[aha] assaltone a più mani all'immaginario

[T_Bazz]

Ciao a tutt@,

visto che si sta parlando di appropriazione di immaginari underground, 
web 2.0 e significato attuale del networking, vorrei condividere con voi 
un testo che ho scritto come paper per una conferenza che ci sara' qui 
in Danimarca il 21-23 aprile (http://darc.imv.au.dk/?page_id=895). Parte 
di questo testo sara' pubblicato anche nel giornale di Arnolfini Gallery 
di Bristol, curato da Geoff Cox (che gentilmente mi ha detto to spread 
my ideas dove opportuno).

Si tratta di alcuni risultati della ricerca che sto portando avanti ad 
Aarhus proprio su questo discorso sul social networking e 
sull'appropriazione dell'immaginario hacker che si sta discutendo qui e 
in hackmeeting (per questo mando la mail a tutte e 2 le liste).

E' in inglese, ma spero che sara' di buon spunto per tutt@ voi.

Cari saluti!

T_Bazz

-------

Aesthetics of Common Participation and Networking Enterprises

Tatiana Bazzichelli


In the last half of the twentieth century Avant-garde art practices from 
Fluxus to mail art promised the creation of collaborative art and the 
production of new models of sharing knowledge. Today, techniques of 
networking developed in grassroots communities have inspired the 
structure of Web 2.0 platforms and have been used as a model to expand 
the markets of business enterprises. The principal success of a Web 2.0 
company or networking enterprise comes from the ability of enabling 
communities, providing shared communication tools and folksonomies. In 
this paper, I aim to advance upon earlier studies on networked art using 
a cross-national design, refusing the widely accepted idea that 
networked art is mainly technologically determined. Furthermore, I will 
present a few considerations that connect early experiments of networked 
art with the establishment of social networking platforms.


The Rhetoric of Web 2.0

At first glance it may seem evident that business enterprises in social 
networking and Web 2.0 built their corporate image by re-appropriating 
the language and the values once very representative of certain 
networking art practices, from mail art to net.art – and of the hacker 
ethic as well. Tim O’Reilly, one of the main promoters of the Web 2.0 
philosophy, and organizer of the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004 (San 
Francisco), wrote in the fall of 2006: 'Web 2.0 is much more than just 
pasting a new user interface onto an old application. It's a way of 
thinking, a new perspective on the entire business of software'. [1] 
However, both what has been called Web 2.0 since 2004 (when Dale 
Dougherty came up with the term during a brainstorming session) as well 
as the whole idea of 'folksonomy' which lies behind social networking, 
blogging, and tagging, are nothing new.

According to the software developer and venture communist Dmytri 
Kleiner, these forms of business are just a mirror of the economic 
cooptation of values of sharing, participation and networking which 
inspired the early formation of hacker culture and peer2peer technology. 
As he pointed out during a panel at the Chaos Communication Congress in 
Berlin in 2007, 'the whole point of Web 2.0 is to achieve some of the 
promises of peer2peer technology but in a centralized way; using web 
servers and centralized technologies to create user content and 
folksonomy, but without actually letting the users control the 
technology itself'. [2]
But even if the Web 2.0 business enterprises do not hide their function 
of data aggregators, they make openness, user generated content and 
networking collaboration their main core strategies. The perpetual beta 
(Tim O’Reilly, 2005) and the user contribution become keys to market 
dominance. Google was one of the first companies to base its business in 
involving users to give productive feedback, releasing beta versions of 
its applications, such as Gmail for example, to be tested by users 
without being formally part of the production process. The idea of 
applying collaborative software development in Web 2.0 companies, 
practice of production typical of the open source communities, becomes a 
strategic business advantage with consequent decreases in costs. Many 
companies have adopted the open source built-in communities model, from 
IBM, Google, Apple, Facebook, to Creative Commons, and Wikipedia is not 
out of this cloud.


