<nettime> The Producer as Power User

[Pit Schultz <pit.schultz@gmail.com>]

The Producer as Power User

by Pit Schultz

'The apparatus will be the better the more consumers it brings in
contact with the production process - in short, the more readers or
spectators it turns into collaborators.' (Walter Benjamin)[1]

1
Within the circumstances of today's media networks it is impossible to
not produce.[2] The classical dichotomy of production and consumption
has been melted down by the circuits of communication and given birth
to what marketing calls the prosumer.[3] Also known as power user,[4]
neither professional nor amateur, neither hobbyist nor self-employed,
between sofa and kitchen table, sometimes expert, sometimes
dilettante, leaving the suburbs and moving to the city centres or the
countryside, using trains and airplanes but not owning a car.[5]
Living from project to project and shifting between unemployment and
immediate wealth, the power user has left the factories and office
buildings long ago to stay home and be the post-industrial anti-hero.
On the thin surface of the heavy layers of well developed old
technologies,[6] this prototype of the knowledge worker[7] grew up to
become a collective role model for the rest of us and began to
transform the boundaries of industrial labour, turning it into an
ambiguous field of totalised work ethics.[8] Everyone is a power user
now, dependent on the degree of participation in the global
communication apparatus.

2
Through the intensified use of the networked computer, the
subjectivity of the power user colonizes space as far as the networks
go.[9] Being digital[10] is constituted by an auto-referential mode of
production which has transformed the workplace into a permanent state
of mind, organized into thin slices of valuable work time. Like a CPU,
the brain now functions as the ultimate desktop[11] where every
thought might be useful and therefore needs to be recorded to be
organized better. With genetics, the code of life has become a
commodity, and the power user gains access to her ultimate eugenic
self-optimization, hacking the body-machine.[12] This pattern of total
productivity is not only defined by the success of its results but
also by the entirety in which it dominates everyday living standards
and permeates every aspect of a life on the screen.[13] There are
areas of optimization, and areas of contemplation, but one is never
free of production, of having to communicate and report, of having to
learn to embrace new standards; or leaving trails of usage, just to be
able to take part in the global production of affective and
intellectual labour[14] and subjectify according to the expected
profits.[15]

3
Consuming power and being consumed by it, the power user reproduces
the force fields of the network, as well as being effected and formed
by them. In the literal sense of the word, the power user takes more
from a certain power than others: she might be a heavy user, a
hardcore gamer, or a machine addict, a linux-hacker, driven by a
desire to know and to gain control over the power which in reverse is
controlling her. What distinguishes power users from average users or
uninitiated newbies is the depth of practical experience with the
relatively unknown and unsystematized areas of technification. This
knowledge is uncertain by definition; it mostly centres around
extending administrative control, and establishes a semi-stable status
of alpha testing, where idea and implementation are in a maximum flux
of exchange, and the gain and loss of control can be repeatedly
re-experienced. As a gardener of her own media archive,[16] the power
user begins with the cultivation of a private archaeology of
knowledge. It is here, in the enclosure of electronic loneliness,[17]
where the mediation with technical changes takes place at first, and
only from this point on, the power user is paradoxically able to
re-enter the gift economy[18] of the public domain again.

4
At the forefront of the still ongoing cybernetic modernization, the
power user serves as an unpaid research and development unit, as a
mediator to popular media culture, and a sensitive prototype of
sociotechnical exploration. In many cases the power user is
self-trained, almost making a living out of her skills, beyond
productivity in an industrial sense, without being responsible for a
specific product or task. She is primarily dedicated to her own
individualization, the customization of the extended self in relation
to other power users, in the form of an ongoing system configuration.
Usually not too much involved as a developer, the power user actively
contributes to the deployment of software tools by finding new uses
for them, or documenting errors, and therefore inscribing herself into
the collective process. She lives on the back end and insides of
cybernetic circuitry, and constantly configures and expands it as
essential parts of the household. On behalf of technological
determinism, it is easy to think it's cool to be a power user, but
there is a price to pay: unique authorship dissolves in the technical
reproduction of subjectivity, into a set of management strategies.
Entering a new era of industrialization, the craftmanship of the
digital artisan [19] makes space for the customization skills of the
power user, within a more and more standardized and modularized
corporate information service environment.[20]

5
Becoming an expert, functioning between the average user and the I.T.
professional, the power user marks a transitional state of computer
literacy, which socially buffers the imperfections of current
technologies, but also generates a type of sleeping knowledge in which
an economic potential is generated without the need for financial
rewards. Power users form the waiting reserve of unpaid labour in a
networked environment of digital knowledge production.[21] Their
specialization through intensified usage is a model for other
computerized work areas, such as film editing, music production, game
development or journalistic production. The unpaid labour of the power
user is not only legitimated through the need for lifelong learning or
the chance to gain access to specialized expertise, but mainly by
social reputation, deriving from the tangible and intangible aspects
of the production of life quality. By putting themselves into the
voluntary service of new media technologies, they gain more media
freedom.[22] For the maximization of this yet unbound productivity,
the access to the means of production needs to be as universal and
open as possible.

