Learn, hack!

URL

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2004/fahrplan/files/76-digital-prosthetics-slides.pdf

File name

76-digital-prosthetics-slides.pdf

File size

341.1 KB

MD5

3cce48ae94dfba94ea06f6975b7baa34

SHA1

1b2ef5e693a5be39ca2515855b89595a6106807b

A lecture on how digital media prosthetics, institutionalisation (in particular the manifestations of copyright and patent law which lurk behind vested interests in controlling the transition to a vastly powerful new world), and the imperatives of corporate planning have come into a conflict so fierce that shared lived experience, increasingly, is forced to undergo a rapid process of commodification. I'd like to propose a lecture on how digital media prosthetics, institutionalisation (in particular the manifestations of copyright and patent law which lurk behind vested interests in controlling the transition to a vastly powerful new world), and the imperatives of corporate planning have come into a conflict so fierce that shared lived experience, increasingly, is forced to undergo a rapid process of commodification. This struggle, which can no longer be defined through the lens of geography or class alone, in turn, points to a not that distant future in which commons-based peer production/consumption is exploited within a context of intense social taylorism and digital fordism with the ultimate goal to turn culture into a paid-for experience, and hence moving the terrain of struggle away from the surplus value of labour to the "legitimacy" of knowledge sharing and pervasive networking, and how the latter can be monetised and controlled in accordance with anarcho-capitalist agendas. Obviously, the question which we ought to pose to ourselves is how the revolutionary demands of hacking can be guided, assembled, and reproduced so that this process of commodification is consciously resisted by technology developers and users alike, artists, and all those whose creativity and desire for socially-conscious technological innovation and emergent social cooperation have been enhanced by the digital condition we're increasinly in the centre of.