Networked Art  & Social Networking

In the artistic context of the past twenty years, networking art was 
referring to the ability of creating a map of connections in progress, 
and nets of relations among individuals. Since the 80s, platforms of 
networking have been an important tool for sharing knowledge and 
experience. According to some artists and theoreticians, networked 
culture, developed during the last half of the twentieth century, gave 
rise to a gift-exchange community as an alternative economy and social 
system (Welch, 1995; Baroni, 1997; Saper, 2001) [3] and this model of 
communication allowed for the ‘exchange’ of spontaneous gifts. The 
concepts of openness and Do-It-Yourself, were the starting point for the 
development of networked art, such as mail art, but also of punk culture 
and hacker ethic. The art of networking was based on the figure of the 
artist as networker: a creator of sharing platforms and of contexts for 
connecting and exchanging. It was not based on objects, nor solely on 
digital or analogical instruments, but on the relationships and 
processes in progress between individuals. Individuals who could in turn 
create other contexts of sharing. The same Do It Yourself hands-on 
practice was used to describe subsequent phenomena of networking and 
hacktivism; from Neoism to Plagiarism, up until the 1990s, when the 
network dynamics are affirmed on a broader level through the use of 
computers and the Internet. The ‘hacktivist attitude’ referred to an 
acknowledgement of the net as a political space, with the possibility of 
decentralized, autonomous and grassroots participation.

Today we are facing a progressive commercialization of contexts of 
software development and sharing, which want to appear open and 
progressive (very emblematic is Google’s motto ‘Don't be evil’), but 
which are indeed transforming the meaning of communities and networking, 
and the battle for information rights, placing it into the boundaries of 
the marketplace. This shift of the principles of openness and 
collaboration into commercial purposes is the mirror of a broader 
phenomenon. Like Google, many social networking platforms try to give an 
image of themselves as 'a force for good'. [4] At the same time, the 
free software community is not alien to this progressive corporate 
takeover of the hacker counterculture. Google organizes the Summer of 
Code festival every year to get the best hackers and developers to work 
for the company [5]; it encourages open source development, supports the 
development of Firefox, funds hackerspaces – i.e. the Hacker Dojo in 
Mountain View. Ubuntu One, an online backup and synchronization utility, 
uses Amazon S3 as its storage and transfer facility – while the Free 
Software Foundation bases its GNewSense, a free software GNU/Linux 
distribution, on Ubuntu. [6] This ambiguity of values, which is 
contributing to the end of the time of digital utopias, is described 
well by Matteo Pasquinelli: 'a parasite is haunting the hacker haunting 
the world' (2008), analyzing the contemporary exploitation of the 
rhetoric of free culture, and the collapse of the 'digitalism' ideology, 
corroded by the parasite of cognitive capitalism. [7].

An interesting example of the transformation from networked art as a 
collective and sharing practice to the creation of economically oriented 
communities is given by the art of crowdsourcing of Aaron Koblin. [8] 
The artist uses the Amazon Mechanical Turk to create works of art, which 
result from a combination of tasks, performed by a group of people, 
gathered through an open call asking for contributions. The contributors 
are paid a specific amount of money after delivering their work. Koblin 
used the strategy of crowdsourcing to create works such as Bicycle Built 
for Two Thousand, Ten Thousand Cents and The Sheep Market. [9] But, even 
if these works involved many people who perform the single tasks, the 
members of the group are not in connection with each other. What we have 
at the end of the process is an aesthetic representation of the 
collectivity, but the collective doesn’t exist per se. If we go back 
thirty years to the practice of mail art, it involved individuals linked 
by belonging to a non-formalized network of common interests, which 
resulted in exchanging postcards, handmade stamps, rubber stamps, 
envelops and many other creative objects shared though the postal 
network. In this case, the network was open to everyone, not 
economically oriented, and the artists participated to the call just for 
fun or for pleasure of sharing interests.


