digital commons group at green academy

At the end of august I was invited/applied to Green Academy at croatian island Vis. It was a great and inspirational experience all-in-all. One of many things that came out from discussions within ‘digital commons group’ was also some kind of report, which I’m publishing here in a very raw form.

In the general world of commons problems are mostly localized and are sometimes addressable locally. The digital commons debate is already lasting for some time and the problem is that digital enclosures are conditioned globally through harmonization of intellectual monopoly regimes, limiting the capacity of localized action.

What are digital commons?:

  • culture, science & knowledge without property exclusions, limited by copyright regulation
  • a positive message relating to digital commons is that there is already abundance in the digital. It makes it more visible as a contradiction between property and social use and thus makes it more immediate to intervention by the commoners. Therefore, we have seen communities transforming the institutions.
  • protection of copyright monopolies expensive both socially and economically
  • there’s good things about digital commons and bad things: openness and universal access vs. commercial capture through monetizing of our relations to one another as in the example of Google’s page-rank –> our relationst to objects of the world are commodified by Amazon and our relations to our fellows is commodified by FBook

How is this changing the world of information, culture and knowledge?:

  • Free Software movement as a model of struggle against enclosure: it was an avant-guard movment as it gave a gift to the world, and then gift got split: big beneficiaries are proxies and commercial entities, but some of these gave us benefits too – however, given the opportunity they will move it back into an enclosure
  • this is an interesting lesson for other commons movement how commercial entities capture commons
  • a big commons built upon free software is internet

How this got replicated onto other fields beyond:

  • communities: free culture (Wikipedia) and piracy (ex Gigapedia/ LibGen/Aaaarg.org)
  • institutions: open access to scientific journals, open education resources, public sector information & open governance/consultation/democratic procedures (Icelandic constitution writing process)
  • those initiatives and commons struggles that emphasized the user rights changed the perspective on copyright that prioritizes monopoly of right holders, and bottom-up initiatives to reform copyright (open content licenses and institutional mandates) should and could prove successful with institutions with a public mission
  • commercial approach is dominant in these institutional fields (commercial academic publisher) and we are now trying to revert the predatory practices of commercial actors

Looking forwards towards the future:

  • proxies such as big internet companies appropriate the commons, then the question becomes how do we reappropriate
  • proxies replace proxies, but can p2p replace Google and the question is then how do we produce that desire
  • observing the problem of commons in the digital domain reveals their common character on a global scale, however local they may appear observing other commons.

Thanks to: Marcel Mars (Nenad Romić), Tomislav Medak, Vuk Čosić, Jodi Dean and everyone else in the digital commons group.

same old same old: codecs!! (avconv and AAC)

Today I encountered problems with encoding video/audio material due to same old problematic, which so many people seem to not notice but seems that it is oh so important. At least to content creators.

In short, here’s the thing: avconv, the flagship encoder/decoder for most of a/v content (it’s a fork of more famous ffmpeg), now cannot in a simple way encode AAC audio (this is the most common format for h264 mp4 video – or so it seems). In order to have avconv with libfaac encoder (which creates AAC audio) compiling is necessary – without an option to create a deb (if you are on Ubuntu or Debian). That’s quite inconvenient. However, there is an experimental work-around: instead of -acodec libfaac, use ffmpeg/avconv’s own experimental encoder by using -acodec aac -strict experimental.

So here’s the full commandline:

avconv -i INPUTFILE.EXT -s 480x320 -r 25 -b 1000k -bt 1600k -vcodec libx264 -pre:v medium -acodec aac -strict experimental -ac 2 -ar 48000 -ab 128k OUTPUTFILE.mp4

Above was made in order to transcode any video to a format suitable for Waterwheel online platform.

leopoldina istanbul on archive.org, jamendo and bandcamp

I’ve uploaded this collection of drone-ambient tracks (album), created in 2008 (and released on NYE from an Istanbul cafe) to archive.org, jamendo and bandcamp. I’d like to get it on SoundCloud too, but I’ve spent all my upload minutes, huh!

CC-BY-SA of course. Local (deviator’s) microsite is here.

I’ve created this album purely with my granulators – patches written in Pure Data on Linux, using Doepfer’s Drehbank as a controller.

a slice of critique of “commons”

A thought-provoking critique of the commons ….

“[…] communicative capitalism celebrates and relies on constant, nearly inescapable injunctions to participate, to express, to be part of a common that is expropriated from us rather than shared by all of us. It enjoins us to share in an illusion, to embrace a fantasy that extreme inequality is accidental rather than essential to the capitalism of global communication networks. Because we know it’s an illusion, a fantasy, at least part of the work of consciousness-raising is done. The task, then, is to claim the common against those who say they own it, accentuating the division between their claim to own and our communicative acts, power, and production.”
— Jodi Dean

See also her books Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics and her blog I Cite.

green academy @ island of vis – day one

It’s been now 24 hours since I arrived to the island of Vis to attend, to participate at the Green academy organized by croatian chapter of Hienrich Boell foundation. So far it’s been really amazing. Not so much because it’s warm as warm can be, the crystal clear island-ish seawater superb (as much as I was able to swim in the early morning), and some kind of lazy atmosphere on the streets (all these things are amazing in themselves), but mostly because the content of the ‘conference’ is somewhat mindblowing. The theme is the “commons” and it is divided into five sections/working groups:

  • digital commons
  • urban commons
  • natural resources: land & water
  • education
  • public media

Furthermore there are one-day workshop (on friday) titled:

  • Commons and Agricultural Production
  • Commons and Energy Production
  • Commons and Economic Democracy

But what is commons?

Commons-based society is a world in which the fundamental focus on competition that characterizes life today would be balanced with new attitudes and social structures that foster cooperation. It is a new way of life that values what we share as much as what we own, where “we” matters as much as “me”.

