Categories
Free Culture

Freedom Of Simulation

OpenSim is a Free Software re-implementation of the Second Life (SL) virtual world server. The popularity of Second Life and the availability of a Free server (from OpenSim) and a Free client (from Linden Labs, the original authors of SL) means that OpenSim and SL’s scripting language may become the standard for networked virtual reality in the same way that the Apache server and HTML have for networked hypertext.

OpenSim is an excellent project but it has two issues that are of concern for the freedom of OpenSim users. These are not being discussed within the Free Software and web freedom movements, and they need discussing quite urgently before detrimental norms become fixed.

The first problem is that OpenSim is written in C# and allows users to write scripts in C#. There are alternative implementations of some of the less complex parts of OpenSim (in Perl for example), but the main sim (virtual world) engine would be more difficult to replace. Is it worth trying to do so, or at least trying to produce a non-C# alternative in parallel, or are C# and Mono a safe environment for at least this Free Software project?

The second and far more serious problem is Second Life’s existing user restriction mechanisms, its implementation in OpenSim, and how this interacts with ip maximalist calls for further restrictions.

SL objects and scripts are software and/or data, they are owned by their users, and they are run by their users on the server. But Second Life has a built-in DRM-style “no copy/no change” flag system for virtual objects that can remove the freedom of the users of that code to modify and share it.

The flag system is implemented by OpenSim but can be turned off by the server administrator. This is as it should be; the flag system is a restriction that has been rejected in CD, cable TV and other media. It destroys fair use and discourages consumers, destroying the very value it is supposed to protect. But the ability to turn off the flag system disturbs some IP maximalists. And even the flag system is not enough for some IP maximalists who demand encrypted textures and other ridiculous security theatre for Linden Labs’ implementation SL.

The flags are unnecessary for administrators and for rightsholders. Linden Labs and OpenSim operators can claim safe harbor protection under the DMCA, like web hosts and like video sharing sites, and rightsholders can appeal under this system. Calls for further restrictions should be resisted, and the established norms of Fair Use and free use of software espoused and defended. And they are ineffectual for “content creators”, as shapes and textures are ultimately sent over the network to the client anyway.

One solution to “protect” content encumbered by control flags, although more to protect virtual world administrators from endless protests that they are enabling “content theft”, would be a system to strip flag-encumbered objects from a user’s avatar when it teleports into a Free sim (one with the flag system disabled) and restore them when they teleport out. Proper DMCA safe harbor compliance would be preferable, but such a system would answer critics and inform users.

It is possible to establish norms and systems that protect the freedom of users of virtual worlds while obviating the demands of ip maximalists. For both the freedom of users and the profits of rightsholders Networked Virtual Reality should be like the World Wide Web not the old walled-garden dial-up network services that lost to it.

So, in summary.

1. Decide whether C# and Mono is the best environment for OpenSim and if not what can be done.
2. Resist calls for stronger restrictions on users and explain why they are counter-productive.
3. Establish that control flags are legally unecessary, destroy users rights and will depress adoption and exploitation of worlds.
4. Establish DMCA/EUCD best practice for OpenSim operators and implement code to support this.
5. Implement control flag firewalls that strip and restore restricted content when avatars teleport to and from a sim.
6. Establish both software and web user/data freedom standards for OpenSim users and promote them as part of the value of OpenSim.
7. Promote the use of Free Software and Free Culture licences within virtual worlds for scripts, objects and textures.
8. Reframe the terms of the debate using the growth of Free Software, the Web, and online music sales as counter-examples to IP maximalist claims.

Free Software and free Culture advocates and organizations such as the Free Software Foundation, Creative Commons, The Open Knowledge Foundation and autonomo.us must step up to this urgent task.

Categories
Add category Aesthetics

The Cognitive Science Question For Art

When I got to art school in the early 90s, cultural studies was the face of the literary theory land grab in that part of the academy. Its stranglehold wouldn’t be broken until the Sokal Hoax some years later. I resisted semiotics and deconstruction as the hegemonic narratives of a coercive authoritarian culture. The long cry of denial of those who’d missed the boat in ’68 echoed through the postmodern era. It was vapid, tedious bullshit entirely congruent with the managerial ideology of the day.

Technology was opaque to the Derrida-and-Deleuze brigade, however much they protested to the contrary, so mid-90s interactive multimedia was a good place to resist Theory from. Computing machinery was part of another land grab, but criticism of it was possible. And numbers were at least a means of resisting the claim that everything was a text(e).

You’d think given this that I’d be all for the Cognitive Science land grab on literature, but no. To try to explain Shakespeare or Austen in terms of evolution, cognition or economics is fucked up. Literature and the aesthetic are what is needed. Parsing the literary into consumable and mashable data is complicit with corporate (and academic) information culture, the terrible cool of Alan Liu’s excellent “Laws Of Cool”.

The literary and the aesthetic are desperately needed by a culture that threatens to prolapse into mere information. Cognitive Science can explain why you see stripes or why events follow one another in time, and economics can excuse any crime, but the indigestible objects of THE literary and THE aesthetic, not as mystifications but as emergent (epi)phenomena of socialized humanity are needed as an irrational to the sociopathic “rationality” of neoliberalism and managerialism.

We do need another hero. Because no amount of economic incentives or cognitive exegesis is going to escape the gravity well of vapid cool.

If art cannot be grounded in cognitive science, where can it be grounded? In a non-cognitive aesthetic. What can a non-cognitive aesthetic be in the post-postmodern era?

