• DyneManifesto

work on this manifesto started the 13 august 2001 and it is still under heavy construction.

preludio

La destruction de la conscience individuelle represente pourtant une haute idee de culture, c'est une idee profonde de la culture d'ou derive une forme toute nouvelle de civilisation. Ne pas se sentir vivre en tant qu'individu revient a echapper a cette forme redoutable du capitalisme que moi, j'appelle le capitalisme de la conscience puisque l'ame c'est le bien de tous.

Antonin Artaud, Messages revolutionnaires - 3 juin 1936

Yes the old rules of the art world remain intact but so what! The real cultural impact of this era will be seen historically to have come from the community of programmers and developers that created the open source movement, who used gnu and the net to challenge more effectively than any previous avant garde the nature of creativity, collaboration and intellectual property. What Brecht promised the hackers delivered. As we make our technologies and they make us, the true outcomes may yet mirror the early visions more closely than our current era of necessary disenchantment may allow.

David Garcia, from somewhere inside my harddisk

panorama

• === horizon(tal) ===

  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. === undistinguishable bits ===

  Software - whether executable programs, music, visual art, liturgy, weaponry, or what have you - consists of bitstreams, which although essentially indistinguishable are treated by a confusing multiplicity of legal categories. This multiplicity is unstable in the long term for reasons integral to the legal process. The unstable diversity of rules is caused by the need to distinguish among kinds of property interests in bitstreams. This need is primarily felt by those who stand to profit from the socially acceptable forms of monopoly created by treating ideas as property. Those of us who are worried about the social inequity and cultural hegemony created by this intellectually unsatisfying and morally repugnant regime are shouted down. Those doing the shouting believe that these property rules are necessary not from any overt yearning for life in Murdochworld - though a little luxurious co-optation is always welcome - but because the metaphor of incentives, which they take to be not just an image but an argument, proves that these rules - despite their lamentable consequences - are necessary if we are to make good software. The only way to continue to believe this is to ignore the facts. At the center of the digital revolution, with the executable bitstreams that make everything else possible, propertarian regimes not only do not make things better, they can make things radically worse. === proper progress ===

  Property concepts, whatever else may be wrong with them, do not enable and have in fact retarded progress. In the network society, anarchism (or more properly, anti-possessive individualism) is a viable political philosophy. One main problem with anarchism as a social system is about transaction costs. But the digital revolution alters two aspects of political economy that have been otherwise invariant throughout human history. All software has zero marginal cost in the world of the Net, while the costs of social coordination have been so far reduced as to permit the rapid formation and dissolution of large-scale and highly diverse social groupings entirely without geographic limitation.

snips follow

The center of the free software movement's success, and the greatest achievement of Richard Stallman, is not a piece of computer code. The success of free software, including the overwhelming success of GNU/Linux, results from the ability to harness extraordinary quantities of high-quality effort for projects of immense size and profound complexity. And this ability in turn results from the legal context in which the labor is mobilized. As a visionary designer Richard Stallman created more than Emacs, GDB, or GNU. He created the General Public License.

And so, in one of history's little ironies, the global triumph of bad software in the age of the PC was reversed by a surprising combination of forces: the social transformation initiated by the network, a long-discarded European theory of political economy, and a small band of programmers throughout the world mobilized by a single simple idea.

The rules we have now, known as copyright, were established in the age of the printing press, an inherently centralized method of mass-production copying. In a print environment, copyright on journal articles restricted only journal publishers requiring them to obtain permission to publish an article and would-be plagiarists. It helped journals to operate and disseminate knowledge, without interfering with the useful work of scientists or students, either as writers or readers of articles. These rules fit that system well.

Richard Stallman

from encyclopedia:

Dyne is the unit of force. One dyne is that force which, acting on a mass of one gramme, imparts to it an acceleration of one centimetre per second per second.

Dynamics is the branch of mechanics which consists of the study of the motion of matter and its causes.

• You can not step twice intothe same river, for the other waters are continually flowing on. It is in changing that things find repose.

  • Heraclitus, fragments 21, 23

Dynamics are things that change. The language of change is mathematical and is based in calculus. Fundamental to calculus is the derivative. The derivative can be viewed as the ratio of change between a dependent variable and an independent variable. As the velocity changes over time, its derivative is acceleration. Acceleration describes the change in velocity over time.

But if the universe changes continually according to the tensions between opposites, it is senseless to ask for its origin in the manner of myth. There is no beginning and no end; there is only existence. Heraclitus states magnificently: "This world (kosmos) which is the same for all, no one of the gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be an ever-living fire, with measures of it kindling, and measures going out." Fire is the symbol for a universe in flux between tensional opposites. As Burnet says: "The quantity of fire in a flame burning steadily appears to remain the same, the flame seems to be what we call a "thing." And yet the substance of it is continually changing. It is always passing away in smoke, and its place is always taken by fresh matter from the fuel that feeds it."