///Wikimédia Commons///
Partage de médias sous licences libres ou ouvertes
https://tube.hoga.fr/w/gFn95rWincK2EcJxVx2hDn
#Wikimédia #Commons #Partage #médias #libre #ouvert
#commons
#politik #selbstbestimmung #commons #nichteigentum #chiapas #mexiko
Neue Strukturen der EZLN in Mexiko: "Gemeingut und Nichteigentum"
Chiapas. Die Zapatistische Armee der Nationalen Befreiung (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) hat angekündigt, dass die materielle Grundlage der neuen Etappe des Zapatismus die "Nicht-Besitznahme" des Landes sein wird.
Wiedergewonnenes Land soll "Gemeingut" werden, in dem es weder Kommissionäre noch Agenten noch Unternehmen noch Ejidal-, Staats- oder Bundesbehörden gibt, sondern "nur die Menschen, die diese Ländereien bearbeiten und sich um sie kümmern. Und sie verteidigen."
In einem Gespräch mit Subcomandante Moisés, das von Kapitän Marcos verbreitet wurde, erklärte der Sprecher der EZLN, dass der Vorschlag für die "materielle oder produktive Basis dieser Etappe" eine Kombination aus individueller Familienarbeit, kollektiver Arbeit "und dieser neuen Sache, die wir 'Arbeit in Gemeinschaft' oder 'Nicht-Eigentum' nennen", sein wird. Diese beginne mit dem Landbesitz.
"Ein Teil des zurückgewonnenen Landes wird als 'Gemeinschaftsarbeit' deklariert. Das heißt, es ist nicht parzelliert und gehört niemandem, weder kleinem, noch mittlerem, noch großem Eigentum. Dieses Land gehört niemandem, es hat keinen Eigentümer. Und in Absprache mit den umliegenden Gemeinden 'borgen' sie sich das Land gegenseitig, um es zu bewirtschaften", fasst er zusammen.
Die Regeln seien einfach: Die Arbeit auf dem Land solle in mehreren Schichten und nach Absprache zwischen den Bewohnern einer Region durchgeführt werden. Der Anbau von Drogen sei ebenso untersagt wie der Verkauf von Land, der Eintritt von Unternehmen oder Industrie sowie die Anwesenheit von Paramilitärs.
"Das Ergebnis der Arbeit auf dem Land gehört denjenigen, die es in der vereinbarten Zeitspanne bearbeiten. Es gibt keine Steuern oder Zehntabgaben. Jede Einrichtung, die gebaut wird, ist für die nächste Gruppe bestimmt. Sie nehmen immer nur das Produkt ihrer Arbeit", erklärt Moisés.
Er fügt hinzu, dass die Idee des Nichtbesitzes entstand, als er die Ältesten fragte, was die Spaltung und die Kämpfe verursachte, und ihre Antwort lautete "die Eigentumspapiere". "Es geht nicht darum, dass es früher keine Probleme gab, sondern dass sie durch eine Vereinbarung gelöst wurden", betont er.
"Was jetzt kommt, ist eine Phase des Lernens und der Neuanpassung. Mit anderen Worten, wir werden viele Fehler und Probleme haben, weil es kein Handbuch gibt, das einem sagt, wie man es machen soll. Wir werden viele Rückschläge erleben, ja, aber wir werden immer wieder aufstehen und weitergehen. Wir sind Zapatistas", betont der Subcomandante.
Im November hatte die EZLN zunächst in einem Kommuniqué die Auflösung ihrer alten Strukturen und dann zum 40. Jahrestag ihrer Gründung umfangreiche Veränderungen in der Organisationsstruktur der Zapatistischen Selbstverwaltung angekündigt. Zur Begründung hieß es, dass dadurch die Unabhängigkeit der einzelnen Gemeinden gestärkt würde.
