Recently at the NYC 2008 anarchist bookfair my brother and his friend went to subvert the bookfair by allowing bystanders to digitally copy the books they bought(or simply snatched from a table). There is no real opposition to capitalism today, only rituals of opposing it, the anarchist and leftish communist milieu is indivisible and incorporated to the system of capitalism. Even intervening in this milieu's bookfairs to allow the abrogation of intellectual property rights will be met by avid milieu scenesters in the typical fashion; they will see you sell nothing and briskly walk away.

Aside: Since most ritual anti-capitalists cannot dream of a de-schooled society, most of these bookfairs have conferences and talks that just reproduce a similar mode of activity all colleges and universities perform currently with the only proviso that "laymen" can hold their own talks at these conferences.



The crude improvement to a traditional scanner:


If you look at the picture you will notice a bolt; this bolt is to fasten a digital camera to. The white cardboard is really supposed to be a glass but it broke; the weight of the glass will flatten out the pages. Copying books with this mediEVIL device is much quicker than using a traditional scanner. They are working out a software process to post-process the images(removing curvature, etc.).

If you are really out to wage uncompromizing war against commodity society you can find many more worthwhile targets than anarchist bookfairs, such as, for example, absolutely everything else out there. Is that really hard to get, Nikephoros? Do you get high on airplane glue before you come up with this kind of shit, or what?

I friend of mine ran a website a while ago called "Collective Knowledge," which was basically the same idea. Where radical books were scanned into an online resource site.

I actually like this concept; the more books that are available to all is a good thing.

Actually I never went, but I did author the above post except for the flyer. My brother and his friend went and are committed to this project, I am a bit of an outsider.

The anarchist/left communist milieu is a part of capitalism and the State, but they like to pretend otherwise, so intervening in this mileu is very inventive. They just went with the MediEVIL contraception shown, with no plan and/or permission. Apparently Chuck0's big tent of anarchism deflated and they took over the ex-Infoshop table at the event.

You can see a Youtube video interview about the Bookfair and this Samizdat project here:
Anarchist Bookfair 2008 New York City 10 min 43 sec.
Their project is @ 2:19 min. - 3:57

In my view to wage war against the present society/system/state you need to destroy modern compulsory schooling first. We learn to just accept this society by the time we are adults; more than just accept we embody this society and system by adulthood.

Fun stuff. Fuck anarcho-capitalists, we should destroy anarchist capitalism! I'm giving points to Nikephoros, but his intentions remain weak and liberal. A better intention would be to destroy the practice of exchange within the radical community. That would rattle some cages.

Let me get this straight--they were run off for trying to help people copy books? I find that a bit shocking, but also suspect the whole story isn't being told...

When I was younger my parents told me that they would give me a dollar for every book that I read. Now I, the capitalist that I am, have a wealth of knowledge.

@bzfgt: Can you quote where you get the impression they were run off. This did not happen.

@modesto: What process did your friend use for "Collective Knowledge"? Did he use a conventional scanner? I have a CanoScan Lide 70 and it would take forever to scan a whole book with it, but with MediEVIL* it is alot quicker.


*Note: This is a just a name I constructed for the device based on its looks and my anti-politics battles with conventional grammarians poking at medieval. My brother and his friend do not know I invented this name for the device, so I have no idea if they will take to it.

I think this is pretty great. Fairly inventive and of great spirit.

One things I appreciate about the milieu is that this kind of snarkiness is par for the course. It is what I miss about punk rock. A sense of humor.

On a separate but related note... there are two arguments here are both challenging. One the one hand there is the idea that "there is no outside" of capitalism, the spectacle, exchange relationships, racism, etc. On the other is the idea that making this assertion is a challenge to the hegemony of it. The first idea is that there is no hope. Nothing we do matters or is any different than those we oppose. The second is that there is something we can do but it might as well be "speaking truth to power" for all the good it does.

As someone involved in a high profile project that tends towards the latter its hard to not see the futility of it.

But there is always humor.

I guess I misunderstood, Nike. So the complaint is just that there wasn't enough interest? What is so sinister about the NYC book people? And what was your brother trying to do exactly? As presented thus far, this whole thing is completely incomprehensible to me.

Alas, Nike is as poor a storyteller as he is a writer.

It is true Nike has an accusatory style (and probably intent), the meaning I extracted was that expropriation via scanning is more radical that selling books by folks carrying on about anti-capitalism. If the books and zines were gifted at these fairs (some are!), the 'medieval' scanner would be redundant unless materials were exhausted, in which case, it would be seen as contributing to (re-appropriating) abundance in situ.

The more radical thing would be to ask "what would Jesus do?" and he would totally kick their tables over and scream "all this greed!". Fuck yeah Jesus, you go.

Alas, people have to lay out money to produce and distribute the materials in question, and they often aren't wealthy to begin with, believe it or not. I thought that was the reason we oppose capitalism as an economic system, instead of walking around yelling at hot-dog vendors and prostitutes and the like.

"Alas, people have to lay out money to produce and distribute the materials in question"

So, BZ, is it always important to recuperate any investment? More important to recoup expense than re-appropriate living? That is the logic of exchange and the basis of the argument "you cannot escape capitalism by dropping out". Another way of saying this is "insanity is doing something over and over in the same way and expecting different results each time". Another is "one can not make new connections without simultaneously breaking old ones".

I think it comes down to whether one ultimately wants a rupture or merely an adjustment.

Capitalism is a political economic system based on a continual production of surplus value (not 'profit') that is extracted from the labour of workers over and above their wage costs.

Plainly, the anarchist book fair is not a capitalist event on these terms even if it makes a 'profit'. I would describe it rather as a mercantile affair with cultist and clique-ish overtones.

The money raised from the sale of books and magazines by anarchist groups is used, not for profit, but rather for the return of money invested and thus to fund the production of further books. All systems of historical existence are based upon the past accumulation of previous knowledge in whatever compressed form this may take which then functions in the present to be deployed as ‘capital’. Thus it is that the 'capital' involved in the pirating of texts is equally accumulated from past experiences derived both personally and socially. The point is whether pirating is social or anti-social... the claim for an abstract liberation of knowledge is a nut crushing a sledgehammer, nobody is crying out in need for 'enclosed' anarchist literature. Most texts possessed by most established anarchist organisations should be kept behind bars.

Unfortunately, for anarchist publishers, of whatever type, they do not own the extended means of production necessary for producing books and thus are condemned to operate within the limits placed by commodity logic. The expropriation of the texts recounted above, equally relies upon commodified, but less human, forms of reproduction – the internet is not less a ‘capitalist’ system than paper production and printing presses.

The claim that scanning books ‘liberates’ knowledge is unproved. A book is already a liberated form in terms of its technological realisation in comparison to digitalised texts. It is true that a book requires an initial printing but those books produced may continue to circulate endlessly between living individuals, each able to read on his own terms in his own time (I still feel a little skip of my heart whenever I see a copy of Camatte’s wandering of humanity (Red and Black ‘75). Also the question of whether posting something on the internet, making it more ‘available’ is any way anti-capitalist is highly dubious – as this is exactly the modus operandi of established capitalist media.

In contrast to reading a book, a digitalised text requires a computer and internet access for reading. I should also add that screen reading is extremely cursory, useful for quick indexing but not for thoughtful consideration. It is more likely that a book will find a reader adequate to it than a digital text (which tends to produce only a consumer-type consciousness). Furthermore, the’ liberation’ in question here, depends on a digital camera, a computer, software and internet access (in other words, a high degree of capitalisation). One might argue that other anarchists present should have expropriated this technology of the pirates and put it to more socialised uses. If we are to define the terms for thieving from each other, how could anyone assert a right to use anything except through use of superior force and barbarism?

If the individuals involved in this didn’t like the anarchist texts that were available on the day, which is why they wanted to steal and ritually debase them, why didn’t they spend some energy producing their own? If they did like the texts available, which is why they wanted to reproduce them, then why didn’t they give the money tied up in their fixed capital (the camera, the computer, the software) to the publishers so they could produce more?

If, on the other hand, they simply wanted to disrupt the proceedings in general and draw attention to themselves as clever fellows, then fair enough, but perhaps a more honest expression of the reasons for this disruption (i.e. the dreary banality of anarchist literature) might have proved even more liberating. Whatever the psychological reason for hating anarchists, the accusation that a bookfair is capitalist is specious (at least it is no more capitalist than the 'expropriation' described here that is supposed to oppose it).

Thanks to one_shoe for making a thoughtful and intelligent contribution to a for the most part self-indulgent and silly thread.

One_shoe, makes several assumptions: that we paid for a pc for this effort, that we bought a digital camera for this effort, and that the anarchist groups and peddlers involved are re-investing whatever money was made. I could make a similar stupid accusation to his direction that instead of him to buy a pc to write garbage to me, maybe he should perform activity X. If you check the Youtube video I already mentioned you will see that at this bookfair one tabler even promoted "Third World-ism".




Thus simply by reactorcore.org making available in text format Deschooling Society a powerful antidote to the Marxian rubber-soles dispalyed in the shop window above by one-shoe was injected to the discussion. The texts and books we read influence our development as thinkers as they build connections between neurons. Digitizing such works can allow interested peers to network and discuss with other interested peers the relevant text(educational object) now made more readily available. After all schools have the ample money of taxes, what do interested peers and autodidacts have? The sneers of elitist anti-politics members and their jeers? Ha!

The fact that alleged radicals choose to cling to intellectual property and accuse us to "steal and ritually debase", proves how their subversiveness is alleged in the first place and how they are just ritually opposed to capital.

I must also point out it cannot be ignored that one_shoe has published a book and not made it freely available in digital form(to my knowledge), and this is inseparable from his views on the subject discussed in this thread.

Mr. Samizdat is my brother's friend and I rendered what I quoted by him above from an AOL IM chat log. I just cleaned up what he wrote to put it into sentences and nothing else. The only reason I did this is because on this sad forum, if I did not do this minor cleanup, in addition to attacking his arguments, out the woodworks we would have people attack his use of instant messaging conventions so freely.

I don't reslly see how any of this follows. People recouping their expenses is a far cry from a capitalist enterprise. If you really believe what you're saying you should send me all your money, it's the same logic.

Hi BZ. What I'm saying is that if we continue to think of gifts as investments requiring some sort of return, we'll never escape the hold over us which property exerts. One_shoe always gives a good argument from the point of how capitalism is reproduced, additionally that exchange should not be confused with capitalism and that we partake in one way or another in capitalism whatever we do. That is a fine place to stop if ending the appropriation of surplus labor is all that we want. Personally, I'm not content with merely the end of capitalist production. We can still disrupt the connections we have only by making new connections and that means doing things differently. That is detournement, which is necessary even if not sufficient to revolution (however one defines it).

On the other note, if you e-mail me a po box number, I'll send you what money I have (although it won't, I'm afraid, be much).

f.

nike:

yes, and a! was one of the publishers of that book. does that mean that his viewpoint is also impure? or because his post was friendly to you does that mean that you won't go on the attack? or is attacking all you're interested in doing?

your posts are most reminiscent in tone and style of the people you dislike the most on this forum. is that what you want?

Meh, they stole my idea. ;)

Not really (how can you steal an idea?!?), it only makes sense when a cursory search for anarchist texts result in little more than a waste of time, a surprising outcome given how, well, the whole freaking anarchy thing works. You *would* think that these texts would be readily available.

But Nikephoros, my impression is that they had one (possibly a few) scanners setup, and it did not seem on the face of things a very easily facilitated process.

These are consumer events. Consumers want to come and consume, period. If they are told "well here's a book scanner but you have to stand here flipping pages and such" they will, like most consumers, scoff and walk away. So it doesn't surprise me that they weren't "well recieved." Even if they were, how many books could have been scanned in the process? A dozen throughout the whole *day* of scanning? I mean it, it takes awhile to scan shit. I've scanned in over a hundred books, they're all on eMule. If it is anarchist related I am partially responsible.

So one should not take from this the "incessant consumerism of anarchism," but rather that the proof of concept was still in a trial stage and it will take some more refinement for it to actually fit within the consumerist aspect of these events.

Matt and I have discussed a similar concept, and it will come to fruition eventually, but it cannot be just one or two scanners that requires the labor of individuals to operate. It has to be fully automated.

I could have gone to the last 5 bookfairs with a concept similar to theirs. But I would have felt that I was being insulting to the dynamic, that my little shitty scanner would at any point have achieved the point of belonging to a larger consumer event while sharing the ideas of free dessimination of information. The consumers would have looked at me with blank faces, "Nice idea... shit presentation." This is the era of "instant gratifaction" consumerism. It's always been like that, of course, but I think due to the internet and mass communication and mass media it has become far worse.

The idea in the future is a Copyright Infringement Van (or table) with at least 6 scanners that can do at least 3 pages per second (yes, you read that right, *per second*). Non-destructively without much human intervention. You pull up, people drop their books in a slot, maybe type some information out if they want, and a few minutes later the book comes back out, and it is freely available at the end of the day on USB sticks that you can buy (*at cost*) or you can bring along your own sticks and grab the whole bookfairs books.

This is a large consumer event, it shouldn't be frowned upon as a failure nor should the anarchists themselves be looked down upon as evil capitalist consumers (even if they are mired in a process of capitalist consumption, it is not their fault, it is the fault of their society and the systems which they have no other choice to utilize for their consumption).

The idea that people would *refuse* to utilize such technology at such an event is proposterous, and if they did so you *could* start throwing around metaphors about how they're capitalists pigs. Until a viable mechanism is created though it is a bit early to say that the idea of freely dessimiated information has at this point been rejected by anarchists (with the exception of those assholes out there who call themselves anarchists but are stuck in a proprietary cycle of keeping their publications in book form even though it started off as a fucking PDF to begin with).




Kevin, the first step to getting out of these cycles of proprietarian property systems is for *us* to reject them, for *us* to say they are no longer necessary or desirable.

By doing so we will have taught others the value of freely sharing such information, and instead of maybe half a dozen anarchists (the number of anarchists I have really talked to who believe in this sort of digital sharing) scanning books, you have thousands of them. Hitting libraries and completely scanning all of human knowledge.

It starts with *us* so your argument is null and void.

But instead some of us insist on books being "more desirable" than their digital counterparts and so on.




One more thing, Nike, you might suggest that they use a V split with directional cameras. It doubles the cost of the camera setup, but cameras are dropping in price quite dramatically, and the needed megapixels are really quite affordable now. Basically one camera per page, tilted sideways with a piece of glass over it. Not only does it create archival quality scans, but it avoids the problem of curved pages, which while is able to be avoided with software, is not ideal from a "raw scan" perspective (you would want to be able to have access to the raw scans so that people interjecting their own stuff into an OCR would be dissuaded).

This process can be automated with a simple actuator that lifts up the transparent part (plexliglass in this case, since actual glass can't handle the stress), and a page turner. I'm having trouble with the latter part.

I'll keep an eye out on Samizdat, but I'm glad there are more guys out there who are like me in this respect.



And a last point, it doesn't matter if anarchists want to be proprietarians. It really doesn't. If this works then you can refuse to publish the digital counterpart of your information all you fucking want.

It will be published either way. It will happen either way. So who cares if people want to be hypocrites? I'm still amused by anti-capitalists books sold in Barns and Noble. :)

Just not even relevant though unless you really want to be caught up in name calling bullshit (which admittedly this forum has become quite good at doing).

one_shoe,



No. Capitalism is an economic system based on the ownership of capital goods. Capital goods are accumulated (or more adequately, hoarded) possessions that can only exist via a state (be it minarchist or what) upholding those goods via force.

We don't know if the anarchist bookfair is capitalist until people start scanning in books wholesale, not one or two people messing around, but hundreds of people lining the fuck up, and the fucking cops are called on the people doing it because of "copyright infringement." Copyright being a concept of "exclusive power over something" which is no different from the same type of power prelevant in the accumulation of goods (in the end all capitalist property is proprietarian; whether you fence off a piece of land and tell people they can't have access or you sue them for thousands of dollars because they aren't allowed access to an mp3 that they want).

The basis of anarchism is that no one human can accumulate more than they can use because to do so requires force, that force becoming essentially a police state. Authoritarianism.

It's actually quite simple. And on these grounds the anarchist bookfairs around the world may or may not be seen as capitalist, but there is a pretty damn convincing argument that they are not anarchist. One can say this is for pragmatic reasons, it's not like it's some sort of bad or evil thing.



I would classify the anarchist bookfairs as large consumer events mired in capitalist proprietarian practices. I don't go to these consumer events because I am not much of a consumer, and I don't like to participate in mass consumerism on that scale. It just feels boring.

Not only that you need money if you want to get anything usually and I'm not for that. At least the really really free markets are a bit better in that respect, but even they aren't immune from the proprietarian practices inherent in capitalism.



Yes, but the books themselves cannot be mass produced as of yet without a capitalist system there to mass produce them. While this is not inherently hypocritical (you use what you can get) the idea that utilizing a digital medium is wrong, the same which is also predicated on a capitalist system there to uphold it, that's pretty fucking ridiculous. Especially since within our society the digital medium is quite prelevant to the point where you may never have to pay anything to acquire it, or where the cost to acquire it would be pennies on the dollar, it's just preposterous. I can't believe it really. You spend $20 to get an old shitty laptop and you can view more text than you can read in your entire lifetime.

But sure, there's nothing inherently "wrong" with wanting to pursue publishing more books (outside of the environmental destruction and all that such inefficient means of production create of course). Nor there is nothing wrong with wanting to recoup costs. Those are behaviors *defined by the system.* You are *forced* to act in such a way. It still amuses me that Wikipedia, for instance, won't acknowledge a well written piece of commentary because it's online, but will happily do so if that piece is in paper form (look at how the Anarchist FAQ guys have struggled for years to have their book-sized project published).

