On Sunday 21 July I went to a conference called “reRoute” hosted by the New Economics School and held at New York University. The conference was for what I would call young leaders in the consumer movement, although the attendees would not call themselves that. I am not sure what they call what they are doing, but some of the terms which they use to describe subsections of what they do include advocating for “environmental justice”, promoting the cooperative movement, and labor rights.
Jenn Baek of Free Culture Foundation invited me there after she herself was invited to the event by someone from Creative Commons. It was not exactly a surprise to either of us that this event existed although we both wished that since events like this and what we both do are so closely related, there ought to be some communication between our respective communities.
Jenn organized a panel on open access and invited some speakers. Jenn being a lawyer started by giving an overview of how the Internet has forced a re-examination of copyright practices. I talked about open access and health literature. Jill Cirasella of CUNY libraries spoke about the problems that libraries have in buying subscriptions. Sumana Harihareswara spoke about Mediawiki and Leah Feder of Sarap.is spoke about FLO, or “free libre open” software.
We had a small group of attendees – only perhaps 20 people – so before the talk we asked everyone why they were there. One person – Emily – was there representing a cooperative organization and seeking administrative infrastructure to better organize their own project and better connect with other projects. Another gentleman seemed quite far along into a software development project which was designed to share freely licensed media, and I appreciate his intentions, but it seemed that somehow he had been doing this for a long time without coming to realize that his work had largely been done before by other projects and that the general culture around what he was doing forbid people from using commercial and proprietary sharing platforms as he was proposing. That made me think about how many other people must be replicating work due to the inability of the free culture movement to organize and advertise its assets.
Sumana said something during her presentation which struck me as poignant, even though it was not the point of her presentation. She was talking about how people use Mediawiki and other free software to better their lives, and while doing this she compared that software with proprietary platforms by saying that “Mark Zuckerberg has a plan for your life.” By that she meant that Mark Zuckerberg along with Facebook and any other Internet platform had a global reach that very personally requested that all persons on earth donate some of their free time to developing their commercial product, which was media to attract one’s attention enough to make people also willing to look at the ads which the platform is paid to show everyone. Mark Zuckerberg’s plan for my life is that I look at the ads he wants me to see and to buy products which people pay him to tell me that I want, and it might be the case that his first interest is pleasing the marketers who pay him and not necessarily in helping me live up to my potential in life. I have thought about this before but her saying this made me reconsider how I do not give my uncompromised consent to engage with Internet platforms as I would like to do, but rather, I am coerced into serving some ruler’s personal whims in exchange for my getting access to some resources which may belong to the ruler or which may belong to society and the common good. If the resources really belong to the ruler then the ruler deserves his or her due; but if the ruler has coopted property and assets which ought to be shared among everyone then I am not happy about their applying restrictions to asset that which belongs to all people. Could platforms like Facebook and Google be re-established as non-profit or government properties, or at least, could they be properties which strongly commit to advancing better and freer lives for all people?
After our talk I went to a larger group session to talk to others and see who else was there. I will not name any more names, but some of the presentation titles were as follows: Bringing Solidarity Home: Creating Alternative Housing Economies Through Cooperative Living; Food Co-ops and Food Justice; How To Start A Worker Co-op; Non-Hierarchical Staffing Structures 101; The Possibilities Of Participatory Budgeting; Stop, Drop, and Roll: From Fossil Fuel Divestment to Reinvestment; and Community Supported Industry.