Dort, wo sich zapatistische Unterstützungsbasen befinden, sollen Lokale Autonome Regierungen gegründet werden, die der Kontrolle der jeweiligen Versammlungen der Dörfer, Gemeinden oder Stadtviertel unterliegen und für die Befriedigung der lokalen Bedürfnisse in den Bereichen Gesundheit, Bildung, Ernährung und Justiz verantwortlich sind.
Diese Regierungen haben die Möglichkeit, Bedürfnisse, die ihre eigenen Kapazitäten übersteigen, in den Kollektiven der zapatistischen Autonomen Regierungen zu koordinieren. Diese dienen dem Austausch und der Organisation von Aktivitäten wie beispielsweise der Durchführung von Impf- oder Alphabetisierungskampagnen sowie größeren Kultur- und Sportveranstaltungen. Noch größere Reichweite haben die Versammlungen der Kollektive der Autonomen Regierungen der Zapatistas.
- Von Redacción Desinformémonos, amerika21
Open Source PDF of 'Lumbung, Commons and Community Art'
The Open Source PDF of my & Simon Kentgens' book "Lumbung, commons and community art" with HumDrumPress is out:
https://humdrumpress.com/Lumbung
Full quote of the introduction:
_This conversation originally took place on Radio WORM, a community internet radio station run by, and inside of Rotterdam’s alternative cultural venue WORM. Our one and a half hour talk, interrupted only by a few short pieces of music and sound recordings, took place on the evening of Friday, March 24, 2023. We, Simon Kentgens and Florian Cramer, had been witnesses and peripheral participants of documenta fifteen in Kassel in the summer of 2022, and tried to draw our preliminary, personal conclusions after an intense and controversial event.
For us, documenta fifteen was the culmination of a longer debate about radical collectivity and the commons in the arts. The commons is a model of production, and of society, in which resources are freely shared and collectively owned by a community. Examples include Free/Open Source software, public libraries and other shared resources.
As collaborators at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam’s art school, we had been involved in various projects around collective, self-organized, community- and commons-oriented, and often non-Western arts practices, in order to rethink our school’s curriculum, which, like most art schools, focuses on students’ individual artistic and work portfolio development. For years we had worked with various local and international multidisciplinary artist collectives in workshops we organized at our school. These included Gudskul, an alternative art school founded by three Jakarta-based collectives, including ruangrupa; 展銷場 Display Distribute from Hong Kong; Jatiwangi art Factory from Indonesia; Banana School (BananSkolen), an alternative, non-hierarchical school run by the Goodiepal & Pals (GP&PLS) collective in Copenhagen; the Amsterdam-based We Are Here collective of undocumented refugees, and the Rotterdam-based Take-A-Way collective of artists, refugees and addicts.
We reencountered many of these collectives as documenta fifteen participants in the summer of 2022. Our co-worker reinaart vanhoe had worked closely with ruangrupa for more than twenty years, has published a book on them and other Indonesian artist collectives as part of our school’s research program, and ran a community space at documenta fifteen.
Founded in the 1950s as a five-yearly exhibition, Documenta is widely considered to be the world’s most important contemporary art event, and usually features art by big-name artists, or artists who become big-name by exhibiting at Documenta. Documenta fifteen, however, broke with the conventions of contemporary art by neither being a curated exhibition, nor even an art show in any strict sense, but rather a three-month festival to which collectives invited other collectives. These collectives were physically present for many of the one hundred days of the event, and the emphasis was on activities such as workshops, social gatherings, cooking, and other communal happenings in addition to exhibitions.
This was part of what ruangrupa, the artistic directors of documenta fifteen, called “lumbung”. In their home country of Indonesia, a lumbung is a rice barn that is collectively used by farmers. In a broader sense, the word corresponds to the English word “commons” which originally stood for collectively owned and used agricultural land. In German and Dutch, the words “Allmende” and “meent” have similar origins and meanings. For ruangrupa, lumbung is also a practice that enables an alternative economy of collectivity, shared resource building, and equitable distribution.