If you want to allow this system to continue perpetuating itself via this manner, that's cool. But some of us are revolutionists. We don't want to reform the system or work within the system, we want to bring it crashing the fuck down. And by *selling* books that you *have* to sell because you could not make them if you *didn't* sell them, you are only perpetuating the dynamic that has existed for so long. And have only contributed to making such systems more consumer events than events that emancipate people from the system itself. Not to say that the bookfairs are not enlightening or contributing to the movement, but I think that they are more toward being cushy consumer events than truly revolutionary. And I think this response to you is going to illustrate that.



You're confusing mass accumulation with capitalist accumulation. There's somewhat of a distinction here. Knowledge can be passed down via an elite few or it can be disseminated freely among one another. Capital in this context is that knowledge of the elites. You would not call a million people knowing that the moon is an object that orbits the earth "capital" in this context because that is knowledge that, while accumulated over time, is within each of those people. But you could call the Church holding private the ideas of capital and maintaining illiteracy in the populous a sort of capital, because they hold exclusive right to that knowledge.

Knowledge has, throughout recorded the history of mankind, been kept in boxes by that elite specialized few who used it to control the rest. Anarchists are calling for the dissemination and emancipation of that knowledge.



The relevance of this is beyond me. Most past experiences have derived from authoritarian regimes. Doesn't fucking matter.



I'm pretty sure the original post was not calling for any abstract liberation of knowledge, but an announcement that it was being worked on by some anarchists for better or worse and that it's going to happen either way. This is anarchism, you cannot use philosophical babble to stop nature from taking its course.



Whatever that means.



We're going to be consumers either fucking way. The question is whether or not we chose to buy books or we chose to fucking download them. Here's a hint, one can be achieved for pennies on the dollar, and the other costs money. Which are you going to chose? I'm going to chose the easier route frankly. I spend $20 to get a book or two or I buy a laptop for the same price that can hold a thousand books. I think I know where my priorities are. I think I know how to avoid this capitalist commodification. But when the idea is floated people everywhere in the movement freak the fuck out as if it's a sin or something. It's ridiculous.

The fact that you accept that you are stuck in a self-perpetuating system of (capitalist) commodification would at least to me suggest that you have or want ways to get out of it. If this is not a solution, the idea of "going digital" as it were, what the fuck is? Please by all means.



Those texts were not expropriated. Those texts were emancipated. Assuming someone was crazy enough to actually spend the time necessary to scan a full book. And assuming that they didn't pay a fucking dime to acquire that book. Otherwise something was lost and the system was perpetuated by the monetary exchange.

The internet is by all means a "less capitalist system" than paper production ever fucking thought about being. It's the *only* place in the *history* of humanity where constant sharing is an ongoing and pervasive activity. Where *no one* pretends to have exclusive right over *anything* because *if it can be copied it will be copied.* I say it over and over again, but millions and millions of people are participating right the fuck now. And it is those consumers who are caught up in the old self-perpetuating ways of things who are the problem, not those who participate on a much more free level.

You could have a thousand really really free markets and bookfairs and it would not even come close to the liberating power of the internet. And this is *in spite* of the capitalists trying to control the fuck out of it. *In spite* of the capitalists suing thousands of people a year for participating in human sharing. *In spite* of the attempts by capitalists to digitally restrict people from having access (DRM). In spite of it all it is happening.

So please don't look at your pithy bookfairs or your "anarchist publishing shops" for some "solution" to a problem you seem to be unable to recognize!



Yeah? Tell that to #bookz on Undernet. Tell that to the thousands of users who go there *daily* to acquire books that they otherwise could not afford. Tell that to eMule where millions of people are sharing software manuals and programming texts to one another. Give me a reasoning that you think that scanning books *is not* liberating.

Even Amazon and Googles book scanning projects were utilized by the pirates at first to get copies of books otherwise not available. But they cranked down on that (making it a bit harder for someone without a botnet to copy a book wholesale).



Is it really? Can I borrow a book? OK, thanks. I just burned it. Have fun! Want to have a copy of something I have? Oops, you deleted it because it offended your weak sensibilities. Fun! Doesn't bother me a bit.

A book, like all capitalist enterprises, is predicated on proprietary or proprietarian concepts. It can be hoarded, it can be accumulated and controlled. AK Press probably has thousands of books in their warehouse. The vast majority of the world are never going to have access to those books. But if I make a copy some kid in China can pop into a webcafe and get a copy. Or some guy in the third world can run to a local education center where some nice missionaries or some bullshit is giving out internet access. Or better yet, they pop online via some stolen wifi connection and get it that way. All for pennies on the dollar. Which is better for them? Spend a fucking month working to get the salary to acquire that book in print form or to spend two or even three months to get a used piece of technology where they can download that book for practically nothing?



A book will not last ten years if it is regularly consumed by individuals. It will fall the fuck apart. A digital copy will circle endlessly as long as technology exists. This is a really weak argument. Libraries are constantly having to refill their supply of books that are popular. Your argument relies on the mass production of books (which as we've seen is a capitalist endeavor), and the lack of participation in the utilization of that book.

A digital copy can be used, search, read out loud (for those who are visually impaired), copied, shared, and so on. You can do many things with a digital copy that you cannot do with the book itself.



The same media that has since the inception of digital capital attempted to restrict the usage of said media? Putting secret sectors on a disk so you couldn't copy it. Putting anti-copying mechanisms on media so if you did try to copy it you'd be scolded or the software would no longer work? The same wonderful capitalists who go to extended efforts to make it so that something you've paid for is not really yours and that all rights are that of the capitalists?

Please tell me you don't seriously think the 50+ million people downloading mass media is not an anti-capitalist endeavor. Please tell me you don't *seriously* think that all of those consumers who are not giving a goddamn cent to the capitalists is not "against them" in any way. 1/3rd of all internet bandwidth is utilized in this manner for fucks sake! Holy shit!! When ThePirateBay went down most of Europe's bandwidth suddenly dropped.

Obviously there is a need for a freely accessed internet, but in the meantime disseminating this information freely across the one we already have is surely, absolutely, better than fucking depending on some goddamn publishing house to make shit available some some yuppies can go to their consumer events and parade around as if they know better than we do.



So? Internet access is largely free, and computers are quite cheap. You get a PDA and a solar charger for $100 you have more books at your beck and call than you could ever afford in your lifetime. Because books themselves rely on that proprietarian system of exclusive control that we anarchists are kind of against. Ounce for ounce, molecule for molecule, a digital form is far more environmentally friendly, too, as it is not sucking up undue amounts of resources that the processing of printing does (at least theoretically, obviously regardless of how the capitalists produce things, they will not give a shit about the environment, but we gotta start making our own PDAs one day too if we're serious about this).



Are you the Crimethinc idiot pfm? Because you're using his *same exact argument* and it's tiring. I was going to respond to this banal argument when I put that book online but it's taken me awhile because it requires selective editing to prove the point and I don't find it very interesting at the moment. I've let people down in that respect but what can you do.

In any case, this is pretty fucking dismissive of those, you know, thousands of fucking people I was talking about before. Guys like *me* who read Proudhon on a fucking 10 year old black and white laptop while stealing electricity from a house that I put back online (stealing electricity is a ridiculously simple affair). Or the thousands of people who go to #bookz and download their favorite volumes. Your biases show your inherent inability to appreciate human behaviors that are right there in front of your eyes if you chose to open them. You go to mininova *right now* and *millions* of people have downloaded the various books on there. Now it might be easy enough for me to accept that *some* of them do glance at those books, that some may not even get past the first chapter. But whose fucking fault is that? The user or the writer? Should, because I spent hard fucking earned cash to get a book, I then *read the full thing* because of some obligation to the book? Or should I read what I want to read when I want to read it regardless of your empty reasoning?

We're all consumers, but the problematic consumers are those who mindlessly do so. Those who have an affliction based on the ownership of objects as opposed to sharing. Those who pretend that consumer events utilizing proprietarian methods trump consumer sharing.

You may not be pfm but that person wrote "we aren’t interested in instant gratification," alluding to the idea that downloading a text online was "instant gratification." I would argue the complete converse. Getting a book online does meet with a certain gratification, that is, of accessibility, and of being able to have it instantly, sure. But getting an *object* placed in ones *hands* meets that gratification far more grandly, as if you download a book online, you can quickly see whether or not it appeals to you, but if you get it in hand, you will surmise quite readily that it appeals to you regardless, even if it's garbage in the end.

This is part of the Having vs Being dynamic (which I agree with greatly). Having book is, to many consumers, far better than Being someone who reads books. And I know quite a few friends who do have quite a lot of books.

And they never read many of them at all. So I chose to believe that those people downloading all those fucking books are actually, you know, reading them. Just like I do.



So the fuck what? Do you think anyone who reads your books doesn't have access to those things? I assure you that 99.9% of the people who will *ever* read anything you write or anyone at the anarchist bookfair for that matter, has access to the same methods of information sharing. Must you be then reminded of the capitalization required to publish the books that you like? The question is whether the end product is more beneficial to the capitalist system.

Digital distribution is not for the reasons I have outlined. And because there exist no significant publisher of books out there that is anarchist in nature, books continue on their merry way perpetuating the same system which we purport to dislike.

It doesn't help a capitalist to scan their fucking shit and share it online. Isn't that enough?



Like what? Scanning capitalists books in? I think it would be difficult for anarchists to recognize the scanning of capitalists books without first recognizing the benefits of scanning their own, especially without using capitalist keywords like "theft" and such.



A book that no one is using cannot be "stolen" if it is sitting there and borrowed for a few minutes. Permission need not even be given, since that book is the capital of the book seller (since the book seller has accumulated more books than they could read and such it is the same exact dynamic).

If you are going to then support the upholding of capital goods, of capitalist accumulations in light of someone borrowing something for a little while, then you may not be wanting to post that garbage here. I may not be a regular poster here, but I think anyone with any reasonable comments would understand the insult of these words.



That's what the capitalists say. That when someone downloads an mp3 that they're "stealing." This is a rather archaic view given that millions of people dismiss it as capitalist droning. That when someone scans a book they're dirty little thieves. You have had no problem calling fellow anarchists thieves. If you watched the video you would have seen that the book scanning people did not at any point go and "expropriate" a book (a more accurate term here, for the record, is "emancipate" since the book would be returned). It was actually somewhat disappointing. By telling others to go scan books it resulted in people being not only afraid of doing so (after all, as the OP notes, the basic property relationship is still there, even if you did nothing wrong at all from an anarchist perspective, borrowing a book from someones stand could lead to a confrontation). But it also led to people not wanting to expand the effort for the reasons I mentioned in the other post (people don't come to consumer events to be laborers).

So basically it was pretty fucking weaksauce, and I'm sure the atmosphere around there was pretty disappointing. But when I arrive with book scanners and if you stop me for one fucking second from scanning a book that would be done in 5 minutes I would be compelled to laugh in your face. If you call me a thief I call you capitalist swine.



Why benefit one publisher when they could benefit hundreds of thousands of people, share the ideas of anarchism to even more people, and make the whole affair quite exciting? They made a good run at it and I wish I was there to have seen it. Next time! I always say that, been saying it for years, but next time buddy!



I think they had good intentions, I think it failed on one account because it did not address the larger consumer nature of the fair, and I think that they naively thought that they would be more accepted in an environment where anti-technology viewpoints are pervasive (an observation that is generally true of American anarchist perspectives). And I think in general that because the technology did not facilitate easy consumer consumption and sharing (like say, bittorrent, or IRC or other methods I described), the consumers were quite off-put. Quite predictable, really, which is why I never did it even though I've been talking about it for *years* (go to flag.blackened.net and search for |Y| and book scanning, this is a very long term project I've had on the side).

But I still say, fuck yeah, good on them for trying. Hell, I'd be really touched to know that they read my blog and made it out of wood because of my suggestion there. That'd be really nice. They have bigger balls than me to be honest. To do it and have other people scan the shit in was a really great test of solidarity. I'm a cynic on one level in that I wouldn't think people would do it because they're big scaredy cats and the American society is highly inundated with a capitalist relationship to property. I really wish I knew what actually happened as the OP's report is stingy on details.



You mischaracterized the emancipation described in the OP. In fact, from the video I got the impression that they were *really* expecting people who had *bought* books to share them. That's why I said it was weaksauce. Because a true show of solidarity is everyone scanning shit in, saying fuck the "vendors" and making every fucking piece of paper in there digital.

But I don't think anyone would even have a chance of doing it unless the technology facilitated it. 10 books a minute or some shit. How would anyone complain? It'll be awesome.

But the point of scanning books is not only to add to their availability on the internet and leave it at that. The point is always to be feeding into the potential of allowing for those book to be printed out freely by anybody at a later date. There is no reason to imply that any 'liberation' to be had here is destined to remain on the viewscreen forever. Of course its much more interesting that scanning books should feed into their future living circulation... as... books! I don't think there is any reason to pretend that people here (including Nikephoros's brother) are limited to concerns of fetishizing and celebrating the boring steps involved in modern technological reproduction and then walking away, satisfied with a job well done.

Because the interregnal gestures involved in simultaneously self-enabling and showing through example certain provocative ways to go about autonomous publishing that conflict with the routine production methods of established publishers are more interesting than just buying another book. The living, breathing practice of "fuck off copyright here is my spontaneous form of samizdat that supersedes you" displayed in its total, dumb ease-of-use is more interesting than submitting another manuscript to Atonomedia, etc. The attempted break with certain capitalist habits of production and distribution, even on a small scale, is far more interesting than the lack thereof, totally caught up in routine and not bothering to imagine any other way out that might be practiced unpretentiously, concretely and usefully.

To one_shoe's defense here, him and I had begun working toward getting a digital version of part 2 of Nihilist Communism online a few months ago (to be eventually published as a standalone book), but the project has sort of come to a standstill at this point, not to mention how I've been back living on the road for a while now anyway and haven't had the book with me. As lame as it may sound, I didn't want to bring glaring communist material with me for the US border crossing -- I've been fucked with over this kind of thing in the past and ultimately denied entry. I've been fingerprinted, treated as a criminal and flagged in their database for no real reason. Homeland security is absolutely paranoid and insane right now, I didn't want to give them the slightest bullshit reason to hassle me...

On the other hand, stafford rootbeer mentioned an OCR of Nihilist Communism was on the way a couple weeks ago...

haha, I actually PM'd Nike to ask him if you were his brother because I remembered you telling me about this idea a while back...

Collective knowledge was the shit

Where did you go Mtu?

matt, Nike alerted me to this which was really kind which is why I even posted in the first place (as late as my response was). You know me though, I like to come in style, big Crimethinc-esque van and cute guys and gals wearing hilarious outfits rolling the scanners in or something (mawh, forgive the objectification). I still think it's great that his brother did it. I don't even care where they got the idea, it's only *right*.

Sorry for not being more involved in the stuff we discussed, but I got owned by that project (I was making it SVG readable since the book is such an art expose) and I got tired of it, I haven't given up, just taking a break. Damn winter here is lasting a lot longer than I bargained for.

Sorry for the long ramble, too. :P I'll shut back up.

fendersen:

What you are talking about is unprecedented in human existence and I would suggest is biologically incompatible with our basic activity-capacity in relation to objects (what you call ‘property’).

The structuration of ‘the gift’ is of course (or I should say, up to this point in time) never a ‘gift’ as such. The purpose of much gift giving in the past, and now, was/is to preserve a steady state in relations and thus served as a means to establish a control over events and persons by means (paradoxically) of expenditure. Ordinarily, we think of accumulation as controlling but, paradoxically again, restraint, or the drawing of a line around the products of certain activities is, as Camus said, the essence of revolt.

Balance in ancient steady-state societies was preserved by a form of ‘blood-letting’ in property terms. It worked a little like self-harming and only really released pressure if what was/is given really mattered to those who were about to ‘give’ it. For example, it was common in Celtic areas such as the UK, Ireland and N. France during the iron age to ‘give’ many treasures to the bogs and marshes... in some places this became so ritualised that huge efforts were put into building ritual causeways/piers designed for the purpose of taking the ‘giver’ out to the centre of the bog. (see for example, the fiskerton causeway)


This is not exactly my point, I do not say that we participate in capitalism whatever we do – I say we do not oppose capitalism in whatever we chose to do... it is not the same thing. There are two arguments here, one about ripping off anarchists the other about ripping off commodities in general. The former is dubious to say the least because it refuses a direct human relation in favour of aggressive idealism. The second is neither here nor there as an activity in itself... free consumption of commodities does not make people less stupid or more revolutionary, it is entirely neutral and beside the point. To return to the first issue and its ‘justification’, the claims that anarchist publishers are really ‘capitalists’ is as I said before incorrect, they are (at worst) mercantilist (and usually inefficiently so). Ideologically, of course, we are all equally 'capitalist' in that our thought forms are derived from the objective substrate. The avowed motivation for piracy in this case is therefore invalid and thus serves to obscure more profound drives of a destructive and antisocial character (as displayed in other refusals of discussion).

If a child is absorbed in playing with a spoon and bowl and then another child (let’s make it evil) , who is playing with an expensive electronic toy, sees the rapt enjoyment of the other it is immediately motivated to snatch the spoon so as to disrupt the pleasure of the first; the first child will cry and fight back... because the bowl and spoon game IS the child. To take something from someone maliciously, even in the name of some abstract ‘liberation’, is never less than a malicious act because ‘liberation’ or ‘free’ access to commodities is a much more abstract ‘right’ than immediate and actual engagement with a present object.


Again, we are talking about attacking anarchist groups here. So, the question is: what connections are being disrupted really? Certainly not capitalist connections. The proper way to engage a text, the expression of another human being, is to engage in critique with it, be inspired to create something to improve it, or rather to pass it on to someone else.

It seems strange to me that the abstract fetish/ideal of ‘the gift’ or 'public ownership' (the naive ideology of immediate access) should serve as a means for offending and seeking to cause harm to actual real other human beings in the same room as you. Such activity begs the question, who, if not to other people , the gift is being made to? Because it seems to me, that really what we are talking about here is not so much gifts, ambiguous as that term is, but rather a strange (or primitive amalgam) of theft and sacrifice, which leads to your final point:


Why would you do that? To prove a point? fendersen, are you really so mean that you would freely give your money to bz just to prove a spiritual point about giving, and without expecting anything in return? I find the idea of a life that has no demands incomprehensible and the idea that mutual demands may not be exchanged but only realised in the gift form to be autistic. Consider instead the fox that kills two chickens, it makes a profit. Consider the swift, a bird that never lands, soaring up after taking a sip of water from the river, it has made a profit. Both have inscribed a circle and realised a moment of elan out of an accumulation of lived existence.

