Group items tagged

In October 2009, we co-promoted the first Free Culture Forum (FCF)

The FCF released a Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge

The Charter lists a variety of ways of achieving sustainability developed by initiatives based on free culture principles, some more consolidated, some still experimental

The Charter also promotes the principle of combining several sources of finance, as a way of guaranteeing independence of the creators.

What we call the Free Culture Movements comprises a wide range of experiences mainly emerging in the framework of the internet and the digital revolution.

We are still living in a capitalist society; and in the last twenty years, one major change has been the qualitatively new importance of information, communication and knowledge both in the economy and in society at large.

communities of highly individualised members

the potential opened up by the new technologies

This goes together with a second question we have often dealt with, that is, why these ‘networked forms’ are emerging in so many movements and indeed in so many aspects of present-day society.

these forces have one of their fundamental roots in the movements of the 1960s and 70s and specifically in two salient facts: the shake-up of the Fordist, patriarchal, hierarchical institutions of post-war capitalism and the (connected) repercussions of the massive expansion of higher education.

We need to better conceptualise the anthropological transformation which underlies these new patterns of social relationships

Which leads us to a third area of issues: the movements we analyse have been emerging from the very core of societal innovation of the last decades. What do we call this? Post-Fordism? The knowledge economy? Informationalism? Cognitive capitalism?

When we started Networked Politics, we wanted first of all to deepen the comprehension of the problems that had emerged in the innovative forms and principles of organisation in the global movements. It was in this way that we came to discover parallels with the organisational forms that had emerged in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement, as well as with various experiences of web communities of collaborative production

as producing common resources.

logics based on openness to the ‘outside’

First, where knowledge, information and communication play a central role, the processes of production appear intrinsically and more immediately social. They benefit and rely on flows and networks of production which go beyond the formal boundaries of any specific organisation (not to say single individuals).

But there is also another aspect of this social nature of production that needs to be noted: in many senses, the flows of production appeared to shift away from the formal boundaries of what is traditionally considered productive work, to spread into society at large.

the social nature of these processes seems to put pressure on any regulatory, governance and accounting system closed within the boundaries of formally isolated organisations.

this configuration also brings people to questioning the adequacy, legitimacy and efficiency of property regimes as we know them, be they private or state mechanisms.

The increasing rediscovery of the notion of commons by these movements and many beyond them – has its roots here.

When we look at the qualities which need to be mobilised and at the forms of organisation of production in these spheres, we observe an increasing importance of attitudes and capacities

creativity, flexibility, development of information, continuous learning, problem-solving, initiative, communicational and relational skills, decision-making, attention, experiential/practical/”tacit” knowledge.

embedded in individuals and are not easily reproducible and controllable through planned command or automated mechanisms.

depend on motivations which are not easily reducible to the monetary

a blurring of entrepreneurial and managerial functions and of dependent work

another dimension where the experience of the FC-movements is interesting. There are experiments of a different kind around these problems

related to the meshing and mobilisation of different motivations, non-hierarchical division of labour, collaboration and coordination, and so on.

working on the basis of a distributional/sharing

the logic behind the internet itself

a third cluster of problems

The increased immaterial and social nature of the processes of production and of products is creating a series of problems in the systems of measures.

Such problems are evidently further complicated by the digital revolution, which made it possible that a digital product, once created, can be potentially reproduced “easier, faster, ubiquitously and almost free”

In this lies another clue that fundamental difficulties are emerging, which point toward what could be called a crisis of the system of value – which, indeed, has many other roots, well beyond this realm.

Fordist forms of production, to be deployed in a non-destructive way, required the invention of a new institutional framework, which crystallised in the Keynesian revolution; which, in turn, to be effectively deployed required the invention of a new system of (public and private) measures and accounts, which culminated in the famous – and today widely contested concept of – Gross National Product. Doesn’t this resonate with the present?