The distribution of curatorial control, its multidisciplinarity, collectivity and shared ownership made documenta fifteen a radical, large-scale, real-life commoning experiment: by actually running and living a commons, rather than just imagining it (as art is usually expected to do). It also meant that things went wrong. We aren’t claiming any critical authority here, to have the last word on this experiment, but wish to share our experiences and observations to contribute to a larger body of histories of documenta fifteen, written by its community members._
Protecting New Mexico’s centuries-old water democracy
Water is life and it's meant to be shared.
#newmexico #water #democracy #waterislife #indigenous #acequias #irrigation #ditches #commons #agriculture #life
Self-organized school clashes with contemporary art institute
When a self-organized collective collides with the inner workings of a white cube institute [or documenta fifteen redux]: the artist-/activist-run school BananSkolen (created by Goodiepal & Pals) got into a foreseeable disaster at Den Frie, a Copenhagen contemporary art space. Here’s the story from the viewpoint of BananSkolen,
DeepL-translated from Danish:
OOOHHH
After three months of exhibiting and teaching at Den Frie, during which the Bananskolen has been subjected to varying forms of accusation, suspicion, massive institutional ignorance and, most recently, a violent accusation of being a source of insecurity for the art gallery’s staff, we now see no alternative but to strike and teach elsewhere. For the record, we outline the process below: Den Frie invites the Banana School/Goodiepal to exhibit in the basement. Thus, large parts of the SMK exhibition Unboxing the Goodiepal Collection will move to Den Frie, and the plan is also to hold Banana School in the exhibition space. In other words, Den Frie will receive four months of free event programming - free for the institution, free for the participants, unpaid for the educators. The basic principle of the Banana School is free school for all, so in that sense everything is as it should be. So far, so good. The Banana School is provided with a small budget, shoots money into the production of the exhibition itself, and both are fine in a way, but from here things start to go wrong. We install our exhibition ourselves (which is unheard of in an institutional context), and some of the first contact we have with Den Frie’s director, Dina Vester Feilberg, is a reprimand for eating and drinking in the art gallery’s café without paying for it - mind you, during our unpaid installation work. By comparison, the art gallery catered for all artists and (paid) staff during the installation process at Another Surrealism. Bananskolen opens on June 18, Dina Vester Feilberg and the exhibition’s curator Iben Bach Elmström have chosen to be on Bornholm for Folkemøde with some real artists that weekend, so the opening is taking place without any attention or support from the institution. Okay okay, we get to have a cake and make some tea for our opening, but we should know that there is no budget for any significant opening event under any circumstances, let alone a dinner (which Den Frie otherwise partly organises). By comparison, there is a decadent baroque dinner with food and wine galore about a week later when Jules Fisher’s performance piece opens. And not a bad word about Jules Fisher or their work - we’ll manage without dinner, of course. The exhibition is open and Banana School is in session. That means free school, concerts, performances etc etc etc, five days a week. With this, to the best of our belief, rather generous gesture, come accusations that we are serving coffee from the café to our (unpaid) teachers and that we are harassing café visitors. With all due respect, there are very few visitors to Den Frie’s café, and we have a good track record of inviting those who drop in to the Banana School. Of course, Dina cannot know all this, because she never shows up at the exhibition, never attends the Banana School events. Life as an art gallery director is understandably busy and pressured, but it is undoubtedly customary for the management of an institution to at least greet the people who exhibit in the building. At the very least, see the exhibition, just once. At least try to relate even slightly to what is being shown. None of this has happened - and then of course it’s easy to sit in your office at the other end of the building and not know that it’s not actually harassing anyone when, for example, the Banana School students sit at the café tables drawing and cutting.
