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Folker Grassmuck
Bio: Media
researcher & freelance writer. Did research on artificial
intelligence, garbage, otaku, the Turing Galaxy and on the history of
media and identity discourse in Japan. Currently teaching at the Institute
for Computer Science in Education and Society of Humboldt University
Berlin doing research on the "Knowledge Order of Digital Media",
and networking media cultures as part of the group mikro
e.V., curating the event series "The
Wizards of OS".
The Digital Knowledge Order Between Rights Protection
Systems and Public Domain
The Internet as it emerged during the 70s and 80s was a wide-open and
largely unregulated space. "Information wants to be
free" was one of its philosophical fundamentals. It nurtured
cooperation, learning and sharing. Its attitude towards power is best
expressed by the credo of its developer community: "We reject: kings,
presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.
"During the 90s new powerful users entered net space, and didn't like
what they saw, and began shaping it according to their interests. Commercialization
of its infrastructure and its content set it. Various government agencies
started to intervene and regulate. The 'data lords' (aka the rights
industry) are erecting walls to protect their digital wares. If they
succeed, knowledge will be fenced in, partitioned minutely into individual
usages, metered, tracked and even made to self-destruct if it senses a
license infringement. On the other side we saw a mighty re-emergence of
the sharing hacker spirit in the form of the free software movement.
GNU/Linux didn't only prove that it's a better operating system than
Microsoft can build. Most of all it proved that a lose open cooperation of
individuals unfettered by money concerns can be a rewarding worthwhile
thing to do. Open code set an example that inspired other forms of open
knowledge, open encyclopedias, open theory, even open law. These are the
two trajectories on which the Internet is moving today: toward openness
and toward closure. Each choice you make on the net supports either one or
the other.
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