Or rather, consider, the mean-minded and ugly method of engagement deployed by those who are making the same arguments as you here – consider the distortions that this ‘liberation’ of materials causes in them, in what way do they differ from any other entrepreneurial behaviour? They may ‘set free’ commodities but what does that do for them? I glimpse no radiance in them, nor discern any generosity at all in their ‘giving’. Because it seems to me that their activities are merely a repeat of avaricious individualism but in bad faith... (like on cable tv, I can watch their products any time but there is something about their product that stinks). In what way are they personally raised up by what they do, in what way are they freed, filled with joy, now that so many million digital commodities are free? Bataille talks of a hermit who consumes a leg of ham secretly in a time of genral starvation; now there are millions of hermits with thousands of on-line books at their disposal, and it has made no difference to their intelligence.

A quick note to reply indirectly to possible allegations made against my hoarding of book profits. It gives me great joy to see my writings reproduced by other means but only because they are ‘mine’ and remain mine because of the effort and craft I put into them. Active replication is a signal of success whilst passive replication (the mere quantity of a text’s residings on-line) indicates stagnation.

I appreciate other people, who are able to organise themselves and put effort into autonomously producing and authoring objects, it is a fundamental human activity, it is a way of inscribing the self and society – it is a faint shadow of direct production of the means of existence. I do not particularly appreciate those who merely forward links or reproduce texts, as they do not, as it seems to me, have anything to say themselves.

I have invested my own money in my publications and I have sent out all my copies free of charge (the cost of postage also taken on by me). An old-style comrade sent me a cheque for one once but I did not cash it.

Most of my writing originates within public space (for example the seminar series on here will form the base of the next book) and then is elevated into book form (which is fundamentally superior to online texts). As a writer I seek the pleasure of a for-itself text, as a reader I appreciate engagement with others on the content of what is written.

It is my opinion that texts should become more and more hidden not more and more accessible if they are to have radical effect – to this end I ditched half of the print run of nih-com (how’s that for potlatch fendy?). This is the base of my feeling for the sacred anyway – there needs to be effort and commitment on the part of the seeker. What is certain is that intelligence cannot be downloaded.

This sounds like a pretty Hobbesian statement, but maybe I'm reading you wrong. I don't think Western European late neolithic archeology combined with the historical present is sufficient to generalize all human existence. Be that as it may, it is easy to confuse functional results with motivation. I just don't think there is enough evidence to suggest a tit-for-tat consciousness behind swamp offerings. What I call property is a relation, not motivation. Motivation is so often only seen after the fact any way, elicited less as a directed goal than the "rational" justification for what we have already done or are about to do. Much of our behavior is in fact not rational. We don't always do x because of a and b and c (unless we are forced to) but only blame a, b and c afterwards, and then only when asked.

Objectivity is a concern with objects (as in contradistinction, I suppose, to ideas). Property is the result of our relations with objects. It is not the object itself. Property is an idea with real consequences. The idea has a corresponding verb form: appropriation (and its variants). That is a behavior, not 'thing'. I once knew a communist from the olden days who explained the negation of property in everyday-life terms: This 'polite' concern for a possible other is what is missing in all modern days economic analyses. Ripping off is ripping off. It is meanness, not a concern for property. Kind of like rape is not usually about sex but violence and control. Under capitalism, it is the value of things above and beyond folks. That is still mean.

As to sacrifice, if that which is given is not something dear, it may as well be called "garbage disposal". This is not what we mean by sacrifice. Sacrifice suggests loss and pain. It is a view of gifting only through the lens of scarcity. It is the view of a perpetual victim.

Finally, the bowl and spoon game is not the child, it is the adult observer. I've talked about this elsewhere:
As to my offer to BZFGT, why do you see it as a game of one-upmanship? His "if you believe this, then you would ..." was not, I think, an exercise in formal logic (I took it as joking sophistry). My answer was meant to illustrate that, yes, I do believe it. As a matter of fact, this would not stop me from giving him money if he sincerely asked for it. It is a whole lot easier to share when you don't have much to start with than you might think.

I often consider the swift and the fox and the chicken. It's always concerned me. But I am not thinking about individual acts so much as imagining a system of gifting (reciprocity) where the idea of profit cannot exist without abstraction from the context of lived existence. I'm saying in such a system, what goes around comes around. From the dung beetle's point of view, the fox has just saved her from certain death by those pecking birds. You could call that profit, but I try to avoid thinking of the life going on around me in economic terms of exchange. I had problems with Battaile's metaphor of expenditure. This does not mean the model does not fit. There's just so much more.

Its been fun.
f.

Agreed, almost like a real anti-politics. I am happy that you have now completed what needed to be said on this, and that the fully articulated tension between the various poles describes the field as it really is... unless that is someone does have something more to say which will then extend the field further – it is always possible.

Human society exists contrary to that of nature. Natural societies, intraspecific relationships, that is, the relationship within a group of gazelle or a group of birds, is generally based upon an unconscious sharing relationship. That is, the act of sharing has no real rhyme or reason to it, it just happens.

It would be silly to suppose that this is a "gifting" scenario, however, since nature is full of resources and when resources are scarce the reality sets in and competition is created. Animals will freely graze the tundra when the right season hits, but in drought they will hoard a watering hole if they can, and in the case of some animals a watering hole would even be controlled by force.

When animals shared resources equitibly, with the ocassional spat over naturally occuring scarcity (overpopulation, drought, etc), there were no comparable hierarchies, intraspecifically animals were all on the same level, just because there might be an anthropomorphic (ie, human supposed) 'hierarchy' in a pack of wolves does not mean the capabilities of each wolf in that 'hierarchy' are unequal (a leader of a pack could have achieved that status through sheer luck, with his opponent slipping on a rock during a fight).

But humans, recognizing that some other animals were superior to another, having intelligence, and most importantly adaptablity, began appropriating other modes of interspecific behaviors (that is, behaviors that exist only across species lines). Intraspecifically they *no longer* had a level playing ground. Humans good at making weapons would kill other humans. Humans good at discovering medicines or just making shit up would have superior status because they would become relied upon for healing. Specialization was born (incidently "specialization" derives directly from "species"), and with it, scarcity.

Specialization is a poweful tool, because if you are good at one thing, and you can do it well, and most importantly those of society depend on you for it, you can bargain for things that otherwise you would not be able to get. Hunter tribesmen were superior to the others in a clan, would have their pick of women in almost every recorded tribe. But this is the unintended invention of "scarcity." If only a few hunters are the best, and everyone relies on those few hunters for most of their food, then your ability to have access to resources is limited. If you were a bird or gazelle I mentioned you would only have to worry about drought or other predators across species lines, but *now* you have to worry about that specialized human who is feeding you, and you must placate them, like one might placate a lion by sacrificing one of its own. You have lost something to them. You *are* inherently unequal.

But because of that intelligence humans are capable of the exact converse. Scarcity can be created via specialized forces of domination, humans picking one behavior, doing it well, and using it as a bargaining tool to achieve higher status. But it can also be abolished by rejecting those same mechanisms. In a highly technological civilization specialization is maintained through the same old mechanisms, power and control, but the control of knowledge is the most prelevant theme. If only a few people, I would imagaine anarchists, helped dessiminate that knowledge, the power and control would *naturally* reduce itself to a more Natural state, where all in society do have a (relatively) equal footing just like they did in pre-history. Anarchists are the only real people to do this because the dynamic is anti-authoritarianism. This control I talked about that was created within human societies is something that anarchists are inherently against.

Project Gutenberg is an example of humans following their natural instincts, sharing freely, without worrying about any other sticky details or rhetoric. We live in a society where accumulation, profit, control, and domination are unconscious behaviors, where sharing is actually had to be seen from a conscious perspective. That is, it's a lot easier to not share, to control, than it is to share. This is the culture of authoritarianism. And we're the only animal society on the planet to do things this way.

I envision sharing not to be thought of as some active process of "generosity and kindness" but as a behavior that is automatic, unconscious. When a bird shits it falls to the ground, is reabsorbed into the ecosystem, and life goes on. When a human shits, it goes into a sewer somewhere, and winds up in a stream, polluting that steam. A bird contributes to the ecosystem (except where birds are unnaturally overpopulating environments due to human involvement). A human does not. A bird is sharing, a human is not. Humans are not part of the overall sharing process that is natural within the planetary ecosystem. That has to change.

And it can't change until we accept that not sharing is a dominate theme used solely by those mired in authoritarian practices. That accumulation is in fact a bad thing. That the culture of authoritarianism is real and it exists here and now and even in our own circles.

Capitalism is merely a word used to describe the current paradigm of authoritarianism, and to embrace it or to not oppose it achieves nothing toward actualizing an anti-political, anti-authoritarian, natural society.

BTW, if anyone disagrees with this assessment of natural non-human behaviors, then you might want to check out Mutual Aid ( http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4341 ) or watch Nice Guys Finish First by Richard Dawkins ( http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 5568693212 ).

The view that sharing is against our nature is really not supported by any scientific evidence. The closest thing you'll find is stuff by Objectivists (of the Ayn Randian variety). And it's hardly objective.

yay fenderson and one shoe...

i am usually stumped by the purist arguments that have examples in this thread. (perhaps that is a statement about my own over reliance on purist arguments.) i saw the scanning set up at the new york bookfair and was neither impressed nor threatened by it. someone in fact bought a book at my table and later brought it back, so perhaps i was one of those Scammed. (edit: a risk that one takes by putting one's self out there.) at any rate, one shoe's points about relationships certainly ring true for me, and since the point (certainly for attending bookfairs and events - which are always money losses for us and most of the tablers - but also in running distros or publishing things at all) is to meet and talk with people i find interesting along lines that i find interesting, efforts like the scanning project are to me merely another way of people saying that they aren't interested in engaging with me. i certainly understand and can relate to not wanting to engage with anyone. and it is also not surprising that those efforts-to-not-relate come dressed in the clothing of "holier/more anarchist than thou," as many of the statements
(gdmt - another edit - always figuring out too late that i am being too terse. -
of course there are limits to the kind of engagement that can happen at these bookfairs, and of course it is a statement about the society that this is what it takes for people to come out and meet each other. none the less, a conference/bookfair/event provides a useful framework for introducing oneself to others, or finding topics for conversations with new people.)

more significantly though, i find the idea of speaking without speaking, of communicating on the surface to get at things below the surface (i'm sure there is better language for this), of writing as a way to actually dialogue (vs. monologue), to be particularly evocative.
a minor example of this is SotS, or good epigrams in general, where the reader is forced to acknowledge how much s/he brings to the text, and is not/cannot be a passive observer of it. again this has feelers in what relevance this forum has, and in how we communicate in various ways (not just in writing).

If someone *did* buy a book from you, scan it, and return it, I would agree that that is completely wrong, and I would agree with there being a disengagement in that process. I don't know if that's what happened, but the fact that you don't seem to know what happened (they had to have a reason to return it, no?) shows the overall disengagement related to the purchasing and exchange of goods. At least that's how it comes off to me.

I get mocked for observing consumer behavior (I once admitted that I watched people go in and out of Wal-Mart), but that's basically the dynamic that I feel exists everywhere in our capitalist inundated world. You, the consumer, buy and exchange things for other things, and the person behind the counter is just another cog there to sell it. There may be casual greeting here or there, and in the case of the bookfairs I have had a few interesting discussions, but in the end the general feeling I have recieved is that of a consumer-seller relationship not unlike the same I would get at Wal-Mart.

I find it disheartening however that the same keywords are being utilized by anarchists that capitalists would use to define the same behavior. "Scammed by thieves." "GNU is a scam." "Pirating is theft." As I truly believe scanning and sharing texts of this nature could be facilitated by an engaging and wonderful process without discontentment on the behalf of the vendors.

I don't quite know how the OP's brother addressed the situation, but in the video he seemed quite engaging, perhaps something was lost there. I believe that if a larger more pervasive project was undertaken engagement would be absolutely pivotal to success.

When you saw the scanning project did you engage the guy and discuss it? It seems from your comments that you kind of glossed over it, imho. And that you wrote the guy off as "holier than thou" or something. I didn't get that from the video at all. He seemed really nice.

I started a thread called: Why are you "radical"; an Odyssey of your radicalization, in that thread I revealed that reading the Gutenberg e-text of Marx's Communist Manifesto(on my Palm Pilot like device) is what started my journey of considering myself an anti-capitalist.

My mother on contrary took me to Easter egg-hunts where I hunted for candy. She raised me to believe in Santa Claus and to write to Santa to deliver toys to me on Christmas. If all I had was the conditioning of my family environment, television and schooling, there is no way I would be anything but a staunch capitalist.

From the Flyer:


The way the brain works is not like one_shoe is portraying things, he is trying to only(or mostly) analyze things in terms of economics. In terms of economics we can never break from capitalism because we are all raised to become a part of the capitalist system(Ex. in school they referred me to a psychiatrist for walking out of school, because I had to be a deviant to not adjust to the society around me). We are hardly considering economics here and profit motive. The brain takes a wide variety of sensory data and experiences and forms connections across the synaptical gaps between neurons committing to memory using chemical neurotransmitters, what we deem important.[1] So what you read in a sense changes your brain chemistry and "becomes a part of you".



@Why: It is not a scanner. Mr. Samizdat can digitize a whole 100-200 page book in a few minutes using the MediEVIL device and a digital camera. Using a traditional scanner the process is much longer and time consuming, probably it would take hours. Mr. Samizdat did most of the digitizing not attendees of the Bookfair. Why, what did you use to digitize the works you mention? A conventional scanner?



@one_shoe: I do not see how making something you write scarce on purpose, will do anything other than make it scarce. As already revealed Mr. Samizdat agreed with you that most anarchist works should be locked up and not shared more, he said he had trouble finding books he considered worthy.

@leona: How am I suppossed to know that !a is !aragorn? It took a while to figure that out, I do not know much about !aragorn or his activities; I know more about the Aragorn character from the Lord or the Rings trilogy! He just makes a vague reference to a big project he is involved with and does not name it, I can only guess what he hints. What I do know is this other less familiar !aragorn character did not dismiss this effort like one_shoe did as "steal[ing] and ritually debas[ing]".

To be clear to anyone in this thread, I am not against anyone selling a book in the printed form. This is not the age of linotype or the even more former epoch when not only all paper had to be hand-made but every scroll had to be hand-copied by a destitute scholar/scribe. Most books originate from the start in a digital computer form(and are written by the author in such a manner) and then are printed out(at present). The question is, are the ideas more important or is only making them available in printed book format for purchase, more important?

[1.] The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret and Science of Happiness (Hardcover)
by Yongey Rinpoche Mingyur, p. 34. (I highly recommend this book combining the Buddhist tradition with modern science.)

Nikephoros, I got "What is Property?" from Gutenberg and read it on a crappy 10 year old laptop that I brought at a yardsale for $20 (it has long since blown up but outlasted most books I have had). So our journeys are similar. Only the book didn't "introduce" me to anti-property concepts, it *confirmed* my previously held beliefs, and assigned a name to them. Interestingly, I didn't even know about "What is Property?" until having read the Anarchist FAQ, a piece of information that until the middle or end of this year was *only* available in digital form. And subsequent revisions will always be found superior in its original digital form.

Just to clarify, I knew he was using a camera, but page turning takes a few seconds at the bare minimum, and snapping the photo depending on the camera can take a second or two. A brand new book will need to have its binding "broken" which also makes the process a bit more difficult (and then returning a book with a broken binding is pretty rude). A new book won't just 'lay open'. For a first time user it would take more than a few mintutes.

I started off using a scanner but digital photographs are the way to go. Scanners can be found readily in yardsales for pennies on the dollar though (and for those who have contacted me about my project I have suggested using them because they don't seem to have much money), they do consume a huge portion of time use. I've submitted over 10 books to Gutenberg from my old book collection (one of the earliest writings on there of erotica was scanned and OCR'd by me, and it was written by a female!), it took months.

I geniunely would be surprised if they could get digitizing quality from the efforts of passerbys. I might even suggest that some of the stuff Mr. Samizdat scanned may not have even been OCR-able. Could be wrong though, would be interesting to see how it turned out. If he did the scanning himself he probably has a good method down and it would be adequate in that respect. But I confess I could be exaggerating here, I didn't experiment much with a one camera setup because it resulted in curved pages which I found were inadequate to OCR.

Do you agree with the sentiment of "locking up" anarchist books? This is extremely counterintuitive to me and is hard for me to understand. I have had a harder time finding anarchist books than anything else, most of which actually derives from Gutenburg since those works are in public domain.

Chuck0 and I have had this discussion many times before but he never goes so far as to calling scanning in anarchist texts "stealing." And over time he has even admitted (maybe because of my persistant persuasion) that the works he is working on would possibly benefit from being made available for free. You look at independent authorship (particularly scifi novellas) and you can see a dramatic uptick in an authors income by first making a book available in digital form and then asking for donations for the print form. The consumers of today are quite an interesting bunch.

The arguments about the "superiority of printed form" are in my mind grasping at straws and there are positives and negatives in either direction. My original response to this thread was heated as I felt that fellow comerades were being ufairly characterized and insulted over such a simple concept as ... sharing.

Look at the mailing-list homepage of the Samizdat project:



[1.] To give one example, when I read One-Dimensional Man in printed book form, I formed opening and closing braces like this: [ ], around selections of text, that I felt were the most important and evocative. This condenses the book to a mere 12-14 pages; if the book was not available in a "liberated" text format on Marxists.org I probably would have never done this. I do not have the money to start a peer discussion group of 10 members and pay for 10 copies of this book so everyone has a copy, but I can easily afford to use a laser printer to print out 10 copies of this abridged version and make sure everyone has a copy of this abridged format. I made a thread on Infoshop.org forum to post this abridged version: One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse Infoshop Forum Thread

So the project is not about just copying every book that is out there, but what you feel has effected you and altered your mind and to attempt a reproduction of this process in others. I used MediEVIL to digitize Centuries of Childhood since I feel it is worthy.

