[iDC] lambda lambda lamda
Brian Holmes
brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr
Tue Feb 21 10:43:33 EST 2006
Eric Goldhagen's intervention in this thread is so exact it
hurts:
"The problems of net-neutrality can not be fixed by rouge
cowboys like Garrin and WiFi-NY. Short of building our own
people's internet, we sadly have to rely on regulation to
ensure public access and net neutrality. This is a systemic
issue that must be addressed in a large scale way by
community and government, not by individual capitalists."
This is always the limit of small-scale anarchist or
libertarian acts of resistance, in our time anyway. If they
get anywhere beyond the symbolic, it's only to become
practical on neoliberal terms. I would very much agree with
Eric that the only real social change has to be
institutional, meaning it has to involve big players,
anything else is a dream; but I would add that one can use
the symbolic potential of resistance and volunteerism in a
bid to make that kind of change happen. Thus, Trebor's open
databank on cooperative practices is not exactly the
solution to my lack of access to Ingenta (although someone's
gift economy has been the solution to my lack of access to
Muse! Thanks, anonymous). However, the cooperative databanks
being done by many people are a huge intervention into what
we were talking about before, namely the creation of the
values that orient institutional development. If we keep
pushing, someday all the databanks will be free.
The problem is, like Brooke Singer I don't feel too sanuine
about the posssibility of getting much through the
institutional apparatus in the US right now... As for
Brooke's question to Eric:
> do you (or anyone else) know of
> community based groups using a similar model? the technology is not
> particularly interesting here but what fascinates me is a model of a
> flat hierarchy (ok, not exactly the case with WiFi-NY) in which there is
> no central governing body.
Well you can look up all the traces left on the web by the
great dream of the London "Consume" network, which in the
early days of techie enthusiasm for wi-fi was supposed to be
a voluntarily erected people's service-provision and
cultural-production network that would be so successful that
corporations would just have to beg for the privilege to do
them favors, in order to get access to some piece of all the
action they would produce... As you can guess by the way I
wrote that sentence, alas I don't believe that this
libertarian dream really came true...
best, BH
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