Well, it’s been a while since I wrote anything about the Debtors’ Party [1], I have a few texts in mind about horizontal money, about why we should continue to use the word communism, and more about the macroeconomics of class struggle [2], but I thought I’d start by honouring a debt.

I promised my friend Tsvika Frosh of the Raw Men Empire that I’d write a Debtors’ Song.

So here it is.

= The Debtors' Song =

My bank wants more money
They gonna take away my home
They gonna take away my home
if I don't pay my loan

My doctor wants more money
You see, I had a little spill
but they don't give the pills
if I don't pay my bills

My school wants more money
The man, he call me on the phone
They gonna call the lawyers
If I don't pay my loan

Now I may indulge some
but I didn't blow my money on the drink
never been the type to gamble,
or live life on the brink

I just did what I had to
got an education and a home
got some medication when I needed
and had the doctor set a bone

And I'm not holding back none,
I've been payin' what I can
I've done what can be done
and I still can't pay the man

- chorus -

  Now my bank wants more money
  But I ain't gonna pay.
  I ain't gonna pay,
  cuz I ain't got it anyway.

  Now my school wants more money
  But I ain't gonna pay.
  I ain't gonna pay,
  cuz I ain't got it anyway.

  Now my doctor wants more money
  But I ain't gonna pay.
  I ain't gonna pay,
  cuz I ain't got it anyway.

  There's no two ways about it,
  there's no progress to be made.
  A debt that can't be paid
  is a debt that won't be paid

  And I ain't the only one here,
  you all know what I'm going through
  wether you're a worker or student
  I know you're a debtor too.

- end chorus -

We got to get together,
we got to find a way
we got to make them listen
there's no way that we can pay

Tell them creditors to back off,
show them profiteers the door,
we got to get together,
so we don't need them any more.

They say the market system,
is all so fair and free,
but there's just some things, and I can list them,
that don't add up for me.

To get an education, do you need to drown in debt?
There's a way to teach each other in a better way I bet,
and to get your medication, is this the way it's got to be?
We all need medical attention, why can't it just be free?
Whats the point of making profit on hospitals and schools?
Do we want to be surrounded by sick and angry fools?
Wouldn't everyone be better off if we all had health and skills?
There's got to be a better way, we just gotta find the will.

- repeat chorus -

Now animals deserve a habitat,
and even fish deserve the sea.
And even birds need a branch to build a nest,
so why does it gotta be,
that the people got to go to work,
got to work most every day,
and struggle just to get a home,
a place where they can stay?

Who's planet is this anyway?
How did this come to be?
That them creditors own everything,
while the rest face misery.

If we can't go and find a job,
and if we can't get that loan,
then we just can't get the things we need,
no school, no health, no home.

Them creditors got everything,
us debtors pay and pay,
we gotta put a stop to this,
we gotta find a way.

If us debtors get together,
all together, every one
we can heal, and house and teach each other
and do the work that must be done.

Them creditors, they don't help us none,
they just get in the way,
their profits are what drags us down,
we must refuse to pay.

- repeat chorus -

I’l be at Stammtisch [3], as usual, around 9pm. Come by! Maybe we’ll have a sing-a-long!

[1] http://www.dmytri.info/collected-texts-related-to-the-debtors-party-initiative-updated/
[2] http://www.dmytri.info/marcoeconomics-of-class-struggle/
[3] http://bit.ly/buchhandlung

I’m currently involved in a discussion on the Empyre mailing list with Tiziana Terranova, Adam Hyde and others. The topic of Kickstarter and simular sites came up, as I’ve been meaning to address these sorts of projects, both for their potential and their limitations, I though I’d repost an excerpt of my response here:

I love Kickstarter and similar sites, like Flattr, Goteo, etc. If you are a cultural worker or free software producer I highly recommend using these, as they are generating a fantastic community of cultural production, which is great to be part of, if you can.

Yet, it’s a very small community. So the vast majority of production can not be funded by these sites. It’s exactly the kind of token or fringe alternatives that we must not mistake as a genuine embodiment of social change, as cool as it is for the few it can support.

Kickstarter, for example, has raised $125 million dollars in it’s history. In total. This seems like a rather impressive sum until you remember that it’s just over half the budget of “Spiderman 2,” which is one movie, and not an especially high-budget one.