I don't think that's the same thing as locking things up but if that's what one_shoe was alluding to, I can definitely agree with it.

As long as the originals are available, though.

Remember my rebuttal to part of your abridged version of that text? I kinda called it out for missing some important bits that were in the original. A350 built by 20 people remember (the Technoloy Overdone thread)? ;)

Man I can be an insulting bastard at times.

The past is nice, but I'm not sure what you mean when you say "preserve a steady state in relations" in relation to the present. Care to give examples? Also, what do you mean when you say the gift is not a gift "up to this point in time?" Will some future golden age of communism finally engender the gift as such? I really have no idea what you're trying to get at.

Creating this scanning apparatus coupled with the modest attempt to describe its existence is just a practice, like your daily writings, that moves against the logic of capitalism. Your "doing nothing" argument seems to be little more than an all out war on any other practical activity that goes beyond the motor skills involved in moving a pen or pressing buttons on a keyboard. But I'm sure writing against capital is just as unacceptable and moot, of course! At the same time I see no reason to limit, in advance as part and parcel of your critique, certain practices that go beyond words. Some people want to live their critiques as well, it becomes more comprehensible and lucid for some people to experiment with attempting to carve out what they're writing in gesture and body language. Yes, you already know this, but...

Yes, we are talking about being subversive, not just writing subversively. Attacking the anarchist church is as good a place as any and there are obvious strategic reasons to do so. The same goes for writing. I could be wrong, but I'm going to conjecture that you have a ridiculous bias against the delegation of any form of activity that goes beyond the pen, and no real argument to back it up (at least I have not felt or witnessed one up until this point). I'm sure you have a rich history of going to protests and getting jaded or whatever, but still...

And are any capitalist connections being disrupted by the continued narratives on anti-politics.net?

As if that is not exactly what was happening at the book fair in this case -- a living critique of the distribution of texts based in the inspiration to improve forms of distribution, i.e. to hint at the dissolution of formal-commercial affairs and to display the radicality in informal reproduction that, in living example, reproduces the printed word against existing laws of capital. The gesture was no less impressive than anything you've ever written, and this especially so if you want to reduce everything in advance to the ultra-defeatist equivalent of "we do not oppose capitalism in whatever we chose to do." But I see evidence of the dissolution of capital, a spontaneous hint, another moment of dissatisfaction that could no longer be contained from everyday life... where certain rituals imposed by present conditions were rejected (eloquently no less) in a simple, effective manner. It's pleasurable to watch these unexpected breaks sprout up...

prove that it moves against the logic of capitalism. (especially since there are many logics of capitalism and there are also illogics of capitalism.)

one-shoe has already stated, and i have commented on, the idea of events as social and relational (even with the limitations of sociability and relationships in the current context).

the premise of you and your compatriots on this forum seems to be that information will free people.
this is a liberal premise, demonstrably false.
that of course does not mean that lack of information will free people either.

the world is not binary.

There's an old inscription at cia headquarters:
They should know!

Then there's this little ditty:


The dreaded systems theory approach suggests that information is always modified by the system (our "brain") in order to better fit. What doesn't fit passes clean over our head. The output is always different than the input. This is what processing means. Lies and truth are only moral assessments. From this process, we attain "common sense".

Here's "demonstrable proof" that scanning shit in and providing it free of charge is against capitalism (as matt even pointed out, digital copies can be utilized to make *print copies* too, if you're obsessed with print like some are):

US Constitution: The Congress shall have Power [. . .] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Copyright Act of 1790
Copyright Act of 1909
Copyright Act of 1976
Berne Convention Implementation Act of 1988
Uruguay Round Agreements Act (URAA) of 1994
Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (making copyright essentially perpetual)
Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (criminalized copying things digitally)
Family Entertainment and Copyright Act of 2005

These are *political laws* that were intended to *enhance the power of capitalist copyright*. Anything that *rejects* these *laws* is demonstrably against capitalism. The debate about "freeing people with information" has no bearing on the argument.

The argument, that I only realized last night, is that capitalism is creating value based on objects whereas anarchism would place value on people themselves.

Hey guys, here’s a letter to you,

So many questions and so little time for me I'm afraid.

Today, I've been: playing Colditz a POW role playing/ board game with my kids; I've improvised on the vectoring in the story The Tinderbox; I've made tomato soup, sourdough bread and icecream; discussed the dismerits of psychodynamic counselling; got drenched in the loverly english summer rain down by the river with the dog and spoke to six people I've never spoken to before; I've scoured Bataille's Absence of Myth for that dratted Ham quote (if only I had access to an e-version!)

In other words Matt, it is not my writing that I oppose to capital but my life and the doing nothing, as I have listed above, is the full content of this opposition.

I seriously appreciate both Why's and Nike's much more conducive expression of their ideas, it is a pity I am not able to really discuss in depth these issues for the moment.

However, if I include matt here (whose forum conduct is always never less than exemplary), what I could draw attention to is that all three of you on this thread have admitted to failing to achieve named projects within this particular field that you advocate. I do wonder whether this might have something to do with the nature of the concept of ownership and anti-ownership that you are working with?

To focus more closely on an example of this, Why (the person not the question) is in favour of us owning our shit (he is against sewers) but against us owning our creativity (he is in favour of 'free' objects on the internet...) I find that an interesting juxtaposition. By contrast, I find the sewers beneath cities to be a great wonder of our existence (sewerage does not have to pollute rivers), if only the skilled workmen who built these edifices were named that we might know them as we know that John Lennon wrote I am the Walrus.

My father once told me, that when a plane flew overhead he'd often think that it was more than likely that it contained something made by him. He used to treat the glass on the instrument panels, an anti-reflective process called 'blooming' (it just strikes me at this moment, another edit, – and this is the point, I want to draw more names in, he gave me an old copy of Daphne Demaurier's The Glass Blowers a book about the french revolution, and that was what he was, on the line, a glass bloomer. Was this working in glass significant to him? Did he want it to be to me? He never gave me any other book).

If only that process had really belonged to him just like that famous piece of greek pottery inscribed with the slave's name who made it. You see, I think the contrast between what you are saying and what I am saying is based on the notion of ownership. I do not think owning things, making things your own, putting your name on them, the basic manoevres of territory, is a bad thing. I don't see capitalism as a system of property so much as a system of exploitation. To abolish capitalism, in my opinion, we need, in our activities to extend our personal ownership to the full extent of our individuality, rather than erase it altogether.

I wonder, whether you three did not complete projects because you are constantly afraid to assert your urge to ownership... it is this tendency which I discern which causes me to think of the internet as a continuation of the system of exploitation rather than liberation (of course we are making this engagement ours, so it is not a one way street, but the issue is of quantity versus quality). If I were to give any advice on undertaking autonomous activity I would always say, secure territory, and then place yourself in a position where you can chose to defend it, or let it go. Unless something is really yours you are going to constantly drift. In other words, you americans, go out into the plains and form your waggons into a circle. Of course that is absurd and meaningless to the eagles, termites and snakes, why defned that patch and not another. The answer is because it is the act of inscription and defence of inscription that creates the intensity and the meaning. Human beings 'find' the cog form and the spoke form – we move outwards, we move inwards. Territory is totally arbitrary but... on the other hand if the irish labourers had each inscribed their name into every brick that went into the sewer system which they built beneath our streets, wouldn't that send a shivver down your spine? That conection of ours with their 'promising themselves through their activity into the future.'

This is why I bang on about Nietzsche's second essay in Geneaology of Morals... you make something yours, you pass from this condition to the next via the cost you have taken on, the threat that a loss would inflict. Each of us is only an individual, we can only achieve individual scale victories, but they are there to be won if you are able to inscribe a territory for yourself.

Maybe, as an exercise, you should play my part for me, write my posts, and maybe I can do the same for you. Maybe I'd be a better you than you are yourself, maybe you'd be a better me. That is the scale of de-authoring that I appreciate, rather than some urge to warehousing of free goods, with the rosebud, rosebud of what we lose in anonymity hidden somewhere in there, uncatalogued.

Anyway, to end it here: you guys are really ok. And I'm not too bad as well.

o-s (not copyrighted)

ps. Just to add, and before you think I've gone all William Morris, there is also the question of unskilled labour. The brickmaker if you like and the brick transporter, we cannot all inscribe our names on every brick, so many hidden hands in even the simplest undertaking... so these questions go on, the quesiton of owning and letting go, of authoring and de-authoring, of setting limits to the self, all of which we could put in the general category of socialisation (or human relations).

I'm not making statements about ownership, I'm talking about control. Capitalists control our shit, as funny as that sounds. You pay to have it taken away and you pay to have it made (buying food that you consume which in turn makes the crap). I'm not against sewers (sorry if that is the implication) I'm against sewers being controlled by entities which in turn charge you to use them. I as a being have intrinsic value, the fact that I exist means that I must contribute to the ecosystem in some way. To be punished for existing is pretty darn counterintuitive to me.

I am somewhat heavily involved in the space industry on the side, many times I come across Libertarian jerks who have these long convoluted philosophical discussions about economics in space and how air itself should be a commodity. If you cannot afford to breath air, you get sent out an airlock (that's the extreme scenario). That's not how ecosystems work, they don't have an overarching political and economic system there to create them. The great space fairing Libertarian sophists keep forgetting that they wouldn't be able to make Oxygen a commodity if it wasn't for someone breathing out CO2.

Being part of an actual working ecosystem does not preclude you from having creativity or being an individual contributor (or even from having credit for those contributions). It just means that you cannot use your contributions beyond your individual ability to control them. A squirrel will 'hoard' nuts for the winter, but there exist no Squirrel Conglomerate that has specialized Squirrel Nut Pickers, Squirrel Security Guards, Squirrel Politicians and so on, it is naturally limited by its individual ability, and so the ecosystem has evolved to handle squirrels partaking in this yearly hoarding ritual. But the ecosystem cannot handle the control exhibited by capitalists because we do have those things, we're able to strip whole forests of their resources because each individual is part of a specialized function that they are deemed fit for. One person cutting down a a few trees to build a log cabin is fine and dandy. A couple of dozen people utilizing technology to cut down a whole forest so others can then go on to build hundreds of houses, is not. The ecological participation is one sided, and the value of being exists in the products that are created, not the efforts of an individual for their own good. If you had to make a house from scratch by yourself you would not have the instrinsic ability to go cut down a whole forest. While I'm not arguing for that exactly, I am arguing for not having a *reason* to cut down a whole forest because specialization in this context would not exist. Not having to rely on people cutting trees down to build a house means that they don't have a compelling reason to keep cutting down trees.

If I download a book that someone scanned in, I don't necessarily depend on any one individual to get that book, but I may be inadvertantly sharing parts of that book back without even thinking about it (the basic premise of P2P systems). No one is controlling me. But if I have to pay money for that book I am being controlled by all sorts of individuals and conglomerates. I am being controlled by a system of wage slavery, by a system of commodity sharing, and my value as a human exists solely in my ability to be forcefully required to "contribute" something to society. My existance no longer has value in and of itself, and if I am not a "contributor" (within the confines of the sociopolitical system being discussed) I myself *have no value*. Yet as a living breathing entity I *am* contributing to the overall ecosystem whether you like it or not, or whether you acknowledge it or not.

There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to "own things," (in fact I would posit that possessive-ownership is a *fact of nature*) but from an anarchist standpoint there is an inherent authoritarianism in wanting to *control* things outside of your individual sphere of control. You can refuse to publish a book digitally all you want. It did start off as your possession, after all. But if you go to extra lengths to *prevent the dessimination of that book* you have breached a demonstrable barrier between authoritarianism and anarchism. The only way it could be done is by utilizing authoritarian structures such as political, judicial, and policing systems.

This has nothing to do with wanting to debase your works, though. Really, it doesn't. I sincerely mean it. There are millions of people putting crap up on YouTube without a requirement for monetary recompense (I myself have a whole series of entertaining pieces such as tutorials there!). Few if any of those people would feel their works were "stolen" because they were copied without permission on millions of other computers. And it is this copying and sharing that resembles closer the natural ecosystem where there exist no control in the process of sharing where people can be both consumers and producers within the same breath. A far cry from being a producer of one thing only but a consumer of completely different things that have little to no relationship outside of the system of domination in which it takes place.

I may admittedly not care about whatever crap I'm scanning in (in fact I can admit I even overtly disliked some of the works). That's irrelevant. It would be impossible to care about thousands and thousands of works that exist out there. Even if every brick on a building was signed and dated by the person who laid it, there would be little acknowledgement of the act. I don't see *why* I should have to care about every work that I touch, however. You will go about your daily life not caring about the eccentricities of the products you consume. A thousand people may be directly involved in the creation of one single item you possess, do you lose anything by not knowing them? Would you really *want* to know each and every one of them?

In my daily life I do not want nor need recognition. matt and I had this very same discussion, he was perplexed by my obsessive compulsion toward complete anonymity. But I don't derive pleasure from being known as to who I am or what I do. I derive *more pleasure* from seeing others working on concepts I have expressed before than I ever would from achieving a goal and then announcing that I did it, expecting praise from the masses. To me to do something without requirement for recognition has within it a certain virtue to it. To give away complete and utter control to all that I have created, to emancipate my ideas and allow them to be freely desiminated and used by anyone who choses. In our society it requires more effort to release yourself of control over something, because like those laws I mentioned our intrinsic culture is inundated with a psyche of authoritarianism.

Finally, I have been successful in all projects I've worked on and I would consider matt's contributions to his projects a continuing success. If I set out to do something I will accomplish it, and I'm not sure that your knowing about it has much relevance to it at all. Just because you don't know doesn't mean it hasn't been successful. The fact that half a dozen unique individuals have approached similar projects makes it successful in my mind, because it's the people who matter, not their products. The difference between having a book I wrote and appreciating that I wrote it.

BTW, I tried finding Absence of Myth for you (you'd be surprised how many books are *already* available). Unfortunately the older books are more difficult to find, they either have to be really old, or really new. Anyway, I did find The Absence Of Myth by Sophia Heller, interestingly enough. It may have the quote in there somewhere as it's somewhat related to the same concepts (check #bookz).

To those who dislike my redundant writing style, I edited this a few times and deleted a lot of admittedly redundant writing, but I have to go at the moment and if I read it later and find something extraneous I will edit it out.

I seem not to have explained myself very well but I take it we are now agreed that simply taking something from someone in the same room so as to copy it and post it on the internet is a somewhat alienated act in a set up where non-alienated acts are extremely difficult to undertake. So, we can move on from that to deal with the question of the socialisation of consumption.

The argument put forward by why is that by making consumer products available for free the capitalist system is damaged at its very heart, the relation of exchange. This may or may not be true. I would think it is not true... I would guess that the advantages for capital in consumers sharing products on the internet outweighs the disadvantages and that revenue is recouped at another level from the feeding frenzy. But even if it is true, (and finance is being withdrawn from the entertainment industry, are there any figures to prove that this is happening?), even if it is true the military observation, ‘a disadvantage for the enemy is not necessarily to your own side’s advantage’ holds up. A collapse in the culture industry, as in the housing sector, is healthy like a forest fire for the larger capitalist structures who can clean up when things are cheap.


I am not against your project, whatever it is, but I am sceptical about your claims for it. I am not convinced that you are less ‘controlled’ when you don’t pay than when you do pay... you haven’t really substantiated this claim. It seems to me that the logic of the commodity continues in the form of activity even though the payment of money within that immediate exchange is absent – for non-commodified consumption to occur there would have to be a general set of relations, a fully operational community, in place. I do not think it is the payment of money that is alienating in buying a cd or book, although of course it is an expression of alienation, so much as the general system of relations between people and how these are mediated through products.

The problem lies, I think, in the socialisation of consumption, and the development of an active subject from ‘downloading’. If we look at a parallel example: if all the products in the supermarket were free this might be very convenient for us as individuals but for the supermarket system to continue without money would still require a basic alienation of the populace that it serves from the production of their own lives. Even without money the supermarket would imply a system of production that was in your words, ‘controlling’.


So, it is like work on a production line.


That is true, little acknowledgement and how could there be, if your life is dominated by the active-passive consumption of hundreds and thousands of products. I was not thinking about it in a literal sense, and any way in some areas of production this personalisation does occur (I have seen some cosmetics for example with the image of its human adjunct attached). I was thinking more about advancing to the fore the lived human activity in any undertaking in opposition to the instrumentalist direction imposed by dead labour that seems to dominate within your schema.

What you do is made possible by the technology available, its availability has set your practice in motion. It is as if it has made the decision objectively, it has valued your activity. Therefore, you do not care about whatever crap you are scanning in, because the ‘in’ is bottomless and insatiable – and that, precisely, is the logic of the commodity, which is the logic of levelling everything to its availability/exchange (there is an objectivist revolutionary argument in this, do you want to make it?) Nobody goes to libraries now because they resemble too much the city dump – filled with what is obsolescent, the truly levelled, that from which the commodity aura, and thus human desire, has faded.

In the US you don’t have experience of the welfare state where ‘services are free at the point of delivery’ and therefore you might be surprised that capitalism is just as triumphant where ‘free’ services are available as where they aren’t.


Not at all. But we are talking about generalities here and how practice proceeds from them, for example:

Elegant things:
A white coat worn over a violet waistcoat.
Duck eggs.
Shaved ice mixed with liana syrup and put in a new silver bowl.
A rosary of rock crystal.
Wisteria blossoms. Plum blossoms covered with snow.
A pretty child eating strawberries.

You know that bit in 1984, where Smith finds an ‘antique’...

