Entries Tagged 'English' ↓

Torrentfreak interviewed four former members of Piratbyrån, including me, on the past and future of The Pirate Bay. As for the looking backwards, we gave somewhat different answers about its positive accomplishments and our favourite anectodes from its earlier history. But when asked what the future should look like, at least three of us expressed the view that The Pirate Bay should better be sunk.

Marcin De Kaminski:

Besides still being an infrastructure for exchanging files between internet users, most of the ideas and ideals of the early TPB have been lost.
I would have hoped that the internet community at this time would have replaced TPB with something new and more innovative instead of stagnating in some kind of passive mode where progress is hard to see.

Sara Sajjad:

If I could decide, the site would be shut down in all ways possible. It should never belong to someone or something else than itself, and I don’t want it to belong to the wrong people.

Rasmus Fleischer (that’s me):

I think that The Pirate Bay is in a process of slow decay, which has been obvious for the last three years. Its basic failure was that it become such an icon that people began to celebrate The Pirate Bay rather than to copy it, although being copied was the real goal – not to be the biggest, but to spawn a hydra.
Today the best thing would be to get rid of The Pirate Bay and start over with new solutions for free and decentralized file-sharing, not too dependent on web search engines. To me, such a quest would be in the spirit of the Bay.

Brokep has been saying the same thing for a while now.

As for myself, I am not envisioning the “next level” of file-sharing to be super anonymized and/or encrypted. Of course there will (and should) be darknets, but in order to promote curiousness rather than consumerism, we should rather go in the opposite direction. Which would be the direction of “openness”, if that term would not have become almost meaningless.

I don’t mean open as in open data, not open as in indexed, and definitely not open as in “upload a torrent and watch the metadata being used by a hundred hoax sites”. I don’t mean open as in public, but rather a kind of openness which emerges from the overlapping of online communities, both smaller and bigger. I mean open as in sharing not only a file, but a context.

Talking about innovation can be sneaky. We should just not be narrowly looking forward, because much of what we seek is right behind us in the history of file-sharing, in the days before bittorrent. I would like to see a new standard for file-sharing which could combine the technical features of the bittorrent protocol with the kind of interface we know from certain “older” networks, like Soulseek and Audiogalaxy.

That would include the possibility to browse each other’s folders in search for musical discoveries – a mode of navigation which today seems to be becoming as untimely as hypertext. But since we still seem to need some kind of search, the big question might be how to enable a searching which is not only decentralized, but can also resist spammers and scrapers. It might be technically impossible if you think search as in “one big search engine”, but that might not be necessary. And even today you can easily search for music on Soulseek, find it and download it – without interacting with the world wide web.

There are several reasons to reduce the dependence on web search. Censorship might not be the biggest one. If we want file-sharing to promote independent culture – whatever those words might mean – then there must be alternatives to the emptiness of the search box and to the narrowness of the personal newsfeed.

Let’s invent new shades of openness. First step is to get rid of the imbeciles, like commenter #1 on Torrentfreak, who never misses an opportunity to shout “long live TPB!”

My first book was Det postdigitala manifestet, an essay consisting of 47 sections (first very short, then gradually longer with the 23rd section in the middle being the longest, then again gradually shorter). In a sense, it is a book about music, but I think every single section deviates from that topic in various ways, and it might well be called a book about politics as well.

It was published in 2009 and subsequently translated to Finnish and Esperanto, but no other language. There is still no English translation of the book in its entirety, but maybe something better: a translated excerpt, comprising five of the longest sections (§§ 15, 21, 22, 23, 29).

Thanks to the art journal E-flux, the aptest of translators could be put on the task: Mikael Kopimi Altemark, who himself was very much part of the process (or rather the bus) from which large parts of the text emerged. Now when I see the result, it almost feels like a new text. I think this feeling depends equally on the selection, the translation and the presentation.

Read it here: How Music Takes Place: Excerpts From “The Post-digital Manifesto”.

