[p2p-research] Non digital commons a lot more complicated than Free Software

[j.martin.pedersen]

Hi Roberto,

On 29/11/10 05:17, Roberto Verzola wrote:
> In my case. however, I decided that "logging off" was not an option.
> Since you are on this list, it seems you have decided likewise not to
> "log off". I'm curious though if you have actually "logged off" yourself
> and if you think that experience was a good long-term approach. I
> decided it wasn't.

I have logged off when I have been in remote places or travelling and I
like it a lot. The world around me comes closer and I have more capacity
to process the information emerging from it.

I am not anti-technology and I didn't mean to log off permanently, but
just long enough to see some other dimension. Like you rightly say, the
way we think is technologically embedded and there is a significant
different between pen and PC as a means of thinking and communicating.

As you also say, this is a dilemma - and I want it to be made into a
dilemma, not a simple problem. However, at this stage it is not even
really much of a problem, but rather denied. I think many people are too
deeply immersed in it (ICT) to want to and be able to see it clearly.
1-2 flights per year, 1-2 computers per decade is all that my dilemma
allows me.

I have worked in the Amazon where I taught indigenous people how to take
a PC apart and put it back together, learning the names of all the
components and their functions, before installing Free Software on it,
bringing all of these aspects of the dilemma together into the workshop
space. We talked about the problems of ICT, but that is not the same as
rejecting it.

I don't have a problem with dilemmas at all - I think most things in
life are ambiguous - I am arguing against simplifications or denials of
problems that tend to remove the ambiguity.

The material dilemma must be fully acknowledged/recognised - that's all
I am saying. The leaders of the free culture movement do not do that -
quite the contrary - and many others simply follow their lines of
inquiry, hence obscuring further the dark side. Accordingly, it was the
subject line of this email that prompted this current exchange, which
perpetuates the myth that digital commons are simple, immaterial systems.

-martin