I recommend Prevert's poem's Inventory and procession

I don’t know if Dagmar Krause’s lp of Hans Eisler’s Tank Battles is available digitally. I hope it is and I hope it isn’t as I have it on vinyl but I’d also like Yoshomon to listen to it. Eisler wrote some really great songs about revolutionary defeat, and on the back of the lp sleeve there is a quote from Eisler which reads, ‘the noise in the street is not mere noise, it is made by man’. He is right of course, traffic is not traffic it is human beings, queues are not queues they are human beings. But whilst he suppresses something in the imposition of second nature within capitalism’s bustle he fails to realise the exact co-ordinates of the street in which he lives and give the activity and people that are there names – in other words, despite his genius, he was still a bourgeois, who conjured up ‘man’ as an ideal opposition to the ‘noise’ of the commodity. In the same way you conjure the ideal quantity of free downloads in opposition to ‘controlled/controlling’ quantities exchanged for money. By contrast, what I am getting at, is the noise outside my window is being made by Asfarq, Rahul, Rhiannon, Caiden and Hazar, they are playing, I think, Dr Who.

There's something that seems to be missing here. I mean, normally when I go on about "getting shit for free" people go "that won't work, because stuff needs to be produced, people have to get paid!"

Obviously there are many arguments used by people and it's never really settled whether or not capitalists are hurt by this behavior. If I'm not going to ever pay for books then capitalists aren't hurt by my reading them, because I was never a customer to begin with. Capitalists are about control, however, and the mere fact that they use the sociopolitical system to enforce their "ownership" of something intangible or easily acquired illustrates that they do consider it hurting their bottom line, which is in fact why these new laws are created. If our actions make the capitalists reactive, then I consider them good, especially in this case we are completely winning the war by all accounts (for every new law there are millions more who reject it). If there is a collapse (which I don't foresee any time soon), then I don't see how the capitalists can recover, since a collapse in the way culture exists means revolution.

I don't have a problem with commodities in general, nor do I with consumption for that matter (the fact I don't use it insultingly should illustrate that). I only have a problem with economic commodities, because economics are at the core of authoritarianism. The question to me is whether or not I can receive commodities without relying on an overarching system of control (by control I mean the political, economic, and judicial). Can I receive a commodity without relying on a hierarchy? I can't imagine that I could without first admitting that I must also be the producer of that commodity in some way or another.

Now this does not automatically mean being a producer of one specialized commodity, to be a wage slave on a factory line somewhere, only to cash my check so I can then go buy other commodities to fulfill my needs or wants (a purely utilitarian approach would be boring to me so wants are desirable). That's how the capitalists approach it. Instead I envision being a producer of any one thing that I want, with the ability to understand down to the simplest of details how whatever it is that I want works. You talk about what I can imagine is a very pretty outfit, the white coat worn over a violet waist coat. But you don't discuss how it *got there.*



Nah, more like seeking out flat rocks to skip across a pond, not caring that some are lopsided and finessing them anyway, because the skipping of the rocks is the enjoyment, not the rocks themselves. I accept that some rocks won't skip, but if they are flat I will skip them anyway. To you, my skipping of rocks may be meaningless and the rocks that sink to the bottom may be a waste. To the children on the shore it is nothing less than amazing!

I'm simultaneously writing two books, you know. It's taken me 10 years, and may still take another 5 to complete them both. They will be available for free, in whatever form you wish. Digital, paper, whatever. I even figured I could release a version made in a titanium tungsten diamond composite which would last a hundred thousand years. Perhaps even in the shape of a rock that could be skipped on a pond.

If you did not skip my rock I wouldn't care the slightest.

I'm really at a loss to respond to you though about this. This web forum you are utilizing right now has the direct involvement of hundreds of people, and indirect involvement of hundreds of thousands. The software itself, the underlying host for the software, and all the related dependencies. The logo alone relied on hundreds of people to produce! I'm not arguing for the "depersonalization" of things, in fact it's quite the converse. We can't get any more depersonalized than we already are. One need only look at the worlds factory lines to recognize this.

I'm sitting in the "PUNK/HARDCORE/GRID" channel on Soulseek while waiting for some files to download. We're having all sorts of interesting discussions. Most of us aren't musicians and are just people wanting to consume some commodities that are suitable to our taste. But it would be hard for me to see them as music producers. Oh, no, they must be hamburger flippers, or students at propagandizing state schools. For them to be emancipated from their daily life of drudgery the current state of affairs must come crumbling down. All I propose is bringing the state down. How do you get out of these cycles of domination? I cannot make a statement about commodification or consumerization (outside of the uses that capitalism has for them), because I cannot find fault with them. The Spectacle is the spectacle.

I learned today while updating Blender (a 3D modeling software), that they recently released another open source short film. It looks really fun, and it will be released digitally on May 30th (interestingly enough even they have to give the DVD version exclusivity because they too are operating in the same dynamic we're discussing here, having to actually pay for things rather than to be free to do them without worrying about it). But it shows how behaviors can be if one isn't completely indebted to a system of domination. Most contributions are done in peoples spare time, just like skipping rocks. Now imagine if everyone had complete and total "spare time"? Presumably after we have brought down the system.

"Product personalization" is in fact the newest consumer movement. It's the reason "indy bands" have become "popular again." You look at something like MySpace or YouTube and the "individual is valued above anything else." Of course this is not true as they are essentially advertising based paradigms, which go so far as to spy on your behavior to figure out what next big thing will appeal to you, the wonderful, personalized individual. It's the reason LPs are sold. "Vinyl is so much more personal!" When someone buys an iPod and downloads their wonderful indy music, they're contributing to an overwhelming level of domination, and when it is pointed out to certain people they will cry foul and call Chinese sweatshops merely the marketplace in practice, and that "progress" is the ultimate goal. Often times these are supposed liberals.

What I do is merely to emancipate these things from the chains of the capitalists. While technological availability was necessary for it to happen, there's no reason I could not have done it at any era before. In fact, that's exactly what happened with the advent of the press, everyone was copying the designs and books were readily available. I even suggested to A! Mag that they get their own press rather than relying on the depersonalized, disconnected, monetary based industrial printers to get their magazine out. Copyright came *after* rampant press piracy occurred, not before. I don't care about the crap I scan in because it would be impossible for me to do so, because we've far surpassed the ability to consume all that exists in whatever form. That doesn't preclude us from still being conscious consumers with an appreciation for what we consume, however.

I've never seen an empty library, so I'm wondering where that comes from. They're as popular as ever. The digital equivalent does not in any way mitigate that process at all. If anything it extends the ability of users to acquire text in another form, perhaps meaning that more people read now than ever before.

A welfare state in our current society is quite unlike the society I am envisioning. While one might get a monthly check to exist, they will spend that money just as they would had they earned it, contributing back to the process in some way or another, and still relying on the systems of domination that exists. While the capitalists may try to take over freely shared commodities and consumption processes, I find it hard to fathom since the basis of their system is control. If it isn't controlled, and they control it, who in their right mind would still ascribe to the systems of control? Maybe the yuppies who download music on iTunes when it is readily available on eMule, Soulseak or Gnutella. But since there is little evidence that intelligent and emancipated consumers do that, I have few worries. It's those same "personalized consumers" who get their little "independent music feed" update every morning and whom, on sight of a new album released by their favorite band, click the "buy" button.



I'm completely lost, though. Completely! Help me out here, please. How does this have to do with commodity sharing? That white coat must come from somewhere. I do not believe that it should come from some place where some third worlder is sitting at a sewing table making hundreds of white coats a day so that someone in the first world can then go buy it after laboring under a similar (though unlike) process. While it may come from some local person and their cute little shop (with all the constituent parts made by locals, buttons made by a rock shaper, cotton grown by a farmer, etc), the fact remains that our society cannot exist without industrialization, thus you would be an exception to the rule, and the "personalization" that you would have in such a scenario would be mere chance.

Otherwise that white coat is in fact made utilizing the system of domination that I do not think is even remotely mitigated by the nostalgia or charm one would feel for it. And the act of sharing could not possibly hurt ones individual proclivity toward shiny things, because sharing without capitalism there to make the shit means that we'd be having to make the shiny things. I only suggest making it possible through a sharing dynamic, without anything lost.

BTW, I meant to add, you can get that music here: ed2k://|file|Dagmar%20Krause%20-%201986 ... 4484C7C3|/

I'm about halfway downloading so I'll seed for a little while so that your friend may get it. I want to hear it as it may help me understand you a little better. Fortunately I do not have to go buy an LP somewhere to get it.

I suppose that means we're controlled then;)

Hey now, I know I can be abstract at times but that's cutting it a bit.

I suppose you could call me a naturalist so control in this context is that beyond physical reality, invoked by a "higher authority." Proudhon proved property (in the authoritarian, non-possessive sense) has no logical reason to exist. It was invented when some guys said "God exists," and others said, "God grants us rights to such and such." Then guys ran around writing up these things called laws, notibly property law which said a piece of paper trumped everything else.

So the statement is akin to saying "our society cannot exist without breathing air."

It is largely acknowledged that the music industry is losing lots of money due to illegal downloading. CD's are essentially obsolete, though there is a growing market for vinyl.

I don't think this taking money away from the CD selling major labels is a blow against capitalism. The triumph of the mp3 is just the triumph of a different business model (see the latest albums by Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails) and the falling apart of an outmoded one. This isn't a collapse of the culture industry but a reordering of it.

On the very longterm the triumph of the internet may be detrimental to the economy in that it could degrade humans to the point of being useless even for the production process, but for right now the internet seems to serve the economy very well. The narrative of computer as an enlightening/educating tool is just a horrible joke now. The internet is moving away from even text on the screen and keyboards... towards videos and touch screens... from a metaphoric illiteracy to a very real one...

For some odd reason, I pictured myself as Billy the Kid in "Young Guns II" in an elegant room lit by candlelight, eating white cake and shooting guns for fun.

Yes! Although I’m thinking Macabe and Mrs Miller – the orientation here is towards a peculiar transcendent quality of the object and thus of the concrete relations between actual people which it reflects and summarises.



I do not believe (yet) that the entertainment/culture/telecommunications industry is threatened by downloading.... in fact, I think the continuous immersal of individuals within communications/gaming/entertainment technology is inhibitive of subjective critique and is, probably, objectively to the advantage of capital (but that is not certain, there is an argument to be made in favour of hyper-alienation and its relation to work-function) – even so, never has consuming free time been so much like going to work.

Example of the continuation of the music biz alive and kicking: the deal that Madonna (and I think the rolling stones) have struck for music/events also re-coups the loss of revenue from downloads – in fact books and songs now seem to act as free ‘adverts’ for other lifestyle commodities: clothing, drinks, jewelry, beauty products, ‘exclusive events’ etc. And more importantly as adverts for the constant innovation in hardware. It used to be that we’d wait for the day of release for a new single and play it over and over again on our dad’s record player which was maybe twenty years old, now it is the hardware, the player, that is eagerly awaited – and the ‘objects’ that it hosts, songs, books, images exist merely for the player to function optimally. I do not say there is a decline from ‘45’s to ipods, only that the locus from which profit is derived has shifted. People continue to want ‘real’ things and are prepared, one way or another, to ‘pay’ for them. Why?

I think it has to do with the notion of worth, and having to earn things, be worthy of them, to have a ‘right’ to own them. It is about prestige. I think it is because objects continue to exert cultic/associative/totemic qualities, and that they inscribe a certain territory by ‘themselves.’ In other words, objects cannot be reduced to their content, their ‘use’. Things, real things, are important as registers of existence. People want to ‘pay’ for things, one way or another, because this makes themselves real, it sets a limit, it inscribes a territory where ‘I’ am who I ‘am’.

Why,

When I first read your post I felt that perhaps you were deliberately misunderstanding me so as to not have to include a critque in your account, so that your arguments could stay under ‘control’ and remain unidirectional. It seemed to me that you did not really respond to what I said because you have so much invested in being right that you cannot afford to listen to criticism. I appreciate that you are very dedicated and it is this that is maybe the source of my problem with what you have to say – I have never been very dedicated, in fact I have spent my whole life opposing believers and what I call solutionists, I guess convinced people make me feel bad whereas people who are 'against' things tend to make me feel better. However, upon reflection, I should admit that it is probably not a case of you ‘deliberately’ misunderstanding me, because I don’t understand what you are talking about either, so this may be a case of working within different paradigms here. Let’s cut to the quick, and set out as I understand it, what your arguments are:

1. That free availablity of texts, music and images accelerates the demise of the capitalist relation because it removes the exchange of money for goods.
2. that sharing digital files establishes a new form of consumption/community.

Ok, I have a question and an observation about this, question first. If the capitalist relation is being damaged then this should be quantifiable, can you point to an actual crisis in the media/entertainment/culture/telecommunications industry (for example based on the collapse of companies without replacement on a higher level) or could you predict how long it is going to take before downloading begins to bite hard? Now the observation. (Literally) everyone I know who listens to music or watches images downloads it for free, I discern no particular radical turn in their consciousness that may be attributed to this.

Finally, a study might be undertaken which compares free downloading with movments of free love, free festivals, free parties etc. Also it might be reasonable to consider whether the blackmarket in fakes, the drug economy, the sex industry and so on are a threat to capitalism – all of them transgress legalised forms of ownership and consumption.

Well, I wasn't saying that the music industry is *hurting* because of this mass rejection of capitalist property. Quite the contrary, capitalism adapts very well, indeed, the iPod was a response to rampant music piracy. And most iPods out there are filled with pirated music, the fact that iTunes converts any mp3 to play on the thing proves that their mode of operation is first and formost to be a pirating technology. The question to me is how long can the capitalists continue to adapt? Reinventing the "popularity" of vinyal is only going to go on for so long (and sadly from my observation it is young radicals who chose to go that route above others). The capitalists are so good at adapting that when TV shows were made available for free online, the various TV networks starteding showing the same shows on their official websites (sponser supported, of course!), and that was the whole cause for the "writers strike," because they weren't getting monetarily recompensed for it (they're not getting monetarily recompensed by the bittorrent users, either).

All I'm doing is pointing out a mass rejection of capitalist property. It doesn't even require that people be "radicalized," no, in fact, it's better that they're not, because political movitations can be squashed (one need only look at the relatively small uptake of new anarchists on a yearly basis), but consumer actions are utilized by capitalists, and to squash consumer behavior would be self-defeating. Instead of passing laws to ban bittorrent, they use bittorrent itself to distribute the very media they don't want people getting for free.

matt was correct in being careful with how he worded things. I say "piracy is against capitalism," he says, "piracy is against the logic of capitalism." Quite distinct things to say, and it'd be hard to argue with him on that point.

If we cannot look to mass piracy as an indicator of human behaviors rejecting capitalist property, then we really have no significant behavioral indicator of anarchism being remotely possible on any grounds. Instead of being completely defeatist like that, however, I say it's a good thing that people are rejecting capitalist property (in this case copyright or "intellectual property"), and that perhaps it can be utilized on a more pervasive level. You look at Open Source and can make the same observations, that millions of people are rejecting capitalist property because they download FireFox and run software on all sorts of freely available platforms (bittorrent itself is open source), but even Open Source has been coopted and marginalzied by the capitalists.

There's something else you said.



I would suggest getting "To Have Or To Be?" by Erich Fromm. You will have to go to a library or purchase it unfortunately, I can't find it in my archive of digitized texts (it was one of the first things I ever scanned, small book, quite readable, and enjoyable at that). I would posit that more people don't pay for media than do however, but it would be impossible for me to "prove" this since such a statement would be including everyone in the world. However, if you look at basic statistics it's pretty apparent even if I can't narrow it down further than generalized data: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_s ... iracy-rate

I don't know that buying pirated goods is a rejection of capitalist property, though, as it is generally created under the same systems of domination. It always makes me laugh when the "piracy scene" complains that a "source was stolen" when one group uses another groups source and puts their name on it. Quite evident that our culture of authoritarianism exists even within the pirates.

Here's another interesting site: http://www.iipa.com/pdf/IIPA2007Tableof ... 021207.pdf

Generally it's hard to really get statistics because the people making them up are the ones who stand to lose the most, as the paper "On the Reliability of Piracy Statistics" shows.

But I'm going on a tangent as I don't propose to say that it's hurting capitalism at this point, merely that it can be an exploited behavior in the future. We can't build a network of archived media because we'd get our servers consficated. Let them try consficating our free internet though.

Leona, I've been reading through The Brothers Karamazov lately and I've come across a couple of interesting fragments that reminded me of this thread.

On the impotence and simultaneous beauty of the scanning apparatus and every single one of its -- and its operators' -- included gestures:

I understand that the scanning table was hardly any less ridiculous when considered as an isolated point of contestation against capital than Dostoevsky's tradesman breaking his furniture (the beauty of the gestures standing out sharply in both cases), but its undeniable that it was there nevertheless, it was an event, so I'm not sure exactly what you would like me to prove or what any of this has to do with the world not being binary.

It doesn't matter to me whether the gesture negated a "logic" or an "illogic" of capital... sure there are both of these... and a lot of them... so what? I just used the word "logic" because copyright is written in bureaucratic stone and thus acts as one of a million other logics of capitalism, one of a million other impasses (yes yes, the world isn't binary -- amazing!). This scanning demonstration directly and audaciously subverted the specific constellation of (il)logics that is copyright as we know it today, if only for a brief moment, TAZ-like if you want. It appeared as life that was not called upon or preordained by copyright logic; it had no reason to exist under stable capitalism.

I should admit however that I don't really view these events in terms of logic, but more so in terms of aesthetics and unknowns. Capital did not ask for this demonstration to arise. It was an unknown, experimental gambit, an aesthetic blip on the radar that shouldn't have been there. It created new life that was not asked for nor wanted. It was an illegal instance of life, a momentary rupture, that moved (yes it moved, there is nothing to prove here, he was moving) against the stabilized forms of practice that copyright bureaucracy otherwise prefigures everyday.

The world isn't binary. For the most part, in varying degrees and on varying scales, billions of gestures throughout the day of the book fair continued along in perfect, purist compatibility with the existing laws of copyright. And then suddenly, alongside all of those other gestures, this incompatibility sprouted up on the tiniest scale, but it was there and there was no denying that it deunified with the behavior that was expected of it by the ruling bureaucratic directives of the day and thus moved against capital... an insignificant incompatibility, extraneous and worthless, but still moving at least. I am thankful that it was still moving, and at an anarchist book fair no less! Thus relative to its own sphere of potential, an exemplar within a barren field of graves in one of the last places one would hope to find a graveyard...