During an otherwise quiet summer in the basement, Den Frie (i.e. Dina) manages to continue accusations against and suspicion of Bananskolen. Among other things, according to Dina, we have no ‘respect for the other artists’. This presumably alludes to the fact that we would have turned down the sound of Jules Fisher - our neighbouring exhibition - something we have only seen the café staff do. Interesting, by the way, that an institution manager who, at this stage, has still barely set foot in our exhibition, chooses to make sense of what ‘respect for other artists’ means - but that’s another matter. Teachers and students at the Bananskolen have also been refused entry to Den Frie’s other exhibitions on several occasions if they do not pay for a ticket. A demand Den Frie is of course within their rights to make, but given the institution’s invocation of ‘respect for other artists’ - and not least the fact that everything that emanates from the Bananskolen is, as I said, free - it’s an interesting form of pettiness to exercise. The suspicion reaches a preliminary climax at the end of August, when Dina - under quite extensive drama - accuses Goodiepal (one of the Banana School’s teachers and founders) of having stolen a cookbook that Den Frie will use to prepare the large-scale artists’ dinner marking the celebration of Another Surrealism (the discrimination hardly needs to be emphasized further, and we are of course fully aware that different exhibitions have different budgets, different importance, more or less great, renowned artists to please, etc.). The accusation of theft is brought forward as if it were some kind of art theft (it is a Taschen edition of Dali recipes), and Dina chooses to continue the accusations (even to outsiders around the Banana School), even after Goodiepal has explained that the book is at the Den Frie, where he found it and read from it. Accusations of theft are blatant - in these times, when Den Frie is making much of jury language about disqualification charges, it would be fair to say that such accusations are indeed defamatory - just as it is undeniably borderline to contact several of the Bananskol’s friends and acquaintances with the same accusations that Goodiepal stole. Goodiepal’s explanation of what happened and his description of where the book is, is being overheard, but when the staff arrive the next morning, the book is of course where Goodiepal has said it is. The crisis is averted, the surreal dinner is prepared and held, but neither the Banana School nor Goodiepal receives a shred of apology for the accusations and drama. No one takes responsibility for the situation, a ‘it wasn’t me’ mentality pervades the staff, the Banana School manages to get talking about the situation and this ‘it wasn’t me’ movement, of course, ends up with Dina, the manager, where communication then stops as Dina, even in this situation, does not feel obliged to deal with the situation in any way. The very same manager, who in numerous newspaper articles and Facebook posts has been quick to ‘take the rap’ for this and that regarding the exhibitions she is behind and the artists she invites in, is thus curiously done taking the rap - not even for her own erroneous accusation of theft. More callous managerial ignoring of a sensitive conflict situation is something you’ll have to look hard for - and while management strategy and labour market welfare are not the Banana School’s core competencies, it seems an unprecedented and beneath contempt case. Goodiepal then takes a break from Bananskolen, and when he returns for the first time after the conflict (on Saturday 17 September), Dina happens to drop by the exhibition space (whether this coincidence and first-time visit has anything to do with the fact that one of Jesper Just’s own employees has stopped by on this particular day, we can only speculate). Still frustrated and upset by the disrespectful treatment and accusation of theft, Goodiepal asks Dina to leave the exhibition until he receives an apology from her/the institution. She brushes it off, and the situation escalates to the point where Dina accuses Goodiepal of laying a hand on her (after walking into his extended finger pointing at the door he is asking her to leave as long as he/Banana School has not received an apology). When it becomes clear that Dina has no intention of following his recommendation, Bananskolen instead moves out of the room and continues the day’s program outside Dem Frie. On 21 September, Bananskolen then receives an email, the death blow if you like, from Dina, accusing Bananskolen/Goodiepal of being fundamentally unwelcoming. She describes how ‘several employees are uncomfortable coming to work’, but won’t answer which ones. 'The only staff the Banana School has regular contact with are, by their very nature, the café staff, as neither the management nor the curatorial staff show any interest in our work, but if we can create insecurity right up the management and curatorial corridors, which we are completely ignored by, it really is a mystery. If, on the other hand, café staff feel unsafe or intimidated by the activities of the exhibition, this is of course something we will take into account and address - no one should feel uncomfortable in the Banana School setting. Unfortunately, the consequence of all this is that the Banana School will have to go on strike - five weeks early. Obviously, we cannot carry out our activities in a space where people are uncomfortable - especially when we are not allowed to know who is experiencing this uncomfortableness.
