Death of the Commons

I’ve been chat­ting with 

catvin­cent

about this latest ker­fuffle of Six Apart ban­ning a couple of users for draw­ing and post­ing homo­erotic slash (debat­ably depict­ing minors; I believe in locked posts; def­in­itely por­tray­ing power abuse but oth­er­wise con­sent) while doing noth­ing at all about miso­gyn­ist het­ero­sexual porn.

I’m not par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in dis­cuss­ing the finer points of that here. I’ve posted what I have to say over on his journal and feel free to join the thread there.

How­ever, I did com­ment on the com­modi­fic­a­tion of public space and the cor­por­ate nature of our dis­cus­sion zones right now. 

He respon­ded: “And that’s a dis­cus­sion I’d love to join in with. Your LJ or mine?”

Mine, I guess.

So, what did I mean? I guess that by having our con­ver­sa­tions in spaces owned by Six Apart (Live­Journal) and Mur­doch (MySpace, You­Tube) and the CIA (Face­book, some argue), we secede our rights to free speech under whatever law we might have (for those that have these rights; Aus­tralia, after all,has no free­dom of speech in its con­sti­tu­tion) and agree for our speech to be bound by cor­por­ate terms and con­di­tions. There is no elec­tronic equi­val­ent to the town square. The old untrammeled halls of usenet are over­run with porn and sub­sumed almost into GoogleGroups. The prom­ise of the Inter­net’s demo­crat­iz­ing power has to some extent turned out to be worse than a lie; it was in the end a lure to trap us in cap­it­al­is­m’s net and profit from what was free. The flip­side of that is that they now have power to dic­tate what speech is per­mit­ted and the 1968 Parisian catch­cry “It is for­bid­den to forbid” is as alien to the youth of today as the idea that advert­ising should­n’t exist on the Internet.

This is a step fur­ther again than copy­right. What, I wonder, is the out­come of this death of the intel­lec­tual commons?

To some extent, I feel that this new gen­er­a­tion will dis­reg­ard it in the same way that they dis­reg­ard copy­right. They still make mashups and samples and post videos on You­Tube that con­tra­vene the “laws”. As the “real world” of cor­por­ate boots stamps all over their lovely art, they create altern­at­ives: Engage­Media, a video space col­lect­ive which developed open source video shar­ing soft­ware plumi; greatest­journal, a Live­Journal look-alike based on the same open source code.

And yet here I am having the con­ver­sa­tion on Live­Journal because that’s where the people are and I am someone who likes a cer­tain crit­ical mass. I guess it’s like saying I’m happy to pay the cover charge and agree to behave a cer­tain way in the bar because there’s a cer­tain cachet for me in being seen in that bar… If I want to go and do other things that bar does­n’t allow, then my friends and I can hold a private play party somewhere…

Opin­ions?