In Conversation with German Political Philosopher Christoph Spehr

Yesterday the Institute for Distributed Creativity organized an event with Christoph Spehr at The Thing in NYC. It started with a screening of Spehr's "On Rules and Monsters" and was followed by his video on notions of utopia. Both videos pieced together sections from films to create a continuous essay-like structure. The political philosopher Spehr is know for his notion of free cooperation especially in Germany. In 2004 he contributed to the Free Cooperation conference about online collaboration.

Some questions also from the discussion over dinner with Christoph still resonate with me. We discussed the emergence of an academic proletariat, for example, that only gets low-level, technical jobs despite a college education. However, I always wondered why Christoph's interest in cooperation is largely exclusive to the offline world. Is not the WWW an energetic platform for cooperation or its more intense sister, collaboration? But this time I understood him better. Christoph is chiefly concerned with a new imaginary for the Left and future social formations. It's about productive dreaming. He looks everywhere for small pockets in which alternative economies are blooming. (We briefly touched on Michael Albert's theory of participatory economics, PARECON). Within that larger picture of searches for existing societal alternatives one of his foci is also the Internet and its many cooperation-enhancing technologies and experimental economies. It is through these glasses that he looks at free culture/free labor online. Participatory cultures, and the unregulated commons, for him, are exclusive structures in terms of gender, race, qualification, and class. I'd add questions like: Who can afford to contribute online? Who has the media literacy and confidence to be an author? Spehr separates the commons from the notion of the gift economy because of the obvious hierarchies of exchange. He refers to it as the "gift industry." He thinks that the commons and the gift economy don't go together. I disagree. I think that the commons is split into unregulated zones of peer production and fenced areas of gated online estates.

I appreciated notions like that of individualistic collectivism, to which I referred in an earlier post. I also agree with Christoph that hybrid, alternative economic forms such as this individualistic collectivism (i.e. social bookmarking or p2p file sharing) are more realistic stepping stones to a new society. Tomorrow, Christoph and I will continue our discussion at the Left Forum, Cooper Union in NYC at 2pm. Come by if you are in Manhattan.