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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I didn't mean to imply that peer production is
going to go away. </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>Neither do I think
it urgent that revenue models be found. People, myself included, love
to contribute within open frameworks.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I guess we might just
accept that self-motivated, self-directed creative work is not
financially sustainable, but not critically so -- a sustained
unsustainability ;)</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I agree and isn't it interesting tho' that there is
no problem of affordability, as you point out with respect to the middle
ages and religious orders. If we don't lack the money, we do lack comparable
infrastructures today; artists may wear black but they annoyingly
spurn the cloister; they live in poverty, but won't ritualize
it as in "a vow of...". There is no system or ethic of tithing and no
central 'agency' like the Church to oversee the "liturgy,"
manage income, create economies of scale, etc. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Tithing is an interesting concept. A Toronto
curator recently proposed a 1% municipal tax for art. I wonder if you could
consider the exhorbitant proportion of the cost of consumer goods that is
attributable to marketing as a kind of tithe.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>But I digress... what concerns me still is the
fragility of the relationships and commitments that are needed to
make peer networks productive. </FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2>What I'm
wondering is whether there might not be an advantage to shifting the locus
of stability from the commons (where stability relies, as you point out,
on a bottomless pool of volunteers) to the producers, and here I am
not yet convinced that agency is not relevant.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>It's interesting that you should
mention cooperatives because I was just thinking about those the other day.
What particularly interests me about them is not so much how they work
in relation to existing markets but how they can create markets. I
think agency is especially relevant in the context of
cooperatives because it is not just a matter of equitable accounting, but
within the capacity of a cooperative structure to orient all processes
to the producer not the commissioning principal or the
consumer. </FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>I developed a model once for the visual arts that
showed the artist at the centre and all the other players rotating around like
planets. In 2003 that seemed pretty progressive. I'm now thinking that the model
should put the artist on the outside, containing and instrumentalizing the
institutional players. Which makes a kind of sense in terms of distributed
networks and peer production, which are the glue that would link and hold
that outer circle together. And that would perhaps better describe what is
actually happening today.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>- Rob</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>