Looking forward to follow the response. I note the annotation of the Tumblr: “One of the founders of The Pirate Bay has some pretty sophisticated ideas about music, politics, and protest. Not what you might expect, either. Worth reading.” (Not that I was really personally involved in the founding of The Pirate Bay, but still a very timely connection, considering the release of the documentary film TPB AFK, in which I briefly appear.)
I also note that different people on the Twitter has been quoting different parts of the text. That indicates that some people has actually read it. Do you know how cool that is? So cool that I will now produce a condensed version of the text using only these quotations:

Why assume that preferences come firmly lodged in the individual? Music unfolds in the charged field separating the opposing poles of responsibility and irresponsibility.
Presence serves selection. A post-digital sensibility of music comes with a questioning of the ownership of the spaces where music takes place.

In the recent weeks, I have been lecturing at various places in Sweden: Landskrona, Västerås, Mölnlycke. I’ve been talking about the changing status of the book and the library, but this theme has also been situated within a general critique of so-called “social media” and the transformation of the www that has taken place over the last five years, in parallell with the economic crisis. This was also the main theme for my lecture at OCA in Oslo last month – a lecture whose point of departure, just like last time in Belgrade, was structured by the experiences of Piratbyrån.

Before lecturing in Oslo, I was interviewed by the Nordic art magazine Kunstkritikk. The interview has been published online in Norwegian as well as in English translation. Here follows some clips from the latter version:

On the “counter-revolution of the digital smorgasbord”:

A kind of shift occurred in Sweden in 2007-2008. Up until that point the record companies had clung desperately to their traditional ways of making money, but then they began to investigate new business models. Suddenly the commercial interests also began to exploit this idea of unlimited access, supplying a variety of streaming services that can be said to satisfy the same needs as file sharing – provided that you regard file sharing as simply another consumption technology. At that point it became important for us to emphasise that the potential we see in these file sharing networks is not as a means for maximising consumption. Rather, they represent an infrastructure that can be used to build selective, curatorial structures where users join up to make specific selections from this overabundance of options – instead of simply being met with a search field where you type in what you want and get it.

On “social media”, speed and disctraction:

The current commercial centralisation of the Internet – which gathered momentum by usurping a kind of enthusiasm previously mainly found among radical, anti-commercial forces – has caused much online social interaction to segue into social media such as Twitter and Facebook. It has become almost impossible to trace collective interaction backwards in time, for these media have been systematically built in a manner that does not allow access to the back history. Instead, you are prompted to click ahead, to see what is happening now, in this instant. That is why there is such a need for connecting the fast media to slower media. As long as they cannot be connected to collective memory devices they do not allow collective phenomena to emerge, leaving us with a mere culture of distraction. What we need to do is to build more alternative settings where such conversations can be had. They can be based online, but they can also be based in physical space.

And this is the post-digital scenario?

– What you might call “post-digital” is a trend that is evident in radical web politics in several ways. Many web activists have helped build hackspaces, i.e. physical spaces for experimenting with technology and for teaching encryption and anonymisation and ways of using the Internet other than those envisioned by Facebook and Apple. It certainly says something about a shift towards the post-digital world when hackers begin to see a need for meeting physically, in real life. If we are to infer any political conclusions from the post-digital manifesto I suppose that it suggests that the challenges we face in relation to Internet won’t be resolved online; they will depend on control of the physical public space. The post-digital manifesto points in this direction – from the web to the city space.

On the crisis of copyright:

– I think that the permanent crisis of copyright is inextricably linked to the permanent crisis of capitalism; a crisis we are facing right now. This is about constructs and structures that cannot be repaired. Constructs that are about to break down. The legal grey areas will multiply rather than fade away. This situation is not handled by asking what should replace our current laws. Rather, we should take our starting point in specific art forms and forms of culture, ask what we really want to protect, and then try to find solutions that safeguard those values. We are facing a long process of coming up with new alternatives. We cannot sit down and draw up a plan for a post-capitalist society. Nor can we make a plan for post-copyright culture. These are difficult processes that can fail and founder in many ways. But we must try as best we can to develop something that works.

These are some of the themes I tend to touch in my lectures these days, even though I approach them from very different angles, depending on the context.

En italiensk tidning bad Geert Lovink att skriva 96 ord om internets framtid. Hans budskap är varken nytt eller omvälvande, men det är kort.
Kanske är detta textuella kortformat – “96 ord” påminner om “140 tecken” – en del av själva problemet. Men just nu kan nog de 96 orden funka som en tydlig utgångspunkt för en rak diskussion om hur vi i dagsläget bör formulera syftet med ett nätpolitiskt engagemang.