6
The defining threshold which sets the entry line between the unpaid
labour of the power user and the highly paid services of the knowledge
expert, is no longer entirely constructed by the traditional
institutions of knowledge production, such as the university. The
global network itself became the educational environment for those
without direct access to the institutions. The involvement in free and
open projects, from where the power user not only builds up a
reputation,[23] but also gains crucial skills, can easily equal the
value of an academic degree. This type of distributed expert knowledge
is of a more pragmatic and immanent kind, more webbed into social
fabrics, trial and error and thick description,[24] than the one
describable in handbooks and how-to guides. While the quality of
official education is suffering pressure from the mass production of
academic experts, the massive self-education of power users creates a
new and growing class of google intellectuals,[25] who can only know
as much as is available in the open, establishing a new economy of
words from the bottom up. What power users also produce is the
negativity of demand: missing links, feature requests, unreachable
goals and unrealized ideas. Power users form a ghost army of
pricelessness, in a last big battle of the copywars,[26] where
academic science might become dependent on them.

7
The order which controls the life of the power user derives from a
computerized form of self-discipline. In exchange for her submission
she is granted access to the platforms of free exchange. Her daily
routines are structured by networked environments, the rhythm of
digital media such as mobile phones, news blogs, the permanent
build-up of private archives, interrupted only by technical
malfunctions, which are happily accepted as welcome challenges for
individual creativity. The power user is a voluntary file clerk in the
global open archives; her singularity is embedded into a truly
encyclopaedic digital commons.[27] Her contributions to the means of
production are a necessary part of the general media architecture,
which she keeps alive as a cultural infrastructure. To be productive,
her contributions, private or public, critical or affirmative, need to
remain free gifts to generate the surplus on which other advanced
services and enclosures can be built upon.[28] The ambiguity of this
low end info-communism in the eye of the hurricane of world wide
integrated capitalism, has become one of the major resources of the
neo-liberal knowledge economy and can be described as both
revolutionary and reactionary.

8
Riding the top of the gaussian curve of social consensus production,
the power user does not mark any source of originality, but serves as
a redirector, a filter, amplifier, repeater, reporter and commentator
of actualities. Travelling possibility space, she is processing and
commenting upon news, in collaboration with other power users, as a
fabrication of facts, to cover the structural uncertainty of the media
society, e.g. the social risk to fall off the edges or stay behind.
She says: 'I post so I am', frequently actualizing her binary
existence by publishing and posting, so more links go to and from her
name and address. The power user dreams of the singularity of the
author, which she gave up for a passion for engineering.[29]
Interestingly, the cross referencing of digital citation coincides
with a growing production of books and papers, as if the material
carrier would provide a better insurance against future memory loss
and individual disappearance. The accumulative result of panic
publishing is the establishment of a radical mediocrity [30] in
intellectual production, where more and more redundant work is
produced for the mere sake of the legitimation of the authors. In this
process of constant enclosures, the new author turns into a journalist
of everything, an entrepreneur with himself as the main product, a
frequent chronicist of his own biography, an under-cover con-artist
and encyclopaedic archive gardener who can be hired for anything which
might generate temporary market interests.

9
As the power user forms a quasi-autonomous unit with her machines, the
quality of her production is at first only measured by herself. The
tasks of administration and maintaining, self-employment and constant
re-education, configuring and repairing, testing and improving,
applies at first only to the systems of an extended self, not driven
by an autopoietic 'l'art pour l'art' but a self-sufficient digital
craftmanship aiming at the expansion and optimization of the entirety
of the productive process through the reconfigurations, explorations
and improvements of the individual units. The power user is also a
power consumer: she participates in an actual economy of cash to enjoy
the updating of her gadgetry, credit card payments of flights and
services, of storage and bandwidth costs. Checking prices online and
evaluating the potential of new goods, reselling used equipment on
online auctions, recommending and even customizing to find new uses.
The legal greyzones populated by power users, are an expression of
opportunity and parasitical subversion of brutal market growth. By
joining peer-to-peer networks or fan-groups and exchanging warez and
tips and tricks, the power user enhances the mere distribution of
commodities, and turns them into a participatory, economically
reproductive form of digital lifestyle.