I'm back home now but I had been living on the road out of a van for the last four weeks or so. Here is a picture of us stealing power (and wireless internet) from a Super 8 motel:



The scanning apparatus moved against capitalism during the book fair just as much as we moved against capitalism by siphoning electricity here (no more, no less as far as I can tell). Yet I did this not as some gesture against capital first and foremost, but simply because I can't afford motels and paying for wireless internet is absurd. The gesture nevertheless moved against capitalism. Both it and the scanning setup were moments of deunification from its laws and demands, moments of negation. I know these events are real and can be considered tactics -- what I'm not sure about is the sense in which you're trying to deny their reality and why! Prove that the scanning apparatus doesn't move against the logic of capitalism!

I don't think I've ever said anything resembling this. Nowhere am I mentioning freedom or trying to define or defend it. I'm just pointing out clear cut instances of of lived negation, of praxis.

Finally, this was well put by seaweed in the Zerzan thread and I think it applies here:

Also, Leona, you mentioned being paranoid about the possibility of someone using this scanner against one of your books... and suddenly this whole provocation was irredeemably anti-social and insulting! But are you sure that the world is as binary as your pessimism would have it here?

pilpil later mentioned,
But the scanning table could have accomplished a lot more than this, in the context of dealienating and pleasurable social gestures no less. What if someone had bought a book from your table, scanned two or three copies of it, and then returned the extra copies to you in order to beef up your stock and enable you to unload more of 'em?

Hi Matt. Don't mean to interupt, but I heard a good joke this morning:


Then there's this joke from Yahoo search:


Three excerpts and 42 links to Amazon.

__________________
[1] Where's the open source hardware to run those programs?

Again, how/why was it a contestation against capital? What capital was being contested?

At most bookfair type events that I've been to a lot of the tables have photocopied zines, many of them reproductions of copyrighted texts (sometimes whole books). This practice of taking a text and 'making it your own' by turning it into a zine has been fading away with the rise of scanning and putting things on the web. I much prefer being handed or mailed a paper reproduction or reformatting than emailed a pdf...

I think that the new issue of Letters, which is out now, will not be put online as a pdf until the third is released. Or maybe it never will. Its format is such that it will also take a lot of effort to reproduce from its finished form. I get a lot of pleasure from being difficult. If anyone would like to read a copy, please write to me. Those in Europe can write to one_shoe, who will be getting a package of them soon.

most of the people who are responding to me don't seem to understand what i'm talking about or are at least not responding to what i'm trying to say, and i doubt my ability to be any clearer for them.

i will add (for the possible honor of someone who returned a book to me) that i didn't say that someone ripped me off. i tried to say that it is possible (i think it unlikely) that someone returned a book to my table after having scanned that book at the scanning project. i don't think it happened, and even if it did, i don't care much.
the hypothetical people who are rejecting an association with me (some potential association) would be mainly the people who see my hypocrisy (as someone engaging in capitalist behavior at the book fair) as distinct from (presumably worse than) whatever hypocrisy they engage in.

there was an interesting reading group last night in which we talked about design issues, and this thread/topic came up, and i remembered that the one piece of the other side of this argument that i agree with, the one way that i understand that sense of "this is breaking important rules" is the way that sharing information, in fact, specifically sharing product for free, is opposed to the scarcity model that rules so much of our lives.

of course, the context that this exists within (a context that other people have spoken to on this thread better than i can), makes this expansiveness a fairly trivial thing, no matter how good it feels in the moment.

yoshomon,



What would you consider a contestation of/against capital? I think I answered this fairly obviously. Could you explain how this action *isn't* contesting capital and how it is instead *perpetuating* or *maintaining* capital?

This is how I am using the word "capital":

1 a (1): a stock of accumulated goods especially at a specified time and in contrast to income received during a specified period; also : the value of these accumulated goods (2): accumulated goods devoted to the production of other goods (3): accumulated possessions calculated to bring in income



I also pointed out how millions of people don't "prefer" or are "satisified" with the non-material form of books or information. Who is right? I say neither. I only say that to prevent either from having access is authoritarian.

I do not think you are contesting capital. You are merely promoting a different way to circulate commodities. The method you are promoting is the one that seems to be increasingly promoted by the economy, at the expense of older methods.



In the narrow context we're discussing, workers at the printing companies where the books were made contest capital on a daily level when they assert their humanity. This conflict is usually not one of 'rupture' or the actual destruction of capital (the printing presses, binding machines, boxes of books, the building), but it does happen on the level of people refusing discipline and productivity.

Scanning books is no more a contestation against capital than burning a cd for a friend or other activities of digitizing media that have created whole industries. I wouldn't be surprised if someone is already marketing or will market a product by which people can easily scan their books onto their computer. Soon people will burn their friend a copy of the novel they just scanned. This does not conflict at all with capitalism. Quite the opposite.

Did you read the rest of my post? Do you not understand that Imprimaturism known as copyright as a specific form of capital? Do you not see contestation in living out the refusal to submit to that Imprimaturism in practice?

Did you ever get those books I sent you?

Ok, but you sure didn't speculate toward any possible positive form of social interaction either. I got the impression that you were saying everything was, by default, alienating about this scanner setup.

Sure, but any less trivial than... what? Why is it worth, over anything else, dwelling on the fact that it was trivial? I mean, in contrast to the surrounding book fair, in a qualitative sense, I view the act as innovative and less trivial than being allocated and lulled into the "I'm sitting at a table now" routine, doing... something trivial? There must be a better criticism of this provocation that saying that it was trivial because the irony is that it exploded beyond its surroundings and lived immediately -- not in theory, not in Jehovah's Witness style pamphleteering -- within what would be as commonplace as drinking water in a future, less-capitalist environment.

But copyright is a form of imposed discipline and productivity -- the law says that everything is copyrighted by default, etc. -- when it comes to 'protecting' the written word and enforcing its scarcity. What happened here with "Mr. Samizdat" then, what he did, was exactly at "the level of refusing discipline and productivity." How is Mr. Samizdat not a worker? How was he not asserting his humanity? You are well aware that "work" or "the factory" exists outside of the factory as well, in the streets. As if the anarchist book fair isn't the factory itself, i.e the perfect place -- or no worse than any other at least -- to engage in sabotage...

so do you, why and matt and whoever, think that shoplifting is anti-capitalist? how is shoplifting (from a bookstore in particular) any different than what you're promoting here?

matt -
i mention the triviality because of the context that your posts (among others) have set up - here are some examples -
"went to subvert the bookfair"
"ritual anti-capitalists cannot dream" (referring to the people at the book fair)
"the more books that are available to all is a good thing."
"those assholes out there who call themselves anarchists but are stuck in a proprietary cycle of keeping their publications in book form even though it started off as a fucking PDF to begin with)."
"But sure, there's nothing inherently "wrong" with wanting to pursue publishing more books (outside of the environmental destruction and all that such inefficient means of production create of course)." (this one is particularly awesome, as if creating and running computers is environmentally friendly and energy efficient, and as if efficiency is not a concept that is rotten to the core in this culture... sterling)
"The living, breathing practice of "fuck off copyright here is my spontaneous form of samizdat that supersedes you""
"Some people want to live their critiques as well, it becomes more comprehensible and lucid for some people to experiment with attempting to carve out what they're writing in gesture and body language."
"Yes, we are talking about being subversive, not just writing subversively."
and why's absolutely brilliant explanation that if it is prohibited in the us legal system than that means it must be contra-capital. i mean, the list goes on and on.

(not to mention loads more- including from previous threads - in which the implication is that technology and sharing stuff is the way to liberation.)

if you got the impression that i said that everything about the scanner set up was alienating, then you are perhaps overly defensive. i didn't say anything about the scanner set up at all (except that it was neither threatening or impressive - another comment reacting to people's posts extolling the virtues of the project).
I have been talking about People.
you do seem to like talking about things.

yoshomon,



Yeah, but outside of the methodology which the capitalists can control, thus it is contested on that basis. The basis of capitalist property is control.



While I can envision emancipating the older methods, I think it would be harder to do so at this point historically. We must work with what we have now, not what we have had in the past which is long inundated with capitalist methodologies.



Are you guys saying some of this stuff to mess with me? It's so incredibly hard to parse what you're saying and it can be intrepreted two different ways!

Workers at a highly industrialized factory where they must load ink into a machine every 30 minutes, clean off ink from things, load reams of paper into machines, are "asserting their humanity"? They're cogs in a machine of "productivity." They spend 8+ hours a day working their asses off, 8 more hours a day sleeping, only to have two hours in the morning and evening spent preparing for work and downtime. They get weekends off, and all in all have maybe 3 days a week of free time interspread throughout their whole entire fucking dissmal life. These people are dominated. Now some of them may be free and it may be something they geniunely want to do, but the vast majority are not.

It amused me when Crimethinc published their new book and parroted propaganda about how their publisher was "a union owned publisher." Turns out their publisher is a big multimillion dollar corporation and the union consists of people getting health benefits.

Now I may be admittedly misreading you. You say "when they assert their humanity" you may be talking about the *books* but that's quite odd to me, still! (Though it does fit in line with this overarching object-value perspective that inundates this thread.) When the books "assert their humanity" they are doing it on store shelves, on websites that ask for a credit card number, or at book fairs, all the while demanding, for you to purchase or acquire them, that you yourself be a cog in the same dominate system in order to get the money to do so.

In other words, workers be damned, the kids at the fair selling their wares are the ones that the books are for and those people are the ones who are "asserting the humanity of the workers"? You know how I insist on asserting the humanity of workers? By working toward abolishing work. And I do this by recognizing the commodity/consumer relationship and understanding that we can't be rid of that (white coats and hard bound books placed in hand, anyone?). But we can be rid of the dominating work environment which creates those commodities.



ThinkGeek has been selling a hand-scanner for quite some time now. This has simply not happened because of the laborous aspect of scanning something in. The popularity of hand scanners is generally nil. But I do agree with you that capitalists coop these basic tendencies, and gave two distinct examples. Just because the capitalists can utilize these methods does not make these methods intrinsically capitalist or desirable from a capitalist standpoint.

Burning a copy of something is easy, it is not work, it is a simple chore that takes a few clicks of a mouse button. This is why I expect once a proper scanning project gets off the ground it will take hold (because it wouldn't be laborous, but simply picking books up and putting them in a machine). And sure the capitalists would probably make their own automated scanners (they actually have them already but they sell for tens of thousands of dollars), who cares. We'll be focused on hitting libraries and bookstores and scanning in everything ever written.

As I said from the beginning, the OP was a very small proof of concept trial.

I wonder what you think would happen if we squatted in a capitalist bookstore after it closed and scanned all its books in. I bet that wouldn't be "contesting capital," either.

I'm still seeding that music (dagmar krause - 1986 - tank battles , songs of hanns eisler), btw.

leona, shoplifting is absolutely anti-capitalist. But borrowing a book to scan is different from shoplifting, isn't it? Shoplifting is better really, because you get to keep the book and you can scan it in at your leisure.

BTW, just so you know, we discussed this in great lengths on the infoshop.org news feed and I can find it again for you if need be, but proportionate to the information density of books, yes, absolutely, 100%, computers are more efficient. And that's computers created in the currently polluting, capitalist environment. A couple of hundred hard drives can hold all of the print information in the world. We're talking millions and millions of tons of trees, ink, etc.

When I say 'asserting their humanity', I mean asserting their humanity against the conditions you describe. Clearly humanity does not triumph in a factory, but class struggle still happens. The cogs are still people and not perfect extensions of the machines they operate.

Okay, a couple more handfuls of herbs to the pot.

Marx argues that periods of dynamic mercantilism dissolve established 'orders' of economic production, and that in one such episode feudalism passed to capitalism through a frenetic circulation of commodities which, by the normal way of these things, concentrated capital into fewer and fewer hands (dispossessing many times more) and which then enabled the financing of a more controlled accumulation of capital through capitalist industrial production, in which new laws of ownership were then enforced.

The dissolution of productive periods via mercantilism is marked by the collapse of property laws (such as copyright) because of widespread use of piracy, slavery, theft of land, war, general barbarism etc - Sir Francis Drake, a privateer, was basically a pirate for the state. And if we take the rise of China as an example, the entirety of its economic 'development' has been based on the slavery of its workforce and the pirating of pre-developed technologies.... China's piracy/privateering certainly didn't stop News International or Google or Microsoft or Sony or any other the others from doing business with it.

Marx called the period before capitalist production primitive accumulation and you can read about in chapter 31 of vol 1 of Capital http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/wo ... 1/ch31.htm It seems to me that, despite what others might say, the piratical activity of primitive accumulation does not just occur 'before' capitalism but also at certain moments within capitalism when different orderings of production are being established. I would suggest that in most cases copyright law is applied between capitalist producers rather than to consumers. I would therefore also suggest that releasing objects from law is in line with technical developments rather than specifically 'against' capital... I would suggest yet again, that this devaluing of objects will cause an eventual general disengagement from what is downloadable specifically, as production of new desirable non-downloadable objects are set in motion. Or, consumerism will simply disappear altogether as an essential part of production. 'Why' makes good points about capital's reinvention of itself. And Fromm, yes, I will check it out.

A quick note just to reply to the original response to my original response where I had suggested that if the individuals involved had liked the texts they were scanning they could have 'released the capital bound up in their equipment' and contributed to the group who had made the text. The response to this was that 1. nobody said the computer was bought with money. 2. that the texts scanned were not necessarily 'liked' by the scanning people. To this first point, I did not say the computer equipment was paid for but that it could have been put to use within a relation between the scanning people and the book selling people, this would have been an example of 'socialisation' of production. (we should observe here the contrast between a text as a function of a set of relations, a project between people in a group and its relation to the outside world, and the mere perpetual ideal availablity of it).

One of the things that this discussion might need is a clarification of the levels of 'humanity' available for use in different technologies. My grandfather was a 'handy man' (like the Del Shannon song), in his day, the level of technology was such that he could fix 'anything' because 'everything' from cars to plumbing was 'fixable'. One of the things about digital technology, as fendersen's joke makes clear, is the withdrawal of so much technology from the human 'fixable' horizon. The combination in highly technically capitalised objects of dead labour with living labour is very much (much more than very much) tipped in favour of 'dead labour' i.e. work that is not actually present now in activity but which has been accumulated and stored within technical objects. An investigation of this relation can be begun here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_co ... of_capital It is for this reason of 'rising organic composition of capital', and the objects that are therefore available to us, that I suspect the human scale, and with it the prospect of social revolution (i.e. the dictatorship of people over things) has now passed.

A good discussion, heated but not too much so.

The quietist advert in all history? What next, sealing it in jars and burying it in a cave next to the dead sea?

Then the revolution is only a great oaktree/giant beanstalk away. The line failure in living, failure in loving gets me every time but without crackles and hiss, will it be the same?

Yet I have already have more requests for copies than with my other efforts to promote it.

I did make a nice flier that I am mailing out with the second issue.

From my understanding concentrated capital has existed as long as the historical record, it's one reason that people like Zerzan and Jensen speak so poorly about civilization, particularly the city-structure, and agriculture. You go back to the earliest Mesopotamian civilizations and you'll note that they had kings! Some of the earliest known writing was regarding money, too. Marx's critique lacks what I consider a full understanding of the anthropological record, which is of no surprise since they were too busy being dirty imperialists back then to learn their history.

It would be folly to compare sharing a digital copy of something "piracy" to the extent of the old imperialists, though. It would be like calling expropriating the means of production authoritarian. I might disagree with expropriating the means of production despite that most of our European comrades consider it the central core of theory, but I would never go so far as to say that! "Piracy" has undergone the same general convolution that other words like "property" have. I mean, it strikes me as somewhat odd that copying a piece of data is "piracy," because many pirates of old were highly feared and brutal authoritarians, a far cry from the geeks and pop-teens who grab a piece of media! But I like the word and it has a use, as long as it is used contextually. Property itself used to mean "possession," indeed, you can still find people who will say "possession is 9/10ths the law," but over time the culture of authoritarianism decided that property should be more than possession and should exist in laws and on paper and be supported by police forces.

(Crap, as I'm proof reading this I am realizing that I have missed an important point, so forgive the excessive redundancy if it exists. One thing that I have left out is that piracy, to the extent that one copies something and then goes on to *sell it on the market* is just a micro-capitalist behavior. There's a guy who goes through my apartment complex every other day selling pirated movies that I have already downloaded and watch, I told him this one time, but he laughed at me. I'm not his market focus. It's those people too poor to have an internet connection or computer. Basically the exploited exploiting the exploited, quite sad really.)

Capitalism responds to market influences, so when there is a demand from consumers for CDs so that they may burn and share them, CD-writables are produced enmasse (a common theme in the mid 90s and early 2000s is that people would make "mix CDs" for one another, I still have some from that period, *everyone* did it). This is *not* what the capitalists *want* however, which is why they passed laws against this behavior, particularly in Canada they "taxed" the media itself (1997), even if you weren't using it to copy data digitally (lest I use the word "pirate" here!). In the USA they passed the DMCA (1998), forbidding you from copying data that was "digitally encrypted," no matter how weak the encryption, going so far as to not just ban copying things, but ban the mere thought of copying things. And this was all a response to rampant copying and sharing.

But did it stop the sharing and did the capitalists benefit from it? Hard to say. The piracy statistics suggest that they don't benefit from it, but only history will tell. The fact that the capitalists are reactive toward this behavior suggests to me that they do have some fears with regards to the distribution of media, and the PC industry is seen by software developers (particularly on the gaming side) as a dead end, and in that vein the evil pirates have almost won! 80%! In the great capitalist haven of America! Now to become producers rather than mindless consumers! (Give it time and we will have a procedurally based game development platform that will blow your mind, sometimes I wonder if I have too many projects to handle.)

