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Introduction to Version One Point Zero Page 3

Page history last edited by Clare Birchall 11 years, 9 months ago

... continued from  Introduction to Version One Point Zero Page 2

 

In raising such questions, we want to perhaps go a little further than many of those who have also experimented with online platforms have done so far. For example, McKenzie Wark experimented with open peer-commentary when writing his GAM3R 7H30RY (Version 1.1, 2006); and Kathleen Fitzpatrick has recently begun to do the same with Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (forthcoming from NYU Press). Similarly, Ted Striphas’s Differences and Repetitions Wiki site for Rhizomatic Writing  contains drafts of work in progress he invites others to edit, amend or comment on, with the promise that their contributions will be duly acknowledged. But in all three cases these authors – Wark, Fitzpatrick and Striphas respectively – retain authorial control. They very much remain the identifiable ‘authors’ of these identifiable ‘works’, and it is to them that these ‘works’ are clearly to be attributed. Although this is still the case with this first iteration of the Liquid Theory Reader, New Cultural Studies: The Liquid Theory Reader (Version 1.0), it need not necessarily be so with any of its subsequent iterations. Indeed, that it is not so is part of the very idea behind this project.

 

It is important in this respect to stress that with the Liquid Books series, and particularly The Liquid Theory Reader, we are not attempting to produce an exercise simply in remixing. For example, Kevin Kelly recently reported that a fan of his book Out of Control, Andreas Lloyd, had remixed it,  or at least sharply but intelligently edited it, so that, rather than a ‘rambling book about one dozen things’ it now focuses ‘on the cybernetic and feedback aspects of the systems [Kelly] was reporting on in the early 1990s’. The resulting remix has been given the title Bootstrapping Complexity by Lloyd, at Kelly’s instigation, and demonstrates just ‘the kind of literary fluidity’ the latter described in his ‘Scan This Book’ piece for The New York Times (see n.1). Indeed, the ‘result is quite amazing’, according to Kelly, who continues excitedly:

 

So if you never read Out of Control because you were put off by its length, here is a user-generated remix that shortens and focuses the book... However, if you liked Bootstrapping Complexity, you may also want to try my 'long-winded' original version with lots more stuff.21

 

In a similar vein,  Cory Doctorow, the science-fiction writer and co-editor and co-owner of the blog Boing Boing, recently announced his intention to embark on an experiment designed to demonstrate that, as a for-profit author, he does not lose money by giving away e-books for free without the aid of a traditional publisher. Doctorow’s plan is to make his collection of short stories With A Little Help available on a freemium basis, ‘in a range of packages and at a range of price points from $0.00 to $10,000’. These packages include:

 

  • E- book: free, in a wide variety of formats (text, HTML and PDF);  
  • Audiobook: free, in a wide variety of formats (including podcast, CD and DVD); 
  • Print-on-demand trade paperback: $16 (approximately; price TBD) via Lulu.com. However, Doctorow is also ‘offering a custom-cover package for people running events or giveaways: for a setup fee (I'm thinking $300, but that's not fixed in stone), I'll sell you as many copies at Lulu's cost as you'd like with your own cover on it’; 
  • Premium hardcover edition: $250, limited run of 250 copies; 
  • Commission a new story: $10,000 (one only).22

 

Yet for all that Doctorow positions his books as being available as ‘free, remixable downloads’, and for all the help he has received from fans, friends and family members in producing the various packages and formats in which With A Little Help is to be obtained, Doctorow, too, like Kelly, remains the identifiable ‘author’ of his identifiable ‘works’, and it is to him that these ‘works’ are clearly to be attributed. Indeed, more than one of the packages in which With A Little Help is available depends, for its value as a commodity worth paying up to $10,000 for, on the rather romantic idea of the author as individual (human) genius, or at least unique creative persona. I am thinking in particular of the $250 Premium hardcover edition of With A Little Help. According to Doctorow, each copy of this edition will have embossed on the cover ‘an original illustration of me as a superhero in cape and goggles, drawn by Randall Munroe, creator of the immensely popular XKCD Web comic’ (Randall frequently features me as this character in his strips, and it's become such a running gag that I'm routinely greeted at speaking gigs by fans bearing goggles and capes for me to wear).’ Not only that, but ‘every book will have unique endpapers made from paper ephemera solicited from writer friends’ of Doctorow who are also clearly identifiable and nameable authors. These range ‘from William Gibson and Neil Gaiman to Kelly Link and Eileen Gunn.’23