10
As the permanent exchange between sender and receiver, between server
and client, has become the primary source of digital productivity, the
power user has to integrate them in her ego design[31] process.
Constructed as a leaking container of commercial cultural content,
peer-to-peer networks become sources of 'shared identity'. Driven by
their hunter-gatherer instincts, power users cannot get enough of free
content; they are liberal enough to traverse different levels of
resistant production, and reprocess minority politics and psychosocial
delinquency as 'hybrid identities', which are generously hosted by the
system for the sake of diversity and innovation. From the other side,
jurisdiction and commerce reestablishes the order of individual rights
and their restrictions. Power users are the organic intellectuals[32]
who work between the frontlines on social implementations of upcoming
standards, and expand and test their acceptability. They also socially
develop new work disciplines, job models, and cultural killer
applications. The model of legitimation of the double bind of this
emerging hacker class[33] is symptomatic for the rest of society. In
order to modulate and redirect power relations, the power user has to
legitimate her access to power as a critical one. By referring to the
forces of technical revolution and the crisis it leads to, she is
betting on tactical reformism as an opportunity for individual
freedom. At the center of this double bind between technology and
capitalism stands the relation to property and authorship, in which
the power user works both on her own dissolvement as well as
re-establishment.

11
There are two different types of power users, affirmative ones and
critical ones. The affirmative power user operates as a singularized
entity of intensified use and micro-self-publishing, who then, by
learning more, join flocks of loose and interlinked groupings, and
develops a sense of togetherness. Dependent on the degree of desire
for such a community, she joins the forming of sub-groups, where in an
antagonism against and within the host system, she turns into a
critic. As a critical opponent, she supports the community of the
like-minded with plans to change the host system, and the critique
becomes an expression of the growing self-awareness of her own
class.[34] As an affirmative member she chooses competition in favor
of individual optimization and uses the integration for means of
efficiency. It is rare that the power user is not critical and
affirmative at once and it is here, in the social field, where power
unfolds with the most forceful ruptures, ready to be reprocessed into
its symbolic forms again.[35] Finally, unable to distinguish between
me and we, the power user
speaks of herself in plural.[36] Tactically transmutating between
multiplicity and singularity, her oscillating condition of mind has
become identical with the modes of production which define her.

12
There are no sovereign media.[37] The more excluded or invisible a
group, the more interesting it becomes for representation. The more
violent the fight, the more self-destructively it resists
representation, the more difference it produces, so the media sets its
focus of investigation to the maximum. Terrorism is the continuation
of communication with other means to send 'messages without
words'.[38] Total mediation does not allow any outside, any existence
in the shadows; it only allows unrepresentable noise, chaos, decay and
disintegration - or a peaceful life in a subordinated normality.
Therefore the line of the outside becomes the center of attention.
Focusing on the extremes of catastrophe and violence, the uncanny
chaos becomes symbolized and fixed in a commodity value exchange, and
economy ultimately turns into a matter of faith. The power user serves
as an active agent of mediation: she works on the overlappings of old
and new electric media, and tests the boundaries of the new interfaces
between internet, television, radio, telephony and other gadgetry for
a possible answer.[39] As free capitalism enlightened by free media
aims at the total domination of space and time, the power user
delivers to the all-seeing eye, as it operates on its surface through
image media, to objectify what it 'sees', and what it sees is what you
want.[40]

13
The expected growth of open archives at the non profit end of the
spectrum exceeds commercial growth by orders of magnitude[41] because
the intensity of exchange is much larger than in a closed learning
environment. The power user marks a change of the function of the
author in such a collectified mode of production and is described by a
prolonged list of last authors.[42] Any enterprise in the future which
operates on the basis of knowledge production will have to rely partly
on 'free and open' resources, as a foundation of their business power.
As a contributor the power user remixes modes of production,
consumption and distribution, maximizing communicative participation.
Therefore the power user becomes the new ideal of education in a
democratic media culture.[43] This new type of authorship is more
factory-like, more collective, based on an imaginary predictability of
'free will'[44] and constant competition, a combination of the dreams
of info-capitalism and soviet constructivism.[45] Its openings and
enclosures are dialectically entangled; none of them exists without
the other.

