[p2p-research] Fwd: Hacking Capitalism

[Michel Bauwens]

Dear friends,

thanks for letting the world know about this important book,

Michel

see
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/johan-soderbergh-on-hacking-capitalism/2007/11/30

(also: http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Hacking_Capitalism for details)

Michel

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Johan Söderberg <johan.soderberg at sts.gu.se>
Date: Nov 30, 2007 4:19 PM
Subject: Hacking Capitalism
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


Hi Michel,


>Do you have any presentation, and key excerpts, so we can feature it as
book of the >week on our blog, as well as create an entry for our wiki?

perhaps this could work?

In Linus Torvald's book about the invention of the Linux kernel, he states
that hackers have become revolutionaries 'just for fun'. The word 'fun' is
here meant to smooth over any leftist conotations from the word
'revolution'. However, the notion of hackers becoming revolutionaries just
for fun would have appealed to the eighteenth century poet Friedrich
Schiller. Disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution, he sat down
to ponder over how to make revolution work better the next time. Friedrich
Schiller saw the 'aesthetic play-drive' as the primary force which could
foster a more wholesome human being, whose maturing would also carry forth
and be able to sustain a post-revolutionary aesthetic state. Schiller meant
that the aesthetic education of man was necessary to heal the rift within
man caused by specialisation:

"[. . .] If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he
will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is
only through Beauty that man makes his way to Freedom."

Both adherers and critics of Schiller have pigeonholed him in the tradition
of romanticism. It would do Schiller more justice if his words were
recovered from the fine arts scene and instead applied to the politics that
flow from the 'beauty of the baud' and the play with source code in the
computer underground. It was this kind of poet that Herbert Marcuse
encountered when he begun his investigations into the liberating potential
of art and play. Already back in the 1930s Marcuse contrasted aesthetics and
play with the instrumentality and drudgery of labour. The argument in Hacking
Capitalism is that hackers have invented a new mode of developing technology
and organising labour that is subjected to the play-drive in Schiller's and
Marcuse's sense. The politics of hackers has only partly to do with
resisting copyright, censorship and Digital Rights Management. At its heart,
the joyful revolution of free software development consists in the distance
it places between doing and the wage labour relation.


No reviews as of yet. The book shipped last week from the publisher so in
all likelihood no-one has even read the book at this moment.

Thanks!
Johan
<http://www.ws-network.com/04_team.htm>



-- 
The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer
alternatives.

Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at
http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p

Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at
http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html
BEST VIDEO ON P2P:
http://video.google.com.au/videoplay?docid=4549818267592301968&hl=en-AU

KEEP UP TO DATE through our Delicious tags at http://del.icio.us/mbauwens

The work of the P2P Foundation is supported by
http://www.ws-network.com/04_team.htm
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20071130/2516db84/attachment.html