Prompt 19: Space for discomfort

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). Their concern is how to open up space for making concrete the kinds of discomforts that practices of reuse might produce, both when sharing materials, as well as when reusing materials by others.

Below reflection is based on my own positionality - as an artist and academic who often works with grassroots communities + precarious cultural practitioners both in Europe and Asia, as well as having on-going discussion with people about the discomfort of free and open source licensing.

A. Although CC4r might not have originally be designed as a legal license, it feels to me that it cannot capture the ways to handle discomfort especially when people may feel re-appropriate the work disrespectfully. Given the articulation of CC4r which favors re-use and generous access conditions, this is somehow within some (presumed) comfortable boundaries (or assumptions) and these might be different for people. What would be that? Can CC4r provide some general template/questions in the statement (perhaps just a small additional section), which each project can fill out by themselves?

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? In this way, the so-called license becomes repetition with differences, that speak to individual projects.

B. Although there is the idea of no original or single author, how could we acknowledge the effort and knowledge that a collective/community or people build around the project? 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 (possibly extend beyond the capitalistic way of extractive practice and this can happen in community vs scholarly practice too)? Indeed, the idea of asking current and future authors (as a collective) is a good starting point for caring for each other.

C. Perhaps it is also important to discuss free and open-source projects that are developed and created by less privileged people. On the one hand, they would like the work to be freely seen, visible and distributed. On the other hand, they would also like opportunities will come back to them so that they can continue to run the project or simply survive in this increasingly complex capitalistic world. If the project has been developed in different iterations, and with different projects emerged, how to bring back all the (dis)comfort together? (Perhaps this prompt is more related to the statement in Prompt 05: we use copyleft not only to circumvent the monopoly granted by copyright, but also to protect against that appropriation. My question is: how to protect the people?)