Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes "strike-through" in the original text omitted.)
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
Peer-to-Peer Communism vs. The Client-Server Capitalist State
The Conditions of the Working Class on the Internet
Trapped in the World Wide Web
Peer Production and the Poverty of Networks
Venture Communism
Manifesto of The Telekommunisten Network
A Contribution to the Critique of Free Culture
Copyright is a System of Censorship and Exploitation
The Creative Anti-Commons
Free Software: Copyright Eats Itself
Free Culture Requires a Free Society: Copyfarleft
Peer Production License: A Model for Copyfarleft
Venture Communism and Copyfarleft
References
The Telekommunist Manifesto is composed of texts that have been extended and reworked by Dmytri Kleiner, from texts by Joanne Richardson, Brian Wyrick and Dmytri Kleiner, 2004-2008
A pdf of this publication can be freely downloaded at:
http://www.networkcultures.org/networknotebooks
If you want to order copies please contact:
Institute of Network Cultures
HvA Interactive Media
Singelgrachtgebouw
Rliijnspoorplein 1
1091 GC Amsterdam
The Netherlands
http://www.networkcultures.org
[email protected] publication is licensed under the Peer Production License (2010).
Commercial use encouraged for Independent and Collective/Commons-based users.
Amsterdam, October 2010.
ISBN/EAN 978-90-816021-2-9
Introduction
In the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx argues that, "at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production".1 What is possible in the information age is in direct conflict with what is permissible. Publishers, film producers and the telecommunication industry conspire with lawmakers to bottle up and sabotage free networks, to forbid information from circulating outside of their control. The corporations in the recording industry attempt to forcibly maintain their position as mediators between artists and fans, as fans and artists merge closer together and explore new ways of interacting.
Competing software makers, like arms manufacturers, play both sides in this conflict: providing the tools to impose control, and the tools to evade it. The non-hierarchical relations made possible by a peer network, such as the internet, are contradictory with capitalism's need for enclosure and control. It's a battle to the death; either the internet as we know it must go, or capitalism as we know it must go. Will capital throw us back into the network dark ages of CompuServe, mobile telephones and cable tv rather than allow peer...