven advertising

Increasingly, users are themselves distributing information about products and services that they appreciate, see the Wired article on a famous user-made iPod ad, at http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,66001,00.html? ; Companies are also learning to use (and abuse) these communities of 'passionate consumers', according to this report in Le Monde, at http://www.lemonde.fr/web/article/0,1-0@2-3230,36-396272,0.html

[lxvii]

Coordination Theory

"Thomas Malone: What I mean by coordination theory is that body of theory and principles that help explain the phenomena of coordination in whatever systems they arise. Now what do I mean by coordination? We define coordination as the management of dependencies among activities. Now how do we proceed on the path of developing coordination theory? The work we've done so far says that if coordination is the managing of dependencies among activities, a very useful next step is to say: what kinds of dependencies among activities are possible? We've identified three types of dependencies that we call atomic or elementary dependency types. Our hypothesis is that all the dependencies, all the relationships in the world, can be analyzed as either combinations of or more specialized types of these three elementary types. The three are: flow, sharing, and fit. Flow occurs whenever one activity produces some resource used by another activity. Sharing occurs when a single resource is used by multiple activities. And fit occurs when multiple activities collectively produce a single resource. So those are the three topological possibilities for how two activities and one resource can be arranged. And each of them has a clear analog in the world of business or any of the other kinds of systems we talked about.

Flow is probably the most obvious. It happens all over the place, and in some ways is the most elementary of all. Sharing also happens a lot whenever you've got one resource shared by multiple people or activities, whether that resource is a machine on a factory floor, a budget of money, or a room, or whatever needs to be used potentially by multiple activities. The least obvious is the last one called fit. A good example of where that occurs would be if you have engineers designing a car. One engineer is designing the engine, another engineer designing the body, and so forth. There's a dependency between the activities of those engineers that arises from the fact that all of the pieces have to fit together in the same car. So the idea is that, for each of these types of dependencies, there's a family of possible coordination processes that can be used to manage it. For instance, with a sharing dependency, one way of managing that is by first come, first served. Another way of managing that is by priorities: the [people with the] highest-priority activity get to use the resource as long as they need it, as long as there's no other higher-priority activity there. And for each of the other types of dependencies you can have a similar kind of family of coordination processes for managing them, some of which are centralized, some of which are decentralized."

(http://www.dialogonleadership.org/Malone2001.html)

Book by the author: Thomas Malone: Coordination Theory and Collaboration Technology

[lxviii]

Open Business Process Initiative

OPHI is a group of organizations and individuals dedicated to developing an on-line collection of knowledge about business processes that is freely available to the general public under an innovative form of "open source" licensing. More info at: http://ccs.mit.edu/ophi/index.htm

[lxix]

See for an overview of designing corporations around customer cultures, at http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/mar2005/nf2005037_4086.htm

[lxx]

An explanation of the concept of the general intellect, at  http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=476

[lxxi]

Cognitive capitalism

« La thèse défendue ici sera celle d'une nouvelle "grande transformation" (pour reprendre l'expression de Karl Polanyi) de l'économie et donc de l'économie politique (...) Certes, ce n'est pas une rupture dans le mode de production car nous sommes toujours dans le capitalisme, mais les composantes de ce dernier sont aussi renouvelées que celles du capitalisme industriel ont pu l'être par rapport au capitalisme marchand (en particulier dans le statut du travail dépendant qui passe du second servage et esclavage au salariat libre). Pour désigner la métamorphose en cours nous recourrons à la notion de capitalisme cognitif comme troisième espèce de capitalisme. »

Yann-Moulier Boutang in  http://multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1656 ; See also http://www.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/labo/walras/Objets/New/20021214/YMB.pdf

Self-organisation and cooperation in cognitive capitalism, special issue of Solaris magazine, at http://biblio-fr.info.unicaen.fr/bnum/jelec/Solaris/d05/5introduction.html , http://biblio-fr.info.unicaen.fr/bnum/jelec/Solaris/d05/5link-pezet.html

Critique from the FrenchTrotskyist Michel Husson, in: : Sommes nous entrés dans le capitalisme cognitif ?Critique communiste n°169-170, été-automne 2003

[lxxii]

The Regulation School: some documentation

Some recent articles and essays from a newsletter associated with the Regulation school, will give you an idea of the high quality and level of interest of their production:

On the concept of `worldwide public goods', at http://www.upmf grenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/lettrepdf/LR48.pdf ;the current phase of American hegemony is unsustainable, at  http://www.upmf-grenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/lettrepdf/LR46.pdf ;

on the need to reconsider our outdated notions of productivity, which have no bearing on the current situation, at  http://www.upmf-grenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/lettrepdf/LR43.pdf ; an overview of intellectual property regimes and their evolution, at http://www.upmfgrenoble.fr/irepd/regulation/Lettre_regulation/index.html

[lxxiii]

on the soul-destroying corporate cultures:

"Whether it is in response to us sensing that a new possibility exists for us on the horizons of our current ways of being, or whether it is to do with us sensing an increasing lack, is difficult to say. But, which ever it is, there is no doubt that there is an increasing recognition that the administrative and organization systems, within which we have long tried to relate ourselves to each other and our surroundings, are crippling us. Something is amiss. They have no place in them for us, for our humanness. While the information revolution bursts out around us, there is an emerging sense that those moments in which we are most truly alive and able to express our own unique creative reactions to the others and othernesses around us (and they to us), are being eliminated. In an over-populated world, there seems to be fewer and fewer people to talk to - and less and less time in which to do it."

(http://pubpages.unh.edu/~jds/ )

[lxxiv]

"Management-by-objectives" as a feudal structure:

By Robert Jackall, "Moral Mazes", 1988, in fact a in-depth anthropological study of the modern entreprise format:

 

"When managers describe their work to an outsider, they almost always first say: 'I work for [Bill James]' or 'I report to [Harry Mills].' and only then proceed to describe their actual work functions . . . The key interlocking mechanism of [modern corporate culture] is its reporting system.  Each manager . . . formulates his commitments to his boss; this boss takes these commitments and those of his other subordinates, and in turn makes a commitment to his boss . . . This 'management-by-objective' system, as it is usually called, creates a chain of commitments from the CEO down to the lowliest product manager or account executive.  In practice, it also shapes a patrimonial authority arrangement that is crucial to defining both the immediate experiences and the long-run career chances of individual managers.  In this world, a subordinate owes fealty principally to his immediate boss."

 

Moral Mazes goes on to describe how bosses use ambiguity with their subordinates (and other more-or-less unconscious subterfuges) in order to preserve the power to claim credit and deflect blame, which tends to perpetuate the personalization of authority.  Unlike a straight, Max Weber style bureaucracy, which is procedure-bound and rule-driven, a patrimonial bureaucracy is a set of hierarchical fiefdoms defined by personal power and patronage."

Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Bibliography-Notes | Notes 2 | Notes3