Burning Man & Networking Enterprises

If we proceed following a comparative method based on ethnographic 
investigation of some cases, this above mentioned shift from networking 
art as grassroots practice to social networking as business model 
appears evident. A very clear example is the Burning Man festival, a 
weeklong art event held every year since 1990 in the Black Rock Desert 
(Northern Nevada, California). [10] Managed since 1997 by the business 
enterprise Black Rock City LLC, it would have never been possible 
without the previous existence of some underground art groups, such as 
The Suicide Club and The Cacophony Society (Brian Doherty, 2004). [11]
The Suicide Club and The Cacophony Society had deep roots in surrealist 
art practices, creating a unique way to live the city of San Francisco, 
promoting and organizing pranks, interventions, games and collective 
performances thorough the end of 1970s and the 1980s. The top-secret San 
Francisco Suicide Club, heavily influenced by Surrealism and Dadaism: 
was started by five people: among them, Gary Warne. Warne gave concrete 
form to the concept of synaesthesia in the San Francisco public space, 
‘to create experiences that would be like living out a fantasy or living 
out a film’. [12] As an example, the surreal experience of climbing the 
Golden Gate Bridge in the fog with a group of people, or getting naked 
on San Francisco cable cars. In 1986, The Cacophony Society, formed by 
members of the Suicide Club, followed in their path. It developed 
through street theatre, urban explorations and pranks in public places, 
such as the Santarchy Event, which became like a virus that replicates 
itself (V. Vale, 2006) and which is still celebrated every December on 
the streets all over the world involving tens of thousands of Santas. 
John Law defined the Cacophony Society's activity as Surreal Tourism, 
which 'helped you look at wherever you were in a completely different 
way, almost like a William Burroughs cut-up' (John Law, 2006). Another 
of the Cacophony's central concept was the trip to the Zone, or the idea 
of "Zone Trips", inspired by the Temporary Autonomous Zone by Hakim Bey 
(1985). The Zone Trip #4 in 1990 organized by John Law and Michael 
Mikel, described as A Bad Day at Black Rock, signed the beginning of the 
annual Burning Man festival, previously a beach party held at Baker 
Beach since 1986. The origin of Burning Man is therefore deeply 
connected with surrealist art experiments and the early San Francisco 
urban counterculture.

Today Burning Man is held every year in Black Rock City, a temporary 
city built up for just one week at the end of August in the playa of the 
Nevada Desert. It is a community experiment, where the people involved 
create huge art sculptures, music events, happenings and performances, 
and which dissolves without leaving traces after a wooden sculpture of a 
Man, together with the art installations, and the other venues are 
burned by its inhabitants. The managers of Black Rock City LLC, a 
company that organizes and administrates the annual Festival since 1997, 
progressively transformed Burning Man into a networking enterprise. 
Burning Man might be seen as a collective social network, a virtual city 
with specific rules and economy, based on the concept of sharing goods 
and experiences. There is no money to use in the playa, and the people 
survive sharing their food. But as John Law points out in a private 
interview with the author (San Francisco, 2009), Burning Man is very 
different today from what it was before. It is a networking enterprise, 
with 50.000 participants every summer paying around 200 dollars to be 
part of it, and with a precise structure: it is a centrally organized 
chaos, where the Man, which is burned at the end of the festival, is 
raised at the centre-top of the city. It is situated at the centre of 
the playa and it looks at the people from the top. The participants 
themselves do not raise it all together anymore as it happened in the 
early times at Baker Beach, and it looks clear that Burning Man is not a 
non profit gathering anymore.

The evolution of Burning Man from a counterculture experimental art 
gathering to a centralized event organized by a business enterprise 
could be compared with the transformation of social networking, from 
networked art to Web 2.0. Social networking platforms such as Facebook, 
MySpace, Twitter, etc., have established themselves among Internet 
users, representing a successful model of connecting people. But at the 
same time, they mirror a very centralized way of creating networking. 
Fred Turner, in his paper "Burning Man at Google" (2009), explores how 
Burning Man’s bohemian ethos supports new forms of production emerging 
in Silicon Valley and especially at Google. 'It shows how elements of 
the Burning Man world – including the building of a socio-technical 
commons, participation in project-based artistic labor, and the fusion 
of social and professional interaction – help shape and legitimate the 
collaborative manufacturing processes driving the growth of Google and 
other firms' [13]. In 2006, for example, Black Rock City LLC began the 
developing of Burning Man Earth in collaboration with Google [14], which 
is not surprising, considering that Google's cofounders, Larry Page and 
Sergey Brin, are burners since the early days. In 1999 the founders 
famously shut down the company for a week during Burning Man.

