Remixtures

(via if:book) McKenzie Wark, autor de “A Hacker Manifesto”, deu no mês passado uma entrevista ao site Text da Creative Commons a propósito de GAM3R 7H30RY. Em cooperação com o Institute for the Future of the Book, o professor de estudos culturais e de media da New School University de Nova Iorque decidiu colocar online uma wiki melhorada contendo uma versão provisória do livro que permite que os leitores acrescentem comentários através de janelas ordenadas como se fossem cartões de notas numa página. O livro electrónico, que se insere - como o nome indica - no novo campo dos estudos críticos sobre jogos de vídeo, encontra-se publicado sobre uma licença CC-by-nc-nd 2.5. Em Abril de 2007, a Harvard University Press irá publicar uma versão impressa.

Na entrevista, Wark aborda a relação entre as economias da dádiva e da mercadoria no sector dos novos media e estabelece uma comparação entre os precedentes da prática da partilha e generosidade intelectual popularizadas nos últimos anos pelas Creative Commons e o copyleft em movimentos artísticos de vanguarda como a Internacional Situacionista de Guy Debord. A ler com atenção nestes dias em que a “cultura livre” corre o risco de ser mais uma marca cool assimilada pela máquina capitalista:

Users of mainstream services like MySpace are now very nervous about ownership questions – and rightly so. Who owns what you contribute to somebody else’s website? So just as a matter of principle I wanted everyone to feel like they could have “ownership” of GAM3R 7H30RY, where noncommercial purposes are involved. The CC license is now widely understood as a key to that goodwill gesture, at least in the new media circles where this book was likely to travel.
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People are waking up to the fact that the so-called participatory side of the blogosphere is really just another version of outsourcing. Not only do we have to put up with the ads in commercial online media, we have to produce the stuff ourselves now. You write it, but they own it.
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one of my all time favorite books is Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. There’s a lovely edition for sale from Zone Books. Today its Amazon rank is about 18,000 – but I’ve seen it as high as 5,000. This edition has been in print for twelve years.

You can also get the whole text free online. In fact there are three whole translations you can download. In the ’60s Debord was editor of a journal called Internationale Situationiste. All of it is freely available now in translation.

The Situationists were pioneers in alternative licensing. The only problem was they didn’t have access to a good license that would allow noncommercial circulation but also bar unauthorized commercial exploitation. There were some terrible pirate editions of their stuff. Their solution to a bad Italian commercial edition was to go to the publisher and trash their office. There has to be a better way of doing things than that.

But in short: the moral of the story is that if you give a nice enough gift to potential readers, they return the gift by buying your stuff. Debord’s works are now classics. Constantly reprinted, a nice little earner for his widow. But it is because of this huge gift of stuff to readers that readers – generations of them – return the favor by buying the works.

Culture has always worked like that. The real question to ask is the reverse: how is anyone except the media conglomerates going to make a living when they have commodified culture to within an inch of its life? How are they even going to make a living off it? It’s never been done before in the history of the world.

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