Instead of further going down the corporate lane of Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook, I propose to go back to the original architecture of Internet as public infrastructure with decentralized nodes. It may be romantic to insist on the distributed nature of networks but it is a necessary political demand. Net criticism is a toothless project without a utopian dimension. Even if internet itself had a military origin in the Cold War, and is now dominated by equally destructive force of greedy venture capitalists, backed up by libertarian gurus. Let’s rethink the public sphere: another internet is possible!

Jag avstår tills vidare från egna synpunkter men hoppas på en diskussion i kommentarsfältet där jag så småningom kan hoppa in.

Dead birds falling from the sky in America as well as in Sweden. This event is in need of a soundtrack, and here it comes – one hour of music, all related (more or less) to the theme of bird death.

Download via Zshare (mp3, 95 MB).

Tracklist:
Compostela: A fallen bird
John Zorn: Bird in the mist
Pantaleimon: All the birds
Hala Strana: Hell birds
Red Sparowes: And by our own hand did every last bird lie silent in their puddles, the air barren of song as the clouds drifted away
Zaimph: Bird of prey
Rome: Birds of prey
Skullflower: Shiny birds of doom
Coil: Red birds will fly out of the East and destroy Paris in a night
Legowelt: Sturmvogel
Telefon Tel Aviv: The birds

Disclaimer: Very hastily put together, not sure if the volume level might shift between some tracks.

PS: Only half of these tracks are available on Spotify so you better not dare comparing this mixtape with your not-cool-at-all “playlists”, aight?

Non-Swedish readers: Sorry for writing the introductory and ending comment in a language that you don’t understand, even if Google Translate might actually be understandable. The main body of this post, however, consists in quotings in the English language. Feel free to comment in any language you want.

Under tisdagen pågick en intensiv etikdiskussion mellan en handfull popmusikbloggare, främst i USA. Det skedde på Twitter, där diskussioner är ganska knepiga att spåra i efterhand. Man får liksom läsa baklänges. Medan jag ändå fastnade i att gräva fram meningsväxlingar kunde jag inte låta bli att sammanställa dem i en mer läsbar form. Dessutom förstod jag gradvis vad saken rent konkret gällde, så att jag nu även kan bjuda på en inledande resumé.

Panda Bear kallar sig en av medlemmarna i Animal Collective. Han har tidigare släppt tre soloalbum och kommer med sitt fjärde inom någon månad. Två av spåren är avsedda att släppas som vinylsingel nästa måndag You can count on me, Alsatian Darn) läckte nyss ut på nätet. Jag vet inte hur läckan gick till, men gissar att de två mp3-filerna först fanns på slutna ftp:er, sedan sipprade ut till halvslutna torrenttrackers som What.cd, varefter någon eller några valde att lägga upp dem på webben. Detta innebar att musikbloggar kunde länka till en direkt lyssningsmöjlighet, samt i förlängningen att den mycket välbesökta musiksajten Pitchfork kunde andrahandlänka till bloggarna. Vilket också skedde, inom en mycket kort tidsrymd.

Panda Bears-spåren lades upp på We all want some (WAWS), varefter Pitchfork länkade dit, vilket för övrigt svenska Rodeo gjorde. Men det tog inte många timmar innan Will Oliver på WAVS tog bort länken och uttryckte sin ånger över att ha postat den, enligt egen uppgift efter att ha kontaktats av Domino Records. Hur som helst så finns filerna fortfarande tillgängliga bland annat på Soundcloud och vissa musikbloggar fortsätter att länka dit.

/ / /

Så till själva meningsväxlingen. Ouvertyr:

is it worse to be deservedly irrelevant or undeservedly overrelevant?

is it worse to be an active asshole or a passive asshole?

Så frågade sig i fredags handlingens protagonist, Connor McGlynn från musikbloggen I guess I’m floating, utan att det egentligen handlade om detta specifika fall. Men kring honom cirklar sedan den Twitter-enaktare där spridda inpass görs även av Lisa Ehlin (Rodeo), Craig Jenkins, Mallory Pickard och Taylor Johnston. Det hela börjar tidigt på tisdagen då två Panda Bear-låtarna redan har länkats från någon musikblogg, utan att Pitchfork ännu har uppmärksammat saken.