However, before the Banana School disappears completely, it is imperative for us to stress that we have never before experienced the same level of disrespectful treatment from an institution. We’ve put up with a lot of suspicion and a lot of accusations - from coffee theft to art theft - but for the institution and management to now turn their complete lack of respect and interest in our work into us being the ones who are unsafe and harassing, well, that’s really the last straw. When Dina is faced with the prospect of the Banana School closing (five weeks early!), her email tone is immediately cooperative, we are immediately offered assistance to take down the exhibition - an assistance we hardly need repeat that we were not given to install the exhibition. Dina’s enthusiasm for getting the Banana School out of the house without even an approximate attempt to resolve the conflict is the clearest underlining of her fundamental dislike of us - it is in itself hurtful and personally insulting, but it is above all a managerial failure of dimensions. After an almost unfathomable level of ignorance from a manager to her own exhibition programme during the first three months of the exhibition, the same manager sends an unpleasant and accusatory email (in)directly pushing us out of Den Frie. We have never seen - and in fact cannot imagine - an artistic director who fails all parts of her responsibility more than Dina Vester Feilberg. As much as we wish future artists and exhibitions at Den Frie the best of luck, we hope that this course of action has consequences - above all on a personal level, so that Dina in her future art career will be a little better at practicing the basic life lesson that everyone - artists and people alike - should be treated with respect, no matter if they’re called Ryan Trecartin or Isa Genzken or Rosemarie Trockel or some-name-you-never-come-to-remember-because-it’s-just-a-young-not-academically-educated-person-you-don’t-know-from-e-flux.
The Banana School is of course sorry that what started as a lovely invitation and an exciting project has to end like this, but after this outline of the process (which incidentally omits several small, passive-aggressive, suspicious remarks and more thorough descriptions of the daily indifference our exhibition and programme have been met with from the institution), we hope there is no doubt why we have chosen to make this decision. And that it is in the very highest degree Den Frie, in particular Dina Vester Feilberg, and not Bananskolen, that is responsible for the situation having escalated in the way it has. Thank you for a wonderful few months to all the truly talented and kind and generous people who have contributed to and participated in the Banana School.
Thanks to Peter and Søren.
We go on strike, but eventually ask the question: why invite us in the first place?
Greetings Bananskolen
The Nazi-at-the-Bar problem (July 2020)
I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you.
So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he (the bartender -ed.) immediately says, “No. Get out.”
And the dude next to me says, “Hey I’m not doing anything, I’m a paying customer.” And the bartender reaches under the counter for a bat or something and says, “Out. Now.” And the dude leaves, kind of yelling. And he was dressed in a punk uniform, I noticed.
Anyway, I asked what that was about and the bartender was like, “You didn’t see his vest but it was all Nazi shit. Iron crosses and stuff. You get to recognize them.”
And I was like, oh ok and he continues.
"You have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.
“And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it’s too late because they’re entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.”
And I was like, "Oh damn.” And he said, “Yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people.”
And then he went back to ignoring me. But I haven’t forgotten that at all.
———
by Michael B. Tager (aka. at-iamragesparkle) at Twitter on July 2020, via Reddit via space-alien-cat @Doc Edward Morbius (aka. @dredmorbius@diaspora.glasswings.com) on a now-kinda-lost JoinDiaspora thread. Reposted with some light proofreading for readability from my Ello. Rediscovered via my Medium Drawings Roundup newsletter.
———
#PublicSpaces #commons #CommunityManagement #ForumModeration / #fz_links / Sept. 13, 2021
Telling the story of the search for the #COVID-19 vaccines puts #capitalism under the microscope. It is a story that helps us to zoom in on why the pharmaceutical industry is set for one of the biggest profit windfalls in its #history. And it magnifies our view of the commanding role of the capitalist #state in a process that the likes of #BorisJohnson present as driven by corporate ingenuity and naked competition – but in reality is driven by our wealth and by scientific #knowledge that is part of the #commons.
