It’s dark outside, we’ve already had snow for two days, which is totally unusual for Bremen in October (I even built a snow-cat in the garden with my daughter Renée). I had a full bottle of beer this evening, like almost every day in the last two weeks, which usually happens only when I’m having cooperation problems. And I apologize for being silent for so long on this list.
It gives me the cripples when I have to fill out forms where >profession< is demanded. I look at the tiny space given there and ask myself, what the hell am I gonna write there? So what I already love this list for is that all of you seem to have the same problem. That’s nice.
Me, this is Christoph Spehr. I’m living in Bremen, Germany, together with the German feminist critic and editor Claudia Bernhard and our two children, sharing also (together with others) a small magazine, called >alaska<, a very small cultural centre, called >Paradox<, and some projects. I wrote >More Equal than Others. A foundation of free cooperation< and >Aliens are Amongst Us. Domination and liberation in the democratic era< and of course I’m proud that Geert and Trebor like them.
The question that drives me most at the moment (and a lot of you, too, it seems) is: how do we construct non-hierarchical forms of cooperation, expecially when it comes to global cooperation and to the use of the Net? It’s a very practical question for me, because since lately I’m trying to set up a networking project to exchange and collectively develop materials for political education and public debate. It’s a job; I guess it was imagined by the Luxemburg-Foundation as one of these boring websites where someone shuffles texts in and some others feel incredibly connected and >in the Net< and this is it. After I got the project I altered the direction a bit, more to initiate movement and self-organisation. I had this vision of a platform that is based not on individuals but on collectives, which administrate their own space (>rooms<) there (in a simplified cms way, including also blogging and wikis) and form groups of collectives (>streets< or neighbourhoods or whatever) that are able to take common decisions that usually are made by webmasters or maintainers, using an access management system that is based on these categories (room, street, whole platform). To put it simple: your group can design their space, load up some stuff and make up some blog or whatever, and your group decides itself what is only for them, what is for their neighbourhood, what is for the public; and it decides together with their neighbourhood which other collectives can join exactly this neighbourhood and what happens in your >street< and what not. So you allow >borders< as well as cooperation, and pull down decisions from the hierarchical top.
Sounds nice, I thought. But it soon turned up that the >wired logic< of how networks are programmed usually (even as cms, even in open source) is totally contradictionary to that. Network architectures as we know them, the whole logic of computer programming as we know it, is completely hierarchical. (Or at least, as I know them, okay.) They are based on Babuschka rules: the higher level sets up the higher rules.
I found out that the two >technicians< I work with didn’t understand for months what I was talking about. Because in programming, a >group< is something absolutely different from a >group< in politics. The former is a place designed by the maintainer where people can gather and do some things but don’t decide anything. The latter is a real-existing collective that is working on a self-organised basis and wouldn’t allow any >maintainer< outside this group to know, judge and decide what they’re doing. And legitimation and democracy are simply non-existing categories within common virtual structures. That’s how it seems to me. I know there are the wiki-nets, there are unmoderated mailing lists and unrestricted forums (like on Indymedia), but this is not what I mean – this is just running around in big places, which may be fun and interesting, but it is not democracy, it is not self-organisation, and it’s still an assembly of the virtually powerless under the ever-watching eye of the maintainer.
So this is something I’m really interesting in your experiences. Am I wrong? Or is it that we have to go along with >wired rules< that we have to subvert, to treat in a special way, to adjust them to non-hierarchical cooperation?
I think is also a direct question about the conference preparation.
The little adjustment I made with the project mentioned above led to a very interesting workshop at Bremen with a wild bunch of projects and people, a mailing-list and a preliminary website while the platform architecture is still in the making, and serious stress with the boss (consisting not at least in the interesting question: who is the leader of this project?). At the moment we try to handle this in a civilized way, giving a paper each about global networking and how to imagine it, that we put on the website and try to gather people to discuss it with us. You can check it out at www.walled-city.org, section papers/documents, the papers are >Some ideas regarding the foundation of a global university< and >No halls, no marble – Outlines for a knowledge system for the multitude< (guess which is mine?), and there is a forum for the discussion under message boards / global networking.
Gregory, thanks for yous SF-text!! I finally managed to expand it, using Stuffit. Told Claude proudly how great it is, the Net, that I found some forum where people had exactly this Mac-to-Win-problem and someone turned up with a solution, and that I downloaded Stuffit, and dragged and topped and was able to solve the problem, wow, the Net makes it possible! and Claude told me that this was nice but meant solving a problem through the Net that wouldn’t have existed without the Net. That much for gendered emotions about virtuality, globality and networking.
Good night, see you
Christoph