14
The power user is the opposite of the hacker; she does not want to get
'inside' or 'outside' the system, but stays at her place to deepen her
knowledge. Only the collectivization of these singular 'boreholes of
insight' overcomes the traps of a production process which collapses
in the final goal of a fabricated individualism, as an advanced part
of capitalistic production, and the establishment of a radically
mediocre authorship within very constrained and predictable
boundaries. The second criteria of change is the equivalent of what
was called consciousness before, but is today rather a media process
than a psychological one. In effect, the media architecture of the
information and communication infrastructure[46] has replaced the
discursive function of the psychic apparatus, and clarity can only be
regained in the plurality of a parliament of things. This is the
radical conversion of Descartes' 'cogito', and the first trials of a
truly planetary politics are still tinkering around how to outsmart
the 'other'.[47] The current defense of conservative fundamentalism
can only be a phase of transition and the symbolic death in which
capitalistic production culminates; it cannot remain a means in
itself. Driven by the will to knowledge,[48] the power user will
ultimately empower herself by giving the power of knowledge away. The
more intellectual property is collectified, the more sources are
open,[49] the more a critical mass of free knowledge becomes possible.

NOTES:
1. Benjamin's 'The Author as Producer', republished in Harrison & Wood
(1992 [1934]: 484).
2. Berthold Brecht 'Der Dreigrosschenprozess': 'To tell to the mind
worker that he would be free to forfeit the new means of production,
would mean to direct him to a freedom outside of the process of
production.' (1966 [1931]: 176; my trans.); also compare: 'Axiom I:
one cannot not communicate' (Watzlawick et al. 1967); also: 'Every
communication has a content and a relationship aspect such that the
latter defines the former and is therefore metacommunication.' Axiom
II is currently exploited in social software systems.
3. 'Some of the richest and largest corporations in the world are also
for their own technological and economic reasons accelerating the rise
of the prosumer.' (Toffler 1980: 270)
'The customer is now a participant in the production process. One way
or another, we recruit customers to become our allies and in effect,
co-producers. The customer now is what we call a prosumer. [...]
What's happening is a shift toward consumption in which the lines have
blurred between producer and consumer or customer.' (interview with
Alvin and Heidi Toffler by James
Daly, Business 2.0, 15 Sept, 2000).
4. The power user, defined in various jargon glossaries as: 'a
computer user who needs the fastest and most powerful computers
available'; 'someone who's read the manual all the way through once';
first mentioned in 1985: 'I'm a power user - my computer draws a
kilowatt.' (Newsgroups: net.micro, 26 July 85); 'the power user can
have a multiple window connection to a host. The casual user can be
supported by a macro capability to provide desired functions from the
host.' (Newsgroups: fa.info-mac, 1 July 1985); Raymond M. Glath:
'Level 1 - "Typical End User"? (Basic knowledge of using applications
and DOS commands). Level 2 - "Power User"? (Knowledge of DOS Command
processor, Hardware functions, BASIC programming, etc.). Level 3 -
"Applications Programmer"? (Knowledge of programming languages and DOS
service calls). Level 4 - "Systems Engineer"? (Knowledge of DOS and
Hardware internal functions). Level 5 -
"Computer Science Professor that develops viruses for research
purposes?"' (1988) <http://www.
textfiles.com/virus/glath.vir>.
5. See Pritchett's Mindshift: The Employee Handbook for Understanding
the Changing World of Work (1996).
6. See Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New (1990).
7. '[...]in the knowledge society the employees, that is knowledge
workers, again own the tools of
production' (Drucker 1994).
8. See Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930).
9. See Felix Guattari's 'De la production de subjectivit?' (1986). The
concept is also central to
Hardt & Negri's Empire (2000: 277) and Lazzarato's 'Immaterial Labour'
(1996: 137). Similarly, Negri states: 'It is the production of oneself
with others in struggles, it is innovation, the invention of languages
and networks, it is to produce and to reappropriate the value of
living labour. It is to booby-trap capitalism from within.' (2000)
Michel Foucault, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in
May 1973, is quoted by Mark Cot? as saying: 'The fact is, capitalism
penetrates much more deeply into our existence.
[...] A web of microscopic, capillary political power had to be
established at the level of man's very existence, attaching men to the
production apparatus, while making them into agents of production,
into workers. [...] There is no hyperprofit without an
infrapower...[which refers not to] a state apparatus, or to the class
in power, but to a whole set of little powers, of little institutions
situated at the lowest level.'
10. 'In being digital I am me, not a statistical subset [...] True