Connor McGlynn:
wondering why the twitter isn’t blowin up like world trade over the new leaked panda bear tracks.
i wonder if pitchfork will abandon their moral values today and post the panda bear leak for “mad hits”.
since he’s putting out pretty much every song on Tomboy as a single before the album, is this what blogs are gonna do every time?
where do you draw the line? they already gave away the first two tracks, and we’ve come to expect and be ok with a free promo track or two.
but when these panda bear 7″s will continue to come out in adv of Tomboy and the songs continue to leak… c’mon, bloggers, know your role.

Profetian blev alltså sannspådd – Pitchfork länkade till WAVS där det räckte med ett klick för att höra de två spåren.

Connor McGlynn:
@pitchforkmedia ugh you fuckers you had to do it. lame ass selling out your God for ad money.
@ryanpitchfork what’s the pitchfork policy on posting leaks, man? seriously? because you used to avoid it but now you do it all the time. i’m not trying to bait you, i just think you guys have lowered your ethical standards by allowing that shit for hits

Lisa Ehlin:
If it’s good, it’s good, no? Think the album almost becomes secondary to the constant hunt for new music. So I think yes.

Connor McGlynn:
depends on pitchfork’s involvement and if they are willing to undermine an artist they love for “mad hits”

Lisa Ehlin:
Sometimes I just think it’s all there but in reverse. You hear it, love it, then buy the album. Undermining which artists?

Connor McGlynn:
that’s fine for smaller artists that you might not have listened to if not for the blog that showed you the songs.
but Panda Bear doesn’t need bloggers and P4k giving away every friggin song on his upcoming album.

Taylor Johnston:
I think it’s more about p4k’s need to be at the forefront of the conversation. it’s like it didn’t happen unless they cover it.

Connor McGlynn:
my concern is that Panda Bear is going to release all Tomboy songs single by single over time. so they will all leak and no one will care.
does no one else see how that’s prolly going to lead to this stupid scenario every single time? and bloggers / p4k don’t care about that?
it’s one thing if an album leaks and one or two songs are used as promo singles.
have you ever seen pitchfork go like “hey guys, the entire Deerhunter album just leaked, hear/download it here *link* !”
of course not. that’s what’s going on with this panda bear track leaks. it’s the same thing, exactly the same

Taylor Johnston:
true, I think they’d rather sell out an artist then appear to be “out of the loop”.

Connor McGlynn:
that’s like the saddest thing in the indie music world i’ve ever heard

Craig Jenkins:
Panda’s a dunce if he’s going to release the whole album as singles, given the events surrounding these last two attempts.

Connor McGlynn:
ridic that panda needs to change his plan cuz the sites that exist cuz of artists like him prevent him from being the artist he wants to be

Mallory Pickard:
It’s hard to gauge the long-term effects of encouraging leaks, but I think we can all admit it discourages artists.
It’s the leaks that have to be stopped at the end of the day. The masses will never have this debate.

Craig Jenkins:
Blogosphere rules, ethical or not, dictate that when something leaks, you damn well better have your story posted.

Connor McGlynn:
that’s assuming what matters most in the culture about which we’re blogging is US instead of the music that supports us

Craig Jenkins:
Sad, sorry state, but music blogging in 2010 is a quest for relevance as much as it is a discussion of music.

Connor McGlynn:
but it’s never been about bloggers, so why now? we’re just dudes that help other dudes discover new music.
our job is to discover new music, not give away music from established musicians who don’t need our help.
there are two types of blogs: tastemakers and trendriders. and some do both.
you either create buzz by writing about new bands, or respond to buzz by writing about (and giving away music for) already hyped bands.
why anyone follows more than one of the latter sites is beyond me. if you love music, you should seek out new bands/sounds.
and if you run a music site with no intention of discovering and sharing new music, wtf is the point?
and let’s be clear, “new music” does not mean the latest newly leaked track from an established artist.

ps. I know it’s a bit hypocritical that an andrew bird track is the lead-in on IGIF. it was out of my hands. new shiz coming soon.
to be fair, IGIF has done this sort of thing before, but as we’ve grown we’ve recognized the problems in it

