Comments on: What’s a Cultural Commons?

By: risa

risa — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 14:45:51 +0000

i think art, great art, is always pushing up against clouded spaces in our brains. it unfolds through how we interact with it. i think poetry and drawing are a great deal like open source code. and the interesting thing about code, as i heard myself say to Matthew, a writer who came by our pre-launch premiere for indyish last night, is that 90 percent of it doesn’t work, just like how 90% of poetry is bad.

the source code is for building. it’s for uniqueness and innovation. it’s for the stubborn people who want to tailor make their own experiences of the software. and it’s for learning- it’s tough to understand what was done once the code has been compacted and polished up for the machines. in source code form, software is potentially legible. there is all kinds of space in the code for notes and names and messages. it’s a kind of palipmsest of effort. it has, as julien pointed out in the robotics post, a kind of aesthetic.

By: Yohei

Yohei — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 01:26:43 +0000

So given Risa and P@’s great comments, it becomes clear that there are complicated questions and certain dangers that need to be addressed when we talk about applying open source theory to big, vexed concepts like culture or society.

One danger, hinted at by Risa’s talk of the excluded, has to do with outcomes. And open source is a model easy to turn into one concerned with best outcomes.

That is, the danger is that this kind of system ends up as an evolutionary, Darwinian one. As we all know, in evolution, there are pools of traits that help or hinder or neither, but in the end, those most attuned to survival come together. It’s harmless if something like a product or a business practice is spoken of in this way. When we talk about product X, the correlative to the evolutionary concept of survivial might be utility or efficiency. What is environment in evolution (that is, what survival responds to) might be something like consumer demand or need. The best outcomes arise for the moment — and as an ongoing process, different relationships and combinations will be produced, superceding earlier outcomes.

But it can be troubling when the best outcome model is used for forms of art. What drives artistic movements (say, Impressionism)? What would be the equivalent of survival or utility? The tendency and risk is to end up with a highly sociological, proprietary model of “art and consumer” or supply and demand matrices, or else an Arnoldian aesthetic of the “the best that has been thought and said.”

So there is good reason to tread carefully when discussing huge concepts like art, or culture, or society, whatever. Open source is an indispensable premise that could easily fall into familiar potholes. And it’s always worthwhile to think through what — if anything — the source code is ultimately for, and how the entire process is conceptualized.

By: risa

risa — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 23:54:29 +0000

hey p@, you’re all over the site today poking at these ideas of mine and i think it’s awesome..welcome p@!
entoutcas..
here’s my response to your interesting query:
the idea of the ‘entire network of knowledge that’s ever been exchanged’ is not that it could ever be something that would or could be managed. The question of how best to manage people’s opinions (their ideas, their knowledge, maybe even their feelings) is, I think, the wrong question. It is certainly not the question that open source poses. The real challenge that open source and other creative systems embrace is not to manage the knowledge, but to make their own best expressions of it and contributions to it.
By shifting the focus from how we could force knowledge to be good, to how we could contribute to its becoming better we can avoid the disasters and cascading failures of rigid and closed systems. Or at least maybe the mediocrity.

By: p@

p@ — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 23:12:11 +0000

It’s very interesting that you bring up Mario Bunge’s, “E. & C.: … and the Unity of Knowledge” in this ‘commons’ context. A while back I read E.O.Wilson’s Consilience: Unity of Knowledge, Carl Sagon’s Billions and Billions and D.R. Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: Eternal Golden Braid, from these books I started piecing together a picture of society that I have now come to believe is best described as “Open Source.” I also call it OpenCulture, OpenBusiness, OpenContent, OpenMedia, etc.., OpenX if you will…

The idea of your Cultural Commons is appealing but I wonder how it could realized… I mean, “the entire network of knowledge that’s ever been exchanged…” is a very large network… How would we go about managing such a thing? What are the checks and balances on the relevance some knowledge would have over others, how do we go about retaining this vast knowledge database? I guess some might say… Google. (i joke, i kid with you.)

Anyway, very interesting… I hope to hear more thoughts from you about this.
p@, austin tx