Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts
Showing posts with label copyright. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Possibilities (or, this is what an anarchist government might look like)


OK, we've just stepped into office. We got there because we asked everyday Aussies to donate five bucks to our campaign (Obama style). We raised truck loads and while campaigning hard we used the excess money to implement 78 community permaculture gardens Australia-wide. We have another 221 ear-marked to start up in the next six months. We don't owe business one dollar, and like George Monbiot we refuse to dine with industry. As you can imagine they are shitting themselves.

The first 7 changes in this first week in office will include:

1. In consultation with indigenous Australia demolish the states and reform local governments based on traditional aboriginal tribal lands - the natural food and water bowls of Australia. Our federal government will merely oversee and encourage localised initiatives, education and activities based on indigenous knowledge and ecologically-sound economics.

2. An education programme to slow breeding. Indigenous Australia have practiced a highly successful 'biophysical economics' (Herman Daly) for over 40,000 years. Aboriginal culture is based on breeding only to numbers that the land can support. Infanticide was a strategy of their permanent sustainability. We would adapt this to a voluntary extinction gift, or a non-baby bonus (PO) in the form of heirloom vegetable seeds, recycled costumes (MU), spices wind-sailed from Asia (JW), the latest in recycled computer technology and traditional musical instruments. Breeding today is not a noble and selfless act, especially in large numbers, it's a religio-capitalist ploy to boost productivity-profit and therefore violate the landbase (just ask Peter Costello, who we've sent to work in one of the Djadja wurrung compost fields). Capitalism, based on dangling eternal fantasies in front of the dutiful consumer-parent, so as the idea of more consumerables is even more pleasurable than the products themselves (David Graeber), feeds directly into the fantasy of the ever-expanding family and therefore into baby production. Australians will be educated and rewarded to only have one or two children at most, preferably none - the most noblest act of all.

3. All rights relinquished (IR). A community-specific programme for the abolition of copyright and the advancing of the arts as a fully de-capitalised social gift ecology. Artists, writers, poets, filmmakers and musicians will gift their work to the communities that they themselves participate in. In return the community will support them in terms of shared resources. Celebrities and other toxicultural figures will join Peter Costello in the compost fields. More on this here.

4. Non-compostable waste producing industries (including the arts) will be cast adrift with no government backing or future support. The government will insist that local governments only back industries that use a 'biophysical economics' model. All previously government-supported private industry will be axed and industries that can not adapt ecologically will be bought by the government. Privatisation of public commons will become a thing of history. All other industries will be put on notice to change their operations within 12 months.

5. Aboriginal land tax for the sale of all private property (PO). Each time a piece of land is sold or resold revenue will be taken from the sale and go directly to the establishment of a local indigenous centre, or the maintaining and further developing of existing ones. These centers will foster indigenous culture - art and food covers all areas of life - and foster indigenous sustainability knowledges, which would feed directly back into the wider community. Private property owners who plant and maintain permaculture gardens will be exempt from paying tax or rates on the land, and will be given a permacultural allowance to provide food ethically - 'within walking distance' (RP) - grown for their families and friends. Private property owners who employ indigenous land consultants will be given further incentives (to be advised by the local indigenous communities at a later date).

6. The removal of all religious indoctrination and packaged-processed foods from schools. This hardly needs justification, but if you require more information please leave a comment below. Similarly, secular ignorance of religion will not be tolerated. All schools will teach the history of religions, focussing on religion's involvement in the establishment of private property and the tendency for religious supremacy to create resource wars. Food gardening will replace all religious indoctrination lessons.

7. Art auction houses (such as Christies and Sothebys) will turn all of their artifacts over to public cultural centers. Those works deemed to be not interesting or amusing enough will be garage-sold to the public. Each household can choose up to three works only, collectors will also be delegated to the compost fields. The proceeds from the art sales will go to detoxifying the arts industry with education programmes aimed at educating artists about food and survival in a post-capitalist world. The film and music industry will become heavily digitised and everything freely available online. Film projects that produce as much as one empty Mt Franklin plastic bottle (or equivalent) will be shut down.

After such a good start we're all going to celebrate with some Astrid Lorange home brew. Over to you comenteers for our next week in office.

Monday, January 19, 2009

All rights relinquished (or, 'Copyright Nothing' after The Fugs)

To get this post started, here is my 3-step, de-evolutionary path for a fully de-capitalised (and de-celebritised) culture - permanent culture (permaculture); culture of the mutable and unwashed.

