not

Lecture at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, 2 November 2009

There is no longer an outside
The commons are inside the space of capitalism

If somebody violates an artwork protected by a Creative Commons licence, a ‘traditional’ tribunal is meant to intervene.
To defend the the commons we rely on the force of the public, on the public force — that is the State.
The ‘legal code’ of Creative Commons licences: “The work is protected by copyright”

A sort of new ‘capitalism without intellectual property’ (Google, Facebook) is emerging and supporting the flows of free culture produced by the digital multitudes.

If the new cultural commons want to escape the typical modern opposition between public and private, they have to focus on their productive power, on their living knowledge before it is turned into a legal object or a cognitive commodity.

In the school of Italian post-operaismo, similarly, a new understanding of rent emerged recently.
Within cognitive capitalism the leading business model is said to be based on rent rather than
profit. ‘The rent is the new profit’.

If rent is becoming the dominant model of the knowledge economy, which should be the political
response? Sabotage of value (like @ dotcom crash; mortgage crisis) — the sabotage of rent.

we support P2P practices as they represent a sabotage of cognitive and speculative rent on a massive scale. Target of knowledge sharing and peer-to-peer networks is the regime of rent rather than the copyright regime.

Rather than seeing the commons as something that exists outside of drives to dominate and control, there is no commons without the antisocial tendencies that animate it.

As a file is shared between two computers, a disc burned and handed to two individuals, there is always a third, the owner of the network, or the hardware, that profits from it. This leads Pasquinelli to declare, along with, Vercellone, that “rent is the new profit.” (Pasquinelli also develops this idea through a discussion of this essay by David Harvey). This new form of rent operates in terms of speed and time rather than space.

If it is true that ‘the multitude is to the metropolis, as the working class is to the factory,” then the multitude must in some sense produce the skyrocketing rents of gentrification.

Jason Read’s review of Animal Spirits