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# Novelty against sovereignty: A comparison between two cases where innovation is mobilised to circumvent the law — Filesharing and Legal Highs

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Johan Söderberg


Schumpeterian-Shenzenian innovation state: Everything has to be about innovation.


   * social innovation
   * user innovation
   * etc. etc. etc.

Discoursive and legitimacy need to extend it to social and democratic practices. Why? Low legitimacy of the EU, USA, and institutions in general. They have a need to reach out and associate themselves with those who are outside, like hackerspaces, etc. The latter are captured at least on a discoursive level. -> There is a tention here.

How many strings are attached. Like the electricity string, etc.

Big embrace of letting go of control of innovation, technology, and its development and use, so that it can be more productive.

Decentralisation as a political problem: precondition for circumvention, which has been raised to a goal in itself without much reflections on the blind spots of such a strategy.

Slides should be linked [here]

Excerpts of laws: anti-circumvention-clauses.
   * US DMCA,
   * EU 2001/29/EC article 6,
   * UK Copyright, Designs and Patterns Act 1988, c. 48 Part VIII.

Circumvention is done through devices and the legislation applies to devices.  Programming code counts as a device, and there is a slippery slope there, where the knowledge of writing code can be already suspicious. -> Trying to control the knowledge in the head of the people.

DeCSS T-shirt is shown. http://www.attivissimo.net/timeline/decss_tshirt.jpg


# Imaginary of file sharing

I am from Sweden. :) -> Pirate Bay, a pure outside standing against the Swedish state and the US state behind the Swedish state.  Even at the time of Napster and its court cases one of the five labels pressing the charges was Burtisman, who was at the same time lending 20 million dollars for Napster so that it can continue to go on.  With the hope that they can buy the brand and the technology.  The court case boiled down to for how much to buy all that unpayed labour for?

Split narrative: Napster wants to bring down the music industry, music industry Napster, but at the same time they were negotiating the price of buying off resistance and resistant technology.

It furnished the industry with new ways of branding, promotion and distribution.

Dialectics! \o/ :o


# Imaginary of psychonautics

Even more firm antagonism between the law and the public authorities vs. subcultures and identities formated around opposition. The penalties are often higher and the consequences more grave.

Hakim Bey (10-15 years old): we should not ask for the legalisation of drugs but be grateful to the fact that those were off balance for the state so the state does not messes with it -- the only protection against recuperation and integration into capitalism.

Case study: a strange great drug. DMT

Innovation is driven by laws. When state tries to control the plant material to start from, some other homegrown plants are used instead as an autonomous solution

Legal highs: The whole gains about creating novelty -- yet-to-be-controlled drugs. -> Like rewriting the file sharing protocols.

The "blessing" of being outlaws, not having to submit reviews to FDA is not just liberating for individuals, is also something Big Pharma is driving for.

In US and here, pharmaceutical companies have "strict" regulations.
Interesting the way they used patient groups in the 80s for AIDS, as seen in Texas Buyer's Club.

Post-market surveillance: you put drugs on the market and see what happens, monitoring a lot of patients and calling the drug back when it doesn't seem to work. (or people die). Before, a drug at least had to be narratively framed as something which heals a sick person. -> Limit to the market -- but now lifestyle drugs like anti-depressants, etc.

Viagra for example was designed for heart related disease, in the test distribution came out the secondary uses, therefore the market for which it was developed (and the fuction it was designed for) changed.
Sort of an inductive model of research. Clinical tests > Post market surveillance.
Psychonauts then are an important figure in this picture.

The position of psychonauts (as well as that of hackers..) has to be inquired.

_slide showing The Entheogen Review_

When you search for Google you structurally work for them, in a way.

20 years ago there was already the critique that hackers do free labour, but people don't experience like that: have not reached class consciousness, yet it goes into profit margins.

dual labour?

Illegal users could be drawn into such an interpretation: industry is dependent on the illegal subcultures, who are labouring for a negative wage value -- against the threat of jail.

Innovation was inside the factory before, but now (in the social factory) it is dispersed in society. There is no clear line now dividing between inside or outside the workforce.
Industry prefers not to define the difference between a violation of private property and violation of ???

1996: US, Analogue Act. <- synthetic version of heroin resulting in Parkinson cases as side effect <- popular uproar. everything which looks similar to illegal drugs chemically and has the same effects has the same control measures -- so it is controlling the future through this vague definition.

(missed this part)

Franz Neumann, Frankfurt school, connecting these to the economic conditions, the development of capitalism.  Up until that moment capitalism was made up of competing capitalists with a shared interest in the state.  From this slightly reductionist view followed all the other procedures: nominal rights, equality in front of the law, et.c

Carl Schmidt represented a new kind of capital: monopoly capital -- for which state flexibility and flexibility of the law is the most confortable.  A different legal agreement.


## DISCUSSION


1. *Do you see there an opportunity for unemployed?  ---  For job creation for people who think they have great ideas?*

No.  There is a connection to how the West is de-industrialised so it is a strategy where the area tries to remain competitive.  A concrete example is a factory which closes down and the machines end up in a hackerspace --- a very direct connection.

*But only few people benefit.*

Yes.  In the factory labour could organise but in the hackerspace?  Circumventing the possibility of having a strike!  How to claim back the fruits of labour?


2. *It is a great comparison between the two communities and the shift to production-outside-the-factory.  Like how slaves became wage workers.  Freelancers' Union, 2060 members receiving services --- it is more or less an NGO supporting with advice and information.  It is based on funding from Ford and Rockefeller.  This model, Google and Microsoft may benefit from such transformations.  Microsoft payed studies to see what kind of labour organising may come out of the hacker scene.  **It is a key question to see how this can be related to the clashing of ruling class fractions today!**  Also, what it means for people like us.*

We cannot dismiss traditional unions too quickly.  There is the ideology of the new.  We need to be self-reflecting and self-critical.  What is the limitations of the new methods?  When is it possible to have a strike it is still a very effective way.


3. *It is interesting how you use circumvention to explain subversive subcultures, but at the same time you could use it to explain the capture of capital from a certain mode of production -- it is really a kind of dialectic when the use of such technology is continuisly owned and disowned and owned again by rival groups which struggle over how it can be developed and distributed.*

If there is already a collectively productive community we can put it to use.  The RepRap people started out to destroy capitalism and ended up as MakerBot -- a startup with venture capital.  It has to be systematised, there has to be a legal framework for sustaining it.

On the one hand individuals can be incentivised by venture capital but on the other hand put into prison.
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