Of course I can admit that the piracy on PC doesn't hurt the gaming market in its totality, and perhaps the argument that consumers are merely choosing alternate non-downloadable technics (PS3/360/Wii) to get their media is true, but I would posit instead that the evidence seems to be opposite that when you consider ease of accessibility. With downloads of Wii/360 software only limited by the difficulty of having a mod chip or modified firmware. Bioshock for 360 has been downloaded 10k times according to mininova (does not count other trackers), Bioshock for PC has been downloaded 10x that. On the 360 you need to replace your disc drive, flash the 360 drive firmware, and do a nasty swap, then you need a DVD9 burner and discs. On the PC you only have to click "mount," "install," and "patch." Consumers clearly chose the simplest most effective less laborious route, and as I've written extensively here and elsewhere it has been used to the capitalists' advantage, even if only a *perception* of simple effectiveness exists (such as the use of electricity for productivity; using a blender is simple, the technics that go into it are not and the extended labor to get you there in the confines of the capitalist system is arguably higher).

What I seem to not be expressing well here (though I know I have) is the idea of the "reemergence of the handy-man." I have argued in the past that the proprietarian use of technology has mystified it in a way, making it some uncrossable barrier that people cannot pass. Consider your the example used by one_shoe, of that of digitized vehicle operation. Most vehicles have codes that one can get by plugging in a diagnosis machine. The proprietary car manufacturers keep these codes secret so that mechanics and the like must rely on the manufacturer to be able to repair a given thing. It is again an example of capitalists *controlling* things.

I envision technologies that are completely open, and able to be addressed by any one individual if they *want to*. I have repaired many a car, but our society is trending in a direction where people are either unable to address a given technology or are afraid to. I recently had my ex get something trivial changed on her car, her husband was "unable to do it" even though she'd found a DIY replacement guide on the internet. I told her that since she was a female she could probably get an autozone rep to do it (and to also run a diagnosis on her vehicle since there was a red light on). Deep down I wished *she* used that DIY guide herself, or that I could have been there and done it with her watching so next time she wouldn't be afraid of breaking anything. I get this everywhere I go, though. People afraid to let kids hop on their computer because they can "make it blow up," or people afraid of fixing a mere household thing because if they break it the costs are a lot higher. Ever since I was a kid I've been wiring up phone lines, repairing plumbing, and doing electrical work (the benefits of being poor mean that you do things yourself, creating a certain individualist character about you).

I wrote to an extent about this concept on my blog. It is somewhat abstract, however, and I have yet to really understand how we can take current technics and create a self-learning apparatus so that people may return to being how they were.

We used to milk our own cows and churn our own butter. Now the capitalists do it for us and we sit behind desks rotting away. I *do* want to return to that, and I don't think "sharing things digitally" *precludes that in any way.*

In fact I think it necessitates it.

And you won't see this rejection of the authoritarian culture in the worlds factories. It'll be on street corners, in public parks, at music festivals, really really free markets, and maybe just maybe the ABFs.

That was a good post. I appreciate it. But you still haven't substantiated your main arguments, nor have you discussed the obsolete character of what you are 'liberating', nor have you disscussed why people want to 'pay' for objects, nor have you discussed the possibility that your activities are simply flowing with the development of technology.

Your argument that piracy now is different from back then is beside the point, the point being about a free-for all and its relation to the 'liberated' (looted) free flow of commodities in moments of breakdown in productive structures.

You say that downloading is not the same as previous forms of piracy, it is true there are no firecrackers in your beard, but the relation to the breakdown of law is the same. Piracy on a wide scale (and we can include 'gold rushes', financial meltdowns and similar phenomena) occurs at particular junctures where law and production reaches a limit – in such cases there is a shuffling of the deck but little else. On these occasions, some of the bosses get it, but the form of the boss survives.

Your point about markets and pirated dvds is well made but I draw a different conclusion... as you say, others are too poor for internet connections and computers etc. In other words the product in the market you belong to is the internet, and you seem to discount this.

You have not demonstrated that free consumption of a certain type of capitalist goods, the free availability of a certain style of commodities, changes the nature of the general social relation – and that is your central point isn't it?

The points about handy-men was well made though even though your comments about marx and 'imperialism' were not (what is it you think that makes the 'imperialist' activities of emigrants to other land as they searched for a 'free' existence (trampling over others to get it) different to the internet's further incorporation of human culture into a unified form of information, a process within which you are a frontiersman). Isn't digitalisation itself the control you speak of?

For four hundred years since the time of Gutenberg, little improvement was made in the method of printing, that is till the invention of the linotype machine.[1] In our times, as I said before most print originates in a digital form on the computer and then is printed, and this digital form can very easily be transmitted from person to person. No one uses a linotype machine anymore to assemble a line form for slugs to be placed in, then melt the cast iron slugs, assemble the lines into a page form, print the page, then re-melt the slugs.

The question then must be asked, is why does the anti-capitalist and anarchist milieu make so many of its books and texts distributable only in a printed book format, as if we are living in the age of linotype still? Are they for copyright, profit and a linotype method of distribution, that much? What do they hope to gain?

Leona, I do not know why are you surprised at my ritual anti-capitalist comments. The Bastard Theory Conference as it was presented on this forum, was/is copying the prototype of academia and its Conferences, with the only caveat being that anyone can start their own "talk." The NYC Anarchist Bookfair seemed to copy academia as well from its flier, using the same talk/conference format. Recently there have been threads about Zerzan's talk at Montreal, where it is learned that NEFAC and Hors d'Oeuvre were singing the International, chanting slogans against Zerzan, protesting outside. Taking this into account maybe I should be more reserved to associate this milieu with the university, since that is an insult to the university! Sure the university has lots of tenured professors and authors associating in specific and hostile camps; and building their reputation and associating their name with one of these camps of thoughts, but they do not go so far and so low!

@Yoshomon: US Postage stamps are at 42 cents(for regular sized packages and envelopes). If someone in this milieu mailed to me to start a discussion about the stupid shit that is dealt with endlessly in this scenester forum, like APOC moaning about what Kevin Tucker did in some primitivist magazine, I would be pissed at them. More junk mail garbage to sort out to the recycling.

[1.] Rogers, John R. Linotype Instruction Book. Brooklyn: Mergenthaler Linotype Company, 1925, pp. xxvii.

yoshomon, I would like to see you respond to what I said, so I can affirm to myself at least that it wasn't entirely meaningless or otherwise worthy of a calculating reticence.

Seriously now, which form of the factory deserves more precedence, is the real thing, or is worthy of having "humanity asserted" in its dreary face over another form? The anarchist book fair is work. I am dead at my job and dead at that job as well. I would like to assert humanity, or contest capital to the best of my limited ability at both places, instead of being worried about outmoded, demarcating class-war categories that ideologically alienate proper forms of struggle to proper venues ("We are not so foolish to hope another proletariat into existence" was one of the better lines in Politics is Not a Banana #1, or perhaps, "Some lugubrious party communist is reading this right now and shaking his head: 'Bananas can’t be proletarian!'").

Elements of the conditions proletarians face are everywhere and can be contested everywhere. Mr. Samizdat was no less contesting capital in this demonstration than when at my old supermarket job in the meat department of The Real Canadian Wholesale Club -- which I worked at for three years -- I would slack off daily to the greatest extent I could muster and steal product from the meat cooler rampantly. That was a time of a lot of free pepperoni sticks, handisnack cheese dip things and super subs.

Mr. Samizdat slacked off at the fair. "Why go to all the effort of distributing these books in prim, orderly, bureaucratically-appropriate fashion when I can just make copies of them through this crude device instead?" Now that's some prime slacking off if I ever did see any.

There is also a case to be made about the creation of samizdat in general, which I've always found enjoyable at any rate. Marx argues that periods of dynamic mercantilism dissolve established 'orders' of economic production, and that in one such episode feudalism passed to capitalism through a frenetic circulation of commodities which, by the normal way of these things, concentrated capital into fewer and fewer hands (dispossessing many times more) and which then enabled the financing of a more controlled accumulation of capital through capitalist industrial production, in which new laws of ownership were then enforced. Where Russian samizdat was a "grassroots practice to evade officially imposed censorship," (with all of the historical examples of which there is no need to go into right now), the minimum definition of the western derivative can be seen in a similar vein with many of these "new laws of ownership" and their bureaucratic-social consequences -- cultural approbation, profit, "intellectual property," ISBN, ISSN, et al. -- as the main points of comparative censorship, all forms of, in your words, discipline and productivity no less.

And on the doing nothing front, it is not impossible that creating samizdat is just as enjoyable as a meaningless, non-ideologically charged pastime to somebody as duck eggs or knitting sweaters. One of my correspondents swears by it, while thinking nothing of it. He doesn't attempt to bring any analysis of capitalism into the mix. It just brings him pleasure to share in such a manner and that's it.

3. This would be, through a different means, exactly releasing the capital bound up in their equipment and contributing to the group who had made the text.

It's interesting that you mention this just now. After experimenting with and becoming frustrated with -- for various reasons, especially cost -- some of the bigger, automated perfect binding machines over the months, I accidentally stumbled into the Atomic Binding Machine, its inventor being a ready manifestation of any "reemergence of the handy-man" if there ever was one.



http://atomicpublishing.net/video.aspx

Over the years this guy has been constructing his own binding machine for his own small-time purposes. I had my eye on it for a while and when I was driving around the states a couple weeks ago, I realized I would be passing through Fort Collins, where its creator lives, so I called him up, went straight to his house and picked one up from him after he showed me a demonstration.

These things are less than $100... neat little contraptions, and clearly fully reproducible and open to further inventiveness, copying and modification should anyone want to put the effort into learning basic woodworking. The guy stressed to me that his goal, no matter what, was to make these things available to people for under $100, and after all parts are accounted for, he actually loses a little bit of money on shipping apparently, so he's almost there I guess.

one_shoe, you are using anarcho-capitalist arguments, my friend, I don't know why.

That post was heavily edited and shortened because I have received comments in the past that my writing is highly redundant, verbose and "could be said in fewer words," (two admonishments on this alone in the past week).

The "obsolete" "monetary" and "flowing with the development of technology" concepts are all the same argument with different perspectives.

Before digital media became so pervasive the capitalists had already implemented a large and overwhelming printing industry. To compete with this industry on any significant scale was impossible because it was already inundated with the capitalist methodology. You have these massive factories that have a very high turnaround, which depend on other industries operating the same way. If you go against the culture of authoritarianism and do that expropriating thing our comrades are for, then your factory will fail due to economic sanctioning. People don't do business with you because you are not an "officially recognized" entity, you are, as you write, a "pirate." You don't get the inks you need in time, you don't get the publishing contracts in time, and your business goes under. This *same exact dynamic* is responsible for the failure of the Argentine coops (the first real attempt to expropriate capitalist facilities in the modern age). However, had the technology been *emancipated* before it became so pervasive, had people rejected the accumulating and profitability aspects of capital, and instead recognized the human aspects of sharing, we could have stopped it from growing to the extent that it did (but of course we would have had to reject everything, not just the press, this should be stressed). This is why print is now obsolete.

People "pay" for objects because they have no other recourse. The dominate culture of authoritarianism says "that book was printed with trees cut down by people somewhere, the ink was made from organics and synthetics somewhere utilizing industrial processes by many people, that press was made and operated by other people, and all of *these* people got paid, so *you* have to pay, too." There's no other way around it because it is a self-perpetuating system of exploitation. It starts with rent and it continues down the chain of authoritarian behaviors. But this observation is a very old one from an anarchist perspective, so I am at a loss as to why I must iterate it on an anarchist forum!

Technology ties the two together, for reasons that seem to me self-evident. There are historical predictors in the way technology is utilized. If a new technological or cultural paradigm is becoming the norm, there's a remote chance that we can coopt that paradigm for our own benefit, *before* capitalism adapts and controls the whole of the technology. Back when we went from horse and buggy to cars, we had ample opportunities for society as a whole to produce cars on a decentralized local level, by individuals understanding the technology equally. Indeed, Ford may have been an ardent anti-semite, but the new technology he envisioned was based on renewable concepts, with the plastics and fuel made for his vehicles made of soybean oils! But what happened is the capitalists realized the power and influence of ground oils and determined to utilize that instead for vehicle technology. That simple bit of control allowed them to dominate that sector.

Now you might make the argument that "advancement is control" but I find the argument quite weak on the scheme of things. You can use advancements *to* control, and indeed, that's what the capitalists have done, but if those advancements are not mired in controlling proprietarian paradigms, one is able to chose whether or not they will ascribe to those new paradigms. It is control in the same way any other external environmental consideration is control, if a mass movement occurs then oh well. I've discussed this vague and abstract concept before, but if we had a global revolution then the authoritarian fascists would be the "rebels" and we'd be the "control freaks." It's a hilarious concept though, to be concerned with such matters. That we should worry very much about fascists in a world in where they are not welcome, and that "negation" would be to "become a fascist."

I think that we can only change the social relation as far as consumption, commodification, and economics (or the abolishment of economics) is concerned. We cannot be rid of the former two, but we can coopt new technology as they are being assimilated and we can migrate away from the dominate aspects that the capitalists have made with that technology. I only use simple examples where before we had *none*.

Revolution does not seem to be your goal, in fact, it seems to me that you believe it is impossible. I do not know how to respond to this except to say, wait and see. I might not have all the answers, am a terrible writer, but guys like Samizdat and Vik Oliver pave the way.

I would like for you to imagine that revolution was possible and tell me how you propose we might achieve it.

I apologize for not replying to your post earlier. I don't really know how to reply or proceed because I think we're talking past each other to some extent.

How so? I think I was talking directly to the point you made about workers asserting their humanity, not past it, in the sense of wondering why this assertion should be seen as appropriate contestation only within limited venues like traditional workspaces. Unless you're saying something different and I'm misunderstanding you, I don't understand the need to draw a line in the way you seem to be suggesting. What isn't a workspace? When we go outside, what isn't the factory without walls?

I also don't really understand what you're saying here. Sabotage is precisely "refusing discipline and productivity" in the most direct sense possible, why is it not allowed as a contender or a very real chance within the "asserting humanity" category?

I register that as an insult but it doesn't mean anything to me. I could have used insults too, e.g. 'activist' or 'positivist' but it didn't occur to me, nor does it really matter.

I am conducting a discussion about the nature of objects and human relations through them, I am relating this to capitalist production. I am disputing that the various internet phenomena from auctioneering, speeded-up communications, and free pastimes and entertainments have anything at all to do with either the end of capitalism or the beginning of a communist society. As far as I can see, such things are merely neutral at best but probably not neutral given the ease with which they are undertaken – it is therefore mystifying to me why you think your technical interest should be considered, a priori, a revolutionary act. I say mystifying but that is rhetoric because I do understand that you understand that capitalism is built from the ground up from acts of exchange of commodities for money and that if this foundational-activity is disrupted then the capitalist system will falter.

By way of contrast, I understand that capitalism is first and foremost an abstract system, or precondition for the productive activity which occurs within its limits (even as it is derived from it). Capitalism is produced simultaneously with society through the accumulated production of commodities – and whilst commodities are exchanged, and this is how money circulates, it remains a fact that what sets things in motion is Value (a combination of use and exchange) rather than simple exchange, or money, or profit. Capitalism produces for need, like any other system, and capitalist need is expressed in capitalist value. Indivdual, and mass, exchanges of goods take place within the territory of capital which always precedes as a structure whatever instances of human activity takes place within it. Therefore, the disruption of forms of consumption is only significant if it effects a change in consciousness in consumers (and even then a change in consciousness does not indicate a change in activity/relations)... I do not see that consumption of free commodities is in itself revolutionary when no new set of relations is actually established between people. Otherwise, not using the internet and going for a walk with the dog would be a revolutionary act, drinking from a public water fountain would be a revolutionary act, and all the people in the world who have never seen a computer will be constantly and perpetually producing revolution because they too are not exchanging money for goods.


Not from me, keep hammering away – read DH Lawrence, he had to hunt down his own meaning over entire books. The ideal of efficiency of expression misunderstands that it is the act of expressing and not the meaning expressed that is of most worth (my point in this discussion).

I am not in a hurry except to say I have spent the small amount of time I have available on the computer each day discussing this with you over the last week when I wanted to get on with my workers' councils thesis and make a start on my backlog of correspondence but such is life, it is the interruptive nature of human engagement. I literally have no interest in this topic of discussion, I am not madly against what you do. In fact, it is so far from my everyday thoughts that what you are saying has never even occurred to me as an issue before. But it is interesting to me to hear other people's opinions and to see whether they can substantiate their claims. I have found this discussion to be interesting if a little frustrating because you seem resistant to examining your argumetns from a different perspective. You suggest, there are activities that are 'outside' the capitalist relation. I say, perhaps. You suggest that your activity is an example of this. I say, I am sceptical. You say there is a genuine trend within consumption that is not bound by exchange. I say that seems even more unlikely.



You mean emphases? Maybe you are right. But the issue of productive forces, of what we inherit in terms of dead labour and what our active capacity can do to alter the logic/flow of production must be examined from many different perspectives.



I don't know why you say compete.



Agreed, but see my point above, about how the general relation precedes the instances of exchange within it. It is therefore not surprising that isolated instances eventually conform to the general move of the logic.



I think this is idealistic, the technology is developed within the capitalist framework... it is not technology that can liberate us but the cessation of the general social relation which 'sets us motion' and reproduces itself out of our activities, whatever they may be.



Do you really think I am so stupid? I am amazed, it makes me think you haven't read anythiing I've written. I put the word 'pay' in inverted commas because I was talking about how objects have an aspirational and expressive function in human relations. Things are only 'worth' something to us, if we 'pay' for them. The bread tastes better if I have made it myself, the view from the top of the mountain is better if I climbed up rather than took the cable car. I am not advocating romantic ideals here so much as raising the complexity of human relations as they are mediated through objects; 'free availability' sounds to me like advertising talk, BOGOF offers, mobile phone deals and so on – it takes the nature of commodified desire as natural and unquestionable. It sets up a certain framework of distribution and consumption within that framework as if it did not have to be questioned.



