|
The World-Info-Con 2002 conference “The network Society of Control” was a two-day
interdisciplinary meeting and conference held at De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics in
Amsterdam, one of the Amsterdam partner organisations for World-Infoirmation.Org
Amsterdam 2002.
The idea of the conference was to investigate two key areas of infopolitics:
surveillance and security in the digital domain, and public relation management as
two sides of information control, and secondly the intensifying debate about intellectual
property rights and alternative models for the current highly restrictive legal frameworks for
intellectual property rights management.
The choice for these themes was guided by a growing awareness that information control is
a vital meeting point of economic, political and cultural interests. The conference was
intended to look at this issue not only from a political / economic point of view, but also to
take the cultural dimension of these processes very seriously. Culture relies on the
availability of information and the exchange of ideas and opinions. The space of free
exchange of information, ideas and other immaterial goods is increasingly reduced, after the
early start of the Internet and net.culture seemed to promise an exponential growth in the
availability of information and the possibilities for information exchange.
Cultural development and innovation is stifled by all too tight restrictions on information
exchange. This point is also recognised in the world of information law, and initiatives such
as the Creative Commons a new legal project and licensing system put forward by some of
the brightest minds in US information law who attempt to address this issue in a constructive
manner. We briefly describe here the background of our discussion and some of the main outcomes.
In advance of the conference a reader was compiled with materials mainly distributed via the
internet, which documents the context of the conference in greater detail, contains interviews
with relevant thinkers and activists, and concludes with a section on the World-
Information.Org project itself and the projects produced by artists in the frame of the 2002
Amsterdam edition of World-Information.Org.
Background
In 2000 De Balie organised a conference of similar scale and format devoted to a critique of
the new economy called Tulipomania DotCom. At that time, June 2000, the new economy
and dotcom craze were at their height in Europe and The Netherlands, but had already
crashed in the US. What we witnessed in the two years that followed was the complete and
total demise of the new economy and large parts of the new media industry. The benefits of
the dotcom hype went to the financial speculators who left the digital pyramid game at the
right moment, whilst their willing accomplices were left with a severe dotcom hang-over.
The idea of a bristling internet- and new media economy, let alone the premise of a “new”
economic logic has been dissolved. New media as a business sector has become the object
of disdain and pessimism. No longer is the ICT sector seen as the motor of innovation and
economic renewal.
Meanwhile, despite the pervasive dotcom nihilism, the Internet has been a huge success as
a social and cultural phenomenon. Well above 500 million people use this new
communications medium on a daily basis, and especially e-mail has transformed the
economics of international communication, fostering countless transnational connections
between a multitude of private, personal, social and public initiatives. But despite the fact that
the economic take-over seems to have failed in the on-line world, whilst the social and
cultural sphere are thriving, is no reason for celebration of the latter: First of all the social and
cultural actors were relegated to the side-lines when the commercial violence unleashed
itself on the networks. Later on they were equally absent in the demise of the commercial
players on-line. At best they were helpless spectators, at worst they were part of the vast
army of willing accomplices….
More worrying, however, is the fact that after the demise of the new economy darker forces
have taken control of the dominant net.agenda: security and control have become the buzz
words of the main-stream discourse about the Internet. At first it focused on the concept of
“unwarranted content”. Post 9/11 it turned into an at times hysterical debate on security
demands vis-à-vis the perceived threat of international terrorism.
In the drive for total information control that followed from this security anxiety even more
vital issues than the balance between security and privacy are in danger of dropping out of
sight: Silently the old economy, and in this case in particular the media and information
giants have absorbed what was left of the “new” economy. New integrated constellations of
media production and distribution have emerged, of which the AOL/TimeWarner case has
only been the most visible. They generate dubious information monopolies that appear in
stark contrast with the widely celebrated open ended and exchange based character of the
Internet.
New legislation for intellectual products in the digital domain all push for the protection of
vested interests. The interests of public accessibility of information products, one of the main
strong points of digital networking technology, are severely harmed by the narrow
interpretation of Intellectual Property according to various representatives of public
institutions such as libraries and public information centres, and more predictably by the
advocates of copyleft and open content. These critics stress the necessity of an open
information and knowledge space as a catalyst for development and as a means of bridging
the digital divides that grow within and between our societies. Interestingly similar initiatives
have been launched from the side of information law stating that free use of information
materials, within certain limits is a prerequisite for innovation.
Final report World-Information.Org
In a number of converging debates the figure of the commons has emerged as a central
thread; the creative commons, the information commons and the overarching idea of a digital
commons. Taking the analogy of common land for the poor to cultivate, the discussion
asserts an open and participatory knowledge and information space in which knowledge
becomes a resource for the public domain, rather than a proprietary asset. There are
complicated questions here about the viability and the economics of a digital commons.
