P-Prompt: Spaces for discomfort - Honesty

We started to think with Winnie Soon of this prompt because of their work with Lee Tzu-Tung on queering contractual hierarchies and appropriation gestures, and also their energetic participation in the Open Source publishing community through projects such as Servpub and Aesthetic Programming (with Geoff Cox).

Winnie is an artist and academic who often works with grassroots communities and precarious cultural practitioners both in Europe and Asia and addresses the discomfort of free and open source licensing. Their concern is how to open up space for making concrete the kinds of discomforts that practices of reuse might produce.

"The implications of (re-)use are difficult to articulate for different projects that are using this license. For example, how would each project consider the situatedness of conditions: in what way the collective/individual would find discomfort when other people (re)use your work? How would an individual wish others to (re)use? How can we be honest with ourselves and our projects? (...) How could we also acknowledge the power imbalance between privileges and less privileges in free and open source culture, in which there might be a different understanding of extractive use?" (Winnie Soon, Revisit Reuse, Prompt 19: Space for discomfort)

Winnie brings up the peer pressure that less-privileged reusers might experience when being asked to release a work under a Free Culture or Open Access license. When we ask them later to say more about what they mean by "honesty", they answer:

"To be honest with how much one would like to share and what you want from it in return. If one is not happy for others to install or pick up your code and study it, perhaps you should not have the floss license. Or, if you would like to be contacted for every use, just state this." (Winnie Soon, private email)

Winnie proposes to pay attention to the feelings and insecurities involved in making work public. They ask to pause for a moment and double-check which are the right conditions for sharing or not sharing.

A related approach has come up in the Revisit Reuse work session, where participants have proposed to "enter sideways" as a way to create a moment of reflection as part of a collective process. The group invented different exercises to pay attention to contradictory feelings of for example wanting visibility and acknowledgement but needing protection and opacity.

Making space to feel and acknowledge potential discomfort before releasing a work means also to work together to make the implications of reuse imaginable.

Could such frank and courageous articulations of what is at stake contribute to a practice of reuse in solidarity?