As we get to the end of the story, we find out that the search for the #vaccine is not really a search for a cure at all, but a search to avoid dealing with the causes of the #virus.
https://corporatewatch.org/vaccinating-capitalism-corporate-pharma-raids-the-commons-and-leaves-the-root-causes-untreated/ #corona #mers #pfizer #who #zika #ebola #bigpharma #capitalism #hedgefonds #crisis
More #greenwashing of #patent #monopolies ; no such #patents ought to be permitted in the first place; they steal from the #Commons , then pretend to generously give back https://www.managingip.com/article/b1vnwyxc7j8mnn/hpe-ip-chief-on-why-making-green-patents-free-is-force-for-good see http://techrights.org/2021/04/27/epo-greenwashing-stunts/
Usury, Central Banking and the History of Capitalism
~36:00
#Capitalism #Politics #History #Usury #AntiUsury #Bank #Banks #Banking #Commons #Reformation #Enclosure #BritishEmpire #BankOfEngland #DutchEmpire #Colonialism #Nationalism #Globalism #Global #Jesus #Christ #JesusChrist #Church #Christianity
La Ville de Montréal au rendez-vous du FAB16 et du Fab City summit
Le FAB16, qui se tiendra du 9 au 12 août, rassemblera makers, designers,
industriels, artistes, enseignants, chercheurs, et plus encore.
Cette grande rencontre sera suivie du sommet Fab City, du 13 au 15 août.
>> Links in english (online event)
Rôle fablabs crise sanitaire / Plus d'infos sur le FAB16
#fablab #fablabs #makers #diy #doityourself #do-it-yourself #transition #city #creativecommons #commons #communs
Robbing the soil, 1: Commons and classes before capitalism
https://climateandcapitalism.com/2021/08/01/robbing-the-soil-1-commons-and-classes-before-capitalism
“The #soil is the great #connector of #lives…. Without #proper #care for it we can have no #community, because without proper care for it we can have no #life.” #WendellBerry
#MetabolicRifts #IanAngus #robbingthesoil #commons #classes #capitalism #progress #agriculture #food #farming #history #degradation #environment #ecosocialism #fields #pastures #farmers #workers #land #property #inequality #class #karlmarx #marx
Fairness Reconsidered: Receiving Public as a Commons
The conceit of the Fairness Doctrine was that broadcast spectrum was a commons, and a limited public resource, arbitrarily allocated to a given (usually private) party. The right came with the obligation to manage this common resource in the public interest. The doctrine went through a few iterations before arriving at the "Fairness Doctrine" formula in 1949, notably the Mayflower Decision (1941). There is similar history, though often arriving at different policies, elsewhere, notably the heavy reliance on government-owned or -controlled broadcasting through much of what was otherwise free Europe: the BBC, Germany, France, etc., much of that strongly informed by the rise of fascism and Nazi German in the 1920s and 1930s. (The US had its own fascist / populist demagogues, notably Father Charles Edward Coughlin and Joseph McCarthy.)
This past week's On the Media podcast has a good introduction to the Fairness Doctrine, in the context of Fox News and why the F.D. itself is inadequate to address Fox. (Hint: Cable subscribers.)
The past 5, 10, 20 years or whatever timeframe you care to throw at it, of experience in the online world suggest that treating digital media over (mostly) private infrastructure as strictly private ... has some pronounced failure modes, to use technical understatement.
I haven't seen others making this argument yet, though I suspect some are, but my view is, roughly, that public mindshare is itself a commons, and should be held and managed in the public interest. There's a point at which reach or penetration themselves become exploitation of a public resource, and concern over the impacts of such reach are legitimate public concerns.
If you look at the fundamentals of information theory, there are three (or four) major components:
Sender -> Channel -> Receiver
You could also add noise, encoding, and decoding.
The Fairness Doctrine concerned channel.
Both free-speech and classic censorship matters, concerns sender (and to at least some extent, channel).
The new doctrine I'm suggesting covers the receiver, and specifically the general public as a general message recipient.