Some of the contradictory questions are explored in the texts gathered in this reader and
during the conference for which it is produced. Can we dispense with the model of
commodification at all to produce the knowledge that needs to enter the public domain? Can
the digital commons help to bridge the digital divide? Is the idea of open networks about to
be dissolved in the face of the current narratives of the war on terror? Can the digital
commons ever become sustainable? Is there any political will to turn it into a reality? Is
institutional politics needed at all, can it contribute?
For us as organisers the main question put forward was how to build the digital commons?
Specific Outcomes
The conference produced a high level of analytic debate from a variety of disciplinary
viewpoints. From the start the conference was conceived as small-scale, but high-level
international working conference. The conference should first of all be regarded as an
endeavour to map the new terrain of information politics in a period following the demise of
utopian claims of cyberculture in the nineties and the ideology of the new economy that was
built on many of these claims at the turn of the millennium, and more importantly in the
middle of a period of widespread cynicism about information and network technology and its
significance for social, economic and cultural processes in society.
Especially the first day of the conference was an exercise in mapping new domains of power
by tracking recent trends in networked surveillance and technologically enhanced social
control systems, leading from the more technologically determined forms of information
control to the refinement of p.r. technologies and public opinion management strategies.
Cultural critic and writer Brian Holmes most literally illustrated the practice of mapping new
control systems by discussing a serious of projects he has been involved with together with
the French art group Bureau des Etudes, who are involved in an extensive project series
producing maps of European control and policing systems executed as large scale
newspapers, on-line maps and installations and wall-paintings, all of which are distributed via
cultural festivals, magazines, and internet projects.
In the afternoon session of the first day Sheldon Rampton and Eveline Lubbers made a
critical analysis of the communication strategies of large companies and government
agencies aimed at positioning a very specific image of their actions and policies not always in
balance with their actual policies. They showed how civic-interest groups, concerned about
possible effects of these policies held outside of public scrutiny with sophisticated
communication strategies, can work around the p.r. front to make companies and
government agencies accountable to the wider public. Eveline Lubbers revealed how the
p.r.-related spendings of mayor industrial companies on communicating these companies’
efforts on sustainable production methods, in 2001 exceeded the actual spending on the
creation of more sustainable production methods, thus indicating the scope of the these
problem civic interest groups are facing…
The second day was first of all a critical examination of the strategies of the open source /
open content movement that advocates alternatives for the mentioned restrictive regulation
on intellectual property rights, especially as they have been developed for the digital domain.
Darius Cuplinkas from the Open Society Institute in Budapest showed a very successful
alternative publication system of scientific and academic papers that made these findings
publicly accessible and created a viable network for academic exchange, independent of
mayor academic publishers. The reasoning here is that this knowledge is created with public
means (academic funding) and thus should be available in the public domain and not closed
of as a commercially exploited information asset.
Steve Cisler contributed insights from the world of public libraries in the US, while Thorsten
Schilling of the Bundeszentrale für Politische Bildung showed a series of projects of his
organisation, emphasising that there is still a very strong public domain, at least in Europe,
which should be mobilised more decidedly for the digital domain. Felix Stalder discussed
examples of initiatives that have been created outside of formal institutional frameworks,
such as the Open Flows organisation (Open publishing systems) or the mailing list nettime
on net-criticism and internet-culture.
This second day was in short devoted to a comparison of models of how a digital public
domain, or a digital commons, could be built. We missed the presence of a representative of
the Creative Commons project a new set of licensing systems developed by information law
specialists in the US headed by professor Lawrence Lessig, intended to offer more flexible
arrangements to manage intellectual property rights. Their case is to go back to the original
purpose of copyright law to safeguard intellectual production by offering authors some
mechanisms of protecting their work, while ensuring sufficient possibilities for the exchange
and re-use and modification of existing ideas, so as not to stifle innovation.
Most speakers concluded that the restrictive frameworks for intellectual property rights
implemented recently by the US (DMCA) and in a new DG XIII directive by the EU, will not be
able to withstand the pressures for a more free exchange of intellectual products exerted by
the convergence of technological development (deployment of broadband internet most
notably) and wide-spread consumer demands. The right to protection of intellectual products
is also not understood as self-evident in many non western cultures, and so Arun Mehta
concluded that only an act of civil disobedience, mimicked by millions around the net would
be able to enforce a change in these policies, and was in fact an inevitability.
The absence of a representative of the Creative Commons (because of problems with the
date and the official launch in the US of their new licensing systems) precluded a direct
comparison of the various alternative models proposed with the licensing systems introduced
by the Creative Commons group. As the Creative Commons licensing system is currently the
most promising alternative to DMCA-like regulation, this could only be dealt with in a cursory
manner, and remains a topic for a next debate.
All lectures of the conference can be found on-line in
the section  “Media Viewer”.
Report by Eric Kluitenberg.
|