I must point out however events in last day. Yesterday the opening included a keynote lecture by Tine de Moor from Utrecht University titled “The cooperative continuum: collaborative consumption and production in long-term historical perspective”. Apart from getting into very interesting historical perspective of the various forms of the commons, from common pasture land over guilds to modern forms of cooperatives, not excluding seemingly useful analysis (features of initiatives, advantages of collectivities, differences on time scale…). There might be interesting to point out two issues that seem important (at least to me):

  1. historicaly, time of 1750-1850 seem to mark an emergence of concept of individual, who only then becomes a central unit of society and is also time when private property becomes the main form of property, and
  2. various good use cases of ‘successful’ collectivites cannot be really copied as a higher-level model – in other words, models of working collectivities cannot simply be copied out from its original local context – it seem to be extremely difficult to achieve same success in a different context – this presents quite big challenge in an effort to create systemic opportunities (platforms for localities) on higher levels (municipality, state)

The next day there were some short clarifications on what can we expect or where were are actually going on this conferenct. And I found Danijela Dolenec articulation particularily thorough. Here I quote directly from her notes (that she was happy to share afterwards)

We propose the Commons as a terrain for exploring a new politics that can join these issues together. The language of the Commons:

  • carries the emancipatory potential by offering a vocabulary and concepts that may help connect green left movements grounded in concerns for democracy, social justice and sustainable development
  • the principles of the commons offer a radical vision both of the political (self-governance, co-creating the conditions of our lives, direct involvement in the rule making that governs our communities) and the economic (moving away from private property and replacing the concept of ownership with concepts of reciprocity, mutuality, solidarity, sharing, using, co-producing, taking part together etc.)
  • following in the tradition of the work of Elinor Ostrom, it allows us to critique both states and markets, both processes of overcentralization, top-down processes, hierarchical structures, as well as processes of privatization, exploitation and commodification

Silke Helfrich from Commons Strategies Group had a long, entertaining and somewhat school-like presentation about World of the Commons, where she raised some interesting analysis and issues on the Commons.

  • Commons aren’t goods. Commons is about the way we relate to eachother in sense of ‘fairaccess’, ‘sustainable use’ and/or social control.There is no commons without commoning.
  • Elinor Ostrom (as opposed to Hardin‘s Tragedy of the Commons) claims that people:
    • communicate with each toher
    • negotiate /establish rules
    • often know best what is good for them
    • are able to cooperate /instead of compete/

After lunch there was a lecture by Srđan Dvornik called “Society as a Common” and later in the evening I was particularily fascinated by two speakers at the panel – Zoltgan Pogatsa and Kostas Loukeris. More about these later.

linux is a process, not a product

This is an essay that I wrote for IDOCDE (International Documentation of Contemporary Dance Education) project/website last week in Lunow-Stolzenhagen. It is an attempt to explain what FLOSS essentially is using some analogies. Feedback welcome.

Here’s a story.

Imagine yourself going to a workshop by an amazing dance professional who is teaching a movement technique that is the latest and greatest thing ever. You pay for it and work on it weeklong and you are amazed and thrown off your feet (literaly too) by its beauty, elegance, thoroughness, radicality, inventiveness – in short THAT is the most amazing method of movement that enables lighting-fast progress with your body and movement.

You think and realize you want to share this with your local peers. What’s more, you want to improve on it, merge the technique with some of your own discoveries during the years of your practice. You plan a workshop and a short sketchbook. You will fully credit the amazing dance professional. People will be thrown off their feet like you were, and will take it further, enrich it with their own ideas, use it in their work, make their own workshops for others to see and learn. This is how progress is made, isn’t it? By building on each other’s work. You learn something, you improve it, and you share it with others, so they can learn, improve and share it with others. People talk about it, mention names and peers, good practices survive, bad ones are left behind. You can be cherished if your work is distributed, mentioned and built upon.

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review of expression front

It started as some crosslinking between fellow musicians, you know, referring and recomending… Essentially, I ended up chating with a french person (in english) over facebook chat about Sad Sam Lucky Outtakes, and ended up uploading complete album Expression Front (from 2001) to SoundCloud, and that’s the album Kevin Carnaille of “Have Faith in Sound” blog wrote about. In fact, Have Faith in Sound is amazing music blog, passionately covering a wide range of sounds and musics.

Read Nova deViator – Expression front (2001) or check it after the break.

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fixing my sister’s laptop

So my older sister works on a laptop with “that other operating system” and she started to complain that the first system drive is too full (that-other-operating-system was giving her errors about insufficient disk space). That laptop had a remains of my attempt to lure her into Linux, but it didn’t work out. Which is totally fine. But the disk had partitions like this:

  • system partition of “that other operating system” – 38Gb
  • linux partition – 25Gb
  • swap partition – 6Gb
  • data partition – 250Gb

So, I’ve put a gparted live cd image on a usb stick using UNetBootin, booted the laptop into that, erased linux and swap partitions and grew first ‘system’ partition. When I rebooted I was greeted by lovely GRUB RESCUE prompt:

error: no such partition
grub rescue>

I downloaded boot-repair-disk and put it again on the same usb key using UNetBootin. I booted the laptop with it and chose advanced settings only to see, that it has understood that there is a MBR record missing and that it needs to repair it, so that it boots into ‘that other operating system’ (to put it simply). Just clicked “repair”, and it asked me for internet, so that it uploaded some diagnostic data to paste.ubuntu.com (Ubuntu pastebin), and asked me to reboot. Voila, it booted to ‘that other operating system’, needed to chkdsk + some of the software thought its freshly installed. Other than that, the system partition had additional 20Gb. End of story. Thanks to diligent work of free software community. I’m a bit blown off.