One could argue that disinformation, fake news, propaganda, and distraction are forms of intentionally introduced noise, and I'm sure there are elements concerning encoding and decoding which might be similarly considered.
Again, I'm not aware of anyone else offering a similar view, but it seems to me that our traditional models of speech, publishing, broadcasting, censorship, and responsibility are failing us here.
#FairnessDoctrine #FCC #Broadcasting #DigitalMedia #Media #OnTheMedia #Commons #Audience #InformationTheory
In der heutigen Marktwirschaft kalkuliert sich Aufwand durch die Aufsummierung von Arbeitsstunden (Zeit) der am Herstelungsprozess beteiligten Individuen. Diese sind dabei nicht nur von ihrer Mitwelt (Natur und andere Lebewesen) getrennt, sondern agieren auch vereinzelt in marktförmigen Beziehungen. Doch wie kalkuliert sich Aufwand in einer Ontologie der Verbundenheit, also einem Seins-Verständnis, dass alles Lebendige miteinander in enger Wechselwirkung steht? Mittels Energie wäre ein ein Vorschlag:
https://keimform.de/2020/die-kalkulation-von-aufwand-in-einer-ontologie-der-verbundenheit/
#Zukunft #Gesellschaft #Zivilisation #Arbeit #Ontologie #Verbundenheit #Marktwirtschaft #Commons #Commoning #GlobalCommoningSystem #Keimform #Utopie #Leistungsprinzip #Leben #Lebendigkeit #Permakultur #Klimawandel #Bewusstsein #Biozentrismus #Energie #Aufwand #Nachhaltigkeit
Matt Stoller and Charles Perrow on consolidation and monopolisation in the audio media world
Podcasting, like blogging, was supposed to be a way for people --- actual human beings rather than corporate golems or AI vampires --- to talk to and reach other humans, peer-to-peer, requiring nothing more than a microphone, audio editor, website, and RSS feed. The latter-day E.F. Schumacher, Doc Searls, asserted in the long-ago, social proximating days of 2017:
Nobody is going to own podcasting. By that I mean nobody is going to trap it in a silo. Apple tried, first with its podcasting feature in iTunes, and again with its Podcasts app. Others have tried as well. None of them have succeeded, or will ever succeed, for the same reason nobody has ever owned the human voice, or ever will. (Other, of course, than their own.)
Because podcasting is about the human voice. It’s humans talking to humans: voices to ears and voices to voices—because listeners can talk too. They can speak back. And forward. Lots of ways.
Podcasting is one way for markets to have conversations; but the podcast market itself can’t be bought or controlled, because it’s not a market. Or an “industry.” Instead, like the Web, email and other graces of open protocols on the open Internet, podcasting is all-the-way deep.
-- Doc Searls, \"Open Word—The Podcasting Story\", April 16, 2017
http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2017/04/16/open-word-the-podcasting-story/
In his latest critique on creeping rampaging monopolisation on the Internet, Matt Stoller looks at Spotify's grab for an ever-increasing share of the podcast space, and concomitant advertising, with its recent exclusive contracting of several large podcasts: On the Spotify-Joe Rogan Deal and the Coming Death of Independent Podcasting. \"Spotify is trying to do to the open podcast world what Google did to publishers\" indeed.
Spotify is gaining power over podcast distribution by forcing customers to use its app to listen to must-have content, by either buying production directly or striking exclusive deals, as it did with Rogan. This is a tying or bundling strategy. Once Spotify has a gatekeeping power over distribution, it can eliminate the open standard rival RSS, and control which podcasts get access to listeners. The final stage is monetization through data collection and ad targeting. Once Spotify has gatekeeping power over distribution and a large ad targeting business, it will also be able to control who can monetize podcasts, because advertisers will increasingly just want to hit specific audience members, as opposed to advertise on specific shows.