personalization is now upon us [...] The post-information age is about
acquaintance over time: machines' understanding individuals with the
same degree of subtlety (or more than) we can expect from other human
beings.' (Negroponte 1995: 164)
11. 'Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of
mechanized private file and library [...] a device in which an
individual stores all his books, records, and communications [...] It
is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory [...] Otherwise it
looks like an ordinary desk.' (Bush 1945)
12. 'Eugenics is a perfect complement to the capitalist
political-economic imperative of authoritarian control through
increased rationalization of culture.' (Critical Art Ensemble 1998:
119) 'If the more utopian political aspects of the PC and video were
never realized, biotechnology will probably never even have any such
aspects on a general collective level, for the simple reason that the
means of production will not be given to the public.' (Critical Art
Ensemble 2002: 120)
13. 'There is something else that keeps me at the screen. I feel
pressure from a machine that seems itself to be perfect and leaves no
one and no other thing but me to blame [...] The computer's holding
power is a phenomenon frequently refered to in terms associated with
drug addication. It is striking that the word "user" is associated
with computers and drugs.' (Turkle 1995: 29)
14. 'The particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial
labor (its essential use value being given by its value as
informational and cultural content) consists in the fact that it is
not destroyed in the act of consumption, but rather it enlarges,
transforms, and creates the ideological and cultural environment of
the consumer.' (Lazzarato 1996: 137)
15. System/Environment: the purification of the knowledge production
process leads to a growing amount of attended 'waste material' which
leads to the question of the information commons. James Boyles' 'A
Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism For the Net?'
(1997) was highly influentive for Lawrence Lessig's approach. The
systemic or 'green' approach has been forgotten in favour of a liberal
politics for openness and innovation.
16. 'The pure thinking of yore [sic] has now become a purifying
thinking, obsessed with the administration of its own mindset.'
(Adilkno 1998 [1992]) <http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet/adilkno/
TheMediaArchive/50.txt>.
17. 'Change the world, stay at home.' Adilkno, 'Electronic Loneliness'
(1998 [1992]) <http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet/adilkno/TheMediaArchive/38.txt>.
18. 'Power, of which this is always and everywhere the definition,
resides in the act of giving without being given.' (Baudrillard 1993
[1976]: 40)
19. See Richard Barbrook & Pit Schultz's 'Digital Artisan Manifesto' (1999).
20. 'The IT-service market is developing itself from artisanship to
mass production.' ('Gartner Briefing: IT-services become mass
products', Computerwoche, 3 October 2005, my trans.).
21. See 'The Automation of Higher Education' (Noble 1997).
22. 'As a central part of their campaign for more market competition,
the neo-liberals created a new definition of media freedom. Echoing
the prophecies of the futurologists, they claimed that the application
of their deregulation and privatisation policies within the electronic
media would encourage the rapid construction of an interactive cable
network.' (Barbrook 1995)
23. 'Reputation, similarly, is a measure of the value placed upon
certain producer-consumers - and their products - by others. The flow
and interaction of reputation is a measure of the health of the entire
cooking-pot economy.' (Aiyer Ghosh 1996)
24. 'Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than
that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is.' (Geertz 1973:
29; 'thick description' is a term borrowed from Ryle 1949).
25. A term introduced by Diana McCarty and Hans-Christian Dany for
extensively using search engines instead of one's own head.
26. Copywars? <http://www.eff.org/IP/>.
27. 'You will be obliged to get the assistance of a large number of
men who belong to different classes, priceless men, but to whom the
gates of the academies are nonetheless closed because of their social
station. All the members of these learned societies are more than is
needed for a single object of human science; all the societies
together are not sufficient for a science of man in general.' (Diderot
~1777)
28. The potlatch is also a means of social hierarchisation; only those
who can give much, are powerful.
29. Compare Benjamin's question to the author as engineer: 'Does he
achieve to support the socialisation of the means of production?'.
30. 'Henk Oosterling argues that art has become "radically mediocre".
This sounds like a rejection of contemporary art, but he means it
literally: middling, medium. According to Oosterling, art is not an
activity that takes place separately from society, art represents an
interest, a being-in-the-middle. Oosterling's vision is marked by a
media perspective: we ourselves, he says, have also become radically
mediocre; we have allowed ourselves to be embraced by the media with
which we communicate and transport ourselves. In this view, neither