Visit the video store and walk down the aisles, imagine that each of the titles you see on the shelf had budgets more similar to Spiderman 2 than to anything funding by Kickstarter. Now imagine the total number of workers employed by the budgets of the movies you see in the video store, compared to the number of workers employed by projects funded by Kickstarter and you can see what I mean.

Does Kickstarter work? Sure! Does it fund amazing projects? Yes! Should you use it? Absolutely! Will it change the way culture is produced? No. It wont. And even imaging it could assumes a massive descaling of cultural employment. Would we even want that?

Now, you might believe that this is merely a temporary situation, that Kickstarter and similar sites can grow and grow until they can reach a similar scale to capital funded culture, but that is not possible. Why? Because “Spiderman 2″ is funded from accumulated capital, while Kickstarter is funded from the retained earnings of workers. This is a rather important difference.

What it means is that the limits of the amounts of funding available for each model are a function of the structure of wealth in society. The total pool of accumulated capital vs the total amount of retained earnings workers are able to consistently divert from consumption. The former is orders of magnitude larger than the later. In fact, the workings of the labour market will tend to push the later towards 0.

For projects like Kickstarter to scale they can not depend on the limited funds workers are able to divert from consumption, and must tap into the real source of accumulation: Surplus Value. In other words, only when money available for Kickstarter investment can be reproduced from the captured profits of the works they fund. To achieve that, Kickstarter would need to become not much different than the industry as it exists today.

Sorry if this breaks your heart. It breaks mine. But as much as I love our hacker and free culture community, let’s not mistake our subculture with a new mode of production, doing so will only make us complacent, content with our lack of complicity in evil proprietary culture, instead of standing with the great majority of cultural producers and consumers and demanding nothing less that the complete transformation of cultural production, which means the abolition of capitalism.

For the rest of this ongoing discussion, see the Empyre archives:

http://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/

On Nettime, in repsonse to my association of the Creative Commons and Shareware, Nick mentions that several CC licences are usefull for Free Culture.

On 08.11.2011 21:58, Nick wrote:

Thanks for this Dmytri, I really enjoyed it. To me it highlights in particular how negative is Creative Commons’ preference to conflate their licenses under the heading “licensed under a creative commons license,” and refusing to take a stance as to the implications of license choice, as for example the FSF do. After all several CC licenses (BY, BY-SA, Zero) are all very useful to “free culture” people, but the issues of free culture, of seeking to break down the barriers between ‘consumer’ and ‘producer,’ are barely if at all mentioned.

Thanks Nick, if I ever return to the shareware/creative commons comparison, I would add something about the subsumtion of the common within capitalist processes, this is illustrated by what you describe above, that several CC licences allow a genuine free culture commons to exist within the framework of the Creative Commons, in the same way as Free Software meets the qualifications of “Shareware” as published by the Association of Shareware Professionals (now the Association of Software Professionals).

The Copy-Just-Right anti-commons forms of of Shareware and Creative Commons, have no issue with genuinely free works being included within it, it’s purpose is not to exclude such works, but rather to pass itself off as having simular common-cause with a “remix culture” as such free works. Yet, the freedom of being creative and productive with the work is actually antithetical to the “Some Rights Reserved” mission of protecting producers, while at the same time “granting” the limited rights of sharing, which function to promote and distribute the private property of producers, thus building value for the producers.

Many of the early pioneers of Shareware became millionaires by “allowing” their users to “share” their software, and this business practices was even taken up by larger software vendors at times, yet the practice was firmly positioned within a traditional capitalist market economy and unrelated to the gift economy of free software. Yet, the misleading name causes confusion between the two until today, with many people referring to free software as “shareware” or “freeware,” despite the quite different origin and definition of these terms.

The same is true of Free Culture, for which “Creative Commons” has become a surrogate term, despite it’s form and history having no more to do with Free Culture than Shareware has with Free Software. Best,

IMPORTANT: Stammtisch today is at C-Base. We will not be at Cafe Buchhandlung this evening.

In the meantime, please enjoy today’s text:

The Creative Commons is to Free Culture what Shareware is to Free Software

Back in the early days of computers proprietary software developers had a problem. Often working from home or small-offices, far removed from their potential customers, there was no easy way to sell software to their customers. One common way was to use classified adds in computer magazines, but unless a software title was very well known, it was difficult to convince customers to pay for it before they had the opportunity to try it and verify that it does what they need it to. 