1. All rights reserved - antiquated copyright and intellectual (private) property laws.
2. Some rights reserved - creative commons (transitional phase).
3. 'All rights relinquished' (Ian Robertson) – total abolition of the arts-as-capitalism's-slut.

Today I received a generous, although inflexible, comment from one of my favourite counter-culture bands of the sixties – The Fugs.
Hi Patrick. We, The Fugs, strongly recommend you delete your soundtrack from your film. We are honored that you have chosen us as a backing for your flicks, but unfortunately you are breaching copyright. We wanna keep the music bizo clean if you know what we mean. Musak is always a safe option. Love your blog btw. Fugz
What surprised me most was the language: "clean" and "safe". If you know The Fugs you'll know their music is neither clean nor safe, but very much unwashed and alive.

I chose to comply to the request for two reasons: Firstly, the bourgeois-training of my boyhood still responds well to politeness and good manners, and secondly, because I don't want to use music to accompany my (incidental and non-commercial) films by artist's who have contradictory values between what they make and how they act. My art and my values aim to 'bring down civilisation' (Derrick Jensen) and the culture of the 'Great Washed' (Alastair McIntosh), in small, everyday, bite-sized pieces. And besides, there are plenty of musicians who support this kind of de-capitalising anarchy. Artists and bands I have used for my films in the past, and who have not censored me (as yet), include:

Nightmares on Wax
Caribou
DJ Spooky
godspeedyou! blackemperor
esmerine
Aesop Rock
Howe Gelb
Justin Townes Earle

To name a few. Although once again, I have not sought approval to use their material as my work is strictly non-commercial and, in general, I do not acknowledge property rights for art. I do however take very seriously due acknowledgment of borrowed material, especially because it shows nothing is autonomous (and private) and everything is borrowed and shared.

Copyright is an embedded pathology of a civilised toxicology (impermanent culture) obsessed with transporting resources (mediated goods and food) and mediated celebrity. This toxiculture is an unstoppable fireball so ingrained in our skulls that even our beautiful (and dirty) old hippies buy into it. Who cares that artists are supported in the communties that they inspire (online and offline)? I do. Who cares that artists aren't paid for their goods? Not me. Who cares where artist's food comes from? I do! It comes from the soil that they help to improve and de-toxify, so as the vegetables, meat and fruit they eat and share no longer participate in a petroleum-based agriculture responsible for so much violence.

Yes, I acknowledge that my digital-anarcho-primitivism is problematic as the waste generated by the tools that make online art is unfathomable. My belief that 'progress is killing us as much as it is enabling us new possibilities' is, I admit, representative of my values in contradiction. However, the blogosphere has the potential to curb the secondary tier of art (the first being the conceptual) – the manufacturing of goods and other property including the intellectual. Online art also has the opportunity to take art back to its roots: to play in the space of the everyday. The film that The Fugs required I take down (I couldn't just delete the sound because I'd already deleted the master file from my ancient, overloaded laptop, and it only exists as an uneditable compressed Mpeg4), showed the flying fox I made for Zephyr and his friends. This 1.36 min film was called 'Permaplay' after 'permanent play', a fundamental of permaculture (Holmgren, Mollison), or permanent (sustainable) culture.

Impermanent culture is based on the immutable (the idea of universals such as copyright and God) – and on the toxicultural activity that springs from mediated life, removed from the landbase that supports us. On the other hand permanent culture (permaculture) is based on the mutable – the flux and chance of ecological life, where waste does not exist as everything is used and reused in a dynamic cycle of regeneration. Ironically, The Fugs' track that I used was their piss-take on the great immutable Ten Commandments.

W B Yeats' line from his poem Lapis Lazuli, 'all thing fall and are built again', is not a flawed generational hangup, and its timelessness doesn't make its very idea immutable, rather generationally adaptable. One of my favourite Fugs song is the 'Nothing' song, where everything is nothing, "Monday nothing... New Yorker nothing... Hanging out in Folkways nothing..."etc., including big Fug-fan Allen Ginsberg - "Nothing, nothing nothing!" This is the spirit in which the world becomes everything, where things' values aren't placed in an order of hierarchy or private property (David Graeber), but are shared monistly on ecologic grounds.