LiVES manual

* Freedom of Creativity *

"The growth of the network rendered the non-propertarian alternative even more practical. What scholarly and popular writing alike denominate as a thing ("the Internet") is actually the name of a social condition: the fact that everyone in the network society is connected directly, without intermediation, to everyone else. The global interconnection of networks eliminated the bottleneck that had required a centralized software manufacturer to rationalize and distribute the outcome of individual innovation in the era of the mainframe."
- Eben Moglen

Free and open source software (often referred as FOSS) is, when referring to the original principles endorsed by the Free Software Foundation[1] (FSF), a new model for distribution, development and marketing of immaterial goods. While recommending you to have a look at the philosophy pages published by the FSF, we'll highlight some implications which are most important for us by making our activities possible and motivating them.

FOSS implies an economic model based on collaboration instead of competition, fitting in the fields of academic research where sharing of knowledge is fundamental , and development where the joint efforts of different developers can be better sustained when distributed across various nodes. In this regard we like to quote John Nash (Mathematics Nobel in 1994) saying that "the best result will come from everybody in the group doing what's best for himself, and the group".

Imagine then that all creations re-produced in this way can also be sold freely by anyone in each context: this opens up an horizon of new business models that are local, avoiding globalized exploitation, still sharing a global pool of knowledge useful to everyone.

Furthermore, in the fields of education we believe that the inherent independence of FOSS from commercial influences is crucial in order to empower students with a knowledge that they really own, not making them dependent from merchants owning their creations by imposing licenses on the tools they've learned.

And lastly just consider, and feel free to invent more on these tracks, the impact of FOSS in fields such as communication, social networking, games, media and... evolution.

[1] see http://www.fsf.org

* No nationhood *

"Per far che i secoli tacciano di quel Trattato[2] che trafficò la mia patria, insospettì le nazioni e scemò dignità al tuo nome."
- A Bonaparte liberatore, Ugo Foscolo, 1778-1827

"One Planet, One Nation"
- Public Enemy

Our homelands are displaced and sometimes very different, difficult to be put in contact with the boundaries given by nations. In fact we think that nation states should come to an end, for the borders they impose aren't matching with our aspirations and current ability to relate with each other.

During the few years of our lives we have been taught to interact and describe ourselves within national schemes, but the only real boundaries were the differences between our languages, while we have learned to cross them.

From our national histories we mostly inherited fears and anger, but with this network we have learned how to bury them, as they don't belong to us anymore. What's left is a just a problem that can be solved: we will stop representing us as part of different nations. Even if we could, we don't intend to build our own nation, nor to propose to you a new social contract, but to cross all of these borders as a unique networked planet, to start a new cartography.

We have a planet! and it is young enough to heal the scars left by the last centuries of war, imperialism, colonisation and prevarication that left most people around us cultivating differences and fake identities represented by flags and nationalist propaganda.

We aren't claiming to open the borders to the speculation of multinationals, since we are well aware this can be a rhetoric used by “neo-liberalist” interests to tramp over the autonomy of developing countries. The Contextual integrity[3] of different social ecosystems needs to be respected, but still as of today the national borders haven't succeeded in preserving it.

With some exceptions, most of the national programs and cultural funds we agreed to work with were intending each of us would dress a flag, as we were recruited in a decadent game of national pride and competition, with an agenda of cultural, economical and physical domination, tracing all our movements, assimilating them to leviathans that are playing their last violent moves in a chess game for which we are just seamless pieces.

This doesn't make sense anymore to our generation, we refuse to identify with the governments holding our passports, while we look forward to relating with each other on the basis of dialogue and exchange, approaches and architectures that can be imagined globally and developed locally,
in an open way the channels that let us speak to you right now.

Therefore we declare **the end of nations**, as our generation is connected by a way more complicated intersection of wills, destinies and, most importantly, problems to be solved.

[2] Trattato di Campoformio

[3] see Nissenbaum, H, (2007) Contextual Integrity -
http://crypto.stanford.edu/portia/papers/RevnissenbaumDTP31.pdf

* Networked cities *

"Creo que con el tiempo mereceremos no tener gobiernos."
- Jorge Luis Borges, 1899-1986

Naturally our cartography draws connections among nodes, hubs of intelligence that are closer in cyber space than in the physical one. In the last century we have learned how we can share music, lyrics, stories and images, since for a few decades we are able to copy them with marginal costs across the whole world.

This let us relate to each other with an outreach that is amplified by the density of our living environments, the urban spaces that somehow offered enough gaps for our agency. Those who pretend to govern our living are now busy in controlling those voids, as every tree in a public square represents an obstacle for their cameras, omnipresent eyes patronising our evolution.

We found shelter in the ancestral practices of trance[4], opening the doors of our perception to the unknown, resonating our own bones, enhancing the agility of our tongues to follow the hip hop flow of radical thoughts, skating over the universe we are constrained, painting fantasy over the imposed walls of our cities, jumping higher to join the loose ends of our parkours.

These practices are now among all of our cities[5], seeded by our own need to evolve, to influence a governance that doesn't listen to us. Some kids turn into a dark army of vengeance, some lose faith in the future, some fall in the virtual loopholes offered by the magnetic startups of the dot.com boom. We need to offerourselves an alternative to this hopeless conflict and the first step is to build a narrative that respects all choices, that doesn't neglect suffering.

All this creativity and despair is shared among our cities, stuffed by unnecessary needs and mirages of success of the "creative industries", while we already elaborate a concentric vision that is linked to the density of our lives and the cultural flow of our errant knowledge.