Categories
Aesthetics

The Economic Question For Art

There are often two sides to any story and trying to flatten it breaks both. Contradictions are ever present.

Fine art is absolutely dependent on money. It is all but an economic category. Taste (and aesthetics) is the product of social class, it is a socioeconomic shibboleth. Yet art historians and artists are often dismissive of the profit motive. Artists’ behaviour, starving if not in the garret then in bedsits on three or more jobs for decades to make art that may or may not eventually sell for much more than they will ever see, is economically irrational.

The current insane prices for art instrumentalized as stock-market-beating commodities is a problem for aesthetics. Should aesthetics recognize the importance of works paid attention by the market? To do so all but discards the artwork as the subject of aesthetics. It is aesthetics in quotation marks, a state of being that makes hipsterism seem authentic (sic). Should aesthetics try to ignore the market? To do so leads to the clammy embraces of academic radicalism or state art.

How can the aesthetic flatland of the market be escaped by an art that may nonetheless be destined for it? How can that question be answered without the word “crash”? How can the Hardt-and-Negri-and-Zizek dinner party radicalism of the academy and the equally instrumentalised art-as-a-substitute-for-regeneration of state art be avoided into the bargain?

Categories
Aesthetics Satire

Portrait of The Artist as Homo Economicus

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/arts/design/04pica.html

David Galenson seems to be part of the wave of culturally triumphant economic explainers who are dining out on neoliberalism’s success since that nasty business with Keynesianism in the 70s meant the economic paradigm had to be reset. They definitely have it right this time, it’s a science. You know, like Marxism was.

Galenson’s mission is to bring the explanatory pixie-dust of market economic analysis to art. The NY Times article linked above contains a number of extraordinary claims about art inspired by Galenson’s latest book. Not all are made by Galenson, but they do not contradict the quotes from him. I am hoping that Galenson’s book has been misrepresented by the article, but the article itself requires addressing.

Galenson apparently claims that markets and conceptual innovation are what differentiates Twentieth Century art from previous art. But markets in art have existed since classical times. Particularly wherever a merchant class has emerged but also with nobles and royalty. Courts are, in economic terms, markets. And the competition of different dynasties, courts or worthies for the scarce resources of artistic production constituted a monopoly only in so much as everyone who buys a can of coke does.

Michael Rushton goes further than Galenson by claiming that innovation requires markets. If there was no innovation in art prior to the existence of markets then the historical emergence of cave art is inexplicable, and tribal art must be an haullucination.

Galenson seems to claim that quantitative methods or market economics have not often been applied to art and that art history is hostile to them. This is ahistorical. There is a long history of Marxist analyses of art history, and the history of aesthetics is largely a history of economic class and economic development. The question of who pays for art, and how the sale price of a work of art relates to its aesthetic worth, is not a new one.

Galenson follows these claims with a quick count of image frequency in recent art history textbooks in order to establish the most important works of the twentieth century. But text books are not the same as the museums, journals, catalogues or collections that create the importance of works of art that these books report. Applying simple quantitative methods to this tertiary information renders them both information destroying and parasitic. At best they can prove only that someone else has proved something somewhere else.

Books were chosen because actual great art does not come to market often enough to provide useful data for quantitative analysis of what the market determines great art to be. Read that sentence again. It is fortunate indeed that Galenson didn’t have to rely on the art market to provide the information he needs to prove that markets are the producers of great works. But is there not a problem with a thesis when attempting to follow it through disproves it on a practical level?

Economics can tell us much about the sociology and history of art, as it always has. Galenson is wrong if he thinks that he is bringing new cargo to the art world. And his premises and methodology are bogus.

That said, let us suppose for a moment that Galenson is right. What would Galensonist art look like?

Since it cannot be measured by sales, it need not be expensive. No Damien Hirst skull bonds for hedge fund managers and oil oligarchs to use to out-pace the market for lesser commodities, you could sell an unmade bed as long as you get in the next art textbook. Since the interior structure of the work is irrelevant, it need not be aesthetic. Easy reproducability is more valuable than beauty or internal complexity. Since it must get in the textbooks it needs to be popular, but this need not be because of its artistic worth. It could illustrate fashionable theory or trends, and/or be produced by an artist who is good at parties.

Galenson’s artist is Tracy Emin. He is welcome to her.

The post-historical Hegelian idealism of market economics is anti-humanistic. But art is part of the human condition. It is no surprise that the figures an economist is interested in are numeric rather than compositional. The problem is that art considered quantitatively has no interior, yet it is the content of art that makes it “great”.

The failure of Galenson’s project is the failure of neoliberalism laid bare without the concealing effects of economic transition or state intervention. Markets cannot provide Galenson with the material he needs to fulfill his project. It’s a good thing we don’t have to rely on them for anything more important. Such as, say, food or energy…

Categories
Free Culture Projects

Book! Book!

http://aboutfoo.com/blog/2008/08/04/exploring-freedom-the-book/

In more book news, I’ll have some blog posts ^D ^D essays in a new book about Free Culture issues out later in the year.

Categories
Free Culture

Lessig’s New Book – Remix

Lawrence Lessig is finishing off his series of Free Culture books later this year with “Remix”.

See here for details.

Dedicated to Lyman Ray Patterson and Jack Valenti, it pushes three ideas — (1) that this war on our kids has got to stop, (2) that we need to celebrate (and support) the rebirth of a remix culture, and (3) that a new form of business (what I call the “hybrid”) will flourish as we better enable this remix creativity.

It’s available for pre-order now.

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Personal

Back Again

Thanks to Matt for getting the web site back up.