I'm reading Charles Perrow's 1972 classic Complex Organizations which discusses both intra- and inter-organisational structures and dynamics. Stoller's description of the consolidation of podcasting strikes me as quite similar to the deconsolidation and reconsolidation of the music industry, in about 1955 and 1962-1973. The golden age of decentralised music production and distribution lasted less than a decade:
After the critical period from about 1956 to 1960, when tastes were unfrozen, competition was intense, and demand soared, consolidation appeared. The number of firms stabilized at about forty. New corporate entries appeared, such as MGM and Warner Brothers, sensing, one supposes, the opportunity that vastly expanding sales indicated. Some independents grew large. The eight-firm concentration ratio also stabilized (though not yet the four-firm ratio). The market became sluggish, however, as the early stars died, were forced into retirement because of legal problems, or in the notable case of Elvis Presley, were drafted by an impinging environment. Near the end of this period the majors decided that the new sounds were not a fad and began to buy up the contracts of established artists and successfully picked and promoted new ones, notably The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan. A new generation (e.g., The Beatles) appeared from 1964 to 1969, and sales again soared.
But now the concentration ratios soared also. From 1962 to 1973, the four-firm ratio went from 25 to 51 percent; the eight-firm ratio from 46 to 81 percent, almost back to the pre-1955 levels. The number of different firms having hits declined from forty-six to only sixteen. Six of the eight giants were diversified conglomerates, some of which led in the earlier period; one was a new independent, the other a product of of mergers.
How did they do it? The major companies asserted “increasing central control over the creative process” through deliberate creation and extensive promotion of new groups, long-range contracts for groups, and reduced autonomy for producers. In addition, legal and illegal promotion costs (drug payola to disc jockeys, for example) rose in the competitive race and now exceeded the resources of small independents. Finally, the majors “have also moved to regain a controlling position in record distribution by buying chains of retail stores.” The diversity is still greater than it had been in the past, and may remain high, but it is ominous that the majors have all the segments covered. As an executive said, “Columbia Records will have a major entry into whatever new area is broached by the vagaries of public tastes.” But for a concentrated industry, the “vagaries of public tastes” are not economical; it is preferable to stabilize and consolidate them. This would be possible through further control over the creative process and marketing.
Charles Perrow, Complex organizations : a critical essay, 1972, pp. 186--187.
https://archive.org/details/complexorganizat00perr/page/186/mode/2up
https://www.worldcat.org/title/complex-organizations-a-critical-essay/oclc/979139067
(Perrow's discussion draws heavily on Paul M. Hirsch, The Structure of the Popular Music Industry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Survey Research Center, 1969); P. M. Hirsch, “Processing Fads and Fashions: An Organization-Set Analysis of Cultural Industry Systems,” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 4 (January 1972): 639–659; P. M. Hirsch, “Organizational Effectiveness and the Institutional Environment,” Administrative Science Quarterly 20, no. 4 (September 1975): 327–344; Richard A. Peterson and David G. Berger, “Entrepreneurship in Organizations: Evidence from the Popular Music Industry,” Administrative Science Quarterly 16, no. 1 (March 1971): 97–106; and R. A. Peterson and D. G. Berger, “Cycles in Symbol Production: The Case of Popular Music,” American Sociological Review 40, no. 2 (April 1975): 158–173.)
Decentralisation is a frequently expressed goal of Web technologies, but so long as there is an available point of control, and a means to assert exclusive relationships or ownership, centralised control will reestablish itself, and the commons will again be enclosed.
And advertising, ever the anti-Midas, turns every golden thing it touches to shit.
Perrow's description in the next few paragraphs of the production side of music, and the various distribution of risks amongst headline performers, agents, labels, printing facilities, retail outlets, radio, and side musicians, seems to me to have direct correspondences to much of the consumer-facing (and business-services) Web-startup world.
Recommended reading.
#podcasting #commons #monopoly #advertising #MattStoller #CharlesPerrow #DocSearls #Spotify #JoeRogan
The end of capitalism has begun
Paul Mason promoting his book “Postcapitalism” in the Guardian. A long read, tying together postcapitalist developments and sketching a vision of the transition.