Yet, the very emerging of computers had the solution embedded into the very technology, users where already distributing software on their own, by way of exchanging floppy disks, uploading software to Bulletin Board Systems or Online Services, or even printing out source code so that others could rekey it on their own computer. 

However, this practice was directly contradictory to the way commercial software was sold: paid for in advance and sold in a box in a store or by mail order. To prevent such unauthorized distribution, commercial software was often distributed on copy-protected media that used various cryptographic and obscurity techniques to prevent its users from distributing it on their own. This was “All Rights Reserved” software, the published insisted on you buying it from them or their contracted resellers, and not, under any circumstances, share it with others. 

In the same way that commercial art, movies, music and books, for instance is “All Rights Reserved,” publishers want you to buy it directly from them or their agents, and never share it with others, and likewise, the rights being reserved are the publisher’s rights.

Yet, the very technology that made a recording industry possible, mechanical reproduction, also made it possible for its users to share it. Starting from home-taping to today’s online social platforms, fans of certain artists actively share with each others. And just like the commercial software authors, the music industry has availed itself of a wide variety of tactics to prevent this, from legal and political intimidation, to all sorts of cockamamie “Digital Rights Management” techniques.

Yet, this “All Rights Reserved” business practice was well and good for well-funded publishers who where able to afford effective advertising and build out large-scale distribution networks, yet for both smaller artist and smaller commercial software vendors, such a system worked against them, and they turned to ways of using users’ sharing with each other as means to find their audience and customers.

In the software world this manifested as “Shareware” and in cultural production this manifested as the “Creative Commons.”

Both these movements developed as systems of “Some Rights Reserved,” granting users the ability to share with each other, but restricting them according to the will of the publisher, common restrictions in both cases included non-derivative clauses, and non-commercial clauses, effectively preventing consumers from becoming producers, meaning that the publishers where eager to use consumer sharing as a means to build the value of their property, but wanted to make sure that their status as producer was maintained, that all creative and commercial use of their work was restricted only to them, that their consumers would remain consumers, instrumental only as casual distributors.

Reading both the Shareware and the Creative Commons licenses, there was no confusion over whose rights where being reserved, the publishers claimed all rights and denied all responsibilities. The consumers’ rights where not mentioned, except in efforts to limits any they might have.

Meanwhile, at the radical fringes of cultural production, and in the quickly expanding belly of information technology, a more revolutionary way of thinking existed. Artists and Software users felt constrained by the restrictions on their ability to be creative and productive with the culture and software they had, from the poet Comte de Lautreamont’s call for a poetry written by all, to Richard Stallman’s call for a computer operating system written by all, free culture and free software where concerned with the rights of the consumer, not the producer. Or even more to point, concerned with abolishing the distinction between producer and consumer, understanding culture and technology to be a mutually constructed wealth, the value of which becomes more rich the more people contribute to it.

The use of the word “Share” in Shareware and the use of the word “Commons” in Creative Commons share a misleading disingenuousness, they seem to imply common cause with the consumers, but no less than “All Rights Reserved,” “Some Rights Reserved” is designed to enclose the consumer, to make sure they can not become the producer. “Some Rights Reserved” allows consumers to contribute to the value of the producers’ product as promoter and distributor, but not to share in the value, which, far from being “common,” remains the sole property of the producer.

Free Culture and Free Software attempt to prefigure communities that truly share in common.

Thimbl[1] has been getting some attention lately, party because of my talk at Social Media Week Berlin[2], partly because of a tweet by the legendary Doc Searls[3].

Despite being part of Transmediale 2010 and winning a distinction at the festival, many people don’t seem to realize that Thimbl is an artwork.

It’s a part of Telekommnunisten’s Miscommunication Technologies series along with such works as deadSwap[4] and r15n[5]. Miscommunication Technologies uncover the social relations embedded in communication technology, creating platforms that don’t often work as expected, or work in unexpected ways.

I suppose the fact that Thimbl is an artwork was a surprise to the organizers of Social Media Week, and perhaps would be to Doc Searls as well. Who, like many of the people in the audience at Social Media Week might be thinking. Huh? What makes this art exactly?