/ / /

Ingenstans handlar det om huruvida det skulle vara moraliskt fel att skaffa sig gratis tillgång till läckta mp3:or om man kan det. Tvärtom förefaller det för dessa musikelitister självklart att man på ett individuellt plan håller sig uppdaterad med det allra senast tillgängliga, oavsett hur man kommer över det. Inte heller handlar diskussionen om att det skulle vara fel att kopiera musikfilerna. Det handlar inte om upphovsrätt och inte om pressetik, men om en slags hederskodex som i dessa musikbloggares universum står över både upphovsrätt och pressetik. Agerandet av jurister och publicister är inte intressant för dem.
Att musiken efter att den släppts officiellt kommer att bli tillgänglig i fildelningsnätverk hålls för minst lika självklart som att den kommer att recenseras av tidningar. Frågan här gäller ingen av de sakerna, utan vad som händer i tidsrymden mellan läckan och släppet, i det här fallet en vecka. Hur fungerar då konnässörernas ekosystem? Utgångspunkten tycks vara att det inte finns en allmängiltig moral, utan etiska regler som måste vara töjbara beroende på vilken grad av offentlighet en kanal har. Att läcka musik diskuteras inte som en abstrakt fråga om rätt eller fel utifrån artistens “rättighet”, utan utifrån frågan om hur ny musik ska kunna leta sig fram till en gradvis större publik. Idealet är intimitet och tillit. Det intressantaste uttalandet i sammanhanget är: “The masses will never have this debate.”

For the few non-Swedish readers who might stumble in here, I can point to my article which is now up in translation at Eurozine: “The revenge of the beer fiddlers? The regulation of amateurs in musical life“.

Originally published last year as “Bönhasarnas revansch?“, it provoked a few mentions in the press. Some read the article as a historical account, which it is, while others preferred to read it as a “pro-amateurism” argument, which it isn’t exactly. But I would not care to dispute interpretations of this kind:

In exhaustive fashion, the article shows that those who fight against amateurs are aligning themselves on the wrong side of history.

By the way, I’ve always found “amateurism” to be a strange term. Reminds me too much of an ideological position or a general economic system. Wouldn’t “amateurship” be more appropriate in most contexts? I’m anyway happy that I did not have to translate the article myself. Thanks to Fronesis for that!

In 2005, we arranged with Piratbyrån a May Day celebration. It was, if I remember it right, just at the time when Sweden was about to implement harsher copyright laws, and even politicians began to realize that the regulation of file-sharing activity was actually becoming political. The celebration, however, was not in a mood of sadness or protest, but rather a joyful affirmation of the openness of P2P networks. One of the slogans: “Welfare begins at 100 mbit”.
Accelerating digital communications and enabling access was fresh strategies which produced a kind of politics which did not fit into the Swedish party system. This accelerationism also enabled a certain political transversality and new alliances between hackers, artists and intellectuals, and it could quite easily be underpinned by a mainstream deleuzianism and/or benjaminism. All this while entertainment industries kept clinging on to the model of selling “units” (cd, dvd).

Now in 2010, we are tunneling communications. Well, we do not only dig tunnels – we also connect them to post-digital spaces – but we certainly do not call for accelerated communications any more. At least, acceleration has ceased completely to be politically interesting.

ChrisK recently summarized (my translation):

As matters stand now we must think in terms of cipherspace, the net’s tunnels of encrypted information. If the 00’s was the decade when cyberspace imploded and we finally stopped thinking the internet as a “virtual world”, then the 2010’s might be cipherspace+hackerspace.

Indeed, we have been talking about darknets at least since 2005. But for long, we tended to present darknets only as the less preferable alternative to open P2P-networks. If openness was associated with the famous “long tail”, we speculated that attacks on open sharing would not stop sharing but force it into smaller and darker networks of trust, which could limit access to the very mainstream of music and movie files. This theory probably still bears some truth, but seems to be just one tiny part of a larger complex. In the end, many of us use virtual private networks and access our IRC communities wia SSH on a daily basis.
Darknets for data do not need to use the internet infrastructure, but when they do, they have the character of an internet-in-the-internet. The most radically anonymous darknet experiments, like I2P, does not even have any gateways to the “ordinary” internet, but operates in tunnels underneath – slooowly.

It is Lovecraftian worm-ridden space that makes solidity the altruistic host of emergence.