A good point I think but it suits my pessimistic outlook... see the new issue of Y.'s journal where I have written something on this. But also my point about totalisation is that at each successive crossroads of technological development, the 'capitalised' element becomes more dominant in comparison with the lived activity element and so the turn around you propose becomes progressively less likely. There is direction and movement in history, and it is away from us.




I have never had a goal, perhaps that's my problem. I do not feel I exist at that vital level where change must occur, I am only an individual, that is, a product.



I don't know what you mean by terrible writer or who your friends are. We can always wish that we were someone else, but they are not here, so we may as well do the best we can. Have you read Waiting for Godot?



But I prefer imagining nice things – don't you know that the revolution will be stupid and that we will have to immediately set ourselves against it so as to make it ours? If you want to see a more substantial account: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsieur_Dupont

Sorry, no spellchcek or read through, must rush.

one_shoe, I will definitely respond to you later and I appreciated your response very much, it was high in content. But please don't take time away from things you might value more to participate in something you value less. I am a patient person.

BTW, it wasn't an insult, as I consider anarcho-capitalists defeatist, similarily to primitivists, I think they pick an extreme concept and stick to it because it fits their idealism. I would welcome both into an anarchist society wholeheartedly and think they both have much to contribute to a larger critique of society.

I think, in our current relations, it is acceptable to write books for a living, provided you have other outputs beneficial to others. Or is it unfair to amass more than another, to compete rather than to share? It occurs to me that whilst we may have goals and views about the implications of our own actions, but judging anothers' is unfair (and moreover a waste of your attention and food). Energy is push, we need to act to find our direction.

I will make the argument as strongly as possible and as clear as possible. I notice four important epochs in the printed form of transmitting knowledge:

1. The Scribe/Scroll Epoch
Paper was hand-made and all text was hand copied by artisans/scholars/scribes. Obviously most people never read much because the printed form was out of their means, it was too time consuming and expensive.

2. The Gutenberg Epoch
Once you arrange hand-made blocks representing letters into a form, it is easy to impress 500 pages say, and make a bigger print run than an artisan scribe ever could. But still at this time they had no way of keeping the blocks and forms and would have to repeat the effort after each print run. For alot of this epoch paper was still hand-made.

3. The Lintotype Epoch
With the linotype machine it is much easier for the printer. He can much more quickly perform his craft. Instead of having to dis-assemble the form and metal blocks of letters, the machine could just melt down the letter slugs and re-melt it back in the form when you needed another print run(taking most the extra labor out of extra print runs). Paper was now truly mass produced along with the means of printing.

4. Digital/Computer Era
Almost all authors today use the computer to write their books. If they write on paper still, then their publisher first digitizes it into computer then prints it. It is much easier to transmit this form of printing and reproduce it than all previous epochs of the printed form.


The profit motive of the ritual anti-capitalist and anarchist milieu has allowed the best advantages of the Digital/Computer Era and its methods to be missed. If under Soviet bloc censorship, authors and subversives could transmit their message in print form, imagine what we could if instead of formally expecting a "print run" by a formal capitalist industry, we DO IT OURSELVES. Are laser duplex printers so expensive? Is book binding so complicated?

So we have two problems:
1) I would never DIY distribute or print out most scenester pulp fiction(its only concern is to cater to a hermetic, insignificant milieu) that is freely available electronically
2) The quality material is under copyright, distributed by capitalist print runs and thus harder to obtain, reproduce, transmit and discuss

Indeed, but I am trying to relate it to a theoretical society of anarchist production. Rather than take our current condition for granted, and in fact, rejecting it out right.



They don't, on two counts. They don't in and of themselves have anything to do with abolishing capitalism, it is the methods which they are obtained and the environment in which they are shared that does. And the end result is not the creation of a communist society, because that preassumes a communal aspect to production. Capitalism and communism are merely two sides to the same coin, rather than looking at sociological behaviors they both look at economic behaviors, and since economics is a human invention that exists solely because of force, I posit that it would be difficult to have an anarchist society within the confines of economics. Anarchism is a much broader, and humanistic concept. It doesn't, as a concept, discuss production on a societial scale to any significant extent, while the other two philosophies do.



Revolutionary acts are never seen that way until after the fact, which is one reason my writings aren't being "published" or why I don't discuss what I do on a very significant scale. It would be premature to do so because as usual people disregard what you do because they have their own value systems and you must be relegated to personal irrelevancy. It is one thing to discuss hydroponic greenhouses, it is a whole thing altogether to show those greenhouses in operation and share them freely with people.

I have farmer roots, 4 generations of farmers to be exact (though we never owned our own land, funny that). I hate the idea of a fucking greenhouse. But I recognize the necessity of such technologies to remove us from this production mindset to this human mindset.



That is not an intrinsic aspect of capitalism, that is an aspect of any producer-consumer society. That is, indeed, how all societies in recorded history, and potentially even pre-history, work. Even if you look at the most primitive tribes you will find things like exchange. Intelligence begets an understanding that force can be used to ones benefit, I am merely arguing for an environment where force cannot so easily be used to ones benefit. Where exchange by force is no longer a method to gain. By this I propose that we rid ourselves of the producer-consumer distinction where there are no producers and there are no consumers. The Aka are the closest primitive society to these ends, where all are able and willing to create all the tools they have, where all join in on the hunt, where all, interestingly in the case of the males, raise the children equally (the Aka males even 'nurse' the babies with their nipple for comfort, that's just how equal their society is).



While 'value' in this context may be the driving force for commodity exchange, what maintains 'value' is force through the creation of 'scarcity.' By controlling a given resource or commodity, you are able exploit the fact that someone might want something that you 'have.' You can then coerce them into behaving a certain way to 'get' what you have. To disrupt this mechanism is to 'devalue' the products, and to start valuing humans themselves. Just like the Aka. It doesn't require a significant change in consumer conscious because they already do value humans, and indeed, products are just one of many ways to do so. All it requires is a change in the 'production' of goods.

It's simple supply and demand. The capitalists (or should I say, authoritarians) have maintained their monopoly by controlling resources. If you create a type of resource that is simply uncontrollable then the value mechanism that they have created will have to change. Otherwise we will all go insane (if the theory that humans value 'things' the most is true). And anarchism is simply impossible.



I think though that you are neglecting to recognize the 'new set of relations' that is being established between people, such as 'sharing things with complete strangers' (a concept our capitalist society abhors!). Or concepts like 'giving away stuff without any need for recompense.' These are behaviors that are facilitated by the digital medium, because it makes it a lot easier. If I wanted to share some music with you I need only send it as an attachment in an email. Certainly I got a link for yoshoman for some music that you liked (which btw I enjoyed a lot) and it took all of a minute. If I was relegated to the analog, commodity based medium I would have had to work a few days to pay for the LP, then I would have had to package it up, and mail it to him. The 'value' of the music from the commodity standpoint is in the ability to control the physical medium, for the store to have me arrested if I walk out with it (without paying), or for the producers to apprehend me if I come into their factory to print myself one out. The value of the music from a human standpoint is the sounds that it makes!

It no longer has 'commodity value' in the sense of physical objects which can be controled, hoarded, burned in a flaming pile of ignorant hedonism.



I have said before that helping a woman cross the street is revolutionary. Living is revolution. But we aren't living in our current sommodity ridden capitalist environment!



You have no reason to be "madly against what I do." Perhaps you are too skeptical about the prospects of revolution for "what I claim" to be very interesting or compelling. I don't know. Certainly the assumptions about capitalism being this seeingly abstract concept which exists out of thin air (and not as most anarchists understand it to be a system of enforcement and control) would suggest that. But I can't know.



Because, if anarchists are going to care about printing, and if anarchists are going to do it within the confines of a capitalist society, then they must have their own individual way of operating. But if they are such a minority that their only solution is to work with the system, they won't get anywhere. Thus there is an intrinsic competition, or necessity for one, if one is going to try to get outside of the confines of that system. But like I said, it may be that your skepticism here has accepted the inevetablity of the current state of affairs to where nothing can compete with the system because the system just is, that is how it always will be, etc.



There is no evidence of conformity in this scenario though. The number of pirates goes up, not down. Sharing goes up, not down. I can find easy statistics for you if you wish. They take down a dozen bittorrent trackers, two dozen take their place, and so on. The movement has started on some level. To say that the current paradigm is "conforming" is, again, just illustrating this defeatist, accepting attitude toward the authoritarian system as we know it.



That assumes that people have a conscious and pressing urge to continue perpetuating the system as it is. I assure you that when the first presses were being made many thousands of people were exploiting the technology, sharing it, and ignoring the implications of "copying someone elses works." It's the whole reason the state invented copyright. Each time a new technology or paradigm came into existance, the capitalists have controlled it in large part. I made mention of the car and hempfuel, the examples are limitless, though. You can look practically anywhere and see where the capitalists have said "you cannot do such and such without first paying." And they increasingly create laws to uphold these principles.

The capitalist relation to social behavior is one of force and authoritarianism, it exists not because the people want it to, but because it can. The social relation to the current producer-consumer mindset is so ambiguous and abstract that it has very little bearing on whether or not we are able to outstrip capitalist supply and devalue capitalist products to the point where humans must start looking toward one another for value.



Nothing in this universe is free, but you have been writing from a capitalist perspective, that is, capital seems to be the only way in which your value relationships work. Thermodynamically such a statement would be completely absurd, so when I speak free I mean "free to the extent that your natural capability might acquire something."



It only names consumption as an unquestionable act, commodities themselves, that is, economic commodities, are ignored in the idea.



You cannot sanely question your desire to eat or take a shit, I'm afraid. Some people can't do without their pop music or their TV shows. Others cannot do without their communal activies or thesis writing. Still others can't do without their "collective made indy clothes." Me, I can do without all of those things. Well, except for the eating and shitting part, 'cause that really is unquestionable.

You are making value judgements based on peoples desires for 'stuff' while at the same time saying 'stuff is necessary,' but being critical about how people acquire that 'stuff.' I make no judgements on the stuff nor the necessity of it. I only see that it exists and thus propose to bring down the system. How things work after that is anyones guess. The idea of course may flow very well with how you think, because with the capability for anyone to make anything, ones 'stuff' might just come out a bit more unique than you can imagine. Instead of everyone toating around nice "brand name" crap the "brand name" is their own unique implementation. Similarily to how people customize their MySpace page. While some might currently use generic templates to customize their page, if they had a bit more free time (such as not having to go to work or school) then I imagine they would produce things that would be beyond our current level of appreciation. Especially since our commodified world is that generic place that has little human element to it.



You are idealistic. For me, as an anarchist, the goal is to achieve anarchy, to end capitalism, to end production as we know it. I could care less about the other things. "Lived activity" is just a bunch of subjective qualifiers which I couldn't hope to make an enlightening statement upon, but "capitalist production" and "authoritarianism" are at least somewhat quantifable to me. By creating this idealistic vision of what behaviors are correct, I believe we overlook how the system is creating itself even within our own circles, which indeed is really the topic of this thread. In that case you are absolutely correct.



We are all hopelessly insignificant. Everything my ideas rely on rely on the input of hundreds of thousands of individuals. Whether or not it will happen the way I believe it will is anyones guess. I certainly believe it will to the point that I spend time arguing about it on message boards. But mostly I don't care. In a few years I'll have achieved absolute self-sufficiency and can just disappear if I wanted to.

But not before publishing that book I keep talking about.



On the contrary, I don't wish to be anyone else. I merely wish people could learn to let others be and not criticize their writing as if it is useful. Not that criticism isn't useful, but that the criticism I have received has not been very much at all.



Only if your definition of revolution is negation. Fortunately for me I do not believe the fall of authoritarianism requires consciousness. And in fact, I expect that if it were to happen things like 'apathy' and 'selfishness' would in fact be conductive to such an environment.

Feel free to scan in Species Being for me, as I won't read it any other way. ;)

I do not understand why you don't participate more in the "game" threads that HPW starts. It seems a lot closer to your actual area of interest than discussions about production and the systems that produce.



What coin is that? Economics? Because consuming machines (people in capitalist relations) are also social machines (the project of sociology (pretending with you that sociology isn't another expression understanding people in capitalist relations)).

I don't think anyone (or at least me) thinks that "an anarchist society will exist within the confines of economics." Even anarcho-communists agree with this line, but what of it? Will an anarchist society be one where we will still be consuming-machines-without-exchange-relations? I tend to think not, and you have clearly expressed the alternate position.

I am glad you fess up (finally) to the foundation of your (anarchist) position, humanism.

I'd argue that you have anarchism, communism, and even capitalism (social philosophies) confused with what it actually takes to produce -things- on a society-wide scale. Your sense of scale needs to be re-calibrated, as does your arrogance about what exactly a "revolutionary act" is.

I have no idea what this means, you are using the term "consuming-machine" rather pretentiously as far as I can tell. How does the "machine" metaphor come into play here? I'm curious because you claim that Why has "clearly expressed the alternate position" to this, but... to what?

On the other hand, to speak of consuming-machines, I liked your latter choice of words in suggesting that Why "re-calibrate" his arrogance in order to fine tune his ability to grok revolutionary acts... hahaha. Just align those cogs, tighten that nut a little more... okay, good, slide the PCB in now... perfect, your revolutionary is fixed ma'am, that'll be $5.

aragorn,



Consumption is not a "capitalist endeavor." It is a fact of nature, if you do not consume things you cease existing. The assumption that one_shoe seems to be making is that the producer/consumer relationship within capitalism is a byproduct of social behavior and not a product of authoritarian behavior or control, "Capitalism is produced simultaneously with society through the accumulated production of commodities."

The accumulated production of commodities could not happen without an authoritarian mechanism in place. It is, I would posit, an anti-social mechanism. Certainly the relationship between someone buying some goods at a store and a cashier exchanging the monies is hardly social.



No, that's patently not true. You read the Anarchist FAQ which great many anarcho-communists "agree with" and they have their freaking "scarcity indices" and "market indicators" as a "way" to maintain the flow of goods in their society. And if you look at any communist society that has ever existed they have been focused on the communal production of goods. While you may think that you are against economics, I don't think there exist a significantly appropriate theory that includes everyone which is against economics. You have the mutualist, the individualists, the "anarcho"-capitalists, the syndicalist, the communists, the banks of exchange, the no-interest banks, etc, etc. Practically every theory of anarchy that attempts to 'solve' the applicability problem (that is, the problem of it being achieved pervasively) almost always winds up discussing production, consumption, and economics.

My idea is to end all three, and combine the former two into an abstract concept where there is no real distinction between producer and consumer. How does this reject or neglect human social relationships? I gave examples. I don't get counterexamples except for dismissive tones and the regurgitation of the same stuff.



No. I made it clear in this post and many others that I don't have a distinction between production and consumption. I don't propose to "end exchange," I only propose to remove the mechanisms inherent in commodities, so that exchange is more of an abstract human relationship (exchanging kind words and beliefs, sharing things without requirement for recompense) than a concrete economic relationship (exchanging labor for wage, or labor for societal acknowledgment, expecting recompense for efforts made).

If you were a guest at my house I would serve you drinks. I would never ever expect you to get it yourself or to expect you to get me a drink (though that would be nice, it is not a necessary precondition).

If you were a customer at a restaurant and I was a waiter, I would serve you drinks. I would expect to be your servant, and never expect you to get your drinks yourself, or make your own food, or anything like that. Indeed, you wouldn't even have the option to do so for yourself. I am not a person, I am a server. My value is of being a servant.

In the first example the exchange is humanistic, that is, I do what I *want* to do (I was brought up to treat guests with respect). In the latter scenario I do what I *have* to do because I have to pay rent, light bills, and so on, because I exist in a system of commodity exchange.



That's not my "foundation" that is the foundation inherent in the theory itself. It is anti-authoritarianism. What is more humanistic than that?



Actually, I would argue it is my experience of scale that makes me understand the problem. There are some in the general 'movement' who will claim quite amazing things while neglecting just how interconnected and interdependent the capitalist world is. Especially when those in the movement neglect their own significant dependence on the capitalist system. And when there are suggestions made about removing that dependence, it is rejected because, somehow, that is how things are to be. If accepting fate, if sitting around and saying "this is how it is and that's that" is revolutionary, then OK. That's how you feel.

I reject such notions.

Why,

I appreciate your arguments and the points you have made. Unfortunately I do not have time to go through what you have said point by point. I agree there are many advantages in having certain 'things' more easily available (I thank you sincerely for your Dagmar Krause upload [What is the address?]) but the downside remains at the level of quality of experience and engagement.

There are two issues I will restate in summation:

1. You have not addressed the fact that the decomposition of copyright laws which you refer to is being undertaken by capitalist productive forces (the chinese economy as I pointed out earlier is based upon the fragrant/flagrant disregard of patenting). In other words, you are affirming a process that is happening objectively anyway within capitalist production...

I am not shedding any tears but the only result of this process that I can see is the proletarianisation of 'creative' individuals and the further degradation of cultural products (the collapse of individual capitals [artists, pop stars, writers] means the collapse in quirky/profound products).

2. It seems to me that what is at issue here is less a matter of what is consumed but of how it is consumed. In other words, the masses do not lack access to downloads, they do not require free 'information' but the critical capacity to reflect upon and change their conditions... your downloading activity cannot contribute this and thus the mystery of what to do to change things remain. All the displacment/compensatory activities which we undertake remain, despite our best intentions, mere smokescreens for our uselessness. What we do have, in the absence of ways out, is each other other, and the circuits we have established. The significance of this is small to the world but big to us.

It seems to me that my arguments are classically petit bourgeois but it also seems to me that revolutionary consciousness (i.e. a consciousness existing in and of tension) is either petit bourgeois or it is merely affirmative of objective developments in productive forces and against 'fetters'. In other words, I am not one who shouts, 'forwards' as some sort of solution to existence.

I see no reason for you to read the book I have written as this discussion is more current and therefore in advance of it, the book was intended to be read by those who might have a 'spiritual' form of consciousness.

regards.