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). 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.

Winnie brings up the peer pressure that less-privileged reusers might experience when being asked to release work under a Free Culture or Open Access license:

"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." (Winnie Soon, Revisit Reuse, Prompt 19: Space for discomfort)

"What I mean is to be honest with how much one would like to share and what you want from the return, or what forms of conditions around with 'sharing'. If one is not happy for others to install or pick up your code and investigate, perhaps not to have the floss license. Or if one would like to be contacted for every use, just state this." (Winnie Soon, private email)

A similar approach has come up in the Revisit Reuse work session, where participants have proposed to "enter sideways" and invented different exercises that make the implications of reuse imaginable at the beginning of a collaborative process.

Beyond the legal conditions that assume equal conditions and outcomes for everyone, Winnie's proposal pays attention to the feelings and insecurities involved in making work public. Could we make space for discomfort by answering the following questions before releasing a work?

• I/we would feel comfortable if you would reuse these materials/works/practices in the following way: ............................
• I/we would experience discomfort if you would reuse these materials/works/practices in the following way: ............................
• To make reuse feel comfortable, please ............................... (contact me/us - pay me/us - .....)
• Reuse would feel not comfortable if ............................... (you did not contact me/us - did not pay me/us - .....)