Yes, this all resonates a lot with stuff that Reza Negarestani writes in Cyclonopedia about the “()hole complex”:

Nemat-space is an ultimate crawling machine: it is essentially cryptogenic and interconnecting with anonymous-until-Now.

There seems to be a logic of escalation inherent in the drive to tunnels, catacombs and holey space – be it in Tora Bora, Iran, Arizona or I2P.

To do yet another quick historical comparison. In 2006, ChrisK warned that the planned wiretapping laws would only escalate encryption and tunneling – which, in its turn, will surely provoke legislators to attack darknets, and so on, as a positive feedback loop out of control. In 2010 ChrisK instructs how to actually build these tunnels. I do not see this as paradoxical, neither as reducible to one singular tactics, but rather as something that we could maybe talk about as “escalationism”.
To a certain degree, we can see parallells between the nether and the ether. Matthew Fuller once wrote, about pirate radio:

Mutual escalation of competing technologies, of legislation and its object, of the appropriation of locations for studios and for transmitter sites, produces its own mutational field in the composition of the machinic phylum of radio – /…/ but the result is in excess of what had previously been legislated against. It is now harder to locate and capture a radio station connected in this way to a transmitter than it was before the legislation was introduced.

After reading the treatise on the ()hole complex included in Cyclonopedia, however, one becomes quite certain that the escalations of the nether (tunnels and darknets) are something quite different, not to say quite more cthulhian.

According to the archeological law of contemporary military doctrines and Freudian psychoanalysis, for every inconsistency or anomaly on the ground, there is a buried schizoid consistency: to reach the schizoid consistency, a paranoid consistency or a plane of paranoia must first be traversed.

We can not be “for” or “against” darknets – not even in the sense that one, maybe, can be “for” or “against” free and open P2P networks. That’s why I look forward to applying Reza Negarestanis genuinely weird theory of the ()hole complex – which is partly a fundamentally reworked version of Deleuze & Guattari’s treatise on nomadology and the war machine – on current darknet dynamics.

In late 2008, K-punk and some other British bloggers critically discussed a certain (deleuzian) political strategy of “accelerationism“, a discussion involed several references back to Nick Land (whose presence in Cyclonopedia is again rather obvious).
Once upon a time, in the days of the CCRU, Nick Land and Sadie Plant wrote a text called “cyberpositive“, where they attacked Norbert Wiener‘s kind of cybernetics.

His propaganda against positive feedback – quantizing it as amplification within an invariable metric – has been highly influential, establishing a cybernetics of stability fortified against the future. There is no space in such a theory for anything truly cyberpositive, subtle or intelligent beyond the objectivity required for human comprehension. Nevertheless, beyond the event horizon of human science, even the investigation of self-stabilizing or cybernegative objects is inevitably enveloped by exploratory or cyberpositive processes.

Nick Land wrote, in another text from many years ago:

Positive feedback is the elementary diagram for self-regenerating circuitry, cumulative interaction, auto-catalysis, self-reinforcing processes, escalation, schismogenesis, self-organization, compressive series, deutero-learning, chain-reaction, vicious circles, and cybergenics. Such processes resist historical intelligibility, since they obsolesce every possible analogue for anticipated change.

This cascade of concepts can obviously not be a manifesto for escalationism, but can possibly stimulate some further reflection on how it might be thought. Then we can also remember how the theory of path dependency, within political science, has also been defined as a case of positive feedback. In most cases it would be quite silly to believe in any simpel possibility to counter positive feedback (escalation) with negative feedback (stabilization), especially if we are actually talking about internet protocols.

For now, I will have to leave open the question about how escalationism differs from accelerationism. No doubt, this goes beyond a simple issue of emergent versus linear dynamics. While acceleration might be thought of as a means to an end (or even an end in itself), escalations are rarely sought for and usually thought of as culminating in some kind of “war”.
However, we could say that escalationism does not have escalation as its object, any more than the war machine has war as its object. It might even have more to do with preventing the most disastrous escalations. One way to do it might be to let the escalation happen before it becomes disastrous. But it is in the nature of escalationism that there is no subject that can judge the right timing, before the whole thing has escalated into something else.

(Just some very preliminary thoughts. It might develop to something, it might not.)