 

By contrast our concern with The Liquid Theory Reader is more to encourage the raising of responsible ethical and political questions concerning authorship, attribution, citation, copyright, intellectual property and so on. Laura J. Murray makes an interesting and rather provocative point that goes at least part of the way toward illustrating the difference in her review of Brett Gaylor’s 2009 documentary on copyright law and the remixing of music, RiP: A Remix Manifesto.24 (Interestingly, this film also includes an appearance by Doctorow as a talking head – although it’s perhaps not all that surprising given RiPs immersion in the libertarian ‘free culture’ discourse, not just of Wired magazine and Lawrence Lessig, but also the Electronic Frontier Foundation, of which Doctorow was European Director until January 2006.) For Murray, Gaylor's film:

 

brought to mind comedian Sarah Silverman’s plea last fall for Jewish college kids to take a ‘Great Schlep’ down to Florida and register their grandparents to vote for Obama: Gaylor’s film too tries to provoke a particular demographic into action by appealing, not so much to a higher cause, as to self-interest and to a cultural style that defines their social identity.

Such targeting can be an effective or even necessary strategy. But then Silverman was trying to get kids to engage with political process. Gaylor is trying to get kids to remix—which, he asserts, they’re already doing. That’s one dismaying thing about this film, ultimately: it acts like a political film but is nothing of the sort. The ‘call to action’ is not, ‘watch out, Canada’! which it could usefully have been, but rather ‘remix this film’! Not even ‘remix Time Warner’s corporate products’, but ‘remix my film’. It seems somewhat narcissistic as an exercise.25

 

As far as Murray is concerned, then, individuals like Gaylor, Doctorow and the Pittsburgh DJ Girltalk, who also features in RiP, want the freedom to remix almost because the technology means they can, and because they don’t see why they should be prevented from expressing themselves as creative individuals in this way. There is little or no wider engagement on their part with the contradictions and complexities of commodity culture, property relations, the system of global capital, ‘other sorts of social struggle, or indeed, other dimensions of intellectual property struggle’, including the way ‘free culture’ is represented in RiP as an explicitly white, middle-class, male cause:

 

Is it not important that singer-songwriters and composers without day-jobs and doting parents have the ‘freedom’ to create? What about the problem of cultural property as understood in Indigenous communities? How can we acknowledge Indigenous protocols or laws and also allow for cultural recombination and freedom of expression? Etcetera, etcetera.26

 

 


 

 

Endnotes

 

21. Kevin Kelly, 'Remixing Out of Control', CT2: Conceptual Trends, Current Topics, 7 October, 2009. Accessed 12 October, 2009.

 

22. Cory Doctorow, ‘Doctorow’s Experiment: With A Little Help’, Publishers Weekly, 19 October, 2009.

 

23. Cory Doctorow, ‘Doctorow’s Experiment: With A Little Help’, Publishers Weekly, 19 October, 2009.

 

24. Laura J. Murray, review of RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary directed by Brett Gaylor, Culture Machine: Reviews, June, 2009.

 

25. Laura J. Murray, review of RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary directed by Brett Gaylor, Culture Machine: Reviews, June, 2009.

 

26. Laura J. Murray, review of RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary directed by Brett Gaylor, Culture Machine: Reviews, June, 2009.

 

Would still another example of the kind of narcissism identifiable in the examples of remixing  offered in their different ways by Kelly, Doctorow and Gaylor be the attempt, by the Black Eyed Peas, to reinvent the idea of the album by making their latest release, The E.N.D, available for fans to remix and revise it – so that the release of this album does not signal the end of the creative process, so much as a point in time or  stage in a flow of edits, updates and extensions  that will continue collaboratively, long after the CD initially goes on sale, as fans contribute remixes to it and new songs are written and added to it?

 

 

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