art nor the individual are autonomous, they are parts of the 'inter',
they consist of the connections that they are concerned with.' (Altena
2000)
31. See Stefan Geene's Money Aided Ich-Design (1998).
32. 'Every social group creates together with itself, organically, one
or more strata of intellectuals which give it homogeneity and an
awareness of its own function not only in the economic but also in the
social and political fields. The capitalist entrepreneur creates
alongside himself the industrial technician, the specialist in
political economy, the organisers of a new culture, of a new legal
system...' (Gramsci 1994: 217) 'All men are intellectuals... but not
all men have in society the function of intellectuals [...] in any
physical work, even the most degraded and mechanical, there exists a
minimum of technical qualification, that is, a minimum of creative
intellectual activity.' (Gramsci 1994: 217-18)
33. 'Hacking is the production of production. The hack produces a
production of a new kind, which has as its result a singular and
unique product, and a singular and unique producer.' (Wark 2004)
34. See Roberto Verzola's 'Cyberlords: The Rentier Class of the
Information Sector' (1996).
35. 'Power is coextensive with the social body; there are no spaces of
primal liberty between the meshes of its network.' (Foucault 1980:
142)
36. See Richard Sennett's 'We, the Dangerous Pronoun' (1998).
37. 'The sovereign media insulate themselves against the hyperculture.
They seek no connection; they disconnect.' (Adilkno 1998)
38. 'Our people in Arabia will send him messages without words because
he [the president] does not understand words' (Interview on CNN, Peter
Arnett with Osama bin Laden, 11 May 1997).
39. 'Now, the totality of the existing architecture of the media
founds itself on this latter definition: they are what always prevents
response, making all processes of exchange impossible (except in the
various forms of response simulation, themselves integrated in the
transmission process, thus leaving the unilateral nature of the
communication intact). This is the real
abstraction of the media. And the system of social control and power
is rooted in it.' (Baudrillard 1981 [1972]: 169).
40. See Hakim Bey's The Obelisk (1997).
41. '[A] single development, in either technology or management
technique, which by itself promises even one order of magnitude
improvement in productivity, in reliability, in simplicity [of
software projects.]' (Brooks 2005 [1986]); Compare the Wikipedia.org
press release of February 2004: 'the surge in growth has [...]
resulted in Wikipedia.org surpassing Britannica.com, Infoplease.com
and Encyclopedia.com in terms of its Internet traffic rank and has
placed Wikipedia.org firmly within the top 1,000 websites.'
42. 'Mallarme, Benjamin ('The Author as Producer'), Foucault ('What is
an Author?') and Barthes ('The Death of the Author') all write on the
erosion and/or disappearance of the author. But their writing had
little effect on the disposition of author law. On the contrary, in
law there is an enormous expansion of the definition of the author to
include those doing dance, pantomine, cinema, photography, video,
translations, softwares, databases, exhibitions... well, the culture
we have is the one we deserve!' (email to author, from Kobe Matthys,
January 2005).
43. See Olivier Marchart's 'Media Darkness' (2003).
44. See Eric S. Raymond's 'Predictability, Computability, and Free Will' 
(2004).
45. 'Everyone can and should ... introduce a maximum degree of
precision, clear-cut contours, and purposefulness into the thing
produced by him, just as dedicated specialists have until now, the
form searchers, the workers of art. Advocates of the transformation of
raw materials into a certain socially beneficial form, combined with
the ability and the intensive search for the most meaningful form -
this is what an "art for all" must comprise. Everyone should be an
artist, a sublime master in the thing he is doing at a certain moment
in time.' (Tretjakov 1972).
46. 'Space and Time... fall into their places as mere mental
frameworks of our own constitution.' (Innis 1994 [1952]).
47. See the political process of deciding on Software Patents
<http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/>.
48. 'And only on this solidified, granitelike foundation of ignorance
could knowledge rear itself hitherto, the will to knowledge on the
foundation of a far more powerful will, the will to ignorance, to the
uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but - as its
refinement!' (Nietzsche 1886)
49. Compare the doctrine of Intelligence Services lead by the
principles of 'open source' (Bj?re 1995).

REFERENCES:
Adilkno (1998 [1992]) Media Archive, New York: Autonomedia
<http://thing.desk.nl/bilwet/ adilkno/TheMediaArchive/>.
Arie Altena (2000) 'Radicale Middelmatigheid', Boom, Amsterdam
<http://www.xs4all.nl/~ariealt/nonmodernity.html>.
Richard Barbrook & Pit Schultz (1999) 'Digital Artisan Manifesto'
<http://www.ljudmila.org/nettime/zkp4/72.htm>.
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Pit Schultz, Berlin, February 2005 Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0


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