This dialectic between counterculture and networking enterprises shows 
once again that the art of networking today is strictly connected with 
the use of commercial platforms and therefore is changing the meaning of 
collaboration and art itself. Is it today still possible to speak about 
“counterculture”, when social networking has become the motto of the Web 
2.0 business?


Co-optation Theory vs. Business Practice

The question is whether the co-optation theory of the counterculture 
might be the right explanation to understand the present development, or 
better, implosion, of the networking culture. Thomas Frank’s The 
Conquest of Cool (1997) and Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to 
Cyberculture (2007) may show the way; both books analyze how the endless 
cycles of rebellion and transgression are very well mixed with the 
development of business culture in Western society – specifically in the 
U.S.. As Thomas Frank suggests 'in the late 1950s and early 1960s, 
leaders of the advertising and menswear businesses developed a critique 
of their own industries, of over-organization and creative dullness, 
that had much in common with the critique of mass society which gave 
rise to the counterculture. The 1960s was the era of Vietnam, but it was 
also the high watermark of American prosperity and a time of fantastic 
ferment in managerial thought and corporate practice. But business 
history has been largely ignored in accounts of the cultural upheaval of 
the 1960s. This is unfortunate, because at the heart of every 
interpretation of the counterculture is a very particular – and very 
questionable – understanding of corporate ideology and of business 
practice'. [15]

The American counterculture of the 1960s was very much based in mass 
culture, promoting ‘a glorious cultural flowering, though it quickly 
became mainstream itself’ (Frank 1997) and becoming attractive for 
corporations, from Coca Cola to Nike, but also for IBM and Apple.

Fred Turner explains how the rise of cyberculture utopias is strongly 
connected with the development of the computer business in the Silicon 
Valley, as the background of the Whole Earth network by Stewart Brand 
and the magazine Wired demonstrate. [16] It should not surprise anyone 
today that Google is adopting the same strategy of getting close to 
counterculture - hackers, burners at Burning Man, etc. - because many 
hackers in California were already close to the development of the 
business we face today. The cyber-utopias of the 1980s and 1990s were 
pushed by the market as well, and they were very well connected with its 
development. Turner demonstrates how the image of the authentic 
counterculture of the 1960s, antithetical to the technologies, and later 
co-opted by the forces it opposed, is actually the shadow of another 
version of history. A history which instead has its roots in a 'new 
cybernetic rhetoric of systems and information' born already in the 
research laboratories of World War II in which scientists and engineers 
'began to imagine institutions as living organisms, social networks as 
webs of information' (Turner 2007). Once again, with Web 2.0 
enterprises, we are facing the same phenomenon.


The Disruptive Art of Business

Accepting that the digital utopias of the 1980s and 1990s have never 
been completely extraneous to the business practices, might be an 
invitation for artists, networkers and hackers to subvert the false idea 
of ‘real’ counterculture, and to start analyzing how the cyclic business 
trends work, and what they culturally represent. Analyzing how the 
networking culture became functional to accelerate capitalism, as it 
happened for the youth movement of the 1960s, might change the point of 
view and the area of criticism. The statement ‘if you can't beat 'em, 
absorb 'em’ could be reversed from the artists and hackers themselves. 
If artists, hackers and activists can’t avoid to indirectly serve 
corporate revolutions, they should work on absorbing the business 
ideology to their own advantage, and consequently, transforming it and 
hacking it. A possible tendency might be not just refusing business, but 
appropriating its philosophy once again, making it functional for our 
purposes. Some artists are already working in this direction, creating 
art projects with deal with business and which subvert its strategies, 
like The People Speak (Planetary Pledge Pyramid 2009), or Alexei Shulgin 
(Electroboutique 2007), UBERMORGEN.COM (Google Will Eat Itself 2005, and 
Amazon Noir 2006, both created with Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico; 
The Sound of Ebay 2008), the community of Seripica Naro (2005), just to 
mention a few. [17]