Therefore we declare the birth of a **planet of networked cities**[6], spiral architectures of living swirling above our heads and across our fingers, as they evolve in a common practice of displacement and re-conjunction, joining the loose ends of our future.

Our plan is simple and our project is already in motion. In fact, if you look around yourself, you will already find *us* close. While the current economical and political systems face the difficulty of hiding their own incoherence, we are able to implement their principles better and, most importantly, we are elaborating new ones.

We are reclaiming the infrastructure, the liberty to adapt them to our needs, our right to property without strings attached, the freedom to confront ideas without any manipulative mediation, peer to peer, face to face, city to city, human to human.

The possibility to grow local communities and economies, eliminating globalised monopolies and living up from our own creations, is there. We are filling the empty spaces left in our own cities, we are setting our own desires and we are collectively able to satisfy them.

Furthermore, some of us are seeking contacts with the lower strata of societies, to share a growing autonomy: as much they are excluded by the society they serve, that much they are close to freedom, while it is clear that autonomy is the solution to present crisis.

These marginal communities were the villagers who, mostly because of rural poverty, could no longer survive on agriculture, as well as the migrants and refugees who had to escape their birth places, or never had a homeland. They came to the city and they found neither work nor shelter. They created their own jobs out of the cynical logics of capitalism, mostly in refuse recycling. They look ugly to the minorities in power, while most architects and urban planners unjustly call their shelter "illegal settlements". Some of them organise themselves to gain power with solidarity, and those are the squatters.

During the past decades we have learnt to enhance our own autonomy in the urban contexts[7], diving across the different contexts composing the cities, disclosing the inner structure of their closed networks, developing a different texture made of relationships that no company can buy.

We are the **Weaver Birds**, burung-burung manyar[8], we share our nests in a network, we flow as the river of the spontaneous settlement of Code in Yogyakarta[9], the gypsy neighbourhood of Sulukule in Instanbul, the Chaos Computer Club, all the hacklabs across the world, the self-organised squatters in Amsterdam Berlin Barcelona and more, the hideouts of 2600 and all the other temporary hacker spaces where our future, and your future, is being homebrewed.

This document is just the start for a new course, outlining an analysis that is shared among a growing number of young hackers and artists, nourished by their autonomy and knowledge. Our hacker spaces are quickly proliferating as we don't need to build more space rather than penetrate existing empty space, we are highly adaptive and we aim at connecting rather than separating, at being inclusive rather than exclusive, at being effective rather than acquiring status. To those who feel threatened we ask: do not resist us, for we will last longer than you; and leave us space, for you don't use it while we do. Do it for the good of all of us, because we are your own kids.

[4] Lapassade, G. (1976) Essai sur la transe, Éditions universitaires

[5] De Jong, A, Schuilenburg, M. (2006) Mediapolis. Popular culture and the city, Rotterdam: 010-Publishers

[6] Batten, D.F. (1995), Network Cities: Creative Urban Agglomerations for the 21st Century, SAGE

[7] Lapassade, G. (1971), L'Autogestion pédagogique, Gauthiers-Villars

[8] Burung-Burung Manyar means "Weaver Birds" in bahasa indonesia, is a book by Romo Mengun published in 1992 by Gramedia (Jakarta)

[9] the Code riverbank was considered an "illegal settlement" of squatters, while Romo Mengun has been active between 1981 and 1986, gathering the sympathy of intellectuals believing that these poor members of society should be accepted and helped to improve their living conditions. The government of Indonesia planned its forced removal in 1983, but as protests followed the plans were cancelled. Nine years later in 1992 Kampung Code was selected as the winner of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in the Muslim World. The Code riverside settlement continues to exist until this day, as a remarkable example of urban architecture.

* Horizontal media *

"Whoever controls the media -the images- controls the culture."
- Allen Ginsberg, 1926-1997

Our concern about freedom in media is serious, the current urgency justifies all our acts of rebellion, as they become necessary. One of our main activities is patiently weaving the threads for open networks that put us all in contact. But greedy national regimes and criminal organisations threaten us as if they can avoid their fascist nature to be known, while opportunist provokers use our open grounds to have granted the right to offend and generate more wars.

About media we certainly accumulated enough knowledge to trace a clear path for our development, as we have been doing since the early days of our existence: we are active in implementing the liberties that the digital age grants us. This intellectual freedom is very important for the development of humanity, for its capacity to analyse its own actions, to weave its faith in harmony.

Our plan is to keep on developing more on-site and on-line public space for discussion, following a **decentralised pattern** that grants access to most people on our planet. We created tools for independent media, to multiply the voices in protection of common visions, to avoid that a few media tycoons take over democracies, as is happening in many different places of this world.

We are aware of the limits of the present implementation of democracy: while they are busy celebrating their own success over archaic regimes, these systems stopped updating their own architecture and have fallen in control of new enemies which they cannot even recognise anymore.

The solution we propose is simple: maximise the possibilities to recycle existing media infrastructures, open as many channels as possible, free the airwaves, let communication flow in its multiplicity, avoid any mono-directional use of it, give everyone the possibility to run a radio or TV station for it's own digital and physical neighbours, following an organic pattern that will modularise the sharing of sense and let ideas propagate in a horizontal, non hierarchical way.

If these media architectures will be linked with education models that foster tolerance we have hope to accelerate the evolution of our planet and grant protection to the minorities that are populating it.

The above copyleft 2008 dyne.org foundation and respective authors. Verbatim copying and distribution is permitted in any medium,
provided this notice is preserved. - Read the complete text at http://dyne.org/first_dharma_dyne.pdf

The LiVES Project is very proud to be a part of this movement. Thank you all for your support !