The answer is surprisingly simple, it’s art because it is carried out in an art context, at events like Transmediale, Hack.Fem.East, Sousevelance, and at places such the Piet Zwart Institute and the Israeli Center for Digital Art.

These works function as a kind of performative science fiction. Introducing the narrative of the political economy of the Internet into the media arts community by way of interactive artworks in the form of telephone and internet platforms. Much like the Telekommunist Manifesto introduces the same topics in text. Among the core messages that we wish to contribute to the media art dialogue is an understanding of how centralization and decentralization relate to exploitation and freedom, respectively.

Thimbl is an artwork, not really an alternative to Facebook, Twitter, or even Identi.ca, as it was billed at Social Media Week. Although programmed into the event unwittingly by the organisers, everyone was non-the-less quite pleased at the results, and with the discusion that ensued.

Thimbl is about the need for decentralized social media, and illustrates that this is something that has always been a part of the Internet, while also showing that it’s not really so difficult to implement.

Even though it’s ambitions are symbolic, Thimbl actually works.

Because it is decentralized, we can’t know how many users it has, but you can see the global timeline of all users that we do know about on our own ThimblSinging[6] instance. If you have a finger account on any server, anywhere, with a Thimbl-compatible plan file[7], you can use this site as well, and start using Thimbl without installing anything from the Thimbl project on your own server.

Or, you can grab the code and host a instance of ThimblSinging yourself.[8] If you prefer the command line, or want to script something, Thimbl-CLI[9] is available, as is the thimblr gem that comes with ThimblSinging.

Even the GMail of Thimbl already exists; Phimbl.tk[10], where you can just sign up and have a Thimbl account.

And PageKite[11] has added support for Thimbl too, meaning you can even easily self-host your Thimbl account, if you want to, perhaps even on your mobile device.

So, if all this exists, why is Thimbl not a real alternative?

Well, for one, we made it as an artwork because it has merit as such, wether or not it becomes a viable platform. Some ideas that emerge from science fiction become reality, and some don’t, yet the predictive science doesn’t directly determine the merit of the work of fiction.

However, that’s not the main reason. Perhaps even calling it science fiction is misleading here. It’s not Thimbl’s technical viability that’s speculative, but rather it’s economic viability.

Thimbl is an economic fiction.

Making it work is not the greatest challenge, making it financially viable is. Thimbl does not provide investors with the ability to control it’s users or their data, and as Thimbl’s Manifesto[12] states “This control is required by the logic of Capitalist finance in order to capture value. Without such control profit-seeking investors do not provide funds.”

For Thimbl, or any other platform with a simular vision, to become a real alternative to the capitalist financed platforms like Facebook and Twitter, we need more than running code, even more than a small, perhaps dedicated, user base. These assets are only enough to keep it going as a lively, yet marginal underground medium. A fun platform for experts and enthusiasts, unknown and unknowable to the masses.

To get beyond this and actually break the monopolizing grip of centralized social media we need to match their productive capacities. We need financing on a simular scale. so that the development, marketing, and operations budgets are comparable and sufficient to compete. That is what is required to be a true alternative, not a symbolic one. Yet, Capitalism can not provide such financing.

Just like science fiction becomes reality when science transcends the limitations that existed when the fiction was imagined, for economic fiction like Thimbl to become reality economics will need to transcend the limitations that we currently face.

We can write code, we can write texts, we can create artworks, but as a small network of artists and hackers, we can’t change the economic conditions we work in by ourselves.

That is why Thimbl is an artwork; its message must transform society for its vision to become reality. It is a manifesto, written in code.

If you want to see the project succeed, join us, grab the code and ideas you want and run with them.  

[1] http://thimbl.net

[2] http://socialmediaweek.org/event/?event_id=551

[3] http://twitter.com/#!/dsearls/status/119808351688335362

[4] http://deadswap.net

[5] http://docs.telekommunisten.org/r15n

[6] http://thimbl.tk

[7] http://j.mp/dotplan

[8] https://github.com/fguillen/ThimblSinging

[9] https://github.com/blippy/Thimbl-CLI

[10] http://phimbl.tk

[11] http://pagekite.net/wiki/Howto/FingerAndThimbl/

[12] http://www.thimbl.net/manifesto.html