Even if it is easy to recognize co-optation as a cyclic business 
strategy among networkers, hackers and activists, it takes more effort 
to accept that business has often been part of counterculture and 
cultural development. In this phase of ambiguity, it is fundamental to 
look back to analyze the reasons of the shift of networking paradigms 
and counterculture values, but it is also necessary to break some 
cultural taboos. Artists should try to work like viruses to stretch the 
limits of business enterprises, and hack the meaning of business itself. 
Instead of refusing to compromise with commercial platforms, they should 
try to put their hands on them, to reveal hidden mechanisms of social 
inclusion and exclusion, and to develop a critique of the medium itself.

To conclude, I would like to mention the famous statement at the end of 
Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay, which dialectically juxtaposes 
'Ästhetisierung der Politik – Politisierung der Kunst'. [18] Art, to 
become effective, has to understand how the mechanisms of fascination – 
and in our case, capitalism – work, to respond with a critical approach 
through the media, which need to be once again transformed into a tool 
of intervention.


Notes:

[1] John Musser with Tim O’Reilly & the O’Reilly Radar Team, ‘Web 2.0: 
Principles and Best Practices’, O’Reilly Radar, Fall 2006,
http:// oreilly.com/catalog/web2report/chapter/web20_report_excerpt.pdf

[2] 24th Chaos Communication Congress, Panel ‘Hacking Ideologies, part 
2: Open Source, a capitalist movement’, with Dmytri Kleiner, Marcell 
Mars, Toni Prug, Tomislav Medak, 23 November, 2007, Berlin. Video: 
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/24c3_m4v_2311.html

[3] Respectively:
Welch C., Eternal Network. A Mail Art Anthology, University of Calgary 
Press, 1995;
Baroni V., Arte Postale! Guida al network della corrispondenza creativa, 
Bertiolo, AA Edizioni, 1997.
Saper C.J., Networked Art. , Minneapolis/London, University of Minnesota 
Press, 2001;

[4] ‘Social Media – A Force for Good’, Panel Discussion with Stephen 
Fry, Biz Stone, Founder and Chief Executive of Twitter; and Reid 
Hoffman, Founder and Chief Executive of LinkedIn, 19 November 2009,
http://www.stephenfry.com/2009/11/19/social-media-force-for-good/

[5] http://code.google.com/soc/

[6] As Florian Cramer made me notice, discussing Ubuntu in private 
e-mail correspondence.

[7] Pasquinelli M., Animal Spirits. A Bestiary of the Commons, 
Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.

[8] http://www.aaronkoblin.com

[9] Respectively: http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com, 
http://www.tenthousandcents.com/, http://www.thesheepmarket.com/.

[10] http://www.burningman.com/

[11] Doherty B., This Is Burning Man, New York, Little, Brown and 
Company, 2004.

[12] ‘Cacophony Society’, in V. Vale, Pranks 2, San Francisco, 
RE/Search, 2006.

[13] Turner F., ‘Burning Man at Google: A Cultural Infrastructure for 
New Media Production.’ New Media & Society, Vol.11, No.1-2 (April, 
2009), 145-66.

[14] http://bmanearth.burningman.com/

[15] Frank T., The Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture, 
and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago University Press, 1997.

[16] Turner F., From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Stewart Brand, the 
Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Chicago 
University Press, 2007.

[17] Respectively: http://www.pledgepyramid.org; 
http://electroboutique.com; http://gwei.org; 
http://www.amazon-noir.com/; http://www.sound-of-ebay.com; 
http://www.serpicanaro.com

[18] Benjamin W., Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen 
Reproduzierbarkeit, in: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, 1936.